Poetry 1900 to the 1940s

Over the period from 1993 through 1997 the publication of critical books on the major American poets has been remarkably steady. The two most critically popular poets, William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, have accounted for approximately (allowing for multiple-author studies) three books per year; Robert Frost was the subject of two books per year, and Marianne Moore, H.D., and W. H. Auden one book. This year is unusual because there is no book from an American publisher exclusively devoted to Wallace Stevens and only one short book on William Carlos Williams. However, Frost is the subject of Karen Kilcup's important study of the poet's debt to feminine literary traditions, and Auden is the subject of five critical studies, including John Fuller's landmark W. H. Auden: A Commentary. The past five years have also consistently produced excellent studies of less critically favored poets such as Richard Wilbur, Louise Bogan, Carl Sandburg, Robinson Jevers, and Mina Loy. This year we have a study of William Bronk that expertly places him in his literary milieu.

i Robert Frost

In Robert Frost and Feminine Literary Tradition (Michigan) Karen L. Kilcup maintains that we should think in terms of several traditions rather than a single tradition of American literature. She places Frost within two often marginalized traditions—the sentimental and the regional—which became associated with sentimental female authors such as Lydia Sigourney and the regionalist Sarah Orne Jewett. Although Frost emerged from these two traditions, he came to regard them as minor ones as he labored to situate himself within the canonical mainstream. Kilcup believes that Frost wrote his finest poems in the early volumes A Boy's Will and North of Boston when he worked in these traditions and before he developed the bardic, ironic style that distanced him from his poetic subjects. Although she does not value Frost's ironic style as much as his earlier less self-conscious and more emotional one, she appreciates the range of the poet's work and she is sensitive to the reemergence, as in "The Silken Tent," of the "feminine" style in his later work. She also sensitively analyzes poems such as "Stopping by Woods" in which the earlier and later styles play against one another.

Before the book settles down to literary history and close readings, the introduction engages in the theoretical soul-searching that is so often a feature of contemporary criticism. Kilcup seems to have difficulty striking the right balance in her approach to the feminist issues that Frost raises. She wishes to accept the revaluation of the "sentimental" tradition by feminist scholars who say the tradition has been underestimated because it was identified with female authors. She even asserts that gendered norms have tended to fill our anthologies with intellectual, ironic poems at the expense of more sentimental, frankly emotional poems. But her defense of "sentimentality" does not seem consistent with her comments on the poetry she analyzes. For example, she asserts that readers have been trained to be uncomfortable with "excess emotion," as if our reaction to poetry is simply a matter of cultural conditioning, by an "elite masculine Western perspective that values reason over emotion." Yet she realizes that the central issue is whether the emotion is "unsteadied" (she avoids the word "controlled," which seems too masculine) by rhetorical techniques that inhibit our response to emotional material.

Her theoretical support of the sentimental tradition is contradicted by her negative comments on some of the sentimental poems that she analyzes. She also appears confused about her premises when she introduces a notion of a "gendered" conception of selfhood. Her description of the feminine self which possesses "flexible or permeable ego-boundaries" is so qualified that she clearly can give no credence to the idea that a fluid, multidimensional self is feminine rather than masculine—especially in poets. Most strangely of all, she worries that her own methodology of intellectual argument and specific analysis is too close to a masculine mode of " 'objectivist' argumentation" that is aggressively rational and shaped on disagreements. Perhaps such comments are the vestiges of the more doctrinaire book that Kilcup decided not to write.

Instead Robert Frost and the Feminine Literary Tradition is in part a much-needed reply to Katherine Kearns's feminist reading of Frost in Robert Frost and a Poetics of Appetite (AmLS 1994, pp. 330-31). Since Kearns's interpretations of the negative characterizations of Frost's women were well if narrowly argued, Kilcup is right to engage Kearns's arguments in detail. Whereas Kearns characterizes the women in "A Servant to Servants" and "Home Burial" as driving men to madness, Kilcup conceives of the power of characters such as Mary in "Home Burial" not as malign but as "affirmative and desirable." "Home Burial" provides an occasion for the subtlety of Kilcup's reading. The key passage presents the image of a descending moon, which sheds its light in Mary's lap and later aligns itself with her in a "dim row, / The moon, the little silver cloud, and she." Does one read these lines ironically or "sentimentally"? If ironically, then indeed Frost is viewing Mary coldly. But Kilcup argues that Frost invites us to read these lines "sentimentally—in his overt sympathy for Mary's perspective, certified by the poem's romantic yet realistic conclusion: death and love converge." Her reading of this poem is enriched by comparing it to Lydia Sigourney's "Death of an Infant" to identify its sentimental roots. In the female speaker of "A Servant to Servants," she finds an insight into female character worthy of a regional writer like Jewett or Rose Terry Cooke in Cooke's "Mrs. Flint's Married Experience." Instead of the concern with "masculine power and autonomy" that Kearns finds in Frost's "A Servant to Servants," Kilcup discovers a "liberating self-voicing" of the forces that repress the speaker.

