The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk

The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk

The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk Henry Weinfield University of Iowa Press  |  Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2009 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org Printed in the United States of America Design by April Leidig-Higgins No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper lccn: 2008933514 isbn-13: 978-1-58729-781-6 isbn-10: 1-58729-781-7 09  10  11  12  13  C  5  4  3  2  1

contents Acknowledgments  vii Introduction  1

one

Oppen, Bronk, and the Story behind “A Narrative” 11

two

Because the Known and the Unknown Touch: A Reading of Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” 35

three

In the Drift of the World: A Reading of Bronk’s Life Supports: New and Collected Poems 107

four

Oppen’s Reoccupation of Traditional Lyric in “Eclogue,” “Psalm,” and “Ballad” 181 Afterword  199 Notes  207 Bibliography  223 Index  231

acknowledgments The publication of this book has been made possible in part by support from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA) in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame. I am also grateful for the grant from ISLA that I received that gave me the opportunity to travel to the University of California at San Diego to examine the Oppen papers there. I would like to thank the librarians of the UC–San Diego Special Collections for their help. Quotations from George Oppen’s New Collected Poems are used by kind permission of the New Directions Publishing Corporation. Quotation from the work of William Bronk is by permission of the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York. I am grateful to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. I would like to thank David Clippinger, who is now in the process of editing William Bronk’s letters, most of which are now housed at Columbia University, for his kindness in making some of the typescripts of the Bronk letters available to me. I could not have written the chapter on Oppen without the magnificent edition of the poet’s letters edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and I am glad of this opportunity to thank her. My thinking on Bronk and Oppen has been enriched by the many friends and colleagues with whom I have had the benefit of conversations over the years. Let me mention some of them by name: Paul Auster and Michael Perkins, with whom I conducted the taped conversation with Bronk that appeared in a special issue of Sagetrieb devoted to the poet; Burt Kimmelman, who coedited that issue; Michael Heller, the author of the first book on the Objectivists, Conviction’s Net of Branches, and of many articles on Oppen and Bronk; Louise Chawla and John Ernest, whose work on Bronk has been important to me; and Michael Davidson, whose edition of Oppen’s New and Collected Poems has enriched our understanding of the poet. I am grateful to the late Burton Hatlen (whose death was announced just as I was completing my labors) and to Marjorie

Perloff, both of whom read and commented on the long Oppen chapter and from whose criticism I have greatly benefitted over the years. My friends and colleagues Stephen Fallon, Kevin Hart, David O’Connor, and Catherine Schlegel have enriched my intellectual life at Notre Dame, and I am grateful to Allen Mandelbaum, Paul Bray, and Robert Murphy for their friendship and intellectual companionship. I would like to express sincere thanks to my editor at the University of Iowa Press, Joseph Parsons, and to the managing editor, Charlotte Wright, who with kindness and efficiency shepherded this book through its various steps. Also, a special note of thanks goes to Blythe Woolston, indexer extraordinaire. When I was completing my revisions to this book, Peter Nicholls’s splendid study, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, appeared. I wish I could have taken a fuller account of it in these pages, but I am grateful, in any event, for a recent opportunity to discuss Oppen with Peter at the University of Sussex. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Stephen Fredman and Norman Finkelstein for the considerable time and effort they put into reading and commenting on the manuscript of this book at every stage of the process. As always, I am grateful to my friends Stuart Liebman and Lois Greenfield, and to my wife, Joyce, and our children Paul, Saralena, and Vera for their encouragement and love. Finally, I think of three poets who are now dead—Allen Kimbrell and two friends from my undergraduate days at CCNY, who introduced me to the work of Oppen and Bronk and shared the excitement of discovering their poetry with me: Ross Feld and Bradford Stark. It is to their memory, as well as to that of the poets George Oppen and William Bronk themselves, that I dedicate this book.

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The Music of Thought in the Poetry of George Oppen and William Bronk

introduction This book is devoted to the poetry of George Oppen (1908–1984) and William Bronk (1918–1999), the two American poets whom I regard as the finest among their generation, a generation that came to maturity around the beginning of the Second World War. They would seem on the surface not to have a great deal in common with each other. Oppen, born into a prosperous German-Jewish family on Long Island, was a member of the Objectivist circle, a group mainly of Jewish, left-wing poets, including Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, and Carl Rakosi, who were influenced by William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound (despite the latter’s fascism and anti-Semitism). Bronk, who lived almost his entire life in Hudson Falls, New York, in the same Civil War–era house in which he was born, came from an old American family of Dutch ancestry: the Bronx was originally the tract of land in which his seventeenth-century forebear, Jonas Bronck, lived. Bronk’s literary sensibility was formed largely by Shakespeare, the King James Bible, and by the New England writers of the American Renaissance: Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, Emerson, and Dickinson; and then, in the twentieth century, by Frost, Aiken, and Stevens. Moreover, whereas Oppen was often at the center of literary activity, Bronk was something of an isolato—not quite in the mold of a Dickinson, but not so very far from it either. He had no interest in “poetics” or in literary politics and only the most tangential relations to any school or circle of poets. Yet despite these differences, Oppen and Bronk have a good deal in common. In the first place, they are both extraordinary thinkers in poetry, poets who have something original to say and for whom thought really matters. At the same time, they are poets for whom thought acquires the resonance of music, poets whose best work is sensual and intellectual at the same time. They are also poets whose cast of mind is pessimistic and even fatalistic and whose most characteristic tonality is sadness. Oppen is working in a disjunctive, modernist vein and writing a free

verse in which the “music” is entirely a function of the phrasing, whereas Bronk for the most part is writing blank verse and working in distinct forms; but they are both practitioners (Bronk perhaps more than Oppen, and Oppen mainly during his great middle period) of what used to be called the “plain style.” There is a good deal of rhetorical sophistication in their work, but, fundamentally, both are writing a poetry in which the music is an extension of the thought, rather than the other way round. Their writing is serious, meditative, and straightforward; they believe in the “direct presentation of the thing.” And finally, Oppen and Bronk are thinkers whose work is deeply attuned to the philosophical, scientific, and religious quandaries and crises of our time. Their poetry confronts the “big questions”; it does not remain at the level of the personal, even when (and this is especially true of Bronk) it is profoundly personal; it struggles with truth and, in the process, with the meaning and value of poetry itself for our time. In philosophical terms, one could say that Oppen and Bronk are, broadly speaking, existentialists, at least in the Sartrean sense of believing that existence precedes essence and that meaning can no longer be conferred from the outside. Oppen has a clearer relationship to existentialism than Bronk does: he was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard and Heidegger, for example. Though not at all sanguine about humanity’s prospects for the future, Oppen was also in some sense a Marxist—at least in the sense of believing that if capitalism is not ultimately supplanted, humanity will be destroyed. Bronk, profoundly skeptical but in some ways deeply religious at the same time, has to be considered sui generis, and, in any event, he is too fatalistic in his orientation to life to be encompassed by a philosophical perspective that is centered above all on choice. Although Bronk’s mature style was formed by his encounter with Stevens, he was never taken up by the Stevensians—neither by the academic Stevensians nor by the avant-garde Stevensians—and this has continued unto the present day. An iconoclast and, as I noted, something of a recluse, Bronk has never been championed, as Oppen, together with the other Objectivists, has, by any of the prominent critics of our time. Ironically, the poets who early on recognized the quality and distinctiveness of Bronk’s work, and who eventually achieved stature of their own—writers such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, and Oppen himself—tended to belong to the Pound-Williams wing of American poetry; but Bronk himself had no use for Pound whatsoever and very little interest in Williams. It in troduction 2

was through Cid Corman’s important magazine Origin that Bronk became known to these and other poets, many of them affiliated either with the Black Mountain School or with the Objectivists. Between 1951 and 1971, Origin published three series, and, as Corman explains in his introduction to the anthology he edited, The Gist of Origin, Bronk’s poetry is the “thread that binds all the issues together.”1 Corman’s metaphor has resonance for me because I regard Bronk not only as a major poet but as a central presence who, by virtue of his centrality, threads the diverse strands of the poetry of his time together in a skein. Yet this conception, I am obliged to admit, is something of a platonic one because in actuality Bronk’s poetry is still relatively unknown. To entertain a Bronkian distinction, he is a central presence in reality but not in actuality. If this book does not succeed in changing that situation, it will nevertheless have made the attempt. There are sociological as well as aesthetic reasons for bringing Oppen and Bronk together. The two poets became friends in the early 1960s, and in fact Oppen played a significant role in disseminating Bronk’s poetry at an early stage of his career; for it was he who edited The World, the Worldless, still Bronk’s best-known single collection of poetry, and arranged for its publication in 1964. Bronk, in turn, exerted what I consider to have been a deep influence on Oppen and came to symbolize (or objectify) for Oppen his own tendency toward skepticism, a tendency in conflict with the empiricist leanings of Objectivism. I tell the story of the encounter between Oppen and Bronk in the opening chapter of this book, through an analysis of Oppen’s sequence poem “A Narrative,” a poem in which the figure of Bronk plays a symbolic role. In bringing Oppen and Bronk together, I am to some extent attempting to override the categories in terms of which contemporary American poetry has been habitually viewed. If the term “Objectivism,” for instance, is seen as having more than a sociological meaning (and admittedly, it was chosen somewhat arbitrarily as a rubric for encompassing the poets that Louis Zukofsky included in the Objectivist issue of Poetry of February 1931)—in other words, if it corresponds to the philosophical perspective articulated by Zukofsky in his essays—then to consider Oppen an Objectivist seems to me to some extent an obfuscation of what is really at stake in his poetry. I develop this argument in the opening chapter and in the brief afterword to this book, but the book as a whole is not really driven by any particular thesis. I believe that Oppen and Bronk created great and in troduction 3

enduring poetry, and I have simply wanted to articulate what it is in their work that I find so valuable and distinctive. When I was a young man, I sought both of these poets out because of my high regard for their work, and I was privileged to come to know them both as friends. Their extraordinary accomplishment as writers did not exist in a vacuum; they were remarkable human beings, albeit in very different ways. I was introduced to their work in the late sixties when I was an undergraduate at CCNY and involved with the literary magazine Promethean. Under the editorship of Ross Feld, Promethean published a number of Bronk poems and also reprinted a section of Oppen’s first book, Discrete Series (1934), which at the time had long been out of print. I began to correspond with Bronk in 1970 or 1971 and was introduced to him by the poet Bradford Stark in 1972. Though he had a great gift for friendship, Bronk was suspicious of literary people because of the unpleasant experiences he had had with editors and publishers who patronized him or treated him with contempt, and I remember that he responded with irritation and suspiciousness to my first letter to him, a letter in which I ventured to make a few glib pronouncements about his poetry (I was twenty-one or twenty-two). Eventually, we became very close friends, however, and remained more or less in continuous contact until his death in 1999. Bronk was a tremendously passionate man whose powerful emotions were often held in check until they burst their dams. His conversation could be fluent and elegant, but it could also be spasmodic, as if he felt that language, the medium of poetry, should not be debased to other purposes. I got used to his silences and to the aura of loneliness that always surrounded him. He was a wonderful host, and after a sumptuous dinner we would repair to his old-fashioned parlor where he would recite his latest poems in his marvelous voice. I wrote to Oppen in 1975, not only because I was by then immersed in his poetry but because of his involvement in radical politics. This was during my Marxist phase (when I was irritating and alienating all of my friends), and I had a deep admiration for Oppen’s solitary struggle to integrate the aesthetic and the political sides of his character. Bronk, in his poetry, often addresses himself to a static and unchanging human condition, but Oppen aspired to speak for a generation struggling to be born. “How shall one know a generation, a new generation?” he asks in “Of Being Numerous.” Oppen responded warmly to my letter, and, with an openness and generosity I could never have anticipated, he invited me in troduction 4

to come for a stay with him and Mary in their summer home on Eagle Island, Maine. That was a truly memorable visit, and I have vivid images of Oppen quietly navigating his sailboat past rocks on which seals lay sunning themselves. Unlike Shelley, he was an expert sailor. But while one associates the Communist and Objectivist Oppen with mastery of “the materials” of life (to borrow the phrase that became the title of his 1962 volume of poems), there was a romantic and even mystical side to his character, as indeed there is to his poetry. Oppen had moved from New York to San Francisco when I came to know him, and I was to meet him on only three or four occasions in all. There was the time in Maine, then once or twice in Brooklyn Heights, and then a last time, a few years before his death, in San Francisco, when he was already suffering from Alzheimer’s—which, oddly, seemed in some ways to heighten the strange quality of lucidity that he radiated. In the 1970s I edited and published a little magazine called The Mysterious Barricades. It was a homemade operation, not very well printed or distributed, and it ran for only four issues. That last issue, which came out in the winter of 1976, contains, in addition to eight Bronk poems, my first essay on Bronk as well as an essay by Allen Kimbrell on Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous.” (Kimbrell was a gifted writer who subsequently became a geological engineer and died tragically in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, when, as a member of the Army Corps of Engineers, his truck hit a land mine in Kuwait.) I came closer to expressing what I had to say about Bronk in my second essay, “ ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’: William Bronk and the Condition of Poetry,” which was included in a special issue devoted to Bronk of the journal Sagetrieb that I edited with Burt Kimmelman in the late eighties. I subsequently wrote a number of additional essays on Bronk and edited an edition of his Selected Poems, which New Directions published in 1995. In the meantime I had dedicated a sonnet to Oppen (“For years I called myself a communist”) for the special issue on him of Paideuma in 1981 and had contributed a short essay on “Of Being Numerous” to the George Oppen: Man and Poet volume, edited by Burton Hatlen, which was published by the National Poetry Foundation, also in 1981. Though Oppen’s response to the essay was typically gracious (and extremely gratifying), I knew that it was only a first approximation of what I wanted to say about the poem. It has taken me a long time to write this book, not because my views have changed in any substantial way but because I had to learn how to in troduction 5

write it. I knew that I needed to devote a full and substantial essay to “Of Being Numerous,” both because it is Oppen’s masterpiece and, in my view, the greatest long poem of the second half of the twentieth century, and because it is an astonishingly fertile poem, encompassing an array of themes and with a rich intertextual dimension. Everything in Oppen’s poetic career, from Discrete Series onward, seemed to me to lead up to “Of Being Numerous,” possibly because of the long hiatus in which he wrote no poetry; and so in grappling with this major text I would be saying something fundamental about Oppen’s work as a whole. And in the case of Bronk, a master of the short poem, whose work took all sorts of formal dips and turns as it developed, I knew that I would have to confront the career more or less in its totality, so as to show how it developed and changed over time. Particularly because Bronk is so abstract and intellectual a poet, so much a poet of ideas that are continually reworked and reiterated, the problem would be to show that the work develops and changes over time and that it cannot be reduced to a set of abstract themes and variations. I had written a study of Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (a poem that, in its treatment of history and of the theme of the One and the Many, is in some respects a precursor to “Of Being Numerous”), in which I developed a method of reading sequentially so as to pay close attention to the process of the poem’s unfolding. It was this method— basically of grasping the “phenomenology” of the text, understanding it not spatially or as a static unity but as a process of coming into being— that enabled me to turn the short essay on “Of Being Numerous” I had written into an extended analysis. Besides a number of extraordinary lyrics such as “Psalm” and “Ballad” (two poems, discussed in chapter 4, in which Oppen renegotiates a relationship to ancient lyric genres), Oppen’s greatest work is in his sequence poems, especially those contained in This in Which (1965) and Of Being Numerous (1968), the second of which received the Pulitzer Prize. The reasons that Oppen gravitates to the sequence poem are complex, but basically one can discern a double movement or impetus in the work: one that begins from immediate, fragmentary perceptions and resists “grand narratives” and totalizing gestures of any kind, and another (with which the first is in conflict) that aims at totality. Oppen is thus a dialectical poet, but the dialectic is complex and difficult to parse in his work because it is aimed at totality (hence dialectical in the ordinary sense) and at the same time in conflict with in troduction 6

that aim. Oppen’s work reaches for totality and for closure, and yet from the outset it resists closure—and even continuity—because it recognizes that all totalizing systems are partial, artifically constructed, and hence dangerous. To the extent that Objectivism as a philosophy implies that the individual can have a purchase on objective reality (and, admittedly, this is an oversimplification), Oppen, from the beginnings of his career, is the antithesis of an Objectivist; for what we get in Discrete Series is not objective reality but fragmentary appearances, subjective perceptions, moments of discontinuity that refuse to be subsumed in any “normal” view of reality: Her ankles are watches (Her arm-pits are causeways for water) ................................... Her movement, accustomed, abstracted, Declares this morning a woman’s ‘My hair, scalp——’² Everything is indeed “abstracted” here, objectified as a discontinuous fragment, but only so as to resist “objectification”—which is to say, in Marxist parlance, reification. Discrete Series was in one sense a preparation for the later work; but while it articulated the epistemological problematic that is never far from Oppen’s thinking, it did so in a manner that was too one-sided to be successful as poetry. The twenty-five-year hiatus that followed, during which Oppen wrote no poetry, was almost mandated by the fact that when Discrete Series was written the poet had the technical resources to explore only one side to his vision: he had no formal way to reach for totality without simply repudiating the vision that had given rise to Discrete Series in the first place. It was his development of the sequence poem that enabled Oppen to express the two conflicting sides to his vision; but it was also the maturing of that vision, and his development of a new capacity for articulating philosophical ideas and incorporating them within the poem, that enabled him to arrive at the sequence poem. There are poems in numbered sections earlier on, but I trace this development to the This in Which volume of 1965. “A Language of New York,” contained in This in Which, could be considered the first of the characteristic sequence poems of Oppen’s middle period. Oppen later incorporated most of it in “Of Being Numerous.” “A Narrative,” in which Oppen begins to display a mature sense in troduction 7

of craft, comes toward the end of This in Which. In “Pro Nobis,” a lyric placed almost at the very end of the book, Oppen writes: “I believe my apprenticeship / In that it was long was honorable” (157). Oppen is registering his own sense of maturity in this poem and of having emerged from a long apprenticeship, and I think his perception is accurate. The sequence poem provided a formal means of reaching for totality without positing an unsustainable claim to mastery or transcendence; in other words, it enabled the poet to begin from the standpoint of immediate perception and without relinquishing his singularity or humanity, but at the same time to allow his intuition to guide him onward—“without any irritable reaching” after closure (to borrow Keats’s language in the Negative Capability letter). The separate sections of the poem could reflect on one another, contradict one another, add to one another in a dialectical movement, or simply follow one another randomly, as in a “discrete series.” Thus, in the great sequence poems of his middle period and especially in “Of Being Numerous,” Oppen is able to “see the one thing” (180) while at the same time maintaining his hold on the complexity and fragmentary nature of modern life. He is much less successful in his late work, it seems to me—that is, in the three books that follow Of Being Numerous: Seascape: Needle’s Eye (1972), Myth of the Blaze (1972–1975), and Primitive (1978). In these books, Oppen loses the precarious balance that he was able to achieve in the great sequence poems of his middle period; his vision, perhaps overpowered by its own scrupulosity, its obsessive struggle against closure, devolves into fragments. Thus, in my reading of the career, everything leads up to and falls away from “Of Being Numerous.” For a long time I had wanted to write an extended essay on Bronk’s poetry, but I was frustrated in all my attempts to begin. It seemed to me necessary to write about the career as a whole because in Bronk’s case there is no single poem or even group of poems that could stand in for, let alone encompass, a poetic oeuvre that establishes its significance not only through the singularity of Bronk’s vision but also from the resonance of individual poems. The previous attempts that had been made (including my own) to penetrate and make sense of Bronk’s work had tended to treat it thematically, as if the work could be taken as a static unity and boiled down to a series of concepts or motifs. There seemed no point in doing that, not only because it had been done before but because it distorted and falsified what was really going on in the work. Granted that on the level of content the “redundancy quotient” in the work is rather high, but this in troduction 8

is to disregard the actual poetic process and the way in which the work not only articulates ideas but also struggles against them. Rather than treating the work thematically, I wanted to show how it developed and changed over time. The problem was that Bronk, particularly in his later years, was extraordinarily prolific: Life Supports, the volume of collected poems that won the American Book Award in 1981, was followed by ten additional volumes; and the quality of the work varied, sometimes drastically. Eventually I came to realize that what gave the work the form of a career, so to speak, delineating its stages, was precisely its struggle with form, a struggle that was especially crucial, in Bronk’s case, because of a tendency toward discursiveness that was always posing the danger of pulling the poem back into “prose.” Interestingly, whereas Oppen begins from the fragment—the “instant in the eyes” (167) that in its purest form is syntactically incomplete—Bronk begins, much more classically, from the sentence, but a sentence that needs to be purified of its sententiousness so that it no longer exists in the abstract, no longer has anything to say apart from the “music” in which it is absorbed. Bronk, in some ways the most “poetic” of contemporary poets, the one with the greatest lyrical power, achieves the intensity peculiar to his style through a struggle with the boundary conditions of poetry—that is, against what would destroy the poetry as poetry. Bronk’s struggle with form is necessitated, on the formal level, by the discursiveness of his style, and, on the content level, by his tragic vision of formlessness—that is, by his vision of the tenuousness and precariousness of all forms. “World, world,” he writes early on, in lines that, interestingly, may have influenced Oppen (see the latter’s poem “World, World—”): I am scared and waver in awe before the wilderness of raw consciousness, because it is all dark and formlessness: and it is real this passion that we feel for forms. But the forms are never real. Are not really there. Are not.³ It is a struggle with formlessness that will eventually lead, ironically, to the fixed forms of the last six collections contained in Life Supports, after which the struggle loses momentum, having gone as far as it can go. After Life Supports, Bronk will write many fine poems, but his work will no longer take any radical turns or explore genuinely new poetic territory. This in troduction 9

means that Life Supports marks a boundary that is not merely arbitrary and when I came to this realization I was able to set the boundaries for the project around the Life Supports volume. In the long chapter on Bronk, because I was dealing with the entire trajectory of the poet’s work up to and including Life Supports, I more or less exhausted what I had to say; but in the chapters on Oppen, because I was focusing mainly on the two long sequence poems, “A Narrative” and “Of Being Numerous,” this was not the case, and at a certain point it became clear to me that I needed to address Oppen’s concern with the lyric genres and with the question of genre itself. Thus, in chapter 4, through an examination of three lyric poems contained in different volumes, “Eclogue,” “Psalm,” and “Ballad,” I show how Oppen’s concern with generic considerations opens up a meditation on political and religious themes that are at the heart of his thinking. The book concludes with a brief afterword in which I draw out the implications of the conception of poetic vision that one finds not only embodied in the poetry of Oppen and Bronk but actually articulated in a crucial passage of Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous.” What is at stake for me is not merely an academic argument over Objectivist theory but how we conceive of the poetic enterprise and whether indeed there remains a future for poetry. If we find a path to the future, it is from the poets who come before us—not necessarily by following in their footsteps but by learning from their example. Of the generation of American poets now fading from the scene, I am convinced that it is from Oppen and Bronk that we have most to learn.

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chapter one Oppen, Bronk, and the Story behind “A Narrative” During a period in the early sixties that coincides with the composition of his sequence poem “A Narrative” (1963),1 George Oppen was immersed in the poetry of William Bronk. Oppen, a member of the Objectivist circle, had encountered Bronk’s poetry in the pages of Cid Corman’s magazine Origin and had initiated a correspondence with Bronk, probably in June 1962.2 It was Oppen, in fact, who arranged for the publication of Bronk’s volume The World, the Worldless (still his best-known single collection of poems), and in 1963 Oppen was involved in the editing of this book. The collection was jointly published in 1964 by New Directions and the San Francisco Review, which was edited by Oppen’s sister, June Oppen Degnan. As his correspondence during the period indicates, Oppen was profoundly influenced but also deeply troubled by Bronk’s work and by the skeptical thrust of Bronk’s thought. A Marxist who had for many years been a member of the Communist Party before leaving politics and returning to poetry,3 Oppen was critical of what he regarded as Bronk’s solipsism, but at the same time he resonated with Bronk’s vision and to some extent made use of Bronk to distance himself from the Objectivist philosophy of Louis Zukofsky.4 All of this emerges in or behind the lines of “A Narrative” itself. In section 8 of the poem, Oppen writes: But at night the park She said, is horrible. And Bronk said Perhaps the world Is horror. She did not understand. He meant

The waves or pellets Are thrown from the process Of the suns and like radar Bounce where they strike. The eye It happens Registers But it is dark. It is the nature Of the world: It is as dark as radar. (153–54) The conversation memorialized in section 8 of “A Narrative” seems to have occurred in late 1962 or early 1963, during Oppen’s first visit to Bronk’s home in Hudson Falls, New York.5 The reader of Bronk can actually hear Bronk’s voice, his characteristic turns of phrase, in Oppen’s cadences. The absence of quotation marks in the passage, typical of Oppen’s technique of layering different and sometimes disparate voices and texts in a montage of his own, heightens this effect. (Oppen was a dialogical poet whereas Bronk was almost entirely a monological one.) If to the reader of Bronk the lines “Perhaps the world / Is horror” and “But it is dark” have a Bronkian weight, this is because words such as “world” and “dark” function as leitmotifs in Bronk’s poetry. In “The World,” for example, a four-line poem from Finding Losses (1976), Bronk writes: I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world; but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere. There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no. I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.6 And in “About Dynamism, Desire and Various Fictions,” one of the sonnets from To Praise the Music (1972), he writes: “Also the Golden Age was a dark time / if there was one. I think it is now and was not / ever. It is dark now as it always was” (144). The lines “It is the nature / Of the world” toward the end of section 8 of “A Narrative” have a Lucretian flavor, and a connection can be drawn in this context not only between Oppen and Bronk but also between them both and Lucretius. Moreover, in Oppen’s collected poems “A Narrative” can be found only a few pages before “Of Being Numerous,” his masterpiece and the greatest of his sequence poems, and I would suggest that o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 12

there is a connection—marked by their shared Lucretian overtones— between section 8 of “A Narrative” and the opening section of “Of Being Numerous.” In the latter (from his 1968 collection Of Being Numerous), Oppen writes: “Of this was told / A tale of our wickedness. / It is not our wickedness” (163). One immediately wants to add the lines from “A Narrative”: “It is the nature / Of the world.” The echo of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura serves to sum up a view of the world (broadly speaking existentialist) that puts the Judeo-Christian tradition into question and that asks whether the universe is ultimately meaningful, in the sense of being guided by Providence, or merely a series of random processes. In “Of Being Numerous,” Oppen begins with the Adam and Eve story—the story that attempts to explain the origin of misery and suffering as our fault, since otherwise it would be God’s fault, the fault of a good and loving god who by definition is faultless. “Of this was told / A tale of our wickedness. / It is not our wickedness. . . . It is the nature / Of the world”—or “the way things are” (as Rolfe Humphries translates the title of De Rerum Natura).7 In three lines of radiant simplicity —here he is writing “at the top of [his] ability,” to borrow the phrasing of another sequence poem in Of Being Numerous, “Route” (193)—Oppen deconstructs the foundational myth of the West. Like Bronk, he wants us to see that, insofar as the stories we tell ourselves are false, though they may be consoling they are ultimately destructive of our capacity to live full and meaningful lives. Both poets are concerned with truth, and this entails sweeping away false narratives. Thus, the irony behind the title of “A Narrative” is, precisely, that it isn’t one. Indeed, this poem (and this is typical of Oppen’s work in general) puts the very idea of the “grand narrative” into question: it has a series of metanarratives but not really a narrative, and what one of its metanarratives points to is that, ungrounded as we are (as we now are), the foundational myths or narratives that we hold onto, such as the Adam and Eve story, can no longer serve us as a foundation; at best, they are starting points for rethinking the fundamental questions that confront us.8 And this, essentially, is what Bronk is saying in “About Dynamism, Desire and Various Fictions”—as we see from the way in which the poem continues: The thing I wanted to tell you is how we propose a drama, sort of, a story of our lives which requires changes—sequences of time, o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 13

such that once there was this or something else —dark, say, or the Golden Age, and then something happened and this came about. Well I don’t think it did. What I want you to know is that nothing happened and nothing can, that stories are fictions, truth doesn’t tell one, that the beautiful is that, nothing more, and enough, no story, nothing to do or tell. (144) The loss of foundations that both Oppen and Bronk are confronting is one aspect of an epistemological crisis, or crisis of modernity, which, ironically, is already old news by the time these poets come to maturity in the middle of the twentieth century; and it is interesting that Oppen’s phrase “the process / Of the suns” in section 8 of “A Narrative” echoes none other than Alfred Lord Tennyson in “Locksley Hall”—the same Tennyson who wrote a dramatic monologue entitled “Lucretius.” If we compare Tennyson’s lines to Oppen’s, however, we can gauge something of Oppen’s historical specificity. Tennyson writes: “Yet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, / And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”9 The optimism that Tennyson is expressing in these lines is shattered not only by the larger poetic context in which they are framed but, if we examine them closely, by the lines themselves. The Victorian emphasis on scientific progress has a dark undercurrent because, even if the thoughts of men are widened with the development of scientific knowledge, this inevitably coincides with an increase in religious skepticism. It may be that Tennyson has no doubt that an increasing purpose runs through the ages, but this would be a human purpose only; and though he doesn’t want to say so, he obviously has a great deal of doubt over whether the widening of human thought is guided by a divine purpose; indeed, the two purposes are at cross-purposes for him in these lines. Perhaps this is why Oppen echoes Tennyson—and that he should do so at all, of course, even if unconsciously, is interesting in itself. But clearly, if science has a consolatory function for Tennyson, it no longer does for Oppen. The nature that science “illumines” is all darkness: “It is as dark as radar.”10 In section 7 of “A Narrative” (the one prior to the section in which he mentions Bronk), Oppen writes: o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 14

Serpent, Ourobouros Whose tail is in his mouth: he is the root Of evil, This ring worm, the devil’s Doctrine the blind man Knew. His mind Is its own place; He has no story. (153) The serpent whose tail is in his mouth is an ancient symbol of the Infinite, and hence “the root / Of evil” because the infinite renders the world unintelligible (“as dark as radar”). Oppen’s ambivalence in these lines makes it difficult to ascertain precisely where he stands. His collapsed narrative is both a diagnosis of reality and a critique of an ancient narrative—one that contains the seeds of the truth at the same time that it is an evasion of the truth. In Oppen’s perspective, Milton—“the blind man”—is partly equated with Satan in that he comes to know what Satan expresses in the famous lines from Paradise Lost: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.”11 To Oppen, in other words, as to Blake (one of Oppen’s favorite poets), Milton was of the devil’s party.12 And if the mind is its own place, if, as solipsism ventures, it is shut off from any external reality, then it “has no story.” Or, as Bronk writes: “And enough, no story, nothing to do or tell.” In English literature the locus classicus for the crisis of modernity that Satan’s speech registers is Hamlet, and Satan’s speech echoes Hamlet’s statement that “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”13 Oppen’s trope of the blind man, the symbolic significance of which goes beyond the fact that it is a metonym for Milton, has an immediate antecedent in Wordsworth. In book 7 of The Prelude, Wordsworth has a vision of a blind beggar, who, with upright face, Stood propped against a wall, upon his chest Wearing a written paper, to explain His story, whence he came, and who he was. “Caught by the spectacle,” Wordsworth adds, my mind turned round As with the might of waters; an apt type o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 15

This label seemed of the utmost we can know, Both of ourselves and of the universe.14 If the world is as dark as radar, as the figure of the blind man seems to indicate for Oppen as well as for Wordsworth, then our knowledge of the world would seem to be merely nominal or formal. This is a perspective on reality that Oppen clearly associates with Bronk. Not that Oppen fully embraces it: the passage itself, as well as its context in the poem as a whole, indicates that he is ambivalent in regard to this “devil’s doctrine.” But the poetic power of the passage emanates from his sense that it contains a truth to which he cannot be blind. In Oppen’s sequence poems, figures or tropes that appear in early sections recur in later ones, often in different guises and in association with different ideas. Thus, in section 8 of “A Narrative,” Bronk—or rather the figure of Bronk—is associated with the idea of the “blind” inexorability of natural processes. Metaphorically, there is in fact a double blindness here: we, as human beings, are blind to the ultimate intentions or causes of the universe (and hence the figure of the “blind man” in section 7), but also the universe is “blind,” has no ultimate intentions, is merely a series of random processes. “The waves or pellets,” writes Oppen, “Are thrown from the process / Of the suns” (154), and it is interesting that the metaphorical waves of physics mentioned here are anticipated, in section 6 of the poem, by the image of an actual river, an image that engenders a Heraclitean meditation: I saw from the bus, Walked in fact from the bus station to see again The river and its rough machinery On the sloping bank ——I cannot know Whether the weight of cause Is in such a place as that, tho the depth of water Pours and pours past Albany From all its sources. (152–53) The river pouring “past Albany / From all its sources” connects the poem to the town of Hudson Falls, which is about forty miles north of Albany and near to the source of the Hudson, and thus to Bronk, who lived in Hudson Falls all his life. “The river and its rough machinery / On the sloping bank” refers obliquely to the locks on the canal along which Bronk o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 16

frequently walked and where he took his friends when they came to visit. “The river and its rough machinery” is shorthand for the blind inexorability of natural processes and for the attempt on the part of human beings to control or regulate them, an attempt that itself inevitably falls victim to natural processes. (Oppen was always taken with what he termed “the materials” of life, particularly those connected with boats and shipping. His 1962 collection was entitled The Materials.) The passage puts one in mind of Bronk’s poem “Displacement: The Locks on the Feeder Called The Five Combines,” by which in fact Oppen was tremendously impressed and to which he refers on several occasions in his correspondence. The connection between section 6 of “A Narrative” and “The Locks on the Feeder” (which is how Bronk and his friends always referred to that poem in conversation) is so interesting, indeed, that one is tempted to think that Oppen was in dialogue with the Bronk poem; but in fact, he didn’t actually come across it until about September 1964—which makes the connection perhaps even more uncanny.15 In the opening stanza of “The Locks on the Feeder,” the way in which the falling of the water level in “the Feeder” (i.e., the feeder canal) leads to the cracking of its lock walls becomes a metaphor for the inexorability of nature, for how things “drive down” (as Bronk says in a much later poem, “The Destroyer Life” [209–10]): The Feeder falling, its lock-walls crack, as once their gates would open while they held fast against the barges bumping, washing water. Now, they tumble, going the way the water went and had to go, though locking west, uphill, seemed sucking upward, always it was down. (89) The cracking of the walls, occurring with an imperceptible slowness, becomes in turn a metaphor for the ruin of cities and civilizations, and the fact that we are unable to perceive this process becomes associated with our habitual evasion of reality or denial of death. The cracks are puzzles, like natural apertures, corollas of flowers, caves where, looking in, we look for something that happened, and hold our breaths on the hoped-for chance it should happen again as we look. We inspect how nearly, with our never knowing, stone lay o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 17

against another, their two sides faced to fit, and fitting all that dark, long time when what seemed surfaces was always depth, and look in there as into empty rooms in ruined cities, not quite imagining what life they ever held, such as it was, no vivider than ours, grown indistinct. But more to marvel at than this is the freed courage of cut stone, the assured assumption devised to convince our minds, as it always does, that cutting, facing, piling stone is a way to meet reality, impress it, that what our forceful show has dealt with here is the same reality that years of cutting stone or moving water have failed to bring us to. (90) In cutting stone or moving water, we construct a reality in order to evade a truth that would otherwise make it impossible for us to live in the world. Thus, as Oppen will write in “Of Being Numerous,” “We stand on // That denial / Of death that paved the cities” (178). The poem concludes as follows (without an additional stanza break): We know all this—our pledge of debt to evasiveness—that almost everything we do is beside the point: as though our courage were that we give an answer, however irrelevant, not having willed to answer the questions risked. We sham responses. The shunting details pretend another question. We are displaced. We bear ourselves as into a house across the street and live as though a neighbor’s life until we ready a death there and bear him away and bury him. And what of it was ours? We invented for him the whole of the tangible world, the birth and death and all such things as we found distracting to do, as cutting stone, the skills to lay it close. I hurt for the double waste, the falling ruin of all the uselessly built,

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and turn for nearer home—I covet it, though no one there and not the sill of a house. (90)16 Oppen thought the poem should have ended before this conclusion. His letter to Bronk of September 2, 1964, containing remarkable understanding and appreciation of the poem, is especially interesting for the way in which it opens up an argument over what amounts to two entirely different approaches to the art of poetry: I would want to dispute a bit—I read that poem as ending at “or moving water have failed to bring us to.” It would seem to me so absolutely conclusive, so absolutely beautiful. Whereas surely something a little professorial happens right away to get the thing underway again; “We know all this, colon.” . . . It is not that I don’t feel the statement of the rest of the poem, this proliferation of the egos and I’s which refuse to be quite reflexive. But it can be said otherwise. June pointed out to me how many of the comments on your work said “absolutely original,” and I think that must be felt of them; there must be no possible impression of a statement having been put into verse particularly in a prosody which quite often relies on iambics. I do think a poem must be no less than magic, and surely the stone revealing itself is magic and absolutely conclusive. A very powerful poem. Hope you’ll accept this as a dialogue, Bill. I do not consider my work superior to yours—I suppose I think I know some things. (103–4) Bronk responded as follows in a letter dated September 3: You are without malice (toward me at least)[,] disinterested[,] my most discerningly loyal reader. How should I not be grateful for the worth of your criticism? And you are esthetically unassailable. Indeed you don’t go far enough. I know I am frequently sententious and tedious as even Polonius hardly dared to be. I tried the poem as you suggested and it makes a valid and effective unit and is more vivid. So why not? Well, I hadn’t finished when I got to “have failed to bring us to.” A weak defense but all I have. If I end it there it becomes a sort of coitus interruptus and no

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one is more distressed than I am if my orgasms go on to be flaccid and barely discernible. . . . All right, I think Eliot was wrong to let Pound improve [“and make” crossed out] The Wasteland by his excisions, making a poetically valid piece from his discursive excursions as though mining diamonds out of the mud—(as one is led to believe he did). Something was wrong with his values—Eliot’s, that is. But Pound was probably right. As you are probably right. But that doesn’t make me wrong. Or anyway I am only simply wrong as against being doubly wrong (the double waste) if I went along with you. The dialogue is fascinating in that it rehearses so many of the issues associated with modernist poetics. Oppen would have wanted the poem to end before “We know all this” because it seems to him that the essential images or metaphors have been brought to completion by this point and that everything that follows is unnecessary moralizing on the situation. Objectivism emerges in response to Imagism, and both movements share in the modern animus against rhetoric, discursiveness, “philosophizing”; both share a desire to make the poem hard and spare, a “machine made of words,”17 something “objective” and independent of the poet rather than a transient expression of his subjectivity. In Oppen’s view, the poem’s conclusion “can be said otherwise,” and what he means is that there is nothing altogether necessary in the language, in the specific words that are used. As Oppen correctly notes, Bronk’s prosody is essentially iambic, and with poetry that rests on a traditional metrical foundation there is always the danger that an essentially prosaic statement will merely be slotted into the verse, as into a Procrustean bed. All of this is reminiscent not only of Imagist/Objectivist poetics (i.e., the Pound/Williams school) but also of New Critical formulations as well.18 Quoting his sister, Oppen refers to the originality of Bronk’s poetry, and then adds—ambiguously—that this “must be felt” (103). It seems to me that Oppen is making two perhaps antithetical statements at once: first, that Bronk’s work is clearly original and that the reader inevitably feels its originality; and second (more complexly), that in order for the poetry to succeed, the force of Bronk’s potential originality must be actualized in and through his language and cannot merely reside abstractly in his thought. This is fine practical criticism. Oppen astutely recognizes that the danger confronting Bronk’s poetry is that it can easily slacken o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 20

into “prosaic” utterance, into what later in the letter he calls “iambic recitative” (104). But Oppen’s position is nevertheless one-sided because, whatever Bronk’s faults may be, and even if they are such as Oppen diagnoses, they are part and parcel of the same originality that Oppen praises, which means that if Bronk had eliminated them he would have cut himself off from the source of his power as a poet at the same time. For though Bronk is aware that “ideas are always wrong,” as he writes in “Blue Spruces in Pairs, A Bird Bath Between” (34), he is nevertheless a poet of ideas, and the power and originality of his work cannot be separated from what he has to say. In the letter to Oppen, Bronk admits that he is “frequently sententious and tedious as even Polonius hardly dared to be,” but if we are going to understand Bronk, as I think we are only just beginning to be able to do, we have to put the emphasis on that dared to be. Oppen objects to the naked abstraction of the poem’s conclusion, and in this respect his position is in line with the dominant aesthetic tendencies of the time; it is an extension of Williams’s formulation in Paterson, “No ideas but in things,”19 but it is also consonant with the argument against abstraction that one finds in the New Criticism, for example. By contrast, Bronk dared to moralize, to be “sententious,” but he also dared to communicate what he had to say, as fully as possible, flaws and all. As against the Objectivist—or Symbolist—emphasis on the poem as a made thing, Bronk sees the poet, in one sense, as Wordsworth did, as “a man speaking to men,”20 and, in another (especially in his later years), as speaking through “the Muse”—or, in other words, as spontaneously inspired. This is not to say that he emphasized speech alone or failed to recognize that the poem is a composition, something made by the poet; indeed, in “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox,” one of his most important extended meditations, he speaks of art as trying “a whole world at once, / a composition” (27). But at the same time, he insisted that the poem emerges from a human experience and is itself a human experience that must be communicated fully to the reader. This is why, in his sly, only apparently straightforward, Yankee way, Bronk tells Oppen that he “hadn’t finished” when he got to the point at which Oppen thinks the poem should have ended. And he was right. The poem, as its full title indicates, is about displacement: about the sense in which displacement—not having any essential place or being deprived of an essential place—is fundamental to nature or reality, and about how o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 21

human beings always refuse to recognize this. The poem’s metaphoric substitutions lead inevitably to its conclusion: displacement of the water in the Feeder leads to cracks in the lock walls, in the stone, though these are for a long time indiscernible; human beings cut stone, as they do everything else, in order to wall themselves off from reality; the reality that they refuse to recognize is that they are displaced—not merely historically or sociologically but ontologically. We are displaced. We bear ourselves as into a house across the street and live as though a neighbor’s life until we ready a death there and bear him away and bury him. “I hurt for the double waste,” the poem says in its conclusion—the double waste being both the “natural” waste of things as a result of “displacement” and the waste of human potential, a human potential that is squandered not so much by displacement as by the commitment of human beings to a life of inauthenticity in order that they might avoid reality. Oppen’s strictures against the poem’s conclusion are partly justified, just as Pound’s against the original Wasteland manuscript were. The poem has flaws, a certain amount of loose writing (“iambic recitative”), but it is an extraordinary poem in its own way. If Bronk had heeded Oppen’s strictures rather than following his own bent, he would never have been able to write it; and then, as he says in his letter, there would have been the “double waste.” Oppen associated Bronk not only with skepticism but also with solip­ sism, and thus the figure of Bronk in section 8 of “A Narrative” is implicated with “the devil’s / Doctrine the blind man / Knew” of section 7 (153).21 In a January 1963 letter to June Oppen Degnan—a letter explicitly about Bronk’s poetry and probably written after his visit to Hudson Falls—Oppen writes: The purport of the poems, of course, is the solipsist position. (Agreed that this position has been fatal to a great deal of art.) The thing about these poems is that they put this statement forward with absolute concreteness, with absolute simplicity, with no mistiness at all. . . . I don’t think I have ever heard before the statement in Not My

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Loneliness, But Ours: once said, as it is here, it seems inescapable. The loneliness not of the individual, but of the group. (77) This is interesting but not quite accurate because, for Bronk, precisely because we are all locked into our own subjectivities, we are all subject to the same human condition. The statement in “Not My Loneliness, But Ours” is indeed inescapable. The poem begins, “The most of men are all too much myself,” and it concludes as follows: The human loneliness is the endless oneness of man. Man is one; man is alone in his world. We are the one, even we, who whisper together now closely, as though we were two, as children do, knowing as much as we, and making believe, even as we believe, that another is there. (43–44) It is a complicated—indeed, paradoxical—position because it expresses both belief and disbelief in otherness. The self, aware of its own essential loneliness, is simultaneously aware that others have an identical experience and, in fact, that this is what constitutes the “oneness of man”; but by the same token, this oneness negates the very concept of otherness. For this reason, although Bronk writes out of a deep well of loneliness, he is the very antithesis of the “hermetic” poet. Oppen, for all his populist sympathies, is much more hermetic. Bronk makes use of the first-person plural (the “we”) in a way that very few poets of our time have been able to do, and this is an important index of his originality. His is a truly ethical voice, not because he presumes to speak for others (much less for any particular creed) but because he writes out of the knowledge that he contains the human condition within himself. In section 9 of “A Narrative,” the dark skepticism that Oppen associates with Bronk is extended in a new direction, one that reflects on language itself: The lights Shine, the fire Glows in the fallacy Of words. And one may cherish Invention and the invented terms

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We act on. But the park Or the river at night She said again Is horrible. (154) Oppen recognizes that our hold on reality is already filtered through language and that even those epiphanic moments in which we seem to break through to a sense of clarity come to us (that is, “shine” or “glow”) “in the fallacy / Of words.” The concept of clarity is the defining criterion for Oppen both of truth and of an authentic poetry, and in “Route” he will write: “Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, / A limited, limiting clarity” (193). The same poem contains the following lines, however: “Words cannot be wholly transparent. And that is the / ‘heartlessness’ of words” (194). Surely what Oppen is saying could not be more clear—and could not be more distinct from those tenets that we usually associate with Objectivism: “one may cherish / Invention and the invented terms / We act on,” but reality does not consist of a transparent world of objects, and even if it did, the language we have at our disposal would be unable to render it transparently. Ironically, though Bronk is perennially aware of the tenuousness and, one might even say, fictitiousness of all ideas and conceptions of order, his lens is rarely turned on language or poetic language per se, as Oppen’s is here. In formal terms, one could say that Oppen’s “disjunctive poetics” (to borrow Peter Quartermain’s phrase)22 emphasizes and registers a skepticism about language that has both epistemological and ideological overtones, whereas Bronk’s essentially classical approach communicates skepticism but in such a way that it does not spill over from the poem’s content to its form. Indeed, because poetic form, for Bronk, is the means not only of expressing but of coping with the formlessness of the world, Bronk’s forms actually become more and more classical and circumscribed as his work develops. By contrast, Oppen becomes increasingly disjunctive in his late work. Though section 9 of “A Narrative” recapitulates and extends the skepticism that Oppen associates with Bronk, in the process of doing so it opens the way for a kind of affirmation that is very different from what we get either in Bronk or in Zukofsky. What is at stake here is the question of truth itself, a question that is initially broached (albeit obliquely) in the two opening sections of the poem: o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 24

I am the father of no country And can lie. But whether mendacity Is really the best policy. And whether One is not afraid To lie. And truth? O Truth! Attack On the innocent If all we have Is time. (150) “If all we have / Is time”—that is, if there is no such thing as eternity and no eternal verities, then it follows that there can be no objective truth either. In that case, what is presented as being objectively true is merely a function of the “will to power”—which is to say, an ideological manipulation or “[a]ttack / On the innocent.” But even if Truth (in the sense of a Platonic form) does not exist, there can still be the possibility of truthfulness, which is something that presumably can be known—at least to the self, and at least insofar as it is able to gauge its own intentions. From this point of view, truthfulness would be one of “the small nouns / Crying faith” that Oppen invokes so memorably in “Psalm” (99). But if there are no eternal verities, if there is only the will to power, then why would one be “afraid / To lie”? Oppen’s unresolved syntax leaves the question open, but perhaps he is saying that even in the absence of eternal verities (i.e., of God), to lie is to descend into an inferno of self-loathing. The issues of truth and sincerity are central to Objectivism, of course, both in its theoretical focus and as a poetic practice; and it should be noted that Oppen’s criterion of truthfulness does not involve the same kind of epistemological commitment to an objectively verifiable world that we have in Louis Zukofsky’s “An Objective,” the document around which the Objectivist Movement coalesced after its publication in Poetry in 1931. Zukofsky’s essay begins as follows: “An Objective: (Optics)—The lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus” (Prepositions, 12).23 Here, o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 25

in this simple statement, we have one important aspect of Objectivism, what Burton Hatlen has called its “commitment to the reality of a knowable world of objects.”24 But what is fascinating is that Zukofsky’s famous statement—even the imagery in terms of which it is set forth—is explicitly contradicted by the passage in “A Narrative” in which Bronk is invoked: “The eye / It happens / Registers / But it is dark.” Thus, it seems clear not only that Oppen is taking on Zukofsky in this passage but also that he is doing so through the mediation of Bronk. Oppen’s concern with truthfulness is obviously consistent with Zukofsky’s criterion of sincerity, which is also emphasized in “An Objective,” and Oppen would have had no argument with Zukofsky’s assertion in that essay that the poem should “convey the totality of perfect rest” (Prepositions, 13). But when Zukofsky declares, “It is assumed that epistemological problems do not affect existence” (13), Oppen is certainly unable to offer his assent.25 Indeed, epistemological concerns are primary to Oppen from the outset of his career, beginning with Discrete Series (1934), and one could argue that bringing them to light was precisely what his objective as a poet was.26 Oppen was not always consistent, however, and the one essay he published in his lifetime, “The Mind’s Own Place,” affirms the more typical “objectivist commitment to the reality of a knowable world of objects” that we find in Zukofsky’s theoretical formulations. Rachel Blau DuPlessis notes that “The Mind’s Own Place” was apparently written in March and April 1962, which would place it about a year before the composition of “A Narrative” and probably before the full weight of Oppen’s encounter with Bronk as well (Oppen, Selected Letters, 55, 85). Unfortunately, it is a rather poor performance—not only rambling and confused but, in my view, an evasion of the poet’s deepest insights. Even the title is an evasion. Recall that in section 7 of “A Narrative,” Oppen writes: Serpent, Ourobouros Whose tail is in his mouth: he is the root Of evil, This ring worm, the devil’s Doctrine the blind man Knew. His mind Is its own place; He has no story. (153)

