The Poetics of the Everyday

Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse

Siobhan Phillips

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9780231520294
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"—recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention.

Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits.

Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

Chapter One

The Middle Living of Robert Frost

An Ordinary Cadence

IN 1892 THE LAWRENCE, MASSACHUSETTS, HIGH SCHOOL BESTOWED valedictory honors on two students, and both spoke at commencement. Elinor White first delivered an address on “Conversation as a Force in Life,” extolling the benefits of talk with someone who might “look into our eyes and give answer to our meanings rather than our words” (Thompson, Frost, 1:129–31). Robert Frost then spoke on “After-Thought,” exhorting his fellow graduates to that “questioning and answering” that comes after “toil” (Collected Poems, 636). Later that summer, these two scholars promised themselves to each other in a private exchange of rings. The virtue of conversation, the prudence of afterthought, the security of long marriage to one’s high-school sweetheart: Frost’s graduation seems to provide a fitting beginning for a traditional, ordinary life. It might be an equally fitting start for a traditional, ordinary poetry. When the pair’s commencement subjects come together, in the conversant marital afterthoughts of Frost’s “In the Home Stretch,” the poem seems content to describe a familiar domesticity.

So do many other Frost poems, and by design: Frost states in one interview that he took his inspiration from “the clean and wholesome life of the ordinary man” (Interviews, 47). A “clean and wholesome” persona was the first and most famous image of Frost the poet—the chronicler of smalltown voices and old-fashioned scenes, the literate farmer growing apples in New England, the wise but accessible rhymer whose maxims grace cards and calendars. By now, however, the image seems both outdated and demeaning. Frost’s ordinary affect defined itself, and was defined by others, in explicit opposition to modernist aesthetics,¹ and the rise in his critical reputation has therefore come with the decline of his accessible image, from Lionel Trilling’s insistence on Frost’s “terrifying” implications in 1958 to Christopher Benfey’s emphasis on Frost’s “vivifying” pessimism nearly fifty years later (Trilling, “A Speech,” 156; Benfey, “Dark Darker Darkest,” 28). Readings have passed from the poet’s reassuring familiarity—his “affirmation of old values, simplicities, pieties,” in Trilling’s words—to his alienating challenge (“A Speech,” 155). The Frost a twenty-first-century reader inherits is no longer an “ordinary man” and a reactionary exception to modern or American literary history, but a complicated philosopher and a writer vital to both traditions.

A full understanding of Frost’s importance, however, may require attention to rather than dismissal of his ordinariness, since Frost’s “middle way,” as he once described it, helps to reconcile the enduring oppositions that his poetry suggests. These oppositions support conflicting reasons for Frost’s significance: is his work centrally modernist, for example, because of its concern with a threatened individualism or because of its engagement with communal, even political questions? Frank Lentricchia suggests the first, arguing that the “primordial ground” of Frost’s work is “the poet’s subjectivity” (Lentricchia, Frost, 4), while Walter Jost counters with his description of Frost as a “creature[] of circumstance” (Rhetorical Investigations, 35). Is Frost a vital American writer, moreover, because he continues a poetics of transcendental individualism or because he furthers a tradition of consent? Roy Harvey Pearce asserts that Frost’s “community of one” extends the national antinomian strain, whereas Elisa New argues that Frost’s verse manifests an American adaptation to worldly practice (Pearce, Continuity, 277; New, The Line’s Eye, 24–25). Frost criticism often moves between and among such alternatives; recent accounts, including Jost’s and New’s, tend to deemphasize what Jost calls a “neoromantic, lyric preoccupation with Self” for descriptions of what New calls “adhesive attachment and connectedness.”² Yet subjectivity and its situation were never, for Frost, mutually exclusive regards; his work abandons neither side of the “melancholy dualism” that his own reading of Emerson takes to be “the only soundness” (Collected Poems, 860).³ Frost’s greatest interest for literary history may be his facility within this dualism, as his work shows how a seeming self-compromise can be a subtle self-assertion.