Kilcup detects a sharp decline in Frost's empathetic powers in New Hampshire. Although she admires the regional, gossipy quality of "The Witch of Coös," she regrets "the distanced and voyeuristic stance that the narrator assumes." Her analysis of the late work interestingly detects the sentimental core within an ironic treatment. For example, in "Stopping by Woods" (a New Hampshire poem) she suggests that Frost is "echoing and transforming the feminine genre of sentimental poetry" as "Frost reconstructs the wild mother tongue of the witch into a safely civilized account by a male speaker" of an encounter with nature. The intensity of the vision and the detachment of the speaker help to account for the poem's power. New Hampshire reveals the process of Frost separating himself from the too specifically domestic or regional (as opposed to universal and canonical) to become a more "universal" poet.

Although the second half of the book is less focused than the first, the description of Frost's intense friendship with Edward Thomas (characterized as "homoerotic") and the comparison of Frost's poetic career with those of poets such as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Amy Lowell establish links between Frost's emotional and poetic life and cultural femininity. In refusing to embrace the modernist qualities of "complexity, irony, detachment, and darkness," Millay exemplified the way a poet could forfeit the recognition that Frost desired. I have mentioned Kilcup's readings of well-known poems, but this comprehensive book also has important readings of lesser-known works such as "In the Home Stretch" and "Maple."

Among the essays on Frost this year, William G. O'Donnell's "Talking About Poems with Robert Frost" (MR 39: 225-49) is an entertaining and valuable record of remarks Frost made about the creative process and his own work. Among the anecdotes recounted is the story of Frost sending a friend who requested an example of a revised poem a copy of "The Axe Helve" in an unchanged text with the title spelled "Ax-Helve." In "Robert Frost and Dramatic Speech" (SR 106: 68-76) Wesley McNair compares Frost's syntax, grammar, tone, and rhythm to those of some more recent poets to investigate the mystery of how Frost manages to create the sound of a living voice.

ii William Bronk

Since I knew nothing about the poetry of William Bronk (1918-1999), I profited greatly from Burt Kimmelman's The "Winter Mind": William Bronk and American Letters (Fairleigh Dickinson). The book's strength is a comparative approach that gives the reader a sense of Bronk's place in American literature. The distinctiveness of his poetry emerges through comparisons to the works of predecessors such as Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and Dickinson, modern masters such as Frost and Stevens, and contemporaries such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and George Oppen. Bronk's austere sense of our inability to grasp reality is related to traditional notions of "learned ignorance" and the via negativa as well as to the philosophical skepticism of Beckett, Wittgenstein, and Gödel. Presuming that the human mind cannot grasp reality, Bronk nonetheless believes that if we are scrupulous about the mind's limitation, we may achieve some respite from the burden of our ignorance. His key poetic conception is the "wordlessness" of reality. Bronk would not say we live in a world of shadows, or that reality is a meaningless void, because he will only say what the world is not. As he apprehends the falsity of the perceptual world, he nevertheless "intuits a realness that is not the actual world." His obsession with a direct experience of the world that is not humanly possible is the constant subject of his poetry. Kimmelman writes that "Bronk's plan for escaping from the trap of a 'worldless world'—as if to get to an absolutely true world—requires, paradoxically, that he face up to what he sees is an unqualified emptiness created by illusion."

Kimmelman grounds his understanding of Bronk in the poet's book on Whitman, Melville, and Thoreau, Brother in Elysium, which resembles Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael as a highly personal reading of American literature. Like Whitman, Bronk conceives himself as part of a larger community, but he would not judge anyone within the community because he believes with Melville that "humans never completely transcend a primitive state of being." Bronk is perhaps closest to Thoreau, who wrote that "Nothing is worth saying, nothing is worth doing except as a foil for the waves of silence to break against." As Bronk himself wrote, "Thoreau preferred no expression at all to the valuing of expression for its own sake as though it had its own truth and reality." Like Frost, Bronk feels at home in the New England winter landscape of bare trees, snow, and wind. Unlike Frost, Bronk expresses no Romantic nostalgia for a spiritualized landscape or a more meaningful identity. Kimmelman indeed considers Bronk a more authentic New Englander than Frost because "Frost imitated the Yankee colloquial, whereas Bronk simply speaks it." Frost nostalgically denies Emersonian idealism, but Bronk would not indulge in this nostalgia because the question of idealism in an inert world never arises. In "The Abnegation" Bronk writes that "I will not / be less than I am to be more human," and in "The Mind's Landscape on an Early Winter Day" that the mind is "lost, even when the senses seize the world."

Although Kimmelman gives us a sketch of Bronk's life, including his friendship with George Oppen and involvement with Cid Corman's Origin, the book leaves us wanting to know much more about Bronk's personal circumstances. He is described as a solitary "bachelor" who ran the family lumberyard in his home village of Hudson Falls, New York. But like Charles Olson, he was an amateur archaeologist fascinated with the way that Mayan and other ancient cultures apprehended the world. As Kimmelman writes, readers naturally wonder how Bronk "lives with his own philosophy," and many find his language of negation and tautology unattractive. His very belief in using words to create the illusory order of a poem seems contradictory. Kimmelman explores Bronk's paradoxical qualities by comparing him to Stevens, observing that Stevens's influence was so great that Bronk stopped reading him because Stevens's voice obliterated his own. Kimmelman maintains that Bronk's language has greater integrity than Stevens's: "Stevens's language is lush, while Bronk's is austere. Stevens's philosophy is compelling—yet Bronk's is more rigorous and penetrating."

