The Mid-Twentieth-Century American Poetic Speaker in the Works of Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, and George Oppen

Home , Bohemianism, Burton Hatlen, Confessional poetry, Frederick Seidel, George Oppen, Henri Cole

“THE OCCASION OF THESE RUSES”: THE MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETIC SPEAKER IN THE WORKS OF ROBERT LOWELL, FRANK O’HARA, AND GEORGE OPPEN

A dissertation submitted by Matthew C. Nelson

In partial fulfillment for the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy In English TUFTS UNIVERSITY May 2016

ADVISER: VIRGINIA JACKSON

Abstract This dissertation argues for a new history of mid-twentieth-century American poetry shaped by the emergence of the figure of the poetic speaker as a default mode of reading. Now a central fiction of lyric reading, the figure of the poetic speaker developed gradually and unevenly over the course of the twentieth century. While the field of historical poetics draws attention to alternative, non-lyric modes of address, this dissertation examines how three poets writing in this period adapted the normative fiction of the poetic speaker in order to explore new modes of address.

By choosing three mid-century poets who are rarely studied beside one another, this dissertation resists the aesthetic factionalism that structures most historical models of this period.

My first chapter, “Robert Lowell’s Crisis of Reading: The Confessional Subject as the

Culmination of the Romantic Tradition of Poetry,” examines the origins of M.L. Rosenthal’s phrase “confessional poetry” and analyzes how that the autobiographical effect of Robert

Lowell’s poetry emerges from a strange, collage-like construction of multiple texts and non- autobiographical subjects. My second chapter reads Frank O’Hara’s poetry as a form of intentionally averted communication that treats the act of writing as a surrogate for the poet’s true object of desire. Drawing on the antagonistic relationship between the affective structures of desire and the compromised possibilities of desiring subjects that Laruen Berlant describes in her book Cruel Optimism , my chapter resists confusing the intimacy of O’Hara’s poetry with the effect of the poet’s presence and points to locations where Frank O’Hara contrasts his own personal wellbeing with that of his poetic subjects. My final chapter examines the differences between George Oppen’s poetry before and after his twenty-five year departure from writing in

1934. While Oppen’s work strives to treat its objects in concrete and objective ways, the mid- century expectation of an abstract, singular poetic speaker conflicted with Oppen’s Marxist- inflected principles. My chapter argues that Oppen creates a new phenomenology of reading that attempts to ground the fiction of the poetic speaker by historicizing it as a genre-inflected mode of poetic address. Ultimately, this dissertation asks how these poets imagined themselves addressing and not addressing their actual reading publics. By doing so, I hope to outline the emergence of a modern poetic norm and uncover a version of literary history that has been hidden in plain sight behind that norm.

Acknowledgements Sometime during seventh grade, I decided I wanted to become a teacher, a writer, and a scholar—in that order. I would like to thank my advisor, Virginia Jackson, for helping me achieve all of these goals. Thank you, Jennie. Thank you not only for teaching me, but also for showing me how to find joy again in the work that I do. I am luckier than most and I am grateful for my strong foundation of so many friends, mentors, and family members. I would like to thank the bi-monthly Barnes and Noble writing workshop that first introduced a seventh-grader to poetry—John Keats, nonetheless! From this group, I am tremendously grateful for the lifelong friendship of Lola De Maci, the single most inspirational person I have ever met. I would also like to thank each of my high school English teachers: Lucie Gonzalez, John Nath, Ann Palicki, and Joe Palicki. Wanda Courey, you never taught me literature, but your courses made me a better person. The amount of support I have is overwhelming, but in the best way possible—like a king- sized comforter on a twin-sized bed. Enza Barbato, thank you for making Boston feel like home. Emily Uva, thank you for your unending compassion and thank you for making Boston my actual home. Steven Elsesser, thank you for being my first real friend at Tufts and thank you for bringing me food when I had pneumonia—I never forgot that. Thank you Ken Barr, Michael Fenter, Peter Chronis, Michael Clark Wonson, Thomas Drury, Patrick Sheehan, Travis Roe, Chris Rhodes, Jay Thornton, Devin Poor, John Haga, and all of my other “Sisters” for teaching me the value of community. Thank you to my fellow “gaymers”— you know who you are! Thank you Jim Morgrage and everyone with Harbor to the Bay for showing me how to give back to others. A special thank you to Joseph Richard for keeping me sane while I finished this project. I was privileged to have been part of Jennie’s “Medford School”: Erin Kappeler, Caroline Gelmi, Mareike Stanitzke, Nino Testa, Jacob Crane, Leif Eckstrom, Jackie O’Dell, and Seth Studer each provided invaluable insight into the early stages of this project. I could have never completed this work without the wonderful friendship and intellectual generosity of Barbara Jean Orton. Tufts would not be the same without Modhumita Roy, Radiclani Clytus, Christina Sharpe, Carl Beckman, Carol Wilkinson, Tim Atherton, Stephan Pennington, and Natalya Baldyga and all of their cheerleading. I am especially grateful to Wendy Medeiros, Douglas Riggs, Chantal Hardy, and Noah Barrientos for cheerfully navigating me through otherwise mind-boggling administrative nightmares. I am thankful to the Tufts Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for their financial support and I am grateful to the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego for my time working with George Oppen’s manuscripts. My sincerest gratitude goes out to my committee members: John Lurz, Ichiro Takayoshi, and Steven Gould Axelrod. Steve, thank you for your many years of encouragement and mentorship. A special thank you to Aaron Steppe—and not just for your last-minute help. I am lucky for your continued friendship, kindness, and cunning intellect. To Jimmy Giddings: I have no better friend. You were my backbone for most of this project. Above all, I am blessed to have an extraordinary family. To Auntie K.K., Auntie Silky, Uncle Johnny, Auntie Sharon, Auntie Anna, and all the rest of my extended family: thank you for your unconditional love. To my sister, Amanda Alfieri: thank you for sneaking me out to The Rocky Horror Picture Show so many times and making me feel “cool,” even when I was not. You gave me the confidence to be who I am and you championed me when I was afraid no one else would. Above all, thank you Mandy and thank you Tony for Gibson and Geneva, who both give me so much joy. This dissertation is dedicated to my parents, who drove that seventh-grade boy to those writing workshops twice a month. Everything about me I love—I have because of you.

Table of Contents Introduction: The Semi-Dramatic History of the 1 Mid-Twentieth-Century Poetic Speaker 1. Robert Lowell’s Crisis of Reading: The Confessional 45 Subject as the Culmination of the Romantic Tradition of Poetry 2. “The Quietness with a Man in It”: Frank O’Hara and the Act 85 of Writing 3. “A Man of the Thirties”: Collectivism and the Problem of the Poetic 121 Subject in George Oppen’s Discrete Series and Of Being Numerous Notes 166 Bibliography 193

Clarity

In the sense of transparence I don’t mean that much can be explained.

Clarity in the sense of silence 1

Introduction

The Semi-Dramatic History of the Mid-Twentieth-Century Poetic Speaker

“It is to be feared that critical formulas, even the best, are responsible for more bad judgment

than good, because it is far easier to forget their subtle sense and apply them crudely than to

remember it and apply them finely.”

I.A. Richards 1

In the twentieth century, the language of poetry criticism underwent a curious shift. At the start of the century, academic discourse rarely employed the figure of a poetic speaker, but by the mid-century the speaker seemed an almost intrinsic property of poetic reading. The axiomatic ease with which contemporary scholarly works still use the term “poetic speaker” as a default mode of reading gestures not only to the persistent popularity of this reading mode, but also to its thorough integration into literary studies. Clara Clairborne Park comments on these changes in her autobiographical essay “Talking Back to the Speaker” in the Spring 1989 edition of the

Hudson Review, using her absence from academia between completing her M.A. in English at the University of Michigan in 1949 and accepting her position as a lecturer at Williams College in 1975 as a unique perspective to document these shifts in discourse. According to Park, literature classrooms in the mid-century quickly seemed to adopt the figure of the dramatic poetic speaker without significant comment or opposition:

It happened that between the forties and the sixties I was out of the academic world, and

when I got back into it, the tradition was in place. My colleagues taught My Last Duchess

and Channel Firing ; they said “the speaker”; they talked about voice and tone. One likes

to do the done thing; soon I was doing it too. I do it to this day, off and on, at least when

I’m teaching Introduction to Literature. But because I didn’t grow up with it, because I

encountered the ideas not as an exciting corrective but as a fact accomplished, I still view

it as an outsider.” 2

Much of Park’s essay documents the emergence of the figure of “the speaker” and the slippage between the figures of “the speaker” and “the poet” in major critical publications throughout the

20 th century, noting that despite the supposed dogma of the speaker, even its most adamant followers—including Reuben Brower, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, and M.H.

Abrams—frequently defer to the figure of the “poet.” Park uses these slippages to push against the perceived obviousness of the poetic speaker and trenchantly cautions against reading the speaker as a “traditional” figure. As Park reminds us, despite the fact that “People had written about poetry (if we begin with Plato) for more than two millennia without feeling the need for such a phrase [as the speaker],” 3 sometime between 1940 and 1960 the fiction of a poetic speaker entrenched itself as a “fact accomplished.”

For Park, such slippages are “heartening” 4 because the figure of the speaker inhibits the capacity for poets to directly speak to their readers. After invoking Dante’s description of his own tears while writing Canto XX from the Inferno , Park concludes that in order for students to connect with poetry we should restore the human figure of the poet: “Do you think it was only the poet’s emanation that wept? Think of the poet’s emotion, reader, so you can share it. If you want to gather the fruit of your reading, take care how you interpose with poetic constructs, especially those you yourself have constructed.” 5 Even though the bulk of her essay traces the figure of the speaker throughout her archive of early twentieth-century criticism, her memoir values and appeals to her role as a teacher over her role as an academic. If parts of her essay read

polemically, it is because she positions the stakes of her argument directly into the space of her classroom: “I would rather have students too naïve than not naïve enough. Distrust exacts a price, as when children are taught to refuse rides from strangers. We pay it as criticism metastasizes, as we read more and more cleverly, first looking behind masks, then discerning masks where no masks are, then persuading ourselves that the eyeholes are empty.” 6

While Park’s absence from academia during the mid-century offers her a unique perspective on the emergence of the poetic speaker, her concerns about the state of literary classrooms were hardly new observations; many critics and poets during that time expressed similar concerns about the alienation of their readers. Robert Lowell, in his 1960 acceptance speech for the National Book Award in poetry, echoes his friend Randall Jarrell’s concern that

“the modern world has destroyed the intelligent poet’s audience and given him students.” 7

Although Lowell’s speech is famous for its distinction between the “cooked” and “raw” poets, most of his speech expresses envy over these raw poets’ ability to address what he, only slightly salaciously, calls their “midnight listeners.” 8 Perhaps strangely, given that this is an acceptance speech for a major writing award, Lowell worries about his own future relevance. He claims that,

“writing is neither transport nor a technique,” but the majority of his speech also suggests that

“transport” and “technique” cannot be separated from poetry either. Lowell is receiving a major award, so it is strange that worries so much about his own future as a writer at the closing of his speech: “When I finished Life Studies, I was left hanging on a question mark. I am still hanging there. I don’t know whether it is a death-rope or a life-line.” 9 If intelligent poetry is to stay relevant—Lowell’s true concern—he recognizes that such poetry needs to reinvent itself for its audience’s expectations for new forms of circulation and poetic address.

If Lowell’s description of cooked and raw poetry is read as an expression of envy and anxiety for raw poetry’s ability to adapt to new modes of reading and circulation, then Lowell’s speech unexpectedly unites these two rival factions more than it divides them. Indeed, immediately before offering his distinction between cooked and raw poetry, Lowell jokes about a telephone receptionist who, unable to hear him clearly, uses the antiquated term “orator” instead of “author” to introduce him. If his speech divides mid-century poetry between two styles of writing, his controlling metaphor for this divide is the fiction of the poetic speaker and not his allusion to Levi-Strauss, despite the memorability of his cooked and raw distinction. Both poetic camps, despite their apparent differences, struggle to address their rapidly changing audiences.

Lowell expands upon his cooked and raw distinction that “there is a poetry that can only be studied, and a poetry that can only be declaimed, a poetry of pedantry, and a poetry of scandal.”

Given the controversial reception of Life Studies in 1959 as overly confessional, it is clear that

Lowell aligns himself with both sides of the divide despite his reputation as the representative

“cooked” poet. Lowell’s speech, read as such, challenges the current, largely factionalist historical models for mid-century American poetry. The entirety of his speech, from its opening joke through its unpersuasive claim that “writing is neither transport nor technique,” 10 demarcates mid-century poetry as a distinction between mediums of oral communication: how the Romanesque orator and midnight radio shows address their listeners.

In this dissertation, I wish to take the implications of both Park’s memoir and Lowell’s speech seriously and analyze how an attention towards the changing expectations of poetic address, especially the emergent fiction of the poetic speaker, open up new models for understanding the history of this period in American poetry. In order to accomplish this, my project unites three poets whose divergent poetic practices rarely lend themselves to treatment

beside one another—Robert Lowell, the Boston Brahmin confessionalist; Frank O’Hara, the spontaneous, queer New York School flâneur; and George Oppen, who is known primarily as a

1930’s Objectivist poet, despite writing all but one of his collections after 1960. 11 By choosing three mid-century poets who are rarely examined beside one another, my dissertation hopes to move beyond the aesthetic factionalism that structures most historical models of this period, what Andrew Epstein calls the “Sharks and Jets” 12 model of conflicting mid-century poetic schools. By tracing the emergence of the figure of the poetic speaker and its subsequent consolidation as the default mode of reading poetry in the mid-century, I hope to offer a less factionalist and more inclusive model for this period. 13 Reading these eclectic figures in relation to each other not as sparring aesthetic camps but as poets struggling to adapt to the shifting reading practices of the mid-century outlines the emergence of a modern poetic norm and offers a version of literary history that has been hidden in plain sight behind that norm.

All three of these poets, I argue, explicitly thematize and complicate the figure of the poetic speaker, albeit in different ways. In the case of Lowell, whose confessional poetry is known for minimizing the distance between the poetic speaker and the author, the obvious argument might be that the autobiographical elements of his poetry undermine the dehumanizing mode of the speaker that Park points to in her essay. Indeed, given the predominance of confessional poetry post-Lowell, Park’s appeals to Dante feel out-of-touch. Marjorie Perloff goes so far as to take such a reading as a given, almost not even worth mentioning: “the most obvious thing to say about this poem is that it marks a return to the Romantic mode in which the ‘I,’ clearly designated as the poet himself, undergoes a highly personal experience.” 14

In my first chapter, “Robert Lowell’s Crisis of Reading: The Confessional Subject as the

Culmination of the Romantic Tradition of Poetry,” I counter this assertion by examining the

origins of M.L. Rosenthal’s phrase “confessional poetry” and argue that the autobiographical effect of Robert Lowell’s poetry emerges from a strange, collage-like construction of multiple texts and non-autobiographical subjects. The confused public reception of Robert Lowell’s Life

Studies , perhaps more than with any other work in the mid-century, points to the quick but uneven changes in poetry discourse. If in 1970 Marjorie Perloff could claim that the autobiographical effect of Life Studies seemed to fit naturally—obviously even—within a larger history of post-Romantic poetry, in 1959, when Life Studies was initially published, critics believed that these same autobiographical elements were without precedent and antithetical to poetry as a medium. Indeed, the reception of Life Studies shifted dramatically even within a few years of its publication. M.L. Rosenthal, in his famous review “Poetry as Confession” published in 1959 and which coins the phrase “confessional poetry,” uses the simile of his title to draw a formerly clear, now violated, boundary between poetry and confessional prose. He describes

Lowell’s collection not as a collection of poetry, but as a “use of poetry” and as an “impure art” damaged by its “ghoulish” inclusion of autobiography. 15 This divide between poetry and confession in his review, however, is lessened a year later in his book, The Modern Poets ; he removes his distancing simile and titles his chapter on Lowell and his peers “Poetry of

Confession.” 16 If mid-century poetry and confession were at first two distinct genres, as a result of Lowell and his peers this divide between autobiography and poetry blurred and confession became a specific genre of poetry.

I argue that the intimacy attributed to Lowell’s poetic speaker should not be taken for granted and that the autobiographical effect of Lowell’s poetry emerges out of this distinction between poetic and prose reading practices. By manipulating his reader’s expectations of a single, consistent poetic speaker, Lowell’s poetry artfully unifies and misrepresents an

assortment of non-autobiographical sources as parts of his personal history. Contrary to Marjorie

Perloff’s claim that Lowell’s poetry returns to an antiquated Romantic mode, I argue that

Lowell’s manipulation of mid-century reading practices masks his collage-like structures and creates an autobiographical effect that marks his confessional poetry as a distinctly mid-century mode.

I expand upon my discussion of Lowell’s confessional poetry in my second chapter:

“’The Quietness with a Man in It’: Frank O’Hara and the Act of Writing.” In it, I argue that the

“I do this, I do that” mode of reading O’Hara falsely imbues O’Hara’s poetry with a sense of the poet’s presence. 17 Charles Altieri, in his essay “The Significance of Frank O’Hara,” argues that the figure of the poet’s self stands in for poetic form as a source of textual unity in his writing:

“With O’Hara, the self must be creative without a ground; value depends entirely on the vitality with which one engages his experiences.” 18 This reading justifies O’Hara’s poetry by appealing to a fantasy of autobiographical insight into the poet’s personal life and resonates with many of the readings of Lowell’s “confessional poetry” in my previous chapter. I posit that the impression of intimacy in O’Hara’s poetry should not be interpreted a simulacrum for O’Hara himself. While in my previous chapter I focus on Lowell’s manipulation of prose and poetic reading practices, in my discussion of O’Hara I focus on O’Hara’s descriptions of the act of writing as a form of averted communication. Instead of equating intimacy with presence, I point to locations where O’Hara’s poems specifically thematize decisions not to communicate and discuss the ways through which his poems use the textual figure of the poetic speaker to frame themselves as intimate objects.

I orient this argument around my interpretation of O’Hara’s mock manifesto “Personism:

A Manifesto,” a text which I believe offers a queer model of reading that stresses the act of

writing as a surrogate for the poet’s object of desire. In “Personism,” O’Hara describes poetry as a scene of averted communication where the act of composition contrasts against the act of picking up a telephone. Instead of imagining the poem as an overheard form of abstract address,

O’Hara stresses the poem as a physical object, “lucky pierre style,” “squarely between the poet and the person.” 19 The poem, which receives the emotions that would otherwise be expressed through a telephone, is “correspondingly gratified” by this exchange and stands in as a physical barrier, an object literally shared between two people that prevents direct communication. If his poetry feels intimate, it is because only the poetic object seems gratified by this exchange: “one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” 20

I argue that instead of infusing his poetry with his own presence, O’Hara’s treatment of the act of writing as a deferral of pleasure uses this sense of presence inversely as proof of the poet’s absence. In his poem “In Memory of My Feelings,” O’Hara explicitly decides to write a poem instead of being carried “like a gondola, through the streets.” 21 The poem endeavors to stress the power of imagination, but treats this imagination as a deferred potential inhibited by but also conceived through the scene of writing; writing becomes a site of imagination, the

“scene of my selves” 22 that allows for the broadening of the potentiality of the poet’s subjectivity even while the physical act of writing prevents the poet from making such possibilities a reality.

The poem ends with an impending, but not actualized murder—a continually deferred death and an embrace of the “medusa” 23 that maintains the poetic object’s delicate balance between presence and absence. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, my chapter inverts

standard methods of reading O’Hara’s poetry and asserts that the act of writing inhibits the poet’s ability to “live as variously as possible,” 24 despite his poetry’s impression of such gregariousness.

My final chapter, “‘A Man of the Thirties’: Collectivism and the Problem of the Poetic

Subject in George Oppen’s Discrete Series and Of Being Numerous ,” traces the differences between Oppen’s poetry before and after his twenty-five year hiatus from writing between 1934 and 1962. Oppen, despite publishing only one book before this period, is often categorized alongside Zukofsky and Reznikoff as part of the early 20 th century Objectivist poets. In this chapter, I argue that even though throughout his career Oppen desired to create concrete and objective poetic objects, the mid-century expectation of a singular poetic speaker conflicted with

Oppen’s aims.

While Oppen’s first book, Discrete Series , published in 1934 does not mention any pronouns that might suggest the figure of a poetic speaker, much of his late work begins by foregrounding such pronouns. His fourth book, Of Being Numerous , published in 1968 comments on and modifies his first, but does by highlighting the inability for a singular perspective to appropriately convey both physical objects and collective identities. If Oppen’s text aims to represent the meaning of “being numerous,” 25 this meaning hits up against what he repeatedly calls “the shipwreck of the singular.” While Oppen’s poetry criticizes both the concepts of collective and singular identity, a major undercurrent of his concerns stem from the detachment between these ideas and their historical contexts. Pushing up against Theodor

Adorno’s description of the lyric poetry as the voice of society in his speech “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 26 I argue that Oppen perceived poetic speech as a harmful abstraction away from the historical contexts that ground collective identities. While for Adorno the figure of the

speaker allows for a universalized expression of experience that challenges contradictory ideologies, Oppen believed that such a figure impeded poetry’s ability to contextualize potentially harmful abstractions like the concept of “humanity” into specific and concrete histories.

While many critics struggle to explain Oppen’s twenty-five year hiatus as a “silence,” my chapter focuses instead on why, after this period, Oppen’s poetry suddenly foregrounds the figure of poetic speech. By comparing Discrete Series with Of Being Numerous , I argue that

Oppen, like the other two poets in my dissertation, struggled against the expectations of the poetic speaker. While Lowell manipulates and inverts the expectations of a poetic speaker and

O’Hara juxtaposes the fantasy of poetic speech against the act of writing poetry, Oppen attempts to ground this abstraction by historicizing the figure of the poetic speaker as a genre-inflected mode of poetic address. Throughout Of Being Numerous , Oppen uses the titles of his poems to invoke poetic genres, with the collection’s final poem, “Ballad,” specifically grounding its poetic speaker by treating it as a historical component of the ballad genre. For Oppen, such a history suggests a means to circumvent the tension between collective and singular poetic modes. As a counterpoint to collection’s repeated tropes of “the shipwreck of the singular” and the allusion to

Robinson Crusoe being “rescued” into an amorphous mass culture, Oppen uses the historical contexts of his ballad to celebrate his capacity to “visit other islands.” 27 This gesture, which slightly echoes Adorno’s fantasy for poetry to communicate between people for “whom the barriers have fallen,” argues for a new phenomenology of reading that emerges from the specific histories and material contexts of mid-century poetry.

* * *

While analyzing how each of these three poets struggle against the unevenly developing expectation of a poetic speaker understands them within a new, non-factionalist model of poetic history, my project—much like Oppen’s poetics—aims to contextualize them within the history of the mid-century poetic speaker as an emergent but not uniform mode of poetic address. There is no single origin point for the mid-century figure of the poetic speaker. Although the figure of the speaker is linked both to the rise of modernism and the practice of close reading, early century figures of the poetic speaker rarely play a central role in poetic reading and do not directly resemble the wide spread fiction of the speaker used in the mid-century. As Parks painstakingly notes in her reflective essay, criticism throughout the twentieth century frequently slipped between the figure of the speaker and the figure of the poet.

In order to mark this shift, I wish to begin my discussion of the history of the speaker with I.A. Richards who, despite his status as the presumed forefather of the New Criticism, 28 largely did not envision poetry through the figure of a speaker. By starting with Richards, I hope to trace the shifting investments of academic criticism over the mid-century as the speaker develops as a concept. While the concept of “semi-dramatic” poetry that Richards develops in

Principles of Literary Criticism in 1924 lays the groundwork for the American New Criticism’s later description of poetry as a full-fledged “dramatic utterance,” the interpretive stakes for

Richards, who addresses his work partially towards the discipline of analytic philosophy, vary dramatically from those of the American New Criticism several years later. When Cleanth

Brooks and Robert Penn Warren use the term “speaker” in their 1938 textbook, Understanding

Poetry , they use it in passing as a means to adapt their text-based critical methods— partially inspired by Richards— for mid-century pedagogies that believed literature should directly relate

to a student’s experiences. I end my discussion of this history with Reuben Brower, who in his

1951 book Fields of Light adopts many of Richards’s theories, but uses the figure of the speaker to circumvent Richards’s complicated psychological and philosophical theories of reference. I argue that while Understanding Poetry use the speaker as a pedagogical term, Brower’s use of the poetic speaker normalizes it as an object of critical analysis.

Unlike the American New Criticism, Richards does not invoke the figure of a speaker, poetic or otherwise, unless describing it as a literal act of speech within a play, or as a physical recitation. Even these instances are rare and surprisingly inconsequential to his arguments about poetry and communication. When Richards assumes the figure of the speaker, it seems that he does so either because of the perceived genre conventions of his time, or as a way to envision the auditory properties of poetic language. In Practical Criticism , published in 1929, the word

“speaker” only appears ten times: three times in the examples quoted from his students, five times when discussing actual acts of speaking, and two times when discussing tone as a literary device. 29 Infrequently in other places he discusses poetry as an “utterance” or as “dramatic,” but unless he is talking about poetry taken directly from a play, Richards strains to validate these statements. In order to label poetry that is not explicitly read aloud as an “utterance,” for example, he offers without definition the category of “semi-dramatic” poetry. This label, however, never fits comfortably. Richard’s discomfort with the label “semi-dramatic” is critical to the history of the speaker: as the century progresses, critics increasingly describe poems as full, and not semi- “dramatic situations” in order to ground their concept of a poetic speaker. In contrast to the later critics, the poem for Richards is semi-dramatic precisely to emphasize its qualities as a written object and to distance it from the medium of true dramatic performance.

Richards’s most explicit instance where he describes non-recitational poetry as an

“utterance” occurs in his chapter on “Sentimentality and Inhibition.” In his discussion of an excerpt from the long poem More Rough Rhymes of a Padre by Reverend G.A. Studdert

Kennedy, Richards imagines the figure of a girl, but does so without establishing any explicit causal linkage between the girl and the poem as an “utterance.” 30 The character and the “semi- dramatic” situation emerges here as a critical frame because the existence of the text solely as a physical object cannot readily incorporate human emotions. She is neither evoked as a character because of a teleological linkage between act and actor nor as a means to distance the reader from the figure of the poet, but as a necessary precaution to reduce the possibility of reading the sentimental value of the poem ironically, perhaps even cruelly, as a caricature of real emotion:

“We must, of course, not read the verses as a piece of imaginative sociology such as Zola dreamed of. It is not an attempt by a novelist to render realistically the stock thoughts and feelings and the diction of a girl without poetic ability, expressing herself in verse.” 31 Richards’s discomfort with this mode of reading is evidenced by his use of the verb “have” and his repeated insertion of qualifying phrases: “We have to take [the poem], in the usual way that lyrical, emotional verse is taken, as a semi-dramatic utterance not inviting ironical contemplation—to be judged on its merits as poetry.” 32 Richards’s push against “realism” here is a complicated one, which on one hand seeks to resist the dehumanization of the poem into a historical document, while simultaneously authorizing the sentimental responses that it prompts by inventing a specific historical situation. The Kennedy poem, which “bewails a lost or absent lover,” 33 must have a character in order to control for the cruel possibility of an ironic or unsympathetic reading, 34 but the poem cannot be an utterance for the obvious reason that is exists as a physical text; the text as a pure text without a semi-dramatic staging invites the possibility to turn any

emotion or experience into a cruel mockery of its sentiments. Richards notes that, “words, as we all recognize, are as ambiguous in their feeling as in their sense; but, though we can track down their equivocations of sense to some extent, we are comparatively helpless with their ambiguities of feeling.” 35

Even given this potential for ambiguity, Richards attributes such miscommunications to the impact of poetry on a reader’s mental state. In Science and Poetry he compares reading poetry to taking a drug 36 and in Principles of Literary Criticism he describes poetic reading almost as a form of mind control: “communication, we shall say, takes place when one mind so acts upon its environment that another mind is influenced, and in that other mind an experience occurs which is like the experience of the first mind, and is caused in part by that experience.” 37

The ability for the reader to adequately understand the poem then relies on her or his ability to commune with the poem and acquire the appropriate mental state, which in Practical Criticism he links to the poem itself at the expense of the physical materiality of the text: “[…] the whole state of mind, the mental condition, which in another sense is the poem. Roughly the collection of impulses which shaped the poem originally, to which it gave expression, and to which, in an ideally susceptible reader it would again give rise.” 38 Mental states, however, should not be confused with mental images; Richards stresses in Philosophy of Rhetoric that meaning is not an image, but the word brings in the meaning that the image used and perception lacks. 39 As such, he argues that words are not a medium with which to copy life, but that their true work is to restore order to a person’s thinking.

A full discussion of Richard’s theories of reference and signification are beyond the scope of this dissertation, 40 but Richards goes to great lengths to justify the emotional qualities of literature by imbuing them into his philosophical systems of reference. While later critics use the

figure of the poetic speaker in part to adapt humanistic or cognitive literary devices such as tone or even irony into the textual analysis of close reading, Richards’s theories of reference have no such need for a speaker. Francis Ferguson notes that much of the challenges faced by the New

Critics were not faced by Richards because of Richards’s dual attention to psychology and textuality. Ferguson’s observations suggest a prescient quality to Richard’s concerns about the ironic potential of texts: “While Richards hewed to the observations that the words in literary works could never serve as absolutely rigid designators, the New Critics stabilized the instability of the words in literature by designating the language used in literature as a distinctly literary language. Once words entered the precincts of the poem, they were able to grasp and hold as many competing and irreconcilable meanings as the reader might attach to them.” 41 The sentimentality in Richard’s discussion of Kennedy is a common trope in Richards’s writing, where the very language of poetry represents humanistic values that are absent in scientific communication. Elsewhere, in Practical Criticism , Richards offers a similar but less abridged version of the same comparison:

There are subjects—mathematics, physics, and the descriptive sciences supply some of

them—which can be discussed in terms of verifiable facts and precise hypotheses. There

are other subjects—the concrete affairs of commerce, law, organization, and police

work—which can be handed by rules of thumb and generally accepted conventions. But

in between is the vast corpus of problems, assumptions, adumbrations, fictions,

prejudices, tenets; the sphere of random beliefs and hopeful guesses; the whole world, in

brief, of abstract opinion and disputation about matters of feeling. To this world belongs

everything about which civilized man cares most. I need only instance ethics,

metaphysics, morals, religion, aesthetics, and the discussions surrounding liberty,

nationality, justice, love, truth, faith and knowledge to make this plain. As a subject-

matter for discussion, poetry is a central and typical denizen of this world [….] It serves,

therefore, as an eminently suitable bait for anyone who wishes to trap the current

opinions and responses in this middle field for the purpose of examining and comparing

them, and with a view to advancing our knowledge of what may be called the natural

history of human opinions and feelings. 42

For Richards, poetry holds a specific relevance not just in its relationship to scientific language, but because poetry’s differences from scientific language offer it a privileged position to contemplate philosophical fields such as ethics and metaphysics. 43 This relationship between poetry and philosophy was not accidental; Richards, educated by G.E. Moore at Cambridge during the “linguistic turn” in philosophy, approached poetry empirically as a specialized form of language and protested that poetic language was undervalued by the current philosophies of language that stressed logical structures. In Science and Poetry , written in 1926, Richards carefully argues for the value of poetry to philosopher by describing it as a “pseudo-statement” that resists simple logical validation and “coherence theories” of truth. 44 As Richards explains, “a pseudo-statement is a form of words which is justified entirely by its effect in releasing or organizing our impulses and attitudes (due regard being had for the better or worse organizations of these inter se); a statement, on the other hand, is justified by its truth, i.e. its correspondence, in a highly technical sense, with the fact to which it points.” 45 Meaning, according to many philosophers at the time when Richards published Science and Poetry , must be internally verifiable by structural logic of a proposition. As a result, the logical content of a proposition rarely reflected the messy language through which ordinary individuals communicated ideas.

Mathematics was the ideal language for such philosophers; poetry, which they believed did not

generally concern itself with concrete propositional statements, was an inefficient— perhaps even dangerous— form of language. 46

By describing poetry as a pseudo-statement, Richards attempts to challenge positivistic models of language by describing a form of language that can hold meaning but where that meaning is not itself verifiable. As Richards mentions in his interview with Reuben Brower,

Richards’s G.E. Moore “was vocally convinced that few could possibly mean what they said. I was silently persuaded that they could not possibly say what they meant.” 47 While Moore was concerned with how meaning gets expressed through language, Richards questioned “how much and in how many ways may good communication differs from bad” to approximate meaning. 48

His pragmatic view of language interrogated “how words work in discourse” 49 and desired to improve the effectiveness of this work.

Arguing that reference was not absolute and that schools of thought like semiotics and psychology bore relevance to the study of language were strange, relatively new ideas. While

Richards championed utilizing these fields in order to study the ambiguity of language, Richards saw them as tools to improve communication and not, as continental philosophy would have them, evidence against the possibility of reference altogether. Indeed, Richards’s work in what he called “Basic English” demonstrates a firm, optimistic belief that, given an ideal interpreter, words can be communicated without misunderstanding.50 This belief in the possibility of direct reference, if only given such an ideal interpreter, requires at times strange, overly complicated theories of reference that rely heavily on the foreknowledge of the interpreter. Richards likely believed, quite literally, that literature, especially poetry, suggests a utopian, humanistic function as “machine[s] to think with.” 51 However, I.A. Richards’s famous opening line from Principles of Literary Criticism is rarely remembered in its original context; Richard is clear that the book

“need not, therefore, usurp the functions either of the bellows or the locomotive.” 52 For Richards, the stress of his opening falls equally on the word “machine” as on its verb “to think”; the purpose of a book serves the improvement of society and “might better be compared to a loom on which it is proposed to re-weave some raveled parts of our civilization.” 53

As Kathleen Raine describes in her autobiography when she remembers a lecture given by Richards on Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” Richards took this comparison between poetry and machines seriously as a potential model for diagramming reference:

I remember a lecture he gave, years later, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in

London, on the Ode to the West Wind ; ingeniously illustrated as I remember with little

drawings on the blackboard of electrical wires and switches and boxes, meant to

represent ‘communication’ from, as he said, an unknown source, to an unknown

recipient: a process beginning and ending in mystery. Shakespeare would have done it

with airy sprites, Blake with angels. The little diagrams were the vestiges of a style by

whose disguise, in the twenties, it was necessary at least to appear to be ‘scientific.’ But

the thought was metaphysical and Platonic. 54

This description of the poem as an intercepted electronic transmission, while originating from an

“unknown source” and directed to an “unknown recipient,” does not offer the figure of a speaker as such. Instead, Richards constructs systems of reference that rely on the specific mediums of communication. As Richards notes in Speculative Instruments , “The exploration of comprehension is the task of devising a system of instruments for comparing meanings. But these systems, these instruments, are themselves comparable. They belong with what they compare and are subject in the end to one another.”55 While Richards likely used these images to mystify the complexity of linguistic mediation, each type of medium requires a different set of

skills and contexts in order to intercept and decode the message. 56 As such, the capacity to interpret poetry, as written on a page, as transmitted over a telegraph, or as spoken aloud to a public audience, hinges on its relationship to the specific mediums of communication and the reader’s familiarity with the technical and cultural codes of those mediums. The importance of the telegrapher is similarly minimized in this account; interpretation emerges from a negotiation between an ability to decipher the contexts and codes surrounding linguistic signs and the concepts drawn on to do so. So it is the message and the receiver of the message who interprets— who must be well-read and well-versed in the media of exchange— whose role is critical in determining meaning; not the speaker.

For Richards, the procedures or “foreknowledge” required to communicate using different mediums of language plays a determinate role in our capacity to interpret meaning. This required foreknowledge varies based on the context of the communication and the contextual relationships between the symbols used, but is always linked to the past experiences of the interpreter: “A comprehending, accordingly, is an instance of a nexus established through past occurrences of partially similar utterances in partially similar situations—utterances and situations partially co-varying.” 57 Broadly speaking, foreknowledge is subsumed within

Richards’s larger concept of “comparison fields,” 58 which produce reference by comparing the signs of utterances against the interpreter’s foreknowledge, the relationships between the signs within the total utterance, and the possibilities of alternative signs that could have been chosen to express the utterance. Comparison fields are not separate from the semiotic sign, and instead triangulate the relationship between symbol and referent so that reference can happen.

These complicated models of communication, while unable to withstand critiques by recent theories of reference, stress Richards’s optimistic belief in the possibility of direct

reference, if only given an ideal interpreter. As he explains in Philosophy of Rhetoric , “the poetic problem is precisely the maintenance of stability within minds and correspondence between them. It is not how to get the flux into molds supposed somehow to be fixed already; but how to recreate perpetually those constancies (as of sets of molds) upon which depend any order, any growth, any development—any changes, in fact, other than the chance-ridden changes of chaos.

It is through the interactions of words within a language that a poet works.” 59 Like Wittgenstein,

Richards avoids defining poetry and instead defines it as work. Because reference depends so largely on foreknowledge, “language, as understood, is the mind itself at work and these interactions of words are interdependencies of our own being.” 60

Because of his theory of reference, Richards’s discussions of poetry need only emphasize language, its medium, and the reader’s contexts of interpretation; he does not need to invent a speaker for the poem in order to ascribe meaning to the text. While many of the New Critics would later echo Richards’s distinctions between scientific language and poetic language to some degree, the American New Critics primarily worried more about the difference between poetic language and ordinary language. Not surprisingly, the methodological stakes changed, and with them so did the theories of reference; if Richards wrote both to philosophers and teachers of literature, the American New Criticism modeled themselves as a populist movement speaking to students, educators, and academics alike. 61 Gerald Graff observes that, even though the New

Critics often described their methods in scientific terms, “the New Criticism stands squarely in the romantic tradition of the defense of the humanities as an antidote to science and positivism.” 62 While Richards drew from Coleridge and analytic philosophy, the American New

Critics drew largely from conservative and Neo-Kantian ideas. Joseph North, in his study of the

New Criticism’s shift away from Richards, notes that the anti-industrial position of the New

Criticism stems from their anti-communist prejudices: “the easiest way to summarize this effect is to note that, while the New Critics happily took up many of Richards’s practical innovations and made them into core components of literary study in the United States and thence elsewhere, they did so in a way that split them off from their theoretical foundations in an incipiently materialist aesthetics, and then reoriented them such that they began to point in the opposite direction—back towards Kant.” 63

While North’s reading offers an insightful context into the influence of both Kant and the

New Criticism’s Southern Agrarianism roots, I disagree with North’s rejection of the American

New Criticism’s pedagogical aims. Even as the New Criticism pushed English departments to

“return to the text,” the reading practices championed by the New Critics imbued their texts with a strange sort of social aura. Throughout the history of the New Criticism people critiqued it for rote or mechanized forms of reading, but the New Critics envisioned their work as improving reading for the sake of democratizing ideals. 64 Robert Archambeau argues that “the New

Criticism, contrary to received opinion, is an ethically based criticism.” 65 Tara Lockhart explains the New Criticism’s emphasis on textuality in similar terms: “such an approach is democratic, then, not only because of the range of readers toward which the text directs itself, but also because of the ways that it discounts prior knowledge and experience, so that all readers may proceed in the same manner.” 66 However— and this concern was evident in Richard’s worry about ironic readings of sentiment— without a deeper human or historical context beyond the text, the meaning of the text risked becoming a purely functional surface without any greater literary or societal implications beyond itself.

This problem worsened in the early 1940s—as Mary Poovey notes— when more individuals adopted close reading and became concerned by the biological metaphors

underpinning the New Criticism. In this period, critics softened references to “organic unity” and supplement these metaphors with structural concepts. Some theorists, such as Rene Wellek and

Austin Warren, went so far as to suggest abandoning the biological metaphor of “organic unity” altogether. 67 According to Poovey, “the effects of supplementing the metaphor of organic unity were immediate and profound, for when the New Critics used ‘structure’ or ‘highly complex organization’ instead of ‘organic unity,’ they completely effaced the role of reading, since structure and organization do not retain the dynamic connotations of organic.” 68 While this shift occurred slowly, if at the start of the New Criticism books suggested a utopian, humanistic function as “machine[s] to think with,” by 1946 poems were objects for “judging,” not for thinking, “like a pudding or a machine.” 69

While the New Criticism’s methodology increasingly pushed to limit the aims of reading entirely to judgments about the text itself, this push also risked describing texts in impersonal terms that would alienate the New Criticism as a discipline from its pedagogical aims. As much as the New Criticism is framed as an academic movement, at its heart it challenged esoteric and specialized forms of historical or autobiographical reading practices out of a desire to develop modes of intellectual interpretation which were more accessible to wide audiences. 70 As Cleanth

Brooks explains in his interview “Forty Years of Understanding Poetry,” his desire to co-publish textbooks with Robert Penn Warren began modestly enough with the observation that, “Our students, many of them bright enough and certainly amiable and charming enough, had no notion of how to read a literary text.” 71

As a result of the emerging pedagogical and populist aims of the New Criticism, critics like Brooks and Warren developed the mid-century figure of the poetic in part by integrating the

New Criticism’s modes of reading with American secondary education standards. While I.A.

Richards does not use the figure of a poetic speaker, Brooks and Warren use the figure of the speaker as a pedagogical point of access that justified Understanding Poetry to mid-century poetry communities and secondary education institutions, where it was expected that poetry relate to everyday experiences.