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“The mind is its own place,” Milton’s Satan had asserted, but the elimination of the verb in the title of Oppen’s essay turns the solipsistic energies of Satan and Hamlet into a cozy euphemism that prevents us from even hearing the Miltonic echo and hence from grasping the epistemological problem to which Satan’s assertion is connected. And the substance of the essay is equally evasive. Referring to Williams’s eternal red wheelbarrow and to some equally sentimental verses by Denise Levertov, Oppen writes: “These are, as poetry intends, clear pictures of the world in verse which means only to be clear, to be honest, to produce the realization of reality and to construct a form out of no desire for the trick of gracefulness, but in order to make it possible to grasp, to hold the insight which is the content of the poem.”27 Everything in this sentence lays claim to a crude and narrow empiricism and to what by now, in 1962, is a shop-worn group of ideas: that the world is objectively accessible to us, that the task of the poet is to derive “clear pictures” of the world and communicate those pictures in clear language, and that this is what constitutes honesty and sincerity in poetry. All of this is countered, if not deconstructed, in “A Narrative,” and the Miltonic echo in both texts indicates that Oppen is wrestling with a problem that is initially suppressed in the essay and then given full scope in the poem. This in turn suggests that Oppen’s confrontation with Bronk opened up a crisis in his thinking, one that pitted him against Zukofsky and that led to the great sequence poems of the Of Being Numerous volume: “Of Being Numerous,” “Route,” and “Power, the Enchanted World.” Despite its emphasis on sincerity and transparency, Objectivism is burdened by a number of salient contradictions and by the bad faith of not owning up to them. It seems clear that Objectivism has two sets of unreconcilable commitments and that it is unable to recognize the extent to which they are in contradiction. First, there is the epistemological commitment—problematic in itself—to “the reality of a knowable world of objects.” The materialist and empiricist assumptions implicit to the theory, assumptions consistent with Leninism and rooted in a social climate that disdained “bourgeois subjectivity” of all kinds, indicates that the theory has an essentially pre-Kantian outlook, and that far from being objectively true it is unprovable in itself. (After Kant, is it possible to speak so blithely about the external world?) But second, there is the aesthetic commitment to the poem as a verbal artifact or object that is suf-

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ficient unto itself and not merely an extension of the poet’s subjectivity; hence Zukofsky’s idea that great poetry achieves a quality of “rested totality [that] may be called objectification” (Prepositions, 13) or Williams’s statement (cited by DuPlessis and Quartermain in their introduction to The Objectivist Nexus) that “the poem, like every other form of art, is an object, an object that in itself formally presents its case and its meaning by the very form it assumes.”28 The idea that the poem is an “object,” or a “machine made of words,” is clearly metaphorical and not to be taken literally: if a work of art were merely equivalent to its material properties, it would cease to be art; this would be true even of a work of sculpture, which clearly is an object in the most obvious sense. But even so, there is nothing unique to Objectivism in its commitment to make of the poem something independent, something that is not merely a speech act and an extension of the poet: such is the aim of all art, and in itself it is consistent with Symbolism, with the organicism of the New Criticism, or with any theory that emphasizes the impersonality of the author. But without the assumption of the reality of a knowable world of objects, Objectivism would remain undelineated as a theory, and the problem comes when we recognize that its metaphysical and aesthetic commitments are in contradiction with each other as far as their understanding of the question of experience is concerned. For while Objectivism’s metaphysical perspective (by which I mean perspective on what constitutes reality) implies the priority of a world of objects—objects that act upon the senses of the poet, who then serves as a transparent medium for rendering the world—its aesthetic commitment implies the priority of an artistic shaping process. If the poem is to be made into an “object”—that is, if its parts are to fit together so that they function “on their own,” as a “machine”—then clearly there has to be an artistic intervention or shaping process of some kind. But if a shaping process intervenes, then one no longer is being “true” to the “reality of a world of objects.” Objectivist theory tends to use the words “object” and “objective” in more or less the same way when referring to the world and to the poem, and this strikes me as a sleight of hand; but even if it were not, still the criterion of truth or sincerity (always insisted upon in Objectivist discourse) would have to be very different with reference to external reality and to the poem because if one were sincerely and honestly rendering the world, or at least one’s experience of it, this would not of course imply that the poem in question was any good; and concomitantly, if one were attempting to create a “good” poem, this o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 28

would involve a kind of sincerity and honesty that was not necessarily “true” to external reality. Objectivist theory wants to have its cake and eat it at the same time: it wants to give priority both to the poem and to the world of objects (which constitutes reality and to which it has immediate access); and in conflating these two domains, it manipulates the criterion of sincerity, so as to make it appear to apply to both of them in the same way.29 The irony is that the theory is actually more Romantic in a certain sense than any of the ideas of poetry promulgated by the Romantics themselves, for the Romantics, however much they emphasized expressiveness, always took poetic craft for granted. If one were to retain the metaphysical presuppositions behind Objectivism (which the Objectivists never really did, of course), revision would be impossible and the poem would merely be the expression of an inspired moment.30 The materiality of language (which the Objectivists themselves emphasize) ensures that “words cannot be wholly transparent,” and this means that the “poetic object” will always be deflected from the initial experience—assuming that it is even possible to talk about an initial experience. Oppen’s invocation of Bronk in “A Narrative” and his evocation of the Bronkian skepticism and darkness has the effect of distancing him from Zukofsky and from the latter’s version of Objectivism. But against all expectations, the poem ends on an optimistic note, and if we return to section 9, where initially all seems utterly dark, we can locate the basis for the sense of hope that will carry the poet forward and enable him to resolve (or at least set aside and put into perspective) his quandaries: The lights Shine, the fire Glows in the fallacy Of words. And one may cherish Invention and the invented terms We act on. But the park Or the river at night She said again Is horrible. (154) The senses are deceived and the world is constructed, rather than grasped for what it objectively is, through the “fallacies” imparted by language; yet, at the same time, the possibility is given here of cherishing the world, o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 29

invented or constructed though it may be. The tone of skepticism remains dominant, but one can glimpse beneath the surface of Oppen’s lines something akin to Husserl’s “phenomenological reduction,” which, recognizing that external reality is ungraspable, excludes it from its purview, taking instead the world that is experienced as its essential reality. In other words, the poem takes “the arduous path of appearance”—the phrase from Heidegger that Oppen chose as one of the epigraphs to This in Which—as its reality (92). “The lights / Shine, the fire / Glows.” From an objective point of view, “it is dark” (154; section 8), but still there is the possibility of illumination—or, to borrow the quasi-mystical language of “Of Being Numerous,” the possibility of an “intensity of seeing” that is experienced in terms of “[t]he absolute singular // The unearthly bonds / Of the singular” (167). Ironically, it is only by performing the phenomenological reduction— in other words, by setting aside “objective reality” (and hence the Objectivist perspective, at least in its narrowest sense)—that Oppen is able to work free of Bronk’s influence as well. Thus, when the image of the river returns in section 11, the poem’s conclusion, it no longer has the same implications of horror and epistemological helplessness that it evoked in earlier sections: River of our substance Flowing With the rest. River of the substance Of the earth’s curve, river of the substance Of the sunrise, river of silt, of erosion, flowing To no imaginable sea. But the mind rises Into happiness, rising Into what is there. (155) It is impossible to see into the “source” of things because in order to do so one would have to separate oneself from them, and this is impossible (as Heraclitus saw); and yet, as the conjunction “But” indicates, when one is able to accept the givenness of reality and the way in which one is situated in “what is there,” “the mind rises // Into happiness.” “I know of no other happiness / Nor have I ever witnessed it,” Oppen continues. In the images that surface as the poem draws to a conclusion, though the poet remains in a “mist” that is tantamount to what Wordsworth called o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 30

“the burden of the mystery,” the acceptance of flux and finitude leads not only to happiness but, paradoxically, to a kind of religious sense of the miraculousness of existence: I know of no other happiness Nor have I ever witnessed it. . . . Islands To the north In polar mist In the rather shallow sea —— Nothing more But the sense Of where we are Who are most northerly. The marvel of the wave Even here is its noise seething In the world; I thought that even if there were nothing The possibility of being would exist; I thought I had encountered Permanence; thought leaped on us in that sea For in that sea we breathe the open Miracle Of place, and speak If we would rescue Love to the ice-lit Upper World a substantial language Of clarity, and of respect. (155–56) Paradoxically, it is here, if at all, in the midst of the “seething” world, that being and permanence are to be encountered, and it is here that the Orphic poet is able to rescue love from the darkness of a chthonic underworld. Having begun in irony, the poem finds its way to a resolution, and even to a sense of fulfillment, that enables it to achieve closure. From a philosophical point of view, however, given the poem’s terminus, one could ask whether Oppen’s acceptance of “what is there” amounts to a perspective on reality that is really different in the end from Zukofsky’s simple and o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 31

straightforward empiricism. Does it matter whether one begins with an acceptance of sensory data and external reality or whether, in bracketing the problem of reality through the “phenomenological reduction,” one focuses on appearances? From a poetic point of view, in any event, I think that it does. In order to reach the “Upper World,” Oppen had to descend into the inferno of Bronkian skepticism. This is one of the stories that the poem has to tell. Oppen must have known on some level that if he had not submitted himself to such a quest, the “language / Of clarity, and of respect” to which he was dedicated would have remained facile and superficial. In the end, he is able to carve out a path and a direction that differ from both Zukofskyan Objectivism and Bronkian skepticism. For Oppen, as he tells us in “Of Being Numerous,” is finally a poet of witness, a poet for whom the known and the unknown come together: Because the known and the unknown Touch, One witnesses ——. It is ennobling If one thinks so. If to know is noble It is ennobling. (182–83) But what of Bronk? How would he have responded? It is impossible to say for certain, of course, but I think Bronk would have been dubious about Oppen’s attempt to come to a hopeful resolution and to put closure on both the problem posed by the poem and the poem itself. In “Virgin and Child with Music and Numbers” (a poem from The World, the Worldless that, incidentally, was one of Oppen’s favorite Bronk poems), Bronk writes: “We are not / fulfilled. We cannot hope to be” (45). In a letter to Oppen of October 31, 1962, in which he must have been responding to a comment Oppen had made on the poem, Bronk repeats these clauses, before adding: “our unfulfillment is the measuring of our humanity.” To Bronk, because the human condition involves not knowing what one desires to know, because desire and not knowing come together, and because unfulfillment is the measure of our humanity, it follows that the refusal of fulfillment is the measure of integrity. This is nowhere more starkly expressed than in “The Abnegation”: o p p e n , b r o n k , a n d t h e s t o r y b e h i n d “a n a r r at i v e ” 32

I want to be that Tantalus, unfed forever, that my want’s agony declare that such as we want has nothing to say to the world; if the world wants, it nothing wants for us. Let me be unsatisfied. Hearing me scream, spare me compassion, look instead at man, how he takes handouts, makeshifts, sops for creature comfort. I refuse. I will not be less than I am to be more human, or less than human may be to seem to be more than I am. I want as the world wants. I am the world. (112) Where Oppen, dialogic poet of witness, will vacillate between defining “Man beyond rescue” (as he does in “Of Being Numerous” [185]) and seeking to “rescue / Love to the ice-lit // Upper World,” Bronk, throughout his career, will resolutely refuse to accept any form of transcendence that is willed or manmade. If beauty comes, it must come of its own accord and not because of our heroic efforts. Thus, when Bronk evokes and reinterprets the Orphic myth, as he does in “The Sense of Passage,” one of the sonnets from To Praise the Music, the form in which he presents it is as pessimistic as that of the original. “Constant survivors, ghosts / perpetually,” he writes, “our reach is really back / into the body myth of mortality” (125).

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chapter two Because the Known and the Unknown Touch | A Reading of Oppen’s “Of Being Numerous” In the lines from “Route” that have taken on the aura of defining his essential poetic attitude, Oppen wrote: Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity. (193) When one considers Oppen’s beginnings as a poet, however, these lines are especially ironic; for what is remarkable about the poems in Discrete Series is certainly not their clarity per se but, on the contrary, their opacity: the way in which they register perceptual moments that point to our inability to comprehend the world. If the poems in Discrete Series clarify anything, if they are clear about anything, surely it is that not very much is clear. Taken as a whole, they testify to the impenetrability of matter and the material world. Their mode is imagistic and disjunctive; they make no use of propositional statements or philosophical generalizations. They do not, for example, assert, as Oppen will in fact do in “Of Being Numerous,” that “the world, if it is matter, / Is impenetrable” (164); they merely present this state of affairs. Everything is broken down into its component parts as in a Cubist painting, and there is no attempt at synthesis or at establishing a bridge between the perceptions being registered and the conceptual world of shared human meaning.

Consider the following lines from Discrete Series as an example: No interval of manner Your body in the sun. You? A solid, this that the dress insisted, Your face unaccented, your mouth a mouth? (28) The woman is not even a woman, let alone a specific person, but rather a “solid,” and this is known only because her dress, in covering her, insists upon the fact. Everything is defamiliarized and estranged, not just the perceptions being registered but the language registering them (“your mouth a mouth?”). The perceptions have become unmoored from a human world of shared values and conventions, and so we are left with questions about the simplest things. Ironically, the lines that immediately precede the statement on clarity in “Route” are drawn from a passage that concludes the same poem from Discrete Series that we have been discussing. In “Route” the lines are as follows: Your elbow on a car-edge Incognito as summer, I wrote. Not you but a girl At least (192–93) And in Discrete Series they read: Pointedly bent, your elbow on a car-edge Incognito as summer Among mechanics. (28) In both poems, the image of the elbow on the car-edge is sharply delineated, but in itself it is unconnected to anything of larger significance. In “Route,” the image is contextualized and made to exemplify the “limited, limiting clarity” of the credo that will then follow; in Discrete Series, however, the image is merely an isolated perception in a world in which there is only “matter in motion” and in which everyone and everything is therefore incognito—that is, without identity. The mechanics at the end of the poem from Discrete Series (and mechanics figure in many Oppen poems) represent the single intrusion of b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 36

what one might call symbolism. The world of Discrete Series is a deterministic, mechanistic world, a world in which all causation is hidden. A “discrete series,” Oppen explained to Rachel Blau DuPlessis in 1965, is one in which “each term is empirically justified rather than derived from the preceding term”; the example he gave was the numbers of the stops on one of the subway lines in New York City.1 Through experience one can connect the dots (i.e., one remembers which is the next stop), but not through any sort of a priori theory. Given its significance as the title of the sequence, the notion of a discrete series is indicative of a perspective on reality that is consistent with the skepticism of David Hume, who, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, writes: “Beyond the constant conjunction of similar objects, and the consequent inference from one to the other, we have no notion of any necessity, or connexion.”2 Skepticism remains an abiding thread in Oppen’s work, and images of a universe that operates according to “blind” deterministic and mechanistic principles will continue to recur in his poetry. “Route” itself begins (half-ironically—Oppen would not want to be held to this perspective): “Tell the beads of the chromosomes like a rosary, / love in the genes, if it fails // We will produce no sane man again” (192). And in the lines that immediately precede the ones drawn from Discrete Series under discussion, the blind eye symbol that we encountered in “A Narrative” recurs: “Reality, blind eye / Which has taught us to stare——” (192). Whether the eye is blind because the reality it stares at “is as dark as radar,” as Oppen puts it in “A Narrative” (154), or whether (by a catachresis) reality is itself a blind eye, because there is no God or ghost in the machine, and therefore no a priori truth to be discerned, in either case the lines underscore the abiding darkness of Oppen’s vision. In the sequence poems of his middle period, however, Oppen’s skepticism is countered by other tendencies. What is especially significant, moreover, is that the moments of clarity are no longer registered solely as disjointed images and instances that, like the elbow on the car-edge, have the effect of emphasizing the opacity of the world. Oppen is now capable of making and incorporating philosophical statements in his work, and this makes all the difference. Perhaps the reason that Oppen, in poems such as “Route,” sometimes brings back images and passages from the early work (and we shall encounter other instances of this tendency) is that he has now found a way to open up and illuminate those poetic possibilities: self-quotation thus becomes a mode of revision and self-transformation. b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 37

Indeed, the capacity to make philosophical statements—statements that reflect on the universe, the human condition, and the immediate world of politics and society—does more than add a new dimension to what was already there: it transforms (and here I probably disagree with the majority of those who have written on Oppen) a distinctly minor and rather eccentric body of work into one of the major oeuvres of our time. If we were not examining them through the retrospective lens of the Of Being Numerous volume, I doubt that the poems in Discrete Series would have any serious claim on our attention or, for that matter, that anyone could have predicted that the poet of Discrete Series would turn into the great philosophical poet of “Of Being Numerous.” Oppen’s newfound capacity to make philosophical statements coincides with a new eloquence and with a new capacity for thematic and formal development. There still remains very strong pressure in Oppen’s poetry against glibness and abstraction; but when statements such as “Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world” break through the tightly woven imagery and syntax, one feels that they are hard won and that they carry a weight of profundity and struggle that separates and distinguishes Oppen from the majority of his contemporaries. Oppen’s long struggle with opacity—first in Discrete Series, then in the more than twenty-five years during which he was a member of the Communist Party and wrote no poetry, and then in the period leading up to The Materials (1962), when he resumed writing and his work again began to take hold—was the necessary prelude and propaedeutic to the clarity and profundity he was eventually able to achieve. For in developing the capacity to say things about the world—that is, to generalize, even to essentialize—not only does Oppen override his own poetic origins, but he also breaks with a tendency that is perhaps salient to the modernist movement as a whole. If we place this in historical perspective, it is clear that since the middle of the eighteenth century, at the very least, poetry has been hemmed in on all sides by prose, which developed partly by swallowing up what had originally been the province of poetry. Because more and more of its traditional terrain was gradually taken over and inhabited by the prose genres, it was natural that at a certain point poetry would respond by attempting to ward itself off from abstract ideas. This tendency was only exacerbated when, under the aegis of modernism, the revolt against strict metrical forms swept away what had previously been the most important way in which poetry had defined and protected itself b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 38

not only from prose but also from the prosaic. In the absence of meter, it was impossible to accommodate philosophical conceptions as such. But one could argue that Williams’s dictum “No ideas but in things” is the expression of a tendency that has roots that go well back into Romanticism. In Keats’s odes, for example, the propositional statements are few, hard won, and usually protected by irony. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”—this is spoken, at least in part, and possibly in its entirety (depending on the placement of the quotation marks), by the urn, and so it is not necessarily affirmed by the poet. (The poet “nothing affirms,” Sidney had already maintained in his “Apology for Poetry” of 1583.)3 Buttressed by the various materialisms of the early twentieth century, the various poetic tendencies of the period—not only Imagism and Objectivism but even Symbolism as well—were united in their opposition to abstraction and generalization and in their commitment to a poetry of sensuous concreteness. Poetry always has to be protected from the ideas of its time, most of which are clichés, and one could argue that in the politically charged milieu in which Oppen came to maturity the need for poetry to be protected from ideology was especially salient. Moreover, on the other side of things, pragmatism, the only indigenous American philosophical development of the century, had cut the legs out from under philosophical truth by arguing (in the words of William James) that “[t]he true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons.”4 It may be that Oppen wrote no poetry during the twenty-five-year period in which he was connected with the Communist Party for the same reason that Discrete Series wards itself off from philosophical statements, from generalizations of any kind. Nevertheless, as Hegel recognized in his Aesthetics, poetry needs the idea; the image is nothing if it is not permeated and illuminated by the idea. In Oppen’s case, the initial refusal of philosophical ideas, entailing a reduction of the poem to discrete perceptions and discrete moments of cognition and recognition, imposed, over time, its own pressure; when it was finally released, it led to a breakthrough, which in turn enabled the poet to embrace an expanded order of complexity. Completed in early 1966,5 “Of Being Numerous” is not only Oppen’s greatest poem and one of the greatest of the twentieth century but a poem that is truly exemplary for our time. “Of Being Numerous” is a poem that unfolds in time and to some extent is on the subject of time, and, for that b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 39

reason, in order to grasp hold of it one must be true to the phenomenology of its unfolding. My purpose, therefore, is to construct a meditation on (and around) the poem that remains true to its difficulty, to its serial development, and to its paradoxical struggle for unity and coherence—a struggle that is always on guard against any unity and coherence that could actually be achieved, since such an achievement, taking the poem outside of time, would inevitably be a falsification.6 In saying as much, I have already implicitly touched on the title, the form, the central theme, and even the importance of “Of Being Numerous.” These are issues that will come into perspective as my analysis develops; but before proceeding further, I should say that the form of the poem, the fact that it is a sequence poem, emanates from the poetic/ epistemological problem that generates its central theme and that is contained in its title: the problem of finding unity in multiplicity in a manner that is not artificial and in which the coherence arrived at is not merely imposed a priori. “Of Being Numerous,” one might say, is the poem that not only resolves this formal problem (insofar as it can be resolved) but does so in a manner in which the formal resolution is mirrored by the central thematic concern: the ancient problem (going back to Parmenides) of the One and the Many.7 Moreover, in “Of Being Numerous,” this theme is comprehended not only in its abstract metaphysical guise but also in relation (a) to the poetic process and (b) to the polis—which is to say, to the possibility of community. Both dimensions of the theme, furthermore, are grasped from a historical standpoint and with respect both to the crisis of modernity in general and to the concrete historical moment in which the poem is composed: the mid-1960s, the era of the Vietnam War. Oppen’s vision in “Of Being Numerous” is an existentialist one, with roots in such diverse thinkers as Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Heideg­ ger, and Maritain—and, among the poets, Blake, Hölderlin, and Shakespeare.8 The sustained music of his achievement is arrived at both through the depth and intensity of the thought process that unfolds and through the dialogue the poet carries on with a pantheon of other thinkers. The poets and philosophers whose words and conceptions are echoed and intermingled with Oppen’s own in “Of Being Numerous” communicate much of the poem’s richness of texture and compensate for the austerity of its vision. But these are claims that I hope will be substantiated by the analysis that follows. b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 40

1 There are things We live among ‘and to see them Is to know ourselves’. Occurrence, a part Of an infinite series, The sad marvels; Of this was told A tale of our wickedness. It is not our wickedness. ‘You remember that old town we went to, and we sat in the ruined window, and we tried to imagine that we belonged to those times——It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death; the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it——’9 One of the two epigraphs to The Materials (1962)—the poems Oppen collected following his return to poetry after the long hiatus in which, as he was fond of saying, he was involved with other things—is taken from Jacques Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry: “We awake in the same moment to ourselves and to things.”10 In the lines that open “Of Being Numerous,” self-knowledge is predicated on the act of seeing or witnessing the things among which we live. Whether or not we exist outside of the world of objects, as Descartes thought, is not in question, but certainly we cannot know ourselves apart from an interaction with the things of the world. Oppen’s presentation of this fundamental starting point is much more radical than my gloss on it, however. “There are things / We live among”: the fluidity of the statement is undercut by the line break, which, in arresting the eye, obliges us to read in at least two ways. “There are things”: what is, is plural; and the only approach to being is through becoming; the only approach to the One through the Many. Oppen’s concern with knowledge at the beginning of the poem indicates an initial suspension of the epistemological concerns that will hover over the poem. “There are things / We live among”: so much is clear and we are simply told that “ ‘to see them / Is to know ourselves.’ ” Beyond the immediacy of the statement, however, the predication of knowing on seeb e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 41

ing suggests that we are inevitably immersed in time, in the temporal occurrences that make up an infinite series. Each of these occurrences is “a part,” and we are partial, because we do not come to know ourselves apart from them. Insofar as they can be isolated from the continuum—insofar­ as the “actual” can be isolated, as Oppen will say in section 27—they pre sent themselves as “sad marvels,” miracles, really, of our knowing. The beauty of Oppen’s prosody, here and throughout the poem (indeed, throughout the great poetry of the middle period), results from a conscious process of deceleration, so that phrases we would ordinarily pass by because of their familiarity are replenished, as if with their original meaning. “There are things we live among, and to see them is to know ourselves.” Oppen’s great gift is to allow utterances of this kind—the simplest utterances, but for that very reason pregnant with meaning—to be heard, as if for the first time. It is in this way that he puts his signature on language, and not through any conscious striving after originality. There are deep constraints on his language, however, and when words finally break through to the surface, they resonate against a great well of meaning. What gives the simple phrasing of the opening passage such resonance, especially when we have worked our way through the poem a number of times, is the depth of the meditation in which it is embedded and out of which it emerges. The beautifully subtle allusion in section 1 to the story of Adam and Eve initiates the poem’s intertextual dimension. The allusion is interesting both for what it says about Oppen’s poetic technique and for what it says about the poem’s philosophical content. There is something marvelous, first of all, in the nonspecificity of the reference (“Of this was told / A tale of our wickedness”), and then in the definitiveness of the conclusion that follows (“It is not our wickedness”). The disjunctive leaps that the poem employs, both in its own narrative and in the cultural narratives to which it alludes, contribute to its strangeness and its resonance as poetry. With regard to the poem’s philosophical content, moreover, the story of Adam and Eve has a specific resonance for Oppen for a number of reasons. One aspect of Oppen’s project, as the opening lines indicate, is to see the world anew and, as far as possible, in its simplicity, without the social, historical, and philosophical projections with which it is habitually encumbered. Thus, in section 36 of the poem, alluding once again to the Genesis story, Oppen will assert that the world is that which “the first eyes / Saw” (185). For Oppen, however, to see the world anew entails going back to origins b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 42

and rethinking the foundational myth of Western civilization, with its emphasis on original sin. And for Oppen, as for Lucretius, it is not our wickedness, it is the way things are; or, as he writes in “A Narrative,” “It is the nature / Of the world” (154). Typescript drafts of section 1 of “Of Being Numerous,” when it was still entitled “Another Language of New York,”11 indicate that Oppen had originally written the following in the second and third stanzas: An event, a part Of an infinite series. Of this indeterminancy Was told a tale of our wickedness. It is not our wickedness.12 The revision is fascinating and masterful. The substitution of “Occurrence” for “An event” conveys the suggestion of indeterminacy and thereby eliminates the need for the word itself. But the original emphasis, considered in relation to the Adam and Eve story, suggests the following thought process: (1) Our reality is constituted by indeterminacy; (2) this is precisely what “human kind cannot bear” (to borrow T. S. Eliot’s phrase in Four Quartets); and (3) because it cannot tolerate a reality that is indeterminate, it constructs a foundational myth of original sin as a way of circumventing this reality. The use of juxtaposition (i.e., the placement of heterogeneous elements side-by-side and without logical transition) is crucial to Oppen’s poetic technique in “Of Being Numerous”; and here, a prose passage in quotation marks that seems to be of a personal nature (“You remember that old town we went to . . .”) is juxtaposed against lines of verse that evoke the foundational myth of the West.13 The obscurity of the passage resonates against a struggle to imagine or penetrate to the heart of experience without falsifying it (“It is dead and it is not dead, and you cannot imagine either its life or its death. . . .”); but what is clarified in and through the passage is precisely the obscurity of things (“the earth speaks and the salamander speaks, the Spring comes and only obscures it”).14 The passage thus brings to light—both through its content and in juxtaposition with what has come before—the impenetrability of the world, which is a crucial aspect of what Oppen uncovers in the poem. In Oppen’s via

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negativa, “the known and the unknown / Touch” (182); for indeed, a part of what is known (poetically) is the unknown. 2 So spoke of the existence of things, An unmanageable pantheon Absolute, but they say Arid. A city of the corporations Glassed In dreams And images—— And the pure joy of the mineral fact Tho it is impenetrable As the world, if it is matter, Is impenetrable. The line opening the poem’s second section, “So spoke of the existence of things,” seems to posit a connection to the first section, but what that connection is remains unclear, as does the subject of the verb “spoke.” The missing pronoun could be I (the poet), we (humanity), or perhaps they (the ancients), and the implicit connection could be that because there are things we live among, because the world is multiple and various, it was somehow incumbent to speak about the being of all these things. In what sense, however, can “the existence of things” be characterized as “an unmanageable pantheon”? Perhaps only insofar as each, in its singularity, possesses a numinosity of its own—although when one attempts to make sense of the relationships among these separate things, one quickly discovers how “unmanageable” that totality is. The attempt to penetrate to the level of the “Absolute” yields only arid abstraction— and this (however obliquely) connects us to the corporations, which are at once artificial bodies and the bodies in motion that compose them. As conveyed by the image of the glass and by the ambiguous syntax, in one sense it is all transparent and in another entirely impenetrable: the city of b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 44

the corporations is “glassed [participle] in dreams,” but those “glassed[-] in [compound adjective] dreams” are also trapped in the bodies that contain them, and thus they can never emerge from those bodies or penetrate outward. We are left with impenetrabilities that exist both on the sociopolitical level (with respect to the alienation one associates with the modern city) and the metaphysical level; for “the world, if it is matter, / Is impenetrable.” Yet, in a strange reversal, the perception or experience of impenetrability, though in one sense estranging, yields also a kind of joy: “the pure joy / Of the mineral fact”—in other words, to an experience of being that is beyond interpretation. 3 The emotions are engaged Entering the city As entering any city. We are not coeval With a locality But we imagine others are, We encounter them. Actually A populace flows Thru the city. This is a language, therefore, of New York. 4 For the people of that flow Are new, the old New to age as the young To youth And to their dwelling For which the tarred roofs And the stoops and doors—— A world of stoops—— Are petty alibi and satirical wit Will not serve. b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 45

The life of the modern city seems to engender the consciousness that while we are alienated from our own time and place, this is not necessarily the case for others, including those whom we “encounter” in the city itself. Modernity thus coincides with nostalgia for a mode of existence in which one was in harmony with one’s surroundings. Ironically, this is a “version” of pastoral (to borrow William Empson’s formulation), a mode of literature that originates in the city (in Hellenistic times) and that is characterized by nostalgia for a lost harmony. But the problem of alienation, as developed first by Rousseau and then by the Marxist and existentialist traditions, is paradoxical: one is alienated if one feels a lack of harmony with one’s society; but if that society is itself “alienated,” then to feel oneself in harmony with it is to live an inauthentic existence and thus to be alienated in another sense. It may be a myth, however, that alienation of this kind occurs only under capitalism or under the conditions of modernity: “We are not coeval / With a locality / But we imagine others are.” Those “others” could be the natives or primitives that Oppen will juxtapose against his own society, or perhaps those who belong to another time (“You remember that old town we went to . . .” [164]), or perhaps those who simply do not possess the same kind of consciousness or self-consciousness as the poet and whom he will later regard alternately with fondness or suspicion. Simultaneously, however, there is the problem first broached by Heraclitus: that everything is flowing and that therefore one cannot grasp any sort of stable truth; to do so, one would have to be able to separate oneself from the flux of life, which of course is impossible. Everything, from this point of view, is new, “the old / New to age as the young / To youth”: you cannot step into the same river twice, and so there is no vantage point from which to grasp hold of a totality. But here the political enters into the equation as well because of an unstated but implicit vision of harmony that is juxtaposed against the tawdriness of the “tarred roofs / And the stoops and doors —— / A world of stoops”—where the word “stoops” stands for a world of “petty alibi” that in the end “Will not serve.” 5 The great stone Above the river In the pylon of the bridge

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‘1875’ Frozen in the moonlight In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing, Which loves itself In counterpoint to the idea of Heraclitean flux is the notion, exemplified and made concrete in section 5, that there are singular moments embedded in consciousness—what Wordsworth called “spots of time.” “The great stone” returns us to the impenetrability of “the mineral fact” of section 2; but in this remarkable section of the poem, the antithetical images of impenetrability (or stasis) and flux, the stone and the river, are combined; what is frozen in the moonlight (that is, in the light of the imagination) is the stonelike impenetrability of the flux of time. The uncanniness of this perception is underlined metonymically by the historical date engraved on the stone, which, occupying a line of its own and surrounded by space, seems at once to evoke and to arrest the process of time. Consciousness has nothing to gain and awaits nothing because there is nothing it can do with these perceptions—except insofar as it can find an outlet for them in poetry; and there is thus a sense in which it is destined to circle fruitlessly within itself (like the “glassed[-]in dreams” of section 2). Yet, this is precisely its mode, the experience in which consciousness is most “at home” and in which it comes to love itself, conferring its own measure of value upon itself. 6 We are pressed, pressed on each other, We will be told at once Of anything that happens And the discovery of fact bursts In a paroxysm of emotion Now as always. Crusoe We say was ‘Rescued’. So we have chosen.

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7 Obsessed, bewildered By the shipwreck Of the singular We have chosen the meaning Of being numerous. Section 6 opens with a fine pun on “pressed,” which, in rhyming with “obsessed,” the first word of section 7, draws the two sections together. “We are pressed, pressed on each other,” both in the sense of hurried, rushed, busy (the French say pressé) and in that of being squashed together (in the subway, perhaps, which will enter as image and symbol later on) like proverbial sardines. Though we complain of it, this is the life we have chosen for ourselves: “Crusoe // We say was / ‘Rescued’. / So we have chosen.” Oppen chooses Crusoe as his figure for the solitary, “singular” man in section 6 because the protagonist of Defoe’s 1719 novel was shipwrecked on an island, lived with its “natives” for a time (those who are “coeval / With a locality”), and then finally was “rescued” and returned to civilization. The shipwreck motif enters the poem in section 7 and will be a central symbol from now on. In my original essay on “Of Being Numerous,” included in the George Oppen: Man and Poet volume, I mentioned that Marx “inveighs against those ‘Robinsonades,’ in which the pastoral illusion of being able to step outside of the world economy is projected.”15 As Oren Izenberg has recently noted, in a fine discussion of Oppen’s poetry and thought that turns on this section of “Of Being Numerous,”16 Marx, in the famous chapter of volume 1 of Capital entitled “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” chastises bourgeois political economists for making use of the Crusoe story in order to develop the specious argument that the capitalist mode of production is somehow intrinsic to the “state of nature.”17 But while Oppen may have chosen the figure of Crusoe because of its resonance for Marx and for political economy, the Marxist economic perspective is irrelevant to the context in the poem at hand, and I am afraid that my remark may have sent scholars on a wild goose chase. Responding to my original essay, Marjorie Perloff countered that “what is

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projected in the poem is less the wish to transform the social order than an acute distaste for people.”18 Perloff was quite right to suggest that the Marxist connection is irrelevant to this section of the poem (at least in a direct political or economic sense), but her subsequent observation has the effect of banalizing Oppen’s concern in the passage and is, I think, as wide of the mark as my own original observation had been. Oppen (the man) had no distaste for people, as anyone who knew him could attest (and, in any event, his personality is irrelevant); but, more importantly, the poet’s concern here has to do with the status of the individual vis-à-vis mass society, and with whether the individual as an individual (specifically, the poet or “meditative man” of section 10) can continue to exist in the context of society as it is constituted in the twentieth century. Oppen’s fear, as expressed more explicitly in section 10 of the poem, is that “[t]he isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted” (168). In Defoe’s novel, as I noted, Crusoe is shipwrecked, stranded on an island, and then rescued. In the context of sections 6 and 7 of the poem, however, Crusoe’s shipwreck is “the shipwreck / Of the singular” and thus does not precede but coincides with his “rescue”—with what we have chosen to call his rescue. This reversal is reminiscent, both in its irony and in its attendant symbolism, of the last line of T. S. Eliot’s “Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “Till human voices wake us and we drown” (7). We know that Eliot’s line had a significant impact on Oppen because he quotes—or rather misquotes—it in the title, “Till Other Voices Wake Us,” and the concluding lines (“till other voices wake / us or we drown” [286]) of the final poem in Primitive (1978), his last published book—which is an interesting irony in itself. Although by saying that Crusoe was rescued we indicate that we have chosen to define ourselves—and hence “man”—as social or political animals, there is a sense, for Oppen, in which we cannot be defined in these terms, and thus perhaps we cannot be defined at all, a sense in which we are governed by our silence rather than by our communication with others.19 Insofar as the passage contains a certain amount of nostalgia for Crusoe on his island, it could itself be seen as a version of pastoral. But the passage is less a lament for a lost state of harmony than a diagnosis of an existential reality. “Crusoe // We say was / ‘Rescued.’ / So we have chosen.” By choosing to interpret the story in terms of a rescue, we have chosen to define what it is to be human in terms of being numerous—in terms of

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the modern city—rather than in terms of the isolated man on an island. “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe,” writes Donne.20 We have made this choice and now must live with it, regardless of the loss it entails. As a figure for the solitary individual, Crusoe is also aligned with Oppen’s conception of the poet—as will become increasingly clear as the poem unfolds. One of Oppen’s central concerns in “Of Being Numerous” is whether, under the pressure of mass society, poetry, as we have come to know it in the West, can continue to survive. In this respect, Oppen’s meditation is very much in the tradition of Marxist, or Marxist-Hegelian, aesthetics (which itself derives from Schiller and Kant in an unbroken line). During the time he was associated with the Communist Party (CP), Oppen refused to write for The New Masses, the party’s cultural journal, and it is obvious that his aesthetic stance was diametrically opposed to the CP’s cult of “proletarian literature” (which was aimed at expressing the point of view of the masses and at writing for the masses—and of course this could always be manipulated by the Comintern). For the Western Marxist tradition, on the contrary, it is precisely through his solitude that the lyric poet expresses the “universal” aspirations of society and humanity. The relationship of the poet to society is thus, from this point of view, another formulation of the relationship of the One to the Many. The Marxist philosopher Theodor W. Adorno offers a succinct expression of this dynamic in his essay “On Lyric Poetry and Society”: “Only one who hears the voice of humankind in the poem’s solitude,” writes Adorno, “can understand what the poem is saying.”21 In this essentially Romantic formulation, the lyric poet’s singularity gives resonance to the universal. To Oppen, however, the close connection between the lyric poet and humanity (or even the idea of humanity) is now threatened. To be a poet, for Oppen, under the conditions of modernity (and, even more so, in the context of what we would now call postmodernity), is to experience “the shipwreck / Of the singular”—that is, not only the traditional solitude of the lyric poet but the awareness that poetic solitude—and therefore poetry itself—is menaced by mass society. 8 Amor fati The love of fate

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For which the city alone Is audience Perhaps blasphemous. Slowly over islands, destinies Moving steadily pass And change In the thin sky Over islands Among days Having only the force Of days Most simple Most difficult If Marx is a somewhat ghostly presence in the previous sections, it is Nietzsche, with his rallying cry of amor fati, who is the interlocutor in this one. The Nietzschean “love of fate” is certainly blasphemous because it is predicated on the death of God—and therefore “the city alone / Is [its] audience,” there being no higher power to listen or observe. Given the rather tenuous link between section 8 and the previous sections of the poem, it is interesting that Oppen now makes the island symbol explicit—it was implicit in the previous section, but the word was not actually expressed in connection with the figure of Crusoe. If there is no God, there is complete freedom, but everything is contingent and provisional. Fate, or destiny, is not in the mind of an omniscient deity but is rather a chain of occurrences, “a part / Of an infinite series” (section 1), and, as such, it is inscrutable. The destinies that pass over geographical islands are as mysterious as those that pass over human ones; for from this perspective, even though “[w]e have chosen the meaning / Of being numerous,” every man is essentially an island, walled off and impenetrable. In this extraordinary section of the poem, the days “hav[e] only the force / Of days” because the meanings we ascribe to things are all merely provisional. To borrow another Nietzschean aphorism, we are “human, all too human”: there is no transcendent shape to our lives. The final couplet, “Most simple / Most difficult,” recalls Wittgenstein as much as Nietzsche. To Wittgenstein, the b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 51

conviction we have always harbored that there is some deep, ultimate mystery remaining to be unraveled is a prejudice imposed on us by our language. The world from this point of view is “most simple,” but to accept it is “most difficult.” Oppen develops a perspective here that we find in Wallace Stevens’s “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction.” “How clean the sun when seen in its idea, / Washed in the remotest cleanliness of a heaven / That has expelled us and our images,” writes Stevens, and then immediately adds, “The death of one god is the death of all.”22 To see the world in this way is at once most simple and most difficult because it requires a radical un-learning of all that one knows. “You must become an ignorant man again,” says Stevens in his “Notes” (329). 9 ‘Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance    from Them, the people, does not also increase’ I know, of course I know, I can enter no other place Yet I am one of those who from nothing but man’s way of    thought and one of his dialects and what has happened    to me Have made poetry To dream of that beach For the sake of an instant in the eyes, The absolute singular The unearthly bonds Of the singular Which is the bright light of shipwreck By the time we reach section 9 of “Of Being Numerous,” it is clear that the general theme of the One and the Many coincides with a dialectical engagement between the poem’s ethical dimension and what we might call its “suspension of the ethical”—to pose this in the Kierkegaardian terms that will later make themselves felt in relation to section 16. Indeed, this dialectic is partly responsible for the poem’s form as a sequence poem. Nietzsche’s amor fati in section 8, together with the island symbolism of that section, gives rise to the ethical dilemma of section 9, a dilemma that Oppen confronts not only as a poet but also as a secular mystic: b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 52

“Whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people, does not also increase.” For Oppen, the visionary poet or seer, when the intensity of seeing increases, it is not focused empirically on the things of the world but rather on what the poet will later call “the one thing” (in section 27), which is not in the world at all but simultaneously transcends it and makes vision possible. The ethical dilemma arises for Oppen because the vision of the world that he experiences as transcendence removes him from immediate engagement with human beings and with the things of the world generally. Oppen’s beautiful phrase, “the bright light of shipwreck,” which concludes both this section and section 19, encompasses and encapsulates in a single image the way in which he conceives of poetic vision and the ethical dilemma that it evokes. The underlying conception that is condensed in this phrase is more fully articulated in section 8 of “Route”: Cars on the highway filled with speech, People talk, they talk to each other; Imagine a man in the ditch, The wheels of the overturned wreck Still spinning—— I don’t mean he despairs, I mean if he does not He sees in the manner of poetry. (198) This is a visionary—indeed, an apocalyptic—conception of poetry, which focuses on disaster, on “Man beyond rescue,” as Oppen puts it in section 35 of “Of Being Numerous” (185). As an artistic conception, it is allied to Turner’s paintings of shipwrecks and the Houses of Parliament on fire, as well as to Mallarmé’s Un Coup de dés, where the vision occurs “du fond d’un naufrage” (from the depths of a shipwreck). The ethical dilemma attendant upon an artistic vision of this kind comes from the fact that whereas the vision is focused on suffering and disaster in terms of its content, the artist not only is inspired by what he sees but exults in it and feels himself exalted by it. There is an interesting correspondence between Oppen’s “bright light of shipwreck” and what Kant in the Critique of Judgment (1790) analyzes as the “dynamical sublime” (from the Greek word dynamis, meaning “might” or “power”). “When in an aesthetic judgment we consider nature as a might that has no dominance over us,” Kant writes, “then it is dynamb e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 53

ically sublime.”23 That which would ordinarily evoke terror and the feeling of being annihilated, if it does not lead to these feelings, “reveals in us a superiority over nature” (121), and this in turn is experienced as a sense of transcendence. “Even war has something sublime about it,” Kant adds (122), implicitly raising the ethical problem but without addressing it directly. This seems relevant to me (although admittedly it may be a private resonance) because I associate the beach to which Oppen obscurely refers in section 9 (“To dream of that beach / For the sake of an instant in the eyes”) with his experience of World War II. My warrant for making this connection is that whereas in section 9 the poet asks “whether, as the intensity of seeing increases, one’s distance from Them, the people does not also increase,” in section 14, referring to “those men // With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents”—in other words, to his fellow soldiers —Oppen asks, “How talk / Distantly of ‘The People’ ” (171). As in the passage from “Route” quoted above, in the context of a wartime experience— a beach, perhaps, on which a battle is raging—if one does not despair, one sees in the manner of poetry. Oppen’s mystical formulation for this in the concluding lines of section 9 is “[t]he absolute singular // The unearthly bonds / Of the singular // Which is the bright light of shipwreck.” One recalls his phrase “the shipwreck / Of the singular” in section 7. But here the singularity of vision, which enables the poet to “see the one thing” (section 27) and is experienced as “an instant in the eyes,” ties him to something unearthly, not of this world. As I have elsewhere suggested, Oppen’s emphasis on clarity—which functions as a kind of master concept in his work, as Nature did in Wordsworth’s—has both an Enlightenment and a mystical derivation and direction, the one tending toward limitation, “common sense,” and a communal order, and the other toward a visionary sweeping away of boundaries.24 This is why, for Oppen, “as the intensity of seeing increases,” it leads both to a “distance from Them, the people” and to an anxiety in regard to this distancing. Oppen is a secular, not a religious, mystic because he is fully aware that he “can enter no other place,” that his poetry, however much it may be focused on “[t]he unearthly bonds / Of the singular,” emanates “from nothing but man’s way of thought and one of his dialects.” Nevertheless, to see in “the bright light of shipwreck” is in part, at least, to sublimate the ethical dimension in the aesthetic one, and, as Oppen knew, the dangers attendant upon a sublimation of this kind, especially in the twentieth century, are real and ever-present. b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 54

10 Or, in that light, New arts! Dithyrambic, audience-as-artists! But I will listen to a man, I will listen to a man, and when I speak I will speak, tho he will fail and I will fail. But I will listen to him speak. The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—— well, nothing but the many that we are, but nothing. Urban art, art of the cities, art of the young in the cities—— The isolated man is dead, his world around him exhausted And he fails! He fails, that meditative man! And indeed they cannot ‘bear’ it. While “the shipwreck of the singular” has to do with the loss of individuality under the press of mass society, “the bright light of shipwreck,” in its negative aspect, involves the suspension of the ethical dimension. Both of these themes are developed in section 10 with respect to the sphere of art, the possibility of fascist or totalitarian political formations, and the potential all of this has to surface as violence. The opening line recalls the days in the 1960s of the Living Theater, with its roots in the ancient dithyramb. Out of the dithyrambic hymns to Dionysos, tragedy emerged, and the atmosphere that Oppen conjures in the opening line is one of foreboding, in which a (political) tragedy is about to begin. The loss of boundaries (“audience-as-artists”) seems a prelude here to the kind of violence that sweeps over society in Euripides’s Bacchae. “Incipit tragoedia!” writes Nietzsche in The Gay Science.”25 It was Nietzsche who showed us how the ancient rhythms of violence, sacrifice, and catharsis were progressively sublimated and mastered as tragedy emerged from the dithyramb and Dionysian ritual, but it was left to the twentieth century to demonstrate how tenuous are the bonds of civilization and how easily the process could be reversed. What Oppen clearly sees is that an art in which the solitary artist has been submerged in the “crowd”— an art constituting itself as a new dithyramb, in which the audience are themselves artists—is either the prelude to or the product of totalitarianism, whether of the left or right. Under such conditions, the “isolated” or “meditative” man, unable to reach his audience, is doomed to failure. In this pessimistic vision, the classical balance between artist and audience no longer holds: the artist is no longer able to find his audience, and the necessary boundary between artist and audience is lost. b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 55

11    it is that light Seeps anywhere, a light for the times In which the buildings Stand on low ground, their pediments Just above the harbor Absolutely immobile, Hollow, available, you could enter any building, You could look from any window One might wave to himself From the top of the Empire State Building—— Speak If you can Speak Phyllis——not neo-classic, The girl’s name is Phyllis—— Coming home from her first job On the bus in the bare civic interior Among those people, the small doors Opening on the night at the curb Her heart, she told me, suddenly tight with happiness—— So small a picture, A spot of light on the curb, it cannot demean us I too am in love down there with the streets And the square slabs of pavement—— To talk of the house and the neighborhood and the docks And it is not ‘art’ Extending from section 9 through section 11 is an inventory of different experiences or modalities of light. The uncanny “light [that] / Seeps b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 56

anywhere” of section 11, “a light for the times,” can be associated with the light of Edward Hopper paintings, in which the ordinary is reflected back as nightmare. And in the nightmare vision of the first half of this section, with its evocation of hollowness (the opposite of the impenetrability of section 2) and its ambiguous syntax (the phrase “Hollow, available” can modify both “pediments” and “you”), there is an eerie quality of doubling (“One might wave to himself / From the top of the Empire State Building”) that reads uncannily as if it had already been analyzed by Freud: For the “double” was originally an insurance against destruction to the ego . . . and probably the “immortal” soul was the first “double” of the body. This invention of doubling as a preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams. . . . From having been an assurance of immortality, [the double] becomes the ghastly harbinger of death. The idea of the “double” does not necessarily disappear with the passing of the primary narcissism, for it can receive fresh meaning from the later stages of development of the ego. A special faculty is slowly formed there, able to oppose the rest of the ego, with the function of observing and criticizing the self and exercising a censorship within the mind, and this we become aware of as our conscience.26 The repetition (or doubling) of “Speak” in this section of the poem has a ghostly resonance of the kind that accords with Freud’s analysis. The verb is surrounded by space and interrupted, without punctuation, by the phrase “If you can”; the result is the creation of another syntactical ambiguity, such that the implied clause hovers among three locutions: Speak, if you can; If you can, speak; and If you can speak. What is especially interesting in all this is that the passage is literally ghostly in its resonance; for what it echoes is the repeated echo of “Speak” in the opening scene of Hamlet, where first the guards implore Horatio to speak to the Ghost and then Horatio commands the Ghost to speak. “Stay, illusion. / If thou hast any sound or use of voice, / Speak to me,” says Horatio (127–29)—but there are nine other repetitions of the verb in the scene. Section 11 is really divided in two, and the utterance of a name, with the corresponding assertion that this is an actual girl and not a pastoral archetype (“Phyllis——not neo-classic, / The girl’s name is Phyllis”), has the effect of bringing the ghostly resonances of the opening lines down to earth. The doubling that occurs in this section of the poem is thus also b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 57

between the symbolic realm of art, situated high above the city, at “the top of the Empire State Building,” and a local reality, situated “down there with the streets” and pointing to that which “is not ‘art’.” In this engagement between the realm of art and that which is “not art,” art is not only distanced from ordinary reality but also estranged from it—and one is reminded how deeply implicated the connection between experiences of estrangement (or alienation) and the artistic process is in twentiethcentury aesthetics. The Russian Formalists, for example, argued that the function of the work of art was essentially that of “defamiliarization” or “making strange.” As we have already seen, Oppen is clearly troubled by the ethical implications stemming from the various ways in which the art of his time (including his own art) embraces alienation. A certain kind of Marxist perspective might argue that the work of art has the utopian function of seeing into or beyond an alienated reality and that it must therefore separate itself from that reality; but what if this tendency is itself an extension of the alienated reality it purports to correct? By the end of section 11, the poem seems to take refuge from the ghostly realm of high art in simple human interactions. “Phyllis” is a real girl, one of many, not a shepherdess in a stylized (and therefore estranged) pas­toral. The section moves from what is distanced and remote, from the light that shines at the top of the Empire State Building to “[a] spot of light on the curb.” But it is significant that at the conclusion of section 11, Oppen insists on the distinction: “I too am in love down there with the streets . . . And it is not ‘art.’ ” 12 ‘In these explanations it is presumed that an experiencing subject is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.’ the rain falls that had not been falling and it is the same world . . . They made small objects Of wood and the bones of fish And of stone. They talked, b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 58

Families talked. They gathered in council And spoke, carrying objects. They were credulous, Their things shone in the forest. They were patient With the world. This will never return, never, Unless having reached their limits They will begin over, that is, Over and over Oppen’s subtle interrogation of the problems associated with the Western artistic tradition is extended in section 12 through the juxtaposition of a “primitive” culture against our own. The “primitive” relationship to temporality in section 12 provides a context of otherness against which our own relationship can be measured. “An experiencing subject” (let us say the “Phyllis” of section 11) “is one occasion of a sensitive reaction to an actual world.” But the problem is that these reactions are ephemeral and thus are lost to the process of time. The connection between the prose passage that begins section 12 and the meditation on art and what is “not ‘art’ ” in the previous sections would seem to be that art originates precisely in order to contain and memorialize what would otherwise be lost to time. But the ambivalence to art manifested at the end of section 11 results from the fact that the attempt to contain and memorialize is predicated on distancing or estranging oneself from the immediacy of life. This process of estrangement is phenomenologically connected to an experience that Oppen often characterizes as boredom, and it is thus antithetical to the patience of the “primitive” culture evoked in the body of section 12—a culture devoted to the making of artifacts but not, strictly speaking, to “art” (in the symbolic sense in which Oppen is conceiving of the term). What Oppen evokes in the “anthropological” turn of section 12, as if from the standpoint of an irretrievable past, is a “credulous” people who “were patient / With the world” and who thus did not suffer from boredom or angst. Like so many twentieth-century artists, Oppen is fascinated by and nostalgic for what one might call a culture of immanence, one without experience of the old b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 59