The claim for Bronk's greater philosophical rigor and profundity in comparison with Stevens's will not convince many readers. And even if one does agree, Kimmelman appears to make the unjustified assumption that the more philosophically profound a poem is, the more profound it is as poetry: "Thus, Stevens confronting a finally impenetrable experience, may take refuge in the power of the imagination to construct a world of its own in the most lush colors. Bronk, however, refuses to countenance any such provisional world, and never swerves from his epistemological investigation." Kimmelman argues that when Stevens seeks refuge in the world of the imagination, "his language becomes excessively florid, as if to camouflage his ultimate inability to describe his philosophical problem." Yet Bronk is like Stevens in finding a "hopeful thread, one made of steel, in the possibility of a self-locus with a universal disorder—a centrality, as he calls it." Unlike Stevens, however, Bronk does not entertain the possibility of a "central man," or a "thrice concentred self." Finally, Bronk's austere view of existence seems "the exact opposite of Stevens's well-known insight in his poem 'Sunday Morning' that 'Death is the mother of beauty.' " Bronk has absolutely nothing to say about death. In his magnificent poem "The Smile on the Face of a Kouros," he approaches death with "empty hands." As Kimmelman concludes, "Bronk chooses to value puzzlement and formlessness rather than to celebrate any delusory promise of form." In this sharply focused study, Kimmelman's enthusiasm for Bronk's poetry is appealing, and the reader should be willing to entertain the unconventional opinion that Bronk is a modern master for the sake of appreciating it and absorbing Bronk's unique style.

In "A Note on William Bronk's Poetics of Silence (ChiR 44, iii-iv:136-39) Michael Heller suggestively describes Bronk's technique in "Silence and Metaphor" as "exfoliating the nature of its own dilemma."

iii Marianne Moore

Elisabeth W. Joyce's Cultural Critique and Abstraction: Marianne Moore and the Avant-garde (Bucknell) is an unconvincing portrait of Moore as an avant-garde artist—specifically a variety of dadaist. Joyce develops the insights in Linda Leavell's Marianne Moore and the Visual Arts (AmLS 1995, pp. 362-63), a study of the influence of avant-garde painters, photographers, and collage artists on Moore. But rather than showing, as Leavell does, that the avant-garde simply influenced Moore's modernism, Joyce claims that Moore "is primarily avant-garde in nature as opposed to modernist." She argues that Moore is not a modernist on the grounds that modernism rejected bourgeois convention so completely that the form of the modernist work became its content and that it abandoned any ambition of influencing cultural or social change. In making this argument, Joyce refers only to Stevens as a characteristic modernist and only in a brief reference. Throughout the book, some detailed comparisons of Moore to contemporary poets might have corrected the implied judgments that modernists such as Eliot, Pound, and Stevens were not committed to social change. Unfortunately, Joyce's technique is to cite some critic's definition of modernism or the avant-garde or dadaism and apply it to Moore without a sense of the complexity and variety of the practice of actual modernists or avant-garde artists. Thus, Joyce improbably distinguishes the avant-garde from modernism on the basis that the avant-garde "refused to divorce itself from bourgeois culture" and "remained socially-invested." Since Moore was a critic of her culture (as if Stevens et al. were not), Joyce concludes that Moore must be avant-garde.

Only a book that ignores Moore's biography could sustain so unlikely a picture of her. In her introduction Joyce says that it is irrelevant to her whether Moore actually knew the artists discussed in the book or if she saw their works. "The relationship between Moore's work and the visual arts is for me a route to gain access to her poetry from a new perspective. Therefore, there will be little attention in this book to Moore's biography." As a result, Joyce compares a Hannah Höch collage or a Man Ray "rayograph" to a Moore poem without clearly stating the basis for the comparison. Similarly, she emphasizes the "abstraction" in Moore's work, even though Moore was not particularly interested in abstract artists. This methodology gives Joyce no way to adjust her characterization of Moore to biographical reality. For example, she says that "Moore's notion of ethics is often related to the standard Judeo-Christian dictums for behavior because of her conventional Protestant upbringing." The words "often" and "conventional" imply that Moore's Christian ethical principles were superficial instead of the foundation of her character. Joyce cites a passage from Julia Kristeva about the artist developing a personal ethics which she uses to imply that Moore the poet has an ethical sense markedly different from that of her "conventional" self.

This revised sense of Moore's ethical nature emerges in the long and interesting reading of Moore's "Marriage." Although the reading is admirably detailed, Joyce concludes that Moore, whose judgments are known to be careful and reticent, actually disapproves of the institution of marriage. This interpretation eliminates the poem's positive associations of its subject with a marriage of opposites or an ideal of "liberty and union." (If Joyce had examined Moore's rich but troubled family life, she would have found plenty of evidence for Moore's mixed feelings about marriage.) Joyce goes so far as to claim that her "rejection of marriage is a rejection of traditional views of reality." We also find this conception of Moore as a kind of post-Nietzschean iconoclast in the reading of "Camellia Sabina." Joyce believes that the poem expresses "ambivalence toward logical progression" and that "Moore again aligns herself with the dada ambivalence about rationality and science; she admires rational method, yet she must always undercut it through her ultimate disapproval of it." To Joyce, Moore is a poet who is often "furious" and expresses a "sneering attitude" toward social norms of which she disapproves.

