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| Four Sample Entries 1. Topic entry (medium) 2. Poet entry (short) 3. Poet entry (medium) 4. Poet entry (long)
Topic Entry (medium) The New York School The New York School of poets was the half-serious name given to a loose collective of poets who began living and writing in New York City in the 1950’s. Typified by a surface aesthetic which stressed the importance of poetry as an ongoing process rather than a carefully wrought finished artefact, the poets were part of a larger grouping of painters, writers, and composers all investigating new aesthetic avenues in post war New York and America at large. The main figures of the school, John Ashbery, Barbara Guest, Kenneth Koch, Frank O’Hara, Harry Mathews and James Schuyler have written diverse work, but all are united by a rejection of the dominant mode of poetic practice in post-war America which was determined mainly by the school of New Criticism and which many believed had become institutionalised and overly formal. These writers of the New York School turned away from the dominant influences of Eliotic modernism and traditional British prosody, embracing instead alternative strands of modernism such as the everyday aesthetic of William Carlos Williams, the philosophical and subjective poetry of Wallace Stevens, and the confrontational experimentation of the European avant-garde. Although the school never had a systematic program and their only real manifesto, O’Hara’s “Personism,” was a sophisticated joke, their work can be typified as an avoidance of the depth-model of poetry advocated by New Criticism with its emphasis on craft, ambiguity, seriousness and meaningfulness, in favour of glittering and playful surface poems that emphasise experimentation, uncertainty, postmodern playfulness and a questioning of the structures of meaning in the modern/postmodern age. Much has been made of the surrealist element of the verse but this is, in fact, not the major influence on their work. There is as much, if not more, of Mayakovsky, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Roussel and Lautréamont in their work as there is Breton or Aragon. In terms of influences, the New York School poets chose to turn away from the American academic traditions of poetry and instead began to interact with the complex cultural mix of post-war New York, finding inspiration and kinship with painters such as Pollock and de Kooning, as well as with composers such as John Cage. Indeed, the influence of the historical avant-garde, the combination of contemporary experimentation in the visual arts and music along with a love of the ephemera of everyday, American life and an openness to all sorts of popular discourse from cartoons to the language of memos can be found in most typical New York School poems of the fifties and sixties. The name “The New York School” was first applied to the poets by gallery owner Edwin Denby. The “New York School” was originally the name chosen by the American abstract expressionist painters of the time, Pollock, Kline De Kooning and so on, to differentiate them from the School of Paris: “So,” Denby explains, “the poets adopted the expression ‘New York School’ out of homage to the people who had provincialized American painting. It’s a complicated double joke” (in Ward 7). This story is rather typical of the modus operandi of this unusually cheerful avant-garde grouping. Just as their name is a complicated double joke with serious cultural and aesthetic aims, parodying the ambitions of their own painter friends but also undercutting their own ambitions, so much of their earlier poetry combined humour and in-jokes with a radical attack on the dominant poetic traditions. Thus we have Koch’s “The Artist” where the avant-garde artist creates more and more outlandish works of action art which become so confrontational they actually threaten the lives of the audience, and O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” which mimics Mayakovsky’s futurist work “An Extraordinary Adventure which Happened to me, Vladimir Mayakovsky, One Summer in the Country,” recasting the poem from the macro-political context of post-revolutionary Russia to the micro-politics of the post-war gay scene based in the Long Island resort of Fire Island. For much of their early years the poets worked together in a small, but influential, milieu of artists, often through collaboration, without really having a wider public. However, the coherence and reputation of the school was confirmed by the publication of Donald Allen’s “New American Poetry” (1960) where Allen grouped the poets together as the New York poets, with the exception of Mathews. By this time, relations within the group were becoming somewhat strained and it is safe to say that by 1966, the year of the tragic death of O’Hara, perhaps the central energiser of the cultural interconnections so central to the school, the title school was more of a useful critical term than a reality. Still, the idea of a New York School has proved resilient enough to have a second generation consisting of such poets as Kenward Elmslie, Tony Towle, Ted Berrigan, Joe Brainard, Ron Padgett and Bill Berkson, a number of whom were mentored by the first generation. Kenneth Koch’s description of the “scene” in his poem “A Time Zone” (One Train 1997) perhaps best encapsulates both some of the basic New York School techniques while at the same time providing us with a historical sketch of the context: I come down to the Cedar on a bus hoping to see O’Hara and Ashbery Astonishingly on the bus I don’t know why it’s the only occasion I write a poem Where Am I Kenneth? It’s on some torn-out notebook pages The Cedar and the Five Spot each is a usable place A celebrated comment Interviewer What do you think of Space? De Kooning Fuck Space!