European striving for transcendence. But “This will never return”—that is to say, the people (who have left only a few artifacts as traces of themselves), the cultural possibilities they embody, and the world in which those possibilities could be actualized. None of this will ever return— unless, as in Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence,” “They will begin over, that is, / Over and over,” like the rain. “[T]he rain falls / that had not been falling / and it is the same world.” The metaphorical evocation of boredom contained in these lines connects the passage to the opening poem of Discrete Series (the “Maude Blessingbourne” poem), which is also the poem Oppen chose to begin his collected poems. Oppen continued to regard this poem as a source for his poetry as a whole, and, as we shall see, he actually quotes from it at a crucial moment of “Of Being Numerous” (in section 37). The knowledge not of sorrow, you were   saying, but of boredom Is——aside from reading speaking   smoking—— Of what, Maude Blessingbourne it was,   wished to know when, having risen, ‘approached the window as if to see   what really was going on’; And saw rain falling, in the distance   more slowly, The road clear from her past the window  glass—— Of the world, weather-swept, with which   one shares the century. (5) Maud Blessingbourne (Oppen added an “e” to her first name) is a character in Henry James’s “The Story in It”: Maud Blessingbourn, when she lowered her book into her lap, closed her eyes with a conscious patience that seemed to say she waited. . . . She got up and stood by the fire, into which she looked a minute; then came round and approached the window as if to see what was really going on.27 What must have attracted Oppen to this passage was its concern with temporality, implicit in the phrase he quotes but more explicit in James’s b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 60

description of “a conscious patience that seemed to say she waited.” During the time in which he was at work on Discrete Series (the late 1920s and early 1930s), Oppen had apparently not yet read Heidegger; but one of the fascinating aspects of his development is that his concern with boredom, with temporality in general, as evidenced by the “Maude Blessingbourne” poem, coincides so fully with Heidegger’s. We usually think of boredom in negative terms, and the nostalgic evocation in section 12 of those who were “patient / With the world” would tend to underline this connotation; but for Heidegger boredom is a gauge of reality. In “What is Metaphysics?,” the inaugural lecture he gave after being appointed to the Chair of Philosophy at Freiburg, Heidegger wrote that boredom “draws all things, all men and oneself along with them, together in a queer kind of indifference. Thus, boredom reveals what-is in totality.”28 Boredom has this revelatory effect, in Heidegger’s account, because it coincides with an experience of emptiness or nothingness, which, if one is attentive to it, reveals that meaning is a human construct and that all contingent meanings are partial (in both senses of the word). In doing so, however, boredom simultaneously attunes us to the ontological, to the being that lies beneath appearances—or, in other words (if we translate this to Oppen’s mystical imagery), to “The absolute singular / The unearthly bonds / Of the singular” (section 9). Oppen was retrospectively fascinated by the fact that the “Maude Blessingbourne” poem was written in 1929, the same year as Heidegger’s inaugural lecture; and in a letter of 1966, quoting the passage on boredom in the “Maude Blessingbourne” poem and referring to “Heidegger’s statement that in the mood of boredom the existence of what-is is disclosed,” Oppen adds: “I think this is the law of poetry, and the only law.”29 13    unable to begin At the beginning, the fortunate Find everything already here. They are shoppers, Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal is without issue, a dead end. They develop Argument in order to speak, they become unreal, unreal, life loses solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 61

because baseball is not a game but an argument and difference of opinion makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger One’s soul. There is change In an air That smells stale, they will come to the end Of an era First of all peoples And one may honorably keep His distance If he can. In the thirteenth section of “Of Being Numerous,” juxtaposed against the evocation of temporality and recurrence of the previous section and against the description of a people who were “patient / With the world,” Oppen presents us with a phantasmagoria of unreality and inauthenticity, a realm peopled by “ghosts that endanger // One’s soul.” This involves a reversal of sorts of section 11, in which the ghostly realm of high art was juxtaposed against the ordinary and the local; for here, it is the denizens of ordinary reality who are ghosts that endanger one’s soul. And here the experience of boredom, far from providing access to a vision of totality, is seen as a kind of death-in-life. Oppen is drawing on the wastelands and underworlds of Pound and Eliot, Blake and Baudelaire in this section, and the influence of Williams’s “At the Ball Game,” with its evocation of a fascistic crowd, is also evident.30 In his desire to “keep // His distance / If he can,” Oppen is extending a tradition at least as old as Gray’s Elegy, with its revulsion against the “madding crowd’s ignoble strife.” But there is something original in the way the fear of contamination takes on apocalyptic overtones that are calibrated in terms of the political situation of the day: “There is change / In an air / That smells stale, they will come to the end / Of an era / First of all peoples.” With these lines, a political current that will run through the rest of the poem is foregrounded—and clearly what is being glimpsed is not only the end of a particular era but nuclear holocaust and the end of civilization. What is particularly frightening in this vision is a quality that goes beyond pessimism to verge on something utterly deterministic. All roads seem to lead to disaster in this dark prophecy. Here the cause is American-style materialism and emptib e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 62

ness, but in “Power, the Enchanted World,” another of the great middleperiod poems, the same result stems from the impending political and military collision between the United States and the Soviet Union. “What does it mean to object / Since it will happen?” writes Oppen in that poem. “It is possible, therefore it will happen / And the dead, this time, dead” (205). 14 I cannot even now Altogether disengage myself From those men With whom I stood in emplacements, in mess tents, In hospitals and sheds and hid in the gullies Of blasted roads in a ruined country, Among them many men More capable than I—— Muykut and a sergeant Named Healy, That lieutenant also—— How forget that? How talk Distantly of ‘The People’ Who are that force Within the walls Of cities Wherein their cars Echo like history Down walled avenues In which one cannot speak. In section 9, Oppen confronted the possibility that the poet’s vision distances him from “the people,” and here he names fellow soldiers from whom he “cannot altogether disengage [himself].” There are only three times in the poem in which ordinary individuals are named, and in each case what is memorialized is the pathos of anonymity and temporality, the fact that these actual human beings will be lost to history: “Phyllis” in b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 63

section 11; “Muykut” and “Healy,” Oppen’s fellow soldiers, now in section 14; and “Mary-Anne,” whoever she may be, in section 21. One of the functions of art is elegiac, its memorializing function; but in a paradox that was first developed in Gray’s Elegy (1751), the naming of “ordinary” individuals—that is, those who are not what Hegel called “world-historical” individuals—has the effect of underlining their essential anonymity.31 “How talk / Distantly of ‘The People,’ ” Oppen now asks. His continuing interrogation of art and of the relationship between the realm of art and what is “not art” is joined to a political critique because of the communist habit of referring in the abstract to “the people.” But as section 14 concludes, Oppen is also aware that the desire of both art and understanding to come to grips with totality—not to remain at the local level, “down there with the streets”—is what necessitates distance, and so the lines are also implicitly asking, “How not talk distantly of The People?” “The People,” in those concluding lines, are an amorphous “force” that cannot be fully grasped, and their place and times cannot be articulated. It is interesting that the word “speak” occurs in sections 11, 13, and now 14 of the poem. In section 11, as I noted, “Speak // If you can” echoes Horatio’s address to the ghost of King Hamlet; in section 13, the ghosts at the baseball game, who “endanger // One’s soul,” “develop / Argument in order to speak”—false, inauthentic speech that militates not only against art but against life itself; and here in section 14, the attempt to get close to “The People” evokes a contrary state of affairs in which speech—both poetry and understanding—is somehow cut off and rendered impossible. 15 Chorus (androgynous): ‘Find me So that I will exist, find my navel So that it will exist, find my nipples So that they will exist, find every hair Of my belly, I am good (or I am bad), Find me.’ Oppen’s collagelike technique of incorporating quotations and pseudoquotations into his poetry in a manner that allows the different voices or attitudes to merge without attribution—that is, without separating them out into different selves or locating them in terms of an origin—is beautifully mirrored in the content of section 15, where the androgynous chorus b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 64

implores recognition, demands to be found. One can read this passage either as a satire on narcissism or in relation to the individual’s desire for recognition as a distinct individual as a straightforward expression of a human pathos. Perhaps because the central theme of the One and the Many has been turned in so many complex directions by this point, the passage (whether it is an actual or a pseudoquotation) arrives at a kind of equipoise in which the contradictory vectors of satire and pathos are neutralized. If we read it for its pathos, then what the passage expresses is connected to and motivated by the presence/absence dialectic of the previous section, where the naming of distinct individuals paradoxically underscores their anonymity in the face of death. From this point of view, the androgynous chorus reads like a tribal chant, and this would link it both to the various “anthropological” turns that the poem has previously taken and (because the simplicity of prehistorical cultures might in this context represent a “stripping away” of all that is vain and inessential) to a kind of pathos of the human condition. If we read it as a satire on narcissism, then we return to section 13, where the “shoppers, / Choosers, judges” are “ghosts that endanger / One’s soul.” One of the ironies attendant on this reading is that what makes everyone like everyone else—that is, what turns them into a “crowd”—is precisely this desire for recognition, this insatiable lust to be found. Poetry itself is implicated in this lust for recognition—and I would argue that Oppen’s famous twenty-five-year silence, as well as his involvement in the Communist Party, is connected to his awareness of and struggle with this inevitable fact.32 16 ‘. . . he who will not work shall not eat, and only he who was troubled shall find rest, and only he who descends into the nether world shall rescue his beloved, and only he who unsheathes his knife shall be given Isaac again. He who will not work shall not eat . . . but he who will work shall give birth to his father.’ Section 16, consisting in its entirety of a quotation from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, is nevertheless central to the poem as a whole.33 b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 65

Oppen said of this passage that “the context of the entire poem alters [Kierkegaard’s] meaning,”34 and we shall see that this is indeed the case. Although the quotation clearly underlines the necessity of work and struggle in the process of forging an identity—and, as such, is juxtaposed against the narcissistic tendency of section 15—we must understand it against the larger background of Fear and Trembling in order to grasp its significance to Oppen’s poem. First of all, it occurs in a context in which Kierkegaard establishes a dichotomy between the “external world,” subject to “the law of indifference,” and the “world of the spirit,” in which “an eternal order prevails” (27). At the beginning of the “Preliminary Expectoration” to the “Problemata” (in other words, at the beginning of the body of the work), Kierkegaard makes the following crucial distinction: From the external and visible world there comes an old adage: “Only one who works gets bread.” Oddly enough, the adage does not fit the world in which it is most at home, for imperfection is the fundamental law of the external world, and here it happens again and again that he who does not work does get bread, and he who sleeps gets it even more abundantly than he who works. In the external world, everything belongs to the possessor. . . . It is different in the world of the spirit. Here a divine order prevails. Here it does not rain on both the just and the unjust. (27) In Oppen’s appropriation, the polarities of Kierkegaard’s radical idealism are muted because Oppen does not distinguish between “the external and visible world” and “the world of the spirit”; but what is especially ironic is that Oppen’s ellipses also have the effect of muting what we might call the “materialist” counterpart of the argument, which Kierkegaard openly expresses when he admits that in the external world “he who does not work does get bread.” In this undoing of the Kierkegaardian polarities, Oppen was apparently attempting to reconcile tensions and ambivalences that are played out in both his poetry and his life. It is only in this fashion that Kierkegaard can be accommodated; otherwise, he would pose too serious a danger of “escapism.” For actually, a great deal more is at stake in Oppen’s appropriation of the Kierkegaard text than is immediately apparent from the quotation. What is at stake is the dialectical engagement between Kant and Hegel, on the one hand, and Kierkegaard, on the other, an engage-

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ment that the latter himself inscribes in Fear and Trembling. For Kant and Hegel, the universal status of the ethical allows for no exceptions, but for Kierkegaard, as a result of what he calls the “paradox of faith” (70), there can be a suspension of the ethical for the sake of a higher end. Abraham, the “knight of faith” in Kierkegaard’s conception, stands for a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” according to which “the single individual is higher than the universal” (70).35 Thus, if we may translate Kierkegaard’s conception to the language of “Of Being Numerous,” Abraham (ironically, the “father of his people”) represents the “absolute singular / The unearthly bonds / Of the singular,” which cannot merely be swept up into and subsumed by the universal. “Abraham cannot be mediated,” asserts Kierkegaard; “in other words, he cannot speak. As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me” (60). One can hear this echoed in several of the passages in “Of Being Numerous” that precede the Kierke­ gaard quotation. In section 11, in lines that echo Horatio’s address to the Ghost, Oppen writes: “Speak // If you can // Speak.” If “speech” expresses the universal and pertains not only to ordinary communication but to the realm of philosophical generalization, it follows that there is something irreducibly specific and particular in both art and history. In the concluding lines of section 14, Oppen refers to “The People” (a philosophical abstraction) “Who are that force / Within the walls / Of cities // Wherein their cars // Echo like history / Down walled avenues / In which one cannot speak.” As Wittgenstein writes at the end of the Tractatus, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”36 Abraham does not represent the aesthetic in Kierkegaard’s conception,37 but rather a mystical faith that establishes its singularity and that Oppen translates to the aesthetic. To Kierkegaard, given the terms of his radical idealism, this conception of singularity does not pose the same problem of elitism and escapism that it does to Oppen; for if one splits apart the world of spirit and the external world, and if to the spiritual world, “No one who was great . . . will be forgotten,” then it scarcely matters what happens in the external world.38 To Oppen, however, committed as he is to “the arduous path of appearance,” it matters a great deal; so there can be no question of leaving the polarities intact: one must strive to reconcile them. And yet, as we see, the Kierkegaardian polarities are by no means foreign to what Oppen struggles with in “Of Being Numerous.”

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17 The roots of words Dim in the subways There is madness in the number Of the living ‘A state of matter’ There is nobody here but us chickens Anti-ontology—— He wants to say His life is real, No one can say why It is not easy to speak A ferocious mumbling, in public Of rootless speech Sections 17 to 20 descend into the underground (or underworld) of the subway in order to measure things on high from the standpoint of things on low and, by so doing, to develop a complex meditation on language and being, politics and history. The immediate nexus is the allusion to Orpheus’s descent “into the nether world” in the passage quoted from Kierkegaard; but these three sections, coming at the center of the poem (much as the topos of the descent into the underworld is at the heart of the epic as a genre), pick up an important thread that was initially developed in section 13. “They develop / Argument in order to speak,” Oppen had said of the crowd of “shoppers, / choosers, judges”; “they become / unreal, unreal, life loses / solidity, loses extent.” Interestingly, the repeated phrases “unreal” in section 13 and “real” in this one echo “The Burial of the Dead,” the first section of “The Wasteland”:   Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.39 Similarly, the words “roots” and “rootless” in section 17 have a connection to the passage in “The Burial of the Dead,” in which Eliot asks, “What are b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 68

the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish?” (38). There is also a hint of several passages in the Four Quartets where the underground train becomes a metaphor for a passage through a meaningless or infernal landscape: part 3 of “Burnt Norton,” the “place of disaffection” in which “the world moves / In appetency, on its metalled ways” (121), and part 3 of “East Coker,” with its “vacant, interstellar spaces,” and in which the poet conjures “an underground train, in the tube, [stopping] too long between stations” (126). Oppen’s relationship to Eliot and to the modernist project of reconceptualizing the epic is a complex subject that has received very little attention. Eliot, following Baudelaire, had modernized the epic descent to the underworld by reconceiving it in lyric terms and in relation to an urban landscape. In “The Wasteland,” the lyric standpoint of “Prufrock” is given a kind of epic ballast by being furnished with mythological and literary underpinnings; the result is an epic in miniature that seems to lament, along with the decline of Western civilization, the loss of epic possibilities, the tropes of which return in the poem as thin shades of themselves. Oppen was more deeply influenced by Eliot than has perhaps been recognized, and he does not seem to have had the kind of animosity toward Eliot that Williams, for example, harbored; but though the “wasteland” motif enters into the texture of his work, it does not pull it in a nostalgic (or reactionary) direction. In an interesting letter of 1964, comparing his own poetry to Eliot’s, Oppen notes that Eliot’s “metaphysical standpoint is faith and [his] anthropocentric standpoint is the Age of Faith.” For this reason, Oppen adds, “I haven’t, I’m afraid, written a Wasteland, haven’t written a decisive expression of a period. I meant not to try in this book [This in Which]. I mean to try in the next [Of Being Numerous].40 In “The Wasteland,” Eliot’s “grouse” (as he sometimes put it) was against the decline of the West; but in the Four Quartets it is apparently against life itself. A similar pessimism makes itself felt in Oppen’s relation to history, but this is countered by an ethical (also very Jewish) commitment “to make much of life” (“To the Poets: To Make Much of Life” is the title of a late poem from Myth of the Blaze [New Collected Poems, 260])—a commitment that does not allow for mystical withdrawal and that stems in part from a very different reading of the Enlightenment. By the same token, whereas Eliot has a nostalgic relationship to the epic, and whereas Pound in the Cantos actually attempts to reconstitute it in modern terms, Oppen is fundamentally opposed to the epic, because of its connection b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 69

to empire and to warfare.41 And this is a strain in the poem that will now begin to make itself felt. 18 It is the air of atrocity, An event as ordinary As a President. A plume of smoke, visible at a distance In which people burn. 19 Now in the helicopters the casual will Is atrocious Insanity in high places, If it is true we must do these things We must cut our own throats The fly in the bottle Insane, the insane fly Which, over the city Is the bright light of shipwreck Sections 18 and 19 of the poem, rooted in the experience of the Vietnam War, are extraordinary for their condensed power and intensity. The brilliant language and imagery of these sections (Oppen makes use of such techniques as paronomasia and juxtaposition) gives them a quality that is reminiscent to my mind of the synaesthetic effects that Blake achieves in “London.” The “ferocious mumbling, in public / Of rootless speech” of the previous section leads in section 18 to “the air of atrocity,” which is all the more atrocious for being disconnected from its outcome. Oppen’s meditation on rootlessness, disconnection, and the extreme violence that these can entail is linked to his meditation on poetry and to the aesthetic dimension, and this is what makes these sections particularly troubling. The root meaning of “aesthetic” is perception, and if perception is dislocated and distanced from a social context, it can find beauty even in a plume b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 70

of smoke that results from a bomb dropping, or, in other words, from a situation “in which people burn.” This is why the phrase “the bright light of shipwreck” is repeated from section 9 of the poem, where it had been connected to poetry and to “[t]he unearthly bonds / Of the singular.” In that earlier context, Oppen had expressed the anxiety that aesthetic perception itself, “the intensity of seeing,” leads to “distance / from Them, the people.” Just as the city of corporations in section 2 is “Glassed / In dreams,” so the bombardier in his helicopter is immured from (and inured to) the destruction he causes. The phrase “Insanity in high places” (where “high places” is literal as well as metaphorical) beautifully connects the bombardier to the “President” and then to the image of the bottled fly. Insanity is being conceived as alienation not only from reason but from a fundamental sense of self-interest and survival. What the “President,” being “ordinary”—and therefore grasping the meaning of things only in an ordinary, linear, empiricistic fashion—fails to understand is that “If it is true we must do these things / We must cut our [own] throats.” One of the meanings of “being numerous” (which politicians, alas, never understand) is that we cannot ultimately divorce ourselves from others and that our artificial and anachronistic political categories (those of nationhood, for example) do not ultimately endow us as a species with immunity from the real—“Glassed / In dreams” though we may be or though we think we are. 20 ——They await War, and the news Is war As always That the juices may flow in them Tho the juices lie. Great things have happened On the earth and given it history, armies And the ragged hordes moving and the passions Of that death. But who escapes Death

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Among these riders Of the subway, They know By now as I know Failure and the guilt Of failure. As in Hardy’s poem of Christmas We might half-hope to find the animals In the sheds of a nation Kneeling at midnight, Farm animals, Draft animals, beasts for slaughter Because it would mean they have forgiven us, Or which is the same thing, That we do not altogether matter. In a 1973 letter to Donald Davie, Oppen wrote of himself: “Yes, as you say: I am a very Hardyesque poet (tho not thru Hardy, as a matter of autobiographical fact. I found it elsewhere).”42 What is “Hardyesque” in Oppen is the sense of determinism that pervades so much of his poetry. “They await / War, and the news / Is war // As always // That the juices may flow in them / Tho the juices lie.” Freud, in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1936), posited a death instinct, and in these central sections of “Of Being Numerous” it is as if humanity as a whole—not just the “ragged hordes” but those who are supposedly civilized—are impelled, lemminglike, to suicide. The failure of the entire civilization is pressing them onward, and the repetition of the subway motif from section 17 adds to the sense of determinism and mindless forward momentum. The “poem of Christmas” to which Oppen alludes is “The Oxen” (1915). In this poem, Hardy contrasts the innocent belief of childhood with the skepticism and loss of faith of adulthood: Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock. “Now they are all on their knees,” An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.

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We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then. So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If someone said on Christmas Eve, “Come; see the oxen kneel” In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know,” I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.43 Oppen retains Hardy’s image of the kneeling oxen, but only for the purpose of stationing it against the completely unsentimental utterance of his final stanza. Notice how Oppen moves from “animals” to “Farm animals” to “Draft animals” and finally to “beasts for slaughter,” and notice also how the conclusion that emerges from this sequence ties up the section as a whole. In being compelled to violence by our “juices,” it is as if we betray not only ourselves but—to exacerbate the pathos—the entire animal kingdom (all those creatures that, in the old idea of the Great Chain of Being, we conceive as subordinate and subservient to ourselves), and it is as if our only redemption could come in the thought that they— not God or Christ but the animals themselves—have somehow forgiven us or that we are not as central to the universe as we have traditionally assumed. It is worth pausing over this section, and particularly its final lines, because just as Oppen takes Hardy’s “poem of Christmas” and builds something new out of it, something appropriate to his own time and milieu, so, it strikes me, he does with Christianity in general, with the Christian ideas of forgiveness and redemption. Monotheism makes man central to the created universe, and Christianity, by viewing man as created in the image not just of God but of a God who took on human form, raises this idea to cosmic proportions. Human sinfulness (our propensity for war and violence, for example) calls forth the need for forgiveness and redemption. In Hardy’s poem of Christmas, the oxen are praying in their sheds. In Oppen’s poem, with its sensitivity to the horrors of hisb e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 73

tory (“Great things have happened / On the earth and given it history”), the metaphorical prayer for forgiveness from the sinless animals of the concluding passage is in part an extension of the Christian ethos (and Christmas spirit) permeating Hardy’s poem but it also expresses a postChristian (and postreligious) awareness that Christianity is itself implicated in the horrors of history. The cadence of the section’s final two lines—“Or which is the same thing / We do not altogether matter”—is Oppen at his most eloquent and profound. 21 There can be a brick In a brick wall The eye picks So quiet of a Sunday Here is the brick, it was waiting Here when you were born Mary-Anne 22 Clarity In the sense of transparence, I don’t mean that much can be explained. Clarity in the sense of silence. Hardy is a determinist, but in section 21 determinism and indeterminacy somehow come together in the image of the brick—one among many—that the eye happens to pick. The rhyme accentuates the conception: it so happens that “brick” and “pick” rhyme, and though there is no reason for this, it has a determining effect on the verse. We are thrown into the world, as Heidegger says, a world that preceded us and that to some extent determines us: “it was waiting / Here when you were born.” The brick has a symbolic weight in the passage, but the implications are entirely ambiguous and indeterminate. They could be benign: the eye could simply pick out a brick in a brick wall, for no reason and with no subsequent result; or they could be malignant: this particular brick could happen to fall on a specific individual named Mary-Anne. The passage is b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 74

charged with undisclosed meaning—in the way that life itself is. The connection between sections 21 and 22 is obscure because ultimate ends and causes are obscure (“I don’t mean that much can be explained”). If this is the brick that was waiting when one was born, there is no way of gaining control of that fact or of avoiding it. What poetry gives us is not mastery of the world but a momentary sense of “transparence” in which we are freed from the illusion of mastery and thus able to accept silence. 23 ‘Half free And half mad’ And the jet set is in. The vocabularies of the forties Gave way to the JetStream And the media, the Mustang And the deals And the people will change again. Under the soil In the blind pressure The lump, Entity Of substance Changes also. In two dozen rooms, Two dozen apartments After the party The girls Stare at the ceilings Blindly as they are filled And then they sleep. The question that looms over this and the next several sections of the poem concerns “the people”—that old leftist phrase that occurs also in sections 9 and 14. In his interview with L. S. Dembo, Oppen remarked that “ ‘Of Being Numerous’ asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually does exist.”44 He was deeply ambivalent about whether it is possible to speak in the abstract about b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 75

“humanity” or “the people,” and the ambivalence is related to the tension in his thought between radical nominalism, which recognizes no abstractions or generalities, and a humanism colored by Marxism. In these sections of the poem, one senses the internal struggle in Oppen being played out even over the status of the grammatical article: the people, a people, people, peoples. One senses, furthermore, that this problem pertains to an area of experience that cannot be fully explained. Here again, the clarity that the poem produces is tantamount to silence and allows for an engagement with the impenetrable. That which cannot be explained cannot be explained either because it is abstract or because it is in constant flux, or for both reasons. The three stanzas of section 23 form a triptych in which highly disparate areas of impenetrability are juxtaposed. In the first of the three, what seems to be at issue is merely the inauthenticity of commodity fetishism, with its debased jargon; but when we encounter the last line of the stanza, “And the people will change again,” it becomes evident that this perspective is too limited and that there is something impenetrable in this process and hence in the “substance” of history or of a given society. Oppen’s use of juxtaposition makes us read the term “substance” in the second stanza back into the first stanza and forward into the third. Substance is the real or essential part of anything, literally that which stands under or underlies it. As Aristotle defines the term in On the Soul, substance embraces matter, form or essence, and that which is compounded of the two—therefore, change. Aristotle defines matter as “that which in itself is not ‘a this’ ” and form as “that precisely in virtue of which a thing is called ‘a this.’ ”45 Substance is therefore graspable and ungraspable, knowable and unknowable at the same time. As such, it is a crucial conception in Oppen’s vocabulary, marking the site at which “the known and the unknown / Touch” (section 31).46 The transitional image of the lump in the second stanza is ambiguous—and ominous in its ambiguity: it could be an embryo or a cancer. And though the girls in the culminating third stanza are being penetrated (or “known” in the biblical sense), the irony here is that “the pure joy / Of the mineral fact / . . . is impenetrable / As the world, if it is matter, / Is impenetrable” (section 2). There is nothing prurient or gratuitous in Oppen’s image of “[t]he girls / Star[ing] at the ceiling / Blindly as they are filled.” On the contrary, every aspect of this complex image is motivated by the poem as a whole. Man, as a species being, desires to know—both Aristotle b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 76

and Genesis are in accord on this. This is a defining characteristic of our substance, and yet, precisely because we cannot separate ourselves from what is to be known (Heraclitus’s insight), substance is that which can never be fully known or penetrated. Thus, there is a sense in which we too are “blind” or asleep. The poet stands apart in order to grasp more than a part, but what he grasps is that he too is a part and therefore partial. 24 In this nation Which is in some sense Our home. Covenant! The covenant is There shall be peoples. 25 Strange that the youngest people I know Live in the oldest buildings Scattered about the city In the dark rooms Of the past——and the immigrants, The black Rectangular buildings Of the immigrants. They are the children of the middle class. ‘The pure products of America——’ Investing The ancient buildings Jostle each other In this half-forgotten, that ponderous business. This Chinese Wall. The Abrahamic covenant was in reference to a particular people, the “chosen people,” but the question is whether there can be such a thing as a covenant under the conditions of modernity and of secular society. b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 77

The political concept of “the nation” is still governed by a religious or transcendental sense of things, and the very idea of “home” brings the political and the religious together; but if there are separate peoples, as of course there are, then a human covenant would have to include them all and not just a single people, and the question is whether this is possible. The religious covenant that would bind the people up into one nation (the word “religion” means a binding together) always pertains only to a particular people, and thus from an internationalist, Marxist point of view it is an anachronism; but without such a notion of a covenant, we are “homeless” and uncentered. Oppen is thinking through the fundamental political problem as it pertains to modernity. Oppen’s condensed language is of necessity both ambiguous and ambivalent: on the one hand, the use of the term “covenant” is implicitly religious, but, on the other, this gesture is undercut by the irony of “peoples” (the plural form), which seems merely to testify to what is already in evidence. If there are only peoples, and if nothing holds them in common, then the notion of a covenant is completely ungrounded. There is a sense, however, in which Oppen’s relation to Judaism and his socialist politics coalesce around this very notion. As a political tendency, socialist (or communist) internationalism has a Jewish origin—and essentially for two reasons: first, because the Jews were a people without a nation, who, having suffered from the European nations, were in a position to grasp what the transcendence of nationalism might mean; and second, because a universalizing perspective originates with Hebrew monotheism and is its main bequest to the Western world—this in spite of the dialectic between particularism and universalism that originates with ancient Judaism and continues into the present day. But, as we know, a universalist or internationalist perspective is an extremely difficult idea to live up to, among other reasons because it involves giving up the sense of “rootedness” that people seem to desire. “In this nation / Which is in some sense / Our home,” writes Oppen. Everything is problematic in this deceptively simple utterance. The idea of “home,” for example. How can one be at home in the world when to do so means to be false to one’s ideals? And as for the American nation, though founded on the ideological assumption that different peoples can come together to form a unity (e pluribus unum—the one from the many), the very idea of nationhood, which implicitly opposes one nation to the others, contradicts this as-

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sumption. All of this seems to be implied in the diffidence of Oppen’s language; yet at the same time, the verse seems to say, here we are. In section 25, architecture is again a figure for impenetrability and alienation, as it had been in earlier sections of the poem, but now it is also a figure for the way we are literally formed and deformed by the structures of the past. The sins of the fathers are visited upon the children: “the youngest people . . . Live in the oldest buildings . . . In the dark rooms / Of the past.” Everything is contained and homogenized: the immigrants disappear into the “black / Rectangular buildings” (the cliché is the “melting pot”) and somehow emerge as “The pure products of America”—a phrase Oppen borrows from Williams’s poem “To Elsie” (“The pure products of America / go crazy—”).47 We are at once swallowed up by our structures and walled off from reality by them: the metaphorical apartment buildings give way at the conclusion of the section to the symbolic Chinese Wall. 26 They carry nativeness To a conclusion In suicide. We want to defend Limitation And do not know how. Stupid to say merely That poets should not lead their lives Among poets, They have lost the metaphysical sense Of the future, they feel themselves The end of a chain Of lives, single lives And we know that lives Are single And cannot defend The metaphysic On which rest

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The boundaries Of our distances. We want to say ‘Common sense’ And cannot. We stand on That denial Of death that paved the cities, Paved the cities Generation For generation and the pavement Is filthy as the corridors Of the police. How shall one know a generation, a new generation? Not by the dew on them! Where the earth is most torn And the wounds untended and the voices confused, There is the head of the moving column Who if they cannot find Their generation Wither in the infirmaries And the supply depots, supplying Irrelevant objects. Street lamps shine on the parked cars Steadily in the clear night It is true the great mineral silence Vibrates, hums, a process Completing itself In which the windshield wipers Of the cars are visible. The power of the mind, the Power and weight Of the mind which Is not enough, it is nothing And does nothing b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 80

Against the natural world, Behemoth, white whale, beast They will say and less than beast, The fatal rock Which is the world—— O if the streets Seem bright enough, Fold within fold Of residence . . . Or see thru water Clearly the pebbles Of the beach Thru the water, flowing From the ripple, clear As ever they have been The history of the world is a history in which human beings have carried “nativeness / To a conclusion / In suicide”—that is, in which one “nation” or “people” has risen up in war against others until it too succumbed to the lemming logic in which it was enmeshed. “If it is true we must do these things / We must cut our throats,” the poet had asserted in the Vietnam section of the poem (section 19). In section 26 (which is by far the longest in the poem), however, Oppen confronts the empiricist credo (at once epistemological and aesthetic) with which he began in Discrete Series, a credo in which what is defended is “limitation” and what is attacked or defended against is the “metaphysical sense” of the world, including of the future. We must take Oppen at his word that “ ‘Of Being Numerous’ asks the question whether or not we can deal with humanity as something which actually does exist.” The “metaphysical sense / Of the future” he mentions coincides with a conception of humanity that transcends the immediate particulars of nations and peoples, a conception, we may say, that culminates in the Enlightenment at the same time that it is put in question by the scientific developments of the Enlightenment. The aporia Oppen faces is that while the conception of humanity remains an abstraction—and one, moreover, that does not allow for the sense of rootedness which is experienced only within the “limitation” of a particular locale—without that conception nativeness will be carried to b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 81

a conclusion in suicide. There is in addition the opposite problem, which the twentieth century has also brought home to us (if we needed to be reminded of it), and this is that abstractions like “humanity” are themselves fully capable of bringing us to a conclusion in suicide; but this is another matter, and one that is not fully brought into play in the present context. “We want to say / ‘Common sense’ / And cannot,” writes the poet. What Oppen means by “common sense” is crucial to our understanding of the passage as a whole. In my view, he is not referring to the practical wisdom of the “man in the street” but rather to a metaphysical notion of human commonality, on which the idea of the human community rests. This passage in “Of Being Numerous” recalls Heraclitus’s aphorism (which Eliot used as one of the epigraphs to “Burnt Norton”), “There is a logos common to all, yet each one lives as if he had a private understanding of his own.” This kind of understanding of the human undergirds the classical conception of the poet as a spokesman for the many, on which the entire history of poetry in the West is predicated. What Oppen is confronting at this point in “Of Being Numerous,” however, is the demise of this sense of the common and hence the demise of our classical understanding of both politics and poetry, at least in the way in which the Greeks had conceived of those activities. There is a beautiful overlap between politics and poetry in the way the meditation develops, because the loss of a sense of shared commonality, which leads to suicide on the political level, is also tantamount to the end of poetry. Thus, the meditation picks up from where it left off in section 10, where Oppen had confronted the failure of the solitary, meditative poet (“And he fails! He fails, that meditative man!”) and the concomitant rise of the new dithyramb. In the pattern established by the Greeks, the poet can serve as a spokesman not only for the polis but for humanity as a whole, insofar as he is able to preserve “[t]he boundaries / Of [his] distances”—and we should note the repetition of “distances” from section 13, where “one may honorably keep // His distance / If he can.” But in Oppen’s prophetic meditation (he is writing before feminism or the “politics of identity” took hold), this classical balance is now in grave jeopardy. The syntax and therefore the meaning of the passage stretching from “Of lives, single lives” to “We stand on // That denial / Of death that paved the cities” is ambiguous—unnecessarily so, to my mind, since it introduces confusion where clarity is wanted. Nevertheless, as I interpret these lines, Oppen is emphasizing that although human lives are single, and b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 82

although the idea of “humanity” as a transcendent category cannot be defended scientifically, it is one we require in order to enable us to confront the ultimate reality of death. If we no longer have a sense of the human, then we no longer have a clear conception that enables us to distinguish a boundary between what is common to all and what is particular to the individual. If we have no sense of commonality, we have no criterion for establishing boundaries of any kind. “Stupid to say merely / That poets should not lead their lives / Among poets.” Anyone who has meditated deeply on the fate of poetry in our time must acknowledge the prophetic resonance of these lines. For the fact is that poets now do lead their lives among poets—they have no other audience—and they are haunted by this fact of American life; it has had the effect of cordoning them off (frequently in “Creative Writing” departments) from reality. The lines that immediately follow (“They have lost the metaphysical sense / Of the future, they feel themselves / The end of a chain // Of lives, single lives”) suggest that the poets themselves sense that they have “come to the end / Of an era” (to borrow the language that Oppen applied to the culture as a whole in section 13)—in other words, that they themselves fear that poetry is already a thing of the past. The loss of the metaphysical sense of the future implies the loss of the poet’s capacity to “speak” for his society and for humanity as a whole. The poet’s life is now merely “single”; he can no longer “defend / the metaphysic / On which rest / The boundaries / Of our distances”—he can no longer defend aesthetic distance itself. He no longer has an audience outside the guild of poets, and, in any event, under the conditions of the new dithyramb, of “audience-as-artists” (section 10), these distinctions (these “distances”) are no longer meaningful. Forty-odd years after Oppen wrote these lines, the illness he diagnosed has only worsened. In section 26 and in his various meditations on poetry throughout “Of Being Numerous,” Oppen implies that the classical balance between the poet and his audience (between the one and the many) can be destroyed in two antithetical ways: either through the isolation and alienation of the poet or through the poet’s immersion in the group (“audience-as-artists,” etc.). If all lives are single, there can be no clear boundary establishing the appropriate distance between isolation and immersion, and yet that “metaphysic,” though perhaps suspect on empiricist grounds, is absolutely necessary. Insofar as the metaphysical standpoint of Objectivism is itself empiricism, it seems that Oppen’s diagnosis applies to Objectivism b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 83

itself. Here, then, is where Oppen departs from the Objectivist ethos— unless we say that his confrontation with its limitations is itself Objectivist, which to some extent it surely is. In losing a metaphysical sense of the future, the poets are no longer able to invoke a notion of “common sense”—that is, of man as a speciesbeing, which we find in Heraclitus’s aphorism that there is a “logos common to all.” Civilization rests on this notion of “common sense” because without a conception of humanity there can be no metaphysical sense of the future and therefore no project that extends beyond the finitude of a single life. “We stand on / That denial / Of death that paved the cities,” writes the poet. The denial of death is literally, as well as metaphorically, the ground for the metaphysical sense of the future that in Oppen’s lament the poets have lost. Oppen was deeply influenced by Kierkegaard, as we saw in relation to section 16, and he may have borrowed his conception of “the denial of death” from the Danish philosopher. In Ernest Becker’s great study in existential psychology, The Denial of Death (1973), Kierkegaard—and particularly his perspective on heroism—is a central focus.48 Oppen is not mentioned by Becker, and at the time he wrote “Of Being Numerous” he could not, of course, have known of Becker’s study; but the parallel is wonderfully illuminating nonetheless because the problem Oppen is grappling with in this section of the poem hinges on the issue of heroism and is replete with Kierkegaardian ironies. The question is this: does heroism consist in the denial of death or in an absolute confrontation with death? Without the denial of death, there can be no project for humanity, no sense of the common, no metaphysical sense of the future, but only “lives, single lives,” as the poet says. And yet, there is clearly a sense in which the denial of death is unheroic and a denial of truth. Civilization (literally “city life”) is at once the metaphysical “ground” for humanity and a covering over of the truth. In Oppen’s beautifully open syntax, the generations stand on the pavement (the image is concrete, literally as well as figuratively) that they themselves (as a result of the denial of death) have paved; the pavement is the “ground” of historicity, that which allows the “generations” to build upon one another and thus in some measure to avoid being swept into the maelstrom of nonbeing. At the same time, however, as his fluid syntax indicates (“Generation / For generation and the pavement // Is filthy as the corridors / Of the police”), Oppen acknowledges that all of the civilizations built up by the generab e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 84

tions of humanity are corrupt. (“They await / War, and the news / Is was // As always” [section 20].) The repetition of the word “generation” in this section of the poem reverberates with the pessimistic wisdom of the ancients, of Homer and, above all, Ecclesiastes (with its vision of the futility of generational cycles). This pessimism is something like the ground bass to Oppen’s complex music. Nevertheless, he certainly is not about to abandon history, and in the passage that follows, with its lengthened lines, there is an opening out to history and an explicit concern with the new: How shall one know a generation, a new generation? Not by the dew on them! Where the earth is most torn And the wounds untended and the voices confused, There is the head of the moving column. This is surely one of the great passages in twentieth-century American poetry. The tragic irony it conveys, that violence and suffering are always implicated in any genuine newness, is reinforced by the u sound as it modulates through the passage as a whole. What follows is strangely circular, however. Oppen invokes the possibility that “the head of the moving column”—what we would tend to call the avant garde—will be unable to find its generation; but at the same time, the only way in which one can know a new generation is through “the head of the moving column.” What accounts for this doubleness, in Oppen’s quasi-Marxist formulation, is that while a “generation” can only be defined by those who have an authentic relationship to their time, it is possible that, under a particular set of historical conditions, these figures will be unable to express themselves or fulfill what they intrinsically have to offer. Here, as in Gray’s Elegy, we again encounter the pathos of anonymity and unfulfilled potential. In the concluding lines of section 26, the historical realm of human endeavor and the power of the mind itself are juxtaposed and measured against “the great mineral silence,” against “[t]he fatal rock // Which is the world.” Much as, in earlier stanzas of this section, a metaphysical conception of humanity had been dialectically posed against an empirical sense of single lives, so now, in the concluding stanzas, human history is set off against the natural world. Oppen’s agnosticism in these stanzas gives weight to the impenetrability of the natural world: b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 85

The power of the mind, the Power and weight Of the mind which Is not enough, it is nothing And does nothing. Nevertheless, as in the lines on consciousness in section 5 of the poem (“consciousness // Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing, / Which loves itself”), Oppen’s agnosticism releases a visionary power in which images of brightness and clarity prevail. 27 It is difficult now to speak of poetry—— about those who have recognized the range of choice or those who have lived within the life they were born to——. It is not precisely a question of profundity but a different order of experience. One would have to tell what happens in a life, what choices present themselves, what the world is for us, what happens in time, what thought is in the course of a life and therefore what art is, and the isolation of the actual I would want to talk of rooms and of what they look out on and of basements, the rough walls bearing the marks of the forms, the old marks of wood in the concrete, such solitude as we know—— and the swept floors. Someone, a workman bearing about him, feeling about him that peculiar word like a dishonored fatherhood has swept this solitary floor, this profoundly hidden floor——such solitude as we know. One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads in his hands, He must somehow see the one thing; This is the level of art There are other levels But there is no other level of art In section 27—which, significantly, except for its final stanza, is written in prose—Oppen arrives at his fullest and clearest understanding of b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 86

the nature of poetry. He develops a philosophical conception of poetry in this section, but one that is given, paradoxically, in the context of a poem and that therefore cannot be divorced from poetry. The conception that Oppen develops does not shirk from difficulty (“It is difficulty now to speak of poetry,” he begins), but at the same time it recognizes that in order for poetry to be poetry it must attain the “determinate simplicity” that Hegel calls for in his Aesthetics. The difficulty of speaking of poetry for Oppen—and of speaking of it now, in (and for) the present—is both historical and epistemological. It apparently has to do, in some not fully explained way, with “those who have recognized the range of choice” and “those who have lived within the life they were born to.” Though this might seem reductive, I would argue that Oppen is here developing a Marxist conception of poetry akin to the one Adorno articulates in “Lyric Poetry and Society.” For Adorno, the voice of humanity can be heard “in the poem’s solitude”; and for Oppen, in section 27, the poet is linked to the figure of the “workman.” In the previous section, Oppen had written that we “stand on / That denial / Of death that paved the cities,” and in this section the poet (the one who has “recognized the range of choice”) recognizes that he “stands”—in an equally metaphorical way—on the “solitary floor” that the workman (the one who lives “the life [he was] born to”) has swept. The relationship between the poet and the workman is thus an aspect of the relationship between the one and the many. “It is difficult now to speak of poetry,” however, because the poet is as isolated from the workman as the workman is from the poet; neither is able to “find / [his] generation,” and thus both are in danger of “[withering] in the infirmaries // And the supply depots, supplying / Irrelevant objects” (section 26). Note the repetition of the phrase “such solitude as we know,” which here applies equally to the workman and the poet. The entire section should be read in apposition to section 10, where Oppen had lamented the failure of the solitary poet (“And he fails! He fails, that meditative man!”). That Oppen is here developing a Marxist conception of poetry—that is, one in which poetry depends on a relationship (veiled and attenuated, to be sure) between the poet and the “productive forces”—does not mean that he is asserting anything like a univocal conception of truth or that “the one thing” of the concluding stanza of section 27 stands for a philosophical truth that could be universalized and articulated. This would be to turn Oppen into an epistemological Stalinist, which he clearly was b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 87

not.49 On the contrary, for Oppen “the one thing” cannot be grasped cognitively or rationally, but only as an intuition of completeness and formal precision. What allows the poet to weave unity out of the “thousand threads in his hands” (the image is astonishingly precise) or to “see the one thing” is a capacity that is neither rational nor a product of sense perception, in a simple sense. The emphasis should be on the word “somehow” (“He must somehow see the one thing”)—as if to say that we don’t know how it happens or how it can be explained, only that it does happen and that the existence of art is the proof that it does. In section 9, Oppen had described this moment in visual terms, as “an instant in the eyes” in which “[t]he absolute singular // The unearthly bonds / Of the singular” is experienced, but he now has the confidence to give it an expression that risks being philosophical because it is rooted in a poetic context. “This is the level of art / There are other levels / But there is no other level of art,” he writes. “It is difficult now to speak of poetry,” among other reasons because we are skeptical of philosophy—because no discourse on poetry is able to attain to the singularity that poetry attains; and yet, in the conclusion to section 27, Oppen rises to a formulation of poetry that is itself poetry and, in its determinate simplicity, represents genuine knowledge, knowledge appropriate to its time. 28 The light Of the closed pages, tightly closed, packed against each other Exposes the new day, The narrow, frightening light Before a sunrise. In the sequence of metaphorical transformations that Oppen is developing, the light of art, nature, and implicitly history are tightly interwoven: the “light / Of the closed pages,” of the poem that exists before it has come into existence, is the “narrow, frightening light / Before a sunrise” because it “exposes” not only a new day but the “wounds” of a “new generation” (section 26). The uncanny light of art, of “the one thing” (section 27), circling back to “The absolute singular // The unearthly bonds / Of the singular,” is thus “the bright light of shipwreck” (section 9). Oppen’s imagery in section 28 is strangely Mallarméan, particularly in view of the connection that can now be drawn between the closed b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 88

book and the shipwreck motif, both of which figure so prominently in Mallarmé’s poetry. Whether or not Oppen was influenced by Mallarmé in any important degree, his technique in “Of Being Numerous” is in many respects strikingly symbolist—at least in the sense that his central images are not empirically derived, as they perhaps are in Discrete Series, but the creative products of a movement of the mind. If symbolism is “an attitude that emphasizes the creative role of human consciousness as a force that actively transforms the flux of human experiences into coherent perceptual and axiological structures,” as Charles Altieri, distinguishing between symbolist and immanentist modes of thought, defines it, then Oppen is a symbolist poet—at least in “Of Being Numerous,” his greatest poem.50 But the same, of course, can be said for all genuine poets, because the poet “must somehow see the one thing; / This is the level of art / There are other levels / But there is no other level of art.” 29 My daughter, my daughter, what can I say Of living? I cannot judge it. We seem caught In reality together my lovely Daughter, I have a daughter But no child And it was not precisely Happiness we promised Ourselves; We say happiness, happiness and are not Satisfied. Tho the house on the low land Of the city Catches the dawn light I can tell myself, and I tell myself Only what we all believe True b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 89

And in the sudden vacuum Of time . . . . . . is it not In fear the roots grip Downward And beget The baffling hierarchies Of father and child As of leaves on their high Thin twigs to shield us From time, from open Time There are other levels, however, and essentially they constitute what we call life, the process “Of living . . . [of] open / Time,” in which the unity that art affords is not given and in which all judgments are partial and contingent. Oppen’s quasi-mystical conception of form is matched, on the representational level, by his insistence on reflecting the openness and even the formlessness of reality, and so it is interesting that the poem moves dialectically from a philosophical statement concerning the unitary dimension of art to one in which existential openness is reiterated. The experience of “the sudden vacuum / Of time” is connected to a fear of rootlessness, and this explains the poet’s address to his daughter that frames the section. A metaphysical concern with roots and rootlessness had already been developed in sections 17 through 19 of the poem, as we have seen, but there the context was sociohistorical rather than ontological and Oppen was covering ground that had been opened up especially by Eliot. Strangely, in section 29 Oppen’s concern is not only with ontological rootlessness but with the facticity of all rootedness that the fear of rootlessness itself breeds: “is it not / In fear the roots grip // Downward / And beget // The baffling hierarchies / Of father and child”? To be “caught in reality,” from this point of view, is to take on the roles that “shield us . . . From open / Time.” This is the most Sartrean section of the poem, and there is a sense in which what the poet is saying might seem to constitute an unfair argub e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 90

ment against existence, as he well knows. If to be “rooted” is to be in “bad faith,” and if to form judgments is inevitably to engage in falsification, then one cannot live in the world. The citizen or political man is he who is engaged in the pursuit of happiness. But “it was not precisely / Happiness we promised / Ourselves,” writes Oppen in the most obscure passage of the section: “We say happiness, happiness and are not / Satisfied.” What is intended here as an ethical promise, which, even in the absence of a transcendent horizon, allows for the transcendence of hedonism, is a life dedicated completely to meaningfulness—in other words, a life that is completely unshielded from what Oppen can only refer to as the light. Meaning a Life, the title of Mary Oppen’s memoir, is akin to what the poet may be suggesting in this context but cannot explicitly say.51 30 Behind their house, behind the back porch Are the little woods. She walks into them sometimes And awaits the birds and the deer. Looking up she sees the blue bright sky Above the branches. If one had been born here How could one believe it? 31 Because the known and the unknown Touch, One witnesses——. It is ennobling If one thinks so. If to know is noble It is ennobling. Philosophy begins in wonder, according to Heidegger, and in this respect it has a kinship with poetry.52 The beautiful credo that forms section 31 is a succinct affirmation, at once poetic and philosophical, of everyb e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 91

thing that this poet—who finds it so difficult to speak of poetry or to make judgments about life—finds himself able to affirm. To me—and I suspect to many other readers—it is as moving a poetic affirmation as any that our century has produced, as any it affords and perhaps allows. Paradoxically, its persuasive power is a function of its insistence on the conditional mode. “It is ennobling / If one thinks so”—and that if one thinks so carries enormous force. The conditional gives credence to the resonance of “to know is noble,” which otherwise would have a merely naive quality of assertiveness—as if, so late in history, one could accept the Enlightenment attitude without a sense of irony. Yet it is ennobling to know, if one thinks so; this is to say that if one opens oneself to the sort of experience that Oppen describes in section 30 (an experience of “defamiliarization,” in which the known and the unknown touch), one feels oneself exalted, and such an experience—qua experience—is not subject to doubt. Oppen, I believe, owes something to Wordsworth here, or at least is moving through terrain that was already charted by the Romantic poets. Wordsworth in “Tintern Abbey” knows that the transcendent conception he espouses may possibly be a “vain belief,” but he cannot deny the feelings and experiences that have given rise to that conception. Section 30 clearly stands as a kind of objective correlative for the more abstract (but no less poetic) formulation of section 31; and it is interesting that the imagery of section 30—and particularly the deer in the forest— replicates the imagery of Oppen’s “Psalm” (from This in Which), which has often, and quite rightly, been read as a kind of ars poetica. “Psalm” concludes, “The small nouns / Crying faith / In this in which the wild deer / Startle, and stare out” (99). The irony, which I think has not often been noticed, is that “faith” is not itself one of the small nouns but, like “knowledge” or “nobility,” an abstraction or substantive, which, as such, requires a leap of faith—a movement of the mind beyond sense perception. Yet the epigraph to “Psalm” is “Veritas sequitur” (The truth follows), and so apparently this is where the poet is willing to take his stand. 32 Only that it should be beautiful, Only that it should be beautiful, O, beautiful

