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6/01 cJCIRC/DateDuepGS-p. 15

EXTENDING THE FRONTIER: THE METAPHYSICAL TERRAIN OF
TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY
By

Rebekah Ayn Keaton

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to
Michigan State University
In partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
For the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English

2002

ABSTRACT
EXTENDING THE FRONTIER: THE METAPHYSICAL TERRAIN
OF TWENTIETH CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY
By

Rebekah Ayn Keaton

Modern and contemporary American poets have consciously adapted themes,
diction, poetic metaphors and rhetorical structures to speak about sacred and secular
experience from the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. This study looks
closely at the modes of integration and dispersal of the metaphysical poem by four
twentieth century American poets: Edna St. Vincent Millay at the beginning of the
twentieth century and Richard Wilbur and Robert Creeley at mid-century; it concludes
with an examination of Molly Peacock’s metaphysical poetry. These four poets are not
only “metaphysical” writers in a traditional sense, but they have also revitalized and
expanded the metaphysical poem’s possibilities through innovations and ingenuity in
their handling of the metaphysical poem. For example, Millay deconstructs the
metaphysical libertine love lyric to examine how political, social and cultural ideologies
are revealed through the rhetoric of traditional love poetry. She then reconstructs the
love lyric to express and endorse the feminist attitudes and behaviors that were emerging
in the early decades of the twentieth century. At mid-century, Wilbur forges a formal
poetic where the mundane and the miraculous cohabit and he achieves this difficult
balance by employing the same seventeenth century rhetorical tropes and figures to

assume, maintain, and shift an argumentative stance within a single poem as Millay does

 

in her metaphysical poems. Never before placed within the metaphysical tradition,
Creeley produces an open form poetry of immediate experience that is grounded on a
poetic of performance reminiscent of Donne’s dramatic word play. Peacock’s
contemporary poetry continues to incorporate metaphysical themes and rhetorical
methods, blending the best of both seventeenth century and twentieth century
metaphysical practices, and raising questions about traditional boundaries between
modernism and postmodernism and between objectivity and subjectivity. Examined
together, the metaphysical poetry practiced by these four poets, traditionally seen as
writing very different modes of poetry (and often modes generally read as existing
outside “The Metaphysical Tradition”), suggest an hearty strain of metaphysical poetry

throughout the century that has proved adaptable to a variety of poetics.

Copyright by
REBEKAH AYN KEATON
2002

for Terry

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

John Donne wrote, “No Man is an Island, entire unto himself.” I am indebted to
the many ﬁne scholars whose work this dissertation builds on, and for the more
immediate community of professors and family members who have helped me
conceptualize, write, ﬁne tune chapters and stay sane during the process.

I ﬁrst began this project under the guidance of the late Donald M. Rosenberg, who
sadly passed away in 2000. It was in a graduate seminar on early seventeenth century
poetry with Professor Rosenberg that the germ for this project ﬁrst occurred. For his
knowledge on renaissance poetry, his model of scholarship and his generosity to me, I am
indebted. Diane Wakoski, with whom this project has come to fruition, also proved an
invaluable aid. Reading innumerable drafts, she helped me harness my initial love for the
poems into scholarship. I would also like to voice my appreciation for the rest of my
doctoral committee: James McClintock, who has been a calming force in the dissertation
process, and Randal Robinson and Scott Juengel who were kind enough to come on
board for the ﬁnal push.

Ronald Keaton, my father, also deserves my heartfelt thanks for reading many of
these chapters in their early stages and for his time in editing them. He has been a
bolstering force during the writing process. With him in support, include my mother,
Karen Keaton, my brothers, Mark and Paul Keaton, and my husband Terry Peterson. It is
for Terry that I offer my deepest gratitude. The dissertation process is long. I am
thankful for his understanding, for his encouragement and for making our life a happy

one as I pushed forward.

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Extending the Frontier: The Metaphysical Revival ............................................ 1
CHAPTER ONE

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Donne’s “true mistress” ............................................ 20
CHAPTER TWO

Richard Wilbur: “metaphysical poet” .......................................................... 64
CHAPTER THREE

Metaphysical Performance in Robert Creeley’s Poetry ..................................... 105
CHAPTER FOUR

Molly Peacock: Contemporary Wit ............................................................ 146
NOTES ............................................................................................. 174
WORKS CITED ................................................................................. 188

vii

INTRODUCTION

Extending the Frontier: The Metaphysical Revival

Seventeenth century metaphysical poetry experienced an appreciative critical
revival at the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, John Donne, Richard
Crashaw and Andrew Marvell seemed to speak directly to the modern sensibility out of
temper following the chaos of the First World War. In 1926, TS. Eliot proclaimed,

“Donne is a poet of chaos. In this, he is a modern poet” (Varieties of Metaphysical

 

ﬁqgtﬂ 155).l Metaphysical poetry’s analogical method, foremost marked by its expert
use of rhetorical ﬁgures to fuse intellectual and emotional responses to the complexities
of human existence, powerfully denotes the psychological urgencies of human experience
and the need for viable unions--however temporary these unions might be--to stave off
the chaos. Since the onset of the metaphysical revival, modern and contemporary
American poets have consciously adapted themes, diction, poetic metaphors and
rhetorical structures to speak about sacred and secular experience from the metaphysical
poets of the seventeenth century. Not only the championed metaphysical poets of chaos
but also George Herbert, Richard Herrick, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traheme and the
Cavalier poets--Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace and Sir John Suckling-provided
modes of speaking about contemporary experience.

Modern poets revised and carried on the metaphysical tradition in part because
they saw in seventeenth century metaphysical poetry a rhetorical response to existence
that spoke to their own modern experience, and in part as a critical attack against the

preceding periods of eighteenth century Neoclassicism and nineteenth century

Romanticism. Although many critics conclude that the metaphysical revival reached its
climax in the late 19403, metaphysical poetry has continued to present a model of writing
and thinking attentive to the angst of living in a postmodern world.2 This later strain of
metaphysical poetry practiced by contemporary poets presents a unique adapting of
metaphysical themes and methodology with a heightened postmodern conception of
subjectivity, epistemology and language.

This study of twentieth century metaphysical poetry looks in depth at the poetry
of four American poets: Edna St. Vincent Millay at the beginning of the twentieth
century and Richard Wilbur and Robert Creeley at mid-century; it concludes with an
examination of Molly Peacock’s metaphysical poetry. Despite the various “schools” to
which these four poets are said to belong, they are not only “metaphysical” writers in the
term’s traditional sense, but they have also revitalized and expanded the genre’s
possibilities through innovations and ingenuity in their handling of the metaphysical
poem. For example, Millay deconstructs the metaphysical libertine love lyric to examine
how political, social and cultural ideologies are revealed through the rhetoric of
traditional love poetry. She then reconstructs the love lyn'c to express and endorse the
feminist attitudes and behaviors that were emerging in the early decades of the twentieth
century. At mid-century, Wilbur forges a formal poetic where the mundane and the
miraculous cohabit and he achieves this difﬁcult balance by employing the same
seventeenth century rhetorical bag of tricks to assume, maintain, and shiﬁ an
argumentative stance within a single poem as Millay does in her metaphysical poems.
Never before placed within the metaphysical tradition, Creeley produces an open form

poetry of immediate experience that is grounded on a poetic of performance reminiscent

of Donne’s dramatic word play. Peacock’s contemporary poetry continues to incorporate
metaphysical themes and rhetorical methods, blending the best of both seventeenth
century and twentieth century metaphysical practices. Read alongside seventeenth
century metaphysical poets and Millay, Wilbur and Creeley, Peacock’s metaphysical
poetry raises questions about objectivity and subjectivity, modernism and
postmodernism, as well as questions regarding literary traditions and poetic borrowing.
Examined together, the metaphysical poetry practiced by these four poets, traditionally
seen as writing very different modes of poetry (and often modes generally read as
existing outside “The Metaphysical Tradition”), suggest an hearty strain of metaphysical
poetry throughout the century that has proved adaptable to a variety of poetics. In order
to fully appreciate the rich terrain of twentieth century American metaphysical poetry,
however, we must ﬁrst look at the metaphysical revival at the beginning of the century

and examine the appeal of the metaphysical for American poets.

George Saintsbury’s Minor Poets of the Caroline Period and Herbert Grierson’s

 

editing of Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century, both published in
1921, mark pivotal events in the revival of seventeenth century poetry, as they brought
new readers to the poetry, which had generally fallen in favor in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries. T. S. Eliot’s seminal Clark lectures (a series of eight) delivered at
Trinity College in Cambridge four years later in 1926 proved to be th_e critical expository
prose written on metaphysical poetry during this period. While Eliot had been working
out his theories of metaphysical poetry as early as 1917 in articles and reviews, it is not

until these lectures that Eliot puts forth a comprehensive theory of seventeenth century

metaphysical poetry’s characteristics as well as a deﬁnition of metaphysical poetry in
general. Eliot had intended at some date to turn these lectures into a full-length study of
metaphysical poetry entitled “The School of Donne,” but it never came to fruition. They
were not published as a whole until 1993 in The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry.
Despite the lectures’ late publication, Eliot’s theories were distributed to a much larger
audience than those attending his lectures. They were circulated around to other critics
who would acknowledge Eliot’s theories in their own published studies of metaphysical
poetry. Mario Praz, George Williamson, Joan Bennet, John Crowe Ransom and Cleanth
Brooks quote extensively from the lectures and credit Eliot’s deﬁnitions and theories for
laying the groundwork for their own studies. Praz in “Donne and the Poetry of his Time”
quotes Eliot’s deﬁnition of metaphysical poetry in Clark Lecture Eight, accepting Eliot’s
division of metaphysical poetry into three distinct periods. He writes “Eliot spoke of
three metaphysical periods in European poetry: a medieval period, a baroque period, and
a modern one with Jules Laforgue as its chief representative” (58-9). He cites Eliot’s
deﬁnition again in his essay “TS. Eliot and Dante,” published in 1937: “In the eighth of
his Clark lectures (not published) Eliot deﬁned metaphysical poetry as ‘that which what
is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that
which what is ordinarily only felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be
feeling’” (547). George Williamson’s The Donne Tradition: A Study in English Poetry
from Donne to the death of Cowley (1930) also acknowledges that Eliot’s “critical
thinking on the ‘metaphysical poets’ has so inﬂuenced my own that I can only express
my deep obligation to him, without trying to deﬁne its limits” (23). More recently, C.A.

Patrides in his introduction to John Donne’s Complete Poems (1984) notes, “In

 

retrospect, it is not easy to decide which was admired more, Donne’s poetry or Eliot’s
apocalyptic theory” (1).

Eliot strove to resurrect seventeenth century metaphysical poetry as a viable
model for modern poetry, and did so as a practicing poet. He writes that as a “craftsman”
his “interest [. . .] is centered on the present and the immediate future; he studies the
literature of the past in order to learn how he should write in the present and the
immediate future” (Lecture 1, “Introduction: On the Deﬁnition of Metaphysical Poetry”
1MB 44). As a “craftsman,” Eliot’s resurrection of metaphysical poetry in both his
poetry and his critical prose had a profound impact on not only the way the twentieth
century has read seventeenth century metaphysical poetry, but also on the way twentieth
century modern and postmodern poets would use the metaphysical poem. It is necessary
then, to examine closely Eliot’s deﬁnition and theories of metaphysical poetry, as well as
consider how metaphysical poetry inﬂuenced his more general theories of poetry, and in
particular his theories of the impersonal, the tradition, and the objective correlative. As
we will see, Eliot’s theories of metaphysical poetry and his desire to found a new school
of poetry coalesce in New Criticism.

Eliot opens his ﬁrst Clark Lecture by explaining that the renewed interest in
seventeenth century metaphysical poetry stems from

besides pure literary appreciation, a consciousness or a belief that this
poetry and this age have some afﬁnity with our own poetry and our own
age, a belief that our own mentality and feelings are better expressed by
the seventeenth century than by the nineteenth or even the eighteenth.

Donne is more frequently used as a critical measure than ever before [. . .].

Contemporary poets are by their admirers likened to Donne or to Crashaw;
some of them no doubt study these writers deliberately and elect to receive
their inﬂuence; there are not wanting voices to declare that the present age
is a metaphysical age (“Introduction: On the Deﬁnition of Metaphysical
Poetry” m 43).

In stating the relevance of a sustained investigation into the nature of seventeenth
century poetry, it is apparent that for Eliot the revival is as much an appreciative move
towards the seventeenth century as it is a rejection of Neoclassical and Romantic theories.
Eliot, in previous critical writings, had attacked New Classicism’s “dissociation of
sensibility” and Romanticism’s so-called ”escapism.” He aimed to found a new poetic
that might counter these previous epochs. These aims are nowhere more apparent than in
Eliot’s desire to “redeﬁne” metaphysical poetry.

The term “metaphysical,” as originally applied to the seventeenth century poets,
was in part a moniker, to poke fun and fault the poets’ learning and techniques. John
Dryden, in 1693, ﬁrst applied the adjective “metaphysical” derogatorily to John Donne’s
poetry to describe his poetic method in his inﬂuential essay on Abraham Cowley,
“Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire.” Here, Dryden claimed that
Donne “affects the metaphysics, not only in his satires, but in his amorous verse, where
nature only should reign; and perplexes the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations of
philosophy, when he should engage their hearts and entertain them with the softness of
love” (79). Samuel Johnson, in 1779, probably adopted Dryden’s passage as his source
in his short biography of Cowley, “Life of Cowley,” where he established the now

familiar usage. He declared: “About the beginning of the seventeenth century appeared a

race of writers that may be termed the metaphysical poets [. . .]. The metaphysical poets
were men of learning, and to show their learning was their whole endeavor” (1 l).
Dryden and Johnson found the metaphysical poets obfuscating. They were both offended
by metaphysical poets’ rejection of what they deemed as valid norms of reason and
nature. As Neoclassicists, they advocated an unadomed style that aimed for concrete
ideas articulated in a logical and clear manner. In their eyes metaphysical poets were
guilty of using verbal ambiguities, abstruse analogies arbitrarily yoked together, and of
desiring originality at the expense of the mimesis of nature. Nineteenth century critics
and poets, although reacting against New Classicism’s simple and unadomed methods,
remained skeptical (though slightly more tempered) of metaphysical poets’ use of
rhetoric. Henry Hales in 1883 assessed Donne and the metaphysical poets as follows:
Donne's contemporary reputation as a poet, and still more as a preacher,
was immense; and a glance at his works would sufﬁce to show that he did
not deserve the contempt with which he was subsequently treated. But yet
the chief interest is that he was the principal founder of a school which
especially expressed and represented a certain bad taste of his day. Of his
genius there can be no question; but it was perversely directed. One may
almost invert Jonson's famous panegyric on Shakespeare, and say that
Donne was not for all time but for an age. His natural gifts were certainly
great. He possesses a real energy and fervour. He loved, and he suffered
much, and he writes with a passion which is perceptible through all his

artiﬁcialities. (English Poets 560)

 

Alfred Welsh in Development of English Literature and Language (1882) speaks more
harshly, echoing Dryden and Johnson: “We ﬁnd little to admire, and nothing to love.
We see that farfetched similes, extravagant metaphors, are not here occasional blemishes,
but the substance. He should have given us simple images, simply expressed; for he
loved and suffered much: but fashion was stronger than nature” (413).
Unhappy with the previous demarcations of metaphysical poetry, as deﬁned by
New Classical and Romantic critics, Eliot in this ﬁrst lecture sought to arrive at a new
deﬁnition of what metaphysical poetry might be. He begins by dismissing Dryden and
Johnson’s attempt to classify the poetry based on the fact that they were “neither
practicing metaphysics, nor of the philosophical cast of mind” (46).
It will be seen accordingly, that the invention and use of the term
“metaphysical” spring from what for us is hardly better than an accident.
To this race of authors, Dryden and Johnson, neither fully qualiﬁed to
judge, conceded profundity of thought and learning; and thought and
learning dressed in outlandish and difﬁcult imagery seemed to Johnson
metaphysical. (46)
Eliot’s rejection of Dryden and Johnson’s seemingly careless application of the temi
“metaphysical” to seventeenth century poets carves out a critical niche for his own
approach to the metaphysical poets. Eliot, a practicing poet, and a student of philosophy-
-he studied philosophy as a graduate student and wrote his master’s thesis on F.H.
Bradley--is clearly making his case as a qualiﬁed critic.
Although Eliot questions the aptness of the term “metaphysical” he ultimately

accepts the term and tries to justify it by inﬁising it with different signiﬁcance than the

 

derogatory implications originally intended by Dryden and Johnson. He begins by
mapping out three distinctly metaphysical periods: the thirteenth century in Florence, the
seventeenth century in England, and the nineteenth century in Paris. Enacting a
“systematic study” of the language, causes and resemblance between these three periods,
Eliot arrives at the following deﬁnition of metaphysical poetry: “that which occurs when
an idea, or what is ordinarily apprehensible as an intellectual statement, is translated in a
sensible form; so that the world of sense is actually enlarged” (53—4). He then adds, with
italics, “the Word made Flesh” (54). Four years later, Eliot provides a fuller deﬁnition of
metaphysical poetry in his essay “Rhyme and Reason: The Poetry of John Donne,”
written for The Listener. In this essay, Eliot ﬁnds that metaphysical poetry
has come to mean a poetry in which the poet makes use of metaphysical
ideas and theories. He may believe some theory, or he may believe
nothing; but he must be a poet who experiences emotion through thought
as well as one who thinks about emotion. Of metaphysical poetry in
general we may say that it gets its effects by suddenly producing an
emotional equivalent for what seemed merely a dry idea, and by ﬁnding
the ideas of a vivid emotion. It moves between abstract thought and
concrete feeling; and strikes us largely by contrast and continuity, by the
curious ways in which it shows thought and feeling as different aspects of
reality. (502).
Eliot again notes the unique fusing of thought and feeling in the metaphysical
poem. Three additional characteristics of metaphysical poetry are now part of his

definition. The ﬁrst is the assertion that it “suddenly” produces “an emotional

equivalent”; second, it operates on a system of “contrast and continuity”; and third, it
presents a multi-dimensional picture of reality. Eliot’s deﬁnition of metaphysical poetry
presents a template for his own poetic method. His poetry similarly creates emotional
surprise, manifested by a contrast/continuity pattern to project sense in the life of the
mind. It also denotes an acute interest in a multi-dimensional existence and a search for
correspondence--between the seen and the unseen, between the conceptual and sensuous
and the temporal and the etemal--while painfully denoting the difﬁculty in articulating
the transitory, often ﬂeeting, glimpses at the connection between these realms.

Eliot particularly admired the way John Donne and other metaphysical poets
created emotional surprise: the way they “devoured experience” and for their ability to
transform ideas into passionate sensations and to transform mental observations into
emotive states of mind (Selected Essays 64). This was achieved through a highly
charged rhetoric containing elaborate conceits, radical juxtapositions, hyperboles, puns,
and puzzling paradoxes. These ﬁgures procure “a direct apprehension of thought” which
is felt “immediately at the tips of the ﬁngers” (MP), such as we ﬁnd in Donne’s “her
body thought” (“Second Anniversarie”) or Marvell’s “a green Thought in a green Shade”
(“The Garden”).3

The second characteristic of metaphysical poetry Eliot ﬁnds is its use of a contrast
and continuity pattern. The poetry does not shrink from dichotomies, but embraces them
as it works to reconcile the paradoxes inherent in all experience, between the conceptual
and the sensuous, the temporal and the eternal and between the seen and the unseen.

John Donne’s poem “The Sunne Rising” presents a couple’s love as a microcosm of the

10

world. The trope aptly illustrates how metaphysical poetry contrasts and reconciles the
temporal and the eternal.

As for these kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,

And thou shalt heare, all here in one bed lay.

She is all states, and all Princes, 1

Nothing else is. (19-22)
The woman is likened to the state, which is immortal. The speaker is likened to a prince,
who although he may govern and protect, is temporal. The inverted word order of line
twenty-one encloses all that is of value between them, reconciling the temporal and
eternal nature of the world.

The third characteristic of metaphysical poetry, as offered by Eliot, is an interest
in the multi-dimensional presentation of reality, a philosophical quest which Henry
Vaughan succinctly deﬁnes as one which explores “what mysteries do lie beyond thy
dust; / could man outlook that mark!” ([They are all gone into the world of Light] 19-
20).4 It is this last characteristic that is most prevalent in Eliot’s own poetry. Repeatedly
we ﬁnd in his poems an interest in the simultaneous existence of a real world and the
presence of a secret world.

Eliot demonstrated an interest in correspondence early in his career. In his
dissertation, "Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley" he notes
"the life of the soul does not consist in the contemplation of one consistent world but in
the painful task of unifying (to greater or lesser extent) jarring and incompatible ones"
(132). It is precisely the friction between the two worlds and the knowledge that "the

world of practical veriﬁcation has no deﬁnite frontiers [...]. And this emphasis upon

11

practice--upon the relativity and instrumentality of knowledge--is what impels us towards
the absolute" (169). Attainment of the absolute is perfect correspondence. In Eliot’s pre-
conversion poems this fusion is of subject and object. After his conversion, the fusion is
between the individual and God. In all his poetry, however, in order for this unity to
occur, one must move away from the personal. Private experience is too limited.

Eliot repeatedly asserts that poetry, and not just metaphysical poetry, must avoid
the too personal. In "Tradition and the Individual Talent" he deems that "poetry is not a
turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of

personality, but an escape from personality” (Selected Essays 43). This "impersonality"

 

directly attacks the preceding epoch of Romantic verse and becomes the signature of
Eliot's poetry and the impetus behind his theory of the objective correlative. Eliot’s
conception of “impersonal,” as he explains in a letter to John Gould Fletcher, is not
without passion. He claims that “there is an important distinction between the emotions
which are in the experience which is one's material and the emotion in the writinguthe
two seem to me very different" (15m 410). The “personal” brings the poem about, but
the poem must not remain personal. The task of the poet is to ﬁnd a way of speaking
about personal experiences and emotions. The only way to accomplish this is to employ
an “objective correlative.” Eliot’s now infamous, and somewhat ambiguous, theory of
the objective correlative was mapped out in his 1922 essay "Hamlet and His Problems."
Eliot explains the essential problem with Shakespeare’s Hamlet (the man) is that he is
unable to articulate his extreme psychological angst, precisely because his troubled state
of mind is “excessive of the facts as they appear” (Sacred Wood 46). Hamlet’s

psychological disintegration is beyond the emotions that his mother’s crime produces.

12

There is no objective equivalent to explain Hamlet’s mental turmoil, and more

importantly, without one, he is unable to understand his emotions. Eliot argues that what

is needed is an objective correlative. Eliot deﬁnes the objective correlative, asserting that
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by ﬁnding an
objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that
when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are
given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (48)

Eliot’s objective correlative strives to articulate emotions and thoughts in a way
that will be meaningful to others. As David Goldfarb notes in “The Vortex and the
Labyrinth,” “the objective correlative is an external thing known to addresser and
addressee--that produces the same emotion in both minds. Eliot recognizes that the artist
can express that intention only by connecting to the knowledge base of the receptor” (2).
In this sense, the objective correlative provides an operational description of metaphor
with universal meaning, produced by its very grounding in the “knowledge base”
(English literary tradition). Rhetorical tropes and ﬁgures thus prove particularly apt in
ﬁnding objective correlatives for emotion in that they strike an analogy between a known
element and an unknown element. Seventeenth century poetry’s analogies, in the form of
elaborate conceits, shocking similes, radical juxtaposition of symbols, imagery and
allusions, paradoxical inquiries and punning word play thus provide Eliot with an
available tradition to ground his poetic theories, a strategic move that allowed him to

discountenance two whole centuries of poetry.

13

The conceit, a favorite rhetorical ﬁgure of seventeenth century metaphysical
poetry, presented an ideal means for Eliot to forge objective correlatives. Despite
negative perceptions of the conceit, the metaphysical conceit is not exaggerated as an end
in itself, but objectiﬁes an idea or emotion, such as when Donne ﬁgures the Trinity as a
metal worker or lover, or when Carew likens courtship to a battleﬁeld or market place.
Eliot also employs the conceit to describe an abstraction or an emotion. The opening
comparison of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” shows not merely the scene, but
reﬂects Prufrock’s condition, his unrest, mental confusion, and self-induced paralysis:
“the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table” (lines 2-
3). This opening conceit is also an exceptional example of the objective correlative. The
shocking comparison objectiﬁes Prufrock’s mental status and applies to the poem as a
whole. As Charles Altieri succinctly notes in “Eliot’s Impact on Anglo-American
Poetry,” “it becomes impossible to make any ﬁrm distinctions between scene and act, or
ﬁguratively, between foreground and background" (198). Ether saturates the poem’s
structure as it becomes the poem’s controlling trope, providing the prevailing pattern of
imagery in the poem, unifying the fragmented narrative. Eliot’s “Preludes” provides
another example of his conceited method. In the poem, the spinning world is compared
to “ancient women / gathering fuel in vacant lots” (lines 53-54) to objectify the temporal
and eternal nature of time and history. In this conceit the world is compared to past
generations of women who “fuel” other generations and so they continue to exist in the
present. This present is a “vacant lot.” The conceit yokes two Opposing images,

emptiness (“vacant”) and plentifullness (“lot”). This paradoxical nature of time and

history is the inescapable “lot in life” of all human beings. For Eliot, and many of his

14

contemporaries, the metaphysical conceit presented a viable means to talk about the
clashing ideas and incongruous emotions concomitant of the modern period. It is
important to note, however, that while Eliot’s theory of the Objective correlative is akin to
the metaphysical use of the conceit (and other rhetorical ﬁgures) it is not identical.
Eliot’s theory of the objective correlative argues that the analogy is objective, not
rhetorical and thus, will always produce the same emotional and intellectual response
from all readers every time.5 Eliot’s emphasis on objectivity as a means to present the
chaos of modern experience in an objective and orderly manner, exerted lasting
ramiﬁcations, not only on the poetry written during the modern metaphysical revival, but
also on the poetry that follows. His theories on metaphysical poetry and his call for a
new poetic of the impersonal and the objective correlative converge in New Criticism.
New Criticism drew extensively on Eliot’s critique of metaphysical poetry and his
essays “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems.” His theory
that a text does not express the personality of its author, but as it relates to a tradition of
literature--was adopted by New Critics, along with his theory of the objective correlative
as the only way to articulate emotion in a work of art. New Critics disavowed the
possibility of numerous subjective meanings / contents in favor of one overriding one,
which although perhaps containing ambiguities, was uniﬁed and coherent. Meanings and
poems existed as they are and would continue to be, regardless of alterations in the
existing culture. They also adopted Eliot’s argument that the literature of Western
Europe could be viewed as a “simultaneous order” or work, where the value of any new

work depended on its relation to the order of the tradition. Thus, the world of the

15

“individual talent” does not so much express a personality as it affects and is affected by
the literature of the past.

The metaphysical revival and the full fruition of New Critical theories culminated
in Cleanth Brook’s seminal Modern Poetry and the Tradition, published in 1939. Brooks
was immensely inﬂuenced by T. S. Eliot’s poetry and criticism. It was Eliot in his
Cambridge lectures who planted the seed that seventeenth century metaphysical poets
were not a peculiar offshoot of the main course of English poetry, but that they had deep,
hidden connections with its central development. Brook’s “rewriting” of literary history
traced a rich and honorable poetic tradition from the seventeenth century to the early
twentieth century, placing substantial emphasis on the history and use of metaphor.
Cleanth Brooks claimed that the appeal of the metaphysical poets to the modemists
stemmed from the belief that the poet is able to "reconcile the irrelevant or apparently
warring elements of experience" (33) and their “common conception of the use of
metaphor” in which “the metaphysical poets and the modemists stand opposed to both
the Neoclassic and the Romantic poets on the issue of metaphor" (l l). Echoing Eliot, we
see how Brooks, and New Critics in general, collapsed Eliot’s theories of metaphysical
poetry and modernist poetry into an almost undistinguishable mode of writing. The
fallout is that while Eliot’s criticism on seventeenth century poetry is astute and
insightful, his theories regarding metaphysical poetry became intertwined with his
personal poetics and desire to “found” a new school of poetry--one validated and
perpetuated by New Criticism—-that they have become an orthodoxy and have

consequently, as orthodoxies must, masked other quite vibrant strains of American

metaphysical poetry that do not mirror his particular brand of metaphysical poetry nor ﬁt

16

into New Critical theories. Poetry that does not portray mixed feelings, incongruous
imagery, clashing ideas, and rigorous objectivity could not be metaphysical.
Metaphysical poetry must acknowledge the full discordancy of modern life. The
metaphysical poet must be, as Eliot said of Donne, “a poet of chaos.”

Recently, contemporary literary theories, in particular Feminism and New
Historicism, have rightfully rejected the New Critical precept that texts are autonomous
units. They have challenged New Criticism's liberal humanism as being elitist,
depoliticizing and socially marginal. Despite this fact, New Critical mappings of
metaphysical poetry remain largely intact, mostly because New Criticism’s close reading
still proves a useful tool in examining metaphysical poetry’s elaborate modes of
analogical argument. The following examination of the metaphysical poem in twentieth
century poetry thus continues to enact close readings; however, I incorporate a number of
post-New Critical reading strategies to produce a more open and ﬂexible reading of the
modes of integration and dispersal of the metaphysical poem by twentieth century
American poets, which acknowledges social, political and cultural factors. What I
propose, then, is a critical methodology that allows a recuperation of New Critical
practices by pointing to the ﬂaws in New Criticism’s prior readings of seventeenth
century and modern metaphysical poetry, and by taking into account later theoretical
models. It is my hypothesis, for instance, that Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theories
and Paul de Man’s theories of tropes may be used in conjunction with New Historicism.
The latter has shown that it is pertinent to ask what historical or cultural events might
illuminate the poems and what do these poems reveal about the connections between

language, knowledge, and power in a particular culture. Lacan’s theories of subjectivity

l7

and language similarly help us to answer questions regarding what image of humanity the
poems imply or construct and how the poems reveal particular conﬂicts produced by
family life or social conditions during a particular historical period. We may also ask if
there is a psychic economy at work in the poems which betrays the microphysics of
power relations within the individual or within the represented domestic environment and
how is the hegemony of parental (secular or divine) authority, for example, translated
into a speaker's own psychic economy. Deconstructive theories of reading are useful
when asking the above questions that new historical and psychoanalytical theories pose
and like Lacan’s theories, deconstruction is based on structuralist groundwork. It argues
that there is no unmediated knowledge of “reality”: knowledge is symbolic. If humans
cannot translate experience into symbolic form, then they cannot know it in a way that is
useful to them. Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading explains that “The attributes of
centrality and of selﬂiood are being exchanged in the medium of the language” (112).
Selﬂiood depends on engagement with the ﬁgural.

As we will see, twentieth century metaphysical poetry, like its seventeenth
century model, is marked by its aggressive engagement with the ﬁgural, exhibiting a kind
of tour deforce of language. Extended analogies, juxtapositions of extremes, a plain and
colloquial style of speech and dramatic argumentation that includes argumentation by
paradoxes, syllogistic structure, hyperbole, erotema (the rhetorical question), pun, simile
and metaphor indicate that the metaphysical poem is highly rhetorical. It is important to
note that these rhetorical devices and structures are not merely employed as ornament or
as clever semantic tricks, but function integrally within the metaphysical poem.

Twentieth century metaphysical poets do not merely adopt seventeenth century conceits

18

and structures in strict mimesis, but adapt them to uniquely address their experiences.
They cite—mi the tradition, breathing new life into it. As Robert Creeley aptly writes,
“Tradition is an aspect of what anyone is now thinking-mot what someone once thought
[. . .]. A tradition becomes inept when it blocks the necessary conclusion: it says we have
felt nothing, it implies others have felt more” (“To Deﬁne” in Collected Essays 473).
Finally, the examination of twentieth century American metaphysical poetry that
follows is not the study that Eliot would have anticipated. At the beginning of the
twenty-ﬁrst century, looking back at the previous century, Eliot would have hoped that
readers would point to his poetry and prose as heralding a metaphysical renaissance that
reﬂected in spirit and form his own poetry. Poets writing within this tradition would
graciously acknowledge his inﬂuence and respectfully situate their poetry without quarrel
within the larger English Metaphysical Tradition he helped to revive. What we ﬁnd
instead is a vibrant strain of metaphysical poetry that succeeds by its very deﬁance
against Eliot and New Critical polemics. Millay, Creeley, and Peacock explicitly reject
the “objective” and the unquestioned “Tradition.” Even Wilbur who most resembles
Eliot’s particular metaphysical bent rebels against Eliot’s metaphysical chaos, desiring
instead to use the metaphysical poets’ rhetorical tropes and f1 gures to argue for a world of
balanced and understandable correspondences. Thus, as a group, Millay, Wilbur,
Creeley, and Peacock would certainly appear to Eliot as deﬁant and unwieldy children.
We will see, however, that it is precisely their rebellion against Eliot and New Critical

politics that allows them to so richly extend the American metaphysical tradition.

l9

T: s ,

 

 

CHAPTER ONE:

Edna St. Vincent Millay: Donne’s “true mistress”

The extent to which T. S. Eliot’s poetry, poetic theories, and criticism shaped the
terrain of twentieth century poetics is vast. Roger Kimball, in a 100th birthday

anniversary tribute to Eliot (1999) for New Criterion, recently chronicled Eliot’s impact

 

on the twentieth century. William Empson admitted “I do not know for certain how
much of my own mind [Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him
or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating inﬂuence, perhaps
not unlike the east wind.” R. P. Blackmur likewise concluded “No modern critic has had
anything like the effect of Eliot on [. . .] literary people.” Critic Clement Greenberg went
even further in his praise of Eliot’s critical power. After mentioning “Aristotle, Johnson,
Coleridge, Lessing, Goethe,” and other ﬁgures from the critical pantheon, Greenberg
concluded, “T. S. Eliot may be the best of all literary critics.” Certainly one of the most
sustaining and far—reaching inﬂuences that Eliot’s writing has had is on the literary canon.
The making and governing of the canon in the twentieth century has been largely the task
of New Critics. New Criticism, which became the dominant literary theory from the
19305 through the 19605, Kimball himself claims is “an approach to literature and culture
that once seemed--and perhaps still is--the most supple, serious, and responsive of any
formulated in the twentieth century.” New Criticism adopted Eliot’s theory of the
impersonal and of uniﬁed and coherent textual meanings, regardless of alterations in the

existing culture. These ideas were solidiﬁed and brought into wide practice by Cleanth

20

Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s textbook Understandirg Poetry (1938) and John
Crowe Ransom’s book The New Criticism ( 1941).

