Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry
271
Reading the Middle Generation Anew: Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry
271eBook
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Overview
In addition to having worked during the broad middle of the last century, these poets constitute the center of twentieth-century American poetry in the larger sense, refuting invidious connotations of “middle” as coming after the great moderns and being superseded by a proliferating postmodern experimentation. This middle generation mediates the so-called American century and its prodigious body of poetry, even as it complicates historical and aesthetic categorizations.
Taking diverse formal and thematic angles on these poets—deconstructionist, biographical-historical, and more formalist accounts—this book re-examines their between-ness and ambivalence: their various positionings and repositionings in aesthetic, political, and personal matters. The essays study the interplay between these writers and such shifting formations as religious discourse, consumerism, militarism and war, the ideology of America as “nature’s nation,” and U.S. race relations and ethnic conflicts. Reading the Middle Generation Anew also shows the legacy of the middle generation, the ways in which their lives and writings continue to be a shaping force in American poetry. This fresh and invigorating collection will be of great interest to literary scholars and poets.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587296673 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 271 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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reading the middle generation anew Culture, Community, and Form in Twentieth-Century American Poetry
University of Iowa Press Copyright © 2006 the University of Iowa Press
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ISBN: 978-0-87745-956-9
Chapter One Confession, Reformation, and Counter-Reformation in the Career of Robert Lowell Elisa New
At the end of his career, in the poem "Phillips House Revisited," Robert Lowell reflects on the figure of his dead grandfather, the Yankee entrepreneur he had remembered in the early poem "In Memory of Arthur Winslow." Now, checked into Phillips House with a chest complaint, his room in the same elite wing inhabited forty years before by the dying Arthur Winslow, Lowell meditates on the martial efficiency of his closest Protestant forebears, the Winslows. Represented in this poem, as throughout Lowell's work, by the team of mother Charlotte, still the "femme militaire" (Day by Day, 78), and her redoubtable father, Arthur, the Winslows can be relied on always to get the last word, even on the matter of their own extinction:
But these forty years grandfather would insist have turned the world on its head- their point was to extinguish him like a stranded crab. He needed more to live than I, his foot could catch hold anywhere and dynamite his way to the gold again- for the world is generous to the opportune, its constantly self-renewing teams of favorites. (Day by Day, 87-88)
A few poems earlier, in a lyric addressed "To Mother," the poet had used his own arrival at middle age to conjure what sympathy he could for his mother's complacent domination of "dour, luxurious Boston." Lowell probes his mother's ability to make the elegance of her parlor itself a reproach; or, more exactly, to furnish the stiff-backed milieu that Boston deems elegant. In "Phillips House Revisited" Lowell discovers what undergirds this perverse aesthetic of discomfiture: a classic Protestant knack for turning disadvantage to advantage. Embracing discomfort as badge of honor and birthright, Lowell's family solicits and bestows the "gracious affliction" Sacvan Bercovitch has called the mark of the American "self." No surprise, then, that Robert Lowell's recollection of his mother's rebuke - "Why do we keep expecting life to be easy, / when we know it never can be?" (Day by Day, 79)-resonates in his memory of Arthur Winslow, as Arthur Winslow's ferocity tints all his representations of her. Arthur Winslow, like his daughter, does not need good fortune to feel his chosenness. Quite the contrary, Winslow assumes that the world's generosity to "the opportune" flows chiefly to those who "improve the time" without expecting improvement to bring pleasure - or progress to mean change. The elect are those opportunely situated in the same straits their forebears endured: down the generations, God beaches these elect on the same lonely strand their forefathers found. Arthur Winslow's pilgrim's progress is thus fulfillment of a destiny not despoiled by vulgar luck. God's "self-renewing teams of favorites" become so precisely by never courting His favor.
