4/18/22

In March of 1963, according to the notation on my fly-leaf, I purchased The Modern Poets, edited by Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read (McGraw-Hill, c1963). It spoke to me articulately, even eloquently. It may well have been the first such purchase I made for my small personal library; it certainly became the unchallenged basis for a major portion of my library and a symbol of my interest and perspective. For, I must tell you, the book spoke to me on at least four different levels.

In the first place, it opened up a whole world of modern poetry. I was educated, with an English major, in the 1950s — in a liberal arts college and a major state university, both in the South. With some sixty semester hours of English to my credit, I had had only one course in 20th century literature, Modern Drama. Indeed, the university English department had a policy that modern literature was not seasoned enough to be fit subject for scholarly study and critical examination. No courses were even offered for graduate credit.

Poetry had been defined for me by traditional classics; for example, Shakespeare’s sonnets, John Donne’s Metaphysical poetry, Alexander Pope’s heroic couplet, Wordsworth’s blank verse, Coleridge’s literary ballad (“Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), Keats’ odes, Tennyson’s elaborate rhyme schemes, and Emerson’s lyrics. Poetry rhymed and had traditional rhythmic and metrical patterns. Modern poetry had been represented in anthologies of British and American literature by William Butler Yeats, W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, Robert Frost, a host of American lyricists like Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale — and, of course, those voices challenging the limitations of tradition, T. S. Eliot, Carl Sandburg, and e e cummings. By 1963, I prided myself as a student of poetry, especially the British Romantics, but I must admit that I was not a reader of poetry. Only a student.

This book marked a simple beginning in another direction. Here were “modern poets.” Though I might now quarrel just a bit with the self-assurance of the title, THE Modern Poets, especially in a book in 1963 that does not include Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and others who had earned the sobriquet, The Beat Generation. The subtitle, An American-British Anthology is somewhat more accurate. The editors vowed to include “poems of representative substance and power,” selected from “the finest living poets.” (Wallace Stevens, I believe, was the only deceased poet to be included — and e e cummings who died while the book was in the final stages of preparation.) The substance and power of these 201 poems, provide conclusive evidence documenting the place poetry written in the first six decades of the 20th century will have in the ultimate canon. I am convinced. Poetry, for me, is redefined, and its range of interest is expanded. The student of poetry has, indeed, become a reader of poetry. My library began to grow.

Granted, this anthology betrays the academic elitism of 20th century American poetry. Of the eighty-two poets, almost half are British. More than a third of the Americans were educated at Harvard, well over half of them in Ivy League schools, some three-quarters if you throw in the Seven Sisters and Amherst. As for the Midwest, the South, and the Pacific Coast, you find a handful from the University of Chicago, Vanderbilt, or at Big Ten universities. After pediatrician William Carlos Williams and insurance executive Wallace Stevens, these poets hold positions in colleges and universities, with only a very few exceptions. May Swenson, whose biographical note incidentally, is one of the briefest in the collection, graduated from Utah State Agricultural College. Beyond her, you have to look hard to find a poet outside the ivied walls and beaten paths of academe.

However — and this is of particular importance — in its own quiet and dignified way, this anthology takes a stand against the obliqueness, erudition, intentional ambiguity, and enigmatic complexity that was beginning to redefine “modern” and “poetry” in glossaries of critical usage. The editors are very explicit about this intention in their short, simple preface. They begin, “Among the works of modern poets, poems that give pleasure are far more common, we believe, than poems that present problems.” Their primary purpose has been “to make an anthology that would confirm this belief.” Their second paragraph is even more explicit and polemic:

“Contrary to rumor, modern poetry is not an obstacle course or an occult science. Such notions, infectious as the common cold and just as hard to shake, have tended to put a curse on poetry — a form of art that, above everything else, is a communication to be shared. The poems in this volume invite congenial acquaintance. They give proof, page by page, that before they are puzzles to be resolved or substances to be analyzed, they are human documents waiting to be claimed.”

This is the second important level at which the volume speaks to and for me. However, it has not been influential, by and large, on the academic establishment. Just look, for example, at the volumes of The Best American Poetry for the past twenty years or so. In most of them, a substantial number of poems are “puzzles to be resolved,” if not an “obstacle course” or “occult science.” At least one poet has argued in print that if you can understand it, or if it is accessible to the common reader, it is not poetry.