Eliot’s impact on the reading of poetry, is a striking example of how poetry and
critical theories are intertwined, affecting not only the poems being written, but how we
read these poems. Our interest here, however, is not on the general inﬂuence of Eliot’s
criticism, but on the speciﬁc inﬂuence that Eliot’s criticism of seventeenth century
metaphysical poetry had on poets, critics, and readers. Eliot’s particular metaphysical
bent is seen in the poetry of the Nashville F ugitives--J ohn Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn
Warren and Allen Tate--as well as in the poetry of Archibald MacLeish and Hart Crane.
Sonia Raiziss’s book The Metaphysical Passion makes a cogent argument that all of these
poets share T.S. Eliot’s metaphysical bent. Important to this study, however, is how
Eliot’s poetry and criticism of metaphysical poetry, as understood by New Critics, gave
rise to how poetry was read, and in this chapter, how Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry
was read.

Nina Baym in "Melodramas of Beset Manhood" writes that “We never read
American literature directly or freely, but always through the perspective allowed by
theories” (42). Edna St. Vincent Millay’s poetry presents a salient example of how New
Critical theories mismapped the metaphysical terrain of modernist poetics. Her poetry is
particularly interesting in that it illustrates not only an unrecognized metaphysical strain
in American poetry (in fact one purposefully neglected), but also a strain highly
Conscious of its relationship with seventeenth century metaphysical poetry. She wrote

many of her best poems using forms traditionally found in seventeenth century poetry

SUCh as the Elizabethan and Petrarchan sonnet and her poetic subjects generally are those

associated with the sonnet: love, desire, ﬁdelity and the passing of time.l While these
themes and structures are not unique to seventeenth century poetry, her method of
analyzing these themes and expressing emotional and intellectual experience through a
self—conscious rhetoric mirrors the manner of the seventeenth century metaphysical poets.
She employs metaphysical poetry’s rhetoric of dramatic argumentation, argument by
paradox, hyperbole, irony, pun, and juxtaposition. Her poetry also contains direct
allusions to metaphysical forefather, John Donne’s, secular poetry and to Cavalier poetry
generally. My contention that Millay’s love poetry evokes not only Donne’s love lyrics,
but also Cavalier poetry, draws on what Jonathan Culler calls “the discourse space of a
culture.” 2 Following Culler, I will relate Millay’s poems “to whole series Of other works,
treating them not as sources but as constituents of a genre” (258) and demonstrate that
Millay’s scrutiny of secular love and the passing of time are modeled after seventeenth
century metaphysical poetry’s analytical investigations into the complex and
contradictory emotions of love. In doing so, I will show that it is precisely Millay’ re-
visioning (opposed to strict mimesis) of seventeenth century metaphysical poetry that has
led many critics to dismiss the idea that Millay is a metaphysical poet. My focus is thus
threefold. I will demonstrate that Millay’s poetry occupies a deﬁnitive place in the
metaphysical tradition, but I will also examine and root out the causes as to why Millay’s
poetry has not been read as metaphysical. I look speciﬁcally at why her poetry was not
recognized by New Critics as metaphysical when it was ﬁrst published (a period
coinciding with the metaphysical revival), despite the fact that early criticism of her
work, prior to New Criticism’s emergence as the dominant theory in literary criticism,

touted her poetry as metaphysical. I also examine how New Critical theories and

22

readings of Millay’s poetry exerted a lasting inﬂuence on how Millay’s poetry has been
read, so much so that those critics rejecting New Critical tenants continue to reject Millay
as a metaphysical poet. This tri-focus reveals not only the bias of critical theories when it
comes to “metaphysical poetry,” but also allows us to begin to re-map the American
metaphysical terrain. This new terrain will reﬂect the fertile uses to which Millay and
others put the metaphysical, rather than reﬂect the stunted borders marked out by a
number of literary critics.

Early criticism of Millay’s work, before New Criticism, noted the afﬁnities
Millay’s poetry shared with seventeenth century poetry, particularly in her use of wit. In
1921 Mark Van Doren declared that M illay’s poetry “is independent, critical and keen, a
product more of the faculties than of the nerves and heart; it is feminine; it is fearless; it is
fresh [. ...] effected through deliberate exercise of the wits” (Thesing 45). Three years
later, Carl Van Doren in a review of Millay’s poem, “Thursday,” speciﬁcally compares
Millay’s poetry with that of Cavalier poet, Sir John Suckling, saying, “Suckling was not
more insouciant than she is” and praises “the candor with which she talks of love
“put[ting] by the posture of ﬁdelity which women in poetry have been expected to
assume” (Thesing 124, 125). “Thursday” playfully invokes the Cavalier lyric’s libertine
theme, tone and rhetorical elements.

And if I loved you Wednesday,
Well, what is that to you?
I do not love you Thursday—

So much is true.

And when you come complaining
Is more than I can see.
I loved you Wednesday,-- yes--but what
Is that to me?3

I quote the poem in full because we hear not only echoes of Suckling, as Carl Van Doren
noted, but also of Cavalier poet, Richard Lovelace in his poem “The Scrutiny.” In “The
Scrutiny,” the dramatic speaker likewise addresses his beloved who has presumably just
accused him of inﬁdelity.

Why should you swear I am forswom,

Since I vow’d to be?
Lady, it is already morn,
And ‘twas last night I swore to thee

That fond impossibility (lines 1.5).4
In both Millay’s and Lovelace’s poems, the speaker’s excuse both ﬂippantly dismisses
the inﬁdelity and ironically substantiates it. The time of both speakers’ oath is past and
with the passing of time one changes and so the person, who swears an oath yesterday, is
not the same person today. As the time of the oaths are in the past, it is impossible to
swear oneself to another. When Millay’s speaker smartly asks, “what / is that to me?” it
is nothing precisely because the “me” that stands before the complaining lover is not the
same that professed her love the day before. Millay and Lovelace both suggest that time
is itself subjective and measured by the senses. Lovelace’s speaker makes this point
eXpliCit when he asks, “Have I not love’d thee much and long, / a tedious twelve hours’

Space?” (lines 6-7). The poems’ teasing arguments are emphasized by both poets’ use of

24

the rhetorical question to sustain their self-serving arguments. As Paul de Man’s analysis
of rhetoric in Allegories of Reading makes clear, the rhetorical question instead of
functioning as simply a true question or statement, is an ambiguous discourse function; it
both asserts and negates itself. Functioning as an ambiguous discourse, the rhetorical
question acts as a paradigm of both speakers’ vows of ﬁdelity made previously to their
lovers, and thereby stresses the rhetoricality of all vows: tacitly situational and given to
contingency, play and slippage. But there is still something else going on here.
Rhetorical questions, as Nancy Ainsworth-Vaughn notes in "Is that a Rhetorical
Question? Ambiguity and Power in Medical Discourse," present "a discourse act that is
inherently face-threatening (the true question) without having to risk the consequence of
that act. To put it another way, the speaker can claim the power of not intending the
question as a true question" (195). So, on the one hand Millay’s and Lovelace’s speakers
are asking if they once loved the beloved. In which case, the beloved would have to
answer afﬁrmatively. On the other hand, Millay’s and Lovelace’s speakers do not expect
an answer at all, and thus their actions are afﬁrmed again. The rhetorical question allows
them to risk nothing. They are not to blame. The rhetorical question is also used by both
speakers to negotiate power while simultaneously pretending to relinquish power.
Millay’s and Lovelace’s questions “allow” the beloved to feel an active participant in the
divorce of affections while at the same time, they protect the speaker from the beloved’s
accusations. Eliot in his second Clark lecture, “Donne and the Middle Ages,” aptly
points out that the rhetorical question’s use in seventeenth century drama oﬁen “implies
something entertained, but not precisely believed” (m 88). In Millay’s and Lovelace’s

poems, it suggests that the speaker does not quite believe his / her vow either. Their

25

witty use of the rhetorical question masks their ﬁckleness and the suspicion that they are
lacking in their inability to commit. Thus, the rhetorical question is employed as a self-
protective posturing device which carries on the jockeying for power within the social
fabrication of courtship that one witnesses repeatedly in seventeenth century love poetry.

Millay’s dramatic speaker in Sonnet X from Second April, [“Oh, think not I am
faithful to a vow!”] likewise subverts logical argument and its complimenting rhetoric
through ceaseless play.

I would desert you — think not but I would!——

And seek another as I sought you ﬁrst.

But you are mobile as the veering air,

And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
Wherefore to be inconstant is not care:

I have but to continue at your side.

So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,

I am most faithless when I most am true. (lines 7-14)

The speaker’s argument is premised on her independence, “1 would desert you,”
which is then qualiﬁed by the lover’s mobility (line nine) and summarily concludes with
“Wherefore to be inconstant is not care: / I have but to continue at your side.” Millay’s
use of double paradox (assertion of ﬁdelity is also an attack on ﬁdelity), provides an
example of how she cleverly employs rhetorical wit, opposed to strict logic to make an
argument. Her playful introspection into her faithlessness renders her both faithful and
unfaithful and succeeds in validating both, for the rhetorical ﬁgure of paradox used in the

ﬁnal couplet argues that it is her faithlessness and his changeability that makes them

26

faithful. This handling of argumentation through the fr gure of paradox is similar to that
found in Donne’s poetry, and as illustrated below in his poem “Woman’s constancy.”

Now thou has lov’d me one whole day,

To morrow when thou leav’st, what wilt thou say?

Wilt thou then Antedate some new made vow?

Or say that now

We are not just those persons, which we were? (lines 1-5).
He blames the woman for her ﬁckleness and for justifying it with self—serving pseudo-
logic:

your owne end to Justiﬁe,

For having purpos’d change, and falsehood; you

Can have no way but falsehood to be true? (lines 11-13)
It is the very same argument that Millay’s speaker has used. By the end of the poem,
however, Donne's speaker likewise proclaims his inconstancy, “For by to morrow, I may
thinke so too”(line 17). In both Donne and Millay’s poems, the brilliant meditation on
“now,” on presentness and the way in which vows are sutured to their moment, positions

the two lovers as strangely equal in their mutual changefullness.

Despite early perceptions that Millay’s poetry showed similarities to seventeenth
century precursors, New Critics failed to recognize Millay as “metaphysical.” This was
in part because her poetry did not look nor sound like Eliot’s metaphysical poetry or
“modern” poetry in general. Millay’s metaphysical poetry differs substantially from

Eliot’s modern metaphysical theories and poetic. Eliot championed especially the

27

metaphysical poetry of John Donne, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan and Andrew
Marvell. His metaphysical poetry adopts these poets’ religious and philosophical
introspection and rational scrutiny into the nonphysical realms of experience using
elaborate and often shocking metaphors, conceits and allusions. In contrast, Millay,
while she utilizes seventeenth century rhetoric to enact her inquiry into the inner
movements of thought and feeling, almost never writes about religious themes and her
use of conceits and elaborate ﬁgures is less pronounced. Her metaphysical poetry reﬂects
a method more akin to that of the Cavalier poets, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace, and
Sir John Suckling. Cavalier poetry yoked the highly rhetorical style of Donnean
argumentation with the more classical style of Ben Jonson. Their poems, composed
typically of colloquial language with simple syntax, although frequently hyperbolic, often
appear deceptively lighthearted. The poems’ tone and structure conclude oﬁen with an
ironic turn as the poems’ wit of double entendres and social critiques of human relations
are made manifest.

While Millay’s turn to the metaphysical, like Eliot’s, stemmed from her revolt
against Victorian sentimentality, against false emotions and posturing, and against
Romanticism’s “escapism” and decorative ornamentation, she does not, however, employ
certain poetic techniques we have come to associate with the high modernist verse of this
period: free verse, radical fragmentation and an impersonal tone.5 More signiﬁcantly,
unlike Eliot and the other high modemists, Millay does not engage the metaphysical
tradition because she sees the present as culturally bankrupt (her poems do not reﬂect the
disintegration of culture, and thereby language) but elects to engage in linguistic, cultural

and historical play with the past. She challenges the past so that she might create new

28

and meaningful structures that reﬂect the possibilities of the present. She thus adds her
voice to the tradition, not as means of substantiating her poetic within a larger, and
sanctioned, tradition, but to establish a dissenting feminist voice. She therefore expands
not only the tradition of metaphysical love poetry, but also the larger literary tradition, in
effect, fulﬁlling Ezra Pound's modernist dictum, "make it new."

New Critics neglected Millay’s metaphysical qualities in a large part because of
her gender and her explicit feminism. Inﬂuential proponent of New Critical theory John
Crowe Ransom launched an out-and-out attack on Millay's feminism in his essay "The
Woman as Poet," published in 1937. The date of Ransom’s essay coincides neatly with
the beginning of the Agrarian New Critical inﬂuence in American criticism and was very
much a political maneuver to structure the canon. In this essay, Ransom responds to
Elizabeth Atkin’s 1936 critical biography of Millay, Edna St. Vincent Millay and her
Tim—es, in which she compares Millay with Donne. Ransom counters Atkin’s assessment
of Millay and proclaims that the "age may perhaps be deﬁned with respect to its
characteristic plunge into poetry. It is the age that among other things has recovered the
admirable John Donne; that is the way to identify its literary taste. Therefore it is hardly
an age of which it may be said that Miss Millay is the voice" (78). Ransom claimed that
as a woman Millay could not be "intellectual" (76), and thus she could not write in the
tradition of Donne who is a champion of fusing the intellect with the emotion. Ransom
also faults Millay's erotic imagery, calling it "rude substance" (103), "antireligious and
Bohemian Shockers" (103) and even going so far as to suggest that Donne would have
been "revolted" by it. This seems highly unlikely if we recall Donne's more shocking

combining of secular and religious imagery to express erotic passion in his own poetry.

29

While the metaphysicists are concerned with intellectual explorations, it does not deny

the physical. As Sonia Raiziss in The Metaphysical Passion succinctly notes, “Donne is

 

concerned with metaphysical reference when he seems most physical, and vise versa” (5).
Ransom’s most strident attack against Millay as a woman comes in this now

infamous and often quoted passage from The World’s Body:
[. . .] man distinguishes himself from woman by intellect, but it should be
well feminized. He knows he should not abandon sensibility and
tenderness, though perhaps he has generally done so, but now that he is so
far removed from the world of the simple sense, he does not like to
impeach his own integrity and leave his business in order to recover it;
going back, as he is often directed, to ﬁrst object, the true and tried, like
the moon, or the grass, or the dead girl. He would much prefer it is
possible to ﬁnd poetry in his study, or even his Ofﬁce, and not have to sit
under the syringa bush. Sensibility and tenderness might qualify the
general content of his mind, if he but knew the technique, however,
“mental;” or self-constructed some of the content looks. But his problem
does not arise for a woman. Less pliant, safer, as a biological organism,
she remains ﬁxed in her famous attitude, and is indifferent to
intellectuality. I mean, of course, comparatively indifferent; more so than
a man. Miss Millay is rarely and barely very intellectual and I think
everybody knows it. (74-5)

What Ransom clearly objects to in his assessment of Millay is not her poetics, but her

gendered poetic. Ransom, in his self-conscious attempt to establish New Criticism and

30

its theory of “objectivity” as the dominant literary method could not risk the destabilizing
effect that Millay's “personal” poetry would have caused. He writes: "She is an artist.
She is also a woman. No poet ever registered herself more deliberately in that light. She
therefore fascinates the male reviewer but at the same time horriﬁes him a little too" (76).
One imagines that just the thought of Millay’s inclusion in the canon would indeed
"horrify" him.6

In many respects, Millay’s poetry anticipates the gynophobia which Ransom’s
loaded tropes in the quoted passage puts forth. She refuses to play the part of the “dead
girl” which traditional love poetry, and in particular the carpe diem lyric, insists upon. In
her use of the carpe diem lyric, Millay repeatedly ﬂaunts the living female body, not as a
hidden trope for the poet’s fear of impending death, but to openly voice female sexual
desire. In Sonnet XXVIII [“When we are old and these rejoicing veins”] the female
speaker unabashedly urges her beloved “Be not discountenanced if the knowing know /
We rose from rapture but an hour ago” (lines 13-14). Millay further counters Ransom’s
so called theory that a woman is “less pliant, safer, as a biological organism, she remains
ﬁxed in her famous attitude” when she stresses the ultra changeability of her female
speakers’ attitudes toward their beloved. The two poems we have already examined,
“Thursday” and Sonnet X [“Oh, think not I am faithful to a vow!”], are perhaps two of
her ﬁnest examples.

Despite Millay’s in-your-face rejection of the female body’s role in traditional
love poetry, the repercussions of New Criticism’s reading of Millay were far reaching.
New Criticism, because it coincided with the concerted effort to legitimize literary

criticism as a respectable discipline in English departments across the United States,

31

exerted a complex and lasting inﬂuence on the shaping of not only how students read, but
what they read. Recent contemporary literary theory--in particular, Feminism, New
historicism, and Cultural Materialism--has objected to New Critical tenets. Their
investigations into biography and history have led to a reexamination of the canon and
the ideologies that are implicated, and reinforced, by it. New Criticism’s liberal
humanism has been challenged as elitist, depoliticizing and socially marginal.

Since New Criticism, however, critics have continued to ﬁnd it difﬁcult to place
Millay within the canon of twentieth century American poetry, and thereby metaphysical
poetry. The most sustained body of Millay criticism since New Criticism has come from
Feminist critics. Feminist critics rejected, among other things, New Criticism’s
“objectivity” and praised Millay’s “personality,” claiming it as uniquely feminine. Karen
Alkalay-Gut in "Poetry by Women in America: Esthetics in Evolution" praised Millay as
being among “the ﬁrst burst of women poets who wrote as women, from the point of
view of women, with the concerns of women” (240). Because feminist critics aimed to
counter New Critical evaluations of Millay, their criticism self-consciously strove to
reexamine Millay’s poetry outside of New Critical, and thereby modern and
metaphysical, tenets. Suzanne Clark in “Uncanny Millay” places Millay as writing
within the sentimental tradition, opposed to modernism. Jan Montefore’s Feminism and
_P_o_etjg likewise argues that Millay’s “poetic approach is traditional in a straightforward
sense. The experiments of modernism passed by her; despite the freedom and
colloquialism of her later work, she uses mainly romantic conventions” and that Millay’s

poetry “is the articulation of a straightforward subjectivity” (15).

32

While these critics bring to light many neglected aspects of Millay’s poetry,
thereby forcing us to reread Millay’s poetry outside of New Critical tenets of what
qualities modern poetry might assert, they also restrict our reading of Millay’s poetry.
Striving to resurrect Millay and place her within a new democratic canon that includes
women, they have stressed her femininity, thereby deﬁning her poetry once more by the
very characteristic that New Critics used to exclude her. Also, by foregrounding Millay’s
poetic qualities that were distinctly different from those texts already comfortably
positioned in the literary canon, they left unexplored how Millay’s poetry participates in
the larger metaphysical strain in twentieth century American poetry which such canonical
poets as Eliot, Ransom, and Warren were accepted as participating.

Even within the feminist revival of Millay’s poetry, the success of her “feminism”
elicited differing views. Jane Stanbourgh's examination of Millay's poetry in "Edna St.
Vincent Millay and the Language of Vulnerability" ﬁnds that while Millay speaks for the
changing times and mocks outdated public opinion, she is also "unquestionably a woman
who suffers, and the greatest source of her suffering seems to lie in an overwhelming
sense of personal vulnerability-~and ultimately of woman's vulnerability--to victimization
by uncontrollable conditions in her environment" (214). Stranbough goes on to claim
that the sonnet form is thus a "ﬁt vehicle to convey her deepest feelings of woman's
victimization. Through it, Millay imaginatively reenacts her constant struggle against
boundaries. The wish for freedom is always qualiﬁed by the sense of restriction; couplets
and quatrains suit her sensibility” (227). Stranbough’s assessment is interesting in that

Millay’s form indeed frames her dramatic speakers’ oscillation between excess and

restraint. She does not consider, however, that Millay’s poetic framing might work to

33

emphasize the intense passions rather than to temper them. Jean Gould likewise writes
that Millay “found security in classical form: the sonnet was the golden scepter with
which she ruled her poetic passions” (Thesing 229). Others, such as Debra Fried in
"Andromeda Unbound: Gender and Genre in Millay's Sonnets," and with whom I agree,
see Millay’s use of the sonnet as more innovative and suited to her feminist themes.
Fried writes that Millay employs form to make a feminist point, and as a “bold stroke in
the pursuit of freedom rather than a capitulation to male tradition or a necessary
checkrein for overwrought emotions.” She positions Millay as rejecting the Romantic
use of the sonnet “as controlled respite from freedom” and argues that Millay employs
the form to articulate “a trope for a poetics of burning one’s candle at both ends, of using
life up completely” (235). Her sonnets culminate “in a closure with no residue” (237).
The Skidmore Conference held in 1992 to celebrate 100 years since Millay’s birth
sparked a pivotal turn in Millay criticism. In the essays that evolved out of this
conference, Millay’s ties to the renaissance were again explored. Robert Wittenberg’s
essay, “Millay and the English Renaissance Lyric” writes that the “afﬁnities run deep”
(287), with Millay “indebted to [the renaissance poets] for technical hints and tricks,
particularly the means of assuming, maintaining, and shifting an argumentative stance
within a lyric” (288). Essays by Ernest J. Smith, Holly Peppe and Stacy Hubbard all note
Millay’s adaptation of the renaissance’s carpe diem motif to counter traditional male
poetry. For example, Hubbard’s essay “’Love’s Little Day’: Time and the Sexual body
in Millay’s Sonnets” provides a particularly astute examination of how Millay counters

the use of “the female body’s vulnerability” to symbolize “human mortality” and how she

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“rewrites the male carpe diem tradition by insistently dislodging woman from her role as
abject ﬁgure for the end of something” (103).

Not only were Millay’s afﬁnities with the renaissance once again explored, but
critics also essayed to reposition Millay into the canon. Robert Johnson’s article, “A
Moment’s Monument: Millay’s Sonnet and Modern Time,” innovatively depicts Millay
as demonstrating “clearly modernist attitudes, at least about time” (1 19). He writes that
Millay’s poetry, particularly her sonnets:

[. . .] often balance the urgency of human emotional responses and the
concomitant need to name what one feels against the limitations of
attempting to describe the felt moment. Experience becomes a kind of
topos, a precarious foothold maintained within the ceaseless ﬂow of
change and time, against the sure loss of sensory awareness, the inevitable
death of imaginatively evoked correspondences and all the names that that
language can throw at the world. (117)

This present study of Millay’s metaphysical poetry draws on both Hubbard’s and
Johnson’s essays. It agrees with Hubbard’s argument that Millay refuses to use the
feminine body as an abstract entity, and thus a voiceless object in her poetry, but detours
from Hubbard’s and other critics’ claim that Millay’s feminist poems are a foil to the
misogynist lyrics of the carpe diem lyrics of the Cavalier poets.7 This reading of the
Cavalier poet as a sexually aggressive, self-absorbed libertine who goes about either
seducing or degrading women is too simple a reading of the complexities of the Cavalier
love lyric. It is possible to read Cavalier poetry as not simply indulgently misogynist

fantasy, but as acute examples of social satire, and of course, it need not be an either/or

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proposition. In doing so, it also provides some clues as to why Millay engages
speciﬁcally the Cavalier lyric, opposed to the Elizabethan or Petrarchan love lyric, as a
model for her revisionary metaphysical poetic.

All literary modes, or genres, as Donald Rosenberg explains, “have ideological
dimensions that are political, social and cultural. They are texts that encode the values,
ideals, and condition of a society in a particular historical situation” (258). Adopting this
general view of genres along with Earl Miner’s speciﬁc claim in "The Cavalier Ideal of
the Good Life" that the “social mode is [. . .] a radical feature of Cavalier poetry” (205), I
contend that the Cavalier libertine love lyric can be read as social commentary on sexual
relationships in the seventeenth century and in particular, on the contradictory obligations
of honor in Caroline society. Seventeenth century’s poetic treatment of love grows out
of, and ultimately rejects the courtly love poetry of the Petrarchan lover. Petrarchan love
poetry (from the fourteenth century Italian poet, Francesco Petrarch) expresses and
explores the male perspective. The male is self-torrnented by the female who is depicted
as an unobtainable object of his desire. The female is voiceless and viewed from a
distance, reduced to both an idol and a reﬂection of the male’s desire. Seventeenth
century poets adapted the Petrarchan tradition to suit its more modern needs, which
explored the changing dynamics between men and women in seventeenth century society.
This change in male/female dynamics, as depicted in poetry, was partially ushered in
with the ascension of Charles I in 1625. The signiﬁcance this change had on the
literature was that the French princess Henrietta Maria became queen. In France she was
inﬂuenced by a group that was trying to reﬁne French behavior. They hoped to reﬁne

their society by elevating women to a position of honor and glorifying idealistic Platonic

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love. When Henrietta Maria came to England, she brought these French ideas with her
and attempted to instill them in the English court. Consequently, a Platonic love cult,
known as "préciosité" sprang up around the queen and king. Préciosité's elevation of
women was especially corrupted by the Cavalier poets. Thomas Carew and Richard
Lovelace manipulated it into an affected idolization of women. This pseudo-
Petrarchanism placed the female on a pedestal, not to valorize her virtues, but to ﬂatter
her into yielding her "virtue" to her adoring suitor. The préciosité of the court also
degenerated into the antifruition poem. It pushes the Platonic cult to its extremes,
denying any physical manifestation of love. This can be deﬁned as anti-Petrarchanism.
It is this response to the Petrarchan tradition and response to seventeenth century attitudes
toward courtship that Sir John Suckling adopted.

The court's fabricated morality makes clear that gender relations are always
political relations, and thus grounded on a play for power. Objectifying the female into a
group that can be elevated or reduced at will places the male/poet in a precarious
position, because it is the poet who is to regulate the woman's status. If he elevates her
too much he will feel threatened: if he degrades her, he will lose respect for her. One of
the ways the Cavalier poet responded to this dilemma was by placing the seduction
outside of the reality of seventeenth century society. Instead, it imagined a golden age of
sexual liberty, or invoked a dream motif where the love-lom suitor fantasizes about a
fulﬁlling encounter. The lover always awakes from his dream just prior to its climax, so
that the relationship is never consummated. Many of Carew’s and Lovelace’s poems
envision this type of golden age of sexual freedom. Suckling’s antifruition poems, in

contrast, envision a golden age of abstinence. Understanding that a relationship cannot

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be had with an object that merely reﬂects your own image back at you--like a narcissistic
mirror--Suck1ing rejects the anti-Petrarchan poem of jouissance. He perceived how the
jouissance poem was much like the Petrarchan poem it aimed to displace: objectiﬁcation
of the woman prevented any true relationship between the suitor and his beloved from
forming. The antifruition poem is the antithesis of the Petrarchan love poem in that it
does not seek to seduce the woman at all, rather it seeks to avoid consummation at all
costs. In this manner, the antifruition poem is also the antithesis of the carpe diem poem.
The carpe diem poem argues that succumbing to passion is the height of pleasure. In
contrast, the antifruition poem purports that the jouissance of the affair is in the
expectation of the consummation and not in the sexual act itself.

Just as seventeenth century poetry adapted the Petrarchan tradition to suit its more
modern needs, Millay’s poetry likewise adapts the rich tradition of seventeenth century
love poetry to explore the changing dynamics between men and women in the early
twentieth century. Millay’s poetry examines how political, social and cultural ideologies
are revealed through the traditional rhetoric of love poetry and then refashions the love
lyric to express and endorse the feminist attitudes and behaviors that were emerging in
the early decades of the twentieth century. Love and courtship provide Millay with a
trope to express the intellectual and emotional experiences of human relations presented
in microcosm. As both concrete experience and metaphor, the many stages of love
succeed in locating a concrete sensory experience to express emotional and intellectual
experience. Using love as a trope, the poetry records not only personal individual
experience, but also investigates how literary genres and their rhetorical and cultural

constructions determine the personal, although masquerading as “objective.” Thus,

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Millay’s analytical and emotional inspection of secular love does not merely adopt the
love lyric as enacted by the seventeenth century metaphysical poets as a form, but also as
a conceit to revitalize the genre of love poetry just as the metaphysical poets refashioned
the Petrarchan lyric: she not only razes the traditional love lyric, but works also to
reshape the fragments into a new and meaningful structure that itself produces meaning
through its determined quest for viable unions between women and men. For Millay, it is
only through the serious play of language and form that one can blaze new relationships
and new poetic territory and it is this that most marks Millay as a metaphysical poet.

Millay’s metaphysical poetry embraces a highly rhetorical wit that negates
polarizations and aims towards forging unities out of seemingly discordant objects or
ideas. Her use of seventeenth century dramatic argument and rhetorical tropes and
ﬁgures to talk about modern love is an element of her metaphysical wit. In her poetry we
ﬁnd many of the same characteristics of the typical seventeenth century lyric: attitudes of
libertine sexual pleasure, eroticism, unrestrained passion and idolatry of the beloved.
She employs traditional sonneteering conceits to express these attitudes. Common
conceits include: love as a form of imprisonment or torment; the lover is subject to hot
and cold ﬂashes; the lover paradoxically suffers unbearable torment to be absent from his
beloved, while to be in her presence is also unbearable torment. Millay, too,
hyperbolically depicts love as “the sick disorder in my ﬂesh” and as an “extreme
disease” (Sonnets I and V, Fatal Interview). Love is portrayed as a dungeon which holds
the speaker captive, and the lover is portrayed as her jailer.

“Oh, God! Oh, let me out! Oh, let me go!”

But that my chains throughout their iron length

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Make such a golden Clank upon my ear,

But that I would not, boasted I the strength,

Up with a terrible arm and out of here

Where thrusts my morsel daily through the bars

This tall, oblivious gaoler eyed with stars. (Sonnet V, lines 7-14)

While Millay uses a conventional conceit that can be traced back to Sappho and
Petrarch, she employs the conceit in a metaphysical and uniquely modern manner. The
conceit couples with witty argument to deﬁne the speaker’s playful engagement with
both the emotions of love and the love tradition. The hyperbole in line seven is tempered
by the qualifying “but” in lines eight and ten, creating an ironic posturing in the speaker’s
argument for release. She boasts that if she had the strength she would break free, but
she is clearly enjoying the throes of passion in which she ﬁnds herself imprisoned. Many
feminist critics fault Millay’s use of such conventional conceits that depict the woman
subject to her male lover.8 This passion is fueled, however, not by the ambivalent lover
who offers her only the tiniest of affections, but by her own surrender to her passions. As
she asserts, the chains “make such a golden Clank upon my ear.” It is clear that this
imprisonment is the speaker’s own making, one she revels in. The poem itself is Millay’s
playful poetic prison in which she contentedly bars herself.

Millay’s use of the sonnet form, also troubling to both feminist and modernist
critics, is an essential component of her poetry’s wit: it creates emotional surprise by
yoking seemingly contradictory feminist aims with traditional Petrarchan and Elizabethan
forms. A close look at Millay's posthumous poem, Sonnet CLXVIII ["I will put Chaos

into fourteen lines"], which takes the sonnet form as its subject, as well as the

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sonneteering conceit of love as imprisonment, illustrates that the sonnet is a particularly
well suited form for the speaker’s pursuit of love, and of Millay’s quest for poetic re-
creation. Both the content and the form aim to resolve conﬂicts of mastery and servitude.

