Wallace Stevens, in a letter written half-a-year before his death, remarked that Walt Whitman’s “good things, the superbly beautiful and moving things, are those that he wrote naturally, with an extemporaneous and irrepressible vehemence of emotion”. True and revelatory of Stevens’s best work, rather than of Whitman’s, the remark illustrates a central vehemence of American poetic tradition. The best poets of that climate are hermetic precisely when they profess to be vatic democrats, and they are curiously extemporaneous when they attempt to be most elitist. Whitman and Stevens, despite Stevens’s protest, deeply resemble one another in this regard, and have large affinities with a company of major American poets that includes Emily Dickinson, Hart Crane, and such extraordinary contemporary figures as John Ashbery, James Merrill and A. R. Ammons. A deep uncertainty concerning the American reader combines with ambitious designs upon that reader, and the result is a poetic stance more self-contradictory than that of most modern British poets of comparable achievement, from Thomas Hardy on to Geoffrey Hill, with D. H. Lawrence being the largest exception, as his Whitmanesque affinities clearly show.
Ralph Waldo Emerson may be regarded either as the primary source or as the initial representative of this American poetic difference. His audacity is still too little appreciated in Great Britain, where many critics oddly think him somewhat tame and bland. His dialectics are subtle, but his actual stance is antinomian and even violent in relation to the pieties of all anterior creeds. A religious thinker who could say, of the crucifixion that it was a Great Defeat whereas we, as Americans, demand Victory, a success to the senses as well as to the soul, is a writer who like his admirer Nietzsche, would dare to say anything. Urging his American bards to be at once agnostic and democratic, the prophetic Emerson encouraged, and goes on fostering, a split in American high culture that will evidently never end. The alternative convention in American literary aesthetics, which began with the anti-Emersonian protests of Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, and continued through the school of T. S. Eliot, finds its honourable last representative today in the distinguished poetry that Robert Penn Warren has been writing for the last decade. But Warren is a sunset hawk at the end of a counter-tradition. Emersonianism, with all its tangles of vision, style and stance, remains the dominant American poetic mode.
Three instances – from Whitman, Stevens, and Ashbery – may be cited in illustration of the peculiarities of American poetic Stance. Stevens kept insisting that he did not read Whitman, but when in a Yale lecture of 1947 he wished to give a demonstration of what he could admire as poetic strength, he chose to quote a brief lyric that Whitman wrote very late, “A Clear Midnight”:
This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done.
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death and the stars.
The stance here is the Emersonian Dionysiac, returning to the commonal, away even from the differences and iterations of language. But the great and only apparent improvisor, Whitman, “an American Bard at last”, is totally individualized in what is after all his unitary and esoteric theme, the oceanic mother who compounds in herself, as she will for Stevens and for Hart Crane, “Night, sleep, death, and the stars”. The American poetic soul emerges as the Coleridgean moon of imagination, “silent, gazing, pondering but with the destructive American Emersonian difference, an antithetical flight or regression away from art and nature alike, towards the solipsistic grandeur that is a new gnosis.
Whitman’s greatness may be in the ease or grace of this hermetic flight or regression, whereas Stevens had to attain it through rather too overt an esotericism or gaudy elitism, as here in the fable of the Arab-as-moon from Notes toward a Supreme Fiction:
We say: at night an Arabian in my room,
With his damned hoobla-hoobla, hoobla-how,
Inscribes a primitive astronomy
Across the unscrawled fores the future casts
And throws his stars around the floor. By day
The wood-dove used to chant his hoobla-how.
And still the grossest iridescence of ocean
Howls hoo and rises and howls hoo and falls
Life’s nonsense pierces us with strange relation.
Life’s nonsense reduces us to relying upon the distinction between hoobla-how and hoobla-hoo, which is an instance of that Stevensian negative exuberance which has driven the eminent American critic (of the Poundian persuasion) Hugh Kenner to the sad conclusion that all Stevens represents is the ultimate culmination of the poetics of Edward Lear. Yet the distinction belongs firmly to Emersonian doctrine: the hoobla-hoo is the song of the bird of Aphrodite, the wood-dove, but the hoobla-how reductively refers to sexual limitation, due to age and a lifetime’s repressiveness.
As the Coleridgean moon shines upon the aged Stevens, it compels him to confront what Whitman was too evasive to confront: the self-awareness of the erotic limits of poetic imagination. The future is death and death only, the word out of the sea uttered so persuasively by the Whitmanian terrible mother, yet Stevens masks his sexual anxieties by an elitist extravagance of trope. The moony Arab can afford to throw “his stars around the floor ” but Stevens has lost so much that he can afford no more discarding gestures. Perhaps Stevens was addicted to loss; it might be urged that his disciple Ashbery scarcely knows how to proceed except by acknowledging loss. That may be the inevitable price of a tradition whose founders – Emerson and Whitman – so perpetually demanded victory.