First we might notice the style of the piece, chatty and easy to follow. It is a poem that on the surface does not demand a second reading, which is not to say it does not merit one. The long, run-on lines produce a velocity and haste again typical of the work of this period and also mimic the “all-over” painting techniques of de Kooning and his peers. Just as an abstract expressionist painting has no depth, no differentiation between the centre of the canvas and the edges, and works formally through the push and pull of local details and their inter-relation, so Koch’s poem is concerned with the surface detail of his recollection, shifts between different time zones without favouring one over the other, and creates a dynamic from the local interaction of small details. Thus we have the pleasing half rhyme of Ashbery / Astonishingly” which also describes Ashbery’s penchant for a tone of astonished wonder, or the slight pronominal shifts of “I write a poem Where am I Kenneth? It’s on some torn-out pages” where the division between the poet, the poem, the act of writing the poem, and the answer to the poem’s question, becomes blurred. The poet, the poem, the act of writing the poem, even the memory of the writing of the poem, all become equal within the surface process of the poem’s creation. In addition to illustrating New York School formal techniques, the excerpt is full of typical thematic and cultural concerns. The importance of the group of poets meeting in down-town bohemian bars such as the famous Cedar explains, to those in the know, what kind of writers we are dealing with here. In addition, the aleatory nature of the writing of a poem on torn-out pages while riding the bus indicates the classic avant-garde aim, as stated by Peter Burger, of removing imposed divisions between art and life (Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde). It also neatly takes poetry out of the academy and literally onto the New York streets. Finally de Kooning’s rejection of space is similar to Koch and his contemporaries’ rejection of poetic depth; theirs is not an innovation in art but a radical re-invention. While the school was unusual for an avant-garde grouping in that it had no stated program in the form of manifestos, a number of basic features are held in common by most, if not all, poets associated with the school, first and second generation. I have already mentioned the rejection of depth and craft, the processual aesthetic, the emphasis on surface and the use of humour. To these can be added confusing shifts in pronominal deixis (as we saw “I” can become “it” very easily), sudden shifts in location and temporal zones and a use of allusiveness where the allusion is either so private it cannot be traced, or is to something trivial and silly that does not add meaning to the work but merely diverts its progress. All of these were purposefully designed to undermine standard poetic procedures so that the Romantic lyrical ego of the confessional school is reduced to just linguistic effects rejecting psychology altogether; the refusal to stay centered on a time and place freeing the poem from all representational and historical duties, while the bizarre allusions were designed to parody the highly serious use of allusiveness in modernist work. Many of these early techniques were jokes designed to liberate poetry but the aesthetic of the school did move on from these. At its worst, New York School poetry can remain addicted to the tricksiness of much of these strategies and result in a self-satisfied campness; however all the major players of the first generation were able to use their attack on New Critical poetry as a jumping off point to more serious investigations into poetic language. From these beginnings the New York School poets have fashioned a complex and influential postmodern art which does not differentiate between form and theme, locates the process of writing poetry centrally within the processes of everyday life, undermines both poetic but also intellectual, economic and cultural meta-narratives, and treats words like material in the way an abstract painter might treat paint as mere pigmented matter. In addition their work has re-invented both the lyric and long poem form, by taking cultural products and language as their referent rather than the “real” world or the poet’s self, and by creating an ongoing critique of ontological and aesthetic norms through a playful yet serious self-reflexivity. Through the seventies and into the eighties the close personal ties which formed the group in previous decades had all but totally dissolved. O’Hara was dead, Schuyler something of a recluse, Ashbery now a poet of national significance and Koch somewhat overlooked. In addition, Guest had drifted, aesthetically, towards modernism and found a new audience with Language orientated poetry, while Mathews had moved to Paris to join the OuLiPo avant-garde group. Still, since the apparent collapse of the school their influence and importance has grown. Ashbery and Koch continued to publish major collections and Schuyler was able, late in life, to overcome his health problems and develop a public profile. The appearance of the collected poems of Schuyler in 1993 and O’Hara in 1995 were both major publishing events. In some ways the critical community has lagged behind the public appreciation of New York School Poetry but in the past few years major monographs on the School as a whole, and on individual members, have begun to appear. As for their lasting influence, they have created a significant legacy. Aside from the second generation of New York School poets, the interactions and conflicts between Language-oriented poets such as Bernstein and Hejinian with Ashbery and O’Hara’s work in particular has been important. Echoes of Ashbery, O’Hara, and Koch can be heard in the work of numerous contemporary poets writing in English and numerous other languages, while the strength of postmodern poetry, which owes most if not all to these poets, is ever increasing. Further Readings. Auslander, Philip, The New York School Poets as Playwrights: O'Hara, Ashbery, Koch, Schuyler, and the Visual Arts (New York: Peter Lang, 1989); Diggory, Terence & Stephen Paul Miller Eds., The Scene of My Selves: New Work on New York School Poets (Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation, 2000); Gooch, Brad, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara (New York: Harper Perennial, 1994); Lehman, David, The Last Avant-Garde: The Making of The New York School of Poets (New York: Doubleday, 1998); Ward, Geoff, Statutes of Liberty: The New York School Poets (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993, revised edition 2000); Watkin, William, In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 2001). Headwords: John Ashbery Bill Berkson Charles Bernstein Ted Berrigan Joe Brainard John Cage Kenward Elmslie Barbara Guest Lyn Hejinian Kenneth Koch Harry Mathews New Criticism Frank O’Hara Ron Padgett James Schuyler Wallace Stevens Tony Towle William Carlos Williams
