*
RUGGED TRIM (or WHAT'S IT ALL ABOUT, ORPHIE?)
*
Kenneth
Rexroth edited a Selected Poems of D.H. Lawrence in 1947, reprint
paperback editions of which can be found cheaply . . . I remember
reading it as a youth, and though I can't point to any specific instance
I think it had a profound influence on my writing . . . It's certainly a
book that I have purchased several times over, a book I return to and
read . . .
Rexroth says many interesting things in the
Introduction; looking at it recently I was struck by his comments
comparing Lawrence's poems to Hardy's:
"This verse [Lawrence's
early rhymed verse] is supposed to be like Hardy's. It is. But there
is always something a little synthetic about Hardy's rugged verse. The
smooth ones seem more natural, somehow. The full dress, Matthew Arnold
sort of sonnet to Leslie Stephen is probably Hardy's best poem. It is a
very great poem, but Arnold learned the trick of talking like a highly
idealized Anglican archbishop and passed it on to Hardy. That is
something nobody could imagine Lawrence ever learning, he just wasn't
that kind of animal."
Rexroth is comparing Hardy's "rugged" style
poems to Lawrence's: as he points out prior to the passage I've just
quoted, Lawrence began as a sort of apparently-on-the-surface Georgian
poet, though he differed from them in at least one significant way:
"Some of the Georgians had a favorite literary convention. They were
anti-literary. Lawrence was the real thing." Thus the Lawrence mode of
writing rugged was never a conscious stylistic choice; with his
background it came to him naturally (Rexroth: "I don't think he went
about it deliberately.") . . .
(Haven't many other poets besides
the Georgians played this anti-literary charade? Taking on the Rugged
Role is always very tempting.)
Rexroth: "There is a vatic quality
in Lawrence that is only in Hardy rarely. . . . Hardy was a major poet.
Lawrence was a minor prophet. Like Blake and Yeats, his is the
greater tradition."
*
Well. Robert Lowell pronounced somewhere (I'm quoting from memory) that the two greatest Modern Poets were Rilke and Hardy.
Which
means doesn't it that for those of us English-speakers who take
Lowell's word as guide and who can read Rilke only in translation, that
THE great Modern Poet to encounter in our own tongue is Hardy . . .
Hart
Crane, writing to Yvor Winters in a letter dated May 29th, 1927,
ventures to say that Hardy is "perhaps the greatest technician in
English verse since Shakespeare."
Here's the poem Rexroth named Hardy's best . . . I've never seen it in any anthology:
The Schreckhorn
(With thoughts of Leslie Stephen)
(June 1897)
Aloof, as if a thing of mood and whim;
Now that its spare and desolate figure gleams
Upon my nearing vision, less it seems
A looming Alp-height than a guise of him
Who scaled its horn with ventured life and limb,
Drawn on by vague imaginings, maybe,
Of semblance to his personality
In its quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim.
At his last change, when Life's dull coils unwind,
Will he, in old love, hitherward escape,
And the eternal essence of his mind
Enter this silent adamantine shape,
And his low voicing haunt its slipping shows
When dawn that calls the climber dyes them rose?
*
Quaint glooms, keen lights, and rugged trim: what semblance to the personality of Hardy's poetry!
Rexroth
calls this a "full dress, Matthew Arnold sort of sonnet." So compare
it to the one sonnet of Arnold's which is best known and most
anthologized, whose subject like Hardy's is mountainous and nothing less
than the Everest of us:
(there are no themes for old age, an Arab proverb says, but death and the mountain)
SHAKESPEARE
Others abide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out-topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncrowns his majesty,
Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling-place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foil'd searching of mortality;
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know
Self-school'd, self-scann'd, self-honour'd, self-secure,
Didst tread on earth unguess'd at.—Better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.
*
Better
so! Why better so?— maybe, because everything that wishes to remain
sacred must surround itself with mystery, Mallarme's commandment: the
loftiest hill of Parnassus will still maintain its cloudcover 'gainst
the foil'd searchings of every mortal reader (every reader is mortal,
whereas those who have learned the ropes, ie poets themselves, can
perhaps manage to climb or scramble over each other to a unclouded height whereon they
may glimpse a little daylight's eterne) . . .
*
(Most of us never make it up to the Base Camp. I'm still stuck in rope-tying class: Knotting 101.)
*
(I
don't know if Arnold was the originator of this oeuvre-as-mountain
metaphor, but surely it must have been a cliche long before boring Basil
Bunting trundled it out in "On the Fly-Leaf of Pound's Cantos" . . . )
*
Hardy's
phrase "rugged trim" contains in itself the contention, the
contradiction. Rugged is "anti-literary," plainspoken colloquial raw;
trim means smooth, crafted, in Rexroth's phrases "highly idealized" and
"full dress."
*
Rugged versus trim. Mayakovsky versus
Mallarme. Brecht versus Benn. Enzensberger versus Celan. Prevert
versus Bonnefoy. Late Neruda versus early Neruda. The Communist
Quasimodo versus the Hermetic Quasimodo. Parra's Antipoem versus
Stevens' metapoem.