Millay's poem aims for union with the beloved, for a resolution to the conﬂict,
and the rendering of the speaker and beloved as equals. In the following posthumous

poem from Mine the Harvest (qtd. in full), Millay’s personiﬁcation of "Chaos" as male, a

 

kind of fugitive, faithless lover who is at last captured, demonstrates this desire.
I will put chaos into fourteen lines
And keep him there; and let him thence escape
If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape
Flood, ﬁre, and demon-- his adroit designs
Will strain to nothing in the strict conﬁnes
Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,
I hold his essence and amorphous shape,
Till he with Order mingles and combines.
Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,
His arrogance, our awful servitude:
I have him. He is nothing more or less
Than something simple not yet understood;
1 shall not even force him to confess;
Or answer. I will only make him good.
This sonnet, while it places chaos in prison, instead of the speaker, uses the prison

conceit unconventionally. The monosyllabic opening, “1 will put,” places syntactic

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E9
L3

emphasis on the speaker’s assertive and active “will.” The mitigated command “let”
repeated in lines two and three tempers the speaker’s desire. “Let” paradoxically both
permits and restrains. This free play of action underscores the promise that the captured
lover “will strain to nothing.” It suggests that the lover will both want for nothing, and
his will, strained by nothing, has free reign, or rather, free will. The logic is that if the
lover is imbued with free will, then he freely chooses to reside within the prison. If we
accept such logic, then the seeming contradiction of “pious rape” negates itself: the
ravishment is not a stealing of favors, but a temporary “holding” of her lover’s “essence
and amorphous shape.”
Millay uses the sonnet form, as Debra Fried has cogently argued, in the same
manner Donne uses a version of it in his poem "The Triple Fool”.
I thought, if I could draw my pains,

Through Rimes vexation, I should them allay,

Griefe brought to numbers cannot be so ﬁerce,

For, he tames it, that fetters it in verse. (lines 8-1 1)
The problem, however, as Donne’s speaker learns is that once a reader recites these
verses, he/she “frees againe / Griefe, which verse did restraine” (lines 15-16). Grief is
“increased by such songs” (18). Like Millay’s speaker, Donne’s speaker discovers that
restraint of emotional distress achieves only a temporary stay. But the type of stay in
these two poems differs. Donne’s poem presents the poem’s structure as a container, that
may be enclosed or opened at will and suitable for the sonnet form, as it is one that aims
towards closure. Donne uses form as a self-protective attempt to master his fears of

rejection by the woman in Songs and Sonnets and to calm his fears of sin and divine

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judgment in his Holy Sonnets. Conversely, Millay’s form temporarily holds her lover’s

 

“essence and amorphous shape,” resisting mastery and closure. It is rendered temporary
by the lover’s own ﬂux. Thus, the lover’s will is equal to the speaker’s, no greater, no
less. Line ten with its plural pronoun “our” makes this mutual servitude to love clear.

My reading of Millay’s use of the sonnet, therefore, differs somewhat from Fried.
While I agree that Millay’s use of the form allows her to question the assumptions that
come with it, I disagree with F ried’s argument that the "curt, determined vows at the end
[of this sonnet] leave us with a sense that in this poetic mastery over a lover rival one
takes its sweetest revenge from its substitution of an inescapable gentleness for the rival's
former cruelty and arrogance" (6). 1 don’t read the speaker as seeking revenge on the
lover for unrequited love, or love withdrawn. The poem aims not to break chaos, but to
contain him. A proper reading of the ﬁnal line, "I will make him good" depends on our
understanding the various meanings of "make." It does not merely mean to make, as in to
force someone to do something but also to make, or create, something out of material that
already exists. She does not force him to be good, but only re-forrns him into something
he already is, "simply not yet understood.”

The fourteen lines of the sonnet are likewise not rigid bars of imprisonment. The
poem structurally and thematically balances chaos and order. The octave is a single
sentence, but controlled by rhyme and meter. The sestet is written in shorter lines, most
of them end-stopped. The poem does not force the rhyme on chaos, but allows it to
"mingle and combine" just as thematically the poem aims for a union with the beloved

chaos. She does not make chaos "confess" nor force it to conform to the form with the

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use Of rhyme, committing "pious rape." She uses the form instead to urge a confession or
reaction and to reveal "something simple" or "good."

The sonnet is Millay’s best form, and one suited to her metaphysical search for
viable unions. Traditionally a form used to temper, moderate and restrain, Millay uses
the sonnet not for conﬁnement, but for completeness and reconciliation (albeit
temporary) of seemingly incongruous elements. The emphasis is on the process of union
making, rather than on the static union itself. The previous discussion of Sonnet
CLXVIII also illustrates how Millay’s use of the sonnet form is very much modern. Like
the modernist poem, there is no easy distinction between Millay’s form and content. The
traditional forms she writes in, especially the sonnet, uniquely embody the poems’
meaning. As Cleanth Brooks notes in The Well Wrought Urn, content and form in the
modern poem cannot be distinguished without distorting the overall meaning of the
poem, even if the form itself seems paradoxical to a commonsense notion of “meaning.”
It is the language of the poem itself, which effects the reconciliation of opposites or
contraries, resulting in the meaning of the poem.

Millay employs the sonnet form in her ﬁfty-two sonnet sequence, Fatal Interview,
published in 1931. Fatal Interview presents Millay’s most sustained engagement with the
seventeenth century love lyric, and takes its title from John Donne's Elegy XVI, "By our
ﬁrst strange and fatal interview / By all desires which thereof did ensue" which Millay
quotes as the sequence’s epigraph.9 Norman Brittin, in his full-length book on Millay,
Edn_a St. Vincent Millay, claims that the "title [...] implies no connection between
Donne's work and Millay's sonnets” (85) and was chosen solely to commemorate

Donne’s tercentenary year, which was also in 1931. I will demonstrate, however, that

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Millay’s sequence enacts a "fatal interview" with not only Donne’s poem, but also with
the traditional male love lyric as a whole, by questioning the politics inherent in the
presentation of women within the genre, and within the carpe diem genre in particular.
The remainder of this chapter will show that Millay’s sonnet sequence deconstructs the
traditional male lyric (fatally "killing" it) and succeeds in constructing a new strain of
metaphysical love poetry, which is feminist in character and yet in keeping with
seventeenth century love poetry’s larger aim, the scrutiny, through rhetorical language, of
physical and nonphysical experience.

The ﬁfty-two sonnets of Fatal Interview represent a yearlong seemingly
adulterous affair, beginning in autumn and the speaker’s ﬁrst attraction and desire for a
relationship with the object of her affection. The relationship is consummated in winter.
With the advent of spring, the intensity of their affair heats up and continues throughout
the summer months, with a brief break up in between. With the return of autumn,
however, the relationship cools, and there is a falling off until it ends completely. The
seasonal motif, in which the affair mirrors the changing of seasons, forges an analogy
between the mutability and transitory nature of love.

Millay’s sequence presents more than the speaker’s emotional experience of being
in love. Each sonnet intellectually scrutinizes the many stages and emotions of love and
acts as an objective correlative to articulate the speaker’s experiences as she grapples to
understand and articulate her ever-changing relationship with the beloved of the poem.
Each sonnet is a contained event, which the speaker turns over in her mind, inspecting its
causes, effects and felt experience. The sequence describes not only the speaker’s love

affair, but is also employed as a trope for the more general experiences of human

45

relations presented in microcosm, just as Cavalier lyrics had used love as trope for
political and social critique. The poems scrutinize human interactions with time--the
seasons, the temporality of experience and emotions, and eventual death--with society--
which watches and regulates human relationships--and with the literary tradition--which
gives voice to experience.

Before the speaker has made her affections known to the beloved, she already
understands the temporal nature of love. Attempting to articulate her desire, she tries to
deﬁne it, thereby making it rhetorically “present.” It is “This beast that rends me in the
sight of all, / This love, this longing, this oblivious thing” (Sonnet 11, lines 1-2). Love is
an abstract “thing,” indeﬁnable and yet the repetition of the emphatic pronoun “this”
places strong syntactical weight on her current emotion. “[T]his” insistently puts love
into the present moment and temporarily succeeds in capturing the speaker’s passion. As
soon as Millay’s speaker names her particular emotion, however, she is already looking
forward, envisioning the end of love. Love

Will glut, will sicken, will be gone by spring.

The wound will heal, the fever will abate,

The knotted hurt will slacken in the breast;

I shall forget before the ﬂickers mate

Your look that is today my east and west. (lines 4-8)

That love inevitably ﬂickers and dies maps the fatality of every lover’s situation.
The heavy repetition of the simple futurity of the verb “will” forcefully (and willfully)
makes present the absence that love will cause. Engaging her mental faculties

deliberately to choose a course of action for her emotions is an act of self-control that

46

conﬂates time. Why does Millay’s speaker in the early throes of desire envision its end?
Susan Sontag suggests that modern psychology “equates the discovery of the self with
the discovery of the suffering self. For the modern consciousness, the artist (replacing
the saint) is the exemplary sufferer [. . .]. The artist attempts to control his suffering, by
making it his own creation, his choice and submit to it” (42). This is the same willful
desire for control found in Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV [“Batter my heart three person’d
God”] which is discussed in detail in chapter three. Like Donne, Millay’s negative
imagery, metaphor and repetitive sound builds until it reveals the speaker’s desperate

desire for permanence, even in the face of acknowledging its impossibility. Love’s

9, 6‘ 9, ‘6

painful loss (“glut, sicken, wound” and “fever”) is countered, however, with the
recovering and diminution of disease (“heal,” “abate” and “slacken”). Millay’s sonnet
successfully reconciles these polarities, of life lived and imagined through the rigorous
use of rhetorical language, thereby capturing and making comprehensible emotional
experience.

Robert Johnson’s “A Moment’s Monument” cogently argues that Millay’s
understanding of the temporal nature of time is a modernist one. Drawing from Henri
Bergson’s writings on time, he writes that modernism perceives “time as relational and
experienced as personal experience, as a duration” rather than a concrete entity (121).
“Time becomes a point of view, a species of imaginative memory” (121) for which
Millay’s sonnets “consciously grasp moments out of the ﬂow of experience and then,

with words, consciously construct a still point from which to view the course of life’s

happenings. They claim time by naming the moments they exist in” (122). Johnson cites

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Millay’s sonnet [“Only until this cigarette is ended”] from Second April as a paradigm of
Millay’s understanding of time.

Only until this cigarette is ended,

A little moment at the end of all,

While on the ﬂoor the quiet ashes fall,

And in the ﬁrelight to a lance extended,

Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,

The broken shadow dances on the wall,

I will permit my memory to recall

The vision of you, by all my dreams attended. (lines 1-8)

The glowing tip of the cigarette aptly describes the modernist notion of time
always in ﬂux. As Johnson succinctly states it, Millay’s poem willfully isolates and
scrutinizes the moment, its “ﬂeeting bundle of sensory data, captured against its physical
background, while the [speaker’s] mind knowingly toys with a vision soon to fade, the
boundaries of the moment imaged by the burst and waning of the burning cigarette’s
light” (123). Millay’s understanding of time does indeed appear modern and shows
similarities to Eliot’s own understanding of time as both temporal and eternal and the
belief that we can comprehend that moment only through ﬁgural language. As Eliot
wrote in his doctoral dissertation, “although we cannot know immediate experience
directly as an object, we can yet arrive at it by inference, and even conclude that it is the
starting point of our knowing, since it is only in immediate experience that knowledge

and its Object are one” (Knowledﬁggand Experience 19). Millay’s treatment of time also

48

SE1

 

recalls Lovelace’s portrayal of time as subjective and measured by the senses as was
discussed earlier in our examination of his poem, “The Scrutiny.”

Because relations exist within time, always in ﬂux, Millay’s speaker’s moods

 

frequently change throughout Fatal Interview. The speaker’s moods shift from self-pity
to accusation, from idolizing her beloved to chastising his ﬁckleness. There are feelings
of fear, ecstasy, desire, foreboding, praise, regret, helplessness and joy. Patricia
Klemens has aptly named Millay’s speaker as the “female counterpart to Donne’s
sophisticated lover” in Songs and Sonnets (8). We ﬁnd the same complexity and
ambiguity of the contradictory voices in Millay’s Fatal Interview: the libertine or the
faithful lover; the cynic or the platonic lover; the masterful or the egalitarian lover.
Similarities with Donne’s sonnets also include the use of bold openings, dramatic
monologues, elaborate conceits, erotic imagery, extreme emotions, and the celebration of
physical and spiritual love. Several critics have noted the similarities between Millay’s

sequence and Donne’s Songs and Sonnets, but have tended to downplay the

 

comparison.'0 It is helpful, however, to examine Millay’s sequence in conjunction with
Donne’s Elegie XVI ["On his Mistress"] of which Fatal Interview takes its title. It is my
contention that Millay’s introspection into the complex and often contradictory emotions
of its female speaker takes this poem as her structuring conceit.

In Donne’s elegy, the speaker prepares to go on a journey and wishes that his
mistress does not accompany him. Presumably, his mistress has suggested that she might
disguise herself as a man so she can join him on his voyage. The speaker begs her not to
persist in this desire and does so by urging her to remember their personal history

together and past vows:

49

r /—' j

 

By our ﬁrst strange and fatal interview,

By all our long desires which therof did ensue,

By our long starving hopes, by that remorse

Which my words masculine perwasive force

Begot in thee, and by memory

Of hurts, which spies and rivals threatened me

Icalmly beg. (lines 1-7)
Besides indicating the couple’s vows of constancy, he also, through the repetition of
“by,” creates a catalogue of oaths, which strive to jar the woman’s memory of past shared
experiences. Not only does it show solidarity with the other, but it works to exclude
others from this circle of community, such as the "spies and rivals" mentioned in this
passage. It is the outside world that threatens the speaker in the poem.

Seemingly unable to convince her, he moves from begging to jockeying for

power:

I conjure thee, and all the oathes which I

And thou have swome to seale joynt constancy,

here I unsweare, and overswere them thus (lines 9-1 1).
He argues that to accompany him is "love by waye so dangerous" (line 18) and he pleads
"Tempter, o faire love, love impetuous rage, / Be my true Mistris still, not my faign'd
page” (lines 13-14). The speaker's method then moves to threats; he reminds her of the
nymph Orithyia and her fate at the violent hands of the ill natured north wind, Boreas
who took her by force, rape: “Dissemble nothing, not a boy, no change / Thy bodies

habite, nor mindes [...]” (lines 27-28). The speaker’s rhetoric heavily emphasizes the

50

woman’s appearance. Not only is she not to dress as a boy to go with him, she is not to
change her appearance in any form whatsoever from what it is. It is a warning against
transvestitism. It is important to note that during the renaissance, many people believed
that outward appearances reﬂected the spiritual inner self: so that to be his "true"
mistress, she must appear as such.

The speaker of the poem then argues that the woman is a female, and will be
recognized as such no matter what she wears.

Disemble nothing, not a boy, nor change

Thy bodies habite, nor mindes; bee not strange

To thy self onley. All will spie in thy face

A blushing womanly discovering grace; (lines 27-30)

Stanley Fish notes that "Masculine authority can be asserted only in relation to a
ﬁrmly deﬁned opposite [...]. In order for [the speaker] to be a man she must be
unmistakably and essentially a woman" (223). The male speaker's insecurity is
reiterated when he portrays other men as being overly aggressive and insatiable in their
lusts, and these lusts are associated with their own physical appearances, such as the
"changeable cameleon" of French men (line 32) and the "spittles of dresse, shops of
fashion" (line 33) of their countries are likewise perceived as a threat. In this deceptive
environment, the "Players, which upon the world's stage be, / will quickly know thee, and
no leese alas" (lines 36-37). Punning on lasse and lass, he argues that they will see
through her disguise and will seize her femininity and know her sexually. He expounds

on this saying the Italian "will hunt thee with such lust, and hideous rage" (line 39), as

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well as the "hydroptique Dutch," punning on the insatiableness of the Dutch drunk of
both liquor and sex.

Literary historians explain that between 1500 and 1640 female cross-dressing was
prevalent in London and frequently attacked by the clergy. William Prynne attacks it as
against “human nature” and “deeply censures the aspiring of women above the limits of
their female sex, and their metamorphosis into the shapes of men, either in haire, or
apparell” (Benet 26). Likewise, King James in 1620 ordered church ministers “to inveigh
vehemently in their sermons against the insolence of our women and their wearing of
broad-brimmed hats, pointed doubles, their hair cut short of shorn” (Hobby 42).'1 Diana
Trevino Benet in "Sexual transgression in Donne's Elegies" notes that there were a
number of factors that contributed to women’s sense of greater independence during this
period: “a growing market economy led a large number of women into the ﬁelds of cloth
making and dairy farming; the increased visibility and productivity of women outside of
homes as more wives worked along side their shopkeeper or tradesmen husbands; the
puritan ideal of marriage as a partnership and of the woman’s moral responsibility within
the domestic sphere” (20). It is not surprising that Millay’s poetry, written after the First
World War and the onslaught of women entering the workforce and amongst the
backdrop of the woman’s suffrage movement, ﬂappers, women’s bobbed hair and
plummeting necklines and rising hemlines, was also examining the relations between
men and women--their real and poetic appearances-- and how these relations are
imbedded in literature. Indeed, many readers and critics characterized Millay as “a kind

of poetic ﬂapper” and declared that her poetry "represents our time to itself' (Atkins 8).

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Millay’s “First Fig” from A Few Figs from Thistles (qtd. in full) indeed seemed to speak
authentically for this era of social change.
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!

Donne’s elegy is the perfect poem for Millay to select to announce her
confrontation with the traditional male love lyric and its portrayal of women.
Masquerading as the libertine poet, she dons the garb of the carpe diem lyric in her £a_ta_l
Interview sequence, thereby playing the part of Donne’s transvestic mistress. She does
not, however, merely adopt the lyric and simply reverse the genders of the speakers. As
if in deﬁance of Donne, she gives the love lyric a uniquely feminine voice, “undisguised”
in its personal and erotic imagery. In doing so, she addresses the possibility that all
guises are artiﬁcial constructs mediated by social, political and literary institutions.

Millay ﬂagrantly masquerades as Donne’s transvestic mistress as she adroitly
handles Donnean wit, paradox and logical argument in Sonnet 111 ["No lack of counsel
from the shrewd and wise"]. The sonnet adopts Donne's famous metaphysical conceit
from "A Valediction F orbidding Mourning" that compares a woman's constancy to a
compass.

If they be two [soules], they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the ﬁxt foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the other doe.

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And though it in the center is,
yet when the other far doth rome,
It leanes, and hearkens after it,
And growes erect, as that comes home. (lines 21-32)
Despite its praise of the woman, the woman is held morally responsible for both lovers in
Donne’s conceit. She must remain ﬁxed, the speaker's center: a pose not unlike that of
the mistress in Donne’s Elegy XVI. In contrast, Millay writes:
No lack of counsel from the shrewd and wise
How love may be acquired and how conserved
Warrants this laying bare before your eyes
My needle to your north abruptly swerved;
If I would hold you, I must hide my fears
Lest you be wanton, lead you to believe
My compass to another quarter veers,
Little surrender, lavishly receive. (lines 1-8)

The compass in Millay’s conceit is not a symbol of stable and moral love, but of a
love based on a lie forced on the female by the male's propensity to want what he can't
have. The fallout of the paradox in lines four through eight, that men want what they
can't have, is that women are forced to act contrary to nature. They must act coy and
create a love potion, “a philtre any doll can brew,--“ that can temporarily put the male
under a spell, just so that they can love him. In traditional love poetry the drinking of

such a potion indicates the qualities of uniqueness and inevitability of romantic love; the

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lovers are naturally fated for each other, as if the gods or destiny determined their love.
In Millay’s poem the potion signiﬁes the very artiﬁciality of the lover’s affections.
Drinking a potion is antithetical to what the speaker claims is her true nature, "free from
guile." Paradoxically, Millay’s speaker is the “truer” mistress when she appears most
untrue.

Patricia Klemins in "'Being Born a Woman': A New Look at Edna St. Vincent
Millay," writes that "Donne's compass encloses space; Millay's determines directions"
(207). The entire concept of the woman's character changes from one of ﬁdelity and
dependency to one of experience and independence when Millay substitutes Donne’s
rigid mathematical tool with her geographical device which freely pivots until alignment
is met with the earth’s magnetic pull. Thus Millay’s conceit deliberately moves toward
natural unions, while Donne’s anchors the couple to manmade unions. This apt
distinction reﬂects Millay’s interest in subjectivity as a site of perpetual construction.
Repeatedly in Millay’s poems we ﬁnd emphasis placed on the woman’s various
experiences and self-development in response to experience rather than on the formation
of an apparently stable identity that is repeatedly revealed to be merely a deceptive
disguise.

The theme of female “appearance” in the traditional love lyric is the explicit
subject of Sonnet XI [“Not in a silver casket cool with pearls”]. The speaker demands
openness and engagement with her physical self, refusing to hide her desire.

Not in a silver casket cool with pearls
Or rich with red corundum or with blue,

Locked, and the key withheld, as other girls

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Have given their loves, I give my love to you;

Not in a lovers’-knot, not in a ring

Worked in such fashion, and the legend plain—
Semper ﬁdelis, where a secret spring

Kennels a drop of mischief for the brain: (lines 1-8)

Possibly in deﬁance of Donne’s speaker, Millay’s speaker vows--through the
adoption of Donnean negation--that she will be recognized, “known” as a sexual woman
and opts for “Love in the open hand, no thing but that” (line 9).12 She comes to her lover
“ Ungemmed” and “unhidden” (line 10), offering her love

As one should bring you cowslips in a hat

Swung from the hand, or apples in her skirt,

I bring you, calling out as children do:

“Look what I have! -- and these are all for you.” (lines 11-14)

In an astute reading of this poem Stacy Carson Hubbard points out that the
woman’s “sexual treasures are displayed by the very skirt that was designed to hide
them” (108). Millay’s poem transfers the woman’s sexuality from the “hidden interiority
of the knotted ring [. . .] to the shameless exteriority of the child’s open-handed offering”
(108). In doing so, this poem counters the carpe diem genre and its regulation of female
appearance.

In the carpe diem poems of Donne, Herrick, Carew and Marvell the woman’s
“appearance” (read as “chastity”) is heavily regulated. Often using the blazon to praise

the woman’s youth and beauty, the male speaker urges the beloved to succumb to his

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desire while she is still in possession of these traits. Herrick argues in his carpe diem
lyric, "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time":
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-ﬂying;
And this same ﬂower that smiles today,
Tomorrow will be dying. (lines 1-4)l3

With its rallying cry to “seize the day,” the carpe diem motif is grounded in the
knowledge that time passes and with its passing the individual moves closer towards his /
her death. Seventeenth century poetry employs it not only as an argument to seduce the
woman to yield her virginity to the suitor while still young and beautiful, but also as a
philosophical contemplation of love’s passion and the battle against extinction. The
argument is that if she does not offer up these gifts to him, then they will ultimately be
seized by time and intimate death. As Herrick’s poem concludes: “for having lost but
once your prime / You may for ever tarry” (lines 15-16). She will tarry because she will
have lost her looks to time’s ravishment, death’s predecessor. The suitor, because he too
fears death, perceives time as a rival. The result is that the female body becomes not only
the object of the male’s desire, but also the enemy to be conquered in a symbolic triumph
over death. In Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” the speaker strives to convince his coy
and virginal mistress that she should prefer him over death: “The grave’s a ﬁne and
private place, / But none I think do there embrace” (lines 31-32).

Millay counters the objectiﬁcation of the female body in her Sonnet XI. Her
reference to “a silver casket cool with pearls” suggesting a cofﬁn, alludes to the carpe

diem’s fascination with death and its objectiﬁcation of the female body as a symbol of

S7

human frailty. Millay’s speaker refuses to place her love and body in such guise. By
discarding the fatal symbolism of the carpe diem motif, Millay’s poem opens up the
possibility for viable unions that are physical and generative, rather than terminal. This
poem’s replacement of the carpe diem motif with the openness of woman’s sexual desires
depicted as a freely offered gift--“look what I have! — and these are all for you.” (lines

1 1-14, emphasis added) shifts the woman’s identity from one dependent upon the one
time event of giving her virginity to one whose sexuality is just one facet of her identity.
The speaker’s openness in this poem procures the desired consummation in the very next
poem.

Millay’s sequence uniquely consummates the couple’s love. In the traditional
love lyric love almost never reaches fruition despite its argument that succumbing to
passion is the height of pleasure. In fact, the carpe diem tradition depends on the lady’s
prolonged denial. As Marvell’s speaker illogically declares . .though we cannot make
our sun / Stand still, yet we will make him run” (lines 43-46). Consummation only
speeds time up and invites death sooner. The poem itself is dependent on the lady’s
coyness and refusal. If she were to speak and bequeath her virginity, as does Millay’s
speaker, there would be no reason for the traditional carpe diem poem to continue. By
contrast, love requited (and verbally expressed) in Millay’s poem produces new
emotions, more sexual encounters and greater expression of desire, not to mention
another forty sonnets.

Millay’s consummated unions are like time itself, temporary and in continual
ﬂux. Thus, consummation can not be equated with death. The yielding of one’s virginity

is no longer equated with power. Youth and Beauty likewise lose their power. Power,

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instead, comes from experience and the open voicing of experience, rather than
inexperience. Subsequently, Millay’s speaker is consistently open in expressing her
desires. In Sonnet XXVIII [“When we are old and these rejoicing veins”] she engages
the carpe diem tradition and asks her beloved to make love now while they are still
“young and warm and in [their] prime” (line 6) and before “morning strikes her spear
upon the land” (line 10). The speaker’s argument to seize the moment concludes with a
punning ﬂippancy toward potential social gossip. She advises her beloved to “Be not
discountenanced if the knowing know / We rose from rapture but an hour ago” (lines 13-
14). The sexual connotation of ‘knowing’ rejects the carpe diem genre’s insistence of
female “discountenance” and the secrecy of the woman’s physical desires. Her openness
directly counters Thomas Carew’s male speaker’s threat to socially acknowledge the

”'4 This poem takes the traditional

woman’s sexuality in “A Deposition of Love.
Petrarchan convention of the lamenting lover but retaliates against the woman by
threatening to disclose the fact that the woman has acted unchastely. In this poem the
speaker ﬁrst rebukes her “rebel sex” (line 1) and portrays himself as one of the many men
whose “poor hearts that humbly sue” (line 4) for the lady’s affections. But by the second
stanza, we see that the lover’s complaint seeks social revenge on the woman. The
speaker’s bold “But I did enter, and enjoy,” explicitly reminds the woman of their past
sexual intimacy. He threatens to reveal this information if she does not reciprocate his
love. Carew’s deliberately shocking rhetoric aptly satirizes the social norms of the period
that dictated sexual relations between men and women. The speaker’s announcement of

sexual intimacy deﬂects from the woman and highlights the role religious and social

doctrines play in human relations. By contrast, Millay’s more modern speaker

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unabashedly proclaims her desire to “know” her lover and “enjoy.” The use of the pun
invites the reader’s own “knowing” as well and seeks that the reader join in destabilizing
the carpe diem love lyric and its dependency on secrecy, and then in refashioning it to
suit more open aims of communication. Puns consistently remind us that language,
although it often depends on seemingly random or “natural” associations, does not yield
arbitrary meanings, but purposeful and motivated subject constructions.

Millay employs the carpe diem tradition again in Sonnet XXIX [“Heart, have not
pity on this house of bone”]. The sonnet uses the framework of the carpe diem argument
and its frequent use of marketplace rhetoric to counter its tendency to objectify the female
body as property for economic exchange and poetic production.'5 The speaker argues:

Heart, have no pity on this house of bone:
Shake it with dancing, break it down with joy.
No man hold mortgage on it; it is your own;

To give, to sell at auction, to destroy. (lines 1-4)

Contrary to the traditional carpe diem poem, the argument is not directed toward
the beloved, but toward oneself as the speaker urges herself to seize love before
“Molestful age inherits, and the ground / Will have us” (lines 10-11). What we do not
ﬁnd in this poem, however, is the coyness or the itemizing of the woman’s bodily charms
as perishable commodities to be manipulated by the lover / poet, who is identiﬁed with
the potential buyer and with the merchant who displays the woman’s wares. Instead,
Millay’s female aims to do her own spending (Hubbard 104).

When the affair ends, and the female speaker’s love is no longer requited, we

truly see how Millay’s sonnet sequence breaks from the traditional renaissance lyric. She

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refuses to threaten, insult or even blame the beloved. In Sonnet XL ["You loved me not
at all, but let it go"] she confronts her beloved.

You loved me not at all, but let it go;

I loved you more than life, but let it be.

As the more injured party, this being so,

The hour's amenities are all to me--

The choice of weapons; and l gravely choose

To let the weapons tarnish where they lie; (lines 1-6)

The use of isocolon, the parallel structures of lines one and two, ironically denotes
the inherent difference, between the lover and the speaker--one stays and the other
remains. The ironic use of isocolon emphasizes the speaker's independence, opposed to
what we might expect to ﬁnd when a lover is shafted, pathetic dependence. In the ﬁrst
line “go” means absence, while "be" in the second line is read as presence. The speaker
"presents" herself as a strong, independent and even stoic ﬁgure. Millay's portrayal of the
jilted lover sharply differs from the jilted lover found in traditional love lyrics. Usually,
the jilted lover reacted in one of two ways: he would complain that he would die without
the love of the beloved, presenting himself as pale and wasting away; or, he would
threaten revenge on the lady, such as we saw in Carew’s “A Deposition of Love.”
Millay's speaker refuses to entertain the idea of revenge and "gravely choose[s] / To let
the weapons tarnish where they lie." Her speaker is ultimately more self-assured than the
male speakers. This assurance is echoed in the poem by the playful use of the pun on
“grave.” Unlike the traditional carpe diem suitor who seeks to triumph over death

through the capture of the female and his ravishment of his victory’s spoils, Millay’s

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suitor refuses to objectify either herself or the beloved, and so “kills” the outmoded carpe
diem rhetoric, even if it means gravely facing her own impending grave.

Millay’s speaker accepts the end of love, because she has played the game fairly
and openly, as she says in one of the ﬁnal sonnets of the sequence, “In my own way, and
with my full consent” (line 2). Even in pain she repeats that she “was not one for keeping
/ Rubbed in a cage a wind that would be free” (lines 7-8) even with the knowledge that

If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly (Sonnet XLVII, lines 9-11)

It is the woman’s experiences, openly articulated, that provide her with her unique
speaking voice. As she declares in Sonnet XIX [“My most distinguished guest and
learned friend”]:

The pallid hare that runs before the day
Having brought your earnest counsels to an end
Now have I somewhat of my own to say. (lines 2-4)

Punning on “hare” and “here,” the poem forges a linguistic place in the world that
yokes past, present and future experiences. In locating a space for her experiences, she
ﬁnally puts to bed traditional lyrics’ “counsel” to disguise herself as the stable identity to
which male identity and male poetic utterances depend. Shaking off the deceptive dress
of the carpe diem motif, she releases the poetic female once and for all from her position
as stable compass point to the roaming male lover. The result may be that love is
ﬂeeting, “folly” and “madness” (lines 5 and 6) but Millay’s speaker willingly chalks it up

to experience: “I have done ill, it is a certain thing; / Yet breathe I freer, walk I the more

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sound” (lines 11-12). Punning on “sound,” she is no longer the voiceless female deﬁned
by her physical body parts, but a complete, speaking, passionate and thinking subject.

In metaphysical fashion, Millay’s poetry consistently reminds us that selﬂrood is
dependent on an engagement with the ﬁgural in that it stresses our physical connection to
the larger community of human existence--literary, historical and social. Her poetry, read
as engaging in dialogue with the tradition of seventeenth century love poetry--
remembering its own literary, historical and social contexts--reveals that the seemingly
incongruous use of feminist themes, seventeenth century conventional subjects, topoi,
and traditional forms is part of her larger modern metaphysical poetic of concretely
deﬁning (actively determining) emotional, physical and intellectual experience. Reading
her poetry in this manner re-maps the metaphysical terrain, as ﬁrst delineated by Eliot
and the New Critics. It extends the metaphysical to reﬂect a rich and diverse strain of the
metaphysical in twentieth century American poetry while it also begins to dismantle
critical tendencies that erect sharp boundaries between feminism and modernism, and

thereby between feminism and metaphysics.

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CHAPTER TWO

Richard Wilbur: “metaphysical poet”

If Edna St. Vincent Millay represents an unrecognized twentieth century strain of
American metaphysical poetry by New Critics (which I suggested in the previous
chapter), then Richard Wilbur is this century’s recognized “metaphysical poet.”
Beginning with his ﬁrst book, The Beautiful Changes, published in 1947, Wilbur
attracted the attention and praise of poets and New Critics such as TS. Eliot and Cleanth
Brooks who deemed Wilbur representative of mid-century poetics and declared him one
of the most promising voices of the young post second-world-war poets.l The formal,
witty and impersonal poems deliberately marked by a highly stylized rhetoric--elaborate
wordplay (especially puns and paradox), extended conceits, and intricate argument--
seemed to signify the full fruition of the New Critical style. Since the various challenges
to New Criticism, however, the popularity of Wilbur's poetry, despite that it was twice
awarded the Pulitzer Prize, received a National Book Award, and that Wilbur served as
Poet Laureate of the United States, has waned. Bruce Bawer in 1991 sums up Wilbur's
poetic stature in his essay, “Richard Wilbur's Difﬁcult Balance,” claiming, “For all his
prominence, [. . .] Wilbur seems nearly marginal. We do not, after all live in the Age of
Wilbur,” and Robert von Hallberg in his recent contribution to the Cambridge History of
American Literature (1996) writes, “Wilbur is still admired, but really as the best poet of
the 19505.” Thus, Wilbur’s reputation, unlike Millay’s which has consistently risen in
the past three decades, has generally suffered--although his technical skill, unparalleled in

twentieth century verse, continues to receive critical praise. The rise and fall of Wilbur's

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poetic stature is important to this present study of the metaphysical terrain of twentieth
century American poetry and to Wilbur's metaphysical poetry in particular. For Wilbur's
literary stature as a metaphysical poet, like Millay’s, reﬂects the rise and fall in stature of
New Critical theories. Contrary to Millay, whose critical reception suffered during New
Criticism’s heyday, Wilbur's reputation swelled, largely buoyed by New Critics.

