The Plural of Us

Poetry and Community in Auden and Others

Bonnie Costello

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780691202907, 9780691172811
• eBook ISBN: 9781400887873
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Plural of Us is the first book to focus on the poet's use of the first-person plural voice—poetry's "we." Closely exploring the work of W. H. Auden, Bonnie Costello uncovers the trove of thought and feeling carried in this small word. While lyric has long been associated with inwardness and a voice saying "I," "we" has hardly been noticed, even though it has appeared throughout the history of poetry. Reading for this pronoun in its variety and ambiguity, Costello explores the communal function of poetry—the reasons, risks, and rewards of the first-person plural.

Costello adopts a taxonomic approach to her subject, considering "we" from its most constricted to its fully unbounded forms. She also takes a historical perspective, following Auden's interest in the full range of "the human pluralities" in a time of particular pressure for and against the collective. Costello offers new readings as she tracks his changing approach to voice in democracy. Examples from many other poets—including Walt Whitman, T. S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, and Wallace Stevens—arise throughout the book, and the final chapter offers a consideration of how contemporary writers find form for what George Oppen called "the meaning of being numerous."

Connecting insights to philosophy of language and to recent work in concepts of community, The Plural of Us shows how poetry raises vital questions—literary and social—about how we speak of our togetherness.

1

Speaking of Us

POETRY IS THE EXPRESSION of individuals, prompted by experience and imagination to record their feelings, their ideas, their fears and desires. It also springs from culture and community. The poet presumes, or at least hopes, that his expression speaks for others, that what he feels and thinks is not merely personal but shared, representative, even universal. And the thoughts and aspirations the poet presents from his individual perspective are not only those of the private and inward self. They may concern his interpersonal and social relations, or his participation in the common, which is established in his address to the reader. How the poet makes use of the first-person plural may tell us a lot about how he imagines his intimate, social, and artistic relations. “We” can be partisan, tribal, authoritarian, and even demagogic. Yet many of our greatest poets have often meant by “we” “not the collective singular We of tradition” but rather an open-ended “You-and-I united by a common truth” or at least together “seeking truth to which we shall both be compelled to assent”; they have said “we” to create community rather than to divide groups or impose majority.¹

As Walt Whitman draws to a close his long poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” he poses a set of rhetorical questions. “We understand then, do we not? / What I promis’d without mentioning it, have you not accepted?”² How many are included in this “we”—one or a multitude? Does Whitman speak as an intimate or as an orator? Is the reader included in this group, or is she overhearing an address to someone else? Is the assent here merely intellectual and emotional, or is it also implicitly political? With Whitman the reader has richly and dialectically imagined the meaning of “we.” It remains interrogative, collaborative, improvisatory, invitational, and above all in the optative mood. As a reader, I meet Whitman’s vision on my own terms, not by the assent of the group or the necessity of logic. Whitman’s closing questions emerge from the acknowledgment of deep paradoxes concerning the one and the many—paradoxes of democracy and of poetry. At the very end of “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Whitman’s “we” is no longer a potential between a speaker and those he addresses but a congregation, turned to the physical world’s “dumb beautiful ministers”: “We fathom you not—we love you.”³ The collective subject in these lines is not so much presumed as brought about by the poem, and in a way this “we” is the very thing “promised without mentioning it.” This “we,” a relation emerging in the constant shuttle of “I” and “you,” is indeterminate and open, public and yet private, many and few, of the mind and of the body. Whitman’s promise of democratic community is linked to the plurality of readers and is a thing always in the making, not something fixed and imposed. Whitman’s “we” is agglomerated but also individuated; it is reciprocal and engaged, with indefinite edges and continuously varying interlocutors, infinite but not a totality. In speaking of “us,” Whitman foregrounds the nuanced social meanings and varied tonalities of the first-person plural. He also highlights its performative nature. It makes something happen. Whitman opened up a pronominal poetics that has become a hallmark of recent American poetry. However, as Whitman well knew, the relation of this imaginary community and literary-symbolic effect to a realizable social presence is ambiguous and indeterminate.

W. R. Johnson celebrated Whitman as a rare “choral” voice in modern lyric. Even Whitman’s “I,” he argues, is really a “we” since it speaks of a culture’s aspirations. Whitman’s choral lyric, Johnson avers, is not a reflection of the realities of America but a vision of American potential: “What choral poets do is not so much to state the fact of good community as to imagine the possibility of good community.”⁴ Separating the man from the art, and selective in his choice of texts, Johnson finds this drive toward communitas even in Pound, whose Cantos, he argues, “exists only in potential,” as a collaboration with each reader. In the Pisan Cantos especially, in his anguish and humility, “muttering only to himself, suddenly and amazingly he begins at last to talk to all of us, for all of us,” “about the survival of communitas, in its utter ruin.”⁵ For Johnson, modern choral lyric speaks for a potentiality that it also helps realize, at least in the virtual world of reading.