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Red green blue——the wet lips Laughing Or the curl of the white shell And the beauty of women, the perfect tendons Under the skin, the perfect life That can twist in a flood Of desire Not truth but each other The bright, bright skin, her hands wavering In her incredible need 33 Which is ours, which is ourselves, This is our jubilation Exalted and as old as that truthfulness Which illumines speech. Against but also as an extension of the Romantic dialectic of beauty and truth, Oppen separates beauty from truth in section 32 of the poem, putting the emphasis on the first rather than the second, but then he surprisingly brings back the significance of truth at the close of section 33—or rather, not truth but truthfulness. The distinction is an important one because truthfulness can be known by the subject in a way that truth cannot; “truth” is an abstraction, whereas “truthfulness,” if not exactly one of the “small nouns,” is an experience that is self-validating. If the known and the unknown touch, then knowing cannot wholly be cognitive or rational, cannot simply be in relation to an abstract, objective truth; and indeed, the kind of knowing that is evoked in section 32 as “beautiful” is knowing in the biblical sense: “Not truth but each other.” Yet truth cannot be abandoned as a criterion, nor can it be folded into or equated with beauty; for even if it is not grasped in the abstract (i.e., in itself), it is that which “illumines speech”—at least in its concrete, human form of truthfulness. Oppen writes “truthfulness” rather than “truth” in order to give weight to the concrete over the abstract, but clearly the one

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at least implies the other. As I have several times suggested, words denoting light in Oppen’s poetry, such as “illumines” in this context, have both an Enlightenment and an anti-Enlightenment derivation, a cognitive/ rational and a mystical sense. “Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, / A limited, limiting clarity”: that passage from “Route” is relevant to the present context as well because it sheds light on the sense in which beauty both is and is not truth in Oppen’s sense of things. 34 Like the wind in the trees and the bells Of the procession—— How light the air is And the earth, Children and the grass In the wind and the voices of men and women To be carried about the sun forever Among the beautiful particulars of the breezes The papers blown about the sidewalks ‘. . . a Female Will to hide the most evident God Under a covert . . .’ Surely infiniteness is the most evident thing in the world Is it the courage of women To assume every burden of blindness themselves Intruders Carrying life, the young women Carrying life Unaided in their arms In the streets, weakened by too much need Of too little And life seeming to depend on women, burdened and   desperate As they are b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 94

In the opening verses of section 34, which to my mind is one of the most difficult sections of the poem, images of wind and weightlessness are reiterated. Section 32 had emphasized the beautiful, posing it against the weightiness of truth (“Only that it should be beautiful . . . Not truth but each other”), and here the “beautiful particulars” are experienced as light in two senses: in the sense of being illumined but also in the sense of lacking gravity, of being borne up into the air, and therefore of being momentary and insubstantial. “How light the air is / And the earth,” writes Oppen. The things of the earth are transitory; and thus, paradoxically, these opening lines, with their human (all-too human) sounds and images, carry a poetic counterthrust (out of Ecclesiastes) of sadness, loss, and even heaviness. An additional paradox—and here is where the difficulty really begins —is that these transitory things of the earth are “carried about the sun forever.” The context is partly that of modern physics, with its law of the conservation of matter and energy, but there is also a metaphysical dimension to the line, intensified by the word “forever,” which points to a quasi-Parmenidean realm of motionlessness and timelessness beyond appearance and change. The movement from “To be carried about the sun forever” to “Surely infiniteness is the most evident thing in the world” (the only two lines in the section to occur uncoupled) is particularly jagged and difficult, largely because of the strangeness and obscurity of the quoted passage. That passage turns out to be from Blake’s epic poem, Jerusalem, which is subtitled “Emanation of the Giant Albion.” “ ‘O Albion,’ ” says Los, Blake’s archetypal poet (who is struggling to hold onto a waning internal light), “why wilt thou create a female will, / To hide the most evident God in a hidden covert.”53 For Blake, as for gnosticism generally, the Fall is into the physical world; and in the mythology Blake constructs, the infinite and eternal realm of spirit is gendered masculine while the corruptible realm of matter and of spatio-temporal distinctions is gendered feminine.54 Oppen was deeply influenced by Blake,55 but he is not simply following Blake in this passage: he is ruminating over Blake’s lines, and I think we should be careful not to attribute to him either Blake’s gnosticism or what might be construed as Blake’s sexism. The tonality of Blake’s lines changes in the context that Oppen establishes, as the second half of section 34 indicates; for Oppen remains tied to “the beautiful particulars” and therefore to “the arduous path of appearance” (in the phrase from b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 95

Heidegger that he uses as an epigraph to This in Which [92]). At the same time, however, there is a mystical aspect to Oppen’s vision, and when he distinguishes beauty from truth—as he does in the erotic passage of section 32—it is with the sad intuition that our immersion in beauty, in the physical world, affords us a glimpse of truth but at the same time keeps us apart from it. Note that the quotation from Blake, “a Female Will to hide the most evident God / Under a covert,” is followed by a philosophical statement, “Surely infiniteness is the most evident thing in the world,” in which the word “evident” is repeated. And it is interesting, moreover, that the phrasing and syntax of the statement in this line mirrors that of the passage from “Route”: “Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, / A limited, limiting clarity”; for the two passages contradict each other and point to an essential aporia in Oppen’s thought. As a matter of fact, the repeated word “evident” is ambiguous when the two adjoining passages are taken together, because in the Blake quotation it applies not to sense perception but to what points beyond sense perception, whereas in the statement it can apply to both, and this ambiguity indicates that Oppen’s philosophical statement is both in contradiction to the Blake quotation and a corroboration of it. On the one hand, the “beautiful particulars” are so many and various that they add up to an “infiniteness” (Oppen uses this word rather than the more abstract “infinitude”) that is somehow “evident” to the senses; the beautiful, from this point of view, pertains to the capacity of the senses to apprehend the “particulars” of the world with clarity. But on the other hand, the fact that none of these particulars is able to hold a finite shape, since all of them are constantly passing in and out of existence, makes it “evident” that what gives them meaning is essentially beyond them and beyond the capacity of the senses to apprehend. From this point of view, the statement in “Surely infiniteness is the most evident thing in the world” is a corroboration rather than a contradiction of the Blake quotation.56 “Is it the courage of women / To assume every burden of blindness themselves,” Oppen asks in continuation. If infiniteness is the most evident thing in the world, it may be that living in the world requires a kind of blindness. “We want to defend / Limitation / And do not know how,” the poet had written in section 26, but perhaps he has now come upon the defense he needs. In “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Nietzsche suggests that a too finely delineated historical sense, when misb e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 96

applied, can rob life of its vitality. If one sees things only under the aspect of eternity, “in the bright light of shipwreck,” it is impossible to live. From a gnostic standpoint (continuing the Blakean idea), insofar as the particular intrudes on the eternal, the “young women // Carrying life” are “Intruders,” but for the same reason (in lines that are especially strange because of their superficial obviousness) it is on these women that life seems to “depend.” In the opening lines, the imagery was characterized by a certain lightness sweeping everything up into the air; but now, in the conclusion, with the image of burdened and desperate mothers carrying life unaided, we are pulled back into the earth and heaviness prevails. 35 . . . or define Man beyond rescue of the impoverished, solve whole cities before we can face again forests and prairies . . . If life depends on those burdened mothers of section 34—in other words, if it has no transcendent horizon and is merely what is lived—then “Man” (here considered as a species-being, as the ironic capitalization, in a section in which the initial words are conspicuously uncapitalized, would indicate) has no telos and is “beyond rescue” or salvation, either from a theological or a historical (i.e., Marxist) point of view. In this “impoverished” conception of “Man,” mankind or humanity is “beyond rescue,” and the idea that he requires salvation is an anachronism that must be cast aside. “Man” is beyond rescue in both of these senses, but also he is “beyond rescue of the impoverished” in the sense that his millennial hopes of rescuing the impoverished (either spiritually or economically) will never be fulfilled, and therefore these too have to be cast aside in the interests of dealing with the problems at hand (“solve whole cities”). These lines are so packed and ambiguous from a syntactical point of view that they are susceptible not only of diverse but even contradictory interpretations. Is Oppen espousing a type of quietism in these lines? I think not, but the passage could be taken that way. The existentialist and Marxist strands of Oppen’s perspective are being braided together in this passage b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 97

in a way that is not fully intelligible, but I think his intention is to say that in order to solve the problems that impoverish us as a species, we have to accept a somewhat “impoverished” conception of ourselves, one that forgoes the old systems of salvation that are now holding us back. Only by so doing can we see our way clear to a new simplicity that enables us to “face / again / forests and prairies.” 36 Tho the world Is the obvious, the seen And unforeseeable, That which one cannot Not see Which the first eyes Saw—— For us Also each Man or woman Near is Knowledge Tho it may be of the noon’s Own vacuity ——and the mad, too, speak only of conspiracy and people talking—— And if those paths Of the mind Cannot break It is not the wild glare Of the world even that one dies in. There is a fascinating intertextual connection embedded in the first half of section 36 that not only helps us grasp Oppen’s meaning but also furnishes us with crucial insight into the movement of his thought and his relation to poetic technique. Consider the syntax of the third stanza (which itself is enjambed to the fourth): b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 98

For us Also each Man or woman Near is Knowledge. As they so often do, Oppen’s line breaks indicate syntactical doubling, so that in this case “each man or woman near is knowledge” but also “near is knowledge.” The latter possibility echoes the opening lines from Friedrich Hölderlin’s great poem “Patmos,” and this, I believe, provides us with one of the most important keys we have to the poem. I give the passage from Hölderlin both in the original and in the Michael Hamburger translation, which I strongly suspect is the one that Oppen, who had very little German, knew (it is the only translation of Hölderlin I am aware of that renders the first line of “Patmos” “Near is”): Nah ist Und schwer zu fassen der Gott. Near is And difficult to grasp, the God.57 That Oppen is involved in a crucial dialogue with the Hölderlin of “Patmos,” one that also carries the overtones of his engagement with Heideg­ ger and Wittgenstein, seems clear. Patmos is the Greek island on which Saint John the Divine is said to have received the vision that resulted in Revelations, and in Hölderlin’s “Patmos” what is celebrated and lamented is the simultaneous nearness and distance, approach and withdrawal, of the gods (or, in this case, God), which is this poet’s great and perennial theme. In Hölderlin’s conception, the potential for vision—both religious and poetic (for they essentially amount to the same thing)—is underwritten by the simple fact that “Christ lives yet” and that “known / To him are all his works from the beginning.”58 To Oppen, on the contrary, “the world / Is the obvious, the seen / And unforeseeable, / That which one cannot / Not see.” It cannot be foreseen or revealed because it contains no hidden mysteries, nothing beneath the surface to foresee or reveal. Whereas Hölderlin attempts to hold onto the departed gods, for Oppen even this is no longer possible: the gods have departed forever, and therefore (as in section 35) the systems of salvation we have entertained in the West, b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 99

throughout our history, must finally be set aside. Oppen’s powerfully syncopated rhythms underline the point: the world is “[t]hat which one cannot / Not see // Which the first eyes / Saw.” The allusion to Adam and Eve, recalling the earlier allusion to the Genesis story in section 1, strengthens the point about human beings as a species. The conception that Oppen is here developing would seem to borrow from or at least run parallel to the later Wittgenstein, for whom the idea that there are hidden truths or mysteries that philosophy is capable of revealing or unearthing is fallacious. “Philosophy, as we use the word,” Wittgenstein writes, “is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us.”59 If the world is the obvious, then, as Wittgen­ stein will argue, the task of philosophy is to rid us of the need to do philosophy in the old way. The first half of section 36 is framed by two although clauses (“Tho the world / Is the obvious”; “Tho it may be of the noon’s / Own vacuity”), which have the effect of tempering what is said about knowledge. Eliminating some of the subordinate clauses (all of which, of course, are important to the poetry), we can reduce the passage to two statements formulated in bare prose: (1) “Though the world is the obvious, for us also each man or woman near is knowledge, though it may be of the noon’s own vacuity”; and (2) “Though the world is the obvious, near is knowledge, though it may be of the noon’s own vacuity.” In the first case, each man or woman near (us) confers knowledge—but the knowledge pertains to what is obvious and, it may be, to the vacuity of existence. In the second case, more simply, the knowledge we grasp is of the obvious—hence of the vacuity of existence. In both cases, “the known and the unknown touch,” as Oppen says in section 31. For Hölderlin, again, “Near is / And difficult to grasp, the God,” whereas for Oppen, “Near is / Knowledge”—the knowledge that the God cannot be grasped. Therefore, for Oppen, the knowledge that can be grasped, the knowledge that is near, is “the obvious” and (it may be) the knowledge “of the noon’s / Own vacuity”—in other words, of the darkness and emptiness of Nature. (The v’s in obvious and vacuity emphasize the way in which knowledge is being framed.) Now, in hearing the lines, “Near is / Knowledge,” the reader of Oppen immediately wants to add, as a substitute for “Tho it may be of the noon’s / Own vacuity,” “The knowledge not of sorrow, you were / saying, but of boredom,” the first lines of the “Maude Blessingbourne” poem in Discrete Series—to which I referred b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 100

with reference to section 12 and which Oppen will himself quote in the next section of the poem. Heidegger is clearly implicated in this section of the poem, perhaps even more so than Wittgenstein. For Heidegger, in the passage from “What is Metaphysics?” that I quoted earlier, “boredom reveals what-is in totality.” But Oppen’s relationship to Heidegger is mediated, in this case, by his relationship to Hölderlin and by Heidegger’s relationship to Hölderlin—and we should remember that in Heidegger’s famous turn to poetry in his later writings, Hölderlin is the most important presence. In his great 1946 essay “What Are Poets For?” (an essay in which the central focus falls on Hölderlin), Heidegger writes that knowledge of the abyss is the precondition to a renewed contact with Being. Human nature, he asserts, “lies in this, that mortals reach into the abyss sooner than the heavenly powers. Mortals, when we think of their nature, remain closer to that absence because they are touched by presence, the ancient name of Being.”60 For Heidegger, “To be a poet in a destitute time means: to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods.”61 For Oppen, however, the attempt to hold onto a spiritual or numinous realm can only be through poetry itself—in this case, through an echo of Hölderlin that has the simultaneous effect of upholding and negating (or at least, revising) what the German Romantic poet says about the gods. Oppen attends, singing, not so much to the trace of the fugitive gods as to the trace of a trace he finds in an earlier poet. Hölderlin went mad, and the second half of section 37 raises the specter of madness. The ancient Greeks saw a connection between madness and prophecy, manike and mantike, and thus for them (as in Plato’s Phaedrus) madness can have the positive connotation of lifting us to the divine. But the madness Oppen addresses in this context seems to me wholly negative. The poet moves from “the noon’s / Own vacuity” to “—and the mad, too, speak only of conspiracy / and people talking.” In that associative leap, Oppen is raising the possibility that the theological emptying out (or vacuity) that one associates with the crisis of modernity is dangerously connected to madness. “There is madness in the number / Of the living,” he writes in section 17 of the poem, “ ‘A state of matter’ // There is nobody here but us chickens // Anti-ontology.” If the gods have departed and there is “nobody here but us chickens,” but we still have the need for the gods, madness may be the inevitable result. “And if those paths / Of the b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 101

mind / Cannot break,” the poet concludes, “It is not the wild glare / Of the world even that one dies in.” In other words, if at this late stage of history we are unable to break out of the mental grooves we have inherited, if we are unable to face the “wild glare” of reality (one of Oppen’s finest epithets) without resorting to myth, we will bring death on ourselves as a species (through nuclear holocaust, for instance). Moreover, the death we bring on ourselves will not have been necessary: it will not come from the world as it necessarily is, but rather from our own insane projections. 37 ‘. . . approached the window as if to see . . .’ The boredom which disclosed Everything—— I should have written, not the rain Of a nineteenth century day, but the motes In the air, the dust Here still. What have we argued about? what have we done? Thickening the air? Air so thick with myth the words unlucky And good luck Float in it . . . To ‘see’ them? No. Or see motes, an iron mesh, links Of consequence Still, at the mind’s end Relevant In section 37 the poem’s paradoxical turn toward closure begins. It is interesting, therefore, that in this attempt at finally making an end, what should recur is precisely a beginning—a beginning that is also an origin. b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 102

The line quoted at the beginning of this section occurs in the “Maude Blessingbourne” poem opening Discrete Series, which the connection with Hölderlin in section 36 has now once again evoked. “Boredom reveals what-is in totality,” according to Heidegger; but this “what-is,” in Oppen’s vision, is at once bare matter (“the motes / In the air, the dust // Here still”) and what is impenetrable (“As the world, if it is matter, / Is impenetrable” [section 2]), though nevertheless disclosing itself to poetic vision through its impenetrability. Oppen has come full circle, not only to the beginning of “Of Being Numerous” but to the tragic source of his vision, and this is the point of greatest askesis or emptying out in the poem. On the one hand, in the post-Cartesian reduction at which he arrives, the human realm in its totality is reduced to the status of myth (“Air so thick with myth the words unlucky / And good luck // Float in it”), and, on the other, the material world forms an “iron mesh” from which we are excluded precisely because we are implicated in it. This is the “mind’s end,” the bourn marked out in advance for this traveler in thought, beyond which the poem’s trajectory cannot be stretched; and yet, even at this end point there is an opening out to thought’s unendingness—“Still, at the mind’s end / Relevant.” 38 You are the last Who will know him Nurse. Not know him, He is an old man, A patient, How could one know him? You are the last Who will see him Or touch him, Nurse. As a poem, “Of Being Numerous” is not a “discrete series”—that is, a series in which “each term is empirically justified rather than derived from the preceding term” (Oppen’s example was the stops on one of New York’s subway lines). The poem, as I have tried to show, develops “organib e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 103

cally,” with each section emerging from previous ones and contributing to the development of a set of concerns that are linked to the central theme of the One and the Many. Nevertheless, for Oppen, throughout the poem, in epistemological terms the world is given as it is, without any secret or hidden underlying meaning (“Tho the world / Is the obvious, the seen / And unforeseeable . . .” [section 36]). The way in which the poem unfolds, in formal terms, is thus, to some extent, in counterpoint to (or dialogue with) the way in which it represents the world—and this is because of the nature of the poetic process itself, the fact that the poet (as opposed to the thinker) “must somehow see the one thing” (section 27). In section 38 of “Of Being Numerous,” we have come to the end of the line, as it were, as one comes to the end of a subway line. Oppen’s objective correlative for this is an old man in a hospital or nursing home whose life is about to come to an end. This “sense of an ending,” which is not organic and cannot be fully encompassed, is made beautifully vivid by the repeated address to the nurse. It recalls two other addresses in the poem to young women: “Speak // If you can // Speak // Phyllis . . .” (section 11) and “Here is the brick, it was waiting / Here when you were born // Mary-Anne” (section 21). “It is difficult now to speak of poetry,” Oppen had written in section 27: “One would have to tell what happens in a life, what choices present themselves, what the world is for us, what happens in time, what thought is in the course of a life and therefore what art is, and the isolation of the actual.” All of these issues and passages coalesce and are recapitulated in the coda of section 38, where we move from knowing to witnessing (“Because the known and the unknown / Touch, // One witnesses” [section 31]). The movement is as clean and as stripped down as it could possibly be: “You are the last / Who will know him . . . Not know him . . . How could one know him? // You are the last / Who will see him . . .” 39 Occurring ‘neither for self Nor for truth’ The sad marvels In the least credible circumstance, Storm or bombardment Or the room of a very old man b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 104

Much as he returns, in sections 36 and 37, to the first poem of Discrete Series, so now, in the penultimate section of “Of Being Numerous,” Oppen returns to its own opening: “Occurrence, a part / Of an infinite series, // The sad marvels.” By this point, “the sad marvels” have acquired something of the resonance that “the still, sad music of humanity” has for Wordsworth’s poetry; they occur neither for some reified (and no longer believed in) conception of the self nor for a pseudo-objective notion of truth, which is equally inaccessible (“Not truth but each other,” the poet had written in section 32), but simply in “the room of a very old man”—as if to say that, if one is attentive to it, the most ordinary circumstance of reality confronts us with “the wild glare / Of the world” (section 36). 40 Whitman: ‘April 19, 1864 The capitol grows upon one in time, especially as they have got the great figure on top of it now, and you can see it very well. It is a great bronze figure, the Genius of Liberty I suppose. It looks wonderful toward sundown. I love to go and look at it. The sun when it is nearly down shines on the headpiece and it dazzles and glistens like a big star: it looks quite curious . . .’ Should the poem have ended with section 39, in the room of a very old man? I have sometimes thought so. The “sad marvels” open up on curiosity of their own accord, on the sense that everything is “Still at the mind’s end / Relevant” (section 37); and from one point of view, there is a certain banality in Oppen’s quotation from Whitman’s letter, distanced as we now are from the spirit of political optimism with which the letter seems imbued—and surely “Of Being Numerous” is as good a measure as we have of that distance. “Now in the helicopters the casual will / Is atrocious,” the poet had written (section 19). From that point of view (not to mention the one from which I now write, forty-odd years after the poem was composed), the “great bronze figure, the Genius of Liberty,” has come to seem rather tarnished. Yet the passage from Whitman (written almost exactly a century before “Of Being Numerous”) “grows upon one in time,” perhaps for the very reason of the ironic, dissonant, and even unpoetic distance it establishes; and in this way, by establishing that unpoetic distance, it allows what may be the greatest long poem of our era to cease resonating, which otherwise it would have been unable to do. b e c au s e t h e k n o w n a n d t h e u n k n o w n t o u c h 105

chapter three In the Drift of the World | A Reading of Bronk’s Life Supports: New and Collected Poems The poetry of William Bronk speaks to the human condition and also, therefore, to its own time with an eloquence and a philosophical acuity that are unmatched in American poetry of the postwar period. When he died in February 1999, although still relatively unknown, Bronk was “our most significant poet,” as Ross Feld termed him in a review of Life Supports that appeared in The Nation.1 I regard Bronk’s poetry as representing perhaps the most radical confrontation with the limits of poetry in our time, and for this reason it seems to me crucial that we refine our understanding of his art not only in itself but as it develops over the course of time. What is radical about Bronk’s poetry is its straightforward use of philosophical statement in a poetic context that ultimately resists being reduced to philosophical statement. The critics who have written about Bronk have tended to focus on the first but not the second of these tendencies. Gerald Bruns observes, in the context of a recent study of Maurice Blanchot, that some of the most important thinking on literature of the twentieth century has emphasized the sense in which poetry “refuses” philosophy, or (to pose this in the manner of Adorno and the Frankfurt school), “rationalization” of any kind.2 But Bronk’s refusal of philosophy is especially subtle, for, to a greater degree perhaps than any other twentieth-century poet (the only figure who comes close is Valéry), he seems to be writing a poetry of explicit philosophical statement. Though he makes no attempt to adorn or sugar-coat the statement language in which his poetry is couched, Bronk does not set himself in opposition to the classical traditions of rhetoric and eloquence, and his poetry seems, at least superficially, to be situated

conservatively within the Anglo-American tradition of English poetry. But when we begin to grasp the “limit conditions” of Bronk’s poetry, the ways in which it simultaneously makes use of and transcends propositional or philosophical statement, we see how genuinely radical it actually is. If Bronk’s is a poetry that puts the limits of poetry into question, however, the danger that such poetry faces is of losing its tension, or, in other words, of becoming prosaic and being pulled back into prose. When it transcends the statement system from which it emerges, Bronk’s poetry becomes capable of a ghostly music that is like nothing else in English poetry; but it is not always that he reaches this level, and hence the importance of a practical criticism that can make distinctions. Bronk is a philosophical poet to the same extent that he is a musical one, and if we fail to understand the ways in which music and philosophical statement are braided in his work, we will fail to appreciate not only the originality of his poetry but also its subtlety. This is why the thematic approach to Bronk must inevitably fail. Precisely because Bronk is so fully a poet of direct, philosophical statement, and because he is unwilling to submerge or camouflage what he has to say in metaphor or in any kind of rhetorical evasion, if we fail to grasp the “dark italics” (to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens) that color even his most seemingly explicit and straightforward utterances, we run the risk of turning him into a moralizing dogmatist.3 The critic John Taggart falls into this trap in an essay, originally published in 1978 and entitled “Reading William Bronk,” that misreads Bronk so egregiously it offers us a paradigmatic instance of how not to approach him. Commenting on “About Dynamism, Desire, and Various Fictions,” one of the sonnets from Bronk’s 1972 collection To Praise the Music, Taggart has this to say: The title is a giveaway to what began as intensity, became a resonant power, and now beckons to us as an almost depraved arrogance. It is all a fiction. And we know because Bronk tells us so. . . . [H]e is always telling us how it really is. All the poems turn on this two-step: it looks like this or maybe this or even this, but it’s really that. It is a truism, but it still holds: poetry is showing, metaphor and image; prose is telling, exposition and analysis. What is distressing about this representative poem is that not only can it not even mount some illustrations for its argument . . . but it also isn’t an argument. It won’t do to label this philosophy, which amounts to the violation i n the dr ift of the wor ld 108

of poetry. . . . For what we get is dogma: this is how it is. A dogmatic voice is a tired voice in poetry, maybe even a dead one.4 What is really tired here is the old saw and shibboleth that a poem should not mean but be. From Taggart’s dogmatically limited perspective, neither Pope nor Lucretius could be accounted a poet. Even in the abstract, this is obviously too limiting. But what Taggart fails to grasp is Bronk’s lyricism, the various ways in which the prosody and sound structure of his poetry, as well as its emotional coloring, bear upon what he has to say. Taggart doesn’t understand what Bronk is saying as a poet because he doesn’t understand what Bronk is doing as a poet. The poem to which Taggart addresses his vituperative remark is “About Dynamism, Desires and Various Fictions” (which was discussed in chapter 1, in relation to Oppen’s “A Narrative”): Also the Golden Age was a dark time if there was one. I think it is now and was not ever. It is dark now as it always was. The thing I wanted to tell you is how we propose a drama, sort of, a story of our lives which requires changes—sequences of time, Such that once there was this or something else —dark, say, or the Golden Age, and then something happened and this came about. Well I don’t think it did. What I want you to know is that nothing happened and nothing can, that stories are fictions, truth doesn’t tell one, that the beautiful is that, nothing more, and enough, no story, nothing to do or tell. (144) Taggart interprets the poem’s title in terms of the crude allegory he has concocted about how and why Bronk failed as a poet, but in doing so he himself fails to take account of Bronk’s irony. The peculiarity of the title has to do with the fact that it reads like that of an essay—one by Montaigne, say. There is a kind of generic trompe l’oeil in this procedure, whereby a lyric poem, a sonnet, is made to appear as if it were an essay. More could be said on this score, but this is enough to start us on the i n the dr ift of the wor ld 109

track of what is going on in this particular poem and in Bronk’s poetry in general. “Also the Golden Age was a dark time,” it begins, and that “Also” makes not only the line but the entire poem possible. It is as if the voice emanated from some distant place and as if one were encountering it in medias res. That distancing, the strange sense of beginning in the middle, makes us feel that the voice we are hearing is not that of a twentiethcentury poet living in upstate New York but rather an ancient and anonymous voice of wisdom. The voice we hear resembles that of Koheleth; what it intones is a lost passage from a late scripture. The placement of “Also” is reminiscent of the word in Nietzsche’s Also Sprach Zarathustra (though in German it means “thus”). In conflating the Golden Age and the Dark Ages in the opening tercet, Bronk plays with pronouns, as he so often does. Thus, in the ironically enjambed “if there was one” in line 2, “one” can refer either to “Golden Age” or to “a dark time.” In the next sentence, which contains another brilliant enjambment, “I think it is now and was not / ever,” the primary meaning is “I think it is dark now and was not ever golden,” but the pronominal ambiguity leaves open other possibilities and points up the absurdity (or uselessness) of the metaphors “dark” and “golden.” The main “story” that the poem unfolds is that all historical narratives, indeed all narratives, are fictions because the truth is abstract and beyond our capacity to grasp; and yet part of the poem’s emotional texture is the idea that the Dark Ages are always with us and that, in any event, we are in one now. The voice is sad and dark in this poem. It is, as I said, an ancient voice of wisdom, but at the same time it is aware of itself as the exponent of a modern Age of Irony, one that no longer believes in the Golden Age or indeed in any kind of historical narrative. And yet the poem derives its considerable power from something more than its irony—or rather, it derives its irony from something more than its apparent irony; it derives its power from an undefined sense of the beautiful (“the beautiful is that, nothing more”), which is present in the poem’s phrasing, its cadences, its allusion to a Golden Age, to which only poetic assent can be given.5 If we are ever going to get Bronk right, it is not going to be by skating on the surface of his statement language or his themes. The advocates of Bronk who have limited themselves to a thematic analysis have opened themselves (and Bronk) up to the kind of “put-down” we get in Taggart’s superficial reading. Bronk’s themes and ideas are not unimportant; indeed, they are often profound, but ultimately they exist in the context i n the dr ift of the wor ld 110

of his poetry and as the vehicle of that poetry. Metaphor is traditionally analyzed in terms of the tenor and the vehicle, where the vehicle is the concrete figure expressing an abstract tenor or meaning. In Bronk’s case, either this doesn’t apply or the terms must be reversed—so frequently do abstract statements serve as the vehicle in his poetry for a meaning that transcends them and that is the poem itself. This means that what Bronk is ultimately intent on expressing is the beautiful, the Poem. Everything that he says is sublated to the music of the poem itself. To understand Bronk, therefore, we have to hear the dark musical currents in his work and grasp the ways in which thought and sound are braided together and in counterpoint to each other.

The Earliest Phase Bronk was not particularly precocious in his beginnings. The poems collected in My Father Photographed with Friends, written when he was in his twenties,6 have flashes of brilliance but are mainly apprentice work and, as such, tend to fall into two categories: poems in fairly strict iambics, with symmetrical, end-stopped rhyme, and poems in free verse. The metrical poems are too tight and the free-verse poems are too loose, and so both kinds are searching for something that is still missing: an organic relationship between form and content. The dominant influence on these early poems is clearly Frost, and it was some time before Bronk was able to work free of Frost’s influence.7 Nor are the ideas particularly original or compelling in these early poems. The great poet of ideas that Bronk was to become has yet to emerge; the formal and psychic space necessary for such a poetry is not yet accessible to him, and so the poems have a diminished tonality, as if they were deliberately holding something in reserve. I give as an example “The Woods, New York,” a poem in which the sonnet form is awkwardly handled but in which there are two lines that promise something still being held in abeyance: I walk through city streets as once through woods without the benefit of map or plan. Failing to get to places when I should, I learn a twisted pathway through the land. Or lost, with nothing near to set me right, where brick facades are similar as trees, i n the dr ift of the wor ld 111



I walk along and suddenly come to a quite familiar, remembered place, surprised and pleased. This is a city the world will always remember as one remembers Babylon or Thebes. In the distant summer that follows our last November the sifting screens and shovels will fail to perceive its being in me. I walked here once toward dark and felt the wind come up across the park. (9)

The poem is clearly uncertain of its focus, but in the lines, “This is a city the world will always remember / as one remembers Babylon or Thebes,” what emerges from the overly domesticated language, with its extraneous descriptive details, is an experience of alienation or decentering that Bronk will soon learn to express more forcefully and directly. In order to have written “as one remembers Babylon or Thebes,” one would have to have separated oneself from one’s own time and place, so as to look at the human experience under the aspect of eternity, as it were. The I would have had to become an other, as Rimbaud says, and hence Bronk’s characteristic use of the pronoun one. The experience of decentering that Bronk expresses in these lines had already been characterized by Paul Valéry as “the crisis of the mind” (the title of an essay written in 1919): “Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia . . . these too would be beautiful names. . . . And we now see that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.”8 But notice that the crisis Valéry describes is converted by Bronk from a psychic trauma to a poetic gain. What Bronk confronts is the insignificance of a culture that will soon fall into the abyss of history—where it will perhaps be contemplated by subsequent cultures just as it is now contemplating previous ones. But at the same time, this confrontation—by virtue of the simple fact that it is occurring—allows for a kind of transcendence of particularity, a symbolic triumph over time that the reader experiences on the spiritual level as liberation and on the linguistic level as poetic resonance. This conversion of loss to a gain is reminiscent of what happens in the experience of the sublime, as Kant describes it. In a situation in which the individual is inundated by sensory material that the understanding is unable to process, as when he or she is confronted by the vastness of i n the dr ift of the wor ld 112

Nature, the mind converts what had been a painful experience of negation into an experience of transcendence by conceptualizing the experience in terms of the infinite. Kant categorizes the sublime in terms of the “mathematical” and the “dynamic” types, but in both cases that which is sublime is “what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense.”9 Many of Bronk’s poems will correspond to this Kantian dynamic. But here it is necessary to make a crucial distinction: in Bronk’s work, it is not the poet, but rather the poem itself, that converts loss to gain. To borrow the language of a poem from Bronk’s collection The Empty Hands, the poem is its own “balm” (68); as for the poet himself, however, he remains unconsoled.10 Though not particularly ambitious in what it attempts to encompass from a technical point of view, there is one poem in My Father Photographed with Friends that seems to me a fully realized work of art. I am referring to “Benedicite Omnia Opera” (which I placed at the beginning of my edition of Bronk’s Selected Poems): See the fish in the sea deep down deep down density. Bird-colored flower-colored dark; grey, wild hunger of the shark. Heavy, heavy water lies, moulds the body, bulges eyes. Open eye and open mouth search the water north and south.

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Pectoral fins calm the floor, hover quiet close to shore. There are mountains in the sea; oh, deep down deep down density. (8)11 The strangeness and intensity of Bronk’s phrasing are already in evidence here, and we can connect the peculiarities of his diction to his mature vision, which in this poem has apparently already taken hold. In the second stanza, for example, note that the dark is “bird-colored” and “flowercolored.” Of course, there are colors but no birds or flowers in the sea; but the reason birds and flowers are mentioned is that they contribute to the darkness, which (literally and figuratively) takes precedence over them and all other entities—as if to say that birds and flowers, with their variegated colors, function not to eliminate the darkness but to delineate it. By the same token, what is emphasized is not the shark but its hunger—as if the shark existed to define the hunger rather than the hunger to define the shark. Water, inchoate like darkness, “moulds the body, / bulges eyes.” The repetitions of the last stanza are magnificent, and the poem’s final word, “density,” continues to reverberate after the poem has been spoken or read. What is the relationship between the poem’s Latin title and its vision? We are left to ponder. “Bless all things,” says the title, but the poem emanates from a vision of depths and darknesses that nothing—certainly not an anthropomorphic God—seems to penetrate. But perhaps we are in the context of the Book of Job (“Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?”).12

The Encounter with Stevens It was in Light and Dark, his second book but the first to be published, that Bronk really began to hit his stride as a poet. The book was published in 1956 by Cid Corman’s Origin Press and then reissued in 1975 by the Elizabeth Press. The quality of the writing is quite uneven in this book, but in passages such as the second stanza of “The Mind’s Landscape on i n the dr ift of the wor ld 114

an Early Winter Day,” we first encounter poetry that is characteristic of the mature Bronk (“Benedicite Omnia Opera” is a beautiful and fully realized poem, but not in Bronk’s mature style): For loss is what we live with all the time. None knows this better than the mind should know, the mind that wanders, and cannot tell our name, itself all seeds and survivals, little else, poor blind. The mind is always lost and gropes its way,— lost, even when the senses seize the world and feed as though there never could be loss. It is this winter mind, the ne’erdowell that never finds a plan, that tells us see. And we open our eyes and feel our way in the dark. (20) As this stanza makes clear, the decisive experience that enabled Bronk to work free of his Frostian strictures was his discovery and absorption of Wallace Stevens. Bronk’s “winter mind” is taken, of course, from Stevens’s “The Snow Man” (1921), a poem, we now realize, that is both an extension of the Romantic agon or crisis poem and a radical departure from Romantic tradition—as radical as anything published by Pound, Eliot, or Williams (though during the “Pound Era” this may not have been apparent). “One must have a mind of winter . . . not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind,” the poem begins.13 Burt Kimmelman chose The Winter Mind as the title of his study of Bronk (the first full-length treatment of the poet to have been written), and he quotes the last six lines of “The Mind’s Landscape” as the epigraph to his book. But Kimmelman neglects to mention that the phrase came to Bronk via Stevens. The omission is understandable: there is a “plain” Stevens as well as a gaudy one, but, as Kimmelman rightly emphasizes, Bronk is generally a much more austere poet than Stevens.14 Moreover, what Bronk is saying in “The Mind’s Landscape” is so different from what Stevens is saying in “The Snow Man” that the two poets in this instance are almost at antithetical removes from each other. As Harold Bloom observes of “The Snow Man,” Stevens’s poem is written against the pathetic fallacy—this is what makes it so radically modern, though the poet’s attitude to the pathetic fallacy is finally ambiguous, if not indecipherable.15 In Stevens’s poem, because human nature is ultimately unable “not to think / Of any misery in the sound of the wind,” there is a desire to pass beyond the limitations of i n the dr ift of the wor ld 115

what is human and, simultaneously, a countervailing ambivalence about acceding to or expressing that desire. If one were a “snow man”—that is, either insentient or (if this is taken in a Nietzschean direction) a god— then clearly one would no longer experience and be assailed by a sense of misery and loss. The Romantic desire for transcendence and an antiRomantic, almost Buddhist, desire to be without desire meet in Stevens’s poem, with the two opposing vectors producing a free verse, a music of thought, of almost uncanny balance. For Bronk, in “The Mind’s Landscape on an Early Winter Day,” however, “loss is what we live with all the time”; thus, there is no getting around the human condition, not even a desire to do so.16 The mind does not come to the rescue of the senses in order to convert their loss into gain (and thus the Kantian formulation of the sublime is not applicable): “What the senses feel is loss, and not less loss / for being neither final nor complete . . . For loss is what we live with all the time. / None knows this better than the mind should know, the mind / that wanders” (20). Bronk remains unconsoled. His “winter mind” does not signify a desire to transcend the human condition in order to arrive at a greater or purer sense of reality; it reflects the human condition itself, which the poet seeks to register with as much fidelity as possible. If a music nevertheless emerges, as indeed it does, if the poem—not the mind but the poem—converts loss to gain, this does not result from any seeking of transcendence but is rather the result of the poem’s commitment to truth. This awareness—an awareness that almost seems to be posed against Stevens in “The Mind’s Landscape”—makes Bronk a moralist in a quite old-fashioned sense that I find true of no other significant poet of the twentieth century and that is sometimes disconcerting to his readers. “The Snow Man” is a poem of deep, one might almost say radical, ambiguity, but there is very little ambiguity of the Stevensian kind in Bronk’s work; his poetry contains a good deal of word play, especially of the kind in which two or more meanings combine in a single phrase or figure, but, in contrast to Stevens, the possible meanings are usually clearly delineated in Bronk’s work in such a way as to make his intentions clear. In Bronk’s poetry, beginning with Light and Dark, abstractions are not skirted but engaged directly. Leaving aside the form-content dialectic of Bronk’s poetry, for the moment, we might say that the difficulty of this poetry resides mainly in the complexity of its ideas—not (as frequently

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is the case in Stevens’s work) in the difficulty of establishing the author’s intentions. Nevertheless, what Bronk took from Stevens was considerable. First of all, on the level of content, Stevens gave him permission, as it were, to locate himself as a poet for whom meaning could no longer be conferred by some external religious or philosophical tradition but had to be built up by the mind alone. It was through Stevens, in effect, that Bronk discovered himself to be an existentialist (though he would never have used that term). But here we must again distinguish between the two poets. Like Yeats, Stevens was a Nietzschean, and from “Sunday Morning” on, he cultivated a determination to convert emptiness and indeterminacy into freedom and transcendence. This was something that the darker Bronk never wanted to do, partly because it would have meant embracing illusion, but also because anguish was too palpably engrained in his vision to be denied. Like Stevens, Bronk contemplates a landscape that is metaphorically barren because its meaning is dependent on the mind alone; but unlike Stevens, Bronk does not contemplate that landscape with the equanimity of a snow man: he is more intent than Stevens on seeing reality as it is—he has no interest in transforming it on a blue guitar, and he also has no assurance that the mind is efficacious or that it has a purchase on “things as they are.” Thus, Bronk’s winter mind remains one that is “always lost and gropes its way.” Yet, these differences notwithstanding, Stevens gave Bronk the impetus to find his own direction. More than anything Stevens had to say, it was Stevens’s music that Bronk heard and that allowed him to form his own style. I use the term “music” metaphorically, as a way of speaking about the sound of Bronk’s line (these are metaphors as well); but, in addition, one notices in Light and Dark the prevalence of poems having to do with music and in which music is a central metaphor. Thus, one could say that Bronk took from Stevens not only his “music” but the idea of music as transcendence. Nevertheless, of the poems in Light and Dark built on the theme of music (these include “Some Musicians Play Chamber Music for Us,” “The Bach Trombones at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,” “Her Singing,” “Music that Sees Beyond the World,” and “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox”), only “Her Singing” sounds as though it came out of Stevens: it is clearly one of Bronk’s weaker efforts, and Taggart is not unfair when he says that it reads like a “rejected companion stanza” to “The Idea of Order at Key

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West.”17 Yet for the most part in Light and Dark, as “The Mind’s Landscape on an Early Winter Day” would indicate, it is clear that Bronk is distinguishing and separating himself from Stevens—indeed, at the very site at which the influence of Stevens is strongest. This is how originality takes hold in poetry, and it was through Stevens that Bronk asserted his own originality and strength. It was Stevens’s line, the supple blank-verse line that could be tightened or loosened as the need required, that gave Bronk the instrument he needed to tune his own discourse. Throughout his career, Stevens’s poetry oscillates between blank verse and free verse: the richly formal blank verse of “Sunday Morning” and the free verse of “The Snow Man” are the two axes on which almost all of his poems are plotted. Bronk, by contrast, is essentially a poet of blank verse, not of free verse; his speech rhythms require the formality of meter, no matter how ghostly, hovering in the background, and no matter how much the poem opens to verge on free verse. But, in any event, it was Stevens who gave Bronk the permission to vary and modulate his blank verse according to need. In Light and Dark, the closed forms and symmetrical rhyme schemes of My Father Photographed with Friends are jettisoned, but so are the attempts at a “true” free verse (if I may pose it this way) that can also be found in the earlier book. As “The Mind’s Landscape” indicates, Bronk does not entirely abandon rhyme—and actually he will make significant use of it throughout his career; but from now on, rhyme will no longer serve as an external structuring device in his poetry: it is now a mode of intensifying irony that wells up from within the poem. Note, for instance, how rhyme, assonance, and consonance are summoned by the statement with which the second stanza of “The Mind’s Landscape on an Early Winter Day” begins, and how they accentuate that statement (for this is a circular process): For loss is what we live with all the time, None knows this better than the mind should know, the mind that wanders, and cannot tell our name, itself all seeds and survivals, little else, poor blind. The poem’s germinating idea, perhaps, as expressed by the rhyme, is that the mind is blind, and thus the rhyme can be said both to emphasize the idea and to emerge from it. It was the example of Stevens, then, that enabled Bronk to become a i n the dr ift of the wor ld 118

philosophical poet—though Stevens himself is a philosophical poet only in part and only from a certain point of view. Of course, there is a sense in which all significant poetry (at least of a certain difficulty or density) will be philosophical (will contain ideas, wisdom, etc.) and a sense in which no genuine poetry, no matter how abstract, can be reduced to the philosophical conceptions it may contain. But if there has ever been a poet of ideas—a poet whose images and emotions seem to culminate in direct statements, either metaphysical or moral, about the human condition—it is Bronk; and in a period in which American poetry as a whole took flight from abstract statement, Bronk’s work presents itself in a curiously antithetical light. Under the aegis of modernism, American poetry fled from philosophical statement because, having jettisoned poetic diction and the techniques of versification that traditionally provide a generic separation between poetry and prose, there was no other way it could avoid falling into the prosaic. Williams’s dictum, “No ideas but in things,” from this point of view, merely makes a virtue out of necessity. “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox” (26–28) is the most extended philosophical statement in Light and Dark, and one of the most impressive poems in Bronk’s entire oeuvre. Many of the poet’s characteristic themes emerge in this great and profound poem, and it is perhaps in “The Arts and Death” that the tragic dimensions of his meditation on the human condition are fully revealed and expressed for the first time. The poem begins with two characteristically simple statements, in two lines that are separated from what follows by an ensuing stanza break: “I think always how we always miss it. Not / anything is ever entirely true.” The immediate conception is that we—that is, humanity throughout history—are always aiming for a truth that we always miss because anything that we can conceive (note the use of “anything” rather than “nothing”) is going to be partial and therefore not entirely true: we never grasp truth in its entirety. The very act of aiming at something (or, as the phenomenological tradition would say, intending something) means that we are already limited in what we can conceive. But this idea will be unfolded in the poem through a metaphorical elaboration that, as the title suggests, is musically analogous to a fugue. The opening motive, “I think always how we always miss it,” will be repeated in various guises throughout the poem. At the end of the third stanza it becomes “I think / always, how we always miss the aim,” and the idea of missing the aim gives rise to the image of the toy soldier in that third stanza, an image that is connected i n the dr ift of the wor ld 119

in turn to the themes of war, death, fictionality, and, therefore, art, all of which will be encompassed by the poem. The opening motive has to do with our inability to grasp the truth, but from here the poem opens out on a meditation on death: Death dominates my mind. I do not stop thinking how time will stop, how time has stopped. Those dead— their done time. Time does us in. Fuguelike, the poem slows its pace and continually reflects on its own progress through the use of alliteration (Death dominates), assonance (mind / I / time), and chiasmus (done time / Time does). And in the way that the poem unfolds, the connection between the two major themes, our inability to grasp the truth and the inexorable fact of death, is suspended until the beginning of the fifth stanza—though when the connection is finally made, what is expressed is one of Bronk’s deepest and most original insights: I think always how we always miss it; how the dead have not been final, and life has always required to be stated again, which is not ever stated. We are never able to arrive at any final truth, and so everything is required to be “stated” (a characteristically Bronkian word) again and again, although the real point to be stated can never be stated. It is as if in our interminable attempts to “get it right,” we are modeling or imitating the attempts of what Bronk will later (in the poems contained in the final section of Life Supports, for example) call “Life,” in order to express and manifest a reality or truth that is always transcendent. There are no essences. But here we come very close to the center of Bronk’s tragic vision. Our futile attempts to get it right lead us not only to make philosophical or scientific statements but also to create art; and so, beginning in the third stanza, the poem reflects on the meaning of artistic creation, in relation to the issues of fictionality and death, through the image of the toy soldier: Mark how we make music, images, how we term words, name names, i n the dr ift of the wor ld 120

how, having named, assume the name begins here, stops there, add this attribute, subtract this other: here the mold begins to harden. This toy soldier has edges, can be painted, picked up Alliteration, assonance, enjambment—these devices again carry the poem’s irony. All of our attempts at making, the poem asserts, at naming names and creating forms, are shadowed by death. In the poem’s fourth stanza, “the vast debris of the dead” is figured in terms of “the endless list / of only their names, if anyone knew their names.” And so, as in Gray’s Elegy, these names become metonymic of the essential namelessness of the human condition. Similarly, in the fifth stanza, the “passion that we feel for forms” is real, “But the forms / are never real. Are not really there. Are not.” Yet this passion for forms, for preserving names, is responsible for the solidarity we feel with the dead and hence with the entire human community: Joined to the dead already, to those known who have died already, are we not also joined to many we would have known in their time— to one in Ilium, say, who thought of the dead? The mention of Ilium seems to me a lovely gesture and reminiscent of Keats’s evocation of Ruth in the “Ode to a Nightingale.” Art, in “The Arts and Death,” does not negate the poem’s vision of futility and thus is not a privileged refuge, but at the same time the symbolic resonance of Ilium in the poem implicitly testifies to the value of poetry. If it does not quite have the finished harmony of Gray’s Elegy or Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” “The Arts and Death” is nevertheless one of the great meditative poems of our time. As I have tried to show, it is a poem of extraordinary, fugal complexity that embraces a surprising number of themes and motifs. Yet the poem culminates in four lines—each separated from the body of the poem and from one another—in which the simplicity of the resolution produces a cadence of great beauty: I think always how we always miss the real. There still are wars though all the soldiers fall. We live in a world we never understand. Our lives end nothing. Oh there is never an end. i n the dr ift of the wor ld 121

The poem has employed a good deal of enjambment, but all four of these final lines are end-stopped—indeed, each is a single sentence. To me, they have an extraordinary pathos and an extraordinary dignity. Partly this is gained through the use of internal rhyme and repetition in the second and fourth of these lines (all / fall; end / end) and the perhaps compensatory use of slant rhyme in the two couplets (real / fall; understand /end). And so, though “there is never an end,” the poem achieves closure. One of the most characteristic and significant features of Bronk’s style (as we have already seen in relation to “The Arts and Death”) is his use of the first-person plural, the we. At a very early point in his career as a poet (the tendency is already in full flower in Light and Dark), Bronk takes it upon himself to speak for humanity, to be a spokesman for the human condition, and in a way that is deeply anomalous in the context of contemporary poetry—indeed, this is one of the stylistic tendencies that distinguishes him most fully from other poets. We expect the first-person plural in an Alexander Pope, say, to give an example of a poet who lived in a much more homogeneous society than our own and one in which poetry was at the forefront rather than at the margins of the culture. Yet Bronk’s we, though different from Pope’s, is just as prominent an aspect of his style and one that must be pondered and examined. In a June 1961 letter to Cid Corman that is quoted by John Ernest, Bronk sheds light on his use of the first-person plural: “There are many people in the world and if I assume that I speak for them by virtue of speaking only for myself it is because of the conjunction of two conditions[:] (1) we are encapsulated and remote from each other[;] (2) we are interchangeable if not identical though we may appear different in different light.”18 As I noted in chapter 1, the irony is that, for Bronk, precisely because we are all locked into our own subjectivities we are all subject to the same human condition. This is very different from the usual solipsist position, and it is one of the most singular aspects not only of Bronk’s thought but also of his style. How Bronk was able to take on the stance of spokesman for humanity is mysterious. This is not something he took from Stevens or from any other modern poet. Moreover, we shall search in vain through his biography for clues to this disposition. Lyman Gilmore tells us in his recent, scrupulously researched biography, The Force of Desire: A Life of William Bronk, that from early childhood till the end of his life, Bronk suffered from a deep sense of isolation; he was a bisexual whose homosexual inclii n the dr ift of the wor ld 122

nations were hidden to the world (including to me). But most people who feel isolated do not experience that isolation as essential to what is human; they tend to think that they are alone in their suffering and they do not translate it to a conception of humanity. And, in any event, very few have Bronk’s poetic gift. Gilmore’s biography tells us a great deal about Bronk the man, but very little about the poet—not because Gilmore is inept as a biographer but simply because the biographical enterprise is unable to penetrate the spiritual (and hence real) life of the poet. Only the poetry can do that. Perhaps we can say, though, that Bronk’s isolation was enabling in that it allowed him the freedom to identify with the great nineteenth-century American writers—Emerson, Dickinson, Melville, and especially Thoreau—who found the poet’s and moralist’s vocation of speaking for his time and for humanity in general more natural than the writers of our century have tended to do. Poetry was still linked to the pulpit in this period by the old emphasis on eloquence, and what was natural to the pulpit was not yet unnatural to poetry. On the evidence of his poetry, it is clear that what enables Bronk to speak for the human condition is first of all his belief that there is one— that is, that human beings are always fundamentally the same. This in itself is not particularly interesting, of course, but one aspect of the uniqueness of Bronk’s poetry has to do with the way the idea gets played out in the work. There is a relativistic side to Bronk’s thought, as we shall see, but Bronk’s use of the first-person plural testifies to his belief that the life of the individual essentially repeats that of the species in an unchanging pattern. “We know what men felt once as if they feel / forever,” he writes in “We Want the Mark of Time”: The anguishes of ancients, their ecstasies, recorded once and unforgotten, even their trivial times, are so much ours, it is as if we were no more than ants, a bird, or any beast fixed in a closed, instinctive pattern (31) Locked in their instinctual, repetitive patterns and unable to transcend their limits, human beings, in Bronk’s vision, desire change and even the “sense of an ending,” but their real experience is the vertiginous one of free fall and formlessness. We want the mark of time—“want” in the sense of both desire and lack—and we must learn to do without it. i n the dr ift of the wor ld 123

It follows from everything that has been said that Bronk is a tragic poet of repetition, loss, and eternal recurrence (though without the Nietz­ schean overtones). The “redundancy quotient” is high in Bronk, as I earlier noted, and this makes his work difficult to absorb, especially when one has not yet become attuned to its subtle shifts and modulations. But repetition is a tragic theme in the work as much as what happens in it, and the struggle of the poetry is thus to articulate eternal patterns with a force or eloquence that is truly proverbial: “For loss is what we live with all the time.” One of the ethical questions that gets asked in Light and Dark is whether there is anything positive to be found in loss, anything sustaining that can lead to growth. In “The Acts of the Apostles” (22–23), the answer is that there is; but the poem is hedged round by ambivalence, and its relation to the Christian story is very strange indeed. “The second time the flesh was harder to put on / and there was no womb to shape and soften it,” the poem begins, and the implication, subtly developed in the first two stanzas, is that though the grief and loss of the Crucifixion were so overwhelming as almost to eliminate the possibility of resurrection and rebirth, somehow these things occurred. In the third stanza, the metaphorical landscape gives way to the abstract moral that underlies it: Some grief is stronger than any joy before or after it, and life survives. It feeds within itself on grief, not nourished then by other food, as winter trees survive because they do not feed. But now the simile of the trees is joined to the metaphorical landscape of the Christian story: Their mouths refused almost the taste of the brief return; grief-seared, they could not savor it. The time did come,— but it was afterwards, that a new joy leafed over their grief as a tree is leafed. It was the tree of grief that grew those leaves. That last line, incidentally, is quite magnificent from a tonal point of view, and it is an indication of the musical values that Bronk’s poetry spontane-

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ously captures: the long e sounds, mixed with the r’s, the alliteration of “grief” and “grew,” and the way the long ef of “grief” culminates in the long ev of “leaves.” Finally, in the fourth stanza the metaphor shifts to focus first on young birds who leave the trees and take flight and then (in a typical Bronkian turn) on ourselves; for just as the birds “grow to the empty air / and fall, and find the empty air sustains,” so we too, in Bronk’s vision, “are lofted in our downward course by the wide / void of loss.” Thus, “The Acts of the Apostles” turns out to be Bronk’s “Sunday Morning.” But the movement “downward to darkness” is more darkly ironic in “The Acts of the Apostles” than in “Sunday Morning,” for in Bronk’s poem, though we are lofted, it is by the “wide void.” Stevens uses the phrase “wide water” twice in “Sunday Morning” (it resonates with the poem’s feeling for the sublime), but the “chaos” of “We live in an old chaos of the sun” in his poem’s final stanza seems consoling, and the void is conspicuously absent from “Sunday Morning.” Nevertheless, the ambiguity at which Bronk arrives in the concluding lines of “The Acts of the Apostles” is more or less equivalent to the “ambiguous undulations” of Stevens’s pigeons: We grow in stature: grief is real and loss is for life, as long as life. Long flight, soar freely, spiral and glide in the empty air. Loss is for life, Bronk is able to say, and again he means this in two senses: it lasts as long as life, but also (and therefore) it is what sustains life: life can be grounded on nothing else because our natural habitat is the empty air.

