Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Ann Marie Mikkelsen

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry by Ann Marie Mikkelsen Terence Diggory (bio) Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Ann Marie Mikkelsen. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. x + 244 pp. $110.00 (hardcover). The concept of pastoral that Ann Marie Mikkelsen applies to twentieth-century American poetry is more an ideological position than a literary mode. The key formulation derives from William Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), with regard to the "double attitude of the artist to the worker, of the complex man to the simple one ('I am in one way better, in another not so good')" (Empson 14; Mikkelsen 9). Set parallel to this formulation is the task that the pragmatist philosopher John Dewey undertook in Art as Experience (1934): "to restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognized to constitute experience" (Dewey 3; Mikkelsen 34). Establishing continuity—between artist and worker, between art and everyday experience—is a condition of "creative democracy," as Dewey understood it, and as Mikkelsen understands the progressive politics that she associates with both modernist pastoral and pragmatism. In a succinct acknowledgment of her allegiances, Mikkelsen explains in an endnote: "I generally understand pragmatism to entail a democratic, progressive agenda, as is suggested by [Robert B.] Westbrook and [James T.] Kloppenberg in addition to a number of literary critics including Frank Lentricchia, Cornel West, Ross Posnock, and Giles Gunn" (183 n37). The presence of William Carlos Williams in this lineage is suggested by the title of Gunn's book Thinking Across the American Grain (1992), which echoes Williams's In the American Grain (1925), although Gunn does not discuss Williams directly. Given Mikkelsen's reliance on Dewey as the most "politicized" of the pragmatist philosophers (16), the previous study of Williams that most closely aligns with her aims is John Beck's Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams, John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics (2001). However, Mikkelsen objects to Beck's characterization of Williams as "nostalgic," contradicting her emphasis on the "progressive" stance that she believes Williams and Dewey share (75). Although Mikkelsen makes some unpersuasive attempts to identify pastoral rhetoric in the writing of Dewey and William James, for the most part [End Page 168] she wisely looks to the poets to carry the pastoral burden in the progressive movement she envisions. In addition to Williams, she focuses on Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens and John Ashbery, devoting a separate chapter to each. A concluding chapter glances at Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian and Lisa Robertson, offering just enough gender contrast to throw into higher relief "the romance of masculine individualism" (163) that Mikkelsen finds to be both perpetuated and contested in her male poets. "Romance" is a very broad category while "pastoral," in most critical usage, is more restrictive. In her effort to argue that her poets engage in questions of identity from a specifically pastoral perspective, Mikkelsen runs into some trouble, particularly in the chapters on Frost and Stevens. Each of these chapters treats a recurrent figure in the poetry, the tramp in the case of Frost, and in the case of Stevens, a "fat" personage who appears in various guises, such as the "fat Jocundus" of "The Glass of Water" (1938; Stevens 197). The idea is that such figures occupy marginal positions in society, like the shepherd of classical pastoral, and that the poet's engagement with them becomes an occasion for that double comparison identified by William Empson: "I am in one way better, in another not so good." Indeed, Mikkelsen suggests that such engagement transforms the poet's own identity to make it more fluid, more open to the full range of experience that Dewey valued. But one may grant these consequences without granting that they result from an operation that is specifically pastoral. A relation of sympathy between the poet as insider and a social outsider may be a necessary condition for pastoral but it is not sufficient. Other relationships are involved, including the outsider's relationship to the world in which he is placed, a world that in turn is outside, somehow...