A New Theory for American Poetry

Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination

Angus Fletcher, Angus FLETCHER

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN:
  9780674019881
  9780674012011
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674253957
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Amid gloomy forecasts of the decline of the humanities and the death of poetry, Angus Fletcher, a wise and dedicated literary voice, sounds a note of powerful, tempered optimism. He lays out a fresh approach to American poetry at large, the first in several decades, expounding a defense of the art that will resonate well into the new century.

Breaking with the tired habit of treating American poets as the happy or rebellious children of European romanticism, Fletcher uncovers a distinct lineage for American poetry. His point of departure is the fascinating English writer, John Clare; he then centers on the radically American vision expressed by Emerson and Walt Whitman. With Whitman this book insists that "the whole theory and nature of poetry" needs inspiration from science if it is to achieve a truly democratic vista. Drawing variously on Complexity Theory and on fundamentals of art and grammar, Fletcher argues that our finest poetry is nature-based, environmentally shaped, and descriptive in aim, enabling poets like John Ashbery and other contemporaries to discover a mysterious pragmatism.

Intense, resonant, and deeply literary, this account of an American poetics shows how today's consumerist and conformist culture subverts the imagination of a free people. While centering on American vision, the argument extends our horizon, striking a blow against all economically sanctioned attacks upon the finer, stronger human capacities. Poetry, the author maintains, is central to any coherent vision of life.

1

Clare’s Horizon

One day, when he was a small boy, John Clare went looking for the horizon. Throughout his life as poet, and this included his enforced dream-life when he was placed in an insane asylum, he never ceased this journey. Pursuing the horizon without interruption inevitably prohibits landfall, harbor, home, unless one radically redefines these ends to include their own contracted horizons. Landfall is the sailor’s term for reaching a destination, which necessarily interrupts the impossible search for any final edge of what surrounds us. The horizon, however, marks the idea of end as purpose, as a magnetic pull drawing ever forward our wish for “immanent transcendence,” as Husserl paradoxically named the mixing of inward and outward apprehension.¹ This may seem like an unfounded otherworldly dream, but Emerson thought it real enough in his “Circles,” where the fluid and volatile universe asks us to respond in this double way: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.”² The horizon thus formed is of course a primary figure in two senses. It cuts a line between our animate selves and what we see in the distance, physically; but given its mental and theoretical force, horizon also cuts a further line between our physical world and what we see beyond it in a visionary sense. There is perhaps no final horizon of our ideas, although within the sphere of our senses there is that narrower perceptual horizon toward which our senses carry our thoughts like an invisible cargo of selfhood. If finally this ineffable cargo never reaches port, it fails because space at last becomes a modality of time, as Clare’s three great sonnets on a winter flood once showed in one wild scene.³

Rushing madly toward the unbounded, beyond the known, the untamed flood is no longer a placid river of time.

 

—On roars the flood—all restless to be free
Like trouble wandering to eternity

As we shall see throughout this book, horizon may or may not imply transcendent dimensions of thought, but at least for the poets I am considering, horizon always implies description. John Clare’s own autobiographical words best indicate the source of this mutual relationship between self, horizon, and description.⁴

 

I loved this solitary disposition from a boy and felt a curosity to wander about spots where I had never been before I remember one incident of this feeling when I was very young it cost my parents some anxiety it was in summer and I started off in the morning to get rotten sticks from the woods but I had a feeling to wander about the fields and I indulged it. I had often seen the large heath call’d Emmonsales stretching its yellow furze from my eye into unknown solitudes when I went with the mere openers and my curosity urged me to steal an oppertunity to explore it that morning I had imagin’d that the worlds end was at the edge of the orison and that a days journey was able to find it

We might think that young Clare was engaged here in what he called “pursuits after happiness,” the chase after “astonishment,” to use another Clare word, as if he had already imagined his horizon to be the defining limit for the poetry he wrote. It is perhaps more appealing simply to think that the joy of searching for the horizon is the delight of discovery in its extremest form, in its limiting idea of the ultimate boundary of our real and imaginary knowledge. As a child, Leo Tolstoy too would “whirl around to see if he could catch sight of the nothingness” in just such a quest. In his massive biography of Solzhenitsyn, D. M. Thomas mentions Tolstoy’s childhood experimentation with ontology along with similar experiments Solzhenitsyn had tried.⁵ For the two novelists such childish adventures appear connected with what Thomas calls a “mastery of strategy and large-scale movement of forces.” No doubt the onset of the reality principle, which suppresses primary and secondary narcissism, leads to a weakened interest in the mere being of horizons, or emptiness, or the nothing, or even things whose Being is believed to pre-exist their material existence. As child and man Clare made many ontological experiments in Tolstoy’s vein, but few grownups can make this journey, except as an artful intimation of immortality. For Clare, though, the lifespan always collapsed into single moments of immanent transcendence; he was always walking toward the horizon, which maybe he learned to do early, from his flat fenland home.