The Sublime and the Beautiful The World, the Worldless, published jointly in 1964 by New Directions and the San Francisco Review, is probably Bronk’s best-known single collection. In some respects, it is on a continuum with the poems in Light and Dark, but it seems to me that The World, the Worldless is a bleaker volume on the whole. There is less light and more darkness in it, and, as its title indicates, it approaches presence from the standpoint of absence, being from the standpoint of nothingness. Where “The Acts of the Apostles” in Light and Dark contained the idea that the void is sustaining

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and that loss leads to the growth of the individual, “The Belief in the Self Abandoned” in The World, the Worldless views this idea as essentially a myth: Belief goes in time, belief in the self included. What was it I was, or thought I would be? Who could remember? Something of fruit, of trees, of things that show their form from the start and grow larger, fuller, riper, in the same form. More of that form. That was wrong. For me it was wrong. No matter. There are changes. Forms are destroyed.   (37) The statement is a powerful one, and the power of the statement—here and in so many of the poems in The World, the Worldless—arises from the fact that Bronk’s philosophical perspective, though it will continue to develop in various ways, is now formed. Though the poem argues against the idea that there are organic forms and expresses the idea that forms come into existence only to be destroyed, it succeeds, largely through its succinct articulation of these ideas, in finding its own formal eloquence. There is a kind of nakedness to the idea, however, that was not previously present, and, as a result, the great risk that Bronk is taking as a poet— the danger of falling into philosophy, into prose—has become more readily apparent than perhaps it previously was. Precisely because he is so nakedly a poet of ideas, Bronk’s poetry requires protection that can only come from its prosody or, in a larger sense, its “music”—that is, the rhythmic expressiveness of its language. This is true of all poetry, of course, but in Bronk’s case it is true in a special sense. In philosophical terms, it is clear from The World, the Worldless onward that Bronk is moving in the direction of a radical skepticism that deconstructs all fixed beliefs and values. But there is one value that has to remain implicitly selfsustaining, however contradictory this may seem, lest the poetic enterprise itself be subverted—and this is aesthetic value. Ironically, in Bronk’s poetry, poetic form will have to form a bulwark against the confrontation with formlessness that is his poetry’s central theme. “Ideas are always wrong,” Bronk asserts in “Blue Spruces in Pairs, A Bird Bath Between” (34), one of the most extraordinary poems in The World, the Worldless. Here we have an assertion that carries an almost

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proverbial sense of conviction—and it is worth noting that Bronk is one of the few contemporary poets whose assertions can take the form of proverbs. But the irony, of course, is that the statement “Ideas are always wrong” is itself an idea, and thus we have a form of the Cretan Paradox.19 Ideas are always wrong because (as Hegel saw) they always come into conflict with opposing ideas; thus, “Their separateness / causes a threat to neuter each other out / and leave us without a world” (34). Indeed, with the statement of the idea that ideas are always wrong, two opposed but equally important ideas in Bronk’s work come into collision. I noted earlier that Bronk is a poet of repetition and loss who speaks for a human condition that is always and ever the same; but here his skepticism about ideas coincides with a kind of relativism that eliminates the possibility even of similitudes, so that instead of repetition we have a formlessness without touchstones or familiar shapes of any kind. And yet, the two opposing ideas come together because it is precisely the experience of being “always unfixed” (34) that is endlessly repeated and that constitutes the human condition for Bronk. As he asserts in “The Outer Becoming Inner,” “Not / for us ever any familiar and definite world” (45). Bronk sees the world in terms of its worldlessness because immediate reality testifies to the sense in which “the real world” (no phrase occurs more frequently in Bronk’s work) is either transcendent or nonexistent. It is important to recognize that what makes Bronk a poet of the absurd on one level makes him a religious poet on another. As John Ernest observes in an essay that focuses on Bronk’s “religious desire,” the poet is “passionately devoted to the belief that there are no grounds for belief, and to the conviction that all convictions are ultimately fictions.”20 There is a sense in which Bronk sees the world only under the aspect of eternity, as indicated by the emphasis he places on the stars in his poetry; from this point of view, phrases like “Seen by starlight” in “Blue Spruces in Pairs” testify to a kind of mysticism. Bronk is no Henry Vaughan, however. Though he too will write a poem entitled “The World” (which I will discuss below), he will not assert, “I saw Eternity the other night,” as the seventeenthcentury poet does in his poem of that title, because for Bronk the intuition of eternity or of a “real world” can only be grasped from the standpoint of the unreality of this one.21 Bronk’s struggle to grasp or create form out of formlessness pulls his work in a number of different formal directions. In the first stanza of “In

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Navaho Country,” for example, the language struggles (through the use of assonance, consonance, alliteration, and other tonal devices) to give shape to a reality that is perceived as having none: To live in a hogan under a hovering sky is to live in a universe hogan-shaped, or having hogans in it to give it shape, earth-covered hovels, holes having a wall to heave the back of the heart against, or hide the head, to black the heavens overhead, a block and a shapening in the windy vast. This could be said of other houses too. (35) And in “Truth as a Far Country; as a Piteous Ogre” (37–38), Bronk turns— not for the last time—to allegory. In this frighteningly inventive poem, he conjures up a country containing a castle in which an ogre resides; country, castle, and ogre are all metonymies for a truth that we, as human beings, are completely unable to bear and that we try to destroy.22 Metonymy and allegory, as in the aptly entitled “Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World” (36), thus become ways of approaching a truth or reality that are otherwise unapproachable. At the same time, however, and by way of antithesis, Bronk develops a mode that we might call the essay poem (or lyric), a poem denuded of metaphor but in which the language of philosophical abstraction is transformed by the sheer gracefulness of phrasing and syntax. “The Nature of Musical Form,” possibly the book’s finest poem in this mode, begins as follows: It is hard to believe of the world that there should be music in it: these certainties against the all-uncertain, this ordered fairness beneath the tonelessness, the confusion of random noise. (60) The syncopated enjambment between the first and second lines, in which the slight pause after “be” leads to the heavy accent on the first syllable of “music,” beautifully renders the irony that the poem is conveying. Note the double entendre on “fairness,” which connotes justice as well as beauty in this context. That beautifully chosen word returns at the poem’s conclusion:

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There is a fairness of person too, which is not a truth of persons or even, we learn, a truth of that person, particularly. It is only fairness stating only itself: as though we could say of music only, it is. (61) This is actually a Platonic moment in Bronk (and there will be others to follow), for here, as in the Symposium, physical beauty (“fairness of person”) participates in an otherwise transcendent beauty. Although Bronk’s confrontation with formlessness marks him as a poet of the sublime, what is finally most telling in The World, the Worldless is its turn to the beautiful—or, more precisely, the dialectical tension between the sublime and the beautiful in the book. Kant associates the beautiful with ordered forms, and the Bronkian poem, as I have suggested, is itself an ordered form, notwithstanding its confrontation with formlessness. But the experience of the beautiful in Bronk’s poetry is not orderly or formal but, in its own way, ineffable—“as though we could say of music only, it is.” If anything, the experience of the beautiful is more complexly ambivalent in Bronk than that of the sublime: it emerges out of feelings of acceptance, reconciliation, and pleasure, but also, at the same time, sadness. “Tenochtitlan,” with its imagery drawn from Aztec culture,23 is a poem in which the interplay between the sublime and the beautiful is explicitly developed. In this poem, one can see how the hyperintellectuality characteristic of Bronk’s approach to the poem was necessarily balanced by the simple sensuousness of his relationship both to nature and to language: I did not go to Coatlicue today, to her of the writhing skirt of serpents, skulls suspended at her neck, clawed Mother of the Gods. Not that it mattered: if we have learned at all, we have learned not to deny the terrible ones their due; they have it; we are theirs to keep. But we also learn—not knowing is it fear or defiance teaching us—not to think of everything always, sometimes not to think.

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Xilonen, Goddess of the Young Corn, of green and growing, grant us the solace of sweet ears soft in the mouth; accept our truant love. We drink to you, Xilonen, we are drunk with deep pleasures and a deep need, drunk with gentleness and the pleasure of gentle needs. (58–59) The poem is beautifully balanced: the first two tercets evoke the terror we sometimes associate with the sublime, the third is transitional, and then the last two—with their lovely tonal recurrences (green / growing / grant, drink / drunk, etc.)—are fully absorbed in the experience of the beautiful. Notice Bronk’s use of the word “solace” in the penultimate tercet—a use reminiscent of the connotation of sexual pleasure that the word had for Chaucer and the medievals. Perhaps the most beautiful poem in The World, the Worldless (certainly it is the most fully absorbed in the beautiful) is “Certain Beasts, Like Cats” (46). The poem begins as follows: Because we do not live some life different from the life that we do live, sometimes I would have traded life for death to feed my life to all that feeds on life. The chiasmus in the first two lines (live / life / life / live) is followed by the opposition of life to death in the third, and then in the fourth by the mirroring of one half of the line by the other; these repetitions and oppositions give the quatrain the feeling of a deeply ruminative slowness. The poem expresses a suicidal impulse of a kind that is not dissimilar to what we have in the sixth stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale”: Darkling I listen; and for many a time   I have been half in love with easeful Death, Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,   To take into the air my quiet breath; Now more than ever seems it rich to die,   To cease upon the midnight with no pain,    While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad     In such an ecstasy!

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  Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—    To thy high requiem become a sod. (206) The pain of being an individual consciousness, and the desire to appropriate or merge with all of life, is the Romantic agon; but where Keats in the ode unfolds a drama of selfhood, Bronk is both more explicit and more reticent: the opening quatrain, with its absence of imagery, is as explicitly naked as any assertion could be; but then in the next three stanzas, the self disappears behind the images of birds, flowers, and cats that the poem evokes: Along the river, white long-legged birds lift one foot slowly, pause to put it down, and lift the other, down, and feed, absorbed in certainties that never fail, though blind. Great drifts of purple flowers hold the roadside; patrols of purple flowers roam through fields and climb to overtop high banks. Purple is what color there is in the world. Certain beasts—like cats—are sleek and quick, their skins shimmer with light; they dream. What force there is in fish that live their years in the cold darks of the sea, swimming the darks. The birds have a ruminative slowness, much as the poem does, and the flowers “roam” in the way beasts like cats do; but in the imagery of “cold darks of the sea, swimming the darks,” and in the metrical substitutions in that line, there is a feeling of the sublime that merges with the beautiful. It is only at this point in the poem that the lyric-I returns: In August once, I dozed on an unused bridge to hang in the very world, in the teeming air. Great world, your lives are such that we despair, seeing the loveliness, to live our lives. Yet men are all of these, and more than these strong beasts, dark fish, white birds and colored flowers.

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The image of the bridge and the metaphorical connotation of suspension connected to it is particularly apt because, as in the Keats ode, consciousness in this poem is suspended between a recognition of its separateness and a desire to merge with the world. The invocation to the world that then follows, the rhyme on “air” and “despair,” and the way the tonality of “loveliness” is echoed by “live our lives”—all of this strikes me as very beautiful in itself; but the final two-line cadence is not only beautiful but astonishing for what it condenses. The desire to trade life for death that was expressed at the beginning of the poem is now complicated by the thought that because human beings already are the simpler forms of life mentioned in the middle stanzas (are in the sense of being both connected to them and containing them), at the same time they are more than those forms, and, being more, they inevitably desire to be less than they are, because being less entails what they now do not have and therefore is something more. The Romantic paradox, more succinctly stated in “Certain Beasts, Like Cats” than even in the “Ode to a Nightingale” itself, is that less is more and more is less. Because we are more, we don’t have what is less than what we are, and, in not having it, we desire it—which is to say, we desire more than what we have, though this “more” entails being less than what we are. Thus, this deeply humane poem teaches us (again, like Keats’s ode) a kind of heroism: that ultimately we must not be satisfied with being less than we are. In “The Abnegation” (from That Tantalus), Bronk will write: “I will not / be less than I am to be more human, or less / than human may seem to be more than I am” (112). Yet in the poem’s final line, the reprise of the imagery of the middle stanzas leaves us with a feeling of simultaneous connection to and separation from a beauty that cannot be explained.

Beyond Good and Evil In The Empty Hands, issued in 1969 by James Weil’s Elizabeth Press (which from now until the publication of Life Supports will be Bronk’s publisher), we find Bronk striking out in some new directions and consolidating older ones. The language of abstraction is more prevalent here, and there is a current of didacticism that was not fully present in The World, the Worldless. Basically, what has happened is that Bronk has thought through, more rigorously than he had previously done, the problems and concerns that are always central to his poetry, and for that i n the dr ift of the wor ld 132

reason he is now more willing to formulate abstract, metaphysical statements about the nature of reality without necessarily couching them in metaphor. One aspect of the evolution that the poetry has undergone is the increasing abstraction of its language (there is a poem entitled “The Increasing Abstraction of Language” in Bronk’s volume The Meantime). Another is that the poet’s transcendentalism has become so radical and so insistent that it has necessarily opened up an ethical dilemma that previously was not explicitly comprehended or articulated. Not that the beautiful and the sublime are entirely separate modes in Bronk, but the orientation to the beautiful, such as we find it in a poem like “Certain Beasts, Like Cats,” is not primary either in The Empty Hands or, for that matter, in the subsequent volume, That Tantalus. To some extent it goes underground until it reemerges in the sonnets of To Praise the Music (1972). Nevertheless, in a few of these poems we get a new kind of irony and succinctness, an understated formality that has a shapeliness we associate with the beautiful. One such poem is “Go Ahead; Goodbye; Good Luck; and Watch Out”: You get to Gilead, let me know. That balm, supposed to be so good for human hurts —all wounds, holes, hollows, hungriness— you tell me if it’s there, and how it works. Till the time comes, I’ll look for further ways with the old lack, the void, push it along ahead of me in the only way we have to carry this luggage of ours of hungriness like an empty bag. What else is there to do? No kind of balm. You look, though. Let me know. (68) Language and biblical allusion (the Bible is very often an important reference point for Bronk) become a kind of balm, tempering the severity of the statement that there is no balm in Gilead. The poem’s gentle irony is brought to fruition in the cadence of its concluding off-rhymes: “What else is there to do? / No kind of balm. You look, though. Let me know.” In “Corals and Shells,” we have the presence of enigma. Straightforward though its assertions may seem on the surface, there is something riddling and impenetrable about this nine-line poem that mirrors its conception: i n the dr ift of the wor ld 133

That which we call reality is that which except for a dormancy, a kind of death approaching, we were completely unable to endure. Do you know what it is? It is that dormancy itself, that insensate sleep, those stiff rigors and bones of death where we hide, which we hate. Alive, we couldn’t endure it; we die to endure, endure to die. It kills us. We are glad it does. Corals and shells. Shall we ever cover a land? (70) The poem seems to have emerged out of a meditation on the word “endure.” This word, repeated four times, is built on the Latin durus for “hard”; hence the “stiff / rigors and bones” of the middle stanza and also perhaps the corals and shells of the title. Here is a rough paraphrase, with at least some of the ambiguities drawn out: Either what we call reality or reality itself is what we were completely unable to endure (i.e., bear, put up with), except insofar as it presented itself as a dormancy, a state in which life or the world seemed suspended in a kind sleep that was like the approach of a kind of death. But reality is that dormancy, that insensate sleep, those rigors and bones of death. Even though we hate it (or them), we hide (i.e., take refuge) in those rigors and bones of death, or in death itself (and perhaps also—the syntax is ambiguous—in that dormancy and that insensate sleep) because reality is what we cannot endure (Eliot: “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality”),24 even though, ironically, this is what constitutes reality and makes it unendurable (or unbearable) for us. When we were alive, we couldn’t endure (i.e., bear) it (i.e., reality), and so we die in order to endure it (i.e., [1] last and [2] bear reality), endure to die (i.e., [1] live and [2] consent to die or bear death). Reality (a reality that has now been defined in terms of encompassing death) kills us, but we are glad that it does because, after all, it is the ground of our being, without which we are ungrounded, even though we are also unable to endure contact with that enduring ground in this life (since to endure it would mean to give up this life).

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The paraphrase is inadequate (though this is illuminating in itself) for a number of reasons. First of all, the argument circles back upon itself in a way that is impossible to encapsulate because of the various meanings of “endure” and because of the ambiguities surrounding the pronoun “it.” The only thing endurable (i.e., bearable) in reality turns out to be reality itself—and hence that which cannot be endured except insofar as it draws us to what is enduring, to death. With the poem’s final line, moreover, paraphrase comes to a complete halt because the metaphor of the corals and shells (substituting for the “stiff rigors and bones of death”) cannot fully be explained. What do we make of the concluding question? I take it that Bronk is asking whether we will ever be grounded, but I’m not sure whether the “ever” here is locating the “we” ontologically or historically, in terms of some undisclosed state of being or some historical future in which we will be able to “endure” the ground of our being. The poem is written in a very strange past tense, as if from an enduring standpoint, beyond the grave. The standpoint from which Bronk’s poems are written is problematic because it is almost always beyond in some way: beyond the grave, beyond human finitude, beyond what is natural or given to human understanding. But what is transcended when one passes beyond the human is not only ordinary human understanding but the ethical dimension, and therefore, as I intimated earlier, Bronk’s essentially tragic vision poses a serious ethical dilemma. It should be noted, however, that when this ethical problem emerges (and it is not until The Empty Hands that it makes itself felt in a distinct thematic way), the reader experiences it differently than the poet seems to do. The poet is governed only by his vision and is willing to take that vision as far as he can—this is what gives it its power, after all. But while the reader is carried along by the forcefulness of the language, he or she experiences the ethical content of the poetry almost as an affront (to borrow a Kierkegaardian concept). Thus, when I say that Bronk’s vision poses an ethical dilemma for the reader, I mean this quite literally: in The Empty Hands, Bronk challenges the reader, implicitly demanding that the reader either see things as he himself does or (if the reader is strong enough) resist what the poet is saying. There are a number of poems in The Empty Hands that lay the matter on the line, not only clearly but, one might say, aggressively. One of these is “Of the All with Which We Coexist,” an extraordinary

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poem in quatrains that immediately follows “Corals and Shells” in Life Supports: Looking around me. I see as far to one sky as another. The limitations of the eye: we know the sky goes farther. Yet instruments give us the same view and absolve the eye. If I am not central to the world, then it fails to make a difference whatever I feel. The universe is large: to be eccentric is to be nothing. It is not worth speaking of. If I am anything at all, I am the instrument of the world’s passion and not the doer or the done to. It is to feel. You, also, are such an instrument. You speak of justice and injustice, and well you might. You speak of grief, of ecstasy. This is a cruel world and a gay one. We are. Feel. There is nothing to do, to be done, to be done to. (70–71) This may be the first time we find the phrase “the all” in Life Supports; it was implicit in earlier poems but will figure prominently from here on. Bronk is one of the few poets in the twentieth century who is able to use the word “all” without sounding banal or pretentious (even Yeats has trouble with the word). But that doesn’t lessen the difficulty, for if we coexist with the all, then we exist (are individuated) as one of its aspects—but only as one of its aspects, not in ourselves in any significant way. Thus, although Bronk says, “If I am not central to the world, then it fails / to make any difference whatever I feel,” the truth is that by this logic the question of centrality is a red herring; for if I am central to the world, then it also fails to make any difference whatever I feel. It makes a difference to me, perhaps, and presumably to other individuals (for if I am central, I feel as other individuals do, and perhaps what they do), but not to the world; for all of us are “instrument[s] of the world’s passion” and not actors in our own right. “You speak of justice and injustice, and well you might,” the poet says, addressing the reader (addressing me)— not, I think, in an unkindly or patronizing way, but as if acknowledging i n the dr ift of the wor ld 136

an obligation that requires us to speak imprecisely, so as not to turn our backs on human life. Nevertheless, it is clear that, from this transcendent standpoint, justice and injustice are mere constructs and not what is real: “There is nothing to do, to be done, to be done to.” This is hard to accept; it is hard for the reader and hard even for Bronk to accept, but for Bronk it is an ineluctable truth that cannot be gainsaid. I, as a reader, am not persuaded by the idea, but I am persuaded by the poem—and I find this in itself problematic because it means that I accept on an aesthetic plane what I cannot accept on a metaphysical or ethical one. So I am affronted by the poem. “Of the All with Which We Coexist” is the first poem in Life Supports in which what I am calling the ethical problematic posed by Bronk’s poetry—that is, a transcendentalism that has the force of invalidating ethical categories—emerges distinctly and explicitly. This tendency is obviously implicit in the earlier work, however, and thus it is interesting that in the letter to Cid Corman cited earlier, we find Bronk stating a position that is virtually identical to the one that will later make its way into “Of the All with Which We Coexist”: “I am the instrument of the world’s passion if I am anything at all. You also are such an instrument. But you’ll have to take care of that. My poetry does not exist in a world in which there are people who vote and make history. (If I misunderstand you, it is because I intend to.) There are many people in the world and if I assume that I speak for them by virtue of speaking only for myself it is because of the conjunction of two conditions[:] 1) we are encapsulated and remote from each other[;] 2) we are interchangeable if not identical though we may appear different in different light[.]”25 It is possible that “Of the All with Which We Coexist” was actually written in 1961 and for some reason withheld from The World, the Worldless, but ideas and statements that appear in Bronk’s letters not infrequently make their way into his poems years later.26 In any event, the ethical problematic posed in “Of the All with Which We Coexist” is taken even further in “Not to Cry Out, ‘How Long, Oh Lord, How Long,’ ” another four-stanza poem (though this one containing stanzas of six lines), which appears a few pages later in Life Supports: What we intend in the obscure faintness but chained and stubborn fastness, the force of our violent genes, or in some field of abstract intention that includes i n the dr ift of the wor ld 137

their powers of change:—what we intend, we intend beyond evil and goodness since that intent, however evil, must still be our singular good. (72) It is significant that in this opening stanza Bronk seems to echo Nietzsche. Nevertheless, I would contend that he arrives at what would seem to be a Nietzschean position not through a direct encounter with the German philosopher, who actually meant very little to him, but by a route that is almost antithetical to the one that Nietzsche traversed.27 For whereas Nietzsche goes beyond good and evil by throwing off the shackles of Christianity, Bronk’s direction, as the title of the poem indicates, is essentially a religious one. Nietzsche does not believe that the world (or life) has an “intention”; on the contrary, in his understanding, it is we who impose our intentions and our ideas on it. For Bronk, however, just as we are the instruments of the world’s passion, so what we intend is intended through us. That intention goes beyond the human constructs of good and evil. Nevertheless, coupled with this transcendentalist perspective, there is something Calvinistic in the orientation here, and as the poem unfolds the sermonizing overtones become more and more insistent: we can hear Bronk’s Dutch forbears (from a time when the Bronx was the place where the Broncks lived) still thundering to their congregations about original sin. The structures (and strictures) of Calvinism remain intact—although, ironically, not only Christianity but God himself has disappeared. The poem, like so many in Bronk’s oeuvre, develops through anaphora and achieves tremendous power through the cumulative momentum of its repetitions. “What we intend” in the opening stanza leads to “What we know” in the second and to “Whatever it is intended” in the third. Then in the fourth and final stanza, the verbal pattern is broken, only to be forcefully reasserted as the whats and whatevers reecho and the poem arrives at its powerful conclusion. Here are the final three stanzas of this extraordinary poem: What we know is only whatever the genes intend, nothing else and not even that: we don’t know. It must be true an instruction would be received, but we instruct ourselves so softly as to not overhear,

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and only afterwards, seeing what it is we do, or how we do it, we think how the instructions read. Whatever it is intended, it is we who intend in spite of not knowing. Is there evil in the world? It is our evil, our intent. We are so committed to evil that wherever the act should be beyond us, we contrive or condone that someone else should do it. We see it done. We want it so. Not evil for the sake of evil, but in spite of that. Yet evil nevertheless, and ours, our own. What I mean to include is our helplessness and, besides, our confirmed intention. We mean it. What I have to feel is both goodness and evil, which are strong but not the point. We mean to be—whatever—what we mean to be. (73) The poem’s “we” takes responsibility for everything pertaining to humanity: nothing human is alien to it. Nevertheless, despite its moral probity, despite the willingness of the “I” to take responsibility for a “we” that it knows it contains and can stand in for, the poem’s essential realization is that “what we intend, we intend / beyond evil and goodness,” for good and evil “are strong but not the point.” If Calvinism and transcendentalism converge (and one can easily see from this poem how a Jonathan Edwards could lead to a Ralph Waldo Emerson in America), this is because they are two forms of fatalism or determinism. On the Calvinist side, we are so engrained in evil that, do what we may, evil is still our “singular good”; and if evil is our good, if we factor God and objective ethical categories out of the equation, the very meaning of “good” and “evil” becomes hopelessly scrambled. On the transcendentalist side, the categories of good and evil are artificial, a bulwark thrown up against a reality that does not disclose itself to us. Since we coexist with the “all,” what we intend, or mean, is finally what the world intends or means, and a “meaning” of this kind cannot be parsed. This is why the poem, recapitulating the anaphoric movement of the first three stanzas, ends in a tautology: “We mean to be—whatever—what we mean to be.” The fatalism inherent in an intellectual position of this kind has its analogue in quietism: “There is nothing to do, to be done, to be done to” (71).

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Masks of Shape As a collection, That Tantalus (1971) is notable for its formal experimentation: for the many different shapes the poems assume; for the way in which the poet loosens and tightens, speeds up and slows down, his pentameter line; for the way in which he plays with voice and narrative. The philosophical perspective or problematic that we have encountered in earlier collections remains constant: reality (or truth) inheres in the all, and so every instantiation of reality is meaningful not in itself but only in respect to a transcendent truth that it partly manifests but that can never be grasped in its totality. In the face of this reality, the poet of That Tantalus, attempting to give expression not only to the inexpressible but also to the fact that it is inexpressible, takes on different voices and tries on different shapes more restlessly and fluidly than at any other time in his career. There are some dead ends in this collection, but there are also some poems that, though not particularly well known, are among the finest in Bronk’s oeuvre. One of these is “The Body of This Life.” If we look closely at this poem’s beautiful and mysterious opening line, “I lie along the body of this life,” we can see a thought process unfolded that provides us with a clue to Bronk’s compositional process in general. If this is a love poem (as Norman Finkelstein has suggested to me), it is one in which the experience of merging with an other has been translated to that of merging with all of life. The body that the self lies along is not other to the self, it is the self; and yet, far from being eviscerated by this process of merging, the poetic self seems preternaturally attuned not only to being in general but to all of its minute particulars. Everything in the poem is slowed down—formally, musically, and conceptually—so as to take account of a mysteriousness that we are usually in too much of a hurry to hear and see. The pentameter is slowed by repetitions and by a heavy caesura that divides many of the lines into mirroring halves: I lie along the body of this life, all night stilling my breath to listen to breath, feeling its weight heavy against my weight. Awake, in early light, I look at it and set my eyes to search its hollows out, its curves and surfaces, sojourning there as walkers quarter whose aimless walks are a kind i n the dr ift of the wor ld 140

of office in which they read the proper of the day. slowing at pools of light under the trees, impelled to certain roads, bemused at flowers, as little knowing what a place should mean or what they meant to find as I with you, still sleeping, mute to me, or waking now, awake to some desire not my desire and helpless to answer mine which puzzles itself pondering what day that it were proper to were here, that it should see in sets of bone, in skin, in streaks of hair, some different sight as if it were there and it not there, nor know, at all, what sight it is it sees. (100) In the first four lines alone, aside from the obvious repetitions, we have the following tonal convergences: lie and life in line 1; then along . . . life in that line with all night in line 2; stilling mirroring listen in that line; then feeling in line 3 echoing stilling; and then in line 4, light echoing life (in line 1) and weight (in line 3) and being echoed by it. Moreover, the attention to sound—to echoing words and phonemes—is mirrored, in the poem’s concluding lines, by an attention to the most minute visual phenomena, “sets of bone” and “streaks of hair.” The significance of these tiny things consists in the fact that they both contain truth or reality and indicate the extent to which truth or reality is not contained in anything, is not only beyond them but beyond us—“as if it were there and it not there.” “The Body of This Life” has the solemnity of a hymn; it expresses devotion to the various ceremonies of life, even if not only the meanings of those ceremonies but what they ultimately refer to have been lost or are inaccessible. The liturgical quality to the poem is brought home by the repetition of the word “proper,” which in its ecclesiastical usage refers to the special office or prayers for a particular day or festival. But since the ritualized patterning of words and sounds coincides not with knowledge but with a kind of emptying out of false knowledge, the play on “proper” is ironic: “aimless walks” become “a kind / of office in which [one can] read the proper of the day,” but at the same time the connection between a given feeling or perception and what it is proper to, or what is proper to it, is missing. Completely antithetical to “The Body of This Life” is “I Thought It Was i n the dr ift of the wor ld 141

Harry” (114), a poem structured like a dramatic monologue that reads like an anecdote but turns out not to be a dramatic monologue at all because the imitation of speech is itself an illusion that frames an investigation of the problem of identity. “Excuse me. I thought for a moment you were someone I know,” the poem begins, and it then launches into an amusing shaggy-dog story about mistaken identities, which culminates in an awareness of “how sound our ignorance is,” a phrase reminiscent of Montaigne’s statement in the “Apology for Raymond Sebonde,” “The ignorance that was naturally in us we have by long study confirmed and verified.”28 “That’s what I wanted to talk to Harry about,” the poem concludes: “You looked like him. Thank you anyway.” Midway between the hymnlike solemnity of “The Body of This Life” and the anecdotal quality of “I Thought It Was Harry” is “The Plainest Narrative” (105–6), a poem in which Bronk’s attempt to get at a kind of bedrock of truth is mirrored by his cultivation of the “plain style.” This was the poem by which, as a young man, I was introduced to Bronk, and to an ear trained on Yeats, it seemed almost aggressively unpoetic or even antipoetic: I am William Bronk, have been raised to believe the personal pronoun plus the verb to be and a proper name said honestly is fact from which the plainest narrative begins. I would have said at the time that the honesty of plain narrative is a false honesty where poetry is concerned because the art of poetry depends on eloquence and on an intrinsic musicality. It was some time before I learned to hear the plangency emanating from the prosaic directness of utterances of this kind. Although the “metrical contract” is not clear until the fourth line, “from which the plainest narrative begins,” that line is a perfectly regular pentameter, and this testifies, once again, to the musical irony underscoring Bronk’s statement language.29 On the conceptual level, the plangency stems from the fact that the “plainest narrative” doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, since the “I” on which it is based turns out to be (is construed as) arbitrary: “That ‘I’— / as arbitrary as the proper name, a role / assumed from the verb to be as though to be / were all assumption.” By the time the poem concludes, it turns out to be a deconstruction of the foundations and cornerstones of knowledge, and hence it is an

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undoing of origins—not only of Cartesian rationalism but, going back even farther, of the Adam and Eve story: Aren’t we that Adam, still, from whom we are? The garden is here. I have no way to eat, have never eaten. I round that fruit. I push against the branches of that tree.30 If I were to choose a single poem to represent That Tantalus, it would be “The Mask the Wearer of the Mask Wears.” This mysterious and exquisite poem, consisting of four tercets and a couplet, and thus taking the form of a sonnet, is to my mind one of the greatest poems that Bronk ever wrote. It has a luminous clarity that gives it the impression of condensing and essentializing an entire philosophical outlook with absolute certainty and precision: Yes, look at me; I am the mask it wears, as much am that which is within the mask. Nothing not mask but that. That every mask. The mask will fall away and nothing lost. There is only the mask-wearer, the self-aware, the only aware, aware of only the self. Awake, it dreams: is every character; is always more; is never only that. It contemplates; tries any mask of shape. Any is nothing. Any is not what is. But that it should be. That it should seem to be. That it be no more than that, and yet should be. And that it turn to look, look favorably, look lovingly, look long, on what there is. (117–18) On the formal level, one notes the strict, end-stopped meter, the short syntactical units, and the fact that many of the sentences are actually fragments. Pronouns and prepositions play a central role in the poem, and their meaning is often difficult to construe because they seem to merge with one another in peculiar ways. To take an example: the word “that,” frequently repeated, begins several phrases and clauses, but in line

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3 it is a demonstrative whereas in lines 11–13 it is a relative pronoun. The formal characteristics of the poem, combined with Bronk’s usual conceptual density, make the experience of reading it analogous to viewing a Cubist painting by Picasso. This can be disconcerting to some readers, but the purpose, to borrow Wallace Stevens’s apothegm (from “The Creations of Sound”), is to “make the visible a little hard / To see.”31 In order to arrive at an exegesis of this poem, one must (at least provisionally) locate its referents in terms of concepts that are implicit or ambiguously present in the poem but never explicitly stated; at the same time, one must recognize that it is crucial to the poem as a poem that these concepts should not be explicitly stated. The “it” of line 1, for example, has no clear reference. I see two basic possibilities, which are not mutually exclusive, however. On the one hand, the “it” refers to Being or Life, or perhaps even to God, but in any event it refers to that which transcends any particular human being and in which every human being has its source. On the other hand, the “it” refers to the self, but a self that is disembodied and, like Leibniz’s monads, that mirrors, contains, and mediates something like Being or Life. Thus, in the opening tercet, the “I” is both the mask that Being (or the disembodied self) “wears”—in other words, in terms of which Being is embodied, particularized, and given form—and Being itself. The two instances of “that” in line 3 (“Nothing not mask but that. That every mask”) refer to two different things: the first, to that source which, though disembodied, is alone authentic or real (since every mask, however necessary, is nevertheless fictional or factitious); and the second, to all of the various manifestations, embodiments, or forms of Being (or the self). Bronk is being playful, of course, but there is a dialectical cogency to his playfulness because there is a sense in which Being only exists in terms of its manifestations (i.e., the masks of shape to which the second “that” refers), but those manifestations, in turn, only exist in terms of transcendent Being. Human being, the tercet seems to acknowledge, is that species of being which understands all of this: it understands that every personality, character, or even trait is a “mask” that has its source in something “without qualities.” When the mask falls away, the self achieves awareness, or self-awareness, and there is a pun on “wear” and “aware” in the second tercet. This awareness or self-awareness is essentially devoid of content, however, because as soon as the self takes on any particular set of characteristics or any specific character, it assumes a “mask of shape” and thus ceases i n the dr ift of the wor ld 144

to be (or be aware of) itself. “Any is nothing. Any is not what is” (line 11) because that which is (i.e., Being or the self that contains, reflects, or mediates it) is transcendent: as soon as it takes the form of any particular entity, character, or set of characteristics, it no longer is what it is. “Everything profound loves the mask,” wrote Nietzsche, who was followed in this line of thought by Yeats.32 But Bronk adheres to a different tradition, one that goes back to King Lear. When Edgar has taken on the mask of Tom o’ Bedlam, he says, “Edgar I nothing am.”33 He calls his disguise “the basest and most poorest shape / That ever penury, in contempt of man, / Brought near to beast” (2.21.7–9). In King Lear (perhaps the ultimate source of Bronk’s “winter mind” in English literature), it is a serious question, never definitively answered, whether there is anything left when our social disguises are stripped away.34 Nevertheless, in the four lines with which “The Mask the Wearer of the Mask Wears” concludes—lines in which the poem turns from the indicative to the optative mood—what is notable is the quality of the love that is expressed for the creature, poor and even irrelevant though he may be. The concluding couplet (with its alliterated l sounds), “And that it turn to look, look favorably, / look lovingly, look long, on what there is,” is to me one of the most moving and beautiful passages that Bronk ever wrote. The act of looking here—and this is what I find so remarkable—is turned, Janus-like, in two directions at once: toward individual being, in all of its poverty and pathos, and toward Being, the source of “what there is.”

Shakespearean Cadences After the formal experimentation of That Tantalus, it is interesting that the poems in almost all of the subsequent collections included in Life Supports are in fixed forms, forms that become more and more condensed until this tendency has reached its limit and is reversed by a countermovement toward expansion. To Praise the Music (1972) is a collection of sonnets, or, as Bronk preferred to call them, “fourteen-liners”; Silence and Metaphor (1975), which follows, is a collection of eight-line poems in two quatrains—as if the octave of the sonnet had broken off and become a form of its own; The Meantime (1976), a very short interlude of a book, contains poems of different line lengths; but then in Finding Losses (also 1976), the two-quatrain form of Silence and Metaphor is halved, and almost all of these poems are in a single four-line stanza (one poem is in i n the dr ift of the wor ld 145

two lines and another has two numbered quatrains); finally, The Force of Desire (1978) is a collection of untitled three-line poems. This progressive tightening of form—toward proverb and epigram—is at last reversed in Life Supports (1981), the last section of the collected poems (which gives the volume as a whole its name), and all of the poems in this book are of twenty lines. In the individual volumes he published, Bronk almost always sequenced the poems in the order in which they were composed. “The Mask the Wearer of the Mask Wears” comes toward the end of That Tantalus, but it could easily have been included among the “fourteen-liners” of To Praise the Music. I noted the possible influence of King Lear on “The Mask the Wearer of the Mask Wears,” and this is interesting because, as Bronk informed me in conversation, in the year before he began to compose the poems in To Praise the Music he made a serious study of Shakespeare’s sonnets, reading and rereading them every evening before he went to bed.35 One can understand why he would have preferred to call the poems in To Praise the Music fourteen-liners rather than sonnets. They are not sonnets in any formal or traditional sense—not even in the sense in which Hopkins’s sonnets remain sonnets, for example. They don’t make use of symmetrical end-rhyme and their rhythms continue to be in a blank verse that sometimes grows tighter and sometimes looser. There is no relationship to a beloved and they do not form a connected sequence in the way Shakespeare’s or Donne’s sonnets so obviously do.36 Nevertheless, the form clearly had an enabling impact on the poet in that it allowed him to articulate and hone his most characteristic themes with an elegance and rigor that might otherwise have been inaccessible. It would be difficult to demonstrate the verbal impress of Shakespeare’s sonnets on Bronk’s fourteen-liners in any palpable way, but Shakespeare was an enormous influence on Bronk, in some respects his greatest influence, and what he took from Shakespeare was considerable. Whereas Bronk’s relationship to Stevens was somewhat burdened by the anxiety of influence, this was not the case with his relationship to Shakespeare, who was far enough removed in time to pose no immediate threat to his poetry. We still make too easy and categorical a distinction between poetry and philosophy, but Bronk saw Shakespeare fundamentally as one of the greatest thinkers of the Western tradition, a thinker whose thought could not be separated from the eloquence and sheer rhetorical power of his

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poetry, but a thinker nonetheless. (Bronk often said in conversation that he regarded Proust as the greatest thinker—not just writer but thinker— of the twentieth century.) As a thinker, especially within the constrained limits of the sonnet form, Shakespeare is able not only to paint specific images and evoke specific emotions, but to sculpt ideas—or conceptions— in such a way as to give them an epigrammatic quality or proverbial force; his poetic power derives from his eloquence, but his eloquence from his ability to make statements about reality. Bronk’s “statement-language” (I borrow the term from the literary theorist Käte Hamburger) is often more abstract than Shakespeare’s in his sonnets, partly because Bronk seems to begin from the “we” rather than the “I.”37 But if we examine the poems in To Praise the Music, especially their concluding passages, we shall find in Bronk’s cadences, though they are not at all coupletlike, a reminiscence of the Shakespearean music that he praised. In sonnet 98, Shakespeare writes: “Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white, / Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose.” Shakespeare’s language offers praise even as the explicit statement asserts the opposite. And Bronk does something of the same. There is a counterpoint in some of these poems between the stories they tell—stories that often pertain to ancient myth and have a symbolic relationship to the beautiful—and their self-reflective awareness that all stories are literally fictions and untrue. This theme, or tendency, emerges explicitly in “About Dynamism, Desire and Various Fictions” (144), which I discussed in the introduction to this chapter. A parallel poem is “The Sense of Passage,” except that here the myth is not so much deconstructed as reinterpreted to show its inner truth—which only goes to show that the idea that “stories are fictions, truth doesn’t tell one” (144) exemplifies Bronk’s axiom that “ideas are always wrong” (34): It is as in the story—Orpheus sent to fetch the ghost to another world—to life: if we act just right it is possible. Whenever the other body, the beautiful one, offers to take us over, beckons to us, we believe it is something beyond what a body is. Our lust is to carry over—to transcend: like climbers who make the places for their toes to hold

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to circumvent the overhang of death. (Power) will bring us intact to the other side. (Skill) (heroic virtue) (ruthlessness). Nothing does. Constant survivors, ghosts perpetually, our reach is really back into the body myth of mortality. (125) This profound and to me deeply moving poem is simultaneously an interpretation of the Orpheus story and a meditation on poetry, sexual desire, the beautiful, and the relationship of all of these to death. Our lust is to transcend, but our reach is back “into the body myth of mortality.” The Orphic myth is clearly being reinterpreted in terms of the Freudian “death instinct,” but the idea that we are “[c]onstant survivors, ghosts / perpetually” is enigmatic, for here it is not only the dead Eurydice (“the beautiful one”) who is a ghost, but the living Orpheus as well. In Bronk’s version of the myth (which is presented not as a myth but as its inner meaning), the story is allegorized: Eurydice stands for a beauty that inhabits its own death proleptically, even before it vanishes, whereas Orpheus stands for the questing part of the self that seeks to rescue and preserve the beautiful one from death. The ghost that Orpheus wants to fetch to another world is thus really himself as much as an other, however, and Eurydice is essentially the means by which this is to be accomplished. But because Orpheus and Eurydice are two parts of the self or soul, the story goes in a circle: Orpheus inhabits the realm of death even prior to seeking Eurydice, and thus the encounter with the beautiful, emanating from the body, does not lead to transcendence but back to the realm of mortality. When one examines how this beautifully constructed poem develops, it becomes clear why Bronk did not regard his “fourteen-liners” as sonnets and why they nevertheless realize a definite form. In a Shakespearean sonnet, with its 4/4/4/2 division, the tension that is built up is typically resolved in the couplet; the octave/sestet division is less palpably present in the Shakespearean form than in the Petrarchan, but there is usually a conceptual “turn” after the eighth line of a Shakespearean sonnet as well. There are, of course, many variations, but this is the basic pattern. Now, in “The Sense of Passage,” what is initially posed to us is the surface story, but this surface is already undercut by irony in line 3 (“if we act just right it is possible”). In lines 4–6, the poem succinctly explains why we coni n the dr ift of the wor ld 148

struct the myth and what it represents to us, and then in lines 5–11, with the analogy to climbers, it delineates our desire for transcendence and the various ways (summed up ingeniously in the parenthetical phrases) in which we think that the desire for transcendence can be fulfilled or accomplished. If there is a turn, it comes with the simple phrase “Nothing does” in line 12. The sentence in the remaining two-and-a-half lines does not merely represent a simple summing up but, as with the finest Shakespearean couplets, a conclusion that takes the conception as far as it can go. Instead of Shakespeare’s rhymed couplet, we have an asymmetrical cadence, with the tonal convergence of “perpetually” at the beginning of line 13 and “mortality” at the end of the poem. Another group of poems in this collection tells the “story” of how our desire to know comes into collision with the unknowability of the world. One of these is “The Mind’s Limitations Are Its Freedom” (125–26). The power of this extraordinary poem stems from the cumulative repetitions of the phrase “the mind” that it contains; this phrase is repeated eight times, but its position, both in the line and in the grammar, keeps changing. The poem begins with a statement, which is then followed by a rhetorical question that has the effect of corroborating not the whole but only one aspect of the statement. Both the statement and the question are oneand-a-half lines long, and the irony they convey gathers its momentum in the line breaks: The mind has a power which is unusable and this is its real power. What else but the mind senses the final uselessness of the mind? If the final uselessness of the mind is sensed, it must be the mind—or one of its powers—that is doing the sensing; but this power of the mind is still unusable because of the uselessness of the mind. One could complain that “power” and “use” are similar in meaning, but apparently the power or innate capacity is without practical utility here. In any event, why the “final uselessness of the mind” is being sensed has not yet been explained. This comes in the next tercet: How foolish we were, how smaller than what we are, were we to believe what the mind makes of what it meets. Whatever the mind makes is not. The mind makes something (as the idiom goes) of the experiences the i n the dr ift of the wor ld 149

individual has, in two ways: it interprets them, but also it fabricates them. Though we would like to believe that the mind simply decoded our experiences, it actually constructs them in its own way. It would be foolish to believe that these constructions had any basis in reality, or, in any event, as Kant asserted, that we had privileged access to any sort of pure reality. It is significant that the octave follows the sestet, rather than the other way round, and that the poem’s conclusion circles back to its opening: You know there are always messages we find —in bed, on the street or anywhere, and the mind invents a translation almost plausible; but it hasn’t any knowledge of the language at all. Sometimes the translations are cryptic in themselves. I read them in wonderment. It is a wonderment not usable. What could it all mean? The mind does this. I stand in awe of the mind. Bronk goes Kant at least one better in these lines by translating sense perceptions to “messages” that form a language that must be decoded. The poem asserts that experience is intuited in the form of “messages” and that, though these seem to come to us from “the outside,” they are already constructed; for what the mind meets is what it has already made. These messages pertain to an unknown language and must therefore be translated, but (in a higher-order irony) the translations (presumably our interpretations) are themselves cryptic. Yet—and here is the final irony—in coming upon its own limitations, the mind recognizes the independence and hence the freedom of the mind, as the poem’s title expresses. On the surface, “The Mind’s Limitations Are Its Freedom” reads like a logical demonstration, a page out of Kant, but everything in this poem is ironic, and one of the ironies is that it is really the poem’s sound, subtly but emphatically, that leads the way. In the first of the two quatrains, for example, after so many repetitions of “the mind,” the irony is intensified by the rhyme on “find” and then by the swiftness of the enjambment in the following two lines. In a way that is perhaps not immediately clear, this is a poem deeply expressive of the pathos of the human condition. There is no other poet in English—and here I include Stevens—who could

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have written anything even resembling “The Mind’s Limitations Are Its Freedom.” For an analogue, I think we have to go back to Donne. In “The Ignorant Lust after Knowledge” (with its elegant title), Bronk’s skepticism is taken to such an extreme that Cartesian skepticism, which, after all, is the initiating and defining moment of modern philosophy, comes to seem naïve. Ironically, however, it is precisely at the point at which it is most extreme that Bronk’s skepticism turns into a kind of mysticism: I come in from the canal. I don’t know anything. It is well and good to ask what we need to know as if it were all, as if we didn’t need. Well, I need. I may never know anything —but I need. One sees desire not as something to satisfy but to live with. A light, this side of the hills toward Argyle, flowed like fog through the hollows, rose to the depth of the hills, illumined me. I faded in it as the world faded in me, dissolved in the light. No one to know and nothing knowable. Oh we know that knowing is not our way; but, the choice ours, would make it our way, would leave the world for the same world made knowable. (126–27) Descartes, attempting to doubt everything, builds a foundation for knowledge on the fact that he thinks (since to doubt is to think), but for Bronk, the only certainty is need or desire. From this certainty no other knowledge is forthcoming: “One sees desire not / as something to satisfy but to live with.” But immediately there intervenes (or supervenes) an experience of light, an experience of the beautiful, in which the “I” is dissolved. So at the same time that knowledge is completely cut off to the Cartesian ego (“No one to know and nothing knowable”), there is a sense of illumination, which, in the four lines in which it is recounted, is brought home by the heavy texturing of the language: by alliteration, assonance, and consonance (note in particular the prevalence of f and l sounds, of il’s and ol’s). The poem’s irony is compounded by the fact

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that, in spite of what it is saying about the impossibility of knowledge, it concludes with a real aperçu, a Bronkian proverb that offers us real, one might even say practical, knowledge about ourselves and the world. Precisely because of our experiences of beauty, we would “leave / the world for the same world made knowable.” There is an obvious connection between “The Ignorant Lust after Knowledge” and “The Annihilation of Matter,” one of the finest poems in The World, the Worldless, and a comparison of the two poems tells us something about Bronk’s development in the interim. First, “The Annihilation of Matter”: The light at least was not to be dismissed: a hunked-up moon rode a starred sky. Those objects—what were those objects? Some trivial trees. Something. Never mind. It was the light that mattered, as earlier—that afternoon— the wash of sun crossing the same place; but it was not the same in a different light. Would it be otherwise in a real world? Who could answer? Here, it was always the light that mattered, and only the light. Once, it had seemed the objects mattered: the light was to see them by. Examined, they yielded nothing, nothing real. They were for seeing the light in various ways. They gathered it, released it, held it in. In them, the light revealed itself, took shape. Objects are nothing. There is only the light, the light! (35) Bronk takes a phrase from modern physics, “the annihilation of matter,” and constructs a brilliant pun on matter, which runs through the whole poem: “It was the light / that mattered. . . . Here, it was always the light / that mattered. . . . Once, it had seemed / the objects mattered.” In the first stanza, an actual experience is alluded to, but the experience is presented in the past tense, in the form of a reflection. This reflection leads implicitly to the idea that the world is unreal (for if it is the light alone that “matters,” then the objects that comprise the world are metaphysically annihilated), and hence to the philosophical question at the beginning of the second stanza. The rest of the stanza brilliantly develops the concepi n the dr ift of the wor ld 152

tion, but it is only at the end of the poem that the emotional immediacy of an actual experience is made manifest: “There is only the light, the light!” The power of the conclusion is partly due to the fact that the poem, up to now, has been so resolutely intellectual and the emotional experience has been held in abeyance for so long. In “The Ignorant Lust after Knowledge,” by contrast, despite the ironic distancing of its title, the experience is immediate and the language that conveys it as well as the philosophical conception to which it is tied is naked: “I come in from the canal. I don’t know anything.” There is a great risk in this kind of writing, a risk that the condensation of form has made possible. In “The Annihilation of Matter” (as in The World, the Worldless generally), because “it was only the light that mattered,” the world is unreal: the emotional world of the poem, at least until its conclusion, is fundamentally one of alienation. “The Real World” from To Praise the Music has a very different emotional tone, and this is partly a result of a development in the poet’s metaphysical orientation—not so much a transformation as a shift in attitude or emphasis. “Would it be otherwise in a real world? / Who could answer?” the poet had asked in “The Annihilation of Matter,” but in “The Real World” we are no longer in the interrogative mode: The real world is no world though without our knowing it may well be. We can’t say anything about it: how it is or why, what way it may, but it is there. They studied the animals, how they react, earth sciences, measured the interplay of energies, money matters, how man treats man, or has in time,—his history. Nothing we say makes sense, finally. All right; we believe certain things. There are things we can say within that belief unless they negate it. None of them deals with a real world. There is a real world which does make sense. It is beyond our knowing or speaking but it is there. (136) The risk in this poem, encapsulated in its title, is considerable, but, except for lines 10–12, which are prose, I find the poem equal to the chali n the dr ift of the wor ld 153

lenge it has taken on. The couplet is astonishing in its simplicity, but it is merely the necessary outcome of what has come before. If the “real world” is beyond our knowing and speaking, then presumably it is beyond the world of sense experience; so how can the poet, with such certainty, say that it is there? The significant thing, from a poetic perspective, is that he does say it. From a philosophical perspective, the argument would possibly run as follows: What we know of the world, and what we can say about it, is false, if by the “world” we mean anything finite that can be quantified or isolated for study. Nevertheless, even though the world of sense experience is false, it is through this world that we receive the illumination of something real. That real world makes sense in a double sense. First, through the world of sense experience—in which nothing “makes sense”—we nevertheless intuit a real world in which everything makes sense; we receive this intuition mystically, but with a sense of certainty, or, in other words, as an illumination. Second, the fact that we can sense that this real world does make sense means that it imposes itself in some way upon our senses—so that even though our senses do not give us access to anything real, it is partly through them that we are able to intuit a real world. The couplet at which Bronk arrives in “The Real World,” with its succinct elegance, is the end result of an entire process of poetic development. It is as if everything in the work had been leading up to this point. And yet, here is the bitter paradox, which accounts for why Bronk is still relatively unknown. Suppose one were to say to someone who didn’t know Bronk’s work or who hadn’t read it with attention and in the proper spirit: “There is a real world which does make sense. It is beyond our knowing or speaking but it is there.” That person would probably not find the statement impressive. And he would be right: it isn’t impressive as a statement in itself; indeed, as a statement it may not even make sense. But in the context of the poem, it does make sense, and the poem is there.

