Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology

686 Pages·2009·45.94 MB·English

by  Helen Vendler

POEMS, POETS, POETRY
An Introduction
and Anthology
Helen Vendler
HARVARD UNIVERSITY
&
Bedford Books ofSr. Martin's Press
Boston
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Acknowledgments
Sherman Ale.vie, "EvuLuticm1 and :LRjiservati-oti Love S6*ig" reprinted (font Tin
ifFrintydniitltig©1992 byShertnati Alexte, by permission ol 1l.my-
ingLoose Press "On dieAmtrait from Bostonto NewYork City" reprinted
from Fir.9 Indian en rfn- Afiwrr © 1993 by Sherman Alexic, by permission oi
Hanging Loose Press,
Elizabeth Alexander, "Nineteen" and "Ode"from 77ie Venus Ht&tnirt, by Eliza
herb Alexander, Used by permission of the University Pressof Vtrgiili.1
Paula Gunn Allen,"Zen Americana" reprinted from Coyotes Daylight Idp. Albu
Ljuerique: I.a Confluent't.i Press, & 1978. Reprinted hy permission til die
author.
jichtUndfÿgnttHIS and Copyrights are conUrttied at flit hath ef flrr initdf.(m VOgtS 6dO 7
udncti AuJjfifltfi arr rxH’jUran if theCopyrightpo\te. It is ct violoticm eftIlf lawto irpppdrrcd'
these sekttiotts l>y any IMCUFIU u-hotsotvtri without the written permission <f the copyright
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Preface:
About This Book
This book offers ways to read and understand poems with the
pleasure theydeserve. Its ninechaptersin PartI approachthepoemfrom
various directions, in the conviction that any artwork invites consider¬
ation from different perspectives. Chapter 1,"The Poem as Life/' uses
several short poems to show how a poetic utterance springs from a
—
life-moment sometimes a private one (falling in love), sometimes a
public one (the decline of an aristocracy). Chapter 2, “The Poem as
Arranged Life,"considers thesame poems that appearin Chapter 1, but
this time treats them as arrangements, rather than as utterances; it asks
why the poem takes the imaginativeshape itdoes, and how itselements
havebeenordered. In Chapter3,"Poemsas Pleasure,"aspectsofpoetry'
that give pleasure are mentioned and illustrated: formal aspects such as
rhythm and rhyme, of course, but also construction and images; the¬
matic aspects such as poignancy and wisdom, too, but in addition to
these an individual personal language proper to each poet. Chapter 4,
"Describing Poems,” and Chapter 5, “The Play of Language," suggest
—
some useful ways of describing poems by the class of poems they
belong to, by the little plots they act out through grammar and syntax,
by the speech acts they engage in. by the agents they choose to do the
work of the poem, and so on.
Chapter ft, "Constructing a Self/’ moves on to the psychological
world of the poem. Since each poem is a fictive speech by an imagined
speaker, how does the author make that speaker convincing? How is a
v
vl PREFACE: ABOUT THIS lioot
credible self constructed on the page? The more abstract lyric self of
—
Chapterft ungendered,oftiospecified age or race,of nodetermined
—
country ‘is contrasted, in Chapter 7, "Poetry and Social Identity,”
with the lyric self which is socially marked, as we encounter a speaker
making clear her sex, or his race, or his age, or her sexual orientation.
Oursenseof the purposeand theaudienceofa poem depends to a great
extent on howtheselfofthespeaker isdefined.Chapter fl,"Historyand
—
Regionally,11takes upthe topics oftimeandspace the twogreataxes
—
on which all literature turns as they applytolyric poetry. And finally,
in Chapter 9, "Attitudes, V—alues,Judgments,” the largest questions we
can put to a literary work questions about its attitudes, values, and
—
judgments are raised and discussed with respect to some crucial ex¬
amples, old and new.