Frost’s best critics have articulated versions of this skill, often with reference to the Jamesian pragmatism that Frost admired: Frost cited James’s writing as his “greatest inspiration, when [he] was a student,” and several analyses have shown how the poet’s “middle way” maps a version of the philosopher’s via media (Thompson, Frost, 1:536).⁴ Lentricchia draws on James, for example, when he distinguishes Frost’s tendencies from solipsism by describing a self-definition “vis-à-vis the real world” (Self, 18), and New draws on James when she distinguishes Frost’s tendencies from fatalism by identifying a will that “proves itself in the bending or… the seizing… of what options should present themselves” (The Line’s Eye, 25).⁵ In an illuminating recent study, Mark Richardson makes such proof central by showing how a worldly context creates rather than opposes Frost’s individualism.⁶ Further criticism might build on such insights, however, through greater attention to a specific means and medium of Frost’s creation—to everyday time. This analysis can show the continued importance of Frost’s familiar affect as it describes the basic stipulations of his contextual awareness. Frost’s respect for the common, that is, may be as significant for its use of conventional temporality as it is for its adoption of conventional values, and his worldly subjectivity not only exploits his political and cultural situation but also mines the transcultural and apolitical power of diurnal life.⁷ If James’s pragmatism shows how the flux of experience can provide that very sense of self and store of truths that historicism seems to deny, Frost’s poetry extends this vital suggestion;⁸ from the confident declarations of “The Road Not Taken,” foreseeing an identity through its later retelling, to the quieter acknowledgments of “Carpe Diem,” finding in retrospection a way to live, to the didactic dialogue of “Build Soil,” recommending a repeated “turning under” of ideas, to the private narrative of “The Valley’s Singing Day,” rewriting dawn as a couple’s creation, Frost links worldly and human rounds to make ordinary experience the test and proof of consciousness. When the final lines of “Storm Fear” ask “whether ’tis in us to arise with day / And save ourselves unaided,” they pose a vital assignment of Frostian mornings, in which one must rise both independently “unaided” and dependently “with” the world’s progress (Collected Poems, 19).

This human rising is not easy, however simple a sunrise may seem, and the difficulty details Frost’s import. If the benefits of a middle way were as effortless as mere conformity, Frost’s ordinary poems would remain as intellectually inconsequential as Trilling suspected them to be. Frost counters this charge with his attention to the risks of daily existence; in fact, daily life presents some of the most quietly terrifying situations in Frost’s poetry. Everyday time can seem more like the lulling cycles of a Freudian death wish than the lively recursions of an independent will—from the “loneliness” and “house fear” of “The Hill Wife” to the drudgery of a despairing “Servant to Servants” to the seemingly futile “Investment” of a couple who hope to “get some color and music out of life” (Collected Poems, 122–23, 242). In these works and others, routine threatens with a mortal submission that is all the more devastating for its mundane source. One might so easily succumb to ordinary rounds, as “The Investment” suggests, giving up a desire for the piano’s creative “vigor” as one yields a desire for anything invigorating. From its very title, therefore, “The Investment” not only wonders if quotidian living submerges one further and further in a colorless, musicless banality. It also suggests that this process steadily relinquishes “living” itself: to the poem’s protagonist, counting meager winter meals in “unearthed potatoes,” diurnal endurance seems to pull one into a cold ground. “Home Burial” extends a similar threat of entombment when it presents a wife’s horror at the very fact of existence. As the lure of everyday erasure attends Frost’s many accounts of everyday living, it demonstrates the existential effects of regular efforts. One must work so hard to “rise with day” because it would be so easy to “sink under” dailiness.

Dangerous possibilities are not the only ones, though, and Frost shows that ordinary living can overcome its innate menace. In his work, the real power of common habits can counter the real peril of ordinary hazards. These habits may be no more exalted than the exchange of conversation, the recollection of afterthought, or the consistent difference of married life; “In the Home Stretch,” in fact, summarizes and dramatizes Frost’s best quotidian living when it combines just such practices. In the pages that follow, I use this poem to show more specifically how Frost would resist the perils and use the benefits that other works adumbrate. The poem’s reception might itself mark the subtlety of Frost’s demonstration: “In the Home Stretch” has drawn little commentary and could well appear unremarkable in form and content;⁹ its blank verse merely tells of a husband and wife’s first night in a new home. Yet as the work uncovers the complexity of a humble context, it can respond directly even to so challenging a philosophical statement as Emerson’s “Experience”: Emerson begins his essay with the question, “Where do we find ourselves?” (Emerson, Collected Works, 3:27), and the wife of “In the Home Stretch” concludes her poem with the assurance that “it would take me forever to recite / All that’s not new in where we find ourselves” (Frost, Collected Poems, 108–14). Whereas Emerson laments the “preparation,” “routine,” and “retrospect” of ordinary life, whereas he regrets those moments when “we dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives” (3:28, 49), Frost presents a couple discussing their household and garden as they eat their dinner. His characters prepare for a future of routine retrospection in the hopes that they can reconcile the individual genius and worldly practicality that Emerson’s essay wishes to conflate.