This conception of Moore as a dadaist critic of convention and rationality unfortunately leads to a portrait of her as an artist who is afraid to speak clearly about her convictions, or who even fearfully suppresses poems when their cultural critique is too overt. For example, Joyce observes that the collage artist Hannah Höch (1889-1978) used "abstract" techniques to conceal her message because she feared German state censorship, which sets up an unfavorable contrast with Moore, who merely fears "facing the horror that her subversive message would induce in her more conventional audience." Joyce even claims that Moore feels self-contempt for her timidity. For example, Joyce claims that Moore's poem "Roses Only" was dropped from her Collected Poems, and that "Poetry" was drastically shortened because their social criticism was too overt. She even maintains that at the end of "Jerboa," in the image of the creature's frozen "Chippendale claw," Moore obscurely confesses that she is too conformist to speak out: the jerboa's frozen posture expresses Moore's feeling about those "including, I believe, herself—who conform, those who become the model bourgeois immediately in the face of public opprobrium." Joyce's book contains some excellent analysis of Moore's poems, especially lesser-known ones such as "The Snail" and "Roses Only"; it also adds to our understanding of how Moore drew on the avant-garde scene for inspiration. But this portrait of Moore is weakened by a lack of biographical and historical understanding.

In its careful review of earlier criticism, research into intellectual sources, and close readings, Robin G. Schulze's "Marianne Moore's 'Imperious Ox, Imperial Dish' and the Poetry of the Natural World" (TCL 44: 1-33) is a model of scholarly criticism. Although critics have viewed Moore's animal poems as complex autobiographical masks, or nearly allegorical emblems, Schulze notes that Moore's animals are authentically real and that Moore is a highly sophisticated nature poet. Among an exhaustive list of sources, Schulze focuses on Moore's reading of Darwin, who convinced her of the scientific fact of evolution, and T. H. Huxley in such works as "Evolution and Ethics" and "A Liberal Education and Where to Find It." Schulze demonstrates Moore's deep involvement in the post-Darwinian debate and her cultural critique (revealing her deep faith in rational discourse) of "human engineers," such as Huxley, who subordinate God's creation to human purposes. Illuminating readings of Moore's poems "The Buvalo" and "Nine Nectarines" reveal Moore's "environmental ethic."

iv William Carlos Williams

G. Stanley Koehler's Countries of the Mind: The Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Bucknell) discusses the "theme of the descent" and the poet's "true subject"—love. Although the book contains many fine readings of Williams's poetry, its thesis is vague because Koehler asserts the presence and importance of Jungian and Eastern motifs without demonstrating them. Countries of the Mind recalls Zhaoming Qian's Orientalism and Modernism: The Legacy of China in Pound and Williams (see AmLS 1995, p. 369). Qian speculates more carefully than Koehler about where Williams would have read Eastern poetry and philosophy, though even he finally cannot show that Williams would have been any more likely to derive themes of "joy in sorrow" or "being and nonbeing" from Eastern than from Western sources. Similarly, Koehler can only speculate that Williams may have read the Chinese work The Golden Flower or Jung's description of the stages of life; and he unfortunately does not refer to Qian's study, which could have provided support for his own speculations about influence.

Koehler nevertheless reveals an interesting parallel between Williams's concept of the "descent" and Jung's notion that in the second half of our lives we experience "the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning." Koehler remarks that Williams himself considered his poem "The Descent" (from Paterson) the most significant of his career. Koehler relates these lines to a "shift of emphasis from the particular toward the abstract, from the world of reality toward the realm of the imagination" in Williams's poetry. In this phase of his career, Williams is not the poet of "things" grasped in their imagist clarity but a more subjective, romantic poet, as he expressed it, of the "dovegrey, countries of / the mind." Koehler traces this theme through images of the journey as a progress toward a "lover's meeting." His book is an interesting interpretation of the philosophical and didactic dimensions of Williams's late poetry. These dimensions are also examined in Louis L. Martz's Many Gods and Many Voices, which examines the "prophetic voice" within Paterson.

Christine Holbo's "Contraception as Revelation: Objectivity, Authority, and the Politics of Fertility in Kora in Hell" (WCWR 24, i: 1-32) is a fascinating analysis of reproductive politics in early 20th-century America. Although Williams was critical of Margaret Sanger's faith in transforming society through sexual liberation, he was sympathetic to her campaign for birth control and sexual freedom. From its opening line, "Fools have big wombs," Kora in Hell is informed throughout by this politics of fertility. The interplay of politics and poetry is also the subject of Alec Marsh's Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit of Jefferson (Alabama). Marsh traces the roots of the "money question" to American populism and argues that its Jeversonian spirit collided in the poet's work with the spirit of modernism. Whereas Pound was drawn to authoritarian solutions to "the social contradictions of modernization," Williams was influenced by American pragmatism to prefer the "democrat not the autocrat." Marsh argues that economic theory is as crucial to Paterson as it is to The Cantos. In Paterson Williams uses an empirical method to reveal the "conjunctive relations [of ] the corporate age in which we live." Finally, Christopher MacGowan has expertly edited and annotated The Letters of Denise Levertov and William Carlos Williams (New Directions).

