Edgar Lee Masters and Desire from Beyond

There are a number of obvious observations about Spoon River Anthology: the poems are dramatic monologues, they are constructed out of everyday language; they eschew rhyme and meter; they are separate but joined in a larger project; they unstintingly explore social relations, especially marriage; the poems are imagined epitaphs. It is this last that interests me most. We hear from ghosts. Masters's use of the epitaph -- a speaker's voice from the other side of the grave -- creates a very productive emotional intensity based on the condemnation of eternity. The dead have lived their lives and can no longer alter their paths. Paradoxically, their temporal situation heightens the intensity of their desires rather than dissipating those desires. His speakers don't often take the perspective that what's done is done. Though the end is certainly final, there is a yearning exponentially greater in the dead than the living.

Mabel Osborne
Your red blossoms amid green leaves
Are drooping, beautiful geranium!
But you do not ask for water.
You cannot speak! You do not need to speak -
Everyone knows that you are dying of thirst,
Yet they do not bring water!
They pass on, saying:
"The geranium wants water."
And I, who had happiness to share
And longed to share your happiness;
I who loved you, Spoon River,
And craved your love,
Withered before your eyes, Spoon River -
Thirsting, thirsting,
Voiceless from chasteness of soul to ask you for love,
You who knew and saw me perish before you,
Like this geranium which someone has planted over me,
And left to die.

This dramatic monologue would have been despairing enough had it been written from the perspective of an old woman, but a dead one is even further removed from the object of desire. The dramatic intensity is increased by the fact that her fate is mirrored by the geranium upon her grave.

It is unfortunate that literary effects (such as the geranium as figure for the fading possibility of satisfaction) is so meagerly distributed in the text. The direct and conversational diction is substituted for poetic technique. There's little about a line like this from "Searcy Foote" to apprehend poetically: "I wanted to go away to college / But rich Aunt Persis wouldn't help me." Even the dramatic event of this poem is flattened by Masters's clinical delivery: "I poured the chloroform on a handkerchief / And held it to her nose until she died."

There's a surprising lack of similes and metaphors, though when they do appear they add some depth, for example when A. D. Blood complains that "the milliner's daughter Dora and the worthless son of Benjamin Pantier / Nightly make my grave their unholy pillow." The pillow evokes a productive conflation of rest and activity (i.e. death and sex) supercharged by its concision.

William Carlos Williams, Objects, and Associations

It seems to me there's too much emphasis on Williams as an "objective" poet. That is, he does more than simply present objects. His famous dictum "no ideas but in things" has been taken too far. He doesn't discount ideas entirely in favor of things "in themselves." Instead, he stresses the value of ideas, but he wants to understand them through things. In his 1923 text Spring and All, he is at great pains to define and promote the imagination. His biggest targets are "association" and "symbolism," but surprisingly, he ultimately appears to end up arguing for a position that requires sharpened versions of these two processes.

Association is a function that surrounds "vague words." In one of the book's prose sections, Williams uses the example of the sky to discuss how some art fails to give the reader access to the sky:

"The man of imagination who turns to art for release and fulfilment of his baby promises contends with the sky through layers of demoded words and shapes. Demoded, not because the essential vitality which begot them is laid waste [...] but because meanings have been lost through laziness or changes in the form of existence which have let words empty" (100).

This argument seems akin to Pound's complaint about a line like "dim lands of peace." Pound deplores the addition of "of peace" as a vague and limp abstraction. Williams would probably add that "dim lands" is itself a weak construction because such a construction may have an automated response; the line does not sufficiently bring the landscape before the reader. The words are empty, relying on symbolism to move away from the land to a verbal abstraction rather than a description that would move into the land.

But here's where I think it's also important to note that Williams doesn't want to move into the land simply to present a landscape. His notion of the imagination derives from the idea that associations should flow from the encounter with what is presented as directly as possible. He doesn't despise associations; he requires that they be earned honestly, i.e. by traveling into the object rather than trusting a habituated move away from the object.

Whether or not he is able to do this in his own poetry is up for debate. A first obvious question is why he needs to add the prose sections to Spring and All; can't the practice of his poetic technique accomplish his goals without a host of critical statements smattered throughout? Does the poetry accomplish the laudable task of revitalizing the world and generating man's imagination?