 

so I went on with my heart full of hopes pleasures and discoverys expecting when I got to the brink of the world that I coud look down like looking into a large pit and see into its secrets the same as I believd I coud see heaven by looking into the water so I eagerly wandered on and rambled among the furze the whole day till I got out of my knowledge when the very wild flowers and birds seemd to forget me and I imagind they were the inhabitants of new countrys the very sun seemd to be a new one and shining in a different quarter of the sky still I felt no fear my wonder seeking happiness had no room for it I was finding new wonders every minute and was walking in a new world often wondering to my self that I had not found the end of the old one the sky still touched the ground in the distance as usual and my childish wisdoms was puzzled in perplexitys

Clare’s horizon defines a conundrum: what can be the enclosing space that does not enclose? Horizon promises neither beginning nor end, but only the growing awareness that by describing a circle one has reached beyond the idea of either beginning or concluding. Philosophers ancient and medieval, for example, Nicholas of Cusa, had long wondered about the nature and extent of the cosmos, reaching well into the modern period of scientific telescopic observation in its most recent developments. When Clare spoke of the new world and the old one, what kind of explorer was he? We can say that as a small boy walking the heath, he was doubly in touch with that felt human universe of which a fragment of Empedocles speaks: “the earth that envelops us, the body.” One recalls embodied childhood. Escaping over and under stone walls and fences, one knew the mingled thrill and fear and strangeness of trying to cheat the too short day of its diurnal limit. Clare was later to recall this fear, discovering in every encounter uncanny powers whose apprehension was to haunt him for the rest of his life. In this he resembles other Romantics, yet his quest differs.

 

night crept on before I had time to fancy the morning was bye the white moth had begun to flutter beneath the bushes the black snail was out upon the grass and the frog was leaping across the rabbit tracks on his evening journeys and the little mice was nimbling about and twittering their little earpiercing song with the hedge cricket whispering the hour of waking spirits was at hand when I knew not which way to turn but chance put me in the right track and when I got into my own fields I did not know them everything seemd so different the church peeping over the woods coud hardly reconcile me

As Joseph Conrad once wrote, “a Landfall may be good or bad.” This particular landfall for the child was significantly ominous, reminding us that in country life the untoward is uncanny, because the voyager on land as upon the sea can hope to encompass the earth with one particular spot of home beckoning to the eye, but there is always danger, and approaching a harbor is the trickiest navigation of all. Landfall, to be successful, requires a clear eye and a clear atmosphere. Perhaps because Clare’s native terrain was so flat and featureless, he seems the voyager for whom Conrad’s dictum is appropriate: “From land to land is the most concise definition of a ship’s earthly fate.”⁶ On the occasion of Clare’s journey to the horizon, landfall and nightfall came together in one dark moment.

 

when I got home I found my parents in the greatest distress and half the vill[a]ge about hunting me one of the wood men in the woods had been killed by the fall of a tree and it servd to strengthen their terrors that some similar accident had befallen myself as they often leave the oaks half cut down till the bark men can come up to pill them which if a wind happens to rise fall down unexpected

The essence of description seems to be that for its poets the objects described are empirically delimited, emotionally powerful sources of the uncanny. Even happiness is like this. Clare would say, “I used to be fondly attached to spots about the fields,” and these spots he would forever revisit. Each revisiting meant a renewal of the familiar in a new light, so that finally he could base descriptions of the unfamiliar and its receding horizon against his intimate knowledge of places to which he was fondly attached. “I never unriddled the mystery,” he once reminisced about another search for fact. In this sense he was precisely unlike a tourist, the paying traveler one suspects of not much liking his own home, hence given to the alienation of touring, unless, of course, like a fanatical nomad, he makes wandering without home the chief aim of life. Again Conrad comes to mind; The Mirror of the Sea recurs constantly to the sailor’s home on land.

The art of poetry has many ways of constraining linguistic flux and holding context at bay, and within these limiting constraints the horizon marks an outer limit of hopes, fears, and dreams. This is sometimes a hard business, calling the ship to reach the impossible edge of a dull, leaden shadow line, as in Conrad’s great story. In Clare’s perhaps unwitting pun, horizon is the orison of a prayer to nature. Continually changing its inscription of the full reach of what we can see, horizon fails of geometric elegance, remaining subject to all the changes of wind and weather and of changing terrain. Horizon is a function of all the obstacles to an observer’s line of sight, and hence only on the ocean or on great open plains does it appear to be an absolute geometrical limit. But even then it is always only a phenomenon of beckoning promise, reminding us that we are encircled by our own ignorance, even as we are protected by the circle of our tentative knowing. Finally, horizon carries us outside of ourselves, yet keeps our feet on the ground. Conrad has a monitory role to play here, because his Captain McWhirr or Captain Giles, among so many others including the young “Conrad” of The Shadow Line, constantly demonstrate that despite all fears we can keep our feet on the ground, even when we are literally at sea. This knowledge leaves us free or at least somewhat more free to deal with the way things are. Besides recognizing the truths hidden in the long annals of natural history and natural science, we can recognize another truth, that poets seem quite unable to express what counts most for humans without invoking the merest things of nature and nature’s various appearances. When I speak in later pages of description, I am speaking about this almost genetic connection between poetry and natural fact.

