The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned

261 Pages·2008·4.96 MB·English

by  Marit J. MacArthur (auth.)

American Literature Readings
in the st Century
Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin
American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by
contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of
the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States.
Published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the
Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote
By Thomas Fahy
Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics
By Steven Salaita
Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to
Morrison
By Kelly Lynch Reames
American Political Poetry in the 21st Century
By Michael Dowdy
Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and
James: Thinking and Writing Electricity
By Sam Halliday
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness
By Michael Nowlin
Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories
By Melissa Bostrom
Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry
By Nicky Marsh
James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence
By Piotr K. Gwiazda
Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism
Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez
The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow
and Don DeLillo
By Stephanie S. Halldorson
Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction
By Amy L. Strong
Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism
By Jennifer Haytock
The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut
By David Simmons
Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American
Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko
By Lindsey Claire Smith
The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop,
and Ashbery: The House Abandoned
By Marit J. MacArthur
The American Landscape
in the Poetry of Frost,
Bishop, and Ashbery
The House Abandoned
Marit J. MacArthur
THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE IN THE POETRY OF FROST, BISHOP, AND ASHBERY
Copyright © Marit J. MacArthur, 2008.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60322-6
All rights reserved.
First published in 2008 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the US—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-37150-1 ISBN 978-0-230-61411-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230614116
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
MacArthur, Marit J.
The American landscape in the poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery :
the house abandoned / Marit J. MacArthur.
p. cm.—(American literature readings in the 21st century)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism.
2. Landscape in literature. 3. Abandoned houses in literature.
4. Rural conditions in literature. 5. Country life in literature. 6. Nostalgia
in literature. 7. Frost, Robert, 1874–1963—Criticism and interpretation.
8. Bishop, Elizabeth, 1911–1979—Criticism and interpretation.
9. Ashbery, John, 1927—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title.
PS310.L3M33 2008
811(cid:2).540936—dc22 2007047161
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: August 2008
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my mother, Marit Sheldon Taylor
Without your love, resilience, and wisdom,
I would never have learned to flourish far from home.
Contents
List of Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
The House Abandoned 1
Robert Frost 8
Elizabeth Bishop 16
John Ashbery 21
1 Robert Frost: “The Ruined Cottage” in America 33
A Rootless Youth: San Francisco to New England 33
Abandoned Houses and Cellar Holes 43
“The Gift Outright”: Key West in 1935 62
“Directive”: The Legacy of Derry in 1946 70
2 Elizabeth Bishop: Incarnations of the
“Crypto-Dream-House” 81
A Lost Home and a Fairytale Orphan 82
A Homeless Tourist, 1934–1951 92
Home at Last: The Brazil Years 126
Return to New England 135
3 John Ashbery: The Farm on the Lake at
the End of the Mind 147
A Farmer’s Son 148
Escape from Sodus and Early Nostalgia 159
Pulled Home 171
Ashbery’s “Version of America” 189
The End of the Ashbery Line 201
Notes 225
Bibliography 235
Acknowledgments 243
Index 247
Abbreviations
AW John Ashbery, A Wave
AWK John Ashbery, As We Know
ATSWS John Ashbery, And the Stars Were Shining
CPPP Robert Frost, The Collected Poems, Prose & Plays
CP Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927–1979
CPr Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Prose
CW John Ashbery, Chinese Whispers
CYHB John Ashbery, Can You Hear, Bird
EAP Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box.
Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments
FC John Ashbery, Flow Chart
HD John Ashbery, Houseboat Days
HL John Ashbery, Hotel Lautréamont
LRFLU The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer
MSO John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out
NBRF The Notebooks of Robert Frost
OA One Art. Letters. Elizabeth Bishop
OT John Ashbery, Other Traditions
SL Selected Letters of Robert Frost
SPCM Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
TP John Ashbery, Three Poems
WSIW John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander
YNH Your Name Here
Introduction
One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists
in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American
life. . . . No country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors,
nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor
ivied ruins. . . .
the effect . . . upon an English or French imagination, would
probably, as a general thing, be appalling. . . . The American knows
that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his
secret, his joke, as one may say.
—Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879)
One sees in an ironic light, the flat matter-of-fact light of the
American landscape, James’s remark that America “has no ruins.”
America is full of ruins, ruins of hopes.
—Randall Jarrell, “An Introduction to the Selected
Poems of William Carlos Williams” (1949)
In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their
local environment or try to change it by political means; only the
exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune
elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a
fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfac-
tion or failure. . . .
Pluralist and experimental: in place of verfallen Schloesser
America has ghost towns and the relics of New Jerusalems which
failed.
—W.H. Auden, “American Poetry” (1960)1
The House Abandoned
In the view from my bedroom window, in the house where I grew up,
an abandoned farmhouse stood in a nearby field, in the foreground of
2 THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE
the foothills and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. My
childhood in Lafayette, Colorado, east of Boulder and north of Denver,
was more suburban than rural, but our house, joined in a row of others
with small back patios and narrow unfenced front yards, skirted the
countryside. Beyond the last row of houses, there was Coal Creek, bor-
dered by cottonwoods, and open fields lay to the south, west, and east.
Not far from the abandoned farmhouse, a family still lived on a func-
tioning sheep ranch. (Now the ranch is gone, and new subdivisions and
shopping centers have erased many of the open fields.) As a child in the
1980s, I often explored this rural landscape, and at the other end of the
continent, I spent several weeks every summer on a horse farm in
Pattersonville, New York, which my grandfather, a former business
executive, had bought when he retired in 1974. On his land too I
discovered an abandoned house—once owned by a Polish-American
family by the name of Surin—pictured on the cover of this book.
My father died in 1988, my mother sold the house in Lafayette in
1993, and since then, like the statistically average American, I have
moved often, living in Illinois, England, Colorado again, California,
Poland, and California again. As it turned out, I finished the manu-
script for this book while I was a visiting scholar at the University of
Łódz´, living in a Communist-era block apartment building, located in
the neighborhood of the former Jewish ghetto. Aside from the repeti-
tion of the phrase, “LITZMANNSTADT GETTO 1940–44,” which
is stamped in white capitals at intervals along the sidewalks and along
the route to the former ghetto quarter from the city center, there is
little visible memorialization in the cityscape. These fading letters are
left over from the city’s ceremonies of 2004, marking the sixtieth
anniversary of the liquidation of the ghetto. Small brown signs mark
the buildings associated with the ghetto, numbered on a pamphlet for
a self-guided tour, available from the tourist office. Since Łódz´ escaped
the bombings that destroyed other Polish cities, many of these build-
ings still stand, some empty and dilapidated, many in disrepair.
Compared to the total displacement and systematic murder of
Poland’s Jewish citizenry by the Nazis, the subject of my study here—
the poetic evocation of American experiences of displacement, loss
and abandonment of houses and landscapes, and complicated nostal-
gia for these in the twentieth century—may seem inconsequential or
myopic. Discussing my research inside and outside the United States,
however, I have found that many people share an intuitive, personal
sense of the pathos of the abandoned house in our time, and share
stories about it from many different cultures and in various art forms.
For example, in his 1962 collection In a Green Night, Nobel laureate