Um...sometimes. I think he successfully avoids the "crude symbolism" that associates "anger with lightning, flowers with love," but it seems he sometimes fails to apprehend the emotional vitality available in the objects of the world. Unfortunately, I'm going to argue that one of his most well-known poems fails in this task: his famous red wheel barrow does little to fill the words again.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

The objects may be brought more fully in front of the reader, but I find its ability to evoke emotion questionable. It's likely this poem has been talked about so much by critics simply because it presents an intellectual challenge to see how this material might be bent in a certain direction. In this sense, it's a fun puzzle piece, but it engenders the pleasure of the critic and not the reader.

By contrast, the poem beginning with the following stanza more nearly accomplishes Williams's poetic task:

The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air - The edge
cuts without cutting
meets - nothing - renews
itself in metal or porcelain -

Very bluntly, the rose is refused its usual associations; it cannot be simply a marker for love. Instead of trusting that traditional movement of associations, Williams takes a closer look at the object. He notes how the petals come to an end in an edge, marking the boundary between the object and its environment. But the rose, and more specifically the petals, are continued in the reflection of the metal or porcelain vase holding the flowers. Although the petals end, making the rose an object made discrete by its boundaries, they paradoxically transcend their boundaries. The rose is understood in terms of movement rather than stasis.

I would argue that, in fashioning a new way in which the rose might be understood, Williams is also contemplating a new way in which the rose might articulate with human emotions. The poem works against typical associations, but it can only do so in the context of those associations. Although Williams insists that the rose is obsolete, he knows he's working against the backdrop of received ideas. In other words, Williams does not proceed as if the rose is obsolete as a metaphor for love; he revitalizes the metaphor by discovering a new basis for it. He states:

The rose carried the weight of love
but love is at an end - of roses

If is at the edge of the
petal that love waits

In the first couplet, the rose has been a symbol for love, but as the flower ends, so does love. The diction of the second couplet is complicated, but my reading is that "If" is at the edge of the petal. The fact of ending and the need to pick up the continuation in the reflection creates this conditional situation, requiring a new way of perceiving the flower in its environment. The potential of such an imaginative response in the reader reintroduces the possibility of love. For Williams, the flower is not a metaphor for love; the "if" of imagination is a metaphor for love.

Sigmund Freud on Dreams

Freud theorizes that dreams are wish-fulfillments. Because not all dreams involve pleasurable occurrences, he suggests that "distortion" is a fundamental aspect of dreams. The manifest content of dreams must be distinguished from their latent content. The content of dreams must be interpreted by first examining the thoughts at work which give rise to the dream's manifest content. Freud identifies two forms of distortion that have been useful for literary critics: condensation and displacement.

Freud means at least two things by the term condensation. First, he means that dreams are condensed; they naturally omit some aspects of the dreamer's thoughts. Second, he suggests that objects, figures, and even words within the dream are overdetermined; they represent more than just one thing: "The construction of collective and composite figures is one of the chief methods by which condensation operates in dreams." Each figure, then, cannot be interpreted as standing for one thing in a simple relationship. Instead, even seemingly simple objects in dreams are more complicated, representing layers of complex dream-thoughts.

Displacement is another distortion at work in dreams. Freud posits that objects or figures with high psychological intensity can be shifted onto objects or figures of low intensity. The dream-thoughts themselves are masked or censored by the process of dream formation.

The question for literary critics is whether they want to apply Freud's thoughts on dreams to the interpretation of literature. That is, does literature follow the same processes, and for the same reasons, as dream formation? While this is too large a question to answer in all its particulars, I'd like to think the answer is yes, sometimes. Perhaps the best way to prove it would be to perform a Freudian reading of a poem to see if it is compelling. Maybe "Gentildonna" by Ezra Pound. Hopefully, I'll be able to get to this tomorrow night, although I have six more books to read this week....

Hart Crane and America

The blog format doesn't allow for the sort of carefully considered reflection necessary to make sense of a poet like Hart Crane. Blogs are too immediate, while Crane requires so much more time and effort. But the exigencies of this project demand a written response -- and soon.