William Watkin Brunel University, London
Poet Entry (short):
Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) Richard Brautigan wrote poetry for seven years to prepare to write novels. By 1960 he had published four books of verse and established himself as a minor figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. That year he also began work on his first novel, employing the spare style, offset by wildly imaginative figurative language, that he had honed as a poet. Upon publication seven years later, this novel, Trout Fishing in America (1967) became a literary emblem of the flourishing counter-culture movement. Brautigan gained an international audience and returned to writing poetry – this time for its own sake. He would publish six more books of poems, but his readership would decline with the waning of the counter-culture movement. Brautigan was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1935, shortly after his parents had separated. Accounts of family members indicate that his childhood was marked by loneliness, neglect, and poverty. He began writing as a teenager and was determined to become successful. Poverty added urgency to this goal as he felt writing was his only skill. After graduating from high school in Eugene, Oregon, in 1953, he began publishing his poems in national magazines. In 1958 he settled in San Francisco at the height of the Beat Movement and befriended many of the Beat poets including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen. His poetry began appearing in major Beat publications such as the Evergreen Review and City Lights Journal. His first published novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964) sold poorly, but Trout Fishing in America quickly sold two million copies. Brautigan’s reclusive life-style and aversion to the drug-culture made him an unlikely hippie icon, but the candor, idealism, and whimsical nature of his work appealed widely to that generation. The author nurtured this association by the free distribution of Please Plant This Book (1968), eight poems printed on seed packets suggesting the reader prolong the life of the poem by transplanting it into the earth. But his popularity dropped dramatically in the mid-1970s, by which time he became relegated to cult status. Brautigan did not adjust well to this decline, and his later years were characterized by alienation and alcoholism. In the summer of 1982, he secluded himself in his Bolinas, California, ranch house to write his final novel, published posthumously as An Unfortunate Woman (2000). His body was discovered on 25 October 1984, several weeks after he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Brautigan’s verse is pervaded by a preoccupation with time. Generally, if he is not lamenting the erosive effects of time, he is celebrating and attempting to preserve ordinary moments before they are lost to oblivion. Whether his poems are despairing or ecstatic, their effect tends to rely on irony and innovation. His first book, a broadside titled The Return of the Rivers (1957), introduces this concern with time. The poem alludes to Ecclesiastes, acknowledging the perpetual ebb and flow of the earth’s waters but noting the presence of spring, which does not, for the moment, “dream of death.” Brautigan’s early poems often feature surreal anachronisms. In “To England” from Lay the Marble Tea (1959), the poet imagines mailing a letter back to a time when John Donne’s “grave hasn’t been dug yet.” He imagines Donne greeting the postman, who approaches with a glass cane. The new poems in Brautigan’s first major collection, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968), which includes nearly all the poems of his earlier books, resemble the concise, conversational poetry of William Carlos Williams (“Widow’s Lament”) and recall the word play of e.e. cummings (“The Shenevertakesherwatchoff Poem”). The title poem, one of many that allude to an historic tragedy as an analogue for personal loss, compares “all the people lost” due to a girlfriend’s use of birth control to the victims of a mining catastrophe. Brautigan’s poems frequently use dates to harness more firmly an ephemeral moment. In “Alas Measured Perfectly,” a snapshot of two seemingly happy women, taken on August 25, 1888 becomes a metaphor for the poem itself, which has captured what is “all gone.” His next collection, Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt (1970), includes a few poems with only titles, the blank page suggesting something forgotten. “1891-1944,” for example, refers to the lifespan of General Rommel, who, as Brautigan notes in the book’s title poem, has “joined the quicksand legions / of history.” In “The Memoirs of Jesse James,” the poet compares his school teachers to the legendary outlaw “for all the time they stole” from him. Often the composition of a poem is itself the subject as in “April 7, 1969,” where Brautigan wishes to commemorate how bad he feels with “any poem, this/ poem.” The title poem of his next collection, Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (1976), conveys the poet’s frustration in trying to capture the essence of experience. But in “Seconds” he notes, with “such a short amount of time to live and think” he has spent the proper number of seconds observing a butterfly: “twenty.” In the introduction to his final collection, June 30th, June 30th (1978), Brautigan credits the Japanese haiku poets for teaching him to concentrate “emotion, detail, and image” to create “a form of dew-like steel.” He also acknowledges the frequent criticism that his work is uneven, stating “the quality of life is uneven.” In this book, which chronicles a stay in Japan, Brautigan emphasizes that his art not only preserves poetic moments but also validates his existence. In “Tokyo / June 11, 1976” he remarks that his passport and his poetry “are the same thing.” Brautigan’s final poem, “The Past Cannot Be Returned” lacks the optimism of “The Return of the Rivers.” The “umbilical cord” broken, he notes, life cannot “flow through it again.” The 1990s saw nine of Brautigan’s books, including The Pill, reissued in America and many more throughout Europe. The discovery of his earliest poems, published in The Edna Webster Collection (1999), shows that Brautigan’s experimental style and concern with the transience of experience colored his work from the start.
Further Reading. Selected Primary Sources: Brautigan, Richard, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); ---, Loading Mercury with a Pitchfork (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976); ---, June 30th, June 30th (New York: Dell, 1978); ---, The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1968); ---, Rommel Drives on Deep into Egypt. (New York: Dell, 1970). Selected Secondary Sources: Abbot, Keith, Downstream from Trout Fishing in America: A Memoir of Richard Brautigan (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1989); Foster, Edward Halsey, Richard Brautigan (Boston: Twayne, 1983); Malley, Terrence, Richard Brautigan (New York: Warner, 1972).