Accepting Limits If the real world is beyond our knowing or speaking, then not only the philosopher but the poet as well is enjoined to silence. (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent,” Wittgenstein said at the end of the Tractatus.) And if one breaks the silence, then what is said is either a lie or, to put the best face on it, a metaphor—something that stands i n the dr ift of the wor ld 154

in for or represents something, though in this case, what it stands in for is beyond representation. In accepting these limitations on knowledge in Silence and Metaphor (1975) and then again in The Meantime (1976), Bronk further delimits the space in which he can negotiate them: he constricts the poem to the octave of a sonnet and moves from the “fourteen-liners” of To Praise the Music to a two-quatrain form. The poems in The Meantime, published a year later, appear to have been the runoff from Silence and Metaphor; they are in various forms, but most of them, and certainly the finer ones, are also in the two-quatrain form of Silence and Metaphor, and for this reason I shall treat the two books in tandem. By narrowing his form in this way, the poet might seem as if he were turning away from the sublime, but this is not at all the case. On the contrary, the acceptance of limits is for Bronk an acceptance of the limitlessness of reality—or, in other words, of the limits imposed on us (on our capacity for knowledge) by the illimitable, the all. This is the paradox that these poems will engage, some more successfully than others. Those that are fully realized as poems have a genuine music, a quiet gentleness and strength, whereas the others, those in which the problem or paradox is merely stated philosophically, seem at once too loose and too constricted, overly fussy and yet insufficiently rigorous at the same time. Silence and Metaphor begins with what for Bronk is an unprecedented gesture: an untitled, italicized poem (or poetic passage) that seems to function as a preface or epigraph to what follows: Here is the silence; it is everywhere. Because it has always been, there is no time. No need, then, to wait for the time: it comes always in the sense it was always here. Noise is here but never any sound. We listen for sound; it is as if we were deaf. Under the noise, silence is what we hear: final, always, wherever. Silence is all. Grass, I thought to keep you, would have stayed; and you, trees, water, gone too. (151) Paradoxically, our deafness consists in not being able to hear a silence that is everywhere, underlies everything, and is all. This mystical coni n the dr ift of the wor ld 155

ception, in its insistence that speech, articulated sound, transform itself to silence—that is, to what it is not—imposes a significant burden on the volume as a whole. I am ambivalent about these untitled lines: they have a certain grace, but it may be that they are too easy. “The Signification” is also too easy, but in an antithetical way: I will not say that metaphor is the great thing. How should I? Metaphor is a way to handle, signify, designate; we do not handle the great things, though we try. All right. Still metaphor. What is it we signify? We say lies as if they were not lies, as if we believe. And, indeed, we do believe. No; we know the metaphor is wrong. And yet—[.] (152) The poem’s language is resolutely abstract—the language of philosophy or literary criticism. The poem thus creates a trompe l’oeil effect whereby the genres become dislocated and what ordinarily pertains to prose discourse is now confined within a lyric of only eight lines. Moreover, what the poem asserts is that all signification is metaphorical, a way of expressing or handling (in short, of signifying) an abstract truth that goes beyond the capabilities of signification. If poetry is equated with metaphor (as it often is), then, from this point of view, the poem’s “prosaic” (i.e., discursive) language is itself “poetic,” for all language is. All of this is interesting, in the abstract, but the poem’s rhythm is not strong enough to sustain these ironies. Despite the poet’s intelligence, it seems as though Bronk has here succumbed to the American tendency to confuse poetry with discourse or wisdom.38 I would contrast “The Signification” with “The Contention” (from The Meantime), not a major poem but one in which Bronk takes the risk of arguing, within the two-quatrain form, against his own philosophical perspective. The gesture here is thus metaphilosophical rather than metapoetic. This is the only poem in the generally nondialogical Bronk’s work in which a procedure of this kind occurs: Powers thinks I am all wrong: all right. Or, if not, how else—what is it we know? Only, I thought there was something even if I call it nothing. I call nothing all. i n the dr ift of the wor ld 156

Something to die into, or while we live to live with, unspoken, immeasurable, all. He thinks we live with varieties of things, none of them all, but good, I guess, or bad. (171) Powers is arguing against Bronk’s transcendentalism. (I remember having similar arguments with Bronk myself, arguments that, needless to say, were futile.) The poem both begins and ends with the interlocutor’s position—it gives “Powers” pride of place in the dialogue. And yet, presto! the poem is pure Bronk! The most beautiful poems in these two collections, however, are those in which the language and rhythm are perfectly poised and in which the habitual irony and complexity give way to a pathos of unexpected simplicity. In “The Limits of Knowledge,” for example, the binary nature of the two-quatrain form accentuates (and perhaps allows) this dialectic of complexity and simplicity: The unpurposive lights in the sky at night, far from telling us what purpose is as, say, there is no purpose (as may, perhaps, be so) say only how we don’t know what it is. But Venus, tonight, was beautiful in the west. If I wake toward morning, as many times I do, and look in the east, Vega will be there. What certainties are these? We don’t know. (155)39 It is important to note that this poem originated not solely from the idea but from language, for what immediately strikes us in the first stanza is the adjective “unpurposive” and its connection to the concept of purpose. It’s a strange word for a poem, and I can’t think of any other poem in English in which it occurs, but the poem orbits around it and probably originated from it. Purposiveness is a Kantian term, and, as a matter of fact, in the “Analytic of the Beautiful” Kant defines the beautiful in terms of “a merely formal purposiveness, i.e., a purposiveness without a purpose.”40 Bronk may have been musing on the question of what the purpose is to life, and he probably had the Kantian category of purposiveness somewhere in the back of his mind. But notice that the adjective “unpurposive” opens up the possibility of asking the original question—that is, “What is the purpose of life?”— in a new and incisive way, and at the i n the dr ift of the wor ld 157

same time it turns the question on the very concept of purpose itself. All of this stems from a kind of grammatical maneuver, to be sure, but what it illustrates is Bronk’s uncanny ability to make simple ideas complex and complex ones simple. In the first quatrain, the adjective “unpurposive” is linked not to “stars” but to “lights,” and this is ironic because the word “lights” recalls Genesis 1:14 (in the King James version): “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night.’ ”41 Thus, if we hear the echo from Genesis, the adjective “unpurposive” contradicts or at least puts in question the sense of cosmic purposiveness that is conveyed by the noun. There is a subtle balancing of skepticism and affirmation in the poem, and this is confirmed by the way in which, in the second quatrain, the poet returns to those “lights in the sky at night,” giving them names and, in so doing, bringing them home to his own personal experience of evening and morning. In the transition from the first to the second quatrain, there is a subtle shift from the question of purpose to that of certainty. The implicit point is that our experience provides us with various certainties, but we have no way to grasp their underlying meaning and purpose, if indeed they have one. Metonymy provides an approach to the poem itself for Bronk, and the stars are here associated not only with certainty but also with the limits of knowledge. The poem is solidified by its play of sound, its repetitions and its rhymes—full and slant, internal and end-stopped—that extend over the two quatrains. In the metaphysical welter of the first quatrain, the phrase “what purpose is” is balanced chiastically by the phrase “there is no purpose”; “say” rhymes with “may”; “no” with “so” and “know.” In the second quatrain, the slant rhyme of “do” and “know” resolves these complexities into a consonance that at the same time maintains the shadow of a dissonance. The acceptance of limits expresses itself here in terms of the consolation of beauty. That the acceptance of limits should be tied up with the beautiful is an old irony of lyric poetry, one that is variously expressed in three fine poems that come at the end of The Meantime. The first is “Ontology Offers a Hindrance to Humanism”: If man is your proper study do not look for him in the sciences of the natural world.

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He will evade you there, hiding behind his husk and effigy, staying unknown. Concomitantly, don’t look at man for any reality. He is the husk, himself, in respect to that. We can never know what we want to know. (175) The initial irony in this poem, of course, has to do with the way it responds to the famous lines in Pope’s “Essay on Man”: “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; / The proper study of Mankind is Man.”42 Those lines have always been read as epitomizing Enlightenment humanism, with its strong emphasis on limits and boundaries, but Bronk makes it clear that Pope’s distinction is simplistic. Pope follows Francis Bacon in attempting to distinguish what we can know from what we cannot know, but the limits he accepts are invalid as far as Bronk is concerned, because reality for him is defined by its limitlessness. Thus, whereas for Enlightenment humanism (and its inheritor, positivism) the natural sciences could be seen as coterminous with the study of man (this is still the case in the contemporary “social sciences”), for Bronk, if one wants to find “man” in “the sciences of the natural world,” one will find only his “husk and effigy.” Bronk’s phrasing in the poem is note-perfect. Just as good as “husk and effigy” is the way “Concomitantly” takes up the whole first line of the second stanza and, with the next line’s rhyme on “reality,” negates what was previously established in the first stanza. Ontology offers a hindrance to humanism. This little essay on man couldn’t be further from Pope’s thought, and yet it is in the line of wit that Pope cultivated and even pays deference to Pope. A counterpart to “Ontology” is “The Natural Sciences” (175), a poem in which Bronk goes Plato one better by insisting (a) that we have no access to reality through our senses—not even to the “shadows of reality”—and (b) that nevertheless there is a reality: Not Plato’s cave upon the wall of which we see, he said, the shadows of reality. There is reality but I’ve never seen even in its shadow on that or any wall.

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For Bronk, we have no way of getting out of the cave because there is nothing in the world that gives us access to reality; we are not even vouchsafed a glimpse of “the shadows of reality.” And yet Bronk insists as passionately as Plato does on the existence of the real. What is so marvelous here, however, is not just the philosophical irony but the way the syntax is played out asymmetrically against the horizontal movement of the meter and the vertical movement of the stanza. The second quatrain takes the conception another step further: We use, instead, whatever we find: scraps and peels of something as if shards, but not of a world that was. We calculate, predict with them—as much as if there were a world. For Plato, our rational powers at least tend in the direction of a real and intelligible world, but for Bronk such a world is a fiction, though we are nevertheless compelled to go through the motions of treating it as if it were a reality. The contradiction between this poem and “The Real World” is only apparent. The pretend world that we conjure through our calculations and predictions—the world of the natural sciences—is not real. Nevertheless, “There is a real world which does make sense. / It is beyond our knowing or speaking but it is there” (136). But the greatest irony is that the acceptance of limits—or, in other words, of irony itself—should be bound up with the beautiful. Perhaps the most beautiful of the two-quatrain poems—and certainly the one most fully addressed to the beautiful—is “The Tell”: I want to tell my friends how beautiful the world is. Not but what they know it is terrible too—they know as well as I; but nevertheless, I want to tell my friends. Because they are. And this is what they are; and because it is and this is what it is. You are my friend. The world is beautiful. Dear friend, you are. I want to tell you so. (174) This is a poem of pure acceptance, one that could not have been written without the experience of a great deal of psychic pain. Its simplicity is fully earned. The power of the poem is generated by its repetitions, by its i n the dr ift of the wor ld 160

syntactical variations, and by the subtle ambiguities that gather up meanings that at the same time are held in abeyance. The poem begins with a deceptively simple statement, which is then countered by an antithetical statement, after which the first half of the original statement is recapitulated at the end of the quatrain. The syntax of the initial statement runs over, but the rhythm makes us pause slightly after “beautiful.” Similarly, with the second statement (the antithesis), although there is no punctuation after “know,” the rhythm makes us pause at the end of the line, as if there were a phantom colon or dash. The grammar and meaning of “Not but what they know it is terrible too” is slightly different from “Not but what they know[:] it is terrible too,” and the slight ambiguity produced by the crossing of rhythm and grammar, together with the repetitions and the rupturing of the initial statement, produce a sad cadence at the end of the quatrain. It is as if there were a desire to tell something, but nothing to tell and no possibility of telling it, either because what had to be told was too much for the telling or because it was already known or implied in some way, and so the telling would be tautological. All of this is in fact the case, but then in the first two lines of the second quatrain the conceptual gap seems to be closed by a sequence of clauses that appear to offer an explanation of some kind. Each of these clauses leaves gaps that require to be filled in, however. In each of the two lines, the first clause seems to be qualified in various ways, but then with the second clause we realize that this is deceptive—that no qualification is needed and that the simple specification of being is sufficient in and of itself. Thus, “Because they are” seems to mean both “because they have being” and “because they are beautiful”; but with the next clause, “And this is what they are” (where “this” can either refer to “beautiful” or, tautologically, to their being), we read backwards in such a way that “Because they are” means only “because they have being.” Similarly, with the second line, “And because it is” seems to mean both that the world is and that it is beautiful (though also terrible); but with the next clause, “and this is what it is” (where “this” means that the world is and that it is beautiful—and terrible), we read backwards in such a way that “And because it is” means only that the world is. The point—that is, what the poet has to tell—is simply that being (i.e., the world) is sufficient unto itself. True, it can be qualified in various ways—for example, as beautiful—but its beauty is really a function of its being and hence of the acceptance i n the dr ift of the wor ld 161

of being. The poem contains ten being verbs: six repetitions of “is” and four of “are.” Its pathos—what it tells us beneath what it has to tell—is that what it wants to tell can never be told because being (or the world) is all that is the case and sufficient unto itself. This is the limitation upon knowledge (and these the limits of knowledge) that must be accepted, not only philosophically but poetically. Nevertheless, the acceptance has its consolation in beauty, for beauty (as Plato recognizes in the Phaedrus) is different from any of the other qualifications of being in that it follows from an acceptance of being itself. “You are my friend,” the poet says to his reader. “The world is beautiful. / Dear friend, you are. I want to tell you so.”

Part for the Whole Recall that in “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox,” Bronk had written, “I think always how we always miss it. Not / anything is ever entirely true.” Because it is beyond the capacity of human beings to grasp the real in its totality, “life has always required / to be stated again, which is not ever stated” (27). Thus, in Bronk’s vision, human beings are compelled to a kind of Sisyphean attempt to get closer and closer to a truth that must always elude them. This is perhaps more true of the artist even than the philosopher: not because there is anything inherently deficient in art, and not, as Socrates supposed in The Republic, because art is two steps removed from reality, but, on the contrary, because it is the artist who is most driven by desire to penetrate the whole. It is “not by art alone / the aim is missed, and even least of all / by art (which tries a whole world at once, / a composition).” And yet precisely because of the artist’s doomed struggle to arrive at the essence of truth, he is even more attuned to loss than the philosopher. “I speak my meaning in disjointed parts, as something that cannot be said all at once and in a lump,” wrote Montaigne in “Of Experience,” the last of his essays.43 As Bronk’s poems become shorter and shorter, in the “four-liners” of Finding Losses and the untitled “three-liners” of The Force of Desire, he seems to be moving in two antithetical directions at once: on the one hand, striving for an elusive essence that his increasingly condensed form might grasp and fix in place, and, on the other (in tacit acknowledgment that what he has to tell cannot be told all at once), gathering up the “disjointed parts” so that they will add up to something. i n the dr ift of the wor ld 162

The former tendency may seem to be butting against impossibility, given Bronk’s conviction, in any event, that there are no essences; but in artistic terms, it is the struggle to “[try] a whole world at once, a composition” that produces the great poetry, and not the acceptance of accretion, of things adding up. Though Bronk may have wanted to believe that the three-liners “add up” to one long poem (he told me this once—or rather, told me that this had been said to him), unfortunately it isn’t true. The Force of Desire, though it contains some interesting things that one would certainly not want to lose, is a book in which poetry gives way to proverb and apothegm—and therefore in which proverb and apothegm are achieved at some cost. Ultimate reality has its own zip code: 12839. This is all it is. Write to me. Here. (196) Pointed and witty as this is, it is too constrained to allow a more complex music to take hold, and so we feel that the poetic experience it conveys is a lesser one. Finding Losses has some deeper engagements, but, on the whole, the same can be said about these poems as well. There is a poem in the collection, however, that most readers of Bronk agree is one of the most beautiful that he ever wrote, in which all of his pathos seems to well up from a deep core. This is the poem entitled “The World”: I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world; but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere. There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no. I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world. (182)44 The idea that a poem of four lines should be entitled “The World” seems incongruous on the face of it, and yet the appropriateness of the title testifies to the extent to which condensation and compression have resulted in something essential in the case of this poem. It is as if the universe had been squeezed into a ball and rolled toward some overwhelming question. There is only one other major poem in the tradition entitled “The World”: the one by Henry Vaughan, mentioned earlier, which begins, “I saw Eternity the other night / Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, / All calm, as it was bright.”45 Vaughan’s poem, which views the world, under the aspect of eternity, as a kind of Platonic cave, is unlikely to have i n the dr ift of the wor ld 163

had an influence on Bronk; but the influence of Shakespeare, on the other hand, runs deep. I noted that Bronk spent a year ruminating over Shakespeare’s Sonnets before writing the fourteen-liners of To Praise the Music, but, ironically, the evidence of Shakespeare’s influence is more immediately evident in regard to “The World” than to any of the sonnets. The sonnet that “The World” echoes is sonnet 116: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments; love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand’ring bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his heighth be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.46 Shakespeare’s “ever-fixèd mark” becomes Bronk’s “anchor.” But look at what happens to Shakespeare’s emphatic “O no”: in the space of four lines, it changes from a negation to a more emphatic one to an emotional cry that is almost denuded of semantic meaning. The first two lines of “The World” set up a thesis and its antithesis, but the antithesis, “there isn’t an anchor anywhere,” also negates Shakespeare’s emphatic assertion (with all of the proverbial force that Shakespeare’s sonnet has garnered over the centuries) that love is an “ever-fixèd mark.” When we look more closely at Shakespeare’s sonnet, of course, especially the sestet, it turns out that what the poet had been saying all along was something along the lines of what Bronk is saying; for if rosy lips and cheeks come within the compass of Time’s bending sickle, then either love does alter and therefore “is not love,” or Love is transcendent and therefore far removed from anything that has to do with us. The saving grace for Shakespeare, the reason that we do not, at least immediately, recognize that his language deconstructs his apparent argument, is that he is able to chart a middle course

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between these antinomies: he is able to conceive of Love as “the star to every wand’ring bark,” and thus as a sort of anchor, even if its “worth” (i.e., value and occult influence) is unknown. Bronk is more extreme. For him, “there isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world”—not one we can hold onto or picture, in any event. As Bronk writes in “The Natural Sciences,” undoing Plato’s doctrine of forms or ideas, “There is reality but I’ve never seen / even its shadow on that or any wall.” Bronk’s “anchor”—the word itself as opposed to the concept it signifies —may have come to him by way of Wordsworth, though here again the influence would show Bronk negating a piety that undergirds a humanist sense of value. In “Tintern Abbey,” contemplating “a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused . . . A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things,” Wordsworth writes: Therefore am I still A lover of the meadows and the woods, And mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, And what perceive; well pleased to recognise In nature and the language of the sense, The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul Of all my moral being.47 (emphasis added) These lines are justly famous, but they may be thought to contain a certain amount of wishful thinking. Wordsworth makes it seem as if things can be fixed in place—anchored—in a harmonious order that connects a stable self to the external world but leaves the self free, so that neither the self is subsumed in the world nor the world in the self. The cosmic totality rolls through all things in these lines, and yet, “in the drift of the world,” everything somehow remains intelligible. “The mind is lord and master— outward sense / The obedient servant of her will,” Wordsworth will say in book 12 of The Prelude.48 Of course, the fact is that Wordsworth does not always regard nature and the language of the sense as his anchor. Often he is troubled by the discrepancy between sensation and the powers of the mind, and indeed, earlier in “Tintern Abbey” itself, he speaks of “the

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burthen of the mystery . . . the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world.”49 Nevertheless, the statement contained in these lines is clearly is what he wants to believe. Bronk’s revisionary relationship to Shakespeare and Wordsworth in “The World” indicates the extent to which the poem involves a condensation and working through of crucial poetic experience. The power of “The World” (as of “The Tell”) resides in its repetitions, its variations, and its tonal convergences, here compressed as far as compression will allow. If one were to graph the poem’s basic elements and the way they repeat, the graph might look something like this: (A) I thought that you were (B) an anchor (C) in the drift of the world (D) but no (E) There isn’t (B-2) an anchor (X) anywhere (E-2) There isn’t (B-3) an anchor (C-2) in the drift of the world (D-2) oh no (A-2) I thought you were (D-3) oh no (C-3) The drift of the world The A, C, and E elements (i.e., the odd ones in the alternation) occur twice, and the B and D elements (the even ones) occur three times. Only one of the elements, the word “anywhere,” is not repeated, and this word occurs in the middle of the poem, at the end of the second line. In terms of the tonal structure, note the convergence of an (as in “anchor”) and er (as in “were”) sounds, with the latter turning to the ere (as in “where”) sound: I thought that you were an anchor in the drift of the world; but no: there isn’t an anchor anywhere. There isn’t an anchor in the drift of the world. Oh no. I thought you were. Oh no. The drift of the world.

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The words “anchor” and “anywhere,” as it turns out, are the only ones in the poem that contain both the an and er (ere) sounds. “Give me a fulcrum and I shall move the world,” Archimedes is supposed to have said. To Pascal in the Pensées, however, the universe “is an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.”50 If the center is everywhere, then, as far as human beings are concerned, it isn’t anywhere. Pascal’s desolate universe is the one in which Bronk lives. But once again, poetry provides us with the balm of the beautiful that enables us to live with that awareness. In the world, “There isn’t an anchor anywhere.” Nevertheless, in the poem entitled “The World,” as the elements graphed above indicate, the word “anywhere” serves as the anchor to the poem’s prosody.

A Final Opening-Out In tracing Bronk’s development from To Praise the Music through The Force of Desire, I have suggested that two antithetical impulses or tendencies are at work in the progressive curtailment of form that governs these five books: on the one hand, a desire to “[try] a whole world at once,” to see the world in a grain of sand, and, by so doing, to arrive at a kind of essence (even if the belief in essences is not possible); and, on the other, a compensatory willingness to accept fragmentation, to speak his meaning in disjointed parts (as Montaigne says) and as something that cannot be said all at once. The beautiful and the sublime are mutually penetrating in Bronk’s work, and thus the acceptance of limits is simultaneously an acceptance of limitlessness; but while the first of the two impulses leads to an intensification of lyricism (and of the lyric mode), the second, which involves the acceptance of fragmentation, leads to proverb and apothegm but also to prosaic discursiveness—in any case, away from the lyric impulse and the passionate music that poems such as “The Tell” and “The World” are able to achieve. In retrospect, it seems clear that the “acceptance of limits” involved Bronk in a kind of Faustian bargain—not just because what he gained from it eventually left him with no room to maneuver, but because of the emotional constriction that this entailed. “[O]pen the veins / of feeling, pulse let go, let go, let go,” Bronk writes in “The Destroyer Life” (210), one of the poems in Life Supports, the final section of Bronk’s New and

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Collected Poems, which takes its name from this individual collection or sequence. The poems finally expand in this sequence, to a length of twenty lines, and this formal expansion is connected to a new flowering of Bronk’s thematic material. There are some magnificent poems in the sequence—and, in my view, it is the last one in his oeuvre in which the poet explores genuinely new territory. (Everything that comes afterward, ten books in all, is what I call the “late work”; it includes many fine poems but nothing strikingly new, and it is, on the whole, a coda to what Bronk achieves in Life Supports.) Thus, in the Life Supports sequence, Bronk was able to pull back from the dilemma that confronted him—though whether he was entirely able to resolve it is not clear. The formal expansion that he needed entailed some sacrifice of the lyric impulse (since the latter coincided with the containing and curtailing of form), and thus it could only be grounded on the tendency to prosaic discursiveness that was the other pole of his poetics. Life Supports, as well as containing several major poems, is a collection that is rich with fertile intelligence, but not all of these poems build organically from start to finish and are fully realized in aesthetic terms. In some of them, the conclusions are more powerful than the beginnings, not just because the poems build to a climax but because they begin somewhat arbitrarily as speech acts and only gradually work their way into “meter-making arguments.” There are two thematic centers, both of them connected to paradoxes, that seem to engender the poems in Life Supports, at least the initial ones in the collection. The first involves the emphasis on life (one of Bronk’s master terms, along with such phrases as “the world” and “reality”) and the idea that life is what acts on all lived things, so that life is active and the things that live—or rather, are lived—are passive. “Life keeps me alive,” the poet writes in the opening line of “Life Supports,” the title poem of the sequence (206), and, as a variation on this, in a poem entitled “Evaluation,” “Life lives / our life” (215). Thus, “Life is aside from us, / though we are lived,” as he asserts in “The Wants of Life” (216), for life is at once immanent and transcendent. As a metaphysical conception, this is not unfamiliar (in a way, it runs through all of Bronk’s poetry), but the specific formulation is different from anything we have seen, and its poetic significance lies partly in the grammatical and linguistic possibilities that it affords. The second of the two thematic centers in the collection has to do with the way in which primary concepts tend to fuse with their opposites in these poems, so that in a poem such as “The Destroyer Life” (209–10), i n the dr ift of the wor ld 168

for example, life and death merge and become one and the same thing. (This is not unrelated to what Freud means when he refers to the “antithetical senses of primary words.”) The two thematic centers that I have described are connected to each other, moreover, for in the absolute monism of Bronk’s perspective, because life is the only thing that exists (or lives), it contains everything, including what we tend to see as its opposite. This does not involve a denial of the reality of death, as in some versions of monism, but rather a reorientation of the concept of life, such that it embraces death. Life and death are only one example, if perhaps the most salient one, however; the reorientation of other primary pairs runs throughout the collection, with one poem giving rise to and being countered by another, so that this is Bronk’s most dialectical volume. “The Destroyer Life” seems to emerge directly out of the experience of being “boxed in” that Bronk must have felt as a result of the progressive curtailment of form in the previous books and that would, in turn, have necessitated the redirection and expansion of the poems in Life Supports: I know there are things: crystals, fossils, basalts, certain metals, that seem as though they last eternally and I know it is not so. But we think of them so. I think also of logs in the woods, tree-trunks, their bark whole still and, inside, soft as suede, their strength, their hard solidity wasted, years away. I saw on the back porch a mold on a squash, tiny magnificences yesterday and, today, mold and squash together slime. These poems that, once, I thought might be support and comfort to me, come bad times, are now an emptiness. I need to know that all their strength is only as a strength fills them, some strong life, and my strong life is down as living things show life so, do drive down. And I hasten it: my impatiences bristle why it takes so long, open the veins of feeling, pulse let go, let go, let go. (209–10) i n the dr ift of the wor ld 169

Life and death come together in the frightening and uncanny lines that conclude the poem. The poet, sensing that his “strong life is down,” wants to hasten “it”—and the “it” refers both to an emptying out and a resurgence of the life force. In the imagery of those concluding lines, something resembling a suicidal impulse and poetic creation implicitly come together, so that what destroys is what gives life at the same time. In a certain sense, this is a poem about “writer’s block,” but in a way that charges it with so much ontological significance that the distinction between life and poetry is completely nullified. The desire for poetic inspiration becomes equivalent to the desire for intensity or vitality in general in this poem. The life force is simultaneously an instinct drawing us toward death, however, because creation requires the destruction of that which impedes it from coming into existence.51 The poem is thus an allegory of itself in the sense that the process by which it comes into being mirrors what it has to say. Moreover, it seems to level the same criticism against itself that I myself would want to raise. From the second half of the second stanza to the end, it is a great and arresting poem but the opening stanza, though important for the idea it conveys, is somewhat flat, as far as the diction and syntax are concerned. Thus, one wonders “why it takes so long” for the poem to reach the intensity of its conclusion. There are a number of poems in Life Supports (the volume of New and Collected Poems as a whole) that involve a direct address to the divinity. “Poem for the Nineteenth of March, St. Joseph’s Day” is one of these. Like “The Destroyer Life,” it contains some loose writing, but it is one of the poems in Life Supports that I find most moving and that I think gets closest to what Bronk has to say: Father, foster me as your false son; the truth is what we are in our falsity and not the intended, not the actual —either of which had been easier than what we are driven, unwilling, to believe is so. Who wants approximations, almost reals? It had been easy, suspending unbelief, to believe the intended, fool ourselves; or, firm and rigid, insist on the proved, the certified, in the actual world, knowing the actual is not the real, ready to believe it were. i n the dr ift of the wor ld 170

Our ideas are wrong: we think of death, most times, as opposed to life as if it were some mistake to be rectified by mystic means, one means or another. We think of them. But death is the nature of life. There are falsities which are the nature of life, the truth of it. Father, we have had the falsities: fathers not our fathers, sons not ours. We have despaired; have loved them; and been glad. (212–13) In the opening line, “Father, foster me as your false son,” with its beautiful play of sound, the word “false” is ironic but not at all sarcastic, as becomes clear from the second line, “the truth is what we are in our falsity.” Again, we have a paradox that is formed out of converging opposites. As the ensuing lines indicate, what Bronk means here is that the phenomenal world, in terms of which we live, is, on the one hand, a falsification of the truth and, on the other, the only truth we have, which therefore appears to us simultaneously as our truth and our falsity. In the line “the truth is what we are in our falsity,” the truth is both extrinsic and intrinsic to our falsity. The truth discloses our falsity, and our falsity the truth; but also, more subtly, the truth is contained in our falsity and even is our falsity. Carried by the invocation, the first three lines of the poem have an emotional immediacy that is compelling, but the lines that follow, lacking a powerful rhythm, seem to rehearse old ideas. The half line that begins the second stanza, “Our ideas are wrong,” is a prosaic intrusion—especially when one recalls how powerful the repeated statement “Ideas are always wrong” had been in “Blue Spruces in Pairs, A Bird Bath Between.” In the middle of the second stanza, however, the poet again puts faith in the momentum of his language (despite the apparent absurdity of what is being said), and, forgoing explanation, he commits himself to the doubleness of his vision: “fathers not our fathers, sons not ours. / We have despaired; have loved them; and been glad.” That Bronk could invoke the Father in the “Poem for . . . St. Joseph’s Day” is interesting because “Life Supports,” the opening poem in the collection, concludes, “No god comes near me. I am alone” (206). This poem is a kind of fatalistic allegory in which Bronk reworks the old metaphor (one finds it in Mallarmé’s “Les Fenêtres,” for instance) of the world as a hospital. In Bronk’s poem, however, instead of the body being hooked up i n the dr ift of the wor ld 171

to “life supports,” it is a life-support system of its own. Again, the concluding lines are the most powerful: Hard to believe the surge of current through my angers, ecstasies and frights sometimes at crises: a faulty tube, power-outages, not long, but I cried to be restored. The dials and switches wait. No god comes near me. I am alone. (206) One could say that the invocation in the “Poem for . . . St. Joseph’s Day” involves the construction of a religious metaphor, but I think that there is no real inconsistency between the two poems. “Life,” as it is conceived in “Life Supports,” is what sustains life; but insofar as it is in some sense transcendent, it can be invoked and personified. One thing is clear, however, and this is that Bronk is no pagan: no god comes near him, and so he invokes the Judeo-Christian one. In the extended conceit of “Life Supports,” the self is a kind of machine, but the next poem in the collection, “The False Corner,” begins: “This is not the machine, if one wants to say / the machine” (206). To think in mechanical terms is to rationalize, but “[a]nything we know is outside / of rational expression,” the poet asserts in “Rational Expression,” the next poem in the sequence (207). These dialectical interweavings testify to Bronk’s attempt to give rational expression to what is outside rational expression and also to the fact that it is outside rational expression. But especially because of their expanded length, when they lose touch with the ghostly music that underlies all of Bronk’s finest work (when they are impelled merely by their governing ideas), their discursive gestures tend to become prosaic and threadbare. The greatest single poem in the collection, and one of the greatest in Bronk’s entire oeuvre, is “Unsatisfied Desire.” Desire is indeed central to Bronk’s work, as critics such as John Ernest and Norman Finkelstein have argued, and one could say that in its very title, “Unsatisfied Desire” (like “The World”) is attempting to arrive at a final, paradigmatic elaboration of a theme that has been central from the outset.52 Indeed, there is a sense in which everything in Bronk’s career leads up to “Unsatisfied Desire.” There are statements in earlier poems that prepare the way (especially the lines, “One sees desire not / as something to satisfy but to live with,”

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from “The Ignorant Lust after Knowledge”), but nowhere is the conception expressed as fully and as explicitly as in “Unsatisfied Desire”: However beautiful I think you are, I am not content to let it end there. And, oh, you are beautiful even to the extent that your imperfections insist that beautiful is not in being perfect but in such faults —shall we call them faults?—as your imperfection has. And I could agree: those faults are beautiful. There is a world of possibilities; also, there are things not possible. Desires satisfied set us apart in a reciprocal pattern self-contained and not containing more. It replicates, trapped in a world of possibilities, alone, where it is the only possible. I have seen such beautiful things in the world which, apart from desire, I should never have seen. I bless desire, the fault of its satisfaction: the fault of the world. I bless that fault: that, in its offering denying us all, denies us nothing, offers the world to us, not to have. (207–8) This is one of those poems in Bronk’s work that have a kind of inevitability that makes us wonder why the conception they express was never expressed before or in just this way by any previous poet. Such poems are original in the double sense of saying something new and returning us to a primordial conception that has nevertheless been forgotten. The poem makes us remember something very simple about the human condition, and this is that desire, by its very nature, must be unsatisfied because if it is satisfied it ceases to be. Human relationships have a temporal dimension, and, insofar as they are founded on desire, they are inevitably finite. “Unsatisfied Desire,” with its tragic view of life, is one of those rare poems in which a crucial aspect of the human condition is addressed explicitly and with almost no mythological overlay. As such, it belongs as much to wisdom literature as to the history of poetry.

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In Bronk’s exploration of unsatisfied desire, three terms come into play: desire, the beautiful, and what the poet calls “the fault of the world.” The association between desire and the beautiful—the idea that what desire wants (and therefore lacks) is the beautiful—goes back to Plato. (Shelley’s Sensitive-Plant, paraphrasing the Symposium, “desires what it has not—the beautiful!”)53 This association between unsatisfied desire and the beautiful could be cause for despair, but Bronk’s meditation leads not to despair but to gratitude and to an acceptance of the world—and this is one measure of the poem’s greatness. Bronk arrives at acceptance, moreover, not by sublimating eros or distancing himself from it—not through a Platonic transcendence or a Stoic turning away—but by embracing it, even in its most tragic aspect. Beauty gives birth to desire, but without desire it would not exist; and thus, as Bronk begins to explore the problem in stanza 1, he registers the idea that we cannot be content with beauty—in other words, with the purely disinterested and composed contemplation of it that Kant wanted us to achieve. The experience of beauty is thus “imperfect” or incomplete (the word “imperfect” in its Latin derivation means “incomplete”) because of the very nature of beauty, the fact that it is inevitably linked to desire. The conundrum, moreover, is that while beauty, by its very nature, makes us want to possess it, if we were able to do this it would no longer be beautiful to us. Consequently, although beauty does not exist without desire, the desire for the beautiful (which is to say, desire itself, because desire is always for the beautiful) can never be satisfied. Insofar as it can be satisfied and contained in a single possibility (as Bronk expresses this in the second stanza), it ceases to be. This is the imperfection of the beautiful, the fault of the world. We would like to think that all of this is our fault alone and not the world’s—that it is our “eros of absence,” and that it could somehow be cured—but (as the poet implicitly concludes), because we are in the world, if it is our “fault,” then it must be the world’s fault as well. The danger here is of arriving at a position in which “fault / Falls out on everything,” as Stevens writes in “Esthétique du Mal.”54 Bronk overcomes this danger not by evading it but by grasping the sense in which “the fault of the world,” its given, is simultaneously its gift. The fault of the world is ultimately what makes it beautiful, and it is precisely this that is offered to us as human beings. I am reminded of Wordsworth’s “faith,” in “Tintern Abbey,” that “all which we behold / Is full of blessings,” but Bronk’s faith i n the dr ift of the wor ld 174

strikes me as the more profound in this instance for having wrestled more fully with tragic irony.55 In the end, gratitude and irony are beautifully balanced and reconciled in the poem—in such a way that they come to mean the same thing. It is a significant culmination that in “Unsatisfied Desire,” placed as it is near the end of Life Supports, his collected poems, Bronk is able to “bless” desire and to pay tribute to its “fault,” a fault that, “denying us all, denies us nothing, / offers the world to us, not to have.” Though the syntax is ambiguous, it seems clear in context that the world is offered to us not so that we cannot have it but, more precisely, so that we can not-have it. The greatest irony, then, is the way in which a poem so attuned to irony is able to purge itself of bitterness in the end.

Coda One can analyze Bronk’s poetic career up to and including Life Supports in terms of three essential phases: an apprentice phase (My Father Photographed with Friends); a phase in which, having come into maturity and having developed his characteristic line, Bronk writes poems in a variety of forms (Light and Dark; The World, the Worldless; The Empty Hands; That Tantalus); and finally, a phase in which he composes in set forms, which become ever more circumscribed (To Praise the Music; Silence and Metaphor; Finding Losses; The Force of Desire) until, in a dialectical reversal, an expansion occurs once again (Life Supports). That Tantalus contains a great deal of formal variation and experimentation, but after this book, it seems that Bronk is willing to “accepts limits,” perhaps as a counterthrust to his acceptance of limitlessness on the metaphysical level. I am reminded of Stevens’s line from “The Auroras of Autumn,” where he says of the serpent (ancient symbol of knowledge and the infinite), “This is form gulping after formlessness.”56 Form here is either seeking after formlessness or a respite from formlessness, or perhaps both at once, and much the same can be said of Bronk’s work as well. In Bronk’s case, as I have suggested, the impulse toward condensation and compression is doubly motivated: by a struggle to arrive at the essence of things (even if there is no metaphysical ground for the notion of essences) and by an acceptance of temporality that coincides (a) with an acceptance of fragmentation and disjointedness and (b) with the hope that things will never­theless “add up.” The antinomies of form and formlessness at the compositional level are i n the dr ift of the wor ld 175

merely an extension of a whole series of antinomies driving Bronk’s work at the aesthetic and metaphysical levels: the beautiful and the sublime, world and worldlessness, reality and unreality, and so on. By the time of the “three-liners” of The Force of Desire, Bronk had gone as far in the direction of condensation as he could go, and his work was confronted by the Scylla of stasis and paralysis, on the one hand, and the Charybdis of prose, on the other. Many if not most of the three-liners are pensées rather than poems: epigrams or apothegms in which the interest comes from the author’s intelligence rather from a fully engaged relation to the poetic process. In Life Supports, the final section of the New and Collected Poems, the expansion to twenty lines allows for a thematic fertility and reach that was often missing from the poems in the previous collections, but, though this collection contains a number of extraordinary passages, none of the poems, with the exception of “Unsatisfied Desire,” is fully realized as an organic unity. The expansion to twenty lines required a discursiveness that entailed some sacrifice of the lyric impulse. These poems often begin with speech acts that only gradually develop into “metre-making arguments,” but because Bronk’s pentameter line had been loosened by the discursiveness that the linear expansion required, the metrical cohesion that one finds in, say, an Alexander Pope (a master of the discursive style) is lacking. Thus, while Life Supports contains some extraordinary writing, the formal problem that Bronk confronts in this collection—a problem that is perhaps rooted in his poetry as a whole, but that one can certainly trace to the “acceptance of limits” and progressive condensation of the previous books—is not entirely resolved. When Life Supports appeared in 1981, Bronk was already in his sixties, yet he would publish ten additional collections of poetry. It is significant that the poems in these books are in various forms—in other words, that the process begun in To Praise the Music is now clearly at an end.57 These books contain some fine poems (interspersed with weak, unnecessary pieces), but they do not explore anything new in the way of poetic territory. The struggle for form, perhaps never fully organic, had for so long been conducted through fixed forms that when the external edifice is finally abandoned as an organizing principle, there is no longer any room for formal development. Thus, while Bronk’s productivity certainly does not slacken—the Muse will visit him almost nightly, as he told his friends—the ease and spontaneity of the late poems is won at a cost. Every so often something quite marvelous will break through, but in the majori n the dr ift of the wor ld 176

ity of the poems the line has gone slack and the tensile strength so evident in the great work has disappeared. The discourse remains, but because nothing is halting it or slowing it down, it spins itself out as discourse, not as poetry, on what is by now a fairly predictable tape. After Life Supports, Bronk’s work, in effect, becomes too easy, as if the poetry were being confused with what the poet has to say. Bronk’s strengths as a poet are American strengths and his weaknesses are characteristically American weaknesses. He was never a maker, a careful crafter of verses, an artist in the sense of a Mallarmé, for whom “the pure work implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker.”58 Though Bronk’s best work is almost always in blank verse, this is not because he struggled over his lines but because they came to him in this form when he was inspired. He remains a poet of speech, “a man speaking to men,” as Wordsworth defined the poet in the preface to Lyrical Ballads,59 and though the self is put into question in his work, his poetry is always an immediate expression of a personality that, as everyone who knew him recognized, was huge. There is a poem in Bronk’s last, posthumous book, Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems (1999), which, though only three lines long, is pure Bronk: a stunning piece of work and, coming at the end of a long career in poetry, one that seems to bear a symbolic relationship to the work as a whole. It is entitled “Fides et Ratio.” The title is interesting in itself, first of all because it is in Latin and echoes the title of a papal encyclical published in 1998. It is worth pointing out that quite a few of Bronk’s poems have Latin titles and that, for the most part, these titles either recall the Mass or refer to something in Catholic theology. I suggested earlier that Bronk’s first fully realized poem was “Benedicite Omnia Opera,” and other poems with Latin titles in Life Supports include “On Credo Ut Intelligam,” which the critic John Ernest regards as one of Bronk’s most important statements (“William Bronk’s Religious Desire,” 148–49), “Veni Creator Spiritus,” “Civitas Dei,” “Domine Refugium,” and “Ergo Non Sum. Est.” In addition to these titles, there are many references and allusions to the Mass and to Catholic liturgy in Bronk’s poems, some of which we have already noted. For example, in a major poem, “The Body of This Life,” a poem that I referred to as having a kind of hymnlike solemnity, the poet describes sojourners “whose aimless walks are a kind / of office in which they read the proper of the day” (100). Bronk himself was a sojourner in the wilderness all his days. The inheritor of an iconoclastic, Calvinist tradition, he is confronted by “the wilderness / of raw consciousness” (“The i n the dr ift of the wor ld 177

Arts and Death,” 27) and “plead[s] the permanence / of ignorance” (“On Credo Ut Intelligam,” 88). This we have seen. One can only conclude that the Catholic Mass and its liturgical rituals and symbols—its language— provide this sojourner adrift in the world with an aesthetic anchor to his poetry. But to return to “Fides et Ratio,” this tiny poem from the very end of Bronk’s career that allows us to draw a circle around his poetry: The final accomplishment would be to know the emptiness of any accomplishment —to have that pleasure at the end of it.60 Fides et ratio: faith and reason. The title is ironic, but what sort of irony do we have here? The “emptiness of any accomplishment” is the sort of thing that Koheleth, the author of Ecclesiastes, might have written; it registers a skeptical disillusionment that takes reason, in one of its directions, as far as it can go. Here is a bleak sort of ratio, then, but what of the poem’s fides, the other side of the equation? Indeed, one is beset by a host of questions. What does it mean to think of human accomplishments as “empty?” (The Latinate “vanity” in “vanity of vanities”—vanitas vanitarum—means “emptiness.”) And if one takes such a view, how could the knowledge of that emptiness represent the final accomplishment? Moreover, even if it did, how could such knowledge — knowledge “at the end of it,” that is, at the end of life but also of a life of accomplishment—result in pleasure? It would have to be a bitter pleasure indeed. On the literal level, in terms of the poem’s propositional logic, everything is emptied of value in “Fides et Ratio,” and the bitter pleasure that is evoked (if pleasure it really is) is evoked from a transcendent standpoint, as if the subject were a god or some sort of heavenly being looking down on human life and laughing at its meaninglessness. One should note that in asserting what the final accomplishment would be—that is, in establishing its boundaries within a subjunctive grammar—the poem does not presume to possess that accomplishment; indeed, it may be suggesting that the final accomplishment is beyond the power of human beings to possess, precisely because they are not gods. From this point of view, the poem remains within the realm of the human while pointing to what is beyond that realm. Nevertheless, as I have been insisting throughout this long chapter with reference to all of Bronk’s work, this poem cannot be i n the dr ift of the wor ld 178

reduced to its propositional logic, to its ratio. Its fides, however, is located not in something other or beyond but in terms of itself. Ultimately, it places faith in its own capacity to transform “the emptiness of any accomplishment” into something beautiful, which, because it is beautiful, gives pleasure. This, then, is its final accomplishment.

