Poetry: 1900 to the 1940s

i General Studies

Two works this year survey enough ground to be accounted general studies. By far the more useful of these is Bonnie Costello's Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World (Cornell). Costello examines the work of American painter Joseph Cornell, best known for his three-dimensional collages, and three poets: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Elizabeth Bishop. The idea of using the concept of the "still life" as a way into the poetry seems initially promising, since all three were keenly interested in the visual arts—Williams and Bishop even tried their hands at painting. Rather quickly, however, it becomes evident that Costello wants still life to mean much more than an art historian would allow. According to this new definition, still life in poetry can include landscapes and things in motion: it swells; it contains multitudes. Costello has somewhat of a warrant for expanding the term so broadly because she argues that Stevens, Williams, and Bishop grew discontented with a conception of the lyric as a private, isolated artifact. They reached out to the world around them in an attempt to draw the planet to the table. Costello notes that this dissatisfaction with the realm of the private stands out most clearly in the 1930s, when contemporary events appeared to make the ivory tower of art antiquated and untenable. In her reading the three poets increasingly sought ways to invoke the larger world with all its complications in their "still life" compositions. As she notes in her introduction, "For both Stevens and Williams, the artist's absorption in local, creative moments, which involve a certain withdrawal from public politics, can offer a 'solvent' to a world frequented by war and teach it to be 'at one with itself' in the lively integrity of its parts." It turns out, however, that the ambition of making the parts of the world happily consort with one another often falls short of accomplishment, which, not surprisingly, leaves Stevens "vexed, uneasy." Williams too comes to resemble Sisyphus in his stubborn determination to someday resolve the "dialectic between freedom and constraint, chaos and order." Bishop seems to have managed better, but even so, the accomplishment of reconciling contraries inevitably means that some degree of "pain" becomes part of her mix. Because Costello has so amplified the use of still life, one wonders why these poets are singled out, when other clearly significant figures, including Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Robert Frost, produced work that also fits her definition. (Costello specifically rules out the Objectivist poets as candidates for examination through the "still life" critical lens, but this reservation is based, I think, on a misunderstanding of Objectivist conceptions of the poem.)

Costello's approach could potentially include so many diverse poems by Stevens, Williams, and Bishop that the principle of selection here is rather catholic. One sometimes suspects that she has invoked it as an excuse for talking about poems that intrigue her. Be that as it may, she talks about them with a fine eye for detail and an equally fine sense of how the poets differ or agree in their approaches; at its best her argument presents a conversation among the poems of the three figures, making for strikingly illuminating cross-references. This is not to say that the study covers all bases: for Costello poems are mostly made of ideas, especially ideas about culture and aesthetics, and she nods only infrequently to the materiality of verse. One also wonders if the effort she sees the poets engaged in is ultimately an exercise in aesthetic futility. If they seek to invigorate still life with pieces of the larger, chaotically contingent world, are not the poems so produced inevitably fractured and full of intractable elements? Costello nevertheless affirms that the poets triumphed, their work furnishing multiple examples of "the will fluently ordering in its small world the scattered or broken parts of a larger one"—even if her study indicates that the truly intriguing poems in the "still life" mode are the ones in which fluent ordering is most elusive.

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