Modernist Poetic Epiphanies in Eliot, Williams, Levertov, and Revell

Home , Burnt Norton, Denise Levertov, East Coker (poem), Epiphany (literature)

RECONFIGURING SELF, WORLD, AND WORD: MODERNIST POETIC EPIPHANIES IN ELIOT, WILLIAMS, LEVERTOV, AND REVELL

Jessica G. Drexel

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

Chapel Hill 2019

Approved by:

John McGowan

Eric Downing

Gabriel Trop

Tyler Curtain

Thomas Pfau

ABSTRACT:

Jessica G. Drexel: Reconfiguring Self, World, and Word: Modernist Poetic Epiphanies in Eliot, Williams, Levertov, and Revell (Under the direction of John McGowan)

This dissertation examines the occurrence of epiphanies in modernist and contemporary poetry.

The time period addressed in this dissertation traces the development of poetic epiphanies through a series of related poets: T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams represent opposing approaches to poetry in the modernist era, while Denise Levertov and Donald Revell represent the extended influence of the earlier poets through the late-twentieth century and the present day.

By surveying these four poets, I aim to establish a conception of post-Romantic transcendent experience in the form of an epiphany. The dissertation includes both secular and religious poetry, and I show how even traditionally religious approaches to epiphany are radically reconfigured through poetic form and innovative representations of dualistic distinctions. My research uses the prose works by these poets to establish a framework for interpreting their poetry; I also use this prose framework to challenge and add to leading interpretations of the epiphany in modernist poetry. Furthermore, I include extensive close-readings of the poetry.

I conclude that the epiphanies present in the work by these poets is fundamentally distinct from a traditionally Romantic or religious epiphany. Despite their many differences, these four poets employ an immanentist view of the cosmos, which means that dualistic distinctions exist, but that the space of transcendence and totality is at hand, and not cosmically distant. The implication is that modernist poetic epiphanies paradoxically reveal totality in the immediate,

iii material world. These epiphanies are also distinctive because they gesture toward an ongoing mode of perception rather than a bounded, temporal event of sudden illumination. Through the close-readings of the poems, I show how each poet uses innovative aesthetic techniques— musicality, vernacular speech, imagism, spatialization, perception, and attention—to explore dimensions of transcendence, to articulate their experience of this space, and to connect their readers to this space.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This dissertation is the culmination of a long journey shaped by the kindness of many people. First, I thank my undergraduate mentors: David Jones, Eberhard Geyer, and Robert

Blackstock. From my Master’s in Linguistics at UNC, I am indebted to the influence of my advisor Randy Hendrick and to Paul Roberge. From my doctoral work in Comparative Literature and English, I am grateful to Philip Gura for his class on American Transcendentalism and for first introducing me to William Carlos Williams’ poetry. I thank Joel Nickels, a conference co- presenter, and poet John Greening, for affirming my nascent interest in Levertov and encouraging me to pursue her in my research. I am grateful to poet and scholar Donald Revell, for your support of my work and your generous correspondence about Levertov and Williams.

I am beyond grateful for my fellow UNC CoLEAGS graduate students—I cannot imagine better colleagues. Your camaraderie made graduate school rich, your intellect challenged me, and your friendship is dear. I am also grateful for the graduate student communities I befriended at Duke University and Baylor University—thank you extending your warm collegiality to me.

Most importantly, I am deeply grateful to my doctoral committee: Eric Downing, for your mentorship even before I even joined the program, and for making me a better teacher and scholar. I thank Gabriel Trop, for your patience, enthusiasm, and for your profound insight into poetry and poetics. I thank Tyler Curtain, for your challenging questions, generous time and thoughtful input on my research. I thank Thomas Pfau, for your time and direction over years and across university boundaries. To John McGowan, my gratitude is beyond words. Your

v wisdom, advocacy, passion for literature, and care for students have truly shaped me as a reader, scholar, and teacher.

Outside the academy, I thank my mother, who first taught me to love language, literature, and hard work. You never doubted me, and you have cheered me in person and from afar my whole life. I also thank many others—family, friends, especially Erin and Suzanne—for supporting me throughout this project. Thank you to Christ Community Church, who were a family to me in Chapel Hill for six years. Most of all, I am grateful for my husband, Andrew, for walking with me through the entirety of my doctoral work with good humor and selfless joy in this adventure.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER ONE: MUSIC, INCARNATION, AND THE CONTINUOUSLY PRESENT EPIPHANY IN T. S. ELIOT’S FOUR QUARTETS ...... 11

A. INTRODUCTION AND EPIPHANY REVIEW ...... 11

B. REVIEW OF SCHOLARLY APPROACHES TO THE EPIPHANY ...... 13

C. MUSICAL PATTERN AND THE BEYOND ...... 26

i. Introduction ...... 27

ii. ‘Musical Pattern’—Double Existence in Drama ...... 30

iii. “Necessary and dangerous” Duality ...... 38

D. ‘MUSICAL PATTERN’: FROM POETIC DRAMA TO POETRY ...... 43

i. ‘Musical pattern’ in Four Quartets ...... 43

E. CLOSE-READING FOUR QUARTETS ...... 49

i. Burnt Norton ...... 51

ii. East Coker ...... 55

iii. Dry Salvages ...... 59

iv. Little Gidding ...... 62

F. THE HINT HALF GUESSED ...... 65

CHAPTER TWO: WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AS MODERNIST MYSTIC ...... 70

A. INTRODUCTION...... 70

vii B. TWO TRADITIONS OF TRANSCENDENCE ...... 75

C. WILLIAMS AND RELIGION ...... 75

D. TRANSCENDENTALISM ...... 79

E. WILLIAMS REJECTS TRANSCENDENTALISM ...... 81

F. WILLIAMS’ MODERNISM: CREATION AND DESTRUCTION ...... 85

G. POST-ROMANTIC UNITY ...... 90

H. MODERNIST MYSTICISM ...... 92

I. WILLIAMS’ POETIC EPIPHANIES ...... 99

CHAPTER THREE: FROM HELL AND BACK AGAIN: WILLIAMS’ EPIPHANY, FORGIVENESS, AND IMAGINATION ...... 108

A. BEGINNING IN HELL ...... 108

B. PERCEPTION ...... 110

C. INNER PERFECTIONS ...... 113

D. DANCE ...... 127

E. RESISTANCE AND LIMITS ...... 137

i. Dependence on others and the world ...... 139

ii. Corruption Within ...... 141

iii. Human Evil ...... 156

iv. Despair and Descent ...... 163

F. FORGIVENESS ...... 168

G. MODERN TRANSCENDENCE ...... 171

H. LANGUAGE AND FORM ...... 172

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MEDIEVAL TURN: THE MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY EPIPHANIES OF DENISE LEVERTOV AND DONALD REVELL ...... 176

viii

A. FROM DUALISM TO MULTIPLICITY: VISIONS OF HEAVENS AND HELLS ...... 176

B. DENISE LEVERTOV’S EPIPHANIES: POET OF THE BORDERLANDS ...... 178

C. MODERN MEDIEVALISM: “COMPLEX AND MANIFOLD” PRESENCE ...... 191

D. DONALD REVELL’S INHABITED SYMBOLS ...... 195

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 207

INTRODUCTION

In this dissertation, I inquire how modernist and contemporary poets, specifically T.

S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Denise Levertov, and Donald Revell, access non-material states of being when deprived of traditional routes to transcendence. The twentieth century is an age that, as David Wellbery laments, is unprepared “to think that a form, however compelling its unity, exemplifies the unity of mind or of nature or of both.”1 However, I follow Charles Taylor’s intuition that in a post-Romantic aesthetic, “The symbol as consubstantial is rejected. But the other basic idea, that it reveals something otherwise inaccessible, stands.”2 Modernists thus disrupt not only the Romantic concept of aesthetic form as a bridge to transcendence, but also traditional religious pathways to transcendence.

And yet, through radically new poetic forms drawn from vernacular speech, musicality, and perception of the material, ordinary world, modernist poets still construct innovative pathways to secular transcendence and mystical experience. In both cases, I conceptualize the epiphanic space as a recovery of cosmic unity, and the means of arriving at that space, the duration of the experience, the effects of the event, the reader’s participation, and the poets’ conception of unity are my primary interest.

1David E. Wellbery, “Romanticism and Modernity: Epistemological Continuities and Discontinuities,” European Romantic Review 21, no. 3 (June 2010): 287, https://doi.org/10.1080/10509585.2010.484624.

2Charles Taylor, “Epiphanies of Modernism,” in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 479.

1 While I will refer to the entire phenomenon and state of being as ‘transcendence,’ my specific focus is the epiphany, as it denotes a discrete occurrence of lived transcendence. Far from the ordinary acquisition of new knowledge, the epiphany is an exceptional arrival at knowledge. The knowledge is extraordinary, or to an excessive extent, and the path to it is remarkable or unusual. Furthermore, the exceptional qualities of the epiphany and the thing revealed induce delight, joy, wonder, and even ecstasy, making the epiphany a sought-after experience. While there are such things as Northrop Frye’s demonic epiphany and Walter

Benjamin’s profane illumination, they lie beyond the scope of this dissertation.

The poetic epiphanies discussed here do not completely dissolve their foundations in religion and European Idealism, particularly with regard to dualism. In fact, they are predicated upon dualism—the distinction between subject and object, self and other or world, and human and divine or beyond. However, the distance assumed in other pathways to transcendence is immense; it is a distance that demands bridges, symbols, and interpretive matrices, which, according to modernist poets like Williams, further alienate the self from world and word. In the poets discussed here, we find that dualistic distinctions exist, and indeed power the epiphanic experience, but they assume an intimacy between things that does not exist in the other pathways; I call this phenomenon proximate dualism. The beyond, they suggest, is not so far away. Instead of a bridge to the sublime, they offer a leap into the ordinary. The leap is experientially exceptional, but the subject is propelled into the ordinary and does not transcend beyond it. Encountering the ordinary is then exceptional because it is, perhaps, the first time the individual has beheld it as it is. In a way, the epiphany is to experience a lack of blindness. These modernist poetic epiphanies thus assume a dualistic distinction, but not a dualistic distance; for an epiphany to occur, there must be a thing or

2 person and its complement, and leaping across that divide is the epiphany. The leap reveals immediacy and intimacy between a thing and its complement, not the cosmic distance assumed in other pathways. A hallmark of these epiphanies is therefore an affirmation of the ordinary, material world, but while the ordinary is good, it is incomplete or only partially perceived, hence the need for an epiphany. The problem is thus alienation from wholeness, totality, plenitude, and unity; the alienation is not an innate deficiency in the ordinary, but a lack of this completeness.

The epiphany reveals a relationship between things, and the relationship is emblematic for how the cosmos is already ordered (we just cannot see it, and each poet offers a different explanation for this blindness). While the revelation is abstract, its effect is concrete, for the relationship reconfigures the individual’s relationship to self and the material world. The outcome of an epiphany is therefore paradoxical, since it aims to make the exceptional the norm without reverting to dogma, banality, or mere routine. The longing for wholeness is the basis of this dissertation, and I focus on four post-Romantic poets spanning the twentieth century, who take up this quest for wholeness. I argue that each poet should be considered a modernist, or post-Romantic, on the basis of how they conceptualize unity and how this conceptualization impacts their poetic form. Judging by form alone, each poet radically breaks with conventions of Romantic form, even when he or she may occasionally adopt a lyric attitude. I also show how their formulations of secular mysticism and Christian spirituality radically shape their poetic form in new ways; although the poetry tends toward mystical experience, the poetry does not reinforce traditional forms of spirituality or Romantic encounters with the sublime. This form of mysticism takes on an organic, temporally dynamic basis. Part of my question is whether a rejection of the aesthetic

3 pathways entails a rejection of wholeness itself, and to what extent the distinction between

Romanticism and Modernism is due to form. I also question critical work that conflates the pathways with the end goal—can a poet reject Romantic form and still seek wholeness? Is an interest in wholeness symptomatic of an unacknowledged lapse into tradition? Is interest in an empirical whole basis for categorization as a quasi-religious pursuit? Or is there a third way?

I chose exclusively poetry for several reasons. First, it permits me to include a chronological angle throughout the dissertation, as this dissertation will span almost one hundred years—from T. S. Eliot’s 1919 ‘Hamlet’ essay to Donald Revell’s 2018 collection of poetry, The English Boat. Focusing on one genre throughout time brings coherence and unity to the study. But more importantly, poetic epiphanies are fascinating because they occur outside the thematic and formal demands of narrative genre. While there are certainly strong narrative components in modernist poetry, the medium allows words and language to enact and explore spirituality, emotion, perception, and experience more directly, without being filtered through a narrative structure. In a narrative work, there is typically a dominant

“present” located in the actions, characters, chronology, and plot-structure, and other presences can only be arrived at through interpretation. A poem, however, more easily compresses attendant associations, presences, and meanings equally into the language and non-narrative structure of the poem. All associations can be present simultaneously. Words thus configure states of being and attitudes toward the world, and the entire poem enacts wholeness. The structure of these poems often—in their brevity, spatialization of abstractions, and use of material imagery—suggest the nature of wholeness, and they offer a short and clear model of relations between things. Many of these poems are a crisis of

4 attitude, not action and plot. Things are reconfigured, even when nothing happens. While a similar effect can be achieved in novels and other narrative genres, poetic configuration enables us to experience the multiplicities of presences apart from action.

I also examine the implications for language in the framework of proximate dualism.

Without an immense gap between the ordinary and the extraordinary, the third space—the bridge—is removed. Language and poetry no longer occupy that between space, and they are then shared equally between self and world. I even argue that language is more thing-in-itself in this formulation than in frameworks that place language and art entirely in the space between dualistic poles. Due to this proximity of language to both ordinary and epiphanic space, I assert that in place of narrative, fixed forms, and lyricism, these poets emphasize the senses—vivid imagery, spatial configuration of abstract concepts, the mingling of ordinary speech and musicality, and also musicality as a method of ordering ineffable meanings. Each poet also employs a different sensorial modality for experiencing epiphany: Eliot is fascinated with music, Williams and Levertov with dance, and Revell with attention.

My methodology for selecting poets and examining their work is as follows. First, I assume a connection between the poet’s metaphysics and aesthetics. What a poet believes about the structure of the cosmos profoundly shapes the contents of an epiphany, how it will impact the one experiencing it, and also how and whether the epiphany can occur in the first place. The poets represent a variety of metaphysical backgrounds, but they all include exceptional moments of epiphany, and they all incorporate highly innovative and radically new poetic forms. For these reasons, I demonstrate the existence of epiphany in each poet’s work, then I turn to their prose work as a basis for examining the epiphanies. This approach also gives me the opportunity to point out moments of discontinuity between metaphysical

5 aims and poetic practice within a poet’s own oeuvre. My project begins with T. S. Eliot, who is part of the epiphany canon, but who quite often appears alongside novelists like Woolf,

Faulkner, Joyce, and Mann in scholarly work. Eliot’s epiphany will hinge upon the theological metaphysics of Christ’s incarnation, the presence of Pentecost, and music; I am unaware of other scholars who link Eliot’s theology with his concept of music. Eliot’s theology cites original sin as the cause of alienation from the ordinary, a key point in the musical goals of Four Quartets. The Eliot chapter comprises three parts: first, an in-depth overview of scholarship on epiphanies; second, a comprehensive overview of the concept of

‘music’ and ‘musical pattern’ in Eliot’s prose work; and third, an interpretive reading of Four

Quartets, with special attention given to the relationship between epiphanic moments, the incarnation, Pentecost, and Eliot’s prose concept of music.

In contrast to the theological approach, William Carlos Williams will also have dualism, but he points to issues of perception and the need for a practical process of vision.

Perception is damaged by any mechanism that leads to dogma, convention, categorization, and pre-interpretation of a thing before it is beheld in itself. The problem of association and interpretation gives Williams’ conception of epiphany—or dance—a fascinating element of temporality that is surprising for such an imagistic poet. While I draw on a number of his prose texts, I rely heavily on Kora in Hell, since many of his core concepts originate in this text, and since Williams himself cites it as a key text for his ideas throughout his career. I devote two chapters to Williams because any discussion of epiphany in his poetry quickly prompts a connection to American Transcendentalism, due to his Whitman-Emerson lineage.

The first chapter therefore further lays the groundwork for discussing epiphanic experiences in a secular, post-Romantic understanding of modernist poets like Williams. A second

6 problem I anticipate is the more recent push to read Williams through American Pragmatism.

While I agree with this scholarship in its explanation for totality in Williams’ metaphysics, I sense that the mystical dimensions of his aesthetics are overlooked in the Pragmatism analysis. In the second Williams’ chapter, I apply the framework of Kora to a selection of poems drawn from throughout Williams’ career, starting with Spring and All (1923) and concluding with selections from Journey to Love. Among other poems, I focus on a mid- career poem entitled “When Fresh, It Was Sweet,” and on Williams’ famous late-career poem “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” While Paterson is relevant to my project, its length and complexity are beyond the scope of this project. Instead, I aim to build a more thorough and comprehensive analysis of Williams by examining shorter poems from throughout his life.

In the fourth chapter, I turn to the late-twentieth-century poet Denise Levertov, and the contemporary poet Donald Revell. Levertov is a natural fit for this project since she reconciles the infamous antagonism between Williams and Eliot and their respective modernist approaches. In many ways, my dissertation aims to show how radically different and even antagonistic approaches to post-Romantic, post-religious poetry may have more in common than is apparent. In Levertov, the influences of Eliot, Williams, Black Mountain poets, Medieval poets, and contemporary mystics like Rilke coalesce. She units the threads I begin to weave together between Williams and Eliot. She also has contemporary contact points, such as in the poet Donald Revell, for whom she was an early mentor. Between

Revell and Levertov, I show how the epiphanic intuition of Williams and Eliot matures into multiplicity of possible worlds of experience. Instead of the mere dualism, Revell and

Levertov posit a world in which the epiphanic leap can occur in many directions at one;

7 while they retain the poetic style of Williams and his descendants, gone is the fear of association. Instead, they embrace multiplicity of associations that results in an immanentist enthusiasm for the material world. Ultimately, I claim that what we find in these poets is an amalgamation of Medieval and modernist approaches to symbolism, presence, and poetic form. The texts I choose for this final chapter include several well-known essays and lectures by Levertov, which I use to read a selection of mid- and late-career poems from several of her secular and Christian collections. For Revell, I turn to his book The Art of Attention, as well as a brief e-mail correspondence about his work and Levertov’s. From these materials, I turn to his most recent collection of poetry, The English Boat.

There are a few more issues that should be addressed in this introduction. Time is a major dimension that figures prominently in these epiphanic poems. While wholeness can be conceived of intellectually, and some may posit that totality exists in some dimension of reality, the lived experienced in time is a different matter. For Eliot’s Four Quartets, the presence of plenitude is ruptured, but he seems to find a solution through the ongoing

Pentecostal presence. This temporal stretching of wholeness throughout all time is complemented by the material presence of the incarnation in historical time. Eliot’s metaphysical framework is correlated to the aesthetic potential of his prose concept of

‘music.’ Williams conversely finds an unruptured presence through time to be the source of alienation. For him, the associations that accumulate from lived-experiences form an interpretive matrix similar to orthodoxy, dogma, and formal modes of interpretation.

Memory, as well as these things, therefore intervenes and creates distance between perceiver and perceived. Proper perception depends upon the removal of association throughout time, which renders Williams’ approach fairly atomistic; he dubs the process imagination.

8 Atomism becomes a problem later in his career, however, and is a central focus of

“Asphodel.” In this poem, the poet stands by his early approach and introduces forgiveness as a counterpart to and extension of the imagination mode of perception. And finally, time in

Levertov and Revell does not seem as problematic as it does to the first two poets. It seems to be a tremendously generative dimension, and both poets aim to make as many things as present as possible. Theirs is a poetry of rich presences drawing on history, memory, spirituality, psychological associations, and symbolic matrices found in literature and the arts. A central argument I develop throughout the dissertation is that each poet moves toward a reality in which epiphanic wholeness is materially real and continuously present. The epiphany starts out as a bounded event or experience, but each poet envisions a way of relating to the ordinary world and others with an ongoing or recurring sense of totality. To accomplish this, their poetry documents and models both the wholeness itself and how to perceive it.

This leads to the final question of the poet’s relationship to the reader: does the poet document his or her epiphany for the reader? Does he or she intend the reader, in reading the poem, to experience an epiphany, and is it the same epiphany as the poet’s? My answer is that there is a primary epiphany—that of the poet, and a secondary epiphany—that of the reader. The writing of the poem, and perhaps also its subsequent interpretation, is also epiphanic because both actions are modes of perception and discovery. The primary epiphany, in which the poet experiences or sees something exceptional in an exceptional way, occurs in real life and actually precedes the existence of the poem. This means that the poetic epiphany is a different thing than the primary epiphany, as in Levertov’s “The

Instant.” What occurs within the poems is multifold: the poet documents, explicitly or

9 implicitly, the vision of wholeness experienced in real life; in this sense, the poem documents the primary epiphany itself. A second function, however, is to bring the reader to an epiphanic perception of wholeness. In this sense, the poet uses the poetic structure to model how to perceive a thing; in the poem, things occur in right relation to each other, and often the poem shows the progression of perception gradually becoming clearer. And then, there is the reader’s secondary epiphany when they also share this type of vision. Yet another kind of epiphany occurs when a figure within the poem experiences or perceives wholeness, such as in Williams’ “When Fresh, It Was Sweet.” These fictional primary epiphanies model how to perceive a thing, and they also model a self in relation to other things and people. In short, epiphanies are manifested in many ways within and outside the poem. The unifying feature is that all the epiphanies are an experience or perception of things configured in a relationship of wholeness.

CHAPTER ONE: MUSIC, INCARNATION, AND THE CONTINUOUSLY PRESENT EPIPHANY IN T. S. ELIOT’S FOUR QUARTETS

A. Introduction and epiphany review

Epiphany in T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets is the contextualized point of contact between time and timelessness, part and whole, immanence and transcendence, and the concrete and abstract. This nexus assumes a type of dualism, but prior to the twentieth century, it was posited that these binaries would rarely meet, if ever, in the same time and place. One binary could be transcended through religious revelation or through intellectual and abstract thought or through aesthetic experience, but in the twentieth century, these pathways and the existence of dualistic spheres is called into question. Michael Bell describes modernism as “both critically and creatively… centrally concerned with the relations between literary form and modes of knowledge or understanding.”3 Thus, as traditional epistemological systems of intellectual, religious, or intuited meaning no longer provided a means of knowing and understanding the world, there arises new interest in what a thing is. This interest is not a quest for the thing in its symbolism or abstracted, Platonic form, but in its actual existence—its materiality, appearance, and the contextualized conditions in which it occurs and is available for relational contact.4 Implicit in this approach

3Michael Bell, “The Metaphysics of Modernism,” in Cambridge Companion to Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011): 11.

4In describing this interest in the thing as it is, Bell cites Wittgenstein’s forms of life and Lawrence’s vision for The Rainbow and Women in Love: “‘what the woman is – what she IS – inhumanly, physiologically, materially – ... what she is as a phenomenon (or as

11 is the understanding that the things we encounter contain everything needed to interpret their meaning in context; things mean what they are, or as Wittgenstein puts it, “the meaning of a word is its use.” This is not to say that discovery of what a thing is is determinative; a thing is not necessarily fixed apart from its dynamic context.5 The implication of this worldview, as

Bell calls it, is that when epistemological and interpretive distances vanish, so does the possibility for epiphany. Epiphanies are pleasant, exhilarating, even joyful experiences of discovery and new understanding; they are the surprise of unexpected disclosure. For this experience to occur, there must be division of and distance between known and unknown, self and other, subject and object; the spatio-temporal actualization of this contact is the epiphany.

Thus, in a one-dimensional framework where things interpret themselves, the epiphany is somewhat of an anomaly. In Four Quartets, Eliot draws on Christian theology, but his poetic epiphanies are composed without simply returning to prior modes of transcendence. Instead, the conditions for epiphany in Quartets hinges upon Eliot’s prose concept of ‘music’ and ‘musical pattern,’ which I show is directly associated with the doctrine of the incarnation. Epiphany—the contact between the ordinary world and its inaccessible counterpart in a dualistic framework—materializes spatially in the incarnate body of Christ, and is continuously present in the Pentecostal fire. From the body and the fire, Eliot uses the modality of music to access, convey, and experience this epiphanic wholeness. As a modernist poetic epiphany, this approach retains binary divisions, but it

representing some greater, inhuman will), instead of what she feels according to the human conception’” (Bell, 13).

5Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscomb, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958): §43.

12 removes the spatio-temporal distance between them; this ultimately leads to an immanentist poetry that prioritizes non-symbolic engagement with the material world. I advance an interpretation of Four Quartets that posits the presence of two roses, two fires, and two possible cosmoses. Burnt Norton introduces a cosmos of physically and temporally bounded bodies and presences; in this world, the epiphany is limited to memory and possibility, and the disclosure of wholeness is temporary and abstract. As we progress through East Coker and Dry Salvages, the images of fire and rose undergo a gradual transformation as the poet presses and examines the boundaries of time and ordinary modes of perception. In Little

Gidding, through the mode of musical patterning, we arrive at a new kind of epiphany: one that is predicated upon a body that bridges the gap between human and divine, time and eternity. We also discover that the wholeness arrived at in the disclosure of the incarnation is not a temporary experience. Through Pentecostal fire, the epiphanic moment becomes simply an epiphanic mode of new vision and continuous presence of wholeness. In this chapter, I outline several ways that scholars define the epiphany; I show how Eliot defines his version of epiphany—the ‘musical pattern’ and the ‘beyond’; and I present an interpretive framework for Four Quartets by close-reading a series of passages from the poem.

B. Review of Scholarly Approaches to the Epiphany

Epiphanies entered scholarly consciousness with James Joyce’s manifesto in Stephen

Hero in 1914: “By an epiphany he meant 'a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.’” Each word in this definition has spawned extensive commentary from the critics, variously emphasizing suddenness, spirituality, vulgarity, memory, and mind. “Far from aiding us in our reading,” wrote Robert Scholes in an acerbic debate with Florence Walzl in 1967, the term epiphany

13 “has become an obstacle to understanding, an arid formula for cranking out unnecessary interpretations” of Joyce’s work. In spite of the danger cited by Scholes, I aim to outline several critical approaches to the literary epiphany including theological, mythological, psychological, formal, social, and phenomenological formulations. There is natural rapport between some approaches, such as between the psychological and the aesthetic or between phenomenological and theological, but each approach depends upon fixed presuppositions about literary genres, poet and text, subject and object, and reader-response.

For Northrop Frye, the epiphany is a transition point between order and chaos in a mythic structure—the natural cycle and apocalypse, ideally situated on “a mountain-top just under the moon, the lowest heavenly body.”6 In Frye’s summary, the epiphany is an archetypal phenomenon in a mythic context, and it can be a moment, an experience, a state, or a place; it is an “arrival at the summit of experience in nature,” and ultimately a point of transformation and manifestation of the “risen hero” in comedy.7 Because the epiphany signals climax, transformation, and transition, Frye also posits a “demonic epiphany” unique to tragedy and satire. Whereas the typical epiphany precedes the hero’s climax or final glorious radiance, demonic epiphany precedes the moment of total collapse. Frye asserts that,

[T]he fifth phase, corresponding to fatalistic or fifth-phase tragedy, is irony in which the main emphasis is on the natural cycle, the steady unbroken turning of the wheel of fate or fortune. It sees experience, in our terms, with the point of epiphany closed up…. That brings us around again to the point of demonic epiphany… the goal of the quest that isn’t there.8

6Northrop Frye, “Third Essay: Archetypal Criticism: Theory of Myths,” in Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, ed. Robert Denham, vol. 22 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000): 190. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bayloru/detail.action?docID=3261261.

7Ibid., 191, 200.

8Ibid., 222-223.

14 Both versions of epiphany are a point of transformation and manifestation which signal or instantiate a transition to the narrative’s conclusion. A character assumes and is revealed in his final state, and the mythic quest nears its end.

The theological approach to epiphany is less interested in structural qualities of a narrative, and instead focuses on the etymological sense of “showing forth” and “displaying” a cosmically distant divinity or divine truth.9 This approach is well represented by Florence

Walzl’s essay in 1965, whose goal was to explore the influence of the liturgical epiphany, marked by its cyclical formation, on Joyce’s secular literary epiphany. Drawing on Joyce’s unambiguously Catholic background, she highlights his definition of epiphany as a “spiritual manifestation.” Walzl also notes that Joyce originally called his epiphanies “epicleti,” a theologically pregnant term denoting “invocation of the ancient mass liturgies which besought God the Father through the Holy Spirit to transform the bread and wine into the body of Christ.”10 Walzl asserts that the theological origins of epiphany’s cyclical structuring and “planes of symbolic meanings and correspondences” are reflected in the narrative structures and characterization in Joyce’s Dubliners and Finnegan’s Wake. She concludes that

“Joyce describes the process of epiphany ‘as a seeking for spiritual perspective or light,” and she quotes Joyce in Stephen Hero explaining “the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus,” and “the moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised.” From that moment of clarified perception springs the “sudden spiritual

9Florence Walzl, “The Liturgy of the Epiphany Season and the Epiphanies of Joyce,” PMLA 80, no. 4 (1965): 426.

10Ibid., 437.

15 manifestation,” which is the epiphany.11 Overall, the theological approach to epiphany emphasizes the Greek etymology of a showing forth, display, or disclosure of an object; such disclosure forms the basis of Joyce’s aesthetic disruptions of ordinariness.

In contrast to the mythological and theological readings of epiphany, the psychological approach places the subject at the center of the epiphany. Also drawing on

Joyce’s definition of epiphany, the psychological readings of Leon Edel, Morris Beja, and

Ashton Nichols emphasize a subject’s experience of perceiving the world. Focusing on the fiction of Proust, Joyce, Dostoyevsky, Woolf, and Faulkner in The Psychological Novel 1900-

1950, Edel defines the epiphany as the “functioning of the creative imagination: what occurs in the mind before he begins the difficult act of recording and communicating his experience…. [which] might be largely an atmosphere and a state of feeling, as complex and subjective in the reader as in the experience of the writer.”12 Edel’s definition stands in stark contrast to the divine manifestation of the religious approach and the point of crisis in the mythic approach. In Edel’s psychological formulation, the epiphany is not primarily a literary device, function, or event, but instead describes an aesthetic experience that occurs prior to the text’s formation. Furthermore, the epiphany is a function of interiority rather than an outward manifestation involving a subject and object. Whereas other approaches emphasize materiality and ordinariness, Edel links the epiphanic experience with time and linguistic expression; for Joyce in particular, “sounds, words, like thoughts, are experienced in time and

11Ibid., 441.

12Leon Edel, “The Arbitrary Dial: Epiphany,” in The Psychological Novel: 1900-1950 (New York: Grove Press, 1955): 95.

16 they have been, from primitive day, man’s means of giving vocal expression to emotion.”13

The epiphanic experience thus imparts structure and form to an otherwise amorphous state, which can then be converted into an aesthetic text.

Morris Beja’s Epiphany in the Modern Novel (1971), also a psychological approach, focuses on significant experience and the use of language to draw structure and meaning out of experience. While the epiphany replaces transformative spiritual, and therefore religious, experience, epiphany in the modern novel has a residue of spirituality but lacks a grounding in religiously derived meaning. With the absence of religion, he notes “a continuing need— perhaps even an intensified one—[that] has been felt for meaningful, unifying, “spiritual” emotions or experiences that would provide men with answers to some of their burning questions.”14 The psychological epiphany therefore replaces “the divinely inspired moment of new knowledge” as an opportunity to explore “the most complex experiences and the most subtle themes”15 in novels like those by Joyce, Woolf, Wolfe, and Faulkner. This approach switches focus from a divinity or truth revealed to the self-contained experience of such a revelation.

In 1987, Ashton Nichols takes the psychological approach in a fresh direction by distinguishing the “new literary epiphany,” which has roots in Wordsworth’s spots of time, from “divine inspiration, religious conversion, and mystical vision.”16 Nichols makes several

13Ibid., 96.

14Morris Beja, Epiphany in the Modern Novel (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1971): 21.

15Ibid.

16Ashton Nichols, “The New Epiphany,” in The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987): 4.

17 key points throughout his argument: first, he describes religious epiphanies as revelatory moments that require “post hoc interpretation” to impart meaning to the thing or event, whereas the literary epiphany replaces theophanic revelation with a “form of purely secular revelation.”17 The secular epiphany hinges upon a “central psychological question: what is the relationship between an immediate perception and the value we ascribe to that perception?”18 From here, Nichols contributes to the psychological approach by casting perception as a psychological event from which structures of meaning can be drawn and then funneled into a creative act. He writes,

[T]he literary epiphany leaves open the ultimate meaning of the experience. Gone is the sense that an event has only one interpretation. This view is replaced by a belief that experience is a function of a mind that ‘half perceives and half creates.’ The new epiphany occurs both in the mind of the poet and in the poem.”19

Nichols concludes by noting the literary epiphany’s effect on the reader: like myth, literary epiphany shows how “words manifest the power of language to reify experience.”20 In 1999, he refines his definition of epiphany thus: “In a sense, epiphany records the act of the mind noticing its own activity, commenting on its ability to perceive objects or experience emotions, remarking its power to press the data of consciousness.”21 In all of the

17Ibid., xii.

18Ibid., 4.

19Ibid., 21.

20Ibid., 31.

21Ashton Nichols, “Cognitive and Pragmatic Linguistic Moments: Literary Epiphany in Thomas Pynchon and Seamus Heaney,” in Moments of Moment: Aspects of the Literary Epiphany, ed. Wim Tigges, Studies in Literature 25 (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999): 468.

18 psychological approaches, interest in the object and alterity is shifted to the subject’s interior as a source of meaning and structure.

Charles Taylor’s approach inverts the psychological in that the words or images come first, and then the epiphany. Taylor’s chapter on “Modernist Epiphanies” in Sources of the

Self distinguishes between Romantic epiphanies—“epiphanies of being”—which disclose an object in itself, and modern epiphanies, which “are not expressions of anything.”22 The modern epiphany is what Taylor calls a “framing epiphany” because it reveals patterns and emotions, not ontologically significant beings. The thingless-ness of the framing epiphanies profoundly impacts aesthetic form: “the epiphany comes from between the words or images, as it were, from the force field they set up between them, and not through a central referent which they describe while transmuting.”23 Modern poetry

[L]iberates us from the constricting conventional ways of seeing, so we can grasp the patterns by which the world is transfigured.... [Pound and Wyndham Lewis's work]... all exhibit a poetry that makes something appear, brings it into our presence. But it doesn't work like the old epiphanies of being, where the object portrayed expresses a deeper reality. It doesn't come to us in the object or image or words presented; it would be better to say that it happens between them. It's as though the words or images set up between them a force field which can capture a more intense energy.24

Although Taylor’s analysis is psychological in its attention to the formation of self through the interplay of patterns and amorphous meaning, he retains an emphasis on the formal composition of words and images in relation to epiphanies. Also, it is significant that Taylor highlights emotion and subjective experience while also focusing on external conditions: the

22Charles Taylor, “Epiphanies of Modernism,” in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989): 479.

23Ibid., 466.

24Ibid., 4.

19 epiphany comes to the perceiver from outside the context of the psyche. Taylor also emphasizes the locale of the epiphany as exterior to the psyche—it is an “epiphany of interspaces,” even though it is primarily perceived and experienced psychologically. Taylor’s distinction between the Romantic and the modern epiphany does not therefore fall along lines of interior and exterior, but between two types of objective revelation. Therefore, rather than downplaying the object, Taylor re-affirms the significance of a

[H]ard-edged, clear, highly particularizing portrayal of the object. When we’re dealing with an expressive object, we strive to see through it, for it is infused with deeper meaning. But when the object serves to frame an epiphanic space, it must stand out distinctly, in its full opacity: the more defined the frame, the more distinct the message.25

Robert Langbaum, too, approaches the epiphany primarily as an innovative literary structure based on imagination in his 1999 “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and

Modern Literature.” Langbaum’s approach, however, is thoroughly grounded in the psychological approach, and he draws significantly from Beja’s work. He writes specifically about the epiphanic mode of seeing in contrast with habitual seeing.26 While the foundation of Langbaum’s study is psychological, he, too, shifts to a more technical interest in how the psychological epiphany shapes literary form. Moving from Wordsworth to modern fiction, he notes that the epiphanic mode contributes to heightened psychological association,

“momentaneousness,” and ultimately fragmentation in fiction. Literary epiphanies disrupt narrative time and consequently “spatialize” these moments of heightened perception. The

25Ibid., 477.

26Robert Langbaum, “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature,” in Moments of Moment: Aspects of Literary Epiphany, ed. Wim Tigges (Atlanta, Ga.: Rodopi, 1999): 41.

20 result is lyric stasis and silence instead of “objective narrative.”27 Langbaum points specifically to Joyce and Woolf to show how Wordsworth’s spots of time permeate twentieth-century literature.

Michael Sayeau builds on the formal aspects of literary epiphanies to shed new light on the everyday. In Sayeau’s analysis, the Joycean epiphany turns ordinariness into an epiphanic “anti-event” because it

[I]s a moment of change and development that opens an alternative… and/or signals the arrival of new meaning. The everyday, on the other hand, is the temporal ground where the event occurs and which it breaks. It was a day like any other but then… It is, as far as literary structure goes, the time and material that fills the space between events. But it is also the dialectical partner of the event, which would have no backdrop against which to emerge if not for it. As I will explain below, when literary works tamper with the conventional rhythms of narrative—that is, when they somehow put out of order the customary pace of eventfulness—the everyday moves to the foreground and is registered as such. It was a day like any other. Full stop. The everyday is always there, but only begins to matter—and matter disruptively—when its rhythmical partner, the event, fails to arrive on time or at all.28

Sayeau will go on to argue that Joyce’s epiphanies are the antithesis of events because Joyce uses structural expectations to build toward an event, but what happens instead is a void of action. This approach to the Joycean epiphany revisits temporality and formalism in order to explore ordinariness and the everyday as social constructs. Sayeau directly calls into question the early critical approaches that assume revelation, disclosure, and manifestation at a point of crisis. While he takes a distinctly narratological approach to epiphany, he ultimately argues that the epiphany embodies the absence of action and a turn to ordinariness precisely at the critical moment.