Poetry has its own special language, but it is built up from, and often imitates, ordinary language and draws out implications of our usage, thus helping us reflect on speech in our public and private lives. While this is a study focused entirely on poetry (and the “we” as narrative voice in fiction produces quite different effects), some preliminary reflection on the perils and controversies surrounding common usage of the first-person plural helps frame the discussion. We allow a great deal of license to the literary imagination, but in public speeches, journalism, or politics, for instance, this same invocation of an indeterminate “we” can sound hollow, coercive, or presumptuous. Does the orator or writer presume to speak for me? Does “we” have any real antecedent for an unbounded, diverse populace? This is a foundational question in American history, one that resonates throughout in the struggles of balance or alignment between I and We, Us and Them. Patrick Henry protested in response to the Philadelphia Convention: “What right had they to say ‘we, the People?’ . . . who authorized them to speak the language of We, the People?’”⁶ One might argue that here too was potential, a community posited rather than represented, something envisioned more than authorized; but our founding documents have real-world consequences fundamentally different from literary contracts with unknown readers. Patrick Henry’s question resounds through American political and social debate, right through to red-hot (and very blue) patriot Molly Ivins, who famously quipped in response to the promiscuous use of “we” in economic journalism: “We is not me or a lot of us.” Ivins is provoked by a reporter’s inclusion of all of us as beneficiaries of financial gain: “Who you callin’ ‘we,’ white man?”⁷ She would be surprised to find any company with Ayn Rand, but radical individualism has its own objections to the first-person plural: “The word ‘We’ is as lime poured over men, which sets and hardens to stone, and crushes all beneath it.”⁸ The point is that even at contrasting poles of political orientation, this pronoun raises hackles. But if the presumed inclusiveness of “we” is inconsiderate, hegemonic, or dystopic in some contexts, it is a democratic imperative in others. President Obama quoted himself and others in Selma when he said, “The single most powerful word in our democracy is the word ‘We.’ We the People. We Shall Overcome. Yes We Can. It is owned by no one. It belongs to everyone.”⁹ A fragmented society, a society of “us” and “them,” turns away, or looks on in disdain, at the suffering of minorities. But if “we” includes all “the people” of America, then the degraded condition of some reflects on everyone. For James Baldwin in 1960, Harlem becomes, not a place apart, but a measure of who we are. He finds rhetorical power in the grammatical ambiguity of the first-person plural through a small modifying clause that closes his essay “Fifth Avenue, Uptown.” Baldwin implicitly calls Americans to honor the promise of inclusiveness: “Walk through the streets of Harlem,” Baldwin invites his reader, “and see what we, this nation, have become.” For better or worse, “we” is a powerful communicative tool, perhaps the quintessential pronoun of oratory, if also of intimacy. Poetry reflects and sometimes seeks to alter the language we use, publicly and privately, and the meanings we form. The study of literature, especially poetry, can raise our awareness of the force and risk of pronouns. Literature does not always want to serve an ameliorative function, nor should it. But some poetry seeks to harness the rhetorical power of the first-person plural to posit and promote community, often where there is social fragmentation. It can also alert us, intentionally or not, to the pronoun’s dangers and exclusions, probing the implications of our usage and making us attentive to what we really mean when we say “we.”

Poetry, more than any other genre, when it wrestles with political and ethical concerns, does so within the arena of language. Though linguists seldom venture into the special realm of literature, their questions and insights about the function of pronouns help foreground the opportunities that poets exploit. Whatever the historical setting, “we” is an ambiguous pronoun in English. Just as each of us is connected to many overlapping and conflicting units and communities, so we mean lots of things by “we,” depending on context. “We” is an indexical pronoun, a deictic floater like “here” and “now.” There is of course a referential meaning of sorts—more like a kind of aura around the word. It means the speaker (or a character the speaker is pretending to be) and at least one other. But that formula doesn’t get us very far. Some languages distinguish “we” that includes the listener and “we” that does not, but English is not among them.¹⁰ “We” in English can be bounded or unbounded. First-person plural might better be called first-person plus, where the second term of the equation I + X = We needs to be solved. And the equation would also perhaps involve two forms, I + X-hearer = We, or I + X + hearer = We. “We” is sometimes weighted plural (an assemblage of individuated I’s) and sometimes singular (a collective or corporate unit with a uniform identity or solidity). And perhaps most important for the lyric and its textual subjectivities, the “I” behind the “We” may be strongly present, almost inaudible, or without iteration. But as linguists interested in relevance theory have pointed out, speech is rarely explicit—it depends on the inferences listeners make, based on their expectations. For all the maxims of cooperative efficiency in conversation (quality, quantity, relation, manner) outlined by Paul Grice in “Logic and Conversation,” implication in the use of the first-person plural can be imprecise: we often don’t really know exactly what others are saying when they say “we.” Exclusions and inclusions are often unconscious, as Ivins and Baldwin are pointing out. The boundaries are at times unclear even to the speaker, which is why the ambiguity of deictic words works in a joke or a poem—two places where ambiguity has value. “We” is often hard to disambiguate, and readers and listeners tolerate a large area of confusion or uncertainty about the identity of “we” in a given sentence. Poetry can exploit that ambiguity to show us something about what it means to be or to say “we,” and to stretch and revise that meaning.