The most obvious aspect of Crane's work is its dense symbolism, heavy with suggestive adjectives, made of rapid shifts in metaphors. Crane poetic technique was completely at odds with someone like William Carlos Williams in terms of how much poetic work each line is expected to do. Crane's poetry is laden with allusive layers of potential meaning, which sometimes has the effect of paralyzing the reader who doesn't know what to make of it all. I often find myself in that position. This density is complicated by the presence of an Elizabethan style of diction.

Despite their stylistic differences, it's interesting to note that Crane and Williams were both involved in projects that attempt to represent America, or at least construct an understanding of what America might be. Crane's "The Bridge" uses the Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol through which the history and future of American might be understood. American figures and landscapes are brought into productive contact in an impressionistic weaving.

Crane makes a strong statement about the America he fashions by selecting a bridge as his symbol; it is a human-made product of the machine age. At times he disparages the "din" of modern capitalism (e.g. "Tintex - Japalac - Certain-teed Overalls ads"), but at other times he recognizes the depths to which the technology and the detritus of contemporary life are integrated into our lives.

"The last bear, shot drinking in the Dakotas
Loped under wires that span the mountain stream.
Keen instruments, strung to a vast precision
Bind town to town and dream to ticking dream."

This section of "The River" suggests that the spirit of the passing bear is picked up by the telephone wires stretching across the country. The "river" throughout this section seems to be exemplified more by telephone wires and railroad tracks than by natural rivers. But he is far from extolling the virtues of modernity. He views railroads, for example, from the hobo's perspective, those who simply make due in the circumstances they've been given. They inhabit a space in the modern world, but on the fringes, and they are still in contact with the natural world that attempts to persist.

"Yet they touch something like a key perhaps.
From pole to pole across the hills, the states
-They know a body under the wide rain;
Youngsters with eyes like fjords"

Not always covered with a roof over their heads, they come into physical contact with a "wide" rain which cannot be escaped as it is by other modern people who only need to run from their cars to their homes.

"Atlantis," the final section of the poem, layers meaning upon meaning as it interprets the cables that help support the bridge. Another modern image, the bridge cables become strings that play the music of America, threads that weave into the fabric of America. By the end, they become "orphic strings" with the potential to release us all, closing the poem on a powerfully optimistic note.

More on Weiskel on the Sublime

In my last post, I described the temporal experience of the sublime as outlined by Thomas Weiskel. But Weiskel moves beyond this observation to consider the meaning of such experience. He finds a parallel in Freudian psychology that, though certainly complicating matters, integrates the sublime into another framework which has shown to have many applications. I haven't decided whether or not this theorization, although fascinating, can be used to help me make sense of modernist poetry.

First, I'll try to summarize Weiskel's expanded narrative of the sublime. He argues that the sublime object (such as a massive object in nature) initiates a desire to be inundated, which in turn sets off the subject's anxiety about such an inundation, which inaugurates a reaction against the desire for inundation, which brings about the active defense of the self. Parallel to this process is the oedipus complex in which "inundation" is the attempt to possess the mother, the anxiety of inundation is the appearance of the superego which threatens castration, and the "reaction formation" that offers defense is the identification with the father.

Next, one must ask what this parallel narrative offers us. It seems to me that one benefit to Weiskel's attempt to map these two ideas on one another is that it encourages an analysis of aesthetics that is particularly psychological. While I don't pretend to know everything about aesthetics, my exposure has usually focused on formal elements. Order or chaos, harmony or dissonance -- the properties of the artwork itself are often taken as evidence of its aesthetic value. But Weiskel encourages a dynamic psychological understanding of aesthetic responses. Those who refuse to find the sublime experience Freudian may find, in refuting Weiskel, that it is more appropriately Lacanian or Kristevan (or whatever) -- but it is inevitably psychological.

But this is all very general. The question remains: is this specific idea useful? Can I use it to approach poetry, especially of the modernist period? Honestly, I'm having a hard time at the outset. There could be two reasons. First, it seems easier to me to identify an oedipal arrangement in narratives than in lyrical poetry. (Again, I need to investigate this further, but it will have to wait).