Brooks and Warren’s appeals to the relationship between poetry and everyday experiences only increased with each revision of Understanding Poetry . In the 3 rd edition of their textbook, even before their famous assertion that “poetry is a form of speech written or spoken,”

Brooks and Warren appeal to the belief that poetry is a form of shared experience by invoking

Wordsworth’s definition of a poet as “a man speaking to men.” 72 Immediately before they begin their first analysis of a poem, they remind their reader that “poetry is not a thing separate from ordinary life and that the matters with which poetry deals are matters with which the ordinary person is concerned.” 73 They reiterate this point even more strongly at the end of their chapter, declaring that “the question of the value of poetry, then, is to be answered by saying that it springs from a basic human impulse and fulfills a basic human interest.” 74 As Craig S. Abbott notes, the poetry championed by modernist classrooms and publications in the early 20 th century, including Poetry Magazine, “espoused an essentially popular modernism in which the highbrow genre of poetry would attain wide appeal through simplicity of language and theme and through a residual idealism usually expressed as an optimism and affirmation—or at least good humor— very much in tune with the Progressive Era.” 75

Recent criticism undermines the belief that popular modernism cannot be intellectually rigorous 76 , but the point remains that in the early and mid-twentieth century, American classrooms—especially high school classrooms—expected poetry to connect with their daily life.

Abbott expands his discussion of modernist classrooms to note that The National Joint

Committee on English “Hosic Report” in 1917 recommended that secondary education classrooms stress literature “closely connected with daily life” and that Henry Neumann in the

1918 Bureau of Education Bulletin urged teaching “literature of the present day” that reinforces

American ideals, including “a certain greatness latent in the commonest of persons.” 77 In his influential history Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English, Arthur Applebee notes that between the First and Second World Wars education curriculums concerning the teaching of literature stressed “experience” as “the central metaphor of the education process.” 78 According to Applebee, this idea of “experience” was broadened beyond just a metaphorical goal for teaching literature and became a widely recognized pedagogical aim and mode of reading: “in literary studies, that metaphor was realized first as simple vicarious experience through literature, then carefully broadened to literature as ‘exploration’—the exploration of self, of society, of the past and present world.” 79 These theories argued that the value of literature as a subject stemmed from its ability to directly relate to and broaden a student’s individual experiences and stressed individualized forms of learning, but these theories also created an institutionalized barrier to teaching the less readily accessible modernist texts widely associated with the New Criticism. 80

Applebee observes the disastrous impact of these ideas, criticizing “the striking inability of the movement to provide a coherent set of principles to give order and structure to the curriculum.” 81

Applebee cites a 1956 study, The English Language Arts in the Secondary School , which absurdly interprets the purpose of literature as the “desire to have fun, a fact which manifests itself in language expression related to sports, amusement, and humorous situations.” 82

Expectedly, early twentieth-century poetry anthologies such as those by Wilkinson and

Untermeyer stressed reading as a democratic and shared experience.

Understanding Poetry attempted to hold onto such democratic ideals while providing them with a greater sense of rigor. 83 Early century anthologies occasionally mention the figure of a speaker, but their discussion of poetic voice differs from that offered later by the New

Criticism. In these texts, poetic voice is generally inseparable from the presumed voice of the poet and their larger community. In her anthology New Voices , published in 1919, Marguerite

Wilkinson describes poetry as “simply the sharing of life in patterns of rhythmical words.” 84

Alan Tate observed of classrooms in the 1940’s that “modern poetry is difficult because we have lost the art of reading any poetry that will not read itself to us,” 85 but as the pervasive amount of mid-century pedagogical literature suggests, the association between reading and personal experience was deeply ingrained in school curriculums and pedagogy. This history explains why

Understanding Poetry offers extensive analysis throughout, in contrast to most anthologies and textbooks before its publication which provided little or no editorial commentary and instructional intervention. 86 Indeed, Understanding Poetry was so pedagogically focused that a

1956 reviewer criticized it because “it tends to do too much for the teacher: the numerous questions appended after each selection exhaust the topic and tend to rob the teacher of opportunities for exercising his own gifts.” 87

While Understanding Poetry obsessively devotes the majority of its letter to the teacher and its introduction to distinguishing itself from these bad reading practices that “make a substitute for the poem as the object of study,” 88 ultimately the figure of the speaker functions primarily as a pedagogical term in Understanding Poetry that allows for the text of the poem to integrate many of these “substitute” objects. Brooks and Warren open their letter to the teacher by outlining three of the most common forms of “substitution” which mark bad modes of reading: “1. Paraphrase of logical and narrative content. 2. Study of biographical and historical

materials. 3. Inspirational and Didactic interpretation” but, very quietly, reintegrate similar forms of these three excluded styles of reading in order into their discussion of the dramatic situation of poetry:

[…]every poem implies a speaker of the poem, either the poet writing in his own person

or someone into whose mouth the poem is put, and that the poem represents the reaction

of such a person to a situation, a scene, or an idea. In this sense every poem can be—

and in fact must be—regarded as a little drama. 89

The condescending treatment of the dramatic situation of a poem as a “little drama,” which is absent in the 1 st edition of the text, speaks to its lack of value as a critical term. The diminutive phrasing of the poem as a “little drama,” is repeated later when they change their reminder in the first edition that “the fundamental point, namely, that poetry has a basis in common human interests, must not be forgotten” 90 to state instead that “the fundamental point, namely, that poetry has a basis in common human interests, that the poet is a man speaking to men, and that every poem is, at its center, a little drama.” 91 Note the persistence of this shift, which is simultaneously stressed but also minimized in its description as a “little drama.” Such a patronizing emphasis suggests that even though Brooks and Warren increasingly frame their later editions around the dramatic situation of poetry, this framing was never completely regarded as a serious critical device. Although Understanding Poetry foregrounds the role of the poetic speaker, the term “speaker” does not appear in the textbook’s glossary and, as Clara Claiborne

Park carefully points out, “in their single explanatory sentence defining the speaker [the aforementioned sentence “every poem implies a speaker”] the poet [comes] first.” 92 Even when

Brooks and Warren offer a definition of a speaker, in this definition the speaker is secondary to the figure of the poet. Park uses this observation and her discussion of the textbook’s

interchangeable use of speaker and poet throughout to argue that “Brooks and Warren are not yet committed to the speaker” in 1938. 93

While Park’s observations are salient and likely accurate given the shifting discourse surrounding the figure of the speaker at this time, I read this inconsistency not as a lack of commitment to the figure of the speaker, but a symptom of the figure of the speaker as a surrogate for what Brooks and Warren deemed uncritical mid-century reading practices. Gerald

Graff, writing about the emergence of close textual analysis, describes the New Criticism’s ability to counter its detractors:

The method of close textual analysis was a response on one side to those who dismissed

literature as a frivolity and on the other side to those who defended it in terms which

rendered it frivolous. Close textual analysis, producing evidence of the richness and

complexity of literary works, simultaneously answered the impressionist, who viewed the

work as a mere occasion for pleasurable excitement, the message-hunter or political

propagandist, who reduced the work to mere uplifting propositions, and the positivist,

who denied any significance to the work at all. And close analysis of meaning could also

demonstrate to the historians and biographers that a literary work was more than a datum

in the history of ideas or the life of the author. 94

Graff interprets the New Criticism as a refutation of such previous forms of reading, and indeed while the language of Understanding Poetry offers a rigorous and persistent refutation of these modes of analysis, the critical methods offered by Brooks and Warren often make subtle appeals towards these residual forms of reading when justifying the value of literature. At times, this solicitation risks offering contradictory definitions of poetry. The opening sentence of the textbook’s first edition introduction broadly asserts that “poetry is a form of speech, or discourse,

written or spoken” 95 but elsewhere argues that a poem is an epiphenomenal effect separate from the medium of communication: “a piece of writing which gives us a certain effect in which, we discover, the ‘poetry’ inheres.” 96

This subtle tension points to a larger and more uncertain relationship between

Understanding Poetry and its appeals to the everyday experiences of its student readers. Indeed, later editions of Understanding Poetry seem to heighten their appeals to everyday forms of communication instead of lessen them, as our understanding of the New Criticism might suggest.

Of the two aforementioned contradictory definitions of poetry, later editions omit the statement that poetry might “inhere” passively as an effect of the text—even though this definition might feel closer to our typical understanding of the New Criticism as a text-focused methodology.

Indeed, much of their work compares poetry against ordinary speech, but does so in order to suggest that everyday speech might contain “incipient poetry” that is, at its heart, not wholly dissimilar from poetry: “by the very nature of the human being, the ordinary citizen in the ordinary day speaks much of what we might call incipient poetry—he attempts to communicate attitudes, feelings, and interpretations. And poetry in this sense is not confined to the speech of the ordinary citizen. It appears also in editorials, sermons, political speeches, magazine articles, and advertisement.” 97

Understanding Poetry buttresses its attempts to align itself with everyday forms of communication by strategically beginning its first chapter with a lengthy discussion of ballads.

While this first section on ballad poetry is initially untitled in the first edition and later called

“narrative poetry” in the 2 nd edition, in the 4 th edition the title for this first chapter changes to

“dramatic poetry,” doubling down on Brooks and Warren’s investment in the dramatic situation and explicitly labeling ballads as its ideal model. However, despite this change, these terms

consistently feel condescending, with the label of “narrative poetry” or “folk poetry” contrasted against more serious forms of literature. For Brooks and Warren, foregrounding ballads allows them to segue from “nonliterary” texts to more “bookish” ones: “Folk poetry has one great pedagogical advantage. It springs from a nonliterary world and some event that has some special appeal to the imagination of that world [....] Our whole effort was to show how the non-bookish poetry could lead straight to the bookish: that is to a narrative poem by, say, Frost.” 98 Brooks and

Warren begin their chapter on “narrative poetry” by aligning themselves with ideals similar to those in the Hosic Report, noting that “the ‘stuff of poetry’ is not something separate from the ordinary business of living, but itself inheres in that business.” 99 At the end of the textbook’s introduction, they justify poetry in terms that more explicitly appeal to the individualist fantasies of the Hosic report: “the question of the value of poetry, then, is to be answered by saying that it springs from a basic human impulse and fulfills a basic human interest.” 100

Brooks and Warren’s decision to draw from ballad culture was not solely motivated by pedagogy, however. Steve Newman, in his insightful essay, “’The Dramatic Situation’ and ‘The

Imagined Community’: Academic Tales of the Ballad from Philology to the New Criticism and

Beyond” argues that one possible origin point for Brooks’s concept of the dramatic situation comes from Brooks’s essay on Frances Barton Gummere and nineteeth-century studies of ballad culture. Newman explains: 101

There is strong evidence that ‘the dramatic situation’ enters into Understanding Poetry

through one of [Francis James] Child’s most illustrious sons, Francis Barton Gummere.

The link can be found in an essay titled ‘The Popular Ballad’ that Brooks wrote in 1930

for a class in Fifteenth Century Literature while at Exeter College, Oxford as a Rhodes

Scholar [….] At the end of the essay, we can see the first formation of the New Critical

credo of dramatic propriety: ‘At its best the folk ballad presents the essence of a dramatic

situation with hard vigorous detail, and with little regard for careful explanation and

interpretation. The dramatic frame is enough; but (again at its best) these details are vivid

enough to invest the framework with all the explanation necessary.’ 102

Newman observes that even though Brooks draws on Gummere to develop the idea of a dramatic situation, he shifts Gummere’s focus away from broad community identities and towards individual identities: “in other words, what drops away from the ballad in

Understanding Poetry is precisely what Gummere called ‘the imagined community’ that makes the nation possible.” 103 Erin Kappeler notes the importance of Gummere for early 20 th century

American education: “the extent to which Gummere’s theory of the development of poetry saturated discussions of English and American schools cannot be overstated. It was taught in high schools. It was frequently debated in the PMLA and other mouthpieces of the newly professionalized English literature. It spilled over into more popular magazines, as well.” 104

Steve Newman suggests that Gummere’s description of “imagined communities” provided a theoretical framework for Brooks to bridge these pedagogies and the figure of his speaker. 105

While the relationship between mid-century poetry and 19 th century ballad culture exceeds the scope of this dissertation, Newman’s argument is a provocative one that explains why Brooks and Warren later call their first chapter on ballads “dramatic poetry.” Such a link is worth further study, but this relationship suggests that transforming Understanding Poetry establishes a continuity between poetry as dramatic utterance and mid-century populist reading practices through the influence of philology and nineteenth-century ballad culture. By modifying

Gummere’s concept of an “imagined community” into an isolated, individual entity, Brooks and

Warren’s description of poetry as a “little drama” resonates with their similarly dismissive comparison between ballad poems and more “literary” or “bookish” poems.

If for Brooks and Warren the figure of the speaker functions primarily as a pedagogical term that translates the reading practice of the New Criticism for a larger public audience,

Reuben Brower is likely the first critic who adopts the figure of the speaker as a serious term for critical analysis. Brower, like the other critics I have mentioned so far, envisioned his criticism as a populist discourse intended to repair modern reading practices. However, unlike Brooks and

Warren who viewed the speaker as a vessel for their critical methodology, Brower perceived the speaker as a means to reinvigorate mid-century reading. If for Oppen the figure of the speaker represents an abstraction that alienates readers from history, Reuben Brower turned to the figure of the speaker as corrective measure against what he viewed as the superficial reading practices encouraged by mainstream print culture.

Reuben Brower, who crystalizes the dominant mid-century concept of the dramatic poetic speaker, 106 opens his 1959 essay “Reading in Slow Motion” by invoking Aldous Huxley’s phrase

“the age of The New Stupid” to describe midcentury reading habits. 107 Brower notes in his essay that “nearly everyone has a reading habit of some sort” and believes that such habits rarely seem to engage “the play of the mind.” 108 Even if popular literature and mainstream media like Time

Magazine might promote “lifelong readers,” 109 measuring the amount that an individual reads seems an insufficient metric to determine the success of their education given the rise of “reading as anodyne and reading as extended daydream.” 110 Even though Brower worries about mainstream public reading, he notes that academic reading practices often are just as bad as those modeled by the mainstream public. This failure, as Brower notes, was perversely the result of the

New Criticism’s broad success in establishing its reading practices. As departments across the

country began teaching and producing scholars trained in the methods of the New Critics, the quality of academic work representing the principles of the New Criticism “in some instances degenerated into a trivial hunt for images or symbols—precisely the manifestations of the movement that in the last few years have found acceptance in academic journals.” 111 Brower laments the overly “mechanical” 112 forms of close reading emerging from the New Criticism’s imitators, who “let method determine in advance—like a sort of gridiron—what we see in the work and what we miss.” 113 In his 1970 introduction to the anthology of essays from the English

Institute’s conference Forms of Lyric , Brower’s worries are even more direct: “Whatever word we use to indicate that we are attending to ‘this in relation to this’ and not ‘that in relation to that,’ there is always the possibility that we may freeze the life of the poem into lifeless formula.” 114

Brower’s concerns about the future of reading were by no means were unique to him or the moment in which he published In Defense of Reading . The New Critics themselves frequently justified their works by lamenting the poor state of reading. I.A. Richards famously begins Practical Criticism in 1929 by mocking the writings of his students. Richards writes that one aim of his study is to “provide a new technique for those who wish to discover for themselves what they think and feel about poetry” 115 but worries about offering too rigid of a critical method: “it is to be feared that critical formulas, even the best, are responsible for more bad judgment than good, because it is far easier to forget their subtle sense and apply them crudely than to remember it and apply them finely.”116 Hugh Kenner in his 1975 memorial lecture for John Crowe Ransom, who coined the term New Criticism in 1941, envisions the New

Criticism first and foremost as a pedagogical movement that unfortunately became a dominant academic discourse: “the curious thing is how a classroom strategy could come to mistake itself

for a critical discipline. Not to distract students with peripheral information, that is one thing; to pretend to oneself, as some New Critics did, that the information has no status whatever, is something else.” 117

Even though Brower positions himself against the New Criticism’s rigidity, Brower tends to adopt many of its methods. In his 1951 book Fields of Light , his definition of metaphor as subject and icon directly references and builds off of I.A. Richards, 118 while his discussion of irony explicitly draws from Cleanth Brooks. 119 Indeed, while Brower worries about the mechanical and repetitive nature of critics modeling themselves after the New Criticism, both

Richards and Brower turn to Coleridge as a model reader. Brower highlights not only Coleridge but also Reverend Bowyer, Coleridge’s teacher whom Brower jokingly calls “the first New

Critic,” 120 in “Reading in Slow Motion,” observing that perhaps the disconnect between the New

Criticism and contemporary audience is a failure of pedagogy, and not a consequence of their interpretive methodology: “to teach reading or any other subject in the style of the Reverend

Bowyer demands an attitude towards the job that is obvious but easily overlooked in our larger universities, where increasing numbers of students often impose mass production methods.” 121

Brower worries that the increasingly mechanical modes of teaching alienate the “unspecialized reader to whom works of literature are ordinarily addressed” 122 and lead to the rote forms of reading he lambasts in the introduction of his essay. As a result, Brower’s prescribes a process,

“slow reading”—which would later develop into what we know as close reading—that must straddle a fine line: on one hand highlighting the full complexity of literary language while on the other hand doing so without transforming the text into a series of routinized proscriptions for reading.

Brower uses the figure of the speaker as a means to tap into and humanize what he sees as the thorough but otherwise impersonal modes of reading inspired by the New Criticism.

Herbert Tucker, who writes about the New Criticism’s adaptation of the Dramatic Monologue genre through the figure of the speaker, observes the distinctly modern and egotistically-driven inflections of this shift:

Through the late ceremony of critical innocence, the readerly imagination of a self, we

modern readers have abolished the poet and set up the fictive speaker; and we have done

so in order to boost the higher gains of an intersubjective recognition for which, in an

increasingly mechanical age that can make Mill’s look positively idyllic, we seem to

suffer insatiable cultural thirst. The master of New Critical tools may offer in this light a

sort of homeopathic salve, the application of a humanistic technology to technologically

induced ills.” 123

For Tucker, the purpose of this shift is to feel addressed by a text, to satiate “the thirst for intersubjective confirmation of the self, which has made the overhearing of a persona our principle means of understanding a poem.” 124 Comically, but also gesturing towards the contiguous relationship between the desires behind self-expressive reading practices and the figure of the speaker, Tucker defines poetry as “Textuality a speaker owns” and announces, “The old king of self-expressive lyricism is dead: Long live the Speaker King!” 125

Brower’s terms hint at such an attempt to push self-expressive or audience-focused forms of reading towards more textually-driven modes of analysis. Instead of leaning on familiar but technical terms like irony or unity, Brower prefers the more accessible phrase “items of experience.” 126 These items build up into what he calls the “total attitude” 127 of the poem, which values the act of reading as a process and not as a teleological path towards meaning:

The total attitude in this or any poem is not the cream of emotion skimmed from the

describable structure; and though it can be fully comprehended only at the end, it is not

found waiting there like the pot of gold at the end of a poetic rainbow, a beatific reward

for good reading. The total attitude has been growing all along as a constant overtone to

the musical progression of the work; or, if it has not, we are left with vacancy or

fragmentary echoes. Nor is the attitude to be confused with the set of adjectives by which

we remind ourselves of its character before consigning it to some Proustian vase of

memory. It is the complex feel of evolving, finally completed relationships and

absolutely inseparable from our perception of them through the poet’s language. Without

this ‘body’ the attitude is ‘some lovely glorious nothing,’ unballasted because

undefined. 128

While Brower’s use of a term like “items of experience” implies a “reader-response” approach to textual analysis, such an implication is a misreading of Brower’s text. Brower explicitly borrows the term “total attitude” from I.A. Richards, but while for Richards this term carries with it complex psychological and philosophical frameworks of signification, 129 Brower refuses such psychological theories. Instead of locating these “experiences” as extra-textual parts of the reader’s own subjective experiences, Brower treats both the speaker and her or his imagined addressee as a “creation of the words on the printed page.” 130 He asserts that, “The ‘person spoken to’ is also a fictional personage and ever the actual audience of ‘you and me,’ and only in a special abstract sense is it the literary audience of a particular time and place in history.” 131

Even though Brower appreciates the actual act of reading, the poem itself is still an isolated text, an irreducible entity where “the only complete description of the attitude conveyed is the poem

itself.” 132 The reader is not directly addressed even if she or he is part of the dramatic staging of the poem.

By framing the poetic speaker and the addressee of the poetic speaker as products of the text, Brower echoes and expands upon John Stuart Mill’s definition of poetry as “overheard.”

For both Mill and Brower, poetry becomes a form of drama where both the means of address and the addressee are products of the poem’s “staging.” Mill describes poetry as a dramatic mode of address, but does so without losing sight of the poem’s means of circulation:

All poetry is of the nature of soliloquy. It may be said that poetry which is printed on hot-

press paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop, is a soliloquy in full dress and on the stage. It

is so; but there is nothing absurd, in the idea of such a mode of soliloquizing. What we

have said to ourselves we may tell to others afterwards; what we have said or done in

solitude we may voluntarily reproduce when we know that our eyes are upon us. But no

trace of consciousness that, any eyes are upon us, must be visible in the work itself. 133

Although Mill recognizes the poem both as a physical text in a bookseller’s shop and as a text produced by an author for public “eyes,” he cautions that such an awareness must not imprint itself upon the work itself. This caution against writing for an audience forms the basis for Mill’s comparison between poetry and eloquence, which “supposes an audience.” 134 Where Mill understands the importance of print culture in the circulation of texts, for Brower print culture damages poetry reading and distracts from the total experience of the text. Consequently, Brower abstracts away the text as a physical, public object and transforms it entirely into speech. His brief mentions of “the printed word” work only as containers capable of holding the various means through which a word can signify potential “items of experience”: “the term ‘item of experience’ is used here to name any response whatsoever that a printed word may stand for: that

is, sounds made in pronouncing it; rhythmic stress; grammatical connection; and meanings of any sort, from the most obscure organic disturbance to images of sensations, to the most distinct reference to an object or person.” 135

Even if Mill might frame the ideal poem as “overheard,” this process of overhearing is a construction of the poem’s scene of reception, and hence not entirely amenable to Brower’s staging of the poetic speaker; Mill never loses his awareness that the “stage” for such a soliloquy is neither a true theater nor the private scene of reading, but the bookseller’s shop transformed through metaphor. As a result of this, Mill never offers a fictive construct resembling a speaker.

In lieu of a speaker, Mill focuses primarily on poets and the means through which they produce poetry as much as— if not more than— he focuses on the properties of poems themselves. He compares Wordsworth and Shelley against each other as a “poet of culture” and a “poet of nature,” noting that, “The difference, then, between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind, is, that in the latter, with however bright a halo of feeling the thought may be surrounded and glorified, the thought itself is always the conspicuous object; while the poetry of a poet is Feeling itself, employing Thought only as the medium of its expression. In the one, feeling waits upon thought; in the other, thought upon feeling.” 136 While

Mill desires a poet who is able to reign in an “overflow” of genuine emotions and shape these feelings through profound thinking, he stresses the emotions themselves must be genuine. Mill criticizes Wordsworth because “his poetry sees one thing, himself another” 137 —something with which Brower and the New Critics he draws on might not only praise, but expect out of poetry mediated through the figure of a speaker.

While Brower argues that the dramatic structure allows for a poem to “shape the total attitude being communicated,” 138 the speaker is not the source of a poem’s total attitude. Brower

humorously offers a case-in-point reading of Blake’s “The Sick Rose,” musing that in Blake’s poem the speaker’s “relevant action for him is not multiple but single: ‘reach for the flying-worm spray.’ His talk, to give it a proper name, is technological.” 139 Although Brower’s use of the word “technological” and his short discussion of the differences between technological writing and literature gestures towards a binary relationship that obsessed many of the New Critics,

Brower seems only passingly concerned with this distinction and even suggests that technological writing, in which a “complex metaphor is combined with equally complex imaginal, dramatic, and rhythmic relationships” 140 might count as literature. Instead, Brower’s primary concern in distinguishing the “technological” reading of a speaker from the “total attitude” that he develops throughout Fields of Light serves to differentiate Brower’s concept of dramatic organization from the semi-dramatic structure offered by I.A. Richards, even though

Brower borrows the phrase “total attitude” from him.

Brower marks a turning point in the history of the poetic speaker. If Brooks and Warren contributed to the popularization of the poetic speaker, their use of the poetic speaker comes across more as a pragmatic strategy than as a theoretical choice. While Richards arguably offers the most developed theoretical argument for poetry’s semi-dramatic situation, Richards does so by situating his studies in complicated philosophical and psychological frameworks. By the mid- century, Richards held an uneven reputation among literature departments, largely as a result of his interdisciplinary focus. He was respected and acknowledged as the forefather of the New

Criticism, but the philosophical and psychological frameworks underpinning Richards’s theories were regularly disavowed by the New Criticism—most famously by Wimsatt and Beardsley, who wrote their essay “The Affective Fallacy” partially as a refutation of Richards— even while the New Criticism appreciated his rigorous modes of textual analysis. 141 Helen Vendler, who

worked closely with Brower and Richards while both were teaching at Harvard, reflects that despite Richards influences on mid-century criticism, he was not highly regarded by its English department by the time he was teaching at Harvard in the 1950’s:

The chairman would not permit me to take Richards’s class because Richards was based

in the School of Education, not in the Department of English (Richards came to Harvard

on a Carnegie Grant developing Basic English). His course was scratched off my

program card by the chairman, and Chaucer was sternly substituted for it. Nothing

daunted, I simply audited a course and a seminar from Richards. 142

Her description of her intellectual debt to Richards similarly, in a manner that echoes the distinction between the technological and non-technological speaker offered by Brower, notes that “I think I see words in their literary connotations, but not so much in their philosophical history as Richards did.” 143

Brower’s concept of the dramatic speaker borrows heavily from Richards, but uses the figure of the speaker to offer an alternative, communication-driven model of reference in lieu of the psychological and philosophical theories provided by Richards. Even though Brower’s model of the dramatic situation feels very familiar, this sense of familiarity masks Brower’s own contributions to the figure of the speaker as such. Indeed, as Park and Lowell highlight at the beginning of this introduction, the figure of the speaker was by no means an established term at the start of the mid-century. In Brower’s work, the figure of the speaker works to counter the

“mechanical” stereotypes of close reading while also expanding the New Criticism’s concept of a poem’s dramatic staging to include both the actual reader and the poem’s dramatic speaker. In this regard, Brower’s use of the speaker sees the humanistic face of the speaker not only as a

means to incorporate devices such as “tone,” but also as a means to—like with Brooks and

Warren—make the New Criticism palatable to midcentury audiences. 144

This dissertation argues that the uneven and shifting history of the mid-century speaker offers a rich and important framework with which to read twentieth-century American poetry.

While Brower crystalizes our concept of the figure of the speaker and provides its most commonly accepted incarnation, the figure of the speaker in the mid-century was not a stable concept and it frequently intersected with and integrated other reading practices. My readings of the mid-century speaker borrow heavily from recent advancements in the field historical poetics, dubbed “The New Lyric Studies” in the 2008 PMLA special edition on this work. While new histories of the lyric seem to promise restorative and recuperative projects for academics studying poetry written during and before the 19 th century, twentieth-century poetry scholars view the new lyrical studies as an emetic that risks alienating poetry’s already diminished readership. Jonathan Culler and Marjorie Perloff, also writing in the 2008 PMLA , expand on this view, worrying that the textured ways in which the new lyric studies addresses poetic reading practices seems ahead of itself; first and foremost, people need to read poetry before we can question how they are reading. Culler goes as far as suggesting that instead of challenging the historicity of the lyric, critics should develop and embrace transhistorical models of the lyric because of a perceived potential for the lyric to restore poetry to twentieth century audiences:

“The power to embed bits of language in your mind, to invade and occupy it, is a salient feature of lyrics: poems seek to inscribe themselves in mechanical memory, Ged ächtnis , ask to be learned by heart, taken in, introjected, or housed as bits of alterity that can be repeated, considered, treasured, or ironically cited. The force of poetry is linked to its ability to get itself remembered, like those bits of song that stick in your mind, you don’t know why.” 145

I do not believe that Culler’s desire to maintain a broad transhistorical category of “lyric” is justified. Culler’s call to transhistoricity is, ultimately, a desire to unite historical reading practices by overwriting or reductively interpreting the specific modes and ethical projects underlying those practices. As Virginia Jackson argues, one major consequence of “lyricization” is a disconnect between critical readings of poetry and the specific ways through which poetic genres structure and address their historically situated reading publics:

When the stipulative functions of particular genres are collapsed into one big idea of

poems as lyrics, then the only function poems can perform in our culture is to become

individual or communal ideals. Such ideals might bind particular groups or subcultures

(in slams, for example, or avant-garde blogs, or poetry cafes, or salons, or university,

library, and museum reading series), but the more ideally lyric poems and poetry culture

have become, the fewer poetic genres address readers in specific ways. That ratio is

responsible for our twenty-first-century sense that poetry is all-important and at the same

time already in its afterlife. 146

While this tension between the abstraction of poetry into a lyric ideal and poetry’s declining capacity to address its reading public opens up rich questions for the field of historical poetics, as

I have already implied, this same relationship situates any study of mid-twentieth-century poetry in a double-bind. If mid-century poets not only read but also stipulated their poetic modes of address towards an abstract overhearing public, then any study of how mid-century poetry addresses its reading publics must inevitably collapse the difference between historically situated poetic address and the abstract modes that make such historical modes of address impossible. In this regard, Culler’s substitution of actual audiences for transhistorical ones seems typical;

historical audiences reading in the lyricized mid-twentieth-century are, in part, expected to read poems through ahistorical modes.

While work in this field has offered excellent readings of poems published during and before the early 20 th century, because the field of lyric studies so closely aligns with the field of historical poetics, the interpretive stakes of lyric studies for discussions of mid-twentieth-century poetry remain unclear. Michael Cohen, drawing heavily on Virginia Jackson’s work in

Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading , notes how “much of nineteenth-century poetry remains obscure to contemporary literary history because the assumptions by and through which we understand and evaluate “poetry” (the protocols of lyric reading, the author function, canons of national literature) are not applicable to most nineteenth-century poetic cultures.” 147

According to Cohen, this retroprojection inhibits our capacity to understand and appreciate earlier poetic periods, especially nineteenth-century poetry. In order to understand poetry, criticism must come to understand the historical contexts and reading practices appropriate to each period. Cohen explains this work using language of recovery and restoration:

To reverse this process, to reconstruct the history of a local poetic culture like the one

detailed here, required more than simply recovering poems or authors. It requires that we

resituate poems in the social contexts in which they were produced, distributed, and

consumed, to the extent that available records and materials allowed. 148

Even if the centrality of lyric reading practices, as critics have claimed, limit our ability to recognize historical genres and interpretive modes, metaphors of restoration and recovery suggest a temporal distance that feels ill-suited to address mid-twentieth century American poetry. Similarly, if the field of historical poetics aims to push back against the monopoly of lyric reading practices by “resituate[ing] poems in the social contexts,” such a project cannot

sidestep the primacy of lyric reading practices during the mid-20 th century; a period wherein the

“lyric” is the dominant historical mode for both reading and writing poetry. Jonathan Culler warns about the consequences for such a push on studies of twentieth-century poetry. Culler, clearly disagreeing with Virginia Jackson, argues that the push to “focus on describing particular genres, such as the ode, elegy, and song, their conventions and traditions” suggests “a not very promising strategy for nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry, certainly, where many of the most interesting lyrics do not seem to belong to those particular genres or subgenres. It would be a major theoretical and practical failure to ignore a vast group of poems, which in fact depend upon a conceptual frame for their effect.” 149

In the chapters that follow, I argue—contrary to Culler’s point—that the poets featured in my dissertation were well aware of this dilemma and struggled in their own ways to adapt their modes of poetic address accordingly. Far from treating poetic address as a conceptual frame,

Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara, and George Oppen were each intimately aware of the reading practices surrounding their work. This dissertation asks how these poets imagined themselves addressing and not addressing their actual reading publics. The figure of the speaker as such, while often used as an umbrella term by literary criticism to encompass all forms of poetic address, was not yet a stable term. This dissertation attempts to unveil other modes of address masked by, but often not entirely removed from our common understanding of the poetic speaker. While the field of historical poetics draws attention to the history of lyricization and alternative, non-lyric modes of address, this dissertation asks what a historical poetics might look like for a period already lyricized and explores how poets working within this model embraced and resisted a midcentury expectation of indirect, abstract address. By looking at these three

poets, all of whom do not comfortably fit alongside each other in traditional factionalist accounts of this period, I hope to argue for a new history of twentieth-century American poetry.

Chapter 1

Robert Lowell’s Crisis of Reading: The Confessional Subject as the Culmination of the

Romantic Tradition of Poetry

Confessional Poetry… is a literary convention like any other,

the problem being to make it sound as if it were true

James Merrill 1

Oh dear, have you ever felt like a man in an unreal book?

Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop 2

In the opening to Robert Lowell’s 1960 acceptance speech for the National Book Award for Life Studies , Lowell begins his speech, not surprisingly, with a joke: a short description of an ironic miscommunication where his editor’s secretary incorrectly summarizes Lowell’s statement over the phone that “I’m one of your [publishing company’s] authors” as “he’s one of your orators.” 3 Although Lowell’s speech is famous for his statement that “two poetries are now competing, a cooked and a raw,” 4 the joke’s punch-line frames his speech more around the tension between modern technology and communication than a poetic call-to-arms. The humor of Lowell’s joke reminds us of the ease and awkwardness through which the boundaries between poetic writing and speech collapsed together in the mid-century; when read through our persistent fiction of the poetic speaker, the poet was always also, by virtue of writing poetry, a silent orator. The force behind whatever vitriol Lowell’s speech might risk lobbing against the

“raw” poetry of the avant-garde is not primarily motivated by an aesthetic disagreement, but is instead driven by the anxiety attached to Lowell’s self-identification with the anachronistic,

Roman-esque word “orator” that threatens to distance Lowell from his contemporary audience.

Forgetting this, it is easy to read Lowell’s remarks about the "raw" avant-garde polemically where Lowell, the privileged craftsperson, offers a diatribe against an emerging tradition of spontaneous verse. But Lowell’s anecdote, which segues from this miscommunication into his

“raw and cooked” metaphor, elicits an uncomfortable envy towards this new strain of poetry and its ability to communicate with its modern readers: “The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners.” 5

Graduate seminars in the history of mid-20 th century American poetry are never a good thing, and Lowell, alluding to his friend Randall Jarrell, makes sure that this point is conveyed clearly:

“the modern world has destroyed the intelligent poet’s audience and given him students.” 6

Modernity, it seems, has created a crisis of reading.

But Lowell does not necessarily blame this situation entirely on modern audiences. As

Lowell admits during his anecdote about the miscommunication, “I am afraid that writing verse rather atrophies one’s faculties for communication.” 7 If any awkwardness or misunderstanding occurs, either on the phone or during his acceptance speech, it is an unfortunate side effect of writing poetry and not an error on the part of the poet’s readership. Poetry, according to Lowell, presents its own forms of communication that, instead of coinciding with his manner of speech, risks stymieing his ability to speak clearly. In his letters, Lowell frequently supports this association between different forms of writing and their unique, at times awkward modes of address. 8 In a letter to Ginsberg dated April 10 th , 1959, Lowell emphasizes the avant-garde’s greater capacities for communication by associating Ginsberg’s poetry with the formal qualities of letter writing: “I think letters ought to be written the way you think poetry ought [to] be. So let

this be breezy, brief, incomplete, but spontaneous and not dishonestly holding back.” 9 Lowell’s letter, which uses this flippant description of letter writing as a justification for offering up what he playfully calls “splenetic joshing,” does so in order to dissociate spontaneity from formlessness and pinpoint the specific set of aesthetic principles buttressing Ginsberg’s “wave of writers,” noting playfully that “I guess poetry as a technique means much less to me than to you.” 10

Although Lowell’s unspecific admission that he sees “a great deal that fascinates me in your wave of writers” peppers his criticisms with touches of mixed praise and envy, Lowell’s

“reason for the rough brusqueness” of his letter is ultimately a defensive one that worries about the cliquishness of Ginsberg’s generation: “there’s so much that is timid, conservative, intolerant of other kinds of writing.” 11 The problem with the beat poets for Lowell isn’t the specific formal or technical qualities of Ginsberg’s peers, but their refusal to read and appreciate the merits of other authors. If Lowell believed in a cooked vs. raw dichotomy in American poetry, Lowell’s attempts at diplomacy suggest a desire to undo the divisiveness of such a divide:

The times are bad? But not as bad as you think [….] Just to name Americans in this

century: James, Frost, Robinson, Wharton, Dreiser, Ring Lardner, Fitzgerald,

Hemmingway, Nathaniel West, Salinger, Saul Bellow, Mary McCarthy, Flannery

O’Connor [,] J.F. Powers, K.A. Porter, Pound, Williams, Ransom, Tate, Blackmur, James

Baldwin, Santayana, Eliot? I’ve given these people in no particular order. They differ

enormously in interest. 12

While Lowell’s list is by no means comprehensive, and clearly includes the more or less biased recognition of several of his friends, the extensiveness and aesthetic diversity of his list (which has the prescience to include Baldwin, who in 1959 had yet to publish Another Country )

expresses Lowell’s investment in divergent, as opposed to singular or continuous, literary traditions which he believes are threatened by the Beat poets’ posturing toward a polemical and totalizing view of literary culture. For Lowell, the Beats’ figuration of a counter-culture poetic movement undermines opportunities to evaluate of writers as individuals, many of whom in

Lowell’s list embodied counter-culture attitudes similar to and different from those expressed by the Beat poets.

Lowell admits to Ginsberg that “I couldn’t make you agree with me in a million years,” but such an agreement seems besides his point. Instead, Lowell’s letter extends itself outwards as an olive branch trying to resist the consolidation of literature into a singular set of aesthetic principles: “We can, however, tolerate each other, at least I can tolerate you , and hope you’ll put up with my rather splenetic joshing.” Lowell’s discussion of Ginsberg’s generation coincides with neither a formalist nor a “school” model of historicizing American poetry, despite its flirtation with such modes of thinking; Lowell’s methods for evaluating the merits of literary works, despite his quasi-formalistic set of expectations regarding letter writing as a form, insists on a relativistic plurality of styles that resists any singular method of interpretation. Similarly, while Lowell often thought in terms of generations,13 especially as a way of discussing the affective and aesthetic threads shared between him and his peers, he consistently resisted the idea of literary “schools 14 ” and believed that they undervalued the capabilities of individual authors.

Early in his career, in a 1949 letter to Santayana, Lowell rejected the notion that he might

“belong to Eliot’s ‘school’ whatever that is; and his problems are not mine; but in an odd way, I felt he was closer in sensibility (not personality) than anyone I’d ever met, young or old.” 15

Lowell’s use of quotation marks around “school” calls into question Santayana’s use of the term as a category for organization even while Lowell’s set of semicolons demonstrates a continuous

re-engagement with this denial that implies a desire to identify with and recognize his literary affinity with Eliot’s poetry. Instead of schools, Lowell’s later letter to Jerome Mazzaro on the eve of the publication of Mazzaro’s “Robert Lowell and the Circle” insists on a more complex networks of literary influence based on the public recognition of individual poets and the persistence of their impact on other artists:

“I don’t think any of the other poets you name ever thought of themselves as belonging or

not belong[ing] to a Lowell Circle. I don’t think I ever heard the words till yesterday in

your piece. A graver matter is the competition, the boxing match. Without it, I think we

miss some of the pleasure of writing: part of it is rather like a tennis match. Who would

play without scoring? But how can you score in poetry? In what contest that means

anything can we enter our poems and books? The scales do not exist to weigh art. Yet

some things are better or greater. I must call the contest emulation. Probably the periods

when many artists, not just one, are excellent, are helped by this emulation. But fame or

reputation is another thing sometimes having little or nothing [to do] with works of art. I

suppose it’s the flaw in us that makes us dance with such jealousy and keenness for this

prize. In this too, some good.” 16

For Lowell, the shifting ways in which his writing is understood and re-circulated by his audiences appears to be the most troubling effect of modernity on American poetry. The “raw” poets in his National Book Award speech might seem sloppy, but their sloppiness also allows for them to navigate emerging technologies and address a public of eager “midnight listeners.” By describing the “raw” poets’ audiences as listeners in his speech, as opposed to readers, Lowell points to the flexibility of these new poets who have adapted their writing to communicate not only through print, but also through public performances like poetry readings or radio broadcasts

(and perhaps telephone calls to secretaries). Their “communications” are not “atrophied,” only under-cooked, and Lowell worries about how these poets’ adaptability might negatively handicap his ability to compete in the poetic “boxing match” that relies on circulation and influence. 17 While Lowell's audience might just as easily mistake Lowell the author for Lowell the "orator," Lowell struggles to maintain the difference between these roles and adapt accordingly. “Writing,” Lowell explains, “is neither transport nor a technique.” 18 If “expertly crafted” poetry is to maintain its status as a relevant public mode, ultimately the question that he believes must be answered is how such poetry might maintain its integrity while also reaching an audience that is increasingly less interested in traditional modes of both writing and print circulation. 19

While literary history has been generous in its evaluation of the impact of Lowell’s

“confessional poetry” on mid-twentieth century poetic address, it has been increasingly lukewarm in its evaluation of Robert Lowell’s impact on mid-twentieth century poetic form and almost entirely silent on how the circulation of Lowell’s poetry among public readers affected his writing. 20 As the name confessional poetry implies, Lowell’s Life Studies cultivates a privileged and deeply interpersonal position of confidence with its reader where its confessional persona, yoked out from the muteness of the printed page, bestows the impression of privacy and direct access to the poet in spite of the poem's physical properties as a publicly circulated print medium. As scholars of mid-century poetry increasingly recognize the absurdity of such an intimate degree of access and resist the label "confessional" poetry, these projects generally object to autobiographical readings of Lowell's work without addressing how and why Lowell's confessional poetry so fervently presents non-autobiographical details as direct representations of his own experiences. 21 Even if confessional readings inappropriately interpret Lowell’s poetry as

autobiography, the persistence and ubiquity of these interpretations suggests that the confessionalism of his poetry is an effect of Lowell’s text and the public reading practices applied to his poetry.