27Ibid., 51.

28Michael Sayeau, “Introduction: In the Anteroom of the Event,” in Against the Event: The Everyday and the Evolution of Modernist Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013): 13-14.

21 Also interested in the everyday, Liesel Olson adopts a narratological approach evaluating the landscape against which epiphany occurs; if an epiphany is a moment of extraordinary insight, revelation, or experience, ordinariness is the social background that provides definition and opposition. Olson writes of the “paradox of the ordinary,” in which the ordinary is hegemonic as the inevitable backdrop of everyday life, but which also paradoxically shocks us when it comes into focus. The epiphany startles an individual out of routine but does not transform or transcend, and the individual is delivered back to the everyday:

Modernist epiphany is often initiated by a banal moment; the "vulgarity of speech," as Stephen Dedalus explains, can elicit a "sudden spiritual manifestation" (SH 210). But the return to ordinary experience is inevitable, if not part of the epiphanic moment itself. Ordinary life becomes the context in which epiphany is subsumed, reconsidered, and assessed in light of its continuity or its ability to actually change one's previous behavior. That is, the ordinary is often more politically efficacious than the moment of shock. As Peter Bürger has explained, aesthetic shock "is aimed for as a stimulus to change one's conduct of life," but the affective experience of being jolted out of the ordinary does not always offer a clear sense of how or what one is meant to change" (Theory of the Avant-Garde, 80).29

While the ordinary is the basis of epiphany, it is also associated with bourgeoisie and middle- class norms,30 feminine domesticity, and routine.31 For Olson,

Beckett's disdain for the everyday may seem a far cry from Proust's aesthetic appreciation of the domestic and habitual, but both writers are simultaneously compelled and repelled by the banalities of modern life, and both are drawn to stylistic practices through which they might embody the everyday, especially its temporal dimension.32

29Liesel Olson, “Introduction: The Paradox of the Ordinary,” in Modernism and the Ordinary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009): 8.

30Ibid., 9.

31Ibid., 16.

32Ibid., 10.

Olson rightly highlights that epiphanies presuppose contexts of ordinariness, and that the modernist epiphany—in the absence of dualistic transcendence—is interested in recovering the ordinary, hence the “paradox of representing the unrepresented.”33

More recently, Gerald Gillespie’s 2010 “Epiphany: Notes on Applicability of a

Modernist Term” in Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context brings epiphany scholarship full circle. Acknowledging the religious origins of epiphany, Gillespie explains that, on the one hand, epiphany “can readily assume the thematic role of discovering a pattern in the besetting trivia,” and on the other, it “is simultaneously a valuable technical device liberating an author from such conventional barriers as chronology, genre, objectivity, and point of view.”34 For this latter reason, the epiphany is particularly suited to the features unique to psychological literature. Gillespie identifies three orders of “complex epiphany”, which are distinct from “episodic nuclei” and which can develop into “elaborate narrative structure[s].”35 The first order is “associated with the mental life of an aesthete or artist;”36 the second “is constituted when the point of view of such a guiding protagonist is relativized.”37 Relativization of the author’s mental life with other equivalent voices renders

33Ibid.

34Gerald Gillespie, “Epiphany: Notes on Applicability of a Modernist Term,” in Proust, Mann, Joyce in the Modernist Context. (Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2003): 50–67.

35Ibid., 57.

36Ibid., 57.

37Ibid., 59.

23 the text a “polyphonic composition,” which leads to the third order, a “modern ecphrasis.”38

Ultimately, Gillespie asserts that the artist’s initial capacity for illumination becomes a primary source of meaning and structure in fiction. However, once the author’s point of view is entered into a text and then relativized, the narrative is open to new possibilities for symbolism and self-generating mythic interpretation. Thus, although the origin of meaning and structure is psychological and subjective, the final work of art returns to a mythic, albeit modernized text: “In the case of Joyce, at least, we observe a writer who strives for far more than the spatialization of consciousness in ironic signs when he helps us leave history and reenter myth through our experience of the symbolic structure of words.”39 Gillespie thus merges the psychological and the mythological in his reading of Joycean epiphanies.

In contrast with the form- and psychologically-derived conceptions of epiphany,

Emmanuel Levinas develops a concept of epiphany almost entirely focused on the ontology of the other. According to Wyschogrod,

What Levinas calls the epiphany of exteriority brings into view the inadequacy of separated being; it is not an exteriority added on interiority so that together both form a totality. Each belongs to a radically different order of existence. Both the sovereignty of separated being and the relation with the other person are characteristic of human existence.40

For Levinas, epiphanies are not subjective or interior experiences, but rather active exchanges involving disclosure and response between two separate beings. The locus of epiphany is the face of the other, in which the other’s being is revealed or disclosed in a state

38Ibid., 66.

39Ibid., 47.

40Edith Wyschogrod, “The Foundation of Ethical Metaphysics,” in Emmanuel Lévinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974): 67–101., 81-82.

24 of existential nudity. Levinas’ approach to epiphany in Totality and Infinity (1961) is in direct contrast to the psychological approach; he asserts that,

[T]he relation with the face is not an object-cognition. The transcendence of the face is at the same time its absence from this world into which it enters…. This gaze that supplicates and demands, that can supplicate only because it demands, deprived of everything because entitled to everything, and which one recognizes in giving (as one “puts the things in question in giving”)—this gaze is precisely the epiphany of the face as a face.41

Langbaum asserts the opposite:

[N]ote how difficult it is to distinguish the radiance of the object from the luminousness of the mind that beholds it. That is because the object’s radiance is its inwardness, which is to say the beholder’s inwardness projected into it. The object is beheld at that point of intensity where it becomes an equivocally subjective-objective image.42

This survey shows that conceptions of the epiphany have as much to do with critical predispositions as the epiphany itself. Using variations of the same core texts—by

Wordsworth, Joyce, Woolf, Proust, Mann, Eliot, and Faulkner—scholars have proposed a wide variety of definitions and explanations of literary epiphanies. I would like to offer an updated account of literary, and specifically poetic, epiphanies in the work of T. S. Eliot,

William Carlos Williams, and Denise Levertov. In this study, I combine several aspects of the approaches described above. At its core, I assert that the poetic epiphany is the contact point between time and timelessness, part and whole, immanent and transcendent, subject and object. While this definition seems to assert dualism in the poetry of these three poets, I argue that the epiphany actually straddles both dualistic and non-dualistic conceptions of the world.

The modernist epiphany assumes a version of these binaries, but it also collapses the distance

41Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingus (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991).

42Langbaum, “Epiphanic Mode,” 46.

25 between them without entirely dissolving their distinctions. Whereas traditionally the religious and Romantic conceptions of epiphany turned on a completely separate sphere of divinity, form, will, or spirit, the modernist poetic epiphany employs dualistic binaries co- present in time and space. These poets do not directly challenge the existence of the binaries, but rather the distance between them. Because the co-presence of the binaries is always possible, the experience becomes de-temporalized and is accessible through time with proper perception. Williams calls this perception imagination, Eliot uses the language of poetry, music and prayer, and Levertov and Revell speak of attention. This process involves elements of all of the above approaches—it necessitates innovative formulations of time; it is contingent upon contact with objective materiality, but also upon psychological and subjective modes of perception and experience; it also demands an other or an object that actively discloses itself. And finally, I discuss how the modernist poetic epiphany has tremendous implications for poetic form and the reader’s response. I also discuss how the psychological account of epiphany emphasizes the collapse of narratological conventions; because of this, the non-narratival poetic epiphany is easily mistaken for a psychological occasion. However, I hold that while the poetic epiphany lacks the event and character structures inherent in narrative, modernist poetic epiphanies are not purely psychological phenomena, as they engage interior and exterior, subject and object, part and whole, time and timelessness.

C. Musical Pattern and the Beyond

“Too often, it seems to me, we assume that “seeing God” requires us to pass entirely beyond the material world. Or that we must move into a space so radically interior that the living world disappears from view. Neither of these ideas is consistent with the Christian understanding of the Incarnation. Nor are they consistent with Jesus’ habit of rooting his speech about the Kingdom in the living world; in his parables of nature, his healing

26 miracles, the great epiphanies at Mount Tabor and on the Sea of Galilee, the vision of God is mediated by the things of this physical world.”43

“Pater believed that the essence of poetry is in "an inventive handling of rhythmical language," and that music represents an art in which form and idea are perfectly mingled.”44

i. Introduction

Much ink has been spilled about external musical influences in Four Quartets,45 but there is little scholarship linking Eliot’s own concept of a “musical pattern”—developed in numerous prose texts—and its relevance to Four Quartets. In this section, I identify the origins of this concept in Eliot’s 1919 essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” and I show how it develops up to 1937, when he first delivers his lectures on “The Development of

Shakespeare” and revisits his “Hamlet” essay. In the Shakespeare lecture-set, he relies heavily on the concept of “musical pattern” in drama, and he further develops the idea in

“Aims of Poetic Drama” (1949) and “Poetry and Drama” (1951). In part, I assert that Eliot will use several terms interchangeably: ‘musical pattern,’ ‘music of poetry,’ ‘music of the play,’ and poetry as a ‘musical’ medium. Furthermore, Eliot uses the term ‘musical’ to describe the poetic dramatist’s apprehension of inexpressible emotions, of spiritual experience, and even of ineffable aspects of Christ’s incarnation in the context of theater.

43Douglas E. Christie, “Learning to See: Epiphany in the Ordinary,” Theological Studies Faculty Works, Nov/Dec, no. Weavings 11:6 (1996): 8.

44Harvey Gross, “Music and the Analogue of Feeling: Notes on Eliot and Beethoven,” The Centennial Review of Arts & Science, Summer, 3, no. 3 (1959): 269.

45A few recent and oft-cited works: Herbert Howarth, “Eliot, Beethoven, and J. W. N. Sullivan,” Comparative Literature 9, no. 4 (1957): 322–32; Lee Oser, Coming to Terms with Four Quartets (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009); Virkar-Yates; Aakshanksha Virkar-Yates, “The Music of Four Quartets: ‘Into Our First World’: Schopenhauer, Wagner, and the Music of the Will in Four Quartets,” in The Edinburgh Companion to T. S. Eliot and the Arts (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 171–78.

27 My primary goal is to transfer this concept to Four Quartets, an effort that is challenging since Eliot so thoroughly embeds the idea in discussions of drama. However,

Eliot’s dream of writing “poetry beyond poetry”46 should be linked with his ‘musical pattern,’ which enables me to argue that his approach to musicality is grounded in poetry, and that the dramatic medium is helpful, but non-essential, in the transcendent aspirations of the poet. Thematic and imagistic patterning in Four Quartets cohere with the theory of a musical pattern, and drama embodies and spatializes poetry but is still an artificial ‘world.’ In

Four Quartets, we find traces of the theater in particularly epiphanic passages, but overall

Eliot replaces the artificial context of the theater with real-world memories, history, geographical places, elements of the natural world, and the materiality of Jesus’ body.

I approach the epiphany in T. S. Eliot’s poetry through his prose work, where he introduces the concept of ‘musical pattern,’ an idea he often associates with drama, but which he also specifically aligns with the ‘poetic’ in drama. Through the concept of musical pattern,

Eliot outlines how the poet and audience connect with the ‘beyond’ through ordinary and poetic language and eventually through the unifying materiality of Christ’s incarnation and the ongoing presence of the Holy Spirit. Four Quartets’ musical pattern organizes the interplay of embodied wholeness through the incarnation. Through the incarnation, the dualistic distance between spiritual and material is collapsed into one body with a ‘double existence.’47 And through Pentecost—the continuous presence of the Holy Ghost with

46Stated in his 1942 speech “The Music of Poetry,” which is documented in F. O. Mathiessen, The Achievement of T. S. Eliot; an Essay on the Nature of Poetry, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947).

47Harvey Gross: “Every theme contains its opposite, its musical inversion. Man, alienated from self and society, finds reconciliation in God; despair becomes the way to joy; time and history become ways leading out of time and beyond history. To express such a context of

28 humankind throughout time—the dualistic distance between time and eternity is also collapsed into one point. Dualistic distinctions within space and time, upon which epiphanic experience is contingent, are thus preserved, but the experiential distance between them lessens throughout the course of Quartets. The privileged moment of epiphanic vision in the rose garden of Burnt Norton cedes to an ongoing, material, historically-grounded epiphanic reality toward the end of Little Gidding.

Eliot’s conception of music provides an aesthetic medium that essentially has one foot in the immediate, sensory world, and one foot in the transcendent space of a unified whole. Music also offers an alternative conception of time as it relates to form, allowing Eliot to create a space for epiphany that is distinct from narratological, psychological, and traditional religious epiphanies. Furthermore, in Four Quartets, Eliot replaces the artificial double reality of drama with an authentic reality in history.48 Thus, the doubling that is so crucial to the musical pattern in his critical work on drama can play out in his poetry, which bypasses the dramatic context entirely, but still employs the epiphanic ‘musical pattern’ he so admires in drama. Finally, although epiphany typically occurs in specific moments and in certain conditions, Four Quartets ultimately stretches the experience of epiphany throughout time, rendering it ongoing and simultaneously ordinary and transcendent. Four Quartets can therefore be read as the process of moving epiphany as a specific heightened moment to an ongoing state of experience that is always partly in both the transcendent and the ordinary.

The dual nature of music becomes tremendously useful in expressing the human-divine

opposition and contradiction, Eliot came, almost by necessity, to employing the form and method of music. For music has the striking ability to express simultaneously opposite states of feeling” (“Analogue,” 282).

48The language of historical fact reflects Eliot’s theological convictions.

29 duality that is collapsed in the incarnation, and in the infinite-historical ongoing presence of the Pentecostal fire. Through a musical and theological reading of Four Quartets, we see that

Eliot pulls the transcendent epiphany into ordinary time and intertwines it with ordinary things.

ii. ‘Musical Pattern’—Double Existence in Drama

In many instances, Eliot highlights that music can express emotions beyond or incompletely captured through action. For instance, in “The Aims of Poetic Drama,” he writes that “great poetry… is dramatic… but it is more than dramatic and poetic. There emerges… a kind of musical pattern as well, which has checked and accelerated the pulse of our emotions without knowing it.”49 Capturing emotional experience is a separate plane of experience that accompanies actions, characters, and plot dynamics, and which Eliot calls a double pattern,50 involving one pattern that orders the world within the drama and one that goes beyond the world of the drama (that is, ultra-dramatic or poetic drama). The musical pattern “intensifies the drama.”51

49T. S. Eliot, “The Aims of Poetic Drama,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: A European Society, 1947–1953., ed. Ronald Schuchard and Iman Javadi, vol. 7 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 384.

50Ibid., 383.

51 T. S. Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: A European Society, 1947–1953., ed. Iman Javadi and Ronald Schuchard, vol. 7 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 594. See also: “But underneath the action, which should be perfectly intelligible, there should be a musical pattern which intensifies our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level. Everybody knows that there are things that can be said in music that cannot be said in speech. And there are things that can be said in poetic drama that cannot be said in either music or ordinary speech” (Eliot, “Need for Poetic Drama,” 403).

30 Eliot takes great care to define the ‘world’ or ‘planes of reality’ that comprise and intersect in theatrical drama—and narrative forms more broadly—particularly with respect to his concept of ‘double worlds.’ In his first lecture on “The Development of Shakespeare’s

Verse” (1937), he distinguishes between ordinary drama and ultra-drama (also called ‘poetic drama,’ and drama with a ‘musical pattern’); ordinary drama has only one ‘world,’ which is that of the narrative itself, whereas ‘ultra-drama’ has a double world. The dramatic, in contrast to poetic drama, is “what is effective on the stage for an audience.”52 That is to say, drama is simply a convincing narrative with characters, action, and conflicts; even if there are multiple planes of reality within the drama, as in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the world of the drama encompasses all of these. In contrast to ordinary drama, Eliot identifies a second type of play—poetic drama—in which the characters function in two planes:

I mean that from the time of his maturity—from Hamlet—there appears dimly another plane of emotion, apprehensible through the music of the play—coming from the depths of Shakespeare himself, so that the people in the play have at least a double existence.53

‘Double existence’ is an idea to which Eliot returns frequently in his prose texts. An editors’ footnote to the Shakespeare lectures reveals that Eliot first mentions “double planes of reality in dramatic and fictional texts”54 in a 1924 essay:

52T. S. Eliot, “The Development of Shakespeare’s Verse. Two Lectures.,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934−1939., ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer, vol. 5 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 536.

53Ibid., 550-551.

54T. S. Eliot, “A Neglected Aspect of Chapman,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber Ltd, 2014), 558.

31 What one gradually comes to be aware of is that in Dostoevski’s novels there are everywhere two planes of reality, and that the scene before our eyes is only the screen and veil of another action which is taking place behind it.55

Unlike the multiple planes of reality within the single world of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, some narratives reach outside the world of the drama to a higher reality, which is abstract and emotional, and therefore musical. The audience participates in both realities. Dostoevsky and

Chapman’s narratives exemplify this doubleness; while the authors and sometimes the audience are aware of the ultra-dramatic world, characters remain within the world of the immediate drama. In his essays in 192656 and 1934,57 Eliot revisits the concept of a double world in Dostoevsky and Chapman. In the latter essay, he clearly contrasts prosaic with poetic drama, linking doubleness with the poetic quality:

It is possible that what distinguishes poetic drama from prosaic drama is a kind of doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at once. In this it is different from allegory, to which the abstraction is something conceived, not something differently felt, and from symbolism (as in the plays of Maeterlinck) in which the tangible world is deliberately diminished—both symbolism and allegory being operations of the conscious planning mind. In poetic drama a certain apparent irrelevance may be the symptom of this doubleness; or the drama has an under- pattern, less manifest than the theatrical one. We sometimes feel, in following the words and behavior of some of the characters of Dostoevsky, that they are living at once on the plane that we know and on some other plane of reality from which we are shut out: their behavior does not seem crazy, but rather in conformity with the laws of some world that we cannot perceive. More fitfully, and with less power, this doubleness appears here and there in the work of Chapman, especially in the two Bussy D’Ambois plays.58

55Ibid., 555-553.

56T. S. Eliot, “Lecture V: Donne’s Longer Poems,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926., ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber Ltd, 2014, 2014), 686–704.

57T. S. Eliot, “John Marston,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934−1939, ed. Iman Javadi, Ronald Schuchard, and Jayme Stayer (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 114–25.

58Ibid., 120.

The language of “an under-pattern, less manifest” and of “some other plane of reality from which we are shut out… some world that we cannot perceive” speaks of dualism inherent in the poetic drama, and it provides a landscape with tremendous potential for epiphanic experience. This hidden reality is approached through the musical pattern, not the dramatic pattern, and with this hiddenness comes the possibility of revelation. An artificial, but ordinary-feeling, world is needed to bridge the distance between ordinary life and the possible—but ordinarily inaccessible—emotions and spiritual experiences of the ‘beyond.’

The theater thus functions as partly ordinary and partly transcendent, and its ability to perform in both spheres at once makes it musical.

However, Eliot warns that, “One must be careful not to take this term ‘musical’ too literally”:

I mean that is it something over and above plot, development of character, and conflict of character: a pattern of action in which the characters more than act of themselves, and of speech expressing more than what the characters know or know they feel. Something is exhibited of which we have only rare glimpses in our daily life.59

The quality of being above and beyond the world of the simple drama is not less than drama, but something more, hence the term ‘ultra-dramatic.’ The experience of writing and watching the ultra-dramatic is a form of transcendence, but one which begins with language “beyond the limited needs of expressing the thoughts and shades of a feeling of a particular character at a particular moment.”60 The ultra-dramatic thus pushes beyond the spatio-temporal boundaries of the ordinary dramatic. Because the ultra-dramatic is more a pattern of emotion,

59Eliot, “Development,” 538.

60Eliot, “Development,” 537.

33 spirituality, and abstraction, it attracts the qualities of music. Twice in the “Development of

Shakespeare” lectures, Eliot refers to the “hidden music”61 that hovers over the ordinary drama and the scene itself. This hidden music occurs specifically in “poetic drama, [in which] we are lifted to another plane of reality, or a hidden and mysterious pattern of reality appears as from a palimpsest,” a pattern that is musical, not dramatic.62 While in other places

Eliot will emphasize the literal musicality of rhythm and meter in poetry,63 he is more interested in it here as an abstract way of ordering and exploring intangible regions of emotion and even spirituality. This is to say that Eliot correlates the non-literal ‘musical pattern’ with a plane of reality over and beyond the world of the drama, and consequently beyond the world of ordinary life of the poet and audience.

While much of the discussion of musical pattern plays out in lectures and essays on drama and narrative, Eliot clearly subordinates musicality to poetic drama, which means that musicality is primarily an aspect or quality of poetry. While in other places he notes that not all poetry is musical, it seems clear that musicality in linguistic arts is due to language’s poetic qualities. It is also significant that while doubleness is an important part of Eliot’s criticism of drama, he does not limit it to drama. The arguments he sets forth for ‘poetic’ drama and musical pattern extend to poetry as a form. The phrase ‘poetic’ is not only a qualifier, but also an aesthetic form compatible with double worlds:

61Ibid., 544, 553.

62Ibid., 538.

63For instance, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, His Metric and Poetry (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1917).

34 But “the greatest poetry,” like the greatest prose, has a doubleness; the poet is talking to you on two planes at once. So I mean not merely that Shakespeare had as refined a sense for words as Dante; but that he also has this doubleness of speech.64

As I explain in my definition of the modernist epiphany, Eliot uses stage plays both to reach beyond and to connect with the audience through familiarity and ordinariness: characters “must have a direct contact with us at the starting point of their emotions, and the situations from which these emotions arise must be comprehensible to us in terms of ordinary daily living.”65 The same principle is especially applicable to language: “Only the poet who can say the common things, as common men would say them in daily speech, can say the greatest things.”66 At first, the world of the drama should be indistinguishable from the

“hidden music” of the beyond; the musical and the dramatic “are not the same, although up to a point they develop together.”67 The musical pattern thus corresponds to poetic drama, whereas ordinariness and the internal world of the drama correspond to the plain drama.

Language specifically lifts the audience to a “higher plane,”68 and even in scenes exhibiting a particularly musical pattern, Shakespeare uses noticeably colloquial speech.69

Eliot is aware of the limits of language; in 1936, he writes in The Listener:

64T. S. Eliot, “Introduction to The Wheel of Fire: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare’s Sombre Tragediesby G. Wilson Knight,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: English Lion, 1930–1933, ed. Jason Harding and Ronald Schuchard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 147.

65Eliot, “Development,” 537.

66Ibid., 553.

67Ibid., 544.

68Ibid., 538.

69Ibid., 548.

35 But underneath the action, which should be perfectly intelligible, there should be a musical pattern which intensifies our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level. Everybody knows that there are things that can be said in music that cannot be said in speech. And there are things that can be said in poetic drama that cannot be said in either music or ordinary speech.70

In the same essay he argues that poetry is the “natural and complete medium” for drama.

Implicit in Eliot’s essay is the concept that poetry follows a musical pattern, whereas prose genres follow a non-poetic, single-world dramatic pattern. Though creating a structural distinction between form and content, Eliot holds that because poetry can follow a musical pattern, it is able to express emotion. This is nothing new, as scholars are well aware of

Eliot’s early concern for emotion in his theory of the objective correlative:

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding and “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.71 Thus far, critics have not linked Eliot’s objective correlative to musical pattern. What he describes in 1919 as the “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events,” I think we should recognize as a pattern that effectively and accurately captures and prompts an emotional response from the audience. Such composition is by nature musical, not dramatic, and pertains to intangible experience, ineffable meaning, and significance beyond the immediate events and characters in a given situation. In “Development of Shakespeare,” Eliot revisits

70T. S. Eliot, “The Need for Poetic Drama,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: Tradition and Orthodoxy, 1934−1939, ed. Iman Javadi, Schuchard Ronald, and Jayme Stayer, vol. 5, The Listener (1936) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 403.

71T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The Perfect Critic, 1919–1926, ed. Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard, vol. 2 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press and Faber & Faber Ltd, 2014), 125.

36 “Hamlet and His Problems,” but he emends his early dissatisfaction to claim that “from

Hamlet—there appears dimly another plane of emotion, apprehensible through the music of the play… so that the people in the play have at least a double existence.”72 Eliot’s early dissatisfaction with Hamlet is its formal inability to capture inexpressible emotion: “the complete adequacy of the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in

Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the fact as they appear.”73⁠ The facts that are so problematic are the substance of dramatic patterning, and the play lacks what Eliot would come to identify as a “musical pattern which intensifies our excitement by reinforcing it with feeling from a deeper and less articulate level.”⁠74

Eliot’s association of musical pattern with emotion is more clearly stated in 1937, in his introduction to Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood. He notes that “Miss Barnes's prose has the prose rhythm that is prose style, and the musical pattern which is not that of verse.”75 He gives a glowing commendation of character and event development in the novel, but he reserves special praise for the emotional component of the novel:

The book is not simply a collection of individual portraits; the characters are all knotted together, as people are in real life, by what we may call chance or destiny, rather than by deliberate choice of each other's company: it is the whole pattern that they form, rather than any individual constituent, that is the focus of interest.76

72Eliot, “Development,” 550-551.

73Eliot, “Hamlet,” 125.

74Eliot, “Need for Poetic Drama,” 403.

75T. S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes, “Introduction,” in Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961), xii.

76Ibid., xiv-xv.

37 Barnes develops an inarticulable pattern, or “set of objects, a situation, a chain of events,”77 that exceeds the dramatic pattern provided by mere prose narrative.

Eliot’s thoughts on poetic drama and the objective correlative together have implications for aesthetic form. Ultimately, Eliot identifies two concurrent forms, the inner and the outer, and this distinction can overlay any medium—drama, narrative, and poetry.

The quality of “unity” or “wholeness” that connects inner and outer form is what gives poetry its musical quality:

And when I say the structure, I mean something beyond stanza form or metre or rhyme scheme—I mean the pattern of ideas and images which cannot be identical for two different poems, as well: the unity of outer and inner form.⁠78

Thus, for Eliot, the music of a poem is its pattern of inner, linguistically inexpressible ideas and images unified with the surface form of words and meanings as understood in contemporary culture. It seems also that the musicality is two-fold: there is the inner, ineffable pattern which is musical, and there is the unity of inner and outer form, which is another type of inarticulable patterning. iii. “Necessary and dangerous” Duality

While I have established the goal of music and the fact that Eliot considers it a link to transcendent domains of emotion, spirituality, and ineffable dimensions of reality, it is worth discussing further how exactly the musical quality functions as an aesthetic tool. If we hold that music is a different formal structure than drama, that it has two paradoxical functions of

77Eliot, “Hamlet,” 125.

78T. S. Eliot, “Poetry, Speech and Music,” in The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition: The War Years, 1940−1946, ed. David. E. Chinitz and Ronald Schuchard, vol. 6 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017), 283.

38 connecting words to ordinary speech and to the ineffable, and that its pattern is distinctive because it captures the relations within the inner form and the relation between inner and outer forms, I submit that anything adhering to these criteria can conversely be recognized as musical. Furthermore, we can thus far identify three things with a double nature in Eliot’s prose: music, a work of art as perceived by a reader or audience and composed by the poet, and the incarnate Christ. Therefore, when establishing criteria for music in Four Quartets, we would expect time, space, poetic form, the poet’s theology, and poet and reader to interact accordingly with the paradoxical double nature of music. In Four Quartets, I investigate whether time and space are indeed represented differently than they would appear in ordinary narrative, whether they connect to both the ordinary and the ineffable, and whether they will function in two relational dimensions—between things in the unseen structure of the poem, and between the inner form, or themes, and the surface level of the poetry.

In regard to the first criterion, the poem speaks of “moments” instead of events and formative junctures in characterization. These moments, instead of being points on a linear narrative line, are instead nodes of experience, and instead of points of action and change, they are places of stillness. Eliot’s notion of stillness can be likened to an anti-event in other scholarship, but this description only makes sense in a narrative sense of time, which Eliot does not give us in Four Quartets. Regardless, Eliot seems to emphasize that the lack of a narrative arc does not mean that experience is impossible; instead, experience happens without being tied to specific point on a timeline: “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. / And I cannot say when, for that is to place it in time.”79⁠ The moments are

79T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton II, in Four Quartets. Collected Poems 1909-1962.. (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1991).

39 rather a state of being, an ability to perceive and experience two dimensions of reality at once in perfect balance. This tension between certainty of experience with ambivalence toward time echoes Eliot’s fraught relationship with language. To understand something, one typically strives for a word or placement in time that will make it intelligible. But to assign a word or to place it in time is ultimately, Eliot believes, to commence alienation. Time as experience is therefore meaningful and significant as a narratival event, but it plays out partly in a dimension of experience that cannot be broken into discrete moments of time. This dimension of experience is, for Eliot, not necessarily an alternative to experience in time, but a concurrent space that occurs alongside the moments that do take place in space and time. In this sense, the experiential space is musical, which helps him to organize and articulate the ineffable dimension. Even if we cannot paraphrase or reduce this dimension in logical language, we can still know that we have been there and experienced something.

The second criterion for music is its “necessary and dangerous” and paradoxical function of connecting to both ordinary and ineffable,80 which is indeed true of Four

Quartets. In the fifth passage of “Burnt Norton,” we read that “words move, music moves /

Only in time,” which suggests that words and music do have an immediate, sensorial, literal existence in time, though “Only by the form, the pattern / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar / Moves perpetually in its stillness.”81 According to the laws of physics, the Chinese jars vibrates constantly on a molecular level, which is a concept Eliot

80In this source, Eliot also clearly links music and ordinary speech. I’m still working on how it all fits together. The interest in ordinary speech spans throughout his entire career. At one point he even states that it is difficult to “be a poet and a Christian.” There seems to be some tension here.

81Eliot, Burnt Norton V.

40 would have been familiar with. So, to describe the Chinese jar thus, Eliot points out the imperceptible but real dimension in which the jar is in motion. To the ordinary eye, however, it is still. Both states are simultaneously true and do not negate each other, and the statement merely highlights the inability of human perception to see and experience both states at one time. Music is a modality of experience that intervenes at this perceptive impasse, because it enables the individual to access and experience the ordinarily inaccessible dimension. First, there is the literal, physical violin music that is perceived by the physical ear. In a sense, this form of music operates on the surface level of art and is therefore ordinary. Second, we should understand “the pattern” to be music in its formal sense, as explained above. “The pattern” is music at work connecting the surface sound of the violin string with the inner structure of unseen meanings—the dimension of imperceptible movement. The music is an alternative and supplement to visual perception because it brings sound and inner form into relationship and allows the beholder to experience both simultaneously.

But sometimes stillness is found in the inner, inaccessible space. The third criterion is also satisfied if we understand ‘the pattern’ as a relation between things, connecting the surface level—the ordinary dimension perceptible by physical senses—to the extraordinary, hidden space. When the poet negotiates the distance between these two dimensions in Four

Quartets, there is explicit language of patterns and music often followed by implicit poetic patterning of images and concepts. In section E, I discuss the explicit ‘pattern’ passages, which appear in a sequential order throughout the poem.

Finally, this discussion of the pattern must be related to the issue at hand, which is the epiphany. Eliot’s epiphanies cannot be subsumed into the psychological or traditionally religious conceptions of epiphany. Ashton Nichols writes that the nineteenth century

41 epiphany, which he describes as “a powerfully realized moment of transformed consciousness” continues into the twentieth century in the work of Yeats, Eliot, Stevens, and

Heaney.82 Eliot, however, asserts that the

[P]attern of emotion beyond that which we originally known as human…. Exceeds the requirements of the dramatic, for it is used to do something more than reveal individual psychology or in the ordinary sense group psychology; that it is not merely in the particular phase but… is a pattern throughout the whole play; and that without being un-dramatic it may be in conflict with the ordinary dramatic upon which our conscious mind is fixed.83

He writes that the musical pattern transcends the ordinary, psychological drama in order to reach the spiritual drama that overlays the characters and actions.84 Of all the “recognition scenes,” Eliot writes that Shakespeare’s conclusion to Pericles approaches ritual, and that the

“poetic drama developed to its highest point turns back towards liturgy: and the scene could end in no other way than by the vision of Diana.”85 In “Aims,” he explicitly writes that poetry in theatre should be a “humble shadow or analogy of the Incarnation, whereby the human is taken up into the divine.”86 The musical pattern unique to poetry thus manifests most fully in moments of recognition, vision, and incarnation. As I explain above, music is primarily concerned with two relational dimensions, the first being the inner structure of thematic and emotional relations, and the second being the unity of inner and outer form. As

82Ashton Nichols, “Epiphany in Twentieth-Century Poetry,” in Nichols, Ashton. The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth-Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment . Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987. Print. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 181.

83Eliot, “Development,” 539.

84Ibid.

85Ibid., 555.

86Eliot, “Aims,” 380.

42 such, it is fundamentally a mediating mode. Like the incarnation, music exists in two places and has two natures, but it accomplishes the mediation while participating fully in the dimensions of both spaces. The meeting or rupture of the distinction between time and eternity is supported by Eliot’s insistence on joining ordinary speech and characters with the epiphanic, musical pattern. Furthermore, it should be no surprise that music has two

“necessary and dangerous tasks,” which consist of connecting the poetic and dramatic formal conventions to the idioms of common speech, and an opposite and paradoxical escape from the familiarity of ordinary language. I assert that the image of Christ’s incarnation thus embodies the epiphanic junction, and it is the image that unites the musical patterns of Four

Quartets.

D. ‘Musical Pattern’: From Poetic Drama to Poetry

i. ‘Musical pattern’ in Four Quartets

There is extensive scholarship on the epiphanic ‘still point’ in Four Quartets, but there is little scholarship that brings Eliot’s ‘musical pattern’ into dialogue with the epiphany.

This section on Eliot shows that music in Quartets is epiphanic, and that it builds toward the embodied—and therefore material—wholeness of the incarnation and the continuously present—and therefore immediate—Pentecostal fire. These two theological concepts provide a spatio-temporal layer of the poem that is both transcendent and immediate, and therefore musical in Eliot’s sense of the term. Also due to its material immediacy, the epiphanic dimensions of the poem correlate to ordinariness.

Music is also related to ritual in that the end of both is epiphany. Ritual is an important connection to epiphany because Eliot proposes two different origins of drama: as

43 an outgrowth of ritual87 and also as a writer’s deployment of poetry in order to make it more accessible to his audience.88 Ritual and music both perform the same function and reflect the two possible origins of drama.89 As Daniel notes in regard to Eliot’s drama Sweeney

Agoniste, he wanted to use drama to increase the contact between his words and his audience,90 and he wanted to shift the medium away from mimesis toward action that is what it says. Daniel writes that dramatists like Eliot “understood language, with all its compelling rhythms and haunting cadences, to be a fundamental component of their dramatic rituals” and that for Eliot specifically, “it was the drum pulsing through language that would reveal drama’s ritual foundations and awaken audiences from sleepy spectatorship.”91 Since we know that Eliot used material originally intended for his drama Murder in the Cathedral as the basis for Burnt Norton, we must read the mediatory function of ritual in drama, as well as the music of poetry, in this poem. In this poem, music is like ritual in its call to the depths of reality inaccessible to ordinary perception.

This reach toward the ineffable, and the shift from drama to poetry, may seem like a movement away from physicality, and therefore away from ordinariness. It is clear, however, that immaterial memory and spiritual contemplation pool around concrete, physical anchors

87See Julia E. Daniel, “‘Or It Might Be You’: Audiences in and of T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes,” Modern Drama, Winter, 54, no. 4 (2011): 435–54. Daniel argues that Eliot considered theater to have its roots in religious ritual, which means the poet would have sought to make his words more real and accessible to a responsive audience.

88Eliot, “Aims,” 377.

89Eliot, “Development,” 555.

90Daniel, “Audiences,” 437.

91Ibid., 441.

44 like buildings, places, and the four elements of earth, fire, water, and air.92 Eliot’s memories of Emily Hale are geographically and architecturally anchored at the Burnt Norton manor; his ancestors (and also a sense of family tradition and myth) are tied to East Coker in

Somersetshire; his childhood takes on the concrete imagery of the Dry Salvages rock formations in Massachusetts; and his religious heritage solidifies in the place and architecture of Little Gidding’s chapel. These are just a few examples, but they show that each intangible element of the poem materializes in some fashion; this pairing is yet another form of dualism and doubling, and thus is somewhat ‘musical.’ While musical pattern does capture the

“fringe” and states of existence beyond ordinary expression,93 materiality and the body remain central to Eliot’s poetry of the beyond.94 As he states elsewhere, in order for poetry not to become “superfluous decoration” in drama, it “should… [be] a kind of humble shadow or analogy of the Incarnation.”95 In Four Quartets, there is indeed a void of the speaker’s body, actions, and personhood; according to Lee Oser, “Eliot does not entirely materialize.

He remains invisible, a fugitive voice speaking behind a shifting tableau of situations.”96

However, while it is true that Eliot’s body has little place in the poem, the body of Christ brings flesh and materiality to Quartets. One of the most vividly physical passages is in East

Coker IV, which describes human physical decay and Christ’s human body as a source of healing:

92Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (London: Faber, 1978).

93Eliot, “Poetry and Drama,” 603.

95Eliot, “Aims,” 380; Harvey Gross: “But he is not approaching the condition because he wishes to lose his ideas in his form, or to create mere patterns of pleasing sounds. He is straining to evoke states of consciousness which cannot be expressed by purely cognitive aspects of language” (“Analogue,” 278).

96Oser, “Coming to Terms with Four Quartets,” 220.

45 The wounded surgeon plies the steel That questions the distempered part; Beneath the bleeding hands we feel The sharp compassion of the healer’s art Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.

Our only health is the disease If we obey the dying nurse Whose constant care is not to please But to remind of our, and Adam’s curse, And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse

The chill ascends from feet to knees, The fever sings in mental wires. If to be warmed, then I must freeze And quake in frigid purgatorial fires Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.

The dripping blood our only drink The bloody flesh our only food: In spite of which we like to think That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood— Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.97

Furthermore, in Dry Salvages V, the poet identifies ‘Incarnation’ as the body in which “the impossible union / of spheres of existence is actual.” Musicality and the body therefore both strive for the same quality of presence and transcendence; music is the path to transcendence in poetry, and the body of Christ is its realization. A few lines before, we read that “the intersection of the timeless with / Time, is an occupation for the saint”; for the rest of us, the ordinary folk, there is the “unattended / Moment,” which, like music, is “in and out of time.”

