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The Poetry and Criticism of Hayden Carruth

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The Poetry and Criticism of Hayden Carruth Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1990 Existentialism and New England: The oP etry and Criticism of Hayden Carruth. Anthony Jerome Robbins Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Robbins, Anthony Jerome, "Existentialism and New England: The oeP try and Criticism of Hayden Carruth." (1990). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 4949. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/4949 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. INFORMATION TO USERS The most advanced technology has been used to photograph and reproduce this manuscript from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 9104168 Existentialism and New England: The poetry and criticism of Hayden Carruth Robbins, Anthony Jerome, Ph.D. The Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Col., 1990 UMI 300 N. Zeeb Rd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 Existentialism and New England: The Poetry and Criticism of Hayden Carruth Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Anthony Jerome Robbins A.B., The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1976 M.A., Syracuse University, 1980 May 1990 Preface This is the first full-scale study of the poetry and criticism of Hayden Carruth, and I have tried to consider as much of his vast output as possible. The study begins with three chapters which describe and analyze Carruth’s development book by book, period by period, from 1959 to 1983. Though all of his collections overlap in the order of the composition of the poems in them, it has been possible to put the books in a reasonably straightforward chronological sequence. Following these first chapters, in "Carruth’s Existential Revisions of Walden." I consider Carruth’s response to the New England literary tradition by way of elaborating his response to Thoreau in particular, with asides into Emerson, Robert Lowell, and Paul Goodman. In the next chapter, "Erotic Conventions," I explore the nature of the narrative voice in Carruth’s long poem The Sleeping Beauty. The final chapter is a study of recent developments in Carruth’s work since 1984, epecially his critique of cultural optimism. There are remarkable consistencies of vision and of verbal effect in Carruth’s work, and in each chapter I have sometimes harkened ahead, sometimes backward in time in describing these connections. Finally, I have appended a 1989 interview with Carruth in which he addresses some of the inquries I have begun here and provides additional information about his life and work. Carruth’s primary importance is as a poet. I have given attention neither to his novel, Appendix A (1963), nor to his widely respected anthology of twentieth-century American poetry, The Voice That Is Great Within Us (1970). I have also ignored books of two types: those which seem to be minor accomplishments - though as such, coming from a major poet, they have their own pleasures and attractions. The Norfolk Poems (1961), The Clay Hill Anthology (a collection of haiku published in 1970), and The Mythology of Light and Dark (1982) are not central to my primary purpose here, which is to show why Carruth’s work is important and why it should be read. The second category I have omitted is of recent limited editions, Mother (1986), The Oldest Killed Lake in North America (1985), and Lighter Than Aircraft (1985). These books are not generally available, but as of this writing (July 1989) there are plans for future commercial issues in which they will be included. Adynamia at the terminus is unavoidable in considering a writer who is still working. In addition to studying the poetry I have also undertaken to show something of Carruth’s critical achievement, which is significant not only in programmatic relation to his own poetry but also for its fine style, for its synoptic and attentive scope, and for its incisively brilliant readings. I have approached it in two ways. Along with the initial narration of Carruth’s career, I have included an exploration of his critical fiction, After The Stranger: Imaginary Dialogues With Camus (1965). ATS is an integrated, finished work, and it is extremely important in regard to Carruth’s development as an existential thinker. Working Papers (1982), and Effluences From The Sacred Caves (1983) are miscellaneous selections of essays and reviews written mostly on assignment between 1949 and 1982. Despite their heterogeneity Carruth’s visions of the projects in contemporary literature emerge clearly, along with his passionate appreciations of great works of the past. Yet, because of their heterogeneity, it would be misleading, to treat them, as some of his reviewers have done, as if they were a deliberately argued manifesto. Indeed, the fact of their spontaneous discursions is philosophically consistent with Carruth’s ideas about the improvised nature of existence. So instead of wringing them for a meta-criticism, I have selected parts of the most salient pieces and brought them to bear on his poetry. In the final chapter I do, however, address certain essays in Sitting In (1986) precisely for their argumentative consistency. I think this is fair because the essays were written freely, not on assignment, and over a relatively short period of time. Having tried to describe my subject, I should try to explain my methods. I have not included large chunks of biography. Interest in personal activity of artists is ever a lesser kind of interest; Carruth has himself written about his life in many essays, e.g.,"Notes About Laughlin’s Typewriter" (Ef), and "The Guy Downstairs" (SI). I cannot elaborate on his private life any more than he himself has. If this study is successful, readers primarily interested in the poetry will go to the essays and discover there, in addition to the singular generosity and erudition of his intellect, whatever he has said about his life. In summoning other writers and thinkers to help illuminate Carruth’s work I have tried to limit myself to those with whom he has firm and fairly obvious connections. His thinking is firmly based in secular existentialism, non-violent anarchism, and Yankee pragmatism, and I have used a variety of existential writers in an effort to show where Carruth joins and where he departs from the currents of existential thought. Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Camus, as well as Sartre, have at times appeared under "existential" rubrics, although I am aware that Camus not only abjured the rubric but also large parts of Sartre’s existential theory. In this cohort Carruth’s position is closest in substance to Camus, in the textures of its expression to the puzzling Dane, in force of expression to Nietzsche, and in its implications for the social polity to Sartre. Informing all his intellectual feeling is his life-long affection for Kropotkin, Bakunin, Goldman, for Emerson and for William James. There are in fact many connections between Carruth’s woric and issues central to twentieth century philosophy and literature. For example, in Georg Lukacs’ critique of Marxist dialectics, History and Class Consciousness (Trans, by Rodney Livingstone, MIT Press, 1971), we find this apothegm: That genesis and history should coincide, or, more exactly, that they should be different aspects of the same process, can only happen if two conditions are iv fulfilled. On the one hand, all the categories in which human existence is constructed must appear as the determinants of that existence itself (and not merely of the description of that existence). On the other hand, their succession, their coherence and their connections must appear as aspects of the historical process itself, as the structural components of the present. (159) This theory of the coincidence between genesis and history describes very well the vision of the relationship between history and the individual in The Sleeping Beauty, and it is consistent, or could be shown to be consistent with, Carruth’s ideas of representation in jazz and poetry. An intensive foray in this direction might clarify my style of textual analysis; it might suggest in Carruth a synthetic ground of Marxist and existential aesthetics, but it would also have the effect of leading us away from the poems.
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