The American Moment: American Poetry in the Mid-Century.

Abstract

The of Geoffrey Thurley's title identifies a period from mid-i95o's to early I960's when for him American culture achieved its maturity (he argues this case largely through poetry). Until that time American art remained provincial-it was defined by its dependence primarily on English tradition; since then it has lapsed, at least temporarily, into decadence. Well into twentieth century, America continued to acknowledge deep down (where it apparently lies unavailable to refutation) the spiritual and cultural superiority of parent culture. In trying to characterize nature of this American baselessness, Thurley falls back on a curiously elusive set of metaphors; America lacked a weight, a centre of gravity. Consequently, to continue his metaphor, trouble with Frost, for example, is his ultimate lightness. The argument seems fraught, as Thurley himself once suspects, with ponderous impalpabilities. Lacking a tradition of its own to draw on, American writing for Thurley was inevitably shaped by its incapacities, and alternated between ingenious eclecticism and less probing facility, neither of which could express whole of human condition. For example, sing-song and inflexible idiom he sees in Dickinson's verse, only reflected general, American lack of natural civilized speech; she never-thank Godtried to produce a 'major' poem. On other hand, Huckleberry Finn, in its use of American idiom, is successful, but only because it is second rate-a more or less wholly successful boyhood story. In this century, Pound and Eliot, transfigured by immersion in parent society, avoid provincialism in their poetry; in their criticism they remain Americans'tourists,' more specifically: the idea of an English poet or a French poet 'wishing' to be intimate with his history! Isn't it enough to be English or French? And so on. Who are poets of American Moment?-among others, Berryman, Lowell, Sexton, Levertov, Duncan, Corso, Ginsberg. Thurley especially applauds Ginsberg: with Howl, the American Moment may be said to have arrived. What he achieved was a flexible chant-tone that got the whole man in. A vaguely feminine affirmation of experience, in Thurley's view, distinguishes him and other Beats above their elitist or alienated contemporaries of Black Mountain and Nervous Breakdown schools. Having the courage of American vulgarity, Ginsberg led those writers who finally cancelled notion of an artistic avant