The Poet Resigns: Essays on Poetry in a Difficult Time

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Poetry

208 The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Poetry in his ponderous classic of sociology, Economy and Society, Max Weber tells us a thing or two about the Protestants whose ethic of selfdenial has formed the basis of modern capitalism: The person who lives as a worldly ascetic is a rationalist, not only in the sense that he rationally systematizes his own conduct, but also in his rejection of everything that is ethically irrational, aesthetic, or dependent upon his own emotional reactions to the world and its institutions. The distinctive goal always remains the alert, methodical control of one’s own pattern of life and behavior. (544) The economic payoff for those who embraced these traits was quite significant , often resulting in their rise to positions of surprising prominence given the origins of their creed in a rejection of worldliness. But as every student of sociology knows, the realm of non-popular culture is a kind of economic world turned upside down, where the ordinary rules don’t always apply. In the little world of American poetry, for instance, you can’t expect a whole lot of payoff for embodying such stereotypically Protestant qualities as restraint in expression, emotional reserve, a relentless self-examination of the private conscience, and an individualism tending toward isolation. While in the Weberian economic world such 209 Poetry in a Difficult World qualities lead to great payoffs in terms of economic capital, in the poetry world they actually impede the accumulation of cultural capital in the form of prizes, awards, and widespread critical acclaim. That, at any rate, is the conclusion to which a contemplation of the poetry of Laton Carter, Kenneth Fields, and James McMichael tends to lead us. Carter, Fields, and McMichael all write poetry very much in what one might call a stereotypically Weberian Protestant manner of expression : tending to plain statement, gun-shy when it comes to heated emotion, obsessively self-analytic, wary of gaudy images, suspicious of the irrational, and, in some measure, tending toward individual isolation . Emotional reticence has been on the outs in poetry ever since Robert Lowell shocked his eminently WASP ancestors with Life Studies, and self-analytic individualism has been largely eclipsed since the rise of identity politics and its aesthetics of group affiliation. Plain statement has suffered a few blows, too, first at the hands of the deep image aesthetic , and again during the current triumph of elliptical verse. Perhaps these shifts in taste have been behind the late emergence of Laton Carter, whose remarkable first book went unpublished for eleven years after an early draft served as his MFA thesis. Kenneth Fields and James McMichael have also received few enough of the accolades accorded to American poets: unlike their Stanford classmates, the former poets laureate Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky, Fields and McMichael have both been relatively unrecognized talents. This speaks less of the relative merits of the poets, I think, than of the shape of the American poetic field, and the kinds of poetic virtues it is most prepared to reward. That Fields and McMichael share certain low-key poetic virtues is by no means an accident: both were students of that anachronistically Augustan poet, Yvor Winters. Winters advocated poetry of plain statement , emotional reserve, and relentless examination of the self. His abhorrence of the irrational was legendary, his defense of reason absolute . While poets like Hass and Pinsky learned from Winters and moved on, Fields and McMichael engaged with him more deeply. McMichael’s doctoral dissertation is an application of Wintersian ideas to poets unexamined in Winters’ critical work, and Fields was hand-picked by Winters to be his successor at Stanford—a post Fields holds to this day. 210 The Poet Resigns Laton Carter is too young to have been a student of Winters, but he studied under McMichael at the University of California-Irvine, and seems to have been drawn to McMichael for his more Augustan qualities . All three poets are in some meaningful sense in the tradition of Winters, without being doctrinaire followers, and all three have to some degree been kept at the margins of a poetic field that has never quite been able to appreciate the kind of work they do. This, of course, only gives us all the more reason to take the time to appreciate for their very real, and somewhat unusual, qualities. Max Weber would certainly recognize Laton Carter’s virtues as...