C. G. Jung and the Unconscious

I put Jung on my reading list because I felt that I would need to confront his concept of archetypes in order to fully consider poetic images. I should have focused on his theoretical works rather than his biography. That being said, I gained some insights about the man behind concepts. In the early part of "Memories, Dreams, Reflections," one is immediately struck by how seriously Jung takes his dreams. Many of his anecdotes are preceded by dreams, and he understands his experiences through his interpretations of these dreams.

It's a bit off-putting at first. But later, he begins explaining his perspectives on the unconscious. He writes that "nowadays most people identify themselves almost exclusively with their consciousness, and imagine that they are only what they know about themselves" (300). He argues that a scientific perspective -- one which only recognizes as real only that which can be proven -- is dangerously myopic, in fact, "the disease of our time" (300). Scientific rationalism may work on the level of the intellect, but the emotions operate on a different level.

Regarding life after death, Jung insists that "we must not forget that for most people it means a great deal to assume that their lives will have an indefinite continuity beyond their present existence" (301). While many of us might be quick to condemn feelings that are generated by unsubstantiated beliefs, Jung suggests that these assumptions are important because they are experienced as important. Furthermore, Jung isn't content to simply accept these beliefs. He insists that we must dig underneath them, not to debunk them, but to understand them. He doesn't recommend blindly trusting the unconscious; instead we must work to make the unconscious conscious. He summarizes his argument thusly: "As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being" (326).

John Berryman

John Berryman's "Dream Songs" give us much to appreciate with only the small price of a little also to bemoan. The formal regularity of his 18-line poems forces him to be concise. Like a sonnet, each burst of eighteen lines must suggest and explore a single problem, though Berryman usually withholds a resolution. Though he doesn't depart too severely from standard American speech, Berryman's effort to incorporate rhyme and meter encourages productive phrasings. Here's an example from #95:

The surly cop lookt out at me in sleep
insect-like. Guess, who was the insect.
I'd asked him in my robe
& hospital gown in the elevator politely
why someone saw so many police around,
and without speaking he looked.

A meathead, and of course he was armed, to creep
across my nervous system some time ago wrecked.

The phrasing of "some time ago wrecked" preserves the rhyme, but it also emphasizes the damage by condemning it to the end of the line, broken over a full stop.

Thematically, Berryman often focuses on both the desires and the brittleness of the human body. While these interests sometimes manifest themselves in pure adolescence, they have compelling truth value, especially to those who stress the importance of "embodied knowledge." In Berryman, however, the body always seems to be in a state of disintegration. In #140, for example, "Henry is vanishing." Later in the poem "the poor man is coming to pieces joint by joint." This fading occurs in conjunction with anxiety over sexual impotence. In fact, the poems are structured by the same physiological and psychological stresses that mark impotence. This is not to say that the poems themselves are ineffective, merely that their effectiveness lies in the exploration of desire that recognizes its inherent unattainability: "Snowy of her breasts the drifts, I do believe, / although I have not been there" (from #248).

Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser's "Book of the Dead" is a fascinating read because it challenges the lyrical form to bear more narrative and documentary material than usual. In some ways this really succeeds, but in other ways it seems to fail. The more prosaic sections are very flat indeed. Here's a sample from "The Doctors":

-State your education, Doctor, if you will.
Don't be modest about it; just tell about it.

High school Chicago 1899
Univ. of Illinois 1903
M.A. 1905, thesis on respiration
P & S Chicago 1908
2 years' hospital training;

I could go on, but it's painful to type such drudgery. This material has documentary interest (if slightly), but poetry (as we've come to expect) should be more concise, more evocative, more verbally or symbolically layered, and just plain more poetic. Although these are expectations that can be challenged on certain grounds, I wouldn't challenge them if "The Doctors" was used as an example text. More artistry, please.

Thankfully, Rukeyser also has a fine lyric voice, as can be seen in this section of "Juanita Tinsley":

Even after the letters, there is work,
sweaters, the food, the shoes
and afternoon's quick dark

draws on the windowpane
my face, the shadowed hair,
the scattered papers fade.

Internal rhyme, assonance, and even metrical punctuations like the spondee "quick dark" all work together within a moving thematic mood. That "The Doctors" and "Juanita Tinsley" lie next to one another in the same poem is a marvel. I appreciate Rukeyser's social motive in taking on such powerful material to make an important social, cultural, and economic point, but the power of the poem sometimes falls short of the power of the material. Even William Carlos Williams's misguided use of documentary materials in "Paterson" is less unfortunate than Rukeyser's because his at least had the aesthetic value of making the reader wonder what it was doing there. That is, the reader's creative labor in reconciling the sharply juxtaposed material seems to me more valuable than piling on details in a largely unified work.

Delmore Schwartz and Life in the Middle

It's a bit surprising that Delmore Schwartz doesn't appear in either the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry or the Gioia/Mason/Schoerke anthology "Twentieth-Century American Poetry." I understand that his work was uneven and that he often reached for philosophical meaning that he failed to obtain, but there are some real successes, too. I enjoy "A Dream of Winter, Empty, Woolen, Ice-White and Brittle," a meditation on potentiality that sees the present as a fitful motion toward ripeness.

His work often investigates what it is to be in the middle of something, that is, to be between one choice and another, or one perspective and another. I believe he fails to achieve his aims in much of his work because he forgets that the key concept of this investigation is "being." He interrogates the concept of middle-ness, but leaves being behind. He pursues an abstraction rather than an instantiation. This, from "The First Morning of the Second World," is Schwartz at his worst:

Suddenly and certainly I saw how surely the measure and treasure of pleasure is being as being with, belonging
Figured and touched in the experience of voices in chorus.
Withness is ripeness,
Ripeness is withness,
To be is to be in love,
Love is the fullness of being.

This flow of abstractions misses any sense of living in love. Some of this could be accepted if we had been given an intersection of lives -- even the sight of someone else's toothbrush in your bathroom might help convince me that withness is ripeness.

But what I like about Schwartz is valuable, too. He has fun with language. He displays a tumbling, word-over-word ebullience that recalls Gerard Manley Hopkins. For example, here's a dashing burst of metrical bounce, alliteration, and assonance from "The Deceptive Present, The Phoenix Year":

Who could believe then
In the green, glittering vividness of full-leafed summer?
Who will be able to believe, when winter again begins
After the autumn burns down again, and the day is ashen,
And all returns to winter and winter's ashes,
Wet, white, ice, wooden, dulled and dead, brittle and frozen

And there are occasions when he remembers how compelling details can be. My favorite poem of his is "During December's Death," in which the world of tragedy and dread, "in which the only light / Was the dread and white of the terrified animals' eyes," is balanced by a particularity like: "I thought I heard the fresh scraping of the flying steel of boys on roller skates / Rollicking over the asphalt in 1926." To be caught in the dialectic of hope and despair is so much more moving when one does it rather than considers it.