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chapter four Oppen’s Reoccupation of Traditional Lyric in “Eclogue,” “Psalm,” and “Ballad” There are three poems named after traditional genres in Oppen’s oeuvre, and, interestingly, they are distributed over the course of three books: “Eclogue,” which was included in The Materials, “Psalm,” in This In Which, and “Ballad,” in Of Being Numerous. It is interesting, moreover, that these titles appear without the indefinite article: Oppen does not give us an eclogue, a psalm, or a ballad, but rather the genres themselves. This gesture, as I interpret it, has a paradoxically double significance: on the one hand, it implies distance from a time when poets had an organic relation to these lyric genres; on the other, it signals Oppen’s awareness that they continue to have something to say to us and must therefore be reoccupied (that is, invested with a modern content) and made new.1 The fact that “Eclogue” is the first poem in The Materials and thus the first poem we encounter after the long hiatus that followed Discrete Series is, of course, significant, and all the more so when one recognizes that the poem is a reflection on Oppen’s experience with communism and the Communist Party: The men talking Near the room’s center. They have said More than they had intended. Pinpointing in the uproar Of the living room

An assault On the quiet continent. Beyond the window Flesh and rock and hunger Loose in the night sky Hardened into soil Tilting of itself to the sun once more, small Vegetative leaves And stems taking place Outside—— O small ones, To be born! (39) An eclogue is a pastoral poem—that is, a poem in which shepherds converse. The term was applied to Virgil’s pastorals (or bucolics). The concluding lines of Oppen’s “Eclogue” echo and allude to the conclusion of Virgil’s fourth eclogue: “incipe, parve puer: cui non risere parentes, / nec deus hunc mensa, dea nec dignata cubili est” [Begin, baby boy! Him on whom his parents have not smiled, no god honours with his table, no goddess with her bed].2 The fourth eclogue is of profound significance in literary history because, in heralding the birth of a new Golden Age under Augustus, it was viewed by the medievals, including Dante, as prophesying the birth of Christ and the Christian era. In canto 22 of the Purgatorio, Statius, addressing Virgil, quotes a passage from the fourth eclogue, which Dante (in a veritable tour de force) renders into Italian, keeping the terza rima: “Secol si rinova; / torna giustizia e primo tempo umano, / e progenïe scende da ciel nova” [The ages are renewed; justice and man’s first time on earth return; / from Heaven a new progeny descends].3 We know that the passage from eclogue 4 was important for Oppen because years later, in “From Virgil,” the fifth poem in “Five Poems about Poetry” (included in This In Which), he not only alludes to it but translates it: Parve puer . . . ‘Begin, O small boy, To be born; o p p e n ’s r e o c c u pat i o n o f t r a d i t i o n a l ly r i c 182

On whom his parents have not smiled No god thinks worthy of his table, No goddess of her bed’ (104–5) It so happens that the men talking near the center of the room in Oppen’s “Eclogue” are communists rather than shepherds. But so unrealistic and lofty are their sentiments (“paulo maiora canamus” [let us sing a somewhat loftier strain], says Virgil to the Sicilian Muses at the beginning of his fourth eclogue) that they might as well be shepherds heralding the return of a new age of justice and the birth of a new Golden Age. In section 2 of “Power, The Enchanted World” (from Of Being Numerous), Oppen will write: I’d wanted friends Who talked of a public justice Very simple people I forget what we said (204) The men in “Eclogue” “have said / More than they had intended” (notice the irony produced by the syncopated line break after “said”); they have no real understanding of what they are saying or what the afterlife of their ideas will be (and ideas do, after all, have an impact on history, even if they are foolish ones and those espousing them are simpletons). After the first tercet, Oppen’s syntax in “Eclogue” becomes difficult. Because of the period after “intended,” one cannot automatically make “Pinpointing” modify what the men have said. Oppen is deliberately ambiguous here: what the men have said pinpoints “An assault / On the quiet continent,” but so does the fact that they have said more than they had intended, and so does the entire situation. In their simplicity, the men think that human beings are capable of exerting their control over what happens in the world, but in this, of course, they are sadly mistaken. In section 3 of “Power, The Enchanted World,” Oppen will write: Now we do most of the killing Having found a logic Which is control Of the world, ‘we’ And Russia o p p e n ’s r e o c c u pat i o n o f t r a d i t i o n a l ly r i c 183

What does it mean to object Since it will happen? It is possible, therefore it will happen And the dead, this time, dead (205) What the men in “Eclogue” fail to take into account is what Oppen in section 26 of “Of Being Numerous” calls the “fatal rock // Which is the world”—against which, he says, the mind can do nothing (179). The fatal mistake of the communists is that they think they are at the center of the world and can exert their control over it. “Beyond the window,” however, there is “[f]lesh and rock and hunger.” Until its final two stanzas, Oppen’s “Eclogue” reads like a satire on abstract idealism—especially if we take the generic marker seriously. In the poem’s concluding lines, however, its bitter irony gives way to a simple affirmation of life itself, an affirmation of the kind that can be found in poetry of the pastoral tradition—and this means that Oppen’s reoccupation of the eclogue is not only satirical but nonsatirical as well. Beyond the window there is not only flesh and rock and hunger but also the new leaves and stems and the “small ones, / To be born!”4 Despite Adorno’s famous assertion (probably not to be taken literally) that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, postwar twentieth-century poetry can boast two great lyric poems entitled “Psalm,” both of them written by Jews during the 1960s, apparently within a few years of each other: Paul Celan’s “Psalm,” from Die Niemandsrose (1963), and Oppen’s, from This In Which (1965). (In another irony, Celan and Oppen both drew the titles of their respective volumes from phrases in the poems they each entitled “Psalm.”) Oppen never mentions Celan, and neither poet seems to have been aware of the other, but history has entwined the two poems in such a way that they both take on additional gravity (if such a thing were possible) in the other’s company. My concern is with Oppen’s “Psalm,” but a brief consideration of Celan’s poem will serve to set Oppen’s in relief. The Old Testament book of Psalms, assembled during the Second Temple period, is a collection of hymns of praise attributed to King David, but the word “psalm,” meaning a song sung to the accompaniment of a plucked instrument, is derived, ironically, from the Greek psalmos.5 As we wend our way through the Psalms, we find the psalmist praising God, o p p e n ’s r e o c c u pat i o n o f t r a d i t i o n a l ly r i c 184

imploring his mercy, petitioning him for redress against idolatrous enemies, and, above all, seeking him and thirsting after him. The Hebrew God of the Psalms is an invisible, hidden deity; the psalmist’s faith in him is difficult and hard won. Oppen’s “Psalm” is a much greater poem than his “Eclogue,” but, in contrast to the latter, it does not seem to pose serious interpretive difficulties: it moves from image to image until it reaches its famous conclusion without noticeable or problematic disjunctions—and this actually is unusual for Oppen. When we examine the poem closely, however, we see that it contains unexpected subtleties: In the small beauty of the forest The wild deer bedding down—— That they are there! Their eyes Effortless, the soft lips Nuzzle and the alien small teeth Tear at the grass The roots of it Dangle from their mouths Scattering earth in the strange woods. They who are there. Their paths Nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them Hang in the distances Of sun The small nouns Crying faith In this in which the wild deer Startle, and stare out. (99) I have quoted the poem, but the first thing one notices when one comes upon it is its epigraph, Veritas sequitur (The truth follows). The epigraph appears with an ellipse because Oppen has chosen to truncate the full statement, Veritas sequitur esse rerum: The truth follows from the existence of things (or, alternatively, The truth depends on the being of things). The statement comes from Aquinas, via Jacques Maritain’s Existence and o p p e n ’s r e o c c u pat i o n o f t r a d i t i o n a l ly r i c 185

the Existent. This is odd because what Oppen has done, in effect, is to borrow a tag from the most important systematic theologian of the Catholic Church and apply it to a poem that carries a generic marker designating it as Jewish.6 Thomas’s full statement opens metaphysical doors that I suspect Oppen did not want to enter, and this, perhaps, is why he truncated it. The truncated epigraph is less discordant with the tag from Heidegger that appears as an epigraph to This In Which, “the arduous path of experience,” than the full quotation from Aquinas might have been. Before returning to these issues, and before examining the way in which the poem unfolds, I want to suggest that Oppen’s “Psalm” is posed against the Bible’s Psalm 42, one of the most beautiful and resonant of the Psalms (it has been frequently set to music, often in its Latin version, “Quemadmodum desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum,” for that reason). I quote Psalm 42 in the King James version: As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God? My tears have been my meat day and night, while they continually say unto me, Where is thy God? When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday. Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted in me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him for the help of his countenance. O my God, my soul is cast down within me: therefore will I remember thee from the land of Jordan, and of the Hermonites, from the hill Mizar. Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy waterspouts: all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. Yet the Lord will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life. I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgotten me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of the enemy?

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As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies reproach me; while they say daily unto me, Where is thy God? Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art thou disquieted within me? hope thou in God: for I shall yet praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my God. In the psalmist’s opening simile, just as the deer thirsts for the water brooks, so the human being (the “soul”) “thirsts” for God. Everything on the front side of the equation is concrete, and everything on the back side abstract. The human soul is in exile, partly because of the long periods in which the Israelites experienced exile and partly because life itself is being conceived as a kind of exile from the living God (in a way that Christianity would emphasize more fully later on). The poet struggles to retain his faith in God and cries out to him, but, taunted by skeptical enemies, he is cast down and disquieted. In Oppen’s “Psalm,” one could say that the poet’s faith is predicated, ironically, on his lack of faith in a transcendent deity. Oppen’s faith is the faith of the secular, hellenized, and assimilated Jew. The comparison with Psalm 42 is revealing. Where the psalmist gives us a simile likening the thirsting deer to the thirsting human soul, Oppen gives us only the deer, and where the psalmist is a distinct presence in his poem, the lyric-I of Oppen’s “Psalm” is submerged in the images presented by the poem. Moreover, where the psalmist attempts to buttress his flagging faith by crying out to the hidden God, in Oppen’s “Psalm” we are given “[t]he small nouns / Crying faith / In this in which the wild deer / Startle, and stare out.” The participle crying in “Crying faith” recalls the “voice of him that crieth in the wilderness” from Isaiah 40:3. To what does “this in which” refer? The point is that nobody knows! But for the time being, at least—that is, the period in which we are absorbed in the things of the world and in the poem itself—nobody cares: the truth follows from the existence of things.7 Oppen emphasizes the nouns, but we should also track his adjectives. In the first stanza, “small” and “wild” are stressed, rhythmically and semantically. The poem’s opening phrase, “In the small beauty,” suggests that the beauty of the forest is familiar and ordinary rather than sublime, but “small” is unusual in this context, and it is only when we come to the “small nouns” at the end of the poem that we fully grasp the adjective’s function: this is not a transcendent Beauty (Beauty with a large or capital

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B), not a Platonic form that goes beyond the things of the world, but the kind of beauty that is immanent to the world itself. The adjectives are not one dimensional, however. In the first stanza, the word “wild” in “wild deer” counters the gemütlich quality of “small beauty”; but in the second stanza, these contrasting colors are brought together in the “alien small teeth” of the deer; and in the third, “alien” is echoed by the adjective “strange” in “strange woods.” The adjectives “alien” and “strange” provide us with an important key to the poem. The deer and the woods they inhabit are strange or alien to us, and this estrangement is intensified, paradoxically, by the fact that they are so fully at home in their world. Everything is concrete for them, whereas for us everything is abstract. The poet, in the opening stanza, is struck by the simple fact that they are there: he expresses this in a fragmentary expostulation, which he later echoes by referring to the deer as “[t]hey who are there.” The deer are the ones who are there. What the poet does not say (but the implication is clear) is that we are not there—we are the ones who are not there. The deer are not strange or alien to their world; if we find them so, if they are strange to us, it is because we are estranged from our own world. We admire their embeddedness, their rootedness (to make use of words and implications that Oppen seeds in the poem); they are wild to us because, despite all of our efforts to construct the world in our image, we can never be fully at home here. “Carpenter, how wild the planet is,” Oppen writes in another poem included in This In Which (128). The truth follows from the existence of things. The deer are there; they have no need to seek transcendence. Oppen wants this (whatever “this” is) to be sufficient, a sufficient reason for faith. For Oppen, in effect, it is by giving up the quest for transcendence—for God—that we solidify our faith in existence. Oppen borrows a tag from Aquinas, the preeminent systematic theologian of the Catholic world, partly—and this, of course, is ironic in itself—to affirm what Aquinas seems to be saying, but partly also because he is himself engaged in a theological project the aim of which can be seen either as the jettisoning of theology altogether or as the constructing of a new theology based on immanence. “Psalm” is surely one of the great religious poems of the twentieth century, but it is not entirely clear that Oppen’s apparent intention of predicating faith on the “small nouns” succeeds. The tag from Aquinas, as I noted earlier, could also be rendered, The truth depends upon the being of o p p e n ’s r e o c c u pat i o n o f t r a d i t i o n a l ly r i c 188

things. In that case, the things of the world could be interpreted as having their source in a partly transcendent Being—which, of course, is what Aquinas actually believed. The wild deer are there, but we are not, and so an antithetical reading inserts itself side-by-side and simultaneously with the primary one. From this point of view, the distance between ourselves and the deer suggests that humanity is still crying in the wilderness, still searching for the large nouns. The contrast between Oppen’s “Psalm” and Paul Celan’s could not be more telling, and there is a sense in which the two poems not only reflect on each other but chart the terrain—from opposite sides of the map— of a Modernist (or, if you prefer, Postmodernist) Jewish poetics. Here is Celan’s “Psalm,” in Michael Hamburger’s translation: No one moulds us again out of earth and clay, no one conjures our dust. No one. Praised be your name, No one. For your sake we shall flower Towards you. A nothing we were, are, shall remain, flowering: the nothing—, the No one’s rose. With our pistil soul-bright, with our stamen heaven-ravaged, our corolla red with the crimson word which we sang over, O over the thorn.8 As George Steiner has observed, Celan’s phrase “Dir / entgegen,” which Hamburger renders as “Towards / you,” could be translated with equal force as “Against / you.”9 In any case, Celan’s rage at the deity he addresses o p p e n ’s r e o c c u pat i o n o f t r a d i t i o n a l ly r i c 189

—a deity who, insofar as he can be conceived as one, would have allowed and therefore presided over the Shoah—suffuses every word of the poem, carrying over to a kind of rage at existence itself. Celan’s God is “No one” (Niemand), not an anthropomorphic entity, not anyone or anything at all, and yet in his very absence this cipher continues to be as much of a presence as ever. The line, “Praised be your name, No one” (Gelobt seist du, Niemand), is tremendously powerful in its irony, but, in contrast to both Psalm 42 and Oppen’s “Psalm,” this is catachresis, a deliberate contradiction in terms, rather than genuine praise. Celan turns the biblical psalm inside out and against itself. Because it is responding so directly to the Shoah, Celan’s “Psalm” not surprisingly has had a greater impact than Oppen’s on general readers. But Oppen’s poem has very distinct virtues. Whether or not he is successful in assimilating Aquinas to his own way of seeing things, Oppen’s “Psalm” is a genuine poem of praise for our time, not merely a sentimental effusion, and in an Age of Irony, such as we continue to inhabit, to have written a poem of praise that does not offend the intellect is a considerable achievement. Oppen’s God has the decency not to exist (or, like Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura, to exist only as nature), and for this reason we cannot very well accuse him of being wicked or uncaring. Oppen is thus the antithesis of a gnostic, and in light of the Shoah it is not so easy to evade gnosticism. The world of Oppen’s poem is not a fallen or an intrinsically evil world; nor, in the context of that world, do we as human beings have to resort to the doctrine of original sin in order to get God off the hook (“Of this was told / A tale of our wickedness,” Oppen asserts in “Of Being Numerous”: “It is not our wickedness” [163]). Oppen’s “Psalm” reconciles us to realities and enables us to live in the world. Whatever the propensities and proclivities of human beings may be, this is a poem that allows us to have “faith / In this in which”—whatever “this” turns out to be. The significance of the generic marker in “Ballad,” the final poem in the Of Being Numerous volume, is more elusive and difficult to pinpoint than it is in either “Eclogue” or “Psalm.” The “folk,” “popular,” or “traditional” ballad, arising spontaneously and anonymously, “is a short narrative song preserved and transmitted orally among illiterate or semiliterate people”; the “literary” ballad is an imitation of the popular ballad.10 Ballads have a story to tell, and Oppen’s “Ballad” tells its story with pitchperfect intonation and rhythm. But whereas most ballads, folk or literary,

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have a distinct subject or theme, it is difficult to say what Oppen’s “Ballad” is about. The poet seems aware of this when he writes, in extraordinary lines that step back strangely from his narrative, “Difficult to know what one means, / —to be serious and to know what one means” (208). Paradoxically, it may be that the difficulty the poet describes contributes to the extraordinary sense of pathos and simplicity achieved by the poem. “Ballad” is written mainly in stanzas of one or two lines (never more than three), with a good deal of intervening space that intensifies the aura of meditative silence surrounding the poem. For the sake of the analysis that follows, I shall quote the poem in its entirety: Astrolabes and lexicons Once in the great houses—— A poor lobsterman Met by chance On Swan’s Island Where he was born We saw the old farmhouse Propped and leaning on its hilltop On that island Where the ferry runs A poor lobsterman His teeth were bad He drove us over that island In an old car A well-spoken man Hardly real As he knew in those rough fields Lobster pots and their gear Smelling of salt The rocks outlived the classicists, The rocks and the lobstermen’s huts

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And the sights of the island The ledges in the rough sea seen from the road And the harbor And the post office Difficult to know what one means ——to be serious and to know what one means—— An island Has a public quality His wife in the front seat In a soft dress Such as poor women wear She took it that we came—— I don’t know how to say, she said—— Not for anything we did, she said, Mildly, ‘from God’. She said What I like more than anything Is to visit other islands . . . (207–8) Given the poem’s title, it is surprising that “Ballad” begins not with the “poor lobsterman,” on which it will eventually focus, but with lines that point metonymically to a vanished world of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury upper-class culture. “Astrolabes and lexicons / Once in the great houses”: these lines frame the subsequent description of the lobsterman and everything that follows. Astrolabes are ancient astronomical devices “used to observe and calculate the position of celestial bodies before the invention of the sextant” (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary); as the passage indicates, given the scientific and rationalistic bent of the New England culture of the time, they would have embellished the parlors of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wealthy mansions as objets d’art. The lexicons point to the emphasis on classical languages and classical learning that was so deeply embedded in this milieu. A whole culture is being summed up in these lines, and its disappearance in a single word: “once.” The lines have a certain nostalgic quality. There once was a rich, classical

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culture in postcolonial New England, they seem to say, which has now disappeared, but when one visits Swan’s Island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, its remains and vestiges can be glimpsed in the mansions that have been turned into museums. The opening lines of the poem consist of two motifs, each of which is given in a sentence fragment: first we have the “[a]strolabes and lexicons / Once in the great houses,” and only then does the “poor lobsterman / Met by chance / On Swan’s Island” come into view. The difficulty of the poem has to do with understanding the nature of this juxtaposition. The poor lobsterman would not in himself seem to be an atypical subject for a ballad. However, where figures like the poor lobsterman in the ballad tradition tend to be treated romantically and to conform to quaint stereotypes (this is still the case with Yeats’s literary ballads, such as “The Ballad of Moll Magee”), Oppen dispenses with all such formulae and with the “local color” associated with the tradition. He also, of course, dispenses with the typical stanzaic form, sometimes called “hymn meter,” associated with the ballad: quatrains of alternating rhymes in which the first and third lines are tetrameters and the second and fourth trimeters. What Oppen retains is the feeling of pathos and simplicity that we habitually associate with this form of poetry. In Oppen’s “Ballad,” however, one might say that the feeling of simplicity is itself complex. The association of the astrolabes and lexicons with a rich, classical culture—or, in any event, one that emphasized the classics and classical learning—is brought home to us by the deeply ironic lines that come immediately after the description of the poor lobsterman: “The rocks outlived the classicists, / The rocks and the lobstermen’s huts.” It so happens that words like “classic,” “classics,” “classical,” and “classicist” are all related to “class,” which in turn is derived from the Latin word for rank. Moreover, classicus in Latin indicates the highest rank or class (Oxford English Dictionary). When one refers (as I have just done) to a rich, classical culture, the word “rich” has the primary meaning of fertile or cultured (these are originally agricultural metaphors), but of course there is also the secondary meaning of wealthy. Words like “rich” and “wealthy” are discreetly left unarticulated in the poem, but the adjective “poor” occurs three times: twice with reference to the lobsterman (the line “A poor lobsterman” is repeated) and a third time when his wife is described as wearing “a soft dress / Such as poor women wear.” The adjective “poor” refers

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to their poverty; it could also allow us to see the lobsterman and his wife as objects of pity, but, in my reading of the poem, the lobsterman and his wife have an aura of dignity that cancels out this connotation. Whether as a foreground or a background concern, it is clear that the issue of class is being raised by the poem, but I think it is also clear that any attempt to reduce the situation to one of class conflict would be simplistic. Certainly the hierarchy of values implicit in classical culture was one that literally as well as figuratively aligned the “classicists” with wealth and the lobstermen with poverty. In the lines, “The rocks outlived the classicists, / The rocks and the lobstermen’s huts,” there may even be a slight note of triumph, but if so, it is ever so slight and mitigated by an undertone of sadness. In connection with those lines, one could assert, following Hegel’s Master/Servant dialectic in the Phenomenology, that though the working class is deprived of the immediate fruits and attainments of a given culture, this makes it closer to nature than the ruling class and gives it a strength and durability that the ruling class does not have. And with reference to the immediately preceding lines, “Lobster pots and their gear / Smelling of salt,” one could add that communists of Oppen’s generation would have referred to the workers as the salt of the earth (echoing Matthew 5:13) and that Oppen possibly has this adage in the back of his mind. Nevertheless, the poem is scrupulous in presenting us with the reality of things as they are and in avoiding value judgments. Certainly, Oppen feels sympathy for the lobsterman (in the sense of attunement, not in that of pity), but he also admires him and recognizes that the lobsterman has no need of his sympathy. Oppen recognizes, furthermore, that for him to view the situation in terms of a class conflict would amount to bad faith (and would be in bad taste) because as a poet, whatever his sympathies might be, he is not a member of the working class. The poet inherits the rich legacy of the past—the classics—whereas the lobsterman does not; this inheritance, transmitted only to the educated class, is what makes it possible for the poet to be a poet. Poetry—classical or “high” art generally —is based on the sense of hierarchy that is buried in the very notion of a classic. The classicism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have disappeared, but the cultural past is still with us; the poet has access to the past, and this is why he can be a poet. If all hierarchies were to be leveled (the communists of seventeenth-century England were called Levelers), poetry could no longer continue to exist. Oppen’s vision of history in the poem is a tragic vision, not the sentimental one that we frequently o p p e n ’s r e o c c u pat i o n o f t r a d i t i o n a l ly r i c 194

find in literary ballads. (Oppen could not continue writing poetry while a member of the Communist Party because of its sentimental attitude in regard to these matters.) The most important feature in Oppen’s deliberately sparse description of the lobsterman is that he is a “well-spoken man.” The implication is that if the lobsterman had inherited the rich legacy of the past, as those who lived in the “great houses” of the opening lines did, he might have been a poet. Oppen is thus working out of a tradition and developing a theme that can be traced to Thomas Gray’s “Elegy” (1751), a poem that had a profound impact on New England culture and the emergence of American democratic thought. Contemplating those buried in the country churchyard, Gray writes: Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire, Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway’d, Or wak’d to extasy the living lyre. But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page Rich with the spoils of time did ne’er unroll; Chill Penury repress’d their noble rage, And froze the genial current of the soul.11 Oppen tells us that he met the poor lobsterman by chance on Swan’s Island, but he may also have encountered him in the figure of the uncanny Leech-gatherer of Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence.” Just as Oppen’s lobsterman is “well-spoken,” Wordsworth’s Leech-gatherer is capable of “stately speech”: His words came feebly, from a feeble chest, But each in solemn order followed each, With something of a lofty utterance drest— Choice word and measured phrase, above the reach Of ordinary men; a stately speech; Such as grave Livers do in Scotland use, Religious men, who give to God and man their dues.12 Wordsworth wrote the poem in 1802, in reaction both to the French Revolution (the phrase revolution and independence is partly being repressed in the title of his poem) and to Gray’s “Elegy.”13 Not only does Wordso p p e n ’s r e o c c u pat i o n o f t r a d i t i o n a l ly r i c 195

worth identify with the old Leech-gatherer, but, by making him a figure of “resolution and independence,” the poet of the “egotistical sublime” (to borrow Keats’s phrase) elides class differences in such as way as to give his vision a conservative, moralizing cast. The poem concludes: “ ‘God,’ said I, ‘be my help and stay secure; / I’ll think of the Leech-gatherer on the lonely moor!’ ” (169). Oppen does not moralize upon his vision but presents it as it is, with the recognition that it is too complex to be reduced to a single perspective—a recognition, indeed, that is part of poem’s vision itself. But Oppen’s lobsterman is fully as uncanny a figure as the Leech-gatherer, and, like the Leech-gather, he is a kind of döppelganger of the poet as well—in a way, incidentally, that is reminiscent of the solitary workman of section 27 of “Of Being Numerous” (180). The lobsterman is “Hardly real / As he knew in those rough fields.” “Hardly real” implies out of place, which in turn suggests that the lobsterman’s intelligence and manners are at odds with his circumstances and surroundings. The uncanny quality of these lines partly stems from Oppen’s awareness that, if not for the accident of birth, the lobsterman could have been the poet and the poet the lobsterman. But Oppen’s vision seems as much ontological as it is social. If the lobsterman is “hardly real,” there is a sense in which this is true of everyone. Everyone and everything is out of place, Unheimlich, uncanny. The description, spare as it is, manages to come to grips with both the sociohistorical and the ontological dimension of human existence. The poem’s setting subtly interjects itself into the tissue of the poem in a way that makes us want to refer to it. As Michael Davidson’s note indicates (Oppen, New Collected Poems, 391), Oppen and his wife Mary have sailed to Swan’s Island (from Eagle Island, where they had a summer home). The lobsterman and his wife have driven them over the island in the lobsterman’s old car. The two couples face each other, so to speak, grasping one another’s similarities and differences—similarities that do not elide differences and differences that do not negate commonalities. We never hear the words of the “well-spoken” lobsterman, and this, I think, is because of the sense in which he is the poem, figuratively speaking. The poem’s final words are instead given to the lobsterman’s wife: She took it that we came—— I don’t know how to say, she said——

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Not for anything we did, she said, Mildly, ‘from God’. She said What I like more than anything else Is to visit other islands . . . Ballad meter, as I noted, is sometimes called hymn meter. Not only the lobsterman’s wife’s speech but also the way in which it is characterized (for example, the triple repetition of “she said”) has something of the solemnity of a hymn. One could perhaps observe that “religion is the opiate of the masses” and that the lobsterman’s wife’s religiosity is an extension of her poverty and insularity (in a quite literal sense), but the aura of silence surrounding the poem seems to suggest that value judgments of this kind serve no purpose and only deflect us from reality. History, the world as it presents itself to us and as it is given in our experience, is simply too complicated to allow for abstract interpretive claims of this kind; even if they are plausible, they have the effect of canceling one another out. (“Ideas are always wrong,” Bronk asserts.)14 It could not be said of Oppen’s “Ballad” (as it could, perhaps, of “Resolution and Independence”) that it is a “religious” poem, but there is a sense in which the tonality of the lobsterman’s wife’s speech carries over to the poem’s final cadences. “Ballad” comes dangerously close, in fact, to concluding in a way that not only would have registered the religious cadences of the hymn book but actually would have replicated them. For Oppen, this amounts to the danger of closure, and he evades it by allowing the wife to conclude with a seemingly random observation. The desire for experience she registers, however, simultaneously reflects the insularity enforced upon her by her poverty (the most she can hope for is to visit other islands in the area) and something she shares in common with the poet and his wife and with human beings generally. Her speech, and the poem itself, ends in an ellipse, which hangs on the page as the unspecified and unarticulated promise of something as yet to come.

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afterword “It is difficult now to speak of poetry,” Oppen writes in section 27 of “Of Being Numerous,” a crucial passage to which I now want to return: One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads   in his hands, He must somehow see the one thing; This is the level of art There are other levels But there is no other level of art (180) If these lines have the ring of truth, as I think they do, they are all the more persuasive for having been written by a poet who did indeed have a thousand threads in his hands and who believed that truth claims are always conditional. In order to have written them, Oppen would have had to see the truth of what he says, for only thus would he have been able to articulate it in precisely these words. That is what is being said in those lines. But this is a conception of poetic seeing, and hence of the poetic process, that is antithetical not only to Objectivist theory in general but, as we saw in chapter 1, to Oppen’s own theoretical assertions, such as can be found in his essay, “The Mind’s Own Place.” In Oppen’s assertion that the poet “must somehow see the one thing,” seeing is not strictly speaking visual but rather a metaphor for the mind’s ability to grasp something in its entirety and all at once.1 What Oppen is seeing in these lines, furthermore, is that if art is not defined in terms of the capacity to “see the one thing,” then ultimately it is an empty category (“This is the level of art / There are other levels / But there is no other level of art”). Art depends not only on a selection process of some kind, a way of sorting through the multiplicity of things seen and of going beyond the phenomena, but on a capacity to find unity in multiplicity, the one in the many. How this happens is always going

to be mysterious, but clearly the process of selection has to come from the mind and not merely from experience; for without the mind, the individual would merely be passive to experience and no selection could occur. Objectivist theory, emerging from Imagism, tends to emphasize physical vision—“the lens bringing the rays from an object to a focus,” in Zukofsky’s phrase; but from this empiricistic standpoint, which (as is always the case with empiricism) seeks to bypass the mind, there can be no explanation for how art comes to be.2 Perhaps one could say, in an effort to preserve Zukofsky’s conception, that it is a question of focusing; but this does not tell us why one might tend to focus on X rather than Y. No doubt the process cannot be theorized. Oppen tells us only that one must somehow see the one thing. At various points in his work, Oppen gives us metaphors to illuminate the kind of vision that, in his vision, distinguishes poetic vision from ordinary vision. “Imagine a man in the ditch,” he writes in “Route,” The wheels of the overturned wreck Still spinning—— I don’t mean that he despairs, I mean if he does not He sees in the manner of poetry (198) Oppen may sometimes have been deluded into thinking that the clarity for which he strove was solely sensory, a clearly delineated physical image, but his poetry tells a different story. It tells us that what is configured, metaphorically, as a quality of the light, is essentially the mysterious mental or spiritual process that enables the poet to see the one thing. For Oppen, to see “in the manner of poetry” is to see both “the bright light of shipwreck” (this is the recurrent, dominant motif or symbol of “Of Being Numerous”) and also in the bright light of shipwreck, for the particular angle or quality of light that enables him to see poetically is also, finally, what he sees. The vision of ruin that Oppen shares with Bronk, and that sometimes has the effect of estranging both poets from the quotidian, has a quasi-mystical origin in that it is connected to an influx of light. “Objects are nothing,” writes Bronk in “The Annihilation of Matter”: “There is only the light, the light!” (35). In both poets, one could say that the visible is sublated to the visionary and that what is seen is subordinated to what is grasped rather than merely being the thing grasped in itself. The ancient trope of the blind poet or seer expresses a a fterwor d 200

deep psychological truth: that the sense of sight is actually dangerous to poetry because of its tendency to usurp the poetic process to itself, and, by so doing, to subvert it.3 If I insist on the sense in which Oppen’s assertion about seeing “the one thing” runs counter to Objectivist theory, this is because, from its inception, going back to Pound and Zukofsky, the theory has spawned a series of reductive, antagonistic, and dualistic generalizations that have had the effect of creating an us versus them mentality and have ultimately been destructive of poetic practice. In sociological terms, sloganeering of this kind may have been useful in providing a refuge for otherwise marginalized literary communities, but it has little to do with reality in any independent sense, and, in fact, it may even have exacerbated the marginalization of poetry in the United States. Whatever truth once inhered in these antagonisms, moreover, has become progressively attenuated over time. Charles Altieri’s essay, “The Objectivist Tradition,” the initial contribution to The Objectivist Nexus (1999), testifies to the continuing relevance and vitality of Objectivist theory in that it continues to attract adherents, some of whom are capable of bringing a high level of sophistication and rigor to their formulations; but it also testifies to the hardening of its arteries in that the errors and misunderstandings on which it was based have only become more engrained over time. If Altieri is given pride of place in the anthology (he also contributes an afterword, “The Transformations of Objectivism”—a much less interesting piece, in my opinion), this is for good reason: his work has been in the forefront of Objectivist theorizing for more than twenty years. Indeed, “The Objectivist Tradition” is an updated reformulation of his seminal essay, “Symbolist and Immanentist Modes of Poetic Thought,” which had an important impact on critical theory in the Objectivist vein when it was published in 1979.4 In “The Objectivist Tradition,” the opposition is between the Symbolist and Objectivist modes. “Where objectivist poets seek an artifact presenting the modality of things seen or felt as immediate structure of relations,” Altieri asserts, “symbolist poets typically strive to see beyond the seeing by rendering in their work a process of meditating upon what the immediate relations in perception reflect.”5 Altieri’s emphasis on the immediacy of Objectivism and the corresponding mediatedness of Symbolism raises questions. In the first place, how would it be possible for the poetic process to capture the immediacy of perception, even asa fterwor d 201

suming that this were desirable? Second, in the case of human beings, does immediacy of perception—that is, apart from thought and mentation in general—even exist? And third, even assuming that immediacy of perception in the pure sense posited by Altieri existed, how could the poetic process convey its own sense of immediacy or spontaneity if perception were given priority and the task of the poem were merely to reflect perceptual relations? Oddly enough, all of this represents a kind of ultraromanticism, in which the poem is reduced to a speech act that is temporally coterminous with its engendering experience. As one of the epigraphs to his essay, Altieri quotes the following passage from Olson’s “Projective Verse”: “In any given instance, because there is a choice of words, the choice, if a man is in there, will be, spontaneously, the obedience of his ear to the syllables. The fineness, and the practice, lie here, at the minimum and source of speech.”6 Presumably, the there to which Olson refers is the state of inspiration—and of course there is such a thing as inspiration, but if that means that the poem can or has to be composed in one breath, or that it doesn’t almost always require second and third efforts and a good deal of rethinking, this is nonsense. If it means simply that the poem has to be inspired in its totality, and that every line has to have tension, then this is true, but nothing very much has been said. What Altieri says about Symbolist poetry strikes me as vague and misleading as well, both because the category is itself vague (does one mean the poetry of Mallarmé? Coleridge? Stevens?) and because, in practice, no poet who could possibly be included under this rubric has ever composed in the way Altieri suggests. Suppose that one were writing a poem entitled “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” Altieri’s formulation suggests that one first has an experience and then goes through a process of “meditating upon what the immediate relations in perception reflect.” This may be true, but as far as the compositional process is concerned, the time lag that Altieri posits is unreal. It is true that Wordsworth himself said that poetry “is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings [which] takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity,” but this refers only to the experience that generated the poem, not to the experience of writing it.7 What happens, on the contrary, making composition possible, is that a particular image or idea immediately—that is, spontaneously—assumes a “universal” form, or, in other words, becomes a symbol, thereby opening up the possibility of the poem. Pound famously defined the image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant a fterwor d 202

of time,” and, of course, one has been told repeatedly that Imagism, which led to Objectivism, was opposed to Symbolism; but in fact, in the most primary sense, this is precisely what a symbol is!8 What must have happened to Wordsworth is that in the experience of visiting the abbey, or remembering the visit, or imagining a visit that had not even taken place (none of this matters), the abbey, through some wholly individualized and probably unknowable process of thought, became an intellectual and emotional complex for Wordsworth—in short, a symbol: a symbol, in this case, of a religious crisis that had not only a personal but also a collective meaning. This transformation of a particular into a “universal”— which is to say, something that reaches beyond itself and that, in so doing, gives unity to the composition—creates or releases what Emerson calls a “metre-making argument,” which in turn allows the poem to come into being.9 In suggesting that Symbolist poets “strive to see beyond the seeing,” Altieri seems to be positing a three-stage process: first, the poet sees something; next, he attempts to go beyond what he has seen; and then (only then) he searches for the words to convey what he has found. But this is quite unreal. To begin with, no genuine poet is interested in physical seeing in itself: he is interested in “seeing the one thing,” which is to say, in writing the poem. This can happen in any number of ways, and why and how it happens is always mysterious. The poetic process, furthermore, is primarily linguistic: even if the experience is recollected in tranquillity, poetic language happens immediately, not at a second or third remove; if it doesn’t happen immediately, there simply is no poem. “The pure work” of poetry, wrote Mallarmé in his essay “Crise de vers,” “implies the disappearance of the poet as speaker, who cedes the initiative to the words themselves.”10 In an interesting move, Altieri contrasts the medieval English poem “Western Wind,” which Olson quotes in the “Projective Verse” essay (Altieri supplies the quotation in one of the epigraphs to his essay), with Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”—to the discredit of the latter, as one might expect. In the century now past, “Western Wind” (or sometimes “Wynde”) was continually quoted with approbation by New Critics and Poundians alike—partly, one assumes, because it is four lines long and manages to be charming without expressing any substantial ideas. Shelley, by contrast, was the bête noir of almost all critics until the Romantic revival of the 1970s. Altieri quotes “Western Wind” in Olson’s version a fterwor d 203

(which substitutes “And” for the more usual “That” and “shall” for “can” in line 2): O western wynde, when wilt thou blow And the small rain down shall rain O Christ that my love were in my arms And I in my bed again.11 Altieri comments: “Wind and desire are less metaphors for feeling than its direct equivalent in physical fact, so that nature and person’s nature are adequate vehicles for one another. . . . [T]he literal will suffice, provided one has learned the craft of the letter” (27). I assume that Altieri meant wind and rain, not wind and desire, but the mistake is a telling one because, in any event, there is no direct equivalent in physical fact for human feelings. Wind and rain are effective symbols in the poem, not only because of the causal or temporal link that is established with the speaker’s going to bed with his love, but also, more to the point, because wind and rain can be made to correspond to sexual desire. Literary usage establishes them as conventional symbols, and they already have this status by the time “Western Wind” is written. But there is no natural equivalence between the external phenomena and the internal feelings at all. Indeed, to think that there is a natural equivalence is to embrace the pathetic fallacy, which is perfectly admissible in poetry but not in criticism. Indeed, as critics such as Bloom, Hartman, de Man, and Miller have enabled us to understand in various ways, it was the Romantic poets who, far from succumbing to the pathetic fallacy, as is ordinarily thought, were the first to make use of poetic language in such a way as to turn the problem on its head: that is, beginning from the awareness that human beings are alone in the universe and that Nature has no interest in us, they were able to renegotiate a relationship to Nature and to the human condition. Hence the significance especially of the Romantic ode. From this point of view (and judging from Altieri’s assertions), one might say that it is rather the Objectivists who, far from disabusing us of our illusions, reinstate them—along with the pathetic fallacy. Altieri complains that the wind in Shelley’s ode “has little objective status” (28). This is true, but, then again, it isn’t intended to have one, and why it should or even could have an objective status is not at all clear. If Altieri is assuming, as seems to be the case, that the wind has an objective status in “Western Wind,” he is mistaken. To be sure, Shelley is making a fterwor d 204

use of symbolism in a different, much more sophisticated, philosophical way than the anonymous Elizabethan poet of “Western Wind” had done. Shelley is obviously concerned not only with the cycles of Nature and the problem of death but also with the issues of human creativity and social renovation, and when we understand how these two thematic centers are not only played out in the ode but interact with each other, we can see why the wind would have presented itself to Shelley as the perfect symbol for unifying all of these concerns—concerns that are enriched, incidentally, by the impress of Dante and Shakespeare on Shelley’s form (the ode is written in terza rima sonnets). The wind, as the “breath of Autumn’s being,” is at once a “Destroyer and Preserver,” but in addition (and by an etymology that goes back to the Hebrew Bible) it is a figure for the inspiration that Shelley desires and that he is able to call forth by means of an apostrophe.12 “The pursuit of abstract synthesis through metaphoric processes is at best tenuous,” Altieri complains; “the mind is always threatened by the possible return of self-consciousness insisting on the merely conceptual and fictive grounds for its orders and driving the self back into a despondent and passive relation to the natural energies its interpretations displace” (28). There is some truth to this, no doubt, but I would like to know what the alternative could possibly be. The only cure to despondency that Altieri holds out is a worse despondency, since it amounts either to believing in one’s fictions—that is, that the wind has an “objective” status and that there is a “natural” correspondence between subject and object—or to giving up the struggle for unity, which is to say (if one wants to be honest), giving up poetry. After discussing Shelley’s ode, Altieri concludes this section of his essay with an eloquent paragraph that needs to be quoted in full because it allows us to get to the heart of the disagreement: Shelley and Coleridge [in the “Dejection” ode] are great poets, but the modes of relatedness on which their greatness is based may no longer be accessible, or desirable, for our culture. Threatened by Enlightenment intellectual and social forces calling into question all they treasured, these poets’ only line of defense was to make the sublime serve metaphysical purposes. The sublime enabled them to accept rationalist critiques of the limits of empirical propositions while creating a space in which the empirically unreal could remain imaginatively real, albeit indefinable except through the vehicle of a fterwor d 205

symbolic imaginative dialectics. And by increasing the distance between the empirical and a realm of imaginative values, these poets purchased a Miltonic exaltation and tragic intensity no Objectivist poet but Pound can rival. But the price of this nobility—in the psychic torments it creates no less than the poetic postures it encourages—may be too high. And even this question may be irrelevant because the sublime too is a faith that may have died. The symbolist vision may not be one we can make new without the various ironies of Wallace Stevens and of John Ashbery. (28–29) This is a passage that is certainly worth wrestling with. The phrase “metaphysical purposes” strikes me as misleading (as the following sentence in the passage partly admits) because Shelley, at least, remained a skeptic always and the sublime serves an imaginative purpose in his work, not a metaphysical one. But my real concern is with Altieri’s concluding remarks, which strike me as deeply pessimistic in a way the Romantics never were. It is true that the price of nobility is high, and it may be true that our own epoch has chosen not to pay it any longer, as Altieri suggests. But there are costs to everything, and we need to be clear on what they are. The sublime, in the ordinary as opposed to Kantian sense of the term, is another way of referring to intensity—and maybe even to poetry. We should question whether, without admitting it to ourselves, in giving up the sublime we have not merely fled from our “psychic torments” and given up on poetry. I am certain of one thing. The two poets on whom this book is focused, George Oppen and William Bronk, did not give up on poetry. They confronted the ironies of a prosaic age, and they encoded those ironies in their work, but they did not abdicate from poetry; nor did they shrink from cultivating an art capable of achieving emotional intensity, aesthetic unity, and maybe even a contemporary form of nobility. (“It is ennobling / If one thinks so,” writes Oppen; “If to know is noble // It is ennobling” [183].) They took refuge neither in an illusory immanence nor in an equally false “lightness of being.” Their language has weight and reality. Recently dead, they are guardians of a trust and beacons along the way.

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notes Introduction 1. Introduction to The Gist of Origin, ed. Cid Corman, xxxvi. For Bronk’s relationship to Origin, see Burt Kimmelman, The “Winter Mind”: William Bronk and American Letters, 22–23. 2. George Oppen, New Collected Poems, 9. All citations from Oppen’s poetry, unless otherwise indicated, will be to this volume and will hereafter appear parenthetically by page number in the text. 3. William Bronk, Life Supports: New and Collected Poems, 27–28. All citations from Bronk’s poetry, unless otherwise indicated, will be to the Talisman House edition and will hereafter appear parenthetically by page number in the text.

Oppen, Bronk, and the Story behind “A Narrative” 1. In September 1963, in a letter to his sister, June Oppen Degnan, Oppen refers to the revision of “A Narrative” on which he has been working; see The Selected Letters of George Oppen, ed. Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 55, 85. The poem was originally included in Oppen’s volume This in Which (1965). 2. Oppen, Selected Letters, 381. Bronk’s first letter to Oppen is dated June 25, 1962. I quote Bronk’s letters from a typescript that David Clippinger, who is in the process of editing them, has made available to me. Cid Corman included Bronk’s poetry in all three series he published of Origin. See The Gist of Origin, ed. Cid Corman. 3. From 1934 to 1958, a twenty-five-year period that coincided with his involvement in the Communist Party, Oppen wrote no poetry. His first book, Discrete Series, was published in 1934 and his second, The Materials, not until 1962. For a brief discussion of Oppen’s itinerary, see Michael Davidson’s introduction to his edition of Oppen’s New Collected Poems; see also Mary Oppen’s autobiography, Meaning a Life: An Autobiography. 4. It is interesting that the midcentury poets of note who championed Bronk’s poetry were all, like Oppen, affiliated with the Pound/Williams school of modern poetry. The Black Mountain poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley are two other important examples. Bronk, an independent and even iconoclastic figure in terms of his tastes, remained indifferent to the poetry of this school; the major twentiethcentury influences on his style were Frost, Stevens, and Conrad Aiken.

5. In a letter to Oppen dated January 25, 1963, Bronk writes: “I have been thinking how generous it was of you to make that dull journey here in the dead of winter.” 6. William Bronk, Life Supports: New and Collected Poems, 182. All citations from Bronk’s poetry, unless otherwise indicated, will be to the Talisman House edition and will hereafter be cited by page number in the text. Life Supports was originally published by North Point Press of San Francisco in 1981. On several occasions I shall quote from the original North Point Press edition. 7. See Lucretius, The Way Things Are (The De Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus), trans. Rolfe Humphries. 8. “If ‘A Narrative’ is a narrative,” writes Alan Golding, “it is one of the mind grap­ pling with epistemological and ontological problems, renewing its contact with the world and searching for an adequate language in which to talk about that world” (92). Eric Homberger associates the disjunctive style that Oppen began to forge in his first book, Discrete Series, with epistemological uncertainty and the need to be free of ideologically bound narratives. “In the face of a comprehensive and radical epistemological uncertainty,” notes Homberger, “Oppen sought an art free from the smothering cloud of anecdote and story which envelops the culture” (118). 9. Tennyson, 190. 10. The same, of course, would hold for Bronk, who was deeply attuned to developments in modern science and mathematics and to the epistemological problems those developments engendered. Oppen was aware of this, and in a letter to June Oppen Degnan of May 1963, he writes: “Not to deny that many people will assert that they feel weary confronted by Bronk. But since Bronk’s attitudes take off from Gödel, Heisenberg, Einstein, and theirs from Newtonian mechanics . . . their belief that they are in some way ahead of him is probably an illusion” (Selected Letters, 85). 11. Milton, 1:254–55. 12. In the section entitled “The Voice of the Devil” from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is that he was a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” (Blake’s Poetry and Designs, 88). 13. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2.253–54. 14. Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, 7.643–46; 1850 version. 15. On September 2, 1964, Oppen writes to Bronk: “June sent me the four new poems to read—And I am grateful to her and to you. I am impressed as always by all of them, and thought the Lock on the Feeder one of your major poems” (Selected Letters, 103). 16. In the 1997 Talisman House edition (which I am generally citing), the line that begins the poem’s conclusion, “We know all this—our pledge of debt,” erroneously omits the dash. In correcting the error, I follow the original 1981 North Point Press edition (98). 17. In the introduction to his collection The Wedge (1944), William Carlos Williams writes: “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words” (Selected Essays, 256). Louis Zukofsky quotes Williams’s apothegm in his essay “A Statement for Poetry” (see Prepositions, 19). n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 2 – 2 0 208

18. In an extended discussion of the dialogue between Oppen and Bronk concerning “Displacement: The Locks on the Feeder Called The Five Combines,” David Clippinger notes that if Bronk had concluded the poem with the line “or moving water have failed to bring us to,” as Oppen would have preferred, “the emphasis [would have fallen] upon the poem as the documentation of what is seen as a visual test of the truth of the real—all of which are the mainstays of Objectivist poetry.” Clippinger adds that the “elimination of the second half of the poem would [have erased] the extended metaphor of the locks as representative of human desire for an unattainable ‘home’ ” (The Mind’s Landscape, 107). This strikes me as something of an oversimplification. Oppen’s letter does not assert a doctrinaire position; moreover, the metaphor to which Clippinger refers is already present in the first half of the poem. What Oppen objects to, and what Bronk defends, is the way in which Bronk moralizes on the theme of displacement in the second half of the poem. 19. Williams, Paterson, 9 et passim. 20. Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads” (1800), 453. 21. Throughout his career, Oppen was deeply preoccupied with the problem of solipsism, as any serious twentieth-century artist would necessarily have been— especially one who also had been involved with the Communist movement. As Peter Nicholls emphasizes, Oppen “carefully dissociates his own work from a poetry attuned to the speaking voice” (37). Certainly in his poetry Oppen did not want to be “a man speaking to other men”; and yet, the opposing vectors of his populist political sympathies, on the one hand, and his modernist commitment to a poetry of silence, as Nicholls characterizes it (137–38), on the other, inevitably led to anxiety over the “devil’s doctrine” of solipsism, which Oppen never resolved and which he sometimes projected onto other poets. 22. See Quartermain, Disjunctive Poetics. 23. Zukofsky, Prepositions, 12. Zukofsky’s phrasing, here and elsewhere in the essay, suggests that he is opposing himself (consciously or unconsciously) to the Symbolist theory of Mallarmé, for whom the purpose of poetry is to evoke the flower “absent from all bouquets” (Oeuvres complètes, 368). 24. Burton Hatlen, “A Poetics of Marginality and Resistance: The Objectivist Poets in Context,” The Objectivist Nexus, 41. 25. In analyzing Zukofsky’s attempt to “do away with” epistemology, Mark Scroggins cites a short poem from Zukofsky’s sequence Anew that also bears on “A Narrative” and to which Oppen might also have been responding in section 8: “Can a mote of sunlight defeat its purpose / When thought shows it to be deep or dark? // See sun, and think shadow” (All the Collected Short Poems: 1923–1964, 97). This poem “works at some level with the irresolvable question of whether light is a wave or a particle,” writes Scroggins. “[It] asks whether the power of the questioning, skeptical intellect—the intellect that seeks a fundamental answer to the question of whether light is a wave or particle, and in the process of seeking loses sight of the immediate sensuous qualities of light—makes any real difference in the objects of perception” (47–48). Scroggins argues that Zukofsky’s polemic against skepticism can be seen as parallel to that of Wittgenstein in philosophy. n o t e s t o pa g e s 2 0 – 2 6 209

26. As I shall discuss in chapter 2, the very notion of a discrete series—that is, one that is empirically derived—indicates that the issue of causality is open to question. Moreover, the radical specificity of Oppen’s imagery in the poems in Discrete Series, along with their syntactical disruptions and disjunctions, indicates that much of what we take for granted in our ordinary interactions, including what constitutes an “object,” is being put into question. Indeed, it could be said that Oppen in Discrete Series seems to “paint, not the object, but the effect it produces”—to borrow Mallarmé’s famous apothegm (Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé, 39). 27. Oppen, “The Mind’s Own Place,” 176. 28. The Objectivist Nexus, 3. 29. Zukofsky tries to have it both ways when he writes (again in “An Objective”): “In sincerity shapes appear concomitants of word combinations, precursors of (if there is continuance) completed sound or structure, melody or form. Writing occurs which is the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody” (Prepositions, 12). Zukofsky’s phrase, “the detail, not mirage, of seeing,” strikes me as again posed against the poetics of Mallarmé (see note 22). It is interesting, therefore, that in A 19, written thirty-five years later (in 1965–66), Zukofsky offers what he refers to as “this / maybe not / too late / tribute to / once Stéphane Mallarmé” (A, 427). Critics focused on Objectivism often attempt to evade the empiricistic implications of Zukofsky’s theory, perhaps because of the way in which these conflict with the theory’s organicist implications. Commenting on the passage in which Zukofsky refers to “the detail, not mirage, of seeing,” Peter Nicholls observes, “Writing, then, is conceived of not as a discourse about things, but rather as one object among others” (9). As Nicholls indicates, Oppen himself preferred to downplay the empiricistic implications of the theory on occasion (though sometimes he was inclined to emphasize them). “ ‘Objectivist,’ ” Oppen asserts in a letter of 1961, “meant, not an objective viewpoint, but to objectify the poem, to make the poem an object. Meant form” (Selected Letters, 47; cited by Nicholls, 7n9). Nevertheless, I fail to see how Zukofsky’s statement in “An Objective” can be read otherwise than as an epistemological commitment to the empiricist position. 30. This aspect of Objectivism coincides with a tendency in twentieth-century American poetry that goes beyond the Objectivists themselves. Thus, Robert Duncan in “Pages from a Notebook” writes: “My revisions are my new works, each poem a revision of what has gone before. In-sight. Revision” (400–401). Duncan was drawing on the conception of “composition by field” that Charles Olson develops in his “Projective Verse” essay—and it is interesting that Olson explicitly connects projective verse to Objectivism—although he prefers “Objectism” as a formulation: “Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the ‘subject’ and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creatures of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects” (“Projective Verse,” 395).

