Discontinuities in American Culture and the Poetic Response

DISCONTINUITIES IN AMERICAN CULTURE AND THE POETIC RESPONSE Mutlu Konuk Blasing. American Poetry: The Rhetoric of Its Forms. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 248 pp. Lisa M. Steinman. Made in America: Science, Technology, and American Modernist Poets. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. xiv + 219 pp. Julia M. Reibetanz These are two very different kinds of books on modem American poetry to come out of Yale University Press in 1987. Blasing' s study explores rhetorical parallels between the great nineteenth-century models, Poe, Emerson, Whitman and Dickinson, and modem or contemporary poets who build upon their formal strategies; it is a book for literary specialists, relying a great deal on contemporary critical terminology and engaging in very close analysis of the poetry it discusses. Steinman's book will be of interest to a wider group of readers, as it ranges over American poetry from 1910-1945 (especially Williams, Marianne Moore and Stevens) in a less specialized way, exploring the relationship of American poetry to the larger cultural context in which it was written, and especially to the new science and technology of the day. These books are not really comparable, but each is valuable in its own way, enlarging our understanding of the modem dilemma for American poets through very different focuses. They are part of a long line of critical studies centering on the innate contradictions of the poet's position in American culture. James E. Miller, Jr., called attention to the problem in The American Questfor the Supreme Fiction (Chicago, 1979), the problem of the American poet, who must absorb contradictions as vast and numerous as America itself. Ross Labrie's study of Howard Nemerov (Boston, 1980) argued that the poet retains his faith in the imaginative process despite the chaos of particulars that surrounds him and the inevitable collision with ''the hard surface of the external world" (144-145). Cary Nelson in his study of such poets as Raethke, Kinnell, Duncan, Rich and Merwin, Our La.st First Poets (Urbana, 366 Julia M. Reibetanz 1981), explored this collision further, arguing the inevitable destruction of language before modem history and science; in Rich's terms, we enter ''the paper airplane of the poem, which somewhere before its destination starts curling into ash and comes apart" (100). This image, long before Challenger, seems to me to be part of an essential American myth concerning language, science and history. Bonnie Costello's study of Marianne Moore (Cambridge, 1981) argued more positively for Moore's endless struggle to encompass in words what she knew must elude her; Moore celebrates "the world's elusiveness, its superiority to our acts of appropriation, seeing the world's freedom as intrinsic to our own" (3). In Poet's Prose (Cambridge, 1983), Stephen Freedman studied the Emersonian tradition, arguing for an indigenous American strain of exploratory poetry, with a strong philosophical bent, turned back on its own medium of language. Joseph Kronick's American Poetics of History (Baton Rouge, 1984) beginning also with Emerson, shifted the ground again from straight historical inquiry to the rhetorical interplay of language. And in Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge, 1984), Charles Altieri argued a poetics of conjecture that explores the absolutely constitutive role oflanguage, but ended by questioning the ultimate direction of contemporary criticism and poetry, which only seem to lead to more "relative standards" (207). It is in the context of this continuing debate, which these and many other books have furthered, that Blasing's and Steinman's new studies take their place. Blasing begins by taking issue with the tendency in American criticism to place Emerson at the head; Freedman and Kronick are part of this tradition as is, of course, Bloom (The Ringers in the Tower, Chicago, 1971; Figures of Capable Imagination, New York, 1976; Poetry and Repression, New Haven, 1976). Blasing argues that the central problem in American poetry begins right at the beginning with the liberation from a dynastic central authority, a liberation from "the very metaphysics and politics of centrality"; like a good many of the studies I have mentioned, Blasing's argument centres on "an originally dispossessed poetry that is always explicitly conscious of the discontinuity between language and...