The Genealogy of Postmodernism: Contemporary American
Poetry"
The Genealogy of Postmodernism: Contemporary American Poetry"by
Albert Gelpi
from The Southern Review, Summer 1990,pp. 517-541
1Despite the fact that terms embracing large cultural
ideologies-- Romanticism, Modernism, Postmodernism--change their
protean shape and color in different hands and perspectives, they
are necessary in defining and comparing successive periods of
cultural history. In fact, the very imprecision of such
epithets--the fact that they enfold inconsistencies and rest in
contradictions and paradoxes--allows us to identify and trace the
volatile play and counterplay of issues and values as a given
period defines itself in relation to is antecedents and sets the
terms for what will develop from it.
The first part of this essay will take a long historical view to
understand the relation of Postmodernism to Modernism. As I have
argued in A Coherent Splendor, the Modernist period, bracketed by
the two world wars, bore a complicated and ambivalent relation to
Romanticism, the dominant aesthetic and cultural ideology of the
nineteenth century. And Romanticism, in its turn, evolved out of
and against Enlightenment rationalism, which had deepened the
skepticism, growing in the West since the Renaissance, about
theological or philosophical absolutes capable of sustaining a
reliable relation between subject and object, mind and matter,
physics and metaphysics. The Romantic's response to this
epistemological and religious crisis was to ground certitude not in
reason or institutional systems of belief but in the felt
experience of the individual: not in powers of induction and
deduction but in the personal intuition of the universal in the
particulars of experience, of the absolute in the passing
contingencies of time and space. These moments of intuitive insight
constituted acts of genuine signification and proceeded from the
highest human faculty of cognition, which philosophers called
transcendental Reason and artists called Imagination.
Romantic epistemology, psychology, and aesthetics proposed an
intrinsic, organic triad of correspondence or continuity between
the perceiving subject, the perceived world, and the medium of
expression in the subtending activity of Spirit. The most
influential theoretician of the Romantic Imagination in England was
of course Coleridge, and in America Emerson; its most influential
exemplars were Wordsworth and Whitman. But visionary insight is
difficult to attain, much less to maintain, and Romanticism put
such stress on the individual's momentary experience that the
Romantic synthesis of subject and object through the agency of the
Imagination began to deconstruct almost as soon as it was ventured.
The literature of the nineteenth century records the interplay
between Romantic ecstasy and, increasingly, Romantic irony: from
Blake's visions and Wordsworth's early nature mysticism to the
decadence of the Romantic ideology at the fin de siecle in art for
art's sake.
In the opening years of the new century, leading to the war
which seemed to many besides Spengler symptomatic of the "decline
of the West," Modernism aggressively advanced a counterideology to
an exhausted Romanticism, explicitly rejecting its epistemological
and metaphysical idealism, its aggrandizement of the individual
ego, its organic model for the instantiation of seer and seen,
word, and meaning. The Modernist work of art proceeded not out of a
conviction of organic continuity or even correlation with nature
but instead out of a conviction of the discontinuity between
subject and object, and the consequent fragmentation of self and
experience required the tight construction of the art object from
the fragments. The Modernist artwork stood as an often desperate
insistence on coherence, heroic considering the odds, amidst and
against the ravages of time: the instability of nature, the
unreliability of perception, and the tragedy of human history.
Modernism, then, began as the intensification of Romantic irony
to the point of rupture. The critical discussion of Modernism has
concentrated on the shattering of formal conventions as an
expression of the disintegration of traditional values, and this is
the aspect of Modernism that anticipated Postmodernism. Marjorie
Perloff has dubbed the Modernist aesthetic, in the title of her
recent book, The Poetics of Indeterminacy, and in The Futurist
Moment she showed how writers learned experimental techniques for
verbal bricolage from collage. Organic form came to mean not a
discovered correspondence with nature, as the Romantics wanted to
take it, but almost the opposite: dislocation or abstraction of
elements from nature into an invented and--Eliot's
adjective--autotelic artifact. The fixing of bits and pieces in an
arrested arrangement compelled a dramatic shift from the temporal
aesthetic of the Romantics to a poetics of space; in painting three
dimensional space hammered into a surface design, in poetry
sequentiality fractured and its splinters reassembled in
simultaneous juxtaposition, in music the elimination of melody for
chordal juxtaposition. Thus Picasso's Cubism, Kandinsky's abstract
designs, Pound's ideogrammic method, Schoenberg's jarring
atonalities.
However, Modernism was not all indeterminacy and rupture. Even
the bricolage, I would argue, was evidence not just of a sense of
indeterminacy but, at least as importantly, a counterdetermination
to resist indeterminacy. Fragmentation impelled imaginative
creation. Stevens spoke for his Modernist peers when he said that a
"blessed rage for order" conferred on the driven artist a heroic
nobility in an ignoble time and a function in society, since the
work of imagination "helps us to live our lives." Similarly, when
Pound charged his contemporaries to "make it new," the fiat of that
aesthetic genesis claimed for the artist a godlike power in social
and cultural life: the ideogrammic method was a technique for
construction.
So I read poetic Modernism differently from many distinguished
commentators on the subject, Marjorie Perloff and Hugh Kenner among
them, in arguing that the Modernists were aiming not at, or not
finally at, a poetics of indeterminacy but rather--as suggested by
the Poundian title of my own book on the subject--at achieving a
coherent splendor. In fact, despite the manifestos and axiomatic
pronouncements against Romanticism, Modernism represents an
extension and reconstitution of the salient issues that Romanticism
set out to deal with. In the face of the intellectual,
psychological, moral, and political turmoil which had propelled the
last two centuries into more and more violent crises, Modernism
continued to exalt the imagination as the agency of coherence. Not,
the Modernists insisted, the Romantic Imagination with its capital
I; but an imagination that, though shorn of mystical and idealist
claims, was still the supreme human faculty of cognition,
empowering the artist (echoing Stevens again) to decreate
disordered experience into aesthetic order. Even in their most
experimental phases, Pound, Eliot, Joyce, Williams, Stevens, all
wanted the pieces in their collages to make a picture. Against
detractors Pound pressed forward with his life's work in the
conviction that he would be able to name his cantos, when the
pattern was complete, with a single ideogram which would subsume
the thousands of pieces. And Stevens, acknowledging that his
fictions were aimed at intimating bit by bit the supreme fiction,
wanted at the end of his life to call his collected poems The Whole
of Harmonium.
