This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in American Poetry

De rerum natura: epic's lyric absolute

DE RERUM NATURA: E P I C S L Y R I C A B S O L U T E 149 distaste for itself. When, in other words, do our own covert cannibalexertions stand fully disclosed as the complicitous reserve on which our sense of bounty abounds?—"To unmean with moaning, / adamant,/ gutteral gist inexhaustibly / ancestral toitself?" Tellus old earth whose houses are perched like 'the language of the birds' / giants of genocide slice the shadowsto species suicide." William Carlos Williams,combing the century's calamities for solace, finds it intact in this grim extremity, recalling theJew in the pit among his fellows when the indifferentchap with the machine gun was spraying the heap he had not yet been hit but smiled comforting his companions De rerum natura: epic's lyric absolute As Europe succumbs to conflagration in 1940, Kenneth Rexroth, on the California coast, finds himselfwriting . . . this poem Of the phoenix and the tortoise— Of what survives and whatperishes, And how, of the fall of history And waste of fact—on the crumbling Edge of a ruined polity That washes away in an ocean Whose shores are all washing into death. Even asthe sea subsides "To a massive,uneasy torpor," the "Fragments of its inexhaustible / Life litter the shingle, sea hares, / Broken starfish." Rexroth imagines the corpse of aJapanese sailor "bumping / In a snarl of kelp in a tidepool"; IJO T H I S C O M P O S T And, out of his drained grey flesh, he Watches me with open hard eyes Like small indestructible animals— Me—who stand here on the edge of death, Seeking the continuity, The germ plasm, of history, The epic's lyric absolute. The emblematic features of Rexroth's poem, the phoenix and the tortoise, are versions of history. In the dystopic vision the State is "the organization / Of the evil instincts of mankind"; "Its goal is the achievement / Ofthe completely atomic / Individual andthe pure / Commodity relationship— / The windowless monad sustained / By Providence." In the perpetuum mobile of administered ecstasy, "The assumption of history / Is that the primary vehicle / Of social memory is the State," obscuring the broader perspective of a living cosmos, The vast onion of the actual: The universe, the galaxy, the solar system, and the earth, And life, and human life, and men's Relationships, and men, and each man ... History seeping from capsule To capsule, from periphery To center, and outward again ... The sparkling quanta of events, The pulsing wave motion of value ... (Rexroth's ellipses) Fronting calamity on the Pacific rim, Rexroth, likeJeffers a few years earlier, turns to Epicurean atomism to account for the unaccountable marvel of such pulsation . Endurance, novelty, and simple Occurrence—and here I am, a node In a context of disasters, Still struggling with the old question, Often and elaborately begged. The atoms of Lucretius still, Falling, inexplicablyswerve. DE RERUM N A T U R A : E P I C S L Y R I C A B S O L U T E IJI And the generation that purposed To control history vanishes In its own apotheosis Of calamity,unable To explain why anything Should happen at all. One more Spring, and after the bees go, The soft moths stagger in the firelight; And silent, vertiginous, sliding, The great owls hunt low in the air; And the dwarf owls speak at their burrows. We walk under setting Orion, Once more in the dim boom of the sea ... Rexroth, like Lucretius, finds that "the thing that falls away is myself." The fall is the unfolding—making explicit an implicated universe—of Democritus's shower of atoms, to which Lucretius adds dinamen atomorum, the "gentle bias," Coleridge calls it.The dinamen isthe skipofthe needle, the bump ofthe table that tumbles the card house, the incalculable diversion, detour (like Duchamp's "delay in glass"— its shattered accidence preserved), deviation like that which style brings to a text. Wallace Stevens's style seems too consistently sonorous to suggest in itself a swerve, but as "gentle bias" it does seem so inclined. Stevens may not have been an enthusiast of Lucretius, but George Santayana's Three Philosophical Poets (1910) would have at least placed the Roman poet in the immediate proximity of Dante and Goethe for him, a supreme altitude for the Connecticut poet to contemplate as he approached his own tropic suasions in Harmonium and "The Comedian as the Letter C...