Headwords San Francisco Renaissance Beat Movement Lawrence Ferlinghetti Michael McClure Philip Whalen Surreal William Carlos Williams e.e. cummings Japanese haiku poets
John Cusatis University of South Carolina
Poet Entry (medium):
CHARLOTTE PERKINS GILMAN (1860-1935) Although her reputation today rests largely on the classic short story “The Yellow Wall-Paper” (1892), a chilling tale of the psychological breakdown of a young wife and mother, it was for her poetry that Charlotte Perkins Gilman first gained national attention. After “Similar Cases,” a satirical poem on social conservatism, appeared in the Nationalist in 1890, William Dean Howells and Floyd Dell wrote to Gilman to praise her talent. Three years later, she published her first book of poetry, In This Our World (1893), a highly acclaimed volume published in four editions between 1893 and 1898. The collection earned exceptionally warm praise from Horace L. Traubel, Whitman's close friend and literary executor, in an 1898 review. In all, Gilman published nearly 500 poems during her lifetime and left dozens more in manuscript at the time of her death. Born in 1860 into the politically progressive Beecher family of New England (her father was the nephew of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Henry Ward Beecher), Charlotte Perkins formed a philosophy at an early age that would govern her life. She believed that it was incumbent upon every human being to find their work in the world and to pursue it without hesitation. When she was 23, she entered into a turbulent marriage to American artist Charles Walter Stetson, during which she suffered a nervous breakdown following the birth of her only child, daughter Katharine. When the marriage ended several years later, Gilman immersed herself in work and emerged as one of the intellectual leaders of the turn-of-the-century women's movement. Her work was shaped largely by her belief in the need for social reform, by her advocacy of Nationalism in the 1890s, and particularly by her support of Reform Darwinism. An influential social theorist and champion of women's economic independence, Gilman became an enormously prolific writer. Five years after the publication of In This Our World, Gilman’s landmark work, Women and Economics (1898), won international acclaim and was quickly translated into seven languages. Several other non-fiction books followed: Concerning Children (1900), The Home: Its Work and Influence (1903), Human Work (1904), The Man-Made World; Or, Our Androcentric Culture (1911) and His Religion and Hers (1923). Novels were published separately, and serially, in Forerunner, a monthly magazine that Gilman singlehandedly wrote and published between 1909-1916, which also featured nearly 125 of her short stories and hundreds of her poems. Gilman became a world-renowned lecturer, and her work was praised by such prominent figures as William Dean Howells, Upton Sinclair, Jane Addams, Lester F. Ward, and Carrie Chapman Catt, who ranked Gilman first in her list of "America's Twelve Greatest Women." In 1932, at the age of 72, Gilman learned that she had inoperable breast cancer, and in 1934, her second husband, George Houghton Gilman, whom she had married in 1900 at the age of 39, died suddenly from a cerebral hemorrhage. At the age of 75, and suffering the effects of the disease, Gilman ended her life by inhaling chloroform. Although In This Our World was the only volume of poetry that Gilman published during her lifetime, she was attempting to arrange publication of a second book of verse in the months prior to her death. Although she grew increasingly weak as the disease progressed, Gilman's resolve to see her second book of poetry in print never diminished. In the weeks before her suicide, Gilman wrote letters to her editor and literary executor urging publication of the collection. She was unsuccessful, however, in securing a publisher before her death, and the second volume, The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, was published posthumously in 1996. Gilman's love of poetry began during her childhood in Providence, Rhode Island. In her autobiography, she remarked on the pleasure she derived from reading, writing, and memorizing verse. Gilman’s first poem, a simple apostrophe to dandelion greens, was published in the New England Journal of Education when she was 19. Shortly thereafter, however, Gilman's verses became politicized, and two of her earliest poems addressed the oppression of women. One, "In Duty, Bound" (1884), written shortly before her marriage to Stetson, depicts the "weary life" and "wasting power" that women endure when they sacrifice their individualism in marriage. Another, "One Girl of Many" (1884), is a sympathetic portrait of prostitution, in which Gilman chronicled the events that lead young women into a life of "dishonor," "misery," and "sin." Gilman saw an analogy between women who were subservient in marriage and those who were sexually exploited as a result of prostitution. Like virtually everything that she wrote, Gilman’s poetry was infused with didacticism and became a device through which she could advance her social theories. Although Gilman preferred to write didactic verse, she enjoyed reading the more artistic works of such poets as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Rudyard Kipling, Jean Ingelow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. She was also personally acquainted with California poets Ina Coolbrith, Joaquin Miller, and Edwin Markham. Her favorite poet, however, was Walt Whitman. Like so many of her contemporaries, Gilman considered Whitman America's greatest poet, and his Leaves of Grass was one of only two books that Gilman carried with her during an extended lecture tour in the 1890s. Despite her deep and abiding admiration of Whitman's sensual free verse, artistry in her own poetry often remained secondary to the message. As a poet, Gilman's strongest work was, arguably, her satirical verse. Her most famous satire, “Similar Cases,” in which Gilman mocked social conformity, brought her immediate acclaim. With its biting satire, “Similar Cases” was reprinted more than two dozen times following its 1890 publication. Gilman’s satire covered a wide range of topics, including the evolution versus creation debate, the pervasiveness of yellow journalism, the meat-packing scandal in the early part of the twentieth century, America's role in World War I, the limitations imposed by women's clothing, the influx of immigrants into the United States, and the myopic existence of the turn-of-the-century housewife. Gilman used her satirical verse to advance her position on some of the same social, political, and economic issues about which she frequently wrote and lectured. Her promotion of ethical journalism, for example, was developed through such forums as essays, lectures, editorials, and even fiction. In such satirical poems on the topic as "The War-Skunk" (1891) and "The Yellow Reporter" (1906), Gilman castigated newspaper journalists who resorted to unscrupulous methods to obtain a story. Likewise, several of her satirical poems addressed both