Contrary to Lowell’s insistence that poetry is “neither a transport nor a technique,”

Lowell’s writing seems particularly obsessed with examining and challenging the coterminous relationship between the specific modes of his writing and the differing processes through which these texts are read. Lowell understood, perhaps more so than any other poet in his generation, how to carefully cultivate and manage a public persona. Literary criticism has linked his political statements to his commemorative and historical poetry, especially in such books as To Speak of the Union Dead ,22 but has failed to connect this to his confessional poetry, which is still read mostly as the “private” expressions of an individual poet’s personal growth. The separation of

Lowell’s “public” and “private” persona, while immortalized in the current usage of the word

“confessional,” operates under the false assumption that Lowell’s “private voice” exists independently of his audience’s reception and interpretation of his poetry. The immense awkwardness of labeling Lowell’s widely circulated confessional poetry as “private” underscores how the cultivation of an audience who might suspend their engagement with Lowell’s poetry as a physical, circulating text necessarily precedes Lowell’s capability to establish a confessional effect as such. The capacity for Lowell to switch so readily between his role as an active, frequently political, and highly visible public poet and his role as a private, deeply-troubled, confessionalist demonstrates Lowell’s deft talent in manipulating his readers to constantly and almost unnoticeably reevaluate their relationships between Lowell and his texts. 23

One consequence of the academic pushback against the label confessional poetry is that oftentimes what critics assert as the “right” relationship between Lowell and his readers is,

ironically, one that effaces the position of the reader entirely. When public reading practices are discussed in relation to Lowell’s poetry, public readers are almost exclusively depicted as misreaders who condemn Lowell’s poetry for its moral shortcomings and read it too mimetically as a reflection of his autobiography. 24 As Thomas Travisano in his critique of the label confessional poetry explains, the metaphor of confession suggests an imbalanced hierarchy between poet and reader that encourages the reader, "as hearer of the confession," 25 to evaluate the text for its moral worth and minimize the poem's aesthetic value: "at least by implication, the confessional paradigm perceives the poet as speaking from a similar-- though far more exposed-- position of supplication and self-disclosure." 26

Frank Bidart, Lowell’s close friend and editor of his Collected Poems , reminds Lowell’s readers of the “homorific meaning to the word confession , at least as old as Augustine’s

Confessions : the most earnest, serious recital of the events of one’s life crucial in the making of the soul. Candor in the Confessions is not simply self-laceration, not covert self-promotion or complaint.” 27 A beautiful sentiment, this sense of “confession” as the “making of the soul” echoes Travisano’s suggestion for reading Lowell’s poetry as part of a mid-century “exploratory paradigm.” Reading Lowell’s poetry as a form of exploration or “soul making,” instead of directly addressing the moralistic misreadings that Travisano attributes to public readers, circumvents the relationship between reader and text entirely and re-imagines confessional poetry as the private expression of an almost Freudian process of working through "critical moments in the lives of self-divided individuals struggling to survive and recover in the face of traumatic loss.” 28 Public disclosure, as a consequence of Travisano's reading, becomes inconsequential to the meaning of "exploratory" poetry: there is no need or desire for absolution, and poetry becomes an entirely private mode of self-reflection. By arguing that Lowell’s poetry

operates as a form of self-reflection or “soul making,” Travisano and Bidart take the autobiographical properties of Lowell’s poetry for granted and use them as a means to evaluate the formal and aesthetic properties of Lowell’s writing. As Steven Axelrod explains, “The tag

‘confessional’ leads us to expect and therefore to find, transparent language use, repressed signifiers, a coherent and univocal subject, a naturalized voice, and an earnest focus on painful personal memories rather than a cultural, political, or linguistic critique.” 29

Strangely, many of the poems that Travisano and other critics label as autobiographical bear little or no direct connection to Lowell’s lived experiences; these autobiographical associations do not function as a referential ground for Lowell’s writing and are often products of the reading practices applied to his work. Although Travisano’s complaint that readers often scrutinized Lowell's poetry for its moral worth is a correct one, reading the term "confessional" not as a historically-specific print genre but as an abstract metaphor for an imaginary scene of exchange between reader and poet ignores, instead of explains, how Lowell's poetry invited such moralistic readings in the first place. In Travisano’s “exploratory paradigm,” the reader is allowed a sense of unparalleled access to the poet's subconscious "memory-traces and dreamlike recurrences of the past, as well as among the symptomatic behaviors of the present" 30 but, by gaining such glimpses into the poet’s psyche, is entirely removed from the scene of reading. This access is of course a fantasy, but it is a powerful one that promises the confessional reader a false sense of anonymously witnessing the poet’s inner-most thoughts to her or himself. In favor of this imagined intimacy of the exploratory paradigm, Lowell himself becomes both the reader and subject of his poems. The poem’s true textual modes of address are simultaneously reified and abstracted away from its actual readers. 31

Christopher Grobe’s recent essay, “The Breath of the Poem: Confessional

Print/Performance circa 1959,” in the March 2012 special issue of the PMLA on mid-twentieth- century poetry similarly erases the position of actual readers despite his attempts to read confessional poetry through performance theory. Grobe’s description of a mid-century

“performative turn” goes so far as to define confessional poetry as a “performance genre, infused, at every stage of its creation and dissemination, with the synesthetic “breath” of embodied orality.” 32 Grobe’s fascination with Anne Sexton’s vodka breath and Robert Lowell’s smell insists on the difference between the fantasy of poetic speech and the physical performance of public poetry readings, but this difference is, obviously, the precise “breath” that cannot be embodied by the physical medium of print poetry. Against his claims that such a breath is

“infused, at every stage of its dissemination,” he experiences Sexton’s vodka breath as a counter- intuitive question that asserts a fantasy of the author’s body more than an actual visceral awareness of her odor: “And I know that everyone says that vodka has no detectable odor, but if you were sitting in the front row at one of Anne Sexton’s readings, could you catch a whiff of those thermosfuls [sic] of booze she drank to fend off stage fright?” 33 For Grobe, the power of such odors emanates not from actual moments of contact with the poet’s physical body, but from the fantasy of such potential but no longer accessible points of contact. The scene of private reading can scarcely be distinguished from the scene of the public poetry reading, but the scene of the public reading is clearly privileged here. Regardless of this, Grobe strangely dismisses the power of actual poetry readings. The physical text becomes a substitute for the body of the author, which in the age of rehearsed poetry readings functions as, “merely the onion-skin flap protecting the poem.” 34 Forgetting for a moment the long history of both formal and informal public poetry readings that Grobe fails to sufficiently acknowledge, this fantasy of substituting

the text of the book for the author’s body offers us little that is not already imagined by John

Stuart Mill’s description in 1833 of poetry, “which is printed on hot-pressed paper, and sold at a bookseller’s shop, is a soliloquy in full dress and on the stage.” 35

Grobe asserts, “Let breath , at once visceral and ethereal, stand for the tensile play between print and performance,” but the very impossibility of Grobe’s prescription for us as critics to “disregard the boundaries between archive and repertoire, autobiography and confession, print and performance” 36 illustrates the hypnotic power of confessional poetry to repress, as if by prestidigitation, these physical limitations of poetry. Lowell, in his youth, disagreed with Ezra Pound by defending the value and importance of live poetry readings against the solitary scene of private reading. In one of Lowell’s earlier letters, written to J.F. Powers in

1948, Lowell transcribes a brief argument with Ezra Pound on the relative value of real and imagined readings of poetic voice:

Cal: “You know, The Waste Land is a much better poem as Eliot reads it than it is on

paper.

Ezra: “Why, it’s a damn good poem anyway.”

Cal: “Yes, but it’s a better one read.”

Ezra: “You ought to be able to do that for yourself. What you’re saying is that Eliot is a

better piano player than you are.”

Slight pause, Ezra draws himself up in a mock pontifical attitude and roars: “Your mind

is so corrupted by your rhetorical reading that to appreciate really good poetry you have

to hear it read aloud.”

Then we all (Mrs. Pound too) burst out laughing.

Ezra: “One of my pleasantest experiences is to watch the startled expression on a young

man’s face when he realized that Granpa is right on some small particular.”

Cal: “How about the reverse?” 37

In lieu of Grobe’s argument regarding confessional poetry’s “performative turn,” I believe that

Lowell’s work interrogates and plays with the reading practices surrounding printed poetry by mixing in and remediating 38 the properties of alternative print discourses such as the memoir, correspondence letters, or literary translation. Contrary to arguments against the label confessional poetry, I contend that the confessional effect of Lowell’s poetry is the result of

Lowell anticipating and manipulating mid-century reading practices. Lowell’s writing seems particularly obsessed with examining and challenging the coterminous relationship between the specific modes of his writing and the differing processes through which these texts are circulated and read, particularly as expressions of his autobiography. In the same March 2012 issue of the

PMLA where Grobe published his essay, Deborah Nelson observes as a point of praise that even as studies in this period become increasingly interdisciplinary, scholars are, “preserving the practice of close reading and the engagement with the poetic tradition characteristic of the field.” 39 This insistence on lyric close reading, while a staple of our discipline, refuses to interpret how the illusion of Lowell's confessional voice is the product of multiple poetic and non-poetic literary modes. As a result of this refusal, we are erasing the diversity of reading practices applied to Lowell’s poetry and constructing abstract poetic speakers who stand in and speak for Robert Lowell himself. Rather than dismissing moralistic or autobiographical readings of Lowell’s poetry, I believe that the persistence of these non-poetical “misreadings” marks

Lowell’s concentrated and quite successful effort throughout his oeuvre to artfully address modern readers and resurrect a non-academic audience for “the intelligent poet.”

Arguing that Lowell’s poetry taps into and integrates the reading practices of both poetic and non-poetic genres requires a significant reevaluation of the historical impact of confessional poetry. Critics such as Diane Wood Middlebrook, in her entry "What Was Confessional Poetry" for The Columbia History of American Poetry , define Lowell’s confessional poetry not as the invention of a new poetic mode, but as the restoration of an old mode that had been lost amid the

New Criticism's intentional and affective fallacies. As she describes it, Lowell "reinstat[ed] the insistently autobiographical first person engaged in resistance to the pressure to conform.” 40

While Life Studies was groundbreaking in its time largely because of its new, unprecedented sense of candor, Lowell's integration of autobiography into his poetry has lost its historical specificity as a unique mode of address. For all of Lowell’s reputation as a “cooked” poet, on the publication of Life Studies , Lowell’s mentor, Allen Tate, criticized Lowell’s collection for what he saw as its un-worked, rough quality. Lowell's new style, as far as Tate was concerned, seemed better suited for prose, and not for poetry:

I do not mean to say that in some of these [poems] there are not sharp and even brilliant

passages like the old Cal; it is simply that by and large, and in the total effect, the poems

are composed of unassimilated details, terribly intimate, and coldly noted, which might

well have been transferred from the notes from your autobiography without change. 41

Even if Tate's claim that Lowell's new mode of autobiographical poetry seemed troubling and lacked "public or literary interest" obviously turned out to be misguided, the naturalness through which we have come to read confessional poetry as self-expression overlooks just how strange

Lowell’s particular mode of writing seemed at the moment when it was first published.

Despite the frequency with which we talk about “confessional poetry” as the dominant mode of mid-century American poetry, at the time of Life Studies ’s publication initial readers

struggled and often failed to make sense of the narrative structures of Lowell’s poetry as poetry .

In many instances, the narrative components of Lowell’s poetry were read as a contradiction of his poetic voice, a mark of his “rawness” and departure from poetic form for at least a few years right after Life Studies ’s release. M.L. Rosenthal, contrary to the longstanding belief that his review of Life Studies coined the phrase “confessional poetry,” did not talk about Lowell’s writing as a genre of poetry until his publication of The Modern Poets about a year later.

Rosenthal’s review is much more cautious than the almost common-knowledge readiness with which criticism cites it implies. Instead of offering clear prescriptions on how to read Lowell’s poetry, Rosenthal reviews Life Studies by insisting on the text’s strange but powerful energy: “It is too early to say whether Life Studies is great art. Enough, for the moment, to realize that it is inescapably encompassing art.” 42

Rosenthal’s review, in its entirety, is marked by these types of uncertain variations between praise and condemnation. Rosenthal understands that Life Studies is “art,” quite clearly poetry, but something about Lowell’s “poetry” causes Rosenthal to resist calling it as such.

While in Rosenthal’s book, the title of his chapter addressing Lowell confidently demarcates a

“Poetry of Confession,” 43 the title of Rosenthal’s review struggles to find an adequate term for

Lowell’s writing and maintains an uncertain separation between poetry and confession as two distinct mediums of expression, linking the two together with a simile: “Poetry as Confession.” If in his later book “confession” represents a genre of poetry, in Rosenthal’s review “confession” stands in as an inadequate placeholder for an autobiographical mode that feels poetic even while it resists poetic reading. Rosenthal goes through great effort, in fact, to contextualize and justify this confusion by opening his review with a typical history of what we might call the post-

Romantic “lyric.” Naming Dickinson, Whitman, and the Romantics in a teleological relationship

with the Symbolists, Eliot, and Pound, Rosenthal intentionally leaves the relationship between

Lowell’s poetry and a larger literary tradition of post-romantic poetry open. 44 The conclusion of his essay reasserts Lowell’s strange belonging within and deviation from the historical norm, ambiguously asserting that Lowell “brings to culmination one line of development in our poetry of the utmost importance.” 45 But what does Rosenthal mean by “culmination?” Is Life Studies the apex of a literary tradition or its end point, the foundation for something entirely new?

Rosenthal’s interpretive impasse with reading Life Studies is clearly caused by the text’s use of an explicitly autobiographical persona, which he believes violates the standards of poetry as an art form: “It will be clear that my first impression while reading Life Studies was that it is impure art, magnificently stated but unpleasantly egocentric.” 46 For Rosenthal, who understands post-Romantic poetry as a “certain indirection” that “masks the poet’s actual face and psyche from greedy eyes,” the chief problem with reading Lowell’s “use of poetry” is precisely how to read Lowell’s synthesis of autobiography and poetry as poetry and not as a “ use of poetry” bastardized by its autobiographical focus. Rosenthal’s review is not without its praise, but his most lucid and unhesitatingly celebratory words are reserved for the earlier, more traditional, sections of the collection. Tellingly, the price for this certainty is a disavowal of Lowell’s autobiographical elements. Rosenthal assures his readers that the collection is not entirely unfriendly to poetic reading practices, noting with a resounding end-stopped sentence that Life

Studies is “not merely a collection of small moment-by-moment victories over hysteria and self- concealment. It is also a beautifully articulated poetic sequence.” 47

As an unfortunate consequence of Lowell’s increasing influence and success after Life

Studies , Rosenthal's initial grasp towards the word "confessional" as placeholder for the uneasy intersection between the conflicting modes of autobiographical prose and poetry has been

ignored and Lowell's autobiographical mode has been naturalized as an extension of the imagined speaking situation of Romantic poetry. While for Rosenthal, Lowell's removal of "the mask" threatened his continuity with the Romantic literary tradition of symbolically coded first- person “speakers,” Lowell's candor has curiously come to mark his placement within the same literary tradition that once seemed resistant to direct first-person expression. In his discussions of

Life Studies , Lowell explains this resistance as a formal property of mid-century poetry: “I wanted to see how much of my personal story and memories I could get into poetry. To a large extent, it was a technical problem, as most problems of poetry are. But it was also something of a cause: to extend the poem to include, without compromise, what I felt and knew.” 48

When Lowell talks about the autobiographical content of his poetry, he frequently attributes this effect to the influence of prose on his writing. During his interview with Frederick

Seidel, he explains how prose reading practices help cultivate a believable autobiographical persona:

If a poem is autobiographical—and this is true of any kind of autobiographical writing and

of historical writing—you want the reader to say, This is true. In something like

Macaulay’s History of England , you think you’re getting William III. That’s as good as a

good plot in a novel. And so there was always that standard of truth which you wouldn’t

ordinarily have in poetry—the reader was to believe he was getting the real Robert

Lowell. 49

Frank Bidart parses this passage, which is frequently quoted in studies on Lowell's work, by describing Lowell’s autobiographical voice as an “aesthetic effect” of his writing, “the illusion that the poem is not art but a report on life.” 50 Bidart, who worked personally with Lowell and knows better than anyone the intentionality and constructedness of Lowell’s poetry, is irrefutable in his

claim that, “The power aimed at in Life Studies is the result not of accuracy but the illusion of accuracy, the result of arrangement and invention.”51 Bidart's choice of the verb "report" is notably unemotional and risks reducing the persona responsible for Lowell's illusion into an automaton, but it reflects back on the surprisingly non-poetic details of Lowell's interview. According to

Lowell, it is his poetry's ability to read like a "good plot in a novel" or history textbook that reinforces the veracity of his poetry's often invented experiences.

While calling the source of confessional poetic address a reporter instead of a speaker fails to acknowledge the beauty and texture of Lowell's writing, this label gestures to the multiple forms of poetic and non-poetic reading practices simultaneously engaged by Lowell's verse. As Lowell explains in an oft cited passage from “On Enjoying Six or Seven Essays On Me,” poetry as a form seemed unable to accommodate the type of autobiographical project he was undertaking:

“When I was working on Life Studies , I found I had no language or meter that would

allow me to approximate what I saw or remembered. Yet in prose I had already found

what I wanted, the conventional style of autobiography and reminiscence. So I wrote

my autobiographical poetry in a style I thought I had discovered in Flaubert, one that

used images and ironic or amusing particulars.” 52

Lowell’s decision to turn to Flaubert, while described as his utilization of a prose “style,” exceeds this modesty by explaining the capabilities of Lowell’s new style against the deficient properties of poetic writing as a form . Specifically, Lowell demonstrates an interest in exploring more than just how he is expressing his memories: he is concerned about expanding poetry’s formal capacities to express “ what he saw or remembered" and pushes against poetry’s limited ability to depict such content by implanting a plot or narrative into the heart of his poetic project. As Lowell

notes in a letter to Randall Jarrell, one of the primary differences between poetry and prose is that

“in prose you have to be interested in what is being said.” 53

Reading for the “what” of Lowell’s poetry, which critics see as anathema to the aesthetic merits of Lowell’s poetry, organizes and brings the confessional effect of his poetry into being. As such, the minute details of Lowell’s everyday life, while giving rise to and constructing his confessional persona, also escape the purview of mid-century poetic address due to their perceived incommensurability with poetry as a literary form. Lowell’s description of the relationship between print culture and prose plot structure in his review of Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to

Dragons gestures to a material, but “ephemeral” whatness of everyday life that is defined by its opposition to the modern transhistorical poetic speaker:

Back in the palmy imperialist days of Victoria, Napoleon’s nephew, and Baudelaire, a

kind of literary concordant was reached: the ephemeral was ceded to prose. Since then

the new poetry has been so scrupulous and electrical, its authors seem seldom to have

regretted this Mary-and-Martha division of labor. Poetry became all that was not prose.

Under this dying-to-the-world discipline, the stiffest and most matter-of-fact items were

repoeticized—quotations from John of the Cross, usury, statistics, conversations, and

newspaper clippings. These amazing new poems could absorb everything—everything,

that is, except plot and characters, just those things long poems usually relied upon […]

Outside of [Robert] Browning, what nineteenth-century story poems do we still read? 54

Contrary to arguments about modernism’s poetic license, 55 Lowell’s review points to an “electric” but “dying to the world” narrowing of poetic genres. Surprisingly, given the history between the the dramatic monologue and the emergent figure of the lyric speaker, 56 Lowell locates Browning as an inspiration for opening up and revitalizing mid-century poetry. Lowell’s envy of Browning,

“the large poet of the nineteenth century who attracts and repels us,” 57 stems from what Lowell perceived as his ability to write about any subject and in perfect form: “Who couldn’t he use,

Napoleon III, St. John, Cardinal Manning, Caliban? He set them in a thousand meters. Nor was his ear deficient—take the opening of Andrea del Sarto , hundreds of lines of Christmas Eve , all of the Householder , most of Mr. Sludge the Medium. ”58 Despite his admiration for Browning’s metrics, Lowell believed that Browning’s deftness created distance between him and his subjects;

Lowell’s reading of Browning places the excellence of Browning’s poetic meter in tension with

Browning’s poetic address, which in the age of the lyric speaker requires the illusion of an authentic voice that is complicated by the indelibly poetic speaking situation of meter. Lowell muses, yet again, on the desirable infusion of prose into poetry, suggesting that Browning’s poetry might have been more “plain,” and hence better, if written by a novelist: “[…| Browning’s idiosyncratic robustness scratches us, and often his metrical acrobatics are too good. One wishes one could more often see him plain, or as he might have been written by some master novelist,

Samuel Butler or George Eliot, though not in her Italian phase.” 59

Throughout Lowell’s essays and letters, prose writing as a literary medium offers a closeness to the ephemeral, material world that Lowell worries poetry can no longer, but must address. Strangely, as in his reading of Browning, Lowell reads Emily Dickinson not necessarily for her revitalization of poetic “voice,” but for her ability to “plunder what was handy.” 60 Lowell only reads her as a lyric poet in the most superficial and necessary ways, recognizing her reputation of creating, “not only spoken language but her own self-speaking language.” Lowell’s essay is fascinating where he resists this lyric reading, at one point comparing her lines to “the late Henry

James’s recklessly strenuous prose.” For Lowell, Dickinson did not write small, single poems, but instead worked toward a larger literary project, much like his own, of expanding poetry into the

realm of prose. He sees in the collection of her writing, like a long novel, “drawbacks to the bulk— the straying into shagginess, purposeless bad grammar, meaningless dashes spread like bird shot” 61 but also admires her for her “divine waywardness, whose success is impossible to approve or condemn.” 62 He admits that she “revolutionized poetry,” but curiously describes her revolution in prose terms: “it was as if she had applied the subtleties of prose to the alien goal of poetry; she made the language of her contemporaries obsolete—if anyone had heard her.” 63

To Lowell, Browning and Dickinson, perhaps the two most iconic originators of the contemporary lyric tradition, counter-intuitively offer models for escaping the “literary concordant” and revitalizing mid-century poetry. Lowell, who admits that Browning’s voice is

“scratchy,” envies him and Dickinson for their ability to include the assorted, ephemeral, and material world that Lowell felt best expressed by prose. Lowell believed that Browning was “right” not because of the mode of his dramatic monologues, but because of their subject material:

Browning had all the right ideas about what poetry should take in—people and time. But

(this is presumptuous) how he muffed it all! The ingenious, terrific metrics, shaking the

heart out of what he was saying; the invented language; the short-cuts; the hurry; and (one

must say it) the horrible self-indulgence—the attitudes, the cheapness! I write strongly

because he should, with patience, have been one of the great poets of the world. 64

Despite Lowell’s admission in “On Skunk Hour” that his trip to San Francisco in 1957 “made him sorely aware” of how his earlier styles “seemed distant, symbol-ridden, and willfully difficult,” 65

Lowell’s unique interpretation of Browning in the above letter to George Santayana, written in

1948 between Lord Weary’s Castle and Mills of the Kavanaughs , shows that his frustration with difficult language and rigid meter precedes his turn towards his “confessional style” in Life Studies and, most importantly, that his experiments with dramatic monologues in Mills were part of a

larger career-long interest in using prose elements to revitalize poetic address. In a letter to

Elizabeth Bishop in 1974, more than twenty-five years after his letter to Santayana, Lowell links these critiques of Browning to his use of autobiography in his confessional poems:

I’ve always thought using oneself was fine because I could test the feeling by memory in

revision, or better still draw on and correct the details of description. But of course anything

so close allows too little for the imagination, the pleasure of pure invention, the control of

plot and form. Browning was never too good, almost[,] when he came close to being

directly himself—he had almost limitless invention, yet there seems too much Browning-

voice in his people, and then, I don’t know how to say it, too little of Browning. 66

According to Lowell, the anticipated voice of the poet, the “Browning-voice,” conflicted with

Browning’s freedom as an author. Lowell talks about Browning’s use of personal experience as a corrective rubric that bears more relevance for his process of revision than for his writing process and opposes his use of authentic autobiography against his “control of plot and form.” Even if

Lowell laments the decline of such “story poems” in his review of Brothers to Dragons and points to Browning as the sole remnant of a lost genre, the story offered in such poetry is clearly not an autobiographical one. Not merely an issue of content, autobiography clashes against both the plot and form of the story poem genre.

“Beyond the Alps,” Lowell’s first poem in Life Studies, draws heavily on his reading of

Brother to Dragons and announces the collection’s efforts to violate the “literary concordant” against integrating plot and characters into poetry. Bidart, in his notes to Lowell’s Collected

Poems, emphasizes the poem’s resonances to Lowell’s review of Brother to Dragons and describes

“Beyond the Alps” as a metaphoric summarization of “Lowell’s journey from Lord Weary’s Castle to Life Studies.” 67 The title of his poem honors Lowell’s newness as a debt to Warren’s “story

poems” which have, as he says in his review, “crossed the Alps and, like Napoleon’s shoeless army, entered the fat, populated river bottom of the novel.” 68 The poem, drawing on his skepticism of Pope Pius XII’s sudden declaration of Mary’s bodily assumption 69 , pushes for a poetic practice that understands its relation to the world. Throughout the text, detachment breeds hypocrisy; the poem mocks the Pope who might “at one miraculous stroke” defy “the lights of science” even while shaving himself with an “electric razor,” 70 and rejects Mussolini, the occasional fixation of

Lowell’s manic episodes, for being “one of us / only, pure prose.” 71 This removal from the world is an enviable but “conspicuous waste” of excessive privilege that, while once a mark of culture, cannot teach us about living in the modern world:

“I envy the conspicuous

waste of our grandparents on their grand tours—

long-haired Victorian sages accepted the universe,

while breezing on their trust funds through the world.” 72

Lowell’s image of Victorian sages blurs together 19th century British and American poetic traditions by alluding to the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, the founding editor of the The Dial who said, “I accept the universe.” 73 By referencing these sages as wasteful and naive, the poem attempts to distance its descriptions of modernity from what it sees as the hypocritical and privileged vantage points of American Romanticism, Victorian literature, and 20 th Century

Modernism; but Lowell, who himself wrote “Beyond the Alps” while partially living off of a trust fund and touring Rome, describes this envy with a near-sightedness that, if the poem is read autobiographically, undermines his project by risking a detachment from material circumstances that is not unlike Pope Pious shaving with an electric razor while denouncing science.

Lowell, who wrote “Beyond the Alps” in 1952, five years before “Skunk Hour” and the other poems that would later mark his new “confessional” style, avoids here, instead of embraces, this contradiction between his actual lived experiences and his poetic persona. By having his persona wake up after his train has already crossed the Alps, Lowell pits his poem against

Wordsworth’s The Prelude , but does so by inverting Wordsworth’s “Simplon Pass” crossing: “Our mountain-climbing train had come to earth. Tired of the querulous hush-hush of the wheels, the blear-eyed ego kicking in my berth lay still, and saw Apollo plant his heels on terra firma through the morning’s thigh.” 74 For Lowell, this crossing represents a failure of the persona’s mental facilities, a “miscarriage of the brain,” and laments the unrestrained abandon of imagination;

Wordsworth famously depicts the Simplon Pass crossing as a failure of his imagination. 75 In these stanzas of “Beyond the Alps,” imagination runs amok into some of his poem’s most figurative lines, but these images, which are lush with allusions to Roman and Greek mythology, risk the same reckless dissociation from the real world that Lowell attributes to the Pope’s declaration of

Mary’s bodily assumption and hence must give way to something else. Lowell’s style here is not the style we associate with Life Studies , and echoes his older style that even Lowell criticized for its “impenetrable surface.” 76 But, this poem also announces the collection’s journey, literally and figuratively, toward something different. As such, Lowell ends the poem with a contradictory image of antiquated newness that is neither Roman nor Greek. The speaker arrives in a different city, Paris, which is hardly new, a “black classic.” But, in this newness, there is an imminent rupture, which is in turn caused by the same ancient divisions:

“Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up

Like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.” 77

Frank Bidart explains Etruscan art in the footnotes to the Collected Poems by quoting from The

New Columbia Encyclopedia : “Etruscan art, formally dependent upon Greek art, is equally complex for, while the forms are recognizably Hellenized, the underlying spirit still retains a barbaric energy quite opposed to the Greek search for perfection in harmony.” 78 This quote, which describes art in terms of harmony and barbarism, bears a telling resemblance to the division that

Lowell outlines in his cooked and raw speech, but the poem draws this comparison with a simile; these new divisions are only like the old ones. The act of reading this comparison opens up the potential for a new poetry, but does so by reminding us that newness itself is complicated by an aesthetic tradition of rupture and division. These violent “killer kings” hardly offer a desirable model to reinvigorate poetry, even if they open up the potential for that reinvigoration.

The remaining three poems in the first section of Life Studies all contemplate the status of the old in relation to the new. “The Banker’s Daughter” and “Inauguration Day: January 1953” offer two contrasting ekphrastic depictions of mausoleums in order to complicate the formal implications of elegiac poetry. In “The Banker’s Daughter,” Marie de Medici, who was mocked by her recently murdered husband King Henri IV as “a cow producing veal,” 79 imagines the immutability of her husband’s tomb as site for both redemption and liberation that offers her unparalleled agency. Her husband’s tomb, “at Saint Denis, / the chiseled bolster and Carrara hound

/ show no emotion when we kiss the ground,” 80 uses the double-meaning of bolster as both a bed and as a support beam in order to transform Marie from “this poor country egg from Florence” into a dangerously influential figure in the French court who served as regent for her son: “I am his vintage, and his living vine / entangles me, and oozes mortal wine / moment to moment. By repeated crime, / even a queen survives her little time.” 81

Alternatively, “Inauguration Day: January 1953” imagines the permanence of Grant’s tomb in New York as an inescapable site of influence that corrupts the possibility for renewal:

Ice, ice. Our wheels no longer move.

Look, the fixed stars, all just alike

as lack-land atoms, split apart,

and the Republic summons Ike,

the mausoleum in her heart. 82

Lowell, who publically announced his CO status in order to protest Roosevelt’s bombing of

Hamburg during World War II, shifts from the dramatic monologue of “Banker’s Daughter” into a public mode of commemorative poetry, but does so only to mourn the decline of an American public as such. Lowell’s letter to Roosevelt in response to the Hamburg bombing condemned the

US’s destruction of civilian property during WWII as “a betrayal of my country” and summoned the figure of Grant as a similarly reckless warmonger: “Americans cannot plead ignorance of the lasting consequences of war carried through to unconditional surrender—our Southern states, three-quarters of a century after their terrible battering down and occupation, are still far from having recovered even their material prosperity.” 83 Lowell’s poem does not figure the public it intends to address, and instead only refers to them as a fallen collective, “the Republic,” who destructively celebrates death by building mausoleums to Grant and electing someone whom, in

Lowell’s estimation, is tantamount to a war criminal. While “Banker’s Daughter” depicts death as a site of joy and harvest, “now season’s cycle to the laughing ring of scything children,”

“Inauguration Day” sees Grant’s mausoleum as a still heart that poisons and stalls the possibility for a Republic ideal.

Lowell’s disappointment with the American electorate in “Inauguration Day” segues into section’s final poem, “A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich,” which opens with “We’re all

Americans.” 84 In “Mad Negro Soldier,” the mania of the dramatic monologue is figured as a consequence of the soldier’s dis-identification with his American allies who “floored” him and the sympathetic treatment given to him by his enemies. As Steven Yenser writes:

[The soldier’s] alienation is witnessed not only by his confinement following World War

II, and not only by his color, but also most poignantly by the drubbing given to him by two

other black American inmates. That insanity is the nature of his environment as well as the

state of his mind is indicated by his claim that he receives attention only from those whom

he is supposed to be at war, “a Kraut DP” and a “ Fraulein. ”85

In “Mad Soldier,” the soldier’s metaphorical allusions to public transportation, “Oh mama, mama, like a trolley-pole / sparking at contact, her electric shock—the power-house,” 86 connect the

Negro’s affair with the German Fraulein to Lowell’s larger concerns about the relationship between poetry and its contemporary publics. The Soldier’s affair, which draws on Lowell’s description of the “El” in “Inauguration Day,” undoes the disappointing, mechanized class divides of urban modernity in “Inauguration Day,” “Manhattan’s truss of adamant, that groaned in ermine, slummed on want,” 87 but does so only by forfeiting the Soldier’s mind. He is destroyed by his cosmopolitan identity, which he cannot adequately reconcile with his identity as an American soldier during WWII, even as he is revitalized by it. If “Beyond the Alps” compares Lowell’s search for new poetic forms to the dissolution of objective moral authorities (the Church, Fascism, and Parisian aesthetics), “Mad Negro Soldier” interjects that the individual subject is similarly undermined by, and hence unable to endure, a modern world that resists moral absolutes.

Given the reputation of Life Studies as a collection of confessional poetry, these opening four poems feel out of place. However, following Lowell’s discussion of the “literary concordant,” if we do not assume a comfortable relationship between poetry and prose, then these poems make much more sense because they each, like the confessional poems later in the collection, attempt to broaden a perceived relationship between poetry and the modern world. In Lowell's letter to Steven

Gould Axelrod in 1974, he reflects on Life Studies and the pressure to keep his poetry innovative and fresh: “Perhaps most revolutionaries are only so in their moment of action. I think I was a professional who was forced, who forced myself, into a revolutionary writing style in writing Life

Studies , the biggest change in myself perhaps I ever made or will—to continue it, tho I’m at times tempted, would be pastiche.” 88 Critics who describe Lowell's poetry as a return to the Romantic first-person speaker fail to appreciate the innovative and distinctly mid-century modes of address throughout both Life Studies and his career as a whole. In Marjorie Perloff’s discussion of “Man and Wife,” for example, the autobiographical content of the poem is taken for granted as “the most obvious thing to say about this poem is that it marks a return to the romantic mode in which the

‘I,’ clearly designated as the poet himself, undergoes a highly personal experience.” 89 Even if we agree with Perloff that “Man and Wife” should be read as an expression of Lowell the poet, making this reading an “obvious” interpretations of his poetry ignores the artistry through which Lowell manipulates the specificity of his poem’s details in order to make the poem’s self-reflective mode seem so apparent.

Although it is likely that Lowell intended for “Man and Wife” to be read as a depiction of his own marriage with Elizabeth Hardwick, such an autobiographical reading of the poem is only possible if we ignore the ways in which the poem also draws upon the titular dramatic monologue from his previous collection, The Mills of the Kavanaughs . While the details in “Man and Wife,”

notably his references to Marlborough Street and out-drinking Philip Rahv in Greenwich Village strongly suggest an autobiographical reading, the poem maintains enough gestures to Anne

Kavanaugh’s narrative to plausibly suggest an alternative reading of a non-autobiographical persona operating within and directing the poem’s autobiographical mode. The opening line,

“Tamed by Miltown, we lie in Mother’s bed,” juxtaposes both of these readings by its unnecessary italicization of the popular 1950’s tranquilizer Miltown and its equally unnecessary capitalization of the word “mother.” While many have noted, including Perloff, 90 that Lowell’s capitalization of

Mother poignantly gestures back to the domineering portrait of Lowell’s mother throughout Life

Studies , the homophone between “ Miltown ” and “Mill town” and the grammatically unnecessary italicization here links the proper name of the drug to the name of Lowell’s previous collection of poems, Mills of the Kavanaughs .91 If we read this line as an allusion to the Mills , the image of the

“gilded bed-posts” as “almost Dionysian” in the same stanza contrasts the husband’s lust with the statue of Persephone from the opening stanza of the Mills. The statue of Persephone in The Mills anticipates the incestuous violation of the “Mother’s” bed in “Man and Wife” by “beckon[ing] to a mob of Bacchanals,” a mythological cult that worshiped the Roman equivalent of Dionysus, infrequently depicted as Persephone’s son—Persephone, a goddess, in this reading becomes the proper reason for the capitalization of “Mother.”

The debt that “Man and Wife” owes to Mills is not only a symbolic or thematic one; the central scene of Mills where Anne Kavanaugh is beaten by her husband for talking in her sleep is similar enough to the ending of “Man and Wife” that it is difficult to attribute the events of “Man and Wife” to Lowell’s tropological use of autobiography, despite the poem’s suggestions of a confessional mode. While “Man and Wife,” unlike Mills , does not concretely depict physical

abuse, the poem’s speaker is woken up by his “sleepless” wife’s “old-fashioned tirade,” which is hyperbolically described form of physical violence:

Sleepless, you hold

your pillow to your hollows like a child;

your old-fashioned tirade—

loving, rapid, merciless—

breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head. 92

This image of the Atlantic Ocean breaking, while not directly alluding to the images used during

Henry Kavanaugh’s beating of his wife for speaking in her sleep, echoes the nautical images in

Anne’s subsequent dreams as a result of the beating:

[…]My mouth

Was open, and I seemed to mime your hound’s

Terrified panting; and our trimming ship

Was shipping water… I was staring at

Our drifting oars. The moon was floating—flat

As the old world of maps. I thought, “I’ll stay.

Harry,’ I whispered […] 93

“Man and Wife,” when read as an allusion to Anne Kavanaugh’s rejected impulse in Mills to leave her husband, bestows a frustrated complacency into the husband’s experience of his wife’s

metaphorical violence. The contrast in “Man and Wife” between the couple’s courtship and their marriage twelve years later offers more than just a portrait of marital decline; this contrast reflects on the husband’s active thought-process as he decides to remain married to his wife. Even without noticing Anne’s influence on “Man and Wife,” the poem’s conflicting use of “loving” alongside

“merciless” hints towards the husband’s mixed emotions. However, failing to notice Anne’s influence risks misinterpreting the husband’s recognition of such intimate moments like the wife cuddling her pillow “like a child” as a recognition of lost innocence not unlike the limerence of their courtship, but Anne’s persona, which similarly uses water images to express her decision to continue her marriage in Mills , transforms the poem’s potential awareness of loss into bittersweet moments of reaffirmation.

Insistence on the “obviousness” of Lowell’s autobiographical mode misses how artfully he manipulates his readers of “Man and Wife” into misreading details drawn from Mills of the

Kavanaughs as the natural expressions of an autobiographical persona. While Perloff espouses

Lowell’s use of realist techniques, especially metonymy, as a way of arguing for Lowell’s innovativeness as a poet, she refuses to consider the ways in which the candidness of Lowell’s autobiography worked in tension with his medium when the collection was published in 1959.

Perloff’s effort to read the influence of realist novels as a technical innovation in Lowell’s poetry instead of as a formal one gestures towards a critical engagement with Lowell’s autobiographical mode, but does so only to ultimately emphasize the irrelevance of such an inquiry:

Whether or not the references in Life Studies ‘tell the truth’ about Lowell seems beside

the point. Because he is writing autobiography, Lowell cannot, of course, tinker with the

basic facts of his life: geographic locale, dates, the names and positions of friends and

relatives, the schools attended, the three months spent in a mental hospital, and so on.

Despite such restrictions, however, Lowell has a great deal of leeway: for all we know,

his mother never owned an electric blanket nor his father a ‘rhino’ armchair; for all we

know, Lowell never spent a sleepless night arguing with his wife Elizabeth. The accuracy

of Lowell’s confessional poetry is of interest to the biographer, but for the critic, the

exciting thing is to discern how thoroughly Lowell mythologizes his private life. 94

Perloff’s attempt to steer the interests of criticism away from the poem’s sense of autobiography and towards its means of “mythologizing” struggles against the massive publicness of Lowell as a popular writer and well-known public figure. Whose private life is being mythologized if the veracity of Lowell’s confessionalism is restricted only to the “basic facts” of his life, facts that are widely available in public records (perhaps even readily available to public knowledge, given the distinction of his family name)? Because of this, the task of the critic must still concern itself with the truth of Lowell’s autobiography: is the critic to examine how Lowell mythologizes his actual private life, or the fictional private life of a textual persona? In the former, the act of mythologizing seems to suggest a process of embellishment, but in the latter mythologizing suggests something else, a process through which fictional “myths” are transformed into cultural beliefs. Perloff mitigates the force of this ambiguity by reading Lowell’s autobiographal elements as an extension of autobiography as literary genre, stabilizing the referentiality of the first-person pronoun as long as the text operates within the “leeways” of certain “restrictions.”