Second, the poetry I'm reading now is from the modernist era, and this group of poets, though diverse, seems interested in putting the mind through a very different set of challenges. The sublime objects in nature confronting the Romantics are absent in modernism. Today I read Hart Crane, who, at the beginning of "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen," writes: "The mind has shown itself at times / Too much the baked and labeled dough / Divided by accepted multitudes." This is not the fate of the mind in Wordsworth or Shelley. I started reading William Carlos Williams's "Spring and All," which also begins with an observation about the mind in an anti-Romantic condition: "There is a constant barrier between the reader and his consciousness of immediate contact with the world."

While I have more thinking to do about these two poets, the traumas of modernism, the divisions and barriers affecting the mind, are more quite different than the experiences of vast nature in Romanticism (e.g. Wordsworth's "The sounding cataract / Haunted me like a passion"). This is an unsatisfactory investigation of Weiskel's theory, of course, but I intend to keep these ideas at the ready as I continue reading.

Thomas Weiskel on the Sublime

The most useful idea in Weiskel's first chapter is his three-part structure of the sublime experience. The first stage is the status quo, marked by a standard or habitual meaning. The second stage involves a dramatic and un-symbolizable break from the preceding system of meaning, leaving the experiencer without the means to make sense of the experience. The third stage solves the break, with the destabilized mind "constituting a fresh relation between itself and the object" (24). Weiskel's enumeration of these stages is immediately helpful because it allows insights like the nearly throw-away line in which he posits that modernist literature hovers inescapably in the second phase, not allowing the renewal of meaning (26).

It must be noted that underlying Weiskel's structural account of the sublime experience is a fundamentally psychodynamic perspective. He's a careful reader of Freud, suggesting that the oedipus complex itself mirrors the three-part structure of the sublime. The passing of the oedipus complex becomes, in Weiskel's view, the sort of transcendent move that typifies the sublime experience. In light of this connection, I'm interested in the flow of desire between stages in both of these models.

Spooky Beautiful T. S. Eliot

I enjoy Eliot's poetry. I understand that he held some very unpleasant social, racial, and political opinions, but the poetry is finely crafted and often...beautiful. That's such a dangerous word, of course, because it announces a value judgment so boldly. Any use of the word "beautiful" is condemned to spend the next several paragraphs justifying it -- a justification usually unsatisfying both to those who agree and those who disagree. But it's fortuitous that I just wrote about Freud's "The Uncanny" yesterday, because I've selected a section of Eliot's "Ash-Wednesday" whose beauty seems to depend on an imagined image loaded with uncanniness. Here it is, the first stanza of Section III:

At the first turning of the second stair
I turned and saw below
The same shape twisted on the banister
Under the vapour in the fetid air
Struggling with the devil of the stairs who wears
The deceitful face of hope and of despair.

Eliot sets up a doubling of the poetic speaker. The speaker looks down the stairs and sees himself (i.e. "The same shape") struggling. This is uncanny in a few ways. First, all doublings throw into question the child's separation from the original caregiver (perhaps the mother). Second, and in a related way, there's the temporal aspect of the self on the second level of stairs as the adult version of the child on the first level.

Thirdly, and perhaps most important to Eliot's project in "Ash-Wednesday," the double has a spiritual aspect. Freud follows Otto Rank in pointing out that: "the 'immortal' soul was the first double of the body. The invention of such doubling [is] a defence against against annihilation." Freud suggests that this invention is child-like, representing the extreme narcissism of childhood. He argues that, "when this phase is surmounted, the meaning of the 'double' changes: having once been an assurance of immortality, it becomes the uncanny harbinger of death." The protective double created during one stage of development becomes a terrifying figure for the adult.

The quoted excerpt of Eliot's poem is fascinating because it places the speaker in the perspective of the adult who contemplates himself as a child (rather than the adult contemplating the immortal soul created by child-like thinking). The relationship between Eliot's doubles is perhaps even more uncanny than Freud's because of the temporal overlap of the former. The adult on the second stair and the child on the first coexist; the struggles of the child are ongoing. Even though he is on the second level, the "deceitful face of hope and of despair" plagues him. In other words, the narcissistic stage of childhood is not surmounted at all -- as evidenced by his continued reflection on himself as a child.

