A Companion to Modernist Poetry by Chinitz David E.; McDonald Gail; & Gail McDonald

Author:Chinitz, David E.; McDonald, Gail; & Gail McDonald
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780470659816
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2014-03-26T10:09:53+00:00

The poem's speaker joins Blessingbourne in a quest for meaning beyond ostensible transparencies (of windows, of words), locating in the ephemeral “weather,” which gives incidental shape or color to a scene, the broader historical and social template of a century. The poem's domesticity is conditioned – perhaps threatened, perhaps inspired – by a shared world beyond its comforting residence, an apt emblem of George and Mary's burgeoning search for meaning beyond the mere “reading speaking smoking” rituals of their class.

This search for “what was really going on” soon led the Oppens away from poetry, and toward political action, thus inaugurating one of the defining moments in the history of Objectivism: Oppen's quarter-century absence from the world of writing. Oppen's hiatus has been cause for disproportionate theorization over the years and, until recently, with the publication of Peter Nicholls's critical biography of Oppen, quite a bit of speculation as well (commentary has ranged from Hugh Kenner's glib remark that it merely took Oppen “25 years to write (his) next poem” to listless attempts to discover the missing corpus of Oppen's oeuvre to wildly spurious conjectures about the Oppens's involvement with the KGB). But Objectivism's middle period – its second phase, in Ron Silliman's terms – is defined by a broader set of silences than Oppen's. Both Carl Rakosi and Basil Bunting, each a key figure in the Objectivist issue of Poetry and An “Objectivists” Anthology, ceased writing and publishing poetry in the decades following World War II, Rakosi going so far as to change his name to Callman Rawley in order to secure employment first as a teacher and then as a psychologist and social worker. Bunting, who served as a British intelligence officer in Persia and was later with the British Embassy in Tehran, settled in as a journalist for Newcastle's Evening Chronicle until 1960. Both poets, in keeping with Objectivist tendencies as a whole, bore leftist sympathies. Rakosi was born in Berlin and lived briefly in Hungary before his family settled in Chicago and the slums of Gary, Indiana, in the second decade of the twentieth century, while Bunting was born to a Quaker family in the historic English county of Northumberland, where, with the exception of his military service, he was to spend most of his life.

Bunting and Rakosi were unique among their fellow Objectivists as writers born in Europe whose relationship to the great traditions of English literature was problematic at best. In Bunting's case, as Peter Quartermain has argued, the problem had to do with the marginality – cultural, linguistic, political – of Northumberland in relation to the dominant culture of Britain, and manifested itself as a conscious decision to problematize the Eliotic embrace of a “tradition central, monolithic, and possessed of power” as well as “the dominant ideology” and the “hegemony of English Letters” by “asserting the primacy of sound over meaning … changing the syntax and sound of the poem … [and] denying the central tenets of the Romantic heritage” (8). Rakosi, too, as

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