v W. H. Auden

Alan Jacobs's What Became of Wystan: Change and Continuity in Auden's Poetry (Arkansas) addresses the radical change in Auden's poetic career when he moved to the United States in 1939 and soon after reaffirmed his belief in Christianity. Although the change provoked astonishment and even outrage from the critics who had thought of Auden as a pioneer of Marxist and Freudian insights, Jacobs tends to exaggerate the confusion that Auden's perceived transformation still causes. Jacobs's title comes from Philip Larkin's 1960 review "What's Become of Wystan?" and his argument is often directed at Randall Jarrell's 1945 essay, "Freud to Paul: The Stages of Auden's Ideology." Since the days of Jarrell and Larkin, the work of Monroe Spears, Anthony Hecht, George W. Bahlke, and Edward Mendelson has cleared away most of the misconceptions for serious readers. Jacobs's exaggeration nevertheless sharpens the focus of his argument that Auden's development was not a "succession of unrelated ideologies" but a closer approach to an ideal of community that Auden possessed from the beginning of his career.

Like Kilcup, Jacobs insists that a poet draws on "multiple traditions" that in themselves change dialectically. Even in Auden's Marxist and Freudian vocabularies, Jacobs finds the kind of questioning and probing that were natural to him after he embraced a Christian tradition. For example, Marxism resembles Christianity in its commitment to universal benevolence toward humanity. Whether Marxist or Christian in his orientation, Auden probed alternative explanations for the failure of Marxism or Christianity to implement this ideal. Jacob's metaphor for Auden's mind is appropriately geological—"a series of clashing tectonic plates" in which the pressures were relieved by poems. The poet "constantly sought to organize and combine various traditions into an intellectual equivalent of a unified field theory." Auden's most persistent polemic was directed at Romanticism because it seemed to encompass the fundamental modern error of deifying the individual consciousness and implying that the poet controls his own imagination and language.

Jacobs argues that the poet's move to the United States allowed him to clear a space between himself and the English admirers who expected the poems and confident social pronouncements that he no longer could give them. After his commitment to Christianity he felt that instead of adjudicating among various traditions that he must choose among them. As Jacobs paraphrases Auden, "Obedience to some authority is inescapable; if we reject the authority of tradition, we must accept the authority of local fashion." This logic leads Auden to reject "vatic poetry" and write a "civic poetry" that seeks to establish, not a monolithic tradition as T. S. Eliot conceived of it, but a local tradition based on a community of writers and thinkers. Here, Jacobs discovers a momentous shift in Au-den's development: "The perfect local understanding which the Auden at the end of 1940 celebrates as an incalculable gift, the Auden of 1933 finds scandalous precisely because it is local and not universal." Jacobs traces the history of Auden's conviction that genuine culture must be local rather than universal and generally defends Auden against those who considered Auden's new position a fatalistic withdrawal from political and social issues.

Jacobs himself is nevertheless critical of Auden's sense of local tradition. In comparing Auden to Wendell Berry (the more urban William Carlos Williams would have provided a more interesting comparison), Jacobs remarks that Auden's life in Ischia, Kirchstetten, and New York obviously lacked a sense of a local physical environment. Auden's community building was a shadowy avair of dedicating books to friends and colleagues. In "Thanksgiving for a Habitati," for example, Auden gives thanks for a home where he can receive guests; but Jacobs thinks that the poem implies that Louis MacNeice is a more welcome guest because "the dead we miss are easier / to talk to." Jacobs concedes to Auden's critics that as the poet grew older he withdrew "into the most local of all cultures, the garden cultivated only in the mind."

Underlying Auden's thinking about community is his distinction between "eros" and "agape," or roughly speaking, human and divine love. The topic leads to Jacobs's frank discussion of how Auden understood the place of his homosexuality in his life as a Christian. (Significantly, his return to Christianity and his falling in love with Chester Kallman occurred within a year of each other.) Auden accepted the judgment that homosexual love was a "perversion," yet he also considered it "a blessing from God to him because it helped to preserve him from the idolatry of erotic love that he might have been subject to had he been heterosexual." Auden drew on two traditions concerning love in Christianity: the Dantean one that the beloved leads the lover to divine love, and the Kierkegaardian one that divine love is the only authentic love, with any others "a series of counterfeits." Consequently, homoerotic eros is essentially no diverent from other forms of eros; indeed, Christianity's condemnation of homosexuality puts the gay man in a better position to see the inadequacy, indeed sinfulness, of anything less than the love of God. Auden's own stance on this issue shows that he had at last committed himself to a tradition that he used not only to criticize others but also himself.