the economic impact and the public health risk associated with the meat-packing scandal in the early part of the twentieth century in which adulterated food was distributed and sold. One poem, "We Eat at Home" (1910), promoted Gilman's advocacy of the "kitchenless” residence, an architectural innovation she advanced in such works as Women and Economics and The Home. Gilman argued that the kitchenless home would help to free women from domestic oppression by shifting the most time-consuming household duty outside of the home and into the hands of professional chefs. In a more serious vein, Gilman betrayed her intolerance of a multiethnic society in her highly metaphorical satire, "The Melting Pot," published posthumously in 1996. In it, she dismissed as "swill" the "queer mixture" of nationalities that resulted from the absence of a more restrictive U. S. immigration policy. The poem echoes the xenophobic sentiments expressed in her autobiography in which she bitterly lamented that New York City, her home for twenty-two years, had been overtaken by immigrants. In another dark satire titled "Why? To the United States of America, 1915-1916" (1916), Gilman blasted the U. S. government for its failure to render immediate assistance to its allies during World War I. In a similar thematic vein, her poem, "On Germany," betrayed Gilman's contempt for Germany's role in the war in virtually every line. Satirical humor was also invoked by Gilman in addressing more banal matters. In response to those long-winded speakers who monopolized the podium when she was on the lecture circuit, for example, Gilman wrote a caustic poem titled "The Speaker's Sin" (1900). The poem derides those egotistical speakers who routinely and unapologetically exceed their allotted time. She also used humor to ridicule those women's fashions that she deemed impractical, such as big hats and crippling shoes. In an 1899 essay on “new” poetry, Howells conceded that while some readers might be offended by Gilman’s sarcasm, her verse should nevertheless be appreciated for its wisdom. In addition to satirical verse, Gilman also published dozens of philosophical poems in which she advanced her theories about human nature and the responsibility incumbent upon individuals to effect positive change. In such works, for example, as "The Fatalist and The Sailorman" (1996), "Tree & Sun" (1918), "The Earth, The World, and I" (1900), and "The Kingdom" (1910), Gilman dramatized a host of philosophical issues, including the effect of heredity versus environment, the sources of women's oppression, and her steadfast confidence in the inevitability of progress. She also published a number of clever apothegms, including "The Daily Squid" (1915), “The Front Wave" (1933), and "Queer People" (1899), as well as poems that emphasize the value of such human characteristics as truth, courage, love, joy, and power. "Two Prayers" (1910), for example, celebrates the joy of self-empowerment. Several other poems develop the tension between dichotomous elements: youth and age, old and new, past and present. Some poems had an autobiographical component, including "Good Will" (1895), which was written after Gilman endured hostility and public condemnation following her divorce in 1894. The poem served as a self-reminder not to waste sorrow "on the days that lie behind" or to waste fear on "days that rise before." Poems for and about women were also a frequent topic entertained by Gilman. One entire section of In This Our World, in fact, addresses some of Gilman's foremost concerns about gender issues: economic disparity between the sexes, subservience in the home, and women's suffrage. In the frequently reprinted “She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping” (1889), Gilman issued a wake-up call to women who tolerate oppression through their failure to attain self-empowerment. Some of her poems called for solidarity, as in "A Chant Royal," written in 1920 and published posthumously in 1996, and "Happy Day" (1912), in which Gilman celebrates the suffrage movement. Other poems, such as "To the Indifferent Woman" (1904), admonish housewives in particular not to become so removed from the world at large that they forget that "The one first duty of all human life / Is to promote the progress of the world." Some works, such as "Full Motherhood" (1915), address Gilman's idea of the "new motherhood," which advocated a form of communal maternity in which women would love all children and not just their own. The poem "Body of Mine" (1996) is an affirmation of old age: despite the fact that the speaker’s body has grown "thin, dry, and old," her soul is "Young forever to all demands / Ageless and deathless and boundless and free." Although not nearly as numerous, Gilman's “artistic” poems deserve mention, since they were more varied and less didactic than her other verse. Her artistic poems are comprised of celebrations of nature, children's verse, nonsense poetry, and occasional verse. Gilman’s occasional poetry is particularly noteworthy. One of her favorites, the autobiographical "On a Tub of Butter, Christmas 1882," was published posthumously in 1996. Unlike the majority of her poems, "On a Tub of Butter" is unrhymed and contains a Whitmanesque catalog of evocative pastoral images. Gilman, as speaker, writes that the gift of butter—a rare treat in the impoverished household in which she was raised—made her think of “country life,” including “milkpails drying in the summer sun” and “The worn old barn, with curving roof and low / Dark doorway where the cows come trooping in.” Other occasional poems include a birthday tribute to a long-time friend (1922), a verse written to accompany a lecture (1891), and an observation of “California Colors” (1915). “In Alabama Woods” (1904), is an artistic poem that celebrates the indigenous beauty of Alabama’s spruce trees with their “thick clouds of blue-green needles” and “The dogwood’s flame of snow.” Because the majority of Gilman’s poems were intended to advance a social cause, the often-heavy didacticism frequently compromised the artistic quality. Still, poetry was a genre that Gilman enjoyed immensely and practiced throughout her life. Her last-known verse, “The Grapevine” (published posthumously in 1996), an occasional poem about a trip to the country to view fields of wildflowers, was written at the age of 74, just five months before Gilman’s suicide. In her final months of life, as she scrambled to prepare her second volume of verse for publication, Gilman feared that she would be forgotten. She would unquestionably be pleased by the ongoing revival of her work and the renewed interest in her life. In 1993, a study conducted by the Siena Research Institute named Gilman sixth in their list of the "Ten Most Influential Women of the Twentieth Century." And in 1994, the National Women's Hall of Fame in Seneca Falls, New York paid Gilman the ultimate tribute by inducting her into their ranks. Although much of Gilman’s verse seems to be dated by today’s standards, it nevertheless stands as an enduring reminder of the poet's convictions, her passion, and her indomitable spirit.
