This is Part 1 (of 2) of my essay, “Great Audiences for Great Poetry,” adapted from a 2009 speech I gave at AWP (Association of Writers & Writing Programs) when I was president of the Poetry Foundation.
Twenty years ago I moved to Chicago and started work at the Poetry Foundation. I remember visiting historic Newberry Library, where Poetry magazine long had its cramped offices and where its extensive book collection resided. Thinking back to that walk among the climate-controlled, burglarproof stacks, what struck me was how many of the 25,000 volumes were the books, chapbooks, and galley proofs of small press publishers of the kind represented by the CLMP (Council of Literary Magazines and Presses). The collection was made up largely of review copies sent to the magazine over the years, of course, since Poetry never had the money to go out and purchase books.
When I came to spend more time with back issues of Poetry magazine itself, I was struck by how often its reviews were of poetry books published, again, by the small presses. (And lest we forget, all the large commercial presses once started life as small, independence-minded independents.) So the magazine and the small press community have shared from the start an interest in publishing poetry as it first emerges from the egg — fragile, experimental, risky.
Harriet Monroe, Poetry’s founder, and her “overseas correspondent” Ezra Pound chose the poets they published with a combination of personal enthusiasm, neighborhood familiarity, and a delight in going against the grain. Their chosen poets included an unknown American from St. Louis; a New England farmer born in San Francisco; another unknown American, a woman who loved the Brooklyn Dodgers and came to wear, later in life, a tri-cornered buccaneer’s hat; a pediatrician from Paterson, New Jersey; a Chicago-based folk singer and eventual biographer of Lincoln; and an insurance executive from Hartford, Connecticut. The poetic “voices” of this eclectic group — their ideas of sound and cadence as expressed in the language of the poem — differed wildly from one another. But taken as a group, they set the course for poetry in the English language for the rest of the century. (The “unknown” poets were T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens.)
That reservoir of underground energy that Monroe and Pound were tapping into, which came to be known as Modernism, swept the arts in the years leading up to WWI: not just literature, but painting, architecture, and music as well. As an aesthetic movement Modernism was impatient with past systems of value and belief; it was iconoclastic and experimental. Modernist poetry aimed to unsettle the reader with the unexpected, and didn’t mind if it offended with the outrageous. It was a poetry that had a lot of “edge.”
Today we can look back on a century of Modernist poetry and the progeny of poetic schools and movements collectively called Post Modernism. Eliot and the others are now anthologized as our “Modern Classics.” We can trace their influence down through the second half of the 20th century in successive issues of Poetry: Lowell, Plath, Bishop, Merrill, Ashbery — virtually every significant American poet of the 20th century can be found in its pages. With the passage of time this century of poetry begins to cohere into a body of literature; critical consensus treats it as the literary identity of its era. Bear with me then, if I suggest that there was nothing whatever inevitable about the evolution of our poetry into what it is today.
What, for example, would have happened if Pound and Eliot had not hit it off when they met in 1914? Without Pound’s editorial genius as “il miglior fabbro” we would not have the immensely influential “The Waste Land.” We would have a decidedly more quixotic piece of work called “He Do the Police in Different Voices.” On a grander scale, if the two world wars had not occurred, would Existentialism have emerged as the enabling philosophy of Modernism? Or what if WWII did occur, but the Axis powers had not lost? Would poetry have evolved less as a celebration of the individual and more as handmaiden to the State? (Think less Whitman, more Wagner.)
At one level this “What if?” is a parlor game better enjoyed with a glass of wine. At another, however, it resonates with chaos theory and Wonderful Life, Stephen Jay Gould’s provocative book about the nonrecurring nature of the evolution of life on earth. Gould’s thesis is that if “the evolutionary tape” were to be rewound half a billion years and played again, human life would not be inevitable, or even likely. In fact, even if it were replayed a million times, man would not be expected again. He replaces the Tree of Life, the traditional metaphor showing the evolution of life through all creatures down to Man as its last best form, with a Shrub of Life, having an infinite number of branches all with the potential to predominate. Gould concludes that Man is “a wildly improbable evolutionary event.” In a similar way chaos theory, sometimes known as “the butterfly effect,” deals with the influence of small, random events on everything from cloud formation to the number of planets in our solar system. I don’t know if these theories have been applied to the evolution of the arts, but my suggestion here is that the shoe certainly seems to fit. I’ll give one example.
Coincident with the rise of higher education in this country — the college education becoming after WWII an established piece of the American dream — Modernism took poetry further away from the newspaper-reading public, the popular audiences that had grown up on Longfellow in the previous century, and into the college classroom. The symbiotic relationship that evolved between academic-based literary critics and the Modernist poets served both well: the difficulties of Modernist poetry needed specialists to interpret them, and literary critics needed something more challenging to interpret than:
Under a spreading chestnut tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns what’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.
Those of you who were once “English Lit” majors will recall the names I.A. Richards, F.R. Leavis, and Cleanth Brooks as quickly as you recall the Modernist poets and novelists into whose mysteries these exegetes initiated the undergraduate masses. As Modernism foliated into varieties of Post Modernism through the second half of the century, modern poetry continued to find its readers not in the newspapers but in the college classroom. With Gould’s book in mind one can ask: would Modernist literature ever have prevailed, would it have displaced Tennyson and Longfellow, without the G.I. Bill to create generations of English Lit majors?
…To be continued