One Song, One Bridge of Fire!: Alvin Feinman’s Poetry

I first met Alvin Feinman in September 1951, the day before I encountered another remarkable young man who also became a lifelong friend, Angus Fletcher. Alvin was twenty-two, a year older than we were, and a graduate student in philosophy at Yale, where Angus and I were students of literature. Alvin, to my lasting sorrow, died in 1998. Of my closest friends I am fortunate still to have Angus, having lost Alvin, Archie Ammons, and John Hollander, three superb poets and majestic intellects.

I am no poet; I cannot forget. Many of my friends are or were poets: Mark Strand, a recent loss; Robert Penn Warren, and happily still with us, William Merwin, John Ashbery, Jay Wright; and younger figures: Rosanna Warren, Henri Cole, Martha Serpas, Peter Cole.

Alvin at twenty-two was already a poet of astonishing individuation: the emergence of voice in him clarified as rapidly as it had in Rimbaud and Hart Crane. I recall reading the first of his three “Relic” poems sometime in October 1951:

I will see her standhalf a step back of the edge of some high placeor at a leafless tree in some city parkor seated with her knees toward me and her face turned towardthe window

And always the tips of the fingers of both her handswill pull or twist at a handkerchieflike lovely dead birds at a living thingtrying to work apart something exquisitely, unreasonably joined.

A month later Alvin introduced me to this beautiful, intense young woman in New York. Though lovers, she and my friend seemed remote from one another. I watched her hands in constant motion tugging at a handkerchief and wondered silently at the dispassionate tone of the eight-line lyric so precisely called “Relic.”

Reciting the poem to myself these 60 years I have come to see its relationship to Eliot’s farewell to Emily Hale:

La Figlia Che Piange

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—Lean on a garden urn—Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—Fling them to the ground and turnWith a fugitive resentment in your eyes:But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

The dominant influences upon Feinman’s poetry were Hart Crane, Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Paul Valéry, Rimbaud, Georg Trakl, and the earlier Rilke. I have listed them in the order of their importance in helping form his style and stance. Feinman’s prime precursor was Hart Crane and like the poet of White Buildings and The Bridge, my friend began with a volume of difficult yet frequently radiant lyrics. Unlike Crane, Feinman was not able to go on to the larger form of a visionary romance and his inability to continue doomed his remarkable volume to neglect.

Returning to Preambles and Other Poems floods me with memories. I had taken the little book to my editor at the Oxford University Press, the late Whitney Blake, and urged him to publish it though not even a single poem had appeared in a magazine. Whitney discerned the high value of Alvin’s poetry and agreed to publish it if I could provide endorsements by other poets and critics. Conrad Aiken, Allen Tate, R. W. B. Lewis, John Hollander, and Geoffrey Hartman joined me in support of the new poet. Hartman made a memorable comment:

Thought thinks its ruin here without widening speculation. It finds what will not suffice. … Yet Feinman’s poetry performs so total an epoché on “discursions fated and inept” that only the stumble toward a preamble is left. For so rigorous a sensibility, writing verse must be like crossing a threshold guarded by demons …

The French critic Marcel Raymond characterized Paul Valéry’s The Young Fawn and The Marine Cemetery as a ceaseless agon between absolute consciousness and the acceptance of natural mutability:

In them, a struggle takes place between two contrary attitudes: the pure (absolute) attitude, that of consciousness entrenching itself in its isolation, and the opposite, or impure attitude, that of...