Perloff’s rules for this form of autobiography, however, are unavoidably grounded in an understanding of autobiography as a narrative based prose genre; in order to follow Perloff’s plea and read Lowell’s poetry as poetry¸ Perloff’s critic must first contextualize Lowell’s poetry against a set of “basic facts” that require the critic to read, alongside Lowell’s poetry, the very biographical archives that Perloff claims the critic should not be concerned with.

The ambiguity between Lowell’s factual history and his fictional private life, although a complication for Perloff’s description of his metonomy, was not a problem for Lowell the poet and instead offered a productive tension between his poetic modes and his public but exaggerated profile as a Lowell. The reasons that Perloff explains Lowell cannot tinker with the basic facts of his life, in fact, are inverted in Lowell’s poetry; when Lowell does not tinker with specific facts of his biography, his poems utilize the expectations of autobiographical reading practices that assume a coherency between obviously factual details and non-obvious, often non-factual, ones. Because the number of times the husband holds his wife’s hand in “Man and Wife,” “as if you had/ a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad,” 95 coincides with the actual number of times that Lowell’s wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, had experienced Lowell’s well-documented manic episodes, Lowell’s poem imbues the specificity of its other numbers such as “you were in your twenties” or “twelve years later” 96 with a, quoting Perloff, sense of “factual documentation” and “numerical accuracy.” 97 However, the illusion of accuracy in Lowell’s chronology here is a borrowed one that does not correspond even to the “basic facts” of Lowell and Hardwick’s relationship; Lowell did not meet Elizabeth Hardwick until his trip to Yaddo in 1948 when she was 32 years old. 98 Lowell’s manipulation of these facts augment the poem’s youthfulness by magnifying its Bohemianism, but

Lowell does so cautiously and without damaging the perceived reliability of the collection’s autobiographical mode. Words like “Mother” stand out more as a reference to Lowell’s own mother, as opposed to Persephone, precisely because Lowell’s references to “Mother” and

“Marlborough Street” encourage readers to read the poems of his collection and its short

“autobiographical” prose section, “91 Revere Street,” which establishes his mother’s domineering presence, as part of a single work and not as individual short “lyrics.”

“To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” which lacks any actual autobiographical referent, particularly benefits from Lowell’s encouragement of a continual, what he calls, “novelistic flow.” 99 By heightening the sense of Bohemianism in “Man and Wife,” the nostalgia behind the couple’s “outdrinking the Rahvs in the heat of Greenwich Village” in “Man and Wife” believably segues into the alcohol-induced violence depicted in “To Speak of Woe.” Read together, the turmoil resulting from the husband’s “whiskey-blind” “free-lancing” years later explains his idealization of their alcoholic, but consequence-free youth. While “To Speak of Woe” and “Man and Wife” were at one point drafted together as a single unpublished poem, “Holy Matrimony,”

Lowell reimagined the poem as a two work diptych, with “To Speak of Woe” responding to the male persona in the previous poem, “Man and Wife,” from the perspective of a woman, presumably Elizabeth Hardwick, reflecting on their marriage. The juxtaposition of these two poems is particularly awkward since, according to Lowell, the story of the poem itself, where the wife ties “ten dollars and his car key to my thigh,” was not Lowell’s own and was appropriated, as Frank Bidart explains, from what Delmore Schwartz’s wife had told Lowell about her marriage. 100 It is difficult, in fact, despite the confessional feel of “To Speak of Woe,” to locate any specific parts of the poem that belong to Lowell’s own life. As Lowell explains in his interview with Frederick Seidel, “To Speak of Woe,” “started as a translation of Catullus’s siqua recordanti benefacta ”101 and not as a reflection on his marriage. Although he admits, “I don’t know what traces are left,” his assertion that “it couldn’t have been written without Catullus,” challenges the emotional honesty of his poem. While the desperate tone of the poem might appropriately reflect on the emotional state of Delmore Schwartz’s wife during those nights, the single-mindedness of the wife’s turmoil where “my only thought is how to keep alive” makes it difficult to parse out the voice of Schwartz’s wife from its supposedly inactive origin in Catullus’s poem, which attempts

to bargain piety for the removal of “this foul disease,” an unchaste lover. The odd consequence of this intercision between Delmore Schwartz’s wife and Catullus is that, despite the likely absence of any explicit autobiographical components, the poem does not feel out of place within Lowell’s collection. Somehow, Lowell manages to appropriate these characters and unify them under an absent figure, Elizabeth Hardwick.

The traces of both of these unusual personalities, however, only challenge the confessional effect of Lowell’s collection because, like Anne Kavanaugh, they too are subsumed within

Lowell’s careful cultivation of a focused autobiographical narrative. 102 But, unlike “Man and

Wife,” “To Speak of Woe” encourages this sense of autobiography without drawing on any specific details (“basic facts”) that might anchor the poem to Lowell’s life. Instead, Lowell propagates this sense of candor by gesturing towards and consequently borrowing the autobiographical impression of “Man and Wife,” which is published immediately before “To

Speak of Woe.” Both poems establish their temporality by alluding to the freshly blossomed

Magnolia trees outside the couple’s window, but while “Man and Wife” offers an abundance of deictical markers to carefully orient the past and present moments of the speaker’s reflections, the

Magnolia trees in “To Speak of Woe,” when read without the aid of “Man and Wife,” cannot establish anything more than a generic sense of the poem’s seasonality. Detached from any specific moment of utterance, “To Speak of Woe” parallels the regularity of Boston’s springtime against the equally regular marital transgression of the speaker’s spouse; while the husband in “Man and

Wife” compares the difference between their past and present relationship, the wife in “To Speak of Woe” depicts the husband’s “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge” 103 with a disturbing sense of immutable monotony. His “swaggering home at five” in the morning does not mark a unique event, but instead magnifies the regularity of his transgressions “each night” by echoing and

inverting the idyllic “Ozzie and Harriet” fantasia of a husband returning home from his nine to five work schedule.

Oddly, even though the poem insists on describing its temporality in such generalized ways, Lowell’s use of quotation marks frames the poem explicitly as a piece of dialogue within a specific, albeit unstated, speaking situation. 104 Given the inescapable fiction of “the speaker” which imagines each poem already as a spoken text, the quotation marks here seem redundant, but this redundancy forces the fiction of the speaker to the forefront. Like the Wife of Bath alluded to in the poem’s title, “To Speak of Woe” grounds its authority in the repeatability of the speaker’s experiences (“Experience, though noon auctoritee / Were in this world, is right ynogh for me / To speke of woe that is in marriage”) 105 and is prompted to speak not because of a pre-established chronological order (as is the case with some of the Canterbury Tales ), but as an apologia refuting the previous speaker’s depiction of their marriage: if the husband is unsatisfied with the wife’s

“old-fashioned tirades,” she justifies her “mercilessness” by describing his infidelities and alcoholism. Despite the vast temporal differences between the characters of Robert Lowell,

Elizabeth Hardwick, Anne Kavanaugh, Catullus, Delmore Schwartz’s wife, and the Wife of Bath,

Lowell’s use of quotation marks and apologia anchors “To Speak of Woe” to “Man and Wife” and allows for the generalities of “To Speak of Woe” to imbricate themselves in the same temporal space of the Mother’s bed.

The true accomplishment of “Man and Wife” and “To Speak of Woe” is that, despite their awkward company of unrelated characters, these poems feel autobiographical—obviously so, in fact. Their shared space of the Mother’s bed, while gesturing towards Anne Kavanaugh, is only

“almost Dionysian”; no one doubts what this bed is and who it belongs to, and no matter how powerfully discrepant characters interject themselves into Lowell’s modes of address, no reader

will ever argue that these poems depict Lowell’s relationship with the Wife of Bath. For all of confessional poetry’s reputation as “a return to the romantic mode in which the ‘I,’ clearly designated as the poet himself, undergoes a highly personal experience,” the autobiographical effect in these poems cannot be a product of their personas; neither poem offers anything resembling a straightforward and “unmasked” representation of Lowell the poet, but because of this, the confessional effect in each poem must instead emerge as the epiphenomenal consequence of their modes of address, which when placed within the collection’s overarching autobiographical structure disambiguates the Mother’s bed and conglomerates each work’s assorted personalities into the characters sharing that bed, Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.

Lowell’s decision to so explicitly frame himself as the husband in “To Speak of Woe” has the strange effect, especially when placed into the context of the rest of his collection, of depicting his relationship with Hardwick as more abusive than his regular, 106 but by no means trivial, bouts of mania warranted. Critics who imagine confessional poetry as a form of therapy and self- discovery are challenged then not only by Lowell’s repeated integration of diverse characters and non-autobiographical facts, but also by Lowell’s exaggerated and deceptive treatment of himself as a caricature. 107 While the models offered by Travisano and Bidart attempt to push confessional reading practices away from moralizations of Lowell’s poetry, such treatments prioritize Lowell’s use of autobiography and fail to appreciate his collage-like use of multiple texts and divergent modes of address. Coincidentally, this oversight highlights Lowell’s psyche, but forgets the materiality of Lowell’s texts. As a result of this omission, these attempts to avoid the judgement implied by the label “confessional” too closely link Lowell the poet with Lowell the textual persona and open up Lowell’s poetry to same moralistic readings that these models attempt to avoid.

Few readings are as vitriolic or as damaging to Lowell’s reputation as Adrianne Rich’s famous polemic in the American Poetry Review published in 1973. In her review of Lowell's

Notebook, History, and The Dolphin , Rich condemns Lowell's use of his ex-wife’s letters in his poems for a "a kind of aggrandized and merciless masculinity at work in these books, particularly the third [ The Dolphin ], symptomatic of the dead-end destructiveness that masculine privilege has built for itself into all institutions, including poetry.” 108 Even though Rich praises

Lowell’s poetry "for all its verbal talent and skill," she is unusually harsh and labels Lowell's technical achievements in The Dolphin as "bullshit eloquence, a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book [....] one of the most mean-spirited acts in the history of poetry, one of which I can think of no precedent: and the same unproportioned ego that was capable of this act is damagingly at work in all three of Lowell's books.”109 Rich's claim that Lowell's had "no precedent" in the history of poetry, regardless of the fact that many texts, including Patterson and The Cantos both incorporate private letters, expresses a degree of surprise that seems to forget the entirety of Lowell's reputation as a confessional poet.

Responses to Rich’s indictment have often focused on Lowell’s descriptions of his autobiography, specifically his favorable representation of his ex-wife, and failed to consider

Rich’s argument against poetry’s capacity as a medium to adapt and circulate private letters.

Diane Wakoski’s direct reply to Rich in the following issue of the American Poetry Review argues two different strains of defense, both focused on Lowell’s descriptions of his ex-wife.

Wakoski’s first approach describes poetry as a whole as “once removed from life” 110 and hence views Dolphin as more a “mythology with characters named Elizabeth and Harriet and Caroline in it” 111 while her other contradictory and unrepentantly anti-feminist approach describes the book’s sympathetic depiction of Elizabeth as a justified one that exceeds Hardwick’s own

abilities to defend herself: “if the real Elizabeth of those poems was wronged in real-life, then the poems surely have given her a fuller and more triumphant day in court (we all admire her eloquent and stately beauty now) than perhaps even she could have obtained for herself.” 112

Defenses of Lowell’s collection have more or less echoed Wakoski’s emphasis on

Lowell’s depiction of his relationship. Lowell himself in a letter to Stanley Kunitz seems to agree with Wakoski’s depiction of Hardwick as a sympathetic figure in the book and admits his concerns about Lizzie’s reaction to its publication: “Lizzie is the heroine, the eel I try to ensnare and release from the eelnet, but she will feel bruised by the intimacy. She should win all hearts but what is that when you are left, and left again in print?” 113 Despite the number of critics rallying to Lowell’s defense, arguments that support the fairness of Lowell’s depiction of

Hardwick only address the content of Lowell’s poetry and fail to consider Lowell’s controversial remediation of private letters into a public form. As a consequence, critics have generally failed to address Rich’s primary critique, which focuses on Lowell’s unnecessary inclusion of his ex- wife’s letters themselves. Rich sees the “appropriation” of the letters themselves as an unnecessary and vindictive act without substantial aesthetic merit, largely because the letters are private, “written under the stress and pain of desertion.” 114 She argues that “if this kind of question has nothing to do with art, we have come far from the best of the tradition Lowell would like to vindicate—or perhaps it cannot be vindicated” 115 The Dolphin , perhaps even more so than Life Studies , is confined to a confessional mode of reading that, by focusing on the relationship between Lowell’s speaker and his actual lived experience, is ill-equipped to answer

Rich’s insistence on the difference between poetry and letters as distinct print mediums. Her question, which frames itself as a question not only of aesthetics, but also a question of the properties of both letters and poems as media, exceeds the scope of Lowell’s and Wakoski’s

defenses, which elaborate abstract (even “mythological”) aesthetic claims 116 about the purpose of poetry and ignore poetry’s circulation as a material object within social networks of communication.

Rich’s criticisms were effective and Lowell’s reputation as a poet has never fully recovered. As Steven Axelrod notes in his introduction to his anthology, The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, despite the positive reception of Lowell's final collection, Day by Day , the negativity surrounding The Dolphin shifted how people viewed Lowell's confessionalism and sent Lowell's reputation in a downward spiral from which he has never truly recovered. Around the time of Lowell's death, "it was already evident that the zeitgeist that had carried Lowell aloft for so many years was about to dash him to the earth." 117 By looking at the initial reception of

Life Studies , we are able to recognize that the history of Lowell’s confessional effect is bound up with his adaptation and remediation of various print modes. Lowell’s career is, in effect, a career in what he would call “repoeticization,” the merging of prose and print modes into a singular poetic form. Rethinking confessional poetry as such an effect and not as a straightforward presentation of the author’s voice or presence complicates Lowell’s place in literary history.

Instead of defining the mid-century “lyric,” Lowell’s confessional persona becomes a complicated and difficult effect of multiple non-poetic reading practices aligning around an unclear “use of poetry.” If Lowell’s poetry broadens the all-encompasing margins of the lyric, the label “confessional” also marks, challenges, and identifies with those same limits; at the time of Life Studies was first published, its confessional effect appeared to contradict the collection’s categorization as a book of poetry. Given such a history, Lowell’s use of private letters seems a natural extension of his confessional writing. Even if the morality of such an act might remain an open question, misreading Lowell's use of prose forms harms interpretations of his career as a

whole and inhibits our ability to properly evaluate his work in the context of mid-century

American poetry.

Chapter 2

“The Quietness with a Man in It”: Frank O’Hara and the Act of Writing

“They make me hum like a tuning fork; who wants a ‘voice’ of his own?”

Letter from Frank O’Hara to Kenneth Koch 1

In my previous chapter on Robert Lowell, I argue that Lowell constructs the confessional effect of his poetry by manipulating his reader’s expectations of a single poetic speaker.

Expanding on my discussion of Lowell’s envy of and anxiety towards “raw” poetry, in this chapter I use my reading of Frank O’Hara’s writing to undermine the distinctions between the mid-century traditionalist and avant-garde factions. Both general poles of this divide, I argue, rely on the fiction of the poetic speaker in order to construct fantasies of poetry as a conduit for direct psychological access to the poet. O’Hara’s poetry, instead of offering such points of access, treats poetry as a physical object “between two people” 2 where the act of writing prevents more immediate forms of communication, such as a telephone call. Instead of equating the figure of the speaker with the poet’s presence, I draw on Lauren Berlant’s theory of “cruel optimism” to argue that O’Hara actively positions poetic subjectivity against his own personal wellbeing.

Recent work on O’Hara overemphasizes the importance of mid-century poetic factionalism by depicting O’Hara as a “coterie poet” writing primarily within and to a small, almost isolated circle of acquaintances. These discussions of O’Hara’s circle almost unanimously frame O’Hara’s coterie in radical, even utopian ways. In Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie ,

Lytle Shaw reads into Frank O’Hara’s use of coded references and indistinctive proper nouns to imagine O’Hara’s poetry producing “what Michael Warner calls a counterpublic, a social

formation that, while resisting the terms of dominant culture, is nonetheless characterized by

‘openness, accessibility, and unpredictability.’” 3 Terrence Scott Herring, using Michael Warner’s essay “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject” as a critical frame, argues that Frank O’Hara’s use of camp forms a queer reading public within the structure of mass public circulation. Herring writes with a sexually-positive language that echoes Michael Warner’s utopianism, arguing that

O’Hara’s poetry “is a cruising ground on which gay men come together through impersonal intimacy. And since “Poem” (“Lana Turner has collapsed!”) fetishizes a gay icon, its content works to attract readership familiar with homosexual semiotic codes. What once was the property of a mass public is now reclaimed for a particularized, more restricted audience.” 4

Although O’Hara’s poetry has been received and interpreted by a wide variety of reading publics, many of them likely what Warner might call counterpublics, both Shaw’s and Herring’s readings misinterpret Warner and construct notions of counterpublics as products of a poem’s inherent rhetorical devices. Shaw goes so far as to argue that such publics emerge without any consideration of how actual reading publics might interpret O’Hara’s text, or what social identities these publics might form as a result of their readings. As Warner’s readings of the

“She-Romps” suggests, counterpublics represent historical social formations that “act according to the temporality of their circulation” 5 and where “the refusal of any familiar norm for stranger sociability” 6 “fashion[s] their own subjectivities around the requirements of public circulation and stranger sociability.” 7 Shaw’s reading explicitly positions his concept of coterie poetry against what he calls the “historicist” and “pejorative” 8 readings of coteries and attempts to read

O’Hara’s “model of coterie” as a rhetorical strategy “that is allegorical, not symbolic.” 9

Allegory, for Shaw, is admittedly not a de Manian term 10 , but instead a form of linguistic praxis that “uses the name, in particular, to reimagine the social logics that allow group formations in

the first place.” 11 Although Shaw claims he wants to imagine the social grounds for these

“logics,” Shaw only treats the groups formed by O’Hara’s writing as imaginary ones; Shaw rarely, if ever, points towards real readers of O’Hara and spends most of his book measuring out his concept of a coterie solely as an aesthetics adopted by O’Hara to challenge 1950’s poetic norms.

As Herring and Shaw might lead us to believe, O’Hara’s public circulation often justifies his depiction as an avant-garde writer. Anne Hartman’s essay, “Confessional Counterpublics in

Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg,” attempts to build off of Herring’s reading by contextualizing it within cold war homophobia. 12 Hartman frames Herring’s argument even more explicitly in

Michael Warner’s theorization of counterpublics and uses the queerness of these publics to argue for O’Hara’s treatment as a confessional poet. For both Hartman and to a lesser degree Herring,

O’Hara’s gall to write about his sexuality in the 1950’s becomes sufficient evidence for his circulation within counterpublics, regardless of how his poetry might have been read by actual readers: “In the context of these public rituals of confession and repentance engendered by

McCarthyism, it is not difficult to see why poetic confession would carry a very different set of implications for a gay poet.” 13 Even though Herring and Hartman offer up a concept of counterpublics that, unlike Shaw, considers how queer readers might have circulated O’Hara’s poetry, all of these critics point to a presumed intimacy in O’Hara’s writing as proof of O’Hara’s avant-garde status. 14

As a term, “coterie poetry” has only recently begun to stand-in more as a rhetorical sign for specific modes of poetic address than as a description of poetic circulation among a small group. 15 John Bernard Myers, who in 1969 first applies the term “coterie” to Frank O’Hara’s writing, similarly envisions “coterie” as a mark of the O’Hara’s radicalized nature, but does so

without ascribing a mode of address to O’Hara’s poetry. Myers, as the director of the Tibor de

Nagy Gallery that published both Ashbery’s and O’Hara’s first books, uses the term “coterie” in the introduction to his anthology The Poets of the New York School to praise his supportive role as a publisher and to depict the New York School as a radical social force opposing “the literary establishment:”

Perhaps, despite the pejorative flavor of the word, it might be more accurate to call them

a 'coterie' - if we define as coterie a group of writers rejected by the literary establishment

who found strength to continue with their work by what the anarchists used to call

'mutual aid. 16

As Lytle Shaw notes, Myers’s concept of a coterie is offered as an alternative social structure working against the “traditional school” of poetry.17 Although Myers’s reference to the anarchist concept of “mutual aid” suggests that the New York poets circulated primarily within a sympathetic counter-culture, Meyers description does not attempt to reify or preserve this limited circulation as a model for reading O’Hara’s writing. Indeed, by publishing these poets in his anthology, Myers hopes to envision these poets circulating among new and larger reading publics.

Partly as a result of Donald Allen’s groundbreaking anthology New American Poetry

1945-1960 and John Bernard Meyer’s support of O’Hara and other New York School poets, 18 these fantasies of O’Hara’s marginalized circulation during his life are largely exaggerated. Even if we assume O’Hara’s circulation within a “coterie” of friends, the significant public profiles of his friends makes it difficult to assume that this circulation was contained within such a limited readership. Homage to Frank O’Hara , the posthumous collection of essays by O’Hara’s friends, includes many of the most influential artists and writers of the 20 th century. The sheer number of

influential people included in the book, along with the introduction’s mention that “a few demurred,” 19 complicates the possibility of drawing a clean boundary around Frank O’Hara’s

“coterie.” As Larry Rivers’s claimed at O’Hara’s funeral: “Frank O’Hara was my best friend’

There are at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend […]

At one time or another, he was everyone’s greatest and most loyal audience. His friendships were so strong he forced me to reassess men and women I would normally not have bothered to know.” 20

The Editor’s Note to Homage , written in 1977 (the same year that Marjorie Perloff published Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters ) and published in 1978, imagines a larger contemporary opinion of O’Hara’s significance than the “coterie” model of his circulation suggests:

How central he remains in how many lives, how many new poets keep appearing to

acknowledge how open and powerful and inspiring his poetry really is, how right Edwin

Denby was when (at Frank’s funeral) he said Frank’s reputation would surely grow and

keep on growing, how expressively photogenic he was and (like Picasso!) how

glamorous, how many different words could be used to describe him accurately. 21

Berkson and LeSueur, the volume’s editors, like many of the volume’s contributors, depict

O’Hara not as a marginalized figure, but as the center of New York’s artistic and cultural landscape. Gerald Malanga even goes as far as calling O’Hara the intellectual heart of the 1950’s and 60’s New York scene, using O’Hara’s published criticism on both art and poetry to describe him as a “scholar” poet. 22 Malaga’s depiction, which is marked by its speculation and sense of loss (like many of the essays and anecdotes in this collection), offers an unexpected reading of

O’Hara’s intellectual and aesthetic investments:

In his company I sensed a brilliant mind at work, a scholar by instinct and training; but

now I wonder if he always gave the world the best of which he was capable. I sense from

reading his poems that he worked rapidly and with intense fervor and that he depended

largely upon the fine rapture of his inspiration.

Frank could very well be considered our representative man of letters. His

versatility and originality, his successful productions in many types of literature and his

characteristic literary attitude towards his friends, his fellow poets and his public service

as Assistant Curator for the Museum of Modern Art entitle him to this designation. He

had a keen critical sense and definite critical principles and in one particular piece on

Boris Pasternak, “About Zhivago and His Poems” (Evergreen Review #7, 1959), he set

forth very succinctly his ideas concerning the poet: ‘the poet must first be a person, so

that his writings make him a poet, not his acting the role.’ 23

The difference between Malaga’s depiction of O’Hara as a “man of letters” and Perloff’s depiction that same year of O’Hara as an overlooked “minor poet” marks a dramatic divide between readings of O’Hara’s poetry before and after its reception by academic criticism.

Perloff’s reading only briefly touches on O’Hara’s literary criticism, but when Perloff does examine O’Hara’s literary criticism, she neglects to read it as a specific and unique engagement with a text, framing it instead as a general articulation of O’Hara’s aesthetics that “makes the same points” as his art criticism. 24 Admittedly, O’Hara’s depiction as a spontaneous poet 25 is so widespread nowadays that it is difficult to believe Malaga’s image of O’Hara as a scholar who might have infused a more critical and intellectual voice into his poetry had he just lived longer.

But, instead of proving or disproving Malaga’s reading, I want to emphasize its historicity as a once plausible reading that marks how indeterminate the reading practices surrounding O’Hara

were shortly after his death. The wealth of critical literature depicting O’Hara as an anti- intellectual figure, contra-Eliot and Lowell, has constructed fairly standardized views both of

Cold War intellectualism and of O’Hara’s engagement with “criticism” as such. The scarce evidence through which Malaga constructs his picture of O’Hara as a scholar-poet (he offers a brief personal portrait and cites a few of O’Hara’s publications) largely assumes this now seemingly radical picture as self-evident. While apparently it was possible to read O’Hara as a scholar-poet in 1969, readings of O’Hara have largely framed him in such a way as to close off or limit the ease of constructing such a reading today.

In his 1965 interview with Frank O’Hara, Edward Lucie-Smith asks O’Hara a question which might seem absurd, or at least embarrassingly basic to a contemporary reader given how frequently modern critics oppose O’Hara to more “cooked” mid-century poets such as Robert

Lowell: “Which angle do you see yourself from? You know the usual dichotomy which is put up for one now, arriving as one does all innocent in America, is the dichotomy between the raw and the cooked or between the academic and the Black Mountain, or between Lowell and Olson.” 26

While nowadays few critics doubt O’Hara’s status as a “raw” poet, O’Hara’s indeterminate position even so close to his death depicts a contemporaneous reading of his work that challenges our current understanding of mid-century American poetry. Lucie-Smith’s question, like Malaga’s description of O’Hara as a “man of letters,” implies that O’Hara’s allegiance in

Lowell’s “The Raw and the Cooked” 27 dichotomy feels uncertain at the time of the interview even if the grounds of the divide itself are not. O’Hara, even more significantly, seems uninterested in declaring an affiliation one way or another, replying with unexpected diffidence that, “Actually I don’t really see what my relation is to them one way or the other except that we all live at the same time.” 28

Despite O’Hara’s now canonized status as the figurehead of the New York School, his suggestion that we might place his work somewhere between the polarized nodes of “cooked” and “raw” poetry complicates the terms of midcentury factionalism and suggests the need to develop alternative models for approaching O’Hara’s work. As O’Hara’s poetry widens its public and academic circulation, criticism increasingly fetishizes O’Hara’s circulation within a limited, “coterie” sphere. This recent ossification of O’Hara as an exemplary coterie figure perpetuates the fantasy of O’Hara as an overheard poet who directly and intimately addresses his audience and prevents reading O’Hara as anything but a marginalized, avant-garde writer. Little if any criticism has considered how O’Hara’s transition from a comparatively minor (but, importantly, still published!) poet into a major academic figure has affected our readings of his poetry. 29 Contrary to the fantasy that O’Hara’s poems offer access into the poet’s mental states, I argue that these fantasies of poetic address overlook how frequently O’Hara opposes his own physical wellbeing against the proliferation of his poetic subjects; O’Hara’s descriptions of the act of writing treat writing as an alternative to his living out these dynamic experiences, and not as a direct representation of them. Although he is literally memorialized on his gravesite for his statement that “it is a grace to be born and live as vicariously as possible,” 30 the fantasy of direct poetic address overlooks the line’s unique and important stress on the word “vicariously.”

Even when O’Hara’s poems might seem to directly address the reader and offer intimate access to his mental states, removing this address from the context of its composition, publication, and circulation distorts the meaning of his poetry. 31 A surprising example of criticism’s impact on the circulation and interpretation of O’Hara’s writing is O’Hara’s poem,

“The Critic.” Even the meaning of “The Critic,” seemingly one of the most self-evident poems of

O’Hara’s canon and perhaps the poem most directly addressed to academic criticism, becomes unclear when it is considered in the contexts of its production and circulation:

I cannot possibly think of you

other than you are: the assassin

of my orchards. You lurk there

in the shadows, meting out

conversation like Eve’s first

confusion between penises and

snakes. Oh be droll, be jolly

and be temperate! Do not

frighten me more than you

have to! I must live forever. 32

Although now one of O’Hara’s most widely circulated poems, it is unclear if the critic was initially written as an allegory for academic reading practices. O’Hara wrote “The Critic” in

January 1951, months before publishing his first chapbook A City Winter, and Other Poems in

1952 for the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, which circulated only 280 copies. 33 Although O'Hara had published two poems and a short story in Harvard's The Advocate before A City Winter, his exposure remained fairly small (his poems were printed as "Francis O'Hara" in The Advocate’s table of contents 34 ) and unlikely received any significant criticism in print before writing “The

Critic” 35 . Because of this limited exposure and the fact that O’Hara wrote “The Critic” during his time in Ann Arbor where he was regularly attending writing workshops, 36 it seems reasonable to assume that if the poem refers to a specific critic assassinating “his orchards” (and not someone else’s “orchards,” which is also a possibility) then the criticism referred to in the poem likely does not address a traditional academic or literary critic, but a criticism offered during a personal conversation or group discussion during a writing workshop.

The tendency to read “The Critic” as an allegory for academic criticism is largely the result of Marjorie Perloff’s 1977 book Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters ,37 long considered the gold standard for criticism on O’Hara and arguably the book that established O’Hara as a major American poet. 38 Perloff begins her now famous book by reprinting O’Hara’s poem “The

Critic” as an epigraph. While Perloff offers careful readings of so many of O’Hara’s poems throughout her book, her analysis of “The Critic” reads the poem literally, without much analysis. For Perloff, the poem functions not as a poem, but as a cautionary tale, an aesthetic treatise, and a dying wish. Curiously, however, Perloff’s reading uncritically interpellates and constructs the poem’s “wish” without directly identifying with the “you” of the poem’s addressee:

Throughout this book I have tried to keep in mind O’Hara’s own strictures on literary

criticism, so charmingly put forward in the little poem, ‘The Critic’ (1951), cited at the

beginning of the Preface. I hope that if O’Hara were alive today, he would not consider

me ‘the assassin of [his] orchards.’ I have tried, on the contrary, to respect his wish: ‘Do

not / frighten me more than you / have to! I must live forever.’ 39

If the “assassin” is not Perloff, then who is it? The poet “cannot possibly think of you other than you are,” but Perloff hopes that, were O’Hara alive, he might think of her differently (the “I”

pronoun in Perloff’s reading refers directly to O’Hara himself). Perloff is careful to establish both the date of composition and the authorship of the poem in order to historically situate the poem as a verbal artifact that can be overheard and responded to without describing her own form of criticism, or criticism in general. The poem as epigraph is timeless in that it exists for every future reader and critic to interpret as a cautionary tale, but historically situated enough so that the “I” might not be aware of her own her more contemporary critical methods. Even given her reading that the poet condemns “the critic,” Perloff’s odd understanding of poetic address assumes that her criticism might somehow interpellate and “respect his wish” at the same time.

The aporia here is obvious: after reading “The Critic” as a condemnation of academic criticism, what academic can interpret O’Hara without betraying his work? Ultimately, in order to respect the poet’s condemnation of academic criticism, the academic critic must disidentify from and hence disregard the meaning of his condemnation. For Perloff, the poem becomes more of a cautionary tale than a poem; but instead of condemning her work, this cautionary tale somehow stands in as an epigraph that authorizes it. The “I” addresses her, the actual critic, only as far as that address reinforces and authorizes her position as an interlocutor; if and when her position is challenged, the poem’s capacity to address her breaks down, shifting back and forth between operating as a “stricture on literary criticism” and an obscure “little poem.”

Perloff’s intentionally ironic reading of O’Hara as an anti-academic poet is not an unusual one. Following the assertion in Donald Allen’s anthology that “a total rejection of all those qualities typical of academic verse” 40 unifies the aesthetics of the “New York Poets,” critics often envision O’Hara as a literary underdog, struggling against the aesthetic elitism typified by figures such as Robert Lowell and T.S. Eliot. Daniel Kane notes the impact of

Donald Allen’s anthology in defining the distinction between what Kane calls “academic” and

“alternative” poetry: “This book—perhaps more than any other anthology before or since—has proved to have a lasting effect on American poetry, marking a kind of dividing line between those poets who valued innovation first and foremost and poets who still found conventionally linear or narrative approaches worthwhile and pertinent (We should note that many of the younger writers interviewed in this book credit the Allen anthology for providing them with their initial models and inspiration).” 41 This anti-academic stance towards O’Hara’s writing come across in many forms, but is repeated so frequently that this stance has become canon. John

Ashbery, writing in his introduction to O’Hara’s Collected Poems , writes that “his poetry is anything but literary. It is part of a modern tradition which is anti-literary and anti-artistic.” 42

Ashbery’s reading of O’Hara’s poetry as “anti-artistic” feels like a particularly odd extension of

O’Hara’s anti-academic or “anti-literary” leanings. Ultimately, Ashbery complicates, instead of guides, readings of O’Hara. If we follow the argument that O’Hara rejected formal literary criticism, Ashbery’s claim contradicts traditional depictions of O’Hara as a critic, curator, and close friend of New York artists. If O’Hara resisted an institutionalized, academic form of “art” equivalent to the academic mode of literary criticism, O’Hara’s position as a formal art critic and assistant curator (posthumously promoted to curator) at the MET implicates him within these same institutions he supposedly opposed. How might O’Hara’s “anti-academic” or “anti-artistic” accommodate for his positions within such influential cultural structures and how does this modification of O’Hara’s stance impact our readings of his poetry?

Ultimately, I believe that critics exaggerate O’Hara’s anti-academic positions in order to reinforce his position against more established— “cooked”— forms of poetry. What is at stake for these academic readings is a historical argument that realigns the avant-garde/traditional divide as a struggle to lay claim to a post-romantic and implicitly New Critical tradition of lyric

poetry. While O’Hara’s anti-academic stance has come to define one of the critical boundaries between cooked and raw poetry, O’Hara’s decision in his interview with Lucie-Smith to opt out of the factionalism challenges the usefulness of this divide as a historical model. Specific to criticism on O’Hara’s poetry, he justifies his resistance to this factionalism by distancing himself from the aesthetics of both schools and appealing to his shared position with them as a midcentury poet. While at first glance O’Hara’s appeal to history might seem disingenuously diplomatic or platitudinous, O’Hara’s prioritization of chronological history over this factionalism gestures towards a shared midcentury ethos that minimizes the distance between his work and “academic” poets such as Lowell. O’Hara characteristically expounds on his disagreement with Robert Lowell’s “dishonest” treatment of “something perfectly revolting,” but also agrees with Lucie-Smith’s observation that this diatribe resonates with O’Hara’s own work:

Lowell has, on the other hand, a confessional manner which (lets him) get away with

things that are really just plain bad because you’re supposed to be interested because he’s

supposed to be so upset. And I don’t think that anyone has to get themselves to go and

watch lovers in a parking lot necking in order to write a poem, and I don’t see why it’s

admirable to feel guilty about it. They should feel guilty. Why are they snooping? What’s

so wonderful about a Peeping Tom? And then if you liken them to skunks putting their

noses into garbage pails, you’ve done something perfectly revolting. No matter what the

metrics are. And the metrics aren’t that unusual. Every other person in any university in

the United States could put that thing into metrics. 43

This model of voyeurism, which emphasizes the affective circumstances behind the creation and reception of “Skunk Hour,” challenges the ethical vision of Lowell’s poetry by literalizing the poem and taking its content at face value. While on one hand this reading succumbs to the

confessional fantasy that interprets the poem as an expression of Lowell the poet, on the other hand this reading also challenges the sincerity of the poem’s persona by emphasizing the distance between the praise heaped on the poem and the description the poem offers of Lowell himself, whose activities O’Hara describes as criminal and disgusting. At stake here for O’Hara is not necessarily then the “honesty” of Lowell’s poem or its disgusting nature but the difference between the poem’s lowbrow content and the “university” metrics through which the poem addresses its audience.

The praise of poetic “honesty” that O’Hara offers immediately following this critique of

Lowell feels strange and hypocritical unless Lowell’s reading is reframed as a discussion of metrics and poetic address. Read this way, O’Hara’s statements seamlessly segue off of each other. O’Hara’s disagreement is not a disagreement over the content of Lowell’s confessionalism, but about the inappropriate metrics Lowell chooses to convey such content:

O’Hara: I don’t think there is such a thing as a bad line if it’s true. The metrics make it,

you know they get there themselves. If you really are being honest about something, then

the metrics just devour them.

Lucie-Smith: Well, what’s the criterion of truth in poetry?

O’Hara: Where you don’t find that someone is making themselves more elegant, more

stupid, more appealing, more affectionate or more sincere than the words will allow them

to be. Now I know I do it myself, you know. 44

O’Hara’s statements in his interview implicitly reject autobiographical readings by reframing this aesthetics of this “honesty” away from discussions of a poetic speaker and situating them instead around questions of poetic address and the relationship between meter and content.

Lowell himself similarly frames his poetry around discussions of address in his infamous, self- congratulatory distinction between the “Raw and the Cooked”: “The cooked, marvelously expert, often seems laboriously concocted to be tasted and digested by a graduate seminar. The raw, huge blood-dripping gobbets of unseasoned experience are dished up for midnight listeners.” 45

Although Lowell explicitly undercuts his claim as an exaggeration and even expresses envy towards the emerging avant-garde’s “midnight listeners,” his implication that these different forms are themselves products of divergent expectations of public reception and reading practices highlights the impact of mid-century poetic reading communities on the composition and circulation of poetry.

While O’Hara did not interact much with Lowell, their one public reading together almost comically emphasizes this difference between O’Hara’s and Lowell’s expectations of poetic address. In 1962, during O'Hara's only public reading with Robert Lowell, O’Hara begins by reading a poem (“Lana Turner Has Collapsed”) he had written on the ferry ride over. Lowell, besmirching O’Hara’s informal approach to the reading, apologizes that “I didn’t write a poem on the way over here” and proceeds to share what he had prepared to read. 46 Despite the difference in each poet’s reading, both poets frame their readings around different modes of addressing an identical audience. While O’Hara believes his audience desires an unedited poem whose composition marks and anticipates the specific event of its reception, Lowell expects his audience to demand a poetry that, while edited for the event of its reception, imagines itself composed independently from the expectation of any single mode of circulation. Mark

Silverberg offers perhaps the most straightforward description of O’Hara’s position in the traditionalist and avant-garde binary, using the term “neo-avant garde” to describe how the New

York School poets coopt experimentalist techniques without prescribing to the ideological

principles generally associated with avant-garde movements. 47 While Silverberg’s label perhaps correctly incorporates O’Hara’s poetics with his indifferent political ideology, Silverberg’s description misses that, even if O’Hara’s poetics might not correctly position him within avant- garde movements, his projection of a spontaneous and personalized communal address mimics much more radicalized modes of speech. 48

O’Hara’s poetics feel radical not only because, as Bob Perelman writes, “O’Hara’s verve in taking complex (and vague) matters of poetics and resoling them into the concrete situations of everyday life,” 49 but also because his verve attempts to reposition its modes of address within the setting of a casual, and not professionalized, public poetry reading. O’Hara’s perception of his audience encourages an impression of unfiltered immediacy that, through the spontaneous nature of the poem’s composition and performance, grant the perception of unprecedented access to the poet’s chaotic daily life. In O’Hara’s statement for The New American Poetry , he cultivates this effect: “what is happening to me, allowing for lies and exaggerations which I try to avoid, goes into my poems. I don’t think my experiences are clarified or made beautiful for myself or anyone else; they are just there in whatever form I can find them. What is clear to me in my work is probably obscure to others and vice versa.” 50 O’Hara’s comments here, even if they endorse an autobiographical reading, do so by highlighting the obscurity of his text and suggests that O’Hara’s poems, if they are intended to present an autobiography, do so by producing an autobiography that intentionally challenges its means of public consumption. Not unsurprisingly, discussion of O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” 51 style defines the importance of his work by appealing to a fantasy of direct autobiographical presentation in language similar to the discussions surrounding confessional poetry in my previous chapter. Srikanth Reedy, accounting for O’Hara’s popularity, postulates that “O’Hara’s conversation-poems not only record casual

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talk but also allow us to imagine ourselves as participants in the particular social forms of speech memorialized in The Collected Poems . Indeed, this may account for O’Hara’s appeal to readers of such varying literary and political sensibilities. Reading his late conversation-poems, ‘any individual’ can picture herself in the enviable subject position of Frank O’Hara carrying on with others.” 52

O’Hara’s somewhat comical exchange with Lowell, instead of regurgitating lyrical fantasies of “overheard” poetry, complicates the phenomenology of reading his text as the product of a poetic speaker by stressing the uniqueness of the moment and context of the poem’s composition as a necessary cypher for accessing the poem’s meaning; similarly, the poem cannot be overheard because the only moment of its actual “speaking” is the moment of the public reading for which it was composed. In lieu of an overheard poetry, O’Hara’s mock manifesto

“Personism” offers a very different phenomenology of reading whereby the act of the poem’s composition is placed provocatively “between two people.” Instead of referring to speech and auditory details, O’Hara favors commercial, visual, emotional, gustatory, and tactile descriptions in his manifesto. While “Personism” is interpreted by critics such as Mark Silverberg and

Terrence Scott Herring as an endorsement of O’Hara’s direct presentation of himself in his poetry, this emphasis is mistakenly used to justify the presence of an overheard speaker as the poet himself, even though his manifesto explicitly frames his poetry as an injunction not to speak: “If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ‘Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.’” 53 Elsewhere in his poem

“Poetry,” O’Hara reiterates this thought but stresses the necessity of silence over the necessity of speed, warning that “The only way to be quiet / is to be quick.” 54

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The closest O’Hara comes to offering anything resembling a “speaker” in his manifesto is his discussion of the relationship between writing poetry and making a telephone call. In this discussion, O’Hara frames writing poetry as an alternative to, but not a replacement for nor an expression of, technological mediation: “While I was writing it I realized that if I wanted to I could use a telephone instead of writing the poem.”55 If this detail is read as an example of indirect address, this address explains its rejected potential for mediated speech as the mechanical process of a telephonic speaker unit, which offers nothing that might be heard or overheard as a consequence of reading—at most, the reader is privy to one side of this conversation. The power of O’Hara’s Personism, however, emerges not from the interpellation of this address, but instead from the act of composition, the decision to write instead of use the telephone. By stressing the moment of composition and placing “the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style,” 56 O’Hara counterintuitively identifies Personism with

“abstraction,” or the “personal removal by the poet.” He asserts that Personism, “being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry.” The poet’s affection towards the person to whom the poem is addressed fuels the composition of the poem, which in turn becomes the focus of the poet’s energies, consequently “sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” 57

The poem, unlike the transparent medium of the telephone which electronically communicates speech between two people, interjects itself as a physical barrier that prevents immediate communication between the poet and the addressee. Lisa Gitelman, in her writing on new media, notes that even when the public norms surrounding new communication mediums work “to steady and partly reconstruct a common or normative sense of publicness and an

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abstract public,” the presentations of these mediums “stumble hard against” the logics of previous mediums of communication. In the same way in which she depicts Thomas Edison having to construct new means to describe the emerging medium of the telephone in relation to

“experiences of printedness and public speaking,” 58 O’Hara’s poetry struggles against the logic of telephonic mediums in an inverse manner. O’Hara’s poetry, which might stand in for and imagine the immediacy of direct conversation by tapping into the logics attributing a telephone conversation with privacy and intimacy, also must account for these same logics that oppose the telephone to print discourse. If the poem is to mark itself as an intimate and direct medium of communication by comparing itself to the telephone, that comparison is also compromised by the possibility of using a telephone to communicate, which provides a more immediate means of expressing intimacy than writing a poem.

