John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Art World

You're probably feeling something like despair if you know you can't make it to the University of Louisville for the 1:00 pm session of the The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 (Humanities room 111).  You'll miss Andrew Epstein talking about Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground and their relationship to the New York poetry scene of their day, and you'll miss John Gallaher talking about Michael Benedikt as a nexus figure of the New York School.  You'll also miss me giving a paper called "John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Art World," but don't fret about that. The text—minus any tweaking it may receive as I sit among the nervous grad students in the lobby of the Brown Hotel or among the Gnostic poets at the Mayan Cafe, where they hang out and summon mystic wisdom over bourbon and tamales—is here:

John Ashbery and the Poetics of the Art World 

 …I had to find a way out of the woods.
Now, in some cases, this is easy—you just walk straight along a road and pretty soon
you're out of the woods and there are suburban backlots. In my case,
though, it wasn't that simple, though it wasn't extraordinarily demanding either—I
just lay down in a boat and slept, Lady-of-Shalott style. Soon I was gliding among you
taking notes on your conversations and otherwise making a pest of myself. 
I pretended to be angry when onlookers jeered and cows mooed and even the heralds told me to shut up, 
yet at bottom I was indifferent. I knew my oracles
for what they were—right about 50% of the time—and I also knew their accuracy wasn't 
an issue.

 In these lines, from John Ashbery's Flow Chart, the poet presents himself as Tennyson's Lady of Shalott—and the comparison is apt. Consider the plot of Tennyson's poem. The lady is confined to her tower, isolated from the thriving world of business and love beyond the walls. She weaves a tapestry of what she sees, and in so doing becomes a symbol for many things. Firstly, she is a woman in a world profoundly masculine in its institutions and structures of power. Moreover, she is a laborer in a time when labor conditions—particularly in textiles—are becoming more and more rationalized and alienating. Finally, as a tapestry weaver she is a figure for the artist. All of these things, Tennyson implies, are alienated, confined, set off from the world where barges ply their trade on the river and young lovers meet to wed. We can think of Tennyson’s poem almost as an allegory of John Ashbery's situation, in that three kinds of alienation—having to do with his sexuality, his relation to conventionally productive labor, and his status as a certain kind of poet in midcentury America—led him to a peripatetic life and what me might call a poetics of wandering or drift.

If you want to think about Ashbery and queerness, John Shoptaw, in On the Outside Looking Out has done a better job of it than I could ever do. If you want to think about Ashbery and alienation from labor, read his poem “The Instruction Manual” and write the article about that poem that still needs to be written. If you want to hear about Ashbery and the importance of the art world he entered as a young man in New York at the end of the 1940s, I hope I can help. 

Drawn into the orbit of precocious literary friends at Harvard, John Ashbery joined an artistic milieu in New York City that was intensely aestheticist and that emphasized the autonomy of the art object and the primacy of the medium itself. Ashbery's poetry, too, has been, non-dogmatic and intensely concerned with the medium of language. His particular form of aesthetic expression involves aleatory techniques and linguistic disruptions, and, especially, a kind of narrative drift. Characteristically, his form of narrative, or pseudo-narrative, drifts and observes, and Ashbery does not expect his oracles to change the world: the poetry that comes from them will exist for itself, not—as in the hopes of modernist greats like Yeats, Pound, or Eliot—for the renovation of the culture. Unlike those poets, Ashbery is as pure an aesthete as any poet of the 1890s. This is not to say that he cannot be read politically—he has been, and has welcomed it—but the characteristic qualities of his work stem from early formative experiences in a very particular moment of the New York art world of the late 40s and early 50s, a moment perhaps more extreme in its commitment to aesthetic autonomy than any other in the American 20th century. 

The New York to which Ashbery moved in 1949, when he began his graduate studies at Columbia, was the epicenter of America's visual art scene, but it is easy, given the later lionization of the abstract expressionists, to misremember the situation of American art in 1949. The art world then was small and isolated. When John Bernard Myers, a founder of the Tibor de Nagy gallery, was putting together artists for his early shows, he found the art world tiny indeed: "it should be stressed that… almost everyone knew everyone else" and "all of them lived in Manhattan." The possibility of connecting with the world beyond the art scene, let alone influencing it, seemed extremely remote: during her 1947 visit to New York Simone de Beauvoir came to the conclusion that "there is no informed public" for the arts—hyperbole, to be sure, but a good indicator of how America in the late 40s appeared from a European intellectual's position. And native intellectuals tended to concur, even in the use of hyperbole.

The alienation that permeated the art world did not manifest in political radicalism, but rather in an emphasis on the isolated artist's authenticity, and on the autonomy of the work of art. This was, after all, the era of The God That Failed, with its documentation of the left's painful disillusionment with Communism, as well as the time of the blacklist and the general suppression of the American left. Even the once-radical Partisan Review crowd had largely retreated from politics by 1947, and, having abandoned first Stalin, then Trotsky, they now bent their knees to art. The depoliticization left many artists adrift, a condition Robert Motherwell expressed in in 1944 when he said "The artist's problem is with what to identify himself…. Hence the tendency of modern painters to paint for each other."