In 1936, just ten years prior to Wilbur's publication of The Beautiful Changes,
New Critical proponent John Crowe Ransom, deﬁned the modern period as the age which
“recovered the admirable John Donne; that is the way to identify its literary taste” (The

World’s Bod;I 78). It should not surprise anyone, then, that ten years later those New

 

Critics who praised Wilbur’s poetry also deemed it “metaphysical,” frequently comparing
it to the poetry of John Donne. Indeed, it is Richard Wilbur, perhaps more than any other
twentieth century American poet, whom critics tag as “metaphysical.” This chapter asks
in what sense is Wilbur’s poetry metaphysical and how is his poetry similar to or
different from the poetry of the seventeenth century? It also investigates what is
explicitly meant and what is implied by the application of the adjective “metaphysical”
by critics, and how much of this critical labeling stems from political jockeying to shape
the literary canon. Before beginning, however, let me qualify that my focus in this
present study of Wilbur's poetry centers primarily on his ﬁrst three collections of poetry,
spanning the years between 1947-1956.2 While I believe that Wilbur's oeuvre of poetry
may be termed “metaphysical,” I have narrowed my focus because it is the poems written

at mid-century that many critics label both “representative” and “metaphysical.”

65

Cognizant of the revived interest in the seventeenth century metaphysical poets in
the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century and its shaping inﬂuence on American poetics,
including his own, Richard Wilbur in his 1966 essay, “On My Own Work,” reﬂects:

Most American poets of my generation were taught to admire the English
metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century and such contemporary
masters of irony as John Crowe Ransom. We were led by our teachers
and by the critics whom we read to feel that the most adequate and
convincing poetry is that which accommodates mixed feelings, clashing
ideas and incongruous images. Poetry could not be honest, we thought,
unless it began by acknowledging the full discordancy of modern life and
consciousness [...]. (152)

A few years earlier, in 1964, he cites speciﬁcally George Herbert, Andrew
Marvell and Thomas Traheme as his literary inﬂuences, explaining, “I do this for simple
pleasure, not at all in a scholarly spirit. Those are three people I never tire of’ (Frank and
Mitchell 32).3 Whether Wilbur read these poets “scholarly” or not, all three of these
writers clearly imprint their stamp on his poetry: like Herbert, he emphasizes ceremony,
music and ritual and tends to conclude his poems with a revelation achieved through a
complex mix of mitigated argument and the magical; his use of syllogistic frameworks to
structure a dramatic debate shows afﬁnities with Marvell; and his sincere love and awe
for the material world and his method of expanding our understanding of this world by
revealing its divinity reﬂects Trahemean philosophy.

Wilbur understood that his literary inﬂuences were spurred in part by the

metaphysical revival of the 19205 and 19305, stemming from T.S. Eliot’s and then the

66

New Critics’ championing of the metaphysical poets. He aligns himself with Eliot’s

theories on several occasions, such as when he counters those critics who complain that

his poetry is too “remote” and “detached” by explaining, “I’ve always agreed with Eliot’s

assertion that poetry “is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality”

(qtd. in Perloff). Wilbur also shares Eliot’s view of history in “Tradition and the

Individual Talent.” In his essay “Round About a Poem of Housman’s” Wilbur writes:
The past which most properly concerns the poet is, as T. S. Eliot has said,
both temporal and timeless. It is, above all, a great index of human
possibilities. It is a dimension in which we behold, and are beheld by, all
those forms of excellence and depravity that men have assumed and may
assume again. The poet needs this lively past as a means of viewing the
present without provinciality, and of saying much in little; he must hope
for the tact and talent to make the past usable for the audience that his
poems imply.” (54)

Despite the Eliot/New Critical inﬂuence on Wilbur's poetry, it is a mistake to read
him as New Criticism’s metaphysical boy wonder. Wilbur found that New Critic’s
championing of metaphysical poetry’s “clashing ideas and incongruous images” to reﬂect
the chaos of modern life limiting, for the "atmosphere of contradiction can stiﬂe passion
and conduce to a bland evasiveness” (“On My Own Work” 156). He argues, “the fact is
that we are not always divided in spirit and that we sometimes yield utterly to a feeling or
idea” (156).4 Wilbur's complaint about his and his generation’s poetic inheritance
underscores how the metaphysical revival at the beginning of the twentieth century was

inextricably linked with the rise of New Criticism. New Criticism’s insistence on the

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impersonal--often achieved through ironic distancing and disjunctive narrative and form--
left little room for enacting viable unions between one’s self and the larger world.

A growing number of poets at mid-century echoed Wilbur's complaint and search
for a viable poetic. The ﬁrst challenges to New Criticism came from a deepening sense
of the mind's alienation from nature and of the world's alienation from reality. Robert
Creeley in “On the Road: Notes on Artists and Poets, 1950-1965” writes, "coming of age
in the 405, in the chaos of the Second World War, one felt the kinds of coherence that
might have been fact of other time and place were no longer possible. There seemed no
logic, so to speak, that could bring together all the violent disparities of that experience.
[. . .] there was no place, ﬁnally, from which to propose an objectively ordered reality, a
world that could be spoken of as there in the convenience of expectation or habit" (367).
The logical and highly stylized formal poetry panegyrized by New Critics no longer
provided a viable means to talk about the world. As poets searched for other ways to
speak about their experiences, diverse schools of poetry began to spring up. The Beats,
the Black Mountain Poets, and the New York School all reacted against the formal and
“impersonal” academic verse of New Criticism.

When these open form poets revolted against New Criticism, they also revolted
against metaphysical poetry, at least as deﬁned by New Critics. The emerging new
schools of poetry eschewed along with traditional metrics, syllogistic arguments and
stylized rhetoric. They favored, instead, a poetic of immediate experience, spontaneous
utterance and embraced the personal. Unlike these new movements emerging at mid-
century, however, Wilbur's response was more tempered. Not drawn to personal

confession or spontaneous articulation, he ﬁnds artiﬁce essential. As he puts it in his

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poem, “Cicadas,” “There is no straight way of approaching it” (line 20).5 He continues to
practice a formal poetic of traditional rhyme and meter, syllogistic structures, dramatic
argument, wit and aggressive rhetoric inﬂuenced by seventeenth century poets. Wilbur’s
poetic triumph, however, is that he succeeds in forging a metaphysical poetic that, while
oﬁen “impersonal” in nature, enlists the literary past to discover correspondences
between the material and spiritual realms, and to forge new unities of experience that
emphasize harmony rather than chaos, and engagement rather than evasiveness.

Equal engagement with the material and spiritual is the overarching theme in
Wilbur's poetry and we ﬁnd it in nearly all his poems. For example, his well known “The
World is a Sensible Emptiness” explicitly warns against valuing the spiritual over the
material by depicting a world where the spiritual is valued and the material martyrly
ignored as an arid desert. His best-known poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This
World” likewise insists on equal engagement. In this poem, the dramatic speaker prefers
the gritty world inhabited equally by nuns, lovers, thieves and angels to a purely spiritual
realm. Both these poems are quintessential examples of Wilbur's insisted engagement
with the material and spiritual and will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter
to illustrate how Wilbur uses metaphysical poetry to address this theme, a theme he
readily acknowledges in his poetry. In his essay, “On My Own Work,” he assesses that
"All my poems have to do (a critic might say) with the proper relation between the
tangible world and the intuitions of the spirit. They assume that such intuitions are, or
may be, true; they incline, however, to favor a spirituality that is not abstracted, not
dissociated, and not world-renouncing" (160). This search for correspondence is, of

course, not unique to metaphysical poetry. The Romantic poets also explored the

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interplay between reality and imagination and between the material and the spiritual.
What marks Wilbur as a metaphysical poet, however, is that he forges a poetic where the
mundane and the miraculous easily cohabit and he achieves this balance through a
rhetorical method, in which each word is tangible and immediately felt; a method which
Eliot found in John Donne’s poems and described “an apprehension of thought felt at the
ﬁngertips” (31MB).

Wilbur employs the same seventeenth century metaphysical poets’ rhetorical bag
of tricks to assume, maintain, and shift an argumentative stance within a single poem.
His rhetoric exploits the power of extended analogies, juxtapositions of extremes, a plain
and colloquial style of speech and dramatic argumentation that includes argumentation
through formal structure, association and punning word play to procure an emotional and
intellectual response to experience. His poem “A Glance from the Bridge” (Ceremony
and Other Poems) renders the familiar sight of a city’s grime in winter into a new image
infused with light and possibility. The poem accomplishes this through its logical
structure of mirror (yet contrasting) six lined stanzas that build off the single image of a
person peering off a bridge. In the ﬁrst stanza the city’s river is a “black facade” (line 2)
restricted as if “squeezed [. . .] in a vice” (line 4), and gulls are immobile on the frozen
and “sullied ice” (line 6). In the second stanza, the imagery turns to that of movement
and light as the gulls “rise and braid their gliding, white and spare” (line 7). The river is
no longer frozen, but “swirls” (line 10). These contrasts come to a head in the poem’s
ﬁnal lines and its shocking resolution:

[ .................... ] the freshening river swirled

As if an ancient whore undid her gown

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And showed a body almost like a girl’s. (lines 10-12)
The juxtaposition of extremes and vivid conceit is meant to shock the reader. It asks
several questions at once: How can a whore have a body like a young girl’s? How is the
city’s river like such a whore? And how does the careless glance of one onlooker render
this miraculous transformation?

Wilbur's rhetorical method in “A Glance from the Bridge,” as in his poetry in
general, is overall characterized by its metaphysical wit. The New English Dictionary
currently deﬁnes wit as “that quality of speech or writing which consists in apt
association of thought and expression, calculated to surprise and delight by its
unexpectedness; later always with reference to the utterance of brilliant or sparkling
things in an amusing way.” Broadly deﬁned as “to say,” wit’s etymological root is from
the French word “savoir,” meaning, “to know” (Brewster’s Dictionary of Phrase and
fa_bl_e). The Renaissance understanding of wit accommodated both the term’s properties
as a noun indicating knowledge or wisdom, and its verb properties indicating the act of
articulation. The seventeenth century metaphysical poets exploited this dual meaning as
it stood for the very interest of their poems: articulation of knowledge that is developed
out of and through language. John Hoskins’ Directions for mech and Style, written
around 1600, provides an excellent description of wit as understood by seventeenth
century poets, and as I will argue, used by Wilbur. Hoskin proposed that poetic wit
might be tentatively deﬁned as the power of creating emotional surprise by the
unexpected combination or contrast of generally diverse ideas or images, especially of
incompatible or contraries. It is often the exploitation of a latent resemblance between

incompatible ideas or images, which capitalizes on the contrast (catachresis) or a

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reconciliation of contraries, which capitalizes on the union (paradox). Both can produce
emotional surprise and express mixed feelings (Williamson 25). In seventeenth century
metaphysical poetry we ﬁnd the exploitation of incompatible images most noticeably in
the form of a conceit, such as when Donne compares a happily married couple to a
compass, or when Andrew Marvell compares lovers to birds of prey in “To His Coy
Mistress.” In the latter, Marvell’s suitor argues:

Now let us sport us while we may;

And now, like am'rous birds of prey,

Rather at once our time devour,

Than languish in his slow-chapt pow'r. (lines 37-40)
The conceit argues that the lovers will be like birds, paradoxically both “amorous birds”
and “birds of prey,” which grasp energetically at what they want. This conceit reveals
that in seventeenth century love poetry, love and sex as an oral appetite, is paradoxically
both self-consuming and self-denying. Human appetite, a common conceit for the more
basic and universal fear of death, ﬁts aptly the poem’s carpe diem theme. Carpe diem,
meaning, “seize the day,” is grounded in the knowledge that time passes and with its
passing the individual moves closer towards his/her death.

From the above examples and from Hoskin’s analysis we see that wit is
essentially an analogical method. Wit differs from simple analogy though, in that it is a
mode of communicative discourse that is concerned with the _lr_igge_n relations that
connect the most diverse objects or contrary emotions. It is an essential tool, then, of
poetry concerned with concretely deﬁning abstract thoughts and feelings. Its method of

yoking diverse and contrary items also denote its concern for discovering

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correspondences. Correspondence works to discover or create unity, and reﬂects the
belief that all things are related to each other and there is a truth or universal cause that
gives meaning to human existence. Seventeenth century poet Robert Herrick uses wit in
this manner in his poem, “a Nuptiall Song,” when he writes:
The bed is ready, and the maze of Love
Lookes for the treaders; every where is wove
Wit and new misterie; read, and
Put in practise, to understand
And know each wile.
Each hieroglyphick of a kisse or smile;
And do it to the full; reach
High in your own conceipt, and some way teach
Nature and Art, one more
Play, then they ever knew before. (lines 121-130)
In this poem, Herrick’s labyrinth bed is a hieroglyphic that takes the form of wit and
conceit and acts as a poem of instruction to the imagination: the reader, too, is
encouraged to seek correspondence between the literal and the metaphorical. As the
poem suggests, there are signs “everywhere.” The reader, no less the poem’s lovers,
must “read, and / Put in practise, to understand.”
Wilbur similarly encourages the reader to engage the literal and metaphorical
planes in “October Maples, Portland” (Advice to a Prophet and Other Poems) through its
use of rhetoric. Dana Gioia in “Richard Wilbur a Critical Survey of His Career” notes

that in this poem “There is a surface plot or situation that unfolds in literal terms.

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Meanwhile, under that accessible surface level is a subtext, an unstated but implied
second meaning.” The poem’s surface richly describes autumn in New England and its
colorful foliage.

A showered ﬁre we thought forever lost

Redeems the air. Where friends in passing meet,

They parley in the tongues of Pentecost.

Godly ranks of temples ﬂank the dazzled street. (lines 5-8)
As Gioia points out, the quoted passage is both a literal description of the fall leaves and
a “sacramental means of revealing the divine order.” Moreover, Gioia astutely notes that
it is precisely “Wilbur's masterful puns and word play” that “connects the levels of
meaning.” The “showered ﬁre” and the emphasized “Redeems” (appearing
asyntactically at the beginning of line six) equally portrays the maple’s literal red leaves
and suggests the Pentecostal ﬂame. Similarly, the tree-lined street becomes a canopied
temple as the townspeople ﬁguratively and symbolically (through the use of pun) “parley
in the tongues of Pentecost.”

Here, and elsewhere, provocative puns enact Wilbur's larger search for
correspondence in microcosm. Puns work to create a poetic union not only between two
often contradictory ideas, but also between the poem and the reader. In fact, Wilbur's use
of puns illustrate that the poem’s emotional success is frequently dependent upon the
reader’s ability to co-create meaning through an intellectual and emotional interaction
with the poem. A5 Catherine Bates in “The Point of Puns” explains, “a pun represents a
disruption of the one-on-one relationship between signiﬁer and signiﬁed, pointing to an

ambiguity of meaning” (1). Instead of one signiﬁer being attached to a single signiﬁed,

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the signiﬁer is now attached to two or more signiﬁeds. This does not mean, however,
that the poem’s argument becomes ambiguous, or that all experience is ineffable. What it
does mean is that the reader must logically engage in creating meaning. If the reader, the
interpreter of the pun, is to “get the joke,” he or she must engage in the act of reassigning
the signiﬁed to the signiﬁer. Bates reminds us that “[p]uns may challenge meaning but to
interpret them--if one wishes to make any sense at all--isfaute de mieux to restore faith in
the system of communication without which there would be no understanding at all” (2).
So while puns work to destabilize any given system of meaning, they also allow the
reader to follow the signiﬁers through to their various destinations and thus effectively
re-stabilize them, along with the language system. Wilbur’s puns consistently work to
bring about order and to re-establish viable unions between the material and the spiritual.
As we will see shortly when we examine Wilbur's “Love Calls Us to Things of This
World,” puns are the primary trope used by Wilbur to expertly inﬁrse the physical actions
of the dramatic speaker with spirituality, and it is the reader’s co-creating that fuses the
ﬁgural and literal at the level of word.

Creating viable unions through language play is a function in miniature of what
Wilbur believes to be the purpose of all poetry: “It is the province of poems to make
some order in the world, but the poets can’t afford to forget that there is a reality of things
which survives all orders great and small. Things are. The cow is there” (“Poetry’s Debt
to Poetry” 217). Wilbur does not question the existence of reality, however
unfashionable that may be in today’s postmodern climate. He instead, emphasizes the
material objects that make up reality, producing what Wendy Salinger in her introduction

to Richard Wilbur's Creation, a collection of essays and reviews of Wilbur's poetry, calls

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a poetic of “thingness” (4). Such concentration is solicited by and manifests itself in an
undeniable awe for the tangible objects and physicality of this world, even when
searching for spiritual, religious and meaningful connections to the non-physical realm.

To understand rhetoric’s generative power to produce viable connections, it is
helpful to look at Wilbur's admitted fascination for riddles. Wilbur explains that “to
solve a riddle one must be both intuitive and analytic” (“The Persistence of Riddles” 33).
He explains:

To make a riddle, or to answer one, was to see the peculiar qualities of an
object or creature, to discern its resemblances to other forms and forces,
and to have an insight into the relatedness of all phenomena, the reticulum
of the world. The riddle was thus an expression of imagination or spiritual
power, and as such was employed in the settling of disputes and the
winning of brides, in burial rites, fertility rites, and other religious or
magical ceremonies. However, we may now conceive of riddles, it is
plain that at their inception they had sacred uses, and were a way of
approaching the spirits of things. (33-34)

A metaphysical method is analogous to Wilbur's discussion of riddles. After all,
doesn’t metaphysical poetry present its conceits and other forms of wit as riddles? Donne
asks, how is sexual consummation like a ﬂea? (“The Flea”). How are lovers like the
phoenix? ("The Canonization"). And, perhaps most puzzling, how is divine salvation
like physical rape? (“Batter My Heart Three-Person’d God”). Wilbur's deﬁnition of the
riddle also parallels that of the metaphysical conceit, as deﬁned by Samuel Johnson: "a

kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult

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resemblances in things apparently unlike" (l l). Conceits may include the comparison of
things similar, different and contrary. The conceits used in metaphysical poetry
capitalize on disparity as well as resemblance. They reconcile discordant ideas and thus
bear a close relationship to wit. Indeed, the conceit is a crucial element of wit and the
terms are often used interchangeably in discussions of metaphysical poetry. All three
seventeenth century conceits cited above include not only “a yoking of supposedly
unrelated things; it also obliges us, in the process of solution to strike out across the
conceptual grid which our minds have imposed upon the world” (“Persistence of
Riddles” 45). Wilbur's metaphysical poetry likewise “restores for a moment the wonder
of ordinary things“ (44), such as we saw in the simple regenerative beauty of the river in
“The Glance from the Bridge,” and thus, like riddles, “give practice in the enlargement
and refreshing of reality” (47).

Wilbur's rhetorical wit and celebration of the material led many critics to
associate Wilbur's poetry with seventeenth century metaphysical poetry. One of the ﬁrst
critics to align Wilbur with the metaphysical poets was Ralph J. Mills. In “The Lyricism
of Richard Wilbur” (1962), Mills declares that Wilbur's “natural predecessors can be
located most easily among the Elizabethans, metaphysical, and cavalier poets” (79). He
also points speciﬁcally to Robert Herrick, “whom he resembles somewhat in the ease and
perfection with which he writes, employs forms, captures the right tone and phrase [. . .]”
(81).6 While Mills does not provide a speciﬁc example of this afﬁnity, his observation
proves correct. Wilbur's early poem, “Poplar, Sycamore” (The Beautiful Changes and
Other Poems) illustrates the same highly polished style that concentrates thematic

concerns through meticulous placements and displacements of syntax and line breaks as

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does, say, Herrick’s “To Blossoms.” The poem’s elegiac tone sees nature as emblematic
of human frailty and inevitable death, and the poem’s form enacts both in its
monosyllabic concluding lines of each stanza. For Herrick, this high-polish style resulted
in his poetry, for the most part, to be undervalued and even dismissed during his lifetime.
Edward Philips, for instance, observed in 1675, "That which is chieﬂy pleasant in these
poems is now and then a pretty ﬂowery and pastoral gale of fancy, a vernal prospect of
some hill, cave, rock or fountain; which but for the interruption of other trivial passages
might have made up none of the worst poetic landscapes" (rptd. in Maclean 162).7 But
Herrick, as Leah Marcus cogently points out, “isn’t concerned merely with the charm and
(often rude) vitality of nature, or with the sensuous tryst of human desire, but (and more
deeply) with the causes and origins of things, the reality behind appearances” (177).
Wilbur's “POplar, Sycamore” employs the same simple diction and a Zen-like seeing that
perceives the natural world as part of a greater cosmic world and renders the ordinary
into sacramental gifts, through richly tactile, visual and auditory imagery, leading him to
likewise declare, “My eye will never know the dry disease / Of thinking things no more
than what he sees” (lines 16-16). This search continues throughout Wilbur's long career,
as lately as Maﬂlies, he searches out “the hid pulse of things” (“Alatus”) and “the
mystery of things that are” (“In a Churchyard”).

After mid-century, readers continued to see connections between Wilbur's poetry
and seventeenth century verse. Donald Hill’s 1967 Richard Wilbur (part of the Twayne
American Author Series) was the ﬁrst full-length study of Wilbur’s poetry. This was a
signiﬁcant event as Hill in his “Preface” assesses Wilbur as “one of the most

accomplished and rewarding poets writing.” Wilbur was only 46 years old and had to

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date published only four collections of poetry. Hill applies an adept New Critical “close
reading” of Wilbur's complex but comprehensible poems, presenting a kind of “study
aid” to the poetry. As part of the Twayne series, Hill’s book positions Wilbur's poetry
solidly within the New Critical canon. Perhaps even more signiﬁcantly, Hill’s study
characterizes Wilbur's poetry using New Critical terminology originally applied by Eliot
to the seventeenth century metaphysical poets. According to Hill, Wilbur’s poetry
[. . .] is a poetry of ideas, moderately learned and allusive, strict in its logic
as in its phrasing, given to weighing alternative attitudes, fond of
arguments and of their consequences. Wilbur often begins by describing a
scene or an object and concluding by making a moral, epistemological, or
metaphysical point about it [. . .]. He develops a poem with a rigor and
coherence that recall John Donne with some of the same delight in clever
turns of logic and in the sudden vistas of paradox. (17)

In 1971, Michael Benedikt ﬁnds that Wilbur's “poems tend to use the old idea of
metaphysical ‘wit’” (104). More recently, Peter Harris in his 1990 chronicle of Wilbur's
career, “Forty Years of Richard Wilbur,” notes that in Wilbur the “the presence of
metaphysical pathos [. . .] only intensiﬁes the poignancy of Wilbur’s devotion to
physicality.” Similarly, William Bell sums up the metaphysical inﬂuence on Wilbur in
his 1994 "At Play on the Shore: Richard Wilbur" by concluding that “the metaphysical
plays a commanding part” in Wilbur's poetry and that Wilbur “is like John Donne as
described by TS. Eliot: a thought to him is an experience that modiﬁes his sensibility.
Unlike the reﬂective Victorian poets Tennyson and Browning, he is an intellectual poet

who feels his thoughts ‘as immediately as the odour of a rose.”’ He goes on to assert that

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Wilbur “is a poet of far-ranging and intriguing ideas, and one who practices the fusion of
thought and feeling” and “like Donne and the other metaphysical poets, he is an
intellectual poet who feels his thoughts passionately (21). Johnathan Grey’s Ways_of
Nothingness: Nuclear Annihilation and Contemporary American Poetry similarly
resurrects Eliot’s characterizations of metaphysical poetry when he writes: “Wilbur is a
poet of disparities as well as of unities [. . ..] To read a poem by Wilbur--whose poems
like those of the metaphysical poets are ideally suited for careful scrutiny--is to be pulled
simultaneously toward anxiety and consolation, toward despair and hope, and ultimately
to be deposited somewhere in between.” What is interesting in all of these summations
that link Wilbur's poetics with that of seventeenth century metaphysical poetry is the
various phrases that the critics lift from Eliot’s earlier evaluations of John Donne.8 It is
clear that Eliot’s theories of metaphysical poetry have become orthodoxies in poetic
criticism.

Not surprisingly, those critics who Object to Wilbur's poetry point to its Eliot /
New Critical / metaphysical inﬂuences, which were negatively associated with the

V 66

comfortable bourgeois life of academia. Critics fault Wilburs control,” his inability to
suffer, and his stance seemingly removed from the chaos of modern life. Peter Viereck’s
“Technique and Inspiration: a year of poetry” (1952), marks the ﬁrst in a long line of
such criticism which argues “He has all the qualities of a great artist except vulgarity”
(50). Randal Jarrell’s 1956 review of Things of This World echoes this complaint,
concluding “Mr. Wilbur never goes too far, but he never goes far enough” (48--9).9

Theodore Holmes in his review of Advice to a Prophet (1961) issues an outright attack

against Wilbur's position in academia when he characterizes Wilbur's poetry as “things

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seen from pamassian Heights of wealth, privilege, ease, reﬁnement, and education,
looking down on the permanent sufferings of human kind without being part of them”
(131). By the time James Clive’s “When the Gloves are off” is written in 1971, Wilbur is
decidedly “out” and “his poetry has lost its relevance” (109). Returning to romantic
sensibilities that celebrate the immediate and the spontaneous--ushered in in-part by the
Beats and Confessional poets hoping to counter the stodginess of academic poetics--
dissenting voices have little use for Wilbur's measured response to experience. As Clive
aptly sums up the poetic climate, “if skill got in the road of urgency, then skill was out”
(107). Allen Ginsberg, not Wilbur, was now held up as the voice of the time. Ginsberg
seems to faithfully portray the chaos and conspiracy in the world around him and
deﬁantly rages and vents against this chaos of modern life, while Wilbur in contrast
articulates with great poise and restraint a devotion to the enduring forms of nature and
civilization. As Herbert Leibowitz in a review of The Mind Reader (1976) notes, “his
mildness [is similar to] the amiable normality of the bourgeois citizen. Emergencies are
absent in his poems; he is unseduced by the romantic equation of knowledge and power;
he seldom rails at the world. Suspicious of grandiose gestures, of parading his ego, he
mediates experience through reason”(120). Calvin Bedient also reviewing The Mind-
Rgacieg faults Wilbur's rhetoric: “He is a bell too conscious of its clapper, clapper happy
[. . .] his poetry is completely without risks, a prize pupil’s performance” (21). This line
of attack continues, most recently in William Logan’s “The Way of All Flesh,” a review
of Maﬂlies (June 2000). Logan calls Wilbur's work “baroque, overrnannered manner”
(1) and asserts that “Wilbur can still bestir himself for his endings (his rhetoric dies in

full plumage like a suicidal ballerina), but too many of the new poems don’t remember at

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the end why they began. Slightly worn and depressive, they’re edged with a melancholy
that set in during the Eisenhower administration” (2). Wilbur, in effect, is too
“metaphysical” (baroque and metaphysical, as Rolf Lessenich in “Rhetoric in English
Baroque Literature” having shown, to be closely related, if not one and the same in the
work of seventeenth century metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw). Logan’s criticism,
like the others’ cited above, is political. Wilbur is criticized not just for his method, but
for his very “representedness” of the academy. An undergraduate education from
Amherst and then Harvard for graduate work, faculty positions at Harvard, Wellesley,
Wesleyan and Smith along with numerous awards and prizes-—not to mention a long and
happy marriage and home-life that includes a closet full of tweed sport coats--are all
politically translated as a throwback to the Eisenhower era.

I cite in some length these two divergent responses to Wilbur's metaphysical
poetry (positive and negative), not because I wish to champion one theoretic movement
over another, but because I wish to emphasize how Wilbur's poetic stature is intricately
tied to New Criticism’s stature. Critics who praise Wilbur's work employ New Critical
terminology and value its metaphysical qualities; critics who respond negatively to his
poetry do so on the very same grounds. Moreover, those critics who criticize Wilbur's
poetry echo precisely Dryden, Johnson, Wordsworth and Cooleridge’s objections to
seventeenth century poetry. Dryden and Johnson were both offended by metaphysical
poetry’s rejection of what they deemed as valid norms of reason and nature. As
Neoclassicists, they advocated an unadomed style that aimed for concrete ideas
articulated in a logical and clear manner. In their eyes the metaphysical poets were guilty

of using verbal ambiguities, abstruse analogies arbitrarily yoked together, and of desiring

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originality at the expense of the mimesis of nature. The Romantic poets, although
rejecting New C lassicism’s reason in favor of the spontaneous and organic which sprung
from the poet’s whole being, and not the mind, likewise regarded rhetoric with suspicion.
They deemed that rhetoric impeded emotion and spontaneity. Wordsworth found that
metaphors were “material to be shunned in serious poetry,” and Coleridge likewise
condemns the ingenious and exact ﬁgure which is “a pure work of the will, and implies a
leisure and self-possession, both of thought and of feeling, incompatible with the
grandeur of its subject” (Brooks 6-7). Metaphysical poetry is too witty and too contrived,
and divorced one from any true feeling; it became mere rhetoric without emotion.
Wilbur's most anthologized and critically acclaimed poem, “Love Calls Us to the

Things of This World,” from Things of This World (1956), is a tour-de-force of wit and

 

metaphor.l0 It exempliﬁed the New Critical poem and exempliﬁes Wilbur’s
metaphysical method. Not surprisingly, then, those critics pitted against New Criticism’s
stronghold on American poetics, desiring a more “realistic” portrayal of modern life,
widely attacked this poem. Most recently, Marjorie Perloff in “Poetry of 1956: A Step
Away From Them” attacks New Critical tenants and uses Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to
Things of This World” to do so, perceiving the poem as representative of “establishment
poetics of the mid-ﬁfties,” an age that “demanded such equipoise, an equipoise,
epitomized in 1956, in the poetry world of the Kenyon Review, Partisan Review,
Sewannee Review, and so on, by metaphysical poetry, especially that of John Donne
[. . .].”

Perloff begins her essay by quoting in full Wilbur’s “Love Calls Us to the Things

of This World” and then proceeds to attack the politics inherent within the comparison of

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drying laundry on a clothesline to the dancing of angels outside the speaker’s bedroom
window. She begins by rejecting Wilbur's claims of universality of experience, citing the
following explanation of the poem’s conceit offered by Wilbur in an interview, and later
printed in his essay, “On My Own Work”: “You must imagine the poem as occurring at
perhaps seven-thirty in the morning; the scene is a bedroom high up in a city apartment
building; outside the bedroom window, the ﬁrst laundry of the day is being yanked across
the sky and one has been awakened by the squeaking pulleys of the laundry-line” (159).
Perloff faults the laundry-as-angel metaphor for “its curious inaccuracy.” She posits, if
the scene really takes place outside an apartment building’s window, “the reality is that
the sheets and shirts would probably be covered with specks of dust, grit, maybe even
with a trace or two of bird droppings. At best, these shirts seen (if seen at all) from
Manhattan high-rise windows in the ﬁfties, billowing over the ﬁre-escapes under the
newly installed TV aerials, would surely be a bit on the grungy side.” Wilbur’s speaker,
consequently, waking just as the laundry is being yanked across the sky, is oblivious to
the hard work of the launderer. Perloffs reading of this poem demands mimetic realism
and cites the now familiar charge that Wilbur's bourgeois existence renders him ignorant,
or just plain apathetic, to the plight of the working class. This supposed ignorance most
likely is what leads Perloff to ﬁnd fault with Wilbur's “impersonality.” Instead of
speaking with the personal “I” prevalent among other poets writing in the mid-ﬁfties (e. g.
the personal howl of the Beats’ “1” or the intimate anguish of the Confessional “1”),
Wilbur continues to employ Eliot’s objective persona. This impersonality, however, is

not an indication that the poet recoils from everyday life and its common inhabitants, as

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Perloff would have us believe, but rather, is meant to include the reader in the universal
quest for engagement with the material and the spiritual.

Perloff, while she is an astute reader of many American poets, in particular Allen
Ginsberg, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery, misses the distinct wit of Wilbur's poem,
both in its conceit and in its tone. The distinct charm of this poem (and I use the word
charm deliberately) resides in Wilbur's wit. His use of language--especially his elaborate
wordplay of conceits, puns, paradox, and dramatic dialogue-~illustrates how language is a
magical, incantatory, and creative force. His word play captures the very essence of his
imaginative transience of the world, as well as his reconciliation with the world and thus
produces a very “real” response to life for both the speaker and the reader.

“Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” succeeds in linguistically creating
what the poem calls a “difﬁcult balance” between the material and spiritual realms of
existence. Its neo-platonic vision is similar to St. Augustine’s theology of love.'1 In _T_h§
City of God, Augustine asserts that God made us “coupling and connecting in some
wonderful fashion the spiritual and corporeal natures [. . ..] and this work of His is so
great and wonderful, that not only man, who is a rational animal, and consequently more
excellent than all other animals of the earth, but even the most diminutive insect, cannot
be considered attentively without astonishment and without praising the creator” (116).
Augustine, therefore, argues that humans must not aim for otherworldly aspirations, but
embrace the everyday material world. Wilbur, like Augustine, also believes that it is only
possible to achieve transcendence through the material.

