POETRY IN REVIEW

Abstract

1 6 1 R P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W S T E P H E N Y E N S E R Is literary history possible? It is still not clear to me, to respond belatedly to David Perkins’s trenchant question of twenty-some years ago, the degree to which one can really write sound literary history. American poetry, to narrow the field, especially if one has in view the major practitioners, is more like a four-dimensional network than a sequence of periods or a chain of phases linked by causality. That proposition is of course a corollary to one paradoxical principle behind T. S. Eliot’s ‘‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’’: ‘‘The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.’’ My former colleague Robert M. Adams taught a seminar that he called ‘‘Hard, Beautiful Poems.’’ The texts ranged over the centuries. One implication was that the criteria of hardness (which I take to mean intellectual di≈culty rather than but certainly not exclusive of density, which is often a component of the former) and beauty (easier and more troublesome to gloss, it shades o√ into sublimity by way of splendor and radiance) transcended the hisB a r e l y C o m p o s e d , b y A l i c e F u l t o n ( N o r t o n , 9 4 p p . , $ 2 9 . 9 5 ) 1 6 2 Y E N S E R Y torical dimension. I don’t have any of his syllabi, alas – but hooray, since I am free to imagine that the students’ readings included, in an order their professor liked, some of the following: Shakespeare’s Sonnets 94, 107, and 112, Donne’s ‘‘Air and Angels’’ and ‘‘The Extasie,’’ Pope’s ‘‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot,’’ Keats’s ‘‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’’ (familiarity does not obviate difficulty), and Browning ’s ‘‘A Grammarian’s Funeral,’’ ‘‘Fra Lippo Lippi,’’ and ‘‘Caliban upon Setebos.’’ Though ‘‘difficulty’’ in this context is not a contingent quality but an absolute one, which graces the temporal work now and then, it must also be said that since the beginning of the past century it has been especially prized in some aesthetic quarters. Eliot writes (in his ‘‘Conclusion’’ to The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism) of its exigency for the modern poem, and when Wallace Stevens insists (in his Adagia) that a good poem ‘‘must resist the intelligence almost successfully,’’ the adverb comes across as something of a hedge. Indeed, one might argue that ‘‘Hard, Beautiful Poems’’ is a seminar title itself symptomatic of an era – the modern, say. More recent poets who might be assigned in the seminar would surely include those who invented their own ‘‘language within’’ a ‘‘common’’ language, to appropriate James Merrill’s definition from his sonnet ‘‘The Parnassians,’’ a celebration cum critique of aestheticism. In addition to Mallarmé they might include Emily Dickinson (selected poems, mind you), Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein (in Tender Buttons), Ezra Pound (‘‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’’), John Berryman (especially in the ‘‘Homage to Mistress Bradstreet’’), and Geoffrey Hill. A glance at that list of names will tell the reader that for this reviewer the pertinent difficulty is inextricable from linguistic extravagance and idiosyncrasy. ‘‘Hard’’ is a hard word, and no one would dispute the notion that Robert Frost can be as adamant as corundum (not to mentionasabrasive),ascan,intheirdifferentways,poetsasvarious as Thomas Hardy, William Carlos Williams, George Oppen, Donald Justice, Fredrick Seidel, and Louise Glück. The difficulty I have in mind, however, relates to excess, eccentricity, and obscurity, and it is separable from the ‘‘beautiful.’’ Elizabeth Bishop, surely one of thehandfuloflate-twentieth-centurypoetswhowillbereadonthe lunar frontier, extravagant though she is in a narrow sense of the term, is not ‘‘hard’’ the way that Dickinson can be. P O E T R Y I N R E V I E W 1 6 3 R Among the work of contemporary American poets, none, it seems to me, comports better with our two criteria than that of Alice Fulton, most...