The preservation of individual authenticity and autonomy, rather than any movement on behalf of class or faction, was the artist's mode of opposition—and the means of opposition was the autonomy of the work of art. As Thomas B. Hess put it in ARTnews, “There was nothing to do but paint. The self-directed community became self-oriented. Art replaced revolution in its eschatology…. Never before in painting had art itself so preoccupied the artist.” Ad Reinhardt was more extreme in his formulations than most, but he was not out of step with the general temper of the art world when he declared that art "should have no connection with anything, not God, Morals, Politics, Movements, Aesthetics, Philosophy, Science." Even that soberest of academic art critics, Meyer Shapiro, declared that the artist must now "cultivate his own garden."

But poets came to the garden of the postwar art world, too: a phenomenon, we may be surprised to note, unprecedented in American history. John Ashbery offers two statements about what that felt like in 1949:

I hadn't realized it, but my arrival in New York coincided with the cresting of the 'heroic' period of Abstract Expressionism, as it was later to be known, and somehow we all seemed to benefit from this strong moment… We were in awe of de Kooning, Pollock, Rothko and Motherwell and not too sure of exactly what they were doing. But there were other things to attend to: concerts of John Cage's music, Merce Cunningham's dances, the Living Theatre, but also talking and going to the movies and getting ripped and hanging out and then discussing it all over the phone.

And

This is not the place to wonder why the poets Koch, O'Hara, Schuyler, Guest and myself gravitated toward painters, probably it was merely because the particular painters we knew happened to be more fun than the poets… 

If we look beyond the flippant assertion that the poets entered the world of the painters because the painters had more fun, we will not only find a more substantial explanation for the melding of the poetic and artistic scenes—we will also understand more about how the poets "seemed to benefit" from the fervent experimentalism of the art world.

The first thing to acknowledge is that in the years after the war it was by no means an obvious thing that poets should become involved in the world of art. Although there had been exceptions, like Wallace Stevens, who frequented artist's studios and studded his prose with references to painting, the French-style alliance of poets and painters was rare in early 20th century America. As Dore Ashton puts it in her seminal study of the New York School painters, The New York School: A Cultural Reckoning, "One of the peculiar aspects of traditional American culture had been the total isolation of the different arts. American artists noted early in the century that, unlike artists on the Continent, they had no literary companions." This only began to change after the war, when "well-developed suspicion on both sides" faded, and there were "attempts to bring about a rapprochement."

These attempts were certainly successful, if we are to judge by the reception Ashbery and his peers received among the artists and, even more importantly, the gallerists. Indeed, it is in part through the schemes of gallerists operating in difficult commercial circumstances that the rapprochement of different creative worlds in postwar New York came about.

New American art, in the postwar years, did not generally find patrons among the upper class, but among a small part of the professional middle class, and among other artists. Sensing an opportunity to expand the market beyond visual artists, Myers intuited that "more interaction among all the arts might speed us on our way." At a time when there was no off-Broadway theater as we know it in New York, Myers learned from a friend of Parisian theater in which plays by poets were given sets by contemporary artists and featured music by avant-garde composers. So Myers worked with Frank O'Hara, James Merrill, and others to found the Artists' Theater in 1953. Soon, poets, composers, and visual artists were working together on a variety of productions—including John Ashbery's play The Heroes, with sets by the artist Nellie Blaine. The Artists' Theater, and projects like it, became the crucible in which was forged a multi-arts creative scene, an audience composed of people concerned with, or practicing, different arts, and a culture of collaboration. Born of a desire to survive the indifference of the general public, such a scene, centered on aesthetics and artistic production for artistic producers, was a far cry from the political movements in which artists of the 1930s tended to come together and collaborate. It was a scene in which Theseus, in Ashbery's play, could deliver the line "I now possessed the only weapon with which the Minotaur might be vanquished—the indifference of the true aesthete" and have it received by an audience with approving laughter.

One way to think about the presence of the poets in the postwar art world is to see it as the natural path for experimentally-minded poets, given the aesthetic ferment of American painting and the relative conservatism of American poetry under the rising sign of the New Criticism. But to see the experiment-oriented art world as a draw for experiment-oriented young poets is to see only one part of a dialectical process: it is just as true to say that the art world encouraged and emboldened the poets who entered it to become more experimental. The poems Ashbery wrote at Harvard are not terribly outré by the literary standards of the time. But much of the work he wrote in postwar New York went much further afield.