Wilbur's deliberately balanced two-part structure of roughly equal line lengths (34

in total), with line seventeen marking the poem’s turn, foregrounds the contrast between

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the material and spiritual. The ﬁrst part of the poem celebrates the spiritual while the
second praises the material. The precise diction vividly renders the different textures of
the two realms, while each pun and incident of wordplay explores the contrasts and
connections between the realms, producing the “difﬁcult balance” in the poem’s ﬁnal
line. Humor also aids in achieving this balance. Humor is a crucial element of Wilbur's
wit and he frequently employs it for serious ends. As Wilbur once remarked about
Robert F rost’s poetry, “comedy is serious; it is the voice of balance; and its presence in a
serious poem is a test and earnest of all its earnestness” (“Some Notes On Lying” 140).
As we will see, there is something delightfully funny and charming in the speaker’s
imagining that the laundry outside his window are angels. A pure play of language
entices us into the poem.
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels. (lines 1-6)
The repeated long i sound in line one combines with enjambment and the heavy

66 ,9
S

alliteration of to propel the speaker into an imaginative engagement with his
surroundings and the reader likewise into the poem, only to then hover on “hangs.” In
the pause, the conceit, which compares the homely image of laundry with the spiritual

vision of angels, yokes the material and spiritual realms. Word play procures this fusion.

The speaker’s “eyes” are engulfed by the sound of “pulleys” (surely a visual pun on pull

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eyes) physically and imaginatively drawing the speaker (and the reader) into the
imaginative realm of the conceit. The playful pun on “spirited” in the second line
presents the speaker as he is “spirited” from sleep and his “astounded” soul is struck with
wonder. The soul, in a mirror image of the laundry “hangs for a moment” as pure spirit,
though the speaker is not to stay suspended in this abstract realm. A second pun occurs
in line six, which portrays the early air as “awash” with angels. Playing on the laundry
conceit and on awash’s several meanings (1. level with; 2. washed by waves; and 3.
ﬂooded), Wilbur's laundry-as-angels conceit exists on many levels: ﬁgural and literal,
never sacriﬁcing the one for the other, again achieving “a difﬁcult balance” (American
Heritage Dictionary).

In the second stanza, the spirited laundry receives full description as the speaker
explores his analogy:

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. (lines 7-8)

The use of anaphora (the repetition of the leading phrase “some are in”) denotes a general
and mundane description of the physical laundry, thereby emphasizing with the
declarative “but truly there they are,” the spirited laundry. Once more, truth (or
correspondence) is discovered always in the delicate balance.

The angels outside the speaker’s window paradoxically rise “in calm swells” (line
9) and ﬁll the laundry with “the deep joy of their impersonal breathing” (line 11). This
second stanza thus concludes with a balanced soﬁness produced by the contrary images, a
balance however soon thrown into a more forceful movement in the next stanza. The

laundry becomes more “spirited.”

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Now they are ﬂying in place, conveying

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet

That nobody seems to be there. (lines 12-16)

Wilbur's precise diction captures the thrill of the discovered correspondence.
Each word operates on a ﬁgural and literal level that links the spiritual and the
nonphysical realms. The clothes convey (both transport and communicate) the “terrible”
speed that alarms and elicits awe as its omnipresence is everywhere, actively making
present the spiritual realm in the speaker’s physical surroundings. The clothes truly
“rapt” the speaker’s being (wrapped around and spiritually move the speaker)
momentarily eclipsing all else, even from the impending “punctual rape of every blessed
day” (line 19). Enraptured, he cries out:

“Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.” (lines 17-23)

The speaker however is soon brought out of his Homeric reverie as he awakes
with a “yawn” (line 28). Awakening marks a return to the material world with deep
spiritual implications. Waking is that state of awareness as well as the aftermath or
visible track of moving through water. The speaker too has been immersed in the
spiritual waters of the wash and emerged clean. Yawning (to open the mouth with deep

inspiration) reveals that the speaker has indeed been ﬁlled with the spirit.

In the last stanza, the speaker’s “changed voice” (line 28) commands:

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“Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure ﬂoating

Of dark habits,

keeping their difﬁcult balance.” (lines 24-34)
Engaged once more in the material world he demands that the spiritual be brought down
among the everyday world and its inhabitants: the thieves, lovers and nuns. The allusion
to Christ on the cross, accompanied by the two thieves, suggests that life on earth is itself
a world of paradox and moreover, one negotiable only through a rhetoric modeled aﬁer
the Logos. As Wilbur writes in another poem, “ﬂesh made word / is grace’s revenue”
(“Grace” lines 4-5). ' 2
If Wilbur's rhetoric and imagery pose a problem for some critics, his use of

traditional forms and metrics also present difﬁculties. The twentieth century is, after all,
largely the epoch of free verse. Critics who attempt to assuage the claims that Wilbur’s
forms are “escapism” argue that Wilbur employs these forms to stave off and thereby
control the very chaos that critics accuse him of either avoiding or being merely oblivious
to. Wendy Salinger proposes that “Wilbur’s generation came out of World War II and its
preoccupation with craftsmanship seemed as one of ‘protection.’ A way to contain the
chaos” (2). Wilbur's own acknowledgement of this “conservative impulse” supports
Salinger’s suggestion. Wilbur admits, “My ﬁrst poems were written in answer to the
inner and outer disorders of the second world war and they helped me, as poems should,

to take a hold of raw events and convert them, provisionally, into experience” (Responses

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l 18). Wilbur's use of traditional forms, meter and rhyme then seems similar to Donne’s
desire to control his emotions as articulated in his poem “Triple Foole,” previously
discussed in the preceding chapter. Like Donne’s speakers, Wilbur's speakers often
discover that restraint in poetry achieves only a temporary stay. In Wilbur's poems,
however, it is not so much the emotion, which he seeks to restrain, but rather, the moment
of the experience, be it emotional or rational, which he desires to contain. Moreover,
unlike Donne's formality, which is often employed as a self-protective attempt to master
his fears of either rejection by a woman or judgment by God, Wilbur’s formality is not
employed in self-protective escape. He repeatedly insists that “no poetry can have the
strength unless it continually bashes itself against the reality of things” (Responses 217).
Wilbur is precise when he calls his poetry a “conversion” of “raw events.” Conversion is
both a change and an exchange of thoughts and feeling and one that is frequently a
spoken interchange; it requires mutual giving and receiving (American Heritage
Dictionag). Unable to convert raw events into an understandable and articulative
experience is to live without meaning. Wilbur engages form in conjunction with
metaphysical rhetoric as the catalyst to convert raw events into experience.

Wilbur is committed to the power of rhetoric and form. “An Event” directly
addresses this power. It begins by ﬂaunting its make-believe rhetoric with its speculative
opening:

As if a cast of grain leapt back to the hand,
A landscapeful of small black birds, intent
On the far south, convene at some command

At once in the middle of the air, at once are gone

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With headlong and unanimous consent

From the pale trees and ﬁelds they settled on. (lines 1-6)
In this ﬁrst stanza, the speculative tone invites the reader’s engagement as it imagines
that gravity has ceased and time and action move backwards. The birds immediately, and
en masse, freely accept the speaker’s imaginative hypothesis and ﬂy in answer to “some
command.”

In stanza two, a more direct inquiry focuses on the individual and the reason.

What is an individual thing? They roll

Like a drunken ﬁngerprint across the sky! (lines 7—8)
Wilbur's simile is both viscerally and phonetically exciting. Its vividness captures their
mobility. It ﬁxes the birds in language even as they ﬂy from such stability. He seems to
take pleasure in his ﬁgure as it contemplates equally the birds and his own speech. The
exclamation point indicates that he takes even a kind of linguistic joy in his simile,
however temporary this ﬁx.

Conscious of the need to create tropes to understand experience, he admits his

role as trope-maker:

Or so I give their image to my soul

Until, as if refusing to be caught

In any singular vision of my eye

Or in the nets and cages of my thought, (lines 9-12)
Thought is singular, and aims to trap simultaneously the birds and the viable ﬁgures of

speech in its nest so that he might cage the singular image that will render understanding.

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But Objects and events rebel: “They tower up, shatter, and madden space / With their
divergences” (lines 13-14). They are

Swallowed from sight, and leave me in this place

Shaping these images to make them stay:

Meanwhile, in some formation of their own,

They ﬂy me still, and steal my thoughts away. (lines 15-18)
The delightful punning of “Swallowed from sight” reveals the speaker’s good-natured
acceptance that he cannot capture perfectly this event. The swallows get the better of
him, determining their own movement, which is more perfect in its blending of noun and
verb in one great ﬂourish. But he does forge a place for them to be within the cage of his
poem. That this net of language is temporary is ﬁnally okay with Wilbur. For,

It is by words and the defeat of words,

Down sudden vistas of the vain attempt,

That for a ﬂying moment one may see

By what cross-purposes the world is dreamt. (lines 15-18)

Language, the poem argues, renders the world coherent. In “Poetry and the

Landscape” Wilbur likewise explains:

People feel a real unease and separation when confronted by the nameless,

and it is perfectly understandable that the ﬁrst man, set down in the center

of the ﬁrst landscape, applied himself at once to redeeming it from

anonymity. What has been spoken into being he spoke again, recreating

the creation, giving each a creature a relation to himself, and gaining a

kind of symbolic control over what lay around him. (121)

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Naming, for Wilbur, is a metaphysical act. Chris Eliasmith explains that metaphysics “is
the attempt to say, (of those entities believed to exist), what they are. . ..one’s metaphysics
in an explanatory theory about the nature of those entities” (emphasis mine).
Metaphysical poetry does not create the reality of the world--in fact, it does not question
its existence-- but it does bring it into the ﬁeld of thought and rational understanding. It
is thought, articulated in language, that brings the individual into full existence with
reality.

Wilbur's early metaphysical poem, “Ceremony,” similarly illustrates the
convergence of form and rhetoric to bring one into full existence. It also provides an apt
rebuttal to those critics who fault both his form and his rhetoric for painting “unrealistic”
pictures of life. Rodney Stenning Edgecombe has cogently argued that the metaphysical
shapes this poem. He writes, “It contrasts the idea of artistic decorum--the effort to
assimilate subject to form-~with the divergent practice of stressing their disjunction, as in
the metaphysical conceit. Such disjunctions, Wilbur implies, alert us to the ceremonious
nature of art, the stylized gestures which draw attention to the materials their very
stylization fails to accommodates, and thus seems to betray.”

The poem begins:

A striped blouse in a clearing by Bazille
Is, you may say, a patroness of boughs
Too queenly kind toward nature to be kin.
But ceremony never did conceal,

Save to the silly eye, which allows,

How much we are the woods we wander in. (lines 1-6)

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A debate is set up between art and nature in the comparison between the woman in
French impressionist Bazille’s painting, and the “woods we wander in.” As in the
metaphysical conceit, however, Wilbur's contrast links the human world of art and nature
through the verbal and imaginative likeness and difference of the woman’s “blouse” and
nature’s “boughs.” The wild wood likewise disrupts the disjuncture between art and
nature, recalling the literal and psychological “deep woods” of Milton’s m. It
represents the mysterious and the untamed, both within and outside the self.

The logical framework of the poem emphasizes the debate between nature and art
and formal and informal. In this ﬁrst stanza, the speaker’s “you may say” premises the
anticipated argument of the realist, only to be qualiﬁed by the speaker’s “but” that art and
form do not conceal reality. This debate continues in the second stanza. He posits:

Let her be some Sabrina fresh from the stream,

Lucent as shallows slowed by the wading sun,

Bedded on fern, and the ﬂowers’ cynosure:

Then nymph and wood must nod and strive to dream

That she is airy earth, the trees, undone,

Must ape her languor natural and pure. (lines 7-12)
The argument’s imagery seems sound. The monosyllabic pace of the speaker’s speech in
line ten suggests its reasonableness. But the speaker becomes bored and yawns, “Ho-
hum. I am for wit and wakefulness” (line 13). The poem’s playﬁil and yet serious wit
reminds us that pastoralism is also an artﬁJl feigning. The easy analogy of a striped shirt
and a striped tiger along with the slightly old fashioned diction are not enough. He

prefers instead, the “feigning lady by Bazille” (line 14) to this romanticized illusion of a

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harmonic landscape. The feigning woman is not so much false as she is inventive. As
Wilbur states in a much later poem, “Odd that a thing is most itself when likened”
(“Lying”). Analogy refreshes not just by showing similarities, but differences. ’3
Likewise, in “Ceremony,” he insists: “What’s lightly hid is deepest understood” (line 15).
It is only when the woman’s “social smile and formal dress / [. . .] teaches leaves to
curtsey and quadrille” (lines 15-16) that the woods truly produce “tigers” (line 17).
Ceremony (and poetry) enlivens the natural world, just as the speaker’s inner thoughts are
enlivened.

Wilbur writes with the very ceremony he praises, a highly stylized rhetoric of
rhyme, meter, puns, alliteration and paradox, which shocks the reader into seeing anew
the familiar. His use of contraries to refresh our reality is similar to Robert Herrick’s use
of contraries. Herrick’s poems also refresh the familiar by de-familiarizing through a
series of contrasting ideas. For example, in his poem, "Delight in Disorder," Herrick
contrasts order and disorder, civility and wilderness, formal and informal. Just as
Bazille’s feigned lady in Wilbur's poem conjures tigers in the woods, in Herrick’s poem
“A sweet disorder in the dress / Kindles in clothes a wantonness” (lines 1-2), which leads
Herrick’s speaker to playfully declare:

I see a wild civility:
Do more bewitch me than when art
15 too precise in every part. (lines 12-14)
Wilbur's use of contrasts is just one more method he employs to discover

correspondence between the material and the spiritual. Wilbur's "A World without

Objects is Sensible Emptiness” explicitly expresses this need for correspondence between

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the body and the spirit. The poem‘s title derives from seventeenth century poet and
mystic, Thomas Traheme. In Mediation 65 Traheme writes: “For certainly he that
delights not in Love makes vain the universe, and is of necessity to himself the greatest
burden. The whole world ministers to you and the theater of your love. It sustains you
and all the objects that you may continue to love them. Life without objects is sensible
emptiness, and that is a greater misery than Death or Nothing” (80). In his poetry
Traheme also celebrates the body and the soul. His poem “The Salutation” illustrates his
awe for this world, this "Eden so divine and fair" (line 35), where life is "A gift from
God" (line 28) which he embraces whole-heartedly: "[...] I take / The earth, the seas, the
light, the day, the skies, / The sun and stars are mine; if those I prize" (lines 29-30).”
The repetition of the article "the" catalogues God’s gifts, which the speaker aims to
embrace. The concluding clause "if those 1 prize" (line 30) suggests that these are just
some of the treasures that God bestows. If the speaker does not desire these, he can claim
others.

Wilbur, likewise, celebrates the natural world and argues that only an aggressive
engagement with the material facilitates transcendence. As he stated in an interview
published in the Amherst Student Review, “I simply cannot ﬁnally stomach any kind of
idealism or spirituality which is contemptuous toward the body or what we call the
material. I’m for bringing the body and the spirit to terms, rather than annulling the
body” (Butts 151-2). In this poem, he likewise criticizes spirituality that attempts to do
without images or symbols drawn from physical reality--the “negative way” advocated

by some mystics because no image can adequately represent God. The poem begins with

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the image of camels traveling across the desert, the very antithesis to his ideal
engagement:

The tall camels of the spirit

Steer for their deserts, passing the last groves loud

With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the whole honey of the arid

Sun. They are slow, proud,

And move with a stilted stride

To the land of sheer horizon, hunting Traheme’s

Sensible emptiness, there where the brain’s lantem-slide

Revels in vast returns. (lines 1-8)
The camel, capable of going days on end with little sustenance, moves at a slow and
dispassionate pace, underscored by the monosyllabic beat of its gate. The bareness of

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S

the desert described through the heavy alliterative is a vast emptiness. The
alliterative description leaves no concrete tangible image of the desert in the reader’s
mind: it slips from our cognitive mapping like the very sand it is made of. Wilbur thus
enacts formally Traheme’s “Sensible emptiness.”

The camel, a “connoisseur of thirst” (line 9), nurtures its desire, instead of
satisfying it. Practicing a kind of via negativa, it seems doomed to live unsatiated. But
the poem’s argument turns and contrasts the via negativa with a richer engagement. The
speaker rejects the “Sensible emptiness” and directs the reader to

Think of those painted saints, capped by the early masters

With bright, jauntily-wom

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Aureate plates, or even

Merry-go-round rings [...]. (lines 15-17)
His directive becomes more insistent, his language richer:

[ ................................................ ] Turn, 0 turn

From the ﬁne sleights of the sand, from the long empty oven

Where ﬂames in ﬂamings burn (lines 17-19)
The circular imagery of the artists’ renderings lead through associative thought to the
speaker’s directive to “turn” and the poem’s argument simultaneously turns. As if
infused with the early masters’ artistic gifts, the imagery and diction used to describe the
natural world intensiﬁes. Mirroring the circular imagery of the “aureate plates” and
merry-go round rings” in the old masters’ paintings, nature is ﬁrst a “halo” (line 21) and
then a “tiara” (line 22). These crowns seem ﬁtting images (the ﬁrst spiritual, the second
material) for nature to greet the Christ-child whose birth is announced by the
“supernova.”

The poem concludes:

Wisely watch for the sight

Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn,

Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit’s right

Oasis, light incarnate. (lines 25-28)
Just as the paradox of the Christ-child irrevocably connects the human and the divine, the
poem balances the material and the spiritual: the rare celestial phenomenon of the

supernova is perfectly balanced by the very domestic image of the animals’ hot breath.

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These animals, in contrast to the earlier camels, are not abstracted but very real. And it is
as material objects, and not as abstractions that their spirituality is felt.

Wilbur's “The Terrace” also powerfully evokes the theme of desire and
fulﬁllment and the need for material and spiritual engagement. It serves as a good
companion piece to “A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness,” also published
in Ceremony and Other Poems (1950).

The action of “The Terrace” proper occurs on a terrace, that place where the
inhabitants rest on the margin between the civilized domestic world and the natural green
pastures that lie before them. Perched there, they are open to rich experience, for as
Wilbur says in another poem, “Things concentrate at the edges” (“Marginalia”). The
landscape is hyperbolically drawn. The steep mountains rise and fall excessively so that
the terrace becomes like a roving raft. The grass is not merely green, but a fresh vibrant
and fertile pasture. The speaker and his companion drink in this grandeur thirstily; they
image the landscape as extremely rich food, glazed in sauce. Abundant vegetation
saturates the landscape, but though they feast, their hunger is unsatiated and increases.
Their hunger and imagined feast takes on eucharistic implications as they “drink in tinted
glasses of rose / From tinted peaks of snow” (lines 8-9) and dip their “cups in light” (line
10). They become drunk, not just on the cup, but from each breath they take. But their
benedictions and “gay / Readily said graces” (lines 33-34) fail to procure the endless
heaven they desire. Evening steals away their light. Too late they realize it was their
own greedy desire that created the scene and inﬁised it with divine meaning.

And we knew we had eaten not the manna of heaven

But our own reﬂected light,

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And we were the only part of the night that we
Couldn’t believe. (lines 45-48)

Wilbur refuses to idolize nature, just as he refuses to idolize the spiritual. The quiet
heroism of this poem celebrates the divinity that resides within the ordinary by
emphasizing the emptiness that occurs when the ordinary is not celebrated for what it is.
A similar stance occurs in George Herbert’s poems where the humdrum of every day is
invested with a divine hospitality. Herbert’s metaphors often derive from remarkably
tangible items: money, musical instruments, the natural world, food and “household
stuff” (“Afﬂiction 1”). Herbert also employed the extended metaphor of eating in his
poem, “Love III” to reveal the spiritual in the domestic. In this poem, tasting, eating and
being nourished by love symbolize redemption. In Herbert’s poem, Christ is both the
host who welcomes and the host of communion. The meal the guest digests thus not only
sustains, but also propels life. This dual nature of food is rooted in the word "manna."
Herbert’s manna is the direct contrary to Wilbur's “imagined” manna. But the message
of both poems is the same. Herbert’s poem celebrates the generosity and the self-
sacriﬁce of God's love for the "marr'd human" just as Wilbur's celebrates the generosity
of God’s material gifts to humanity. Both poems make their arguments quietly:
Herbert’s through a kind of quiet faith, and Wilbur's through negation. In both, the
reader must puzzle out the last phrase, drawing him/her into a full engagement with the
correspondence between the material and the spiritual.

Wilbur's “The Writer” published in 1976 in his collection The Mind Reader,
although a slightly later poem than the “representative lyrics” of the mid-century on

which we’ve been focusing our discussion seems a good poem for concluding our

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analysis of Wilbur's metaphysical poetry. “The Writer,” both a love poem to his daughter
and ars poetica, encapsulates Wilbur’s desire to name experience (emotional and
rational) through a metaphysical method.

“The Writer’s” highly structured narrative contains a distinct beginning, middle
and end. The beginning sets up the place and action of the poem proper, the middle
produces the climax and the end concludes with a resolution to the poem’s argument. In
the ﬁrst part of the poem, the speaker hears his daughter typing in her upstairs bedroom
which he ﬁgures as “the prow of the house / Where light breaks, and the windows are
tossed with linden” (lines 1-2). Surely a pun on linden, (ﬂowers / poesy) we are meant to
believe that he, a father and writer, understands this bumpy act of her creative efforts.
His prosaic deﬁning of her actions, “My daughter is writing a story,” ﬂatly underscores
this “understanding” (line 3).

He continues to ﬁgure his daughter’s activity with nautical imagery as he listens
to the “commotion of typewriter-keys / Like a chain hauled over a gunwale” (lines 5-6).
The imagery leads effortlessly to the speaker’s imagining that his daughter’s “life is a
great cargo” (line 8) in which he “wish[es] her lucky passage” (line 9). The daughter’s
typing ceases, and the speaker imagines that she “pauses, / As if to reject my thought and
its easy ﬁgure” (lines 10-11). There is indeed something too easy in the speaker’s
analogy. The metaphor, which compares the “commotion” of keys to a chain pulled
along a ship’s side, fails to capture fully the emotional fervor of his daughter’s creativity.
It notes only the sound of the keys. Her life ﬁgured as heavy “cargo” aboard a ship

positions her as more a passenger than as captain or even the moving vessel itself.

10]

Likewise, his analogy falls short, deﬁning only her outward movements, but speaking
nothing about her inner state of mind.

The rejection of the too easy analogy marks the turn in the poem and a turn in the
speaker’s perspective. He rejects his ﬁrst ﬁgure and engages in a search for a more
precise analogy. The ﬁts and starts of his daughter’s typing soon recall the memory of
two years earlier when a starling became trapped in the same room where his daughter is
now writing. He remembers,

[. . .] how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,

We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove

To the hard ﬂoor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; [. .. ] (lines 20-28)

The image of the trapped starling proves a more intense and precise analogy. It
provides what Eliot terms an objective correlative: it immediately calls up the fervent
emotions of both the starling and the young typist. The bird, literally, and the girl
ﬁguraly, are “humped and bloody.” The Speaker then recalls,

[ ....................... ] how our spirits

Rose when, suddenly sure,

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It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world. (lines 29-32)

The bird perched at “the sill of the world” in the moment of transcendence brings
us to the largest implications of Wilbur's metaphysical pathos. Peter Harris explains,
“The ﬁnding of the right analogy for his daughter’s situation is both the measure of the
quality of his love and of the quality of his poem [. ...] either we are exacting in our
search for what is right and, thereby, afﬁrm life or we are seduced by fatal ease and
become, symbolically, unquickened” (424-5).

The poem does not end with the bird’s ﬂight or the daughter’s literary rite of
passage. Instead, Wilbur adds a ﬁnal stanza:

It is always a matter, my darling,

Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish

What I wished you before, but harder. (lines 33-3 5)
The conclusion is more decisive and ﬁtting because the speaker has avoided easy
sentiment. The love expressed feels sincere precisely because the father/poet has
weighed his verbal options. He does not conclude his love poem until he has rightly
understood and named his daughter’s experience. This naming of experience, both his
daughter’s and his own, turns out to be nothing less than a matter “Of life or death.”

As in “The Writer,” Wilbur's poetry overall denotes an urgency to handle
emotional responses and the concurrent need to name experience, despite the limitations
of attempting to describe the felt moment. By engaging the seventeenth century

metaphysical poets’ rhetoric, modes of argument and debate, wit and search for

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correspondence, Wilbur forges a poetic that succeeds in naming experience. His poetry,
in the end, counters those critics who charge that his formal and witty poetry is too
“impersonal” and removed from the everyday realities of mid-century American life.
Studied articulation rather than spontaneous confession, and metaphoric engagement
rather than mimetic representation, names difﬁcult experience. Wilbur's poetry also
breaks with early modern poetics of T. S. Eliot, John Crowe Ransom and others. His
formal poetry frames experience and discovers new unities of experience that emphasize
harmony rather than chaos, and engagement rather than evasiveness. Perhaps most
importantly, his poetry refreshes reality through a metaphysical method that restores the
wonder of ordinary things. As he writes in the title poem of his ﬁrst collection of poems,
The Beautiful Changes:

[ ............................. ] the beautiful changes

In such kind ways,

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things’ selves for a second ﬁnding, to lose

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder. (lines 14-18)

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CHAPTER THREE

Metaphysical Performance in Robert Creeley’s Poetry

New Criticism’s relationship with the study and appreciation of metaphysical
poetry in American poetry in the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century was intertwined with
political maneuverin gs to shape the literary canon. At mid-century, many poets were
acutely aware of New Criticism’s stranglehold on American poetics. For a growing
number of these poets, the logical and highly stylized formal poetry acclaimed by New
Critics no longer provided a viable means to talk about the world. Robert Creeley in his
introduction to The New Writing in the USA (1967) explains: “The forties were a hostile
time for the writers here included. The colleges and universities were dominant in their
resistance upon the idea of form extrinsic to the given instance. Poems were equivalent
to cars insofar as many could occur of similar pattern—-although each was, of course,
‘singular’” (Collected Essays 89).l The poets included in The New Writing revolted
against the formal (mechanical) and “impersonal” academic verse of New Criticism.
They favored, instead, an open form, immediate experience, spontaneous utterance, and
embraced the personal.

Robert Creeley’s open form poetic marks a distinct break with New Critical
formalist tenets. In his quest to express his individual experiences within a new poetic
form--which evolves out of that experience rather than out of traditional metrics--he
deveIOps a poetic that breaks with New Critical modes, and yet utilizes a metaphysical
method that continues to reject the previous epoch of nineteenth century Romanticism.

Creeley’s poetry therefore participates in the larger strain of mid—twentieth century

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American metaphysical poetry to which Richard Wilbur's formal poetry belongs. Unlike
Wilbur's mid-century metaphysical poetry that exists within the New Critical / Eliot /
Metaphysical tradition, however, Creeley’s mid-century poetry resides within a
Projectivist / Pound — Williams / Metaphysical tradition.

Creeley along with other poets associated with the Black Mountain School
Movement--Charles Olson (the chief theoretician of the group), Robert Duncan, Paul
Blackburn, and Denise Levertov--map the possibilities of a projective poetic that draws
heavily on Ezra Pound’s and William Carlos Williams’s poetry.2 The ﬁrst sustained
discussion of Projectivism occurs in Charles Olson’s essay, “Projective verse,” published
in 1950. The ﬁrst part of Olson’s essay is based largely on letters written between
himself and Creeley from April 1950 until its publication later that same year.3 Creeley,
who has also written substantially on his poetics of sound and organic form, consistently
comes back to Olson’s essay, citing it to reﬂect his own poetics and as a shaping force in
American poetics. In his introduction to Olson’s Selected Writings II (1966) Creeley
writes about the impact of Olson’s “Projective verse”: “It was an excitement which many
of us shared, because what confronted us in 1950 was a closed system indeed, poems
patterned upon exterior and traditionally accepted models. The New Criticism of that
period was dominant and would not admit the possibility of verse considered as an ‘open
ﬁeld” (Q 126). Creeley likewise asserted in his review of Olson’s Y_&_X (1951), “if
poetry is to get further, develop, it will depend on those who, like Olson, make use of its
present gains, push these beyond. Olson’s work is the ﬁrst signiﬁcant advance” (Q2 98).
Critics of Creeley’s poetry have therefore tended to read his poetry solely within the

Projectivist / Pound-Williams tradition and its association with the avant guard

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movements emerging at the onset of the postmodern era.4 They have thus ignored or
overlooked that Creeley’s poetic, situated within this counter tradition, forges a
metaphysical poetic that engages and articulates emotional and intellectual experience.

In this sense, Creeley’s poetry is unique: he uses both the metaphysical mind (which TS.
Eliot and New Critics championed) and the breath / ear mechanics of Projectivism.5 The
result is that Creeley’s Projectivist poetic is not only metaphysical, but also marks a shift
from a modern metaphysical poetic to a postmodern metaphysical poetic in American
poetry: informality is valued over formality, performance over product, engagement over
detachment.

The Projectivist Movement, like many other mid-century movements (Beat,
Confessional, San Francisco Renaissance and New York School) turned to Pound and
Williams as poetic mentors, deliberately countering the stranglehold T.S. Eliot’s poetry
and literary criticism had maintained on the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. Whereas
Eliot had advocated a poetics of objectivity, impersonality, and poetry as an autonomous
artifact situated within the larger English Tradition, Pound’s and Williams’ poetry
emphasized openness, directness, colloquial language and personal involvement
grounded in the local.

From Pound’s Imagist poems, open form poets adopted the language of common
speech, exact diction and freedom in subject matter. Creeley in particular adopted its
hard, clear poetry where concentration is of the very essence. Pound's poem "In a Station
of the Metro" (qtd. in full) is the quintessential Imagist poem.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

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Another important facet of Imagism was the attention to rendering the spontaneous
moment. Pound’s expert use of cadence, which included juxtaposition, shifting tones and
allusions, successfully renders spontaneous movement. Pound’s dictum, “Listen to the
sound it makes!” resounded.

Williams, too, provided invaluable instruction for a new open poetic. He sought a
poetry that was forward-looking and experimental and self-consciously rooted in
American soil. For Williams, Eliot's major weakness had been his relying on an abstract
sense of culture, ungrounded in any actual communities or practices. The local must
provide the materials for the artist's art, which in turn provide the subject of the poem.
The local is the natural environment, culture, both historic and contemporary. “[P]lace is
the only reality, the true core of the universal [...]. We live only one place at one time,
but far from being bound to it, only through it do we realize our freedom [...] if we only
make ourselves sufﬁciently aware of it, do we join with others in other places" (Selected
Essays). In his epic poem “Paterson” (an admitted refutation of Eliot’s “Wasteland”)
Williams argues that only through direct interaction with the world, represented
historically and presently, can one forge an awareness of being.6 “Paterson” concludes:

We know nothing and can know nothing
but
the dance, to dance to a measure
contraptually,
Satyrically, the tragic foot. (235-239)
Projectivism draws heavily on the poetics of Pound and Williams. Creeley

proclaims: “Any movement poetry can now make beyond the achievement of Pound,

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Williams, et al, must make use of the fact of their work, and, further, of what each has
stressed as the main work now to be done. We can’t discard either of these men by
calling them ‘experimentalists’ or by thinking that however right their method may be for
their own apprehension of form, we can not ignore its example in our own dilemmas.
(“Charles Olson “Y & X,” CE 97). Olson, too, declares in “Projective Verse,” “Verse
now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and
put into itself certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who
writes as well as of his listenings. (The revolution of the ear, 1910, the trochee heave,
asks it of the younger poets)” (15). Williams’ theory of the local and the ear/breath
mechanics of both Williams and Pound become the keystones for a Projective poetic that
continues to reject nineteenth century Romanticism while it breaks with New Critical
tenets. The Projective also becomes the cornerstone for Creeley’s metaphysical poetic; I
wish, therefore, to spend some time here discussing brieﬂy the major tenets of
Projectivism.

Insisting on the poet’s direct engagement with the local, the Projective poets
move from objective representation (e. g. Eliot’s objective correlative) and symbolic

9”

reference to performance. In “’Poems Are a Complex (1966) Creeley writes, “poems

are not referential, or at least not importantly so. They have ‘meaning’ in that they do

9”

‘exist through themselves (CE 490). Later, in an interview with Roberta Obermayer
(1999), Creeley explains what he meant when he said, “meaning is not importantly
referential.”

I was trying to make the point that what’s particular in the words as they

say things, seems to me the real point, not what they refer to that’s outside.

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When I’m reading poems, that’s what’s moving to me is not that these
words river or tree refer to a platonic river or tree, a river or tree that’s not
there. As I read, those rivers and trees become actual in my mind. Now in
some obvious ways of course, the words refer to a tree that permits that,
but it doesn’t refer to a tree that’s not in the poem. In fact, the tree in the
poem, in a funny way, is no-where else. And that’s what’s wonderful.
The point being, that in poetry the noun or verbs or the activities thus, are
the things that are actually there.
Creeley’s emphasis on the activity of a poem’s language punctuates his emphasis on the
poem as an event. As performance, the Projective espouses a poetic that is dramatic,
expressive and directly engaged in exploring and articulating the tenuous relationships
between immediacy of thought, emotion, place and event and does so at the word level.
For Creeley, word is thing, opposed to abstract reference. Not surprisingly, then, Creeley
explicitly rejects the “the damn function of the simile, always a displacement of what is
happening” (“Echo” M). His minimalist style in fact forgoes much traditional
description (adjectives, adverbs, and visual imagery). His paired down style, however, is
not devoid of rhetoric for dramatic argument and play. Manipulation of syntax and
rhythm, juxtaposition and complex metaphors permeate his poetry. These tropes and
ﬁgures aid in creating inroads into experience and understanding by familiarizing the
unfamiliar and by defamiliarizing the familiar. As Creeley matter-of-factly states, “you
can’t derail a train by standing directly in front of it, or not quite. But a tiny piece of

steel, properly placed” (CE).