For the non-saint, there is “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all, but you are the

97T. S. Eliot, East Coker IV in Four Quartets. Collected Poems 1909-1962. (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1991), 187-88.

46 music / While the music lasts.”98 The path of the saint and the pathway of music both lead to the half-guessed hint of the Incarnation.

The disembodied Eliot on the via negativa cannot be denied, but it is only one layer of the poem, and it is not the final or most significant plane of reality in Four Quartets. In the

Shakespeare lectures, Eliot goes so far as to claim that it is for the poet and his reader to decide which layer of existence is dominant; we may choose to engage the layer that correlates to our ordinary life, or we may join hands with the poet and venture beyond: “It all depends on the plane of reality on which we choose to take “ourselves” as existing, whether that of social comedy or disaster, or that which we individually and unaided never reach.”99

While this quote suggests that the poet can assist in reaching toward the as-yet ineffable place of existence, the poet has an opposite duty to transparency. Eliot is thus in a difficult position, since as the poet, he would not want to attract attention to himself as poet and violate his goal of aesthetic transparency.100 He is a necessary agent, but not a visible subject or presence within the poem. When we encounter a body, therefore, it is Christ’s body; when we encounter a place, we watch Eliot in that place, but we also find ourselves present in the poem; when we encounter memories, they are peculiarly apparitional, with little of Eliot’s psyche interpreting them to us. It is for this reason that we encounter hedgerows, seasons, natural elements, and snatches of history directly and without narrative context. It seems that, for Eliot, both the ordinary and the beyond are real, whereas as the world of the drama is not.

98T. S. Eliot, Dry Salvages V in Four Quartets. Collected Poems 1909-1962. (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1991), 198-199.

99Eliot, “Development,” 537.

100Cf. Matthew Arnold’s suggestion that poetry can replace religion.

47 With the theater removed, there is a direct line between ordinary life and the historical and ongoing ritual of Pentecost and the incarnation. Whereas any moments of epiphany or transcendence that occur in a theatrical production are confined by the duration and stage of the drama itself, the Pentecostal, incarnational epiphany is here, now, and always. Eliot’s aim in Four Quartets is to make the abstract and inaccessible regions of the beyond immediate and ongoing, here and now. He infuses the ordinary with revealed transcendence and achieves immediate plenitude through the epiphany; much like Williams, he wants to bind the exceptional to the daily.101

Replacing the theater with the ordinary world demands that author and text perform a ritual function, since they work to connect the audience to the beyond. For this reason, Eliot’s attempt at transparency is all the more crucial: ideally, he and the text would be transparent in the eyes of the reader. In Howarth’s assessment, this very transparency makes Quartets particularly musical in the style of Beethoven.102 It is also transparency that leads critics to detect an anti-materialistic and anti-corporeal element in Four Quartets. In Four Quartets,

101However, Williams and Eliot conceptualize what counts as “exceptional” quite differently, even though their practice is similar.

102Howarth asserts that Eliot is too preoccupied exploring the difference between music and language to achieve the full transparency of late Beethoven. So much of Quartets is about the struggle with language that it never quite disappears from the reader’s consciousness. Second, the poem often yields poetry “so outstandingly beautiful” that it succeeds in attracting attention. Howarth suggests that Quartets gives Eliot practice needed to achieve greater transparency in The Cocktail Party and The Confidential Clerk. These two plays are “certainly transparent” (Howarth 330, 331). Howarth’s conclusion suggests that Eliot’s lack of transparency is actually due to his consideration of the audience. Whereas Beethoven’s “journey took him beyond the common ear” and Mallarmé’s poetry “honors the word”, Eliot’s poetry strives to connect the common ear with “what the word signifies.” This is the same tension Eliot calls “necessary and dangerous”: to link the common with the beyond. Because the word is essential for this endeavor, it is impossible for it to fade from view entirely.

48 however, Eliot’s physical and authorial transparency serve to connect real times and places to a concurrent and equally real space of the beyond. Whereas in the theater he attempts to lift the audience to the divine, in Four Quartets he brings the divine directly to the level of the reader. Transparency enables the audience or reader direct access to the frontiers of spirituality and complex emotion that can only be accessed via the musical pattern. Although the musical pattern is essential for accessing this space, it does not intrude upon the audience’s perception. And while this ineffable space is accessed through the musicality of poetry, the abstraction is paradoxically embodied. In the incarnation, the “human is taken up into the divine,”103 which asserts the centrality of the body, albeit not Eliot’s own body or personhood. Furthermore, Eliot refrains from prioritizing ideas and pure spirit over the body:

“drama is made not with ideas but with human beings.”104 Thus, it seems that in his musical poetry and poetic drama, Eliot is pushing for a paradoxical embodied transparency that reaches the beyond but which also renders it experientially and materially present.

E. Close-reading Four Quartets

Epiphany transitions from a privileged moment in the rose garden of Burnt Norton to an ongoing co-presence of time and timelessness in Little Gidding. As a student of mine once noted, the absent, desired, hypothetical love in Burnt Norton is replaced by a love that did happen in Little Gidding: “the drawing of this Love and the voice of this / Calling.”105

Longing and desire pervade the opening of Burn Norton, and even though the epiphanic ‘still

103Eliot, “Aims,” 380.

104Ibid., 385.

105T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding V in Four Quartets. Collected Poems 1909-1962. (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1991), 208.

49 point’ is introduced in this poem, the sense of fulfillment is deferred until the conclusion of

Little Gidding.

Without the removed space of theater, a higher, musically-attainable space of the beyond comes into direct contact with the immediate space attainable by ordinary speech in

Four Quartets. The poem becomes the staging ground for initial contact and eventually a permanent connection between the immediate and the beyond. Since the point of contact is attained through doubling and overlapping patterns according to Eliot’s prose, and since my claim is that the epiphany is the contact between ordinary and transcendent binaries, I assert that the epiphanies in Four Quartets are precipitated by and grounded in overlapping patterns and doubles, which occur both implicitly and explicitly. In this section, a sequential approach to the epiphanies and patterns in Four Quartets reveals a progression of epiphany from a particular, privileged moment to an ongoing presence of both sides of transcendent binaries.

There is a concentration of dual patterning in the second section of each poem in

Four Quartets, so I give special attention to these passages. As Howarth explains, it is easy to see a correlation between Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet Opus 132 and Four Quartets, with the second movement of each poem taking the form of a “scherzo with a markedly contrasting trio.”106 With Beethoven’s scherzo and trio as a model, the second section of each poem begins with a highly stylized, lyrical “scherzo,” in which Eliot seems to show or enact an implicit ‘musical pattern.’ The contrasting trio verses discursively interpret the sounds and images of the scherzo. Howarth argues that Burnt Norton more rigidly adheres to Beethoven as a model, but that Eliot’s style in the second movement evolves into something entirely new by Little Gidding. While the scherzo and trio structure generally characterizes the

106Howarth, “Eliot, Beethoven, and J. W. N. Sullivan,” 322.

50 second sections of the poems, I also note a dramatic shift from imagistic to aural patterning by the end of Four Quartets. In the following sections, I move consecutively through Four

Quartets, giving special emphasis to the second movements. In addition to the second movements, I also focus on the first movement of Burnt Norton and the fifth movement of

Little Gidding, as these two sections represent the start and end points of the poem. Burnt

Norton begins with the bounded epiphany, which is a particular, privileged and fleeting moment of vision, whereas Little Gidding concludes with a new epiphany, which is an ongoing, embodied state of plenitude. I also highlight the first section of East Coker, as it embeds a dramatic scene that stands in relief from the rest of the poem. I include this passage because it sheds light on dramatic elements that interact with the musical and epiphanic dimensions of the poem.

i. Burnt Norton

The first moment typically recognized as an epiphany by scholars is the rose garden and pool filled with light in Burnt Norton I. As I note earlier, the poetic epiphany does not conform to a narratological or psychological structure, but rather unfolds spatially and visually, and it follows a thematic and musical sense of time rather than a narrative or historical progression of time. The rose garden passage denotes sequence: “shall we follow /

The deception of the thrush?” and “so we moved…. To look down into the drained pool”107; the passage does not constitute a narrative within itself or in the larger context of Quartets.

Just enough is said to give the reader a hazy sense of the two people moving and looking, but most of the context remains as elusive as the echoing laughs. Like a dream, the passage lacks

107T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton I in Four Quartets. Collected Poems 1909-1962.. (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1991), 176.

51 critical tension and identifiable characters in spite of the language of people, purpose, and movement.⁠108 Though the absence of crisis could be considered an anti-event in novels such as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Joyce’s Ulysses, the formal structure of a novel puts the anti- event in high relief, with the form building a sense of anticipation in the reader. But in a text like Quartets, the structure and flow of the poem never establish such an expectation.

Spatial and temporal boundaries impose limits on the rose garden epiphany: “And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight / and the lotos rose, quietly, quietly” is soon followed by a clearly demarcated end: “Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.”109

The epiphanic light and its reflections are contained in one particular space by the “dry concrete, brown edged,” and the duration of the epiphany is bounded by passing time demarcated. At this point in the poem, the bird proclaims that “humankind cannot bear very much reality.”110 Both the meeting of binaries—time past and time future—and a human’s capacity for this moment are profoundly limited in Burnt Norton. While it is possible for the binaries to meet in this space of memory, presence, and vision, the experience is short-lived.

This first appearance of epiphany in Quartets is also a first instance of double patterning, in which the unnamed individuals move toward the drained pool, possibly in the presence of the hidden laughter and the roses: “So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern, /

Along the empty alley, into the box circle, / To look down into the drained pool.”111 In place

108The connection to dreamlike poetry is fascinating: “It is not necessary, in order to enjoy the poem, to know what the dream means; but human beings have an unshakeable belief that dreams mean something: they used to believe – and many still believe – that dreams disclose the secretes of the future; the orthodox modern faith is that they reveal the secrets – or at least the more horrid secrets – of the past” (Eliot, “Music of Poetry,” 313).

109Eliot, Burnt Norton I, 176.

110Eliot, Burnt Norton I, 176.

52 of dramatic sequence, we are given an aerial-view impression of Eliot, his companion, and the garden path in a choregraphed pattern. There is a sense of realignment and shifting perspectives. And since the reader has been placed above the garden and can observe the pattern, we are no longer moving through the garden with Eliot and his companion. The roses and laughter are his guests, but the reader is not. Our suspension in space allows us to see and experience a pattern we would otherwise miss. And though we can experience the sense of progression along the alley, into the box circle, and toward the drained pool, the pattern is available to us only because we are also suspended in time. Furthermore, although Eliot and the guest are bound by time as they make their progress through the garden, the reader is above their timeline and can grasp the wholeness of the garden’s pattern. Most important in this passage, though, is the fact that this pattern precipitates the epiphanic moment of the pool filling with light. In this passage, musical and not dramatic patterning catalyzes the realignment of selves, time, and space in anticipation of the epiphany. Burnt Norton I unfolds an implicit epiphany in the pattern through the rose garden to the sun-filled pool, which precipitates the explicit pronouncement of epiphany in the lines, “Time past and time future/

What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always the present.”112

However, this rose garden epiphany is the main point of departure for the rest of the poem because it enacts temporal and spatial boundedness, and existential emptiness and solitude.

The epiphany leads us to absence and emptiness. The rose, light, and epiphany of Burnt

Norton I exist in a cosmos of possibility but no material and spiritual totality; these will be replaced with a second rose, fire, and ongoing presence in Little Gidding.

111Ibid.

112Eliot, Burnt Norton I, 176.

53 ***

In Burnt Norton II, we circle around to a second implicit, patterned epiphany followed by an explicit statement of epiphany at “the still point of the turning world.”

Burnt Norton II Garlic and sapphires in the mud Clot the bedded axle-tree. The thrilling wire in the blood. Sings below inveterate scars Appeasing long forgotten wars. The dance along the artery The circulation of the lymph Are figured in the drift of stars Ascend to summer in the tree We move above the moving tree In light upon the figured leaf And hear upon the sodden floor Below, the boarhound and the boar Pursue their pattern as before But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance. I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where. And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.113

This second section of Burnt Norton extends the concept of musical pattern to inarticulable relations found in the natural world. A collage of natural imagery is immediately followed by the lines, “At the still point of the turning world.” As the rose garden pattern precipitated a personal epiphany, this second example of patterning represents cosmic

113Eliot, Burnt Norton II, 176-177.

54 relations from physiological to astronomical spheres. It is only fitting that this much larger pattern should introduce the cosmic space of epiphany at the still point of the turning world.

Reflecting and elaborating the rose garden pattern in the spiraling pattern of the “garlic and sapphires” passage, the ‘still point’ passage echoes and develops “time past and time future.”

The two scenes do not belong to the same human timeline, and the occurrence of these moments hardly touches the same human or narratival timeline, but they do belong to a greater thematic, and therefore musical, pattern. We find here music in both formal senses— in the inner, ineffable pattern, but also between the repeated and echoed themes that arise and develop throughout the poem.

ii. East Coker

East Coker picks up the theme of co-present beginning and ending in its opening line; in the center of this first section of East Coker, we encounter a second round of patterning, which is notable for its overt correlation with literal music. To the pattern of unfulfilled desire and bounded epiphany established in Burnt Norton, this passage introduces a far more structured vignette that combines literal music with performative ritual. Here, a stage-like scene invites the reader to watch, but the rhythms and pattern of the scene eventually reach out toward and envelop the spectator.

East Coker I114 In that open field If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close, On a summer midnight, you can hear the music Of the weak pipe and the little drum And see them dancing around the bonfire The association of man and woman In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie— A dignified and commodious sacrament.

114Eliot, East Coker I, 182-183.

55 Two and two, necessarye coniunction, Holding eche other by the hand or the arm Whiche betokeneth concord. Round and round the fire Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles, Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes, Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth Mirth of those long since under earth Nourishing the corn. Keeping time, Keeping the rhythm in their dancing As in their living in the seasons The time of the seasons and the constellations The time of milking and the time of harvest The time of the coupling of man and woman And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling. Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Similar to the aerial view offered by the pattern in the rose garden, the reader-spectator again approaches this scene from a distance. There are two distinct planes of reality—that of the reader and narrator, who are physically, historically, and linguistically external to the scene of the dance, and one internal to the dancing group. Twice we are told that the actions mean something (“signifying” and “betokeneth”). Dancers thus model epiphanic unity because time structures the dance’s rhythm, the dance is ritual, and the ritual both leads to and also enacts unity. In another sense, however, the dance and music create time, while the dancers keep time. In essence, the dancers’ meaningful actions are indistinguishable from time, which is indistinguishable from music. The dancers exist in multiples planes of reality at once, and they enact unity and plenitude through their ritual. But unlike the rose garden, the epiphanic point of contact spills over the boundaries of the scene and reaches out toward the spectating poet and reader. The diction switches to contemporary dialect mid-stanza, and the scene of the dancers recedes while the pattern and structure of their meeting lingers. It is as if the ritual pattern hovers over the scene and eventually encompasses the spectators, drawing them into the pattern of time. By the end of the stanza, the dung and death, eating and drinking,

56 and archetypal moments in time apply to both dancers and spectators. In many ways, in this stanza, contact occurs between spectator and audience, between two distinct individuals in the dance, and ultimately between transcendent time and the ritual of the dance. This last point of contact seems to be exactly the kind of double pattern that Eliot discusses in his prose, and it is fitting that music links the ritual act with Time itself. And because of the unifying power of music in this scene, Time is stretched to include the spectators in the dancers’ experience of time.

***

Similar to Burnt Norton II, East Coker II begins with a collage-like layering of elemental images which precipitate an explicit exploration of ‘pattern’ in the second stanza.

The first stanza juxtaposes hollyhocks, snowdrops, thunder, ‘triumphal cars / deployed in constellated wars,’ comets, sun and moon, Leonids, apocalyptic fire, and ice-caps. Overtones of war and destruction permeate the lines, and we are introduced to the apocalyptic fire.115

Eliot’s narrating voice intervenes in the second stanza to interpret the first, and he tells us

“That was a way of putting it—not very satisfactory: / a periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion”; he had hoped to arrive at wisdom from these experiences, but apocalyptic fire brought no illumination.116 Signaling that a new kind of poetry is needed, he goes on to explain that the past is not a source of illumination but of darkness and death. Memory does

115Eliot, East Coker II, 184. There are two ‘fires’ in Quartets; one is the fire of destruction, hell, and earthly corruption, and one is the ongoing, redemptive fire of Pentecost/the Holy Ghost of Christianity. The two fires are juxtaposed in Little Gidding IV: “The only hope, or else despair / Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—/To be redeemed from fire by fire.” In addition to the coupling of rose and fire, it seems that there are also two roses and two fires in conflict throughout the poem. In East Coker II, we encounter the apocalyptic fire, not its Pentecostal counterpart.

116Ibid., 184.

57 provide a form of transcendence and an interpretive pattern external to the present moment, but Eliot seems to suggest here that it is insufficient. The “new” poetry of the modernists is already worn-out, and he seeks a poetry more powerful than memory and re-formulation of modernity. Poetry must now reach beyond without abandoning the place it starts from. In the middle of the second stanza, he explains that:

…There is, it seems to me, At best, only a limited value In the knowledge derived from experience. The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is new in every moment And every moment is a new and shocking Valuation of all we have been.117

The imagistic collage implicitly reveals an epiphanic pattern, which is then interpreted discursively in the following stanza. This stanza of apocalyptic fire and insufficient illumination anticipates the via negativa that pervades East Coker. At the end of this second stanza, the poem initiates negation: “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire / Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”118 The juxtaposition of ‘humility’ and ‘endless’ is likely intentional, as this is yet another antithetical pairing, but one which is ripe for epiphanic unity. To bring these two opposites into contact, the poem commences its journey through the ‘dark dark dark’ of negation in East Coker III.119

In my reading of Quartets, it seems significant that the layer or phase of negation is primarily in the middle of the poem, and not at its beginning or end. It occurs in the ambiguous interstitial space between the two roses, two fires, and two types of epiphanic

117Ibid., 185.

118Ibid., 185.

119 Eliot, East Coker III, 185.

58 wholeness. Before the via negativa phase, we have the rose of unfulfilled desire and the apocalyptic fire, and after the via negativa phase, we have the rose of fulfilled desire and the

Pentecostal fire. The musical tension between these opposites culminates in East Coker, and is eventually resolved in Little Gidding. While negation is indeed a significant and central part of Quartets, I do not believe that it is the primary ‘plane of existence’ for the poem. Four

Quartets has several planes of reality due to its ‘musical’ composition, and while the poem lacks crisis, it seems to move toward the resolution found in Little Gidding. Furthermore, we know that he expects his audiences to “choose” the plane of reality in which they exist, which would suggest that readers of Four Quartets also have a choice as to which form of revelation and experience they will align themselves with—the old or new fire? The first or last rose?

iii. Dry Salvages

In contrast with the visual collages in Burnt Norton II and East Coker II, Dry

Salvages II opens with a lyrical and aural pattern in six “quasi sestinas,”120 which are followed by a discursive passage (the ‘trio’).121 The sestinas introduce and repeat the theme of ‘an end,’ and instead of a rhyme scheme within each stanza, the same scheme—

ABCDE—is repeated five times in each of the stanzas. Rather than each stanza building toward a climax, the repeating rhyme scheme creates a stillness with increasing intensity. On one level, this pattern offers a stand-alone microcosm in each stanza; if any stanza is read in isolation, there is no pattern, but when the stanzas are read together, an ‘ultra-pattern’

120Howarth, “Eliot, Beethoven.”

121Ibid., 325, 329.

59 becomes apparent. While the rhyming words vary in stanzas two through five, the sixth stanza repeats the rhyming words from the first stanza. The question put in the first stanza is answered in the sixth, and the restatement of the stanza lyrically and aurally—indeed, musically—literally enacts the discursive claim that ‘What we call the beginning is often the end’122 and that ‘the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.”123 The final stanza returns to the first stanzas, turning the question into an answer:

[First sestina] Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing, The silent withering of autumn flowers Dropping their petals and remaining motionless; Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage. The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable Prayer at the calamitous annunciation? …

[Second sestina] There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing, No end to the withering of withered flowers, To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless, To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage, The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable Prayer of the one Annunciation.124

The passage immediately following the opening sestinas offers a discursive reflection on ‘pattern’:

It seems as one becomes older, That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence— Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy

122Eliot, Little Gidding V, 207.

123Eliot, Little Gidding V, 208.

124Eliot, Dry Salvages II, 193-194.

60 Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution, Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.

Similar to the discursive passage in East Coker II, this passage revisits history as another pattern incapable of transcendence. Just as experience and wisdom collected through the ages result in a pattern that ‘falsifies,’ evolution and organic movement forward in time are also only ‘partial fallacy.’ The present never moves beyond its own timeline even in the cycles that emerge through historical repetition; escape from the present to another place on the historical timeline is an artificial form of transcendence. Eliot also seems to suggest that development occurring within the sphere of human history is paradoxically “a means of disowning / the past”125 once it becomes history. The cycle of gradual evolution is modeled in the opening stanzas, and in one sense, the verse makes no progress; gradual change resulted in a pattern in the verse scheme, but the substance of the final stanza is virtually unchanged. Voiceless wailing persists, nature continues to decline, human violence and natural disaster remain; decay accompanies progress in this cycle. However, the one substantial change in the final sestina is prayer, which speaks beyond the human timeline;

“unprayable” becomes “hardly, barely / prayable / prayer.” It is fitting that the word

“prayable” in the sixth stanza brings a hovering, isolated presence which disrupts the pattern of six lines. “Prayable” is not an entire line, and although it seems to support the pattern, it also does not have a proper place in this cycle. To mark the progress begun in East Coker II, the poem has progressed beyond negation, and now the poem now points toward prayer and presence as the next step toward epiphanic plenitude.

125Ibid., 194.

61 iv. Little Gidding

In Little Gidding II, the scherzo consists of three octaves with a set rhyme scheme

(AABBCCDD) on the death of air, earth, water, and fire. Death of the elements is ambiguous and can denote both decease of and death by means of the elements. Both meanings are in play, since the corruption of the elements causes further corruption; death leads to death, which is the function of daemonic fire. It is the perpetuation of absence and decay, whereas

Pentecostal fire is continuous presence and plenitude. Eliot intentionally writes these stanzas as a lyrical exploration of death, which climaxes in “daemonic fire,” in correspondence with the destructive fire in East Coker and in contrast to Pentecostal fire.126 Since, as I argue above, Pentecostal fire corresponds to the ongoing epiphanic presence that Four Quartets progresses toward, we should read the daemonic and destructive fire as its antithesis.

Responding to the trio is a lengthy, unbroken narrative sequence in imitation of

Dante’s terza rima.127 The tone of this section is markedly different from the second movement of the first three poems in that instead of a discursive meditation on a concept, it develops an extended first-person narrative:

Little Gidding II128 Between three districts whence the smoke arose I met one129 walking, loitering and hurried

126Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets, 169.

127Howarth suggests that in East Coker II, Eliot “leaves [the quasi sestina] and the Beethoven shape behind, but it is only possible because they have been stepping stones to it. The earlier management of the trio through long probing introspective lines still operates. In Little Gidding, however, Eliot reverses the plan: once more he writes a rhymed lyric to open the section, only now he has squeezed the periphrasis out of it, or at any rate has substituted his own periphrasis for the outworn kind; but for the trio he suddenly builds, by a compelled passionate insight, a tense new formal structure” (325-326).

128Eliot, Little Gidding II, 203.

129This figure is “a “compound ghost” (inclusive of Mallarmé, Babbitt, Pound, Whitman,

62 As if blown towards me like the metal leaves Before the urban dawn wind unresisting. And as I fixed upon the down-turned face That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge The first-met stranger in the waning dusk I caught the sudden look of some dead master Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled Both one and many; in the brown baked features The eyes of a familiar compound ghost Both intimate and unidentifiable. So I assumed a double part, and cried And heard another’s voice cry: ‘What! are you here?’ Although we were not. I was still the same Knowing myself yet being someone other— And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed To compel the recognition they preceded. And so, compliant to the common wind, Too strange to each other for misunderstanding, In concord at this intersection time Of meeting nowhere, no before and after, We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.

Here the epiphanic domain is contextualized in a narrative encounter, and the poet’s psychological, perceptual perspective is the basis of the experience. From this personalized discourse with the ghost, the poet arrives at daybreak and a word of valediction, which is a long way from the “dark dark dark” path he sets out upon in East Coker II and arrives at in

East Coker III. This passage in Little Gidding II accomplishes a coalescence of the epiphanic themes throughout the poem that signals the pilgrim’s ascent. There is a sense of progression, pilgrimage, and portending arrival. There is also finally the ability to arrive at linguistic expression; in the ghost Eliot finds “words I never thought to speak.” Along with arrival and the ability to speak, epiphanic disclosure and recognition permeate this passage in the

“sudden look,” the “eyes of the familiar compound ghost,” “knowing myself” and finally

“the recognition” of the ghost. The interplay of appearance and recognition is

Owen, and his younger self)” (Howarth, “Eliot, Beethoven,” 326).

63 counterbalanced by duality and uncertainty. Throughout the trio passage, dualisms are formed and dissolved: the vision of the ghost recalls “Both one and many,” the poet confesses his “Knowing myself yet being someone other,” the ghost describes the pilgrim’s place in the cosmos as “…the spirit unappeased and peregrine / Between two worlds become much like each other,” and he confesses that “I left my body on a distant shore.” The ghost concludes his monologue with an explanation of the futility and frustration articulated in the first three quartets: “From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit / Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire / Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.” The tense doublings in this passage melt into a unified sphere of musical consonance in the dance, and this refining fire stands in opposition to the “daemonic fire” introduced in the scherzo section.

Through the poetic process of the second movement, we arrive at the same place (fire), but we have moved from destructive to refining fire, from division to unity. Together, Eliot and his ghost find epiphanic plenitude “in concord at the intersection time,” and they find fullness of expression “Between two worlds become much like each other.” To the extent that we can read the ghost as a double of Eliot, it is notable that as the ghost departs and with him the doubled structure of the scene, the first-person narrator continues his walk, at one with himself at the beginning of a new day; quite literally, a new fire ascends. The point of departure and the moment of unity are the same, and it seems that the otherly quality of the ghost only serves to emphasize Eliot’s merging with these qualities. Between himself and the compound ghost, the poet enacts a self-contained musical sequence of internal and historically contained themes that compete and arrive at a unified resolution.

64 F. The Hint Half Guessed

The above analysis of the patterns in Four Quartets establishes that the prose concept of musical patterning is employed to full effect in the poem. In this section, I examine several key passages that illustrate more saliently my claim that the epiphanic spatio-temporal reality that the poem concludes with is actually a return to the ordinary via an incarnational understanding of epiphany. Eliot explores the experience of ordinary things in ordinary time, and musical pattern explains the individual’s ultimate relationship to actual time and space: the world is simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary and can be experienced as such. The main passage that makes this connection to the incarnation as a unifying reference point is found in Dry Salvages V:

But to apprehend The intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint— … For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply That it is not heard at all, but you are the music While the music lasts. There are only hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses; and the rest Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action. The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.⁠⁠13 Here the impossible union Of spheres of existence is actual, Here the past and future Are conquered and reconciled…130

Here the poet locates the moment of epiphany in the ordinary experience of the material world. This moment is a double existence in and out of time; it is a brief glimpse of an

130Eliot, Dry Salvages V, 198-199.

65 ongoing reality. While the rose garden epiphany indicated a presence that arrives and departs of its own accord, the epiphanic intersection in the passage here seems to hinge on perception. Both the saint and “most of us” are after disclosure of something eternal, which is not the passing revelation of the rose garden. The hint half guessed and the gift half understood described in this passage are an enduring reality because its disclosure is always possible: in the incarnation, “the impossible union / Of spheres is existence is actual.” For the poet, we are no longer in the realm of hypotheticals and unfulfilled desire, but in certainty and actuality. And for the ordinary person, the actualized union is glimpsed in unexpected material encounters. Although the perception may be brief or unexpected, wholeness is always present. Like the epiphanies in Williams’ poetry, the glimpse cannot be forced. Unity is apprehended through attention, waiting, and openness, which is grounded in the material world. And when an individual brushes up against this union of spheres in the attended moment, he does not get pulled into abstraction or a pure spirit, but instead encounters an embodied wholeness; the epiphany begins and ends with the material world.

The mystery of the ordinary world is echoed in the final lines of Little Gidding V:

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. Through the unknown, remembered gate When the last of earth left to discover Is that which was the beginning; At the source of the longest river The voice of the hidden waterfall And the children in the apple-tree Not known, because not looked for But heard, half-heard, in the stillness Between two waves of the sea. Quick now, here, now, always— A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything)

66 And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.131

In these last lines of Four Quartets, the poet returns his readers to “now, here, now, always.”

The present is a continuous state of exploration, of returning to the place we left in order to know it again for the first time, of continuous epiphanic discovery of the ordinary.

Exploration is the passage from fire to fire, from rose to rose; he has moved from the temporary fullness of the rose garden to the continuous presence of the fire and the rose.

Binaries and tensions are resolved and collapsed into immediacy. This state of epiphanic presence is not a privileged moment or a disembodied state of spirituality, but a continual engagement with the material world “not known, because not looked for.” In other words, the beyond is right here; if we look for it here, we will find it, according to Eliot. The incarnation is both archetype and spatio-temporal reality, and the theology of the incarnation suffuses all of the material cosmos with transcendent presence. With the Pentecostal fire poured out, the presence of the divine with the human is stretched throughout all time, and the barriers between the two worlds collapse into the present. All epiphanies thus stem from the fire and the body, and the individual escapes not from, but into the here and now.

Through the musical pattern of doubled and overlapping realities, the intervening space between the rose garden and the in-folded rose and fire has taken us from the old fire to the new, from destruction to redemption, from unfulfilled desire to actualized intimacy. This transition has transpired musically, as Eliot has carried his reader through a series of patterns that connect the material world to its overlapping spiritual counterpart. From garlic and

131Eliot, Little Gidding V, 208-209.

67 sapphires, to hollyhocks and snowdrops, to history and memory, to water and fire, Eliot has connected us slowly from layer to layer of overlapping realities. The rose garden concludes with a statement of wished-for presence of wholeness in Burnt Norton V:

Sudden in a shaft of sunlight Even while the dust moves There rises the hidden laughter Of children in the foliage Quick, now, here, now, always– Ridiculous the waste sad time Stretching before and after.132

The same line repeats in Little Gidding V, which creates a bookend effect for the entire poem:

Quick now, here, now, always– A condition of complete simplicity (Costing not less than everything) And all shall be well and All manner of thing shall be well When the tongues of flame are in-folded Into the crowned knot of fire And the fire and the rose are one.133

He transports his reader from the rose garden epiphany—in its boundedness and fantastical existence in memory and fancy—to the ongoing epiphanic state of the fire and the rose. At the end of the Four Quartets, he is prepared—and has prepared his reader—to bring all of the layers together, so that history is infused with the totality of timelessness, and ordinary life is shaped by the double pattern of the historical, physical incarnation of God. The momentary shaft of light cedes to infinite fire, the wished-for rose to the eternally actualized rose. The cosmos that appears in Little Gidding retains its dualistic distinction—fire and rose, time and timelessness—but the binaries are now intertwined. While the music is no longer

132Eliot, Burnt Norton V, 181.

133Eliot, Little Gidding V, 209.

68 recognizable as literal sound and rhythm, he has set before us a rhythm of the cosmos informed by the co-present dualism of the rose and the fire.

CHAPTER TWO: WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS AS MODERNIST MYSTIC

A. Introduction

In this chapter, I attempt to systematize William Carlos Williams’ metaphysical framework by drawing on his prose work, Spring and All, and Kora in Hell. Williams needs no critic to discover the complications of his work and to point out inconsistencies, as he is the first to point them out. Spring and All commences with a statement about imagination, one of his most conflicted concepts. He writes in this avant garde work of 1923 that, “There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world.”134 Seeming to contradict this care for “immediate contact with the world,” Williams addresses his book of poetry “to the imagination.”135 Williams immediately parries the reader’s inclination to associate “imagination” with notions from a previous age:

[N]early all writing, up to the present, if not all art, has been especially designed to keep up the barrier between sense and the vaporous fringe which distracts the attention from its agonized approaches to the moment. It has always been a search for “the beautiful illusion.” Very well. I am not in search of “the beautiful illusion.”136

As we read more of Williams, we must understand that he is making “imagination” new by stripping away prior associations. Continuing his hypothetical debate with critics, Williams adds,

134William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939, ed. A Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1923), 177.

135Ibid., 178.

136Ibid., 178.

70 And if, when I pompously announce that I am addressed—To the imagination—you believe that I thus divorce myself from life and so defeat my own end, I reply: To refine, to clarify, to intensify that eternal moment in which we alone live there is but a single force—the imagination. This is its book. I myself invite you to read and see… In the imagination, we are from henceforth (so long as you read) locked in a fraternal embrace…. We are one.137

In this roiling introduction, Williams gets to the heart of the paradoxes that beset his poetic practice. He wishes his reader to set aside notions of imagination as the pursuit of a

“beautiful illusion,” and to enter an imagination of the present. He seeks an “eternal moment,” which is also paradoxically “immediate contact with the world.” He concludes the introduction by catching hold of the reader and plunging together into a new space, where there are many parts but no transcendent dualism: an ontological and existential “fraternal embrace.” He promises unity without “vaporous fringes,” “agonized approaches,” or a

“beautiful illusion.” Although he claims to avoid these things, I hold that Williams is a secular mystic, and that his aesthetic of ordinariness should be considered mystical due to the epiphanic moments present in his poetry.

In my larger study on the epiphany, I hold that the Williamsian poetic epiphany is characterized by an experiential state, rather than an event that reveals a being or fact. The epiphany furthermore engages with ordinariness in a way that is distinct from Romantic

Idealism’s turn to nature and nineteenth-century Realism’s investment in documentation. The modernist poetic epiphany induces a state of experiencing wholeness, totality, or unity, and it is deeply dependent upon the material immediacy of the ordinary world. Williams’ poetry is challenging to describe because the experience of unity that he seeks is contrary to his radically atomized approach to the cosmos. This challenge leads me to adopt a

137Ibid.

71 phenomenological approach, which allows me to distinguish between Williams perception and conception of the cosmos, and his internal, experiential state. In particular, I draw on readings of Rainer Maria Rilke, whose poetry is notable for its attention to the literal appearance of material things, and for the subject’s internal experience of transcendence induced by this contact. Also because of this challenge, I emphasize the paradoxical but essential combination of mystical experience and ordinary—even vulgar—participation in the material world. Furthermore, while perception and experience are distinct modes for

Williams, one is not prioritized over the other; Williams does not perceive in order to transcend the material world into an abstract state of experience. Rather, the experience occurs in the act of perception.

To complement Luke Fischer’s work on Rainer Maria Rilke, which I explain in more detail in the pages to come, I draw on a phenomenological appreciation of the ordinary, particularly as set forth in Rita Felski’s “Everyday Aesthetics.” Felski argues that phenomenological readings, which focus on experience and things as they immediately appear, attend to and describe the everyday:

Phenomenology, in this sense, attends to what is already in plain view; it looks at, rather than through, everyday modes of experience; it seeks to describe rather than prescribe, to attend to, rather than escape, the commonplace. What renders phenomenology a still timely framework is not Husserl’s attempt at a transcendental reduction—one more expression of a recurring philosophical ambition to escape one’s own shadow—but the gaze of wonder it directs at ordinary objects and mundane forms of feeling and thought. Its aim is to really see ordinary structures of experience—not in order to celebrate them or to trumpet their authenticity, but to gain a surer grasp of the ineluctable nature of our first-person relation to the world.138

138Felski, Rita. “Everyday Aesthetics.” The Minnesota Review Spring 2009, no. 71–72 (2009): 173.

72 Williams’ poetry is well matched with such a reading, as it revels in the everyday, and it is not bound to the evental expectations of novel form. Even in Williams’ poems that do contain identifiable characters and sequenced events, I argue that the epiphanies condense around moments of exceptional experience rather than form a response to character and event formulation. For this reason, epiphanies can be read to understand the quality of a person or event, not the formal substance, while also focusing on the things, regardless of their significance in a narrative structure.

Williams’ epiphanic moments adhere to the standard definitions set forth in scholarship on epiphanies, although I argue that scholarly definitions of the modernist epiphany ought to be updated to include poets like Williams. Ashton Nichols holds that, “a formal relationship is established between certain momentary perceptual events in the life of an individual and the emotional importance of these events as they are later recalled and expressed in poetry. A form of experience becomes a new way of meaning.”139 Williams reflects on everyday moments from his life in his poetry, and such moments as Nichols describes are absolutely present in Williams’ poetry: the flower poems in Spring and All, the opening anecdote in Kora in Hell, and the man on the subway in Asphodel, That Greeny

Flower. However, the delay between perception and epiphanic experience does not quite fit

Williams; instead, we can identify two moments that are significant to the poet. First, the moment of initial perception is quite important—if the moment in real time were not significant, it seems unlikely that Williams would have recalled it later in poetry. Thus, the experience of epiphany occurs in real life and independent of poetic formulations; this is

139Nichols, Ashton. “The New Epiphany.” In The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth Century Origins of the Modern Literary Moment. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987: 4- 5.

73 what I call the primary epiphany. Second, the moment of writing about such experiences seems to create a secondary space of illumination, which seems plausible given Williams’ undying effort to find just the word for such an intangible experience. In both instances, the imagination is critical; the two spaces in which imagination moves is also reflected in the poet’s ambiguous references to imagination itself. On the one hand, Williams often refers to imagination as a mode of perception, and on the other, imagination is a mode of poetic creativity; it is also always a noun, as in the book title Imaginations. These things are the poetic outcome of the initial perception and the subsequent creative act.