What makes this so moving is it throws into question the speaker's whole spiritual struggle. It's no accident that Eliot's speaker is climbing stairs, which acts as a figural motif indicating spiritual enlightenment and the path toward heaven. The coexistence of the second floor adult with the first floor child problematizes the notion of spiritual progress. The "devil of the stairs" appears to be narcissism, the perpetual concern with the self. (Though a full reading of Section III continues the journey...and continues the problematization).

All this commentary may seem to be moving too far away from the poem itself, but this interpretation is supported by some textual evidence. For example, the stanza rhymes (or nearly rhymes) insistently (stair, banister, air, wears, despair) -- except for the word "below," the sound of which jolts the reader. The propulsiveness of the rhymes pushes one forward, but there is that nagging "oh" sound pulling the reader back down again. Also, the inclusion of the second "of" in the last line maintains iambic meter, which is a regular and pleasing rhythm, but it oddly departs from a more standard conjuntion that would simply join "of hope and despair" rather than "of hope and of despair." In other words, the phrasing is regular and irregular at the same time. This doesn't just reproduce rhythmically the semantic contradiction of simultaneous hope and despair, it arrays double against double, adult against child, and self-centeredness against spiritual purity.

Okay, I wasn't able to come back to why I find this "beautiful." That's maybe too large a task for tonight. Perhaps I'll be better prepared to make a rousing return to that idea after I read Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime later this week.

Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny"

The first section of Freud's essay examines the etymology of the German word heimlich. Rather than being an exercise meant to discover clarity and univocality, Freud's investigation leads to a productive ambivalence of meanings. Heimlich means "familiar and comfortable" as well as that which is "concealed and kept hidden." Freud reads in his linguistic evidence the inability of language to refer to the world unambiguously.

This is a useful observation for my purposes for two reasons. First, it effectively undercuts that objectivist strain of modernism that believes in the possibility of scientific accuracy available in carefully controlled and concise language. Second, it reintroduces psychological processes into the poetic attempt to make meaning. That is, language is not solely a system of cognitive or intellectual meaning; it is also a system through which desire moves...or attempts to move. Language, like the self, is the site of struggle, the locus of desire and its restriction.

Freud identifies two temporal transformations that cause the uncanny. The first is the transformation from child to adult; the second is the transformation from primitive culture to civilized culture. (Please note that several of the terms in this last phrase probably need quotation marks to indicate pointed irony, though ambivalence is probably more what I'm aiming for). Freud examines literary tales to identify several tropes and how they make the transformations on each of the stated levels. Since I don't have the energy to write about all of the tropes raised by Freud, I'll choose "the double" because I think it may be applicable to some of the modernist poetry I've been reading.

(There's probably a larger conversation I need to have about my views on poetry itself. Though I recognize I need to provide a better explanation of how I read lyric poetry as distinct from other literary forms such as narrative fiction, I don't think I can accomplish it just yet. There will hopefully be more to come on this topic when I read Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism in early August).

Ezra Pound's poem "The Rest" provides an opportunity to examine ambivalence, uncanniness, and desire all through the figure of the double. "The Rest" takes as its subject the American poets Pound left behind when he became an expatriate. He speaks to those like-minded artists who are left to starve in the harsh artistic barrenness of America. In a way, its an address to his double, the person he may have become had he stayed in the U.S. This haunting double raises the problem of the uncanny: America is both the "familiar and comfortable" home, but it is that which must be put behind in order to emerge as a worldly artist.

Like Freud's ambivalent heimlich, Pound's exile at the end becomes troubled by its own opposite. The poem's final stanza hollows out the triumph he seems to be claiming: "Take thought: / I have weathered the storm, / I have beaten out my exile" (17-19). Weathering a storm means surviving a difficulty, but it also means he was seen safely through. Weathering can be seen to wear one down or slowly dissolve the substance of being, but it might also be viewed as the force which shapes the remaining substance. "Beaten" is also ambivalent. In one way, the speaker physically beats his double, who remains at home in America to read Pound's poem about how they've been broken. To beat a path means to make an escape, but also to wear down by traveling back and forth. In a figurative sense, Pound travels back to America by writing of it. Like the ontological necessity Hegel describes in the master/slave relationship, Pound is an exile only because he is an American.