Bolstered with this hope, moreover, the pair can answer the closing question of “Storm Fear” as well as the opening question of “Experience,” since “In the Home Stretch” ends with plans for “first thing in the morning”: the householder of the first poem doubts his ability to rise the next day against the power outside, but the household of the second foresees a steady dailiness in harmony with the world beyond. “In the Home Stretch” emphasizes that harmony through the poem’s focus on accustomed pattern, blurring the very border that an anxious “Storm Fear” would shore up. At the start, for example, when a wife looks out the window at “weeds the water from the sink made tall,” her first glimpse of a new kitchen notes how the iterative, humdrum tasks of past occupants have joined and changed the outside world. The poem’s final lines reinforce the same interdependence, bringing a worldly force indoors: “When there was no more lantern in the kitchen,” Frost writes here, the “fire got out through crannies in the stove / And danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling, / As much at home as if they’d always danced there.” The fire is wild and homely, free and contained, elemental and domesticated; when its energetic flames replace a couple’s lantern or even a poet’s lamp, they predict a continuing, peaceful cohabitation of the given and the made. Their “dance” does so by a habituation as longstanding as the chores evoked at the poem’s beginning. Through the daily washing of dishes or the nightly lighting of fires, one can both accommodate and appropriate a natural world—and thereby feel “at home” in familiar strangeness.

If this is a general truth, in Frost’s work, Joe and his wife must learn it afresh as they learn how to begin again in a new location. This pair have just given up city lights for “country darkness,” and their home could easily seem “haunted or exposed” to that alterity. They must remind themselves that the “strangeness soon wears off.” They must gradually remind themselves, therefore, that this happens through the interactive “wear” of daily life: “the round,” as the wife calls it, when she tells her husband of “years / To come as here I stand and go the round / Of many plates with towels many times.” Her description in these lines seems to dread a routine future, as the resigned repetition of “many” indicates, but by the time Joe echoes his wife’s phrase at the end of the poem, the two have realized a different possibility: they plan to “go the round of apple, cherry, peach / Pine, alder, pasture, mowing, well, and brook.” A prospective walk affirms the couple’s holdings as it inscribes the fertile cycle of a farm year; the rhythm of the lines’ sounds and stresses savors a playful variety in regular, advancing feet. The couple’s repetitive future is less like a submission to necessity than an assertion of title and a participation in natural creativity; the spouses of “In the Home Stretch” will move forward by cycles that prove their justified place in the larger world.

This transformation of “rounds” might be called the plot of the poem. It is not much of a plot in the usual sense, however, and that difference suggests how Frost’s quotidian work capitalizes on facets of poetic form: “In the Home Stretch” charts a steadily deepening situation rather than a rising and falling chain of events, and it unfolds a continual, consistent order rather than a bounded, beginning-to-end incident. The poem is definitively temporal, that is, without aspiring to the temporality of a story. Like much of Frost’s so-called narrative verse, it thereby marks the distinction of poetry from narrative: though Vereen M. Bell argues that Frost’s focus on “the passing of time” makes him “philosophically a narrative poet,” his work might instead clarify the repetitive time of verse (“Frost” 70–71). Frost’s poems might show, moreover, that a poetic cadence models the best practice of ordinary rhythms; while the morning doubts of “Storm Fear” seem to manifest the uncertainty of its jaggedly irregular lineation, the morning assurance of “In the Home Stretch” seems to realize the promise of the poem’s two-hundred-odd iambic blank-verse lines. Frost’s prosody would demonstrate how “irregularity of accent” can emerge through “the regular beat of the metre,” as he puts it (Collected Poems, 665), just as his poetry would demonstrate how individual will can emerge through the regular iteration of days. Seemingly ordinary subjects, as well as seemingly traditional lines, support this distinctly modernist philosophic insight.

Steps and Circles

What sort of ordinary time, though, do Frost’s poems and people take up? Joe and his wife reflect on the question as they decide what their “home stretch” will mean, answering finally with a future of “all that’s not new”: they mark a progressive consistency that consists neither of sheer advance nor of sheer return. Only after considering both those extremes, however, do the pair settle on their Frostian way. Unmitigated sequence presents the first threat, shadowing the very title of “In the Home Stretch” with thoughts of the last, mortal “home” that steadily approaches, and the wife voices this fear when she looks out the window to a “little stretch” of “mowing-field” and notes how it runs into “woods / That end all.” Such a future is “scarce enough to call / A view,” as she admits; because the “years” she sees in this field are “latter years— / Different from early years,” neither Joe nor she, in their seeming middle age, could want to know their “number.” They must, rather, fear the years’ conclusion: in this conception of time, a constantly different progression measures a finite existence that will one day fall to a deathly mower. Those woods, as Joe later puts it, are always “waiting to steal a step on us whenev...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Poetics of Everyday Time
• Chapter 1. The Middle Living of Robert Frost
• Chapter 2. The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens
• Chapter 3. The Everyday Elegies of Elizabeth Bishop
• Chapter 4. The Cosmic Dawnings of James Merrill
• Conclusion: Everyday Pasts and Everyday Futures
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index