However, Nichols’ connection between perception and significant emotional experience sets him up to argue that epiphanies are a formal technique, “in which a commonplace event takes on a revelatory quality in the mind of the observer.” As a formal technique, Nichols argues that the epiphany creates a space for “increasingly narrative monologues” in poetry, which prompt a shift from lyric poetry to the novel. In my view, this description of the epiphany is actually problematic when we try to understand twentieth- century poetic epiphanies, since this alleged shift to the novel cements the epiphany as a moment contingent upon formal expectations regarding characters, event, and narrative structure. Nichols emphasizes the “commonplace event,” whereas Williams emphasizes the common “thing.” For Williams, things do not require an event to attract perception. And this is not to say that epiphanies occur in a timeless abstraction, but that they rather occur outside of a formal, literary convention that relies on narrative structure. The epiphany is about how the individual experiences the immediate moment through reductive perception, and in reorienting vision, the what discloses itself. This disclosure is not the result of a literary trick

74 to disrupt one’s expectation for an event or character-shaping moment, for this would necessitate interpretation and would distract the reader from the thing right under her nose.

B. Two Traditions of Transcendence

I argue that Williams clearly rejects both of the traditional pathways identified in the introduction: religion and Romantic aesthetics. Although—or perhaps because—this has been a topic of debate for decades, I establish this claim through my own reading of one of

Williams’ earliest texts, a formative moment often overlooked. I draw on Williams’ “Five

Philosophical Essays,” written during an ambiguous period of the poet’s life in the nineteen teens, and I also draw on biographical accounts, letters, and scholarly interpretations of his work to refute the Romantic readings of Williams. I then use the following chapter to offer a descriptive account of Williams aesthetics and epistemology, and I interpret key poems that demonstrate his modernist epiphanic poetics.

C. Williams and Religion

First, I address the issue of religion. The connection to religion and transcendent experience in the twentieth century often leads to scholarship140 on James Joyce; to explain his epiphanies, scholars have shown that his Catholic background must be considered in order to understand the spiritual nature of his literary epiphanies. The epiphanies are more than a narrative trope or an aesthetic trick; in these moments, Joyce is shown to reject organized religion, but still to draw on its spirituality. Williams similarly rejects organized religion but highlights modes of experience traditionally associated with religious mysticism.

140Sharon Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 1850-1950 : Constellations of the Soul (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2012).

75 Ian Copestake, in his recent study on Williams, summarizes the poet’s attitude toward religion:

In 1906 Williams expressed his hatred for “this medieval conception of a divine power with frowning brows who swats us one when we get in a dark corner,” an observation later echoed in his condemnations of the “Bible damnation theorem” with its postponement of “perfectibility to ‘heaven’ and all that heaven implies. For Williams his stance against religion was part of his resistance to anything that acted as a barrier to valuing temporal and contemporary reality.141

This passage demonstrates that Williams clearly eschews divine transcendence as a method for ordering the cosmos, his personal belief, and his poetic practice. As an institution of association, strictures, and set conventions, it was a “barrier to valuing temporal and contemporary value.” In Emersonian fashion, Williams develops a strong sense of the ego, although I hold that Williams’ ego does not entirely take on the cosmic proportions that

Emerson’s ego does. Williams’ ego is a powerful source of unity and imagination, but, as I argue in a later section, it is an ego bounded by time, in search of community, and capable of touching the essence of the other. Paul Mariani, in his biography of Williams, notes that

Williams “underwent a nameless religious experience” in 1905.142 Under the influence of

Carlyle, Emerson and Ruskin, Williams developed a newfound confidence that, “since man himself was divine, since man himself was the truth, so the work he did must also be the truth…. to hell with that ‘mystic medieval conception of a divine power with frowning brows who swats us one when we get in a dark corner’…. he was all for the light, for the emanation

141Ian D. Copestake, The Ethics of William Carlos Williams’ Poetry (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 15.

142Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981), 47. Loewinsohn in “The Sourness of Grapes” notes this same passage, which is from a letter by Williams, Selected Letters (New York: McDowell Obolensky, 1957), 147.)

76 of the divine energy that people themselves were.”143 By 1909 Williams slowly emerged from the Romantic, Keatsian phase of his first poetry, and he transitioned into an Emersonian self-sufficiency; in these early days, Williams’ withdrawal from Romanticism hinged upon the relationship between love, poetry, and belief. Coming to a new sense of self in Leipzig and moving toward marriage to Florence, Williams reasserts his views on religion. “He had come,” writes Mariani,

[T]o ‘hate religious creeds and all dead forms’ and he would never again yield to them. But one of the few things he could trust in was a couple’s faith in each other. Something was happening to Williams. His hatred of convention had gone so far that he was even experimenting with new forms in his poetry.144

Ron Loewinsohn, in his analysis “The Sourness of Sour Grapes: Williams and the

Religion of Art,” further elucidates Williams’ rejection of traditional religion. Pointing to the same “nameless religious experience” highlighted by Mariani,145 Loewinsohn suggests that

“this resignation or despair is the first stage of a secular mysticism that unites his environment and him with it.”146 Although this secular mysticism is similar to the aestheticism of Pater, Wilde, and Yeats, Loewinsohn notes that Williams writes in 1916 that

“there is nothing sacred about literature, it is damned from one end to the other.”147 Such

143Ibid., 47.

144Paul Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked (McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1981), 363.

145Original letter qtd. in Loewinsohn, “The Sourness of Sour Grapes.” 363.

146Ron Loewinsohn, “The Sourness of Sour Grapes: Williams and the Religion of Art,” in William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 1983), 364.

147qtd. in Loewinsohn, “The Sourness of Sour Grapes,” 365, from Kora in Hell (Boston: The Four Seas Co., 1920) Reprinted in Imaginations, ed. by Webster Schott, (New York: New Directions, 1970), 13).

77 rejections of religion ought to be read carefully.148 Williams shares much of Pater’s practice of ‘receptivity’, but his mode of perception eventually diverges from Pater because it

“doesn’t imagine a prison-house or monastery solitary observers, but an organic forest in which creatures of different species interact as equals and communicate in a common language.”149 Loewinsohn’s analysis is helpful because he makes a substantial case for

Williams’ transition to metaphysical autonomy in a seemingly monistic cosmos, which he calls a “secular, egalitarian, horizontal religion of art.”150 It is also in this view of the world that Williams significantly embraces banality as part of his poetic form in Sour Grapes: “The things he envisions are resolutely banal. They are not symbols or metaphors. They don’t stand for anything or refer to anything. They don’t undergo any transformation. Even the dish-mop doesn’t become a daughter.”151 This analysis of Sour Grapes contributes two things to my thesis: first, despite his rejection of organized and traditional religion, Williams’ relationship to art is indeed mystical. Second, his “secular mysticism” is hard to classify. He is not a religious poet, nor is he exactly like the aesthetes Pater and Wilde. While I do not consider Sour Grapes an entirely accurate picture of Williams’ mystical tendencies throughout his life, and since I do not think Williams’ relationship to art is as formally and self-consciously religious as Loewinsohn describes, I would like to pick up where

Loewinsohn leaves off and explore this new “secular mysticism” that, for Loewinsohn, seems to begin in Sour Grapes.

148Loewinsohn, “The Sourness of Sour Grapes,” 365.

149Ibid., 365-66.

150Ibid., 372.

151Ibid., 383.

78 D. Transcendentalism

The second pathway to transcendence is through the Romantic metaphysics and aesthetic form. Romantic poets, such as Samuel Coleridge, see poetic form and “the symbol” as predicated upon metaphysical duality:

[A] symbol… is characterized by a translucence of the Special in the Individual or of the general in the Especial or of the Universal in the General. Above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the Temporal. It always partakes of the Reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of which it is the representative.152

For the Romantic poet, the symbol is a mediator in a dualistic cosmic structure. The special stands in dualistic opposition to the individual, and the symbol forms a bridge between the two. As bridge, the symbol participates in and represents the unity, which occupies a space removed and otherwise inaccessible to the individual. The symbol therefore lacks its own essence, being the “translucence of the Special in the Individual.” Things with true essence, or true reality, are removed from the individual’s presence in the immediate.

However, the symbol becomes a liminal thing in itself; it is not fully immediate nor is it quite transcendent. In this latter sense, the symbol, and all of language and poetry, has essence but only in a liminal space:

[A]rt itself might be defined as of a middle quality between a thought and a thing, or, as I said before, the union and reconciliation of that which is exclusively human. It is the figured language of thought, and is distinguished from nature by the unity of all the parts in one thought or idea.153

152Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Statesman’s Manual (Burlington, C. Goodrich, 1832), 40. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=dul1.ark:/13960/t9669rj0w;view=1up;seq=7.

153Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “On Poesy or Art,” in English Essays: Sir Philip Sidney to Macaulay, ed. Charles William Eliot, vol. 27, The Harvard Classics (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14, 2001), https://www.bartleby.com/27/17.html.

79 Coleridge presents a dualistic division in which art functions as a bridge between the thinking subject and the object in nature. In this framework, unity does not exist either in subject or object, or in thought or nature; rather, art is isolated from both poles of the dualistic structure, but it paradoxically acquires its own essence in a distinct, third space.

Coleridge suggests that unity is found in the middle way itself, and not actually in nature or the individual. Not only does Coleridge thus remove poetry from both immediate and transcendent reality, but he also places ultimate unity within this sphere of the “middle quality.” This space is therefore unattainable via ordinary experience and perception. It requires interpretation and an act of intellection. In his essay on mimetic and meontic art, which is characteristic of Romantics, Thomas McFarland explores the implications of the symbol as bridge between the subject and true being or reality:

Unlike the mimetic artist, however, he [the meontic artist] uses those forms to bridge the chorismos between his own imperfect existence and the realm of true being. The artistic projection of elements of cognized reality into the meontic void toward the apprehension of true being is the process subsumed by the literary term symbol.154

According to McFarland, the symbol is a bridge between the imperfect individual and the universal “realm of true being.” Like Coleridge’s “figured language of thought,”

McFarland explains that the symbol is “artistic projection of elements of cognized reality into the meontic void”155; as a bridge to the realm of unity, the symbol is also representative.156

154Thomas McFarland, “The Place Beyond the Heavens: True Being, Transcendence, and the Symbolic Indication of Wholeness,” Boundary 2, Revisions of the Anglo-American Tradition: Part 1, 7, no. Winter (1997): 299.

155Ibid., 299.

156Coleridge, “Statesman,” 40.

80 With the symbol as representative, McFarland clarifies the Romantic distinctions between symbol and allegory:

We must at the outset recognize that the conception of symbol can take more than one form. Indeed, it is this that caused Romantic theorists frequently to insist on a distinction between symbol and allegory. Both symbol and allegory are noematic presentations by which a given meaning is understood to entail also one not given. In this discussion, however, we shall insist on symbol as denoting exclusively the bridging of the chorismos between experienced reality and hyperouranic being; all other multiple tenors for a single vehicle we shall relegate to the function of allegory.157

McFarland concludes that, for the Romantic, “There is no true symbol if there are not two worlds.”158 The symbol is a metaphysical bridge between the immediate and the transcendent, which are two worlds far removed from each other. This fundamental tenet of

Romantic aesthetics is inextricably related to a commitment to metaphysical dualism, which leads the symbol to become a thing in itself in an abstract sphere of existence. McFarland associates the comprehension or experience of this abstract and hyprerouanic wholeness with ecstasy. In Williams, however, we find dualistic distinctions, but part and whole exist in the same world rather than two separate and distant worlds.

E. Williams Rejects Transcendentalism

I hold that Williams’ poetry contains epiphanies that are an experience of wholeness, universality, or totality achieved through imagination and dance. In this section, I lay the foundations for Williams’ conceptualization of wholeness in preparation for reading the poems. Because the basis for wholeness is typically correlated with Romantic Idealism and with religious dualism, it is important to show Williams’ alternative basis for wholeness.

157McFarland, “The Place Beyond the Heavens,” 299.

158Ibid., 299.

81 Furthermore, because there is extensive scholarship on Williams as a transcendentalist—

Emersonian, Whitmanian, or Unitarian—I would like to distinguish my study from others that offer other explanations for wholeness in Williams’ work. This question is, in large part, biographical, but there is little information to suggest that Williams engaged deeply with continental Idealism. One of the most influential works of criticism comparing Williams to

Hegel provides no concrete evidence that Williams read an Idealist like Hegel, and there is little proof that Hegel’s ideas were definitively transmitted to the poet.

This text is Carl Rapp’s William Carlos Williams and Romantic Idealism.159 In this book, Rapp interprets Williams as a transcendentalist on the basis of the role of nature:

Williams’ idealism, then, is paradoxical because it implies not only the most intimate connection but also the most severe disjunction between Williams himself and the phenomenal world. This paradox, as I have said, is not unique to Williams—it is characteristic of Romantic poetry generally. The Romantic poet is typically drawn in two different directions. On the one hand, he is enticed into the world of the sense, to “the mighty world / Of eye, and ear,” to “this goodly universe,” which is usually called “Nature.” On the other hand, he is equally attracted to what Wordsworth calls “the invisible world,” which is not available to the gross, bodily eye but only to the “inward eye” of contemplation.”160

While Williams certainly asserts his “own spiritual preeminence,”161 I follow Mariani’s intuition that this preeminence is profoundly limited in a way that is not “‘Romantic’ in the

Hegelian sense.” A close reading of Williams’ poems throughout his life shows that his will and ego are powerful, but they are subject to time and the responsiveness of the other.

Furthermore, Williams’ inward eye, which I discuss in the section on reductive perception, is

159Rapp, Carl. William Carlos Williams and Romantic Idealism. Providence: Brown University Press, 1984.

160Ibid., 24.

161Ibid., 30.

82 not interested in the invisible world. Instead, I argue that he seeks to make the invisible visible, and he seeks to bring everything intangible and liminal into “gross, bodily” space.

His disavowal of aesthetic conventions and religious dogma thus offer no metaphysical framework for the mystical tenor of his poetry, and the centrality of the material world includes dimensions of experience that elude the parameters of, for instance, the framework of Pragmatism.

If Williams were ever to have affirmed the Romantic tradition, it would have been during the nineteen teens, when he wrote “The Wanderer” and his “Five Philosophical

Essays.” In 1909, a twenty-six-year-old Williams spent a year in Leipzig where he saw

Schiller’s plays, Wagner’s Ring and Goettedaemmerung, and Strauss’s Elektra.162 Although he was ideally situated to acquire an appreciation for German Romanticism, Williams asserted that Germany was “l’enfer”—hell.163 This year seems to be the only time that

Williams would have come in direct contact with German Romanticism, and he hardly warmed to it. In fact, he writes in his autobiography that during his year in Leipzig, he read

Heinrick Heine, a German poet who, like himself, eschewed Romanticism. Other points of contact with idealism would have been through the American poetic tradition, where

Williams would have received Emersonian thought through Whitman. However, Williams decisively dismisses Emerson a few times throughout his career, calling him a great

“imitator.”164 Yet the notion that Williams continues the tradition of American

162Mariani, New World, 82.

163Ibid, 85.

164Williams, William Carlos, “The Great American Novel,” in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1923), 153–227.

83 transcendentalism is persistent. The most compelling account of Williams and transcendentalism is Ian Copestake’s book Ethics of William Carlos Williams, which decisively demonstrates the influence of the Unitarian church on the poet.165 Copestake focuses on Williams’ ethical impetus for writing poetry, an emphasis that translates the

Unitarian connection into a form of Pragmatism. I, however, argue that Unitarianism may instead have transmitted German Idealism to Williams, and that Williams’ conception of self and the cosmos is more Romantic than Pragmatic. However, although Williams may share much of a Romantic cosmology, his poetic practice works in stark opposition to a Romantic relationship between art and the world. Instead, Williams retains a distinctly secular and modernist epistemology and approach to art, but it plays out in a paradoxical dualism.

In the following section, “Creation and Destruction,” I show how Williams explicitly rejects Hegelian spiritual preeminence as early as his Five Philosophical Essays; in these, he explores the notion of a transcendent, immaterial unity, but ultimately rejects it for the temporary unity experienced through encountering the immediate. Although these philosophical essays are rarely cited in scholarship, I think that they are profoundly illuminating, given that they were drafted in the mid nineteen teens, right before Williams’ publication of his Romantic poem, “The Wanderer.”

Because Williams’ own writing echoes idealism so strongly in some places, it is necessary to respond to the view espoused by scholars like Carl Rapp. It should also be noted that Rapp’s connection between Williams and transcendentalism rests not upon a verifiable link between the poet and this body of philosophy, but upon an observed similarity between

165Copestake, Ian D. The Ethics of William Carlos Williams’ Poetry. Rochester: Camden House, 2010.

84 Williams’ writing and Hegel’s writing. As I note above, I have found no evidence that

Williams directly read key texts from European Romanticism. Since the connection to idealism is strongest through American transcendentalism, my response will focus mainly on a comparison between Williams and Emerson. I conclude that although Williams shares a vision of the cosmos and a prioritization of nature, the atomizing effect of imagination leads to a post-Romantic poetics of creation and destruction. He allows that a person may experience a brief moment of unity, but this unity does not extend into any future moments.

Each moment must be free from prior associations. A process like this is outlined in

Joswick’s 1997 essay, Beginning with Loss, which I will discuss in more depth in the section on descent.

F. Williams’ Modernism: Creation and Destruction

In Five Philosophical Essays: “Faith and Knowledge,” written a few years before the publications of “The Wanderer,” Kora in Hell, and Spring and All, Williams asserts that death, decay, and destruction are laws of nature and are therefore inexorable. Though the laws of nature do not change, he does: “I have found that against the tyranny of the law I have a power, knowledge, to make me no longer its slave but its master, that law serves me and not I it.”166 Echoing Emersonian self-reliance, Williams says that when religious men come to him descrying his knowledge as lack of faith, he notes that they themselves depend on the innovations arrived at through knowledge: “Yet they are cloaked out in my symbols, which I have made.”167 The ideas in this essay are significant in several ways; first, the

166William Carlos Williams and Ron Loewinsohn, “Faith and Knowledge,” in The Embodiment of Knowledge (New York: New Directions, 1974), 155.

167Ibid., 157.

85 description of winter in “Faith and Knowledge” must inform the analogous images of winter and hell that arise in Kora in Hell: if winter in “Faith and Knowledge” is a law of nature, and hell and winter are twin images in Kora, then hell must share the quality of being a law of nature. Like other laws of nature, hell can be mastered, as Williams demonstrates in Kora in

Hell.

Though Williams is known for finding mass culture problematic for its banality, he is receptive to the liberation afforded by science and technology, as evidenced in the tools and protections the people of faith rely on in “Faith and Knowledge.” These “symbols, which I have made,” are an extension of Williams in a way that nature is not, and are therefore not the same type as the Romantic symbol. The symbol is a thing. Though technology and mechanization are often seen as the source of evil and alienation among twentieth-century artists and thinkers, Williams sees them as more an extension of himself than even nature is.

Though Emerson, too, looks favorably on industrial materials as part of the unity of the universe, Williams retains a sharper distinction between individual and world. And while tools and innovation are linked to their creator, the antagonism between nature and artifice actually forms the basis of Williams’ art.168 This distinction also leads Williams to locate art within the world of nature, due to its origin in human speech. Poetry that is disconnected from natural language falls in the realm of artifice, and that is what Williams objects to.

168I concur with Barry Ahearn’s stance that, “It has long been a critical commonplace to speak of Williams’s divided nature (?)… The argument of this book is that this truism is not simply an important feature of Williams’s character, but the defining feature, and that it becomes the defining feature of his early poetry” (Preface to William Carlos Williams and Alterity: The Early Poetry (1994)).

86 Because Williams holds to this distinction, he sharply breaks with Emerson’s glorification and the unity between humankind and nature: “the Universe is the externisation of the soul. Wherever the life is, that bursts into appearance around it.”169 Emerson also locates the source of fragmentation, strife, and imperfection in spiritual disconnection from

God:

For, as it is dislocation and detachment from the life of God, that makes things ugly, the poet, who re-attaches things to nature and the Whole,—re-attaching things even artificial things, and violations of nature, to nature, by a deeper insight,—disposes very easily of the most disagreeable fact. Readers of poetry see the factory-village, and the railway, and fancy that the poetry of the landscape is broken up by these; for these works of art are not yet consecrated in their reading; but the poet sees them fall within the great Order not less than the bee-hive, or the spider’s geometrical web.170

A close comparison between Emerson’s The Poet and Williams’ Philosophical

Essays may initially suggest a greater similarity than I claim at the beginning of this section.

Williams makes a very similar description of unity in nature in his second philosophical essay, “Beauty and Truth”:

Interest seized me and in turn I finally grasped the simple fact that all nature is but a complex arrangement; that the few elements, perhaps one, governed by law, take on shapes, form, which cannot be directly analyzed, for as forms have no substance. At the first attempt your form goes and your elements return…. All nature began to arrange itself as the elements had done, into a remarkable system in which I could detect trends, leadings, and so I discovered other laws, which laws never changed but always shuffled the elements about in an identical way.... Here was something then, this law, which I had never seen, that I could not touch or grasp yet which I knew to exist. I called it an abstraction, then a truth, because it was permanent.171

169Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Literary Classics of America, 1983), 453.

170Ibid., 455.

171William Carlos Williams, “Beauty and Truth,” in The Embodiment of Knowledge, ed. Ron Loewinsohn (New York: New Directions, 1974), 165.

87 Williams concludes that “all nature is but a complex arrangement,” and that this unity is a law, because it is permanent. Though this passage seems to echo Emerson’ universality of nature, God, and man, Williams crucially concludes that the laws, and therefore unity, are intangible and invisible, and that they can only be known in specific, material things. Unity is always a potentiality, and therefore always in the future, but never presently attainable materially or spiritually. Furthermore, the world of things is never fully subsumed into the self, and it is always before the subject, awaiting perception. Whereas Emerson may find this problematic, Williams finds it an exhilarating challenge for the poet to perceive, to know, and then to extend through creative activity.

But even though Williams emphasizes the division between self and world of things, he does not adopt what Rapp and J. Hillis Miller assert is a Romantic “opposition between the inner world of the subject and the outer world of things.”172 I believe that the return to the ordinary and immediate is essential for understanding Williams, and it is very different from

Rapp’s Keatsian reading of Williams’ “The Wanderer”: “Only from… outside of, or independent of, ordinary experience—can experience itself be contemplated as a whole.”173

Rapp claims that Williams and Keats are alike in that, “Being, as it were, on the outside of everything, [the poet’s narrator] can look into anything with an intensity that an ordinary involvement with the thing would preclude.”174 But this is exactly the version of wholeness through abstraction that Williams ultimately rejects in “Beauty and Truth,” written around

172Rapp, quoting Miller in “The Wanderer,” in William Carlos Williams and Romantic Idealism, 4.

173Carl Rapp, “The Wanderer,” in William Carlos Williams and Romantic Idealism, (Providence: Brown University Press, 1984), 17.

174Ibid., 17.

88 the same time as “The Wanderer.” Standing outside the ordinary is indeed anathema to

Williams’ creed: “No ideas but in things.” Even though he retains the subject-object distinction, Williams’ subject never fully steps outside of things. His relationship to the world is indeed new and distinct from idealism’s conception of subject and object.

Rapp further asserts that “therefore, the phenomenal world must be transcended or used in such a way that it points beyond itself. This paradox wherein the phenomenal world is both affirmed and negated is inherent not only in Williams’ work but in Romantic poetry generally.”175 In another essay entitled “Philosophy, Science, and Poetry,” Williams does claim that “There is a unity, of course, and the final term of all investigation; it is the individual himself.”176 However, although this self is always distinct from the world of things that he inhabits, it does not assume the transcendent preeminence that Rapp suggests. Unlike the Romantic ego, Williams’ subjective unity is bounded. Though knowledge of things brings him to a knowledge of self as its own unity, Williams believes that this sense of unity should not inform his future perceptions of things:

Anyone must have as his fundamental determination a complete association of all the activities of his life and their implications. It is the various implications which constitute the sciences, arts, philosophies and so forth. But the unity they seek is behind them not ahead. Before them exists only an infinite fracture, and ever smaller division…177

Regarding the poetry of Marianne Moore, Williams writes that the reader

[W]ill perceive absolutely nothing except that his whole preconceived scheme of values has been ruined. And this is exactly what he should see, a break through all

175Ibid., 20.

176William Carlos Williams, “Philosophy, Science, and Poetry,” in The Embodiment of Knowledge, Five Philosophical Essays, (New York: New Directions, 1974), 73.

177Ibid., 73.

89 preconception of poetic form and mood and pace, a flaw, a crack in the bowl. It is this that one means when he says destruction and creation are simultaneous.178

Just as the imagination is not to impose prior associations on each new moment of perception, so also one’s sense of unity is not to impose itself on the future. For Williams, unity is compartmentalized and limited to the past and present, and it has no bearing on the future. Thomas Joswick argues exactly this in his 1997 essay, Beginning with Loss: William

Carlos Williams’ Poetics: “[Williams] implies that the unity of his writing is present only as it opens toward a future and anticipates a later presence, as if a final closure that might truly unify his writing as a ‘thing’ exists on a horizon that is always yet to come.”179 This future unity rises out of a chaotic and fragmented past, hence “destruction and creation / are simultaneous.”180 Present unity is vulnerable to future destruction, which ultimately leads back to unity when viewed with the clear perception of imagination.

G. Post-Romantic Unity

In many accounts, there is no “crisp unity” to be found in the twentieth century; instead, we come to expect, almost as a matter of convention, “the recurrent act of fragmenting unities.”181 Some say we should not “regret the loss.”182 Others, such as David

178William Carlos Williams, “Marianne Moore,” in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, n.d.), 121.

179Thomas P. Joswick, “Beginning with Loss: The Poetics of William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 98–118.

180William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams (New York: New Directions, 1986), 213.

181Michael Levenson, “Introduction,” in Cambridge Companion to Modernism, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 3.

182Ibid., 3.

90 Wellbery lament that a post-Romantic world is unprepared “to think that a form, however compelling its unity, exemplifies the unity of mind or of nature or of both.”183 And still others necessarily lament the loss, but they acknowledge that art is no longer a bridge that brings unity to a dualistic cosmos. Charles Taylor, one of the latter thinkers, posits that in a post-Romantic aesthetic, “The symbol as consubstantial is rejected. But the other basic idea, that it reveals something otherwise inaccessible, stands.”184 This inaccessibility stands outside dualistic structures, and it seems to reveal a unity, truth, or satisfying experience, even though accessing such a space does not necessarily reveal an ultimate truth and unity.

Such a non-dualistic inaccessibility fuels the modernist poet’s epiphanic engagement with the ordinary world. The word, for the modernist poet, is no longer a metaphysical bridge. Both it and abstracted unity have indeed collapsed, but they land together in a heap, in the immediate present. Unity is no longer in the beyond; it is here, we just cannot see it. Rather than view the epiphanic poetry of modernist poets as conflicted or problematic, I explain how a new mode of poetry arises out this seeming tension, and that the metaphysical and aesthetic implications of this moment are complementary instead of confused.

Hallmarks of Romanticism include dualism, the necessity of interpretation, closed form, language as a liminal bridge or symbol, and the existential distance between individual perceivers and the space of unity, totality, and a whole. These strictures lead poets like

Williams to question established form and to seek a new view of art and experience. A poet’s perspective in any one of these areas has implications for all other considerations; the poet’s understanding of the cosmos will inevitably shape whether the word is a bridge or a thing

183Wellbery, “Romanticism and Modernity,” 287.

184Charles Taylor, “Epiphanies of Modernism,” in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), 479.

91 itself, and whether the individual is part of a transcendently removed Whole. This is why I seek consistency between a poet’s metaphysical understanding and his aesthetic practice.

H. Modernist mysticism

Because Williams’ poetry is largely defined by his eventual opposition to received constraints from either religion or inherited literary forms, it is easy to overlook the systematicity of the form he develops throughout his life. And although he rejects the dogma of Christian metaphysics and Romantic idealism, I will show that Williams relies on a fairly consistent metaphysics that shapes a similarly consistent aesthetic formulation. He believed in a unified cosmos that permits epiphany, revelation, and delight when contact with the whole is made. What remains is nearly a form of monism, which renders epiphanies seemingly impossible. However, I argue that this is a type of metaphysics shared by Eliot and

Levertov. The poetic implications of Williams’ epiphanic monism is a paradoxical and simultaneous insistence on ordinariness and newness. In this unified cosmos, he believes that the individual can be blind to the immediate and the material, which makes his monism more like the proximate dualism I describe in the introduction. Overcoming this blindness forms the basis of epiphany. Poetry can therefore intervene in four ways: it captures the poet’s own true vision, which creates a subsequent moment of vision as the reader sees alongside the poet; third, the poem can also present things to the readers to see on their own, and fourth, there is sometimes a depersonalized poem that describes when and how epiphanic perception can play out in a third-party context. Williams’ metaphysics puts tremendous pressure on his poetic form and use of language. The problem with received forms leads Williams to pivot toward ordinary speech and innovative form, and also to the a-propositional harmonies of music. Through idiom and music, Williams crafts a modernist form that is distinct from

92 Romantic poetic form and that paves the way for post-modernist poetry. This form is consistent with the poet’s metaphysics, and it is emblematic of an important stage in the evolution of poetic forms. Ultimately, it is not merely symptomatic of a conflicted poet or amateur philosopher.

Williams is often mistaken as conflicted or amateur, and when “transcendence” enters the conversation, he is either embraced as a Romantic in his early poetry or dismissed in his late poetry for indulging in a “return to tradition.”185 Such assessments are problematic because they judge either form or content in isolation from the other, whereas until now, form and content have been considered two parts of one thing. To claim that Williams has returned to tradition due to the subject matter of his poetry without evaluating the form with which he expresses this content is highly problematic. Both form and content must be evaluated as a whole; it seems that Williams is most often considered conflicted or paradoxical when the form and content are isolated from each other. Concurring with

Marjorie Perloff, J. Hillis Miller writes that

Williams’ linguistic radicalism, his desire for poems to be not mere representations but “manifestations of the actual,” pulled him in several directions. In the text of Spring and All it pulls him in at least two: toward an understanding of words as intensely involved in and allied with things, and toward a competing vision of words as independent of and separate from things…. Williams’s desire for words to be “both free of things and related to them” generates the tension that drives much of his most experimental work.186

While Miller is right to point out this tension, he treats it as a splintered approach to poetry, in which the poet and his poetry simply do not align. Williams’ poetic practice may

185Marjorie Perloff, “Lines Converging and Crossing: The ‘French’ Decade of William Carlos Williams” in The Poetics of Indeterminacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 153.

186J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality, 308 (qtd. in Case, “As Much a Part of Things,” 85).

93 appear contradictory, but it ultimately offers a particular solution to modern problems with unity and meaning. Because these two aspects of Williams’ poetry are rarely viewed as working in tandem in a distinctly post-Romantic way, scholars may find that Williams’ later work is a regression to his Keatsian youth. For instance, Perloff contrasts Kora in Hell with

Williams’ later poetry, concluding that, “Like 'Paterson, Five,' 'Asphodel' marks a return to tradition.”187 I, however, argue that Kora is not an antithesis to "Asphodel," but rather the early steps toward "Asphodel”; Journey to Love and Paterson are indeed the culmination of

Williams’ metaphysics and aesthetics.

Recent scholarship on Williams reads him as a Pragmatist, which provides a fresh basis for continuity between his belief and aesthetics. Bruce Holsapple, Kristen Case,188 Ian

Copestake, and Alec Marsh all point out the influences of Emerson, Dewey, Whitehead, and the Unitarian Church on Williams. Case, in particular, resolves apparent contradictions by explaining Dewey’s influence on Williams:

Williams employs two distinct, seemingly contradictory strategies. The first of these, for which he is popularly known, is the anti-Romantic presentation of the particulars in which “one by one objects are defined,” an insistence on “clarity, outline of leaf,” that is closely aligned with Pound’s imagism and appears most clearly in the verse sections of Spring and All (Poems, 1:183). The second strategy, most vividly demonstrated in the prose passages, is the use of words in a deliberately, even ostentatiously anti-mimetic way…. The result of the interplay between these two approaches is a text that enacts Williams’s Deweyan conception of embodied knowledge.189

187Marjorie Perloff, “Lines Converging and Crossing,” The Poetics of Indeterminacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 153.

188Case, Kristen. "“As Much a Part of Things as Trees and Stones”: John Dewey, William Carlos Williams, and the Difference in Not Knowing." In American Pragmatism and Poetic Practice: Crosscurrents from Emerson to Susan Howe, 86. Boydell and Brewer, 2011. http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.baylor.edu/stable/10.7722/j.ctt1x7209.9.

189Ibid., 86.

While this account is compelling and I have no need to challenge it, I hold that there are yet other ways to resolve contradictions in Williams that bring mysticism and experience to bear on his materiality.

This third way is a non-dualistic unity that creates a space for epiphany, revelation, and delight upon contact with the whole. Rather than metaphysical dualism, it is assumed that the whole is present in the immediate and the ordinary. Loss of contact is due to tradition, prior associations, and reliance on interpretation, and contact is restored through proper perception. I draw support from Luke Fischer’s work on Rainer Maria Rilke, and I juxtapose Rilke and Williams to show that Williams’ perceptive aesthetics are shared by his contemporaries, and are not merely idiosyncratic.

Fischer proposes a similar way of “solving dualism” through perception and experience: “a phenomenology of the life-world in the mode of everydayness,” which has profound implications for poetry. For Fischer, the poet’s relationship to the everyday is key to understanding the exceptional, epiphanic experience. He proposes a theory of “two-fold vision” which solves the problem of metaphysical dualism. For Fischer, dualism seems an inherent part of how we experience life—inner and outer, self and other, known and unknown. But although experience suggests duality, Fischer holds that such duality is not the nature of the cosmos:

[D]oes this... opposition... reflect the fundamental nature of reality?.... Or, do such experiences pertain to an impoverished disclosure of things that might be remedied? Is a disclosure of reality possible where mind and world would no longer appear in opposition to one another, but as two sides of a single whole?190

190Luke Fischer, The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 21.

95 In Rilke, Fischer sees a unified cosmos, and the seeming duality caused by ordinary experience is remedied through proper perception rather than intellection. This unity extends even to spirit and material: “How could there be such a complex intertwining of the material and the spiritual, the conscious and the non-conscious, the invisible and the visible, if they are ultimately two completely different substances, or if there is not a third term which encompasses the difference?”191 However, Fischer notes that Rilke does not conceptualize a material monism, for that would, in an effort to avoid interpretation and philosophical conceptions, reduce conscious life to non-conscious life.192 Fischer preserves consciousness because it is the nexus of experience, which he believes philosophy has failed to conceptualize properly. Empiricism and Kantianism — ways of knowing through material evidence and discursive thought respectively — “do not uncover experience as it is.”193

Conscious experience, therefore, offers a different way of knowing that can lead to revelation

(traditionally an event possible only in metaphysical dualism) in a non-dualistic cosmos.

Fischer holds that this mode of perceptive and experiential knowing is exemplified in Rilke’s poetry, which allows us to

suspend received scientific and metaphysical conceptions and seek to reflect in an unprejudiced manner on experience…. Over and above this, any views that we might hold in everyday life about the nature of reality must also be suspended.194

191Ibid., 22.

192Ibid., 23.

193Ibid., 31.

194Ibid., 31.

96 Conscious experience arrives at epiphanic knowledge through receptive perception, or as

Fischer says, “two-fold vision.”

Fischer aims “to illustrate a structure of understanding and perception that is implicit to everyday experience and is structurally similar to Rilke’s exceptional vision.”195 Thus, working phenomenologically, Fischer begins with everyday experience and uses that process to describe exceptional experience and revelation in a traditionally non-dualistic cosmos. In both cases, two-fold vision is a “way of seeing that involves a marriage (rather than an opposition) of sense perception and understanding.”196 Two-fold vision leads to twofold imagining, which is directly related to imagination: “it is in the imagination then, that the possibility of a two-fold thinking—a twofold seen with the mind’s eye—can be discovered.”197 Ultimately, Fischer argues that Rilke’s Neue Gedichte show that “poetic language fosters an imaginative thinking and can thereby more adequately show the sensible and the intelligible in their wholeness, in a twofold manner.”198

A post-Romantic conceptualization of epiphanic and revelatory experience is central to my analysis of modernist poetry, and especially to Williams. Along with Fischer’s account of non-dualistic epiphanic vision in Rilke’s poetry, I also have found it helpful to consider other scholars who study spirituality in secular, post-Romantic poetry in the twentieth century. Sharon Kim, in her study of epiphanies in modernist novels, writes that,

When viewed as a manifestation, epiphany presents an unusual form of vision that

195Ibid., 42.

196Ibid., 43.

197Ibid., 222.

198Ibid., 223.

97 does not rely upon a metaphysical mechanics of perception. It does not automatically conflate the eye, the mind, and knowledge, nor require a mind-body dualism…. The rarity of such a gaze attracts the language of spirituality.199

Citing Gadamer, Heidegger, Jean-Luc Marion, and Merleau-Ponty, she describes epiphany as “a mutual encounter, a manifestation that requires both the visibility of what is seen and the radiant perception of it. Joyce describes the moment as spiritual.”200 In all of these accounts, Kim understands the epiphany as necessarily spiritual, but not necessarily religious or subject to an orthodoxy. Whereas Fischer specifically emphasizes phenomenology in Rilke’s epiphanic vision, Kim similarly cites a spirituality that makes epiphany “a different modality of perception.”201

Ultimately, I propose that this type of mystical experience, which occurs in non- dualistic, post-Romantic, and non-traditional religious literature (and particularly poetry) of the twentieth-century, is exactly what we find in Williams. And Williams, furthermore, is characteristic of a brand of modernism that paves the way for what Charles Altieri will identify as post-modern mysticism. Speaking specifically about post-modern aesthetics,

Altieri notes a peculiar rejection of traditional religion accompanied by an inclination toward mysticism:

[T]he contemporaries are often directly religious or “sacramental” in their poetry, while at the same time rejecting traditional Western religious codes and seeking their religious meaning in some kind of “natural supernaturalism.”202

199Sharon Kim, Literary Epiphany in the Novel, 2-3.

200Ibid., 13.

201Ibid., 14.

202Charles Altieri, “From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics,” Boundary 2, no. Spring (1973): 605.

98 The religious and spiritual tenor of such poetry eludes the Pragmatist readings of Williams, and I argue that it creates a space that can be occupied by disparate poets such as T. S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams, who both influenced post-modern poets like Denise Levertov.