The sociologist Howard S. Becker notes that "art works always bear the marks of the system which distributes them," and that and poets depend on the audiences reached by their publishers for "shared traditions" and "background against which their work makes sense." When we consider where much of Ashbery's early writing was being published, and to whom it was being distributed, we see that it was going to a sharply defined audience, one rooted in the art world and accustomed to a degree of abstraction and experiment alien to the literary establishment of the times—to sensibilites more attuned to Willem de Kooning than to de Kooning's literary contemporary Cleanth Brooks. Much of Ashbery’s early writing appeared in Semicolon, a journal published by art curators and distributed at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery, the Artists' Club, and the Cedar Bar—all art world institutions. Moreover, the small collections of poems that precede and follow Yale's publication of Some Trees are both art world productions: 1953's Turandot, with four drawings by Jane Freilicher, was published by Tibor de Nagy gallery in 1953; and The Poems, with silk screen work by Joan Mitchell, published in 1960 by Tiber Press (a publisher of the visual arts). It should come as no surprise that Ashbery came to see the poetry of the literary establishment as too conservative: he and his early audience were immersed in a milieu that accepted and encouraged experimentalism far more than did the established literary institutions of the time.

Within this restricted sphere of reception, there was an even smaller sphere: the little coterie of the poets themselves, a hyper-aesthetic demimonde within the New York aesthetic demimonde. As James Schuyler put it, "John and Frank and I were almost like a mutual admiration society," affirming and enabling one another. Glossing Schuyler's comment, David Lehman underlines the sense of a small world removed from both the literary establishment and the general reading public: "since acceptance or rejection of [their] works was an indication of neither success nor failure, the poets looked to themselves as ultimate arbiters." Tennyson's friends rejected poems like “The Lady of Shalott” and urged him to be a moralist for the broad reading public—the poet of “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” the laureate; Ashbery's were satisfied if he delighted them and them alone.

The situation reminds one of a remark made by Pierre Bourdieu in his examination of the rise of autonomous art. In the absence of pressures to conform to religious, political, or market forces, or to otherwise conform to the norms of a public, artists find themselves "in a position to rebuff every external constraint or demand, are able to affirm their mastery over that which defines them and which properly belongs to them, that is, the form." If we understand this, we understand Ashbery.

T.S. Eliot on the Metra: Urban Alienation and the Urge for Community

Maybe it's appropriate that I've been doing all my thinking about T.S. Eliot on the train, from the windows of which I catch fleeting glimpses into other people's lives: a bent-over old man with a plastic shopping bag shouting angrily at a bent-over old woman; two kids in kelly green hoodies running down an alley, looking back over their shoulders; a laughing, shirtless, dreadlocked man seen through the open blind of his apartment window, a bottle of wine in his hand; other quick flashes of people living out their particular stories, in which I won't, in all probability, play even a walk-on role.  Eliot was, after all, a great poet of urban alienation, of the strange mix of intimacy and distance created by life in the modern metropolis.

Except for my commute on the Metra, where I've been poking around Eliot's Selected Poems on my Kindle, I haven't had much time to devote to Eliot lately, but I do want to start getting him into my mind, since the impossibly glorious summer, free of teaching and (I hope) free of administrative chickenshit, lies just a few weeks in the future, and I'm hoping to bang out two chapters of the big, boring book I've been writing (now called Power and Poetics: A Social History of Aesthetic Autonomy in Poetry): one chapter on the rejection of Tennyson by poets coming of age in the 1890s, and another on Yeats and Eliot. 

The interesting thing, for me, is how both Yeats and Eliot act out versions of Tennyson's old dilemma in radically different contexts.  Tennyson really does have two distinct careers: one as a writer of somewhat cryptic, symbolic, ambiguous poems — poems like "The Kraken" or "The Eagle" or even "The Lady of Shalott" — poems that resist being converted to moral messages; and another career as the writer of poems like Enoch Arden or "The Charge of the Light Brigade," which told the bourgeoise reader what he wanted to hear about decency, self-sacrifice, and the keeping stiff of the upper lip.  He had the dilemma because he inherited a tradition of aesthetic autonomy from one of the main strands of Romantic poetics (Keatsian negative capability, Coleridgean ideas of polysemous symbolism and organic form, etc.), but he wrote at a time when a certain kind of middle-class reader turned to poetry for a particular kind of self-affirming moral guidance.  By the 1880s and 1890s, though, the public that had sought moral guidance in poetry was finding it elsewhere, and publishers were less interested in poetry relative to other genres than they had been.  The public was rejecting poetry, and poets were rejecting the public right back, turning, with a new intensity, to aestheticism, to art for art's sake, and to an attitude that rejected poor old Tennyson as a stooge for the middlebrows.  When Harold Nicholson tried to revive Tennyson's reputation in the 1920s, he did it by disowning the "Charge of the Light Brigade" side of Tennyson's poetics, and embracing the Tennyson canon to which we still cling — the side of the work that shies away from overt moralism.  This was, of course, to truncate Tennyson in order to make him more amenable to our tastes, and in a way to kidnap him out of his own context and fit him to the Procrustean bed of our own time.  For me, this is a real loss, since we miss the struggle in Tennyson between two incompatible urges, the battle between the aesthete and the moralist, which was the real dilemma of the poet in his time.  It's a dilemma that Yeats and Eliot inherited differently.

