JULY 2007
AGNI Essays/Reviews
http://www.bu.edu/agni/essays-reviews/index.html
A Violence from Within: Poetry and Terrorism
by Kenneth Sherman
In the spring of
1941—amid grim news issuing from the European
theatre of war—Wallace Stevens delivered a lecture
at Princeton University called “The Noble Rider and
the Sound of Words” in which he made an elegant and
passionate attempt to deal with poetry’s
relationship to reality. How, Stevens asked his audience,
ought poetry and art in general to deal with the
onslaught of extreme events? It is a question that has
been on my mind since September of 2001. In the wake of
that catastrophe, I found myself returning to
Stevens’s words for an answer.
One does not tend to think of Wallace Stevens, who was
often accused of being overly urbane and ornate, as a
poet preoccupied with current events; yet the way in
which contemporary reality affects our imaginations was
an issue that concerned him deeply. In his earlier, 1936
Harvard lecture “The Irrational Element in
Poetry,” he noted the impact of the Great
Depression: “If I dropped into a gallery I found
that I had no interest in what I saw. The air was charged
with anxieties and tensions.” For Stevens, the
pressure of reality had been “constant and
extreme” since the First World War. “No
one,” he tells us “can have lived apart in a
happy oblivion. . . . We are preoccupied with events. . .
. We feel threatened.” As for the poet, Stevens
believed his task was to resist such pressure.
What did Stevens mean by resist? “Resistance,”
he states, “is the opposite of escape.”
According to Stevens, the poet must absorb the spirit of
his times and convert it into poetry. His goal is to
provide a voice, a lexicon, a rhythm commensurate with
that spirit. But because reality is “ominous and
destructive” and has a limiting effect on the
imagination, the poet must not deal directly with the
subject at hand. Poetry is not journalism. Literalism
diminishes the poet’s effectiveness. A subject
stared at directly will have the Medusa effect of
paralyzing the artist. A painter can capture the age,
Stevens observes, by painting “a guitar . . . and a
dish of melons.” It is not the painter’s
subject that determines the contemporaneous, but rather
his style and sensibility. So for the poet, the reality
of his time can be heard in the rhythms of his lines, in
his choice of words, and in the pauses between those
words.
The enormity and intensity of World War Two heightened
Stevens’s concerns. In “The Noble Rider and the
Sound of Words,” he describes a pressure far more
ominous than the Great Depression and as if to
counterbalance its effect he affords the poet a
magisterial position. The poet—the Noble
Rider—must do nothing less than “help people to
live their lives”; his imagination has the power to
serve as “the light in the mind of others.”
This help is concrete: in giving us words—the very
sound of words—as a force to counter the onslaught
of reality, Stevens sees the poet providing the necessary
resource to bring us through dark times. The poet
“makes us listen to words . . . loving them and
feeling them, makes us search the sound of them for a
finality, a perfection, an unalterable vibration. . .
.” These are not the phrases of a mere aesthete
delighting in the carnality of words. For the sounds are
curative. They affirm Kenneth Burke’s claim that
literature can “serve as equipment for living.”
Stevens’s commitment to the effectiveness of poetry
results in a dynamic definition of the art. “It
is,” Stevens states, “a violence from within
that protects us from a violence without. It is the
imagination pressing back against the pressure of
reality.” Poetry is both a shield and a sword. It
not only protects us from those inimical forces arrayed
against us, it counterattacks as well. His definition is
especially bracing when one considers that
“It”—and this is apparent only if one has
read the entire passage—refers not to poetry, but
rather to the nobility of poetry. The distinction is
important: Stevens wishes to remind us of poetry’s
power to preserve our dignity and maintain our spirit
under excruciating circumstances.
Stevens’s stature as a poet is assured: the
finely-tuned nuances of his language, the liberating
richness of his imagination, secure him a station
somewhere between his “necessary angel” and his
metamorphic blackbird. Yet Stevens—by far the most
influential modern American poet—took a stance that
has proven in one sense limiting and restrictive. Delmore
Schwartz, an early enthusiast and keen interpreter of
Stevens’s poetry, saw the issue clearly when he
stated that in Stevens’s work “everything is
turned into an object of the imagination. . . . [T]he
poet is too poetic.” Oftentimes Stevens abstracted
himself into an ethereal realm, where, as Robert Lowell
noted, “His people are essences, and his passions
are impressions.”
In modern times there have been two major camps of poets:
those who acknowledge the public functions and
implications of poetry and those who follow
Mallarmé’s dictum that “a poem is not made of
ideas but of words,” that it is a verbal construct
whose subject is itself. By claiming that the very sound
of words is useful and restorative, Stevens gave us an
ingenious defense of poetry, affirming
poetry’s public worth, while remaining in the
Mallarmé camp.