It might be too much to say that "The Rest" is uncanny, but it does reveal an ambivalent transformation between childhood and adulthood as the speaker compares a later self to another possiblity for his earlier self. And, though I don't have time to examine it more closely, there also seems to be something going on at the sociological level. Rather than Freud's primitive-to-civilization, however, Pound might actually reverse the trajectory. Those in America who love the beauty of old-world European high culture are "thwarted" by the "systems" and "control" promoting what Pound calls "false knowledge." Heimlich is the European home from which we came, but the ambivalence involved in Pound's poem suggests that this home is only a home-away-from-home where Pound is left to contemplate his ghostly double.

Gertrude Stein and the value of meaning

There is no better writer than Stein for stating at the outset the tentativeness of one's critical assertions. In Tender Buttons, she is obscure. She leaves playfully up-ended any definite notions of meaning one may have had before coming to her work. The question is not whether it's nonsense, but what type of nonsense it is and whether it can tell us anything. There's not going to be any sense at the narrative level; one can only look for which meanings might be subverted by the unexpected, and which meanings are created through those subversions. I can only hope to read small pieces of brokenness to look for what might be offered in return.

Nothing Elegant
"A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest."

The first sentence employs a form found repeatedly in Tender Buttons: a word followed, without punctuation, by a modification of that word. Instead of being placed in front, like an adjective or adverb, the modification calls attention to itself by trailing the word it modifies in an uncomfortable join. Often the modification swallows the word itself.

In this first sentence, the charm is emphasized as a single charm: a real, identifiable, graspable, countable charm...but it is "doubtful." It is negated, though uncertainly. The attempt to isolate and instantiate a single charm is found doubtful. The reader's desire for meaning is ultimately unsatisfied. This is even clearer "if inside is let in and there places change." "Inside" is not, of its essence, inside. Stein suggests it must be "let in." If objects do not contain their inside essences, then they are given meaning. And if it can be given, it can be taken away, which seems to be Stein's project here.

But she has an interesting notion of taking away, as exemplified in another instance of this familiar locution: "this means a loss a great loss a restitution." In subverting the desire for meaning, Stein offers at least some recompense: we gain a greater understanding of language when we understand the necessary dissolution of meaning.

But for me, this is the insight offered over and over again by so much postmodern literary criticism: yes, meaning is unachievable, thank you very much. What I value about (some) postmodern literary texts is missing in Stein's modernist one: a closer examination of the human wreckage of lost meaning. Meaningful or not meaningful, language is a medium of human communication and emotion. Tender Buttons is entirely devoid of people, probably because the blessed rage for order (if I may borrow the phrase), the human yearning for meaning, is too complicated to fit into the task of pointing out language's failure.

H.D. and boundaries

The first thing I notice in reading H.D.'s 1916 collection "Sea Garden" is the intense thematic interest in borders or boundaries. Many of the objects and actions in the poems take place along the coast. The poems explore the drama of spaces in which two distinct environments come into contact. It's tempting to read a self vs. other conflict into this interest in boundaries, but the poems do not consistently figure either sea or land as the alien environment. The drama is structured in terms of difference, but also in terms of power. There are many images of power and destruction.

In "Sea Lily," for instance, existing at the boundary with the sea involves being "slashed and torn," "shattered," and "dashed." But through it all, the flower is "lifted up." There's an ambivalent relationship with this harsh environment. In the second stanza of "Sea Lily," "Myrtle-bark / is flecked from you." This suggests disintegration of the self; the wind off the sea tears one apart. However, the third and final stanza points out that the flower persists. Elsewhere, H.D. suggests that the harsh environment plays a valuable role in shaping a stronger being. In "Sheltered Garden," she writes of the inland garden:

For this beauty,
beauty without strength,
chokes out life.
I want wind to break,
scatter these pink-stalks (40-44)

Her series of poems describing sea flowers complicates simple flowers by extracting the sea element from the land element. In other words, she sees the depth of the objects that must survive difficulty and difference. This is one of the reasons it's unsatisfactory to read H.D. as simply an Imagist who attempts to obtain the object. She doesn't seem interested in objectivity in a scientific sense; she isn't an essentialist; she cannot gesture toward the sort of purity needed to claim knowledge of an object.