Nor need the coherence possible in an artwork, by being
autotelic, be merely aesthetic, as leftist critics of the thirties
and contemporary neo- Marxists would dismissively have it. Charles
Altieri's monumental book with the Stevensian subtitle Painterly
Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry: The Contemporaneity of
Modernism (l990) mounts an extended and compelling argument for the
moral efficacy of the Modernist aesthetic. Working from abstraction
as a hermeneutic of perception in painting, Altieri reads Eliot,
Williams, Pound, and Stevens to show how in poetry as well as
painting the abstracting process of decreation and re-creation,
hermetic though it be, requires discriminations of perception, and
so of consciousness, which permit, indeed compel, us to understand
ourselves and our situation more subtly and precisely, and thereby
compel us to define the values and commitments upon which
responsible choice and action depend. For Altieri, the Modernist
aesthetic comprises an epistemology and an ethics: for many in this
century the only valid way of coming to discernment and
commitment.
While granting as I do the force of Altieri's argument, I would
go further and aver that many of the great Modernist poets came by
different paths to realize the psychological and moral limits of
the Modernist aesthetic and superseded it. The period of High
Modernism was relatively brief--from 1910, say, to 1925--and this
difficult act of supersession on the part of the poets served to
extend their active careers into old age and made for much of their
best work. The often gradual shift in poetic stance can be graphed
dramatically in the contrast between The Waste Land and Four
Quartets, between Mauberley and A Draft of XXX Cantos on the one
hand and The Pisan Cantos and the final Drafts and Fragments on the
other, between H.D.'s Imagist Sea Garden and her long sequences
Trilogy and Helen in Egypt and Hermetic Definition, between the
poems of Harmonium on the one hand and the poems of Transport to
Summer and The Rock on the other, between the Williams of Spring
and AlI and the Williams of Paterson and the triadic poems of his
last decade.
The difference between earlier and later work can be graphed as
well through the often marked preference of critical readers for
one or the other phase of these poets' work. For Perloff and
Altieri, for example, Eliot's masterpiece is The Waste Land; for me
it is Four Quartets. His early poems and the essays define the
Modernist doctrine of the impersonal poet, the autotelic artwork,
and the objective-correlative ache for an experienced conviction of
an absolute reality beyond divisions which anaesthetize him from
himself, other humans, nature, God. It is a painful but clear way
from the glimpsed possibility of deliverance in "What the Thunder
Said" at the end of The Waste Land to the epiphany in the chapel at
Little Gidding when tragic history is grasped through the mystery
of the Incarnation as "a pattern of timeless moments." Out of the
confusing polyglossia of The Waste Land Eliot's own voice has
emerged and identified itself within a circumambient reality
extrinsic to art. Poetry need no longer be autotelic; "the poetry
does not matter," "East Coker" tells us, as it has to matter to a
Modernist, because it matters in a larger scheme of reference and
relevance. That Eliot could say this in what I take to be his best
and culminating poem is a measure of the point beyond Modernism
which he had reached.
It was Eliot's particular Christian perspective--a Calvinist
version of Catholicism--that impelled him to conclude that the
poetry as poetry does not matter. For all Pound's disputes with his
old friend about religion, he came to a not dissimilar position
through a pantheism synthesized from the Greek mysteries and the
Chinese tao. That holistic pantheism is the heart of The Cantos,
even of its economics and politics, and in The Pisans and the last
Drafts and Fragments--the most openly autobiographical and moving
segments of the poem--Modernist aestheticism is explicitly
repudiated: "Le Paradis n'est pas artificial" --not a function of
aesthetics, as Baudelaire had said--but "terrestre" in the eternal
round of nature. In the climactic Canto 81, the goddess' eyes
attend Pound in his prison tent and reveal a vision in which the
chastened ego consents to "learn of the green world what can be thy
place/ In scaled invention and true artistry." By Canto 116, when
Pound has to acknowledge that he will never complete and name his
life's work, he can nonetheless give his incomplete poems an
unexpected affirmation by concluding prosaically: "i.e. it coheres
all right/ even if my notes do not cohere." The failure
is--only--in his art; coherence lies in the ongoing tao. Meaning
surpasses Modernist means.
Neither Stevens nor H. D. nor Williams would ever question the
integrity of the poem in so fundamental a way as Pound or Eliot,
but the late work of all three adumbrated a point of reference and
relevance outside their poetry. With H.D., myths and mystery cults
and occult mysticism inform the long autobiographical sequences
through which she wrote her "Hermetic Definition." Even Williams
found, by the time of Paterson V and the triadic poems in Pictures
from Brueghel, that his resolutely antimetaphysical humanism had
deepened to the point that it had to express itself in mythic and
even, occasionally, religious terms. As for Stevens, the
lengthening meditations turn and turn on archetypes --father,
mother, anima, ephebe--constellated around the image of achieved
self as giant, hero, major man; the fictive presences seem to
resonate with reality, "like rubies reddened by rubies, reddening,"
and the resonance imbues the reader with the shimmer of that
translucence.
In their longer, later poems all these poets temper their early
Modernist stance by opening the visualized, spatialized lyric
moment into sequences in which time dictates the form and the
theme. Canto 30 stipulated the Modernist dread of time: "Time is
the evil. Evil." Even long poems dealing with history like The
Cantos and The Waste Land had to be mosaics of embedded ideograms.
But as the cantos proliferated, they could not be held in a single
simultaneity of apprehension and revealed themselves instead as a
life-poem which delineated its protagonist's convicted course
through history and his own time and in which music increasingly
alternated with painting as the analogue for poetic form. Eliot
wrote the essay on "The Music of Poetry" as he was finishing Four
Quartets to underscore the musicality of its verse forms and the
fuguelike counterpoint of his meditation on time and history. Just
at the point when younger poets like Oppen and Zukofsky were
imitating objectivism, Williams was himself complaining of its
static constraints. Deliberately turning his attention from spatial
arrangement to prosodic measure, he released himself into the
composition of Paterson; and, for the more narrative,
autobiographical poems of his last years, he devised the notion of
the variable foot, based on the melodic line of the musical bar and
stepped in tercets down the page like a score. Stevens smoothed out
the jagged angularities of "Domination of Black" and "Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Blackbird" and pulled his iambics into the endless
silken skein of his later meditations--"Transport to Summer," "The
Auroras of Autumn"--which evoked the turn, and return, of the
seasons.