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Olson in “Projective Verse” provides a usable explanation of how perforrnative
rhetoric exposes and counters traditional modes of poetic articulation such as those
exhibited by the simile.

It is the function, comparison, or, its bigger name, symbologv. These are
the false faces, too much seen, which hide and keep from use the active
intellectual states. Metaphor and performance. All that comparison ever
does is set up a series of reference points: to compare is to take one thing
and try to understand it by marking its similarities to or differences from
another thing. Right here is the trouble, that each thing is not so much like
or different from another thing (these likenesses and differences are
apparent) but that such an analysis only accomplishes a description, does
not come to grips with what really matters: that a thing, any thing,
impinges on us by a more important fact, its self-existence, without
reference to any other thing, in short, the very character of it which call
our attention to it, which wants us to know more about it, its particularity.
(56)
Olson continues, proposing that “there must be a means of expression [.. . .] which bears
in instead of away, which meets head on what goes on each split second, a way which
does not--in order to deﬁne--prevent, deter, distract, and so cease the act of, discovering”
(56).

Metaphor as perforrnative utterance is akin to Renaissance understandings of

metaphor. Classic rhetoric, practiced by seventeenth century poets, sought the

connections between thought and language. Metaphor points to this process of learning

11]

and discovering, an activity grounded in its very name: metaphor (phora = motion).
Metaphor creates semantic motion (energy) through the fusion of terms within the
metaphor. Energy becomes the central component of the poem, placing full focus on the
Qsiﬂ of experience, and not on any outside meaning referenced by simple analogy or
symbol.

We see, then, how Projectivism’s rejection of facile comparison (simile) and
detracting reference (symbolism) challenges both New Critical symbolic modes
championed by Eliot and the poetically “correct” (transparent) similes of the preceding
century’s Romanticism. Symbolism and simile both transfer the focus from the word as
thing to word as referent so that the energy is diffused. This runs counter to the
Projective. Energy is crucial and the most important quality required in a poem. "A
poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it by way of the poem itself to, all
the way over to the reader. The poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy-
construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge" (“Projective Verse” 16). This is deﬁned
as the breath line. The breath line, in that it creates the poem as well as shapes the poem,
is as breath is itself, life giving and life sustaining. The breath line structures the poem,
determined by the speaker’s emotional, physical and mental relation to the event and
place of his/her experience. While the breath is a biological response, it is a mistake to
view the projective breath as intuitive, or Romantic, opposed to logical. While
Projectivism like Romanticism deems that the poem must be spontaneous and organic
rather than mechanical, Romantics regarded with suspicion rhetoric and all modes of
logic that emphasize the mind. In contrast, Olson characterizes Projective Verse not as

illogical, but rather, “post-logical” (“Human Universe” 55). Projective Verse’s

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spontaneity is dependent on the mind, a point that Creeley and Olson are both dogmatic
about. In “A Note on the Objective” (1951) Creeley directly confronts the outwom
debates between the objective (the scientiﬁc mind) and the subjective (Romantic
intuition).
Whether from an altogether ‘scientiﬁc’ attitude, or from some wish to
dissociate, only, by way of the surface of language, one idea from another, '_
objectivity has become the apparent trademark of the careful mind.

Common use would put upon this objectivity the air of the cool head, that

 

is, one capable of confronting diverse phenomenona in their own
particulars, rather than as extensions of one’s own senses. It was this
battle, between the objective and the subjective, then, which had replaced
the looser and more worn ﬁght between classicism and romanticism.
(436)
Creeley concludes that it is “perhaps best to junk both terms, or at least to understand this
necessary balance, one with the other. We can’t stand outside our content and at the
same time we can’t eat it like an apple, etc.” (464).

Projectivism works out a method to attain this balance between the subjective and
the objective by collapsing them within the poet’s physical being. Drawing on Pound’s
and Williams’ poetics of sound and breath, Olson ﬁgures this process in terms of the ear
(the objective) and the breath (the subjective):

The HEAD, by way Of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
The HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE (“Projective Verse”

19)

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According to Olson, the ear is directly linked with the mind. The poet listens to the
world around him/her, which is then transferred to the mind and then sent to travel
through the rest of the body. Only then is the fusion of thought and feeling released
through the breath, creating a unique sensory (mental sense and physical sensation)
experience and expression. Asserting the direct link between the ear and the mind, the
syllable in poetry becomes the “king and pin of versiﬁcation” (l 7).7 The syllable,
however, is not secondary, but immediate. The syllable “is spontaneous this way: the
ear, the ear which has collected, which has listened, the car, which is so close to the mind
that it is the mind’s, that it has the mind’s speed (18). The deliberate parallelism in
Olson’s formula above underscores the unifying ability of Projective Verse to yoke the
intellectual and emotional realms of immediate experience through sound.

Creeley’s unusual word order, puns, and ellipses operate most often on the level
of sound (intricate sound patterns of assonance, consonance, vowel sounds, off rhyme
and near rhyme, fractured words, fragmented lines, and innovative punctuation) and
provides one possible way the projective might balance the objective and the subjective.
This use of sound has been the consistent performative method throughout Creeley’s
career. Forest Gander in “The King is Old? Long Live the King!” a review of Creeley’s
recent collection, Life and Death, notes this aspect of his poetry. He ﬁnds that “Sound
and word play seem primary, existing before idea [. . .]. Discovered meaning results from
the cadence of the phrases, enjambment and line break.” Creeley acknowledges, “that
undertaking most useful to writing as an art is, for me, the attempt to sound in the nature
of the language those particulars of time and place of which one is given instance, equally

present” (“Charles Olson “Y & X,” CE 96). While Creeley, like other Projectivists, cites

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Pound as inﬂuencing his use of sound, Creeley’s unique fusion of thought and feeling
made manifest at the level of word, syllable and sound--an equal engagement with the
literal and ﬁgural--can be traced back to the seventeenth century poets, in particular to
John Donne.8 For example, writing about Donne’s lasting inﬂuence on poetics, C. A.
Patrides in his introduction to John Donne’s Complete English Poems, ﬁnds that Donne’s
major contribution to poetry is his “introduction into lyric poetry of elements innate to
dramatic literature, his boldness in adjusting those elements to his immediate purposes,
his use of variable cadences to evoke diverse emotional states” (xxxi). He goes on to
assert that “Donne’s ‘rough cadence taught generations of poets to look with their ears”
(xxxi).

Patrides’ assessment proves particularly astute when we examine the way Donne
and Creeley both use sound for dramatic purposes and we can begin to see how Creeley
moves away from the purely projective toward a poetic that is both projective and
metaphysical. In his analysis of Donne’s dramatic use of sound, Patrides ﬁnds, “where
the skill is commensurate to the sense [. . .] Donne persuades utterly. The grammar and
the punctuation are on such occasions to be torturous in the extreme, broken in order
forceﬁJlly to make a point” (xxix). “The Canonization” provides just one of many
examples.

The phoenix riddle has more wit
By us, we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutral thing both sexes ﬁt,
We dye and rise the same, and prove

Mysterious by this love.” (lines 22-4)

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Donne similarly employs sound to express a speaker’s emotional distress. The
syncopated rhythm in “The Legacie” denotes the lover’s agony and the throbbing
consonance used in “Batter My Heart Three Person’d God” reveals the speaker’s
conﬂicting emotions towards divine purgation. The latter poem’s opening lines are a
typical example of how Donne blends emotion and intellect by combining sound and
metaphor:

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you

As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee, ‘and bend

Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new. (lines 1-4)
In this conceit, the speaker imagines God as a metal worker, by whom he desires to be
remade. The divine metal worker’s desired skills are described using verbs grouped in

99 6‘

triplets—-“knocke, breathe, shine, rise, and stand, o’erthrow” and “breake, blowe, burn”-
-enacting the power of the Trinity. The ﬁnal grouping of verbs are the extreme extension
of the initial grouping: excessive knocking can break the object; blow is forceful breath;
and something that shines too intensely burns. It is not enough that the speaker be
mended and cleansed from sin; he must forcibly be made “new.” The monosyllabic lines
mimic the blows that come with the violence of the divine correction. The speaker’s
desperateness for forceful action manifests itself through the almost exclusive use of
monosyllabic words, high number of active verbs, enjambment and alliteration.

Extreme emotions passionately felt and enacted by a correlation of sense and

rhythm for emotional impact and psychological purposes is similarly executed by

Creeley. For example, Cid Corman has written that in Creeley’s much discussed poem “I

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know a Man” (qtd. in full For Love), “words and feelings are ‘scored’ freshly” so that
“[e]very syllable pulls its weight and no punch pulled.”

As I sd to my

friend, because I am

always talking,—-John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &

why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for

christ’s sake, look

out where yr going.
The frequent enjambment between lines and stanzas, dashes and crowding of stresses,
unnatural pauses and hesitations illustrate the speaker’s emotional struggle to articulate
his desire for meaningful experience and discourse. Michael Davidson in The San-
Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-century cogently sums up the
poem’s dilemma: “The speaker is caught between two conﬂicting positions: whether to

solve his existential despair by escaping from the world (by buying a ‘goddamn big car’)

117

or by paying a greater attention to what is immediately in front of him [. . ..] to drive and
thus escape such despair is an inadequate solution to a problem of much greater
proportions” (74).

While at ﬁrst the poem’s ordinary rhythms of speech, its colloquial slang and
sparseness seem incongruous with the poem’s large philosophical considerations, “1
know a Man,” as Charles Altieri in Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American
Poetry During the 19605 has cogently argued, contains Creeley’s “most fundamental
dramatic statement on the problem of language and its relation to the void.” The
speaker’s speech communicates little: it is vague, abstract, and thus alienating. Alluding
to “John Doe,” the speaker grandiosely claims he “knows” Everyman. But such claims
generalize and fail to engage directly the immediate: his friend and their circumstances.
The repercussions can be deadly; he nearly drives off the road. Thus, instead of bringing
the speaker closer to his surroundings and understanding, his speech, as Altieri points out,
“further broadens the gap between human subjectivity and the world which it must comes
to terms” (109). He is engulfed by the darkness which “sur-/rounds” him. The
enjambment accentuates the utter enveloping of the speaker’s failure to truly “know” his
companion, who he calls “John”--despite that he knows it is “not his name”--but also
himself. Word level enjambment enacts the dismemberment of the speaker’s uniﬁed and
stable identity.

“I Know a Man” illustrates that meaningful speech requires meaningful
engagement with others as well as the physical, everyday world. Quoting Robert
Duncan, Creeley contends, “You have to confront it and get with it not straighten it out.

Optimism and pessimism have nothing to do with being alive’” (g; 375). Thus, Creeley

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does not romanticize engagement, but insists on grounding experience in the everyday
mundane world where one worries about whether the cupboards are stocked, if laundry is
done and how the next month’s rent is to be paid. Insistence on the mundane derives
from the fact that Creeley believes that all form and emotion derives from engagement
with the local and the immediate. For Creeley repeatedly stressed the concept of
composition by ﬁeld opposed to the inherited line: “form is never more than an extension
of content” (Correspondence 79).9 The poem must be free from a preconceived
rhythmical structure, and yet still adhere to the rhythmical patterns that evolve out of the
poem as well as out of the poetry as he/she experiences the poem. In an interview with
William Packard, Creeley provides the following analogy for this engagement: “take a
glass of water and spill it on the ground. It takes place on the ground in the nature of
itself as water, being ﬂuid, etc., and in the context of the ground, that nature and
circumstance it’s now met with [. . .]”.

Writing about place and his choice of personal landscapes and the relationship
between place and form, Creeley asserts: "art is local, local to a place and to a person, or
group of persons, or just what's in the air despite how vague that sounds. It happens
somewhere not anywhere" (emphasis mine, “Why Bother?” QB 485). It is the poet's
relationship to the local, the "somewhere" in which the poet lives his/her life, that deﬁnes
both the poet and the place. In turn, each place has its own rhythm and measure, whether
the fast pace of the city or the fragmented pace of solitude. The poet in his/her
relationship with this place has his/her own rhythm, measure and breath in which he/she
writes. As he writes in an early poem, . .always the beat from / the breath” (“Le Fou,”

For Love). Noting the primacy of this relationship, Creeley in an interview with Robert

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Sheppard remarks: "I was charmed to recognize the root--that etymologically the
"world" is a compound of "wers" and "eld": it means literally "man's life." A man's life
is the world. What one experiences and/or fact of "all else" in a lifetime is his or her fact
of the world" (The Poetry Workshg) 50). Identity, then, is a primary issue in Creeley’s
poems. A person’s identity is dependent upon his/her relation to the local. This local
includes geographic place as well as one’s relationships with lovers, friends and children.
Creeley's poem "The Measure" M, qt. in full) exhibits the relationship

between man and world and its correlating relationship between experience and form.
The self is situated in place and time through language, but is always in motion as there
can be no absolute ﬁxed points in spontaneous experience.

Icannot

move backward

or forward.

I am caught

in the time
as measure.
What we think

of we think of--

of no other reason

we think than

just to think--

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each for himself.
There can be no objective system of measuring or describing the individual's experience.
The poet can only measure things in relation to him/her self. The "I" of the poem can
only be conscious of his relational identity to the place and time in which he writes.
Thus, the poem may focus only on the present moment and the poet's relation to it. “The
world cannot be ‘known’ entirely [. . ..] Reality is continuous, not separable, and cannot
be objectiﬁed. We can’t stand aside to see it” (Creeley, “The Writer’s Situation,” CE
519-520).

Obtaining continual contact proves no easy task. Creeley's poem "Soup," written
during a tour of Southeast Asia (Hello: A Journal, February 29-May 3, 1976), physically
grounds the poem in New Zealand, although the poem takes place emotionally inside the
speaker's mind. This poem represents the possibility of linguistic articulation of
experience but also notes the risk of distorting the social reality and in doing so, losing
contact. The speaker in this poem is trapped, haunted by inability to forget the past and
inescapable anticipation. The speaker admits his fallibility in the lines "I suppose it's ‘
letting go, ﬁnally, // that spooks me" (lines 32-33). The poem's form as a journal entry
and the use of conversational dialogue offer a sense of immediacy and naturally
occurring experience, seemingly without any imposed structure. The speaker, however,
instead of living spontaneously and moving freely in the moment, tries to suspend time in
the lines "ok old buddy, / no projections, no regrets" (lines 49-50), and again when he
insists that he will not look back, asserting "I don't travel that way" (line 39). The

speaker is presented as trying too hard.

The letter from the friend, reporting "She looks well / happy, working hard--"

(lines 6-7) suggests that the woman is deﬁned in a realistic and socially acceptable place;
working hard and being happy is very much a part of the American dream. Therefore,
the poem presents the speaker's desire for a reunion as going against the acceptable
norms of society while additionally acknowledging the seduction of such desires. The
speaker's inability to escape his limitations and fate, though, are noted most acutely in the
following lines:

Back to the weather,

and dripping nose

I truly wanted to forget here,

but haven't. (lines 45-48)
What the speaker cannot ignore is not only the physical separation and social constraints,
but also the natural order of the world: the weather, the seasons, its effects and therefore
its necessary act of preventing the speaker from rerouting the events of loss.

The poem's title, "Soup," provides the primary trope of the poem although soup is

not directly referred to until the ﬁnal lines.

Say that all the ways

are one--consumatum est--

like some soup

I'd love to eat with you. (lines 57-60)
Soup aptly represents the speaker's desire to gather past, future and present into one
single moment. If we envision a bowl of soup we see a food that is nourishing, made

from various ingredients, usually containing vegetables in a broth. It is the quintessential

122

comfort food, and it is precisely comfort that the speaker desires. Soup also requires heat
and someone to prepare it. Thus, soup requires four essential ingredients which represent
the four elements: the vegetables are grown from the land and thus represent the earth,
the heat is ﬁre, the liquid is water, and the speaker who prepares the soup is the poet's
breath, or air, which shapes the poem. The uniﬁed ingredients, the soup itself, provides a
metaphor for the poem. In addition, the word soup holds the slang meaning of energy,
such as in a souped-up car. The soup as an energy force may be linked to the poet's own
energy derived from his immediate experience.

Creeley’s love of puns is one more way in which his poetry is reminiscent of
seventeenth century metaphysical poetry. Creeley’s pun on “soup” to structure his poem
is similar to George Herbert’s use of a pun in his poem “The Collar.” Like Creeley’s
poem, Herbert’s title provides the controlling trope for the poem and is also a pun.
“Collar” represents the speaker’s clerical collar (physical dress and emotional servitude)
and the speaker’s choler. The polysemous pun provides a safe means for Herbert to
maintain his devotion to God at the same time that he resists the constraints that clergy
life places on him. Creeley’s soup pun likewise provides a means to express his emotions
within the very language he self-protectively employs to mask them. He saves-face in his
time of loss. The image of the soup allows the speaker to express his desire for reunion
with the woman who truly is his whole world (earth, ﬁre, water and air).'0

The various levels of meaning in the metaphor of soup are intensiﬁed further
when we examine the poem's form. Creeley's use of four line stanzas may at ﬁrst seem in
conﬂict with his ideas that poetry should not come from a preconceived stanzaic form.

However, if we view the soup metaphor as symbolizing both the poem and its

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formulating energy as well as operating homodiegetically as a metaphor for the natural
harmonized world, then Creeley's use of quatrains reinforces the soup metaphor. In an
interview, Creeley remarks, "I tend to posit intuitively a balance of four, and foursquare
circumstance, be it walls of a room or legs of a table, that reassures me in the movement
otherwise to be dealt with" (“Poems are a Complex,” Q 494). It is quite possible,
though, that these quatrains come not only from manmade structures of squared tables or
chairs but from a circle or sphere which is made up of four points, each representing the
four elements in a harmonized balance, or from the poet's own form of two legs and two
arms. Either way, the poem's structure, like the soup metaphor, may be seen as
representing the elements of nature and is thus a microcosm of the world and the poet’s
relationship with the world.

Creeley most often situates his poems within small domestic spheres--a bedroom,
a bed, a chair, a window--to act as miniatures of the larger world. These places also hint
at potential intimacy while also enacting the prevailing tension in Creeley’s lyrics--
especially his love poems--between desire and satiety. Thus, objects such as doors,
windows and fences operate as teasing barriers to the intimacy that might assuage his
desire for true contact. In "You" (Windows) the speaker's lover walking out of a door
opens the speaker's mind to severe existential loss.

You were leaving, going

out the door in

preoccupation as to

what purpose it

124

had served, what

the point was, even

who or what or where,

when you thought you

could, suddenly, say,

you understood, and

saw all people as if

at some distance, a

pathetic, vast huddle

up against a fence. (lines 1-14)
The use of interrogatives should bring about the “understanding” desired, but fail, leading
her to a kind of roadblock up against the fence. The speaker, however, is not merely
reﬂecting on the situation in the past tense, but is simultaneously being propelled
forward--from the door, to the street, to a waiting car--by the ﬂux of his emotions and
their evolving status. The [e]motion of the poem is seen in the truncated lines and words
at the end of the poem.

Would they listen, presuming

such a they? 15 any-

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one ever home to such in-

sistences? How ring

the communal bell?

All was seen in

a common mirror, all

was simple self-

reﬂection. It was me
and I was you. (lines 29-38)

Creeley's use of reﬂection and accelerated lines positions the speaker dead center of the
moment in which he acknowledges his being; his identity exists only in relation to the
moment and to the woman walking out on him: "It was me / and I was you." Similarly,
Creeley's italicized "they" foregrounds that if one understands the interrelatedness
between individuals and their place (this includes other individuals) then "they" cannot
exist, only a uniﬁed "us." The emphasis on union is further stressed in the intricate sound
patterns linking “communal” and “all” and the visual rhyme of “common mirror” (line
26).

In "Goodbye" (For Love, qt. in full) a window is the originating location or
"place" of the poem.

She stood at the window. There was

126

a sound, a light.

She stood at the window. A face.

Was it that she was looking for,
he thought. Was it that

she was looking for. He said,

turn from it, turn
from it. The pain is

not unpainful. Turn from it.

The act of her anger, of

the anger she felt then,

not turning to him.
The window where the woman stands, unlike the door, acts not as a place in which
people travel through but one that keeps the speaker and his lover apart. Again, Creeley
uses sound--repetition, fragmented lines and the sharp contrast between the woman’s
declarative stance in the ﬁrst stanza and the speaker’s interrogation that follows--to
metaphysically enact the psychological tension of the poem. The woman’s declarative
remove from the speaker is denoted also by the splitting of verb and action in lines one
and two and the omission of a verb altogether in the last line of the ﬁrst stanza. The

repetition stalls the poem and prevents the speaker from making contact with the woman

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at the window. The repetition of "turn from it, turn from it" becomes perpetually cyclical
and ushers a sense of paralysis into the poem.

Paralysis is the most dangerous of positions in Creeley’s poems. Desire for
intimacy is underscored by the need for motion, continual discovery and interactions with
others. In fact, motion animates Creeley’s poems. Despite Creeley’s condensing the
playing ﬁeld of his poems into short-lined stanzas, often composed in couplets or
quatrains, the jerky syncopated rhythm created from truncated words and lines suggest a
spontaneous movement within the form. Creeley’s speakers likewise are animated as
they move through their personal landscapes, mapping their tenuous involvement in the
unpredictable events of human relationships. Their very movement, directed by powerful
passions, create an intense poetic of [e]motion. On the use of the emotive in poetry,
Creeley explains, “Emotions and feelings particularly, were for me, the absolute bonding,
binding element of poetry and the modus was always involved with its sounds and
rhythms. Not simply the wise guy disposition but the playfulness and the pleasant action
of the mind bringing all this together was my delight also. There was always feeling, it
was at the root” (Obermayer).

The chief [e]motive factor in Creeley’s poems is love. More than mere feeling,
love gives form and meaning to experience. All things develop from love. As he
describes in his poem “For Love,” it is

........ that sense above
the others to me

important because all

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that I know derives
from what it teaches me. (lines 2-6)

This insistence that the world of love contains everything of value; that it is the
only one worth exploring and possessing recalls Donne’s portrayal of love in “The Good
Morrow”:

And now good morrow to our waking soules,

Which watch not one another out of feare;

For love, all love of other sights controules,

And makes one little roome, an every where.

Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,

Let Maps to other, worlds on worlds have showne,

Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one. (lines 8-14)
In both Creeley and Donne, the microcosmic world of love becomes larger and more
important than the macrocosm. Love is the agent of creation and the agent through which
the human mind can apprehend and comprehend the larger cosmos. In Donne, secular
and sacred love cohabit. Donne’s unique approach to love never foregrounds one over
the other. In Creeley, the sacred and secular are one and the same, as he concludes “For
Love”: “Into the company of love it all returns” (lines 61-2).

For Creeley, love becomes the Logos, the supreme unifying principle of the
world, linking not only man to woman, but man to humanity at large, to nature and to the
larger cosmos. In ancient and medieval theology and philosophy, the Logos was the
divine reason that orders and gives form and meaning to the cosmos. Logos, in a

metaphysical sense, was ﬁrst used by sixth century BC philosopher Heraclitus. For

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Heraclitus, the Logos was ﬁre, a “divine force that produces order and pattern discernible
in the ﬂux of nature” (Stamatellos). In Christian theology, the Logos was adapted to
signify the intermediary between God and the cosmos, being both the agent of creating
and the agent through which the human mind can apprehend and comprehend God. In
the beginning of the Gospel of John, Christ is portrayed as the LOgos: “In the beginning
was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (1:1) and in verse
1.14: “And the Word was made ﬂesh, and dwelt among us . . . the only begotten of the
Father [. . .]”. The Logos is the will of God and the ideas that are in the mind of God.
Christ’s incarnation is the manifestation of these divine attributes. Creeley’s conception
of Love as Logos builds off ancient and Christian conceptions. The Logos also provides
the perfect trope for Creeley’s metaphysical poetry. In Greek, ‘Logos’ is the term for
both “word” and “reason”. In Hebrew, the word is “Dahvar,” which means “thought”
and “deed.” Charles Olson in “Human Universe” likewise speaks of the Logos as both
“discrimination [. . .] and of shout” and stresses that we cannot “extricate language from
action” (54). As we saw in the poetry of Richard Wilbur, metaphysical poetry, in
general, exploits the dual nature of the Logos as both “word” and “reason” and “thought”
and “deed” as part of the metaphysical method. Characterized by TS. Eliot,
metaphysical poetry “elevates sense to regions belonging to abstract thought, or on the
other hand, clothes the abstract for a moment, with all the painful delights of ﬂesh”
(VMP 55). In Creeley, the physicality of thoughts and emotions are similarly felt. As
Forest Gander notes, “Reading his poems, we experience the gnash of arriving through
feeling at thought and word.” Mark Doty similarly ﬁnds that “The operation of intellect,

for Creeley, seems to lie almost entirely within the form itself [. . .]. Almost void of

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concrete objects, the poems somehow succeed in making feeling itself seem concrete”
(cite).

In his poem "The Language" (qtd. in full Words) Creeley stresses the

 

interrelationship between the individual and the physical place, between language and
desire and between man and woman through a series of contrasts. The poem also
provides a superb example of how Creeley makes the most abstract of all words, “love,”
concretely felt through his insistence on grounding the poem in the material (here the
physical body) and in its various cadences of speech and thought.

Locate I

love you some-

where in

teeth and
eyes, bite

itbut

take care not
to hurt, you

want SO

much so

little. Words

say everything.

131

I
love you

again,

then what
is emptiness

for. To

ﬁll, ﬁll.
I heard words

and words full

of holes

aching. Speech

is a mouth.
In the ﬁrst part of the poem, the speaker seeks to make love real, ﬁrst through a series of
contrasts between the abstract and concrete with its very line breaks, and secondly
through direct statement in his ﬁnal lines. The poem’s declarative conclusion, "Speech /
is a mouth," asserts that language is not only thinking, or articulating, but the physical act
of speaking with the mouth and from the body. Arthur Ford in Robert Creeley. the ﬁrst
full-length study of Creeley’s poetry, astutely notes that in this poem “love, like words

are holes aching to be ﬁlled, both linguistically and sexually” (64). Love thus provides

the perfect trope for Creeley to explore his larger philosophical considerations of
subjectivity and language.

Creeley’s love poems unrelentingly try to assuage the desire for physical, mental
and emotional contact with the world and others, a need inevitably tied up with language.
His love poems published in For Love aggressively probe the limits of thought and
language and do so by grounding this examination within the human quest for love. The
poems repeatedly ask the fundamental question, how to make the abstraction “love”
concrete? It is with this collection of poems, thus, I wish to focus my discussion on in the
remainder of this chapter. In these poems, we see that Creeley’s metaphysical poetry,
modeled after the Logos, formally and contextually renders the abstract concrete.

In For Love, love is not easily won; its rules and methods prove tricky, engaging
the speaker simultaneously in physical, mental, and linguistic trials. Robert Duncan
points to this aspect of Creeley’s poems and determines that Creeley “continues the art of
the troubadours with its themes of love and trial. He loves the daily, popular tunes, the
ring of contemporary coinage, ﬂashes of wry and sardonic humor, the lover’s chagrin”
(book jacket, Selected Poems). Troubadour love poetry can be traced back at least to the
eleventh century. According to the conventions, a married lady was to be venerated,
placed on a pedestal, where she inspired the lover to great and glorious deeds. Her lover,
her knight in shining armor, was to fall madly in love with her, immediately taken by her
bewitching charms. Sometimes a glance was enough to capture the lover; at other times,
a love potion was helpful or necessary. The drinking of such a potion indicated the
qualities of uniqueness and inevitable nature of romantic love; the lovers are surely fated

for each other, as if their love was determined by the gods or destiny. The beloved and

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her knight were then to engage in illicit love with the tacit approval of the husband, but
only after the knight had courted his lady with religious devotion and suffered great
torment and despair. While Creeley’s suitor indeed suffers and pines for his beloved, his
treatment of love is more in the fashion of the Cavalier love lyric, than in the style of
Troubadour love poetry.

Like the Cavalier love lyric, Creeley’s witty treatment of love mocks romantic
conventions and explicitly critiques the various tropes of courtly love. He frequently
rejects the idyllic garden as a site for his declaration of love and locates his beloved in the
everyday world of domesticity. H He tries to place his beloved on a pedestal, but she
refuses to stay put. Indeed, the beloved walks out on him leaving him with either an
empty cupboard or no clean laundry. To add insult to injury, she refuses to keep silent
and barrages him with profanity. Perhaps most different is that the beloved in these
poems is not some other man’s wife but his own. Thus, the poems in For Love are
frequently anti-romantic. For example, “Song” contrasts the romantic conventions of
song against angry speech and diction. “The Rose” likewise mocks literary convention
that places the supreme value on romantic love and ironically contrasts the romantic
epistle with the colloquial jargon of contemporary speech:

Up and down
she walks, listless
form, a movement

quietly misled.

Now, speak to her.

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“Did you want
to go, then why
don’t you.” (lines 1-8)

Because the speaker’s desire is continually thwarted, he is portrayed as oscillating
between cynicism, bittemess, or ironical detachment. Throughout For Love the speaker
postures as either detached or reservedly ironic. This protective stance renders him a bit
of an outsider, solitary and anxious. He tries too hard, or not hard enough. So desirous
of love, be either resorts to fantasy or stubbornly insists that the daily domesticities are
meant as proof of his beloved’s affection. When they are not, he angers. As he writes in
“The Crisis”

let me say (in anger) that since the day we were married

we never had a towel

where anyone could ﬁnd,

the fact.” (lines 1-4)
The “factual” tone recalls the self-protective posturing of the cavalier poet who on the
one hand desires a relationship with the beloved, but fears rejection and more
importantly, is willing to retaliate when the beloved fails to reciprocate his affections.
The lady, despite the poet’s praise is never put in a good light. Moreover, the speaker’s
narcissism (although more a self protective stance rather than true ego) often composes a
song of declaration which is not about the woman at all, but the suitor’s own need to ﬁnd
meaningful utterance for his own thoughts and feelings. Creeley, in the “Ballad of the
Despairing Husband” cavalierly attempts to reverse the tradition of courtly love but in the

process all but destroys the beloved to whom he directs his poem.

135

When the poem begins, the speaker’s wife has already left him. The regular
rhythm and pat rhymes create a jovial, sprightly tone as the speaker attempts to put a
lighthearted spin on the events.

My wife and I lived all alone,
contention was our only bone.
I fought with her, she fought with me,

and things went on right menily.

But now I live here by myself
with hardly a damn thing on the shelf,
and pass my days with little cheer

since I have parted from my dear.

Oh come home soon, 1 write to her.

Go fuck yourself, is her answer.

Now what is that, for Christian word?

I hope she feeds on dried goose turd. (lines 1-12)
Juxtaposing the narrator’s simple declaration of love and the events of the separation with
the wife’s coarse response work to place the blame for the split on the wife. The
husband’s description of the wife’s actions, however, suggest that she is at fault not so
much for leaving, but for not playing the part of the courtly Lady. Ladies in courtly
ballads simply do not speak as she vulgarly does. But is the speaker as innocent as he

postures? For what kind of courtly lover rhymes “Christian word” with “dried goose

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turd”? The result is humor and bitter mockery not only on the two estranged lovers, but
also on the romantic convention of courtly love poetry. Still, the speaker claims his
ﬁdelity.

But still I love her, yes I do.

I love her and the children too.

I only think it ﬁt that she

should quickly come right back to me. (lines 13-16)

[ ................................................ ]

That may be right, she will say then

but as for me, there’s other men.

And I will tell you I propose

to catch them ﬁrmly by the nose. (lines 21-24)

Again, the wife refuses to subscribe to courtly poetics. Unlike the destiny of one true
love, she claims she may show her affections to “other men.” This attack on the
speaker’s masculinity (the chief characteristic and focus of all courtly love poetry) jars
the husband into asking, “Was this the darling I did love/ --/. . ./. . ./and made my own
world self to sing? (lines 25-28). But this question seems too much to ask. He vows
instead to counter her rejection with his determined affection.

She was I know, And she is still,
and if I love her? then so I will.
And I will tell her, and tell her right (lines 28-31)
Because love is more than mere feeling--as Logos it gives form and meaning to

experience--the speaker’s ability to “tell her right” is pivotal to the relationship. If he

137

fails to locate the right words, then he fails to make love concrete, or real. He loses not
only his “lovely wife,” but also his identity as the “despairing husband,” or more
generally, as the courtly suitor who pines away from his unrequited love.

The wife’s attack on her husband’s “masculinity” translates into an attack on his
virility as a courtly suitor. He vows to rectify the situation by quickening her affections
through his composing the perfect courtly song of praise.

Oh lovely lady, morning or evening or afternoon.
oh lovely lady, eating with or without spoon.
oh most lovely lady, whether dressed or undressed or partly

oh most lovely lady, getting up or going to bed or sitting only.

Oh loveliest of ladies, than whom none is more fair, more gracious, more
beautiful.

Oh loveliest of ladies, whether you are just or unjust, merciful, indifferent, or
cruel.

Oh most loveliest of ladies, doing whatever, seeing whatever or being
whatever.

Oh most loveliest of ladies, in rain, in shine, in any weather.

Oh lady, grant me time,
Please to ﬁnish my rhyme. (lines 32-41)
Playfully punning on “time” (tempo and duration) the speaker understands that love,

because it is the Logos, is only possible when said rightly. If he cannot bring his song to

138

an acceptable en-closure, then not only does his song fail, but he fails to win her favor.
In the end, the husband’s poetic tribute proves inept; the lines ﬂatten themselves into
aimless banter. Void of concrete details, the generality of his profession fails to render
love in event or discourse.