Since Jacobs's book is essentially a defense of Auden's Christian critique of modern culture, it is curious that George Panichas's foreword to Cicero Bruce's W. H. Auden's Moral Imagination (Mellen) claims that contemporary literary criticism has abandoned moral standards and expresses the nihilism of our culture. Bruce's own comprehensive review of Auden criticism contradicts Panichas's claim. Although Bruce relies too much on paraphrase of Auden's works, he presents a suggestive comparison of Auden and Eliot and an interesting reading of "New Year Letter." Norman Page's Auden and Isherwood: The Berlin Years (St. Martin's) corrects the impression left by both writers that "Berlin meant boys." In fact Auden's residence from 1928-29 signaled his reaction away from Oxford aestheticism toward a commitment to addressing the social and political realities of the modern world. Page's lively description of the Berlin of Marlene Dietrich, Fritz Lang, Georg Grosz, Kurt Weil, and Walter Gropius, as well as his account of the pre-Nazi political ferment, suggests the creative excitement Auden felt in those days. Page also reveals the biographical sources of some of Auden's early love poems. The reader who wishes to understand the rich biographical and intellectual texture of Auden's poetry must own W. H. Auden: A Commentary, by John Fuller (Princeton), which doubles the amount of material included in Fuller's Reader's Guide to W. H. Auden (1970). Fuller examines the complete corpus of published poems, plays, and libretti; notes the publishing history of each poem; annotates biographical details, literary sources, poetic forms, and allusions. His aim is a basic understanding of each poem, but he is always alive to the critical issues that the poem raises and sharp in his own judgments. Finally, David Garrett Izzo's Aldous Huxley and W. H. Auden on Language (Locust Hill) argues that in their conception of language the two writers share assumptions about the nature of reality that one finds in Huxley's "perennial philosophy."

vi Wallace Stevens

Stevens figures in three books this year: Douglas Mao's Solid Objects: Modernism and the Test of Production (Princeton), Eleanor Cook's Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford), and Strategies of Difference in Modern Poetry (Fairleigh Dickinson), ed. Pierre Lagayette. The "solid objects" of Mao's book, which also studies Virginia Woolf, Wyndham Lewis, and Ezra Pound, are the physical objects that are so readily dissolved in our subjective impressions. To counter the mind's subjectivity, art is related ("classically," as Lewis would think) to an enduring object; in Pound, even a verbal object should have the solidity of sculpture. Mao observes that the "ur-tableau" of Stevens's poetry is that of "a subject confronting a discrete solid object across a divide of non-knowing and desire," which gives the object the solidity merely of a verbal icon or an imaginary jar in Tennessee. But Mao thinks that too much has been made of Stevens's aestheticism and too little of his respect for "the manifest power of the material world." In part an answer to Frank Lentricchia's characterization of Stevens as a conspicuous consumer of aesthetic objects, Mao's study expresses an important insight into Stevens's conception of the poet's relation to the world. Since Stevens the insurance executive "could manifestly support his family and take a hand in the economic life of his country," Stevens the poet remained "relatively free of the guilt of non-production." Unlike "full-time artists such as Woolf, Lewis, and Pound," he did not need to protest his freedom from aestheticism or his status as a maker of solid objects. Mao gives important readings of "The Comedian as the Letter C" and "The Man with the Blue Guitar" as well as interesting reflections on the modernist sense of a "real" world.

Strategies of Difference also takes aestheticism as its starting point; Stevens's poetry calls attention to its difference from ordinary discourse in its "poeticity." In "Lyrical Variation of Tone in Stevens's Poetry" (pp. 59-73) Alain Suberchicot relates Stevens's aestheticism to his lyricism. In a close reading of "The Idea of Order at Key West," Suberchicot argues that the woman's song is a "mock metamorphosis" and that language is unable to capture the reality of the sea (or in Mao's terms the solid object or reality). Suberchicot argues that Stevens compensates for the failure of language by celebrating "the communal dimension of art, language, and thought." In "Wallace Stevens and Jean Wahl" (pp. 74- 86) Anne Luyat-Moore gives an interesting account of Stevens's friendship with the French poet Jean Wahl and their debate over "reality in poetry." Massimo Bacigalupo's "The Author as Explicator in Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound" (pp. 107-21) compares the two poets' attempts at "getting the world right."

In Against Coercion: Games Poets Play (Stanford) Eleanor Cook shows how poets escape the "inertia of language" through verbal play. In a chapter on "Riddles, Charms, and Fictions in Wallace Stevens" she argues that Stevens's verbal games assert his power over words while paradoxically recognizing how they exercise power over us. Her analysis of allusion and echo in "Wallace Stevens and the King James Bible" is a brilliant explication of an apocalyptic pattern of imagery in "The Auroras of Autumn."