In my view, then, the key to Modernism resides in its attempt,
in the wake of declining faith and debunked reason and decadent
Romanticism, to affirm the imagination as the supreme human faculty
of cognition for (and against) a secular, skeptical age. The
affirmation took place in two phases which indicate the dialectic
with Romanticism at the heart of Modernism. First, the High
Modernism of the teens and twenties concentrating the claims of the
decreative/re-creative imagination in the cognitive authority of
the quasi-absolute, autotelic art object; then, through
acquiescence in temporal and historical process, a period of
expansion, recovering sources of cognition beyond the aesthetic: in
the case of Eliot, by a renewal of faith in the Incarnation; in the
case of the others--Stevens, Pound, Williams, H.D.--by an
exploration of the powers insight that had been the latent legacy
of Romanticism in Modernism all along.
2The epithet "Modernism" came into currency not from the artists
themselves (they thought of themselves as modern but not
Modernist), but from critics in the sixties and seventies
retroactively and reflexively commenting on a cultural period now
past. In fact, the currency of the term marked the end of the
period, and critics soon coined the term Postmodernism to
distinguish subsequent developments. The Postmodernist break with
Modernism, in poetry at least, took place over two generations of
poets. Those who began to publish after World War II found
themselves awed and overshadowed by the enormous achievements of
their legendary predecessors, most of them still alive and writing.
Lynn Keller's Re-making It New: Contemporary American Poetry and
the Modernist Tradition (1987) focuses on the continuities and
discontinuities between Modernist and Postmodernist poetics through
four exemplary pairings: Stevens and John Ashbery, Marianne Moore
and Elizabeth Bishop, Williams and Robert Creeley, Auden and James
Merrill. But other pairings also spring to mind: Pound and Charles
Olson or Robert Duncan, Williams and Denise Levertov, Robinson
Jeffers and William Everson, Yeats or Auden and John Berryman,
Frost or Stevens and Adrienne Rich. The vitality and variety of
American poetry into the sixties come from the postwar poets'
efforts to define their voices out of and against their long-lived
and larger-than-life predecessors.
The poetry of the Cold War period set out the defining features
of Postmodernism before critics introduced the term: a deepening
sense of the mind's alienation from nature and of the wold's
alienation from reality; an intensified experience of material
randomness and temporal flux, of moral relativity anal
psychological alienation, of epistemological confusion and
metaphysical doubt; a drastic scaling down of expectations and
aspirations; a questioning of language as a medium of perception
and communication; a shift from hypostasizing poetry as a completed
work to investigating it as an inconclusive process of provisional
improvisation. The first concerted challenges to the New
Criticism's academic codification of Modernism came in the fifties
from the Beat writers and from the open-form poetics of Olson,
Duncan, and Levertov. Lowell, in many ways the weathervane figure
of the postwar decades, illustrated the shift dramatically as he
moved from the high-pressured closure of the poems in Land of
Unlikeness and Lord Weary's Castle, written during and just after
the war under the influence of Tate's New Criticism, to the
fragmented fourteen-liners that kept proliferating and revising
themselves into version after version of Notebook in the late
sixties and early seventies.
However, the wobble in the form and substance of Lowell's poetry
is only one signal that his generation remained ambivalent and
transitional in its aesthetic allegiances. The Whitmanesque
Romanticism of Beat poets like Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Everson
defined itself against the formalism of Tate and Wilbur. Even the
strong influence of the so-called "Black Mountain School" offered
no clear direction; Olson obviously represented an extension of
Pound's aesthetic and Levertov that of Williams, while Duncan and
Creeley represented the fracturing of Pound's and of Williams'
aesthetic, respectively, in ways that point to Postmodernism. In
fact, the immediately postwar generation was still so imbued with
Modernist values and with a residual Romanticism inherent in those
values that many of them exhibit, as I shall say again later, a
Neoromanticism which offers an alternative pole to Postmodernism in
the contemporary period.
The self-conscious and deliberate break with the Modernism of
the first half of the century came, in fact, only with the
seventies and eighties when a number of deconstructionist and
Marxist critics, along with a number of younger poets, mounted an
attack in the name of a distinctly Poststructuralist, Postmodernist
sensibility. Much as Poetry (Chicago) and Blast and the Dial had
campaigned for Modernists half a century before and the Kenyon
Review and The Southern Review rallied for the New Criticism as the
institutionalization of certain Modernist values during the forties
and fifties, so now the Postmodernist poet-critics, based
principally in New York and the Bay Area, grouped themselves under
the mastheads of such journals as L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, edited by Bruce
Andrews and Charles Bernstein, Sulfur, edited by Clayton Eschelman,
Acts, edited by David Levi Strauss, and Poetics Journal, edited by
Barrett Watten and Lyn Hejinian. Bernstein's The L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E
Book (1984) and Michael Palmer's Code of Signals: Recent Writings
on Poetics (1983) collected manifestoes and position papers from
poets styling themselves as, in various ways, language-oriented
poets. When New Directions, the publisher of Pound and Williams and
H.D., Olson and Creeley and Levertov, brought out Douglas
Messerli's anthology "Language" Poetries (1987), poets available
previously only from small ingroup presses found entry into the
mainstream.
On the aesthetic level, then, the Postmodernist position
formulated itself as a critique of the paradoxes inherent in
Modernism. According to Nick Piombillo's "Writing As Reverie," the
centripetal Modernist effort to unify pieces into a coherent
collage gives way to what is unapologetically "an esthetics of
fragmentation and discontinuity." To the disillusioned
Postmodernist the vaunted claims of Modernism were spurious and
dangerous. The Modernist master merely put the mask of
impersonality on the Romantic ego-genius, and any such exaggerated
individualism led to an elitist pose of disdain for politics that
itself masked the equally elitist sympathy for totalitarianism
which helped make Fascism and Nazism and Stanlinism possible. In
this view what was left of Modernism was immolated in the war it in
part brought about.
Some commentators cast the postwar crisis primarily in
psychological terms, some in terms of physics, others in political
terms, and others still in linguistic terms; but these different
emphases overlaid and enforced one another. Einstein's theory of
relativity was followed by Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.