Further Readings. Primary Sources: Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Denise D. Knight (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 1996); ---, In This Our World (Oakland: McCombs & Vaughn, 1893; 3d. ed. Boston: Small, Maynard & Co., 1898; Reprint. New York: Arno, 1974). Secondary Sources: Golden, Catherine J., “`Written to Drive Nails With’” Recalling the Early Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, eds. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999, 243-266); Knight, Denise D., “`But O My Heart’: The Private Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman,” Charlotte Perkins Gilman: Optimist Reformer, eds. Val Gough and Jill Rudd (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999, 267-284); ---, "`With the first grass-blade': Whitman's Influence on the Poetry of Charlott Perkins Gilman" (Walt Whitman Quarterly Review [Summer 1993]: 18-29); Scharnhorst, Gary, "Reconstructing Here Also: On the Later Poetry of Charlotte Perkins Gilman," Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman, ed. Joanne Karpinski (New York: G. K. Hall, 1992, 249-268). Headwords Jane Addams Henry Ward Beecher Elizabeth Barrett Browning Carrie Chapman Catt Ina Coolbrith Floyd Dell Oliver Wendell Holmes William Dean Howells Jean Ingelow Rudyard Kipling Leaves of Grass Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Edwin Markham Joaquin Miller The Nationalist Christina Rossetti Upton Sinclair Harriet Beecher Stowe Horace L. Traubel Lester F. Ward Walt Whitman Denise D. Knight, State University of New York at Cortland
Poet Entry (long): RICHARD LEWIS (c
1699-1734)
Richard Lewis was one of the most important poets of the
American classical tradition of the early 1700’s. His work is
distinguished by a reliance on classical rather than British sources, by
frequent declarations of literary
independence from Britain and the Continent, and by attempts to
discover an American identity distinct from that of the Mother country.
Lewis’s poems were often long and took as their topics the natural scenery of early Maryland,
literary aesthetics, the contemplative spiritual journey, and New World
nation building.
Richard Lewis was born in Llanfair, Montgomery County, Wales, but
emigrated to Maryland in 1718.
Educated at the British Latin grammar school well enough to gain
entrance to and matriculate at Balliol College, Oxford (beginning 3 April
1718 and continuing for only thirteen weeks), Lewis found employment in
the Maryland Colony as a schoolmaster at King William’s School (a Latin
grammar school) in Annapolis, where he seems to have remained. Calling his
teaching duties “very fatiguing” (“Preface” to Muscipula,
p. xii) he nonetheless managed to marry Elizabeth (Betty) Giles on 15
March 1723, father at least one child, and write a substantial quantity of
poetry before his early death in March 1734. The
most important of Lewis’s poems are the early Muscipula: The Mouse
Trap, or the Battle of the Cambrians and the Mice, an English
language translation of a Latin poem by Edward Holdsworth, published in
Annapolis (1728); “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis” (April or May
1730); “Food for Criticks” (May 1731); and Carmen Seculare (25
November 1732), a state poem (after Horace) published as a folio pamphlet.
Muscipula, Lewis’s first
literary publication, suggests details of the poet’s biography even
while it addresses the aesthetic categories of beauty, the imagination,
and the sublime, focusing particularly on the construction of “GOOD
POETRY.” In a discussion
of the genre of Muscipula, Lewis calls the poem “Mock Heroic
or Burlesque” of which he identifies “two
Sorts” (xi). One describes a “ludicrous Action,” of which Pope’s
Rape of the Lock is an excellent example. Muscipula,
however, falls into the second sort, which has low characters and details
some “great Event.” In this instance Lewis chooses, not the usual “odd,
uncommon Numbers” (irregular verse form), but heroic couplets in
which to cast his translation; this form, Lewis claims, will effect a
“more truly comical” production. Lewis is, nonetheless, most
careful to assert that he has “no intention to derogate…the Honour of
the Cambrians [that is, the Welsh]” (xii).
Lewis’s own Welsh origins
account for his desire not to offend, despite the burlesque form. It is
also clear that Lewis intended to ingratiate himself with his dedicatee,
Maryland Governor Benedict L. Calvert. The Governor, in fact, subscribed
to ten copies of Muscipula, the largest number of any of the
poem’s 149 subscribers. The book’s large subscription led to the
immediate sale on publication of 233 copies, probably making possible the
elaborate production of the volume in quarto with a rubricated title page,
unique for the time until the appearance of the Massachusetts’s Bay
Colony’s still more elaborate Pietas et Gratulatio (1761; Devotion
and Gratitude).
Muscipula celebrates the tenacity of Lewis’s ancestors, who
have “Their Antique Tongue and Freedom never lost,” and who, as he says
in one of his extensive footnotes, could not be induced “to
endure…Servitude, nor could they be reconciled to the English
Government” until the time of Henry VII, “descended from the Welsh.” In such passages, Lewis reveals his own love of freedom
and perhaps his reason for immigration.
Lewis’s “Notes” to Muscipula
are remarkable for their erudition. Lewis quotes such sources as the
Venerable Bede’s Historica Ecclessiastica or Ecclesiastical
History (of Britain), Tacitus’ De Vitā Iulii Agricolae
or Life of Agricola, and Servius’ Commentarii Virgilium or
Commentary on Vergil (4th cent.). Elsewhere
in the “Notes,” Lewis observes that “history” connects “old
Troy” to London as the “new Troy,” and that Aeneas, who escaped Troy
to become Vergil’s founder of Rome , was the mythical grandfather of
Camber, King of the Cambrians . In making these associations, Lewis
appeals to those colonial Americans who did possess classical training;
during the eighteenth century, this practice of figuring parallels between
Early Americans and characters from Vergil’s Aeneid became,
among the intellectual elite, almost commonplace.
In the dedicatory poem to Muscipula,
Lewis, reflecting early American conditions of literary production,
maintains that “‘To raise the Genius,’ WE no time can spare,
/ A bare Subsistence claims our utmost Care.” Despite
this assertion, Lewis was able to execute in this translation the most
intricate literary production of its time in the Maryland colony. In
subsequent years, Lewis continued to publish poetry in colonial newspapers
so that by the time of “A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis” (1730),
he was the author of a sizable body of poems. In the “Journey,” he
indicates that he has thoroughly resettled himself as a loyal,
enthusiastic citizen of his
adopted colony. His portrait of “the Monarch Swain,” for
example, embodies a typical description of the Early American farmer who
reigns over “His Subject Flocks” and fecund fruits and vegetables, all
“unbought,” which “his well-till’d Lands afford.”
