Lit from Within: Contemporary Masters on the Art and Craft of Writing

A Poem of Character

165 A Poem of Character C A R L D E N N I S I N A C O L L E C T I O N O F E S S A Y S meant to celebrate a long-lived literary festival that has featured both poetry and fiction, it seems appropriate to offer some comments about a kind of poem that comes closest to fiction, one that makes its central concern the presenting of a character whose life is separate from that of the speaker. In earlier ages, when poetry was often narrative or dramatic, this approach was central.Today such a poem occupies a sparsely populated border region between the genres. In this regard, we are the heirs of those Romantic poets whose primary form was the first-person lyric or meditation.The reader today tends to approach a poem with the expectation of confronting not characters in action but the voice of the poet, the poet as a constructed personality, who is usually presented as speaking to us directly,without the mediation of mask or narrative.Such poetry may include other characters, but usually those characters do not displace the poet’s position as center of interest. So, in a Romantic poem like Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence,” the old leech-gatherer is given respectful attention , but the focus of the poem is less on him than on the 166 ◆ C A R L D E N N I S way in which he alters the mood of the poet. And in a postRomantic poem like Robert Lowell’s “Alfred Corning Clark” the focus is less on writing an elegy that makes an argument for the significance of Clark’s life as a whole than on defining the particular influence that Clark exerted as a fellow gradeschool student on the young poet, how Clark helped him deal with his own separateness and solitude. Lowell’s poem may be said to have a plot,but it is not the plot of a life,or of the poet’s reading of that life, but the plot of the poet’s growing identification with Clark in the course of the poem, the plot enacted before us as the speaker moves past the tawdry public figure to the boy, and past dry wit to intimate observation. Of course the moment one asserts centrality of the poet’s first-person presence in the typical post-Romantic poem, a crowd of exceptions come to mind,starting with the Romantics themselves. One thinks of Wordsworth’s great narrative “Michael ,” where the focus is not on the teller but on the shepherd himself,on giving him heroic dignity and pathos.And one thinks of Keats’s comments in his letters contrasting Wordsworth’s “egotistical sublime” to what he calls the “poetical character” as represented most fully by Shakespeare, his statement that a poet’s character “is the most unpoetical of anything in existence , because he has no identity . . . is continually informing and filling some other body.” Perhaps if Keats had lived longer, we might know him now as much for his narrative and dramatic works as for his lyrics. And later in the century we can turn for some of the best English poems not only to the dramatic monologues of Browning but to those of Tennyson, like “Ulysses,” “Tithonus,” “Lucretius,”and“Maud,” which suggest Tennyson’s need to supplement his lyric impulse by reaching out to inhabit voices different from his own. Perhaps his example suggests that some poets often do their best work when working against their dominant mode. A good contemporary example of this kind of dialectic is Louise Glück’s most recent book,AVillage Life. Over her career Glück has shown herself to be a strong lyric poet with a distinct focus on the poet’s attempts to give shape to the stresses of personal experience.Though she has often resorted to myth A Poem of Character ◆ 167 to enlarge her canvas, to suggest that the poet’s experience is part of a shared pattern common to the culture as a whole,the power of her poems resides in their distinctive personal voice,in its substantiation in a characteristic tone, syntax, and rhythm. But in AVillage Life she has chosen to subordinate the character of the poet to a group of inhabitants of the“village”referred to in the title.This shift is particularly emphatic...