Charlotte's joyless exploitativeness, like Arthur's grim instrumentalism, makes her a charter member of this team. Her courting of adversity is not a personal or even a family trait; rather, it is a broad cultural pattern. And this is why, of course, Lowell's indictment of his family's vices has never been mistaken for simple indiscretion, but rather always been taken as a profound, or at least thorough, reevaluation of the American soul. Indeed, Lowell's deployment of confession and of the personal to myth-making ends is what best sustains his reputation. Lowell survives chiefly as the poet whose auto-da-fé of representative Americanness unwrites the exemplary Protestant self. As the title of Philip Cooper's synthetic study tellingly suggests,
Lowell's claim to posterity's notice is as "autobiographical myth." Insofar, then, as critics of Lowell have regarded his self-scourgings as addressed to the self as construct, and thus as much to the "American individual" as to his own tortured person, they have not much heeded the precise affective deficit Lowell observes to afflict his New England culture. Namely, they have not much noticed that what Lowell finds wanting in Protestantism is its very repudiation of want and, in his immediates, a Yankee disaffection as corrosive as Yankee instrumentalism. In the final analysis, Lowell indicts Charlotte and Arthur for making conveniences of those whom they do not in any personal way want, but more, for wreaking a kind of vengeance on the idea of want itself. Kin to New England's most corrupt native son, the self-sufficing Gilbert Osmond of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady, Arthur and Charlotte see need itself as lack of mettle.
Reacting, then, to this heritage of affective parsimony, Lowell will develop beyond his early vaticism to shape a poetics and a career more hospitable to human need. Specifically, he cultivates a model of selfhood not mythic but quotidian, not representative but historical, and, most importantly of all, not sufficed by affliction but beseeching succor from day to day. If for Charlotte and Arthur there is nothing so base as Lowell's own "fear of not being wanted" ("Unwanted," Day by Day, 124), the poet's rejection of their legacy necessitates an embrace of need and an openness to ministration that profoundly marks his subsequent work. As he crafts and refines a poetics of exacting and quotidian mediacy, Lowell consecrates himself to possibilities of lesser immediacy, and greater satisfaction, than Protestants countenance. As the heir to Protestant immediacy becomes the poet of mediacy, the artist finds in the "blessèd structures, plot and rhyme" forms capable of appeasing soul and talent both (Day by Day, 127).
This is to say that Lowell's lines above shed light on a less Reformed, more catholic-and in some ways more Catholic-Lowell than we are used to seeing, which is also to say a less ambivalent poet. Albert Gelpi has asserted that "there is no way of telling how Lowell's poetry would have developed had he remained a Catholic; or whether the ... style of Life Studies, which we now associate with his lapse of faith, would have occurred anyway and been accommodated into the expression of a developing religious sensibility." I want to suggest, on the contrary, that Lowell's poetic development is cognate with the development of this genuinely "religious sensibility," a sensibility that, while no longer expressing itself in any kind of orthodox observance, finds full and complex expression in the poems themselves. As I want to show, by the time of Day by Day (1977) Lowell will have separated himself from the exhausted, Weberian Protestantism of Arthur and Charlotte Winslow by casting off from the sufficiencies of Protestant selfhood and the eternalities of Protestant time. He will have learned rather to make his poems hold the spiritual charge of a relation to time more tenuous and "day to day," a relation to the material world more sacramental than efficient, and most crucially a relation to relation itself more open. While classic Protestantism is defined by its liberation of the self from any agency but that installed in the self by God Himself, Lowell will avail his later work of forms external to the self. Openly supplicant, candidly in quest of confessors, Lowell's poetic persona-whether he addresses the Virgin Mary or his last wife, Caroline; whether his subject is Easter or his own old lapsing into mental illness-is that of a man soliciting intercession, charity, and understanding, and of a poet making his poetry the vestibule of such plaints. Lowell's voice takes on the plangency of one who knows the absolution he seeks cannot come from within. As a young convert to Catholicism, Lowell had spent hours in the confessional; as a lapsed Catholic, he makes his poetry hold the imprint of that experience as he seeks structures of regularization, avenues of displacement, custodians of want. What come to be Lowell's most characteristic poetic gestures-the solicitation of a hearing ear, the discovery of a conveyancing image or voice-are transactions between the solitary imagination and the interlocutor or substance that holds this absolution. The poet whom Robert Lowell becomes and the brief, revelatory event his mature poems strive to record are both born in a counter-Reformational rediscovery of confession.
