The Line's Eye: Poetic Experience, American Sight (review)

In her introduction to this developmental study of experience through the American lyric, Elisa New states that her purpose is “to reassert the importance of the American poem to our understanding of American culture.” How each of us experiences the world through nature and how that experience is perceived through the “eye” of the poetic line, in effect, creates our culture. Our world, she argues, is virtual and experienced, not propositional or rationalized, as has been historically argued through the philosophical notions about experience codified by Ralph Waldo Emerson, William James, and John Dewey.

New grounds her analysis of American poetry in critical studies and philosophical writings by Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay Audubon, and Henry David Thoreau. Through these writers she shows the existence of a unified vision and pattern of expression from the Puritans to contemporary literature. In succeeding chapters, she builds from a foundation of ethics and aesthetics to establish common ground in the poets Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore.

Using the philosophical views of traditional American thinkers, the author shows that such topics as knowledge, beauty, design, and innocence have long been used to delineate experience. What is different about her analysis of the American poem is her claim for a direct link in notions of the self from Edwards and Emerson to Frost and Moore. The philosophical traditions found in Dewey and James have contemporary counterparts in Dickinson’s and Williams’s use of the individual ego to order experience.

Besides providing philosophical and cultural background for the American lyric, New uses a number of poems to discuss poetic experience. Frost and Williams, in particular, are the heirs to the values of nature established by Edwards, Emerson, Dewey, and Audubon, but in a rueful, traumatic way. It is Williams’s poetry (especially “Children’s Games,” “The Parable of the Blind,” and the unfinished Paterson) that chronicles the moribund aspects of American culture, divorcing the individual from an Edenic world and delineating the negative aspects of experience. Frost’s poetry (especially “The Black Cottage,” “Mending Wall,” “Paul’s Wife,” and the New England narrative poems) shows the individual voice reacting to a fallen world. Still, Frost and Williams affirm the openness of American experience and show us, as New demonstrates in her richly detailed philosophical study on poetic language, the vitality of new forms and new ways of expressing ourselves.