Meeting the Agony: Three Poems of the Twentieth Century

HOW to approach the agony of modern times? How to come close to it? How to hold it in one’s hands—not to fondle it but to feel its horrible weight, at once immense and slight as the crematorium’s ashes? How to avoid sensationalism but also to avoid tart despair? How, in this daunting regard, to see poetry—to choose a particular art—as something more than eternal elegy or lyric trinket that is bound to be hugely overshadowed by the depredations of history? The bouquets of joy wither quickly in that wind.

Although modernism defines the artistic history of the twentieth century, a salient dimension of modernism lies in the avoidance of these questions. This is the dimension of the formalistic, art for the sake of art, the browsing in various inventive pastures as if notions of aesthetic construction were equivalent to life—or, better, to have abolished life as a clumsy referent. What could be more attractive than art standing by itself—serene, unsullied, and brilliant? For what, after all, has art to do with the bullying of politics? As the political purveys unassailable facts and notions, it has no use for the imagination. It is all assertion. If it admits that its certainties are made up, the game is over; then it must admit that its realities (international Jewry, thieving bourgeoisie, rich kulaks, unassailable security, racial inferiority) are nothing more than manias, the bonds forged by fear and loathing. The distrust of imaginative literature on the part of various dictators makes sad sense. Since imagination cannot be banished (though regimes have tried), it is from a tyrant’s viewpoint far better to set imagination toiling in the mills of social realism or cinematic tributes to leaders than to admit its existential ungovernable truths. One understands from the beleaguered perspective of art the beautiful lure of seizing the prerogative of fancy and sailing away into whatever domains formal means can conjure. No wonder Wallace Stevens is a saintly figure to many poets. He gave poetry room to live and thrive in the midst of the overwhelming twentieth century. He allowed for infinite inner territory. That seems no small achievement.

Another aspect of modernism, American style, focuses on the self. Thus the particular person’s life becomes the natural boundary of poetry. History may enter it; but, given the nature of American life, as encapsulated as its large cars and as spacious as its distances, it need not. To be sure, history is determinative: there was an economic depression in the 1930s, and many people suffered on account of it. Yet the American feeling for human potential and possibility has little use for such determinism. Personal responses are at once a sum of time (“my life”) and a thinning of time into moments and scenes. At least in poems (and particularly in the United States of the Open Road) the individual’s freedom of movement may triumph. One can complain about egoism and redundancy, about the tedium of anecdote, but circumstances vary and intensity may be impressive as it rehearses its grievances and random pleasures. Everyone indulges the first-person pronoun one way or another. Why not admit it and make it a cardinal principle? Surely one life can speak for many. Surely that is a premise of art.

Yet there is something deeper than both our prized and casual events—call it conscience, that voice that refuses the comforts of speculative élan and circumstantial declaration. Such a voice has no use for progress, be it ideological or materialist. Indeed it sees progress, to say nothing of the random hubbub of “news,” as so much distraction. As Dostoevsky observes, the suffering of a child focuses the mind and spirit, stills it and sears it. Whether we call down God or not (and none of the poems I will be looking at do) is immaterial to the fact that conscience is a dimension in its own right. We must seek to dwell both in the unbearable yet necessary place that is uncalled-for suffering and in the historical suffering that human beings insist...