William Empson, New Criticism, and Dream-Worlds

There's no doubt much to say about William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, but I want to hone in specifically on what he has to say about the English Romantic poets because I think it highlights a problem about criticism that I will have to solve if I ever hope to make sense of contemporary poetry. Before even getting into his description and exemplification of the first type of ambiguity, Empson takes the time to viciously (though humorously) dismiss the English Romantics. His primary complaint seems to be that these poets mine their childhood for private experiences and perspectives upon which they reflect as adults:

"Almost all of them, therefore, exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood, where they were able to conceive things poetically, and whatever they might be writing about they would suck up from this limited and perverted world an unvarying sap which was their poetical inspiration."

The psychological material of childhood is not, for Empson, a suitable subject for poetry. And if the above quote isn't slighting enough, his specific charge against Wordsworth turns blistering: "Wordsworth frankly had no inspiration other than his use, when a boy, of the mountains as a totem or father-substitute." Ouch. Snarky. But I don't believe it's as damning as it seems. Empson unknowingly confesses his shortcoming when he continues his sharp criticism:

"One might expect, then, that [these poets] would not need to use ambiguities of the kind I shall consider to give vivacity to their language, or even ambiguities with which the student of language, as such is concerned; that the mode of approach to them should be psychological rather than grammatical" (emphasis added).

In essence, he admits that it is his critical perspective that fails to respond to the poem. He reveals that his contempt is based on the inapplicability of his tools for the job at hand.

But I think this is an unfortunate admission. I don't think that psychology and grammar necessarily oppose one another. The poetry of quality that uses the "tap-root" he describes still creates the ambiguities and ironies that New Critics love to uncover, but they happen at a different level.

I could probably only prove this point by mobilizing a full interpretation of the type I'm describing, but I don't have that kind of time. Instead, I'll suggest that a poem like Wordsworth's Prelude is not a direct route to the past; it is a speech act like an analysand's, full of its own grammar of desire and restriction.

Lorine Niedecker and the Condensery

The question one must confront in reading Lorine Niedecker is "What is produced through reduction?" For the reader, I think this often depends on the the extent to which a thread can be woven through the material that remains. The thread is obvious in sections like this from "Bombings":

I wrote another,
longer, starting

Homage
of love for, to
the young

but the pain's too much now,
for me to copy.

The reader is given a poetic speaker who speaks about the inability to speak at length. Though syntax is chopped up, the form mirrors the content and it can all be attributed to a unified speaker. In fact, the theme of the cost of poetry appears throughout her work. Here's another example from "Thure Kumlien": "To print poems / is as costly / as to drill for pure / water."

Like short ragged breaths, these concisions are a disrupted attempt to communicate the important bits of what the speaker believes important. What is left is overloaded with emotion, but strangely insufficient for communication. Or it might be more appropriate to say that communication itself has changed from a fully realized grammar to a series of staccato bursts, like a Morse code that must be reconstructed.

Elizabeth Bishop and the Tragedy of Desire

There's a tendency in vulgar Freudian criticism to transform images of verticality into dramas of male sexual desire, and I usually shun such reductive readings, but I'm having trouble avoiding it with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Man-Moth." The narrative involves a sub-surface creature who periodically emerges from the depths, strives to a great height, and attempts to pierce the moon (which he believes "is a small hole at the top of the sky"); his only possession is one liquid tear. Without excessive effort, this narrative can be seen to resemble the sexual act.

If one accepts the poem as a sort of metaphor for sexual energy and desire, the first task is to probe the aspects that most challenge this reading to determine if they represent some new and interesting recognition about desire. The most intriguing intersection of the perplexing and the obvious is the idea that the Man-Moth fears rather than desires the moon; that is, the moon is simultaneously marked by both fear and desire. That the moon is taken as a hole in the sky "proves" that the sky is "quite useless for protection." In this sense, the poem emphasizes the fearful desire to prove one's own vulnerability.

But this is a great repressed desire which most of us do not recognize: "Man, standing below him, has no such illusions." Human beings overtly desire invincibility, and the ego is comprised of that desire. The Man-Moth, by contrast, appears as a sort of tragic outcast, but, like Oedipus, he is a figure that transgresses a fundamental restriction. In this case, his desire to prove his vulnerability reverses the gains provided by the individuation process: self-consciousness, autonomy, and power. The Man-Moth's desire represents the impossible reunion with the mother, a reintegration with the universe, the extinction of self.

But he is unlike Oedipus in that he ultimately fails to accomplish his attempted transgression. Bishop's poem dramatizes the Man-Moth's failure to escape individuation, suggesting that one of our great repressed desires is a drive to erase the self that cannot be satisfied. Freud's concept of the death drive seems particularly useful here. The Man-Moth's residence deep underground suggests that there may be an aspect of our psychological makeup that continually attempts to undo that which protects us as discrete beings.

e. e. cummings

The rap against e. e. cummings that he was formally inventive but not philosophically challenging is, I think, a fair one. His typographical techniques and formal innovations are entertaining, but not often insightful. He has a way of expressing positions we've always felt, but is less able to draw out new feelings or sufficiently complicate our positions. Here's a poem I've always enjoyed:

IN)
all those who got
athlete's mouth jumping
on&off bandwaggons
(MEMORIAM

The substitution of mouth for foot is nice, especially because it plays on the phrase "putting one's foot in one's mouth," but it simply reaffirms a commonplace position. There doesn't seem to be enough at stake to make this a poem of the first order.

When he does write something that draws out new insights, the process is too often disrupted by his formal innovations rather than supported by them. For example, poem VII from section two of "Is 5" is a good poem because the diction and lack of punctuation creates a productive tension between the serious subject matter and the mind that can't stop itself from running through it:

you know what i mean when
the first guy drops you know
everybody feels sick or
when they throw in a few gas
and the oh baby shrapnel
or my feet getting dim freezing or
up to your you know what in water or
with the bugs crawling right all up
all everywhere over you all me everyone

The terror is made more stark by the poetic speaker's recognition that the events don't need poetic diction to elevate their importance. The poem is a mad dash through a deadly environment. But I have yet to understand why the poem starts with:

lis
-ten

and ends with:

to
no

This doesn't seem to support the organic form of the poem and is more about cummings's whimsy than it is about careful construction. It is the benevolent distribution of this misplaced formal whimsy that makes me wish cummings had perhaps written less and treated with more care his choice of poetic subjects.

