Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry by Nathan A. Scott, Jr. (review)

Book Reviews107 This collection is also noteworthy in its treatment of women authors. Ronald Schleifer, for instance, speaks of a rhetorical frontier in Flannery O'Connor's work: a kind of boundary between O'Connor's cosmopolitan readers and "the language and experience of rural ignorance" (183). Gary Scharnhorst enters the rather unexplored territory of a specifically female frontier gothic in his study of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Giant Wistaria," a story that opposes sexual sterotypes and the prison-house of the attic and the nursery, thus exploring the frontier of gender identity for American women. Finally, Joanne B. Karpinski's "The Gothic Underpinnings of Realism in the Local Coloriste' No Man's Land" rests on a singular and powerful insight: that in the work of Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, the New England landscape provides "female protagonists with opportunities for self-definition borne out of their relationship to the land in the same way as the unpeopled landscape of the conventional westering frontier did for male protagonists" (141). All told, Frontier Gothic is a collection with which scholars of American literature should become familiar. It contributes significantly to a number of critical concepts indispensable to understanding our literature and our culture. MICHAEL THOMAS CARROLL New Mexico Highlands University NATHAN A SCOTT, JR. Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 298 p. On the testimony of nine modern poets with whom over the years he has found himself deeply involved, Nathan Scott, distinguished Professor Emeritus of English/Religious Studies at the University of Virginia, undertakes in this, his twenty-sixth book, to refute the "absence" ideology of deconstructionist Jacques Derrida and his disciples. The 150,000-word volume bears witness to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, W.H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, A.R. Ammons, James Wright, and Howard Nemerov as rejecting the post-structural conviction that presence is illusion. To each of the nine poets Scott devotes a chapter. Eight chapters first appeared between 1971 and 1991, either as articles in journals (Virginia Quarterly Review, Southern Review, Christianity and Literature, Centennial Review) or as chapters in three of Scott's earlier books (The Wild Prayer of Longing, The Poetry of Civic Virtue, The Poetics of Belief). The first and last chapters—"Introduction" and "Howard Nemerov"—are published here for the first time. In the rich density of ordinary life—in the concrete givens that surround us—Scott uncovers the poetry's source of the sublime. In highlighting Stevens' belief in the transcendence of the imagination, Scott refers to him as the last great exemplar in the Orphic-Romantic tradition reaching back 108Rocky Mountain Review to Hölderlin and Leopardi . . . Rimbaud and Mallarmé . . . Valéry and Rilke. Though the direction of Stevens' transcendence is downward, Scott sees him as a "profoundly religious poet" (38), for he discovers presence shining from the depths of all neighborhood things, from the Is-ness of everything that exists. The American-Come-Lately, however, is uncharmed by the Orphic vision. Dismissing "poetizing" as the chart to some brave new world, he prefers instead a "new nonsupernatural Catholisicm" (42) that mirrors in a language icy and ungaseous what, in the spirit of obedience, we are commanded to become and "Bless what there is for being" (86). In Roethke's joyful psalmic and doxological exclamations of numinous reality—in fire, water, sun, moon, and all the marvelous things of earth—Scott discerns a "truly sacramental vision of human inheritance" (88). Even a highly secular and unsentimental poet like Bishop, grounding her art in the morality of passionate attention, wins through to fundamental knowledge: her empathetic interchange with sundry non-selves seems more faithful to "the Real and to things" (131) than to language. While marking Warren's shift from tight formalities to "somersaults of vivacity" (139)—and sometimes to a garrulous nostalgia—Scott traces the poet's ruling passion, his One-Life bond with nature and "life's instancy" (166), his radical transcendence singing of Glory indwelling in every nook and cranny. Wilbur also revels in the unascetic amplitude of the world's body, in the structures and textures of nature...