American Poets: Stevens, Eberhart, Roethke, et al.

American Poets : Stevens, Eberhart, Roethke, et al. Frank Doggettand Robert Buttel, eds. \follaceStevens: A Celebration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980.361pp. Richard Eberhart. Of Poetry and Poets 1ForeMrdbyJames Dickey). Chicago: University of lllinois Press, 1979,312pp. Jav Parini.Theodore Raethke: An American Romantic. Amherst: Universityof Massachusetts Press, 1979.203 pp. Helen Vendler.Part of Nature, Part of Us: ,\fodemAmerican Poets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UniversityPress, 1980.376 pp. Leon Surette Itmaybe no more than the irremediable slide into middle age being experiencedbythis reviewer, but it seems to him that the academic study of letters isundergoing a similar malaise. In the 195Os-before Sputnik, ecological awarenessand the energy crisis; before xerography, electronic tape and computers;before McLuhan, Levi-Strauss and Derrida-the study of letters seemedtobe a serious occupation addressing important moral, philosophical andsocialissues through well-grounded and autonomous techniques proper tohumane studies. We were heirs of the brilliant critical formulations of the 1930s bysuch men as Richards, Empson, Brooks and Warren. It seemed then thatthe study of letters was the last bastion of humane studies, but one that wassecure, protected by scholar critics of unquestioned intellect who could addressany issue and bring to it wisdom, penetration and illumination. This senseof the centrality of the study of letters may have been merely an illusionin the 195Os,but it was an illusion that was abroad. That illusionifsuchit was-is no longer with us. Manyof us were taught-or believed without being taught, or hoped withoutbelieving -that if one could learn to understand a poem, play or novel, onehad the means to understand society, or man, or life. I suppose that despitethose brilliant, skeptical men of the thirties, we were really children ofMatthewArnold, attracted to literature as to a secular religion, a gigantic scripturecontaining within it the human logos, and requiring constant emenCanadian Review of American Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, Spring 1982, 135-40 136 LeonSurette dation, restoration and interpretation by the priestly scholar, sapient sutler of the metaphor. Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism was the perfecte\pression and ideal embodiment of that confident faith in literary studies. It was hardly the only one, but it was the most confident and most successful of the period. It was published in the same year that Sputnik was launched. The end of an era. Richard Eberhart is the kind of poet the academy did not want andwould not heed in the Fifties. A contemporary of Auden and Warren, a fellow student at Cambridge with William Empson, Eberhart nonetheless wrote personal, unlearned poetry. His essays, addresses and interviews OJPoetn· and Poets, reveal a modest unassuming man with yet a strong sense ofthe high vocation of poetry and of his claim to that vocation. Eberhart's sense of the poetic vocation takes the form of naive romanticism. He expresses. with embarrassing prolixity, those tacit assumptions about literature upon which the high status of literary studies was posited: I have concluded over many years that the state of mind, or of feeling, or of intuition in which one writes poetry is a mysterious state, with the utmost difficulty, or perhaps notatall. subJect to rational explanation, although it is liable to objective analysis of the reasonmg faculty. Months go by without the incentive to write a poem; then, sometimes with the utmost suddenness, and at the least expected moment, the mysterious power will have informedthi: mind and one will be writing words on paper. (p. 77) These remarks were addressed to California high school students in 1946. but it is the view of poetic creation which animates Eberhart throughout his life. He expresses the same view in an interview given more than thirty years later: At least half a dozen times in my life poems have been given to me, as if the whole being was a weathervane played on by the wind of the spirit. It's hard to say this just right because I don't believe in automatic writing but I do believe in some kind of possession, that you are possessed by the poem, and then I also believe that when some of these poemsare given in this way you couldn't stop it-I like to use the analogy of either birth or...