Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry

Introduction

Introduction Laureates and Heretics of the American Poetic Field Gertrude Stein, in her essay “Composition as Explanation,” has said almost everything that I want to say in this book: No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who also are creating their own time refuse to accept. The things refused are only important if unexpectedly somebody happens to need them. (521) In just two sentences, Stein lays out a whole theory of literary composition (creating the time), and a theory of canonization and marginalization, with a sidebar on the recovery of neglected works. In one sense, this book is a series of footnotes to Stein’s observations about literature and literary reputations, an application in practical criticism of her condensed theory of poetry and its reception. Other recent critics share similar concerns, and one of these, David Kellogg, has been of particular use to me in the writing of this book. When I first read Kellogg’s essay “The Self in the Poetic Field,” I knew I had found a paradigm for understanding poetry that would make the project I had in mind possible. Kellogg’s 1 work, based on the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, provided both a set of compass points by which one could begin to understand the vastness and the variety of American poetry, and a way of reading that could account for the conditions of composition and reception. His model proposed a reading of American poetry in terms of the social and aesthetic claims made for it by its readers, and he offered a way of constructing models of the poetic field as it shifted over time. Kellogg gave Bourdieu’s general observations about the dynamics of culture a specific application to contemporary poetry. Kellogg’s article defines the field of American poetry in terms of two axes of value: one aesthetic, ranging from the traditional to the experimental; the other sociological, ranging from the individual to the communal. Readers, critics, reviewers, prize committees, anthologists , and publishers define the relative prestige of these different values as well as the relation of individual poets to the various values. They do this not only through the selection of works for publication or prizes but also in subtler ways, such as by claiming that a certain poet represents an identity group, or by placing a poet’s work in the context of a tradition or a school of innovative writing. To simplify greatly, you could say that the poet who is claimed from the most positions (or is claimed most strongly for a certain position) wins—if by “winning,” we mean gaining a large readership or a prestigious reputation. If the critics, anthologists, and prize-givers from a number of different communities happen to need what you have to offer, you could be claimed from several sides at once. The career of John Ashbery is a shining example of a poet benefitting from multiple claims. For some, Ashbery carries into our own time the great tradition that runs from Keats through Wallace Stevens (people like this write articles with titles such as “John Ashbery’s Revision of the Post-Romantic Quest”). For others, he is the great linguistic innovator who inaugurated a new era in poetry with The Tennis Court Oath (people like this write articles with titles such as “Nimbus of Sensations: Eros and Reverie in the Poetry of John Ashbery and Ann Lauterbach”). For still others, Ashbery is the most personal and private of poets (people like this write articles with titles such as “John Ashbery : The Self against Its Images”). And for some, he is a representative of the gay male community (people like this write articles with 2 | Laureates and Heretics titles such as “Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Politics”).1 If not exactly all things to all people, Ashbery is, at any rate, many things to many people. His way of creating his time happens to be useful to representatives of all quadrants of the American poetic field. It is surely no coincidence that Ashbery is one of the most canonical American poets of our time. Looking at the works of poets in Kellogg’s terms allows us to understand them and their reputations in a somewhat systematic way. The symmetry of his system...