The third level at which this volume speaks to me — especially to the book collector in me — is its format. It sets a high standard for poetry anthologies. The large type face, the selection of the font, the generous white space, the size and durability of the volume, the quality of the paper, the way it feels in one’s hand — all these contribute to the attractiveness of the book. Three other, more substantive features are even more important. First, because of the accessibility of the poems, the book is relatively free of editorial paraphernalia; for instance, footnotes and headnotes, marginalia and interpretive comments. Once again this represents a deliberate choice on the part of the editors, “a determination to avoid the sort of well-meaning apparatus which is designed to initiate and instruct but which, too often, only alienates and befuddles.” Though there are occasional brief comments, their aim is “merely to set a perspective, identify an allusion, turn a key that may help to make a first reading a comparatively full and easy one.” I think of these as being like brief comments a poet might make before reading a poem to an audience. Brief bibliographies of the best known works of each of the poets are included in a modest listing at the end of the book.

The second substantive feature consists of brief, simple, attractive biographical notes on each poet at the beginning of his/her section. These all follow roughly the same format. They do not intrude upon the poems; neither are they designed to illuminate or contextualize the poems. They simply tell when and where the poet was born, grew up, was educated, lives and works. Notes on family and extra-literary works and interests are briefly noted when appropriate.

And this leads to the third, and perhaps most important, feature of the book’s format. As the cover and title past assert, the poems are published “with photographs by Rollie McKenna.” These, I must tell you, would be interesting in and of themselves, simply as a gallery of 20th-century poets. If the biographical sketches are carefully designed NOT to explore character or personality, these photographs let the poets present themselves, and they are brimming with character and personality — as good portraits always are.

And this leads me to the fourth and final level at which this anthology speaks to me. The editors mention the work representing five or six generations. The portraits make that clear and dramatic. Frankly, I felt at home in the anthology from the very beginning because of three groups I thought I saw represented in its pages, that is, in its photographs. At that time, I was a newly married man, expecting my first child, and looking forward to return to graduate study within a few months. Those poets born in the 1920s and 1930s, in the photographs, seemed to belong to my own generation. They looked like me — young, relaxed, open, optimistic, at the beginning of a fruitful life One, James Scully, was actually younger than I, and another, Robert Bagg (whom I have never heard from again), less than a year older. Another group, generally those born between 1900 and 1920, looked like my professors and mentors, genial but demanding, confident but candid, serious but at ease. And finally, those born before 1900 — for example, Robert Frost (1874). Conrad Aiken (1889), Marianne Moore (1887), Wallace Stevens (1879), Robert Graves (1895), Louise Gluck (1897), even T. S. Eliot (1988) — looked like elders of the tribe, like beloved but respected grandparents or great uncle and aunts, just a bit distant, but at the same time, just a bit like counselors or care-takers. Significantly, only Ezra Pound “was unavailable to be photographed.”

Two that I identified as my own generation became personal favorites. In both cases, their photographs are particularly revealing. Thom Gunn (1929) appears in his black leather jacket, studded belt, plaid shirt, and jeans. His relaxed, deliberately casual clothing and posture contrast with his pale, lined face, his carefully combed hair, and his sensitive but friendly expression. Sylvia Plath (1932), with her print dress, dark sweater, soft bangs, and elaborate locket, looks like the demure young matron (wife of Ted Hughes and mother of two children, the biographical note informs us). And yet — and yet — how could we have helped but see a solemnity preventing a real smile (there’s just a faint, “pretend” smile) and the distance and distress in those dark eyes.

The two poems from this collection which I have taught most often and written about most carefully are “Black Jackets” by Gunn and “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” by Plath. Both of them achieve a modern idiom and rhythm with their language, though both adapt an elaborate rhyme scheme (in Plath’s case, making use of consonance and half-rhymes, but nevertheless consistent throughout). Both of them use their subjects — black leather jackets worn by van drivers in a bar; a black rook hunching on a twig, rearranging its feathers in the rain — to build up a real, three-dimensional world, ordinary, perhaps troublesome or uninviting, but evocative. And both introduce a simple image of light to enliven and — all right, illuminate — the scene, to be redundant.

Gunn describes the scratched leather jackets worn by the drinkers in the bar, only indirectly letting the light shine in:

On the other drinkers bent together,
Concocting selves for their impervious kit,
He saw it as no more than leather
Which, taut across the shoulders grown to it,

Sent through the dimness of a bar
As sudden and anonymous hints of light
As those that shipping give, that are
Now flickers in the Bay, now lost in sight.

He stretched out like a cat . . . .
The present was the things he stayed among.

Plath is more explicit, and ultimately more hopeful, though also more threatened by the darkness:

. . . I only know that a rook
Ordering his black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality.

. . . . .

. . . Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles.

If I had ever wondered about the “substance and power” of contemporary poetry, I never would again. These two poems alone, and many others like them, made a convert of me.