The “Journey,” printed at
least four times in the Colonies and five times in England during the
eighteenth century, was surely Lewis’s most popular poem. Pope alludes
to it in his Dunciad, albeit the treatment is less than flattering.
More recently, this poem has provoked several critical essays, some
scholars interpreting it as a poem about nature and others seeing it as a
spiritual account. “Journey” does contain stunning celebrations of
Maryland’s natural scenery. Lewis’s portrait of the American Humming
Bird, for example, is justly famous; he describes the “Humming-Bird”
as hardly larger than the bumble bee: “Like them, He sucks his
Food, the Honey-Dew, / With nimble Tongue, and Beak of jetty Hue.” Lewis
relates that the bird’s “gemmy Plummage strikes the Gazer’s
Sight,” as he marvels at the diminutive bird’s variegated colors,
whose “vivid Green,” scarlet, purple, blue and “golden Blaze” mock
“the Poet’s and the Painter’s skill.”
Recalling
Vergil’s Georgics (four poems on farming) and Thomson’s Seasons,
the “Journey” actually belongs to the genre of the meditatio, a
popular form in Early America during the late seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries. From Philip Pain’s Daily
Meditations and Edward
Taylor’s Preparatory Meditations to Roger
Wolcott’s Poetical Meditations and Phillis
Wheatley’s “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” early American
poets found this classical, philosophical genre a convenient one in which
to cast spiritual, contemplative responses to the American adventure. In
such works as the Old English Seafarer, Dante’s La Commedia,
and John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, this contemplative exercise of
mind records a psychomachic or spiritual crisis; such a record of crisis
dominates Lewis’s “Journey.” Assuming a basic structure of memory (which encompasses the operation of both the senses and the imagination), understanding or the reason, and the will or a resolve to take action, this meditatio opens with the line, “At length the wintry Horrors disappear.” The use of the word “Horrors” is arresting: following a long winter fraught with horrific consequences (perhaps the deaths of children from pneumonia resulting from falling through a weak patch in an iced-over river), the speaker can at last be assured that the new season promises relief. Despite this promise, about a third of the way through the poem, an April storm wreaks a “dumb Horror thro’ the Forest.” This unwelcome intervention within an otherwise idyllic setting causes the speaker to exclaim, “How soon does Beauty fade!”
Earlier in the poem, pleasant
memories of this April sojourn had led the speaker to remark: “Ten
thousand Beauties [rise] to my View; / Which kindle in my Breast poetic
Flame, / And bid me my Creator’s praise proclaim.” But the terror of the storm has, in “memory’s mint,” provoked him to
give his reader the admonitory first line, “At length the wintry
Horrors disappear,” horrors only to be revisited in the terrific
destruction of the Spring storm, which uproots trees and floods the
valley. The persona’s memory, then, leads him to contemplate not just
early Spring’s budding beauties but also the conflict between the
promise of Spring’s pleasures and its painful threat of destruction.
When the storm passes, as do eventually the “wintry Horrors,”
“all restless Thoughts controul” April’s “several Joys,” “And
gently-soothing calm the troubled Soul.” As “restless Thoughts” was,
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a precise description
of the active imagination, it is clear
that the memory here provides the persona with a state of contrasting
images and sensations which bring him to the brink of a conflict within
the soul.
This dynamic contrast the
persona then attempts to grasp, thereby bringing his understanding into
play. For as the persona’s “wand’ring Thoughts aspire” toward a
satisfying explanation, he turns to the vulnerable, human power of his
mind to resolve the problem posed by his journey’s “instructive
Sight.” Following contemplation of the heavens, his focus descends
“sudden from th’ aereal Height,” causing him to turn “inward [his]
reflective View, / My working Fancy” or imagination once again enabling
the persona to center on his own importance, “tho’ mean.” From this self-evaluation, the persona determines that what he
lacks is calm “Content”; what he wants is to be allowed to share his
“leisure Hours…With chosen Books, or a well-natur’d Friend,”
here echoing the popular sentiments among the educated classes expressed
earlier in the century by John Pomfret’s “The Choice” (1700). But upon these musings the persona finds again and again the return of the former horrors, especially fear “at th’ Approach of Death.” Now, “struck with amaze” by the cumulative effect of the journey, the persona cries out, “Tremendous God! May I not justly fear…that my Notions of” an afterlife “Are but creations of my own Self-Love!”—merely “fancied Feasts of Immortality!” As the persona revealingly puts it: “These Thoughts [imaginations], which thy amazing Works suggest, / Oh glorious Father, rack my troubled Breast.” Thus even though the persona is “Condemn’d to travel thro’ a tiresome Way,” as his understanding has taught him, “These active Thoughts that penetrate the Sky / Excursive into dark Futurity” lead him to entrust his fate to the “Supreme of Beings,” and to conclude that, “Whatever State then shalt for me ordain,” he will “sustain thy wise Decree” with patience “And learn to know myself, and honour Thee."
While Lewis’s “Journey”
does indeed both emphasize nature and trace the particulars of a spiritual
odyssey, it is not the
confession of a committed Christian. Rather, the form of the meditatio directs
Lewis toward an analysis of the poet’s principal faculty, the
imagination.