Instead, H.D charts the necessities of transformation, even those unto death. In another example of boundaries, "Evening" describes the passing of light from the world, the movement of shadows as the sun goes down: "The light passes / from ridge to ridge, / from flower to flower" (1-3). But rather than just the disappearance of light, the poem traces the desires of shadow:

black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow (14-17)

Though the reader may read this as a tragedy in nature, H.D. insists on pursuing the flow of desire in this transformation. Evening, from this perspective, is marked by growth rather than a condensation. Her poem "Night" may be read as a companion piece in which night desires the flower petals: "O night, / you take the petals / of the roses in your hand" (15-17). While this may appear to the reader as a loss, the night has its harsh but productive role to play.

It is significant that H.D. doesn't provide a "Morning" poem to balance this darkness, such a poem would diminish the effect of H.D.'s lesson. Though there remains the unwritten phantom of the following day which surely must follow night, H.D. seems to suggest that beauty is most potential in endings. Even the most disturbing poem, "Cities," describes the graceless city and its crowded inhabitants in a dead, but strangely positive, metaphor: "The city is peopled / with spirits, not ghosts, O my love" (78-79). It is fitting that this poem ends a collection published during the Great War, when the threat of a dead civilization forces that civilization to find the spirit of living in its most airless and deadly places.

Philip Kuberski on Ezra Pound

Kuberski contends that Pound sought the type of objectivity in language that was unavailable due to Saussure's and Freud's destabilizations. Kuberski argues that Pound attempts to reverse this relativism and put language back together, recovering the foundation of language and its significance.

I appreciate Kuberski's text because he recognizes the ambivalence of Pound's aims. That is, Pound's desire for solidity and an unassailable grounding of language and culture is destabilized by his own poetic practice. Kuberski writes: "Pound can create an unrequited desire for resolution by each new fragment that necessarily delays it; desire for presence and origin is extended by each eruption of absence and citation" (8). So Pound's poetic technique is unequivocally "modernist" while it appears to reclaim all the stability undone by modernism.

Kuberski is particularly interested in what is specifically American about what he calls "the duplicity of the sign." This is an immensely intriguing phrase and I think it could be usefully applied to Pound's notion of the poetic image. Kuberski seems to use the term "duplicity" to mean an intended breakdown of unified meaning. He provides a quick tour of American literature to show how this duplicity arises and is fostered. It seems strange to me, however, that Kuberski suggests Pound works against this duplicity. I feel that Pound attempts to increase the disturbances in linguistic meaning in order to activate psychological meanings. Kuberski comes from the standard perspective which holds that Pound's Imagism sought objectivity and scientific clarity above everything. I'm not so sure I agree. Instead, Pound seems to prize the insights that come from destabilization.

Patricia Rae on Ezra Pound

Patricia Rae's psychological approach to poetry is intruiging because it is so peculiar. We've all heard of psychoanalytic criticism based on the widely varied perpsectives of Freud, Lacan, Jung, and French feminist psychoanalysts, but Rae applies the theories of William James to literature. I can't say I've encountered this perspective before. There's one immediately appealing aspect of Jamesian criticism: he's an American. If one accepts the idea that literary texts are produced by individuals within a historical and cultural moment marked by an identifiable zeitgeist, then American writers must be marked by quintessentially American ideas. The culture that produces Ezra Pound produces William James.

Because I've read very little James, I'm thankful that Rae takes the time to describe some Jamesian ideas in the early going. Unfortunately, I get the sense that Rae is primarily interested in only one aspect of James's ideas: religious experience and the necessarily provisional relationship between this experience and our ideas of Truth. This careful balance between belief in the transcendental reality of God and its outright rejection is intriguing because it occasions a conversation about the ontological nature of the world and ourselves within it.

