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Chapter 3: James McMichael: Caging the Demon
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Chapter Three James McMichael Caging the Demon Apprentice and Rebel “Who’s a better poet, Robert Frost or Edwin Arlington Robinson?” “Frost.” “I don’t think you understood the question.” It was a spring day in 1966 in Palo Alto when that exchange took place. Twenty-six-year-old James McMichael was defending his doctoral thesis at Stanford, and Yvor Winters, the director of the thesis committee, was asking what should have been an easy question . Any good student of Winters’ idiosyncratic view of American poetry knew that the right answer was Robinson. Frost, for Winters , was the worst sort of poet, one who failed to provide a proper context to justify his dark emotions. Winters maintained that Frost took us too close to madness, to a paranoid sense of the world as irrationally malevolent. McMichael knew the answer the Old Man was looking for, too. In fact, he had all but provided it in the dissertation he was defending, “Rhetoric and the Skeptic’s Void.” McMichael had been a favorite of Winters during his graduateschool years at Stanford. After all, McMichael had arrived at Stanford with his Wintersian credentials already in order: he held a 83 B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he had been mentored by Edgar Bowers and Alan Stephens, Wintersians both. McMichael shared a great deal with Winters, including an attachment to California landscapes and many assumptions about literature. But, most important, both men shared a certain psychological disposition regarding the restraint of emotional extremes, a disposition that made similarities in their poetic practice all but inevitable. Perhaps it was his very closeness to Winters that made McMichael rebel at his thesis defense in a fit of Bloomian-influenced anxiety. The rebellion continued in the years that followed, as McMichael took up the Surrealistoriented poetics then popular in some circles. But his rebellion was eventually to reverse itself. The two poets were too alike. Like many a son who needs to break away from a strong father, McMichael discovered over time the full extent of his resemblance to that father. Whether McMichael had planned to break from Winters at his thesis defense or simply acted impulsively under pressure, he certainly did not jettison his Wintersian heritage along with his chances of staying on at Stanford. Only a year later, in 1967, he would publish his first book, The Style of the Short Poem, which popularizes Winters’ ideas about poetry for an undergraduate audience. While McMichael tells us at the outset that he wishes only to “provide a brief but accurate vocabulary for discussing the style of the short poem” (vi), the book is subtle yet relentless in its Wintersian polemics. Without dragging Winters or Cleanth Brooks by name into the book, McMichael takes Winters’ side in the debate over the heresy of paraphrase, saying simply that he “has assumed that the student will from the first be endeavoring to paraphrase each poem that he reads” (vi). Moreover, he embraces Winters’ call for authorial control and a poetics of statement, saying that he has selected only poems “that are carefully controlled” (vi) and that, “when a poet writes a poem, he isn’t talking to you, but rather to you” (1). Whatever the distinction between talking “to you” and talking “to you,” in both cases the poet treats poetry as an orthodox Wintersian “statement in words” (In Defense of Reason 363), not as Wimsatt and Beardsley’s “verbal icon,” and still less as the young, Imagist Yvor Winters ’ “permanent gateway to waking oblivion” (Uncollected Essays 195). McMichael even betrays a Wintersian prescriptiveness when he tells 84 | James McMichael [34.237.245.80] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:07 GMT) us that a poet should not “use language in so private a way that its meaning remains inaccessible” (4). At times these self-assured prescriptions can sound a great deal like Winters, as in the following passage, a condemnation of poetic solipsism: Insofar as a poet is not clear, he will be talking not to you but to himself . The temptation to talk to oneself is very great, and it is as easy to give in to the temptation in writing a small poem as in writing a big one. It is more difficult to write a clear poem about a tiny subject than to write an unclear poem about a very big one. And it is harder still, of course, to write a clear poem about a big subject. (4) One...