American Poetry Now: Making Room for the Weather

American Poetry Now: Making Roomforthe Weather Charles Altieri.Enlarging the Temple: .Ve\\' Directions in American Poetry during rheJ96Us. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press.1979.258pp. PaulA.Bove.Destructil'e Poetics: Heideggerand Modern American Poet1J. New York:Columbia University Press. 1975.1980. 304 +xxpp. RobertK.Martin. The Homosexual Tradition in AmericanPoen:I'. Austin: University of Texas Press. 1979. 259+ xxpp. JeromeMazzaro. Postmodern American Poet,:\'. Urbana:University of Illinois Press. 1980. 203 +xipp. CharlesMolesworth. The Fierce Embrace: A Study of Contempora1:I'American Poet,:r. Columbia:University of Missouri Press, 1979. 214+X pp. Robert Kraetsch Weare now in the process of retelling the story of Modern. It is a necessary revisionof history and canon and poetics that allows, that will allow, other poetstocome after. The magnificent telling of Modern by Pound, the success ofthe early twentieth-century poets like Pound himself and Eliot and Yeats, thesupporting cast of critics like Hugh Kenner and Northrop Frye- all these forcesconspired to shape and then to close Modern, to complete the period, evento complete literature. There were of course poets even then who fit the story uneasily: Williams, Stevens,Stein, Zukofsky. And a generation of poets, epitomized by the career of Robert Lowell, lived uneasily between two worlds. But only in the past fewyears have young critics of American poetry of this century begun to revise thestory toward a new openness of possibility. I have at hand five such studies. In some ways the first task has been that of naming a generation that came afterthe great Moderns. Charles Molesworth, in The Fierce Embrace, begins witha premise that will lead him to just this naming act: Thisbook's main assumption ...holds that American poetry since the Second World Warhas grownincreasingly immersive in its strategy. abandoning the defensiveirony that waslargely prevalentin the wakeof the modernist era. This shift to a poetry of immersion-a rhetorical strategy.an aesthetic disposition. and an emotional need-entails an embrace not only ofthe rawandchaotic energiesof contemporary life.but alsoof the interior lifeof individualsubjects. thesingular voices that are very much a part of our literature. Ip. ix) Canadian Review of American Studies. Volume 14. Number 2. Summer 1983.219-23 220 Robert Kraetsch Molesworth's strategy is to move from this premise to the figure of Theodore Roethke; for Molesworth it is Raethke who stands against the Moderns and establishes the possibility of a new mode. The Lost Son (1948) appeared ata time when ;'Notes toward a Supreme Fiction" was only a few years old, The Pisan Cantos was recently released, Eliot was still at work on his Four Quartets. Roethke, in his personal battle with the idea of imitation, struck on the modes that ··werelater to dominate contemporary poetry: confessionalism, neosurrealism, deep images,, (p. 23). This interpretation of literary history leads Molesworth to illuminating analyses of Lowell,Ginsberg, O'Hara, Kinnell and Bly, and to less useful comments on Philip Levine and John Ashbery. The radical retreat into versions of the confessional poem, in Molesworth's reading, enabled contemporary poets gradually to free themselves from a position of defensive irony. And while the radical assumptions rather abruptly became commonplace, they were essential to a reopening of the tradition, a release from ··the failure of moral energy" of the modernists, into a search not merely for new forms but into (quoting from Gary Snyder) "a totally new approach to the very idea of form" (p. 21). Molesworth isa careful, demanding reader of poetry. His asides on magazine publishing in contemporary America are an important bonus in the book. Like other contemporary critics and poets, he points to the appearance of Donald Allen's anthology, The New American Poet,)' (1960), as if it might be considered a literary parallel to the appearance of Lyrical Ballads. And, in one of his most fascinating asides, he speculates that it was Rimbaud who established our interest in metaphors for the poet rather than for the poem; the notions of poet as "voyager,madman, shaman, aesthete, and so on" (p. 139) moved our interest away from the poem to the poef s career. But the strength of this fine book remains in its focus on the way in which contemporary confessional poetry inverted the nineteenth-century...