This double-gesture of removal and presence transforms the physical poem into a medium, not unlike the telephone, that allows for a fantasy of the poet’s physical presence even while asserting his distance. Unlike the telephone however, O’Hara’s poetry is not a passive, opaque medium; his poem, “Lucky Pierre style,” is an active participant in the exchange and “is correspondingly gratified.” 59 Despite the apparent intimacy of his assertion that “the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages,” his wordplay between “correspondingly” and the word “correspondence” preserves the physical medium of the poem even as the text struggles to erase it. And why shouldn’t it? The poem, precisely because of its nature as a physical medium that inhibits direct communication, becomes the locus of a sexual fantasy purely by virtue of preventing that fantasy’s actualization. “Correspondingly,” the physicality of the poem persistently reasserts itself as a barrier to communication, even more so at the moments when the poem appears at its most intimate: “one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person

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(other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life- giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet’s feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person.” 60 In the threesome between the poet, the poem, and the addressee, only the poem “is correspondingly gratified.”

The language and humor in O’Hara’s “Personism” offers the deferral of this pleasure as a useful heuristic for reading, but this pleasure is an active and queerly oriented one that does not reiterate the same dynamics of overheard poetry. Even if we maintain a fantasy that his poems grant us access to O'Hara's experience, focusing on the content of this experience reiterates the same “disgusting” voyeurism that O’Hara condemns in Lowell’s poetry. 61 For O’Hara, the form of poetry is inseparable from and must appropriately fit its content. He suggests humorously that,

“for measure and other technical apparatus, that’s just common sense: if you’re going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you.

There’s nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you’re experiencing is ‘yearning.’” 62 His statement, perhaps unexpectedly, asserts the necessity of poetic form (you wouldn’t want to be naked in public!) but does so by reminding us of its utility and the “common sense” unity between form and content. The form of the poem, according to O’Hara, should create pleasure, but this pleasure is a product of the form’s appropriate fit and not a product of the elevated Romantic notions of poetry that O’Hara’s mocking use of the word “yearning” represents. Surprisingly, much of the core of O’Hara’s

Personism, apart from the different means of presentation, echoes many of the New Criticism’s tenants: the heresy of paraphrase, the idea of unity between form and content, and the organic nature of poetry. O’Hara’s playful warning at the end of his manifesto reasserts this relationship:

“The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better

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watch out.” 63 O’Hara’s poetry, like a good pair of pants, appropriately matches its technique with its content.

If the tenants of “Personism” overlap with much of the New Criticism, he departs from the New Criticism by suffusing the moment of reading and composition with pleasure; the text, instead of being a passive receptacle for interpretation, becomes an active source of meaning. If a detached mode of overhearing the poem might seem like inappropriate voyeurism, O’Hara encourages his reader to lust after the appropriately snug pair of pants. What distinguishes this lust from voyeurism is the text’s unelevated self-awareness as a locus of pleasure. Appropriately, pornography becomes a literary genre par excellance for O’Hara:

Far from being an element of literature where the writer finds himself intimately engaged

with his primal forces, pornography is the most difficult, limited, boring and laborious

genre a writer could take on. And therefore it’s an extremely interesting one. Personally,

I wish the postal authorities would ban the detective novel, the autobiographical novel

and the roman a clef , which, like the sonnet, are simple forms requiring only application,

and let pornography run rampant. It, being something which requires great improvisatory

skill, would undoubtedly yield some very interesting and out results, but in the direction

of literary invention, rather than psychological revelation. 64

Pornography, like poetry, marks a separation “far” from “primal forces” and, in deferring that pleasure, becomes “difficult, limited, boring and laborious.” Similarly, pornography, unlike

“simple forms requiring only application,” requires improvisation. This spontaneous style allows the author to produce a formal “literary invention” that distinguishes itself from the psychological content of the text. Reading O’Hara’s poetry, unlike a reading by the voyeur, should not reduce the text to the nudity of its content, nor romanticize the poem’s form with an

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exceptional “yearning.” The poem stands in for the act of actual communication but, like pornography, must be understood as a substitute or an obstacle for that act and never as a replacement. Only when treated as an active, specific object that both gives and receives the pleasure otherwise reserved for the act of communication can the poem’s form appropriately suit its content.

This reading of Personism contradicts many of the typical approaches for reading

O’Hara’s poetry. Even in early critical studies of O’Hara’s poetry, readings privilege the

“imagination” and “presence” of O’Hara in his poems while marking the absence of a concrete

“ground.” Charles Altieri in his 1973 essay “The Significance of Frank O’Hara” argues that

O’Hara’s engagement with the trivial establishes “presence” as “a central value for O’Hara.” 65

For Altieri, the significance of this gesture is that O’Hara “shows how the poet no longer feels committed to organic unity as a principle of poetic construction.” 66 The presence of a creative self offers an alternative avenue to structure the text. As Altieri explains:

For O’Hara the open road has lost its resident gods capable of mastering and directing the

ego. There remains only the present as landscape without depth […]. And if the present is

without depth, whatever vital qualities it has depend entirely on the energies and

capacities of the consciousness encountering it. […] With O’Hara, the self must be

creative without a ground; value depends entirely on the vitality with which one engages

his experiences. 67

In lieu of form, the “self” emerges in Altieri’s reading precisely as an organic, unifying textual feature. O’Hara’s discussion of abstraction suggests that, instead of the poem foregrounding the

“presence” of the poet, the poem actively undermines the poet’s capacity to be present in the text. As Brian Glavey notes, the primary trope for this gesture in O’Hara’s oeuvre is ekphrasis:

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“His poems are certainly bustling with motion pictures, action paintings, and modern dance, but at the same time, monuments, memorials, and especially statues make frequent appearances as well—and not only as things worthy of damnation. The centrifugal force that propels his poems outside of themselves needs to be understood within the context of its dialectical relation to a counter tendency: a centripetal drive toward closure and stability.” 68

Glavey’s essay tantalizingly re-envisions ekphrasis through a queer lens, critiquing that

“this critical discourse subscribes to the doctrine that desire and identification are two distinct mechanisms that can never overlap in respect to their object. The castration anxiety generated by the apotropaic image of the Medusa stems from the fear that desire for the image will give way to an identification with it.” 69 For Glavey, O’Hara’s ekphrasis is not a negation or destruction of the poet’s presence, but an alternative means of affirming of it through the poet’s queerness:

His work looks to the intersection of the verbal and the visual as an important site for the

transformation of the association of homosexuality with spectacle and simulacrum, both

resisting and indulging in the imposition of silence through his poetry. O’Hara’s

ekphrastic identifications transfigure the potentially disempowering experience of being

made into an image—of a “sissy truck-driver” or a statue—into a source of poetry and

pleasure, imaging a way to give in to the experience of being made into a Rivers and still

remain an O’Hara. 70

While Glavey’s essay reclaims Ekphrasis by queering the concept of the simulacra and making it a source of presence, Glavey’s lyric reading foregoes complicating the relationship between the simulacra’s sense of presence and the actual subjectivity of the poet. In order to read ekphrasis as a source of pleasure for O’Hara, Glavey requires the erasure of the physical text as sacrifice. The presence of the poet becomes an expectation of the act of reading, and not an interpretation

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emerging from the poem itself; the poet, and not the poem, becomes the object of aesthetic interpretation. As Glavey writes, “This notion of selfhood is explicitly aesthetic. The poet presents himself as an elusive fictional construct, as the primary work of art in his poems.

O’Hara’s ekphrastic lyrics tend to lack an object precisely because the poet takes its place, ekphrastic description giving way to ekphrastic identification.” 71 Glavey’s claim that the ekphrastic text remains “an O’Hara” substitutes the indefinite article “an” for the more typical definite article “the” used to refer to unique people. If O’Hara’s text offers a sense of “presence” by the reduction of “this notion of selfhood” into something “explicitly aesthetic,” what remains is a substitution of the author function, “an O’Hara” in lieu of “the O’Hara.”

In O’Hara’s elegy, “In Memory of My Feelings,” the destructive potential of ekphrasis develops from the act of forcing the subject’s, likely the poet’s, gregarious personality into the static form of the poetic object. As Lytle Shaw summarizes, “the poem consistently links two kinds of necessary but impossible representations: that of experiences, always pluralizes by the range of feelings from which they emerge and which they in turn generate; and that of identities, or selves, which at once depend upon and transcend the contexts and histories that would make them legible.” 72 O’Hara’s poem, in an almost Whitmanesque manner, 73 quickly expands the subject of the poem outwards, “liv[ing] as variously as possible” into multiple real and imagined subjects, numerous as “stars and years, like numerals,” who pluralize this subject’s identity without distorting its coherence. These forms of identification vary significantly and change rapidly, in one stanza shifting through eleven human and non-human personalities as diverse as

“a Hittite in love with a horse,” “a girl walking downstairs in a red pleated dress with heels,” “a jockey with a sprained ass-hole,” “the light mist,” and “a baboon eating a banana.” 74

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Like in O’Hara’s poem “Poetry,” where “the only way to be quiet is to be quick,” 75 the opening of “In Memory of My Feelings” pits the wellbeing and multiplicity of the poem’s identifications against the figure of the poetic subject, who is explicitly not a poetic speaker: “my quietness has a man in it.” 76 While the first person possessive pronoun “my” implies a poetic subject who is distinct from this “man,” this subject cautions against reading him as a speaker by locating the wellbeing and proliferation of “this man” in the poem’s quietness, and not its speech. The subject of this “my,” is distinct from the man the poem constructs, even while this man enables the subject to envision himself in broader and more adventurous ways than what he experiences in the real world. Given O’Hara’s distinctive nose, the description of the serpent as

“aquiline” suggests a clear correlation between the physical body of O’Hara the poet and the figurative subject of the poem. But, even while this similarity between the poetic subject, these transparent selves, and the poet’s body might allow for these subjects to merge together, the adjective that most readily allows for these figures to convene at the site of O’Hara’s body— the

“aquiline serpent”— similarly convenes these identifications around the petrifying figure of the medusa: “the aquiline serpent comes to resemble the Medusa.” 77 The optics of the medusa are clear; this poem and “the transparent selves” therein might “presently” “come” to represent each other and O’Hara the poet, but this resemblance can never safely occur without destroying these subjects. As the verb phrase “presently […] comes to resemble” 78 looks towards the figure of the medusa, this imminent resemblance requires a physical and abrupt end to the first section of the text. The figure “comes to resemble,” but never quite completes the resemblance gestured to by the present progressive verb phrase. The action that the text stresses is an active one, the act of approaching or “to come,” not the static state “to resemble.” As “In Memory of My Feelings” repeatedly asserts, the figure of the poet as poetic subject interrupts and threatens the wellbeing

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of O’Hara the person. While both the subject of “In Memory of My Feelings” and the figure of the poet presumably represent permutations of O’Hara himself, stabilizing either subject around the figure of “O’Hara” enacts the ekphrasis gesture of “the aquiline serpent” that “comes to resemble the Medusa.” 79

“In Memory of My Feelings,” an elegy, mourns the sacrifices extracted from the figure of the poet, O’Hara, in exchange for both the act of writing poetry and the figuration of O’Hara himself as a poetic subject. The poem attempts to resist these sacrifices and discover safe ways for the poet to identify with the poetic subject, but ultimately each of these attempts end in failure with the subject marching off to “save the serpent.” 80 As Micah Mattix summarizes,

“Throughout the poem, O’Hara distances not only the ‘self’ others have constructed to represent him, but equally the ‘self’ he has constructed in his poetry, from his actual physical self.” 81

According to Mattix, who modifies Charles Altieri’s description of O’Hara’s “radical presence,”

O’Hara’s poetry “is a chronicle of this attempt to present the self squarely at the center of the poem in order to be truly abstract without slipping into the abstraction in poetry typified by Eliot and Stevens. However, O’Hara’s poetics is also a chronicle of the impossibility of placing the self squarely at the center of the poem because the self, as that which is living, changes whereas a poem, once written, is static.” 82 “In Memory of My Feelings” places the self as poetic subject in a murderous relationship to the self as poet and elegizes this conflict. Contrary to Glavey’s reading which describes ekphrasis as a source of pleasure by reducing the physical text to the aesthetic experiences, the physical text of “In Memory of My Feelings” emerges “gratified” by

O’Hara’s decision to “save the serpent in their midst” and embrace the destructive ekphrasis of the poem. The act of writing opposes being carried “like a gondola, through the streets,” 83 but this does not completely foreclose the poet from identifying with the imagined figure being

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carried through the street; while the “serpent” or medusa necessitates the murder at the end of the poem, it is also the “occasion of these ruses ,” 84 so clearly defined against the actual act of exploring the city.

In this regard, as O’Hara similarly gestures to in “Personism,” the scene of writing, by forcing O’Hara the poet to resist being carried “like a gondola, through the streets,” inhibits the actualization of the poem’s Whitmanesque moments even as it gives rise to them. The “scene” of writing allows for these “ruses,” these proliferations of “my selves,” but similarly stresses the impossibility of such a Whitmanian expansion of the self: “Beneath these lives/ the ardent lover of history hides,/ tongue out/ leaving a globe of spit on a taut spear of grass/ and leaves off rattling his tail a moment/ to admire this flag.” 85 History, by spitting on the grass, mocks

Whitman and stresses his distance from reality. But, this mockery also allows for the grass to become an object of admiration; the flag represents both a victory and an occupation of territory, but this flag also acknowledges the importance of the grass spear by using it as the flag’s pole.

History, the actualization of these “ruses,” becomes an unobtainable goal, but the figure of this unobtainability marks history’s dependence on textual objects and in turn mocks the supposed objectivity of history. The poem reminds us when the subject falls in love with “the horse […] on the frieze” 86 that history too represents itself through objects and that these objects are interpreted through subjective experiences. Ironically, some of the most destructive moments of the poem are when aesthetic objects fulfill the desires of their experiencing subjects. The viewer obtains the desirable horse on the frieze only by misinterpreting history, which in turn enables the terrible violence enacted by colonizers: “They look like gods, these whitemen,/ and they are bringing me the horse I fell in love with on the frieze.”

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At the end of the poem, towards the completion of the act of writing, the poem again reintroduces the subject of history, lamenting its distance from the act of creating art:

I have forgotten my loves, and chiefly that one, the cancerous statue which my body could no longer contain, against my will against my love become art, I could not change it into history and so remember it, and I have lost what is always and everywhere present, the scene of my selves, the occasion of these ruses, which I myself and singly must now kill and save the serpent in their midst 87

History emerges here as a primary goal of artistic production, one that is linked with the memories and experiences of the poetic subject, O’Hara, even though the act of making “art” opposes his ability to realize these “selves” as actual experiences. The object of the poetic text becomes the “serpent” or medusa that necessitates for the subject of the poem to commit murder.

While the text strongly implies these “selves” as the target of this murder, the poem constructs the “occasion” or “the scene of my selves,” and not the “selves,” as the grammatical object of

“kill.” The act of writing opens up a potentiality which becomes the “occasion of these ruses,” the “scene of my selves” that allows for their proliferation, but the permanent textual object that binds the poetic subject’s potentiality within the petrified boundaries of the poetic text also limits the realization of this potential. As a result of this limitation, the subject of the poem, by becoming a poetic subject within a textual object, sacrifices its potential to expand outwards even though the possibility of such an expansion is attributed entirely to the act of writing. The

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ending of “In Memory of My Feelings,” while framed as an elegy, never quite kills off the

“scene of my selves,” who are bound up entirely within the contexts of their production. The poetic text eliminates the possibilities of these multiple selves while keeping their murderer at bay: the text ends as the remaining self, the poetic subject, leaves to “kill and save the serpent in their midst” but does not actually depict the murder. The poem recognizes the impossibility of actualizing these selves and describes the textual object as a “cancerous statue” perilously

“against” the “will” and “love” of the poet. Ultimately, the text fails to describe a means for

O’Hara to present himself as a poetic subject without such a suicidal sacrifice of his self. The scenes which are “always and everywhere present” oppose both “history” and the creation of a textual artifact; the poet, if he is to be the subject of such texts, can only write such scenes if, in the moment of composition, he chooses not to live them. By ending the poem not on a murder, but on the impending and unavoidable futurity of the murder that destroys both the poetic subject and the poet’s capacity to be fully present in the text, what remains is a “cancerous statue” of the poet held between a liminal state of presence and absence.

In placing the act of writing so firmly as a stubborn medium for the poet’s own desires,

O’Hara’s use of ekphrasis suggests a strange form of agency that is neither completely self- destructive nor a true source of pleasure. Lauren Berlant labels such aims that work against a subject’s own interests as “cruel optimism”: “a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realization is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic.” 88 Agency as described in Berlant’s text does not suggest sovereignty or a heightened capacity for self-construction. Instead, Berlant coins the term “lateral agency” to describe “a mode of coasting consciousness within the ordinary that helps people survive the stress on their sensorium that comes from the difficulty of reproducing contemporary life.” 89 The

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contemporary flâneur or flâneuse in Berlant’s reading does not provide “relief” from modernity, but instead “exemplifies the mass sensorium engendered by problems of survival that are public and that induce a variety of collective affective responses to the shapelessness of the present that constant threat wreaks [….] Cruel Optimism turns toward thinking about the ordinary as an impasse shaped by crisis in which people find themselves developing skills for adjusting to newly proliferating pressures to scramble for modes of living on.” 90 Lateral agency, which

Berlant defines through her analysis of unhealthy eating habits, operates not as a means of self- production, but as “activity releasing the subject into self-suspension.” 91

Perhaps no poem in O’Hara’s oeuvre better describes the capacity for art to defer and suspend its subjects better than “Why I Am Not a Painter.” In “Why I Am Not a Painter,”

O’Hara treats both poetry and painting as abstract mediums that represent the absence of their subjects. However, the processes by which poetry and painting encounter and address these absences differ. While painting, represented by Mike Goldberg’s “SARDINES,” completely removes its attempted representation of its subject, “SARDINES,” because “It was too much,” 92 poetry, represented by O’Hara’s poetic series ORANGES , begins with a line about its subject, the color orange, and expands into a twelve poem series that never actually mentions its subject. At the most basic level, painting abstracts its subject through minimalistic gestures while poetry continually expands its subject outward in a futile attempt to encapsulate a subject that can never fully be treated in language. Marjorie Perloff succinctly argues how both mediums exist on a continuum, ultimately collapsing the difference between painting and poetry:

In both cases, the original word or image merely triggers a chain of associations that

ultimately lead straight to its demise. O’Hara is a poet not a painter for no better reason

than that is what he is. But of course the poem is also saying that poetry and painting are

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part of the same spectrum, that in the final analysis SARDINES and ORANGES are one.

This is why the rhetorical device governing the poem is repetition (“I drink; we drink”; “I

go and the days go by”; “I drop in; I drop in again”). Art does not tolerate divisions; it

must be viewed as a process, not product. 93

While I agree with Perloff’s assessment that both poetry and painting contemplate the “demise” of their subjects, I disagree with her concluding statement that the poem blurs the divisions between these two mediums. The poem makes it very clear that process for creating both works of art and the position of their subject in both processes differ. While Goldberg initially adds

“SARDINES” because the painting “needed something there,” he removes the subject because

“It was too much.” In “Why I Am Not a Painter,” the subject, the color orange, prompts the creation of the poem:

One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven’t mentioned orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. 94

Unlike “Sardines,” O’Hara’s poem is prompted by and expands outwards as a result of its subject. While for “Sardines” the subject exists as an excess that emerges during the process of

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creation, it exists only to be removed later as an edit that refines the artwork. For “Oranges,” the subject never needs to be removed because the poem, despite its efforts, never represents it 95 ; the color orange proliferates outwards, like the singularity of a black hole, without ever finding the means to satisfyingly represent its source.

As O’Hara explains in “Personism,” the presence of a subject seemed to him the only true means of achieving abstraction: “Abstraction (in poetry, not in painting) involves personal removal by the poet [….] Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry.” 96

Berlant’s discussion of free indirect discourse, which she observes as a double expansion and double negation, offers a possible explanation for how the presence of a subject might also lead to the abstraction of that subject: “The paradox remains that the lush submerging of one consciousness into another requires a double negation: of the speaker’s boundaries, so s/he can grow bigger in rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and of the spoken of, who is more or less a powerful mute placeholder providing an opportunity for the speaker’s imagination of her/his/their flourishing.” 97 For O’Hara, whose poetry, especially in “In Memory of My

Feelings,” shows a keen awareness of the physical sacrifices required by writing, his attachment to poetry as an object of desire can only become an imagined scene of flourishing purchased at the sacrifice of the subject’s wellbeing--what Berlant would call a “cruel optimism.”

Many of the critical texts, including Glavey’s, interpret O’Hara’s poetry as a self- negating medium, but do so in order to recover the expressive content of his text as a utopian horizon. Jose Esteban Muñoz, in his reading of O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You,” argues that

“through queer-aesthete art consumption and queer relationality the writer describes moments

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imbued with a feeling of forward-dawning futurity.”98 Muñoz’s reading offers a beautiful articulation of O’Hara’s engagement with the quotidian as “an encrypted sociality, and a utopian potentiality,” 99 but his claim that this quotidian “trumps fantastic moments in the history of art” forgets O’Hara’s decision to frame these historical moments within the context of a poem.

Muñoz claims that “in tandem with O’Hara’s words, I see the past and the potentiality imbued within an object, the ways it might represent a mode of being and feeling that was then not quite there but nonetheless an opening.” 100 Muñoz’s project frames itself against antirelational strands of queer theory that “quickly replaced the romance of community with the romance of singularity and negativity,” 101 but his attempt to rearticulate a new mode of being through

O’Hara’s poem misses the ways in which the text celebrates its present and current state of being. The poem, instead of looking towards a better mode of experience, expressly rejects the idea of deferring pleasure in lieu of a more perfect art:

what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them

when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank

or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience which is not going to go

wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it 102

The poem’s moment of address at the end, if read as an overheard moment between O’Hara and his partner, Vincent Warren, imbues the text with a degree of intimacy that is countermanded if the you is interpreted as the reader. This ambiguity, however, where the “you” of the intimate address merges with and is intruded upon by the “you” that addresses the reader, undermines the fantasy of the poem as a moment of experience by reasserting the moment of composition and

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the moment of textual circulation. O’Hara “telling” us instead of experiencing this moment precisely when the text recognizes the capacity of art to “cheat” the artist out of a “marvelous experience” shifts the verbal tenses of the poem by eliminating modal auxiliary verb constructions that suggest possibility such as “I would rather look at you than” or “we can go” and replacing them with a present progressive tense that freezes and ends the text: “I’m telling you about it.” The present at the moment of its occurrence seems imbued with a set of possibilities which are interrupted by the production of that moment as a poem. The expressive reading becomes a double-bind: as long as O’Hara’s poem obtains the capacity to communicate with a “you” that always opens up into the reader, then that “you” will interrupt the romantic possibilities described by the text. This ambiguous “you” to whom O’Hara “is telling about it” unavoidably risks interpellation by the reader who extends the moment of the text’s production into the context of address, the act of being told, defined by the moment of the poem’s reception.

This interruption is different than the interruption O’Hara offers in “Personism.” While

Personism envisions the scene of writing as a decision against communication, envisioning the

“you” as the reader defines the poem as an act of communication that obviates the author’s decision to write instead of “pick up the phone.”

If as I suggested in my reading of “Personism” that the experiences given up by O’Hara as a consequence of composing the text animates the poem into an active entity capable of

“giving and receiving pleasure,” then conflating the materiality of the text with O’Hara the poet removes the poem from its position “between two people” in order to justify its status “between two pages.” A strange consequence of ascribing O’Hara’s actual presence into his poetry is that such reading practices allow for critics to assume impossibly proleptic projections of O’Hara’s agency. O’Hara’s textual mark—far from being a “cancerous statue”— actively authorizes the

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circulation and interpretation of his work, even when O’Hara might have objected to such modes of circulation had he been alive. Looking at accounts of O’Hara’s manuscripts and his views about publication, it is unclear, in fact, if the poet intended for many of his works, including

“The Critic,” to circulate. 103 John Ashbery and several others (including Perloff) have noted

O’Hara indifference towards printing his poems. 104 Despite the surprising amount of O’Hara’s poetry in the Collected Poems, it is likely that many of his poems were lost and never reached print. Even his poems that were circulated, either through magazines or amongst his friends, were often irreverently stuffed into couches, pockets, or random strange locations in his apartment.” The bulk of the Collected Poems was never circulated in O’Hara’s lifetime (even amongst his “coterie”), but was instead found after O’Hara’s death in his “closet.” 105

The conflation of Frank O’Hara’s subjectivity with a textual mark, far from being a merely theoretical point, justifies the printing, organization, and circulation of such previously unpublished works in O’Hara’s Collected Poems . Even though Donald Allen, the editor of

Collected Poems, observes that “there is nowhere any clear suggestion that [O'Hara] contemplated anything like a collected volume of his poems,” Allen justifies circulating a collected volume of O’Hara’s poems to a mass public by appealing to an evidently contradictory assertion that O’Hara’s process of revising his poetry and marking the date of composition demonstrates that “he apparently did think of his work as a whole.” 106 Allen’s reading uses these supplementary textual marks to infer and then access an imagined intentionality for public consumption governing O’Hara’s practices of composition and revision. This simultaneous process of inferring and accessing such a purpose becomes the unifying logic of and justification for O’Hara’s circulation as a writer. The attribution of such an intention behind O’Hara’s poetic process contradicts Allen's depictions of O'Hara's poetry as a spontaneous product. In effect, the

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logic that Allen offers to justify the volume's existence conflicts with the argument that many critics writing after Allen and Altieri use to establish the value of reading O'Hara's poetry: it's representation of unmediated experience.

Despite Allen’s status as one of the founding compilers of avant-garde poetry, his justification that the material text establishes an organic unity amongst O’Hara’s oeuvre rehashes the New Criticism’s same metrics for weighing the literariness of textual objects. Instead of condemning or justifying the circulation of O’Hara’s Collected Poems (I’m thrilled to own a copy of it!), I note Allen’s peculiar justification as a means to dramatize how readily and endemically the mute body of O’Hara’s text substitutes for O’Hara himself. To read O’Hara’s poetry as “expressive” or the product of “a voice” imbues the text with a false sense of presence that, in exchange for creating a sense of textual unity, detaches the text from the contexts of its production. The impetus to write no longer becomes the averted scene of communication and instead becomes the production of the poem as a verbal artifact. Personism, in this case, becomes another sign for the lyric reading practices it attempts to distinguish itself from.

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Chapter 3

“A Man of the Thirties”: Collectivism and the Problem of the Poetic Subject in George

Oppen’s Discrete Series and Of Being Numerous

“I’m not sure I haven’t just a habit of form, rather than a conviction. The form of the old poems

that I wrote. And it chokes on this sort of content.”

George Oppen in a letter to June Dagnan 1

To readers only familiar with the concrete and minimalist poetics of George Oppen’s

Discrete Series published in 1934, the attention given the vague, collective “we” at the opening of Of Being Numerous in 1968 likely seemed a betrayal of his poetic principles. While the

1930’s Oppen of Discrete Series might agree with the assertion thirty-four years later in “Of

Being Numerous” that “There are things / We live among,” the claim in the subsequent line that

“and to see them / Is to know ourselves” 2 shifts the poem’s attention away from “the world, weather-swept, with which one shares the century” 3 that Discrete Series so beautifully renders towards the more abstract concept of collective identity. Who is this “we” and are we as readers being addressed here? As readers who are used to the concept of a poetic speaker it is difficult not to interpolate this “we,” but for Oppen, a poet who once critiqued Ezra Pound for forgetting his historical “roots”, 4 such a transhistorical sense of address and collectivity feels oddly detached from the materials of his poetry. 5 In “Of Being Numerous” and the rest of the poems in the collection, “one” does not detachedly “share ” the century with the material world like

Maude Blessingborne in Discrete Series . Instead, in the mid-century, the collection stresses the

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role of active perception: “we” perceive that world and know ourselves as both individuals and as a collective through that perception.

Comparing Oppen’s poetry from before and after his twenty-five year hiatus from writing makes visible an asymmetry between early and mid-century poetic address. Even though Of

Being Numerous ambiguously foregrounds something that resembles collective address, Oppen was not comfortable mediating that address through the abstract figure of a poetic speaker.

Poetic address and its fantasy of the poetic speaker particularly troubled Oppen in the second phase of his career. As Oppen’s midcentury poems increasingly suggest modes of poetic address, his insistence on grounding these modes in their material histories makes it difficult to abstract his poetry into midcentury fictions of the speaker or poetic voice.

George Oppen, who alongside Charles Reznikoff and Louis Zukofsky founded The

Objectivist Press in 1933, envisioned his poems as objects and not as vessels for expressing speech. As Zukofsky explains in his seminal essay from the 1931 special Objectivist edition of

Poetry , "Sincerity and Objectification with Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff," the Objectivists believed that the sincerity of the poem requires that its language serve the concrete representation of material objects as they exist in the real world: "In sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of (if there is continuance) completed sound or structure, melody or form. Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody. Shapes suggest themselves, and the mind senses and receives awareness." 6

While the figure of the poetic speaker allowed the New Critics to imagine poems as objects, Oppen and Zukofsky believed that the idea of such an intermediary voice undermines the capacity for "shapes to suggest themselves. " In Oppen’s 1976 interview with Michel

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Engelbert and Michael West, Oppen explains his reluctance to accept invitations to read his poetry by contrasting the act of speaking a poem against the poem’s status as a physical object.

Speech, according to Oppen, undermines the medium of the text by drawing attention towards the personality of the poet:

I feel very strongly—not as a theory or an exhortation to anybody else, but for myself—

that the poem is supposed to be on the page. I don’t think that the audiences have a right

to examine the personality of the poet. It’s a falsification. In fact, it’s dangerous to the

poet to hear himself reading. He knows that he can do it with his voice, he knows that he

can do it with his personality, but it’s very difficult to be sure of the page. 7

Oppen’s description of personality and voice as falsifications offers a broader criticism of mid- century poetics beyond the specific context of public readings. Michael Davidson argues in On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics that analyzing the social function of form

“complicate[s] the usual form/content binary by thinking about the ways that formal operations and strategies must be seen in relationship to constituencies for whom they are of value.” 8 For

Davidson, the social spaces of the writing workshop and poetry reading, “where the poem circulates among its practitioners and readers,” challenges the solitary connotations of “lyric address” which he emblematizes in Adorno’s claim that, “[only] he understands what the poem says who perceives in its solitude the voice of humanity.” 9 While Davidson uses the circulation of poetic texts to resist a lyric speaker who is “a sign of the absence of a social totality,” 10

Davidson’s critique of Adorno does not go far enough to challenge the concept of a poetic speaker as such. When Davidson opposes the reductive humanism in Adorno’s attempted abstraction of poetry into “the voice of humanity,” Davidson does not object to the fantasy of poetic speech on ontological grounds. Instead, this “voice,” Davidson notes, cannot “bear the

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weight of its multiple aspirants” because of the more practical reason that these aspirants all

“speak different idiolects.” 11 The abstract concept of a poetic speaker as such does not limit the text’s ability to represent the sum totality of all of humanity; instead, the speaker is limited by its ability, as the fantasy embodiment of a single subject position, to represent a conglomerate of all possible subjects.

For Oppen, the value of poetry stems from its ability to restore language to its material contexts. Allowing for abstractions, especially broad abstract concepts such as the idea of humanity, undermines the ability for language to construct meaning. As Davidson notes, citing one of Oppen’s letters, “Oppen acknowledges that ‘the concept of humanity [is] a concept without which we cannot live’ and yet the more we probe it as a proposition the more it removes one from actual people.” 12 While Oppen’s work, especially Of Being Numerous , worries about the limited subject position of the speaker, his work also worries about the abstract qualities of the speaker and poetic voice. These two problems are linked: the subject position of the speaker cannot offer a concrete ground for any sort of collective identity because the speaker, as a fiction produced by the act of reading, is itself an abstraction. As I noted in Oppen’s interview with

Engelbert and West, voice and personality go beyond simply negating the poem’s status as a physical object—they undermine the poet’s ability to compose poetry on the physical page: “it’s dangerous to the poet to hear himself reading. He knows that he can do it with his voice, he knows that he can do it with his personality, but it’s very difficult to be sure of the page.” 13

Oppen, a lifelong craftsperson who worked as a partner in a furniture business during his exile in

Mexico,14 understood that the language and form of poetry depends upon the poem’s status as a real physical object—much of his archive is hammered or woven together with in-line revisions scotch-taped above rejected phrases in overlapping layers. While for Davidson, form represents

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“in-formation about a work’s institutional and pedagogical functions, not a passive container of information that pre-exists the work,” 15 Oppen embraced such “containers” as active, not passive sources of meaning. When Oppen’s later work attempts to locate the shared social contexts for collective identities, these contexts and the texts circulating among these collectives are always grounded by their status as physical objects with specific material histories.

Contrary to Davidson’s reading of Adorno, Oppen’s opposition to the fictions of the speaker and poetic voice envisions a broad, social function for poetry independent of poetic address. Oppen’s prioritization of the physical poem and its material contexts over the individual expression of the poet or the experience of the poet’s audience effectively inverts the relationship between poetry and society expressed by Adorno in his influential 1957 radio address, “On Lyric

Poetry and Society.” Although Adorno, like Oppen, identified with Marxist thinking, Adorno interprets poetry as the universalized expression of an individual: “The lyric work hopes to attain universality through unrestrained individuation.” 16 His radio address characterizes the shift from individual expression to universality with auditory images that unabashedly interpret voice as the intrinsic medium of great lyric poetry. He famously justifies the ethical function of art by claiming that, “The greatness of works of art, however, consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides.” But, quoting this now aphoristic passage in a larger context reveals that this ethical claim hinges on interpreting poetry as a vocal medium:

[Ideology] manifests itself in the failure of works of art, in their inherent falseness, and it

is countered by criticism. To repeat mechanically, however, that great works of art,

whose essence consist in giving form to the crucial contradictions in real existence, and

only in that sense in a tendency to reconcile them, are ideology, not only does an injustice

to their truth content but also misrepresents the concept of ideology. That concept does

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not maintain that all spirit serves only for some human beings to falsely present some

particular values as general ones; rather, it is intended to unmask spirit that is specifically

false and at the same time to grasp it in its necessity. The greatness of works of art,

however, consists solely in the fact that they give voice to what ideology hides.” 17

If art, in its typical modes of representation, requires the intervention of a critic to counter its tendencies towards either deception or reinforcing ideology, Adorno’s concept of voice appears to eliminate the need for a critic to intervene. Voice is a necessary catalyst for Adorno that enables his critique of modernity; when art is mediated through the medium of voice, Adorno circumvents the tendency of art to deceive or reinforce ideology and discusses the work as an immanent critique of ideology. But, this critique also requires the erasure of the poem as a material object in favor of reframing it as an expression between social relations. As Stathis

Gourgouris notes in his parsing of Adorno’s engagement with Hegelian philosophy, “to outwit the magic of language acting on its own, Adorno posits a subject that sheds the cornerstone of its subjectivity—its consciousness. But, he claims, keeping in mind the unmitigated, irreversible nature of language as mediation, that the “unself-conscious” subject passes into language as subjectivity intact.” 18

Adorno thoroughly resists the physical substance of written poetry and translates poetry whenever possible into an expression of such subjectivities. Even if Adorno situates such readings within a larger critique of ideology, Oppen would likely have disagreed with Adorno’s hesitancy to treat poems as physical objects—“the mineral fact,” 19 as he was fond of saying. For

Adorno, lyric poetry is by default the expression of a subject, and voice is its only logical medium. Even when a poem does not readily suggest a subject, Adorno necessarily treats it as an act of individual expression: “Language itself speaks only when it speaks not as something alien

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to the subject but as the subject’s own voice. When the ‘I’ becomes oblivious to itself in language it is fully present nevertheless; if it were not, language would become a consecrated abracadabra and succumb to reification, as it does in communicative discourse.” 20 The a priori quality of Adorno’s subject belies the subservient role of that subject to pure language. Adorno’s claim that, “the highest lyric works are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice.” 21 Adorno frequently slips between language and voice; even if Adorno distinguishes “pure language” by drawing a line between poetry and communicative discourse, the poem cannot so readily shed its status as a communicative discourse either. The distinction here is murky and relies, as

Gourgouris reminds us, on language as an expression of a subject: “the otherwise imperceptible—otherwise than in language—trace of the lyric subject in the poem is what overturns the magic—the ‘consecrated abracadabra’—of conventional linguistic practice.” 22

Adorno aggrandizes voice as a universalizing medium capable of representing pure language that exceeds even from the individual subject on whom it relies. Adorno summarizes this in his claims that the poem “has to make itself a vessel, so to speak, for the idea of a pure language,” 23 but Adorno’s “so to speak” exceeds its colloquialism. The difference between the literal act of speaking and speaking as an idiomatic phrase insists on the interchangeability of the metaphor’s vehicle as a non-existent “vessel” that gains meaning only through its functional relationship with a language purified by speech; the words and idioms of the text are replaceable, but not the vocal medium that allows the concept of the vessel to erase its physical referents.

Aamir Mufti phrases Adorno’s relationship between poetry and language as an asymptote increasingly approaching a historically situated universality: “The more the lyric reduces itself to the pure subjectivity of the ‘I,’ Adorno argues, the more complete the precipitation of the social

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within its content will be. The more it immerses itself in what takes individual form, the more it is elevated to the level of universality, but a universality that is ‘social in nature.’” 24 If the poem’s grand ethical claim is that the individual lyric serves a social function where, quoting

Adorno, “lyric speech becomes the voice of human beings between whom the barriers have fallen,” 25 then Adorno’s description of lyric poetry as speech suggests that the materiality of both the poem and its human interlocutors composes the barriers which must be removed for the lyric poem to express itself purely.

If Adorno believed that the capacity for poetry to enact an ideological critique increases as poetry abstracts itself away from its status as a physical object, Oppen, unlike Adorno, attributed the potential for such a critique to poetry’s actual materiality. Oppen did not believe that the poem should be understood as an expression of voice and felt that the social and expressive functions of language compromised the ability for language to empirically communicate individual experience. Oppen’s early work minimizes the role of human subjects while Oppen’s later turn towards social collectives and poetic address is depicted more as a side- effect of his then position as a midcentury writer than as a dramatic shift in his aims. Much of

Zukofsky's 1931 essay from Poetry minimizes the role of human subjects and suggests that representing traits like voice and tone was not a substantial concern for the Objectivists in the

1930's. According to Zukofsky, objectification, which necessarily arises from sincerity, attempts to separate the objects in a poem from both the material object of the poem itself and from the mind's abstract, representational uses of language. Zukofsky asserts that the details of poetry are received by the mind, not the ear, and explains objectification in the same essay as a "rested totality" that presents the complete materiality of the poem without any additional need for mental processing:

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This rested totality may be called objectification-- the apprehension satisfied completely

as to the appearance of the art form as object. That is: distinct from print which records

action and existence and incites the mind to further suggestion, there exists, tho it may

not be harbored as solidity in the crook of an elbow, writing (audibility in two-

dimensional print) which is an object or affects the mind as such. 26

In his reading of Reznikoff, Zukofsky links meter to objectification by suggesting that poetic meter limits the mind's tendency to distort or add onto the poem. Poetic sound, when addressed in his essay, more closely relates to music and prosody than the human voice; for Zukosky, and to a lesser degree Oppen, the musical qualities of metrical prosody assist in the objectification of a poem. As Zukofsky’s mechanized phrase “audibility” suggests, this musicality simulates the physical sensation of sound in the reader’s mind and distinguishes the poem from non-physical, cognitive fictions such as the poetic speaker.

