Tests of Poetry

These differences have been marked out before, of course—often interestingly. In the late 1940s, for instance, E.M.W. Tillyard issued two literary histories of poetry, the revised Poetry Direct and Oblique (1945) and Five Poems (1948). In the first he contended that the poetry of statement is necessary for the understanding of more intense poetry. In the second he presented close historical readings of five poems covering 500 years before 1900—none from the twentieth century—choosing a poem each to represent its century. He contended that the representativeness of a poem was determined by the fidelity with which it expressed the ideas of its age. Vivienne Koch, a poet affiliated with modernism as well as with leftist historicism, deemed Tillyard's intellectual history of poetics largely a failure. Tillyard claimed that he did not wish to consider topical commonplaces in isolation, emphasizing "the inter-play between thought and form that constitutes the main pleasure of reading" (Koch 706). Yet Koch saw that in his actual analyses of the poems Tillyard ignored form. She noted, just as Robert von Hallberg does in the present divergence, that "not all good poetry embodies 'great commonplaces' or even 'topical' ones" and that poetry must qualify "as poetry" before such detailed literary-historical consideration is warranted (706). She announced her preference for a very different and very ambitious literary history of poetry published in 1948 by the tiny Objectivist Press of Brooklyn—Louis Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry. This was a controversial judgment, given Tillyard's supereminence, the powerful sway at the time of the "world picture" approach to poetry, and Zukofsky's reputation as an incomprehensible communist modernist. Yet Zukofsky was better than Tillyard because his literary history of poetry "enunciate[d] some principles of judgment" and because he worked with the history of poetry in order to understand poetry as a living art (708).

As Tillyard, Zukofsky, and Koch discovered, it is difficult to account for the importance of poetic form in the large literary history; and modernism—the aesthetic of our era or of the era from which we have recently passed—increases the difficulty. Poetry and history are especially hard in so historiographically self-conscious a series as the Cambridge History of American Literature. When Sacvan Bercovitch as general editor summarized his experience convening literary histories of American verse, he noted that poetry was an especially "problematic" category. He was introducing several of his editors; his prefatory remark seems to anticipate their accounts as reports on the difficulties they faced when "conveying formalist lines of continuity and change within a context appropriate to broad historical developments." Yet his editor of late-nineteenth-century poetry, Shira Wolosky, seems to have had no such problem. Her account of writing "Poetry and Public Discourse," the CHAL section on American poetry from 1855 to 1900, is an untroubled restatement of the reasonable but familiar thesis that "[i]n the nineteenth century, poetry had a vibrant and active role within ongoing discussions defining America and its cultural directions." Poetry circulated among the social discourses. Wolosky's way of defining history's relation to the poetic is an iterative, circular version of historical determinism—very "Taine-ish," to use Barbara Packer's term here for the historicist extreme she wants momentarily to appreciate in her rejoinder to Robert von Hallberg, who, Packer believes, stands at the other extreme. "Literature," writes Wolosky, "as an art and a discipline itself thus participates in, and reflects, history as it has been shaped by rhetoric, and rhetoric as it has been shaped by history." "Poetry," she says, "represents and reflects such cultural norms as..."—and then she goes on to name the themes she found "reflect[ed]" in the poetry.

Few who write about modern American poetry—and still fewer contemporary poets—would speak of poetry's themes in such a way. A line is drawn between the poetries of the two centuries, as Vivienne Koch had drawn one between Tillyard's premodern poetics and Zukofsky's...