DISCONTINUITIES IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND THE POETIC RESPONSE

Abstract

Mutlu Konuk Biasing. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 248 pp. Lisa M. Steinman. Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. xiv + 219 pp. These are two very different kinds of books on modern American poetry to come out of Yale University Press in 1987. Biasing's study explores rhetorical parallels between the great nineteenth-century models, Poe, Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson, and modern or contemporary poets who build upon their formal strategies; it is a book for literary specialists, relying a great deal on contemporary critical terminology and engaging in very close analysis of the poetry it discusses. Steinman's book will be of interest to a wider group of readers, as it ranges over American poetry from 1910-1945 (especially Williams, Marianne Moore and Stevens) in a less specialized way, exploring the relationship of American poetry to the larger cultural context in which it was written, and especially to the new science and technology of the day. These books are not really comparable, but each is valuable in its own way, enlarging our understanding of the modern dilemma for American poets through very different focuses. They are part of a long line of critical studies centering on the innate contradictions of the poet's position in American culture. James E. Miller, Jr., called attention to the problem in The American Quest for the Supreme Fiction (Chicago, 1979), the problem of the American poet, who must absorb contradictions as vast and numerous as America itself. Ross Labrie's study of Howard Nemerov (Boston, 1980) argued that the poet retains his faith in the imaginative process despite the chaos of particulars that surrounds him and the inevitable collision with ' 'the hard surface of the external world" (144-145). Cary Nelson in his study of such poets as Roethke, Kinnell, Duncan, Rich and Merwin, Our Last First Poets (Urbana, 1981), explored this collision further, arguing the inevitable destruction of language before modern history and science; in Rich's terms, we enter "the paper airplane of the poem, which somewhere before its destination starts curling into ash and comes apart" (100). This image, long before Challenger, seems to me to be part of an essential American myth concerning language, science and history. Bonnie Costello's study of Marianne Moore (Cambridge, 1981) argued more positively for Moore's endless struggle to encompass in words what she knew must elude her; Moore celebrates "the world's elusiveness, its superiority to our acts of appropriation, seeing the world's freedom as intrinsic to our own" (3). In Poet's Prose (Cambridge, 1983), Stephen Freedman studied the Emersonian tradition, arguing for an indigenous American strain of exploratory poetry, with a strong philosophical bent, turned back on its own medium of language. Joseph Kronick's American Poetics of History (Baton Rouge, 1984) beginning also with Emerson, shifted the ground again from straight historical inquiry to the rhetorical interplay of language. And in Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge, 1984), Charles Altieri argued a poetics of conjecture that explores the absolutely constitutive role of language, but ended by questioning the ultimate direction of contemporary criticism and poetry, which only seem to lead to more "relative standards" (207).