Oppen, like Zukofsky, agrees that objectivism aspires to create poems that are themselves material objects, but argued for a different phenomenology of reading. While Zukofsky's essay defines objectivity cognitively in relation to the reader's “relaxed” mental state, the "total apprehension" that he equates with psychological objectivity, Oppen does not see the material world as something that must be affirmed by perception. 27 In his interview with L.S. Dembo,

Oppen understands this means of crafting poetry as a distinct difference between Objectivism and its precursor, Imagism:

I learned from Louis [Zukofsky], as against the romanticism or even the quaintness of

the Imagist position, the necessity for forming a poem properly, for achieving form.

That's what "Objectivist" really means. There's been tremendous misunderstanding about

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that. People assume it means the psychologically objective in attitude. It actually means

the objectification of the poem, the making an object of the poem. 28

While Zukofsky fits neatly into the well-established narratives of modernism that stress the individual subject, Oppen’s poetry in the 1930’s seems uninterested in its readers mental state and focuses instead on a broadly communal sense of language and its relationship to the material world. 29 Peter Nicholls notes that in Discrete Series, “ This sense of the text as haunted by a materiality it cannot and does not want wholly to master through discourse is fundamental to

Oppen’s Objectivism and marks its difference from a modernism that sees aesthetic form as purely the product of some inner necessity.” 30

Oppen explains in his 1963 essay "The Mind's Own Place" that he viewed the material world as something undeniably "actual" that must be restored to increasingly abstract social uses of language. The objectivity of poetic language is a "test of truth" which aims to represent the world by making linguistic signification concrete and stable:

The word of course has long since ceased to mean anything recognizably ‘real’ at all, but

English does seem to be stuck with it. We cannot assert the poet’s relation to reality, nor

exhort him to face reality, nor do any of these desirable things, nor be sure that we are not

insisting merely that he discuss only those things we are accustomed to talk about, unless

we somehow manage to restore a meaning to the word.31

Oppen's shifting use of first person pronouns here is symptomatic of his discomfort with public address. His use of “we” as a collective identity distinct from “the poet” imagines language both as the barrier to and as the potential bridge between the poet and reality, where the efficacy of the poet’s relationship with reality hinges on a social function of language that modifies but is independent from the poet’s agency. In this respect, language becomes both the means but also

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the obstacle to poetic address, since the poet's relation to reality is mediated by a language that derives meaning not from its historical contexts or the poet’s own experience of reality, but from its social function.

As part of the process of restoring meaning to language, Oppen believed that the text and medium of the poem itself cannot be abstracted away from its status as a physical object. As he writes in his "nailed" daybook, "I mean my work to be a process of thought. Which means I am the literary equivalent of the scientist. [...] not, that is to say, the entertainer." 32 Oppen admired the power of public address but believed that the fiction of poetic speech undermined the material ground of his poetic texts. If, as Oppen desired, poetry was to restore meaning to “the word,” that meaning must be grounded by specific concrete objects and not abstractions such as the personality of the poet, which he believed jumbled signification. Elsewhere in his essay he articulates this more explicitly: "The distinction between a poem that shows confidence in itself and its materials, and on the other hand a performance, a speech by the poet, is the distinction between poetry and histrionics." 33

Oppen often describes the figure of the speaker as a performance, and not as a property of the poetic object. In his interview with Michel Engelbert and Michael West, Mary Oppen expands upon her husband’s assertion of this danger and reframes spoken poetry more explicitly as a performance. Oppen, in response, softens his criticism and notes that although some poets have successfully used voice, he does not believe that voice and personality are amenable to his own poetic practices:

MO: It seems to me that many people who want to be poets have this latent in them, or it

captures them: the ability to perform. And that ambition sometimes, it seems to me,

overrides the necessity of finding within themselves what it is they want to say. They get

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carried away; they become performers.

GO: But there can be a sense of—it’s difficult to explain—a sense of the word falling so

solidly, so exactly where you want it to fall, that it will do what your voice really can’t

do. Of course, what one is trying to do is to express meanings which can only be

expressed with the aid of music, so that one has a temptation to rely on the voice. It isn’t

exactly wrong. Ginsberg, and that whole movement, made a tremendous contribution by

bringing their own voices, their actual personalities into the reading. I’m not quarreling

with those who do. But my own sense of the thing happens not to be that. 34

Oppen’s expressed aim in “The Mind’s Own Place” to restore “real” meaning to language suggests that Oppen did not abandon the core of his early Objectivist principles during this phase, but Oppen’s need to recognize and uncomfortably accommodate the figure of the poetic speaker in mid-century poetics demonstrates that the nature of poetry changed significantly between the two periods of Oppen career. Much of his later poetry is marked by the tension between the expectations of poetic voice and his desire to remain true to the status of poems as physical objects. While he describes his first book Discrete Series as “sub-audible,” 35 he notes that Of Being Numerous was written “ for my own voice” even though “I don’t want to be tied to the characteristics of my voice which was conferred upon me, not chosen.” 36 He describes

Seascape: Needle’s Eye , his book immediately following Of Being Numerous , alongside

Discrete Series as, “in violation of my own speech.” 37

According to Oppen, the figure of the speaker and its capacity to stand in for a collective voice demonstrated the precarious readiness with which an abstract sense of collective identity might collapse into a single figure. Regarding the poetics of the speaker, Oppen’s interviews repeatedly assert a concern that the physical or imaginary act of speaking overemphasizes the

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performance and personality of the poetic speaker over the quality and layout of poems themselves. 38 In Ruth Ellen Gruber’s 1973 interview of George Oppen, Ted Berrigan, and

Marvin Cohen, Oppen expresses a concern that this emphasis on individual personality and aesthetic movements circumvents the ability of readers and publishers to interpret individual poets on their own merits:

[George Oppen]: On the one hand, Ginsberg is so definitively, positively, hopelessly the

poet of that group, that it becomes Ginsberg, and what the hell are you doing. On the

other hand, which is almost worse, almost anybody who sounds like Ginsberg--

[Marvin Cohen]: Is swallowed up.

GO: Yeah! Gets published! [….] And when one establishes a group too solidly—if solid

isn’t quite the word for Ginsberg—at least too prominently, there’s a deterioration of

poetry. Everything becomes poetry which has a few of those words in it, and so on. 39

Oppen saw this emphasis on an individual personality as a distortion of the concrete historical ground that might safely stabilize each individual’s sense of self within a collective plurality.

Abstract collective identities particularly troubled Oppen because of the violent possibilities enabled by their erasure of individual identities and their erasure of the material and historical contexts behind them. Oppen wrote against such abstractions like "the metaphysical concept of humanity, a single figure, a monster" 40 and noted that Of Being Numerous considers “whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually does exist.” 41

Despite his concern about the reception and reiteration of Ginsberg’s personality, Oppen praised Ginsberg for his ability to ground his work in its social history. In the same interview with Ruth Ellen Gruber, Oppen praises the historicity of the Beat movement: “But you get nearer the sense of poetry with this, that this group becomes a group because of an historical sense.” 42

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This praise was a cautious one; despite its generous tones, Oppen worried in a 1963 letter to

Denise Levertov that, “the ‘middle generation’ failed, I think […] not because I disagree with what they want to say, but because they abandoned the figures of perception for the figures of elocution, of assertion, of syntax. Whether the voice is moving or not, whether they are ‘sincere’ or not.” 43 The reservations behind Oppen’s mixed reception of Beat poetry demonstrate a potential conflict in Oppen’s aesthetics. Poetry is undoubtedly a physical object composed of line breaks and written language, but it is also a social object able to connect with and ground a collective of public readers. While Oppen admired Ginsberg’s ability to, alongside earlier figures like William Carlos Williams, and the "Chicago literary renaissance of the twenties" for "search for the common experience, for the ground under their feet," 44 he worried about other poets who might mimic Ginsberg’s style without the same sense of historicity. 45

While for Adorno the poem reveals the contradictions in ideology by universalizing experience through the medium of voice, according to Oppen the social value of poetry develops from its ability to situate abstract concepts like “humanity” within their specific and contemporary social histories. Recently, Oren Izenberg interprets such poetic attempts “to reground the concept and the value of the person ” as a shared ontological project amongst 20 th century poets. This project, he believes, is sufficiently vast enough to outline a new history of poetry that replaces the division between “the traditionalist poet and the avant-garde poet” with

“the poet whose primary constructive investments are in the making of poems and the poet whose primary conceptual investments lie in the direction of persons.” 46 For Izenberg, however, even seemingly concrete terms like “making poems” are understood in the abstract; “making a poem” according to Izenberg is a theoretical act opposed to the more conceptual and challenging act of making “non-poetry,” a distinction which he radically reinterpets from Harold Bloom. 47

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As such, the lines of this division are contradictory to the terms with which Oppen described his own poetics. Oppen and his hammered together or pipe-cleaner bound daybooks challenges

Izenberg’s sense of “making” poetry as an abstract process. Michael Davidson describes

Oppen’s archive in the most materialist terms possible, noting that, “It is often difficult to discern where the poem ends and the ‘rubble’ begins. Prose quotation is often transformed into lined verse; new lines are pasted on top of earlier lines and stick off the page like a relief map; drafts of poems are enclosed in folders joined with paper clips and pipestem cleaners; one manuscript is held together with a nail driven through the pages into a piece of wood.” 48

Yet for Izenberg, who names his book Of Being Numerous after Oppen’s collection,

Oppen serves as a strange headliner for this project. Izenberg implicitly frames his interest in

Oppen around Oppen’s biographical and thematic silence, 49 which he believes challenges the distinction between poetry and non-poetry. By understanding “making” both poetry and non- poetry as aesthetic and philosophical acts, Izenberg maintains his distinction between poets invested in “making poetry” and poets invested in expressing concepts without succumbing to the odd implication that poets who express concepts are somehow not physically making poetry—the physical object of the poem is taken for granted and inconsequential to the theoretical intentions of the poet. He equates poetry, predictably, with the act of speaking, which he understands as a direct expression of the poet’s theoretical intentions. On the back cover of his book, he quotes Oppen’s claim that “because I am not silent, the poems are bad,” which

Izenberg follows with the question, “Why should the goodness of an art depend upon its disappearance?” A physical poem might disappear in such an instance only if the poem’s status as an object is erased and the poem becomes in its entirety reducible to the fantasy of speech.

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This gesture, although misguided, is as I have demonstrated in my other chapters not unique to

Izenberg.

While Izenberg believes that Oppen’s attempts to “make a poet’s silence legible ” will demonstrate that “reading in the history of the theory of poetry may benefit from a less straitened sense of what counts as a context and a more capacious view of what constitutes a moment,” 50 I disagree and believe that Oppen’s reluctant gestures towards speech in his later poetry stands out against his earlier poetry wherein speech is absent and attests to the value of the “micro- historicism” that Izenberg so adamantly opposes. Oppen’s reluctance to embrace the poetic speaker is a historical symptom that signals his discomfort with the changing expectations of 20 th century poetry. 51 Izenberg attempts to have Poetry, in the broadest sense, function as and circumvent historical genres:

[…] a historicism that begins by assuming that generic variation and difference as prima

facie evidence of methodological rigor cannot help but fail to perceive the existence of a

tradition of poetic thinking in which the insistence upon difference (between poets, verse

genres, as indeed between one person and another) is the very problem in need of a

solution. The fervor of micro-historicism has a moral cast that exceeds the requirements

of descriptive accuracy. 52

Contrary to this, much of Oppen’s later verse explicitly turns to historical genres and struggles to adapt them into his historical moment. For Oppen, these genres provided historical contexts that he hoped might ground the otherwise strange, but ubiquitous fantasy of poetic speech in the midcentury. Instead of evading historicism, Oppen’s poetry struggles against this condensation of historical poetic genres as a means to resist the nonspecific category of the midcentury lyric.

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Furthermore, Oppen’s desire for historical contexts takes on a moral cast that is precisely dependent on these contexts’ descriptive accuracy. 53 Silence, when it is discussed in Oppen’s poetry, is often less interested in demarcating an aesthetic line between what is and is not poetic and more interested in exploring an ethical evaluation about what should and should not be expressed in language. 54 In one of his (until recently) unpublished poems, “Memory at the

Modern,” Oppen explicitly contemplates the danger of considering both collectives and individual people outside of their historical contexts and ends the poem by asserting the immutability of his own historicity: “I am a man of the Thirties// ‘No other taste shall change this’.” As a result of this statement and the poem’s references to Oppen’s first volume, Discrete

Series , “Memory at the Modern” is difficult to read without imagining Oppen himself standing in as the poem’s speaker:

We had seen bare land

And the people bare on it

And the men camp

In the city. The lights,

The pavement, this important device

Of a race, I wrote then,

Twenty three years old,

Remains till morning. Nobody knows who died

On the roads of that time, of the fact of roads.

I am a man of the Thirties

‘No other taste shall change this’ 55

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Even read through the figuration of Oppen’s own voice, the poem is (like so much of Oppen’s writing) difficult to parse. The final line of the poem, a quotation from Ezra Pound’s Canto IV, bifurcates the poem along two contrasting meanings of the phrase “the Modern” in the poem’s title. Does the “We” of the poem’s first line collectively address Oppen’s generation and their struggle to survive through the Great Depression, or does the “We” identify with Pound and his aesthetic contemporaries, “The Moderns?”

Both forms of the pronoun’s collective address invite an identification that is undercut by a series of distancing gestures. The scare quotes in the poem’s title challenge any claims to a teleological narrative of advancement implicated by modernity. Throughout, the poem undermines any claims to dramatic historical change: Oppen’s deictic markers implicate “the lights,” “the pavement” and “this important device of a race” within an unbroken continuity between midcentury New York and the New York of the 1930’s. The poem’s concluding allusion to the Cantos is itself a secondhand allusion to the Decameron . In the original story,

Raimon of Castel Rossillon murders his wife Seremonda’s lover, Cabestan, and feeds her his heart. The line that Oppen quotes recognizes the immutability of Seremonda’s horror:

“It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish.”

“It is Cabestan’s heart in the dish?”

“No other taste shall change this” 56

These words, her final words before committing suicide, transcend language and render it inconsequential before the material horror of Seremonda’s unintentional cannibalism. The poem grotesquely recognizes the flavor of Cabestan’s cooked heart, but does so only in order to stress that no taste, and no cause, can change or justify her unintentional act of cannibalism. Is Oppen linking the inescapability of this act to his identity as a man of the thirties, or is he linking it to

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the horrific legacy of mass suffering experienced during the Great Depression by those “who died on the road of that time”?

Seremonda, like the unknowns in Oppen’s poem who died the depression, represents an ethical and aesthetic limit, but the stakes of this limit hinge on how the poem frames its collective mode of address. If the poem is read as an address to Ezra Pound and his

“modernists,” Seremonda suggests an aesthetic affiliation that Oppen cannot move beyond. 57

Oppen’s modernist upbringing, which conditions his desire to know and to represent material truths which are themselves impossible to know and to represent, frames his work and distances him from later generations of poets. However, if the “we” is read as an address to the collective people of his entire generation, the stakes of the poem’s distancing gestures are more troubling.

By offering up a mode of collective address through the contradictory position of a single speaking voice, the poem imagines a collectivity based around the single individual. But for

Oppen, a devoted anti-fascist who was distressed by Stalin’s corruption of Marxist principles, this form of individualized collective address threatens to undermine the possibility of collectivity itself. No matter the language used, the inescapable fact of the individual speaking for the collective, especially when members of that collective are dead and can no longer contradict his voice, risks a betrayal, like that by Ramon of Castel Rossillon, which feeds the concept of collectivity its own heart.

As "Memory at 'the Modern'" suggests, Oppen viewed poetic address as neither a singular nor a stable mode of expression. Even if Memory at the Modern utilizes the figure of a poetic speaker, the poem contemplates and resists the mutability of decontextualized poetic address; the speaker, no matter who reads the poem and from which point in time, "is a man of the thirties." The title of the poem invokes the idea of "memory," but the past is only readily

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accessible through its proximity to a contemporary material referent. The abstract notion of "the city" that Oppen wrote about in his youth is remembered by its relationship to concrete, immutable details that link his past and present experiences of the city: "the pavement" and "the lights." Indeed, his memory fails only when such material referents are mutable and hence inaccessible. The inability to know the men who died during the Depression is linked to their mobility and to his inability to know "the fact of roads." The silence of these men exceeds the dramatic framing of the poem and enters the text not as silence, but as a poetic utterance where the marking of its unknowability violates the ontological state of its inaccessibility. The speaker recognizes the absence of these voices, but in so doing appropriates them into language without any concrete material ground to challenge or verify his appropriation.

While criticism on Oppen has offered several textured views on Oppen’s philosophical, aesthetic, and ethical investments in silence, these readings rarely pay similar care attending to

Oppen's use of a poetic speaker. Because of Oppen's twenty-five year period of silence after writing his first book, Discrete Series , criticism often imagines this speaker as silence’s necessary “other,” a philosophical or ethical valuation of the act of speech measured against his earlier decision to remain silent. This reading takes Oppen's use of a poetic speaker for granted.

Many of Oppen’s later works, especially Of Being Numerous , foreground poetic address and present it as a complicated field of necessary but unappealing poetic modes that do not neatly fit into a binary opposition with silence. Unlike Lowell and O’Hara who eagerly utilize expectations of a poetic speaker in order to construct their unique mid-century modes of address, Oppen worried about the ethical consequences of aesthetically valorizing a linguistically constructed mode of individual subjectivity. This worry complicated Oppen’s identity as a “man of the thirties” by forcing him to reimagine his objectivist aesthetics within a midcentury expectation of

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poetic address. Oppen's first volume, Discrete Series, rarely if ever draws attention to its modes of address, but much of his later work, like the unpublished "Memory at 'the Modern'", thematizes the distance between its use of a poetic speaker and the mid-century audience it wishes to address. Even though Oppen's later poetry often foregrounds the figure of the speaker, his use of this figure was rarely a comfortable one. Criticism rarely considers the challenges for applying his 1930's Objectivist principles to mid-century poetic address. As such, Oppen is often imagined both intellectually and literally as a preternaturally old residual trace of early twentieth century modernism. 58 When Oppen is placed into literary history, he is often read in conversation with his fellow objectivists, Zukofsky and Reznikoff, as part of a 1930’s materialist project descending from the ontological and phenomenological aims of the imagist tradition, despite the fact that six of his seven books were written after 1960. Compared side by side, these two periods of Oppen's career show a startling contrast in how poetic speech was constructed in the

1930's and the 1960's.

Reading Oppen primarily as a 1930's Objectivist poet, and not as a midcentury poet, unnecessarily overemphasizes Oppen's earlier treatment of “thinking with things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody” 59 at the expense of his later interests in “the social, the fact that one does live historically” with the material world. 60 Ming-Qian Ma, for example, collapses Oppen’s earlier objectivist principles into his later phenomenological interests through her use of a hyphen to describe Oppen’s “objectivist-phenomenological act of seeing,” 61 while

Edward Hirsch reads Oppen’s poetry as the expression of a “visual ethic” that “continually affirm[s] the presence of external reality, yet remained committed to surveying the difficult relationship between that reality and the singular perceiving self.” 62 These readings create a consistent narrative throughout Oppen's career by drawing on a visual optics that relies on the

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implied figure of the speaker. Hirsch’s claim of a visual ethic is particularly troubling since it erases Oppen’s lifelong theoretical and professional engagement with Marxism (which is largely responsible for his thirty year silence) and frames the ethical project of Oppen’s poetry as one of purely individualistic and ahistorical self-exploration. This quasi-confessional reading forgets about Oppen's careful attention to the materiality of his poetry and undermines the very discreteness of his work. L.S. Dembo goes as far as to call Oppen's poetry "a Cartesian investigation by imagistic rather than rationalistic means." 63

The poetic image for Oppen resists such individualistic and cognitive aims; it aspires towards actualness and is contrasted against metaphor, which he interprets as an abstraction.

While admitting that “it is possible to find a metaphor for anything, an analogue,” Oppen continues on to claim, “the image is encountered, not found, it is an account of the poet’s perception, the act of perception; it is a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.” 64 The image, for Oppen, acts within language but, unlike metaphor, emerges from the material world and is not projected onto it. As such, the poetic image does not affirm the material world, but is instead affirmed by it, testing language for its deceptive, abstract function as metaphor. In “Memory at ‘the Modern’,” the dead arguably represent a boundary between these two terms where a sincere representation of the “truth” of the dead's unknowability can only be made into a poetic image by presenting them without a material ground. 65

The individual poetic voice, which is a fantasy projected onto the written word, seems more closely attuned to Oppen’s sense of metaphor than poetic image. Peter Nicholls notes in his thorough study of Oppen’s archive that, “Oppen dissociates his own work from a poetry attuned to the speaking voice,” 66 but this dissociation became increasingly difficult over the course of

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Oppen’s career. Oppen's first book, Discrete Series , rarely draws attention to its use of a poetic speaker and do not rely on this fiction as a source of meaning. Glossing through the pronouns that Oppen uses in the collection, Oppen’s infrequent use of second and third person pronouns suggest that several sections of the long poem “Discrete Series” frame themselves within a speaking situation. However, Oppen’s conspicuous deferral of a first-person pronoun implies that the poetic speaker is not the focus of these exchanges. The first instance we have of a first- person pronoun is an objective plural “us” eight pages into the long poem—the book contains no

“we’s,” which is an important contrast to his later writings. This section of “Discrete Series” where we first see the “us” is short, and like so much of his work, minimalistic but beautifully descriptive:

The mast

Inaudibly soars; bole-like, tapering

Sail flattens from it beneath the wind.

The limp water holds the boat’s round

sides. Sun

Slants dry light on the deck.

Beneath us glide

Rocks, sand, and unrimmed holes. 67

As the objective case of the pronoun might imply, the subjectivity of this “us” is inconsequential to the poem and is presented only as a foil to the boat and the material world surrounding it.

There are subjects, human beings on this boat who can observe and experience the world, but the

“mineral facts” 68 of the poem, the rocks, sand, and unrimmed holes which are so easy to overlook, are the poem’s real focus. Though these details are quite literally beneath the poem’s

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perceiving subjects, these subjects are more like passive objects than the elements moving around the boat, keeping it afloat, or propelling it forward. The poem carries most of its details forward without the need for an established speaking or perceiving agent and offers up an “us” only in the final sentence of the poem. The effect of withholding this voice for so long minimizes the poem’s human subjects and suggests that if a poetic consciousness emerges in the poem, it is only as a consequence of her or his perception; consciousness is Oppen’s poetry is not a necessary condition for perception.

Oppen does not present a subjective first-person pronoun, an “I,” until ten pages into his book. While the objective “us” in the first poem marks the space when the perceiving subject of the poem’s short section, perhaps its speaker, is included only in order to mark the inconsequentiality of her or his perception, Oppen’s first use of an “I” is an ironic statement on such absentmindedness:

Who comes is occupied

Toward the chest (in the crowd moving

opposite

Grasp of me)

In firm overalls

The middle-age man sliding

Levers in the steam-shovel cab,--

Lift (running cable) and swung, back

Remotely respond to the gesture before last

Of his arms fingers continually—

Turned with the cab. But if I (how goes

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it?)--

The asphalt edge

Loose on the plateau,

Horse’s classic height cartless

See electric flash of streetcar,

The fall is falling from electric burst. 69

The “I” here is cut off, unable to finish its statement, precisely as a result of its own lack of self- awareness. “How goes it?” the poem asks, but because of the poem’s use of parenthesis it is unclear if the voice asking this question is the “I” or a second speaker. Assuming that the question, “how goes it,” attempts to understand the goings-on of the city street presented in the poem, the answer to this question is readily available. From the removed vantage point of the poem’s reader, the events in the poem are not difficult to parse out: the individual, somewhat awestruck by the crowded streets of the city and the workings of the cable car, stumbles off of the curb absentmindedly into oncoming traffic. However, such a straightforward answer to this question, “how it goes,” undermines the confusion that the text is trying to present. The poem is not about the perceiving subject of the poem, its dramatic situation, or even the experience of the subject’s stumble. The poem, like all of Discrete Series , is about the concrete facts of the city: the worker, the operation of the street car, and the chaos surrounding the street car, or what

Oppen would later call the “occurrences.” The subject’s fall is not an experience and is depicted by the poem as a cryptic statement that resists offering an easy transition from its material referents into cognizable language: “The fall is falling from electric burst.” Oppen use of the verb “is” concludes the poem by offering “is” as both a predicate nominative defining the fall as its cause, a falling because of the electric headlights, and as a simple active conjugation of the

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verb “to be” that arrests the fall’s intermediate state of being. This simple use of “is” as an active verb offers a pure representation of the fall being exactly what it is at the precise moment that it is rendered into the subject’s experience but before it is transformed into the past tense of memory. “Is” becomes a literal suspension of both the subject and the concrete on which it lands, operating in a liminal state between the conceptual and material perceptions of the subject. This liminality defines the fall at the expense of the subject, creating a collapse of the mind/body dualism of perception. At this moment of deferral, the perceiving subject’s experience of the fall

(and perhaps her or his entire consciousness, given that the subject is startled into awareness by the headlights) is part of and equal to the material objects, the literal concrete pavement, of the poem. If there is a self, and by extension a speaker, the experience of that self is not separate from the experience of things—in this case, the street car’s headlights and the impact of the pavement.

While the fantasy of the poetic speaker allowed for the early New Critics to interpret emotional tones as structural components of poetic texts, Oppen attempts to resist the emotional valences of his poetry by flattening his subjects (perhaps literally in his previous poem!). His subjects are more often than not disinterested or absentminded ones. In the opening lines of his collection, Oppen valorizing the affect of boredom in the opening lines of his collection:

The knowledge not of sorrow, you were

saying, but of boredom

Is—aside from reading speaking

smoking—

Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was,

wished to know when, having risen,

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“approached the window as if to see

what really was going on”;

And saw rain falling, in the distance

more slowly,

The road clear from her past the window-

glass—

Of the world, weather-swept, with which

one shares the century. 70

The “you” of the first line implies a poetic subject, perhaps a speaker, but this speaker communicates primarily through second-hand citations of his interlocutor: the “knowledge… you were saying.” The poem diverts its attention from its speaker towards this second-hand subject, the you , but even this subject is not the focus of the poem because the knowledge offered by this subject is itself derived from Henry James. The complicated framing of quotations and second- handed speech culminates in the character Maude Blessingborne 71 who enters the text only to proffer a quotation that pushes back against the very dramatic situation that invokes her. What is really “going on" in the poem is not its dramatic situation, but a total context that is comprised by and contains the discrete elements within it: “the world weather-swept, with which one shares the century.”

If each of these sections of Discrete Series offer a speaker, these speakers are not typical lyric subjects because their capacities for perception are explicitly part of and cannot be separated from the material objects of the poems themselves; the experience of these subjects are predicated on the materials of the poems themselves and not the other way around. These speakers are by no means dramatic, and are themselves objects interacting with and existing

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amongst the other objects of his poem. They are part of, but not the point of access to “the entire sphere, the sphere of meaning.” 72 As a result, the meaning-making function of the poetic speaker cannot apply because the spaces of Oppen’s poem exist independently from its speakers and are overshadowed by any prioritization of their perception.

As his short poem “Drawing,” makes clear, the meaning of the poem resides in the text’s literal status as a physical object called up by the act of reading:

Not by growth

But the

Paper, turned, contains

This entire volume. 73

Reading the poems in Discrete Series for a speaker or a dramatic situation misses exactly what the poems are about: the very discreteness of the poems as things presenting things.

Interpreting Discrete Series in such a way radically and counter-intuitively reframes the discussion of biographical or thematic “silence” in Oppen’s later poetry instead as a reluctant biographical and thematic turn towards poetic speech. 74 In contrast to his deferral of a first person pronoun in Discrete Series , five out of Oppen’s six collections of poetry published after his long silence utilize a first-person singular or plural pronoun in their first poem. As I have already noted, after Oppen’s long break from writing, the figure of the poetic speaker became an increasingly normalized mode of poetic reading. On at least one of the many loose scraps of paper in his archive, Oppen laments this expectation and dejectedly concludes that the idea of poetic speech, although undesirable, is the only option available to him: “I have resigned myself to coming on stage, to talking for silence is impossible.” 75 As this quote implies, Oppen struggled to adapt his sparse, but concrete aesthetic to the subjective filter of fixed poetic speech.

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The one collection after his silence that does not use a first-person pronoun in its opening poem is Oppen first volume after his silence, The Materials (1962). The collection begins with an intentionally misquoted epigraph from Jacques Maritain which declares an inseparable relationship between individual perception and the physical objects that give rise to those perceptions: “We awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things.” In this epigraph and throughout Oppen’s late oeuvre, Oppen alludes to Maritain's distinction between the introspective, "unawakened" self and the "creative subjectivity" that orients itself outwards and

"awakens to itself only by simultaneously awakening to Things." 76 However, while the grammatical subject of Maritain's text is an “I” representing individual subjectivity, Oppen intentionally misquotes Maritain in his epigraph by framing this awakening around a collective

"we": "We awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things." This reimagining of Maritain foregrounds the differences between three distinct modes of perception: the individual "I," the textually mediated "I" of the poet, and the collective "we."

Oppen's misquotation seemingly shifts the individual self into a collective self with relative ease, but as I have already suggested, mid-century Oppen worried about the capacity for an abstract sense of collective identity to collapse into a single figure. Oppen often addresses this problem by explicitly thematizing the difficulty of using the expectation of a singular voice to contextualize the historical grounds of a communal audience. As the title of the first poem in The

Materials implies, “Eclogue” opens Oppen’s collection by drawing our attention to the physical ground of the outside world. While in Discrete Series poetic speech was inseparable from its physical ground, here speech suggests a dangerous excess: “The men talking/ Near the room’s center. They have said/ More than they had intended.” 77 This excess, “pinpointing in the uproar/

Of the living room,” is still summoned up by and still inseparable from the physical world but

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this poem, unlike those in Oppen’s previous collection, violates and threatens the viability of the landscape outside because speech here is summoned up by “An assault/ On the quiet continent.”

Post-WWII, the relationship between poetic speech and the material world has changed. 78 As

Peter Nicholls observes, “ The Materials is a troubled and anxious volume, overshadowed by the threat of atomic catastrophe and by the spectre of an alien ‘stone universe.’” 79 The material world is no longer immutable and is in danger of becoming a crude adulteration of itself and man: “Beyond the window/ Flesh and rock and hunger// Loose in the night sky/ Hardened into soil.” 80 This window is not Maude Blessinborne’s. Boredom cannot be the appropriate affect in the face of such violence, which threatens the pastoral beauty of “small /Vegetative leaves/ And stems taking place,” 81 but the poem does not offer up appropriate emotions to replace this affective state. Indeed, the poem explores if the voyeuristic vantage point of a window is an inappropriately detached means through which to view the world.

Oppen is faced with an aporia that defines much of his later work: speech violates the sanctity of the “quiet continent,” but silence allows these violations to perpetuate. Oppen attempts to resolve this aporia by re-grounding his poetic speech in, as his collection’s title suggests, the materials of the outside world and the printedness of the text itself. Our decision to read “Eclogue” as an eclogue stems from the printed title of the poem which categorizes the poem as such and does not emerge from any specific set of reading practices surrounding eclogic poetry or, more importantly, not from the acts of a speaker in the poem. The acts of speech which threaten the sanctity of the world outside also threaten to destabilize the poem’s utilization of poetic genre, which emerges from the printedness of the poem itself and not from the speakers within the text. These individuals, like those in Discrete Series , are bound up within their material contexts, but unlike those in his earlier work, these characters do not readily coexist

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with the world around them and threaten to exceed the printedness of the text itself. “Eclogue” creates a tenuous but clear alliance between the physical world and our capacity to read poetry as poetry, and not as speech. If the poem is indeed an eclogue, these speakers detract from the poem’s attention on the outside world and are only contained within the text’s loose sense of eclogic poetry by the sheer force of the poem’s print contexts.

Oppen’s later poetry, especially in his first three volumes after his return to writing, frequently turns to such loose attachments to poetic genres as a means of contextualizing his modes of poetic address. In The Materials , the sheer quantity of titles referencing distinct genres, poetic models, and other historical modes of address stresses his thematic investment in tracing such a history: "Eclogue," "Travelogue," "Myself I Sing," "Ozymandias," "From a Photograph,"

"O Western Wind," "Daedalus: The Dirge," and "Still Life." Of Being Numerous , which Oppen describes as his attempt to explore, “the social, the fact that one does live historically,” 82 similarly explores adapting historical genres into their contemporary moments. At the end of his collection, Oppen gestures to the nineteenth century generic origins of the poetic speaker by entitling his poem, “Ballad.” This return is a nostalgic one, but demonstrates for Oppen the imperative to create a new poetry that, like the ballad for the nineteenth century, speaks for its historical moment. By historicizing this voice in a piggybacked gesture towards the genre of the ballad, Oppen utilizes the figure of the midcentury poetic speaker without restricting his push towards an alternative, but equally contemporary mode of address.

As a result of the poem’s reference of ballad poetry, “Ballad” is a poem of loss, and not recovery. Even as the poem luxuriates in its connection with the rural Maine lobsterman and his wife, it marks his distance from them by comparing them to emblems from the age of discovery.

Oppen begins by associating them with “Astrolabs and lexicons, // Once in great houses” 83 that

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used to serve a distinguished function but have become relics of different age when the island served as tourist destination. These relics, especially the astrolabes, however, gesture towards the island’s discovery in the early 17 th century but predate the island’s habitation, which occurred in the late 18 th century. Although these items, as Oppen confirms in his interview with David

McAleavey in 1978, were real and that “those fishermen existed, and everything, just as I described them” 84 , Oppen’s decision to use these objects feels anachronistic even for the nostalgic perspective of the speaker. This not-quite-anachronistic figure of the astrolabe, as such, appropriately juxtaposes against the lobsterman who is too “well-spoken” and “hardly real.”

Like the astrolabe, this lobsterman similarly represents a factually contextualized fantasy of rural life that suspends, but does not escape from, modern temporality.

Oppen places the poem’s speaker, who straddles the mid-century lyric and the nineteenth century ballad, in a similar suspension. The speaker wonders about his connection to reality in such a bifurcated state between the modern and the anachronistic, noting that it is “Difficult to know what one means // —to be serious and to know what one means.“ But this island, regardless of its difficulty, is undoubtedly real because it is full of concrete facts such as “the ledges in the rough sea seen from the road // And the harbor // And the post office,” even as these facts themselves, like the lobsterman who is “Hardly real,” contradict Oppen’s expectations of his contemporary moment. Seriousness, a crucial term for Oppen 85 , seems to resist the material contexts of his poem that seem unreal and give rise to “difficulty.” This resistance is unusual for

Oppen who typically discuss seriousness as an expression of the actual, but because this seriousness is mediated through the voice of the speaker, any knowledge of what “one means” must simultaneously understand the material world and the language spoken to represent it.

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This difficulty, for once in Oppen’s poetry, is buoyed the speaker’s subsequent recognition that “An island // has a public quality.” This public quality resists the solipsistic projection of the speaker as a locus of meaning, even while the poem offers up a representation of that speaker’s consciousness. The poem ends by emphasizing the need for such intersubjectivity, quoting the lobsterman’s wife expressing “What I like more than anything is to visit other islands.” 86 Oppen suggests, in response to a question by Michel Engelbert and

Michael West asking if there is an “acid test for great poetry,” that, “What the poem must have is the thing itself. To carry its own meaning.”87 While Oppen stresses the importance of

“actualness” in his poetry, his comments occasionally imply that his concept of “meaning” relies on a degree of social relativism embodied in the social function of language, “We have to speak to each other, or the buildings will be meaningless. I’m sure you follow me […] Yes, and the woman who says, ‘I like… to visit other islands.’ I guess I just kept saying the same thing.” 88 At times, Oppen goes so far as to suggest that the ability for poetry to test truth is its capacity to communicate the actualness of consciousness and the material world directly between two people. As he writes in another note, “The ‘dignity of work’ derives from the general agreement that it requires no judgment of purposes.// perhaps what we are trying to do is create a democratic culture which permits one man to speak to another honestly and modestly and in freedom.”

Despite the social aim of “Ballad” and Of Being Numerous , Oppen often seems to describe poetry as an act of individual thinking. He writes in an undated letter to John Crawford that “There are thoughts easily available to me because they have already been thought. There is an almost audible click in the brain to mark the transition between thought which is available because it has already been thought, and the thinking of a single man, the thinking of a man as if

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he were a single man. Of Being Numerous is constructed around that click.” 89 These moments, however, should not be taken to construe that Oppen falls into a passive acceptance of the speaker, or that such acts of representing thought should be read apart from their means of circulation; “meaning,” as I have already suggested, rises precisely from the capacity to resist any sense of solipsism and represent these thoughts intersubjectively. Of Being Numerous and the archive surrounding Oppen’s later writings suggests that Oppen is acutely aware of the contradictory limitations of a poetic speaker and struggles to resolve them in his poem. His speaker is on one hand textual fantasy, a distortion of the actual, but on the other hand becomes the intersubjective means through which communicated language might acquire a sense of the

“actual.”

Oppen opens Of Being Numerous and its titular poem by asserting this relationship between perception and historical context. As the mathematical title of “Of Being Numerous” suggests, Oppen places the poem in an explicit conversation with Discrete Series . Unlike his first collection which defers any clear representation of speech or a speaking subject, the second line of “Of Being Numerous” establishes a “we”:

There are things

We live among ‘and to see them

Is to know ourselves’. 90

This “we” is established conditionally only after the existence of “things,” but the position of this

“we” on the page gives it substantial, perhaps even greater weight than the word “things” that falls at the end of its line. Oppen attaches these “things” to a vague sense of “there,” offering an atypically abstract representation of objects. Instead of offering a concrete representation of

“things,” the imprecise treatment of “There are things” in its own line creates the appearance of a

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philosophical proposition, but unlike Oppen’s previous poetry where things could exist apart from their perception by human subjects, the line’s lack of an end stop compromises the independence of this assertion from the subsequent lines that establish the subject. As a result of so explicitly establishing a human subject, the existence of “Things” is equally important and simultaneous to the awareness of that subject’s consciousness, which cannot know for sure where these “things” are until such awareness is achieved. A key question that Of Being

Numerous establishes in these lines then becomes the simultaneity of this proposition. How might a collective identity, a “we,” emerge from a richly historical context without first acquiring the perquisite sense of identity necessary to perceive such contexts?

“Of Being Numerous,” however, does not explore these questions from the safe distance of philosophical contemplation. The question of collective identity is inseparable from his concerns over both preserving and yet not inflating the individual identity of his speaker. Even though his poem aims at establishing a historical ground for his collective audience, Oppen wonders how one might maintain an individual sense of self while also existing within a collective or generational identity. In addition to being philosophical and historical considerations, these questions are explicitly tied to his poetics and manifest in his uneasy utilization of the poetic speaker. Oppen compared Of Being Numerous to The Waste Land and worried about the difficulties of writing such an expression of his era in the midcentury: “Not so easy for me as for Eliot – whose metaphysical standpoint is faith and whose anthropocentric standpoint is the Age of Faith. And therefore I haven’t, I’m afraid, written a Wasteland [sic], haven’t written decisive expression of a period. I meant not to try in this book [ This in Which ]. I meant to try in the next [ Of Being Numerous ].” 91 Oppen rarely expressed admiration towards

Eliot, and revised his first poem after his twenty-five year period of silence, “Blood from the

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Stone,” when he noted with horror (calling himself the “unaudenized and diselioted” 92 ) that it sounded too conversational. While Oppen’s reservations towards Eliot and Auden stem from their use of poetic speakers, in his 1978 interview with Tom Sharp he expresses a caution admiration towards Eliot’s object correlative even as he pushes the meaning of Eliot’s concept into a larger field of meaning: “Yes, but on the other hand, the object—if that’s what you [Tom

Sharp] said—again in my little poem [“Neighbors”] is the entire sphere, the sphere of meaning. I don’t think it should be much reduced from that in those poems. Though, of course, you could be moved by a single person or a tragedy, of course. But it becomes poetry, as it becomes where we are as a whole, the whole that is eloquent to know.” 93 Like the line that Oppen greatly admired from Reznikoff’s from A Group of Verse , “Among the heaps of brick and plaster lies a girder, still itself among the rubbish,” in Oppen’s poetry, objects, like abstract concepts like “man,” are present in their individual materiality precisely because they are not detached from their context around and amongst other individual objects. 94

Even if “Of Being Numerous” explicitly figures its poetic speakers, they do not take the mode of their poetic address or their specific speaking situations for granted, like so many other poets post-lyricization. Critics such as John Wilkinson and Michael Davidson argue that Oppen’s use of “glass” creates a continuity across his first few books that “seems motivated by an anxiety at the ineluctably mediated nature of seeing and the conditions for seeing, as well as the shiftiness of language.” 95 These readings interpret glass solely as a medium for perception, and not as an actual object situated in the real world. Oppen’s revision of Maude Blessingborne in

“Of Being Numerous” corrects his earlier statement by removing any ambiguity suggesting its focus was on a decontextualized act of perception. Oppen reflects that if he could rewrite his opening to Discrete Series then he would have rewritten Maude Blessingborne looking out the

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window to notice, “not the rain/ Of a nineteenth century day, but the motes/ In the air, the dust//

Here still.” 96 The vantage point of the window is no longer a discrete vantage point capable of perceiving the material world and is instead surrounded by its material position within the world.