“We” can register many different forms of togetherness. It can be royal or communal, universal or parochial, intimate or public, personal or impersonal, inclusive or exclusive, majestic, universal, or corporate, intellectual or social. But ambiguity is a virtue in poetry, if also sometimes a problem. Gertrude Stein in “Poetry and Grammar” preferred pronouns to nouns precisely because they indicate but do not fix identity, eliding past conceptions that attach to names, allowing for more open and immediate thought: “Pronouns represent some one but they are not its or his name. In not being his or its or her name they already have a greater possibility of being something than if they were as a noun is the name of anything.”¹¹

The freedom that Stein identifies is a central motivation of many poets as they play with pronouns. Poetry is not just an imitation of the world, but in creating its own world of interactions, it sometimes models values and possibilities occluded in social reality. This need not be a didactic project. As Auden himself said, “poetry makes nothing happen.” But he went on in the same poem to say that poetry is “a way of happening, a mouth.”¹² I follow him there in the sense that poetry performs and voices our deepest human relations. Poetry also exploits the oratorical power of “we”—as exhortation, as seduction, as tribal affiliation. My interest is not in presenting poetry as ethically exemplary—the faults of poets are the faults of us all. Rather, I am interested in how the poetry of Auden and others, in their use of the first-person plural, raises rhetorical and ethical problems and possibilities—implicitly and explicitly, inadvertently and deliberately.

Poets may not be the unacknowledged legislators of the world (Auden frequently expressed his disdain for Shelley’s famous declaration), but many are certainly interested in the governance of the tongue. One of the functions of poetry is to play us back to ourselves, and it can test those little function words that shape our thought. Poetry, though we mostly associate it with “I,” speaks often of or as “we,” and not only the “we” (“us,” “our”) of private relations, since poetry’s roots are partly in oratory. Yet criticism about the lyric has mostly overlooked poets’ uses of the first-person plural, attending instead to “I” and “You.” Lyric has been defined primarily as the genre of the individual, and hence of the first-person singular, though contemporary critics have turned to its social dimension in their attention to lyric address.¹³ An I/You address often brings a “we” into being, both grammatically and in a more dramatic sense, and many poets keep the “I” and “You” audible even in speaking for the group. But it would be a mistake, I think, to treat the first-person plural simply as a byproduct of lyric address. For one thing, “we” in poetry often arises without a clear situation of address. And since a collective pronoun exists for that meeting of I and You, it would seem to point to something distinct, something at least potentially more than or different from the sum of its parts.

Wallace Stevens invokes this emergent unit in his “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” which is not final but recurrent in its sense of ultimate arrival, in which “we collect ourselves, / Out of all the indifferences, into one thing” where “we forget each other and ourselves.” Stevens’s pronoun is moving in its ambiguity, linking the private experience of poetic thought (the lovers’ space of a “room” and the narrower individual’s space of “the mind” and imagination) with the social experience of love and potential community.¹⁴ Is this the usurpation of everything by a single mind, a form of the royal we? Such a reading would link Stevens back to Matthew Arnold’s ideal where man’s soul is “centered in majestic unity.”¹⁵ Or is Stevens suggesting a loss of self in the collective “one thing” that, for the poem, exists externally and potentially in “the evening air” and as an optative “world imagined”? “We say,” “out of,” and other phrases hover between these meanings and others. This intimate encounter within the space of literature, this textual “we” with its unlocalized “here,” would seem to have little to do with actual social relations—might even appear antagonistic toward the social. But it can posit connections that history has restricted, and it can imagine a reality—a future—less fragmented than the one we live in. As Holocaust survivor Paul Celan observed, echoing the persecuted Russian poet Osip Mandelstam’s “To the Addressee,” a poem “can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense . . . are under way: they are making toward something.”¹⁶ The “you” of poetry, then, is propulsive, making its way toward “we,” acknowledging a distance from the other but wishing for a union. Poems can make “we” happen in fictive or readerly time, even if it is blocked in history.¹⁷ In Celan’s beautiful poem “In Memoriam Paul Eluard,” for instance, he recalls the French poet’s St. Peter-like ethical failure when he denied his friendship with poet Zavas Kalandra before a Stalinist tribunal. The poem redeems him by looking beyond death to a “stranger” and deeper “blue” of the soul, and by uttering and making us utter what Eluard failed to say: “the one who said Thou to him / will dream with him: We.”¹⁸ Poems can be “making toward” a potential alliance, a group, even a community—because poetry deals in possible worlds rather than simply representing history.

The connections that form “we” above are private and intimate, but they are not ultimately separate from the civil impulse of poetry. The paradox of poetry, that it is often a private communication but also often an unrestricted and open-invitational one, not only overheard but also indirectly addressed to many if not all, makes the “we” of poetry peculiarly layered. But as criticism has stressed the “I” and “you” of lyric, it has overlooked the shared,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Epigraph Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1     Speaking of Us
• 2     The Demagogue and the Sotto Voce
• 3     Song of My Selves
• 4     Private Stuff and Public Spirit
• 5     Tribes and Ambiguities
• 6     Poet and Audience
• 7     Crowds, Publics, Congregations
• 8     Invitations to the Common
• 9     The Future of Us
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index