Each of these chapters takes up several poems by way of illustra¬
tion, and each isfollowed by a section called “Reading Other Poems"
that introduces a small groupofpoems which can be usefullyread in the
light of that chapter. These arc usuallyshort poems,and range from the
canonical to the recent.The anthology of Part II that follows these nine
—
chapters is intended to provide a wide sampling -more than 250 po¬
—
ems from the literature of lyric, including some poems longer and
more complex than those cited in thechapters. Arranged alphabetically
by author, theanthology includes poems bymore than a hundred poets,
many of them represented in significant depth soas tosuggest the range
ofan individual poet’s work. Finally, my appendices on prosody,gram¬
mar,speech-acts, rhetorical devices,and lyricsubgenreiexist to provide
further illustration of points taken upsubstantively hut not exhaustively
—
in individual chapters. The—y can help consolidate and extend when
assigned as home reading the demonstrations given in class, I have
also prepared a brief instructor’s manual in which I discusssome of the
issues ofteaching poetry and suggest exercises that have, over the years,
helped mv students understand and appreciate poetry. The manual also
comments on most of the poems in Part I that are not discussed in the
text’s nine chapters.
Acknowledgments
I'd like to thank ail the reviewers who helped improve this book
by theIT detailed and incisive Suggestions, among them Charies Allied,
University of California, Uerkeley; Paul Fry, Yale University; Vincent
U. Leitch, Purdue University;Jcrcdith Memn, Ohio State University;
Robert Phillips, UniversityofHouston;David Softcld, AmherstCollege;
PkthAct: Anour THIS BOOK vii
Susan Schweik, University of California, Berkeley; and George Stadc,
Columbia University. 1 am grateful to Charles Christensen, joan Fein-
berg, and Stephen Scipione at liedford Honks for their interest in this
project, for their intuition about the shape it might take, and for their
alert editorial guidance. ]would alsolike tothank Elizabeth Schajf,Ann
Sweeney, Laura Arcari, Mark Rcimold, Alanya Harter, Maria Ascher,
Bill McKenna, and Stasia Zomkowski, I was assisted throughout by my
graduate assistant, Nick Halpem, now of North Carolina State Univer¬
sity,and by myadministrativeassistant, Susan Welby. Finally, I want to
express my warmest gratitude to Sylvan l!amet, who first suggested )
write such a book, who had faith in its completion, and who selflessly
read, as a friend, every word. His detailed comments were invaluable;
and his patient counsel, in the ups and downs of revision, wasappreci¬
ated more than he will ever know and more than I can ever say.
r
About Poets
and Poetry
Poetspossess two talents: one is imagination,theotherisa mastery
oflanguage. Many people, writers and nonwriters alike, see the world
imaginatively: to accompany such people toa party or an exhibition or
a play is tosee the event more keenlyand more vividly than one might
have done atone. The world takes on more color; things art seen from
a newslant; events are freshly interpreted and highlighted: a vivacity of
response issummoned up. With onesort ofimaginative person, every¬
thing is seen more darkly: theguestsat the party seem trivial,grotesque;
the exhibition is tragic;the playis an emblem ofdespair. In thecompany
of an imaginative person of a different son, we see the world, as the
cliche ha? it, through rose-coloredglasses:people seem better, the world
kinder, the cause for optimism stronger. In short, imaginative people
have the gift of making otherssee the world as they see it- And as the
poet Wallace Stevens put it, “Things seen are things asseen,"
While many imaginative peoplearecontent tolet theirsenseofthe
world,conveyed through conversation, vanish astheyspeak, writersfeel
compelled tosetdowntheirperceptionsin writing.Writersoftensee the
imagination, as Stevenssaw it, asa “third planet."Just as a given scene
bolts one way in sunlight, another way in moonlight, so it looks yet a
third way in the light of the imagination. "There's a certain slant of
light." says Emily Dickinson;"In this blue light, 1 can take you there,"
promiscsjone Graham in"SanScpolcrcr."That isthe implicitinvitation
be
ABOUT POETS AND POETKY
offered by all'writers: (hat you willsec things in a new light, the light of
their construction of the world,
—
We read imaginative works whether epic, fiction, drama, or
—
poetry in order togain a widersense ofthereal.Our hungertoknow
the world, bom with us and eager in childhood, finds one of its chief
satisfactions in learning about the responses of others. Of course we are
pleased to learn that others share our views, but we are also keenly
interested to find out that others see the real differently from ourselves.