Timothy Steele and Metrical Poetry

Timothy Steele's 1990 book is an interesting salvo in the conflict regarding the relative value of free verse and metrical verse. Steele considers the growth and current dominance of free verse a striking development when placed against a 2,500-year history of metrical verse. In my opinion, he is more interesting when responding to many of the criticisms of metrical verse than he is in pointing out the misguided choices of modern/contemporary poets. His spirited defense encourages readers to discover what is valuable about meter and what might be lost in the era of its near-demise.

But on the other hand, his firm devotion to meter paradoxically threatens to undermine its importance. Points which seem compelling at first undergo a strange transformation after further scrutiny. Take for example this point: "Shakespeare, for instance, wrote thirty-seven five-act plays in iambic pentameter and approximately 150 sonnets in the same line" (164). Steele employs this strategy throughout his book: cite the use of meter by all the great poets in the history of Western civilization. Unfortunately for Steele, the point about Shakespeare makes me wonder what it is about Shakespeare other than meter that make him such a fascinating writer. In other words, meter being equal, there must be something else that sets him apart from other writers using iambic pentameter. The plenitude and longevity of certain metrical forms forces one to consider non-metrical matters when attempting to discover what is unique and provocative about poets and poems.

Steele easily refutates the reasons often given for the rise of free verse, but he does not convincingly provide a positive explanation for its dominance. It seems to me that the death of meter is largely due to the duration of its unquestioned dominance. That is, the Victorian age so valued meter that other poetic qualities in late Victorian writing moved to fiction or simply dried up. There is so much dreadful verse that flows so metrically. Without the support of meter, poets are forced to search for some other unifying method. In order to invigorate poetry, new writers needed to resuscitate and highlight other techniques. The New Critical revolution emphasized poetic figures such as irony, structure, imagery, repetition, etc. Steele condemns Eliot's concept of "music" over meter, but Eliot's point is well-taken: a poet must do more than search for every purling spring (to quote Sir Philip Sidney).

W. K. Wimsatt on the Unity of Imagery

W. K. Wimsatt's essay "The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery" is a typical -- and typically useful -- New Critical essay. He argues that Romantic nature poetry employs images of nature that are modified by imagination in order to uncover a subjective similitude (or insight of similitude) that exceeds the result of intellectual comparison only.

To exemplify his point, Wimsatt distinguishes between the "tenor" and the "vehicle" of a given poem. I understand them better as the "tone" or "emotional teleology" of the poem and the "content" of the poem. Wimsatt points out how the content of a Wordsworth poem works with its tone to achieve an organic unity. He writes that "[p]oetic structure is always a fusion of ideas with material." For Wimsatt, Romantic poetry leans toward sensory experience of nature rather than an intellectual exercise that characterizes neoclassical poetry. But the Romantic poet reads the spiritual into these sensory experiences, especially by confronting the mysterious in nature.

Though Romantic and neoclassical poetry find quite different places on the spectrum from "sensory" to "rational," the good poetry of each mode achieves the type of fusion Wimsatt explains. It's interesting that one of the New Critics finds something to admire in poetry of the Romantic era. I've started reading an essay by Allen Tate, who is a good deal less favorable when he discusses a poetic figure by Shelley. Maybe I'll write about that tomorrow.

John Crowe Ransom and the Transformation of Desire

John Crowe Ransom's 1947 essay "The Iconography of the Master" begins in typical New Critical fashion by pointing out syntactical figures at work in a poetic text (by Shakespeare). Interesting, but standard stuff. The second half of the essay gets into a fascinating discussion of "teleological speculation." In other words, what is the purpose of a given poem? Ransom argues that this is much more complicated than it might seem (at least, for poetry of quality).

I'm interested in Ransom's use of Freud to answer this question. Ransom begins with a binary opposition between thought-work and substance, which reflects a more fundamental opposition between the ego and the id. (He uses this distinction earlier in the essay when he asserts that mixed poetic diction indicates an interplay between the id and the ego). But in teleological terms, he has trouble fully contrasting these two. If most critics tend to pit the two against each other in a zero-sum power struggle, I think Ransom is trying to remind us that the two were originally theorized to work in concert with one another. That is, the id is too "childish" and demanding to actualize its needs. It needs the special qualities of the ego, one of which is the ego's "aggression against the environment" to help procure the satisfaction of the id's drives.

While the two may work toward the same end, it's also possible that the ego may "fixate" on natural objects in a way that doesn't satisfy the id's drives. While he doesn't provide a lucid discussion of this prospect, nor does he give a clear example, he seems to set up a continuum upon which the two psychic entities interact. The task of criticism then becomes assessing a poem's placement on this continuum. He writes, "we must see how our psychic fixation serves the long-range needs of the biological organism."

With these concerns as a backdrop, it is interesting to look at a Ransom poem like "The Equilibrists," which situates two lovers between their physical desire and the "honor" that requires its restriction:

At length I saw these lovers fully were come
Into their torture of equilibrium;
Dreadfully had forsworn each other, and yet
They were bound each to each, and they did not forget.

And rigid as two painful stars, and twirled
About the clustered night their prison world,
They burned with fierce love always to come near,
But Honor beat them back and kept them clear.

The poem is a complex and ambivalent tale of desire left unfulfilled. While the lovers appear to be the primary figures of the poem, the real subject, the teleological catalyst, is "Honor." The egos fixate upon honor as the sort of restriction instituted by the ego to ensure a later pleasure. But the poem interrogates the possibility of this later pleasure, leaving the lovers in cold graves eternally separated from one another. Honor does not seem to serve our long-range physical needs.

But in true ambivalent style, Ransom also hints at the danger in caving to one's desires:

Great lovers lie in Hell, the stubborn ones
Infatuate of the flesh upon the bones;
Stuprate, they rend each other when they kiss,
The pieces kiss again, no end to this.

What a terrifying image, the body torn into ever smaller bits, each of which continues to seethe with desire. This ambivalence leaves the question of desire in the poem in the same sort of agonized equilibrium experienced by the lovers. I would argue, however, that the aesthetic pleasure of these representations of equilibrium is its own sort of consummation, and the reader who encounters it on the page has obtained the satisfaction unique to poetry.

T. S. Eliot, Tradition, and Phylogenesis

Eliot's important essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" has been roundly criticized because it actively deplores the one thing that so many people see as the purpose of poetry: to express one's emotions. Eliot insists that "the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past." This consciousness of the past comes at the expense of the poet's consciousness of self: "What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

A close examination of the essay, however, reveals that this "extinction" is complicated. Of what is the poem comprised if not the poet's personality? Eliot suggests that poetry is made of the "pressure" that fuses feelings into emotions: "For it is not the 'greatness', the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts." Poetry is the combination of disparate impressions and experiences, rather than the expression of emotion.