The motes, which use the air as a vessel for suspension, insist on the physical properties of the air. Even the light which enables Maude Blessingborne to perceive the materiality of the air in turn becomes a physical object as it reflects off of the dust.

These motes, which appear in Of Being Numerous complicate the subject position of

Maude Blessingborne and in so doing also complicate the position of the “I,” here rendered as the poet George Oppen, who enters into the text only through the conditional phrase, “I should have written.” 97 While Oren Izenberg interprets Oppen’s later preference towards the “motes” as a physical continuity between his early and later works, this interpretation focuses more on the immutability of the motes than their status as physical objects. He writes that “If what has changed, in other words, is the idea that true knowledge (of ‘the world’) resides in things that change, like the weather, and the new idea is that knowledge (of ‘Everything’) resides in things that do not, like motes, then the words of Oppen’s poems would seem to be more like motes than like weather.” 98 As I previously argued, the motes are only made visible by the context surrounding them: the air that suspends them, the light which reflects off of them, and the poet’s gesture towards Discrete Series as something he “should have” but now cannot modify directly.

The text does not offer anything as grand as “knowledge” here. Indeed, the awareness of this intended edit complicates the meaning of the earlier text. Precisely because the motes deny any sort of pure position for perception, the immanence of the poet’s subject position is similarly compromised. The text addresses this directly:

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What have we argued about? what have we done?

Thickening the air?

Air so thick with myth the words unlucky And good luck

Float in it… To ‘see’ them?

No.

Or sees motes, an iron mesh, links

Of consequence

Still, at the mind’s end Relevant 99 The air in the poem is thick with motes, but only because it is also thick with the language that retroactively depicts them. The poem struggles to mediate the tension between the physicality of the motes and the abstract properties of the language that allows for the motes to exist in the first place. Even though there is no unmediated position for “knowledge” or perception, the language of poetry and the intentions of the poet who “should have written” risks undermining the materiality of the printed poem by revising its history and jumbling it with decontextualized abstractions.

Ultimately, the motes themselves become an abstraction and only bear meaning for

Discrete Series if we ignore the printedness of the text, which cannot be revised by intention. In later reproductions of Discrete Series , including the 1975 Collected Poems , Oppen does not

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modify the original text, despite having the opportunity to do so. “Of Being Numerous” and the poem’s “ should have written” expresses the failure and limitations of the poet, and by extension language, which can only revise itself in the present. Contrarily, the poem also insists the possibility that these “motes” are, “at the mind’s end” relevant. But this relevant requires a dramatic shift in subject position. Given the section’s entrance of an “I,” and its later entrance of a “we,” the shift in tense from the first person singular and plural to the third person singular

“sees” allows significance for the “iron mesh” only by completely obliterating the subject positions established in this section. The scare quotes around the ‘see’ immediately following the discussion of words needs not be repeated when followed by “motes” as an object; when the act of sight is removed “at the mind’s end” from the experience of a subject position and placed into its actual “links of consequence” with the material world, the motes become relevant and articulate the asymptote of a different phenomenology for reading that emerges from the materiality of the text itself. This new means of engagement between the text and reader forms

“links of consequence” with the text’s historical contexts independently from both signification and the reader’s subject position.

The literary figure Robinson Crusoe poses a major problem for Oppen’s poetics and their concern with historical contexts. Crusoe, a shipwreck survivor, is defined as such precisely because of his removal from his appropriate contexts. The text is ambiguous about the nature of his return to society and places scare quotes around the phrase “rescued”: “Crusoe / We say was /

‘Rescued’. / So we have chosen.” 100 The NCP cites Randolph Chilton in order to explain the ambiguity around “rescued”:

Crusoe is rescued from solitude to society, in other words, and simply by calling it a

rescue, we make a social commitment…. Numerosity and singularity give each other

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meaning. We need a sense of collective existence to provide the context for a sense of our

own reality. 101

By representing “rescued” in scare quotes, however, Oppen mediates this “sense of collective existence” through dialogue, and not the actual material contexts of singular or collective identity. Oppen concedes in his letter to Rachel Blau DuPlessis that this act of abstraction is unavoidable and that certain necessary concepts for thinking about identity are meaningful only by their abstract relationships to other identities. These concepts are, according to Oppen, “half the burden of the poem which is hardest to establish—the concepts evolved from the fact of being numerous, without which we are marooned, shipwrecked—it is in fact unthinkable without them.” 102

In section 9 from “Of Being Numerous,” Oppen parallels the figure of Crusoe to the figure of the poet, who are both defined by their removal from society. He opens the section by citing a conversation with Rachel Blau DuPlessis:

‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the

people, does not also increase’

I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place

Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of thought and

one of his dialects and what has happened to me

Have made poetry 103

DuPlessis’s statement is coopted into a description of the perceived singularity of the midcentury poet, explained at the end of the section as “the bright light of shipwreck.” This poet, when treated as a pure locus of perception, is marooned much like Crusoe, but this act is also a

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destructive one. While this shipwreck might assert itself into awareness, it is still a shipwreck that is only desirable in the abstract. Both Crusoe and the figure of the midcentury poet are characters defined by their distance from society, but these definitions are absurdly fictional constructs that Oppen condemns as “the unearthly bonds / Of the singular.” Just as “we” might

“say” that Crusoe was “rescued,” the collective defines his singularity and can change that definition at any time. Crusoe, and by extension the figure of the poet, do not possess a strict material context for either singular or collective identity and must be interpellated into either position through language.

In section 10, Oppen suggests that this reduction of poetry into such abstractions where anyone, the “audience-as-artists” can attribute meaning, eliminates the possibility of honest communication between people. Such actual conversations, which Oppen does not attribute to poetry or works of art, allow for a moment of Whitmanesque optimism that celebrates their existence even in their failure to signify:

Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I

will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I

will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many

that we are, but nothing.

Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—The isolated man is dead, his

world around him exhausted

And he fails! He fails, that mediative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it. 104

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If “Ballad” ends Of Being Numerous by reasserting the possibility of such conversations, “Of

Being Numerous” establishes the conditions through which these conversations might fail to exist.

As Peter Nicholls points out, Oppen establishes a “positive sense” for his shipwreck motif in a poem that Oppen did not publish during his lifetime, “Beautiful as the Sea” 105 :

beautiful as the sea

and the islands’ clear light

of shipwreck the pebbles

shifting

on the beach that even sorrow

or most terrible

wound prove us part

of the world not fallen

from it the cadence the image

the poem is

conviction forceful

as light 106

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This poem, which lacks a clear subject, describes the shipwreck through a fragmented and documentary style that feels more like his earlier work in Discrete Series. The “us” is produced as a grammatical object that appears in the text only to be “part of the world not fallen.” This different form of shipwreck recovers the materiality of the island and establishes the physical poem as a conviction, something held firmly as true without any further need for argument or proof. This poem and the actual island itself, not the concept of the shipwreck, become the

“light” and acquire the force of meaning.

Using Jennifer Ashton’s descriptions of modernist and postmodernist poetry, George

Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” articulates a different trajectory for midcentury poetry by offering a textual object that refuses autonomy. Ashton traces the history of twentieth century

American poetry from “a modernism committed to the autonomy of the work of art, an autonomy that hinges entirely on the view that the artist’s intention is central in creating the work, and it ends with a postmodernism committed to the indeterminacy and irrelevance of artistic intention, and consequently, to the impossibility of the autonomy of the work of art,” 107 but this definition does not account for Oppen. Oppen’s works are undoubtedly objects, but they are not interested in experience. According to Ashton, the New Criticism represents

“postmodernists avant la letter ” because while it was “simultaneously committed to the autonomy of the poem (this would be its modernism) , it was simultaneously committed to the idea that the poem’s meaning inheres in its rhythm, measure, and shape […] and to the idea that authorial intentional has nothing to do with meaning.” Ashton summarizes the postmodernism of this description by observing that, “Once meaning is imagined as a function of the experiential effects of a poem, it cannot be a function of intention, and for a critic like Richards, meaning itself drops out of the picture: the experience of the poem precisely undoes our interest in its

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meaning.” 108 Oppen’s work counters Ashton’s logic which requires the experience of a subject in order for meaning to “inhere” in textual object. For Oppen, textual objects acquire meaning from their relationship to other objects and contexts around them, not from intrinsic literary properties such as form. While Oppen’s later work contemplates the possibility that meaning might require collective identities and concepts, his poems never cease attempting to establish a relationship between these abstractions and their historical contexts.

As Oppen explains in his archive in a claim that he believes echoes Eliot, “No one continues to write poetry beyond the age of 28 who does not acquire a sense of history.” 109 Even as Oppen’s poetry increasingly dabbles in philosophy, he never deviates from his desire to historicize. Oppen’s revision of Heidegger in his archive is particularly pertinent. Oppen, quoting

Existence and Being , copies:

Poetry is the inaugural naming of being and of the essence of all things—not just any

speech, but that particular kind which for the first time brings into the open all that which

we then discuss and deal with in ordinary language. Hence poetry never takes language

as a raw material ready to hand, rather it is poetry which first makes language possible.

Poetry is the primitive language of a historical people. 110

But Oppen optimistically challenging the prelapsarianism of Heidegger, adding, “and because a people is always new in history, the ‘primitive language’ must constantly be created.” Poetry, as this “primitive language of a historical people,” must constantly reemerge from its raw materials and recreate a new language for its historical moment.

At the conclusion of Of Being Numerous , which struggles throughout to navigate the relationship between the shipwreck of the singular and the meaning of being numerous, the book offers us a tantalizing moment of interconnectedness through its gesture towards the nineteenth

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century ballad: the idea, not of being shipwrecked, nor ‘rescued’ into mass culture, but instead visiting other islands, other people’s consciousness. Even while Oppen’s collection uses the mode of a mid-century speaker, he pushes up against the very boundaries of its 19 th century historical roots. He shows us that the speaker of midcentury poetry, which operated as an almost unassailable front to poetic reading, is a historical construct unable to appropriately speak outside of its historical contexts. Even though his later poetry constructs address through the figure of a speaker, by attributing a history to the concept of a speaker as, Oppen’s verse suggests a pervasive but challenging concrete path leading outside the fiction of the speaker. It is the historical genre of the ballad behind the ballad’s voice, and not the ballad’s voice itself, that allows for one to “visit other islands” and communicate between people “whom the barriers have fallen.”

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Endnotes

Note to Epigraph: 1George Oppen, Of Being Numerous , George Oppen: New Collected Poems , Ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2002), 175. Italics in the original.

Notes to Introduction: 1 I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1929), 11. 2 Clara Clairborne Park, “Talking Back to the Speaker,” The Hudson Review 42 (1989), 24. 3 Ibid., 25. 4 Ibid., 43. 5 Ibid., 44. 6 Ibid., 43-44. 7 Robert Lowell, “Robert Lowell, Winner of the 1960 Poetry Award for Life Studies,” National Book Award Acceptance Speeches , National Book Foundation, accessed March 9, 2016. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Oppen first met Reznikoff and Zukofsky in 1928 and set up the Objectivist Press shortly thereafter. After publishing Discrete Series in 1929, Oppen took a long hiatus from writing until the publication of The Materials in 1962. 12 Epstein writes that, “chronicles of this period portray rival gangs rushing out of the dark alleys of arts and letters like the Sharks and the Jets, wielding manifestos like switchblades.” See Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), 5. 13 Recently, Gillian White treats what she calls a “lyric/antilyric” dichotomy as a split against poets who aligned with or against the expressive or “Romantic” and “Victorian” ideals of the New Critics, Charles Bernstein, and John Stuart Mills: “This matters to my argument insofar as I read Bishop and Sexton as very much part of a broad cultural shift that the antilyric/“lyric” binary obscures: though their works are comparatively “absorptive,” indeed self-conscious about their return to poetic techniques that resemble Victorian or Romantic verse more than modernist poems, they too were thinking both with and against the idealization of poetry as “lyric” in the Millean terms with which New Critics and Bernstein think” (14). 14 Marorie Perloff, “Realism and the Confessional Mode of Robert Lowell,” Contemporary Literature 11, no. 4 (Autumn, 1970), 473 15 M.L. Rosenthal, “Poetry as Confession” Nation Sept 19, 1959, 154. 16 M.L. Rosenthal, “Poetry of Confession,” The Modern Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 225 17 See note 48 in my chapter on Frank O’Hara. 18 Charles Altieri, “The Significance of Frank O’Hara,” The Iowa Review 4 (1973), 91. 19 Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto,” The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, ed. Donald Allen, (New York: Knopf, 1972), 499. 20 Ibid., 499 21 Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems , 252.

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22 Ibid., 257 23 Ibid., 253. 24 Ibid., 256. 25 George Oppen, George Oppen: New Collected Poems , Ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2002), 163 26 Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society” Notes to Literature Volume 1 , ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 27 Oppen, Collected Poems , 209. 28 See John Crowe Ransom comments about Richards in his eponymous collection of essays, The New Criticism . There is little consensus as to who should and should not be considered a “New Critic.” Occasionally, I.A. Richards is included in this definition, while at other times the label New Criticism refers primarily to the American New Criticism. When I use the term “New Criticism,” I prefer to use it as a broad label which includes Richards in order to stress his intellectual contribution to the reading practices generally associated with the New Criticism. When I want to draw a distinction between Richards and critics such as John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, I use the label American New Criticism. While Reuben Brower was influenced by the New Criticism and offers the figure of the poetic speaker in its most canonical form, Brower is not generally considered to be part of the New Criticism. 29 For the samples from his students’ papers, see I.A. Richards, Practical Criticism pages 44, 74, and 95. For the samples where Richards discusses actual speech, see pages 6, 178, 217, 318, and 337. For Richards’s use of the speaker in relation to tone, see pages 176 and 311. It should be noted that Richards’s use of “speaker” on page 337 is ambiguously related to the communication of beauty. Because of the generality with which Richards discusses the concept of beauty, and because Richards does not mention poetry anywhere near his use of the word “speaker,” I am including this passage in his discussion of actual speech acts. 30 Richards, Practical , 248. 31 Ibid., 247. 32 Ibid., 247. Curiously, unlike many other texts in this period Richards’s use of the adjective form “lyrical” resists positing the category of “emotional verse” within the nebulous concept of a “lyric” genre. Although his description of “lyrical” is linked with the expression of emotion, “lyrical” is not connected to the physical act of speaking poetry, which he attributes to its “semi- dramatic” situation. 33 Ibid., 247. 34 “If the mere fact that some girl somewhere is thus lamenting were an occasion for emotion, into what convulsions ought not the evening paper throw us nightly?” (Ibid., 248). 35 Ibid., 203. 36 I.A. Richards, Science and Poetry (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1926), 74. 37 Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1924), 177. 38 Richards, Practical , 195. 39 Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (London: Oxford UP, 1936), 131. 40 Ann E. Berthoff has several essays that contextualize Richards’s theories of reference. See Ann E. Berthoff, “I.A. Richards and the Philosophy of Rhetoric” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 10 (1980), 195-210 and Ann E. Berthoff, “I.A. Richards and the Audit of Meaning,” New Literary History 14 (1982), 64-79. I also recommend Louis Mackey, “Theory and Practice in the Rhetoric of I.A. Richards” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 27 (1997), 51-86.

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41 Francis Ferguson, “Our I.A. Richards Moment,” Theory Aside , eds. Jason Potts and Daniel Stout (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 271. 42 Richards, Practical , 5-6. 43 For Richards, electronic communication provided a useful metaphor for communication because it requires a multitude of complex instruments in order to decode messages, and is susceptible to distortion as a result of noise throughout the entire process. As his charts in Speculative Instruments demonstrate, electronic communication requires at least a selector, encoder, transmitter, receiver, decoder, and developer in order to translate the electronic transmission. After his work in China, his theories of interpretation, even within similar languages and mediums, are frequently described as processes of translation. 44 Richards, Science , 69. 45 Ibid., 71. 46 Bertrand Russell, in his influential Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy , went as far as to dismiss all abstract uses of language from the study of logic, writing that, “logic, I should maintain, must no more admit a unicorn than zoology can” (169). Richards worried that Russell believed that words themselves were inconsequential to logic, which could reduce language entirely to its propositions. In Principles of Mathematics , Russell writes “Words all have meaning, in the simple sense that they are symbols which stand for something other than themselves. But a proposition, unless it happens to be linguistic, does not itself contain words: it contains the entities indicated by words. Thus meaning, in the sense in which words have meaning, is irrelevant to logic” (273). See Bertrand Russell, Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (London: George, Allen, and Unwin, 1919). 47 Rueben Brower, “Beginnings and Transitions: I.A. Richards Interviewed,” I.A. Richards Essays in His Honor, ed. Reuben Brower (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), 20. Francis Ferguson notes some of Moore’s influence in Richards’s work: “He did not explicitly take up Moore’s argument that the goodness or beauty of aesthetic objects was an actual—if supersensible— property of the objects, but at every point described the meaning of individual poems and the meaning of images that they depicted as implicit statements about the properties of the poems and the images. Metaphor and simile just seemed to him to suggest lines of connection that worked almost like algebraic equations, and he was willing to create narrative descriptions of motivations that would further what might cause such connections” (270). 48 Richards, Philosophy of Rhetoric , 3. 49 Ibid., 5. 50 As Joseph North explains, much of Richard’s work attempted to explore and limit the contexts surrounding communication, including the language used to do so: “far from trying, in proto- New Critical fashion, to strip works of their contexts in order to encourage a close attention to literary language ‘for its own sake,’ Richards is in fact trying to find the most rigorous and precise way he can to put works of literature into a productive relation with their contexts of reception” (146). See Joseph North, “What’s New Critical about Close Reading? I.A. Richards and his New Critical Reception,” New Literary History 44 (2013), 141-157 51 Richards mentions in his interview with Brower that this statement was inspired by Le Corbusier. See Reuben Brower, “Beginnings and Transitions: I.A. Richards Interviewed” I.A. Richards Essays in His Honor, ed. Reuben Brower (New York: Oxford UP, 1973), 28. 52 Richards, Principles , 1. 53 Ibid., 1.

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54 Kathleen Raine, The Land Unknown , (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1975), 37. For potential samples of what this image might have looked like, see pages 22 and 23 of I.A. Richards, Speculative Instruments (London: Routledge and Paul, 1955). As noted in the quote, Kathleen Raine implies a reading of Richards’s electronic diagram that relates his model to alternative, metaphysical means of communication. This reading, likely abstracts Richards’s point too far from his general theory of comprehension. For Richards, electronic communication provides a useful metaphor for communication because it requires a multitude of complex instruments in order to decode messages, and is susceptible to distortion as a result of noise throughout the entire process. As his charts in Speculative Instruments demonstrate, electronic communication requires at least a selector, encoder, transmitter, receiver, decoder, and developer in order to translate the electronic transmission. After his work in China, his theories of interpretation, even within similar languages and mediums, are frequently described as processes of translation. 55 Richards, Speculative , 19. 56 See Richards, Poetries: Their Media and Ends , ed. Trevor Eaton (Hauge: Mouton, 1974), 14. 57 Richards, Speculative , 24. Richards, even though using the phrase “utterance,” observes and qualifies the limitations of the phrase in a footnote a few pages earlier: “I need a highly general term here, not limited to any mode of utterance, such as overt speech or writing. An act of comprehending may itself be regarded as an utterance, being a rebirth, after passage through the lifeless signal, of something more or less the same as the original which was transmitted” (22). 58 See I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (New York: Harcourt, 1923), 11. The term “comparison field” used in Speculative Instruments is labeled more generally as “thought or reference” in Meaning . In Meaning , Richards positions himself explicitly in conversation with C.S. Pierce, Russell, and Frege and develops a general sense of “thought” that reads similarly to analytic theories about “indication.” 59 Richards, Rhetoric , 71. 60 Ibid., 73. 61 For a much more developed account of the ethical aims of the New Criticism see Mark Jancovich’s The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993). 62 Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1979), 133. 63 Joseph North, “What’s New Critical,” 148. 64 Edward Brunner notes that these democratizing ideals were not universal among the New Critics and points to Alan Tate as a noteworth exception who “continued to elevate reading as an arduous and scrupulous practice,” Edward Brunner, Cold War Poetry: The Social Text in the Fifties Poem (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 43 65 Robert Archambeau, “Aesthetics as Ethics: One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism,” Rereading the New Criticism , eds. Miranda Hickman and John McIntyre (Ohio: Ohio State UP, 2012), 30. 66 Tara Lockhart, “Teaching with Style: Brooks and Warren’s Literary Pedagogy” Rereading , 199. 67 Mary Poovey, “The Model System of Contemporary Literary Theory,” Critical Inquiry 27 (2001), 433. 68 Ibid., 433. 69 Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (USA: University Press of Kentucky, 1954), 4. The original text of the essay was

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published in 1946. Joseph North describes the New Criticism’s push away from Richards’s “psychological machinery” an expression of the affective fallacy: “surely we must say instead that the emphasis is not on “machine” but on “psychological,” and that what is really being rejected here is the reader, as a form of context that the New Critics want to insist is strictly irrelevant to the pure aesthetic texts” (150). 70 See Gallop, Jane. “The Historicization of Literary Criticism and the Fate of Close Reading.” Profession 2007 181-186. Jancovich also notes that early 20 th century textbooks were “only concerned with the students’ general linguistic competence, not their understanding of the ‘literariness’ of literature” (87). For a discussion of the academic impact of the New Criticism from I.A. Richards through Brooks and Warren and beyond, see Vincent B. Leitch, American Literary Criticism Since the 1930’s (New York: Routledge, 2009), 21-51. 71 Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, “Forty Years of Understanding Poetry,” Confronting Crisis: Teachers in America , ed. Ernestine P. Sewell and Billi M. Rogers (Arlington, University of Texas at Arlington Press, 1979), 168. 72 UP 3rd , 1. 73 Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry 3rd edition (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 7-8. The first edition of Understanding Poetry begins instead with their assertion that “poetry is a form of speech, or discourse, written or spoken.” See Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry 1st edition (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1938), 1. This change suggests that over time Brooks and Warren increasingly aligned themselves with the pedagogical conversation I outline in this chapter. 74 Brooks and Warren, UP 1st edition, 22. 75 Craig S. Abbott, “Modern American Poetry: Anthologies, Classrooms, and Canons,” College Literature 17 (1990), 210. 76 See Connor Byrne, “In Pursuit of Understanding: Louis Untermeyer, Brooks and Warren, and “The Red Wheelbarrow” in Rereading , 143. 77 Abbott, “Modern,” 211. Steve Newman traces a history from Gummere and Kittrdige to Colby and eventually John Dewey, who was very influential for Hosic. See Steve Newman, Ballad Collection, Lyric, and the Canon The Call of the Popular from the Restoration to the New Criticism ( Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007) 78 Arthur N. Applebee, Tradition and Reform in the Teaching of English (National Council of Teachers of English, 1974), 80. 79 Ibid., 80. 80 This barrier also impacted “avant-garde” texts and anthologies, too. Charles Zukofsky notes in a letter to Ezra Pound that, “I flunked the N.Y. exam for [a] license to teach English in the H.S. because on a question dealing with Am. poetry since 1910 I showed my preference for your work as against the ‘major efforts’ of the current handbooks. The examiner noted ‘minor poets treated at too great length, major ones slighted.’” Letter dated March 1930 qtd in Alan Golding, “Louis Zukofsky and the Avant-Garde Textbook,” Chicago Review 55 , (2010), 27. 81 Applebee, Tradition , 166. 82 Ibid., 167. 83 Christopher Herbert offers a counterpoint to this statement. In his paper “The Conundrum of Coherence,” he argues that the legacy of concepts such as the “unity” and “totality” of poetry in Understanding Poetry owe an intellectual debt to conservative late-Victorian thinkers, especially Herbert Spencer. See Cristopher Herbert, “The Conundrum of Coherence,” New Literary History 35, no. 2 (Spring: 2004), 185-206.

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84 Wilkinson, New Voices , 9. Wilkinson, despite naming her collection New Voices , only mentions the word “speaker” twice in the anthology when discussing poetry. In one reference, her mention of a speaker seems connected to her belief that “all good modern poetry is written to be read aloud” (12) and not to a fully developed concept of a speaker as such. On pg. 123 during her discussion of diction she discusses the “lips” of the speaker. The only instance that might foreshadow the concept of a poetic speaker is in her reading of Carl Sandberg, but even still she couches her brief use of the word “speaker” in a discussion of his “oratorical style” (180). 85 Qtd in Applebee, Tradition , 164. 86 As a result of UP , textbooks increasingly offered commentary and critical instruction. However, through 1960, anthologies rarely included any sort of commentary. Bob Perelman, speaking in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry , observes that many anthologies before Allen’s 1960 anthology explicitly forbid critical instruction. Allen’s anthology, unlike UP , includes statements by its poets. See Bob Perelman, “On Donald Allen, The New American Poetry ,” Jacket 2 , https://jacket2.org/article/don-allen- new-american-poetry . Wilkinson’s anthology, which was frequently used in twentieth-century classrooms at the start of the century, offers only a short introduction. 87 Geoffrey Wagner, “English Composition in the American University.” College Composition and Communication 7 (1956), 227. 88 Brooks and Warren, UP , 1 st edition, iv. 89 Brooks and Warren, UP , 3rd edition, 20. This passage, except for the final sentence, is identical in the 1 st edition. See Brooks and Warren, UP , 1 st edition, 23. 90 Brooks and Warren, UP, 1st edition, 25. 91 Brooks and Warren, UP , 3 rd edition, 22. 92 Park, “Talking,” 29. 93 Ibid., 30. 94 Gerald Graff, Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society (University of Chicago Press, 1979), 141. 95 Brooks and Warren, UP 1st edition, 1. 96 Ibid., 18. 97 Brooks and Warren, UP , 1 st , 7. Brooks and Warren’s definition of incipient poetry, which a few lines above the aforementioned passage distinguishes poetry from “matters of fact,” shows its indebtedness to Richards’s description of poetry as pseudostatement. However, even though Brooks and Warren in their correspondences with each other frequently defer to Richards, Brooks repeatedly dismisses Richards psychological and philosophical models of reference: “what Richards had to say was exciting, but I resisted the new psychological terminology as well as the confident positivism of the author,” qtd in North, “What’s New Critical,” 149. For a more developed discussion on the relationship between Brooks and Richards’s description of poetry as pseudostatement, see John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 159-167. 98 Warren, Robert Penn. “Brooks and Warren” Humanities. April 1985, 2. 99 UP 3rd , 27. 100 Ibid., 22. 101 Mary Poovey argues that the New Criticism developed as a reaction against the study of philology in literature departments (432). To some degree, this narrative is true, but as Newman’s essay makes clear, Brooks and Warren’s developed many of their practices, including

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the figure of the speaker, out of philology even as they pushed against philology as a practice for interpreting the meaning of texts. 102 Steve Newman, “’The Dramatic Situation’ and ‘The Imagined Community’: Academic Tales of the Ballad from Philology to the New Criticism and Beyond,” Childs Children: Ballad Study and Its Legacy , eds. Joseph Harris and Barbara Hillers (Trier, Germany: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2012), 59. Newman also notes that many of the ballads used in Understanding Poetry were cited by Gummere and analyzed in Brook’s essay. 103 Newman, “Dramatic Situation,” 59. As Michael Cohen explains, in the 19th century the label ‘ballad’ entails both the formal properties of a poem and the means through which it is circulated and interpreted: The socio-political value of ballads derived from their association with the idealized oral cultures of imagined folk communities, rather than from qualities inherent in the individual objects themselves. The processes of association that connected certain poems with certain peoples, times, and places were thus crucial to the ideological work of the ballad. Identifying a poem as a ballad not only classified it by way of its formal features; rather, it also named specific ways to understand the cultural function of the poem, namely as a primary source for the history of social and cultural relations among peoples and places. See Michael Cohen, “Whittier, Ballad Reading, and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” Arizona Quarterly 64 (2008), 4-5. 104 See Erin Kappeler, “Editing America: Nationalism and the New Poetry,” Modernism and Modernity 21 (2014), 904. Kappeler argues that Gummere’s racialized fantasies of “communal life of early Anglo-Saxon tribes” (904) shaped modernist fantasies of national identity. If so, then Brooks and Warren’s use of ballads tap into those fantasies and coopt them not as expressions of an idealized community, but as expressions of individual speakers. Richards offers similarly racialized descriptions in Practical Criticism , 300-301. 105 See Newman, “Dramatic Situation.” 106 Many of the most prominent critics of the 20 th century were Brower’s students: Helen Vendler and Paul de Man perhaps most notably. Additionally, his Humanities 6 course at Harvard served as a model throughout the country. 107 Reuben Brower, “Reading in Slow Motion,” in In Defense of Reading , eds. Reuben Brower and Richard Poirier, (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1962), 3. 108 Ibid., 3-4. 109 Ibid., 4. 110 Ibid., 3. 111 Reuben Brower, “Preface” in In Defense of Reading , viii. 112 Ibid., viii. 113 Ibid., vii. Gerald Graff discusses how even though the New Criticism might have started as a critique of modernism, its hyper attention to textuality at the expense of outside influences such as history ultimately undermined its original motivations. See Professing Literature . 114 Reuben Brower, “Foreword,” in Forms of Lyric: Selected Papers from the English Institute , ed. Reuben Brower, English Institute: 1960, vii. 115 Richards, Practical , 3. 116 Ibid., 11. 117 Hugh Kenner, “The Pedagogue as Critic,” in The New Criticism and After , ed. Thomas Daniel Young (University Press of Virginia: Charlottesville, 1975), 45. Kenner’s essay is particularly scathing in its treatment of the New Criticism’s use of a poetic speaker: “The New Critic in the

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same way warned us not to mistake the poem for an utterance of the poet, and an intricate terminology of ‘speaker” and “persona”—not Keats or Donne but ‘Keats’ and ‘Donne,’ each in the role that he plays on this occasion—admonished readers that biography was irrelevant and that all there was to know of the poet in connection with this poem was what the poem could be persuaded to yield. This entailed the formulation whereby all poetry is dramatic, with the incidental advantages both of incorporating Shakespeare’s prestige and of coping with the fact that the life of so great a poet has so little to offer us.” See Kenner, “Pedagogue,” 43. 118 Reuben Brower, Fields of Light , (New York, Oxford University Press, 1951), 43. 119 Ibid., 50. 120 Reuben Brower, “Reading,” 7. 121 Ibid., 7. 122 Reuben Brower, “Preface,” x. 123 Herbert Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric," Ed. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 242. 124 Ibid., 242. 125 Ibid., 242. Tucker notes the presumption of a speaker is itself a violation of the New Critical principles of textuality. He argues, “the dramatic monologue can teach us, among other things, that while texts do not absolutely lack speakers, they do not simply have them either; they invent them instead as they go. Texts do not come from speakers, speakers come from texts. Persona fit non nascitur . To assume in advance that a poetic text proceeds from a dramatically situated speaker is to risk missing the play of verbal implication whereby character is engendered in the first place through colliding modes of signification; it is to read so belatedly as to arrive when the party is over” (243). 126 Fields, 6. Brower makes conscious efforts to define irony in accessible terms: “some definitions of irony imply that the reader finds the intended or true meaning behind the apparent, a view that tends to destroy irony both as a literary experience and as a vision of life [….] to interpret irony, as to interpret metaphor, is something more than to decode it, and though as critics our first task is to bring the reader to see the more and less apparent, or more and less pleasant, meanings of an ironic expression, we must not let him rest content with either alone” (Fields 51). 127 Brooks and Warren also use the phrase total attitude occasionally throughout their work. These terms are key concepts for Brower, however. 128 Brower, Fields , 10. 129 For a discussion of psychological theories in Richards’s work, see David West, I.A. Richards and the Rise of Cognitive Studies , (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) and Joshua Gang, “Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading” ELH 78 (2011), 1-25. 130 Brower, Fields , 19. 131 Ibid., 19. 132 Ibid., 11. 133 John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” Essays on Poetry , ed. F. Parvin Sharpless (USA: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 12 134 Mill, “Thoughts,” 12. 135 Brower, Fields , 6. 136 Mill, “Thoughts,” 34. 137 Ibid., 32. 138 Brower, Fields , 31.

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139 Ibid., 9. 140 Ibid., 10. 141 See Wimsatt and Beardsley, “The Affective Fallacy,” in Verbal Icon . 142 Helen Vendler and Henri Cole, “The Art of Criticism,” in Paris Review Online , 141 (1996), Last accessed March 13, 2016, http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1324/the-art-of- criticism-no-3-helen-vendler 143 Ibid . 144 Brooks and Warren’s popular anthology was only one means through which the New Criticism translated itself for non-academic audiences. Edward Brunner notes that “the editors of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse sponsored and published” a “Glossary of Terms to the New Criticism” “in ten-page segments over the course of three issues in 1948 and 1949. So popular was this compilation of the latest in critical theory that it was separately reprinted and bound and made available to readers for seventy-five cents. It soom reached a fifth printing and remained available (and presumably in demand) up through 1953, at which point it devolved into a bonus that new subscribers received with their first issue” (69). 145 Jonathan Culler, “Why Lyric,” PMLA 123 (2008), 205. 146 Virginia Jackson, “Who Reads Poetry,” PMLA 123 (2008), 183. 147 Michael Cohen, “Peddlers, Poems, and Local Culture: The Case of Jonathan Plummer, a ‘Balladmonger’ in Nineteenth-Century New England,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54 (2008), 13. 148 Ibid., 28. 149 Jonathan Culler, “Lyric, History, and Genre,” The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology , eds. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014), 66.

Notes to Chapter 1 1 Quoted in Marjorie Perloff, “Realism and the Confessional Mode of Robert Lowell,” Contemporary Literature 11, no. 4 (Autumn, 1970), 470. 2 Letter from Robert Lowell to Elizabeth Bishop in 1963, The Letters of Robert Lowell, ed. Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2005), 415. 3 Robert Lowell, “Robert Lowell, Winner of the 1960 Poetry Award for Life Studies,” National Book Award Acceptance Speeches , National Book Foundation, accessed March 9, 2016. http://www.nationalbook.org/nbaacceptspeech_rlowell.html#.VuBLhnrLNL8 . 4 Lowell, “Winner.” Frank Kearful notes that despite the resonance between Lowell’s metaphors and Levi Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked , any association between the two is unlikely because Levi Strauss published the French edition of his work four years after Lowell’s speech. See Frank Kearful, “Alimentary Poetics: Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg,” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 11, no. 1 (Jan 2013), 87-108. 5 Robert Lowell, “Winner” 6 Ibid. Lowell does not explicitly mention which speech he references, but he was likely thinking of Randall Jarrell’s “Poets, Critics, and Readers.” See Jarrell, Randall. “Poets, Critics, and Readers.” The American Scholar . Vol 28. Issue 3. Summer 1959, 277-292. Jarrell remarks that “[God] has given us poets students. But what He gives with one 7 Lowell, “Winner” 8 Saskia Hamilton’s introduction to The Letters of Robert Lowell notes that Lowell edited his essays, his poetry, and his letters differently. Of particular interest is Lowell’s decision not to retype his letters, with Hamilton explaining that this was due in part to his discomfort with using

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a typewriter: “the labor of retyping was such that he did not feel the need to redraft his letters” (viii-ix). 9 Robert Lowell, Letters , 344. 10 Ibid., 344. 11 Ibid., 344-345. 12 Ibid. 345. 13 Lowell occasionally suggests that the common and extreme forms of suffering experienced by him and his peers might be a better means through which to understand his generation. For one such example, see his letter to John Berryman dated March 15, 1959 in Letters , 338 and his letter to Berryman dated March 18, 1962 in Letters, 400-401. 14 In a letter to Santayana, he notes that he doesn’t belong to an Eliot “school” ( Letters 127). His use of quotation marks on school, even so early in his career, demonstrates that his skepticism about grouping aesthetic trends together in such models survives throughout his career. 15 Letters , 127. 16 Robert Lowell, Letters , 516-517. 17 Lowell's description of poetry as a competition echoes a morbid joke made by Auden. When commenting on John Berryman's death, Auden remarked that Berryman had left no suicide note, only a letter that read, "Your move, Cal." See Ian Hamilton, Robert Lowell: A Biography (London: Faber, 1982), 438. 18 Lowell, “Winner” 19 Life Studies , in Lowell’s mind, was meant to bridge these two camps, even though literary history has set him in opposition to the more avant-garde poets of his period: “The Life Studies poems were meant to be entirely art, yet they are meant to give a sort of notebook effect, an impression of truth and a fragmentary naturalness, that would lose all its point if too worked up” (Letters 361). 20 Recently, Adam Beardsworth offers an encouraging reading of Robert Lowell’s ‘bipartisan’ relationship with avant-garde poets. Beardworth offers an excellent overview of critical accounts of mid-century “anthology wars” and argues that Lowell “transcends the polarities of the raw and the cooked” (268). See Adam Beardsworth’s essay, “Bipartisan Poetry in the 1950’s: A Response to Frank J. Kearful’s ‘Signs of Life in Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour,’’” Connotations 24 (2014/2015), 258-270. 21 Eva Brunner recently interprets Robert Lowell’s confessional poetry in relationship to the “narrative turn” in social sciences and literary studies. She argues, albeit by heavily relying on traditional interpretations of Lowell’s use of a confessional speaker, that Lowell constructs his sense of autobiography partially through his use of narrative. See Eva Brunner, “’I was a Stuffed Toucan’: Poetic Self-Positioning in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies , Current Objectives of Post- Graduate American Studies 13, 2012, 1-13. 22 See James Adam York, The Architecture of Address: The Monument and Public Speech in American Poetry (Routledge) 2014. James Sullivan offers an excellent discussion of Lowell’s use of broadsides as an alternative means of circulating poetry and constructing modes of public address. See James Sullivan, On the Walls and In the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s . University of Illinois Press, 1997. 23 Kathleen Spivak recollects that Lowell felt very connected to the social justice movements of the 1960’s and frequently reflected on those events in his poetry. She writes, however, that “Lowell, in public, was actively homophobic—perhaps more so because he was a poet” (251), see Kathleen Spivak, “Talents in a Teapot: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and Boston”

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Confrontation: A Literary Journal 109, 2011, 238-256. In a private conversation with Frank Bidart, Bidart expressed the opposite sentiment to me and reflected happily that Lowell and his wife Caroline Blackwood were both extremely supportive when he disclosed his sexuality to them. Spivak’s narrative suggests that Lowell might have held different beliefs about homosexuality in private. Jesse Schotter argues for a much more conservative reading of Robert Lowell and his political and literary values in “Adaptation Liberal and Conservative: Benito Cereno and Robert Lowell’s Literary and Racial Politics” Genre 42, 2009, 61-82. 24 In her chapter on Anne Sexton, Miranda Sherwin argues that, “the correlation between [Sexton’s] life and her poems has been used less as a tool for facilitating interpretations than as a weapon for discrediting and limiting the scope of her work” Miranda Sherwin, Confessional Writing in the Twentieth-Century Literary Imagination (UK: Palgrave McMillan, 2011), 24. Sherwin argues that confessional poetry resists easy associations between a poem’s speaker and the poet’s autobiography. Sherwin, like Axelrod and Travisano, use poststructuralist theories of the individual to demonstrate the complexity of the confessional subject. I want to distance myself from these readings, which I believe rely too heavily on the fiction of the poetic speaker. I am interested instead how Lowell’s hybridization of poetry as a medium creates and complicates the illusion of an autobiographical persona. See Steven Gould Axelrod, Robert Lowell: Life and Art (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978). 25 Thomas Travisano, Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Jarrell, Lowell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic (Virginia: University of Virginia Press, 1999), 59. 26 Ibid., 59. 27 Frank Bidart, “On ‘Confessional’ Poetry,” in CP , 997 28 Travisano, Midcentury 66. In Lowell’s essay “After Enjoying Six or Seven Essays on Me”, Lowell explains, “What I write almost always comes out of the pressure of some inner concern, temptation, or obsessive puzzle…. All my poems are written for catharsis; none can heal melancholia or arthritis.” See Lowell CP , 993. 29 Steven Gould Axelrod, “Lowell's Postmodernity: Life Studies and the Shattered Image of Home," Jarrell, Bishop, Lowell & Co.: Middle Generation Poets in Context, Ed. Suzanne Ferguson (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2003), 251. 30 Travisano, Midcentury Quartet , 67. 31 Charles Altieri’s essay on Lowell, “Autobiography and the Limits of Moral Criticism” attempts to avoid the problem of moralizing Lowell’s poetry by explaining what he calls the “reading contracts” of autobiography. Altieri argues that an autobiography “will try to make fascinating a particular way of having lived” (167). For Altieri, the act of imposing a moral judgment onto an autobiographical text violates this contract and undermines the relationship between reader and writer (172). See Charles Altieri, “Autobiography and the Limits of Moral Criticism,” A/B Auto/Biography Studies 19, 2004, 156-175. 32 Christopher Grobe, “The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959,” PMLA 127.2 (March 2012), 217. 33 Ibid. , 215. 34 Ibid., 215. 35 John Stuart Mill, “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” Essays on Poetry , ed. F. Parvin Sharpless (USA: University of South Carolina Press, 1976), 12 36 Grobe, “Breath,” 228. 37 Lowell, Letters , 83.