Lacan elaborated the dislocations of Freudian theory into a no-exit
maze. In poetry the perceiving "I" of the lyric or narrative or
dramatic mode disappeared into the anonymous, decentered ego
echoing the polyglossia of popular culture. Marxist theory from the
U.S.S.R, Frankfurt, and Paris supplied the political explanation of
the psychological dilemma, propounding a historical-materialist
critique of late capitalism in which individuals functioned as the
creatures and creation of political institutions and economic
systems and in which devalued art and letters functioned to
commodify the hegemonic values of a consumer society. Language
serves in such a scheme of chance and determination, of relative
values and closed systems, as the material base or medium within
and through which subjectivity constructs social reality and social
reality constructs subjectivity (no longer self or identity). Since
consciousness does not exist "prior to--aside from--language,"
Charles Bernstein tells us, consciousness is "itself a
syntacticalization--a syntaxophony." Kathy Acker describes the
osmosis of language and social reality through the membrane of
consciousness so that the first person pronoun recedes into the
passive voice:
I write with words which are given me.... I am given meaning and
I give meaning back to the community.... I am always taking part in
the constructing of the political, economic, and moral community in
which my discourse is taking place. All aspects of
language--denotation, sound, style, syntax, grammar, etc.--are
politically, economically, and morally coded.
In post-Wittgensteinian theory, language becomes a
self-referential, self-complicating "code" of arbitrary signs at
once determined in a given social system, yet indeterminate in its
signification because of the yawning gap between the word as
signifier and as signified. In her essay "The Word As Such:
L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E Poetry in the Eighties," Perloff cites Blanchot's
explanation of the crisis of referentiality and the slippage of
meaning in the fact that words are "monsters with two faces, one
being reality, physical presence, and the other meaning, ideal
absence." Bernstein speaks of "the fact of wordness" and James
Sherry of "words regarded as facts, as opposed to words as
symbols," but Bernstein goes on to explain that in this context
"fact" does not indicate primarily referentiality or
representation, does not mean (as it would, he says, to a poet like
Olson) "'perception' onto a given world" as "a unified field" but
rather "onto the language through which the world is constituted."
Bruce Andrews writes in "Code Words": "Author dies, writing begins.
. . Subject is deconstructed, lost, . . . deconstituted as writing
ranges over the surface." Inevitably loss of subject puts the
object in jeopardy. The word does not designate an object but
substitutes for its loss; language signals not reference or
presence but disjunction and absence. So Ron Silliman openly calls
for "a writing that no longer yearns for a unified sign," a
"non-referential writing" that emphasizes the word as signifier
rather than as signified. Steve McCaffery writes in "Sound Poetry"
of "the deformation of poetic form at the level of the signifier":
"To align, realign, and misalign within the anarchy of language. .
. .Cuttings. Fissures. Decompositions (inventions). Not intention
so much as intensions. Plasticizations. Non-functionalities.
Shattered sphericities. Marginalities."
At the level of professional literary study, semiotics and
deconstruction splintered literary monuments, including Modernist
monuments, into slivers of polysemous intertextuality, and poetry
followed the academic lead, muffling a defining voice in
polyglossia. In Frederic Jameson's trope, language became a
prisonhouse: blank walls, echoing enclosures, burrowed tunnels; the
more blurred the echoes, the more unbreachable the verbal surface.
Theory swallowed all: poetry submerged into criticism and
linguistics, words about words; even Marxism exercised itself not
in political action but academic analysis.
Indeed, from the Marxist perspective capitalism depends upon and
seeks to enforce the referentiality of the signified. In relating
words to objects in a market economy the act of signification makes
words themselves into commodity-objects which can be manipulated in
selling products to a consumer society. In Silliman's words, "the
primary impact on language and language arts, of the rise of
capitalism has been in the area of reference and is directly
related to the phenomena known as the commodity fetish," and by
that logic, as McCaffery puts it, "the humanization of the
linguistic Sign," its liberation from its capitalist chains comes
through the "centering of language within itself," the insistence
on words as signifiers--that is, as objects distanced if not
detached from referential use.
Manifestoes polemicize terms in order to differentiate the
avant-garde position, and not all the language-oriented poets
subscribe uniformly to all the positions I have been quoting in
their most extreme formulation, especially in the matter of
referentiality. But Barrett Watten's "Introduction" to Silliman's
book-length poem Tjanting (I98l) sums up in three pages the broadly
shared disposition of this most explicitly Postmodernist group.
"Writing looks at itself first,. . . makes a reality by taking
itself apart. . . ." Because the extrinsic "materials" of
experience "have no motive force," the imagination has "no option
but . . . to turn back on itself," even though it "will generally
find itself lacking at that point." Thus the artist is no Modernist
"hero"; that Romantic figure has been "concealed," "broken down,"
"replaced by a chain of objectivized situations and surrounding
objects, both animate and inanimate." The "self-consciousness"
which fights back against the paralyzing structures of decadent
capitalism requires "the recognition of non-identity" rather than
of identity as "the first step in the appropriation of one's fate."
Because "non-identity is the term common to all," "the
deconstructive activity of the text finds the destroyed centers of
other lives. Idiosyncrasy is the central term of an assertion of
faith in the power of writing to construct." Bruce Andrews says
that "subject becomes simply 'the instance writing,' is hollowed
out by the operation of the linguistic system." Maxine Chernoff
puts the displacement or the artist's ego and the impersonality of
the "linguistic event" flatly:
I am not commenting about the nature of one character's
reactions to experience. Rather, I am suggesting that a linguistic
event has been observed by a witness.... Thus, "character" in many
of my prose pieces [and, we can adds the "speaker" in many
language-oriented poems, whether written in verse or prose] exists
so that language can occur.... The linguistic event "happens" in
the sense that anything happens.
Such work, then, stands or falls by the density and intensity of
the "linguistic event," by its success in engaging readers in its
constructive happening. As an exercise in practical criticism I
want to look closely at some representative texts in a sequence
that is meant to illustrate the range of language poetry in the
quality and character of the "linguistic event" which is the poem.
For example, Christopher Dewdney's "Fractal Diffusion" seems just a
stunt as he gradually and mechanically replaces the vowels in his
flat, manual-like prose with another phoneme: "ave" for "a," "but"
for "b," "co" for "c," "dio" for "d," "et" for "e," "far" for "f."
"Fractal Diffusion" thus begins: "In this article I am going to
reify a progressive syllabic/letter transposition in units of ten.
Starting with the letter A and working through the alphabet I will
replavece eavech letter with ave syllaveble normavelly starting
with the paverticulaver letter in question. The effects will be
cumulavetive, the system is avepplied aves it works its wavey
through the avelphavebutett." For some reason, perhaps oversight,
the second "starting" does not become "staverting," but in the last
word the b's begin to be replaced, so that by the time the first
six transpositions are in play we reach this point: "Six letttears
into thet alvelphavebutett, mavenifaretstavetion
petrfaretcotetclio-farlowetr ofar farondiouet-ave
faraver/farettcohetdio conclusion." It looks less like Finnegans
Wake than like pig Latin punched out by a madly logical computer;
that is to say, deliberately deprived of purpose and resonance and
even content, it is not at all like Finnegans Wake.