Although it is highly critical of Stevens's racial stereotyping, Lisa DuRose's "Racial Domain and the Imagination of Wallace Stevens" (WSJour 22: 3-22) is a fair and thoughtful assessment of Stevens's stumbling use of racial themes and allusions. B. J. Leggett's "Stevens' 'The Rock' and J. Hillis Miller's Practice of Misreading" (WSJour 22: 99-115) is an important and overdue critique of Miller's "rhetoric of misreading" in his 1976 de-constructive analysis of the poem. The poem is also the subject of C. K. Doreski's "Proustian Closure in Wallace Stevens's 'The Rock' and Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III" (TCL 44: 34-52).

vii Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Robert Spoo's essay "H.D. Prosed" (AmLS 1997, p. 340) warned that H.D. studies have suffered because the poet's critics have neglected careful research and editing and instead interpreted her "in accordance with reigning theoretical categories and ideological tastes." Unfortunately, Spoo's case is substantiated by Bret L. Keeling's "H.D. and 'The Contest': Archaeology of a Sapphic Gaze" (TCL 44: 176-203) and Margaret Bruzelius's "H.D. and Eurydice" (TCL 44: 447-63). Both essays maintain that H.D. rebels, in Keeling's words, against a "male-dominated tradition of 'the gaze'" and creates a poetic vision that rejects a fixed relationship between subject and object. Both critics assert that there is something essentially aggressive in the modality of sight in Western culture and then proceed to make equally large generalizations about canonical writers. Keeling's essay caricatures Petrarch as an originator of this male "gaze" and then speculates about Sappho's "inter-subjective" gaze. Keeling's conclusions about Petrarch are not based on any analysis of his poetry but solely on the speculation of other theorists about the poet's supposedly masculine "foundational strategies." The result is that the article's reading of "The Contest," which is sensitive and interesting in itself, is top-heavy with generalizations about Sappho and Petrarch.

In "H.D. and Eurydice," Ovid rather than Petrarch is the representative of the "masculine-dominated visual economy." Bruzelius speculates that H.D. opposes with "feminist rage . . . a model of artistic inspiration dominated by the all-powerful possessive artistic gaze." This model is the poet Orpheus, whose gaze subjects Eurydice to masculine power and whose loss allows him to become "the artist who is Orpheus." We receive an initial impression of Bruzelius's knowledge of Ovid from her spelling in both the text and "Works Cited" of Ovid's Metamorphoses as Metamorphosis. Nothing in Ovid's account (Met. 10) of Orpheus's sorrow demonstrates, as Bruzelius claims, that Ovid feels a "blithe disregard" for Eurydice or that Orpheus ever "forgets" his loss. Bruzelius seems to think that Eurydice's loss is a gain because it makes Orpheus a great singer, but in all accounts of Orpheus he was a supreme poet before the episode with Eurydice. Bruzelius claims that all of Ovid's descriptions of relationships are "rigidly hierarchized, with the artwork and the artist on top and the object of the gaze mere material for gossip." But the claim does not stand up to analysis of specific narratives. For example, it is unsupported by Bruzelius's reference to Apollo and Cyparissus. When Cyparissus accidentally kills his tame stag, he wishes to grieve forever; and a sympathetic Apollo transforms him into a cypress tree. Naturally, a hierarchized relationship is involved, but how is it rigid and contemptuous? Indeed, Ovid seems to anticipate and refute Bruzelius's critique in his account of Philomela and Procne, in which a male silences a female, but a work of art allows the telling of her story. Like Keeling, Bruzelius finally settles into an interesting analysis of an H.D. poem; but the generalizations about visual culture and classical poets only detract from the analysis.

A welcome exception to Spoo's generalization is Jevrey Twitchell-Waas's "Seaward: H.D.'s Helen in Egypt as a Response to Pound's Cantos" (TCL 44: 464-83). Here the contrast of H.D. with another poet is firmly grounded in a careful understanding of both poets. Pound called his epic a "poem including history," but H.D.'s Helen is "without history, focusing instead on the cultural psyche." Whereas Pound expressly subordinated the feminine when his revision of Canto I diminished the role of Odysseus's mother Anticlea, H.D. gives Helen a voice in the epic of Troy and shows that the maternal sea is the repressed basis of the warrior ethos. The thesis of this article is based on both parallels in the text and an account of the two poets' lifelong friendship. Jane Augustine's annotated edition of H.D.'s The Gift (Florida) represents the high level of scholarship that the poet's work deserves. This complete edition of H.D.'s memoir of her Moravian childhood, written during the London blitz, shows that the "gift" is not merely artistic, which is the impression given by the incomplete New Directions edition. The Gift is a prophetic narrative that explores in its fullest sense the gift of spiritual vision. Finally, Louis L. Martz's valuable account in Many Gods and Many Voices of H.D.'s relationship with D. H. Lawrence reveals Lawrence's presence both in her fiction and in poems such as "Eurydice."

viii E. A. Robinson, Robert Penn Warren, Langston Hughes,Robert Hayden, Louise Bogan

American literature's most neglected major poet is the subject of Alan Trachtenberg's important essay "Democracy and the Poet: Walt Whitman and E. A. Robinson" (MR 38: 267-80). In his formative Harvard years Robinson's opinion was that if Whitman's work "is not poetry, it is something greater than poetry." Yet he was temperamentally almost Whitman's opposite in his use of metrical forms and of a poetic "I" which designates a speaker who is detached from Robinson's ego. The root of the divergence was that Robinson distanced himself from Whitman's or Emerson's belief in a transcendent power that supported their "democratic hopefulness." Trachtenberg's subtle readings of Robinson's "The Clerks" and "The Sheaves" demonstrate the difference between Whitman's expansive faith in democracy and Robinson's chastened "democratic ethos."

