A History of American Poetry

Richard Gray

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118795354, 9781118795347
• eBook ISBN: 9781118795422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

A History of American Poetry presents a comprehensive exploration of the development of American poetic traditions from their pre-Columbian origins to the present day.

• Offers a detailed and accessible account of the entire range of American poetry
• Situates the story of American poetry within crucial social and historical contexts, and places individual poets and poems in the relevant intertextual contexts
• Explores and interprets American poetry in terms of the international positioning and multicultural character of the United States
• Provides readers with a means to understand the individual works and personalities that helped to shape one of the most significant bodies of literature of the past few centuries

1
The American Poem

The United States … the Greatest Poem

“The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”¹ The words are those of Walt Whitman, from the Preface to Leaves of Grass. Whitman was, in a sense, echoing something Ralph Waldo Emerson had said eleven years earlier, in 1844, in his essay “The Poet.” “America is a poem in our eyes,” he declared; “its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”² Both remarks distill an idea that has captured the imagination of so many Americans, and especially American poets: the idea, or rather the compelling belief, that the New World (as Europeans saw it) could and should be turned into words. America could be written into existence, given not just a local habitation and a name but an identity by a poem. America seemed strange from the very first days of white colonization, to those who crossed the Atlantic to settle or simply exploit it. This was a “silent country,” observed one settler, conveniently ignoring those aboriginal inhabitants who had lived there for perhaps thirty thousand years; and it seemed to need language to fill the void. Some saw it as a wilderness. So the New England cleric Cotton Mather began his epic account of Puritan settlement, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of New England (1702) by announcing:

I WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand. And, assisted by the Holy Author of that Religion, I do … Report the Wonderful Displays of His Infinite Power, Wisdom, Goodness, and Faithfulness, wherewith His Divine Providence hath Irradiated an Indian Wilderness.³

Others saw America in more paradisiacal terms. “Each time I sailed from Spain to the Indies,” Christopher Columbus recalled towards the end of his life,

I reached the point when the heavens, the stars, the temperature of the air and the waters of the sea abruptly changed … I do not find any Greek or Latin writings which definitely state the worldly situation of the earthly Paradise, and I believe that the earthly Paradise lies here.⁴

Either way, those who encountered this strange new world firmly believed that one, and possibly the only way to come to terms with and begin to understand it was to give it verbal shape. To name America was to know it.

After the founding of the republic, language was called on to perform another task as well, which was to help the infant American nation articulate its destiny. “We have yet had no genius in America,” declared Emerson:

which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admired in Homer…⁵

That genius would come, Emerson and others believed, to turn the disparate facts of American historical experience into a coherent story, a heroic narrative with a beginning, middle, and a millennial end. In creating this epic of a new republic such a genius would, it was hoped, do something still further, perhaps more pressing and certainly more personal: he or she would tell Americans something about their individual selves. “The American is a new man,” St. Jean de Crèvecoeur proclaimed in 1782, “who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions.”⁶ The idea was simple and radical: in committing themselves to what they perceived as a promised land, each and every single person had been altered by the commitment; they might change the land, certainly, but the land would change them. An additional purpose of the new poetry followed from this: it would describe this change, this process of psychic transformation. It would show each reader how, why, and in what manner he or she had become “an American.” “The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature,” Whitman insisted in 1855.

In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation but a teeming nation of nations.⁷

So the American explored, announced, and maybe even invented by the poem would be not only new but ample, a curious and compelling hybrid. Responding to and even mirroring the syncretic character of a “teeming nation of nations,” he or she would occupy a liminal space, a proliferating chain of borders; they would fathom and perform a nature that was multiple as well as original; to borrow a phrase from Whitman’s most famous poem, “Song of Myself,” they would be large, containing multitudes.

So, according to this vision of things, the American landscape was a series of texts that could be read, and understood, with the aid of the American poem; American history was a sequence of disparate facts waiting for the American poet to give them narrative shape; the American republic was a rich cultural mix, a tangled series of threads requiring both poet and poem to weave them into a meaningful pattern; and the American people, collectively and individually, were psychically and morally embryonic beings whose birth into full knowledge of themselves depended on their being (poetically) written and named. The vision was undoubtedly an apocalyptic one but it was widely shared; and it could be seen as an echo and extension of the utopian dreams that accompanied the early settlement, the millennial visions of the Puritans, and the idealism of the founding fathers of the republic. If America was a New Eden, or, alternatively, a new Canaan, then it surely required its own prophetic voices to announce it. If the United States of America was a new phenomenon, a nation deliberately founded by a few people at a particular moment in time and according to certain specific principles, then it positively demanded someone who could articulate those principles in a measured and memorable way. The American poet was to tell the tale of the tribe: not, perhaps, in the primitive sense of preserving myths of origin but to the extent that he or she was to offer to their readers some intimation of who they were and where they stood. The prophetic voice is not, of course, peculiar to American poetry, even in modern times, but it has sounded there more frequently, emphatically, and resonantly than elsewhere. From the early celebrations of Divine Providence in allowing the colonizers to come safe to land, through Walt Whitman’s annunciation of a manifest destiny, to the visionary speech of Hart Crane and then, later, Allen Ginsberg: through all this and many metamorphoses, the millennial impulse has survived.