Despite the humor of petty shows of affection, Creeley’s modern suitor genuinely
suffers: he endures pain and distress; he sustains 1055, sometimes even injury and
punishment; he always appears at a disadvantage. But he suffers also in that he permits
himself to be both victim and torturer, much as Edna St. Vincent Millay’s lover suffers in

Fatal Interview. Earlier, we saw how Millay’s dramatic speaker modeled after the

 

various speakers of John Donne, willfully suffers so that she might discover and fulﬁll
her full selfhood. This suffering is serious business. For as Susan Sontag explains,
"suffering [is] the supreme token of seriousness (the paradigm of the Cross)” (47). The
fallout is that “it is not love which we overvalue, but suffering-more precisely, the
spiritual merits and beneﬁts of suffering. The modern contribution of this Christian
sensibility has been to discover the making of works of art and the venture of the sexual
love as the two most exquisite sources of suffering" (Sontag 48). We already saw how
the estranged husband in “The Ballad of the Despairing Husband” attempts to control his
suffering, by making it his own creation, his choice, and submitting to it. This attitude
recalls Thomas Carew’s “Mediocrity in Love Rejected” where love is also a matter of all
or nothing. The speaker calls for more love or more disdain, more ﬁery passion or more
frozen rejection: “Either extreme, of love or hate, / is sweeter than a calm estate” (lines

5-6). That love encompasses all, gives origin and end, Carew’s poem begins and ends

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with the claim “Give me more love, or more disdain.” As long as he suffers, he might

 

have poetic control over that suffering.

Since suffering is physical and linguistic, the beloved in Creeley’s poems is muse,
desired companion and adversary. She promises sexual fulﬁllment while simultaneously
threatens to deplete the speaker’s linguistic energy if the poet’s desire is satiated. "The
Whip" (qtd. in full) encapsulates this paradox, as woman is both the spur and the rein to
the speaker’s desire. The poem presents the speaker’s encounter with his stimulating and
yet disappointing reality as he lies in bed fantasizing "another woman" while,

presumably, his wife lies beside him.

 

I spent a night turning in bed,

my love was a feather, a ﬂat

sleeping thing. She was

very white

and quiet, and above us on

the roof, there was another woman

I also loved, had

addressed myself to in

a ﬁt she

returned. That

140

 

encompasses it.
The “other woman” may be read as either a real woman or as muse; the poem leaves this
ambiguity unanswered, adding to the otherworldly feeling of the speaker’s nighttime
fantasy. Creeley captures the moment of fantasy in the back and front vowel sounds
(white / quiet, had / addressed) which alternate in increasingly rapid succession and
climax in the long e rhyme in the "she / returned." Thus, the diction reﬂects the speaker's
mounting (sexual and linguistic) excitement as he fantasizes about the woman / muse. In
the middle of the poem, the tone changes as it introduces the speaker's feelings of
loneliness and guilt.

But now I was

lonely, I yelled,

but what is that? Ugh,

she said, beside me, she put

her hand on

my back, for which act

I think to say this
wrongly.
The blurred syntax, however, makes it unclear as to which "act" he regrets: his fantasy

(sexual and linguistic) or caring about the woman who is physically beside him? Because

14]

"wrongly" echoes "lonely" the poem ultimately suggests that the speaker's guilt is self-
directed, and perhaps stems from the speaker's belief that it is wrong for him to be in a
lonely relationship, to think about it, and to even speak about it. Just as “I Knew A Man”
fails to produce meaningful discourse for its speaker, fantasy-love likewise fails to
produce concrete meaningful speech because it is not grounded in the physical. The
failure to ground the speech is evident in the long vowel sounds in the poem. These build
up the emotion of confusion, while blurring, even wiping out completely the situation and
the details of the bedroom. By the end of the poem, even the straightforward opening
couplet becomes ambiguous. In the opening metaphor, does “my love” refer to his wife
or his emotions? Whether we read “my love” as his affections or his wife, the
paradoxical promise of sexual pleasure or restless angst concludes anticlimactically with
the image of a ﬂat feather. The outwom modes of troubadour sanctioned inﬁdelity
prevent engagement with place and people, and thereby the speaker’s identity proves less
substantial than the poem’s ﬂat feather. Once more we see how for Creeley failure in
love is precisely the failure to use language “rightly.”

Sexual and linguistic engagement is the focus again in "The Business" For
LEE)- The poem begins with the speaker objectively separating himself from the
emotion of the situation as seen in the opening simile.

To be in love is like going out-

side to see what kind of day

it is. Do not

mistake me (lines 1-4)

142

As in “The Whip,” the poem’s tone proves difﬁcult to access. The poem’s
opening simile presents the speaker as a detached spectator who is perhaps even a little
bored. One wonders if the speaker really cares if the woman returns his love. After all,
what does he mean by comparing love to weather? Creeley, like Olson, asserted the
danger of the simile since it points to an outside reference, a pulling away from the thing
at hand, the woman in this case. The poem puns on the speaker’s posturing for the
upperhand with his declarative “Do not / mistake me.” The asyntactical break
emphasizes the directive “not.” At the same time, the strangely fragmented line also
reads as subtle pleading, “do not mis-take me.” He does not wish to be toyed with. If she
does not fully reciprocate his affections, he does not wish to invest his heart. Despite his
misgivings, as the poem progresses he is actively drawn into the act of loving.

If you love

her how prove she

loves also, except that it
occurs, a remote chance on

which you stake

yourself? But barter for

the Indian was a means of sustenance.

There are records. (lines 5-11)

143

!I_LATI‘I

 

 

Bartering, an act of giving and taking, is one that demands risks or "stakes" and is as
unpredictable as the weather in the ﬁrst stanza. The detached speaker of the opening
couplet is thus drawn into the poem and the experience of love so fully that this poem
becomes exactly that "record" spoken of in the ﬁnal line. It is important to note, though,
that this kind of record is not a static product of love experienced, but one of ongoing
"sustenance," to be re-offered, re—taken and most signiﬁcantly, as life-sustaining as the
poet's breath which forms the poem.

Love in “The Business,” thus provides a ﬁne example of Creeley’s belief in Love
as Logos. Love gives shape and meaning to the experience and the poem through its
articulation (“record”). As Logos, Love, spurred by physical and linguistic desire, is the
supreme performance. It is not something outside of the speaker that he speaks about.
Rather, he dramatically performs his love, simultaneously experiencing and articulating it
from within. Because he gives voice to his experience from the midst of the experience,
the interrogative seems to naturally accompany it. Creeley repeatedly asks,

“0 love,

where are you
leading
me now?” (“Kore” lines 21-24)

We must ask the same question of Creeley’s poems: 0 words, where are you leading me
now? For if Creeley’s poems perform (at the level of sound and word), they demand a
similar response from the reader who is asked to struggle with their difﬁcult syntax and
asyntactical line breaks, the direction and indirection of their arguments, their condensed

playing ﬁelds, and to probe the strange cadences and puns that change and complicate the

144

meanings of the poems. Unable to stand back as spectators, we must likewise perform,
asking, where are you leading me now? Stop asking this question, and the performance
ends.

Likewise, this chapter’s reading of Creeley’s poetry as “metaphysical” is not
meant to shut the door on other interpretive modes or performative strategies. Rather, by
showing that Creeley’s open form poetic--spurred by the Projectivist / Olson, Pound and
Williams tradition, and actively engaged in rejecting New Critical modes--participates
within an American metaphysical tradition that is richly large enough and varied enough
to include the New Critical / Eliot tradition of Richard Wilbur and the Feminist re-
visioning of Edna St. Vincent Millay. In doing so, it extends the frontier of American

poetics, inviting one more performer, Robert Creeley, to the drama of metaphysical

poetry.

145

 

 

 

CHAPTER FOUR

Molly Peacock: Contemporary Wit

Poets coming of age post mid-century and its chief poetic movements-Beat,
Projectivist, Confessional, Deep Imagist, and New York School--prove more difﬁcult to
classify than their poetic parents. In his practical “A Field Guide to the Poetics of the
‘905,” R. S. Gwynn cogently explains:

[. . .] the members of the younger generation of poets seem reluctant to
identify themselves as members of the existing schools [. . .]. It is unlikely
that any contemporary poet under ﬁfty would refer to himself or herself as
a ‘confessionalist’ or ‘deep imagist.’ Most of these poets, who were
learning their craft when the schools were at their height, absorbed diverse
inﬂuences in their early careers and have arrived at poetic styles that, with
only a few exceptions, are not readily distinguishable from each other.

While one may quarrel with Gwynn’s assessment regarding the uniformity of
contemporary poetics, he presents a valid argument about the lack of deﬁnitive schools or
movements. If the mid-century presented an epoch of poetic movements and their
manifestos--largely directed against New Critical modes of objective analysis--the end of
the twentieth century presented individual poets who inherited the spoils of the previous
rebellion--writing most often highly autobiographical poems, emphasizing the poet’s
personality. A counter movement to the autobiographical poem, however, is the
theoretically spurred poem about poetry. If one had to map the poetic terrain, one might

tentatively mark out the boundaries of contemporary poetics within the debates between

146

u,‘.' l.-

 

 

 

the autobiographical and subjective nature of the lyric (spurred in large part by the
previous epoch of Confessionalism, at its height in the 19605) and the theoretical
postmodern poem (incited by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry of the 19705). Late

twentieth century poet, Molly Peacock (her ﬁrst book, And Live Apart, is published in

 

1980), forges a unique contemporary poetic that presents a viable means to transverse the
lingering boundaries between subjective and objective poetics, and between modernism
and postmodernism, while also extending the metaphysical tradition.

Peacock, frequently termed an expansive poet, or a New F ormalist--she refers to
herself as “a low new formalist”--consciously uses form to break with the preceding
epoch of autobiographical free verse Confessionalism.l Form for Peacock, like for other
New Forrnalists, provides a way to balance the ultra personal “I” with the universal
inspection of larger themes--love, death, God, 1055, family--along with the hope that these

themes will prove accessible to a larger reading audience.2

New F orrnalist poet and
critic Dana Gioia, in “The Poet in an Age of Prose,” explains, “meter is a means of
making the language of poems understandable to the greatest number of people.” In
addition to using formal metrics in her poetry, Peacock strives to broaden poetry’s
audience by deliberately deciding to work outside of the academy, preferring instead the
poetry circle and the mentoring workshop. She has also served as president of the Poetry
Society of America from 1989 to 1995 (she is now serving emeritus) and was one of the
founders of the Poetry in MotionTM program which brought over one-hundred poems to
subways and busses across the country. Her practical, if not sometimes didactic,

handbook, How to Read a Poem. . .. and Start a Poetry Circle and her collaborations with

the Oxygen Network on the web also work to make poetry more accessible.3

147

The New Forrnalist label, however--as do most labels--fails to describe or
measure the full throttle of a poem’s activity, and in the case of Peacock’s poetry this
proves especially true. While Peacock writes using formal metrics, the term says
relatively little about how she incorporates formal metrics for dramatic punch and for
what she terms “psychological urgencies” (“From Gilded Cage to Rib Cage” 76). Nor
does the label say anything about her direct treatment of subjects or her deft use of
rhetorical wit to concretely deﬁne experience. Peacock uses form dramatically, in
conjunction with other rhetorical devices (extended simile and metaphor, elaborate

conceit and witty word play) to fuse physical, mental and emotional experience. Her

 

poetic method is essentially a metaphysical one.4

Peacock’s poetry hearkens back to seventeenth century metaphysical poetry,
which is foremost, marked by its expert use of rhetorical ﬁgures to fuse intellectual and
emotional responses to the complexities of human existence. Rhetorical tropes and
ﬁgures prove particularly apt for such metaphysical questioning, as ﬁgurative language
essentially evolves out of the need to understand; they rally imagination and emotion as
well as intellect in order to make analogical leaps from the familiar to the unfamiliar.

Incorporating seventeenth century metaphysical practices, Peacock’s
contemporary metaphysical poetry thus separates itself from the two major channels of
mid and late twentieth century American poetry: the highly subjective confessional poem
on the one end of the twentieth century poetic terrain and the theory driven language
poem on the other. Broadly deﬁned, the confessional poem rejects the New Critical
persona and so-called objectivity and aims for immediacy of expression and authenticity

grounded in the personality of the speaker. Language poetry proposes that there is

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nothing outside of language-mo essential being, no universal truths, no center. A uniﬁed
subject becomes impossible. These two approaches to poetry stem in part from the belief
that science is no longer capable of presenting an objective reality. The “truths” of
science can no longer be considered as ﬁnal or objective since scientiﬁc facts and laws
repeatedly break down and cede to new and better explanations of reality. Language is
likewise perceived as incapable of conveying ﬁxed meaning. Language, as a system of
arbitrary signs, is at once determined in a given social system, yet indeterminate in its
signiﬁcation. All discourse, then, is bounded by its temporal and spatial contexts and all
unions of subject and object are no more than in Jacques Derrida’s terms, “a momentary
ﬁx” (Of Grammatologv).

Peacock’s metaphysical poetry, like other twentieth century strains of poetry, does
not deny the ambiguity of language; however, unlike these other strains, it writes from
the premise that truths exist and can only be known through language. The poetry’s
semantic play celebrates the ﬂuidity of humanity’s complicated, often contradictory,
relationships with a reality that it maintains exists, however out of fashion that may
appear in a period of postmodern skepticism. 1n “Altruism” (Take Heart), for example,
Peacock asks: “What if we got outside ourselves and there / really was an outside out
there, not just / our insides turned inside out?” and “What if, when we said I love you,
there were / a you to love as there is a yard beyond / to walk past the grill and get to?”
(lines 1-3 and 9-1 1). While consistently interrogating her experiences, Peacock retains a
faith in language, a faith in reality. What is at the heart of Peacock’s poetic is the belief
in truths and correspondence, which the poet, if diligent enough, if attentive enough, and

if ﬂexible enough may discover proofs of their existence and accurately articulate these

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proofs through language. As Cleanth Brooks in Modern Poetry and the Tradition
explains, “it is a postulate implicit in a metaphysical poet that nothing is ineffable, that
the most rariﬁed feeling can be exact and exactly expressed. If you cease to be able to
express feelings you cease to be able to have them, and sensibility is replaced by

sentiment and in the end by vague expression of the vague” (200).

 

Peacock’s contemporary metaphysical poetry also extends the practices of
twentieth century American metaphysicals, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Richard Wilbur, and [
Robert Creeley. Just as they adopted the metaphysical method from the seventeenth

century poets, expanding it in invigorating and challenging new ways to rebel against

 

nineteenth century Romanticism and early twentieth century High Modernism, Peacock
likewise ﬁnds innovative means to incorporate a metaphysical method to question
traditional designations of objective and subjective poetics. As previously discussed,
Creeley persuasively shows how the outwom debate between subjective and objective
poetics is largely the re-ﬁguring of the more worn out ﬁght between the intuitive poetics
of Romanticism and the logical poetics of Classicism (“A Note on the Objective,” CE
436).5 Like Creeley, and Millay before him, Peacock explicitly rejects the “objective”
and the unquestioned “Tradition.” Like Millay, she scrutinizes the complex and
contradictory emotions of love in a uniquely feminine voice, undisguised in its personal
and erotic imagery.6 She grounds these explorations of love in precise detail, positioning
them in deﬁned physical places in a manner similar to Creeley’s insistence on the local.
Her poetry also resembles Wilbur's metaphysical bent, which uses seventeenth century
metaphysical poets’ rhetorical tropes and ﬁgures to argue for a world of patterned

correspondences between the physical and the spiritual. Peacock ﬁgures this

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correspondence most often in terms of life and death: “Dying itself is a shimmering verge
between life and death. For me, poetry always takes place in the verge, and verges
always shimmer because the light of the mind shines on both categories at once, trying to

distinguish between them”(How to Read a Poem 182). In her poem, “Cutting Tall Grass’

(Raw Heaven) she suggests that life itself requires our ﬁJll attention to this shimmering

 

verge:
[. . ...] But one must love the vehicle, the sun,
the bugs thrown up behind and the swallows
snatching bugs at the wheels to love a lawn,
the old grass spewn in the bleak shadows,
the new grass smelling of wet and slight rot,
to love to live between what is and is not. (lines 10-14)

Unsurprisingly, like her metaphysical grandfather, Donne (whom she resembles
most), one of Peacock’s central poetic themes is death.7 In fact, she writes that “there are
really only two subjects of lyric poetry, and these are the two things that most rivet our
attention: love and death” (How to Read a Poem 34). It is love that she writes about
most often (although often within the context of death, loss and sacriﬁce) and in a short
autobiographical piece for the recent edition of Contemporary Poets, she writes that her
central poetic theme is love, “in all its manifestations: family love, eroticism, love of
self, altruism, religious love, and hatred, of course too” (933). Unﬂinchingly she writes
about these complex themes with a scrupulous gaze and a willful and unabashed attention
that avoids self-pity. She insists on examining each detail of them, even the taboo:

masturbation, oral sex, menstruation, abortion, child abuse and alcoholism. In Donnean

151

 

and Millayan fashion, Peacock describes her experiences with great bravado: erotic
desire and spirituality cohabit in the surge of her lover’s rising penis and physical and
emotional loss manifests itself in the sticky afterbirth of an abortion or in an imagined
subway ride to an urban Hades.

Despite the highly personal nature of Peacock’s subjects, her metaphysical
scrutiny steers her poems away from the autobiographical confessional utterance I
prevalent in the second half of the twentieth century and works towards universalization .

of experience.8 She explains in her critical prose on privacy “Sweet Adversity”: “Truth

 

always forms its own integrity, separate from whatever emotional and social context that

3-1.1.

generates it. Truth lifts experience out of the personal into the universal, exploding

secrecy, and by doing so grants the personality of the writer her integrity, her privacy,

even if she has just used an intimate detail of her own life. This is the age-old concept of

everywoman [. . .]” (94). For Peacock, the move from the personal to the universal,
however, is more than telling secrets; it requires what she refers to on several occasions

“vigilance” or even “hypervigilance” (Iﬂ 308 and 85). Peacock acknowledges in her

memoir, Pieces, that her poetry depends upon it.

 

A person changing violently, like my father, requires vigilance. But a
concept evolving requires awareness, calmly satisfying and deep. I valued
this understanding because events drove me inward so far that I often lost
touch with them, living instead through a book. While fantasies saved my
mental life, they still made a wall between me and my own felt
experience. [. . ..] Yet for richly lived experience--and that includes pain--

denial must give way to awareness. And for poetry awareness must

152

 

operate keenly because it is the source of precise language. And so you
must perceive sharply, whether that is the stab of a crimson dahlia against
a wet wrought-iron fence, or the stab of realization as its spreads across
your tearstained face. (308)

In her introduction to The Private 1: Privacyin a Public World, she again explains
her poetic vigilance: “hypervigilance [. . .] provided me with a capacity to notice details
that hardly anyone else noticed. When a poet describes such details, she can ﬁll her
poems with shocks of recognition for readers. Everyone knows what the poet is talking
about, yet it all feels original because it is so sharply perceived that the imaginary garden
comes to seem as real as the toad squatting in it” (85). Peacock’s vigilant poetic--enacted
through precise diction, unﬂinching detail, and felt multi-dimensional experience-- steer
her not only away from the personal confession towards universal recognition, but also
toward a metaphysical poetry of wit.

Metaphysical wit is characterized by its calculated surprise and its delight in the
unexpected, what Peacock above calls “shocks of recognition.” It creates emotional
surprise by precise diction, extended metaphors and similes, puns and other rhetorical
tropes and ﬁgures to project psychological states. These rhetorical devices play up the
unexpected combinations or contrasts of generally diverse ideas or images, especially of
incompatible or contraries. In metaphysical poetry we ﬁnd the exploitation of seemingly
incompatible images most noticeably in the form of a conceit, such as when Wilbur
compares laundry to angels, when Marvell compares lovers to birds of prey, or most

notoriously when Crashaw describes Mary Magdalene’s eyes as “Two walking baths;

153

W?

 

{I -

 

two weeping motions, / portable and compendious oceans” (“The Weeper” lines 1 13-
114)."

As with seventeenth century and twentieth century metaphysical poetry, we are
acutely aware of the disparities of materials Peacock’s poems and their conceits present.
In riddle-like fashion, we must puzzle out her analogies: in “Anger Sweetened” we must
solve how anger is like a chocolate covered grasshopper, in “Guilt” how a sister’s letters
are like crawling insects, and in “The Fare” how love for a deceased mother is like a
subway token. Not only must we work to reconcile the disparities between the poems’
tenors and vehicles, but we are confronted with the analogical machinery of the analogies
themselves--driven by the poems’ formal metrics and dramatic cadences. The effect is
that emphasis rests on not only the items compared, but on the rhetorical (analogical and
emotional) act itself.

Eliot assessed this very aspect in Donne’s poetry. He deﬁned Donne’s
characteristic use of the conceit as “the extravagant development of a simile or a
metaphor to emphasize an idea; the focus is transferred from the original idea to the
pleasure of the exactness with which the simile can be carried out in detail” (Clark
Lecture VI [Crashaw] M 180). We perceive this effect when Donne likens two lovers
to a compass in his poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.” The poem is a farewell,
but one in which the speaker forbids weeping; demonstration of emotion would profane
their love. He argues, instead, that their separation should be as unobtrusive as the
passing of a holy man, so quiet that the rest of the world would not know when body and

spirit had separated: "‘Twere profanation of our joys/ To tell the laity our love" (lines 7-

154

8). He proposes, instead, the following lovers-to-compass analogy to argue for the role
their love should play in each other’s absence.
If they be two [soules], they are two so
As stiffe twin compasses are two,
Thy soule the ﬁxt foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if the other doe.

And though it in the center is,

yet when the other far doth rome,

 

if]

It leanes, and hearkens after it,

And growes erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like the' other foot, obliquely runne.
Thy ﬁrmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end, where I begune. (lines 21-36)l0
Donne’s comparison is a prime example of metaphysical wit enacted through
conceit. A metaphysical conceit attempts to express the incomparable nature of spiritual
or sensual experience by way of ﬁgural comparison-~in the above conceit, human love. It
differs from traditional metaphor in that it is a functional comparison, which links images
and ideas from heterogeneous realms, with the goal of producing intellectual insight,

often based on several logical parallels. A conceit succeeds, as Helen Gardner points out

 

in her introduction to her anthology of metaphysical poetry, Circumference, “when we

155

 

are made to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikeness.” Stressing

the intellectual aspect of the conceit, Gardner links the conceit with wit. The conceit

creates a shock of recognition, precisely because the two items being compared do not

physically resemble each other. Donne’s compass conceit involves surprise. It startles us

into looking at things in a new, unconventional manner. The analogy is both unexpected

and remarkably appropriate.

Peacock’s “Anger Sweetened” (qtd. in full Take Heart), perhaps her most

playfully linguistic poem, provides a similar example of Donnean wit enacted through

conceu.

What we don’t forget is what we don’t say.

I mourn the leaps of anger covered

by quizzical looks, grasshoppers covered

by coagulating chocolate. Each word,

like a leggy thing that would have sprung away,
we caught and candiﬁed so it would stay

spindly and alarmed, poised in our presence,
dead, but in the shape of its old essence.

We must eat them now. We must eat the words
we should have let go but preserved, thinking

to hide them. They were as small as insects blinking
in our hands, but now they are stiff and shirred
with sweet to twice their size, so what we gagged

will gag us now that we are so enraged.

156

The poem’s seemingly simple opening declaration, “What we don’t forget is what
we don’t say”-- accented by its syntactical parallelism and closure (3 complete sentence)-
-emphasizes human tendency to mistakenly perceive forgetting and not saying as not only
compatible, but one and the same. The rest of the sonnet sets out to illustrate just how
devastating this mistake might be through its comparison of unspoken anger to a
grasshopper covered in coagulating chocolate. The unusual comparison (a component of
Peacock’s wit) draws on biblical, literary and social tropes and thus in metaphysical
fashion permits logically consistent meanings within the scope of single image. The
grasshopper holds various meanings in literature and Peacock incorporates several of
them in this strange analogy. The grasshopper recalls the locusts in the Bible, those
hoards of pests that God sends as punishment: ﬁrst as a plague on Israel (Exodus 10:4)
and later, it is predicted, as ﬁnal retribution, leading to human devastation (Revelations
9:3). Both accounts stem from God’s anger and direly warn of the havoc anger can
evoke. The grasshopper is also a familiar trope found in literature (and a favorite poetic
symbol in English renaissance poetry). The grasshopper, as DC Allen in Image and
Meaning: Metaphoric Traditions in Renaissance Poetry informs us, was believed to "had
once been a human artist and continued to accompany and instruct human artists; that it
was a king, an aristocrat, a badge of royalty, a poet; and that it was identiﬁed with men in
political disfavor" (82). In Richard Lovelace’s “The Grasshopper,” the grasshopper
serves perfectly to express the royalist lament following the execution of King Charles.
The poem begins in summer when the grasshopper (the Cavalier) sings his merry song,
but with autumn comes the harvest and the sickle (the ascension of Cromwell). The

grasshopper’s "golden ears are cropped; / / Sharp frosty ﬁngers all your ﬂow's have

157

topped, / And what scythes speared, winds shave off quite" (lines 13-16). Peacock’s
chocolate covered grasshopper incorporates several logical meanings of the grasshopper-
image: anger induced plague (excess) and as a linguistic mute (lack). The use of
contrary images (excess and lack) emphasizes the disparate qualities not only between
tenor and vehicle, but also within the vehicle. The result is that when the conceit’s
discordant images are reconciled, the conceit’s wit is felt.

The poem works towards reconciliation of its contrary images through its parallel
syntactic structures and precise diction. The tenor, “anger covered / by quizzical looks,”
is perfectly balanced by the vehicle, “grasshoppers covered / by coagulating chocolate.”
The parallel structure of the two parts of the metaphor emphasizes the analogy, which the
repetition of “covered” fuses. Peacock’s diction is likewise precise: the spurring action
of “leaps” is the polar opposite of the retardant “coagulating,” creating a linguistic
stalemate that will only increase as the poem progresses and the anger congeals.
Peacock’s use of the adjective “quizzical,” meaning both puzzling and mocking, suggests
that the doomed couple are at least semi-cognizant of their mistake and yet ﬁnd
themselves caught up in the sheer delicacy of the event.II

The poem concludes with a tour-dc force of interlocking aural and visual play in
which the sweetened anger overpowers the initial emotion, “so what we gagged / will gag
us now that we are so enraged.” The verb-to-noun transformation of the active “gagged”
to the acted upon “gag” leads inevitably to the couple’s new state in which they ﬁnd
themselves stuck in coagulated anger, “enraged.” Anger sweetened turns out to be not
only anger tempered, but also anger intensiﬁed by the very additive meant to make it

palatable. The irony of the poem, of course, is that anger sweetened becomes completely

158

 

 

'1'" __

 

distasteful. The very thing they had wished to obliterate, traps and transforms
(“coagulates”) the couple and the poem itself is forced to end. The far-fetched
association of the sonnet creates a functional image, which objectiﬁes the emotion. In
fact, anger is so concretely rendered that the speaker and her poem are gagged by it! We
see now, how Peacock’s far-fetched association, like Donne’s compass conceit, proves
precisely appropriate.

Peacock bumps up the voltage of this poem’s metaphysical play through her use
of the sonnet form. Traditionally a form used to temper, moderate and restrain, the
sonnet suits Peacock’s theme and metaphysical method. In her essay on form, “From
Gilded Cage to Rib Cage,” she argues that form may be employed not only “to match the
feeling” but also as “a choice to contain, to control, or otherwise make the feeling safe to
explore” (70). “The verse form almost becomes the arms of comfort in which to express
the enormity of emotion” (emphasis mine 71). Peacock’s form-as-body metaphor asserts
her belief that form, instead of conﬁning (“gilded cage”) becomes the skeleton (“rib
cage”) that holds the poem--its emotions and its narrative--together. Peacock uses this
body metaphor again in a symposium on New F ormalism, published in the journal

Crosscurrents. Here, she is quick to point out that containment does not mean something

 

outside of the speaker or the experience, and warns against “the fallacy of the verse form
as a container or the outside of something, and therefore, as an outside, something
superﬁcial, not deep, merely technical.” She goes on to explain that “If you think of form
as the outside of an Inside, that is only half the truth. Verse form is also inside the Inside.
It acts as a skeleton as well as a skin. Form is body. Verse form literally embodies the

emotion of the poem, in the sense that embodiment both is and contains the life it is the

159

body of” (“From Gilded Cage to Rib Cage” 72). Form tempers--contains and enhances--
the poem’s complex emotions, concretely rendering the poem’s experience. In “Anger
Sweetened,” the interlocking rhyme scheme of the sonnet insists on its analogies, thereby
helping to concretely deﬁne anger; it sweetens the poem’s emotive and intellectual
experience.

Similarly, Peacock’s “Prayer” (Take Heart) thematically explores how experience
is sweetened through restraint. Reﬂecting on adolescent sexual curiosity, the poem
emphasizes how social, religious and logistical restraints (similar to a poem’s metrical
restraints) placed on desire only intensify the desire. Recalling her own adolescence, she
remembers:

[ ................................ ] How sexy to be

In Sunday School class hunched with girl-chasing,
Necking-prone boys and boy-crazy Christian
Girls cajoled, attended to, by Herbie.” (lines 4-7)

Physical and mental tempering of desire is learned before adolescence, of course,
and the speaker recalls that children are taught early the game of “Here’s the church,
here’s the steeple, open the doors, / And see the people” (lines 8-9). Instead of assuaging
their desire to escape the serrnon’s drone, the game “simply focuses the wiggling. / So
prayer on dates focuses writhing” (lines 1 1-12). Metrical form and rhetoric similarly
focus the poet’s emotions.

“The Guilt” (Original Love) employs another emotion-as-insect conceit to
concretely deﬁne an emotion, this time the speaker’s guilt. Guilt (arising from her

sister’s letters written to her and which she has not Opened) is likened to “sheets of

160

insects that erase / bodies down to their skeletons. 1 can’t face” (lines 1-2). She has
witnessed such destruction through the “horrible advances in photography” (line 4) of
Natural History magazine: carcasses destroyed by the insatiable appetite of insects
blown up “to a sticky, gargantuan hairtaffy” (line 5). Rhyming “hairtaffy” with
“photography” cements the mental image of the insect to the speaker’s horror so that the
letters and their concomitant guilt, take on, literally, a life of their own, and worse, they
begin to take over hers.

[ .................................... ] The orthography

of my name crawled across the ﬂoral paper

like fragile, thoracic legs. Unanswered, her letters

came faster, their hoardlike script the raper

of each envelope’s ﬁeld.

[ ............................................ ]

The insectile inscribing became an erasing

of what I hoped to be by what I felt I was,

occasionally pictured in science magazines,

something entirely obliterated and picked clean. (lines 1 1-15, 17-20)

The guilt-insect conceit turns out to be a strikingly apt analogy. Like the

grasshopper conceit in “Anger Sweetened,” the insect--what is normally a mere pest--
becomes an overwhelming plague when ignored. Her sister’s letters are like the anger
unspoken in the previous poem. The unread and unanswered letters eat at the speaker

until she is “something entirely obliterated and picked clean” (line 29).

161

However intellectually apt Peacock’s conceits, there is something fanciful about
them; a pleasure felt in her ability to formulate her experiences through wit. Peacock’s
wit not only creates emotional surprise by the unexpected combination or contrast of
diverse ideas or images (the two insect conceits) or in the use of juxtaposition (“Prayer”)
but also includes humor. Humor is a crucial element of her wit and she employs it for
serious ends. Like Wilbur, she often engages humor to ﬁise physical and spiritual
experience. She also uses humor in a manner that is reminiscent of Creeley, for whom
humor provides a protective distancing for the poet to articulate experience. ’2 The comic
mode hearkens back to seventeenth century poetry’s use of wit to serve a psychological
purpose. It relieves psychic tensions while enabling the speaker to deal with matters that
would Otherwise be too emotionally painful or socially forbidden for discussion. ’3

“Petting and Being a Pet” (Raw Heaven) provides a salient example of how
Peacock wittily employs humor to address the often painful emotion of human need and
to merge physical and nonphysical realms of experience. The sonnet demands quoting in
full so that we can appreciate its aural and visual play.

Dogs, lambs, chickens, women—pets of all nations!
Fur or feathers under the kneading ﬁngers

of those who long to have pets, relations

of softness to ﬂeshiness, how a hand lingers

on a head or on the ear of a head, thus the sound

of petting and being a pet, a sounding horn:

needing met by kneading of bone which is found

through ﬂesh. Have you ever felt forlorn

162

 

looking at a cat on someone else’s lap, wishing
the cat was you? Look how the animal is passed 1
from lap to lap in a room, so many wishing
to hold it. We wish to be in the vast
caress, both animal and hand. Like eyes make sense
of seeing, touch makes being make sense.