Yeats is, of course, drawn to esoteric wisdom, arcane and polyvalent symbolism, and to ideals of transcendent beauty (for which one of his most famous symbols is the rose).  But he's also drawn to a very specific kind of politically and culturally engaged poetry, a poetry at the service of national liberation.  The gymnastics he goes through trying to square that circle can be excruciating.  Here's the beginning of the poem "To Ireland in the Coming Times," where he tries to make the rose of esoteric, otherworldy beauty compatible with the politics of Irish liberation:

Know, that I would accounted be
True brother of a company
That sang, to sweeten Ireland's wrong,
Ballad and story, rann and song;
Nor be I any less of them,
Because of the red-rose-bordered hem
Of her, whose history began
Before God made the angelic clan...

You can feel the anxiety: he wants to devote himself to the rose of eternal, autonomous beauty, but he also wants to write ballads of Irish nationalism — a heteronomous poetry if ever there was one.  He ends up claiming that esoteric beauty and Irish nationalism are compatible by making up a kind of bullshit history, where Ireland's past was devoted to this rose, and where that past endures now in the "Druid land" of Ireland.  Yeats wants to have it both ways, but only by pretending that Irish nationalism is also aestheticism because of an ancient-yet-enduring commitment to esoteric beauty can he do it.  And that's just one stop on the long, strange trip he took trying to work out those incompatible urges.

Eliot faces a different situation, since the politics of national liberation aren't really an issue for him, and there isn't really a strong constituency urging him to write for the greater glory of his nation.  The Irish eventually made Yeats a senator, such being the esteem attached to poets during periods of national liberation, but that sort of situation hasn't really been available for poets from powerful nations like 20th century America: when Yeats wrote to Ezra Pound saying "don't let them make you a senator" (or words to that effect), he must have known that such an event was impossible.  And it was just as impossible for Pound's more respectable friend Eliot.  In fact, Eliot was so far from being an American nationalist that he became not only an ex-pat, but a nationalized British citizen.  Instead, his dilemma had to do with the conflict between a commitment to French symbolist poetics, with all their glamorous obscurity and aesthetic autonomy — Eliot was so drawn to this that he even wrote some poems of that kind in French — and a commitment to poetry at the service of a community of Christians, a yearned-for society of people committed to the same principles, the same tradition, the same past, and the same places — the grounded community of "the same people living in the same place" for generations, as he put it in After Strange Gods (a people for whom he wanted to perform "the role of a moralist").

What I've been thinking about, as I read Eliot's early poetry between glimpses out the train window, is just how Eliot's need for a coherent, rooted, traditional society grew out of his experiences of alienation as a young man in London [correction: in greater Boston, given the dates of composition for "Preludes"].  Consider the experience of urban space in the famous "Preludes" from Prufrock and Other Observations.  The dominant impression is of a strange combination of closeness and distance, of constantly seeing other people in their private moments without actually knowing those people.  If you've lived in a little apartment in a big city, you know what he's talking about.  Here's the second section of the poem:

The morning comes to consciousness

Of faint stale smells of beer

From the sawdust-trampeled street

With all its muddy feet that press

To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades

That time resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

This is the poem of a man whose senses always take in the intimate traces of other people's lives: he smells what the people around him drank last night, and what they're drinking this morning, he sees their footprints in the street, he sees their hands, and the dinginess that is the trace of the repeated actions of their hands, on a thousand window shades.  The bodily presence of others is near, and palpable, and not really meant to be the acknowledged public face — the "masquerade" — they present to the world.  There's intimacy, and bodily proximity, but there's also total anonymity.  Eliot doesn't know the people raising their dingy shades, and seems to glimpse them only partially.  It's proximity without community, the world of the lonely crowd, the depersonalized modern world of gessellschaft.

The impression in the final section is much the same, at least initially:

His soul stretched tight across the skies

That fade behind a city block,

Or trampled by insistent feet

At four and five and six o'clock;

And short square fingers stuffing pipes,

And evening newspapers, and eyes

Assured of certain certainties

The conscience of a blackened street

Impatient to assume the world.

It's all in those stubby fingers, isn't it?  There's more of the intimate proximity of people in their private acts, but once again the people are seen only in parts — as fingers, as eyes — and don't belong to anyone known, to anyone with a proper name.  The poem ends with the speaker (let's call him young Eliot) feeling the pathos of this lonely crowd, perhaps yearning for some kind of connection to the people he only glimpses in brief vignettes of their private lives — until he breaks away with a brusqueness that seems like an attempt to place himself above his own yearnings:

I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;

The worlds revolve like ancient women

Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

The imagination would provide some fanciful connection to the people around him, some emotional intimacy with those Eliot smells, hears, and briefly sees.  But then Eliot backs away, laughing at his pretense, and trying to be the tough-minded, cynical person the metropolitan way of life seems to demand.