Two examples of that impulse, divided by two centuries, might help to illustrate this longevity. Here, first, is a passage from a poem called “The Rising Glory of America” by Philip Freneau, published at the end of the eighteenth century:

And when a train of rolling years are past
…
A new Jerusalem, sent down from heaven,
Shall grace our happy earth …
… Paradise anew
Shall flourish, by no second Adam lost,
No dangerous tree with deadly fruit shall grow,
No tempting serpent to allure the soul
From native innocence. – A Canaan here,
Another Canaan shall excel the old…

* * *

– Such days the world,
And such America at last shall have
When ages yet to come have run their round.
And future years of bliss alone remain.⁸

Towards the end of the twentieth century, in turn, Tato Laviera from Puerto Rico ended a poem titled simply “AmeRícan” like this:

AmeRícan, defining the new america, humane america
admired america, loved america, harmonious
america, the world in peace, our energies
collectively invested to find other civili
-zations, to touch god, further and further,
to dwell in the spirit of divinity!

AmeRícan, yes, for now, for I love this, my second
land, and I dream to take the accent from
the altercation, and be proud to call
myself american, in the u.s. sense of the
word. AmeRícan, America!⁹

Both these poems will be discussed in a little more detail later. For the moment, the crucial point to make about them, and the pairing of them, is a matter of both change and continuity. Laviera resists the Anglocentrism implicit in the Freneau poem in favor of a new kind of ethnic identity, “AmeRícan” rather than “American,” the product of a convergence with other minority groups: with New York City as an exemplary space in which cultural mixing, or “mestizaje,” occurs. “We give birth to a new generation,” Laviera declares at the beginning of his poem; and he uses the accents of many cultures, a hybrid language that he and other American poets of Hispanic origin call “Spanglish,” the oral tradition and the language of the street, all to describe what it is that is about to be born. What the lines by Freneau and Laviera share, however, is just as significant as their differences. It is also what they share with so many other American poets: the belief in and, following on that, the announcement of a new dispensation in the New World.

From the beginnings of European settlement, however, the millenarian impulse in American poetry has had to do battle with something else that grows directly out of the national inheritance – or, to be more accurate, derives immediately from the freight of cultural assumptions that many of the colonists brought with them across the Atlantic. That something is a suspicion, a distrust of the fictive, the “made” or “made-up” quality of literature in general and poems in particular. “Be not so set upon poetry,” Cotton Mather warned, “as to be always poring on the passionate and measured pages.” Verse fed the sensuous appetites, no matter what its ultimate, higher aims might be, and besides it told tales; it depended, at least in the first instance, on human invention, on men’s and women’s lies rather than God’s truth. And to the Puritan injunction against fiction-making could subsequently be added a distrust of anything that was not immediately useful, functional, that did not help in the clearing of woods or the building of farms, shops, schoolhouses, and churches. “To America,” insisted one of the founding fathers of the republic, Benjamin Franklin,

… one schoolmaster is worth a dozen poets, and the invention of a machine or the improvement of an implement is of more importance than a masterpiece of Raphael … Nothing is good or beautiful but in the measure that it is useful…¹⁰

Certainly, Franklin looked forward to a more “refined state of society” when “poetry, painting, music (and the stage as their embodiment)” might be “necessary and proper gratifications.” But his demotion of such activities to the level of the elegantly decorative hardly implied that they would even then be central, vital to the life of the culture; and many other commentators, lacking Franklin’s intelligence and wit, have somehow contrived to suggest that to be a poet is not to be useful in any conceivable circumstances, and that not to be useful is not to be American. So to the roles of prophet and teller of tales are added those of misfit and trickster: much of what is fruitful and energetic in American poetry – as well as much of what is confusing and self-contradictory – grows out of the tensions generated by this discrete series of different roles.

There are, basically, two potential answers to this charge of uselessness: the accusation that poetry fails to pay homage to the cult of the fact. One is illustrated, in the early history of American poetry, by Edgar Allan Poe, who took the scarlet letter of shame and turned it into an emblem of pride. Poe not only accepted the charge of uselessness, he positively reveled in it. Poe played many roles in his life – the courtly charmer with the ladies, the fastidious dilettante in many of his reviews and essays, the bold verbal fencer in literary disputes – but all of them revolved around his resistance to the notions of use and profit. In answer to what he saw as the predominant emblems of national character, the enterprising Yankee, the energetic Westerner, the ruminative and moralistic New Englander, he embraced an aristocratic model, the idea of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 The American Poem
• 2 Beginnings
• 3 The Turn to the Modern
• 4 In Search of a Past
• 5 The Traditions of Whitman
• 6 Formalists and Confessionals
• 7 Beats, Prophets, and Aesthetes
• 8 The Languages of American Poetry and the Language of Crisis
• Epilogue
• Index
• End User License Agreement