I. Williams’ Poetic Epiphanies

What leads me to argue that Williams is a modernist mystic is not his late-style lyrical poetry, his early transcendental ego, or a Hegelian unity with nature; what leads me to this interpretation is the appearance of epiphanies in his poetry. Furthermore, I correlate what

Williams calls “dance,” with these brief moments of surprise and disclosure. For instance, in the following passage from a 1922 poem, the epiphany occurs when two parents attend a ballet performance by their daughter. They perceive her as she appears in the immediate context of a dance performance, but they do not really see her until late in the poem, when they experience a sudden shift in perspective. Not much “happens” in this poem, as is typical for modernist epiphanies:

From “When Fresh, It Was Sweet” (Poems 1922-1928)203 … All enters—Katinka dances The father blinks The mother severely stares —hey-la! we all laugh together—Life has us by the arm. Katinka dies by bending her body down in a crouch about her knees there she stays panting from the exertion of dancing—

The parents relent in alarm

Katinka rebegins to dance— Finis

203William Carlos Williams, “When Fresh, It Was Sweet,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I: 1909-1939 (New York: New Directions, 1986), 237–88.

99 The whole poem comprises a scene of component parts, and the unity of composition centers around a literal and experiential dance. The lines above, which conclude the poem, show the coalescence of fragments in the moment when “the parents relent.” This is the climax of the poem, characterized by a Williamsian sequence of perceptive reduction which allows the audience to see and respond to immediate appearance. Until now, the disparate parts are all present in the same space, but they persist in alienated disconnection. The breakdown of perceptive barriers brings the dancer and her parents into a state of experiential unity. The epiphany is then followed by imagery of resurrection and rebeginning, but also paradoxically the conclusion of the experience.

Another example of epiphany is found in Spring and All (1923), in which the poet describes a personal moment of sudden perception and delight. The epiphanic experience can be traced in his perception of leaves embracing; the experience is so consuming that the poem begins with the epiphany in medias res, and the reader does not realize immediately that she has entered an epiphanic moment. The reader unwittingly mimics the poet’s induction into the moment, as the experience gradually unfolds for its reader, yielding an epiphanic insight during the process of reading. In the middle of the poem, we ascend with the poet, now self-aware, into the embrace of unity:

“XXIV” (Spring and All, 1923)204 The leaves embrace in the trees

it is a wordless world

without personality

204William Carlos Williams, “Spring and All,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939, ed. A Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 175–236.

100 I do not

seek a path I am still with

Gipsie lips pressed to my own–

It is the kiss of leaves

without being poison ivy

or nettle, the kiss of oak leaves–

He who has kissed a leaf

need look no further– I ascend

through a canopy of leaves

and at the same time I descend

for I do nothing unusual–

I ride in my car I think about

prehistoric caves in the Pyrenees–

the cave of Les Trois Freres

As Williams allows himself to be swept up in the moment of rich perception, he experiences several similar and simultaneous versions of the moment—the perception of leaves (itself like a kiss), the contact between the leaves (also like a kiss), the gypsy kiss (like

101 the perception of the leaves embracing), and the experience of unity between these similar embraces, which is itself a type of embrace. The poet states that “I ascend” in or through this moment of compounded embraces. Though the moment has a hint of Romantic idealization of nature, Williams is careful to ground nature in an urban context: the entire experience takes place inside his automobile and is subject both to the passage of time determined by the speed of the machine and to the poet’s perception. To the outside observer, and to Williams observing himself, the act of driving past the leaves is concurrent with the ascent above the leaves; the two are indistinguishable, and the ascent does not carry him beyond the reality of ordinary, mechanized life. This poem is also notable as an early reference to descent following the epiphany; after experiencing unity, the poet descends back into ordinariness.

This descent, however, is not hopeless: in returning to the automobile, the poet returns to the space of opportunity for future epiphanies.

In “The Rose,” Williams creates a subject-less epiphany, allowing the reader to assume the role of perceiving subject. At the same time, the rose takes an active role in the epiphany as it gradually discloses itself to the perceiver. Though the poem begins with

“first,” denoting sequence, the poet drops any sense of sequence and is consumed with the timeless unfolding of the flower. As the thing reveals itself to the viewer, there is a sense of perceptual and experiential ascent: the petals “come… to the mind as to the eye.” The flower’s agency is eventually indistinguishable from the viewer’s perception, although it seems that both are necessary participants in this epiphanic moment. In this fashion, the rose leaps from the poet’s perception to his mind, and he is completely drawn into an energetic vision.

102 “The Rose” (Collected Earlier Poems, 1939)205 First the warmth, variability color and frailty

A grace of petals skirting the tight-whorled cone

Come to generous abandon to the mind as to the eye

Wide! Wider! Wide as if panting, until

the gold hawk’s-eye speaks once coldly its perfection

“Its perfection” denotes the thing’s essence, which we can infer based on Williams’ concept of “inner perfections” in Kora in Hell. Because the rose the eventually “speaks… its

[own] perfection,” this is an important example of self-revelation in Williams’ epiphanies.

Whereas Katinka’s performance highlights the parents’ role in relenting, this rose suggests that a receptive perceiver is not necessary for a thing’s essence to be disclosed. The rose beckons to the reader with dynamic, almost erotic, warmth, but its disclosure concludes with coldness, which seems to suggest an internal fixity. The gradation from warm to cold also indicates the rose’s progression from object to subject. As the rose advances its material and essential fullness to the eye of the beholder, I interpret the line “the gold hawk’s eye” to refer to the stigma of the rose. Thus, the inner perfection of the rose is, in fact, an eye. The rose’s essence is perception itself. By calling the stigma a “gold hawk’s eye,” Williams likens the stigma to a gemstone known for its “chatoyancy,” which is the quality of reflecting light and appearing three dimensional. The chatoyant effect of the hawk’s eye stone is the same as the

205William Carlos Williams, “The Rose,” in Adam and Eve in the City, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume I, 1909-1939, ed. A Walton Litz and Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 1986), 406.

103 appearance of undulating patterns in burled wood, and the luminescence of a cat’s eye in the dark. Thus, the inner perfection of the rose reveals revelation—what is hidden is light itself.

Although we can assume that the reader is a perceiver in this poem, the rose is also a perceiver; the rose self-discloses to itself, and it also sees us. The reader starts the poem as a perceiver, but the poem concludes by transforming the reader into the one being perceived.

Without directly naming either the rose or the viewer, both participate in and contribute to totality, and in this infinite dynamic of mutual perception and disclosure, duality dissipates, and the epiphany reverberates between the reader and the rose.

The last example is from a lengthy poem published in 1955, late in Williams’ career.

In this excerpt, the epiphanies occur when the poet perceives and receives an impression of totality:

From “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower” (Journey to Love, 1955)206 … This man reminds me of my father. I am looking into my father’s face!

… from what came to me in a subway train I build a picture of all men.

It is significant that perception precedes the association, rather than vice-versa.

Williams does not set out looking for symbols or associated images; instead, he writes “I am looking” and “from what came to me.” In both epiphanies, the poet emphasizes passive and

206William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in Journey to Love, in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II, 1939-1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 2001), 330.

104 receptive perception. In seeing a thing as it appears, Williams’ imagination is activated and experiences the epiphany of his “father’s face” or “a picture / of all men.” Both moments are extraordinary experiences, but they lead the viewer from a strange or unknown person to visions of familiarity, intimacy, and universality. Rather than escaping into a space of uncanniness, vulgarity, or mystical transcendence, Williams is brought back into the ordinariness of his father’s face and that of all men.

In William Carlos Williams’ poetry, epiphany can thus be conceptualized in two ways: as an experientially significant moment and as a poetic phenomenon that rises out of formal literary expectations. As a formal poetic moment, it is contingent upon a specific understanding of space and time, usually determined by or in opposition to expectations based in narrative form, which I explain in detail in my chapter on T. S. Eliot. I argue that, in poetic epiphanies, narrative literary expectations are replaced by metaphysically derived formulations of time and space, and that they therefore correlate to the poet’s epistemology, which is why I hold that it is important to establish Williams as a post-Romantic and a- religious thinker. We can speak of the poet’s conception of space and time more broadly as his or her vision of the cosmos; by extension, the matter of space and time—or the cosmos— leads the poet to ontological and epistemological reflections on the individual’s relationship to self, others, and world. Similarly, the epiphany as a subject’s experience of plenitude is also epistemological, though arrived at through conditions of experience, rather than conditions of literary form. Although the full range of human experience is encoded in

Williams’ poetry, the epiphanic experience stands out as extraordinary, unusual, and even transcendent—reaching toward an external place or internal state which may use the immediate, material world, but ultimately moves beyond it. For Williams, such a place or

105 state is possible, but he works toward this experience without detaching from his immediate context. In his epiphanies, there are disclosure and experience of unity, totality, and essence.

Williams’ epiphany is a moment in which the fractured relationship between the part and the whole is temporarily resolved. This means that a core aspect of epiphany is indeed wholeness, unity, or totality. Poets like Williams create poetic epiphanies that ultimately blur the distinction between ordinary and transcendent.

Rather than denying the existence of unity, Williams embraces ordinariness as an opportunity for wholeness. His poetic epiphany does not presuppose a traditionally dualistic structure of essence and materiality; instead, it moves toward the co-presence of essence and materiality, the unity of which is invisible to us due to hermeneutic distance, habit, and the cobwebs of convention. The trick of the modernist epiphany is to transfer belief from an interpretive to an experiential relationship with reality. Modernists like Williams resist intellectual interpretation and association, resting their aesthetic formulation instead upon innovative forms drawn from music and idiomatic speech. Williams’ epiphany is achieved by adjusting perception, eliminating associations, and becoming attuned to things as they appear in their immediate context. For this reason, set forms and the poetic conventions of Romantic poets fail to capture and participate in the epiphanies available in the immediate, material world. Williams needs something much more organic and dynamic, and he needs language unencumbered by symbolism, which requires interpretation. Instead, he seeks a form that captures exceptional experience, but which is still familiar and accessible to the ordinary person. For Williams, although the material world is often vulgar, industrial, and organic, it is never uncanny or unfamiliar. He advocates for a rigorous reduction in associations; both in one’s perceptive horizon and in one’s use of language and images. His moments of epiphany

106 are always recognizable to the ordinary, receptive perceiver. Later in this thesis, I will argue that he accomplishes this paradox of newness and recognition through the use of idiom, which is antithetical to the uncanny.207

207Williams’ poetic epiphanies do not fall in the category of Walter Benjamin’s profane illumination, which occurs when the influence of opium liberates the individual’s perception of the ordinary world to an extraordinary and strange experience of the uncanny. The use of opium renders the dialectic of Romantic Idealism and religion’s mysticism obsolete, and it offers the user a revolutionary mode of experiencing ecstasy. However, though Benjamin claims that this process liberates the ordinary, he still requires a transformation of the ordinary; ecstasy is not achieved when the ordinary is experienced as ordinary. Furthermore, the experience of ecstasy in the uncanny, strange, and profane is simply a different space for transcendence, and is as unmoored from the immediate, material world as Benjamin believes Idealism and religion are. Poets like Williams never go quite this far into abstraction, and the ordinary is sufficient for an epiphanic experience.

107

CHAPTER THREE: FROM HELL AND BACK AGAIN: WILLIAMS’ EPIPHANY, FORGIVENESS, AND IMAGINATION

A. Beginning in Hell

Having established my grounds for studying epiphanies and transcendent experience in Williams’ poetry, I now step back and describe these phenomena as they develop organically in Williams’ own work. Kora in Hell is a key text for systematizing this aspect of

Williams’ work, as it introduces and explains his core concepts of imagination, perception, inner perfections, newness, and dance. Also, Williams himself claims that he returned to this text most often throughout his life because it was the most accurate expression of his approach to art. Just as I draw on T. S. Eliot’s prose writings to interpret Four Quartets, I similarly turn to Williams’ prosaic text Kora in Hell as the basis for my reading of his poetry.

In the Prologue to Kora in Hell, published in 1918, William Carlos Williams reflects extensively on the nature of imagination. He frames the prologue with an anecdote about his mother’s poor memory when she once traveled abroad. The story catalogues a series of observations about her innocently atomistic way of seeing the world, and specifically of navigating a new city; though she ought to turn right, she naively turns left and is perpetually lost from turn to turn. Though one man cheats her in one moment, the experience fails to inform her “judgment of the next man,” and she meets each new man free from the lens of pre-judice. Williams juxtaposes these stories with the tale of a boll weevil in a Carl Sandburg poem: though placed in water, hot ashes, or sand, the boll weevil and Williams’ mother sing the refrain “That’ll be ma HOME!” In contrast to the initial presentation of her perpetual

108 lostness, Williams suggests that his mother is actually at home in each moment. Because things are always new for her, there is a natural intimacy that association precludes: for

Williams’ mother, each moment is isolated from others like it, allowing her engage in experience that is free from association; each thing is indeed new. And because each moment is independent from the next, the epiphany must be an experience of things, not events, for an event presupposes continuous narratival context. In concluding the vignette of his mother, the poet offers a manifesto for the imagination:

Thus, seeing the thing itself without forethought or afterthought but with great intensity of perception, my mother loses her bearings or associates with some disreputable person or translates a dark mood. She is a creature of great imagination. I might say this is her sole remaining quality. She is a despoiled, molted castaway but by this power she still breaks life between her fingers.208

With this opening, Williams accomplishes several things. First, he offers a model of what he calls imagination, and even this early in his writing, he avoids offering a definition or an explicit argument. Instead, he gives us a collection of fragments that, together, suggest what imagination is. Second, he launches an implicit argument against association as a mode for interpreting the world. Third, he introduces the notion of brokenness, which is a significant theme later in the prologue. I aim to systematize the elements of imagination while respecting the poet’s aversion to categorization and deterministic definitions. The terms I use are taken from Williams’ own vocabulary, and I use his language to interpret his poetry.

William’s view of imagination in Kora in Hell and a few mid-career poems and prose illustrate a process he explores throughout his career—one which begins with imagination

208William Carlos Williams, “Kora In Hell: Improvisations,” in Imaginations, ed. Webster Schott (New York: New Directions, 1970), 8.

109 and culminates in what I call a secular epiphany. For Williams this moment of illumination and delight occurs when perception and language are cleared of association, so that the imagination is activated, enabling individual people, parts, and things to be brought into dance, with a concurrent experience of both immediacy and universality. In this journey,

Williams will model and discuss how to engage with the ordinary world of lived experience, and how to reach—not beyond—but into it in order to experience transcendence through totality.

For Williams, interpretation is precisely what keeps an individual from seeing things as they are, as it assumes that some layer of the thing needs to be removed or seen past, or that the thing as it appears is not truly itself and needs to be associated with other things in order to be comprehended. This triangulation leads to banality as the thing slowly disappears from sight, buried beneath layers of interpretation. Williams believes that such association is actually a form of un-seeing and is part of the viewer; thus, banality is not a function of the thing, but of the viewer. The first step in Williams’ poetic process is to clear the subject’s perceptive horizon; language must likewise undergo a reduction as symbolism, association, and external metaphors are removed, leaving bare idiom and ordinary language at the poet’s disposal.

B. Perception

Once the subject’s perception is cleared of prior associations, the imagination is free to engage with the things “already in plain view.”209 Imagination is the antithesis of interpretation, as it neither adds to nor subtracts from the thing as it is. As Williams and Kora

209Rita Felski, “Everyday Aesthetics,” The Minnesota Review Spring 2009, no. 71–72 (2009): 173.

110 progress through Hell—which I understand to be a metaphor for the banality of everyday life, with Williams associating himself with Kora—Williams describes splitting himself in two in order to isolate a form of perception that is disentangled from the meta-context of social expectations. This disentangled self is free to observe without accommodating associations, social interpretation, and the conventions in which the moment unfolds. He writes:

The trick is never to touch the world anywhere. Leave yourself at the door, walk in, admire the pictures, talk a few words with the master of the house, question his wife a little, rejoin yourself at the door—and go off arm in arm…” (XII.2)210

The poet being sad at the misery he has beheld that morning and seeing several laughing fellows approaching puts himself in their way in order to hear what they are saying. Gathering from their remarks that it is of some sharp business by which they have all made an inordinate profit, he allows his thoughts to play back upon the current of his own life. And imagining himself to be two persons he eases his mind by putting his burdens upon one while the other takes what pleasure there is before him.

In both paragraphs, there is a “free” self and a “burdened” self. In touching “the world,” the burdened self assumes the weight of convention and association, and when “he eases his mind by putting his burdens upon one,” he unburdens himself of convention and association. Touching the world is not to be confused with the “pleasure there is before him”; in this passage, it seems that the “world” refers to convention. “What is before him” echoes another passage that speaks approvingly of the immediate context that an individual may be blind to. Thus, to “touch the world” is to interpret it and to become complicit in the matrices of association that accumulate around immediate experience, as with the social conventions attached to “the master of the house” and his wife. Here, even though Williams seems to initiate distancing, I read this as an anticipation of the inherent distance and lack of intimacy

210Williams, Kora, 53.

111 that surround the interaction. Williams affirms that the “true” self is in the imagination, and the part that enters the house is an empty shell constructed to operate within the matrix of convention. And in the second passage, the improvisation again suggests that Williams initiates voluntary internal distance from banality, which is different from immediate, ordinary experience. He seems to have drawn near with the hope of participating in the laughter and sense of intimacy, but the artifice he encounters causes him to recede into his imagination.

But before we imagine that Williams is creating a space of escape, he will instead suggest that the world he separates himself from is not actually the real world. The imagination alone is attuned to reality:

XV.3: That which is heard from the lips of those to whom we are talking in our day’s- affairs mingles with what we see in the streets and everywhere about us as it mingles also with our imaginations. … This is the language to which few ears are tuned so that it is said by poets that few men are ever in the full senses since they have no way to use their imaginations. Thus to say that a man has no imagination is to say nearly that he is blind or deaf. But of old poets would translate this hidden language into a kind of replica of the speech of the world with certain distinctions of rhyme and meter to show that it was not really that speech. Nowadays the elements of that language are set down as heard and the imagination of the listener and of the poet are left free to mingle in the dance.211

In essence, the individual going about her day’s affairs is “blind or deaf” to life and language “as heard.” Although the imagination may be seen initially as distanced from reality, Williams believes that it is actually a space of reality and an existential intimacy through dance. If the poet can learn to communicate through language as heard, and if the listener can shed the deafness of association, dance can occur. Indeed, Williams will hold toward the end of his career that imagination is a mental-perceptive space more real than the

211Williams, Kora, 59.

112 world as it appears and is interpreted according to convention: “The ‘truly real’ was in the artist’s imagination, thronging in on his inward view.”212

C. Inner Perfections

What does Williams want to see, and how does he do so? In Kora in Hell, he repeatedly returns to the notion of ‘inner perfections,’ which are the object of the reduced perception; we also find that imagination is the mode through which perception takes place.

Because the perfections are “hidden,” they need disclosure; and since they are “perfection,” I interpret them as the essence of a thing, as we found in “The Rose” poem, in which the rose

“speaks its perfection.” And because the phrase often occurs in proximity to perception in

Kora, the two concepts ought to be considered together.

The passage I excerpt below provides an excellent example of how perception is correlated to imagination and perfection.

Kora In Hell, Prologue: VIII. No. 3. Those who permit their senses to be despoiled of the things under their noses by stories of all manner of things removed and unattainable are of frail imagination. Idiots, it is true nothing is possessed save by dint of that vigorous conception of its perfections which is the imagination’s special province but neither is anything possessed which is not extant. A frail imagination, unequal to the tasks before it, is easily led astray. IV. No. 2. Although it is a quality of the imagination that it seeks to place together those things which have a common relationship, yet the coining of similes is a pastime of very low order, depending as it does upon a nearly vegetable coincidence. Much more keen is that power which discovers in things those inimitable particles of dissimilarity to all other things which are the peculiar perfections of the thing in question. But this loose linking of one thing with another has effects of a destructive power little to be guessed at: all manner of things are thrown out of key so that it approaches the impossible to arrive an understanding of anything. All is confusion, yet it comes from a hidden desire for the dance, a lust of the imagination, a will to accord two instruments in a duet. But one does not attempt by the ingenuity of the joiner to blend the tones of the oboe with the violin. On the contrary the perfections of the two instruments are emphasized

212Mariani, New World, 642.

113 by the joiner; no means is neglected to give to each the full color of its perfections. It is only the music of the instruments which is joined and that not by the woodworker but by the composer, by virtue of imagination. On this level of the imagination all things and ages meet in fellowship. Thus only can they, peculiar and perfect, find their release. This is the beneficent power of the imagination.213

This passage correlates perceiving “things under [one’s nose]” and possessing a strong imagination. Those who are distracted from sensing the immediate thing are of “frail imagination” and are “easily led astray” by “stories of all manner of things removed and unattainable.” The imagination is attuned to the immediate, sensorially perceived world; the

“perfections” apparent in this perception of the immediate are “imagination’s special province.” In the next paragraph, Williams acknowledges a problem: the imagination, which perceives essential, material distinctions, also naturally builds associations and categories.

However, the tendency to identify similarities is “a pastime of a very low order” built on mere coincidence. Williams is certainly interested in essences when he speaks of

“perfections,” though he is careful to distinguish between essence conceived in a categorical association and essence discovered in “inimitable particles of dissimilarity.” In these lines,

Williams strongly rejects any form of Romantic idealism as the basis for comprehending the other’s essence through philosophical reflection; instead, he adopts an approach of material observation to perceive significant differences between things.

Williams then deconstructs undue reliance on interpretation and philosophy to find essences. Though it may seem productive to form categories and infer essences, Williams argues that this “loose linking… has effects of a destructive power little to be guessed at”: in ordering things according to association, the significant differences, or “peculiar

213Williams, “Kora,” 18-19.

114 perfections,” are obscured. Without access to the perfections, it is “impossible to arrive at an understanding of anything.” This urge to find commonalities is misdirected, although it stems from an underlying desire for the dance. To illustrate his point, Williams explains that the beauty of a duet or musical composition does not arise from instruments sounding alike, but different from each other. Harmony paradoxically springs from distinctions, and the unity that the listener enjoys is the fruit of imagination overlaying and drawing out harmony through perception. Each instrument possesses distinctive essence, and a good composer will highlight these differences: “The perfections of the two instruments are emphasized by the joiner; no means is neglected to give to each the full color of its perfections.” Williams thus recognizes the relationship between essence and unity. As I argue in my introduction to

Williams, I find support in this passage for my claim that the pleasure of unity is arrived at through material perception, and that perception is attuned to peculiar perfections via imagination. Williams concludes this section with the proclamation that “on this level of the imagination all things and ages meet in fellowship. Thus only can they, peculiar and perfect, find their release.” He does not say that all things and ages meet in “unison,” but in

“fellowship.” The concept of fellowship is closely connected to dance, or delight, because it assumes the assembly of distinct parts. In unison, things lose distinction as they gather in one sound, but in fellowship, distinctions are highlighted and become a source of delight.

The following passage further develops our understanding of perception and imagination by drawing a comparison between love and writing. In both contexts, prior associations, received categories, and fixed standards of judgment stifle rather than disclose essences in love and poetry. Williams famously rejoices here that the thrill of first love may

115 pass, and he likens the maintaining of the same constant thrill to a “sordid religion.” We also find that newness entails a positive destruction.

VIII. No. 1. A man of note upon examining the poems of his friend and finding there nothing related to his immediate understanding laughingly remarked: After all, literature is communication while you, my friend, I am afraid, in attempting to do something striking, are in danger of achieving mere preciosity.—But inasmuch as the fields of the mind are vast and little explored, the poet was inclined only to smile and to take note of that hardening infirmity of the imagination which seems to endow its victim with great solidity and rapidity of judgment. But he thought to himself: And yet of what other thing is greatness composed than a power to annihilate half-truths for a thousandth part of accurate understanding. Later life has its perfections as well as that bough-bending time of the mind’s florescence with which I am so discursively taken. I have discovered that the thrill of first love passes! It even becomes the backbone of a sordid sort of religion if not assisted in passing. I knew a man who kept a candle burning before a girl’s portrait day and night for a year—then jilted her, pawned her off on a friend. I have been reasonably frank about my erotics with my wife. I have never or seldom said, my dear I love you, when I would rather say: My dear, I wish you were in Tierra del Fuego. I have discovered by scrupulous attention to this detail and by certain allied experiments that we can continue from time to time to elaborate relationships quite equal in quality, if not greatly superior, to that surrounding our wedding. In fact, the best we have enjoyed of love together has come after the most thorough destruction of harvesting of that which has gone before. Periods of barrenness have intervened, periods comparable to the prison music in Fidelio or to any of Beethoven’s pianissimo transition passages. It is at these times our formal relations have teetered to the edge of a debacle to be followed, as our imaginations have permitted, by a new growth of passionate attachment dissimilar in every member to that which has gone before. It is in the continual and violent refreshing of the idea that love and good writing have their security.214 [emphasis mine]

Williams offers another example of a frail imagination, or what he here calls “that hardening infirmity of the imagination which seems to endow its victim with great solidity and rapidity of judgment.” The problem is that the intellectual reads his friend’s poems and fails to perceive what is immediately under his nose. Instead of opening himself to observation and the workings of imagination, the friend quickly jumps to judgment because

214Williams, “Prologue” to Kora, 21-22.

116 “nothing related to his immediate understanding.” He judges the poem according to pre- existent categories of understanding, discarding whatever does not fit his associative matrix.

In this example, Williams opposes perception and understanding. The mind forms associations and seeks interpretation, whereas the imagination enables perception and seeks essences.

“I have discovered that the thrill of first love passes!” With this surprising exclamation, Williams correlates imagination and love. Arguing implicitly, Williams points out the conflict between constancy and love. Whereas one man creates a shrine to a former lover, Williams himself resists the temptation to pretend his love for Florence is always the same as the first thrill. He also introduces the element of time to association: similar to the philosophical desire to seek similarities between things, the lover also seeks a love that is constant from moment to moment. There is something diachronic about association, but perfections are synchronic: they take a peculiar form in this moment, but not necessarily in the next. However, Williams argues that “In fact, the best we have enjoyed of love together has come after the most thorough destruction of harvesting of that which has gone before….

It is at these times our formal relations have teetered to the edge of a debacle to be followed, as our imaginations have permitted, by a new growth of passionate attachment dissimilar in every member to that which has gone before.” Destruction, barrenness, and impending devastation create moments of difference, which allow the next moment, the thrill of new love, to shine out in its peculiar perfection. Although there is a sense of forward progression,

Williams does not propose a cyclical nature of love and understanding; though there may occur new thrills, they are not a return to the same, first thrill. Instead, there is always a forward-moving “destruction of harvesting of that which has gone before.” The harvest will

117 rot if not consumed, and the ground will not produce new fruit unless torn up and sown with new seed. Anticipating his later poetry and writings about violence and destruction, he concludes this passage thus: “It is in the continual and violent refreshing of the idea that love and good writing have their security.” When Williams speaks of love, we must understand him also to speak of good writing, and when of writing, of love. Though Williams does not go so far as to categorize writing and love as essentially two instantiations of the same thing, as Plato might do in Phaedrus, he does draw out their shared contours. The similarity is drawn from experience and perception, and the consonance is the product of his post- perception imagination, not of philosophical understanding.

These passages in the prologue to Kora In Hell establish a framework for understanding the rest of the text, and they provide a foundation for understanding the rest of

Williams’ poetry. We learn how Williams conceives of essences; the other is knowable, and such knowledge comes by perception from the imagination, not from interpretation of the mind. Also, the other is capable of withholding disclosure; in later poems like “Asphodel,

That Greeny Flower,” this dynamic reappears, and we find that, while epiphanic disclosure cannot be forced or demanded, it can be petitioned. The purpose of the poem is that one subject (Williams) is petitioning another subject (Flossie) to disclose inner perfections through imagination in order to experience epiphanic dance; this is ultimately a persuasive poem. In this sense, disclosure and epiphany are a cooperative and co-responsive relationship. We also find that these epiphanies bring delight and are desirable events, but this is not the ecstasy of divine (or profane) illumination, nor of the sublime found in

Romantic idealism. Instead, the exceptional experience of epiphany occurs when ordinary things and people experience collective disclosure. The person experiencing epiphany

118 descends fully into the immediate, material space, and does not depart from it or seek escape through intellectual or religious transcendence. In place of the sublime, Williams has

“dance,” which I discuss in the following section. Williams’ totality comes not from an overarching, abstracted One, but from the significant differences between things:

“perfections.” Perception of these depends on a mode of openness and non-association, and even humility before the immediate thing. This perception allows the imagination to activate and to appreciate shared qualities between similar things. But it also means that epiphanies activate relationships between different things, a relationship that allows the perfection of each thing to shine through. Any harmonizing that arises should then lead to a heightened awareness of the distinctive differences, or perfections, between things. Just as musical harmony features the distinctive qualities of different notes and instruments, the harmony of commonalities should do the same. And Williams is open to two kinds of epiphany: one in which commonalities come into resonance, and one in which differences harmoniously play with each other. While Williams finds the language of harmony and commonality a helpful analogy, he remains skeptical of only commonalities, for that would create the potential for predictive and interpretive associations. Thus, even in disclosed commonalities, the harmony is the result of imagination and freedom from association and prior knowledge. And finally,

Williams notes that destruction and barrenness create temporary disruptions in relational monotony; though often hurtful and destructive, Williams believes that these ruptures create new opportunities for peculiarities to re-emerge. As these peculiar and perfect aspects of personality and relationship come to the fore, there is also new opportunity for “dance.”

***

119 Throughout the text of Kora in Hell, the words “perfect” and “perfections” appear in approximately twenty passages. The picture that emerges shows a sharp distinction between the noun “perfection” and the adjective “perfect.” When Williams describes a quality that is sought out or prized according to convention or tradition, he usually uses the word as an adjective or attributive: “flat Hellenic perfection of style,”215 “perfection of that line,”216

“perfection of a tiger lily or a china doorknob,”217 “perfect rest” and “perfect beauty,”218

“vision of perfect beauty,”219 a room swept clean and “all perfect.”220 Each of these passages is a version of perfection that Williams rejects because when perfection is a quality, it is essentially a different thing than the thing it qualifies, whereas Williams’ concept of perfection denotes the essence of a thing itself. When “perfect” is merely a qualifier, it automatically creates two classes of perfect and less-than-perfect. And when this happens, individuals may dismiss real and good things possessing full essences, but which fall short of the abstracted ideal of “perfect.” Furthermore, the concept of perfect as an abstract quality entails pre-judgment in almost all of these examples in Kora. Before the perceiver even sees a thing, he or she adheres to a pre-existing standard of “perfection.” For Williams, perfection is a thing that is fully itself.

215Williams, Kora, 13.

216Ibid, 25.

217Ibid., 27.

218Ibid., 32.

219Ibid., 54.

220Ibid., 71.

120 Because perfection is a thing in itself, or is, rather, the thing itself, Williams almost always uses the nominal form of the word to denote a thing’s essence. In keeping with his resistance to tradition and convention, Williams’ perfections are unpredictable and cannot be forced, and the nature of perfections change with time. He writes that, “Each age has its perfections but the praise differs”221; “to each age as to each person its perfections”222; and

“the perfections revealed by a Rembrandt are equal whether it be a question of a laughing

Saskia or an old woman cleaning her nails.”223 Williams rejects the “‘faithless’ formula” that yields a perfect work of art,224 and he describes an attitude of diachronic receptivity. All things as they appear, free from associative interpretation, are fit to engage with the imagination. Just as the perfections change from age to age, the pathway to disclosure of perfections is also always different. Williams facetiously praises

those who have the wit and courage, and the conventionality, to go direct toward their vision of perfection in an objective world where the sign-posts are clearly marked, viz., to London. But confine them in hell for their paretic assumption that there is no alternative but their own groove.225

With this oblique criticism of T. S. Eliot, Williams asserts his skepticism toward formulae, tradition, “sign-posts,” and the confines of one artist’s “groove.” The artist thus runs the risk of getting lost in his own groove while a whole world of things full of inner perfections awaits disclosure.

221Ibid., 17.

222Ibid., 52.

223Ibid., 41.

224Ibid., 25.

225Ibid., 27.

121 ***

As I note above, Williams draws an explicit connection between love and “good writing,” so what he says of one we can apply to the other. In this section, I highlight the passages that deal with love and perfection, and how the act of disclosure becomes agentive when more than one person is involved. Since perfections are hidden and therefore intimate, it is a natural trajectory for the concept to take on erotic aspects in certain contexts. Three passages in particular deal with love and perfections:

X.2 ______A woman of marked discernment finding herself among strange companions wishes for the hands of one of them and inasmuch as she feels herself refreshed by the sight of these perfections she offers in return those perfections of her own which appear to her to be most appropriate to the occasion.226

Williams illustrates the invisible communication between two people attending to, or

“discerning,” each other’s perfections. As the woman engages with one person in a crowded room, she finds that “the room is not the same”; the introduction of the man’s peculiarities renders everything different, though only to her, since “it’s all in the imagination.” The man comments on her knitting and compliments her hands. The passage then shows the woman engaging in the space of her imagination, invisibly offering her perfections in return for the other’s. Though presumably her companions would see an ordinary conversation about knitting, in the private space of imagination shared between the two, they dance in their mutual perception of their peculiarities. Such a scene recalls the line from “When Fresh, It

Was Sweet”: “When removed from the intimate / all is intimate.” The interaction is ordinary, but the experience thereof is exceptional; the other is illuminated through dynamic

226Ibid., 50.

122 experience, and not through discourse or interpretation of the other’s intentions. This is a moment of disclosure, and therefore epiphany and dance, which is made possible by their mutually responsive activity in a shared space of imagination. This interaction looks forward to the interactions described in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” Also, the ordinariness of this moment is evidence that Williams’ epiphanies are grounded in the immediate, material world, and that a ‘beyond’ is unnecessary to experience a disclosure of totality and the dissolution of dualistic boundaries.

A second passage dealing with love describes a disclosure which the poet decides not to acknowledge. In seeing the “perfections” of other women, Williams reflects upon chastity.

He notes that he wishes for love, for youth, and for a younger wife; these wishes are not problematic because they are not chaste, but rather because he finds himself guilty of applying an abstract standard of beauty. He concludes that “chastity is a lily of the valley that no one would mock. There is no white nor no sweeter flower but once past, the rankest stink comes from the soothest petals.”227 The flux of desire, beauty, and even chastity speak to the transience of these things, and Williams concludes that “All beauty stands upon the edge of the deflowering.”228 We recall in this moment his triumph that “the thrill of first love passes!”, and I interpret this passage as a hopeful turn to destruction. Although time withers beauty and brings an end to it, Williams ultimately anticipates renewal.

The third passage about love catalogues an opposite eventuality from the first scenario. Whereas the first passage describes mutual receptivity, the following passage explores what happens when the other refuses to disclose her own perfections to him, which

227Williams, Kora, 59.

228Ibid., 59.

123 is important because this possibility can become a significant obstacle to the lover or to the desirous poet. In this situation, Flossie is the “other”:

XVIII.

How deftly we keep love from each other. It is no trick at all: the movement of a cat that leaps a low barrier. You have if the truth be known loved only one man and that was before my time. Past him you have never thought nor desired to think. In his perfections you are perfect. You are likewise perfect in other things. You present to me the surface of a marble. And I, we will say, loved also before your time. Put it quite obscenely. And I have my perfections. So here we present ourselves to each other naked. What have we effected? Say we have aged a little together and you have borne children. We have in short thriven as the world goes. We have proved fertile. The children are apparently healthy. One of them is even whimsical and one has an unusual memory and a keen eye. But it is not that we have not felt a certain rumbling, a certain stirring of the earth but what has it amounted to? Your first love and mine were of different species. There is only one way out. It is for me to take up my basket of words and for you to sit at your piano, each his own way, until I have, if it so be that good fortune smile my way, made a shrewd bargain at some fair and so by dint of heavy straining supplanted in your memory the brilliance of the old firmhold. Which is impossible. Ergo: I am a blackguard. [emphasis mine]

______

The act is disclosed by the imagination of it. But of first importance is to realize that the imagination leads and the deed comes behind. First Don Quixote then Sancho Panza. So that the act, to win its praise, will win it in diverse fashions according to the way the imagination has taken. Thus a harsh deed will sometimes win its praise through laughter and sometimes through savage mockery, and a deed of simple kindness will come to its reward through sarcastic comment. Each thing is secure in its own perfections.229 [emphasis mine]

229Ibid., 64.

124 Having explored his own desire and frustration with perceived but unattainable perfection in another woman, Williams returns a few pages later to his relationship with

Flossie. Here he claims that she experienced love with another man before him, and that the two of them perceived and enjoyed each other’s peculiarities and perfections, but that she has since been closed to perceiving Williams’ own perfections. Likewise, Flossie hides her own peculiarities, presenting herself to Williams as only “the surface of a marble.” Unlike the woman in the first passage who offers her own perfections, Flossie is impenetrable, smooth, and reveals no distinguishing contours. This passage is particularly fascinating because it shows how one can control the extent one’s own disclosure, which suggests agency in self- revelation. Williams also explores ways to disclose himself. He is confident in the existence of his own perfections, which implies that his essence is not contingent upon recognition from Flossie. Although both of their essences are indeed present, disclosure and subsequent dance are not yet possible. He imagines committing harsh or kind deeds, and prompting laughter, mockery, or sarcastic comment. There is a note of ambition and desperation as he seeks to provoke a reaction from Flossie’s inner world in response to his inner world. This passage is reminiscent of the relenting at the end of “When Fresh, it was Sweet,” and also of the quest for forgiveness in “Asphodel, that Greeny Flower.” The challenge of bringing about self-disclosure in this Romantic context can be translated to the poetic context; Flossie’s and the parents’ resistance echoes the reader’s resistance. Whether the world resists, too, is another question; I think that for Williams, poetry is most needed when the epiphany does not happen. Poetry allows Williams to share his imaginal vision with others, and it also creates a space in which his imagination can document, rearrange, spatialize, and order the lived experiences he accumulates in an ordinary day. He invites the reader into this space For

125 Williams, the role of poet is much like the role of lover, and he seems to be wooing everyone—his wife, the reader, and the whole world. He thus faces the same challenge as a lover and a poet as he seeks to call out the other’s imagination and meet in that space in dance.