Peacock mercilessly plays on “pet” as noun and verb (a conceptual pun) and on

“kneading” and “needing” (an aural pun) to emphasize the emotional, intellectual and

physicality of human desire. Puns ask the reader to emotionally and intellectually strike

0'. 1 “nu—.m‘p'li 1 'Lx_F'iI
.. .
I,

out across the multidimensional grid of human experience, and as discussed previously,
they are a favorite device of metaphysical poets because they stress the very possibilities
of language play. They “restore faith in the system of communication without which
there would be no understanding at all” (Bates 2). Readers follow the signiﬁers through
to their various destinations and thus effectively re-stabilize them, along with the
language system. Peacock’s puns consistently work to bring about order and to re-
establish viable unions between the material and the spiritual, and between self and other.
Aural and visual puns expertly infuse the physical actions of the dramatic speaker with
spirituality, and it is the reader’s co-creating that fuses the ﬁgural and literal at the word
level. Thus, Peacock ingeniously enacts the fusion of intellectual, emotional and physical
experience through rhetoric.

Peacock’s playful manipulation of the Shakespearean sonnet fuels the fusion of
multidimensional experience. Liam Rector in the recent edition of Contemporary Poets

has noted this particular quality of Peacock’s poetry in general, positing “the most

163

 

 

important formal device of her poetry is the underlying dramatic form that is always
driving the machine, bending the meanings in their prOpulsion toward closure, sculpting a
lineation in which each line is both an action, a recovery, and a horizon” (933). “In
Petting and Being Pet” the fourteen-line sonnet is highly crafted to induce conceptual and
emotional understanding. Its three quatrains and a couplet dramatically pushes towards

closure and correspondence. Note how the rhymes pair up: “nations / relations,”

99 6‘ 99 66 99 6‘

“ﬁngers/lingers, sound/ found,” “horn / forlorn, wishing/wishing, passed / vast,”
“sense / sense.” Each rhyme enacts the poem’s desire for union. For example, the large
scale “nations” is rendered intimate by “relations,” while the desire for touch, “ﬁngers,”
is answered by the complimenting “lingers.” The “wishing /wishing” pair, with its
repetition, drives home the speaker’s desire (wish). The poem concludes with its exact
rhymed couplet (“sense / sense”) which enacts a ﬁnal pun (mental sense and physical
sensation) that collapses the boundaries between self and other, and between giving and
receiving. The pun thereby drives home the poem’s desire for correspondence between
the physical and the nonphysical realm, enacted by rational and emotional engagement:

“sensef’

Peacock’s “The Fare” (Original Love), written following Peacock’s mother’s

 

death, similarly uses humor to navigate the tenuous realm between the physical and the
nonphysical, between life and death and between holding on and letting go. Humor
provides the necessary balance to steer through her complex emotions to arrive at the
realization that while we can never fully let go of the human need to be mothered, even
while we continue to ﬁght it, we must let go. In How to Read a Poem, Peacock provides

a reading of this poem, explaining, “my inability to conceive of my mother without a

164

living body (right down to handing her perfume to the mortician--absolutely true, and
true to what he said) turns toward the dread of making a hideously permanent mistake,
and ultimately toward not being able to let my mother go, even as I instruct her to drop
the earrings, to let go...” (185).

“The Fare” is an imagined dialogue between the speaker and her deceased
mother. The daughter imagines her mother lying in her cofﬁn lamenting the fact that her
daughter has buried her in a pair of earrings that seem destined to pinch her ears for
eternity. She hears her mother chastising, “Take my earrings ofﬂ / I’ve had them on all
day, for God’s sake!” (lines 6-7). The daughter, equally as worried as she is exasperated
with the mother who will always test her, thinks, ”You’ll never relax” (line 12) and
concedes, “I should have buried you in slippers and a bathrobe” (line 16). The dialogue’s
climax occurs when she must face head on the complex emotions she feels: guilt,
inadequacy, sadness and most importantly, the realization that she must let her mother go.

[ .................................. ] 0 please

do it for me. I can’t stand the thought of you
pained by vanity forever. Reach your cold hand
up to your ear and pull and hear the click

of the clasp hinge unclasping, then reach

across your face and get the other one

and—this effort could take you days, I know,
since you’re dead. Let it be your last effort:

to change my mistake and be dead in comfort.

Lower your hands in their places

165

on your low mound of stomach and rest, rest

you can let go. They’ll fall

to the bottom of the casket like tokens,

return fare fallen to the pit

of a coat’s satin pocket. (line 17-31)
The speaker’s realization of her “mistake” allows for the transformation of the earrings
from that which plagued her mother, into the very tokens the mother needs to make her
safe journey. Perhaps because she cannot fully imagine death, despite her knowledge she
must accept it, the daughter imagines the earrings as subway tokens for her mother’s safe
travel and return. The subway’s descent under ground is of course a descent into a kind
of urban Hades, where the dead must offer coins as payment to be ferried across the river
Styx, and to someday be returned home again. Peacock’s token metaphor provides a
means for the daughter to accept the physical loss of her mother, while assuring the
daughter that she may recall the memory of her mother whenever needed. The humor of
the conceit thus provides a safe distance from which the speaker may come to terms with
her mother’s death.

Creeley, praising Peacock’s poetry, points speciﬁcally to its “saving humor”
(Original Love jacket). Peacock’s poetry in fact shares many of the same metaphysical
qualities we see in Creeley’s poetry, especially in her treatment of love. Peacock, like
Creeley--and Creeley’s metaphysical father, Donne--insists that that the world of love
contains everything of value and that it is the only one worth exploring and possessing.
The microcosmic world of love becomes larger and more important than the macrocosm.

For Peacock, love also provides a model for her metaphysical poetry. She explains,

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“understanding is gained just the way a love relationship is deepened--through the blind
delight of examining it with the senses and the intellect all at once. Emotive brainwork
creates luxurious understanding” (How to Read a Poem 4).

In the opening poem in Raw Heaven, “Distance Up Close,” Peacock likens
embracing the world and its attendant emotions--loss, sorrow, death, acceptance--with the
invitation to love making:

[ .................. ] Embracing the world, nose

to brow with what we’ve got and lost, hugging old sorrows

as they fade into mud and leaves, is like shedding clothes,

is like lovers saying, let ’s-take-oﬂ-our—clothes,

The world is made ﬂesh in their bodies: does is knows.

The world is made ﬂesh by the snows

fading, then merging into mud and leaves, goals

of long ago emerging among trees in rows

in a distance molten as the world comes up close. (lines 14-22)
The poem renders the world of love as one complete with its feat of perfect rhyme from
its very ﬁrst line to its last. The long “0” creates a circle that contains, as in Donne’s and
Creeley’s poetry, a world of love, a world “made ﬂesh.”

Despite the spiritual infusion of Peacock’s poems, however, she insists on the
physical. As she writes in “Forgiveness” (Original Love): “Forgiveness is not an
abstraction / it needs a body to feel its relief” (lines 1-2), and it is the erotic physical body
we repeatedly encounter in Peacock’s inspection of love. In “Lullaby” (Original Love)

the physicality of lovemaking is positively sexy.

167

'r
l

 

 

 

The poem is structured using analogies between the natural world and the human
body and between the intimate bedroom and the larger cosmos. The Ontario night sky is
“Big as a down duvet” (line 1) drawn close “over the naked earth” (line 3). The lovers in
bed mirror this image:

[ ................... ] here we lie

gossiping in a circle of light

under our own big comforter,
buried nude as bulbs. [. . .] (lines 3-6).

Peacock’s fairly straightforward analogies between the natural world and the
human body, between God’s universe and the world of the bedroom recall a slew of
renaissance poems: Donne’s “The Rapture,” Lovelace’s “To Chloris, Love Made in the
First Age” and Thomas Carew’s “A Rapture.” Peacock’s graphic metamorphosis of the
body into vegetation to depict her lover’s aroused sexual organ, however recalls most
notably Herrick’s masturbatory reverie, "The Vine." An examination of Peacock’s
“Lullaby” and Herrick’s “The Vine" illustrates a similar metaphysical method, and yet a
method that yields contrary results. While both poems take place upon a bed and speak
of sexual encounters, Herrick couches his in the popular seventeenth century dream-
motif; Peacock’s sexual encounter takes place in a distinct place, under a “real sky” (line
9) and a “real earth” (line 10) in Ontario Canada.

Herrick’s poem begins:

I dreamed this mortal part of mine

Was metamorphosed to a vine

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Which crawling one and every way

Enthralled my dainty Lucia. (lines 1-4)
The speaker imagines that his sexual organ has been changed into a vine which has the
power to subject his beloved, Lucia, to his will. In his dream, he subtly seduces her; his
“tendrils did surprise” her (line 6). That he dreams of such sexual prowess, suggests that
when he is awake he is unable to make Lucia his subject. Moreover, the poem’s curious
analogy that compares Lucia to a "Young Bacchus ravished by his tree" (line 13)
intimates that the speaker’s reverie is as much a power fantasy as it is a sexual one. The
verb "ravished" (like “enthralled" used in line four) holds two possible meanings: 1.
Lucia is enraptured by the vine, the producer of grapes, which is intoxicating; 2. Lucia is
raped by the vine, alluding to the violent effects of the grape’s intoxicated frenzy in the
Bacchus myth. The reference to Bacchus emphasizes the ﬂeeting nature of the speaker’s
fantasy.

Such ﬂeeting pleasures there I took

That with the fancy I awoke,

And found (ah me!) this ﬂesh of mine

More like a stock than like a vine (lines 20-23).
The speaker awakes just before sexual climax, “more stock than vine.” Remembering the
high use of imprisonment adjectives however, “stock” may refer not only to the speaker’s
erection, but also to the prison stockade: he is a prisoner of his own fantasy which

renders him powerless to reach his climax.

169

 

In contrast, Peacock’s poem (reminiscent of Millay) rejects the pining suitor/
resisting lady motif found so often in seventeenth century metaphysical poetry and
requites her lover’s sexual desire. Love is unabashedly fulﬁlled and celebrated:

[ ............ ] I slide south

to grow your hyacinth in my mouth.

far above, the constellations blur (lines 6-8).
The earth moves for these lovers. Sexual intimacy, opposed to sexual fantasy, offers a
unique power--the very power Herrick’s speaker lacks in his monastic fantasy; it strikes a
momentary correspondence between the larger universe and the couple’s intimate sphere.
“Stars make a pattern / above; down here our pattern is ﬁreﬂies” (lines 10-11). Peacock’s
patterns recall Donne’s “patteme” of love in “The Canonization” (line 45). Thus while
her metaphysical ﬁgure recalls Herrick’s, her treatment of love in more akin to Donne’s:
“The Canonization” also grants sexual love religious signiﬁcance and provide a
“patteme” for others. Also akin to Donne’s treatment of love, Peacock does not privilege
spiritual union over physical union. Thus, in “Lullaby, she shifts her focus back to the
physical: “Earth settles / real hyacinths in place” (lines 13-14).

Peacock’s highly erotic aubade, “The Surge,” likewise imbeds the spiritual within
the physical act of lovemaking using an admixture of the erotic, the religious and humor
to deﬁne fully the complexities of human love.14 The poem bluntly celebrates her lover’s
morning erection which she gleefully claims, “I hadn't tried / by any conscious gesture to
raise” (3-4). She revels in the awareness that “there was nothing I did to cam its praise /
but be alive next to it” (6-7). Robert McPhillips in “The New Forrnalism and the Revival

of the Love Lyric” cogently explains how “the lover’s erection becomes a symbol [. . .] of

170

 

 

3?

the sacred as well as the erotic ‘surge’ which unites the lovers, spirit embodied in ﬂesh”
(83).

there is nothing I need do to please but be.

To do nothing but be, and thus be wanted:

so, this is love. Look what happened, he says as he

watches my hand draw out what it did not raise,
purpled in sleep. The surge inside me must

come from inside me, where the world lies,

just as the prick stiffened to amaze us

came from a rising inside him. The blessing

we feel is knowing that out there is nothing.

The world inside us has come to praise us. (lines 13-22)
The poem’s form enacts the spiritual and physical fusion of the lover’s morning arousal.
Blunt sexual language couples with the sensually alliterative and rhymed stanzas so that
the “prick” of recognition is emotionally felt as the poem’s form simultaneously swells.
The “surge” thus denotes not only the physical swelling, but also the sudden surge of
recognition and the energizing electrical current. This prick of recognition is similar to
the daughter’s recognition that she must let her mother go in “The Fare.” Peacock
deﬁnes this moment as:

The O of recognition, of orgasm, the facing of what we suddenly have to

admit is the shocking reality of a single moment. 0h points to the moment

171

as we experience it, without past or future impinging on its nowness. 0h
heralds genuine emotion, the feeling underneath all other feelings,
surfacing with the thrill of a dolphin as it arches above water always made
bluer by the arc of its presence. (How to Read a Poem 183-4)

The dolphin’s graceful arc proves an apt metaphor for Peacock’s metaphysical
poetic. Her intensely felt experiences surge within the formal and analogical framework
of her poems. Dramatic, rhetorical and physically grounded in precise details of the
material world, Peacock’s poetry brings to contemporary poetry all the best qualities of
the metaphysical tradition, “without past or future impinging on its nowness.”

Peacock’s poetry consistently presents an intense scrutiny into emotional,
psychological and physical experience and insists that this scrutiny may only be achieved
through a highly rhetorical poetic of conceits, puns and textual allusions. In addition, it
combines this metaphysical method to uniquely American imagery, diction, and

postmodern sensibilities. It extends the metaphysical tradition.

Whether Peacock’s innovative metaphysical play stretches into the twenty-ﬁrst
century, or whether contemporary poets follow her example, we will have to wait to see.
However, because the metaphysical poem strikes at the heart of the centuries-old debate
between the mimetic and the rhetorical, between the intuitive and the analogical, and
between the individual confession and the dramatic performance, the present seems ripe
for metaphysical poets. Poets writing today grudgingly inherit nearly a half-decade of
poetry steeped in romantic idealization of the individual and the unhampered utterance of

confessional verse. The last two decades bequeath a poetic inheritance that ﬂaunts its

172

postmodern skepticism toward language and denial of the centering of experience or the
voicing of universal themes. Happily, poets at the crux of a new century may draw from
yet another tradition. They inherit what Dana Gioia terms an “available tradition” of
metaphysical poetry. Opposed to “the tradition,” an available tradition is “namely that
small portion of the past a poet ﬁnds useable at a particular moment in history. The
available tradition is not a ﬁxed entity but a dynamic concept. It changes and indeed
must change--not only from generation to generation but also from audience to audience”
(“The Poet in An Age of Prose” 32). The present proves ripe for a renewed look at the

metaphysical in which contemporary poets may draw on not only seventeenth century

metaphysical poetry, but also twentieth century American metaphysical poetry.

173

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

’ All subsequent references to The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry will appear as
_V__B- Complete citation located in Works Cited.

2 Sona Raiziss’s The Metaphysical Passion provides an informative catalogue of
metaphysical studies between 1900 and 1950, including a graph that takes into account
about 1500 items. Critical studies on metaphysical poetry peaked in 1935, with 73
studies. By 1950, the numbers were down to 15 (Raiziss 244). Complete citation located
in Works Cited.

3 All subsequent references to John Donne’s poetry are found in John Donne:
The Complete English Poems, edited by C. A. Patrides. All subsequent references to

Andrew Marvell’s poetry are found in George Herbert and the Seventeenth Century

Religious Poets, edited by Mario A. De Cesare. Complete citations located in Works

 

Cited.

4 All subsequent references to Henry Vaughan’s poetry are found in Me
Herbert and the Seventeenth Century Religious Poets, edited by Mario A. De Cesare.
Complete citation located in Works Cited.

5 A postmodern reading undercuts the modernist belief in the objective correlative
in a way that brings the move closer to the metaphysical move. That is, it makes the

objective correlative rhetorical: metaphoric and not objective.

174

CHAPTER ONE
’ I adopt this generalization knowing one could push the case that much poetry
touches on these subjects.
2 I classify Andrew Marvell’s secular poetry as existing within the Cavalier genre
of love poetry. I am using the term “Cavalier” to denote the love poetry that revolted
against Petrarchan conventions and its idealization of the female and which did so by

incorporating a metaphysical method to do 50. Thus Marvell, although he was not a

 

IFN

royalist, may be still classiﬁed as Cavalier.

3 All subsequent references to Millay’s poetry are from her Collected Poems.
Complete citation located in Works Cited.

4 All subsequent references to Richard Lovelace’s poetry are from Ben Jonson
and the Cavalier Poets, edited by Hugh Maclean. Complete citation located in Works
Cited.

5 I use the terms “sentimentality” and escapism” as tactilely employed by New
Critical readings of these two periods to underscore Millay’s afﬁnities with New
Criticism which New Critics elected to ignore.

6 New Critical proponents Allen Tate and Cleanth Brooks likewise criticize
Millay’s poetry for not being intellectual and being too sentimental. For reviews of
Millay’s poetry by Tate and Brooks, see Freedman. Complete citation located in Works
Cited.

7 Stacy Hubbard’s essay provides an astute reading of how Millay effectively

escapes the “carpe diem’s discursive logic, in which the female auditor’s virginity and

175

her associations with the grave virtually effect her silence and are ﬁgured by it” (104).
Nowhere in her essay, however, does she consider why the Cavalier poets so frequently
employed the carpe diem motif in their own poetry, often in revealing ways that ridiculed
their speakers. Hubbard seems to accept at face value the carpe diem motif as self-
indulgent reverie on the seventeenth century poet’s part, without any social or political
bearing.

8 See, for example: Stacy Carson Hubbard’s “Love’s ‘Little Day’” and Cheryl
Walker’s “Antimodern, Modern, and Postmodern Millay: Contexts of Reevaluation."
Complete citations located in Works Cited.

9 Unfortunately in the Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay the author’s
epi graphs are omitted.

’0 Most notably is Debra Fried in "Andromeda Unbound: Gender and Genre in
Millay's Sonnets." Fried argues that while Millay’s sequence recalls Donne’s Songs and
wits, it is not necessary for the modern reader to be familiar with Donne’s poems in
order to fully appreciate Millay’s sequence.

" The report of James I’s order appears in a letter from John Chamberlain dated
January 26, 1620. Segments are reprinted in Blaine Hobby’s “The Politics of Gender.”
Complete citation located in Works Cited.

’2 Donne’s “The Negative Love” presents his most sustained use of negation.

’3 All subsequent references to Robert Herrick’s poetry are from Ben Jonson and

the Cavalier Poets, edited by Hugh Maclean. Complete citation located in Works Cited.

 

 

'4 All subsequent references to Thomas Carew’s poetry are from Ben Jonson and

the Cavalier Poets, edited by Hugh Maclean. Complete citation located in Works Cited.

176

’5 For an astute feminist and historical discussion of economic metaphors in
seventeenth century poetry see Elaine Hobby’s "The Politics of Gender." Complete

citation located in Works Cited.

CHAPTER Two

’ TS. Eliot in 1954 remarked, “I must admit to a continuing respect for Robert
Lowell and Richard Wilbur” and Cleanth Brooks admires Wilbur's refusal to “retreat
from this world and take refuge in an abstract order; rather, he accepts the things of this
world as having their own powerful reality, but a reality that reaches beyond
themselves”(“This World and More: The Poetry of Richard Wilbur.” Christianity and
Literature 42.4 (Summer 1993): 541-550).

2 Wilbur's ﬁrst three books are as follows: The Beautiful Changes and Other

Poems (1947), Ceremony and Other Poems (1950) and Things of This World (1956).

 

3 In 1967 when asked which philosophers and theologians impacted him most,
Wilbur again cited Thomas Traheme, along with Augustine and Pascal (Cummins 43).
Complete citation found in Works Cited.

4 In 1966, when Wilbur made this remark, he saw himself as writing more of a
dramatic poem than the ironic meditative poem championed by John Crowe Ransom. He
explains that the “virtue of the dramatic poem is that, while it may not represent the
whole self of the poet, it can (like the love song, hymn, or curse) give free expression to
some one compelling mood or attitude” (“On My Own Work” 156). Complete citation

located in Works Cited.

177

5 All subsequent references to Wilbur’s poems are from New and Collected
Em, unless otherwise noted. Complete citation located in Works Cited.

6 More recently, Ashley Brown’s review of Mayﬂies links Wilbur's use of form
and rhyme to Herrick, though she too fails to cite any speciﬁc example of this afﬁnity.
Instead she belittles the similarity saying, “Herrick also lived through a violent period of
English history that didn’t affect his verse” (World Literature Today 75.1 (Winter 2000):.
p.123)

7 Marcus provides this interesting analysis of Herrick’s literary reputation:
“During the early twentieth century [. . .] his association with lyric ease and country jollity
did not help his reputation among critics who admired the ‘strong lines’ of Ben Johnson
and John Donne [. . ..] For F. R. Leavis he was ‘trivially charming’; for T. S. Eliot he was

999

the paradigmatic ‘minor poet (171). Complete citation location in Works Cited.

8 For a full discussion of Eliot’s evaluation of seventeenth century metaphysical
poetry, please see the earlier Introduction to this dissertation.

9 Numerous critics have since repeated Jarrell’s criticism. Jarrell’s criticism of
Wilbur was not always negative, however. He did call Wilbur's “A Baroque Wall-
Fountain” “one of the most nearly perfect poems any American has ever written” (“Fifty
Years of American Poetry”). Complete citation located in Works Cited.

’0 Things of This World won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the National Book
Award.

H In “Conversations” Wilbur notes the connection between Augustine and this

poem.

178

 

’2 Wilbur's belief in the Logos and its metaphysical potential is possibly indebted
in part to Eliot. If we recall, Eliot wrote: “poetry makes truth more fully real to us; it is
the creation of a serious embodiment. It is the making of the Word Flesh” (“Poetry and

Propaganda,” Selected Essays). Complete citation located in Works Cited.

 

’3 Discussing the poem “Lying,” Wilbur deems that “It is a fundamental impulse
of poetry to refresh the aspect of things” (“On Lying” 139). Complete citation located in
Works Cited.

’4 All references to Thomas Traheme’s poetry are found in George Herbert and
the Seventeenth Century Religious Poets, ed. by Mario A. De Cesare. Complete citation

located in Works Cited.

CHAPTER THREE

’ All subsequent references to Robert Creeley’s Collected Essays appear in text
as CE.

2 Since such an extensive number of books and essays have been written about
Creeley’s association with Charles Olson, the Experimental Black Mountain College and
the Projectivist Movement, I feel it is unnecessary to review this biographical material
here. Instead, I wish to focus only on how the Projective is akin to the metaphysical.

3 Robert Creeley and Charles Olson’s correspondence began in April 1950 and
continued until Olson’s death in January 1970. When they ﬁrst began writing to each
other, Olson had already begun thinking about his theories of the Projective (in fact he
mentions that he is working on an essay about Projective poetry in his very ﬁrst letter to

Creeley, dated April 21, 1950. While the germ of the essay was clearly there, we see in

179

subsequent letters how Creeley had also been working out similar ideas, though more
directed towards prose (which he was writing mostly at this time). Between their ﬁrst
letters to each other and the time “Projective Verse” is published, we witness the co-
mapping of ideas and structure for Olson’s eventual essay. The mutual inﬂuence and
respect between Creeley and Olson is prominent in their letters. For example, in his letter
dated September 19, 1951 Creeley writes, “You have been the only possible inﬂuence on
me; you are the only one who can give me a sense of my own work, which allows me to
make it my own work” (Volume VII 173). Olson responds similarly in his letter dated
September 22, 1951: “Olson is as much or more inﬂuenced by creeley than is creeley
inﬂuenced, for which the sort of thanks that, once in a life, it can be 50” (Volume VII
175). Complete citation located in Works Cited.

4 Creeley has positioned Olson’s writings on the Projective as distinctly
contributing to the shift from a modem to a postmodern poetic, claiming “Olson has
developed theories on the writing and understanding of poetry which place him,
historically, as a bridge between the ﬁrst leaders of the modern movement, such as Pound
and Williams, and some of the most important later innovators” (Book jacket Mg

Olson: Selected Writing). Complete citation located in Works Cited.

 

5 Repeatedly in Creeley’s and Olson’s writings we see that the Projective is not
only a call for a new open poetic but a deliberate rejection of Eliot’s formal poetic. In
fact, Olson argues that Eliot “fails as a dramatist” precisely because he “stayed inside the
non-projective.”

[H]is root is in the mind alone, and a scholastic mind at that (no high

intelleto despite his apparent clarities)--and that, in his listenings he has

180

-—i.m. —_-
" i

I

s.

I

 

 

stayed where the ear and the mind are, has only gone from his ﬁne ear
outward rather than, as I say a projective poet will, down through the
workings of his own throat to that place where breath comes from, where
breath has its beginnings, where drama has to come from, where the
coincident is, all act springs” (“Projective Verse” 26).
Complete citation located in Works Cited.
6 When Williams later recalled how he felt when Eliot's "The Wasteland" ﬁrst
appeared, he wrote:
It wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it and
our brave sallies into the unknown were turned to dust. To me especially
it struck like a sardonic bullet. I felt at once that it had set me back twenty
years, and I 'm sure it did. Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom
just at the moment when I felt we were on the point of an escape to
matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself-- rooted in the
locality which should give it ﬁ'uit" (William Carlos Williams: A
Collection of Critical Esm).
Complete citation located in Works Cited.
7 Olson’s focus on the syllable derives in part from Pound’s assertion that “poetry
/ is the dance of the in/tellect/among the syllables” which Olson cites in a letter to
Creeley, dated June 21 , 1950. Complete citation located in Works Cited.
8 In “A Note on Ezra Pound,” Creeley notes Pound’s “three chief means” to

“charge language with meaning to the utmost degree”:

1. throwing the object (ﬁxed or moving) in to the visual imagination

181

 

 

2. inducing emotional correlations by the sound and rhythm of the speech.
3. inducing both the effects by stimulating the association (intellectual or
emotion) to have remained in the receiver’s consciousness in relation to
the actual words or word groups employed.
(phanopoeia, melopoiea, logopoeia) (Q 27).
Complete citation located in Works Cited.
9 Creeley makes this proclamation in his Monday, June 5, 1950 letter to Olson

who goes on to quote it in “Projective Verse.” Creeley’s declaration resounded,

 

becoming an icon of the Projective Movement. Fellow Black Mountain Poet, Denise
Levertov, adopts Creeley’s famous mantra, but changes it slightly to read, "Form is never
more than the revelation of content,” to which Creeley agrees. He further explains his
statement in his essay “Tales”: “1 would now almost amend the statement to say, ‘Form is
what happens: It’s the fact of things in the world, however they are. SO that form in that
ways is simply the presence of any thing [. ...] What I was trying then to make clear was
that I felt that form--if removed from that kind of intimacy--became something static and
assumptional. I felt that the way a thing was said would immediately declare what was
being said, and so therefore form was never more than an extension of what it was
saying” (Q 30). Complete citation located in Works Cited.

’0 For a more general discussion of puns used by seventeenth century poetry, see
in this dissertation chapter two, pages 74-75.

H A notable exception to this includes Creeley’s poem “The Door” (For Love).

182

 

CHAPTER FOUR

' Peacock deﬁnes herself as a new forrnalist in a discussion with Mahlon Coop.
“Contemporary Proﬁle: Molly Peacock, Non-Buddhist Poet (Online).

2 Broadly speaking, the expansive poets seek to return to the pleasures of rhyme,
meter, music and storytelling. Their goals are to speak to the larger world outside them,
escape the confessional I and to add easy use of science and technology along with
colloquial speech. For an excellent introduction to Expansive Poetry and New
Formalism, see Timothy Steele’s Missing measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt

Against Meter (F ayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1990) and After Formalism:

 

Poets on Form, Narrativegand Tradition, ed. by Annie Finch (Ashland, OR: Storyline
Press, 1999).
3 All subsequent references to Peacock’s How to Read a Poem. . .And Start a

Poetry Circle will appear in the text and in parenthetical references as How to Read a

 

m

4 Several critics have noted Molly Peacock’s metaphysical qualities, and anyone
who picks up her second book, Take Heart (1989), reads on the inside jacket that her
“deeply personal and universal” poems present “metaphysical observations about human
nature and human bonds [which] take root in a lush physical world where form meshes

with feeling, the cerebral with the earthly.” Liam Rector in Contemporary Poets

 

similarly points to her “metaphysical idiom and approach” and “her signature use of
rhyme, employed for dramatic effect” (933). The most sustained argument for Peacock
as a metaphysical poet occurs in Steve Kronen’s “Earthly Quires,” a review of Take

Heart. Kronen acknowledges the afﬁnities between Peacock’s poetry and that of John

183

 

 

Donne: “There is a Donnean wit at work in much of Peacock’s best verse. She is able to
produce and seize upon her idiosyncratic conceits, and with conversational diction (as
guided by the stanzaic rhyming), follow her ramifying logic to its self-made conclusion.”
While Rector and Kronen both herald Molly Peacock as a “metaphysical poet,” neither of
these critics present a sustained discussion of her metaphysical method or provide
analyses of metaphysical poems, although Kronen does point to Peacock’s comparison of
anger to a chocolate covered grasshopper in her sonnet “Anger Sweetened” where he
writes “Peacock’s conceit-making avoids the violent yoking Dr. Johnson speaks of and is

9 “

closer to Eliot s elaboration of a ﬁgure of speech to the farthest stage to which
ingenuity can carry it.” Kronen offers no further analysis. For my analysis of this
conceit, see pages 156-160. Complete Citations for the references to Peacock’s poetry
are located in Works Cited.

5 For a complete analysis of Creeley’s assessment of these debates, see Chapter
three, page 1 l3.

6 Arthur Mortensen’s review of Peacock’s Original Love notes the similarities
between Peacock and Millay, ﬁnding Peacock’s “independent expressions of love and
emotional intimacy” to Millay’s: “She is one of those writers, like Millay, who not only
wants that passion but insists on it” (Egransive Poetry and Music Online Review March
1997. 25 February 25, 2002. <http://home.earthlink.net/~Arthur 505/rev 0397.htm1>).

7 Peacock acknowledges her afﬁnity with seventeenth century metaphysical
poetry, and cites George Herbert, rather than Donne, as a shaping inﬂuence on her poetry.

She lists Herbert’s The Complete English Poems as one of the top twenty books and her

ﬁrst book, And Live Aparg takes its title from George Herbert. As Peacock explains in

 

184

 

 

Paradise, Piece by Piece: “To live apart was a way of having heaven, a calm place, or a

 

least a way of avoiding hell, a jammed place” (160). Peacock’s use of traditional poetic
form, as this chapter will show, reveals an afﬁnity with Herbert’s own desire to temper to
his experiences so that they might be both manageable and understandable. Dr.
Hutchinson wrote in the introduction to The Works of George Herbert that “Herbert often
shows a fear of unlimited space and loves the shelter of an enclosure” (Knight 244).

8 Peacock’s move away from the confessional poem concerned with the poet’s

unique personal anguish, Often at the expense of intelligibility, toward the universal, was

 

a deliberate action on her part. She rejects the confessional utterance prevalent in the l-
second half of the twentieth century in the verse of pioneering poets as Robert Lowell,
Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, even as she acknowledges the inﬂuence of their work on
her own. On Anne Sexton she writes, “She was the Confessional I liked least, but who,
of course, inﬂuenced me most [. . .]. “Sexton wrote straight out about subjects that were
supposed to be kept under wraps: love affairs, abortions, her loathsome ﬁfties wifehood.
In a paradoxical way, by revealing secrets she was protecting her privacy--insofar as
privacy created identity. When I considered what I would take for my subjects as a poet,
I knew that my sexuality would be one of them [. ...]” (The Private 1 89-90). What she
did not like about Sexton was that she “was undeveloped, inchoate, always becoming.
The voice kept sliding, disappearing as the speaker slipped behind the mirror of
metaphor, like my ...my oh dear.” In contrast, Peacock tells us that she “like[s]
poems with distinctly developed, sustained conceits” (90). As we will see later in this

chapter, Peacock’s general metaphysical method fuses the confessional’s freedom of

185

 

subject matter and the intense scrutiny into experience through rhetorical modes (in
particular the conceit) which the seventeenth century metaphysical poets perfected.

9 Donne’s infamous conceit is from “A Valediction forbidding Mourning” and
Marvell’s conceit is from “To his Coy Mistress.”

’0 For an analysis of Donne’s compass conceit as well as how Millay responds to
his conceit in her Sonnet 111 ["No lack of counsel from the shrewd and wise"] see chapter
one, pages 53-55 ofthis dissertation.

H Peacock’s inventive word play in this poem vividly enacts what literary critic
Herbert Read in “The Nature of Metaphysical Poetry” cites as the overall characteristic of
all metaphysical poetry: “an opacity, or ‘charged’ effect ...as though behind each word
lurked considerable processes of thought” (“Reason and Romanticism,” Essays in
Literary Criticism. London: Faber & Gwyer, 1926 p. 55).

’2 For a discussion of Wilbur's use of humor see chapter two of this dissertation,
page 86, and for Robert Creeley’s use of humor, see chapter three of this dissertation,
pages 137-140.

’3 Bruce King in "The Strategy of Carew's Wit” deﬁnes seventeenth century wit
as follows: “There is for example the wit of double entendre which allows the speaker to
mention what is socially hidden. Donne's early poems offer obvious examples of this.
There is also the wit of Dryden's satires, which mocks its victims by comparing the lesser
to the greater. And there is the wit of Hamlet's irony which, in its implications, reveals a
personality caught between conﬂicting demands of conscience and society. Thomas

C arew's poetry deals with the side of reality that is often hidden from public discussion:

sexual appetites, the desire to dominate over others, the need for warmth and security,

186

and the need to protect oneself against harm (Review of English Literature 5 (1964): 43-
44).

I4 9 ‘6 ° ' 6‘ '
See for example Donne s The Canonrzatron” or The Requue.”

187

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188

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