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.

Gertrude Stein and the value of meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

H.D. and boundaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philip Kuberski on Ezra Pound

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

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

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

Patricia Rae on Ezra Pound

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inauguration day: eager imagination

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

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

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

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

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

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