In “Food for Criticks”
(1731), Lewis again pursues his intense interest in aesthetics, here
viewing Maryland’s natural setting as a metaphor for art itself. So
chauvinistic is Lewis now regarding his adopted “country” of Maryland
that he unabashedly declares this new land to provoke even more
inspirational motives for poetry than “The fam’d castalian or pierian
well” of the ancient world of Greece and Rome. Indeed the setting along
the Skuylkil would appear to have the power to turn the “rudest
swains” into sages who can read “the wandering stars” like learned
astrologers.
The latter hyperbole redefines
the relatively innocuous pastoral of Vergil (“Food for Criticks” is
preceded by a quote from Vergil’s tenth Eclogue), peopled by
urbane cosmopolites dressed in shepherd’s garb, by suggesting that New
World nature possesses a fantastic transformative capacity. In Maryland,
“Each thicket seems a paradise renew’d,” wherein “Each sense its
part of sweet delusion shares: / The scenes bewitch the eye, the song [of
various birds] the ears; / Pregnant with scent each wind regales the
smell.” So powerful are these sensations that even “Some indian prince,” baring his “bow and quiver” after dark flies back
from “elyzium” because “He can’t in death his native groves
forget.” In such phrases Lewis reinvents classical
pastoral as a New World phenomenon. No derivative imitation of Pope or
Dryden or even of Vergil here. Lewis would own pastoral for
America. “Food for Critics”--the title striking a defiant chord to
those who would attempt to denigrate the Maryland populace as culturally
deprived--while it clearly indicates Lewis’s fondness and respect for
America’s natural ambiance, also constitutes a most enthusiastic
statement of literary independence.
Carmen Seculare (1732)
displays a similarly independent spirit. Lewis takes his title for this
300-line poem from Horace’s state hymn Carmen Saeculare; both
titles translate as “secular song.” Horace’s hymn was commissioned
by the Roman emperor Augustus in 17 B.C. to celebrate the emperor’s
revival of the Ludi Saeculares (Secular Games), after an interval
of about 130 years. To Augustus, this revival represented more than a
renewal of mere games; to him the Carmen was regenerative in
purpose and was to be suggestive of the new and prosperous Rome he was in
the process of constructing, following a long season of civil wars. To
Lewis the purpose of his Carmen was of no less gravity: he wished
to honor the centennial of the founding of the Maryland Colony by Cecilius
Calvert, the second Lord Baltimore, at the same time attempting to exploit
the regenerative force of language to restore prosperity to an ailing
economy (the staple crop tobacco, was yielding to a failing market). Beyond the celebratory and regenerative intentions of both Horace and Lewis, other parallels characterize the two works. As in Horace, but at greater length, Lewis extols the salubrious effect of Ceres, goddess of grain, as she “Clothes with her richest stores th’ unfallow’d soil.” Lewis goes on for almost thirty lines, praising sundry fruits, flowers, and game. In Maryland, indeed, “No earthquakes shock the soul with sad surprise.”
On the one hand, Horace draws a
spiritual connection between Aeneas, legendary founder of Rome, and
Augustus as his descendant, emphasizing that the ancestor liberum
munivit iter (secured the course for liberty), which
Augustus now, according to Horace, endows upon the Roman citizenry; on the
other, Lewis celebrates
Cecilius as the progenitor of Maryland’s religious freedom (so long as
colonists professed belief in the Christian trinity), hence enabling the
colonists to “unite t’improve the public weal.” The
implicit parallel Lewis makes between Aeneas and Cecilius underscores
Lewis’s general project to locate a “better” Rome in the New World. Just
as Horace concludes his Carmen with a prophecy that the children of
Rome will experience new ages of prosperity, so does Lewis end his state
poem by fastening attention on “those glorious Times” when “our
Children” will enjoy “golden Days.”
As in the other poems examined
above, Carmen Seculare treats its sources not derivatively but
re-creatively. Richard Lewis consistently uses classical sources to
create a wholly new poetic world, one designed to define the American
adventure in freedom for those experiencing it.
He writes a new poetry for a new country. Lewis applies
his considerable poetic talents to rearticulating classicism, the
spiritual journey, and literary aesthetics in terms of the natural scenery
and cultural imperatives of Colonial Maryland, thereby thoroughly
Americanizing his poetic achievement. Further Reading. Selected Primary Sources: Lewis, Richard, Carmen Seculare, for the year M, DCC, XXXII…To the Right Honourable Charles…Lord Baron of Baltimore. (Annapolis, 1732—a folio pamphlet); Mulford, Carla, Gen. ed., Early American Writings, New York: Oxford UP, 2002—pp. 572-579— includes “A Journey from Patapsco” and “Food for Critics”; Steiner, Bernard C., ed., Early Maryland Poetry (Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1900)—includes Muscipula: The Mouse Trap, pp. 58-102. Selected Secondary Sources: Johnson, Christopher D., “A Spiritual Pilgrimage Through a Deistic Universe: Richard Lewis’ ‘A Journey from Patapsko [sic] to Annapolis, April 4, 1730’” (Early American Literature 27 [1992]: 117-127); Kropf, C.R., “Richard Lewis’ ‘Food for Critics’: an Aesthetic Statement” (Early American Literature 15 [1980/81]: 205-216); Lemay, J.A. Leo, Men of Letters in Colonial Maryland (Knoxville, Tenn.: U of Tennessee P, 1972); Marambaud, Pierre, “‘At Once to Copy, --And the Original’: Richard Lewis’ ‘A Journey from Patapsco to Annapolis’” (Early American Literature 19 [1984]: 138-152).
Headwords
Philip Pain Roger Wolcott Phillis Wheatley Edward Taylor
John
C. Shields,
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