I'm intrigued by the distinction made here between feelings and emotions. We tend to think of these as synonyms for one another, but Eliot sees the former as separate "floating" processes and the latter as unified under the poet's personality. The concept being disparaged here is "unity." The act of poetry has something to do with the dissolution of the order imposed on the world by the ego. Poetry, as Eliot thinks of it, is meant to dissolve the ego itself.

But it is not just this negative project; it also is a sort of assembly. Poetry is "a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences [...]; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation." In other words, poetry is the new experience of experiences, not the distorted unification of emotion expressed by the poet's ego.

This, of course, is Freudian language. Eliot seems to advance a notion of poetry in which one sees through the productions of the ego for the unconscious impressions and experiences underneath. But Eliot does not seem interested in advocating a celebration of the id, either. It's important to note that his discussion takes place in an essay on both tradition and poetry. This means, first of all, that he doesn't merely substitute a physiological self of seething drives for the unified ego. Instead of glorifying selfish drives, he invokes the "tradition" of history. We do not exist as beings in a simple present; rather, our present is layered over by the successive waves of the past. Our drives are not our own, but have instead been received at the species level. This combination of drives and history evokes Freud's concept of phylogenetic drives that exist as a part of the transmission of culture. Eliot tries to recover this inheritance that has been too vigorously denied by that precious construct, the individual ego.

A second and related issue is that the process of poetry does not celebrate an eruption of drives in real life, or even an understanding of drives through their phylogenetic recovery. Instead, the process Eliot describes is an aesthetic one. He writes: "the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suffer as individuals, but the artistic project requires a suspension of the self that allows us access to greater combinations. Eliot references Keats's "Ode on a Nightingale" as a poem that operates not by the expression of the poet's emotion or the actual experience of viewing nightingales; instead, it operates through the productive intersection of separate "feelings" brought together in the words and images comprising the poem.

I find in these two connected perspectives an emphasis on a collective unconscious of images and experiences phylogenetically deposited in the modern subject who might aesthetically recover this inheritance through the contemplation of poetry. At the very least, Eliot's essay should be seen as more than a simple veneration of the English canon.

David Porter on the Modern Idiom

In writing about Emily Dickinson as a nineteenth-century precursor to modern American poetry, David Porter slowly constructs a definition of modernism that deserves to be judged apart from its relation to Dickinson. In many ways, Porter's modernism is a series of losses; coherence, meaning, unity, teleology, order, and similitude are all lost. But Porter conceives of two strains of modernism that respond to these losses. Different as they are, Stevens and Frost counteract these losses by providing some sort of organizational principle, Stevens through the constructions of the imagination and Frost through the "inner mood" of the poet and his connection to society.

According to Porter, Dickinson replaces none of these losses. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, representing the second strain of modernism as Porter sees it, make the same refusal (at least during parts of their careers).

Porter provides some great readings of individual Dickinson poems, but his ultimate understanding of Dickinson seems uncharitable at best. He spends his entire book discussing what Dickinson does to language and consciousness, but then denies her a poetic project, a "life-centering angle of vision" (144). For such a sensitive reader, Porter seems incredibly short-sighted to complain that "this Dickinsonian idiom speaks fear without understanding, force without purpose, art without redemptive intention" (261).

I would argue that Dickinson explores the ineffible divergence of the opposed terms in each of these binaries rather than offering the former without the latter. She understands one's longing for the second term from within the first. But they must be separate. If she was to offer understanding, then she would be unable to create the experience of fear. Rather than refusing to replace what is lost, she presents the tangibility of loss. To me, the value of poems like Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" emerges from this same sort of tangibility.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it towards some overwhelming question,
To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all" --
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: "That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."

Recognizing the inevitable failure of communication is its own gain; the loss of connection presents its own materiality. Desire itself is a material absence, and Dickinson's exploration of extreme desire -- extreme separation -- is a substantial poetic project, indeed.

Edmund Burke and the Sublime

Edmund Burke insists that aesthetic responses are first and foremost physiological responses. When he suggests that the sublime operates by terror and the beautiful operates by love, he means that one has the physiological experience of these "passions" (e.g. tension or relaxation). As physiological reactions, these extreme experiences elude reason. Confronting the sublime, Burke writes that "the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it."

Up to this point, there is an exclusive relationship between subject and object: each object gets experienced directly by the subject. But this relationship enters language. Burke contends that words elicit a physiological reaction based ontheir uses in the subject's past, even though these connections are no longer conscious:

"Such words are in reality but mere sounds; but they are sounds, which being used on particular occasions, wherein we receive some good, or suffer some evil [...] and being applied in such a variety of cases that we know readily by habit to what things they belong, they produce in the mind, whenever they are afterwards mentioned, effects similar to those of their occasions."

From this perspective, words create physiological responses because they refer back to earlier experiences to which the word was applied. Rather than being a signifier in a hermetic signifying system, the word possesses a history for the subject. Each use of a word relies upon earlier uses. The direction of this movement points back to childhood. Although Burke doesn't mention this specifically, the word comes to activate childhood memories, those experiences during which children learn language. A complex word gets laid over an experience from the past, and when that word is used, the past is in some way recovered.

In this argument, Burke provides the warrant for a shift to Oedipal terminology. He takes this step fully when he writes about the father: "[t]he authority of the father, so useful to our well-being, and so justly venerable upon all accounts, hinders us from having that entire love for him that we have for our mothers, where the parental authority is almost melted down into the mother's fondness and indulgence." The authority of the father is associated with the sublime, while the love of the mother is associated with beauty. Our aesthetic responses to objects take place within this paradigm of memories.

In spite of these similarities, however, it rewards the careful reader to distinguish between the "delight" of Burke's sublime and the pathology of Freud's repression. Burke describes the sublime as a terror mitigated by distance. He writes that "terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too close." For Burke, the viewer is not truly endangered by the sublime object. Instead, the somatic symptoms are aesthetically recreated to enforce the sublimity of the law-giving father. In this way, the initiate is brought into existing social relations, a sublation involving the assumption of social power through the denial of selfhood.

In speaking of the Deity as the ultimate authority, Burke writes: "whilst we contemplate so vast an object [...] we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him." But he reiterates the social value of this subjection by again stressing the benefits gained through this process: "If we rejoice, we rejoice with trembling; and even whilst we are receiving benefits, we cannot but shudder at the power which can confer benefits of such mighty importance." The sublime is a delight because it dramatizes one's initiation into the law of the father, through which the assumption of power takes place. To relive the terror aesthetically is to reenact one's emergence into social power.