"Rhapsody on a Windy Night" is even better (though here the setting seems more like Paris, and the critic B.C. Southern argues that the images are actually culled from Charles-Louis Phillipe's Bubu-de-Montparnasse, but that's neither here nor there, and only the most ink-stained of pedantic wretches would mention it in a parenthesis).  The imagery suggests a metropolis of the kind familiar to many of us, where the mentally ill wander, disconnected, through the uncaring streets, and where the illusion of intimacy presents itself in terms of base commerce:

Every street lamp that I pass

Beats like a fatalistic drumm

And through the spaces of the dark

Midnight shakes the memory

As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one, 

The street-lamp sputtered,

The street-lamp muttered,

The street-lamp said, "Regard that woman

Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door

Which opens on her with a grin.

You see the border of her dress

Is torn and stained with sand,

And you see the corner of her eye

Twists like a crooked pin."

The intimately-observed sordidness, the seeing-past what is meant to be seen (that stain, that strangely twisted eye), recalls the anonymous proximity of "Preludes," and the odd hesitancy, as the prostitute eyes young Tom Eliot up, trying to gauge whether he's too jammed up for the awful daring of a moment's surrender, is powerful stuff: we feel a strange stand-off, which could result in cold distance or an act of sexual commerce that is much like the alienated intimacy of "Preludes," where we can see, smell, and almost touch the closeness of others without any real intimacy.

The poem moves on to a string of images less literally connected to the street setting.  My favorite is this:

I have seen eyes in the street

Trying to peer through lighted shutters,

And a crab one afternoon in a pool,

An old crab with barnacles on his back,

Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

We return to those eyes looking out from behind shades, seen by other eyes: a curious kinship between the observer and the observed, a kinship in anonymity and alienation.  And the pairing of this with the image of the stick-grabbing crab is wonderful, because the man-stick-crab combination is an intimacy, but also a distance: it's play, but it's also struggle for the stick, and the man and the crab, while involved in the same action, are such utterly different forms of life, so terribly alien to each other.  Like "Preludes," it's all about distance-in-proximity, the alienating condition of life in the rootless modern metropolis.

It's the notion of humanity under these conditions  as "some infinitely gentle/Infinitely suffering thing" that drives Eliot to dream of a more rooted world, a world united by shared traditions, shared religion, and the kind of stability of trans-generational habitation of the same space that the industrial world destroys.  Seeing this makes me about as sympathetic to Eliot's reactionary politics as I'm ever likely to get.  Glimpsing the world from my train window, I feel much the same as he felt, looking at those eyes  behind the shutters.  The difference was that he arrived at a prescription for the condition, in After Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society, and Notes Toward the Definition of Culture — a narrow, somewhat authoritarian, hierarchical, and ultimately a xenophobic prescription.  Me, all I've got is a sense of the problem.  That, and a deep skepticism about people with comprehensive plans for the renovation of civilization.

The Poet Dreams of Power: Part One

The critic Robert von Hallberg has retired from the faculty at the University of Chicago, and the editors of the Chicago Review have marked the occasion by running a series of essays on poetry and poetics in his honor.  In true, inimitable Hyde Park style, they honor von Hallberg by beginning the feature with a short essay picking him to pieces, saying the claims of his book Lyric Powers "are extraordinary, even irresponsible."  I like this, mostly because it embodies the best spirit of the Chicago Review: serious about the life of the mind, and a bit unworldly and impolitic.  I think this must have something to do with the fact that the journal has always been edited by graduate students: they're not in charge long enough to become too complacent, and they're not hooked into networks of mutual academic or literary obligation that might keep them from saying what they mean when they disagree with someone.


One of the essays dedicated to von Hallberg, Keith Tuma's "After the Bubble," speculates on the fate of poetry after the financial crisis, and its inevitable effect on the university creative writing programs where so many American poets currently find themselves employed.  In the course of pursuing some larger points, he makes a comment about Robert Pinsky that got me thinking about the relationship between poets and power — or, more precisely, that got me thinking about how poets have dreamed about how they would like to relate to those in positions of power.  Here's Tuma's remark:

In Robert von Hallberg's recent book Lyric Powers (2008), Pinsky's poetry, which is rooted, von Hallberg thinks, in "imitation of speech," is linked to "the premise that civil, secular values properly govern cultural life." While von Hallberg admits that some readers find Pinsky's poetry boring, he views Pinsky's "patient hypotactic style" as a credible and considered alternative to modernist juxtaposition and speed.  To take on a claim like that would make for serious debate.  Von Hallberg is not shy about identifying Pinsky with power.  But without a critical discourse about poetry and power and these other matters, criticism of Pinsky will continue to operate like gossip...