The negative influence of his aesthetic was noted early
on. In the 1940s, Robinson Jeffers, an almost forgotten
American poet once known for his remorselessly clear and
ascetic verse, sensed the poet’s separation from his
public and warned of the consequences. He complained that
poetry in our nation was becoming “slight and
fantastic, abstract, unreal, eccentric,” and
declared, “It must reclaim substance and sense, and
physical and psychological reality.” More recently,
Dana Goia, in his book Can Poetry Matter?, notes
the inability of working poets to write about their
professional worlds, and contends that this is
“symptomatic of a larger failure in our
verse—namely its difficulty in discussing most
public concerns.” Noting “the paucity of
serious verse on political and social themes,” Goia
states:
our poetry has been
unable to create a meaningful public idiom. . . . [It]
has little in common with the
world outside of literature—no reciprocal
sense of mission, no mutual set
of ideas and concerns. . . . At its best, our
poetry has been private rather
than public, intimate rather than social,
ideological rather than
political . . . . It dwells more easily in timeless
places than historical ones . . . . [M]ost of our poets
have tried to develop
conspicuously personal and often
private languages of their own.
Poets no doubt gained from this inwardness and freedom to
experiment, but, as Goia points out, they lost their
audience. Nevertheless, Stevens’s aesthetic
continues to dominate. Pick up a literary journal and you
see that for contemporary poets, an allegiance to pure or
hermetic poetry has not diminished; in Stevens’s
phrase, the poet sees himself as “the priest of the
invisible.”
While Stevens’s impeccable ear and virtuosity of
language contribute to his enduring effect, there are
strong cultural and social factors that account for his
dominance. I am willing to venture that there is
something quintessentially New World about Stevens’s
unwillingness to take on historical and social reality.
His determined detachment from historical
particulars—his poetic strategy—may well be a
reflection of America’s isolationist proclivity.
Evading or resisting reality allows the poet to maintain
an imaginative “fortress America.” The forces
behind this isolationist tendency are strong. The myth of
the New World as Arcadia—as an alternative to Old
World oppression and decay—persists. And what we
think of as our energy and optimism does in fact stem
from a purposeful and healthy forgetting of former
prejudices, a disavowal of Old World rank and station.
Contributing to the malaise is our obsession with
self-improvement. The “art for art’s sake”
movement believed the imagination ought to heal those
wounds inflicted by the anonymity of mass society and the
mechanization of humankind. With the falling off of
organized religion, art became the prime provider of
spiritual sustenance, its masters – custodians of
the injured soul. In its new therapeutic role, art became
inner-directed, endeavoring to re-create those who are
broken. The result has been a diminishment of the
poet’s role. Who today would pretend to the outgoing
reach of Milton or Blake? Who today would affirm
Pope’s grand assertion that “a poet’s life
is warfare on earth.”
Of course, in our time we assume such a commitment to
reality to be the prerogative of the novelist, an
assumption that further relegates the poet to
otherworldly regions, to self-reflective
musings—despite the examples of poets who have made
a powerful claim on reality. Czeslaw Milosz’s
contention that poetry ought to be “a passionate
pursuit of the Real” is validated by Wilfred Owen
and Keith Douglas who respectively confronted the horrors
of the First and Second World Wars; by Mandelstam and
Akhmatova, who opened a window onto the Stalinist terror;
by Robert Lowell and Robert Bly, who captured the
political turbulence of the war in Viet Nam. These poets
achieve their ends without relinquishing their linguistic
eminence or disregarding poetic craft—the usual
pitfalls of poetry that attempts to proclaim and correct
injustices. Their work is an effective fusion of language
and moral commitment.
When extremist politics play themselves out in areas once
thought of as “off limits,” our wish to see
these upheavals dealt with in poetry is natural. Those
poets who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature over
the last two decades have without exception come from
areas of political unrest: Szymborska (Poland), Heaney
(Belfast), Walcott (the Caribbean), Paz (Mexico), Brodsky
(USSR), Siefert (Czechoslovakia). Now that we know
politics, in the words of Terence des Pres, “as a
primary ground of misfortune,” we might ask: will
these events historicize our poets? Cultural
sensibilities run deep and it is not certain that a
cataclysm—even one as traumatic as that of September
11—will redirect them.
Yet our health may depend on such a shift. Poetry
reflects a nation’s thinking and an inordinately
subjective use of language suggests an inability to deal
with reality. Images of assassinations, famine, and
military incursions play repeatedly on television and
laptop screens, and each of us has become, if not his
brother’s keeper, then at least his mesmerized
witness. In such a climate it is entirely reasonable to
expect poetry to grapple with the actual. But
shouldn’t the poet remain free to practice his
life-sustaining gift? Yes, but at the same time we’d
like our poets to confront those forces that threaten us;
if they do not enter the fray we want them, at least, to
heed the voice of Joseph Conrad’s Stein, who in Lord
Jim advised submitting oneself to “the
destructive element.”
Stevens’s “violence from within,”
ennobling us and restoring our dignity, need not limit
itself to the talismanic sounds of words. The force he
spoke of can confront today’s events, transform and
refigure them so that we may bear their implications.