Jackson MacLow's Words nd Ends from Ez (1989) is a deliberate
Postmodernist deconstruction of a Modernist masterpiece through his
usual device of combining chance and arbitrary rules in the
composition of the text. In an "Afterword" MacLow describes the
"diastic chance selection method" by which he mined from Pound's
text "letter strings" "in which the letters of Pound's first and
last names occupy places corresponding to those they fill in the
names." Thus, looking for the letter "E" in "Ezra," MacLow takes up
Canto l and runs his finger along the text till he hits the first
"e" and makes the "letter string" beginning with that "e" and
continuing, as will always be the rule, to the end of Pound's word
to constitute the initial "string." Line 1 provides "then" as its
second word, and so "En" becomes the first element of MacLow's
version. Running his finger along, he does not find a "z" (the
second letter in "Ezra") till line 32 in "bronze," and since "Z"
must be in the second place, "nZe" becomes the second element. Line
33 almost immediately supplies "R" and "A" in the phrase "beaRing
yet dreory Arms," which means that for the "R" to be the third
letter and "A" the fourth in his series of "letter strings" MacLow
hacks "eaRing ory Arms" out of Pound's phrase. Then line 35
provides "Pallor" with "P" in the initial place, and so on with
"O," "U," "N," "D," and then back to "E" from E-Z-R-A -- and so on
again and again through the letters of the name tirelessly ripping
out "letter strings" in a determined but arbitrary sequence from
the texts of all 120 cantos. Line endings are determined by "all
punctuation marks that follow the selected letter strings in The
Cantos, hyphens that are included within those strings, and final
letters that end lines in later cantos without punctuation"; breaks
between strophes are determined by "end marks (periods, question
marks, exclamation points), strophe endings without punctuation,
and points of suspension (...)." By the chance of these rules the
first two strophes of Words nd Ends from Ez read, or rather look
like:
En nZe eaRing ory Arms,Pallor pOn laUghtered laiN oureD EntaZure
teR,un-tAwny Pping cOme d oUt r wiNg-joints,preaD Et aZzle.
spRing-water,ool A P "
Pound intended that his ideogrammic construction would
constellate into a vision so psychologically and politically
powerful that it would integrate the individual and transform
society. The reader response he aimed for was: "what//SPLENDOUR//IT
ALL COHERES." On the back cover Charles Bernstein solemnly puffs
MacLow's book as "an act of homage and a topographical map of
features of the work otherwise obscured by its narrative thrusts,"
which "reveals a purer, inhering paradise within Pound's poem." But
Pound would have been as contemptuous of MacLow's subversion of his
purpose as of Bernstein's pontificating about it. In any case, how
many of the very few who pick up MacLow's book will get any farther
into its seventy-seven pages than it takes to unriddle the
gimmick?
Jerome McGann's claim that "like Susan Howe's My Emily
Dickinson, MacLow's Words nd Ends from Ez comprises an important
re-reading of a seminal American poet" is worth noting because it
seeks to fudge precisely the point of difference that helps us to
sort out the serious language poets from the tricksters. Howe
focuses her fierce and passionate intelligence, drawing upon
biography and history, to clarify the language of the poems,
whereas MacLow reduces Pound's language to jibberish. Dewdney and
MacLow would not warrant attention except that they reduce the
Postmodernist emphasis on the materiality of language and the
anonymity of the nonspeaker to absurdity. To counter their example,
I want to construct and examine a series of language-texts which
play out their word games for higher and higher stakes.
Ron Silliman's Tjanting (1981) is a book-length exercise in the
poetics of surface. Tjanting starts with "Not this./ What then?/ I
started over and over. Not this": a self negation which generates a
question which in turn initiates a new start and then a new
negation. If not this, then what? There follows the first in a
series of steadily lengthening paragraphs articulating a random,
staccato proliferation of words, phrases, and short sentences. The
succeeding paragraphs (for want of a more accurate word) ring
sound-changes on the verbal elements already asserted and get
longer by adding new bits for subsequent permutations-- until the
last paragraph swells to 85 of the 213 pages of the book. The
welter of dissociated, telegraphic, runic-sounding bits and pieces
is punctuated by portentous pronunciamentos to underscore the point
again and again: "Each sentence accounts for its place," "Each
sentence accounts for all the rest," "Each word invents words,"
"Each mark is a new place," "Each sentence stakes out," "Each word
once the invention of another," and so on.
It is impossible to quote here so as to illustrate the effect of
the word games because the changes are played out from page to page
and paragraph to paragraph. For example, "Last week I wrote 'the
muscle at thumb's root so taut from carving that beef I thought it
would cramp' " (11, the first page of text), becomes "Last week I
can barely grip this pen" (12), "Last week I could barely write 'I
grip this pen' " (later on the same page), then "I could barely
write 'last week I gripped this pen'" (14), then "Barely I write"
(20), and so on through the text spaced out more widely as the new
elements crowd the paragraphs. Or another element from the first
page, "Hot grease had spilled on the stove top" leads to "Grease on
the stove top sizzled & spat" (11), thence to "Grease sizzles
& spits on the stove top" (12), "On the stove top grease
sizzles & spits" (13), "Grease sizzles, spits on the stove top"
(17), and so on.
"I began again and again": necessarily so, since Tjanting does
not seek consequence or development, wants no middle or end. Here
are the beginnings of just a few chain reactions that run through
the text:
"Of about to within which" (11); "Of about to within which what
without" (12); "Of about under to within which what without" (13);
"Of about under to within which of what without into by" (16).
"Nothing's discrete" (12); "no thingdis crete" (13); "No
thingdis creep" (14); "No thid gnis crete" (21).
"Monopoly, polopony" (13); "Polopony, monopoly" (l6);
"Poloponius, molo ponies" (26).
"Detestimony" (13); " Detestimonial (17); " Destestimonialist"
(26).
Lyn Hejinian remarks on the dust jacket that "the presence (and
presentness) of each detail is palpable. The reader recognizes
every word. Perhaps, but only in their abstracted materiality.
Detached from any experiential base or verbal context, signifiers
spawn in a vacuum but can never fill or fulfill the voiding of the
signified by the initial phrase "Not this.'