***

XXVII.3 ______Seeing the leaves dropping from the high and low branches the thought rises: this day of all others is the one chosen, all other days fall away from it on either side and only itself remains in perfect fulness. It is its own summer, of its leaves as they scrape on the smooth ground it must build its perfection. The gross summer of the year is only a halting counterpart of those fiery days of secret triumph which in reality themselves paint the year as if upon a parchment, giving each season a mockery of the warmth or frozenness which is within ourselves. The true seasons blossom or wilt not in fixed order but so that many of them may pass in a few weeks or hours whereas sometimes a whole life passes and the season remains of a piece from one end to the other.230 [emphasis mine]

In the final paragraph of Kora in Hell, Williams presents us with a single day that

“remains in perfect fulness,” with all other days having fallen away. This perfect day stands out and, in William’s conception, becomes representative of the experience of perfection.

Though seasons provide many moments of distinction and often reflect the human’s inner state, the experience of a perfect day may stretch throughout life, even though the day itself has passed on. What Williams describes here is a de-temporalized day: the surrounding days which would typically provide temporal contextualization literally fall away, leaving this perfect day in isolation. This one day is the inner perfection of time itself; all of the meaning and significance derived from seasonal cycles is condensed into this timeless day. It is

230Ibid., 82.

126 complete, but it derives its completion from being experienced rather than being interpreted through its placement in the yearly cycle. Though imagination is mentioned nowhere in this passage, this paragraph is one of the only places where perfect plenitude is presented as having any enduring presence or effect. In this one day, the totality of all seasons condenses into one. Although the day itself passes and does not establish a standard for future perfect days, the experience lingers in memory and imagination. Memory is therefore linked to imagination, not to interpretation. Memory is problematic when it creates an interpretive lens—when it controls perception—but when imagination trains its gaze on times, places, and things, memory becomes a rich repository of spatialized segments of time. Through imagination, time and memory open themselves to fullness of experience. This improvisation points toward the fixity of imagination, as the perceptions and experiences arrived at in this state seem to have a lasting effect on the imagination itself. While the perfect day comes and goes, his ability to experience such a day as perfect remains with him as long as he is open to imagination.

D. Dance

Once disentangled from association and engaged with the world as it appears, imagination leads to “dance,” a space where “inner perfections” come into harmonious interplay, and where interpretive distances are erased. Williams will acknowledge that erasing interpretive filters and associations is a form of destruction, and he will eventually embrace destruction explicitly as a necessary part of the poetic progression toward creation, dance, and totality.231 Dance and ecstasy, or delight, are arrived at when a sense of unity or

231cf. The via negativa in Eliot. Where Eliot believes in original sin, Williams points toward association and tradition as the source of corruption.

127 totality is attained within spatio-temporal immediacy, and when alienated parts assemble into a whole. To illustrate the process of perceptive reduction, imagination, and dance, I return to

“When Fresh, it was Sweet,” published in 1922. While the second half of the poem explores perception, the first half of the poem presents the reader a collection of parts, which are gradually brought into a unified assembly. As the poem builds toward the most significant appearance or perception—that of the dancer’s “death”—the poet participates in the poem by modeling a perceiver who probes the essence of the moment. In this poem about the performance of a Russian ballet, the reader witnesses the duality of subject and other, which makes the reader a third-party witness to the epiphany and dance that play out. The experience of unity and the epiphany at the end of the dance are thoroughly grounded in a material and immediate engagement with the world.

When Fresh, it was Sweet (1922)232 Balieff’s actors from The Bat in Moscow seem as if from the center of the onion—the vision predominates. Removed from the intimate it is all intimate, closely observed to be deftly translated to the stage— Balieff, the actors, and Moscow,

The poem opens with actors, The Bat, and Moscow seeming, but it is not stated in whose perceptive horizon they seem. These concrete and ordinary nominals seem “as if from the / center of the onion,” which suggests that this poem is about the relationship of parts to whole; the word “onion” occupies the center of the line, while “center” is displaced to the beginning of the line. Inverting the typical sequence of perception and arrival at inner essence, the word “center” precedes the outer layers of the onion. Similar to Fischer’s

232Williams, The Collected Poems Volume I, 237-88.

128 evaluation of Rilke, the visible reveals the invisible in this poem. The sentence concludes with the claim that “the vision predominates,” which reinforces the notion that seeing does not always constitute true perception. In this context, the truth of the thing seems to press upon the perceptive horizon of the audience within the poem and upon the readers of the poem, even though audience and readers have not even been named. Vision precedes seers; all are called to attend.

“Removed from the intimate / it is all intimate.” A stage production renders the private moment public, thereby removing it from the intimate space. But, like the center of the onion, intimacy is rediscovered through its displacement from its ordinary setting. For

Williams, the false intimacy of associations actually leads to alienation and unfamiliarity. But when things are experienced distinct from their typical context, they are made intimate again.

In this poem, all things will be pulled out of their understood context and experienced anew.

Observation is also an intimate experience, as it is the first stage of the dance of the imagination. Throughout Williams’ work to this point, he has developed a sophisticated notion of perceiving the immediate world in order to bring it into the presence of the imagination. The stage, therefore, is part of the process of bringing the intimate before a beholding audience. Thus observation, which typically creates distance between subject and object, is actually a relation that creates intimacy for Williams. This intimacy forms the basis of “the dance”:

The swiftness, fullness, delicacy of their compositions dance with the imaginations of peasants and musicians, philosophers, and gipsies—The keen eyes of humor look from tall women’s faces gently; the ensemble is felt above the detail; the music goes

129 free of the fact; the satire puts a varicolored bridle on the donkey— the old and the young engage in the same pastimes—

Layering characterizes both the composition and its performance in real time. The essence of a composition exists outside of its essential parts, but Williams recognizes that the whole composition is framed in a real-world context in front of an audience, which creates space for a dynamic relationship between artwork and audience. The troupe of artists contributes certain qualities that together produce a cohesive work of art, and the audience members, made up of peasants, philosophers, musicians and gypsies, bring their imaginations. Each part is itself a compilation of parts, and the stage creates a space for dance between the groups. Similarly, the audience in the poem models active participation and perception for the poem’s readers, which creates another series of layers consisting of audiences. Like the onion, each layer is a reality in and of itself, but all the layers together form a composite whole. This image also helps illustrate Williams’ conception of the symbol; rather than forming a bridge, allegory, or symbol of some other thing, words are no less a thing than the rest of the material world. Words and poetry form layers in reality, and similar images also form layers.

“Their compositions / dance with the imaginations.” This is Williams’ aesthetic philosophy in short—the artwork, a composition, dances with the imagination of the observer; subject and object enter into a reciprocal relationship characterized by unified, harmonious action. Dancing consummates epiphanic wholeness, as it brings subject and object into a relation of action and response.

Pantomime and gesture woman or man—a power suffuses everything gathering it altogether

130 uniting without brushing even the bloom— The free air welcomes them to itself, the footlights obey as if it were some lost master— The Americans of the audience crumble, sweetness escapes their lips their straining comedians feel a lightness that bids them play— They are relieved of the lot Jolson is entranced

Whereas “vision” predominated the opening scene, now “a power suffuses everything

/ gathering it altogether / uniting without brushing even the bloom.” In this epiphanic gathering, this is the power of “free air,” not a metaphysical force in another dimension.

Things, in the form of a list of nouns, flood the passage in a highly visual catalogue: pantomime, gesture, woman, man, the bloom, the free air, the footlights, the Americans, the audience, lips, comedians, Jolson. The poet’s emphasis on things and images creates a sense of separate objects and distinct parts. Note also the frequent use of the definite article, which heightens the sense of particularity and materiality. But all are brought together by a power external to each individual thing, but which is present only in their collective presence.

Vision has given way to power, which will lead to the dance of inner perfections.

To what is this that everybody comes with gifts as of old they used to bring gifts to shrines or altars?

Abandoning the visual, material, and particular, the question “to what is this that everybody comes?” breaks into the poem urgently. Definite articles drop out entirely as the poet turns his attention to an ontological question, which lends the moment a spiritual aura.

Instead of Moscow, we encounter “shrines or altars” of the distant past; in this, we see again the layering of similar things throughout time. These things contribute totality to history because they form layers of something greater throughout time, like the onion. The ancient

131 altars and offerings do not function as a myth to interpret the current moment, but they manifest perfections from a different age. What is this thing that occurs when individual people congregate for a shared purpose? This thing—which I interpret as the occurrence of the dance—can happen in front of a stage or an altar or a shrine, and by this, the poet situates the dance alongside religious and ritualistic experiences. Furthermore, individuals are universalized: instead of Balieff, the Russians, or peasants, we encounter “everybody” and

“they,” as the epiphanic wholeness initiates the attendees into temporary unity.

Russian skill of dancing? No. Dadaistic scenery? No. Excellent as these things are. The whole reveals these things. The quaintness of Russian types, the depth, sweetness, gaiety, color of the Russian character? No. The symmetry, reserve, force, tallness of the woman? The diverse simpleness and open humor of the men? The sheer skill as singers, the ingenuity of the managers, the composers, the depth of tradition? No. All these things existed before the performance. Is it Balieff? There are other Balieffs. All these things are essential—

Particulars re-enter as the poet forces an answer to his question. He creates another list of things and qualities, but this time he catalogues categories and types of conventions.

The power of the moment cannot be interpreted through the lens of conventions for Russian dancing or Dadaistic scenery. He even admits that the totality exists outside of Russian dances and Dadaism, which is by nature revolutionary and iconoclastic: “The whole / reveals these things.” With each thing bringing its peculiarities, the wholeness is disclosed in the moment, which leads to the thing, which is dance. The parts predate the particular moment of

132 the theater production, and, though their essences remain distinct from the essence of the production, the existence of the dance is contingent upon their collective presence and participation. In the above section, concrete and proper nouns fade out as the stanza concludes in a series of abstract qualities. Is it Balieff? No, we are told. Though he is an essential part, there are many like him. Instead, it prompts an intangible response from the audience: ashamed, tender, wistful, submissive, ready to learn. That is to say, the audience is gradually transforming into the kind of perceiver who sees the world through imagination.

But this cannot be taught discursively; it comes through action and response:

—But it is not that which makes men ashamed and tender and wistful and submissive—ready to learn:

Katinka dances her polka on the contracted stage of composition Gaity is formalized in her dress and her make-up. Youth is in the choice of the actress. Her father blinks to the music to show his joy in her dancing The mother with a severe face of renunciation in a shawl—

Katinka abruptly comes into relief, appearing as the character, the actress, and the daughter, which are three simultaneous, overlapping realities. Although her dance forms a part of a choreographed ballet, her appearance on stage is introduced as part of the epiphanic

‘dance’ occurring in the auditorium. Her audience is therefore as much a part of the event as the dancers on the stage. However, the epiphanic dance meets resistance in the woman’s parents, who fail to respond with shame, tenderness, submission, or a readiness to learn. The blinking father appreciates the performance because the performer is his daughter and she dances with skill, but it is problematic that he views the ballet as a performance. Because of

133 this, he remains external to the epiphanic dance, and does not participate in it. Likewise, the mother’s disapproving face signifies her resistance to participate. The parents’ responses suggest that participation in the poetic dance is not merely through enjoyment or lack of displeasure; rather, enjoyment is passive and still a failure to participate and join essences.

It cannot be more than it is without in a peasant’s cottage being mercenary to the landlord who kills the splendor of national character by his demands for rent, the filth of stupidity which has no escape —blend to make it impossible all that is not imagined by men who have lived yet unsated by life’s endless profusion and color and rhythms, who seeing the brevity of their transit through the spinning world have resort to— translation Here life’s exquisite diversity its tenderness ardor of spirits find that in which they may move—

In dialectical fashion, Williams again interrupts the flow of his poem to address the unspoken question about the place of art in ordinary life. Art dies with pecuniary demands and the oppression of a mercenary landlord. “Landlord” stands in opposition to national character, and financial servitude kills the splendor of identity. Left to their own devices, the oppressed individuals lack access to the reality as experienced through imagination; through translation, a person receives an opportunity to engage in the dance. The theatrical production creates a temporary place in time and space that teaches the individual to engage in imagination.

All enters—Katinka dances The father blinks

134 The mother severely stares —hey-la! we all laugh together—Life has us by the arm.

In another abrupt shift, Williams introduces the scene from his own perspective. With lines like brush strokes, the poet repaints the scene; the dance, the blink, and the stare no longer appear in opposition to each other, but rather appear together in a new composition. We recognize the visual brush-stroke style of writing as the poet’s own voice, which is reinforced by the use of “we” and “us.” Language of all, we all, and us brackets the brief series of articulated parts, signaling a contrast with the opening stanzas that are replete with serial lists and concrete objects. This is the first time Katinka is introduced, and I understand it as a point of critical tension in the poem. Here, the ballerina’s distance from the character she assumes is emphasized. Though her father has joy in the dance, I still read a sense of distance—he blinks to show his joy, and he seems to compartmentalize and distance himself from becoming lost in the moment. He can only see his daughter through his pre-existing associations, and he resists participating in the story she presents on stage. The poet pivots into a reflection on the brevity of life, and concludes that the audience has come to “find that in which they may move,” which is the power that suffuses everything. This phrase echoes the Biblical quotation that it is through the unknown god—whom the Christian Apostles recognized as the Jewish Messiah—in whom people “live and move and have their being.”233

For Williams, this a-religious power is an epiphanic present.

Katinka dies by bending her body down in a crouch about her knees there she stays panting from the exertion of dancing—

In this highly visual three-line section, Katinka dies, and her parents finally respond:

233Acts 17:28.

135

The parents relent in alarm

This line stands in relief against the rest of the poem. Katinka’s feigned death brings everyone present into a dance of action and response. The verb “relent” occupies the middle of this line, which focalizes the dynamic between Katinka and her parents. Relenting is a

“whole,” as the substance of the verb is not contained in Katinka’s death, nor is it contained in her parents’ attitude of frozen distance. Death brings them to life, which prompts a reciprocal dynamic between the characters. In the moment of her “death,” the parents perhaps finally see Katinka. The particular nominals that appear in this line (parents, alarm) do not occur in a static series of images, but rather as the agents of this verb relent. Williams’ dance has finally drawn the parents into the self-forgetfulness of responsive action as they surrender interpretation of reality and allow themselves to experience the ballet. By translation, the compositional aspects that comprise the ballet performance blend the boundaries between artwork and reality.

Katinka rebegins to dance— Finis

In a strange cycle of rapid death and rebirth, the dancer “dies” on stage, prompting the parents finally to engage with the dance on its own terms. And in an almost religious moment, it appears that the parents’ resistance dies with Katinka. Whether the fall is accidental or choreographed, the parents are gradually led to abandon associations and perceive what is directly in front of them; in doing so, their imaginations are unwittingly released. The imagery of death also echoes the language of destruction, decay, war, and barrenness that Williams considers essential to the process of imagination and poetry. This death is necessary for the parents to be reborn with new sight. In Katinka’s resurrection,

136 everyone physically present is truly present in the epiphanic dance, and wholeness is made manifest.

E. Resistance and Limits

“The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation,” writes Emerson in Fate: “Whatever limits us we call Fate.”234

Discovering this profoundly demoralizing reality late in life, Emerson tempers his early optimism and proposes that people wield power against circumstance. This power comes from thought and will, the ability to manipulate the cosmos for one’s own ends: “Thought dissolves the material universe, by carrying the mind up into a sphere where all is plastic.”235

Williams, unlike Emerson, is unsurprised by the resistance he encounters in the world and in other people. While I do not attempt to make an argument of influence, a moment to contrast Emerson and Williams is beneficial since both men contribute converse approaches to the same problems, and both conceptualize a state of escape, liberation, and freedom from these problems. Emerson’s early thinking is characterized by the unbounded optimism in nature and the power of self-reliance, and his late work by the limits imposed by fate, or circumstances. Williams, however, shows a remarkable appreciation throughout his career for the obstacles that beset a free imagination. For him, limits are an unfortunate state of nature, as demonstrated by his whole-hearted acceptance of hell, destruction, and barrenness in Kora in Hell. Also unlike Emerson, Williams’ imagination does not dissolve the material universe; instead, it dissolves the invisible interpretive matrices, temporally generated

234Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Fate,” in Emerson: Essays and Lectures (New York: Literary Classics of America, 1983), 951.

235Ibid., 956.

137 association, and convention. What for Emerson was a nearly debilitating concept late in life was a source of eternal creative impetus for all of Williams’ career. Williams accepted “hell” as a status quo, and also as an infinite point of creative departure. For Williams, the material universe is not something to be transcended; rather, his experience and perception of the universe as banal is perpetually to be overcome by imagination.

In this section, I examine several distinct obstacles that preoccupy Williams later in his career. Since Williams’ epiphanies could even be defined as overcoming of obstacles in the communion of essences, his heightened attention to such obstacles is noteworthy. His early cynical optimism enabled him doggedly to anticipate problems in his philosophy of imagination and dance. Of all the poets in this study, he is the most interested in addressing obstacles to epiphany and finding a way to best them without compromising his commitment to newness. In this section, I show how he actively puts his philosophy of temporal atomism to the test in contexts of resistance.

Williams’ response to obstacles pushes him deeper into his aesthetic commitments— embracing the material, ordinary world, relating to time free from association. This attitude results in a de-temporalized but immediate way of experiencing time, non-conventional use of poetic form and diction, and reliance on the imagination as the space of epiphanic engagement with others and the world.

Furthermore, Williams’ recognition of obstacles reinforces his poetic epiphany as more than simply a psychological, interior event or state. Rather, Williams’ epiphanies begin in the imagination, but they also demand a response from the other. This dynamic can also be seen as the productive agonism that Williams locates between hell and totality. While

Williams may have found the distance between Flossie and him to be personally troubling,

138 that very dynamic carries tremendous potential for his creative process and for his belief about creation and destruction in the world.

i. Dependence on others and the world

Epiphany is not merely a psychological event; it depends upon the active response from other people and things. In “The Rose,” even though Williams is the only human subject present, the rose takes on an agentive and participatory role in the epiphany. The poetry is intertwined with the rose—the poem is the rose, and it allows us to see as Williams sees, and to engage with the rose with the poem as its proxy. As we close-read the poem, we are actually close-reading the rose. The rose poem, as well as “The Leaves Embrace,” exemplifies Williams epiphanic contact with a responsive world. In these contexts, imagination is particularly effective in prompting active response from the world.

“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” however, brings several new sources of resistance into focus. Poems like “When Fresh, It Was Sweet” highlight resistance, but the force of imagination is the only thing needed to coax the individuals into relenting. The dancer

Katinka never reaches out to persuade her parents in the audience, and her focus never engages them directly. Urgency to relent comes from a circumstantial energy generated by the composition of presences. In “Asphodel,” Flossie is directly called upon to relent, and

Williams introduces the element of persuasion as part of his aesthetic-imaginal project; as

Paul Mariani writes, the poem is a finely crafted “calculus of persuasion,” and “his wife’s generosity in forgiving him is not enough. She must also see what he sees.”236 While nature and inanimate objects can be drawn into imagination and brought into a state of dance, the

236Paul Mariani, “The Satyr’s Defense: Williams’ ‘Asphodel,’” Contemporary Literature, Winter, 14, no. 1 (1973): 1, 10.

139 will of the other is a force to be reckoned with. “Asphodel” is the culmination and expansion of Williams’ imagination, perception, and poetic form outlined in Kora In Hell.

Williams begins by reminding Flossie of several times she shared in imagination and gave an active response to both to him and to the world: “I have seen it [the sea] / and so have you / when it puts all flowers / to shame”;237 “We have stood / from year to year / before the spectacle of our lives / with joined hands”;238 “We danced, / in our minds, / and read a book together. / You remember?.”239 While it may look like Williams is building a case of prior associations and categorizing a type of action he demands, or that he is saying she has engaged in imagination before and should do it again, I suggest the highly visual vignettes are a de-temporalization of the memories. They model the process of relenting. By triangulating between the vignettes, Williams builds a picture of perception and imagination, resulting in a confluence of inner and outer experience, and also the co-mingling of his and

Flossie’s perception and experience. Note also the progression in the orientation in these three lines—I have seen, we have stood, we danced. These three attitudes show the

237William Carlos Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” in The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II 1939-1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 2001), 313.

238Ibid., 314.

239Ibid., 315. The act of reading is significant to Williams: “ We read not to gain, or not primarily to gain, knowledge of what we are reading—for we read fiction as readily as we read history or philosophy—but to gain clarity of mind. We read to rescue ourselves from the befuddlement in which we exist between express commitments of our attention” (“The Portrait: Emanuel Romano, RI, 196).

“We waken startled from it when such a vision has passed. For what is knowledge compared to a full possession of our senses, when all our faculties are welded toward the accomplishment of a given end and we come face to face with our position in the world?” (“The Portrait,” RI, 197).

140 progression from the two people perceiving individually, then coming into exterior alignment, and finally engaging in interior dance; from a state of shared interior dance, their gaze is then directed out toward the world, and they engage it collectively. In the prologue to

Kora in Hell, we recall that Williams claimed that he would commence the book “locked in a fraternal embrace”240 with his reader—the reader would see, feel, and experience with

Williams. It seems, then, that this melding of subjects returns in “Asphodel,” and it becomes a driving force in his persuasive effort.241 Throughout the poem, Williams uses his aesthetic process to bridge the gap between him and the other, in this case Flossie. First, he shows how he sees the world, then he aligns himself with Flossie—as if to aid and to share—and his final goal is to arrive at shared interiority which then engages the world.

ii. Corruption Within

Flossie is not the only obstacle in the poem, for Williams must also deal with his own transgressive actions. Far from the un-agentive fade of first love’s thrill, the reality of his own volitional “destruction” poses a significant problem. To make amends, he is forced to demonstrate steadfastness, which is problematic because such a claim hinges upon temporal association. Early in the first part of “Asphodel,”Williams indicates his skepticism toward

240Williams, Kora.

241Williams also discusses a type of “co-mingling” that occurs between artist and object: “The imagination working subtly with the flesh, representing extraordinary co-minglings between two images: — the painter and the sitter. It is a world of unrealized proportions. It is a drawing together such as that between Van Gogh and the Potato Eaters—a man facing other men and representing on the canvas himself as modified by those others so inexplicably placed before him evoking his distress, his disappointments, his starved miscegeny and his love. It is that that he must paint… the internal contours of that other face… facing his own, the artist himself—modified by his love. (William Carlos Williams, “The Portrait: Emanuel Romano” in A Recognizable Image: William Carlos Williams on Art and Artists, (New York: New Directions, 1978), 200.

141 steadfast love: “Of love, abiding love / it will be telling / though too weak a wash of crimson

/ colors it / to make it wholly credible.”242

Again, “Asphodel” is a significant counterpoint to Kora because it stands in opposition to his early claim that faithful love is a “sordid religion”: in devotion and constancy, a lover invites banality and convention, which are synonymous with dissociation and distance, into the relationship. It seems that the young Williams may have also been concerned with the trap of displacing the beloved with a love for love itself; such a dynamic would be similar to the problem of association and convention in art. The Williams of

“Asphodel” has come to a situation that demands constancy, but he instead subtly indicates skepticism of “abiding love” and focuses on forgiveness. The basis of his persuasion is forgiveness, not faithfulness, which is why he describes himself as perpetually seeking

Flossie rather than tending his love for her:

I cannot say that I have gone to hell for your love but often found myself there in your pursuit.243

Hell, in both Kora and “Asphodel,” is a place of dissociation and alienation, and Williams coyly transposes his own transgressions into his matrix of poetry and love as escape from hell.

Hell, in Williams’ sense of the word, is a fortuitous place to find oneself in his situation; if imagination is the way out of hell, then forgiveness is the relational analogue he

242Williams, “Asphodel,” 311.

243Ibid., 315.

142 seeks. In “Asphodel,” Williams identifies himself as a source of alienation, but he re- appropriates hell as a source of imagination and newness. The underworld, after all, is where the Asphodel flourishes:

We lived long together a life filled, if you will, with flowers. So that I was cheered when I came first to know that there were flowers also in hell.244

Forgiveness and imagination are two versions of the same thing, and the “asphodel” is the image that unites them. Thus, when Williams is himself the source of alienation, he calls for forgiveness as a form of imagination. Williams also therefore relates to Flossie in multiple contradictory roles in this poem—as an exemplar of imaginal perception, as a partner in dance, and also as an agent of destruction. The dual nature of hell perfectly suits his position in this poem; it is a place of alienation and also the natural habitat of the asphodel.

As with imagination, forgiveness relates to time by detaching past associations and making one’s perception a blank slate; because of this, imagination and forgiveness are both means to escape hell. Forgiveness is also a unique type of active response that is possible, and hoped for, in Williams’ conception of imagination, as it assumes that the past undeniably bears upon the present, but is yet open to a future reconciliation. Forgiveness is a mode of reception that shares the receptivity and newness of Williams’ imagination, but it has the ability to seal the past in time. While it is not exactly renewed love, it allows Williams to negotiate the present without ceding to interpretation. In addition to needing forgiveness

244Ibid., 311.

143 from his wife, Williams also discovers that he needs to prove the steadfastness of his own love without succumbing to the notion of unchanging, static, dogmatic love. Furthermore, forgiveness is a needed modification of imagination since the obstacle of Williams’ transgression impacts all relational cross-sections: inner and outer states of self (intentions and actions) in relation to the other’s inner and outer states (imagination and active response). In other forms of epiphany, Williams can focus on one or two primary relationships, such as between his own imagination and one object. Once he activates his own imagination, we assume the purity of his perception. With the combination of Flossie as agentive other and himself as historically transgressive subject, the issue of time is unavoidable. The poem’s treatment of time is effective in moving toward epiphanic unity while maintaining Williams’ atomistic approach to every moment as new and unencumbered by the past. To accomplish this, Williams makes time a central theme of his poem; but to do this, he uses verse-form, diction, and memory to deconstruct and reinstate “time” in the poem on his own terms.

First, Williams employs a verse-form in the triadic line that flattens out time and subordinates it to his project. The triadic line with variable foot has occasioned intense debate among critics.245 Levertov notes that Hugh Kenner, for instance, suggested that

245Levertov notes also that Alan Stephens considers the triadic line a return to tradition, since it uses sentence structure as a normative basis for the line. Williams, according to Simpson and Levertov, would have disagreed:

“as quoted by Louis Simpson… said that though there was ‘no definite and recurrent combination of stressed and unstressed syllables’… yet his line ‘is a line because, relative to its neighboring lines, it contains that which makes it in its own right a unit of the attention,’ and because it ‘has a norm against which it almost constantly varies… the formal architecture of the sentence’…. ‘Dr. Williams will have been working in the tradition all along.’ … ‘Dr. Williams would not have been happy to hear it,’ says Simpson, ‘for he insisted on the

144 “Williams’ use of the triadic line was merely a visual aid to reading aloud after strokes had affected his visual coordination,”246 whereas Perloff holds that “Williams scored his lines for the eye, not the ear….”247 But these interpretations miss the emphasis on time. In contrast,

Levertov argues that Williams' poetry is organized in terms of duration of time, not stress patterns or even visual or aural effect.248 Levertov further supports her reading with the fact that Williams himself confirmed her interpretation: “[B]ased on conversations with Williams, with Flossie as witness,” writes Levertov, the "variations in speed.... [pauses] are not resorted to, as it were, but have expressive functions to fulfill—waiting, pondering, or hesitating.”249

Levertov asserts that each line should be read with the same duration of time without regard to stress: “Each segment of the triadic cluster is a foot, and each has the same duration.... As one moves through a poem, the consistency of duration in time, though not absolute, can be felt, registered, experienced—not in a blatant or obtrusive way, but in much the same way that the consistency of traditional metric patterns is felt: as a cohesive factor.”250 If this is true, then the nuance of the following lines is radically changed if we read the lines according to duration of lines rather than stress pattern:

Only give me time, time to recall them

variable foot’s being a measurement in time… a unit of rhythm, not a form of sentence structure” (“Triadic Line” 24).

246Denise Levertov, “On Williams’ Triadic Line, Or How to Dance on Variable Feet,” in New & Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1984), 25.

247Ibid., 25

248Ibid., 23.

249Ibid., 25.

250Ibid., 26.

145 before I shall speak out. Give me time, time. When I was a boy I kept a book to which, from time to time, I added pressed flowers until, after a time, I had a good collection. The asphodel, forbiddingly, among them.

If we apply Levertov’s understanding of the triadic line, then each line is lengthened or compressed until it is co-equal in duration with all other lines. The effect of this equalizing is that while it visually subordinates words and phrases, it temporally juxtaposes them. “Give me time” has the same duration as “time,” and the repetition of the word is not merely for rhetorical emphasis but to take up time. In repeating the word “time” as its own line with equal duration to all other lines, the word becomes time itself; in this sense, Williams reifies time in the composition of the poem. Among the critics, Paul Mariani similarly supports a temporal reading of the triadic line: because of the evening out of the contents of each line, the poem boasts stability, “even at its most impetuous, even when the mind confronts the fact of its own imminent annihilation. It is quiet but masterful control of the line, of the situation, as much as anything in “Asphodel” which counters chaos and helps to ‘geld the bomb.’251

Mariani also cites the “‘new measure’ of variable time” as a method “to make time plastic, to free his imagination from the tyranny of chronos.” This version of time is not a “series of privileged moments—spots of time between a waste stretching before and after—but rather

251Mariani, “Satyr’s Defense,” 6.

146 one long instant between nuclear flash and nuclear heat.”252 What Mariani sees in

“Asphodel” is quite similar to the perfect day described at the end of Kora In Hell—a day plucked out of the conventional timeline, yet timeless without being transcendent. In the perfect day and the one long instant, Williams’ universe is radically egalitarian. All things exist on the same plane just as they all receive the same duration in his poetic line. While there is norming at play in his universe, the norm is not hierarchical; his poetic line is non- traditional in that it doesn’t use rhythm to denote importance or indicate hierarchies.

Furthermore, this poetry is non-traditional in content, because hierarchy is traditional and egalitarianism radical and new.

The effect of the triadic line is newness and radical leveling, but also unity. As

Levertov notes, “the consistency of duration in time” is felt as “a cohesive factor.”253

Although the lines begin with a microcosmic destruction, the end result is unity:

[T]he ultimate determinant of what goes into a line is the totality of the demands of expressiveness, comprising intellectually comprehensible syntax, sensuous and expressive musicality (including variation of pace), and above all the emotional charge—delicate or forceful—of content. Each of these interpenetrates the others. The more fully wrought the poem, the less discrete each of its strands.254

As in Williams’ early poems, discrete parts in “Asphodel” coalesce into an immediate, material present. This interpretation of “Asphodel” is corroborated by Mariani’s description of the asphodel image: “In the timeless moment of the poem it is in this simple flower that

Williams finds his central, foliating, expanding symbol.”255 Through his manipulation and

252Ibid., 6-7.

253Levertov, “Williams’ Triadic Line,” 26.

254Ibid., 27.

255Mariani, “Satyr’s Defense,” 8.

147 reification of time, Williams particularizes and isolates the images and emotions of his poem, and reassembles them into a timeless, co-present, immediate whole.

Only the imagination is real! I have declared it time without end. If a man die it is because death has first possessed his imagination. But if he refuse death — no greater evil can befall him unless it be the death of love meet him in full career. Then indeed for him the light has gone out. But love and the imagination are of a piece, swift as the light to avoid destruction. So we come to watch time’s flight as we might watch summer lightening or fireflies, secure, by grace of the imagination, safe in its care. For if the light itself has escaped, the whole edifice opposed to it goes down. Light, the imagination and love, in our age, by natural law, which we worship, maintain all of a piece their dominance.256

256Williams, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” 334-35.

148 In these lines of the Coda, we find, as in Kora, the coalescence of destruction, creation, love, and imagination. The ritual aura surrounding imagination—present in “When

Fresh, It Was Sweet”—returns in these lines, suggesting that the imaginal experience is, indeed, spiritual. We also find that “light, the imagination / and love” maintain “their dominance” in this poem, which is also resonant with the lines “a power suffuses everything / gathering it altogether / uniting without brushing even the bloom.” In both of these poems— from the “French Decade” and from his old age—imagination induces a spiritual presence in the immediate context, breathing metaphysical wholeness into—“suffusing,” rather than abstracting out of—the discrete strands of the moment. While Williams cannot re-vivify their love through his poetry, he can model imagination and he can continue to invite Flossie to join hands with him again, and to dance in their minds. The Coda gathers all of Williams’ roles together—lover, transgressor, exemplar, and partner in dance—launching a compelling final petition. And no matter which role Flossie responds to, Williams has re-oriented the coordinates of reality such that forgiveness is the only possible and sensible response.

Williams also aggressively incorporates the idea of time, not just time as a poetic element in rhythm, using diction that similarly deconstructs and rebuilds the concept to function on his own terms.257

Only give me time, time to recall them before I shall speak out. Give me time, time.

257Perloff praised Williams’ indeterminacy as a hallmark of modernism in his early poetry, likening it to Gertrude Stein’s innovations in Tender Buttons: "Thus the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons (1914) "has completely unlinked [words]... from their former relationships in the sentence"; she "has gone systematically to work smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean"' [qtd. from Pagany "The Work of Gertrude Stein"].

149 When I was a boy I kept a book to which, from time to time, I added pressed flowers until, after a time, I had a good collection. The asphodel, forbiddingly, among them.

The Steinian “unlinking” of words that Perloff praises in Williams’ early work is also accomplished in this passage, since the equal duration of each line disrupts the syntactical and logical significance of each line: “The asphodel” is temporally equivalent to its modifier

“forbiddingly” and “among them.” Rather than subordinating these qualities structurally to the flower, Williams arranges the modifiers in the lowest and then highest visual placements in the poem, and he splits the two modifiers between two triads. Thus, the structure of the phrase is split into three co-equal sections and then stretched across three jarring triads. But lest it sound like Williams has composed a cacophonous or chaotic verse form through the triadic line, we can actually see that the duration brings coherence to the lines that initially appear disjointed. The cycle of creation and destruction is played out in the microcosm of these lines, as Williams deconstructs and unlinks words and phrases across the triads, only to reassemble them as comparable and equally present images with equal durations.

“While I drink in / the joy of your approach, / perhaps for the last time” speaks of time as a particular instantiation of an oft-repeated action, whereas “Listen while I talk on / against time” personifies time as a cosmic force to be resisted through talking. A few lines later, Williams repeats the word “time” seven times, each with a different semantic shade:

“Only give me time, / time to recall them / before I speak out. / Give me time, / time. / When

I was a boy / I kept a book / to which, from time / to time, / I added pressed flowers / until,

150 after a time, / I had a good collection.” Whereas time was first a force to be resisted, he now begs for time, repeating the word and stretching it out through time. The second “time to recall them” is a plea for the chance to remember; memories take time to recall and to articulate, unlike objects which take up space but no time. The request for time is then bracketed with an echo of the phrase: “Give me time, / time.” Stretching the word out in time, the word becomes incantatory and rhythmic, while the poem pivots abruptly into memory itself. The fact of recollection shows that the plea has worked—he recalls the related memories! The word “time” is now embedded within the memory, and Williams deploys the highly idiomatic phrase “time to time.” Perhaps proclaiming that he has accomplished a

“series of altered contexts,” Williams concludes the vignette with “until, after a time, I had a good collection.” With this final connotation of duration, perhaps alluding to the similar duration of his love, the poet seems pleased, like his childhood self, that he has a “good collection.” Again, words and flowers are analogues in Williams’ imagination, so the present collection of words resonates with the childhood collection of flowers.

And finally, Williams turns to memory. This desire to prove steadfastness also opens up new possibilities for memory, and I show how Williams negotiates a form of memory through imagination that turns past associations into present images. Through imagination, he avoids mythologizing history, yet he is still able to employ images and moments from his past. In “Asphodel,” Williams demarcates imagination as the domain in which memories are experienced. As part of the imagination, memories are de-temporalized and therefore become exempt from association, and they become more like images, as Williams arranges them in three collage-like sequences for Flossie to behold. This is permitted and only possible within the domain of the imagination, a timeless space in which memories and images are collected.

151 The imagination is cast in “Asphodel” as a spatial dimension rather than a temporal dimension, allowing all memories and images to assemble simultaneously; past times do not weigh more heavily than the present. Furthermore, the symbolism that is possible in the space of imagination is drawn from simultaneous beholding, and not from a pattern that has been developed in time and serves to interpret the present and future deterministically.

In the third movement of “Asphodel” Williams recalls two images that come

“persistently / to my mind” as he imagines his attitude approaching Flossie for forgiveness:

From Asphodel, That Greeny Flower (Journey to Love, 1955)258

The statue of Colleioni’s horse with the thickset little man on top in armor presenting a naked sword comes persistently to my mind. And with him the horse rampant roused by the mare in the Venus and Adonis. These are pictures of crude force.

These images are cast aside because of their “crude force”; the poet does not need to draw on icons to capture the nature of his attitude toward Flossie. Instead, he launches into a one hundred- and twenty-one-line image drawn from real life. In this passage, Williams models the sequence of being presented with a visual percept, followed by observation, and then memory and association acting upon the visual.

Once at night waiting at a train station with a friend

258Williams, “Asphodel,” 326-27.

152 a last freight thundered through kicking up the dust. My friend, a distinguished artist, turned with me to protect his eyes: That’s what we’d all like to be, Bill, he said. I smiled…

Turning from the statues, Williams then recalls an ordinary experience that occurred

“once at night.” In this moment plucked from his memory, Williams shares his friend’s vision of the roaring train as a symbol of their ambitions. The memory of the train is followed by a second memory, which repeats the theme of a man who comes “proudly / as to an equal / to be forgiven.” In these images, the poet sketches the existential posture of the transgressive hero emerging from hell and still ambitiously seeking love.

The second memory begins with “I saw another man / yesterday / in the subway.”

Williams reintroduces the theme of sight within this second memory, and also adopts a jarringly imagistic tone. Language of sight rebounds against a flood of staccato, descriptive phrases:

He kept looking at me and I at him: He had a worn knobbed stick between his knees suitable to keep off dogs, a man of perhaps forty. He wore a beard parted in the middle, a black beard, and a hat….