2

The Argument of Form

When the journey to the outer bounds of perception inspires poetic art, it generates a method rarely formalized as a convention in our own recent literature. Yet such a method and its literary genres were well known in earlier times, especially during the eighteenth century, and in English at least going back to Michael Drayton’s massive poetic survey of his country and its rivers and its history and its heroes, the Poly-Olbion. Robert Arnold Aubin’s thoroughly amusing monograph, coming from a happier time of mere learnedness, Topographical Poetry in XVIII-Century England (1936), gives us a catalogue raisonné of a massive, regular, and finally stultifying output.¹ In 1793, reviewing Wordsworth’s Descriptive Sketches: Taken during a Pedestrian Tour in the Alps, the Monthly Review was bored to death: “More descriptive poetry! Have we not yet enough? Must eternal changes be rung on uplands and lowlands, nodding forests, and brooding clouds, and cells, and dells, and dingles? Yes; more, and yet more: so it is decreed.” Throughout the period the influence of painting on description was strong and reciprocal, largely because James Thomson’s descriptive poem The Seasons (1726–30) cast a wide literary spell over the visual arts. Yet we recognize that walking to the horizon could place the poet in touch with almost anything he passed, and all such phenomena might chaotically call out for their place in the poem, thus subverting the tight forms of classic European poetry.

At this juncture a question of literary history and theory arises, to suggest that almost all the accepted recent criticism of Romantic poetry has mistaken its own ground, nor will it be possible for students of Romantic epiphanies (located most famously in Wordsworth’s “spots of time”) to claim that they are simply going beyond the meaning of the tired outburst in the Monthly Review. The point may be stated sharply, but I think correctly: when Romantic poetry turned to its involvement with nature, it committed itself to deepening, analyzing, but generally idealizing a practice which the study of nature makes virtually unavoidable, namely, the description of the natural scene. No matter how differently and with what stylistic variety individual poets approached the task of description—and the contrast between Wordsworth and John Clare or Wordsworth and Coleridge shows how various the styles could be—the fundamentals of confronting nature remain paramount, and they determine the poetry toward its base, the accounting of elements present in the scene before the poet’s gaze. This whole book is an attempt to show the environmental and poetic logic of this claim. By failing to grasp the role of description as the grounding strategy of the Romantic impulse, criticism has been forced into its overestimation of the problems of authorial consciousness and creativity. Such criticism has always been able to lean on the Coleridgean theory of imagination, as presented in the Biographia Literaria and elsewhere, but it has never dealt seriously with the problem enunciated in the Lyrical Ballads and its famed Preface (with later additions), that is, the role of the common in poetry, as distinct from the commonplace. Marxist approaches involve different but related issues, such as the class struggle, the power of capital investment, the conditions of work, the plight of the proletariat, and so on. But Marxist criticism is not really interested in poetry. Its concern is to advance active change in social conditions, so that when Oliver Goldsmith attacks callous disregard of poverty, in The Deserted Village and elsewhere,² such an awareness is one thing for a Marxist, and another for a theorist of poetry such as myself. We may both be interested in these conditions of poverty, but each from a different angle.

Understanding the common as a function of poetic form and language—the subject of Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads—requires an ecologically detailed accounting for its expression, which is only one of many reasons why a criticism that fails to recognize the descriptive tradition and its influx into the Romantic cannot possibly succeed in thinking through the Platonism of Romantic vision. To pursue the metacritical discussion, however, would be the subject of a book other than the one I have written, although the theorist should see that it hardly needs writing, once he or she grasps the role of environment as what is around, as what is surrounding the poet’s seeing eye. Here the wisdom of the late Isaiah Berlin is much to be esteemed: “we must learn to exaggerate,” he said, if we are to shake the accepted ideas of any large cultural construction.³ Criticism may have suffered the inevitable consequences of its own snobbism, having discovered a respectable way to talk about the Romantic, namely, as High Romanticism. This elevated vision is most difficult to restrain, given the role of the sublime during the period, but at the very least it needs to be moderated and analyzed from the perspective of Low Romanticism.

Description, at first sight, has no internal principle of organization, neither narrative nor dramatic nor lyrical, but follows the scene observed. In theory, other ways to find it would do, but walking on a “pedest...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Clare’s Horizon
• 2 The Argument of Form
• 3 Description
• 4 Ashbery’s Clare
• 5 Diurnal Knowledge
• 6 The Whitman Phrase
• 7 The Environment-Poem
• 8 Waves and the Troping of Poetic Form
• 9 Middle Voice
• 10 Ashbery and the Becoming of the Poem
• 11 Meditating Chaos and Complexity
• 12 “The Long Amazing and Unprecedented Way”
• 13 Coherence
• 14 Precious Idiosyncrasy: An Epilogue
• Notes
• Index