It is the iridescent ocean, final and maternal form of “night, sleep, death and the stars which is the largest figuration of Stevens’s poetic (and sexual) dilemma. His esoteric diction barely disguises the human despair of a self-described “harmonious skeptic”. Whitman could identify himself with the pondering moon, and more often with the sun, once even asserting, like Freud’s mad Dr Schreber, that he could send forth sunrise from himself.
The deliberate vagueness of the Stevensian moonlight produces the “unscrawled fores”, or poems-not-to-be-written, but if these suggest poetic impotence, they testify also to a power of redundancy, to an imagination that can afford to throw its stars around the floor. By day one used to hear the wood-dove, but now one hears always the ocean mocking us with its erotic light. Pierced by the strange story of our inadequate relation to life, we end in its nonsense, which is that desire goes on even as the erotic fails. The poet could be speaking these realizations to a universal reader, but he has chosen an elite, capable of relating to so esoteric a mode. Stevens said once that the poet must direct himself not to a drab, but to a woman with the hair of a pythoness, which is a wonderful sentiment, but doubtless he implied also that such a muse would partake of Medusa.
Of the many contemporary heirs of Whitman and of Stevens, John Ashbery seems likeliest to achieve something near to their eminence. Yet their uncertainty as to their audience is far surpassed in the shifting stances that Ashbery assumes. His mode can vary from the apparently opaque, so disjunctive as to seem beyond interpretation, to a kind of limpid clairvoyance that again brings the Emersonian contraries together. Contemplating Parmigianino’s picture, in his major long poem, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery achieves a vision in which art, rather than nature, becomes the imprisoner of the soul:
The soul has to stay where it is,
Even though restless, hearing rain-drops at the pane,
The sighing of autumn leaves thrashed by the wind,
Longing to be free, outside, but it must stay
Posing in this place. It must move as little as possible
This is what the portrait says
But there is in that gaze a combination
Of tenderness, amusement and regret, so powerful
In its restraint that one cannot look for long
The secret is too plain. The pity of it smarts,
Makes hot tears spurt: that the soul is not a soul,
Has no secret, is small, and it fits
Its hollow perfectly: its room, our moment of attention.
Whitman’s Soul, knowing its true hour in wordlessness, is apparently reduced here and now to a moment only of attention. And yet even this tearful realization, supposedly abandoning the soul to a convex mirror, remains a privileged moment, of an Emersonian rather than Paterian kind. Precisely where he seems most wistful and knowingly bewildered by loss, Ashbery remains most dialectical, like his American ancestors.
The simple diction and vulnerable stance barely conceal the presence of the American Transcendental Self, an ontological self that increases even as the empirical self abandons every spiritual assertion. Hence the “amusement” that takes up its stance between “tenderness” and “regret”, Whitmanian affections, and hence also the larger hint of a power held in reserve, “so powerful in its restraint that one cannot look for long”. An American Orphic, wandering in the Emersonian legacy, can afford to surrender the soul in much the same temper as the ancient Gnostics did. The soul can be given up to the Demiurge, whether of art or nature, because a spark or pneuma is more vital than the psyche, and fits no hollow whatsoever. Where Whitman and Stevens are at once hermetic and off-hand, so is Ashbery, but his throwaway gestures pay the price of an ever-increasing American sense of belatedness.
Emerson’s New England law of compensation, that “nothing is got for nothing”, is my bridge from the dilemmas of American poetic tradition to the impasses of a native American kind of literary criticism. From Emerson himself through to Kenneth Burke, the American tradition of criticism is highly dialectical, differing in this from the British empirical tradition that has prevailed from Dr Johnson to Empson. But this American criticism precisely resembles Whitmanian poetry, rather than the Continental dialectics that have surged from Hegel through Heidegger on to the contemporary Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man. Hegelian Negation, even in its latest critical varieties, is intellectually optimistic because it is always based upon a destructive concept of the given. Given facts (and given texts) may appear to common sense as a positive index of truth, but are taken as being in reality the negation of truth, which must destroy apparent facts, and must deconstruct texts. British or Humean literary critics maintain the ultimate authority of the fact or text. Emerson, and Kenneth Burke after him, espouse the Negative, but not at all in an Hegelian mode. Emerson, both more cheerful and less optimistic than Hegel, insisted that a fact was an epiphany of God, but this insistence identified God with Emerson in his most expansive and transcending moments. Burke remarks that everything we might say about God has its precise analogue in things that we can say about a language, a remark which defines American poetry as the new possibility of a negative that perpetually might restore a Transcendental Self.
The American critic here and now, in my judgment, needs to keep faith both with American poetry and the American negative, which means one must not yield either to the school of Deconstruction or to the perpetual British school of Common Sense. Our best poets, from Whitman through Stevens to Ashbery, make impossible and self-contradictory demands upon both their readers and themselves. I myself urge an antithetical criticism in the American grain, affirming the self over language, while granting a priority to figurative language over meaning. The result is a mixed discourse, vatic perhaps, and at once esoteric and democratic, but that is the burden of American tradition. Stevens says it best for that burden but also for a possible freedom in the final stanza of “The Poems of Our Climate”:
There would still remain the never-resting mind.
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed
The imperfect is our paradise
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.