Williams’ description itself is introduced by a significant colon, “He kept looking at me / and I [looked] at him:”—this passage is far more complex than a simple description.

153 The poet does not merely describe the man, but he shows what it is like truly to see. And yet, the catalogue of visual features does not reveal this man’s essence, and such hiddenness anticipates revelation. Like the rose poem, eyes receive particular attention here:

…his eyes which were intelligent, were wide open but evasive, mild. I was frankly curious and looked at him Closely.

“Wide open / but evasive” eyes suggest that while the lack of disclosure as of yet is due to Williams’ perception, the object of his gaze exercises an intentional veiling. Williams’ gaze continues, and after another lengthy description of the man’s clothes, as if searching for the man’s identity in his external appearance, Williams confesses,

… For some reason which I could not fathom I was unable to keep my eyes off him. ….Then I remembered: When my father was a young man— it came to me from an old photograph— he wore such a beard. This man reminds me of my father. I am looking into my father’s face!

Williams’ gaze slowly recognizes the collection of parts that make up this man—his beard, the clothes, the build, his accoutrements—which finally penetrate through his memory. The epiphany illustrates the responsiveness of the image as well as his own effort to perceive it, as Williams writes that the image “came to him.” It is as if the initial act of perception prompted the object’s agentive responsiveness leading up to epiphany. In a

154 moment of layered experience, like the onion, memory’s eye perceives a photograph, the poet’s eye beholds the man, and in a flash of synthesis, Williams exults “I am looking / into my father’s face!” Observation, memory, and present images coalesce into vision; simultaneous modes of perception blossom into a moment of epiphany. It is unclear whether the memory of a photograph or the man on the subway is the object of perception here, but it is clear that Williams’ father is present to him.

In true Williamsian fashion, the poem interrupts the vision with an abrupt return to the immediate: “…face! / Some surface / of some advertising sign / is acting / as a reflector.

It is / my own.” But this turn to the immediate rolls into a new metaphor as Williams likens himself to the reflector sign, and he recalls feeling prompted to act on his vision and speak to the man, but misses the opportunity. Descent from vision is reinforced with the lament that

“With him / went all men / and all women too / were in his loins.” The vision is over and the glimpse of the infinitely generative, existential man goes with it. At the close of this second memory, Williams is dragged back into the world of parts with undisclosed essences.

However, Williams emerges from the experience of these memories with a vision of parts transformed into a whole:

from what came to me in a subway train I build a picture of all men.

The poet stitches together the individual other, who is in himself a whole comprised of individually described parts (beard, socks, fountain pen, slight of build); from this, the poet experiences the epiphany of his father; as the man and the vision fade away, the poet is left to build an image of all men. The essence of all men is accessible only through the poet’s encounters with individual men. Memory, perception of particulars, association, and

155 vision of identity work together to open up the poet’s contact with essence. Memory concludes in a picture of the universal. Upon reflection, the man reminds him of a photo of his father, which reminds him of his father, and he suddenly realizes that in a sense, “this man is my father!” The experience of memory and imagination makes this encounter real— he felt that it was his father. Upon subsequent observation, Williams concludes that, “from what came to me / in a subway train / I build a picture / of all men.” Lest this process of connecting analogues seems like a pernicious mode of association, note that none of his memories and knowledge informed his initial perception. It was only through the work of imagination after neutral observation that Williams was then able to collect these similar moments and gather them into an experience of universality.

To sum up my interpretation of “Asphodel,” I think we must appreciate the threat that time poses to Williams’ process of perception, imagination, and dance. In order to deal with this challenge, he employs techniques in his verse-form, diction, and the concept of time that both show and tell how the imagination relates to time. The result is a flexible, egalitarian, and spatialized temporality in the poem. In the passages I quote here, Williams functions less as a penitent than as an exemplary perceiver; as he lays out memories, images, and descriptions of his perceptive process, he both invites Flossie into his imagination and models how he relates to time and memories. It seems that he hopes she will perceive his unmentioned transgressions in a similar fashion and arrive at a state of imagination, which for Flossie in this situation, would be forgiveness.

iii. Human Evil

In addition to personal transgression and the other’s resistance, Williams also identifies collective human evil as a source of resistance to epiphanic dance in “Asphodel.”

156 This is different from natural decay, since it includes an element of willful destruction; for this reason, it is similar to Williams’ agentive transgression in his relationship with Flossie.

He uses imagery of war, which is collective willful destruction, as a counterpoint to his individual transgressions. If dance and imagination are the opposite of the bomb, then

Flossie’s forgiveness is the opposite of his transgression. Along with this subtle equivocation,

Williams also aligns himself with Flossie against the bomb, which is “dedicated… to our destruction”:

The poem if it reflects the sea reflects only its dance upon that profound depth where it seems to triumph. The bomb puts an end to all that. I am reminded that the bomb also is a flower dedicated howbeit to our destruction. The mere picture of the exploding bomb fascinates us so that we cannot wait to prostrate ourselves before it. We do not believe that love can so wreck our lives. The end will come in its time. Meanwhile we are sick to death of the bomb and its childlike insistence.

157 Death is no answer, no answer— to a blind old man whose bones have the movement of the sea, a sexless old man for whom it is a sea of which his verses are made up. There is no power so great as love which is a sea, which is a garden— as enduring as the verses of that blind old man destined to live forever. Few men believe that nor in the games of children. They believe rather in the bomb and shall die by the bomb.259

In the lines “I am reminded / that the bomb / also / is a flower,” the poet unlinks the bomb from its historical context and place of dominance, and he de-temporalizes and destabilizes its threat by likening it to a flower. Physical destruction is only one of the bomb’s threats; its real threat is its ability to crush humans’ ability to “dance.” It threatens to extinguish the possibility of hope; Williams seems to implicate himself as part of the bomb—“Waste, waste! / dominates the world,” he writes, and then later admits he has hope “in spite of it all, all that I have brought on myself.”

“Like Rimbaud,” writes J. Hillis Miller of Williams’ concept of destruction,

Williams must break down all cultural and natural forms, kill everyone, and destroy everything in order to return things to the primal chaos from which a reality without

259Williams, “Asphodel,” 321-22.

158 any antecedents may spring.... Once this monstrous act of demolition has been satisfactorily completed, the world will be new, and the imagination can turn from acts of destruction to acts of authentic creation.260

The war and destruction we find in “Asphodel” and the 1942 poem “War, the Destroyer”261 become external to Williams’ aesthetic process, and he begins to distinguish between his liberating destruction of convention, and the actual violence perpetrated in real-life conflict.

The “waste” he has brought on himself may be different from the atrocities of the world’s wars, but he still finds hope for renewal from both forms of destruction through imagination and forgiveness. Even as war and societal violence are treated more realistically by Williams, he asserts its tremendous potential for aesthetics and imagination. In “War, the Destroyer!”, the poet grapples with inexorable destruction with the First World War in the past and the second in full sway:

War, the Destroyer! (1942)262 What is war, the destroyer but an appurtenance

to the dance? The deadly serious who would have us suppress

The poem begins by interrogating the essence of war. However, instead of disavowing war, the poem subordinates war to the dance, the state of epiphanic wholeness.

Though ineradicable, war is dismissed as insignificant compared to the dance, and though

260Miller, Daedalus, “Spring and All,” 420, qtd. in Perloff, Indeterminacy, 140.

261Published in 1942. In 1941, Williams commissioned photographer Barbara Morgan to capture a representation of war by ballet choreographer Martha Graham. The image was intended to convey the monstrosity of war through artistic movement.

262William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II: 1939-1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 2001), 43.

159 immensely powerful, war is an appurtenance, not the center of reality. Anticipating the challenge that dance is inadequate or inappropriate in war, the poet suggests that those who would suppress the dance in time of war are dangerous. While war may provide opportunity for dance through its destruction, dance is also an antidote to war. It is not mad to dance in the face of terror; it is mad not to.

all exuberance because of it are mad. When terror blooms–

leap and twist whirl and prance– that’s the show

Similar to Williams’ comparison of the bomb to a flower in “Asphodel,” here we find an early version of this comparison. Floral imagery, so familiar by now in Williams’ work, enters the poem in the phrase “terror blooms.” The following stanza, “leap and twist / whirl and prance” employs words that are self-referentially meaningful in Williams’ poetry, for he has used these same terms for decades to describe the perfection of flowers and their vivification of ordinary life through the imagination. This particular line is reminiscent of a line from “The Rose”: “A grace of petals skirting / the tight-whorled cone.” Williams deconstructs a dynamic that was once true of an epiphanic rose, but which now applies to terror revealing itself “to the mind as to the eye.” Terror, like relenting, is an active response toward the stimulating action, so it, too, is a dark version of the dance in that respect.

of this the circumstance. We cannot change it not by writing, music

neither prayer. Then fasten it on the dress, in the hair

160 “Writing, music… / prayer” denote the institutions of philosophy, art, and religion, all of which are incapable of eliminating war. But Williams has also already anticipated attempts to eliminate the existence of war by opening the poem with his admission that war is a part of the dance, and therefore part of human existence. In the sixth and seventh stanzas, he develops the implications of this viewpoint by showing that, although art cannot end war in an ultimate sense, its existence stands in opposition to terror.

to incite and impel. And if dance be the answer, dance!

body and mind– substance, balance, elegance! with that, blood red

displayed flagrantly in its place beside the face.

The ninth stanza explodes in a series of abstract nouns rhyming with dance:

“substance, balance, elegance!” Williams does not enjamb the line, as he often does with series of visual words; instead, he captures the fluid flow of qualities that comprise the dance.

The words pool in the single line uninterrupted, bringing urgent order out of the chaos.

Throughout Williams’ work, war and destruction are the substrate out of which imagination and dance are born; this points to a significant tension in Williams’ poetics, since war is necessary and prerequisite, yet subordinate to the dance. Whether it be hell, the bomb, ontological war, Romantic infidelity, barrenness, or the perfunctory cooling of first love,

Williams fails to eradicate these things, but he challenges their ontological and cosmic hegemony by asserting that only the imagination is real. Due to the problems of dogma and temporal constancy, Williams is never able to offer a fixed or stable place for imagination.

161 Even though he claims it alone is real, he cannot grant that it has a fixed or absolute place in space and time; rather, it is a true reality that must constantly be rediscovered and reformed in every new moment. This constant newness and re-formation are exactly the forgiveness he hopes for from Flossie in “Asphodel” and the imagination and dance he propounds in “War, the Destroyer!”

Throughout Williams’ poetry, particularly the poems dealing with destruction, violence, war, and betrayal, a future-oriented experience of plenitude is always the solution.

What he seeks is a constantly self-sustaining renewal that extends a unifying hand in the space of imagination, regardless of past destruction. There is hope for dance and unity in each new encounter with the other. Thomas Joswick notes Williams’ statements in Kora in

Hell, that “Violence has begotten peace” and “peace has fluttered away in agitation,”263 highlight the creative relationship between violence and peace, or war and dance. Joswick will even connect futurity with the relationship between these binary opposites:

What Williams achieves in Kora is not a poetics of ‘perfect rest.’ It is a poetics of wandering and pursuit for a form in which language and the immediate can dance together by virtue of their difference. Any final closure or unity for his writing must always be deferred or must only come after, as if something were added to the writing as another of its differential parts. As Williams said in a letter to Kay Boyle, “there is never a poetic form of force and timeliness except that which is in the act of being created, there is no poetic form in theory, in the rules, there is no grammar of poetry—there is only poetry—it is the very essence of the thing that this is so” (SL, p. 133).264

Permanent peace or dance, like a fixed poetic form, is elusive, and though possible only in a momentary present, is also always a future possibility.

263Thomas P. Joswick, “Beginning with Loss: The Poetics of William Carlos Williams’ Kora in Hell: Improvisations,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 19, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 52.

264Ibid., 116.

162 iv. Despair and Descent

One important matter that should be discussed before concluding this chapter is the nature of Williams’ stasis. If epiphanic wholeness is always only a future possibility, and moments of extraordinary unity can only occasionally be coaxed from nature, the other, and society, where does that leave Williams in the day-to-day? Despite the narrative of dance, imagination, essence, and unity found in Williams’ work, poetry fails to elevate the individual to a permanent state of vision. Though vision is momentary, the individual is sustained by the enduring potential for future vision. For this reason, I think it is important to highlight Williams’ motif of descent, an image that often appears throughout his work after moments of vision. The occurrence of the dance is never guaranteed, but one certainty is that the dance, when it happens, always ends. Even the perfect day at the end of Kora in Hell does not denote an actual, lived day. It is a concept and an experience arrived at in the imagination. Descent is therefore the image of falling away from the state of grace, harmony, and vision. Descent is the epitome of clumsiness; it is the harsh encounter with the soiled world and its soiled words. Descent is return to hell in spite of the knowledge that spring and light still exist somewhere else, accessible only in momentary flights from the winter of alienating convention. Descent to hell, for Williams, is the norm.

Paul Mariani’s interpretation of Paterson describes a similar sense of unattainable possibility; by the time Williams write Paterson 4, “much of Paterson, Williams has made us feel, concerns a waiting for something which may or may not materialize, but which for the most part never appears.”265 Mariani suggests that it “is a waiting especially for Kore, the

265Mariani, New World Naked, 611.

163 beautiful virgin, the impossible Perfect Woman.”266 The thing awaited is consummation of his desire for the Perfect Woman, the perfect union in archetypal dance with the perfect other.

While my interpretation of “Asphodel” suggests that epiphanic wholeness can be achieved, there is still a foundation of despair that cannot be ignored. As Mariani notes,

Williams' statements about his marriage have a peculiar and passionate harshness about them; they suggest a marriage built on the will to come through, on a "passion of despair," rather than on the more universally accepted literary myth of romance and sentiment.267

Williams inhabits a world absent of the ultimate or transcendent. For him, the ultimate is known only by its absence, and it is accessed only through imagination. The absence of transcendence holds together all of Williams’ work, as he is typically in a state of anticipation or descent—looking either toward the perfect or falling away from it. The fall is both liberation and despair; it is suspension in perpetual distance from the unreachable perfect. The more dissociated Williams becomes, the more abstract is his poetry. In the descent poems, he demonstrates his own pull toward “hell,” whereas his more concrete, literal, and thing-ish poems capture his impulse to escape hell. These poems show a driving force that Williams subsumes into his larger personal-aesthetic cycle, and they show yet one more obstacle to epiphany. These poems, while beautiful and moving, are a failure of his project. They are lyrical, subjective, interior, and become unmoored in intangible spaces of memory, desire, and fantasy.

266Ibid, 611.

267Mariani, “Satyr’s Defense,” 2.

164 In this final section, I turn to a dynamic that surrounds the momentary experience of wholeness: descent. This dynamic follows naturally in the creation-destruction and war- dance cycle outlined above, and it marks the conclusion of an epiphany. For Williams, descent is the return to ordinary experience, but it is a hopeful return, since ordinary experience is the starting point for epiphany. Ordinary experience is, in a sense, the ontological substrate of war and hell; in another sense, the ordinary is the pregnant moment that is always anticipating escape, which is epiphany. The endpoint of descent also reinforces the fact that Williamsian epiphanies do not transport the individual beyond the immediate world; rather, they deliver him to the immediate. Williams writes explicitly that the near- mystical quality of good poetry does not go beyond nature: “Poems have a separate existence uncompelled by nature or the supernatural. There is a “special” place which poems, as all works of art, must occupy, but it is quite definitely the same as that where bricks or colored threads are handled.”268 Descent returns the individual back to the place of bricks and colored threads; such moments include the return to the automobile in “The leaves embrace,” the word “Finis” that occurs ominously after the resurrection of Katinka the dancer, and in several poems devoted to descent itself later in Williams’ career. The first is titled simply

“Descent,” and it occurs in The Desert Music; this poem continues the themes of war and destruction:

268William Carlos Williams, “Marianne Moore,” in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1954), 125.

165 “Descent” (Poems 1953)269

From disorder (a chaos) order grows —grows fruitful. The chaos feeds it. Chaos feeds the tree.

Although war is not explicitly named in this composition, the concept echoes the statement “What is war, but an appurtenance to the dance?” In this poem, chaos is portrayed as a force of life and growth, and the negative connotations of war have fallen away. In another poem from The Desert Music, Williams expands the notion of descent; the gypsy’s beckoning embrace in Spring and All is replaced by personified descent, beckoning:

“The descent” (The Desert Music, 1954)270

The descent beckons as the ascent beckoned. Memory is a kind of accomplishment, a sort of renewal even an initiation, since the spaces it opens are new places inhabited by hordes heretofore unrealized, of new kinds– since their movements are toward new objectives (even though formerly they were abandoned). With evening, love wakens though its shadows which are alive by reason of the sun shining -- grow sleepy now and drop away from desire The descent

269William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II: 1939-1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 2001), 238.

270William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams: Volume II: 1939-1962, ed. Christopher MacGowan (New York: New Directions, 2001), 245-246.

166 made up of despairs and without accomplishment realizes a new awakening: which is a reversal of despair. For what we cannot accomplish, what is denied to love, what we have lost in the anticipation -- a descent follows, endless and indestructible.

Memory is offered both as a form of descent and as a path forward. The journey through memory is a reflection on reality and “accomplishment,” and is therefore a hopeful descent. Resisting the sense of loss that attends memory, the poet suggests that the experience of memory is, in fact, a new space of experience, which also differentiates it from association. Furthermore, the experience of memory is motivated by new objectives: the descent of evening is different from shadows, because it is new and has a purpose in itself; the descent of evening is also a type of arrival, and therefore new. But the poet recognizes a second type of descent, one that is “made up of despairs / and without accomplishment.” This descent “realizes a new awakening: / which is a reversal of despair.” This is the descent that occurs not after an experience of wholeness, but after unfulfilled anticipation and desire.

This, too, the poet seems to suggest, is yet another opportunity for reversal, and an opportunity for future dance. This is the violence, or war, against which the dance rebels.

Though this description may have strikingly similar characteristics with Williams’ epiphanies to the poet’s “persistent interest in the social,” his fixation upon local idiom, and his fascination with place and location, I argue that Williams still avoids “returning to tradition” in the matter of descent. His interest in the social is on newness, rawness to the point of vulgarity, and immediacy, and not on the social as a lost idyll.

167 As Joswick argues, Williams arrives at newness and the perpetual cusp of epiphany through an ever-renewing poetic form in Improvisations. Though loss and destruction are certainly present in his poetry, he never offers a fixed unity of self and world, but he instead offers a method for experiencing the world through a perpetually new perception. This early form of loss and violence in the early work of Kora is part of the same dynamic of descent that we encounter more clearly in his later work, even though we do find a very early reference to descent even in Spring and All in “The Leaves Embrace” composition. Descent begins with creation and destruction or going “up and down continually” in Kora and in the descent from the treetops in “Spring and All,” and it then blossoms into a rebellious challenge to war in “War, the Destroyer!”

F. Forgiveness

As much as Williams resists associations and welcomes destruction, he encounters a significant challenge to his approach later in life. In the early 1950s, he struggles with depression and the debilitating effects of a stroke, but more importantly, his past infidelity to

Flossie weighs on him. Out of this torrent of guilt and remorse come two things: a desperate desire for forgiveness, and an unshakable confidence that his love for Flossie has remained pure and intact, despite his wanderings (Cite Mariani, Ch. 13). Williams’ confident observation in 1920 now seems insufficient:

[T]he best we have enjoyed of love together has come after the most thorough destruction or harvesting of that which has gone before…. It is at these times our formal relations have teetered on the edge of a debacle to be followed, as our imaginations have permitted, by a new growth of passionate attachment dissimilar in every member to that to which has gone before. It is in the continual and violent refreshing of the idea that love and good writing have their security.271

271Williams, Kora, 22.

168 Thirty years later, Williams is not assured by the security of his and Flossie’s mutual imagination and potential for love, since there is no guarantee that Flossie will respond to relational destruction and violence with renewed love based on their peculiar differences.

The comparison between love and art breaks down, and I believe that this personal crisis leads Williams to incorporate “forgiveness” as a poetic and Romantic loophole around prior association. This concept actually expands the nature of persuasion and illuminates the relationship between poet, reader, and the world of things.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of this poem is the poet’s intense pre-occupation with engaging the imagination of Flossie, his reader. This poem, perhaps more so than any of his poems, is trying to do something to and with his reader. By de-temporalizing the past and making it currently present through the imagination, he calls out to Flossie’s imagination.

Also, because love and writing occupy similar spaces for Williams, the conditions in which writing flourishes ought also to enliven love. He is not trying to convince Flossie by means of reason, but by calling her into a responsive, forward-looking mode of relationship. Against the reality of his past infidelity, he pits the full force of his present imagination, charged with the power of collected memories and images. Inviting Flossie to watch, Williams wrestles with present and past time in dramatized desperation. And although Williams conjures past memories through imagination and is goaded on by the historical fact of his infidelity, he repeatedly ruptures the space of imagination with references to the current, historical time of his petition to Flossie:

There is something something urgent I have to say to you and you alone but it must wait while I drink in

169 the joy of your approach, perhaps for the last time. And so with fear in my heart I drag it out and keep on talking for I dare not stop. Listen while I talk on against time. It will not be for long.

This passage pairs well with the opening lines, in which Williams says “I come, my sweet, / to sing to you.” In this line, he approaches Flossie in the space of imagination, denoted by his mythic singing and his opening reference to the asphodel. However, the poet’s words suggest that his audience, Flossie, slips in and out of imagination, prompting him to renegotiate the space of their encounter. In real, historical time, he talks on in order to detain her, buying actual time in which he might continue to call on her imagination. The following series of epiphanies and images are an invitation to dance. As we might expect, the poet hopes that she will set aside prior associations and be willing to perceive the person before her. In this instance, Williams’ singing becomes a proxy for the story of love he hopes she will accept. To prove his love, he turns to the image of the flower, and in doing so draws

Flossie into the space of the imagination:

a flower a weakest flower shall be our trust

Since we have read his flower poetry before now, we know the epiphanic potential in a mere rose, so turning to this weak flower is actually the first step to imagination. In the words of Paul Mariani, “In the timeless moment of the poem it is in this simple flower that

170 Williams finds his central, foliating, expanding symbol.”272 Triangulating between himself,

Flossie, and the flower they both observe, Williams turns the epiphanic object into a theater for his persuasive poetics.273 Epiphanies then become more prominent throughout the poem, as Williams makes them the focal point of the second and third movements.

G. Modern Transcendence

To what extent Williams should be considered “Romantic” is a lingering question in the scholarship, and I use “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” specifically because it contains many seemingly Romantic features as a love poem that employs a lyrical tone, adopts a traditional first-person narrative frame, turns on moments of rapture, epiphany, and ecstasy, and is written in a stylized verse form.274 However, these Romantic features only serve to highlight the innovative and “new” aspects of the poem, for this poem activates Williams’ entire aesthetic constellation of perception, imagination, dance, and radical newness. The traditional context of the love poem allows Williams to try the limits of his philosophy, forcing him to engage constancy, fidelity, wholeness, and transcendent meaning without compromising his aesthetic convictions. How to write a love poem without engaging expectations for the genre? How to prove the faithfulness of his love without relying on constancy throughout time? How to acknowledge an ongoing relationship while also keeping

272Mariani, “Satyr’s Defense,” 8.

273Ibid, 1. Mariani calls “Asphodel” a “calculus of persuasion.”

274Perloff, Indeterminacy, 153. Here I question Marjorie Perloff’s interpretation of Williams’ late work: "Like ‘Paterson, Five,’ ‘Asphodel’ marks a return to tradition, in this case the pastoral love poem in which the penitent husband makes amends to his long-suffering wife." Perloff offers this evaluation in contrast to the Steinian repeating and “unlinking” of words from prior association, which she thinks is absent in “Paterson, Five” and “Asphodel.”

171 it new? How to continue writing poetry without slipping into convention or habit, albeit one of his own making? At the core of this poem is the problem of Williams’ own self-continuity.

The answers to these problems are a continuation of my study on the epiphanic in

Williams’ poetry, for this issue also gets to the heart of how modernist poets simultaneously achieve raw immediacy while also infusing the ordinary moment with a sense of totality. In the epiphany and throughout Williams’ “Asphodel” poem, we can see the collapsing of distance between part and whole, self and other, and the gradual movement toward epiphanic wholeness. In essence, imagination does for poetry what forgiveness does for love, and by examining the function of forgiveness in this poem, we see more clearly how both it and imagination allow Williams to strive for an epiphanic engagement with the ordinary world.275

H. Language and Form

To conclude my discussion of Williams, I must return to my initial promise that his poetic form is unique in its connection to idiom and ordinary speech. This claim about form necessarily brings us to the issue of language. Overall, Williams’ contributes three innovative forms: first, the poetic and image-oriented prose reflections of Kora in Hell and Spring and

All; second, the vernacular style of his free verse; and third, the triadic line with variable foot found in his late poetry. While William’s triadic line may seem like a return to fixed form in his late career, I think it important that this form is unique to Williams, and he does not adopt or appropriate it from another type of poetry. Williams resists preconceptions and convention, but he never disallows himself to generate his own aesthetic order. He does, after

275Furthermore, this poem allows us to highlight continuity between the verse form, content, and aesthetic framework within which Williams operates, rather than forcing us to classify Williams’ poem according only one of these areas in isolation from the others.

172 all, hold that order comes out of the chaos. What makes order possible in Williams’ aesthetic of all things new and now is the fact that the order is inspired by listening to speech on the streets and not by conforming to dogmatic standards. Whether a poem is composed in street slang or in the triadic line, it participates fully in its own time.

“[W]e are through with the iambic pentameter as presently conceived…” says

Williams in a 1948 talk entitled “The Poem as a Field of Action”: “through with the measured quatrain, the staid concatenations of sounds in the usual stanza, the sonnet… a revolution in the conception of the poetic foot—pointing out the evidence of something that has been going on for a long time.”276 Williams goes on to say that words alone do not constitute poetry, but structure does, because it “is precisely where we come into contact with reality.”277 He wants a form that innovates more radically than Imagism, which

“disappeared” because it failed to offer an alternative structure.278 And this all comes back to

Williams’ emphasis on language, for he then asserts that “we are in a different phase—a new language—we are making the mass in which some other later Eliot will dig.”279 The one type of language that will satisfy Williams’ imperative that everything be new is idiomatic language drawn from the immediate time and place.

The talk concludes with Williams turning to speech with the same receptive mode that we find in his poetic perception. Although unnamed, the imagination is present in

276William Carlos Williams, “The Poem as a Field of Action,” in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams (New York: Random House, 1954), 280.

277Ibid., 283.

278Ibid., 283.

279Ibid., 283.

173 Williams’ conclusion. “Where else can what we are seeking arise from but speech? From speech, from American speech as distinct from English speech... from what we hear in

America…. We here must listen to the language for the discoveries we hope to make.”280

Here Williams makes an argument for regional dialect; in essence, Williams holds that poets ought to draw on the dialect associated with their immediately associated time, place, and people, and that poets ought not appropriate the peculiarities of other regions. For Williams,

British English is problematic not only because it does not spring from his own regional dialect, but also because its appropriation imposes conventional standards on non-British poets.281 Williams will also go so far as to contrast American speech’s alleged organicism and ordinariness with the supposed fixity of English vernacular.282 This misguided claim highlights the organicism and dynamism that Williams seeks as the basis for his poetic form.

Structure and form were just as important as sound and imagery, and his poetic styles throughout his life are unified in their attempt to capture the order of human experience in the present time and place. I concur with Barry Ahearn’s reading of Williams’ poem “The

Orchestra” (1950), written in the triadic line with variable feet. While the poem contrasts with the fast pace and overt vernacular language of early poems like “To Greet a Letter

Carrier,” “At the Bar,” and “Shoot It Jimmy,” it “reflects a flexibility in American speech” that is much harder for an American vernacular speaker to achieve in any other vernacular,

280Ibid., 289-90.

281It should be noted that Williams’ own associations and pre-judice against British English are also present here, as is his own nationalistic tendency. He is particularly concerned with the adoption of British standards for speech and poetry at the expense of regional dialects present in America.

282Ibid., 291.

174 specifically British English. The late poetry with the triadic line does not contradict his earlier poetry, but shows instead that Williams seeks a local voice that “ranges more freely.”283 This quest underscores his abiding commitment to everything he considered new, unbound by the past, and open to present and future plenitude.

283Barry Ahearn, “Some Orchestrations of the American Idiom,” William Carlos Williams Review, Fall, 27, no. 2 (2007): 167.

175

CHAPTER FOUR: THE MEDIEVAL TURN: THE MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY EPIPHANIES OF DENISE LEVERTOV AND DONALD REVELL

A. From Dualism to Multiplicity: Visions of Heavens and Hells

At the outset of this dissertation, I asserted that the modernist epiphany is fundamentally different from Romantic and traditional religious epiphanies because modernist poetic forms completely disrupt the usual aesthetic pathways to transcendent experience. Prior to the twentieth-century, the connection between aesthetic form, religious ritual, and transcendence was rigidly defined, and by achieving a specific form and composition, the poet or artist could attempt to transcend ordinary experience. But in Denise

Levertov and Donald Revell’s poetics, there is no perfect form that guarantees access to this space, and the conception of a transcendent space ‘beyond’ is itself unstable, unpredictable, and impossible to define. With the degeneration of fixed forms, it was assumed that poetry would occupy itself with realism, immediacy, and even vulgarity, the counterpoint to transcendence. If the word was a symbol, and symbols were bridges, then all the bridges collapsed in the twentieth century. Regardless, poets continued to reach for meaning and significance beyond the immediate phenomenon.

Another important feature of the modernist epiphany is its retention of dualism; for an epiphany to occur, there must be separateness: a perceiving subject experiences the unusual or special presence of an object, the other, or another subject. For disclosure and the experience of such disclosure to occur, there must be some form of dualism between self and other, and between subjects. What distinguishes the modernist epiphany, however, is the collapsed distance between these separate spaces, times, and beings. The religious epiphany,

176 for instance, hinges upon the temporary appearance of a divinity or divine truth. A god enters the space and time of a human and reveals itself. Inevitably, the divine departs the human spatio-temporal dimension, otherwise the epiphany would become commonplace and eventually cease to exist. The beyond is therefore an entirely separate and distant time and space. It is partly this distance that propels the mythic quest: heroes and questing individuals descend into the underworld or ascend into the afterlife or the space of divinities. In the

Romantic tradition, the individual transcends the immediate, ordinary world through an intuitive, intellectual, or aesthetic reaching toward the sublime. While the natural world plays a significant role in this experience, the individual moves beyond immediate contact with nature as it is. Not only is nature encountered in an ideal form, the subject is subsumed into the sublime. It is impossible for the subject to occupy ordinary and extraordinary space and time simultaneously, for the epiphany demands presence in the beyond.

In the twentieth century, this dualistic exclusivity collapses, and poets like Williams,

Eliot, Denise Levertov, and Donald Revell reach toward traditionally transcendent spaces, but they keep a firm grasp on the immediate. Like their Romantic forebears, these poets recognize the essential role that the ordinary world has in reaching transcendence, but they do not regard ordinariness as something to be escaped. Rather, their view of the world inverts the binary of ordinariness and transcendence, and they see themselves as alienated from the ordinary world. If they can get past their typical—though not ordinary—way of perceiving the world, they will finally arrive at reality, which is right in front of them. The modernist epiphany, therefore, is simply the point of contact between both sides of a binary: particular and universal, subject and object, subject and other subject, part and whole, material and spiritual. Furthermore, these modernist poets push for a view of the cosmos in

177 which the beyond is immanent or latent in the substance of everyday life. Instead of spatio- temporal distance as the main obstacle to the beyond, these poets point toward perceptive blindness as the main inhibitor. But while it is crucial for the subject to perceive clearly, the modernist epiphany is not purely a psychological or interior phenomenon; for the epiphany to occur, there must be both perception and disclosure, which entails responsivity and reciprocity.

While scholarship on Eliot’s epiphanies has reached a near-saturation point, and work on Williams’ epiphanies is still in process, critics of Levertov’s poetry consider epiphanies a given. In my project, I aim to build on this assumption and connect her poetry to the broader trend of modern and contemporary epiphanic vision and wholeness. Levertov takes the modernist epiphanic landscape one step further: whereas Williams asserts dual vision and

Eliot assert double realities, Levertov asserts a multiplicity of spatio-temporally present realities. Her poetry is often characterized as spiritual, mystical, and immanentist. I also examine several poems by contemporary poet Donald Revell, who was mentored by

Levertov and continues in the modernist trajectory I outline in this dissertation. Both

Levertov and Revell propose attention as the primary method of access to the epiphanic space. For Levertov, the attending subject will take center stage in inducing epiphany, whereas Revell will present a world of epiphanic intersections that are always present.

B. Denise Levertov’s epiphanies: poet of the borderlands

Levertov is a poet who gathers in Romanticism, Black Mountain poetry, the influences of Rilke, Eliot, and Williams, Jewish and Christian mysticism, English and

American localities, as well as rhetoric of late twentieth-century political protest and revolution. Scholars routinely introduce her as a poet of the epiphany: “[Duncan and

178 Levertov possess a world of] poetry as vision, special knowledge and epiphany”;284 “She is, like Williams, a poet of the found object and fortuitous epiphany”;285 “Like the epiphany, celebration occurs at random moments of ordinary experience when one is “off-guard;”286

“Gradually and unsparingly, these recent poems [Candles in Babylon, Oblique Prayers,

Breathing the Water, A Door in the Hive] begin to test out, define, and affirm the transcendent third term that bridges the rupture between individual epiphany and public calamity”;287 and “while not very original, she is often quite a good poet devoted to developing concrete moments in which the numinous emerges out of the quotidian.”288 It is striking that critics so naturally use the term epiphany to describe Levertov’s poetry, that they link Williams and epiphany, and that the epiphany is associated with randomness, ordinariness, and also as a means to “bridge the rupture.” What I call the epiphanic in

Levertov is variously described as “epiphany,”289 “celebration,”290 “numinous,”291 and

284Marjorie Perloff, “Don’t Mention the War,” The Times Literary Supplement Historical Archive, 12, May 28, 2014, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/ABvTA2.

285Lorrie Smith, “Song’s of Experience: Denise Levertov’s Political Poetry,” Contemporary Literature, Summer, 27, no. 2 (1986): 214, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1208657.

286Thomas A. Duddy, “To Celebrate: A Reading of Denise Levertov,” Criticism, Spring, 10, no. 2 (1968): 144, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23094350.

287Albert Gelpi, “Introduction,” in Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 5.

288Charles Altieri, “Denise Levertov and the Limits of Aesthetic Presence,” in Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 127. 289Smith, Gelpi.

290Duddy.

291Altieri.

179 ecstatic. Scholars, and Levertov herself, find it difficult to quantify the extent of her modernity; most settle on a statement of her dual affinity for Romanticism and modernism:

Levertov breathed in... both the Transcendental mysticism at the heart of our Romantic poetry and the hard-edged Modernist formalism that informed the poetry of the first half of this century. In fact, her simultaneous absorption of Emerson and Thoreau as well as Williams and Pound—her reconciliation of those antiphonal strains in her imaginative comprehension and expression—gives her poetry its distinctive timbre and force yet makes it central to the entire tradition.292

And:

Throughout her career, Levertov sustains a devotion to the formalist creed that "Poetry is a way of constructing autonomous existences out of words and silences."' Her late-Romantic poetics amalgamates Keats's Imagination and Negative Capability, Emerson's organic form, and Williams's mediation between "the spirit of here- and- now" and a "supernatural" realm of values. Her early poetry easily bridges the distance between the "inner" self and the "outer" world by uncovering the numinous in quotidian moments, and she negotiates these two poles with an inductive and organic movement: examining an object, event, or feeling to arrive at a larger revelation. She is, like Williams, a poet of the found object and fortuitous epiphany.293

And as Altieri notes,294 Levertov claims to synthesize several competing aesthetic impulses:

[In Overland to the Islands ]…I was evidently trying to unify for myself a sense of the pilgrim way with my new, American, objectivist-influenced, pragmatic, and sensuous longing for the Here and Now; a living-in-the-present that I would later find further incitement to in Thoreau’s notebooks.295

The forms of epiphany that emerge in Levertov’s poetry are the natural continuation of the modernist epiphany I outline in Williams and Eliot, and they demonstrate that epiphany has

292Gelpi, “Introduction,” 3-4.

293Smith “Songs of Experience, 214.

294Altieri, “Limits of Aesthetic Presence.”

295Denise Levertov, “A Personal Approach,” in A Meeting of Poets and Theologians to Discuss Parable, Myth, and Language, ed. Tony Stoneburner (Seminar on Myth in Literature and Religion, Washington, D. C., 1967), 23.

180 settled as an identifiable and commonly recognized feature of modern and contemporary poetry, and that it is a well-established characteristic specifically of Denise Levertov’s poetry.

Levertov arrives at the epiphanic moment through attentive perception, and the epiphany itself is the perceived nexus of multiple co-present worlds. The poet situates herself at the nexus of worlds and communicates her presence in that space to her reader; she also tells the reader that this nexus is here and now. Similar to Eliot, Levertov’s epiphanic point of contact is “quick now, here, now, always,”296 and like Williams, she embraces immanence and dynamic contact with the world. While she adopts an incarnational poetics like Eliot, she retains a Williamsian commitment to ideas in things. For Levertov, the wonder of the incarnation is present in the immediate world, and the way to experience and see this union is through attention. She sees transcendent meaning in the material world, not beyond it. As several scholars note, in these epiphanic moments Levertov emphasizes presence, illuminating fact, and immediacy. I base my analysis of Levertov’s epiphany on her essay

“Some Notes on Organic Form,” written in 1965. In this essay, Levertov explains that

‘organic poetry’ is a method of perception:

A partial definition, then, of organic poetry might be that it is a method of apperception, i.e., of recognizing what we perceive, and it based on an intuition of an order, a form beyond forms, in which forms partake, and of which man’s creative works are analogies, resemblances, natural allegories.

How does one go about such a poetry? I think it’s like this: first there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech… But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross section,

296T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton V, Little Gidding V.