I'm in agreement with Tuma that we need some kind of a deep, non-anecdotal understanding of the relationship between poetry and power, something that gets beyond claiming that one or another poet is resistant to, or complicit with, the powers-that-be.  I hope the book I've been working on, formerly called The Aesthetic Anxiety, now called Poetics and Power — a social history of the idea of aesthetic autonomy in poetry — will be a contribution to such an understanding, but I'm only about halfway done, and by no means assured that the outcome will be of interest to anyone.  So, in the absence of an understanding of the actual relations between poetry and power, let me offer instead a brief, highly selective history of the way some poets writing in English over the past two centuries have dreamed about how they would like to relate to power.  Robert Pinsky certainly appears from some perspectives (von Hallberg's and, I think, Tuma's) to have a somewhat cozy relationship with power.  But seen in historical perspective, things change a bit: compared to some poets, Pinsky is neither close to power, nor desirous of such proximity.  Compared to others, he just appears more successful in realizing his dreams.


It's tough to know where to begin a discussion of the poets and their dreams of how they might relate to power.  I suppose some small gesture to an era when the differentiation of literary elites and power elites had not yet occurred is in order.  Consider the Elizabethans: Sir Thomas Wyatt, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Edward Dyer, Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare, Thomas Campion, Sir Henry Wotton, John Hoskins, Edmund Spenser.  All those "sirs" give a pretty clear picture of the situation: for the most part, the literary elite and the power elite were one and the same.  Of the non-knighted and non-nobel, Spenser was a big landowner in Ireland, and Hoskins was a member of parliament, so they too were members of a power elite.  Campion was a successful physician, and therefore an exception to the power elite rule, as were the two playwrights Marlowe and Shakespeare, who were part of the fledgling world of commercial writing.  As for how they dreamed of their relations to power: well, it varied.  But for the most part they saw their roles as poets as subordinate to their roles as movers-and-shakers, and poems as either pastoral escapism or as the jewels on the pommels of the weapons they used in the cut-and-thrust of courtly life.  Spenser did try to convert The Faerie Queen into a big cash payment from the sovereign (the idea was nixed by Lord Burghley, with the famous comment "all of that for a song?"), but even here it was less a matter of trying to influence power with poetry than of trying to put poetry at the service of power (huge, now-unread, tracts of The Faerie Queen are dedicated to Church politics, and propagandizing against Catholicism).


There's a long, slow differentiation of elites in the centuries that follow.  But let's fast-forward to Alexander Pope in the Augustan eighteenth century.  Pope's interesting for all sorts of reasons, not just for the snazzy hats he wore.  For one thing, he was among the first English poets to make a lot of money by selling poetry in the marketplace.  He lived at a kind of liminal period, when the system of relying on aristocratic patronage hadn't yet died off, and the market system was just kicking into gear.  The relation he had with power may, in fact, have been as a kind of housecat (one noble patron liked to stop Pope during readings and revise lines, such being the patron's prerogative).  But he dreamed of himself as a kind of spirtitual and moral advisor, not speaking so much on matters of immediate political urgency, but offering general principles that might inform the decisions of the powerful at a more abstract level.  Consider the opening of "An Essay on Man":

Awake, my St. John! leave all meaner things
To low ambition, and the pride of kings.
Let us (since life can little more supply
Than just to look about us and to die)
Exatiate free o'er all the scene of man;
A mighty maze! but not without a plan;
A wild, where weeds and flowers promiscuous shoot,
Or garden, tempting with forbidden fruit.
Together let us beat this ample field...

The "St. John" is Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, and one of Pope's most powerful friends.  Pope envisions himself as a companion of the good Viscount Bolingbroke, and envisions the two of them engaged in aristocratic activities together (to beat the field was to send runners out into it with sticks to scare the birds, who would then fly up to be shot by the noble hunter and his companions).  The tone is friendly, if a bit deferential, and the relationship to his Lordship is as philosophical guide: the word's a maze, but not without a plan — a plan the poet will explain to the Great Man in ways that will enable him to carry out his duties of state in a philosophically informed manner.  If the deference might make some of us cringe, now, the proximity to power would make more than a few poets blanche with envy.