Bernstein's "Dysraphism" has a footnote teasing out etymological
connections between this abstruse medical term meaning a kind of
birth defect -- literally a "mis-seaming" -- and the prosodic
stringing (stitching) of words: "disturbance of stress, pitch, and
rhythm of speech." The textual seaming and mis-seaming (seeming and
mis-seeming?) concludes with these lines:
Dominion demands distraction--the circusponies of the slaughter
home. Bracedby harmony, bludgeoned by decorationthe dream surgeon
hobbles three steps over, twosteps beside. "In those days you
didn't have toshout to come off as expressive." One by onethe clay
feet are sanded, the sorrows remanded.A fleet of ferries, forever
merry.Show folks know that what the fighting man wantsis to win the
war and come home.
A series of characteristically short, direct, discrete
statements, unconnected by conjunctions of subordinate clauses, are
stitched together less by discursive sense than by verbal
repetition (seaming) and counterpoint (mis-seaming). Repetitions
include such customary devices as alliteration (for example, the
d's and b's in the first two sentences), assonance ("Show folks
know," "ferries, forever merry," "demands"/ "sanded"/ "remanded,"
"feet"/ "fleet"), verbal associations ("slaughter"/ "fighting"/
"war," "hobbles"/ "clay feet") and use of the same word in
different senses ("come off as expressive," "come home"). Instances
of verbal counterpoint (mis-seaming) threading the lines include:
"braced"/ "bludgeoned"; "three steps,"/"two steps"/"one by one";
"slaughter"/ "surgeon"; "hobbles"/ "fleet"; "circus ponies"/
"fighting man"; "sorrows"/ "merry"; "slaughter home"/ "come home."
The terse, flat, rapid shift in syntactical perspectives and verbal
elements, including cliche and bits of conversation, renders a
decentered poststructuralist sensibility of found and made objects,
and there is even a cumulative sense that the engagement with such
shifting perspectives, though at first disorienting, is in the end
salutary, even fun. However, the verbal play avoids or disguises
interpretive comment or constructive patterning because such
impositions would suggest a center of perspective, attitude,
response -- in short, all that is dismissed as the lyric ego of the
Romantic-Modernist poet. The last sentence of the concluding lines
quoted above--"Show folks know that what the fighting man wants/ is
to win the war and come home"--is not really bent on saying
anything about the compassionate insight of entertainers or the
attitudes of soldiers but is phrasing a sentimental platitude so as
to savor the shape and weight of its monosyllables as verbal
"facts." The shapeless poem has no teleology; it gets nowhere, and
that is its point. It is six pages long, but it could just as
easily have been two or twenty or two hundred.
In "I and the" Bernstein simply lineates a list of words
compiled by a researcher in descending order of frequency of usage
from a data base consisting of the transcripts of 225
psychoanalytic sessions. But the resulting catalogue amounts to
more than MacLow's senseless manipulation. Though it depersonalizes
the patients into faceless and voiceless speakers, it tells a lot
about the pathology of usage, and Bernstein's grouping of the words
in tercets, three lines each of three words, not only serves to
aerate the list but also sometimes makes for lively word-play
within the line. Here is the opening:
I and theto that youit of a
know was uhin but isthis me about
just don't mywhat I'm likeor have so
it's neat thinkbe with hewell do for
Bernstein lineates only 1386 of the 17,871 words in his data
base, but most readers' interest will have flagged long before the
end of the twenty-two pages of his listing.
Despite Lyn Hejinian's praise for Tjanting, her book-length My
Life represents a different kind of experiment in the poetics of
surface through a different use and quality of language from the
purposes of Silliman and Bernstein. My Life consists of a block
paragraph for each year of Hejinian's age; the 1980 edition was
expanded in 1987, and the project could presumably run till the end
of her life. The paragraphs seem to exhibit what are by now
familiar and defining characteristics of "language" poetry: the
absence of speaker and organizing point of view, a surface of
fragments, opacity of reference. Hejinian's paragraphs, each with a
caption that augurs more than it explains, subvert the conventional
assumptions, expectations, and methods of personal autobiography
shaped by the speaking "I." Instead, My Life, assuming the
constructed character of autobiography, submerges the subject in a
linguistic space in which an observing eye and ear and mind weave
memory and fantasy and reading into a presentation of consciousness
in the act of self-construction.
The caption for a typical paragraph, "What is the meaning hung
from that depend," asks a pertinent question whose answer seems
lost in the ensuing details. The caption queries the declarative
statement in Williams' poem, which begins "So much depends/ upon"
and immediately fixes the reader's attention with unwavering
clarity on an arrangement of words and their objects: "the red
wheel / barrow // glazed by rain / water // beside the white /
chickens." Moreover, the allusion points up the contrast between
Hejinian's Postmodernist diffuseness and Williams' Modernist model
of concision and concentration. Nevertheless, upon close
examination Hejinian's prose admits of of the kind of
interpretation that Tjanting successfully repels. The details that
seemed to have nothing to do with one another begin to interact and
coalesce; the clouded surface begins gradually to clear and to
show, however uncertainly, a depth of resonance and reference, an
obliquity of connection that adumbrates an emerging coherence of
perspective and statement, however problematized.
Here, for example, are the opening sentences of the paragraph
foIlowing "What is the meaning hung from that depend":
A dog bark, the engine of a truck, an airplane hidden by the
trees and roof-tops. My mother's childhood seemed a kind of holy
melodrama. She ate her pudding in a pattern, carving the rim around
the circumference of the pudding, working her way inward toward the
center, scooping with the spoon, to see how far she could separate
the pudding from the edge of the bowl before the center collapsed,
spreading the pudding out again lower, back to the edge of the
bowl. You could tell it was improvisational because at the moment
they closed their eyes. A pause, a rose, something on paper.
Solitude was the essential companion. The branches of the redwood
trees hung in a fog whose moisture they absorbed. Lasting, "what
might be," its present a future, like the life of a child. The
greatest solitudes are quickly strewn with rubbish. All night the
radio covered the fall of a child in the valley down an abandoned
well-fitting, a clammy narrow pipe 56 feet deep, in which he was
wedged, recorded, and died. Stanza there. The synchronous, which I
have characterized as spatial, is accurate to reality but it has
been debased.
In the middle of the passage the tag "A pause, a rose, something
on paper," repeating the caption of the first paragraph of the
book, reaffirms a succession of exfoliations--at once visual and
verbal, organic and cognitive, objective and subjective. The
opening trio of images of things heard but not seen--dog, truck,
plane--intimates the "solitude" of the child made explicit later.