This is partly a matteroftemperament(say.mournful versus humorous),
partly a matter of experience (male VCTSUS female, young versus old),
partly an accidental matter of what happens in a writer’s historical epoch
(war versus peace) Someformsofliterature (wecancall them thesocial
genres), such as epic, ficti—on, and drama, make us look at the wide
panurama of asocial group a nation,a village,a family.Though all of
the social genres used tobe written in poetry (Milton.Chaucer, Shake¬
speare), nowadays the social world is usually observed through prose,
We know one America through the eyes of Herman Melville, another
through Edith Wharton, yet another through Ralph Ellison. Each of
them induces us to live for a while in the light of a fresh imagining of
the United States. And in addition to an imagi—native view of America,
each of these writers has a mastery oflanguage Melville's encyclope¬
dic and torrential language of whaling, Wharton's fastidious language of
social difference,and Ellison’sbroodingand intenseintellectual language
of the "invisible man."
Butbesidesthenarrativeanddramaticsocial genres,thereexiststhe
large body of poetry we call lyric. Lyric is the genre of private life: it is
what we sayto ourselveswhen weare alone. Thee may bean addressee
m lyric (God, or a beloved), but the addressee is always absent. (The
dramatic monologue, a form Browning made famous, has a silent ad¬
dressee on stage, but this is the exception to the rule of the absent
addressee.) Ina way,imagination isatitsmostunfetteredinlyricbecause
the writer need notgivea recognizable portraitofsociety,asthe novelist
or dramatist must, Liecause the lyric represents a moment ofinner me—d¬
itation,—it is relatively short, and always exists in a particular place
—
"here” and a particular time "now.”It mayspeak about the there
and then, but itspeaks about them from the hereand now. Itlets usinto
the innermostchamberofanother person's mind,and makes us privy to
what he or she would say in completesecrecy and safety, with none to
overhear.
The diary is the nearest proseequivalent to the lyric, but a diary is
seen by a readerasthe wordsofanother person, whereasa lyncis meant
to be spoken by its reader as if the reader were the one uttering the
ABOUT I’OETS \HD POETRY si
words. A lync poem is script for performance by its reader. It is, then,
the most ultimateofgenres,constructinga rwinship between writerand
reader. And it is the most universa! ofgenres, because it presumes that
that reader resembles the writer enough to step into the writer’s shoes
and speak the lines the writer has written as though they were the
reader’s own:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry ] could not travel both
And he one traveler, long!stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the unde—rgrowth.
ROBERT FROST, "Tht Road NotTliter11
To read these tines is to be transformed into the hesitating speaker. We
do not listen to him; we become him,
Sometimes, ofcourse, thespeaker is more narrowlyspecified, asa
certain type ot person or even as an individual. Yet even when there is
3cleardisparity of personal character as when I, a twentieth-century
white American woman,am reading Idake's lyricspoken bya little black
boy in eighteenth century England — the lyne poet expects that t Will
put myselfintothesubject-position of thelittle black boy, and make the
boy's words my own. Though some theorists have suggested that wc
“overhear” the speaker oflync (makinglyric intoa kind ofmono-drama
of which we arc the audience), it is more often true that I do not, as a
disinterested spectator, overhear the lyric speaker; rather, the words of
die speaker become my own words. Thisimaginative transformation of
selt is what is offered to ns by the lync.
Because lyric is a short form (unlike the epic or The verse-tale), it
must be more concise than narrative ordrama. Everyword has tocount.
So does every gap. fit fact, lyric depends on gaps, and depends even
more on the reader to fill in the gaps. It is suggestive rather than ex¬
haustive. As the poet W. B. Yeats said in a !925 letter, referring to
(but perhapswith lus own writingot lyric in mind), “Tell a little
A' Jit' is Hamlet; tell all & he is nothing. Nothing has life except the
incomplete.11In thefollowingpages,suggestionsare madeon how togo
about exploring a lyric, in order to fill in us gaps and make the most of
itshints,so that the courseof its emotionscan beunderstood ill their full
subtlety.
Even thoughlyricsometimes makesgreaterdemandson usthan do
the more explicit genres, a poem always (if it is successful) attracts us
enough to make us willing to bear with it while wc try to understand it