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Introduction
- University of Iowa Press
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Introduction Eric Haralson In this collection of ten original essays by a team of stellar contributors, the middle generation of American poets is represented by what might be called the usual suspects—Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and John Berryman—but also by several contemporaries juxtaposed for purposes of dialogue and contrast: Delmore Schwartz, Theodore Roethke, Robert Hayden, and Lorine Niedecker. This cadre of poets meets the most obvious definition of “middle,” adumbrated in Stein’s quizzical remark above, since their seasons of prime productivity fell between the 1940s and the 1970s. Yet this collection makes the forceful case that these poets were central in more than just chronological terms. Both formally and politically, their poetry constitutes the center of twentieth-century American poetry—the bull’s-eye, pulsating heart, eye of the storm (choose your metaphor). As the contributors well demonstrate, this middle generation held its own on an emergent literary scene in ways that belie another connotation of its label—namely, that of second fiddle, turning in a “middling” performance after the bravura and (admittedly) the bombast of high modernism . This is not to say that these poets did not feel the pressure of the Pound-Eliot legacy, or that Lowell and Berryman, for all their admiration, weren’t also warding off a precursor in, say, “Robert Frost at Midnight” or “Dream Songs” 35–38, “(Frost being still around).” As Edward Hirsch observes , it is a measure of the middle generation’s success in making it new, It is the human habit to think in centuries and centuries are more or less a hundred years. —Gertrude Stein, Narration (1935) middle adj. (ME middel, from OE; akin to Latin medius), : equally distant from the extremes : ; : being at neither extreme : —Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th ed. 2 | yet again, that we sometimes forget “how seriously they struggled with feelings of belatedness,” with the worry that the songs had all been sung; it was their distinct inspiration, as Hirsch says, to write against the ethos of “heroic impersonality” fostered by Eliot and Pound, and “to bring a messy humanity, a harsh luminosity, a well of tenderness, back into poetry.”1 By the same token, these authors lived amid the human mess, paid dearly for their illuminations, and came by their tender sympathies honestly, feeling what Niedecker called “life’s raw push” and actively seeking out that push more keenly than most of their peers.2 At least some of the ravages scarring the middle generation—alcoholism, mental health crises, pervasive loneliness and alienation, romantic extravagances, suicide—resulted from the effort of proving themselves worthy: “No layoff” from that hard “trade,” to quote Niedecker again.3 These poets became central to their generation by going to extremes in experience and expression, often at great personal cost. Lowell’s note of wry introspection, riffing on the romantics —“Ought I to regret my seedtime?”—speaks for the group as a whole, as does, to varying degrees, Berryman’s plaint in Dream Song 153: “I’m cross with god who has wrecked this generation,” who harvested “a first rate haul” of poets even as “He left alive / fools I could number like a kitchen knife.”4 Throughout their collective body of poetry, whether dealing with the most private or the most global ordeals, a “sense of having come through,” in Steven Gould Axelrod’s phrase, balances uneasily with “a counter-dynamic” of damage and trauma, “a sense of having lost what can never be found again.” From another angle, what Axelrod calls Lowell’s “ultimate triumph in turning . . . psychic deficits into a struggle with language that would alter the course of twentieth-century poetry” also applies across the board, encompassing the life and work of every poet treated in this book.5 If, conceptually, this middle generation mediates the so-called American century and its complex articulations in verse, the configuration of poets discussed here also complicates standard historical and aesthetic categorizations . Such attempts at sorting and packaging (as in modernist versus “middle” versus postmodern) often neglect the multiple facets of the given poet’s cultural situation, or restrict interpretations of well-known poets while slighting the impact of those who are less well known. The essays in this volume track unforeseen connections across semantic boundaries, looking back to the formative impress of modernist writing on these poets, to be sure, but also looking forward to the profound influence they, in turn, have exercised on later authors...