We start to get closer to a recognizably modern relationship of poetry and power with the Romantics — if only because the Romantics were often either radical bohemians with no direct influence on power (think Shelley) or government-sponsored former radicals whose views now seemed less threatening (think Wordsworth).  The document of the time that seems most representative of the poet's dream of his relation to power is Shelley's "Defense of Poetry." It was never published in his lifetime, but has had a huge allure for generations of poets since — and why wouldn't it?  It really lets you have your cake and eat it too.  On the one hand, the poet is responsible only to his private vision, not the demands of the market or the audience of any kind of patron, none of which were much available to Shelley anyway.  On the other hand, the poet has enormous influence: his ideas shape the consciousness of the ages to come.  All of this has its origins in Shelley's arguments with his father in law, the philosopher William Godwin: Godwin said philosophers were the primary thinkers of society, and poets should serve as publicists for philosophical ideas.  Shelley turned the relationship around, saying that poets inspire everyone, including philosophers, to think in new ways.  The process is gradual, spreading bit by bit through readers of the poet to those who are influenced at second or third or fourth hand — the original viral marketing.  Hence the unacknowledged legislator: sure, no one knows you influenced the world, but that's not important: what's important is that the influence happens.  Of course there's no proof that the influence really takes place.  As Lou Reed might put it, you need a busload of faith to believe in this sort of thing.  But poets tend to have a lot of faith in poetry: when I was arguing about the political impact of poetry with Andrea Brady in the pages of The Cambridge Literary Review last year, I couldn't help but think she was a bit of a Shelleyan, and that I was a bit of a nay-saying grinch.  Anyway, the point is this: Shelley's dream of enormous influence is the product of a kind of alienation of the poet from power: Sir Walter Raleigh didn't look for such indirect influence on politics.  When he wanted to make things happen politically, he schemed with other courtiers.  Nor did Alexander Pope look for some secret, long-term, possible-but-unprovable political influence: if he wanted political influence, he buttered Lord Bolingbroke's toast and made some subtle, inoffensive suggestions.  You have to be pretty removed from actual legislators to pin your hopes on small scale, but just possibly viral, influence on public opinion.


It's not quite a straight line from Shelley to us, though.  I mean, think about Tennyson.

“Tennyson,” Eliot once wrote, was “the saddest of all English poets, among the Great in Limbo, the most instinctive rebel against the society in which he was the perfect conformist.” Eliot is certainly right to sense a conflict at the heart of Tennyson.  But to explain the dissonance in Tennyson in psychological terms — as a matter of rebellious instincts and the urge to conform — is to miss the way those very instincts were conditioned by Tennyson’s peculiar moment in the history of English society and the history of poetry.  His was a time when social disorder and growing middle-class power — both products of industrial development — weighed on every thinker’s mind.  It was also a time when ideas of the autonomy from power, fully developed by the Shelley and other Romantics, were bequeathed to new generations of writers.

Tennyson, in ways more instinctive than calculated, came to embrace a role on offer to many writers of his time: that of public moralist.  Literary public moralists both propagated the values of the middle class and urged the amelioration of those values in an effort that, collectively, made a major contribution to the cementing of a social order beneficial to the middle class.  This public moralist is the Tennyson most famous in his own day, the teacher of domestic order in The Princess and Idylls of the King, the prophet of self-denial in Maud and Enoch Arden, the instiller of faith in progress in “Locksley Hall,” and the obedient servant of empire in “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”  The public moralist acting on behalf of the bourgeois order did not, and could not, sit at ease with another side of Tennyson, the late-Romantic poet who’d loved Keats’ poetry, and who had carved “Byron is dead” into stone when, as a youth, he’d heard of the great Romantic’s passing.  Part of Tennyson was always loyal to one of the big Romantic ideas of the poet — as an alienated outsider creating works that sought not so much to speak to the world but to form themselves into mysterious symbolic wholes, or to hover in the delicious indecisiveness of negative capability (this isn’t the Shelleyan idea — it’s more Coleridge and Keats).  Tennyson spent a lifetime at war with himself, his intellectual and aesthetic inheritance ever at odds with the social role he was asked to play, and was so richly rewarded — in sales, in status, in honors — for playing.  His path is that of the poet divided.

Tennyson was, I should stress, far from insincere in his moralism, however much at odds it may have been with his equally sincere aestheticism.  He was, after all, connected to the powerful class on whose behalf he wrote, and he had seen enough of the social disorder of the 1830s and 40s to understand the value of an orderly society.  The authentic Tennyson, then, is not a figure on one side of the aesthete/moralist rift: the authentic Tennyson is the rift, and the product of very specific, and quite contradictory, socio-aesthetic conditions.  So: on the one hand, he was close to, and spoke for, power.  But that was only part of his dream, the fulfilled part.  The other part of his dream was to be withdrawn from the world of power, and to exist in a world of art for its own sake.

That's probably more on Tennyson than anyone wants to read, but I spent all of last summer writing about him, and you know how it goes: anything shorter than three paragraphs seems like too little of an explanation when you think you really know what you're talking about.

Anyway.  The coziness between Tennyson and some other Victorian poets and the newly-powerful middle classes ends, for a whole host of reasons  — the economics of publishing in the era of mass literacy, the relative growth in authority of the social sciences at the expense of the authority of the man of letters, the lessening sense of social crisis in England after the 1850s, the slow loosening of bonds between social, economic, and cultural elites, and other things, most of them dealt with very well in T.W. Heyck's astonishingly informative The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, which is indispensable in understanding what happens to poetry between Tennyson and the modernists.  So we end up with poets once again alienated from power and dreaming of ways that their work might have importance or influence.