Unfortunately, the insistence on this question sometimes seems misguided, leading to empty or narrow interpretations of the poetry under consideration. The poems get reduced to salvos in a very specific discussion, rather than acting as vast and complicated creations in their own right. Rae's discussion of Pound's "Coitus" is a good example of this shortcoming. Its one brief paragraph focuses on the poem's reference to the lack of "dead gods"; she reads the poem only in terms of its "cautious respect for spiritualism" (89). But this reading ignores the striking image of "gilded phaloi" that thrust at the spring air. Um, shouldn't a poem called "Coitus" with thrusting phaloi at least mention desire?

What's especially frustrating is that James's ideas seem to make possible readings so much better than the one Rae provides. For example, the speaker's relationship to the deities in the poem is, I think, more intricate than a simple show of respect. Instead, the entire sensible world surrounding the speaker exhibits sensuality and, particularly, sexuality. As a being in the world, the speaker is affected by this sexuality. It infuses the speaker (who, importantly, speaks in the plural for "us"). Rather than displaying respect for an external (though always tentative) spiritual power, the poem is more interested in the drama of environmental (i.e. external) causes and subjective (i.e. internal) causes of desire.

Rae omits the last two lines of the poem: "The dew is upon the leaf. / The night about us is restless." Pound's insistence that the poem end with "us" in the center of this maelstrom of sexual desire in the natural world suggests that the same energy flows through us. Though it is perhaps claustrophobic (because it is "about us" and "restless"), this desire is of us. Pound uses the deity, the figure of Dione, to dramatize the externalization of the internal -- and ultimately its failure to keep desire at bay. What makes Pound's poem so powerful is the psychological tension between the god responsible for generating desire and the physiological body equipped with the phallus. The act of symbolizing attributes of the self in the form of a deity is the primary process in the poem.

And from what I have read, this if fundamentally anti-Jamesian, who rejects such symbolization and always goes back to the physiological basis of emotion. Pound and James have entirely different interests. If the two thinkers can be brought together in a productive way, it must be by investigating the tension of their opposing directions. What, for me, has always been disappointing about James is that his concept of emotion, which is based on physiological manifestations, rejects the seemingly universal tendency in human beings to understand themselves through external narratives. In treating the externalization of desire, Pound's "Coitus" is endlessly more fascinating and productive than James's reduction. And, though I'm interested to continue reading Rae's The Practical Muse, I'm hoping that she explores this friction between the two thinkers rather than finding a limp and perhaps inaccurate conjunction of thought.

Inauguration day: eager imagination

In reading for my orals exam this Fall 2009, I came across a quote from George Santayana that aptly encapsulates some of the ideas swirling through my reading:

"The idea of Christ himself had to be constructed by the imagination in response to moral demands, tradition giving only the barest external points of attachment. The facts were nothing until they became symbols; and nothing could turn them into symbols except an eager imagination on the watch for all that might embody its dreams."

I found this quote in Patricia Rae's The Practical Muse, a study of the poetics of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. She used the quote in a footnote to explain how Santayana's notion of poetic inspiration is different than William James's. According to Rae, Santayana is ultimately subjectivist in that he places the impetus for creative endeavor entirely in human desire, whereas James, the consummate pragmatist, contends that a declaration like Santayana's is dogmatic and denies the possibility of the divine.

I'm not interested in this discussion for its theological implications as much as what it has to say about the role of desire in poetry. As a psychoanalytic critic, I'm drawn to Santayana's perspective (and also perhaps because he writes so beautifully), but there are potential problems, as well. Rae critiques Santayana's position on the grounds that it promotes a notion of poetry (and art) as simple wish fulfillments or daydreams. I think it's important to reject that critique because it's tantamount to saying that the desires contained in daydreams are not of value. The manifestation of "eager imagination" is a crucial part of aesthetic production.

And by using the word "production" I might have tipped my hand. My main question about Santayana's perspective is whether or not he investigates how such desires are formed; that is, which social circumstances occasions the rise of particular desires. Which forces structure desire?

My oral exam paper hopes to examine these questions in relation to Ezra Pound's early poetry. The answers are still eluding me at this point, but that's why I started this blog. Hopefully, sustained written responses to my reading list will slowly force out some decent ideas on these topics.