The Stranger in the Metropolis: Urban Identities in the Poetry of Charles Reznikoff

The Stranger in the Metropolis 43 The Stranger in the Metropolis: Urban Identities in the Poetry of Charles Reznikoff RanenOmer Ranen Orner is pursuing his Ph.D. in Jewish American literature at the University of Notre Dame, where he is investigating the tension between Zionist and Diasporist-founded notions ofJewish American identity and its consequences for Jewish poets and writers. His recent articles include "Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Apocalypse" and "'It is I who have been defending a religion called Judaism': The T. S. Eliot and Horace M. Kallen Correspondence." In this essay I will explore two perspectives on modem life that are frequently juxtaposed in Charles Reznikoffs city poems: his evaluation of the heterogeneous urban scene itself, and the presence of strangers in their relation to the poet's moral values and preoccupation with the source of human identity. Both frameworks have something vital to tell us about Reznikoffs poetry and his interest in an ethical relation with alterity. I intend to demonstrate that Reznikoffs ethical framework reflects the specificity of his experience in the American city and his interpretation of its unique promise and limitations. Thus, it should also be useful to contrast his urban poetics with that ofanother poet-William Carlos Williams-who also wrote city poems throughout the 1920s and, like Reznikoff, was early linked to the "Objectivists." Charles Reznikoffs interest in the isolation of the other derives from complex emotional, psychological, and historical circumstances that are exhibited in his awareness of a wide variety of cultural and individual struggles in ways that surpass William Carlos Williams' focus on degradation and the failure of the city to measure up to his personal vision. Reznikoffs city verse strives to apprehend the social significance of individual faces among the anonymous urban masses. This essay will trace some of the specific ways that Reznikoffs poetry encourages us to empathize and have humane contact with the other without freezing the other into an alienated position. 1 One ofthe important facets of Charles Reznikoffs poetry that has not yet received the critical attention it warrants is his resistance to a certain convention of modernism that sees the city exclusively in its alienating and threatening guise. Since the time of 44 SHOFAR Fall 1997 Vol. 16, No. I Wordsworth, poets have often assigned various symptoms of anarchy and degradationI to the modem city, but few have sought to immerse themselves in its chaos for the sake of evaluating reality to the degree that Reznikoff devoted himself in his city verse. In his observations ofurbanism, Reznikoff steers away from many enduring truisms about the city, such as the romantic platitude on the fall from rural harmony into the discord of the metropolis; a Jewish poet, Reznikoff exhibits a certain skepticism toward rural or pastoral sentiments. This does not mean that he is blind to the alienating aspects of city life, but simply that as a city dweller (and as a student of medieval life) he is not caught up in measuring the present city against some historical or mythical ideal. On IFar from being mere priests ofnature, poets from early times have been devoted to the city and have left us a record of their numerous attempts to crystallize the "soul" of the city, albeit in representations that often fail to account for its common life. From the time of Virgil's Georgics, wherein Rome is the moral antithesis of rural life and up through Johnson's eighteenth-century Juvenalian .satire (London) and through the late Victorians, city poetry has invoked abstract archetypes such as Babel, Byzantium, Jerusalem or Augustine's City of God. Nineteenth-century English poets overwhelmingly limited their responses to the city to binary oppositions of the real versus the ideal city, a celestial city versus the industrial malaise of their time. In seeking a memorable image for the frightening physicality of London, Wordsworth describes it as a "monstrous ant-hill." Even the beguilingly serene and majestic cityscape of the sonnet "Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, Sept. 3, 1802" is possible only because the city's unspoken energies are asleep. It is significant that Wordsworth exaggerated the virtue of those whose characters had been shaped by benevolent Nature to such a...