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38 I am borrowing this term from New Media theory to draw attention to Lowell’s adaptation of various forms of prose writing into his poetry. I argue that Lowell’s confessional effect emerges in part from the intersection of the cultural logics of both prose and poetry reading practices. See Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media . (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000). 39 Deborah Nelson, “Introduction: Twentieth-Century Poetry: Expanding Archives and Methods,” PMLA 127 (March 2012), 213 40 Diane Wood Middlebrook, “What Was Confessional Poetry,” The Columbia History of American Poetry , eds. Jay Parini and Brett Candish Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 635. 41 Qtd in Hamilton, Robert Lowell , 237. 42 M.L. Rosenthal, “Poetry as Confession” Nation Sept 19, 1959. 155 43 M.L. Rosenthal, “Poetry of Confession” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 225 44 Ibid., 154. 45 Ibid., 155. 46 Ibid., 154. 47 Ibid., 154. 48 Stanley Kunitz, “Talk with Robert Lowell,” Robert Lowell, Interviews and Memoirs , ed. Jefferey Meyers (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 85. 49 Interview with Seidel quoted in Frederick Seidel, “The Art of Poetry: Robert Lowell,” Interviews , 57. Randall Jarrell writes in his essay entitled “Robert Lowell” that “we know well, almost too well, the man who produces Lowell’s poems” (Randall Jarrell, “Robert Lowell,” The Critical Response to Robert Lowell, 251). Elizabeth Bishop, in a letter to Lowell comparing Life Studies to the work of Anne Sexton, Lowell’s former student, offers a sentiment similar to Jarrell’s and observes that Life Studies is “intensely interesting” because “although I know much more about you [than about Sexton], I’d like to know a great deal more.” See Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, eds. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2008), 327. 50 Bidart, “Confessional,” 1000. 51 Ibid., 997. 52 Robert Lowell , Collected Poems of Robert Lowell, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter (New York: Farrar, Staus, Giroux, 2007), 992. By locating his stylistic origins in the figure of Flaubert, Lowell endows the casualness of his poetry with a sense of canonicity, deconstructing the difference between cooked and raw poetry. 53 Lowell, Letters , 298. In some instances, Lowell pillaged his poems from working drafts of his autobiographical writings. See Terry Witek’s chapter “From Prose to Poetry” in Robert Lowell and Life Studies: Revising the Self (Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1993) for a thorough comparison between Lowell’s prose manuscripts and “Sailing Home from Rapallo.” 54 Robert Lowell, “Robert Penn Warren’s Brother to Dragons ,” The Collected Prose (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1990), 68. 55 I am gesturing here in passing to Marjorie Perloff’s Poetic License . See Marjorie Perloff, Poetic License : Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1990)

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56 See Herbert F.Tucker, Jr., "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric," eds. Chaviva Hosek and Patricia Parker, Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985), 226- 43. 57 CP , 992. 58 Ibid., 992. 59 Ibid., 992. 60 Lowell, “New England and Further,” CPR , 204. 61 Ibid., 203. 62 Ibid., 204. 63 Ibid., 204. 64 Letters , 81-82. 65 Lowell, “On Skunk Hour,” CPR , 227. 66 Letters , 625. 67 CP, 1031. 68 Ibid., 1032. 69 See Ian Hamilton. Robert Lowell: A Biography 259-260. 70 CP, 113. 71 Ibid., 113. 72 Ibid., 113. 73 Qtd in CP, 1032. Lowell’s decision to reference Fuller, while an important node that links American Romanticist and Modernist literature, is an unfortunate choice. Fuller, while benefitting from an education which was atypical for women of her day, did not have direct access to her father’s inheritance and only saw Europe through her work as a journalist. In later drafts, Lowell minimizes this allusion by substituting “accepted” with “bought.” 74 CP , 114. 75 “Imatination! Lifting up itself / Before the eye and progress of my Song / Like an unfather’d vapour; here that Power, / In all the might of its endowments, came / Athwart me; I was lost as in a cloud, / Halted, without a struggle to break through.” William Wordsworth, The Prelude 1805 , ed.,Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1959), 159. 76 CPR, 227. 77 CP , 114. 78 Qtd in CP, 1032. 79 Ibid., 115. 80 Ibid., 115-116. 81 Ibid., 116. 82 Ibid., 117. 83 CPR , 369-370. 84 CP , 118. 85 Steven Yenser, Circle to Circle: Structures in the Poetry of Robert Lowell (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1970), 129. 86 CP, 118. 87 CP, 117 88 Letters , 623. 89 Perloff, “Realism” 473. 90 Perloff, “Realism,” 480.

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91 Perloff misses this connection, but argues that Lowell likely chose Miltown out of a variety of other popular drugs available because of the resonance between Miltown and the rest of the line. 92 CP, 189 93 Ibid., 85. 94 Perloff, “Realism,” 486-487. 95 CP., 189. 96 Ibid., 189. 97 Perloff, “Realism,” 474. 98 Paul Mariani notes that Lowell had seen Elizabeth Hardwick at Partisan Review parties before their meeting at Yaddo but that he had been too shy to speak with her. See Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1994), 171. 99 Lowell writes, “When I didn’t have to bang words into rhyme and count, I was more nakedly dependent on rhythm. After this in the Union Dead , I used the same style but with less amusement, and with more composition and stanza-structure. Each poem was meant to stand by itself. This stronger structure would probably have ruined Life Studies , which would have lost its novelistic flow.” ( CP , 997) 100 Bidart, “Confessional,” 1001. Bidart does not specify which of Schwartz’s wives shared this anecdote with Lowell. Given Elizabeth Pollett’s remarks about Schwartz’s drug addictions and infidelities in the introduction to Schwartz’s journals (“living with him was like living on the side of a volcano”), I’m inclined to attribute this story to Pollett. See Delmore Schwartz, Portrait of Delmore: Journals and Notes of Delmore Schwartz, 1939-1959, ed. Elizabeth Pollett (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986). 101 Seidel, “Interview,” 63. 102 Lowell admits in a letter to Richard Tillinghast that “half my pieces come from something.” Lowell, Letters , 522 103 In “To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage,” the reference to the husband’s “free-lancing out along the razor’s edge” connects to the concluding line “each of us holds a locked razor” from Lowell’s “Waking in Blue,” a poem positioned earlier in Life Studies about Lowell’s stay in McLean’s psych ward. The connection between these two lines, along with the poem’s proximity to “Man and Wife,” pushes the reader to interpret the adulterous “hopped up husband” as a salacious representation of Lowell during one of his manic attacks. For a more in-depth discussion of the use of razors in Lowell’s poetry, see Thomas Austenfeld, “Razor’s Edge: Robert Lowell and Shaving,” Pacific Coast Philology 47, 2012, 1-16. 104 When Lowell first published “To Speak of Woe” in the Partisan Review (1958), the quotation marks were not included ( CP 1045). His use of quotation marks is inconsistent throughout Life Studies . In the first section, it is unclear why “Mad Negro Soldier” uses quotation marks but “The Banker’s Daughter” does not, even though both frame themselves as dramatic monologues. The only poem enclosed by quotation marks in the third section is “Words for Hart Crane” while “To Speak of Woe” is the only poem so enclosed in both parts of the fourth section. 105 Chaucer, Gregory. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” The Canterbury Tales. Penguin Classics , 2005. 211 106 Lowell’s relationships, due to his mental illness, were often fraught and occasionally violent. Lowell’s first biography by Ian Hamilton (1982) sensationalized many of these episodes. As Steven Axelrod explains, “This biography all but buried the once-prevailing conception of Lowell as a formal innovator and a moral witness, installing in its place the figure of a man who did little besides bring misery to others” ( The Critical Response to Robert Lowell 3). Axelrod

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notes that the later biography by Paul Mariani, Lost Puritan (1994) “provides a more balanced portrait of the poet” (Axelrod 3). Diane Wood Middlebrook seems to praise Ian Hamilton’s biography, remarking that “From that first page on we made aware of how completely in possession of the subject this narrator intends to be. Yet the flickering consciousness of double meanings that announce themselves at the outset in Hamilton’s prose is not performed in a spirit of condescension” (See Diane Wood Middlebrook, “The Role of the Narrator in Literary Biography,” South Central Review 23, 2006, 7) . Given the tremendous difference in tone between Hamilton’s and Marini’s biography, and given the often warm tone of Lowell’s letters, I believe that Axelrod’s estimation is the correct one. 107 Lowell notes in a letter to Richard Tillinghast that “the prose in Life Studies was never therapy, except as my own therapy for a long period of not being able to write new poems.” See Lowell, Letters , 519-523 108 Adrienne Rich, “On History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin ” reprinted in The Critical Response to Robert Lowell , 186. 109 Ibid., 186-187. 110 Diane Wakoski, “Reply to Adrienne Rich,” reprinted in The Critical Response to Robert Lowell , 188. 111 Wakoski, 187. 112 Ibid., 188. 113 Letters , 570. 114 Rich, “On History ,” 186. 115 Ibid., 186. 116 Even Deborah Nelson more or less fails to treat letters as a separate medium, seeing poetry and letters circulating with similar social expectations within a larger discourse of privacy. For Nelson, the difference between letters and poetry hinges on letter’s insistence of an actual recipient, in effect triangulating her lyric reading of poetry as a conversation between speaker and reader. The impact of the letter, effectively, is not related to Lowell’s intersection of different physical media, but instead to Lowell’s foregrounding of actual conversation against the imagined conversation of Lowell’s poetry as a lyric text. The letter, in her reading, would not differ in effect from quoted dialogue, independent of its means of a letter, telephone conversation, or physical meeting. See Deborah Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). Nelson’s excellent reading of legal history suggests a relationship between mid-century concepts of identity and the circulation of texts, especially photographic images. 117 Steven Gould Axelrod, “Introduction: Robert Lowell from Classic to Outlaw” in The Critical Response to Robert Lowell , 2.

Notes to Chapter 2: 1 Qtd in Lytle Shaw, Frank O’Hara: The Poetics of Coterie (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 5. 2Frank O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara , ed. Donald Allen, (New York: Knopf, 1972), 499. All future citations will be from this edition, abbreviated CP. 3 Shaw, Poetics , 27. 4 Terrence Scott Herring, “Frank O’Hara’s Open Closet,” PMLA 117 (2002): 422 5 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005): 96. 6 Ibid., 111.

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7 Ibid., 121 8 Shaw, Poetics , 20. 9 Ibid., 37. 10 Ibid., 21. 11 Ibid., 37. 12 Anne Hartman, “Confessional Counterpublics in Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg,” Journal of Modern Literature 28 (2005). 13 Anne Hartman, “Confessional,” 47. 14 David Lehman argues that the death of O’Hara “signal[ed] the end of the first phase of the New York School as an avant-garde movement.” See David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of the New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday), 12. 15 Andrew Epstein critiques the coterie model and offers the concept of “experimental individualism” as a contrast. Epstein argues that the discussion of coterie poetry frequently imposes biographical readings onto poetic texts instead of developing how specific relationships impact poetic writing: These [coterie] critiques, however, rarely discuss with specificity friendship as a psychological, philosophical, or aesthetic category (a subject of tremendous interest to the poets), instead folding it into the related, but not identical, rubrics of community or the social. Nor do they spend a good deal of time investigating how such relationships, and the mixture of angst and inspiration they provide, become intertwined with the subject, form, rhetoric, and imagery of actual poems. Also, they tend to privilege, more than I will here, the poets’ desire for ‘solidarity,’ the way composing poetry and other material practices undertaken by avant-garde poets serve to shore up the insularity of a restricted coterie, or are at least designed to do so. See Andrew Epstein, Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and Postwar American Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8. Several other critics have used the term coterie poetry to describe writings by other authors. One of the earlier examples is Arthur F. Marotti’s study of John Donne, John Donne: Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986) whom Shaw references directly. For more recent work on coterie poetry, see Paul Trolander and Zynep Tenger, “Katherine Philips and Coterie Critical Practices,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 37 (2004): 367-387 and Matthew Giordano, “Public Privacy: Melville’s Coterie Authorship in John Marr and Other Sailors ,” A Journal of Melville Studies 9 (2007): 65-78. Trolander and Tenger’s discussion is particularly interesting because their model of coterie poetry, unlike Shaw’s, argues for coterie poetry as an “outward” sphere of distribution that promoted public circulation of Philips’s coterie (382). 16 John Bernard Meyers, The Poets of the New York School (New York: Gotham Book Mart and Gallery, 1969), 7-8. 17 Shaw, Poetics , 21. 18 The origin of the phrase New York School of Poetry started as a joke referencing painting schools. The term was invented partially to appease editors. See Ashbery, “Introduction,” in CP, x. 19 Bill Berkson and Joseph LeSueur, “Editor’s Note” Homage to Frank O'Hara (eds. Bill Berkson and Joe LeSueur. Bolinas: Big Sky, 1988). 20 Larry Rivers, “Speech Read at Springs,” in Homage to Frank O’Hara , 138. 21 Berkson and LeSueur, “Editor’s Note,” in Homage . 22 Gerald Malanga, “Remembering Frank,” in Homage , 179.

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23 Ibid., 179. 24 Marjorie Perloff, Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (New York: George Braziller, 1977), 24. 25 Andrew Ross calls Frank O’Hara “the most spontaneous of all camp writers.” See Andrew Ross, “The Death of Lady Day,” Poetics Journal (1989), 74. 26 Edward Lucie-Smith and Frank O’Hara, "Edward Lucie Smith: An Interview with Frank O'Hara" in Frank O'Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York (San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1983),12 27 Robert Lowell, “Robert Lowell, Winner of the 1960 Poetry Award for Life Studies,” National Book Award Acceptance Speeches, National Book Foundation, accessed March 9, 2016. 28 “Edward Lucie-Smith: an Interview,” 13 29 We know at least that O'Hara's poetry reached a fairly diverse audience and that his print circulation seemed to grow throughout his life, even if the number of printed editions of his books remained fairly small; Lunch Poems, which appears to be O'Hara's most widely distributed book, printed only 3000 copies in its first edition (Brad Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993, 440). The first print run of Meditations in an Emergency sold 900 paperback copies and 115 hardbound copies but was out of print by 1960 (Gooch, 299). These small print runs, however, do not offer an easy measurement of O'Hara's exposure during his life. Love Poems (Tentative Title), the last book printed during O'Hara's life, ran only 500 copies but the book, despite its limited run, sold out within a year of its release (Gooch, 441) and was successful enough to inspire a fairly terse review from Marius Bewley in New York Review of Books . This review and its critique in a letter to the editor by a San Francisco reader suggests a much more dispersed image of O'Hara's print circulation. Even if Love Poems ran only 500 copies, the exchange between Bewley and the letter writer, Stan Persky, suggests a nationwide public circulation that is rarely recognized in criticism of O'Hara's work. In his letter, Persky demonstrates a familiarity not only with Love Poems , but also with O’Hara’s “writings on art and aesthetics" and feels confident enough in O'Hara's reputation to add in a parenthetical aside, “I mean I already know he’s a serious artist.” See Stan Persky and Marius Bewley, “Poem Witheld” The New York Review of Books , April 28, 1966, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/04/28/poem-withheld/. Marius Bewley defends his review, curiously enough, by asserting O’Hara’s already established popularity “in sentiment:” “No bitchery intended. I suspect Mr. O’Hara is sufficiently integrated in sentiment not to feel tainted by having been reviewed below the salt in the company of seven distinguished ‘academics.’” Although Bewley’s reference to O’Hara’s “integration” suggests a certain mass, sympathetic readership for O’Hara, Bewley’s use of scare quotes around “academics” offers a joke about O’Hara’s views towards academic culture and poetry that implies a potentially less sympathetic, but equally familiar, New York Review of Books reading public who would know O’Hara’s writing well enough to understand Bewley’s irony. 30 CP, 256. 31 Michael Clune argues for a different way of reading O’Hara’s historical context in American Literature and the Free Market 1945-2000. Clune relates O’Hara’s spontaneity to free-market discourse in order to argue that O’Hara’s poetry collapses “the fundamental interface between the individual and the collective.” See Michael Clune, American Literature and the Free Market 1945-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 55. 32 CP, 48. 33 Gooch, City Poet , 213.

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34 Ibid., 156. 35 O'Hara had, as far as I can find, one negative review printed before his composition of "The Critic" in an October, 1950 edition of The Advocate, the same magazine that printed his poems. The review writes only one line: "A double entry by Frank O'Hara verges on the musing, but quite definitely falls short". See Anonymous, “On the Shelf,” The Advocate , Oct. 7, 1950, http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1950/10/7/on-the-shelf-pthe-advocate-is/. It is uncertain if O'Hara ever read this review, or what he felt about it. If he did read the review, it is still unclear if "The Critic" refers to The Advocate review, or feedback received (or anticipated) from his writing workshop peers. 36 Gooch, City Poet , 158-159. 37 The title of Perloff’s book itself is a recirculation of the title of James Schuyler’s essay “Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters.” Schuyler, an accomplished poet in his own right, later published a collection of his correspondences with Frank O’Hara. Although the focus of my paper is largely how criticism has circulated O’Hara, many of O’Hara’s friends have (mostly after the publication of Homage to Frank O’Hara) published either autobiographies or collections of letters around their relationships with O’Hara, creating a small print industry that is worth examining it its own right. Many of these texts explicitly cite Perloff, suggesting that even while her title is framed by O’Hara’s aesthetic and social relationships, her book has in turn impacted and framed the ways in which these relationships are remembered. 38 Perloff reflects that when she mentioned working on Frank O’Hara in 1977, “Thomas Byrom cautioned that O’Hara’s “late Victorian camp” was the style of an intriguing but minor poet.” See Marjorie Perloff, “Reading Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems after Fifty Years,” Poetry (Jan 2015). 39 Perloff, Poet Among Painters , xxxiii-xxxiv. 40 Donald Allen, The New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1960), xi. 41 Daniel Kane, What is Poetry: Conversations with the American Avant-Garde (New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 2003), 4. Parentheticals included in the original text. 42 John Ashbery, “Introduction,” in The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara , vii. 43 Standing Still , 13. 44 Ibid., 13. 45 Lowell, “National” 46 LeSueur, Joseph. “Four Apartments: A Memoir of Frank O’Hara.” Another World . Ed. Anne Waldman (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1971), 290. 47 See Mark Silverberg, The New York School Poets and the Neo-Avant-Garde: Between Radical Art and Radical Chic (New York: Routledge, 2010). 48 For an excellent history of the various modes of mid-century poetry readings and how they branch off into different genres of address, including slam poetry readings, see Susan Somers- Willett, The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity, and the Performance of Popular Verse in America (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009). 49 Bob Perelman, “’fucking / me across the decades like we / poets like’: Embodied Poetic Transmission,” Don’t Ever Get Famous: Essays on New Writing after the New York School, ed. Daniel Kane (Champaign, Dalkey Archive Press, 2006), 211. 50 Frank O’Hara, “Statement for The New American Poetry ,” CP , 500. 51 It is unclear exactly who first coined this term, but the label “I do this I do that” poem appears throughout criticism on O’Hara. In Frank O’Hara: New Essays on the New York School Poet , eds. Robert Hampson and Will Montgomery (UK: Liverpool UP, 2010), the phrase appears in

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about one-third of the included essays. Barrett Watten attributes this phrase to Ted Berrigan, see Barrett Watten, “The Conduit of Communication in Everyday Life,” Ariel 8 (USA: Single- Handed Red-Hot Press, 1995), 33. 52 Srikanth Reedy, Changing Subjects: Digressions in Modern American Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 116. 53 Frank O’ Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto.” CP , 499. 54 Ibid., 49. 55 Ibid., 499. 56 Ibid., 499. 57 Ibid., 499. 58 Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (Cambridge, MA.: MIT University Press, 2006), 13. 59 Ibid., 499. Gregory Bredbeck uses Barthes to read O’Hara’s discussion of “Lucky Pierre style.” He argues that, “Like Lucky Pierre, materiality constituted in the present by his ability to straddle (among other things) the exclusionary binary of top and bottom, the text as trick straddles the binary of object and agent, of inertia and activity, that mark and mark off the reserves underpinning Barthes’s will to limited play.” See Gregory Bredbeck, “B/O—Barthes’s Text and O’Hara’s Trick,” PMLA 108 (1993), 279. 60 Ibid., 499. 61 Caleb Crain observes O’Hara’s repeated use of gender-neutral pronouns throughout “Personism,” arguing that O’Hara “masks” his desires, even as he “turns on a repression [he] does not accept” see Caleb Crain, “Frank O’Hara’s ‘Fired’ Self” in American Literary History 9 (1997), 289. While O’Hara describes his sexuality more directly elsewhere in his writings, any attempts to read O’Hara’s writing as a direct presentation of the poet struggles against his frequent decision to use such indirect strategies as veiled pronouns in lieu of a more explicit presentation of his desires. 62 CP, 498. 63 CP, 499. 64 Standing , 157. 65 Charles Altieri, “The Significance of Frank O’Hara,” The Iowa Review 4 (1973), 91. 66 Ibid., 101. 67 Ibid., 91. 68 Brian Glavey, “Frank O’Hara Nude with Boots: Queer Ekphrasis and the Statuesque Poet,” American Literature 79 (2007), 788. 69 Ibid., 786. 70 Ibid., 801. 71 Ibid., 789-780. 72 Shaw, Poetics , 90. 73 Joseph LeSueur mentions O’Hara’s admiration for Whitman several times in his memoir and suggests that O’Hara actively considered Whitman as an influence for “In Memory of My Feelings.” During LeSueur’s chapter on “In Memory of My Feelings,” LeSueur recollects a conversation where O’Hara called Whitman “my great predecessor.” Elsewhere, LeSueur notes with fondness that O’Hara’s remark that “I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass in the city unless I know there is a subway handy” is memorialized on a plaque in Battery Park next to a quote by Whitman. LaSueur calls Whitman, “a poet close to Frank’s heart, a poet whose spirit and sensibility and long line had a salutary and felicitious influence on Frank’s poetry.”

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74 Ibid., 252-57. 75 CP , 59. 76 Ibid., 252. 77 Ibid., 253 78 Ibid., 253. 79 Ibid., 253. 80 Ibid., 257. 81 Micah Mattix, “Frank O’Hara’s Lute against the Self” Applied Semiotics 4 (2002), 250. 82 Ibid., 253. 83 Ibid., 252 84 Ibid., 257. The italics are my own. 85 Ibid., 255. 86 Ibid., 256 87 Ibid ., 257. 88 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2011), 24. 89 Ibid. 18. 90 Ibid., 8. 91 Ibid., 116. 92 CP , 262. 93 Perloff, Poet among Painters , 112. 94 CP , 262. 95 O’Hara, in his answer to Edward Lucie-Smith’s question, “have you ever hesitated between being a painter and being a writer?,” which prompted this poem, explains his predilection for poetry as a desire to avoid time-consuming processes such as editing: “painting and sculpture take so much concentration over such a period of time that I’m not sure I can do it. Whereas one can write relatively fast [….] I don’t believe in reworking—too much.” ( Standing 21). 96 CP, 498. 97 Berlant, Cruel , 26. 98 José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia (New York: NYU Press, 2009), 7. 99 Ibid., 6. 100 Ibid., 9. 101 Ibid., 10 102 O’Hara, CP , 360. 103 The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara claims that “The Critic” was first published in Art and Literature 12 during the spring of 1967. While this volume publishes several of O’Hara’s poems, “The Critic” is not included among them. I am unsure if and when this poem was first circulated in print. 104 See Ashbery's "Introduction" in O'Hara's Collected Poems . Also, see John Button’s essay in Homage : “When asked by a publisher-friend for a book, Frank might have trouble even finding the poems stuffed into kitchen drawers or packed in boxes that had not been unpacked since his last move” (41). 105 See Ashbery, “Introduction,” in CP , vii. The few accounts of his closet unexpectedly suggest that O’Hara might have organized his work. Given O’Hara’s famous lack of organization, the standards that his friends used to label it “organized” are unclear. The discrepancy between the various accounts of O’Hara’s manuscripts suggests that preconceived impressions of his irreverent style might influence these depictions. Kenneth Koch reflects that, “in the closet we

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found all of these manuscripts. Jesus, he’d written a lot that no one had ever seen. They were all dated. They were very organized, some of them revised” (qtd in Gooch, City Poet , 467). David R. Jarraway discusses Frank O’Hara’s poetry closet in relationship to cold war restrictions on homosexuality and Michel Foucault’s repressive hypothesis. See David Jarraway, “’Vanilla Hemmorhages’: The Queer Perversities of Frank O’Hara,” GLQ 4 (1998), 67-109 106 Donald Allen in CP , v-vi.

Notes to Chapter 3: 1 George Oppen to June Dagnan, “Jan something—around the 14 th ” 1960, Box 1, Slide 17, George Oppen Papers 1958-1984, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of California, San Diego. Further citations from this selection will include the box and slide number, but will be abbreviated “G.O. Papers.” 2 George Oppen, George Oppen: New Collected Poems , Ed. Michael Davidson (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2002), 163. Further citations from this anthology will be abbreviated as NCP . 3 Ibid., 5. 4 Mary Oppen, Meaning a Life: An Autobiography (Black Sparrow Press, 1976), 134. 5 David Herd notes a similar sense of confusion in Oppen’s Daybooks : “His formulations can sound at times as if they were written for ‘us’, as if in some sense the Daybooks had an audience, as if he were writing for him. But neither seems right. Oppen is writing here for writing—writing so that writing should be made more true.” See David Herd, “’In the Open of the Common Rubble’: George Oppen’s Poetics,” Textual Practice 11 (2013), 145. 6 Louis Zukofsky, "Sincerity and Objectification with Special Reference to the Work of Charles Reznikoff,” Poetry: A Magazine of Verse 31 (1931), 273. 7 Michel Engelbert and Michael West, “George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Michel Engelbert and Michael West,” Speaking with George Oppen: Interviews with the Poet and Mary Oppen, 1968-1987 , ed. Richard Swigg (North Carolina, McFarland & Company, 2012), 112. 8 Michael Davidson, On the Outskirts of Form: Practicing Cultural Poetics (Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 6. 9 Ibid, 8. 10 Ibid., 8. 11 Ibid., 8. 12 Ibid., 111. 13 Engelbert and West, “Interview,” 112. 14 For a discussion of Oppen’s activities while in Mexico, see L.S. Dembo, “George Oppen Interviewed by L.S. Dembo,” in Speaking with George Oppen, 19-22. Oppen speaks about his time in Mexico extensively throughout many of his interviews in the collection. 15 Davidson, On the Outskirts , 6. 16 Theodor Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society” Notes to Literature Volume 1 , ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 38. 17 Ibid., 39. 18 Stathis Gourgouris, “The Lyric in Exile,” Qui Parle 14 (2004), 153. 19 NCP , 114. Oppen uses this phrase in his poem “Language of New York” which he later shaped into his longer poem, “Of Being Numerous.” Oppen uses his phrase intermittently throughout his archive, suggesting that it was a terminology he was particularly fond of. This term occasionally entered into his readings of philosophy. In his criticism of Simone de

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Beauvoir, he writes, “she seems unaware of the mineral fact, of which Sartre is so conscious” (qtd in Nicholls, Fate, 44). On the title page of the final section of Seascape: Needle’s Eye , Oppen quotes Nishigi: “Let a man who is in the world tell the fact.” 20 Ibid., 44. 21 Ibid., 43. 22 Gourgouris, “Lyric” 153. 23 Ibid., 52. 24 Aamir Mufti, “Towards a Lyric History of India,” The Lyric Theory Reader , eds. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2014): 603-618. 25 Ibid., 54. 26 Zukofsky, “Sincerity,” 274. 27 For a discussion of Oppen’s views on the propositional properties of language, see Peter Middleton “Open Oppen: linguistic fragmentation and the poetic proposition,” Textual Practice 24 (2010), 623-648. Relevant to the focus of my project, Middleton places Oppen’s use of language in relationship to a history of propositional language explicitly drawn from the writings of I.A. Richards. 28 Dembo, “Interview,” 9. 29 Nicholls observes a similar difference between Zukofsky and Oppen by stressing Oppen’s discomfort with Zukofsky’s Kantian influences. Oppen notes that for Zukofsky, objectification means “the consciousness’s act of objectification” (see Nicholls, Fate, 14.). I agree with Nicholl’s point here, but hope to draw a slightly different emphasis. While for Zukofsky objectification hinges on cognition, Oppen’s objectification attunes itself to a collective sense of language that is both reliant on but also independent from its individual subjects. My argument in this paper is that while Oppen is more interested in language as a broadly social concept, over the course of Oppen’s career this social sense of language became increasingly undermined by reading practices that interpreted poetic language as the expression of an individual subject. 30 Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 14. 31 George Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, ed. Stephen Cope (California: University of California Press, 2008), 30-31. 32 George Oppen, Selected Prose , 156. 33 Oppen, “Mind’s Own Place,” 32. 34 Englebert and West, “Interview,” 112. 35 Charles Thomlinson, “George Oppen Interviewed by Charles Thomlinson,” in Speaking , 58. 36 Charles Amirkhanian and David Gitin, “George Oppen Interviewed by Charles Amirkhanian and David Gitin,” in Speaking , 41. 37 Ibid., 41. 38 “One tries and tries, and sometimes I think we guarantee certain things in the line division— that some words are solid there, no matter how they’re said, and you can’t quite control the whole reading” (Interview 69). 39 Ruth Ellen Gruber, “George Oppen and Ted Berrigan with the Novelist Marvin Cohen, Interviewed by Ruth Ellen Gruber,” in Speaking , 67 40 George Oppen, G.O. Papers , box 16, reel 5, slide 9. 41 L.S. Dembo, “Interview,” 10. 42 Gruber, “Interview,” 66. 43 George Oppen to Denise Levertov, Feb 1963, in G.O. Papers , box 1, reel 6, slide 126.

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44 Oppen, “Mind’s Own Place,” 35. In Oppen’s interview with Gruber, Ted Berrigan and Marvin Cohen stress their discomfort with the Beat’s tendency to read in public. Oppen agrees, stressing that the actual act of writing is a solitary one, but goes on at length to discuss that the contexts within which poets are printed and circulate are critical to establishing their meaning and reputation (65-69). 45 Oppen seemed to accept ‘confessional’ poetry on similar terms: “The ‘confessional’ poetry— Not always sensationalism. It expresses—in the most honest and the most radical way—the major fact of this century, that we have lost faith in man which was the foundation of 19 th century rationalism” (archive 19/65). 46 Oren Izenberg, Of Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 31. 47 Ibid., 11 48 Michael Davidson, “Introduction,” NCP , xx. For a more developed discussion by Davidson on Oppen’s archive, please see Michael Davidson, “Palimtexts: George Oppen, Susan Howe, and the Material Text,” Ghostlier Demarcations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 64- 93. 49 Although numerous critics talk about Oppen’s hiatus from poetry as a “silence,” this in itself is a metaphor that equates writing with speech. Oppen was obviously not silent in the literal sense; what little we know of his time working as a labor organizer in the US and his time spent in Mexico suggests very clearly that he spoke with other people. 50 Izenberg, Of Being Numerous , 34. 51 For a discussion of Oppen and his relationship with midcentury conversations about democratic identity, see Tim Woods, “George Oppen and the Public Sphere,” Journal of American Studies 45 (2011), 443-462. Although Woods discourages situating Oppen’s poetry within earlier or midcentury poetics, his essay helpfully outlines the complicated stakes surrounding conversations about collective identity in the 1960s. 52 Izenberg, Of Being Numerous , 34. 53 Herd writes that “Where philosophy will always look to subsume the world under concepts, poetry is capable of singularities, but only, as [Oppen] understood it, if prepared repeatedly to put itself to the test” (Herd, “Open,” 150). 54 See Burt Kimmelman, “George Oppen’s Silence and the Role of Uncertainty in Post-War American Avant-Garde Poetry,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 36 (2003), 145-162. 55 NCP , 295 56 Ezra Pound, “Cantos IV,” Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions Books, 1996), 13 57 This potential reading echoes Oppen’s concerns in his interview with Ruth Ellen Gruber that “Beat” poets, because of their affiliation with the Beat movement, cannot escape being read as reiterations of Allen Ginsberg’s poetry (67). 58 Eliot Weinberger describes Oppen in the Preface to the NCP as appearing “twenty years older than his contemporaries”: “George always seemed ancient, and I am shocked as I now calculate that he was only in his late fifties when I met him. That this was not merely an adolescent perspective is confirmed by photographs: in them, his gaunt and geological face makes him look twenty years older than his contemporaries” (Eliot Weinberger, “Preface,” NCP, xv).

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59 Zukofsky, “Sincerity,” 273. L.S. Dembo offers a more developed discussion of Zukofsky and his definitions of form in L.S. Dembo, “Louis Zukofsky: Objectivist Poetics and the Quest for Form,” American Literature 44, 1972, 74-96. 60 See Oppen’s interview with Amirkhanian and Gitin. 61 Ming-Qian Ma, Poetry as Re-Reading: American Avant-Garde Poetics and the Poetics of Counter-Method (Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 66. Ma’s reading ignores the thirty year period between Oppen’s earlier work and later work, reading poems from Discrete Series side by side with poems from Of Being Numerous . 62 Edward Hirsch, Poet’s Choice (Florida: Harcourt Books, 2006), 255. 63 L.S. Dembo, “Oppen on his Poems,” George Oppen: Man and Poet , ed. Burton Hatlen (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1981), 200. In Oppen’s previously cited interview with Dembo, Oppen discusses his back and forth engagement with imagism in greater detail. See Dembo, “Interview,” 9. 64 Oppen, “Mind’s Own Place,” 31-32. 65 Burt Kimmelman writes of Oppen’s “invoke[ing] the world rather than describing it,” that “this engrossment in language, especially in writing, involves presenting language within the context of death, silence, and the blank visual field on the page of the book.” See Burt Kimmelman, “Tracking the Word: Judaism’s Exile and the Writerly Poetics of George Oppen, Armand Schwerner, Michael Heller, and Norman Kinkelstein,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies 27 (2009 ), 37. 66 Peter Nicholls, Fate , 37. 67 NCP , 12. 68 NCP, 114. 69 NCP, 14. 70 NCP , 5. 71 Oppen added an “e” to the character’s name. The title of the story from which Oppen draws this line, “The Story of It,” only further suggests the importance of objects over characters. 72 NCP , 206. 73 NCP , 33. 74 While many critics have noted Oppen’s reluctance to write propaganda poetry for the Communist Party as a contributing factor to his twenty-five year hiatus, this reluctance is described as a matter of artistic integrity. What is overlooked, however, is that Oppen’s descriptions of this integrity are framed as a rejection of not only the political impetus of propaganda poetry, but also the ethics of writing to its targeted audience and its means of public address. A short and by no means exhaustive list of his statements about his silence demonstrates the importance of audience and address in his remarks: “It’s a narrow public for poetry. It always will be. We didn’t dream of addressing the crowds with poetry. And we distinguished, as I said, between poetry and politics” (Interview 226); “[…] Kenner, in a rather high style, asks, ‘And how is one to understand the 25-year silence?’ So I told him. So I told him what was going on— the unemployed and the rest of it, all of which he was finding rather hard to bear. And very brilliantly, really very brilliantly, he said, “In brief it took twenty-five years to write the next poem.’” (218); “In the arts, even as a poet I was—you can imagine how small a public, even those I looked up to as established poets, had at that time [during the depression]—well, you understand the story I’m telling. But what I was saying to Kenner was that really I had to know more. We had begun at the beginning with some kind of populist sense, always in conflict with the exile group and sophistications of art” (39); “If you decide to do something politically, you

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do something that has political efficacy. And if you decide to write poetry, then you write poetry, not something that you hope, or deceive yourself into believing, can save people who are suffering. That was the dilemma of the thirties. In a way I gave up poetry because of the pressures of what for the moment I’ll call conscience” (20); “It is possible that a world without art is simply flat and uninhabitable, and the poet’s business is not to use verse as an advanced form of rhetoric, nor to seek to give to political statements the aura of eternal truth. It should not really be the ambition even of the most well-meaning of political and semipolitical gatherings to do so, and to use verse for the purpose, as everyone perfectly well knows, is merely excrutiating” (“The Mind’s Own Place” 37). 75 By framing his poetry as an act of talking on stage, Oppen acknowledges his later poetry as an unavoidable and regrettable distancing of himself from his audience. Several critics have observed Oppen’s rendering of distance in his poetry, especially in his use of opaque visual frames. See John Wilkinson, “The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen,” Critical Inquiry 36, 2010, 218-238 and Monique Vescia, Depression Glass: Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos William (New York: Taylor and Francis Group, 2006). I disagree with Vescia’s reading overtly assumes Oppen’s use of a “lyric speaker” (63) but appreciate her contextualization of Oppen’s writing in relationship to other twentieth-century mediums, especially photography. 76 NCP , 159-160. 77 NCP , 39. 78 Oppen writes in one of his letters that “these should have been written in 1940” ( SL 379, n.1). 79 Nicholls, 36. 80 NCP , 39. 81 Ibid., 39. 82 Amirkhanian and Gitin, “Interview,” 39. 83 NCP , 207. 84 David McAleavey, “George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by David McAleavey, January 13, 1978,” in Speaking , 169. Oppen bases his poem “Ballad” off of his experiences of Swan’s Island off the coast of Maine. Oppen enjoyed sailing immensely. His description of the island and its inhabitants in “Ballad” should be considered alongside his conversation about history and reference with Ezra Pound mentioned at the start of my chapter. 85 George Oppen, in a letter to George Thomlinson, links “seriousness” to the idea of addressing one’s peers. Thomlinson, in his reply, breaks Oppen’s letter into a poem: One imagines himself Addressing his peers, I suppose. Surely that might be the definition Of ‘seriousness’? I would like, As you see, To convince myself That my pleasure in your response Is not Plain vanity But the pleasure of being heard, The pleasure of companionship, which seems

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More honorable. ( G.O. Papers , box 19, reel 30, slide 64) Oppen, to my knowledge, does not reply to Thomlinson’s division. It is also unclear, given the context, what Oppen is referring to. Thomlinson clearly translates this form of address as poetic address, but even if Oppen is referring to poetic address, his hesitancy suggested by “I suppose” challenges the ease through which poetic writing functions as such an address. Given Oppen’s description of awaiting an actual reply, it is possible that Oppen is musing about public speaking or letter writing. 86 NCP, 209. 87 Englebert and West, “Interview,” 117. 88 Ibid., 117. 89 G.O. Papers , Box 1, reel 3. Given its position on the reel, this letter was probably composed sometime in the early 70’s. Oppen did not consistently date all of his letters and many of the dates on his manuscripts were later added in pencil by Mary Oppen. 90 NCP , 163. 91 Undated letter to “Andy,” G.O. Papers , box 1, reel 7, slide 302. 92 George Oppen Letter to June Oppen Dagnan, Feb 9, 1959, The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis (Durham: Duke University Press), 31. 93 Tom Sharp, “George and Mary Oppen Interviewed by Tom Sharp,” Speaking , 206. Michael Heller places Oppen in tension to Auden and Eliot and attempts to draw an all-too-familiar boundary between mid-century aesthetic traditions, arguing that Oppen believed, “American poetry had divided into two main branches, one looking to Eliot and Auden as models and one following Pound and Williams. He felt himself to be among the latter. Oppen was, in a sense, writing against a background and legacy of such popular figures as Auden and Auden-influenced writers like Lowell and Berryman, poets, well-emblematized in the linguistic and metaphorical usages of much poetry now being written” (13). Immediately after returning from his silence, Oppen worries in a letter to Charles Humbolt about the conversational tone of his poem “Blood from the Stone,” the poet’s first poem after his twenty-five year long period of silence: “How did I get to fiddling around like that? To my shame this will sound like an Auden explanation…. Of course, I need to make that a totally forthright statement. Shades of Auden------me, the unaudenized and diselioted! I’ll rewrite it’ (SL 31). “Eclogue,” perhaps intentionally or unintentionally contrasts itself against Auden’s Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue . 94 Oppen appreciated the scope and ambition of Eliot’s The Waste Land to express its age, even as he pushed against Eliot’s reliance on voice and abstract concepts like faith. Elsewhere in the loose notes of his archive, Oppen reiterates his desire to write a poetry that “inaudibly” expresses an age: “To try to establish poetically—to try to find poetically the concept—among other concepts—of Man […] Not quite an anthropocentric poetry; anthropocentric modified by the awareness of place—I would like the poem to be transparent, inaudible as the act of knowing” (Reel 13, slide 14). 95 John Wilkinson, “The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen,” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010), 224. 96 NCP , 186. 97 Ibid., 186. 98 Izenberg, Of Being Numerous , 83. 99 NCP , 186-187. 100 NCP , 166. 101 NCP , 379.

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102 Oppen, Selected Letters , 121. 103 NCP 167 104 NCP , 167. 105 Nicholls, Fate , 95 106 NCP , 301. 107 Jennifer Ashton, From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 27. 108 Ibid., 27. 109 G.O. Papers , reel 19 slide 257. 110 Qtd. In Nicholls, Fate , 69-70.

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