Robert Penn Warren's position as a major poet is more assured now that it can rest upon a definitive edition of his poems: The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren, ed. John Burt (LSU). One sees the editor's care and intelligence from his introduction through his remarkably thorough notes. Although Warren had begun to plan a final Collected Poems, this edition is based on texts as they appeared in their original published volumes rather than in their final revised versions. Reconstructing Warren's final intentions for an edition would have involved too much speculation, eliminated much of his early work, and altered the complete sequences of poems as they originally appeared. Using the poems of the original volumes as copy-texts, Burt lists his emendations and his numerous textual variants in separate sections. The result is an edition that records both the history of Warren's revisions and the development of his life's work in poetry. The development of Warren's seminal contributions to literary criticism is seen in Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren: A Literary Correspondence, ed. James A. Grimshaw Jr. (Missouri). The value of this edition as literary history is increased by the personal reminiscences in a foreword by Lewis P. Simpson and an afterword by R. W. B. Lewis.

In "Jazzing It Up: The Be-bop Modernism of Langston Hughes" (Mosaic 31, iv: 61-82) Robert O'Brien Hokanson adds to the discussion of the influence of popular music in Hughes's poetry (AmLS 1996, p. 371) an analysis of the "be-bop" in "Montage of a Dream Deferred." Although this form of jazz is a "texture of fragments, repetitive, nervous, not fully formed," the fragments themselves remain traditional jazz phrases even when a musician such as Charlie Parker bends them out of common recognition. Hokanson argues that Hughes's jazzlike poetry spins variations on traditional themes and forms in a kind of "popular modernism." The essential technique of "Montage" is the play of a variety of voices in a "communal context." Hughes's poetry in the period from 1932 through 1938 is examined in Anthony Dawahare's "Langston Hughes's Radical Poetry and the 'End of Race' " (MELUS 23, iii: 21-42). This period is ignored by anthologists and was obscured by Hughes himself in his autobiography, The Big Sun. Dawahare gives a fascinating account of the national and international politics preceding World War II and the appeal that communism made to African Americans. He shows that Hughes moved away from the idea of "race" as the foundation of a national art and stopped addressing the black masses as passive, oppressed, and "weary." By 1932 in a work such as Scottsboro Limited he was taking "a view of class rather than race alone as the basis for both economic racism and collective struggle." Benjamin Friedlander's "Robert Hayden's Epic of Community" (MELUS 23, iii: 129-43) describes the evect on Hayden of Stephen V. Benét's call in John Brown's Body for a "black-skinned epic, epic with the long black spear." Hayden once thought he might write this epic, and "Middle Passage" (1943; rev. 1962) was written as its opening section. Hayden did not so much "abandon" the epic as revise the assumptions about racial identity on which the poem would have been based. Partly as a result of his Baha'i faith, his emphasis shifted from a "fixed concept of race to a fluid conception of humanity." In his mature works Hayden breaks down the unrealized poem's polarized notions of race and explores the way true communities are created.

Two essays on Louise Bogan are a virtual dialogue on her poetry. In " 'Nearer the Bone': Louise Bogan, Anorexia, and the Political Unconscious of Modernism" (LIT 8: 305-30) Frances Kerr examines "anorexia as an interpretative paradigm" for modernism. Drawing chiefly on Ezra Pound, Kerr notes how Pound's praise of poetic forms that were "nearer to the bone" and of the artistic discipline that controlled and purged the emotions was symptomatic of a culture that "began to associate thinness with beauty, vigor, rationality, and personal discipline." In interesting analyses of poems such as "Feuer-Nacht" and "Medusa" Kerr shows that Bogan's poetry is often a dialogical "conversation about emotions" in which she controls but sometimes merely represses powerful emotions: "Bogan may have used the body of a poem in the way anorexic women use their own flesh." This article contributes to the debate, in works such as Lee Upton's Obsession and Release (AmLS 1996, pp. 365-66), about whether female poets such as Bogan and Moore inhibited the expression of their emotions out of fear of seeming sentimental and weak in a male aesthetic culture.

When I turned to William Kerrigan's "Louise Bogan, Marvell of her Day" (Raritan 18, ii: 63-80), it seemed significant that Kerrigan compared Bogan's poetic corpus to Marvell's "slim body of verse." Kerr would no doubt consider that Kerrigan was praising the masculine qualities of Bogan's work to justify her work according to a male aesthetic. On the other hand, Kerrigan's perceptive comment on certain feminist responses to Bogan seem a relevant criticism of Kerr's article: "an impatient academic movement has . . . denied Bogan her form, her poetics, and her subject matter, canceling her achievement far more effectively than patriarchy ever did." Kerrigan presents a more sympathetic treatment of Bogan's poetry than does Kerr, who reduces Bogan's poetics to a pathological paradigm, because he evaluates her according to the standards that the poet herself set for her work. For example, Kerrigan evaluates Bogan's use of formal verse forms in an age of fragmented free verse without speculating about what such formality may supposedly be concealing. If Bogan is to be accepted on her own terms, her critics should consider Kerrigan's manner of comparing her to poets like Yeats and Marvell and of praising her "triumphant examples of experience transmuted into symbol and form."