To synthesize, the "confessional" school that Lowell earns credit for inventing may trace a greater share of its origins than we have supposed to the confessional: a place where articulation given into the hands of another secures absolution. The poems of Lowell's maturity read, one after another, like missives to a mediating power from the mouth of one who knows he cannot cure himself, who knows, as Lowell famously puts it in "Skunk Hour," that "I myself am hell." Lowell's work demonstrates how the Protestant liberation of self to its own recognizance, soul to its own rigor, is an enterprise doomed to fail, since the self is not cleansing but polluting. As the poet of "Unwanted" knows when he compares himself to a "sailor dying of thirst on the Atlantic" (Day by Day, 121), the native element of the Protestant hypos is inimical to genuine self-knowledge. Protestant self-cleansing is easily degraded into sanctimonious narcissism or the notebook ramblings of the confirmed "case." Charlotte Winslow "go[es] on cleaning house / for eternity" (Day by Day, 124) and making it unlivable; the poet's own self-examination risks the same sterility and stasis:
Alas, I can only tell my own story- talking to myself, or reading, or writing, or fearlessly holding back nothing from a friend, who believes me for a moment to keep up conversation. (Day by Day, 121)
To make of determined work more than another kind of inversion; to produce art whose power to heal extends beyond quelling the symptoms of one sufferer; to shape a space of interlocution not narrowed by monomania or compromised by patronage-these are the goals of Lowell's mature creative life and the achievements of his "confessionalism" at its best.
UNDERSTANDING OF just how thoroughly Lowell's voice is altered, tempered, over time by the mediating influence of the confessional mode requires us to go back to Land of Unlikeness (1944) and to listen in on an earlier Lowell: namely, on the Catholic apologist girded, paradoxically, in full Protestant armor. Lowell's elegy for Arthur Winslow, the most memorable poem in that volume, sets Protestant cupidities in stark distinction to Catholic mercies, but does so in the manner of the classic Protestant jeremiad. Setting off from the convert's smug "This Easter," Lowell would make his elegy express all his disappointment at the failure of Winslow and his forefathers to know failure for failure, affliction for affliction. Eventually, Lowell's exquisitely turned ironies in this poem backfire. Irony turns back on the ironist himself, who deploys the genre of gracious affliction as instrument in a critique of the genre of gracious affliction, and Lowell seems never so thoroughly the Puritan as when inveighing as anti-Puritan.
The contradictions of Lowell's own position aside, however, the poem has great power. Winslow is a sharply etched depiction of self-aggrandizing self-effacement. His career telescopes a family knack for turning any setback into an advantage. Though eventually consumed by the "crab," cancer, Winslow is a man whose very crablike tenacity allows him to prosper anywhere. Thus as a young man on the make, Winslow's familiarity with bottom feeding allowed him to turn a spell of western exile into a literal gold mine, and thus to make alienation pay. Lowell presses the crab imagery as far as it will go, allowing the ironic interplay between Arthur Winslow's consumption by the cancer and the casual consumption of luxury seafood by his still hale coevals to suggest the inevitable isolation of a man "set up" in an elite hospital and left to fend for himself by "people" just like himself. Left to die alone, Winslow is, in fact, paid the highest compliment "Your people" can pay: he is left in peace to enjoy the affliction God visits only on favorites (Selected Poems, 11).