The lonesomeness of childhood is rendered not through
autobiographical anecdotes from the speaker's own early years but
(1) through a vignette of her mother as child, (2) through a
paradoxical generalization about solitude as the "essential
companion" in "the life of a child," and (3) through the apparently
recalled account on the radio of a boy's ghastly death in a
well-fitting. The momentous statement about the holy melodrama of
her mother's childhood seems pathetically undercut by the
description of her eating the pudding, until that image is seen as
a metaphor for the game of life and of the poem My
Life--"improvisational" but deadly serious since in time the
child's illusion of permanence ("Lastings 'what might be,' the
present a future") ends "quickly" in detritus ("strewn with
rubbish") and death ("wedged, recorded, and died"). The spatial
synchronicity of the artwork ("Stanza there") offers the aging
child, which Hejinian and we all are, another all-too-human
strategy against mortality--"accurate to reality" but "debased."
There is no question that reading in this way requires a commitment
that even many serious readers of poetry will not be willing to
make -- the passage explicated is about a fifth of one of the
paragraphs in My Life -- but there is also no question that reading
the text in this way reveals a subject and an object.
As with Hejinian and Silliman, the sympathy and respect linking
Bernstein and Susan Howe have distracted attention from the more
revealing differences between them as poets. The introductory
epigraph to Howe's Pythagorean Silence (1982) makes the point that
for her, as for the Romantics and the Modernists, language mediates
the engagement between consciousness and the external world:
we that were wood when that a wide wood was
In a physical Universe playing with
words
Bark be my limbs my hair be leaf
Bride be my bow my lyre my quiver
The poem makes a telling contrast with Pound's "A Tree." Where
his metamorphosis into a tree comes through identification with
H.D. as his Daphne, Howe's isolation of "words" at the center of
the page-space bases her Daphne-absorption into the "physical
Universe" more explicitly than for Pound in the language-act itself
("playing with // words"). Thus in the last poem in the book the
repeated word "wicket-gate" offers entrance into a world-page of
word-things "lightly scored" by "SOMEONE" in an "extant
manuscript."
wicket-gate
wicket-gate
cherubimgolden
swallow
amulet instruction tribulation
winged joy parent sackcloth
ash
densealed ascent flee
chariot interpret flame
hot arcchaff meridian
in the extant manuscript SOMEONE
has lightly scored a pen over
diadem dagger a voyagegibbet
sheaf
weeds shiver and my clothes spread wide
The capitalized "SOMEONE" locates the centralizing
consciousness, constellating her own page from the already existing
("extant") source (the manuscript and the book of nature) with the
light touch of her pen. The relative anonymity of the generalized
pronoun suggests the empathetic extension and submersion of self
into the word-world outside consciousness in an act of negative
capability learned from poets like Keats and Dickinson.
Paraphrasing Gertrude's description of Ophelia's dying back into
nature, the last line suggests the self-sacrifice of this
commitment to the deeps, and here the "SOMEONE" is personalized.
Howe's shift from Gertrude's "her clothes" to "my clothes" leaves
no doubt about whose experience of submersive openness is being
specified: "weeds shiver and my clothes spread wide."
Though Howe's poems do not punctuate themselves with the
insistent "I" of Romantics like Keats or Dickinson, the language
and imagery register the intense pressure of a personal
consciousness shaping itself in(to) words. It is no wonder that
Howe wrote My Emily Dickinson; hers is the most Dickinsonian
sensibility in contemporary poetry. For example, Section 13 of the
sequence "Pythagorean Silence" begins with a dialectic between
sleep and waking, harmony and multiplicity, memory and
forgetfulness. But the poem is again imbued with an aura of
Romantic ambiguity. Is waking more oblivious than sleep or less,
more attuned to harmony or less? Is sleep a lapsing from, or a
coming to consciousness? The Spacing of the lines pushes paradox to
epiphany. "Memory" engenders "Knowledge" as "simple recollection"
and "history" as "Tracing // the change in ideas about change," but
this personal and collective record of the "intellection of fate
and fame" comes to no more than Drafts // of furiously scrambled
pages Scraps / of beginnings." Still, persisting beneath and
through our history and art is a sense of "lost Originals'': "sheen
of sacramental mystery," "unfathomable visionary dream." Section
13, invoking the Arthurian theme that runs through the poem, ends
with this sublime experience of identity and transcendence which
Dickinson would have understood, even to the commingling of
chivalric, natural, and religious imagery:
Approach to the Castle of Perilous
knight tested by the illusion
of nothingness
Estray
into my own Exile
(a dome to hive) Majestical
Soul is a god and sun is a God
on the horizon (Principle
vision) out of an ocean
Soul is the maker of sun She
is dressed as a man
Beholder in silence and in utter
forgetfulness
Earlier in this essay we heard Bruce Andrews speak of "faith in
the power of writing to construct," but it is a long, slippery
slide from Pound's ideogrammic method and Stevens's "blessed rage
for order" to MacLow's "diastic chance selection method" and
Bernstein's poetry of the signifier. Marjorie Perloff's excellent
essay on language poetry tentatively raises the question of
whether, with the function of the speaker and of referentiality
called into serious question, such poetry, for all its Marxist
talk, might be seen as "no more than a mandarin game designed to
entertain an elite coterie." With regard to much of this poetry I
am in the end more inclined than she to answer the question in the
affirmative. But, as she would agree, the label "language poets"
obscures the more important differences among them, and these
readings of representative texts is to sort out on my the mandarins
from the poets.
The distinction lies in the degree to which one yields to
language a devouring self-reflexivity that denies both subject and
object by refusing to mediate between them. The increasing
inclination to predicate the material autonomy of the verbal medium
detached from a consciousness, however divided, and a world,
however problematic, sets off much of the avant-garde writing of
the seventies and eighties from such earlier Postmodernist
experiments as Lowell's Notebook (1969, 1970) Creeley's Words
(1967) and Pieces (1969), even Ashbery's Three Poems (1972). Some
poststructuralist commentators have argued that we have been so
alienated and self-alienated and language has been so appropriated
by our late-capitalist system that the only authentic use of words
is to show them as constructions operating within the system or as
material entities wiped clean of such corrupted referentiality,
association, syntax. Whether this premise represents the counsel of
despair or an exorcism preluding the formulation of a new language
and grammar, its immediate consequence is to paralyze the capacity
of language for change and effecting change and to reduce the range
of reference and resonance to mere spread of surface.