Ezra Pound makes for an interesting case in point.  He was always concerned with the social role of the poet: in the essay "The Wisdom of Poetry" he said "in former ages, poets were historians, genealogists, religious functionaries."  But in his own day the role seemed rather more unclear.  Mass culture, Pound intuited, had something to do with the change.  "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly" expresses the alienation of the poet in the age of mass communications, incipient mass consumption, and the economic importance of the masses whose tastes were so different from the elites poets had once served:

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;


Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!


The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

That was from 1920.  A year later, Pound offered his dream of a solution to the problem of the poet's role in modern times.  As it turned out, it was a remarkably Shelleyan dream of indirect influence.  Here's a passage from the article I'm thinking of, "How to Read," which — perhaps ironically — ran in the very kind of mass media vehicle that was so dislocating poets: The New York Herald Tribune:

The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the damned and despised litterati...when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot.

In this dream of poetic influence on power, the "governor or legislator" probably has no idea that his language, and, by implication, his mental framework has been conditioned by the poet.  But in controlling the meanings of words, poets have an enormous power as unacknowledged legislators.  One might well argue that it isn't the literati who control the meaning of words, since their contribution to these matters is quantitatively minimal in relation to the products of mass culture.  But arguments are for reasoners, and Pound isn't reasoning here so much as he's dreaming of a way for the things he loves to be important not just to him, but to the polity at large.  There's will-to-power here, for sure, and a compensatory gesture — the sort of thing Seamus Heaney, in a very different context, would call "pap for the dispossessed."  The dispossessed here being poets in modernity.

Egad.  It's time for me to hop a train, and I haven't talked about Eliot, Pinsky, some comments by Larry Sawyer, or Jeremy Prynne.  I'll try to pick up where I left off with my next post, probably tomorrow.  I mean, the new semester is about to begin, and I've got some print writing deadlines coming right up — conditions that always seem to drive me to blog instead of doing any kind writing or thinking that feels like an obligation.


{Here's part two}


{Update Jan. 11: The good people at the Poetry Foundation raise a crucial point about this discussion}

The Aesthetically Poor and How They Got There

One of the more common arguments one hears, regarding the relative lack of popularity of one or another poet, is that said poet's work is "difficult." Such arguments are often followed by homiletics regarding the virtue or importance of difficulty. I should know: I've made them myself more times than I can remember.

I suppose it's because of this that I feel like posting a few paragraphs from the big-ass social history of aesthetic autonomy (with reference to poetry) that I've been plugging away on for a couple of years. Here's a passage where I'm talking about Arthur Henry Hallam's review of one of Tennyson's first books. Tennyson would go on to drop many of his relatively obscure symbolist tendencies and become the most popular English poet of his generation (or of any subsequent generation), but at the time Hallam wanted to defend obscurity. The attitude to the audience is, shall we say, interesting — and a kind of aesthetic mirror image of the free-marketeering, self-made-man ethos of the Victorian middle class.

Hey, I just study this stuff...

**

E.D.H. Johnson has argued, with regard to the Victorian poets, that “artists of their generation were the first to face the problem of communicating with a modern reading public little sensitive to the life of the imagination.” Arthur Henry Hallam, in his short life, was nevertheless among the first English poets to see the problem clearly. What to make of the relative unpopularity of highly skilled poets like the young Tennyson of Poems, Chiefly Lyrical? What could be done about the obscurity of those trafficking in difficult symbolism and indecisive negative capability, especially in a world where literacy of a basic sort was growing, and beginning to displace more elite forms of reading in the marketplace? Hallam phrases the question a little differently, claiming (in the manner of the Wordsworth of the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads) a special sensitivity for the poets: “how should they be popular,” Hallam asks, “whose senses told them a richer and ampler tale than most men could understand, and who constantly expressed, because they constantly felt, sentiments of exquisite pleasure or pain, which most men were not permitted to experience?”. His answer begins with a gesture of conciliation toward the advocates of a socially engaged art: “Undoubtably the true poet addresses himself, in all his conceptions, to the common nature of us all,” says Hallam, for “art is a lofty tree, and may shoot up far beyond our grasp, but its roots are in daily life and experience.” In the end, though, the responsibility of bridging the gap between the difficult poet and the bewildered public lies with the reader, not the poet. Apprehending the wholeness and harmony of the organic form of aesthetic works is, quite simply, hard work. Readers have the potential to grasp refined aesthetic pleasures, if only, says Hallam (sounding as Victorian as a Victorian should) they would, through diligent work, make themselves worthy of such pleasures:

…since the emotions of the poet, during composition, follow a regular law of association, it follows that to accompany their progress up to the harmonious prospect of the whole, and to perceive the proper dependence of every step on that which it preceded, it is absolutely necessary to start from the same point, i.e., clearly to apprehend that leading sentiment in the poet’s mind, by their conformity to which the host of suggestions are arranged. Now this requisite exertion is not willingly made by the large majority of readers.

The aesthetically poor are poor, it seems, because they are lazy.