Sigmund Freud's theory of repression and the unconscious focuses on drives which cannot be sublimated into aesthetic responses, i.e. energy which must be repressed. For Burke, that which exceeds reason is given a harmless aesthetic release as the sublime, while for Freud the uncanny represents the return of the repressed in a truly terrifying form: "among those things that are felt to be frightening there must be one group in which it can be shown that the frightening element is something that has been repressed and now returns" ("The Uncanny"). Whereas Burke posits a vast, obscure sublime into which one both disappears and is created, Freud presents "[s]evered limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm" as examples of a self constructed as guilty and implicated in crimes of desire that exceed the power of aesthetics to sublimate. While Freud's conception creates its own problems for the subject's autonomy, it avoids what is, for Burke, ultimately a complicity with the status quo based on one's acquiescence to the authority of the sublime object.

Aristotle on Discovery

I set myself a difficult task by promising to read Aristotle's On Poetics. The goal was to gain insight into how poetry works, but Aristotle is primarily interested in narrative. It's refreshing to read a carefully structural analysis written by someone who still believes that there's such a thing as the Perfect Plot. His ideas make particularly good starting points for discussions about drama and fiction, but their applicability to poetry is complicated.

It seems more productive to work negatively; that is, start with something that Aristotle focuses on and then chart its absence in lyric poetry. The thing that jumps out at me is the fascinating discussion of "discovery." He lists the ways in which characters may discover information about themselves or others and what these discoveries can lead to. For Aristotle, the greatest discoveries are those that lead to a change in fortunes for the hero. His fate or the fate of others hangs in the balance.

I turn to modern lyric poetry and ask myself what the "characters" discover and what hinges on these discoveries. Because I'm focusing on Ezra Pound for an upcoming project, I think of his work. But I discover that overt discoveries are rare, at least within the bounds of the poems themselves. First problem: often the only "character" in a lyric poem is the poetic speaker. Second problem: these poems are often aestheticized statements of previously-held positions. There is not a change but an attempt articulate or confirm a given perspective. This is especially true of Pound, who spends a lot of time asserting rather than searching for discoveries. Here's the first two lines of "Salvationists" as an example:

Come, my songs, let us speak of perfection-
We shall get ourselves rather disliked.

Pound has a position and he asserts it. There's a certain amount of bluster in poems of this sort. Perhaps more useful in this discussion are those poems (unfortunately more rare) which most faithfully hold to the Imagist ideal. "Alba" serves as a good example:

As cool as the pale wet leaves
of lily-of-the-valley
She lay beside me in the dawn.

There is something to this poem, but the poetic speaker does not actually make a discovery. That is, there is no before the discovery and after the discovery. Aristotle joins the discovery to the peripety (the change in direction or fortunes). Instead, the discovery seems to be the reader's prerogative. The poem is basically a simile offered to the reader, but one that isn't dramatically experienced by the speaker. What do we make of this equivalence? It seems that narratives structure discovery, while lyrics juxtapose suggestions, bequeathing discovery on readers.

Claude McKay and the Ghosts of our Heritage

It is fascinating to open the Selected Poems of Claude McKay after first perusing poetry anthologies. First, the anthologies have been very selective. The second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry features five poems by McKay; Twentieth-Century American Poetry edited by Gioia, Mason, and Schoerke has six; the Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry has a whopping twelve.

The anthologist's imperative to be selective, however, forces these unfortunate editors to decide which McKay they want to present. While all the notes agree that McKay's most important and influential work was comprised of angry yet controlled poems of social protest against racism and racial violence, there's another McKay that has gone missing: a poet so firmly shaped by the experiences of the landscape of his youth that he remains haunted by memories of place. McKay's childhood in Jamaica roils just beneath the surface, and his early Songs for Jamaica explores the ruptures of past into present.

"North and South" begins "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!" These tropic lands burst into the conscious mind as the speaker inhabits a much different place. For example, the speaker in "Home Thoughts" imagines a connection back to the island:

Oh something just now must be happening there!
That suddenly and quiveringly here,
Amid the city's noises, I must think
Of mangoes leaning to the river's brink

There's a sort of synchronicity that allows the adult to overlay his current urban surroundings with the Caribbean of his youth. The speaker experiences two places simultaneously. This is its own sort of doubling; though the speaker is still one, he inhabits and is acted upon by two worlds.

I think this sort of synchronicity or dual subjectivity establishes an important argument that can help us read his more well-known protest poems. The adult is shot through with unconscious memories of the past; he cannot deny or erase his heritage. In fact, the poem "Heritage" begins:

Now the dead past seems vividly alive,
And in this shining moment I can trace,
Down through the vista of the vanished years,
Your faun-like form, your fond elusive face.

The important question about youth, then, is what sort of spirit is released into the future. In perhaps his most well-known poem, a sonnet called "The Lynching," McKay's final couplet is: "And little lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee." The most wrenching lines of the poem, and the ones that cause such outrage, are those that condemn the next generation to the sins of their fathers. If McKay's boyhood yields "O sweet are tropic lands for waking dreams!", then one shudders to imagine the worlds that lads in "The Lynching" will inhabit in the future.

William Wordsworth and the Double

Wordsworth's preface to Lyrical Ballads is justly read and reread by generations of literature students. Each time I read it I find more to contemplate; the things I thought I understood develop new complexities. The idea that strikes me this time through the text is Wordsworth's attempt to define what a poet is:

"[...] a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which [...] resemble the passions produced by real events [...]."

The part that grabs my attention is Wordsworth's claim that poets are "impelled to create" passions. Poets are naturally expected to be creative, but Wordsworth allows them a level of imagination that borders on fabrication. Poets are "delighted" to recognize the manifestation of their passions in the natural world, and their poems recreate the passions. But what does such a recreation entail?

Wordsworth's use of the term "conjure" is particularly subtle, suggesting one the one hand that something is merely recollected and on the other hand that it is actually brought forth. He says that "the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind." Both the poet, who is temporally separated from the original experience, and the reader, who never experienced it, gain an emotion that actually exists in the mind.

This "existence" can either be viewed as either obvious or radical. I believe it's radical. Those who favor the belief that the existence of emotion in the reader is obvious are perhaps mistaking emotion for "understanding." Language conveys information (in complicated ways, of course), but to encounter something through the distance of the intellect, to confront an idea, is different than to experience emotion.