As the above explication should indicate, Lowell's chief poetic device at this stage is the image. Just as images of the crab-mythological and culinary-are set in pugilistic pas de deux, one against the other, Lowell makes similar symbolic use of the heralding trumpets of the judgment day. The faulty hearing of Lowell's doddering Massachusetts kin evokes the invalidism and invalidation over time of the Congregational faith. While this faith's vitality once inhered in its preaching, now the trumpets of the End devolve into ear trumpets for the insensible. These, deafened rather than roused by preaching, are pathetic shadows of their sermon-drunk kin. Fittingly, Arthur Winslow is conveyed to the afterlife on a "trumpeting black swan," the image cousin by pun to the "trumpeter swan." Lowell's revision, which imbues the descriptive "trumpeter swan" (the stylized bird of genteel parlor prints) with sound and present action, only sharpens the irony flowing against the Winslows, whose triumphalist individualism is, as it were, trumped, both from the social and religious standpoint: from the commoners' "Boat Club," Boston Garden, the swanboats cast off. They "coast" while Arthur founders. At the same time, the man once contemptuous of all aid but his own is transported from his "adjusted" bed by a Jesus who "runs" him "Beyond Charles River to the Acheron" (Selected Poems, 11). He who despised charity is now the object of it. He whose feet could catch hold anywhere, who was, above all, "opportune," is demoted from martial pilgrim to patient sinner, or sin-consumed patient. Either way, patience, a Catholic virtue, is Protestant indignity.
The indignity, though, is apparently no more than Winslow deserves. Poetic justice requires that the man who has hogged the American road lose driving privileges in the afterworld. To be sure, by the end of the poem's first stanza, the trope of Protestant pilgrimage-capable, as Bercovitch has shown, of sacralizing great swaths of secular history-is indicted for its partiality to "favorites." Lowell exposes in Winslow the specious rationalization of self-interest that may occur when the expanse of a continent is made to incarnate individual designings: when expansionism is ratified as destiny on the belief, in Bercovitch's terms, that "America was consecrated from eternity for the New England Way." Anticipating Myra Jehlen's work by rejecting any seamless or "natural" identifications of "individual," "continent," and "nation," Lowell puts down the romance of divine design for mere "craft." Winslow's journey across America, his archetypal push west, is not Manifest Destiny, but adventurism, pure and simple. A fisher after booty ("the craft that netted you a million dollars, / Hosing out gold in Colorado's waste," Lord Weary's Castle, 27), Arthur Winslow sustains a family instinct for the main chance, reprising the equivocal ethics of Revolutionary-era ancestors who either "whipped" or backed the king, depending on how the wind blew. In the instance of the Winslows, the difference between good timing and craven opportunism is effectively null.
Lowell's elegy for his grandfather, Arthur Winslow, is a New Critical tour de force: it maintains its energy and texture through the complex imbrication of image chains. Yet the poem's particular effectiveness flows from other sources as well: namely, from Lowell's experimentation with temporal elements, his striving to create a certain range of moods, and his marked (though not markedly successful) attempt to transfer authority outside and away from the thunderous voice of its prophetic and autochthonous speaker. Temporally speaking, it is worth marking how Lowell arranges the details around Arthur Winslow in a manner peculiarly arrested, without dynamic thrust, while the poet writes from the vantage point of a time more vital, that signaled by a vibrantly present refrain: "This Easter." Indeed, as Lowell proceeds in itemizing what there was to remember about Winslow, the affective dynamism of the elegiac form seems oddly to spend or exhaust itself; and where elegy was, now there is only epitaph. This formal hardening is, Lowell's poem seems to demonstrate, not inevitable, but rather a result of the process of Protestant hagiography that arrests and inscribes individual persons in eternal types. As Protestant saint, Arthur Winslow lies in the bed his forebears made. The poem that traces his life's progress is, finally, a portmanteau of inert epithets, or epitaphic tags, that signify the satisfaction of Protestant progress in stasis. The Protestant elegy is easily preempted by a headstone.
(Continues...)
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