Paz in his great book "Children of the Mire"
sums up the history of Modern Poetry as an "oscillation" between
"political temptation" and "religious temptation." In other words,
Democratic versus Fascist.
*
The conflict ensues. Pages
320-4, Poetry Magazine, January 05, Danielle Chapman reviews Reginald
Shepherd's olio of Post-Avants, The Iowa Anthology of New American
Poetries [sic].
(By American, they mean U.S. By Poetries, they
mean in the Arnoldian sense, that each poet is his or her own peakdom;
like mountains each stands far enough apart from all others that borders
are called for: in this theoretical distance every poet constitutes a
separate realm with its own unique language and heritage, its own
tradition of "poetry." So an anthology that brings together works from
these loftitudinally-disparate states is per se a transnational one, a
gathering of alien poetries . . . )
(by Poetries they mean Oxygen
Required. Watch out for falling rocks. No climbers past this point
unless accompanied by a guide.)
Chapman characterizes many of the
poems here as masturbatory ("jerking off"), "narcissistic,"
"self-pleasuring," "enamored with [their] own sound" . . . she forgot
solipsistic, apolitical, autotelic, reader-unfriendly, elitist, etcet.
Chapman
gives more attention to Karen Volkman than anyone else, maybe because
she senses that Volkman is so gifted that she damn well ought to be
writing better than most of the others in this anthology, much of whose
work, Chapman writes, "seems to have been constructed from a book of Mad
Libs, where poetry-speak is randomly inserted into a poetic structure
and the poem pops out like a product. Even the work of a skilled
practitioner like Karen Volkman adopts such gimmickry."
What's
the problem, essentially? The same enigma which ModPo since Baudelaire
has faced us with, namely, WHAT is this poem about?— (Even more
confusing for many readers is that some Modern poems which seem to offer
a clearly ostensible subject—Williams' red wheelbarrow is a par
example—still present problems in understanding what their "real
subject" is . . . )
Chapman: "[P]art of the problem with the
poems in the Iowa Anthology—that of obscurity and incomprehensibility—is
similar to that which has always beset Language Poetry," not to mention
Symbolism, Surrealism, Imagism, and so many other temptologies.—
"[T]he
question of what [Volkman's] poems are about is persistent. Eventually
it becomes clear that they are in fact about themselves." They
disallow us to judge them, Chapman adds: "because the subject of the
poem is the poet's own evasive thought process, our [potential]
objections are overruled by the mind of the poet, which, by its own
definition, moves faster than ours." Didn't Ashbery asset that poets
should try to make their poems "critic-proof"?
*
But making it
critic-proof sometimes makes it reader-proof as well. Most readers are,
to use Arnold's figure, mortal and don't want to be "foil'd" by a poem,
no matter how Shakespeare its author is. They want to know what a poem
is about, and they want to know what it's saying about that subject.
So what IS the poem about? What's it all about, Orpheus?
Samuel
French Morse in his introduction to Opus Posthumous by Wallace Stevens,
hands this injunction down from the bench: "From the very beginning his
poems were 'about' poetry; it is the one real subject of Harmonium and
all the later work."
Morse then quotes from a 1940 letter by Stevens, who hands it down from his throne:
'The
subject-matter of poetry is the thing to be ascertained. Offhand, the
subject-matter is what says of the month of August . . . 'Thou art not
August, unless I make thee so.'
I think by saying "one real subject" Morse means: as opposed to the ostensible or surface subject.
.
. . Either I don't understand the Stevens quote or I'm wrong to see a
contradiction where he says the subject-matter has to be ascertained:
in other words, it's not a given, it has to be found and proved;
that's
confusing, because he immediately follows that by the "offhand"
suggestion that essentially a poem's subject-matter is always the same:
its
apparent subject may be August (or whatever), but its real, its eternal
subject is the poet's interminably flowing assertion of power and
priority.
So evenings die, in their green going, a wave,
interminably flowing. In the beginning is the Word, and you, phenomena,
are non until I utter it.
Per Mallarme, everything in the world
exists in order to end up in a book; for Stevens, onhand as it were, the book exists prior
to its content. What is subject, and what is the subject.
Here's an Arnoldian sonnet on the subject, by Stevens:
THE POEM THAT TOOK THE PLACE OF A MOUNTAIN
There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.
He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.
It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,
How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,
For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:
The exact rock where his inexactnesses
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,
Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.
*
Complete
in an unexplained completion. That's right: never explain. Harold
Bloom's book on Stevens is almost as intimidating and daunting as
Stevens himself. Early on he quotes from Emerson:
"[W]e cannot
say too little of our constitutional necessity of seeing things under
private aspects, or saturated with our humours. And yet is the God the
native of these bleak rocks."
Private aspects, private sights,
visible only from the poet's eagle-eyrie outlook: so edgy-exact this
precipice of bleak rocks where the I alone is native; where no reader
dare venture.
—Whose "God" is the only native, the sole inhabitant, of those bleak rocks?
*