There's a bit from the second book of "The Prelude" that exhibits how thoroughgoing this creation is:

A tranquillizing spirit presses now
On my corporeal frame, so wide appears
The vacancy between me and those days,
Which yet have such self-presence in my mind,
That, musing on them, often do I seem
Two consciousnesses, conscious of myself
And of some other Being.

This brings me to the double, of course. Two Wordsworths interact with one another, the later shaping the earlier through recollection, but the earlier always shaping the later by the addition of experiences. How often do we see this figuration in literature? It seems foundational to poetry as well as subjectivity itself. Doubling reenacts the process of individuation. And, if doubling is forever occuring, then individuation is not an act safely relegated to the past but an ongoing process. We are not individuals; we are perpetually individuating, experiencing whatever joys or traumas accompany this process.

William Carlos Williams's Paterson

It seems ironic that William Carlos Williams's Paterson includes the line "It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written." After all, some would argue that Paterson itself exhibits this "dangerous" flaw. And yet he provides an effective comeback a few lines later when he instructs the reader to "write carelessly so that nothing that is not green will survive." Williams therefore makes a careful distinction between careless writing and bad writing. The suggestive but not quite explanatory difference is that careless writing is "green," evoking flora, growth, spring, vigor, and so on.

The question we must ask about Williams is what subject matter and which poetic techniques most frequently ensure we achieve the necessary "greenness." In Paterson the question of subject matter is a deceptively difficult one. Williams is well known for presenting the sensible world to the reader. That is, abstractions don't suffice for Williams; one must work through the objects of the world. His subject matter in this text is the city of Paterson. He takes a Whitmanesque approach, gathering tangible people, objects, actions, and language to construct his complex and variegated city.

And yet it is not as simple as Williams bringing Paterson to the reader. Paterson is a city figured as a human being:

Paterson lies in the valley under the Passaic Falls
its spent waters forming the outline of his back. He
lies on his right side, head near the thunder
of the waters filling his dreams! Eternally asleep,
his dreams walk about the city where he persists
incognito. (Paterson I.I)

I think it's very important that Williams makes this metaphor: city as man. This relation says something about each term; each is implicated in the other. For instance, the city has dreams that begin in water and continue as people who walk about the city. Conversely, people are filled with the landmarks of the city:

something
has brought him back to his own
mind .
in which falls unseen
tumbles and rights itself
and refalls - and does not cease, falling
and refalling with a roar, a reverberation
not of the falls but of its rumor
unabated (Paterson III.I)

The natural world flows through the individual as a "rumor" or a "reverberation." The river, with its persistent movement and unceasing roar, represents desire. It is a perpetual source of energy that moves through the subject as well as the city:

Beautiful thing,
my dove, unable and all who are windblown,
touched by the fire
and unable,
a roar that (soundless) drowns the sense
with its reiteration
unwilling to lie in its bed
and sleep and sleep, sleep
in its dark bed. (Paterson III.I)

This passage recognizes the act of repression, forcing the roar of the river to "its dark bed" like a hidden unconscious. Williams's particularly astute observation is that the reverberation is not caused by the falls, but by its "rumor." The river-as-the-unconscious is only understood through the distortions required of it to become conscious.

But if I could pick up on Williams's complex metaphor, I see a sort of shortcoming in the poem. Williams too often accepts anything the river brings to him. That is, using an early notion of Freud's, the unconscious is simply the place where things rest (or percolate) that are not currently in the conscious mind. There is much that is ordinary or mundane in the unconscious. But because it is part of the flux of the river, Williams considers everything important. All of this is a round-about way of saying that Williams includes too much. His attempt to grasp everything tangible leads to a collection of objects of varying quality and intensity. He would have been better to be more selective in his material and more intent in discovering language's ability to pick up on the "rumor" of desire.

Cary Nelson's Socioeconomic View

Cary Nelson seeks to historicize the study of modern American poetry in order to correct the record of literary history as it has been institutionalized in the academy. Nelson argues that poetry is more varied and complicated than the narratives that are told about it, narratives that reduce complexity by deemphasizing or completely skipping over whole poetic traditions. In particular, Nelson points out that much poetry was being written that rejected the modernist break from the past. The poetry that survives the critical and historical apparatus is a modernism that "reinforces a romantic ideology of timeless individual achievement and a disdain for lived experience" (37).

I find it very easy to agree with all of this. A problem emerges, however, when Nelson attempts to discuss what makes overlooked poetry worth recovering. For example, he praises H. H. Lewis's "Thinking of Russia":

I'm always thinking of Russia,
I can't keep her out of my head,
I don't give a damn for Uncle Sham,
I'm a left-wing radical Red.

Nelson highlights the concise and effective wordplay that substitutes Sham for Sam, but this is the whole poem. I may be looking for techniques that I've been trained to by the academy, but if there's no other skillful use of language than a quick pun, than I'm not sure what there is to value. Nelson appreciates its commitment and clarity, but the poem seems flat to me as a use of language.

My comments here of course reveal the unfortunate tendencies against which Nelson struggles. Our aesthetic perspectives are based on entirely different notions of what the function of poetry is. Without inventive language and an important discovery that rewards repeated readings, I'm just not that interested. To me, it reads like propaganda -- and it would if it was for rather than against the American economic (and military) system. In fact, I'm sympathetic to the underlying concerns that give rise to the third line, but the poem itself hasn't investigated these in a compelling way. Staunch (though humorous) assertion is all we get.

Nelson succeeds more when he discusses poets or poems that are richly provocative that have only sometimes been coopted by the prevailing literary history. Nelson admits that poetry can be interpreted -- and especially retroactively interpreted -- to perform different social functions. He discusses Eliot's The Waste Land as a poem with at least two viable histories, the revolutionary and the reactionary. Nelson contends that it cannot be decided which of these two is true; the practice of literary history involves understanding the direction and uses of interpretation.

Andrew Ross on the Failure of Modernism

Andrew Ross argues that Modernism considers subjectivity problematic due to compelling contemporary attacks on epistemology (i.e. subjectivism). Subjectivity, from this perspective, is a "problem" which must be resolved, however inconclusively, by reforming language. Ross maintains that poetic practice, and language in general, always retains a role in subjectivity. Because modernism does not understand that this role persists, failure is its chief theme. This theme plays out primarily in a poetry that dismisses subjectivity in favor of other modes of apprehending a truer reality; but Ross points out that these efforts to obtain some sort of unifying conception of reality are bound to fail. Modernism speaks of and through these failures.

I'm inclined to agree with the basics of Ross's argument, but I don't find modernism's interest in failure evidence of failure. That is, it seems modernist poets merely see in the failure of subjectivism an important loss for the subject, not necessarily an equivalency. Parallel discoveries might include the heliocentric solar system, the existence of other galaxies, or the theory of relativity. Each of these revolutionary ideas affects our notions of ourselves, damaging (or at least recasting) the development of our subjectivities. Again, this is a human drama.

