A History of American Poetry by Gray Richard

Author:Gray, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781118795422
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2015-02-17T00:00:00+00:00

This is certainly not confessional verse, but it does represent a startling departure from Merwin’s earlier work. “We are words on a journey,” Merwin insists in one of his later poems, “/ not the inscriptions of settled people,” and that remark alone serves to indicate the change: an interest in the more obviously permanent forms of human vision and voice has been replaced by a pursuit of the mobile and temporary – of life as it passes, in all its rapid disjunctive rhythms.

The change from formal to freer verse forms has not, however, always been a happy one. The earlier poems of Delmore Schwartz were predominantly iambic, and the relative strictness of the forms he employed seems to have exercised a useful discipline. Some of these poems present Schwartz as the engaged observer. “A nervous conscience amid the concessions,” the poet reflects on the “banal dream” of the city, where most people “live between terms” and “death / Has his loud picture in the subway ride”; alternatively, he tries to picture some better world, “soft-carpeted and warm,” in which the self can become “articulate, affectionate, and flowing.” Other pieces are more like an open wound: “Shy, pale, and quite abstracted,” Schwartz is confronted by the ineluctable, ugly fact of himself. “I am I,” one poem concludes; and to know who that “I” is, Schwartz finds it necessary to deal with the accumulated debts of the past. “The past is inevitable,” he insists, and what the “ghost in the mirror” – that is, the image of our past – tells us is that guilt is inseparable from the fact of living. “Guilt is nameless,” Schwartz says, “/ Because its name is death”; we are all burdened by “the guilt of time” and so “the child must carry / His father on his back.” There are many things to be said about this poetry but perhaps the most important is that it is, above all, a poetry of agony and transformation: in one poem, for instance, a man heard coughing in an upstairs apartment is transformed, in quick succession, into Christ (who has “caught cold again”), “poor Keats,” and the archetypal figure of the victim, “Longing for Eden, afraid of the coming war.” The formal and emotional dangers of this kind of verse are perhaps obvious: the transformations could easily become chaotic and unconvincing, while the sense of agony could degenerate into a maudlin, occasionally generalized self-pity. In his early work, though, Schwartz usually manages to skirt such dangers thanks to his adept handling of traditional forms; “the subject of poetry,” he said, “is experience not truth,” and he turns his own obsessive truths into imaginative experience with the help of inherited meters and conventional structures. In “O City, City,” for example, he uses the framework of the sonnet to focus a contrast between the quiet desperation of “six million souls” in New York (established in the octave) and his own longing for a world of purity and passion, where “in the white bed all things are made” (described in the sestet).

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