The recent writing that I find most engaging and moving, even
among the language-oriented poets, denies this deadening premise.
Works like My Life, Pythagorean Silence, David Bromige's "Six of
One, Half-a-Dozen of the Other" (1980), Michael Palmer's Sun
(1988), Fanny Howe's Introduction to the World (1986), The Lives of
a Spirit (1987) and The Vineyard (1988) discover new and old
possibilities for language to mediate a consciousness of a
phenomenal world. Indeed, Fanny Howe's work represents the most
radical questioning of many of the increasingly canonical premises
of language poetry, as the titles of her books suggest. Her
combination of Catholic mysticism and liberation theology compels
her to reject language as a self-referential code ("words speaking
to words") and to postulate the encounter of subject and object
("consciousness" and "visible existence") in an incarnational
language through which "true resurrection takes place: that is,
legitimacy is resolved between Logos and spoken thought."
3Modernism gambled on the fragile conviction that through the
powers of the imagination aesthetic coherence could, if nothing
else could, perform a vital psychological, moral, even political
function that made personal and social life possible. "It is," in
Stevens' words, "the imagination pressing back against the pressure
of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do
with our self-preservation." Post-modernism correctly sees
Modernism in the context of Romanticism and --wrongly in my
view--takes that fact as the source of Modernist errors and
self-deceptions. Thus, though Bernstein admits that in some
respects Modernism can be seen as a "move away from reference,
image and meaning," he associates "the modernist assumption" more
essentially with "a poetry primarily of personal communication" and
"'direct experience,' both in terms of recording the actual way
objective reality is perceived (the search for the objective) &
making the writing a recording instrument of consciousness."
Similarly, Silliman sees the paradox of Modernism in its being at
once "the announcement of the post-modern" and "a lingering
hangover from the previous realist paradigm," which in his
discussion is identified with Romantic notions of "'organic' form"
and an "artificial holism" and with the attempt at "a unity between
signifier and signified."
I would make the same point about the affinity between
Romanticism and Modernism but draw a different conclusion. The very
fact that Postmodernism has not devised a name for itself indicates
that it is what is left of Modernism. In fact, the crucial shift in
the aesthetics of the two halves of this century might be reduced
to the following formula: Modernism - Romanticism = Postmodernism.
Marjorie Perloff located the continuity between Modernism and
Postmodernism in the development of a poetics of indeterminacy, but
that illuminating linkage is only part of the story. The
Postmodernists are correct in viewing Modernism as in many respects
a reconstitution of Romanticism, and their disaffection with
Modernism on precisely those grounds points to a discontinuity at
least as important as the continuity. The poetics of indeterminacy
is in fact what is left when Modernism is severed from its Romantic
roots.
The declension in the Western post-Romantic mind from Modernism
to Postmodernism can be understood as a shift from epistemological
skepticism to ontological skepticism. That is to say, while the
Modernists, like the Romantics, found it more and more difficult to
find the basis or the terms for affirming a secure stance towards
objective reality, for the most part they continued to posit or to
act as though they posited, an objective reality to strive towards
and engage; the skepticism lay in the epistemological process of
coming to know rather than in the conviction that there was
something finally to come to know about the self and the world.
Postmodernists have reached an ontological doubt about the
existence, nature, and character of objective reality itself. Often
Romantics and Modernists end up admitting ruefully and ironically
that they can only present a subjective view or version of
objective reality, but with many Postmodernists, according to
Herbert Grabes's "The Parodistic Erasure of the Boundary between
Fiction and Reality in Nabokov's English Novels," "there is no
longer a representation of discrete versions of a given reality,
but merely a range of synthetic constructs which may, at certain
points and in certain habitual guises, touch on or even evoke what
we conventionally take to be 'real,' but which can with equal
justification be termed 'fantastic' (or 'fictive') or
'realistic'"--'realism' being the most fantastic illusion.
In response to this critique Postmodernists would no doubt argue
that clearing away the delusive and dangerous pretensions of
Modernism has had some positive results: the opening of poetry to
popular culture and to everyday, even banal experience and speech
(what Stevens dismissed as "the malady of the quotidian"), the
recovery of play in a world of chance, the resistance to forced and
false closure, the demystifying insistence that poetry deal
modestly but honestly with a world graced by neither coherence nor
splendor, the acceptance of the subject-object split as a challenge
to scrutinize whether and how words can be thought to refer to
things and make meaning.
I recognize these issues as central to our poetry and culture
since World War II. At the same time, in pondering recent answers
to Frost's query to twentieth century poets--"what to make of a
diminished thing"--I also find a countertendency that I would call
Neoromantic in the work of poets like Roethke, Lowell, Berryman,
Olson, Duncan, Everson, Levertov, Rich, Berry, Snyder. And, from
the generation of the language poets, Fanny Howe and Susan Howe.
Neoromanticism has to be a roomy rubric to admit the mystical
Roethke and the skeptical Lowell, Rich the radical feminist and
Everson the Dionysian Catholic, Duncan the occultist and Berry the
agrarian. However, through their differences all these poets
express a passionate desire to press limits and extend
possibilities, an insistence that language penetrate rather than
maintain surfaces, a compulsion to fathom the mystery linking
subject and object, person and person, word and thing in a
constructive act of signification. Auden's famous remark, after the
Spanish War and on the brink of World War II, that poetry does not
make anything happen, served as one marker for the collapse of
Modernism into Postmodernism. The poets I am designating
Neoromantic all believe, even in the face of the violence of
contemporary history, that the word can effect personal and social
change, that poetry can, almost against the odds, make things
happen--psychologically, morally, politically, religiously.
Just as American poetry in the first half of this century turns
on the dialectic, within the period and within the poets, between
Modernism and the Romanticism it masked, so the poetry of the
second half of the century can be read as the even more complicated
dialectic between Neoromanticism and Postmodernism. This essay has
traced the descent of Postmodernism from Modernism in terms of its
final exorcism of the Romantic aspirations that Modernism
assimilated to its own ends, and my identification of a persistent
or re-emergent Neoromanticism here at the end projects the
discussion past the purposes of the essay into what will have to be
a book tracing out the subtleties of the interchange between
Postmodernism and Neoromanticism. However, whatever valuation one
puts on these alternative modes (mine are by now clear), the
history of American poetry since the forties can most incisively be
told in terms of that dialectic.