I think Ross recognizes that modernist explorations of these revelations are not completely without value. While Ross points out that modernist's believe the aesthetic process cannot bridge the rift torn open by the indeterminacy remaining after subjectivism has been demolished, they certainly have done something in producing their texts. Ross's reading of "Gerontion" (and, by extension, Eliot's other early work) involves, in part, an interpretation of sexual frustration as a rejection of subjectivity marred by imperfect desire (57). Sex is itself an articulation bound to fail because it derives from a too-complete sense of complementarity. From this perspective, Eliot's poetic project may fail, but in doing so it provides a diagnosis of the various manifestations of failure in modern life.

Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore is justly appreciated for her carefully detailed poems that reveal her observation of the natural world. If, as she claims, "it is human nature to stand in the middle of things," then she does so in her poetry, bringing objects (and especially animals) closer to the reader.

But the poem from which the above quote comes, "A Grave," also shows a bit of the symbolism she is often credited with avoiding. This becomes apparent right at the beginning of the poem. Moore often comes up with titles that lead directly into the poem, the classic example being "The Fish," which begins as if the title was the beginning of the first line. "A Grave" is less clearly this type of beginning, causing the reader to wonder if the poem is titled "A Grave" because it concerns one's final resting place, or because those words begin the first phrase: "A grave man looking into the sea." This ambiguous beginning creates a situation in which neither the grave nor the sea (or the man) are objects-in-themselves; they operate as figures for one another.

Moore explains about the sea "you cannot stand in the middle of this." It is too vast and, more importantly, filled with the emptiness of death. I hope I can be permitted such an oxymoronic phrase because, although Moore insists that "the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave," she nonetheless describes it in great detail, as is her general poetic tendency.

But it seems that these descriptions do not describe the truth of the sea as an object; the end of the poem explains that the activities of the ocean only create an appearance: "and the ocean, under the pulsation of lighthouses and noise of bellbouys, / advances as usual, looking as if it were not that ocean in which dropped things are bound to sink-- / in which if they turn and twist, it is neither with volition nor consciousness." Some might read this and say that the ocean is given pure object status; it is without consciousness; it is only the activity within and around it. But my reading, and one that I feel may have been intended during its composition, assigns some importance to the human understanding of this pure object. In other words, the poem's project is not just to achieve objectivity; it is to understand human powerlessness in the face of such a vast object. The poem deliberately starts with the human perspective, explaining the desire to understand.

In a way, this poem replicates the Romantic sublime in which the vast natural object traumatizes the person who experiences it. But the resolution of the experience is very different; the poem doesn't chart the speaker's restorative revelation at the end of the poem. The experience is so traumatic, in this sense, that the human disappears in the face of it. In the same way that the grave symbolizes death, the ocean initiates the sublime and terrible death of subjectivity, so vast and uncontrollable that it abolishes the human.

But this is nonetheless a human drama. A poet still writes the poem; a reader still reads it. The victory of the object is one that is witnessed by the vanquished human, and though the poem doesn't chart the viewer's existential angst, it nonetheless proceeds through meaning-making systems of those whose meaningfulness has been brought into question. Very ambiguous, but Moore's line that things interact with the ocean "neither with volition nor consciousness" is written in language and understood through symbolim, giving at least some hope that our actions are not meaningless.

Wallace Stevens, Imagination, and Desire

I suppose it's inevitable that all discussions of Wallace Stevens get down to the concept of imagination at some point, so I might as well end the suspense early and mention it at the outset: clearly Stevens is interested in the imagination. The point is not to discover this interest, but to discover what it might mean. I'll start with my favorite single image from his work, the ninth section of his well known "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird":

When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

What intrigues me about this snippet is its representation of the mind's complex relationship to reality. In the simplest sense, there are no circles in the sky. The viewer simply imagines a growing set of concentric circles marking the blackbird's progress in space. It's as if the viewer adapts the concept of planetary orbits to the flight of the blackbird: over time, the bird moves away, and its progress can be mapped. Using the imagination, order is applied to something otherwise without it.

But that's not entirely true. Stevens seems interested in the possibility that the viewer has discovered the circles rather than created them. For him, the mind discovers relationships to more fully understand the world, not to disregard it in the creation of a world. In other words, the circles themselves may be the abstract conceptions of the viewer, but they function in relation to the world. It's that connection to the real that concretizes the imagination.

In "So-and-So Reclining on Her Couch," Stevens spends the majority of the poem working in the abstract, playing with algebraic variables rather than concrete objects:

On her side, reclining on her elbow.
This mechanism, this apparition,
Suppose we call it Projection A.

In the early-going, Stevens carefully avoids particulars, suggesting that the form and not the content of the image is the "mechanism" at work. The figure is assiduously not named in the title, instead given the place-marker "so-and-so." But Projection B, made up of the figure's gestures, is given many more details. Finally, Projection C is situated at the end of a dialectical shifting of perspectives:

To get at the thing
Without gestures is to get at it as
Idea. She floats in the contention, the flux

Between the thing as idea and
The idea as thing. She is half who made her.
This is the final Projection, C.

In other words, the concreteness of the object cannot be denied, as if everything is a creation of the mind. And yet the sensible object itself is not the total of its existence; there is a term that exceeds it: the idea. She, the "object" in this poem, is "half who made her." She exists, but partly through the imagination of the viewer.

But there are two further statements in the poem that require attention. First, the ending returns to the concrete, as if to award it some priority: "Good-bye, / Mrs. Pappadopoulos, and thanks." Stevens does what he refused to do throughout the poem on principled grounds: he names the figure in the final line. This nod toward the concrete, however, is undercut by its sudden and ironic appearance at the poem's close.

Second, and what particularly interests me most about this poem, is the reference to desire: "The arrangement contains the desire of / The artist." Here he explicitly refers to desire as an important aspect inhabiting the imagination. He seems to employ a psychoanalytic conception of the figure in the poem, calling her a mechanism, apparition, and projection. The figure is a mechanism that activates or transforms the subject's desiring energy. In particular, this figure is an apparition, a ghostly return of a past figure. The return of Mrs. Pappadopoulos is a condensation of that most fundamental and perpetual of psychoanalytic interactions: the interaction with the parents.

This might seem like a stretch -- and a stretch into an area that many critics of Freud find particularly unnecessary (and uncomfortable). But it seems like the return to the family drama is itself a condensation of an even more fundamental struggle: the development of subjectivity in which the family plays only a part (though an important one). While I haven't fully developed my ideas on this matter, it seems that individuation is at the heart of family relations, and concepts such as the oedipus complex can only be understood in this larger context.