181 or constellation, of experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this demand: the poem.297

This passage continues the Williamsian understanding of poetry as an extension or form of imagination. Apperception as ‘recognizing’ what one ‘perceives’ echoes Williams’ double vision of seeing a thing in its immediate context and in its significance to the imagination; apperception thus apprehends both the material thing and its “inner perfection,” so to speak. Levertov also mentions the concept of “natural allegories.” Like Williams, she seems wary of projecting an interpretive association or a received category upon the perceived object; rather, apperception leads to poetry that arrives at abstract meaning organically and through a non-contrived resemblance. Her definition of the poetry itself as an arising out of “a cross section, or constellation, of experiences...” is also a remarkable inversion of Eliot’s objective correlative, which is “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.”298 Whereas Eliot strives to create the constellation to capture the emotion, Levertov asserts that the lived constellation prompts the poem. Both poets are after “poetry beyond poetry” (Eliot) and the “intuition of an order, a form beyond forms.”299

For Levertov, organic form is about leaping between gaps, “between perception and perception,”300 and she asserts the poet’s presence at the intersection of overlapping realities.

The defining feature of the moments of intersection is that the perceiving poet’s imagination

297Denise Levertov, “Some Notes on Organic Form,” in New and Selected Essays (New York: New Directions, 1965), 67-68.

298Eliot, “Hamlet,” 125.

299Levertov, “Organic Form,” 68.

300Ibid., 13.

182 and perception register the sensuousness and materiality of presence. But while Levertov is drawn to the mystical nature of epiphanic perception, she resists the pull toward pure abstraction. Duddy explains that, “Like Blake, Miss Levertov also sees more than the grain of sand, but the direction of her awareness is not beyond, but within the grain of sand. Hers is not so much a transcendental reality as it is an immanent one.”301 Due to her immanentist tendency, Levertov in “Great Possessions” contrasts her poetics with Symbolist contempt for the material world; her poetry is “…an ecstasy of attention, a passion for the thing known, that shall be more, not less, sensuous, and which, by its intensity shall lead the writer in to a deeper, more vibrant language: and so translate the reader too into the heavens and hells that lie about us in all seemingly ordinary objects and experiences: a supernatural poetry.”302 Here we find both the ecstasy in attention to the material world, and also the multiplicity of present worlds. Levertov’s poetry does not transcend to heaven or descend to hell, but it posits the multiplicity of heavens and hells, which are here and now. That being said, not all of

Levertov’s epiphanies reveal multiplicities; sometimes only one thing is revealed. In these instances, her vision is the uniting factor as she closes the gap between the other’s appearance and essence; the closure of this gap results in a sense of presence for Levertov.

Levertov’s early poem “The Instant”303 is a good example of a singular revelation, but one which also reveals the nexus of worlds necessary to see the single thing as it is. Even in this poem, Levertov delineates many potential horizons and appearances as the poem

301Duddy, “To Celebrate,” 144.

302Ibid., 97-98.

303Denise Levertov and Paul A. Lacey, “The Instant” in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (New York: New Directions, 2013), 74.

183 progresses. The poet and her mother depart home at an early hour to collect mushrooms; the sun is present but hidden by mist; the house is full of would-be seers, but they are asleep. The house is also “sleeping.” From these layers of dormant perception and presence, Levertov and her mother emerge. Material contact signals an abrupt change: “Mushrooms firm, cold” show that the poet is ready to attend, and also that the physical world is tangibly present. In the following section, Levertov and her mother enter a liminal space between heaven and earth: “clouds about our knees, tendrils / of cloud in our hair.” Once in this space and in this state, the Other begins to reveal itself: “Then ah! suddenly / the lifting of it, the mist rolls / quickly away, and far, far—” Levertov’s mother breaks into the disclosure to announce the revelation:

‘Look!’ She grips me, ‘It is Eryri! It’s Snowdon, fifty miles away!’—the voice a wave rising to Eryri, falling.

In these lines, the poet intimates her mother’s epiphany: the distant mountain is here, now!

Her statement of recognition then reaches out to the mountain, indicating a point of contact between perceiver and the disclosed. Following her mother’s recognition is Levertov’s own epiphany:

Snowdon, home Of eagles, resting place of Merlin, core of Wales.

This poem demonstrates one disclosure: the mist lifts, and the mountain is illuminated

(“Light / graces the mountainhead”). Both women see the same physical mountain, but it impresses different things upon each of them. To the mother, the disclosure is a revelation of proximity and recognition, whereas to Levertov, the disclosure of geographical and visual

184 proximity illuminates the proximity of other worlds. In seeing this mountain, the world of

Merlin, eagles, and the core of Wales become present. As the poem unfolds, it seems that the mother’s explanation foreshadows Levertov’s own poem, since she tells the reader to

“Look!”304 By the end of the poem, Levertov and her mother have completely progressed into another world, and they call back to show that this distant world is much nearer than it initially seems.305 This poem shows the concentration of many dimensions, worlds, and perceptions in a single disclosure.

304Levertov writes that the poem occurs when the poet is brought to speech, which occurs immediately after the epiphany, which arises from the constellation of experience: “I think it’s like this: first there must be an experience, a sequence or constellation perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech… But the condition of being a poet is that periodically such a cross section, or constellation, of experiences (in which one or another element may predominate) demands, or wakes in him this demand: the poem.” (“Some Notes on Organic Form,” 7).

305Levertov on this poem: “The last phrase, “every step an arrival,” is quoted from Rilke, and here, unconsciously, I was evidently trying to unify for myself my sense of the pilgrim way with my new, American, objectivist-influenced, pragmatic and sensuous longing for the Here and Now; a living-in-the-present that I would later find further incitement to in Thoreau’s notebooks. An earlier poem included in this book does the same thing in another way. “The Instant” describes a childhood early morning in Wales, picking mushrooms with my mother on a dewy, misty mountainside, when suddenly the mist rolls back and: ‘Look’ she grips me, ‘It is Eryri! It’s Snowdon, fifty miles away!’ — the voice a wave rising to Eryri, falling. Snowdon, home of eagles, resting place of Merlin, core of Wales. Here the sensuous details of the hour and place, down to the scrags of sheep wool caught in barbed wire, the cold firm feel of the fresh mushrooms, the sense of the square house behind us in which the other people are still asleep, are still asleep, are a here-and-now

185 “The Son” in The Sorrow Dance (1967) captures a similar dynamic of many versions of a person or thing condensed into one person. Two parts, “i. The Disclosure” and “ii. The

Woodblock,” show how the son is constantly changing, but how this change is toward completion and wholeness rather than a change of essence. In fact, by forming a constellation of moments and impressions from a mother’s perspective, Levertov shows that the whole of the person is both hidden and disclosed through this relationship. She writes that “He-who- came-forth was / it turned out / a man,” a statement which renders time an unstable reference point in the relationship. From the vantage point of her own retrospection, the future man was present at his birth, and she can now project her future, which includes past and present, knowledge of him as a man onto her memory of his birth. Memory, in this sense, remains in flux and adjusts to the present. However, Levertov’s poem does not result in a sense of instability and uncertainty; rather, the ongoing collection of images, impressions, and associations builds and reinforces a sense of presence. Almost the entire first part of the poem is bracketed syntactically by a statement of the son’s being: “a man… unfurled now”

[emphasis mine]. In “ii. The Woodblock,” the adult son carves a self-portrait into wood.

Here, Levertov illuminates another constellation of consciousnesses: as if acting out his own life’s progress, the son carves an image of himself; as he does so, the poet notes that his memories penetrate the present: “deeply in the manhood his childhood so swiftly led to.” If the first part of the poem fills out the past, this moment suggests that the past penetrates into the present. For Levertov, her son becomes emblematic of two things: one, that anything or any person existing in time will accumulate fragments of being that cannot be deconstructed

basis for the moment’s glimpse not simply of a distant high mountain but of the world of Welsh legend” (Parable, Myth, and Language p. 23).

186 into completely whole things or persons in any given moment; unlike Williams, all temporal associations flow together into a thing or person’s being. Second, time can be deconstructed.

In directing attention to a single thing or person, the poet is able to spatialize time and pick out defining dimensions: in the babe, she sees the man; in the man, she sees the child. From her vantage point, the two are present in the one person.

This ability to see multiplicities in a single person or object allows Levertov to cultivate vision at the intersection of worlds.306 According to my reading of Levertov’s poetry, epiphanic experience can occur in the constellation of times, places, memories, myths, associations, or even multiple “worlds.” As she writes in “Great Possessions,” she seeks to “translate the reader too into the heavens and hells that lie about us in all seemingly ordinary objects and experiences: a supernatural poetry.”307 Levertov’s attentiveness to particularities thus illuminates the ‘constellation’ or intersection of realities that reveal or impart being to the Other. “The Garden Wall” (O Taste and See, 1964)308 breaks the essence of a garden wall down into spatio-temporally derived parts, and then it reassembles them into an epiphanic whole that spills beyond the actual moment of her encounter with the wall. The title of the poem names a whole thing, but the first line of the poem immediately singles out a particular: “Bricks of the wall, / so much older than the house.” In these two lines, the wall is suspended between two ontologies: the bricks and the house; the wall is a whole to its

306In a 1965 letter Duncan tells Levertov that where she sees experience as “a constellation raying out from and into a central focus,” as in “a mandala or wheel,” he sees experience as the spinning equilibration of “a mobile.” (Gelpi, The Language of Vision in American Poetry After Modernism, 170).

307Levertov, “Great Possessions,” 97-98.

308Denise Levertov and Paul A. Lacey, “The Garden Wall” in The Collected Poems of Denise Levertov (New York: New Directions, 2013), .218

187 constituent parts, but it is also part of the house. But this is not a simple prioritization of the particular over an abstracted whole—rather, we are then told that the bricks came from a prior farm and from “another century.” We thought that the poem was about a garden wall, but it turns out that the exact essence of the wall is difficult to delineate. But again, Levertov does not leave us feeling that there is no presence, or that we are surrounded by chaos and nothingness. Her deconstruction instead increases a sense of materiality and presence. In focusing on the bricks and situating them decisively as part of the wall, here and now, she gathers the farm, the house, and the previous century into the present.

The second stanza distills entirely into the present moment of the poet in the garden.

Flowers, parapets, and panels shroud the wall, but the poet notices and discovers the wall behind these current layers. And then, in an act of cleansing, water from the garden hose strays onto the wall, further revealing the wall’s current material presence:

a hazy red, a grain gold, a mauve of small shadows, sprung from the quiet dry brown

The poem concludes that this vision of the wall—the summation of many times, many places, and many things—is an

archetype of the world always a step beyond the world, that can’t be looked for, only as the eye wanders, found.

“The Garden Wall” presents us with a supernatural poetry that pulls us simultaneously into the physical moment, but also beyond it into a concurrent experience of mythic wholeness. It is therefore no wonder that the poem is about a wall, which is, by nature a border or limen.

188 Its identity shifts under the poet’s gaze, suspended between its function as whole to the bricks and part of the house, and also between its role as material object and symbolic archetype.

Levertov’s glimpse at the simultaneous identities is epiphanic in its grasp of totality.

“The Garden Wall” presages Levertov’s post-conversion embrace of incarnational poetics and her fascination with artistic and spiritual borderlands. In the Christian incarnation, she finds rapport with medieval mystics, such as Julian of Norwich: “the

Incarnation… because it enacts God’s promise, is also the supreme act of artistic creation….

For Levertov, the work of the mystics is analogous both to making art and being made art:

Julian wants to enact metaphor; Caedmon’s tongue is unlocked so he might create poetry.”309

Levertov thinks of the incarnation as a living metaphor—not so much a symbol or bridge to an idea beyond, but rather a current physical yoking to something unseen, but present:

Can they subsist on the light, on the half of metaphor that’s not grounded in dust, grit heavy carnal clay?

While Levertov here challenges those who would emphasize the spiritual nature of Christ, she also emphasizes his flesh. She takes the concept of a metaphor to mean simply something or someone who straddles two worlds, or binds two natures; a metaphor is a borderland. The incarnation thus also provides Levertov a single person whose existence is situated at a borderland between two worlds; to see and to enact this reality is to bring the borderland to life in poetry.

309Paul A. Lacey, “‘To Meditate a Saving Strategy’: Denise Levertov’s Religious Poetry,” Renascence, Fall, 50, no. 1/2 (1997): 24-25.

189 Levertov writes in “The Life of Art” that she, too, sits at the borderland: “The borderland—that’s where, if one knew how, / one would establish residence.” Through attention, she enters this borderland: “But there’s an interface, / immeasurable, elusive—an equilibrium / just attainable, sometimes, when the attention’s rightly poised…” While

Levertov’s borderland creativity is primarily informed by her incarnational poetics, she prefers immanence to transcendence; furthermore, her dualism is flexible, often wandering into a multiplicity of worlds rather than into a fixed heaven and hell. The borderland is often a threshold to myth, legend, personal history, archetypcal history, or any number of worlds and ‘beyonds’ that catch her attentive eye; Nelson describes her poetry as lying at “that borderland between the temporal and the eternal, the common and the mysterious — poetry at the threshold between the mundane known and the transcendent knowable.”310 However, he qualifies this transcendence:

It does not seem appropriate, however, to say that Levertov crosses the border into transcendence in a horizontal sense, as if she were leaving the country of immediate experience for some special mystical realm. Rather, one might say, borrowing the Tillichian notion of depth, that Denise Levertov probes beneath the threshold of the here and now and finds the transcendent within the stuff of immediate experience.311

When one is not situated in the borderland, and when one does not engage the metaphor of the incarnation, Levertov seems to think it easy to believe in the beyond. The challenge is to both taste and see—to be present in the transcendent while touching the earth, to let the transcendent be present in the material world. Mysticism comes naturally to Levertov, but

310Rudolph L. Nelson, “Edge of the Transcendent: The Poetry of Levertov and Duncan,” in Denise Levertov: Selected Criticism, ed. Albert Gelpi (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 98.

311Ibid., 109.

190 she, like Williams, never departs from the immediate present, which is what Nelson describes above. Levertov’s borderland, which corresponds well to my definition of epiphanic vision, naturally leads to wonder, which is similar to Williams’ state of dance and meeting of inner perfections.312

C. Modern Medievalism: “Complex and Manifold” Presence

Miracles occur on earth and the Incarnation is a thing of the flesh. The alien nature of the medieval idea of reality has led modern scholars to the point where they do not distinguish between figuration and allegory, and mostly understand only the latter.313

Gelpi notes that Levertov embraces both hard, clear modernist poetic style and also

Romantic mysticism, but I assert that another core element of her poetics is a medieval relationship to time and imagery. As I explain in the chapters on Eliot and Williams, dualistic binaries and ontological distinctions are retained in the epiphanies, but the distance between the immediate and the beyond is reduced, which results in an epiphany of immanent (and usually ongoing) presence. In Levertov’s poetry, this moment of recognized immanence occurs not just at the point of contact between two correlated things or persons, but at an intersection of many times, persons, and things. I argue in this section that the best way to describe this dynamic is to recall medieval conceptions of time and symbols, in which a thing is both historical reality and figurally—or spiritually—significant. Levertov’s epiphanies function in a medieval understanding of the world, but she adopts a more expansive version of symbols and images.

312Robert Duncan: “identity is shared in resonance between the person and the cosmos” (qtd. in Nelson, “Edge,” 98). Duncan: “that crossing of the inner and the outer reality, where we have our wholeness of feeling in the universe” (headnote to Overland to the Islands, qtd. in Nelson, “Edge,” 99).

313Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 112

191 In his essay Figura, Erich Auerbach explains that in seeking to understand the medieval experience of reality, contemporary scholars mistook medieval figural texts as purely symbolic, allegorical, and therefore “positivistic” or “Romantic.” However, Auerbach notes that,

[T]here is no either/or here, no choice to be made between a historical and a hidden meaning in the poem. It is both at once. The figural structure preserves the historical event even as it reveals its meaning. And it can only reveal this meaning when the historical event is preserved.314

What Auerbach discerns is a type of text in which the historical—and therefore material— must be held in the mind along with the meaning or spiritual reality. Drawing on Tertullian,

Auerbach identifies an alternative to allegory—an event, person, or image that is both historically real and also figural. The figural nature of an event does not render it unreal or a- historical; rather, the event participates in both historical time and in the beyond. What I see in Levertov, and in the contemporary poet Donald Revell, is a similar way of viewing the world. While both poets unabashedly draw on Romantic poetry, their epiphanies and use of symbolic imagery are not purely positivist, Romantic, or allegorical. Like the medieval poets,

Levertov and Revell employ matrices of meaning, each dimension of which is equally real. A key difference from the medieval approach, however, is the distance between the here and now and the other dimensions at play. The medievalist thinkers hold that the figural meaning is located in several distant spaces: futurity and “present in the sight of God and in the

Beyond. The revealed and true reality is always and eternally present there, beyond time.”315

Levertov and Revell, however, present a poetry of immanence. The sight of God and the

314Ibid., 10.

315Ibid., 111.

192 beyond, their poetry suggests, are not perhaps present in ordinary encounters with the material world.

In addition to the use of images and symbols, Levertov and Revell also employ a medieval approach to time, which consists of multiple simultaneous and overlapping layers of reality. According to Stephanie Trigg’s recent overview of medieval temporality,

…many studies have demonstrated the different and layered ways time was conceptualized in the medieval period. One of the most influential is the contrast drawn by Jacques le Goff between ‘church time’ and ‘merchant time’, both operating together in suspended complementarity. More recently, Isabel Davis shows how Christian time is both ‘stretched’ but also ‘contorted’ at the Crucifixion, ‘folded over itself into multiple layers’ that include Judaic time, rather than simply displacing it.316

Trigg also cites Isabel Davis’ essay on topological time in medieval texts; in Davis’ analysis,

“For medieval Christians the moment of crucifixion and the all too literal stretching of

Christ’s skin distorted the ordinary passage of time, creating a complex and manifold present.”317

While not all of Levertov and Revell’s poems revolve around specifically

Christological or Christian events, persons, and images, many of their poems expand and develop the experience of a “complex and manifold present.” The incarnation is the dominant ordering factor for Levertov’s world, but rather than limiting her world only to a human- divine dualism, it enables her to engage a vast cosmos of intersecting worlds. Recognition of this is itself an epiphany in “Primary Wonder”:

316Trigg, Stephanie. “Medievalism and Theories of Temporality.” Chapter. In The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism. Under the direction of Louise D'Arcens, 199. Cambridge Companions to Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. doi:10.1017/CCO9781316091708.014.

317Isabel Davis, “‘Ye That Pasen by Pe Weiye’: Time, Topology and the Medieval Use of Lamentations 1:12,” Textual Practice 25, no. 3 (2011): 441.

193 […] And then once more the quiet mystery is present to me, the thorn’s clamor recedes: the mystery that there is anything, anything at all, let alone cosmos, joy, memory, everything, rather than void: and that, O Lord, Creator, Hallowed One, You still, hour by hour sustain it.318

The possibility and historicity of the incarnation in Levertov’s theology opens up a world of overlapping and figural intersections that span all times, places, myths, and spiritual realities.

A medieval, incarnational approach to reality enables the possibility of the simultaneous multiplicities found in Levertov and Revell’s poetry. Furthermore, the medieval approach to time necessarily leads back to an embrace of the material world that is strikingly similar to modern and contemporary poetics. As Auerbach writes,

In no way does [Tertullian] want to understand the Old Testament merely allegorically. Rather, he believes that it was literally and really true. Even in those places where figural prophecy does occur, both the figure itself and what it prophesies are historically real in equal measure. The prophetic figure is a material historical fact and is fulfilled by material historical facts.319

Temporal reality necessitates spatio-material reality, which is why Levertov so strongly urges the physical resurrection of Jesus. Her medieval mysticism naturally will never stray too far from “dust, grit, / heavy / carnal clay.”320 For this reason, the physical, historical reality of

Jesus’ resurrection must keep both halves “of the metaphor” at hand, with both equally and actually present.

318Levertov, Collected Poems, 976.

319Auerbach, Figura, 80.

320Levertov, “On Belief in the Physical Resurrection of Jesus” in Collected Poems, 967.

194 The connection between medieval and modern and contemporary experiences of temporality and materiality cannot be overstated. As Michel Serres, whom Isabel Davis cites in order to explain medieval temporality, states,

My body […] is not plunged into a single, specified space. It works in Euclidean space, but it only works there. It sees in projective space; it touches, caresses and feels in a topological space; it suffers in another; hears and communicates in a third…. My body lives in as many spaces as the society, the group or the collectivity have formed…. Consequently, my body is not plunged into one space but into the intersection or junctions of this multiplicity. (Hermes 44-45)321

Indeed, the modern and contemporary experience of “the intersection or junctions of this multiplicity” echoes the medieval understanding of a “complex and manifold present.” Both of these models of reality have profound implications for the body, as Serres states in the passage above. In my introduction to the dissertation, I noted specifically that the epiphanic moments I study do not exist solely in the psychological realm, but also extend into the material.

D. Donald Revell’s Inhabited Symbols

Attention is a question of entirety, of being wholly present. The poet who fully comes to his senses brings all his words, all of his cadences when he comes. (He brings his enzymes and his immortal soul as well.)322

We live in several dimensions at least, and they are not all vertical. In poems, we remember ourselves severally (remember Denise [Levertov] and Melanie) over the course of a writing life, not always to Eden or everlastingness alone. The poetry of attention sometimes leads to raptures, as we have seen. But more importantly, more fundamentally, its ways and its means

321Qtd. in Salisbury “Serres: Science, Fiction, and the Shape of Relation” 43. However, Levertov and Revell would, I believe, stop short of Serres next step: “Serres expands upon this philosophy of the body by stating that it does not simply inhabit multiple spaces; rather it constructs its sense of itself through and in terms of a structural multiplicity” (Salisbury, 43).

322Donald Revell, The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye (Saint Paul, Minn.: Graywolf Press, 2007), 20.

195 are those of peace—peace even at the level of the syllable; peace even at the center of the eye.323

Donald Revell’s poetry expands upon Levertov’s mode of multiplicity and intersectional vision. If Levertov sees at the borderlands or intersection of things, Revell sees himself as a borderland or intersection in a world of intersections. His poetry is immanentist, and he freely links his work to American transcendentalism. Like Levertov, Revell and his world are also both animated by an incarnational poetics, and his poetry is shaped by disparate influences such as the Black Mountain poets, Julian of Norwich, Dante, Emerson, and Levertov herself.324 Emerson’s concept that “we are symbols, and inhabit symbols”325 is a motivating force in Revell’s poems, but as I argue about Levertov, he similarly sees the symbolism as an intimacy between emblem and meaning. Revell especially repeats the same word in order to activate all possible associations, which contrasts with the Steinian

“unlinking”326 through repetition, and he also employs single words and images in contexts that activate multiple simultaneous associations, memories, and interpretations. Also, unlike the Romantic use of symbols, which generates abstractions and highlights the distance between word or object and its meaning or the beyond, Revell’s symbolism is self-generating

323Ibid., 28.

324Denise Levertov’s poetry is the first book Revell ever purchased with his childhood allowance; Levertov and Revell also corresponded for years, and he considers her his first “hero” in poetry.

325Emerson, “The Poet,” 456.

326Contrast to Stein: "Thus the Gertrude Stein of Tender Buttons (1914) "has completely unlinked [words]... from their former relationships in the sentence"; she "has gone systematically to work smashing every connotation that words have ever had, in order to get them back clean"' [qtd. from Pagany "The Work of Gertrude Stein" in Perloff, Indeterminacy “Lines Converging and Crossing,” 114]

196 and circles closer and closer to immediate experience, creating a close and epiphanic connection between things. He collapses time and symbolic distances in the worlds of his poems. In this sense, Revell, too, employs medieval multiplicity. What we find here is what I call “overlapping states of existence,” in which the poet illuminates a space that is meaningful in several separate but simultaneously experienced planes of existence. Through memory, faith, and a lifetime’s knowledge and associations, Revell explores moments of his life and the world in which all of these fragments collide, resulting in a sense of entirety.

Entirety is also important to Revell’s concept of attention. Aligning his work with the medieval tradition of attention and meditation, Revell incorporates a contemporary sort of attention that is equal parts body and soul; attention spans the gap between “soul” and

“enzymes.” Unlike medieval Christian mystics, Revell does not fall into a traditional division of base and higher natures—of substance and sensual in the language of Julian of Norwich.

Rather, his poetry imposes an egalitarian relationship between the two. While he uses the language of epiphanic poetry—raptures, vision, attending—Revell downplays the epiphanic moment and instead presents a world where entirety precedes and results from epiphanic vision. In bringing all the fragments of self together, an individual finds entirety in the world by first making one’s own entirety present. Revell seems almost to find an individualized

Eliotic “still point” in a cosmos of epiphanic intersections. From this still point of entirety, attention can begin to look for points of contact in the “several dimensions” in which life plays out.

The English Boat explores this phenomenon of entirety beginning with its title, which points toward wholeness, totality, and plenitude:

The title "The English Boat" comes from Andrew Marvell....in these poems, I'm trying my best to write something I call (to myself alone) Whole English--ie ALL the

197 English that I know--Chaucerian, Spenserian, Bronx, Brooklyn, BBC and south Boston. [sic] The ambition I value most in any artist is the ambition, if only for one moment, to keep faith with one's Entire spirit, one's entire vision and language. One moment of true integrity might be a salvation (hence a mode of transportation) in an otherwise painfully imperfect life. To be sure, the work, in my case at least, remains unfinished.327

The theme of salvific wholeness animates The English Boat, and Revell notes that “All my hopes for the book are confided into the symbol-matrix of "Devotion" and the active mythology of "The Glens [of Cithaeron]".”328 In this final section, I show the latest development of the medieval-modernist approach to epiphanic wholeness in these two poems.

In terms of poetic style, The English Boat is fragmentary, spatial, and visual; syntactic fragments amass in terse, alternatingly smooth and staccato phrases. One the level of the line, the poems are difficult to follow, but as the reader moves between lines and poems, the sense becomes clearer as words and images repeat thematically. The poems juxtapose images that are clearly drawn from Christian, literary, and mythological traditions with images whose meanings are intelligible only to the poet. The overall effect is an interweaving of the overly familiar with the obscurely personal into a poetic whole; the images and ideas that appear in these poems do not belong entirely in the psychological, private world of the poet’s mind and memory, nor do they belong entirely to traditional matrices of interpretation. We end up with a peculiar form of double vision, with the poet’s action of attention overlaid with other more familiar mystics and poets. Revell’s poems do not quite convey the focus of an epiphany to the reader, which is unlike Levertov’s impulse to share her epiphanies: Revell rarely says

327Donald Revell, e-mail correspondence to author, April 16, 2019.

328Ibid.

198 “Look!” when the mountaintop appears. Instead, he models attention, and he shows the reader how to collect the fragments of life into an experience of entirety. Finally, it is significant that the entire book of poetry is presented as a whole to its reader; the fact that the poet identifies two specific poems to guide the entire book means the reader must read all of the poems together.

The poem which contains the “symbol-matrix” to unlock the entire collection is

“Devotion,” which commences with an epigraph from the medieval mystic text, The Cloud of

Unknowing: “The main road and shortest road to heaven is run by desires and not by footsteps.” The complete passage from which this passage is taken is the following:

3. FROM THE SPIRITUAL POINT OF VIEW, heaven is as much down as up, and as much up as down; as much behind as before, and as much before as behind; and as much to one side as to any other. In fact, whoever has a true desire to be in heaven is in heaven spiritually at that very time. The high road there which is the shortest road there is run in terms of desires and not of paces of feet.329

From this, we must read the poem as an exploration of immediacy of heaven—the Christian beyond—and we should understand that the poet moves in two radical directions at once. In

“Devotion,” we wander far from a medieval or elevated sense of spirituality into gritty, modern, and highly localized spaces; here, it seems the poet expresses a desire for heaven in a distinctly sharp contemporary American poetic style:

[…] Cloud an eye inward from heaven directly Eye originally a walking sunflower American inward Kansas either end Shawnee Mission love’s sign upon a calendar

[…]

Acrobats adorable pure music

329Anonymous, The Cloud of Unknowing, http://www.norumbega.net/path/cou/progoffcou.html#60.

199 Heaped logarithms white state of books Stolen cameras madhouse just next door Through the woods mad by thieving looks

While the stream-of-consciousness flow of images lends the poem a feeling of interiority and of a roving line of vision, this is a pre-discursive, pre-intellection poem. The poet’s eye has a semblance of not ordering any of these items, but the writer lets these items stream across the page according to a subtle mystical or subconscious association. There is an inner eye, which seems to come from heaven, but which also suggests an other’s eye penetrating inward. “Eye originally a walking sunflower” calls up several associations—Emerson’s transparent eye, which fits the radical visual receptivity of these lines; it also sounds like “I originally a walking sunflower,” denoting progression of a sense of self; sunflowers also look like eyes, even walking eyes. Finally, the placement of sunflowers at the end of the eye imagery flows neatly into “American inward Kansas.” We seem to have panned out from an individual sunflower to a vast region of sunflowers, and the sunflower is now cast as an interior close- up of the state of Kansas. All of this, however, is conjecture; Revell does not help his reader settle definitively on any specific reading of the poem. Instead, we are left with a constellation of loose and almost arbitrary associations to turn our own eyes toward. Perhaps each reader’s attention and personal entirety will bring cohesion to the lines.

A similar confluence of loose associations occurs a little later in the poem, but this time, the poem introduces a medieval-industrial tone:

Straight path along the dusky path homewards Ordinariness spent no otherwise Labor and bafflement without ending Green corduroy copper hair then eyes

Wild with tangling underwood pleasure In the dimness of the stars’ pleasure Pierced to the heart things said things said

200 Homlihed out of honey into Chaucer

Christ of bees babe of swarms weak not vacant Winter when music when fires in vacant Rail yard ashcans heavenly life beholden One whole obdurate English for all saints

Home, I believe, forms a significant part of the symbol-matrix in this poem. In these lines, we find a path that echoes the road to heaven, except this path leads homeward. If we read the Cloud of Unknowing into these lines, home is already here in the sojourner’s desire for it.

And because it is present, it is also ordinary. There is no extraordinary epiphanic arrival; there is simply the desire, which is both quest and arrival. The first stanza also provides a few clues that locate this journey in a place likely familiar to a contemporary reader, with corduroy and copper evoking an industrial context that returns two stanzas later in the rail yard ash cans. Interwoven between these images are the medieval references to Chaucer,

Julian of Norwich’s concept of homlihed,330 Christ, and several images related to bees and honey.

In images like the bees and honey, we can read several simultaneous associations from bees as ordinary creatures one might encounter on the path home, but also as medieval symbols of Christ. Home unifies these stanzas as they unfurl several concurrent paths and roads. “Dusky path homewards / Ordinariness spent no otherwise” resonates with the journeys undertaken in Chaucer’s tales, but it also resonates with spiritual journeys and ordinary daily journeys. There is here an almost Eliotic sense of setting out on a journey to arrive where one started, which captures the sense of simultaneous pilgrimage and

330Kerrie Hide, Gifted Origins to Graced Fulfillment: The Soteriology of Julian of Norwich (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 2001), 50. Homlihed is a Middle English word meaning familiarity or “homely love,” which Dame Julian used to describe “Christ making a home in humanity.”

201 homeliness. I think too, that given the title’s meaning, this preoccupation with familiarity indicates the poet’s own familiarity with many voices and versions of language, literature, religion, and the materials of everyday life.

While the poem is obscure, it does not demand interpretation. Instead, it reveals the ambiguous potential of language and an immediate world that may seem so familiar. The path is both a literal path and a figural path; the bee is an actual bee, but it also activates, likely involuntarily, medieval symbolism in the mind of the perceiver. This dynamic propels the rest of the one hundred twenty-five lines forward, as they range through Manhattan,

Kentucky, and the wedding at Cana. In these lines, Revell adds to the symbol-matrix weddings, sexual intercourse, snow and the color white, Mary’s immaculate conception, an array of tree images including a tree for suicides, brambles and underbrush, and the unnamed cross of crucifixion, and the word “handsel,” another Middle English word meaning gift.331

By the conclusion of the poem, it becomes clear that the poet has made a vast collage of a modern longing for heaven. This matrix of symbols cannot be untangled from each other; sexual intercourse, for instance, appears obliquely in several contexts—illicit, procreative, within and outside marriage, pleasurable, vulgar, and divine. The immaculate conception and the wedding at Cana hover over all of these references, providing direction to the collages, as well as contrasting images. Furthermore, the birth and existence of Christ have a spectral presence in the poem, which contrasts sharply with the language of the death of Christ, as well as human death and suicide. By the end of the poem, the poet has arrived at a state of attention: an awareness of the entirety of things has been activated, and it is difficult to

331“The action of formally delivering or making over into a person's hands.” From The Oxford English Dictionary: https://www-oed- com.ezproxy.baylor.edu/view/Entry/83916?rskey=5a5Pyy&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid

202 imagine encountering any thing or element of life that exists apart from this matrix.

Everything is figural: “through Revell’s obdurate English, symbols are transformed into ordinary objects, and ordinary objects into symbols.”332 Everything is also real. While this view of the cosmos is prepared for an ecstatic moment of epiphany in which all things coalesce, Revell’s goal seems otherwise. Like the ongoing timeless epiphanic state of Four

Quartets, the Revell’s symbol-matrix offers vision that is constantly renewed to include the present moment. It suggests that an elevated moment of understanding will not occur, but that a state of attention will transform the ordinary path home into a continuously experienced path toward heaven. This state arrives gradually at the epiphanic point of contact between worlds and times, where all of the fragments of existence overlap and point toward wholeness. In place of epiphany and ecstasy, the poem concludes with a Whitmanian

“endless happiness of my own name.”333

The second guiding poem, “The Glens of Cithaeron,” concludes the book and provides it an “active mythology.”334 I identify at least five complementary sets of symbols active within this mythology, which are the myth of Actaeon and Diana, poetry, Christianity and the eucharist, death, and the lived experience of the poet himself. These five dimensions overlap often in the same line and same word. Like Levertov and the medieval poets,

Revell’s juxtaposing and layering results in a “complex and manifold present.” It also enacts

332Jessica Drexel, “Inhabited Symbols: A Review of The English Boat by Donald Revell,” The Carolina Quarterly, Online Features (2019), https://thecarolinaquarterly.com/2019/07/inhabited-symbols-a-review-of-the-english-boat- by-donald-revell/.

333Donald Revell, “Devotion,” in The English Boat (Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2018), 10.

334Donald Revell, E-mail correspondence to author, April 16, 2019.

203 his concept of attention, acknowledging that “We live in several dimensions at least, and they are not all vertical.” This poem attends to several dimensions and ultimately blurs the lines between symbol and reality.

The poem commences by combining the myth of Actaeon and Diana with Revell’s myth of poetry:

I begin to think Actaeon never changed. The words that followed him, the poems That leapt upon him and left him for dead Were difficult exactly to the extent They were rational. It makes perfect sense For nakedness to give way to frenzy. And the poems, let’s be clear, were naked.335

Here, words and poems take the place of Actaeon’s dogs, giving us an image of Actaeon being devoured by language. They also take the place of Diana in their nudity, which creates a continuity between Diana and Actaeon’s dogs. Actaeon in this retelling is thus caught transgressing against and executed by the same entity. A few stanzas later, we read that “The poems have been out hunting all the time.”

After connecting the stag image to events in 1969, the poem then emphasizes to the transformation of Actaeon from man into meat, which then links to the imagery of eucharistic flesh and blood and divine love. “Meat” is then associated with both divine love in the eucharist, and also with the speaker as the transgressor. As I write elsewhere, “The speaker becomes both hunter and prey, trespasser and redeemed, in agony and at perfect rest; ultimately, the speaker is consumed by Diana’s dogs and also by a higher love. In the

335Donald Revell, “Glens of Cithaeron,” in The English Boat (Farmington, Maine: Alice James Books, 2018), 51.

204 following excerpt, a constellation of hunting, love, language, myth, and religious imagery unfolds, reconfigures, and overlaps itself”:336

[…]

It is Friday: Stars won’t cross. Acteon Never imagined the frail, sheer speed Of meat. Lord, eat me. Nothing else makes sense.

On the far side of becoming, Metaphor

Is all love, The pure being of each Nude above

Perfect sense. I begin to hunt words. The tension

The soft smile Of the Goddess eases A short while

Reappears In a red stag’s terror. Metaphor

Leaps and eats. It is not difficult. Love is meat.

The dogs leap on Actaeon. He is human. I begin to think of Time as anything In the gift of humans or as sacrifice To the long uplift of lions in the blood. Now dogs tear deeply into the living flesh. Each moment is a visible agony, And still the godly human nature remains

Unharmed. I never imagined the sheer frail Of fear so powerful. Legs and sinews turn Into flowers. Between her breasts, the Goddess

336Drexel, “Inhabited Symbols.”

205 Shelters one such, one blood violet alive. The porch of Heaven is littered with color. As familiar as the moon, our humanness Crosses into heaven as the new poem.

Progressing through this series of overlapping symbols, the speaker continually returns to his relationship to each part of the mythology, and finally arrives at the entrance of heaven. In the last line of this passage, the speaker identifies with the poem; he is, so to speak, a new creation, and therefore more like the poem than the transgressor. Toward the end of the poem, he writes that “[t]he pieces of me are carried fast away / By plot and rhyme.” It is therefore challenging to disentangle any one symbol from this mythology—the act of writing poetry, the poet’s faith, the myth of Diana and Actaeon—all are inextricably intertwined in

“Glens.” The poem is anti-epiphanic because it emphasizes that Actaeon did not change, the poet is “naked / of change,” and he is finally “eaten / and fed changeless.”

But more importantly, the poem is also immanentist because of its medieval multiplicity of symbols. Just as “Devotion” found resolution in happiness with the poet’s own name, “Glens” similarly ends on a note of present plenitude. After this wrestling through the language, myth, and symbols, the poet returns to himself, whole. He also arrives at a state proximate to the beyond. If reality is all symbols and symbols are reality, then heaven cannot be too far off. Furthermore, the writing of the poem seems to effect this movement toward immanence; through poetry, the speaker is able to reify the interlocking relationship between images, symbols, and reality, and in doing so, to generate unifying presence. “Imagination,” writes Revell in The Art of Attention, “is the present state of things… and poems rejoice—in particular, in detail—that this is so.” Again, in place of a clearly marked epiphany and ecstasy, the poem enacts the overlapping and concurrent realities, and it rejoices in the details that expose their proximity.

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