I might be straying too far away from Stevens's poem, but I think individuation and desire plays a role in the poem. The poem stages an encounter not with the mirror image Lacan describes, but rather with the image of the Other. There's an interaction going on in which the subject projects desire onto the figure on the couch as an apparition of his own imago. In other words, imagination isn't the free interaction of object and all conceptual possibilities; it is bounded by the subject's experiences, marked most fundamentally by the process of individuation.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

The general opinion of E. A. Robinson seems heavily influenced by the "anthology effect." Space constraints usually force editors to choose shorter lyrics over longer narrative poems. Robinson's voluminous works in this latter form are necessarily skipped over, which leads to a misrepresentation of the poet's body of work. In the case of Robinson, however, it seems few would lament this omission.

Though I don't claim the authority to speak of "the longer works" in any depth, it does seem that these poems don't provide Robinson the opportunity to display his strengths: humor, concision, and the use of everyday speech. While there's nothing prohibiting a long poem from employing these qualities, they tend to retreat in the face of a wordy horde. Check out the opening lines of "Roman Bartholow":

Where now the morning light of a new spring
Fell warm on winter, patient in his grave,
And on a world not patient, Bartholow--
Like one above a dungeon where for years
Body and soul had fought futility
In vain for their deliverance -- looked away
Over the falling lawn that was alive.

This all still appears a bit overstuffed compared to short poems (though still narrative) like "Miniver Cheevy," a concise character study capped with a wryly humorous ending. Similarly, the shorter poems usually treat more contemporary subject matter, unlike Robinson's trilogy of long poems on Arthurian themes.

Jacques Lacan, the Mirror Stage, and the Double

"The Mirror Stage" must be the most productive few pages of theory ever written. I go back again and again to the ideas in this very short paper Jacques Lacan delivered in 1949 (though I understand its genesis came several years earlier). For me, the concept of the fundamental alienation at the heart of subjectivity caused by the gulf between the image of wholeness we see in the mirror as a baby and the ungainly mass of our uncontrollable somatic functions at that stage of development is widely applicable.

In an essay for school, I called the image in the mirror "that most thoroughgoing of all archetypes: the self." The image is that through which we conceive of ourselves. I have productively used this concept when looking at bildungsromans in which protagonists form an idealized image of their self sufficiency -- and then proceed to fail to reach that image in various ways.

But the mirror stage also seems productive in terms of the "double" that I've been yakking about recently in relation to Pound and Eliot. If the self and the image of the self are both selves, then by definition we're witnessing a doubling. The double is uncanny for the very reason Freud points out: "this uncanny element is actually nothing new or strange, but something that was long familiar to the psyche and was estranged from it only through being repressed" (Freud, "The Uncanny"). The double, in this sense, might often be seen as the return of the earlier assemblage of uncontrolled drives. One is confronted not just with a strange but familiar version of one's self; this uncanny interlocutor is by turns a terrifying and embarrassing eruption of one's own ghastly lack of control.

It seems this idea has some connection, in reverse, to one of the ideas in Herman Rapaport's Between the Sign and the Gaze. Rapaport is interested in the fantasm as a frame for the viewing of another thing. His example is Plato's allegory of the cave, which requires that one imagine a cave in order to understand something about reality. That is, it is not necessary that the cave itself actually exist; it is a stage upon which an intellectual drama unfolds. Rapaport feels that this fantasm, i.e. the imagined cave, must be offered in order to represent the unrepresentable. According to this view, philosophy and literature are filled with fantasms.

Rapaport reads the mountain in Percy Bysshe Shelley's Mont Blanc as more than simply an image; it is instead a frame that allows the staging of desire, which for Rapaport means an encounter with the libidinal experiences of our earliest years. It is not a signal of the return of the repressed, but more like a forum through which our desire is articulated.

It may not be any great insight that the double I've been discussing seems to exemplify Rapaport's fantasm, but it does seem useful to continue considering the mirror stage as a fundamental forging not just of an alienated self, but a self that carries the burden of another, less developed, self with it all the time. Though it always affects our ability to make meaning of our interaction with the world, the actual imago itself may appear from time to time to haunt us.

Robert Frost and the Training of Desire

We live in the land of the lyric, but long ago there were tales told in verse full of dialogue and identifiable, if not intense, plots. Unrhymed blank verse droned on and on page after page. In the case of Robert Frost, monosyllables rattle in rows that told of farm and country landscapes in New England. But you wouldn't know it. The anthologies collect the short and sharp lyrics, leaving the longer pieces grassy and wanting wear.

While I'm not consistently moved by Frost's longer narrative poems, I found much to think about while reading "The Bonfire" from his 1916 collection Mountain Interval. The poem describes a father who tells his children "Oh, let's go up the hill and scare ourselves" by setting fire to a pile of collected sticks and brush. Although it's not exactly prudent to do so, the protagonist wishes to throw off restriction.

If read from a psychoanalytic point of view, this scenario suggests access to the unconscious or a release of the repressed. The protagonist says "Let's all but bring to life this old volcano, / If that is what the mountain ever was -- / And scare ourselves. Let wild fire loose we will." This seems like a complete release from restriction, but the poem is really about what it means to scare one's self -- or more appropriately, to scare one's unconscious through the imposition of the superego.

The protagonist shares the story of when he was a child and set fire to nature. Rather than let the fire burn, he was able "to hold it back / By leaning back myself, as if the reins / Were round my neck and I was at the plow." He was saved from utter destruction by the repression of his desire to run away. He was able to put out the fire after imagining, "The woods and town on fire by me, and all / The town turned out to fight for me - that held me." The internalized presence of the social sphere encircled the protagonist, forcing him to do the right thing and tamp down the flame around him.

The protagonist wants to pass this lesson on to his children, the danger of letting one's self be consumed. He argues that the world can bring greater challenges and more substantial scares, specifically war. He says that "War is for everyone, for children too." If one cannot face the danger of fire, which perhaps signifies the terrible energy of one's own unconscious desires, than one cannot develop the ability to steel one's self against the collective terrors of war.

One must face the threat of Self-annihilation to achieve the victory over the "fire" of the unconscious. But this is not just an individual effort: "I mean it shall not do if I can bind it." The danger must be overcome by obeying the society in which one is implicated. The ultimate success, although the poem carefully does not mention it, is the redirection of one's energies from the destruction of the self or the community toward the community's enemies. If the poem is a sort of rite of passage, then the true transformation is from child to warrior.

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.