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Because the Known and the Unknown Touch 1. Selected Letters, 122. 2. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 55. Oppen does not mention Hume in his published correspondence. 3. John Keats, Selected Poems and Letters, 49–50, 208; Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apology for Poetry,” 155. 4. William James, Pragmatism, 37. 5. See Selected Letters, 126. 6. In a 1970 letter to John Taggart, responding to his question as to how “Of Being Numerous” was composed, Oppen wrote that it was “conceived as a process of thought, section by succeeding section: but very drastic revision, rearrangement, re-writing (therefore) involved: changes in the thinking too—something over a twoyear process. The first section written after some third or so of the poem had been written down, and altered the conception in my mind drastically—etc etc[.] Not much in these (probably inaccurate) post not mortems but parturitions” (Selected Letters, 209). 7. The problem of the One and the Many is perhaps the oldest problem in the Greek philosophical tradition. The Greek word physis (whence our physics) is the word for Nature but has the implication of that which binds things together or fuses them. For Parmenides, reality is unitary and multiplicity (including its temporal and spatial divisions) is essentially an illusion because the One alone exists. Plato essentially agrees with Parmenides, but his doctrine of Forms or Ideas attempts to “save the appearances” in some measure and thus resolve the problem of the One and the Many. The tradition of Western metaphysics is a long history of attempts to deal with the problem of the One and the Many. Maeera Schreiber has recently suggested, however, that “we hear the phrase of being numerous as an allusion reaching back to that moment in the biblical book of Genesis [22:17] when God renews his sacred covenant, or promise, blessing Abraham thus: ‘I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore’ ” (129). Schreiber’s suggestion takes on additional force when the passage in Genesis is read against the passage pertaining to Abraham that Oppen quotes from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (see below). 8. Michael Davidson usefully refers to “that odd fusion of American pragmatism and European existentialism that merge in Oppen’s poetry. In both systems, knowledge is a relationship between rather than of things, a negotiation rather than an appropriation” (129). Other critics who have emphasized Oppen’s relationship to existentialism include L. S. Dembo and Randolph Chilton. 9. I reproduce the poem as it appears in Oppen’s New Collected Poems, 163–88. I have retained Oppen’s spacing even for the prose sections, though I don’t regard it as essential for those sections. 10. Jacques Maritain, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. The epigraph is apparently not an actual quotation from Creative Intuition, but it is very close to the con-

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ception that Maritain develops in chapter 1 of the work, “Poetry, Man, and Things” (3–30), where he argues—against Cartesian dualism—that the self emerges only in the context of its prior immersion in the things of the world. In a 1975 letter to Michael Heller, in which Heller had referred to Merleau-Ponty, Oppen writes: “More moved by Maritain—Maritain of the Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry—only that book of his, in fact” (Selected Letters, 311). 11. The title “Another Language of New York” follows an earlier sequence poem, “A Language of New York,” which was included in This in Which and which contains material Oppen simply inserted into “Of Being Numerous” (see 114–19). 12. The George Oppen Papers, Special Collections of The University of California at San Diego, reel 19. The line, “The sad marvels,” does not appear on this typescript page. 13. Oppen seems to have learned his use of juxtaposition from William Carlos Williams, who, in “A Vision of Labor: 1931” (a poem that the Marxist Oppen would have found appealing both for its technique and for what it has to say), wrote: “In my head the juxtapositions / impossible otherwise to accomplish” (William Carlos Williams, The Collected Later Poems, 42). 14. In a 1966 letter to Steven Schneider, Oppen indicates that the entire passage in quotation marks was spoken verbatim by his wife, Mary, and was in reference to Yves Bonnefoy’s poem, “Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve,” which Schneider had translated and sent to the Oppens in 1965 (Selected Letters, 129, 391). The figure of the salamander occurs in Bonnefoy’s poem. 15. See Henry Weinfield, “ ‘Of Being Numerous’ by George Oppen,” 376. 16. See Oren Izenberg, “Oppen’s Silence, Crusoe’s Silence, and the Silence of Other Minds,” 796. 17. Karl Marx, Capital, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Marx-Engels Reader, 324 et passim. 18. Marjorie Perloff, “The Shipwreck of the Singular: George Oppen’s ‘Of Being Numerous,’ ” 199. 19. Izenberg’s thesis is that “for Oppen, it is not in a practice of changeable form but in a practice of unchangeable silence—a silence that penetrates his poems as well as bracketing them—that we may find, not new knowledge exactly, but a new account of what we mean by knowledge” (791). 20. John Donne, Selected Prose, 101. This is from Donne’s seventeenth meditation in the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). 21. Theodor W. Adorno, Notes to Literature, 1:38. 22. Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 329. 23. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 119. 24. See Henry Weinfield, “ ‘A Thousand Threads’ and ‘The One Thing’: Oppen’s Vision (A Reply to Ross Feld),” 82–84. 25. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 274. This is aphorism 374, the concluding aphorism of book 4. As Kaufman notes (274n), the aphorism was taken over almost in its entirety in Nietzsche’s next book, Thus Spake Zarathustra. 26. Sigmund Freud, “The ‘Uncanny,’ ” 141–42. n o t e s t o pa g e s 4 3 – 5 7 212

27. Henry James, “The Story in It,” 404. 28. Martin Heidegger, Existence and Being, 364; cited by Randolph Chilton, 108; see also L. S. Dembo, esp. 64–69. 29. Selected Letters, 133. In another letter of 1966, Oppen writes: “Having no German at all, much less Heideggerian German, I am dependent on translations, therefore my knowledge of H. is sharply limited. But I have a superstition concerning my relation to H. The poem which happens to be printed as the first poem in Discrete Series—my first book—was written in 1929. That, I’ve learned, was the year in which H. was giving his Inauguration Speech in which he spoke of the mood of boredom (in the translation I have) which leads, again in the translation I have, to ‘the knowledge of what-is.’ . . . I am touched by superstition remembering my hesitation over that word and the sense of having been given it” (Selected Letters, 156). In the interview that L. S. Dembo conducted with him in Contemporary Literature in 1969, Oppen confirmed the importance that Heidegger’s emphasis on boredom would have for his later poetry (reprinted in L. S. Dembo and Cyrena N. Pondrom, The Contemporary Writer: Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets, 182). 30. William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems, 284–85. 31. See Weinfield, The Poet without a Name: Gray’s Elegy and the Problem of History, esp. 114–26. 32. A letter he wrote to Diane Wakoski in 1965, in which he quotes a passage that went into section 15 of “Of Being Numerous,” indicates that Oppen was directly concerned with the narcissistic implications of poetry. Oppen is apparently responding (ambivalently) to the self-dramatization of poems by Wakoski and Carol Bergé: “the intransigent fury of DW and Carol Bergé seems at the least newer, sharper—to be something. A root of poetry, and yet I would say: ‘I, I I I I, find me, find my navel, so that it will exist, find my nipples, so they will exist, find every hair of my belly, find . . .’ It is a root of poetry, it is indeed, well, I don’t know. But just, I think, the necessity of going further. Because it seems to me still the pitfall that has trapped every woman poet who has written in English: I am good (or I am bad); find me” (Selected Letters, 110). 33. Oppen made use of the now out of print and difficult to find Robert Payne translation of Fear and Trembling, changing the wording slightly. The passage that Oppen borrowed reads as follows in the Payne translation: “for here it is true that only he who works has bread, only he who is troubled finds rest, only he who descends into the nether-world rescues the beloved, only he who draws the knife obtains Isaac. He who will not work has no bread . . . But he who will work gives birth to his own father” (29–30). In my discussion, I shall cite the edition and translation of Fear and Trembling made by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Further references to Fear and Trembling will be made parenthetically. 34. Selected Letters, 129. 35. “Problema I” of Kierkegaard’s text (54–67) poses the question, “Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?” 36. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 151. 37. “Esthetics allowed, indeed demanded, silence of the single individual if he n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 0 – 67 213

knew that by remaining silent he could save another. This alone adequately shows that Abraham is not within the scope of esthetics” (112). 38. “No one who was great in the world will be forgotten, but everyone was great in his own way, and everyone in proportion to the greatness of that which he loved. He who loved himself became great by virtue of himself, and he who loved other men became great by his devotedness, but he who loved God became the greatest of all. . . . Everyone shall be remembered, but everyone was great wholly in proportion to the magnitude of that with which he struggled” (16). 39. T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays, 39. The line, “I had not thought death had undone so many,” translates Dante’s Inferno, 3:57, as Eliot’s note indicates (51). Subsequent references to Eliot’s poetry are to this edition. 40. Selected Letters, 108. 41. The influence of Simone Weil on Oppen is worth noting in this connection because Weil’s essay “The Iliad or the Poem of Force” is an incisive analysis of the relationship between warfare and the epic mentality. The first poem in Oppen’s collection Seascape: Needle’s Eye is entitled “From a Phrase of Simone Weil’s and Some Words of Hegel’s” (211). 42. Selected Letters, 258. 43. Thomas Hardy, The Complete Poems, 468. 44. L. S. Dembo and Cyrena Pondrom, The Contemporary Writer: Interviews with Sixteen Novelists and Poets, 175. 45. Aristotle, On the Soul, sec. 412a, p. 554. 46. As we have seen, Oppen also makes important use of the term “substance” in the eleventh section of “A Narrative”: River of our substance Flowing With the rest. River of the substance Of the earth’s curve, river of the substance Of the sunrise, river of silt, of erosion, flowing To no imaginable sea. . . . (155) 47. Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems, 270. 48. See Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death. 49. On this issue, see my debate with Ross Feld in Sagetrieb 12, no. 3 (Winter 1993). Feld writes: “In his own thin-man way, Oppen may have been our most ideological poet. Not just because he seemed to have been an unreconstructed Stalinist but because he operated within that changeable mode of loftiness that in his best-known poem, ‘Of Being Numerous,’ . . . allows him with a straight face to call truth knowledge and vice-versa. ‘Truthfulness / which illumines speech,’ he writes—a formula that like a machine extrudes a braid: ‘One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads / in his hands. He must somehow see the one thing’ ” (“Some Thoughts about Objectivism,” 67). In my response, I argued that “the one thing” to which Oppen refers is an intuition, not an ideological position (see “ ‘A Thousand Threads’ and ‘The One Thing’: Oppen’s Vision (A Reply to Ross Feld),” 79–87. n o t e s t o pa g e s 6 7 – 8 8 214

50. Charles Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 36. Recently, Altieri has refined, but not substantially altered, his perspective. See “The Objectivist Tradition.” 51. Mary Oppen, Meaning a Life: An Autobiography. I am indebted to Stephen Fredman for reminding me not only of the relevance of Mary Oppen’s title in this context but also that she translated St. John of the Cross (see Mary Oppen, Poems and Transpositions). 52. See, for example, Martin Heidegger, What Is Philosophy?, 81–95. 53. William Blake, The Complete Poems, plate 30 [34], lines 30–31, p. 690. 54. In the passage from which the lines Oppen quotes are taken, Los complains that woman has “power over man from cradle to corruptible grave” and that she has usurped “the throne of God” in every man (lines 26–27). Los’s speech concludes with an attack on Newton and Locke (Blake’s habitual bêtes noirs), in which the empiricist tendencies of the Enlightenment are linked to the “female will”: “ ‘Is this the female will, O ye lovely daughters of Albion? To / Converse concerning weight & distance in the wilds of Newton and Locke?’ ” (lines 39–40, p. 690). W. H. Stevenson, in glossing the passage, quotes Blake’s commentary to his Visions of the Last Judgment: “In Eternity Woman is the Emanation of Man; she has No Will of her own. There is no such thing in Eternity as a Female Will” (690). 55. In a 1966 letter to David Ignatow, Oppen lists Blake among his “influences” (his quotations marks). See Selected Letters, 148–49. 56. Though there is no indication that Oppen was influenced specifically by the Critique of Judgment, Kant’s aesthetic terminology seems to come into play in this passage. Whereas Kant associates the Beautiful with definite forms, forms that the senses are able to apprehend, he associates the Sublime with an experience of infinitude that goes beyond the capacity of the senses. The Infinite is a category of Reason, for Kant, not of the Understanding, because it is “evident” not to the Understanding (which in fact is defeated by experience of this kind) but to the Mind alone. 57. Friedrich Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 463. In his preface to the 1967 edition of the Poems and Fragments, Hamburger notes that his initial selection, Poems of Hölderlin, had appeared in 1943; and thus it is entirely possible that Oppen would have known the poem in this edition. Hölderlin is not mentioned in Oppen’s Selected Letters, but Oppen would certainly have taken a strong interest in his poetry— among other reasons because Hölderlin is so central to Heidegger. I suspect that Oppen was strongly attracted to Hölderlin for a number of reasons—not only for the substance of what he has to say but for his style and prosody. As a philosophical poet, Oppen could very well have viewed Hölderlin’s prosody as a road to free verse that bypassed the American one of Whitman, Pound, and Williams. Hölderlin’s attempt to imitate Greek quantitative measures led him to forego rhyme and to develop a prosody that, in the context of the German poetic tradition, was tantamount to free verse. Heidegger’s attraction to Hölderlin was partly predicated on the sense that Hölderlin represented a return to the pre-Socratics, for whom philosophy and poetry were one and the same thing and had not yet become detached as separate disciplines. 58. Hölderlin, Poems and Fragments, 475. n o t e s t o pa g e s 8 9 – 9 9 215

59. Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the “Philosophical Investigations,” 27. 60. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” 93. 61. Heidegger, “What Are Poets For?,” 94.

In the Drift of the World 1. Feld, “Review of Life Supports,” 712. 2. Bruns, Maurice Blanchot, xxii–xxiii. 3. “Speech found the ear, for all the evil sound, / But the dark italics it could not propound” (Stevens, “Esthétique du Mal,” Collected Poetry and Prose, 287). 4. Taggart, Songs of Degrees, 44–45. 5. In his analysis of “About Dynamism, Desire and Various Fictions,” Norman Finkelstein argues similarly that Bronk’s poetry is utopian even if his philosophy is not. Finkelstein points, in this connection, to the prevalence of the conditional mode (to the as if) in Bronk’s poetry. See Finkelstein, The Utopian Mode in Contemporary American Poetry, 133–37. 6. My Father Photographed with Friends and Other Pictures was published by James Weil’s Elizabeth Press in 1976, some thirty years after the poems were written, as a note tells us on the acknowledgments page. The subtitle “and Other Pictures” was eliminated when the poems were included in Life Supports, Bronk’s collected poems of 1981. 7. When he was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, Bronk studied Frost’s work assiduously and came to know Frost personally through the intervention of his teacher, Sidney Cox, who was an admirer and friend of Frost. For biographical information on Bronk’s involvement with Cox and Frost, see Lyman Gilmore’s biography, The Force of Desire, especially chapter 2, which focuses on the poet’s undergraduate years at Dartmouth, 10–30. In an interview with Bronk conducted in the summer of 1988, Edward Foster notes that whereas Frost thought metaphor could provide a bridge between the natural world and the spirit, this “goes entirely against the grain” of Bronk’s work. As Foster subsequently suggests, Bronk’s “poetry of statement” is antithetical to the “nature lyrics” that Frost and his followers were writing (see Foster, Postmodern Poetry, 5–6). 8. Valéry, The Outlook for Intelligence, 23. I was led to this passage in Valéry via the following one in J. Hillis Miller’s The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers: “Historicism, which begins as an interest in the past, ends by transforming man’s sense of the present. As time wears on toward the twentieth century, and especially after the destructive cataclysm of the First World War, this sense of the artificiality of our culture is changed into an even more disquieting certainty that not just the outer form of our civilization, but civilization itself, is doomed to go the way of all the cultures of the past. This is the terrible truth expressed by Paul Valéry in a famous essay written soon after the war. Like Babylon, Nineveh, and Elam, our civilization will soon become mere heaps of broken artifacts, fragments whose very use, it may be, will have been forgotten” (11). n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 0 0 –1 2 216

9. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 106. 10. For an excellent discussion of Bronk’s poetry that focuses (rather differently) on the Kantian categories of the mathematical and dynamic sublime, see Burton Hatlen, “William Bronk and the Sublime.” 11. See William Bronk, Selected Poems, 1. 12. This discussion of “Benedicite Omnia Opera” is largely taken over from my essay, “Bronk’s Heroism: The Style Makes the Poet,” 65–66. 13. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 8. 14. See Kimmelman, The “Winter Mind,” 96, 103. See also Kimmelman, “Centrality in a Discrete Universe: William Bronk and Wallace Stevens”; and Bertholf, “Hans Vaihinger, Wallace Stevens, William Bronk, and the Poetry of ‘As If.’ ” 15. See Bloom, Wallace Stevens, 54–62. 16. In an important essay, “William Bronk and the Geography of America,” Edward Foster contextualizes Bronk’s assertion that “loss is what we live with all the time” by arguing that it should be understood in terms of the American literary landscape generally: “Not even Eliot among our major American poets was as deeply affected in his work by the sense of loss that seems to pervade our civilization as Bronk has been” (58). 17. Taggart, Songs of Degrees, 28. 18. Corman, William Bronk, 22–23; cited by Ernest, “ ‘It Becomes Our Life’: William Bronk and the Life of the Poems,” 7. Corman’s essay largely consists of letters from Bronk that he published without permission. Bronk was extremely annoyed, and this led to tensions in their friendship. The episode is discussed by Lyman Gilmore in The Force of Desire (197–201). Gilmore exonerates Corman, noting that Corman’s essay is “so positive and loving as to be a panegyric, and it is difficult to understand the intensity of Bronk’s displeasure” (198). Gilmore expresses himself with some anxiety here, given the fact that he is writing the “biography of an antibiograph”—to borrow the title of an essay on the poet by Louise Chawla; but Bronk was a very private man, and Corman seems to have misled him into thinking that he would only be publishing a few of his letters. In any event, the episode is telling in terms of Bronk’s relationship to the question of disclosure (which is a very different matter for poems than it is for letters) and even to his use of the first-person plural pronoun. 19. I discuss “Blue Spruces in Pairs, A Bird Bath Between” in somewhat different terms in “Bronk’s Heroism: The Style Makes the Poet,” 66–69. 20. Ernest, “William Bronk’s Religious Desire,” 145. 21. Vaughan, The Complete Poems of Henry Vaughan, 231. 22. In his dramatic reading of this poem, when he came to the line “In the end we shout!” Bronk would actually shout the word “shout.” Many of Bronk’s most haunting (and haunted) poems literally have to do with the idea of a house—and with his own house, the Civil War–era home in which he was born and where he lived all his life. 23. Bronk’s essays on the Meso-American culture of the Aztec and Maya, under the rubric of “The New World,” are included in Vectors and Smoothable Curves: The Collected Essays of William Bronk. This book was originally published by The Elizabeth Press in 1983 and was reissued by Talisman House in 1997. n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 13 – 2 9 217

24. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” Complete Poems and Plays, 118. 25. Corman, William Bronk, 22–23. Norman Finkelstein, writing about “Of the All with Which We Coexist,” remarks that desire in Bronk’s poetry is never able to establish a positive ground in history—essentially the same point that Bronk himself makes in the letter to Corman (see Finkelstein, “William Bronk: The World as Desire,” 490). “Of the All with Which We Coexist” is one of the focal points of Fink­ elstein’s important essay. “This magnificent poem,” he writes, “which may be justly compared to the transcendental lyrics of Shelley and Blake, articulates a vision of human desire with a purity and force unequaled in contemporary poetry” (484). 26. This was suggested to me in conversation by Bronk’s friend and longtime publisher, James Weil. 27. Bronk never discussed Nietzsche with me in conversation, and I have not found Nietzsche mentioned in his published prose writings or in his letters. I broached the question of whether Nietzsche had been an influence on Bronk with James Weil, and he confirmed my own sense that Nietzsche was not a significant intellectual presence for Bronk. 28. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, 370. 29. I suggested earlier that whereas Stevens oscillates between free and blank verse, Bronk is essentially a poet of blank verse, but a blank verse that can be tightened or loosened, as the case may be. It is interesting that in some of Stevens’s poems, it is not until a few lines have elapsed that the regularity of meter becomes apparent. A case in point is the beginning of “Sunday Morning”: Complacencies of the peignoir, and late Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, And the green freedom of a cockatoo Upon a rug mingle to dissipate The holy hush of ancient sacrifice. (Collected Poetry and Prose, 53) It is significant that the meter becomes regular only with “The holy hush of ancient sacrifice” in “Sunday Morning.” That something of the same sort happens in “The Plainest Narrative” is further indication of Stevens’s influence on Bronk. 30. The frequency with which Bronk rings metaphysical changes on the Adam and Eve story is examined by Norman Finkelstein in “William Bronk and the Creation of the World: A Few Remarks.” 31. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 275. 32. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 69. 33. Shakespeare, King Lear, 2.3.21. 34. I am indebted to my colleague David O’Connor, who pointed out to me both the connection of “The Mask the Wearer of the Mask Wears” to Edgar’s speech in King Lear and the pun on “wear” and “aware” in the poem. 35. In the conversation with Bronk that Paul Auster, Michael Perkins, and I had in May 1988, he had this to say about the origins of his fourteen-liners: “My fourteenliners were conscious. . . . Before I wrote the whole book of fourteen-liners, I spent a long time intensively reading Shakespeare’s sonnets, one or two every night before I n o t e s t o pa g e s 13 4 – 4 6 218

went to bed. Reading them very carefully; not analytically but simply to make sure I heard what he’s saying. It wasn’t a deliberate choice, but it seemed to me that 14 was a nice length. After I had done that, I began thinking in that form. It wasn’t any great effort to come out to fourteen lines; it would happen that way” (Weinfield, ed., “A Conversation with William Bronk,” 31). 36. In a valuable discussion of To Praise the Music, Rose Shapiro wrestles with the question of whether Bronk’s fourteen-liners should be considered sonnets. She concludes that the “Bronkian sonnet is a true variation in that, no matter how unsonnetlike an individual poem may appear to be, we intuit the tradition behind every one without necessarily being aware of that intuition” (76). 37. The literary theorist Käte Hamburger, positing a stronger connection between lyric poetry and philosophy than most twentieth-century theorists, emphasizes that the lyric poet works within what she calls the “statement-system” of language, but also subverts that system. See The Logic of Literature; see also my own essay, “ ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’: William Bronk and the Condition of Poetry.” 38. Ironically, it was I who first published “The Signification.” The poem first appeared in The Mysterious Barricades 2 (1972), 9, along with “L’Être et le Néant” (153). In addition to these two in the second issue of the journal, eight were included in the fourth issue: “Who Needs It” (172), “Who Wanted It” (173), “Who Feels It” (173), “The Increasing Abstraction of Language” (170), “The Contention” (171), and “In April” (171), all of which were later published in The Meantime; and “Affectionate Greeting,” later retitled “Friendly Greeting” (188) and “To Be a Saint like Christopher” (180), both of which were later published in Finding Losses. 39. The discussion of “The Limits of Knowledge” that follows is partly derived from my essay “ ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’: William Bronk and the Condition of Poetry,” 139–40. 40. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 73. 41. I am indebted to Norman Finkelstein for pointing out this echo from Genesis to me. 42. Pope, The Poems of Alexander Pope, 2:1–2; p. 516. 43. Montaigne, Complete Essays, 824. 44. In both the North Point Press and Talisman House editions of Life Supports, the poems are necessarily run in, with more than one on the page, and this is particularly problematic with the four-line poems of Finding Losses, which inevitably get lost on the page. In the original Elizabeth Press edition of Finding Losses, however, each of the poems occupies a page of its own, and a number of them are accompanied by woodcuts that the artist Eugene Canadé (Bronk’s old friend) prepared for the edition. “The World” is one of these (see Bronk, Finding Losses, 31). Canadé’s woodcut for “The World” appears, together with the poem itself, as the frontispiece to the New Directions edition of Bronk’s Selected Poems. 45. Vaughan, The Complete Poems of Henry Vaughan, 231. 46. Shakespeare, The Sonnets, 90. 47. Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 110, emphasis added. 48. Wordsworth, The Prelude: 1799, 1805, 1850, 12.221–22; p. 431. n o t e s t o pa g e s 1 4 6 – 6 5 219

49. Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 109. Evidence that Bronk’s “anchor” comes to him partly via Wordsworth, and in opposition to the humanistic pieties sometimes associated with Wordsworth, might be adduced from the poem in To Praise the Music entitled “Silence. Emptiness,” which begins: “How much was subterfuge and piety, / outrageous pretense to avoid the poverty / of the proposed self, including the poverty / of the outer world, if indeed there was one?” (132). 50. Pascal, Pensées and the Provincial Letters, 22. 51. Freud formulated his concept of the death instinct in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). He came to believe that the death instinct is bound up with repetition compulsion, and he argued that in situations involving repetition compulsion, eros is overridden by “something that seems more primitive, more elementary, more instinctual” (25). Bronk, as far as I know, had no interest in Freud as a thinker. However, the connection between repetition—which enters Bronk’s work in so many different guises, not only as a formal device but as a theme—and something like a death instinct in his work is interesting in light of the Freudian connection between the two. 52. Ernest, “William Bronk’s Religious Desire”; Finkelstein, “William Bronk: The World as Desire.” 53. Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 212. 54. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 279. 55. Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 111. 56. Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose, 355. 57. The only exception to this is that the first collection to follow Life Supports, Careless Love and Its Apostrophes, published by Red Ozier Press in 1985, contains a sequence entitled “Apostrophes,” each of which is basically a compilation of prose sentences separated by stanza breaks. These experimental pieces show Bronk at his weakest, in my view, and the experiment was not repeated. 58. This famous statement is from Mallarmé’s essay “Crise de vers”; see Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, 366. 59. Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads,” 453. 60. Bronk, Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems, 110.

Oppen’s Reoccupation of Traditional Lyric 1. I borrow the concept of “reoccupation” from Hans Blumenberg, whose work examines situations in which the content of cultural positions is transformed by later epochs when those positions are retrieved or reoccupied. See Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. 2. Virgil, “Eclogue IV,” MA: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard UP, 1994), lines 62–63. 3. Dante, Purgatorio, 22:70–72. 4. In an interesting discussion of “Eclogue” that strikes me as finally incoherent, Charles Altieri writes that the poem “faces the challenge of attributing signifi-

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cant power to the smallness with which it concludes.” “So from the start,” he adds, “Oppen establishes a fundamental opposition between the boasting talk that the poem describes and the specific process of measuring enacted by the efforts at concentration that it embodies. Confronting this arrogant male imagination, the poem has to define values available for a consciousness marginalized to an ‘outside,’ where flesh and rock are placed on the same ontological plane as a generalized and pervasive hunger” (“The Transformations of Objectivism: An Afterword,” 303–4). This is indeed very abstract, and Altieri seems to be conflating the poet’s consciousness (“the specific process of measuring”) with “the smallness with which [the poem] concludes.” To suggest that Oppen is attributing significant power to anything except for a depersonalized nature and history in the poem is, I think, to sentimentalize the poem. The poem participates in the pastoral, but it reoccupies the genre rather than replicating its sentimental premises. 5. See The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 995. 6. See Jacques Maritain, Existence and the Existent, 10; cited by Peter Nicholls, George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, 73. Maritain does not tell us, but the statement from Aquinas may be from his treatise, De Veritate. Interestingly, Aquinas also wrote a commentary on the Psalms. Michael Davidson notes that Oppen’s original intention was to have the full statement from Aquinas appear as an epigraph to This In Which, an idea that was later dropped (see Oppen, New Collected Poems, 370). 7. Nicholls argues that Oppen took the title This in Which from a passage in Heideg­ ger’s Introduction to Metaphysics: “The polis is the historical place, the there in which, out of which, and for which history happens” (152; cited by Nicholls, 64). The phrase “this in which” certainly has a Heideggerian flavor, and, as Nicholls notes, Oppen also took his epigraph for This in Which, “the arduous path of appearance,” from the same Heidegger text (Nicholls, 113). It seems likely, however, that Oppen would have taken the title for the volume from the phrase in the poem, and in “Psalm” it has a meaning and significance that seems unrelated to the sentence that Nicholls quotes from An Introduction to Metaphysics. 8. Celan, The Poems of Paul Celan, 153. 9. Steiner, No Passion Spent, 360. 10. The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 116. 11. Gray, The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray, lines 45–52. 12. Wordsworth, Selected Poems and Prefaces, 168. 13. See my discussion of “Resolution and Independence” in The Poet without a Name, 191–92. 14. See chap. 3.

Afterword 1. The best analogue I can find for Oppen’s statement (and granted that it is a peculiar one) is Descartes’ notion of “clear and distinct ideas,” a notion that runs through and is a grounding principle in both Discourse on Method (1637) and Meditations on

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First Philosophy (1641). In the former, Descartes insists that “the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true, but that there is merely some difficulty in properly discerning which are those that we distinctly conceive” (Descartes, Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, 19). 2. Zukofsky, Prepositions, 12. 3. Thus, Wordsworth in The Prelude writes: “I speak in recollection of a time / When the bodily eye, in every stage of life / The most despotic of our senses, gained / Such strength in me as often held my mind / In absolute dominion” (12.126–31; 1850 version). 4. See Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 29-52. Altieri’s influence can be seen on such other important theoretical formulations as Marjorie Perloff’s essay, “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” in The Dance of the Intellect, 1–32. Standing behind Altieri’s book, to a certain extent, is the chapter on Williams in J. Hillis Miller’s Poets of Reality, 285–359. 5. Altieri, “The Objectivist Tradition,” 26; references to this essay will hereafter be given parenthetically in the text. 6. Olson, “Projective Verse,” 388. 7. Wordsworth, “Preface to the Second Edition of Lyrical Ballads” (1800), 460. 8. Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect.” In the section entitled “Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols” from his Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye defined the symbol as “any unit of any literary structure that can be isolated for critical attention” (71). The fact that one would want to isolate it for attention, of course, indicates that it is of importance and involves the condensation of meaning—or, in other words, that it is “an intellectual and emotional complex.” Frye goes on to say that “[i]n all literary verbal structures the final direction of meaning is inward” (74), which means that what is significant is not something external—neither “the things seen or felt” nor some sort of putative “seeing beyond the seeing” —but rather the internal pattern and structure of the poem itself. Frye concludes that “[t]he great strength of symbolisme was that it succeeded in isolating the hypothetical germ of literature”—that is, the fact that it establishes itself as a “centripetal verbal pattern” (80). 9. Emerson, “The Poet,” Essays and Lectures, 450. 10. See chap. 3, note 58. 11. Olson, “Projective Verse”; cited by Altieri, 26–27. 12. Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, 221.

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bibliogr aphy 229

index

“The Abnegation” (Bronk), 32–33, 132 “About Dynamism, Desire and Various Fictions” (Bronk), 12, 13–14, 108–109, 147 abstraction: Bronk and, 6, 21, 111, 116–17, 128, 132–33, 147, 156; humanity as, 78–85; modernism and rejection of, 38–39, 119; Oppen and, 7, 30, 39, 44, 76, 188; as reaction to encroachments of prose, 38; reification, 7; as vehicle of metaphor in, 111 “The Acts of the Apostles” (Bronk), 124–25 Adam and Eve story, 13, 42–43, 76–77, 99–100, 124–25, 143, 218n30 Adorno, Theodor W., 50, 87, 184 Aesthetics (Hegel), 39, 87 Aiken, Conrad, 1 alienation: “boredom” and, 59–60; Bronk and, 112, 153; modernism and, 46, 58–59; Oppen and, 57–58, 71, 188; of poet from audience, 55, 83–84, 85, 201 allegory, 128, 170 alliteration, 120–21, 124–25, 128 allusion: in Bronk’s works, 110, 121, 124– 25, 133, 137–38, 143, 157–59, 163–64; in Oppen’s works, 13, 26–27, 42–43, 60, 64–67, 71–73, 77–79, 85, 98–102, 182–90, 211n7, 213n33. See also Biblical allusion and Christian imagery; quotation Altieri, Charles, 89, 201–206 ambiguity: in Bronk’s works, 110, 116,

134–35, 142–44, 161; in Oppen’s works, 57, 82, 96, 183 “Analytic of the Beautiful” (Kant), 157–58 anonymity: in Bronk’s works, 121, 141–42; of the individual, 63–65; in Oppen’s works, 85 “Another Language of New York” (Oppen), 7–8, 43 “Apology for Raymond Sebonde” (Montaigne), 142 Aquinas, Thomas, 186, 188–89, 190, 221n6 Aristotle, 76–77 art: Bronk and, 120–21, 162; Heidegger on role of poet, 101; Oppen and the “light of art,” 88–89; in Oppen’s works, 56–59, 62, 64, 88–89, 199–200; poem as beautiful, 111; relationship with truth, 162; social class and, 194–96 “The Arts and Death: A Fugue for Sidney Cox” (Bronk), 9, 21, 119–22, 162 assonance: in Bronk’s works, 118, 120– 21, 124–25, 128, 151; in Oppen’s works, 85 “At the Ball Game” (Williams), 62 audience: alienation of the poet from, 83–84, 85, 201; loss of, 55; poet speaking for, 82 Bacchae (Euripides), 55 “Ballad” (Oppen), 6, 10, 181, 190–97 Baudelaire, 62

works, 110, 124–25, 133, 137–38, 143, 157–58; biographical information, 1, 107, 122–23; blank verse and, 118, 177, 218n29; career phases of, 111–12, 175; complexity/simplicity in works, 157; compositional process of, 21, 140–41, 146, 176–77; condensation of form, 153; critical reception of works, 107–11, 172–73, 177; death in works, 21, 119–22, 133–35, 147–48, 168–69; decentering and, 112, 135–37; emotional revelation in works, 153; ethical problems in works, 135–39; expansion of forms, 176; the “fault of the world” and, 174–75; as figure in Oppen’s works, 3, 11–12, 23–24, 29; form and formlessness as concern of, 9–10, 24, 126, 127, 129, 175–76; formal structure of works, 9, 127–28, 129, 140; forms as increasingly condensed, 145–46, 155, 162–63, 165–67, 175–76; “four-liners” of, 12, 162, 219n44; “fourteen-liners” of, 111–12, 145, 146, 148–49, 218n35, 219n36; fragmentation in works, 162–63; free verse and, 111, 118; fusion of opposites in works, 168–71; and human condition, 23, 119, 122–23, 139; the individual in works, 123, 130–31, 137, 141–42; infiniteness and, 112–13, 123–24, 136–37, 139, 154–62, 167; influenced on Oppen, 9–13, 30; influences on, 1, 111, 123, 145, 146–47, 164–65; irony and, 109–10, 118, 133, 141, 148, 150–51, 157, 159, 160, 171, 174–75, 178, 206; life in later works, 168–70; loss and consolation, 12, 113, 124–26; lyricism and, 109–10, 128, 131–32, 167–68; meter and, 20, 111, 160, 176; as monological poet, 12; mysticism and, 127, 151; “On Credo Ut Intelligam,” 177–78; organicism and, 126; pessimism and, 124–25; as philosophical poet, 1–2, 107–109, 119, 126–27, 129–30, 139, 143, 146–47, 156–57, 173; as “poet of

beauty: as acceptance of being, 162; Bronk and, 110, 111, 129–30, 133, 147– 48, 151–52, 157–59, 161–62, 173–74, 179; death linked to, 147–48; form linked to, 129; as immanent, 187–88; as im­ perfect, 174; knowledge of, 151–52; limits and, 151–52, 158–62, 174; Oppen and, 33, 92–96, 187–88; as the particular, 95–96; the poem as, 111; the sublime and, 129–30, 133, 167; truth and, 93–96 Becker, Ernest, 84 “The Belief in the Self Abandoned” (Bronk), 126 “Benedicite Omnia Opera” (Bronk), 113–14, 177 Biblical allusion and Christian imagery: in Bronk’s works, 110, 124–25, 133, 137–38, 143, 157–58; in Oppen’s works, 13, 42–43, 72–74, 76–79, 85, 95, 100, 182–90, 194, 211n7 Black Mountain School, 3 Blake, William, 40, 95–96 blindness: in Bronk’s works, 115, 118; nature as, 15–16; in Oppen’s works, 15–16, 26–27, 37, 94–95, 96 Bloom, Harold, 115 “Blue Spruces in Pairs, A Bird Bath Between” (Bronk), 21, 126–27, 171 Blumenberg, Hans, 220n1 “The Body of This Life” (Bronk), 140– 41, 177–78 boredom, 59–60, 61, 62, 102, 213n29 Bronk, William: abstraction in works, 6, 21, 116–17, 128, 132–33, 147, 156; acceptance of limits by, 175, 176; alienation in works, 112, 153; alle­ gory used by, 128, 170; allusion in works, 110, 121, 124–25, 133, 137–38, 143, 157–59, 163–64; ambiguity in works, 110, 112, 116, 142–44, 161; the beautiful in works, 110, 129–30, 133, 147–48, 158–59, 161–62, 173–74, 179; Biblical and religious imagery in index 232

“The Creations of Sound” (Stevens), 144 Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (Maritain), 41 Creeley, Robert, 2 crisis of modernity, 14–15, 112 Critique of Judgment (Kant), 53–54, 157–58 Crusoe, 47–50

speech,” 177; pronouns in works, 23, 110, 112, 122–23, 142–44; the prosaic and, 20–21, 108–109, 126, 156, 176; prosody of, 20–21, 107–11, 118, 124–25, 126, 129–32, 140–41, 151, 158, 160, 161, 165–67; on Proust, 147; repetition in works, 114, 122, 123–24, 138–39, 141, 149, 160–61, 166–67; rhyme and, 118, 122; skepticism and, 2, 3, 11, 22, 32, 126, 127, 151, 158; as solitary or reclusive, 1–4; sonnet form and, 109–12, 145, 146, 148–49; Stevens and, 115–19, 125, 146; the sublime and, 112–13, 125–33; “three-liner” untitled works, 162–63, 176; transcendence and, 126–27, 132–33, 135, 137–39, 156–57, 168; as voice of humanity, 23, 122–23, 137; word play in works, 116, 128–29, 144–45, 152, 158 “Burnt Norton” (Eliot), 69, 82

Dante Alighieri, 182 Davidson, Michael, 196, 221n6 Davie, Donald, 72 deafness, 155–56 death: in Bronk’s works, 21, 119–21, 133–35, 147–48, 168–69; denial of, 17–18, 84–85; as encompassed by life, 169–70; Freud’s formulation of the concept, 220n51; grief or loss as lifeaffirming, 124–26; linked to beauty, 147–48; in Oppen’s works, 17–18, 33, 63, 65, 84, 102; reality linked to, 17– 18, 134–35; underworld and, 31 deceleration, 42 decentering, 167 Defoe, Daniel, 48–50 Degnan, June Oppen, 11, 19, 20, 22–23 Dembo, L. S., 75 The Denial of Death (Becker), 84 “The Destroyer Life” (Bronk), 17, 167–70 determinate simplicity, 87, 88 determinism, 62–63, 72–74 Dickinson, Emily, 1 Die Niemandsrose (Celan), 184 Dionysian, 55 discrete series concept, 8, 37, 103–104 Discrete Series (Oppen), 4, 6, 7, 26, 35, 36–38, 39, 60–61, 81, 89, 103, 105, 210n26 disjunction, 1–2, 24, 35, 40, 42, 208n8 displacement, 21–22 “Displacement: The Locks on the Feeder Called The Five Combines,” 17–22

Cantos (Pound), 69 Capital (Marx), 48 Careless Love and Its Apostrophes (Bronk), 220n57 Celan, Paul, 184, 189–90 “Certain Beasts, Like Cats” (Bronk), 130–32, 133 Christianity. See religion and theology circularity or recurrence: in Oppen’s works, 14–15, 26, 85, 102–103; Ourobouros as figure, 14–15, 26 clarity, 24, 27, 31–32, 35–36, 93–94, 96, 199–200 Clippinger, David, 209n18 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 205–206 common sense and commonality, 82–84 consonance, 118, 128, 151 “The Contention” (Bronk), 156–57 “Coral and Shells” (Bronk), 133–35 Corman, Cid, 3, 11, 114, 122, 137, 217n18 correspondence, 19–21, 22, 213n29, 213n32, 217n18

index 233

“Five Poems about Poetry” (Oppen), 182–83 flux, 30–31, 46–47, 76, 95, 96 The Force of Desire (Bronk), 145–46, 163, 175, 176 The Force of Desire: A Life of William Bronk (Gilmore), 122–23 form: the beautiful linked to, 129; Bronk and condensation of, 145–46, 155, 162–63, 165–67, 175–76; Bronk’s struggle with, 9–10, 24, 121, 126, 127, 129, 175–76; Bronk’s “fourteenliners,” 111–12, 145, 146, 148–49, 218n35, 219n36; Bronk’s twentyliners, 168; Oppen’s resistance to closure, 7, 8, 104–105 Foster, Edward, 216n7, 217n16 Four Quartets (Eliot), 69, 82 fragmentation, 175 free verse, 111, 118 Freud, Sigmund, 72, 148, 220n51 “From Virgil” (Oppen), 182–83 Frost, Robert, 1, 111 Frye, Northrop, 228n8

doubling, 57–58, 98–99; figure of the Dopplegänger, 196 Duncan, Robert, 210n30 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 26–27, 37 “East Coker” (Eliot), 69 Ecclesiastes, 85, 95, 110, 178 “Eclogue” (Oppen), 10, 181–84, 190 Eclogues (Virgil), 182–83 elegy, 63–64, 195 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (Gray), 6, 64, 85, 121–22, 195 Eliot, T. S., 20, 49, 62, 68–70, 90 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1, 123 Empson, William, 46 The Empty Hands (Bronk), 113, 132, 133, 135, 175 Enjambment, 110, 120–22, 128, 150 An Enquiry on Human Understanding (Hume), 37 epics, 69–70 Ernest, John, 122, 127, 172, 177 “Essay on Man” (Pope), 159 essay poems, 128 “Esthétique du Mal” (Stevens), 174 estrangement. See alienation “Evaluation” (Bronk), 168 Existence and the Existent (Maritain), 185–86, 221n6 Existentialism, 2, 13, 40, 46, 84, 90–91, 97–98, 117, 211n8

The Gay Science (Nietzsche), 55 Genesis, 13, 14–15, 42–43, 76–77, 99–100, 124–25, 143, 158, 212n7 George Oppen: Man and Poet (Hatlen), 5 Gilmore, Lyman, 122–23, 216n7, 217n18 The Gist of Origin (Corman ed.), 3, 207n2 gnosticism, 95–97, 190 “Go Ahead; Goodbye; Good Luck; and Watch Out” (Bronk), 133 Golding, Alan, 208n8 Gray, Thomas, 6, 64, 85, 121–22, 195

“The False Corner” (Bronk), 172 fatalism, 1, 2, 139 Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 65–68, 213n33, 213n35, 213n37, 214n38 Feld, Ross, 3, 4, 107 “Fides and Ratio” (Bronk), 177–79 Finding Losses (Bronk), 4, 162, 163, 175, 219n44 Finkelstein, Norman, 140, 172, 218n25 first person plural voice, 23, 122–23, 139, 147

Hamburger, Käte, 147, 219n37 Hamburger, Michael, 99, 189 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 15, 57, 64, 67 Hardy, Thomas, 71–74

index 234

Oppen’s works, 14–15; sublime and, 112–13; truth and, 24–25 irony: Bronk and, 109–10, 118, 133, 141, 148, 150–51, 157, 159, 160, 171, 174–75, 178, 206; Oppen and, 13, 30–31, 35, 85, 92, 206; Symbolism and, 206 isolation: Bronk’s vision of, 122–23; Crusoe as figure of poetic solitude, 47–50; of the poet from the audience, 55, 83; poetic vision as, 63, 71; as suffering of the individual, 130–32; transcendence as, 53 Izenburg, Oren, 48

Hatlen, Burton, 5, 26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 39, 66–67, 87, 127, 194 Heidegger, Martin, 2, 30, 40, 61, 74, 91, 99, 101, 186, 212n7, 213n29 Heraclitus, 46–47, 77, 82, 84 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 40, 99–102 Hopper, Edward, 57 Hudson Falls, New York, 1, 12, 16, 22 human condition: as abstraction, 75–76, 78–85; as beyond rescue, 53, 73–74, 96–98; Bronk and, 23, 119, 122–23, 139; Bronk as voice of, 23, 122–23, 137; Bronk on, 122–24, 130–31, 137, 141–42; Bronk’s vision of, 122–23; common sense and commonality, 82–84; covenant and commonality of, 77–79; Oppen and, 4, 71, 84–85; poet as voice of, 23, 82, 83, 122, 137; unsatisfied desire as, 32–33, 151, 172–75, 176. See also One and the Many Hume, David, 37

James, Henry, 60, 61–62 James, William, 39 Jerusalem (Blake), 95–96 Judaism, 77–78, 184–85 juxtaposition, 43–44, 70, 76, 212n13 Kant, Immanuel, 27, 53–54, 66–67, 112– 13, 129, 150, 157–58, 174 Keats, John, 39, 121, 130–32 Kierkegaard, Søren, 2, 40, 52, 65–68, 84, 213n33, 213n35, 213n37, 214n38 Kimbrell, Allen, 5 Kimmelman, Burt, 5, 115 King Lear (Shakespeare), 145, 146 knowledge: in Bronk’s works, 142–43, 149; in Oppen’s works, 91–92, 100– 101; as relationship between rather than of things, 211n8

“I Thought It Was Harry” (Bronk), 141–42 identity, 141–44 “The Ignorant Lust after Knowledge” (Bronk), 151–53, 173 Imagism, 20, 35, 39, 200, 202–203 immanence, 89, 188 impenetrability: architecture as figure for, 79; hollowness as opposite of, 57; Oppen and, 35, 43–45, 76, 85–86; stasis and, 47; vs. flux, 46–47, 76, 95 “In Navaho Country” (Bronk), 127–28 “The Increasing Abstraction of Language” (Bronk), 133 infiniteness, 95, 96; Bronk’s acceptance of limits and relationship with, 108, 149–51, 154–62, 167, 175; as constituted by Bronk, 136–37, 139; One and the Many, 67; Ourobouros as figure in

language: and authentic communication, 63–64; Bronk on metaphor, 156; as filter or distortion, 24–25, 29–30; mediation of reality through, 67, 150, 153–55; silence and truth, 154–56; word play, 48, 116, 128–29, 144–45, 152, 158 Levertov, Denise, 27 “Life Supports” (Bronk), 168, 171–72 Life Supports (Bronk), 9–10, 120, 145, 167–70, 168, 175, 176–77

index 235

Metaphor of Trees and Last Poems (Bronk), 177 meter: Bronk and, 20, 111, 160, 176; modernism’s revolt against, 38–39; Oppen in relation to, 193, 197 “Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World” (Bronk), 128 Milton, John, 15, 26–27 “The Mind’s Landscape on an Early Winter Day” (Bronk), 114–19 “The Mind’s Limitations Are Its Freedom” (Bronk), 149–51 “The Mind’s Own Place” (Oppen), 26–27, 199 Montaigne, Michel de, 109, 142, 162, 167 music as subject or metaphor, 117–18, 128–29 My Father Photographed with Friends (Bronk), 111–14, 175 The Mysterious Barricades (magazine), 5, 219n38 mysticism: Bronk and, 127, 151; Oppen and, 5, 53–54, 61 Myth of the Blaze (Oppen), 8, 69

light/dark: clarity and truth linked to illumination, 93–94, 199–200; darkness in Bronk’s works, 113–14; illumination and the possibility of seeing, 30; Oppen and the “light of art,” 88–89; Oppen’s “bright light of shipwreck,” 52–55, 71, 88–89, 200; in Oppen’s works, 37, 56–57, 93–94, 199– 200; oppositions in Bronk’s works, 109; poetic vision and, 86; as real in Bronk’s works, 152–53, 154; stars as figures in Bronk’s works, 127–28 Light and Dark (Bronk), 114–20, 124, 175 “The Limits of Knowledge” (Bronk), 157–58 “Locksley Hall” (Tennyson), 14 “Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (Eliot), 49 Lucretius, 12–14, 43 lyric poetry: Bronk and, 109–10, 128, 131–32, 167–68; Oppen and, 6, 8, 10, 50 machinery/mechanical imagery, 16–17, 20, 36–37, 172, 208n17 madness, 71, 101 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 53, 55, 88–89, 171, 203 Maritain, Jacques, 40, 41, 185–86, 211–12n10 Marx, Karl, 48 Marxism, 2, 11, 40, 46, 58, 78, 87–88, 97–98, 181–82 “The Mask the Wearer of the Mask Wears” (Bronk), 143–44, 146 materialism, 39, 62–63; physics and Bronk’s “matter,” 152–53; substance and, 76–77 The Materials (Oppen), 38, 41, 181 Maude Blessingbourne poem, 60, 61, 100–101, 103 Meaning a Life (Mary Oppen), 91 The Meantime (Bronk), 133, 145, 155, 156–57 Melville, Herman, 1, 123

narcissism, 65, 213n32 narrative: ballad form and, 190–91; Bronk on fiction and truth in, 109–10, 142–43, 147–49; as evasion of reality, 102; Oppen and subversion of, 6–7, 13–14, 26–27, 43, 190–91 “A Narrative” (Oppen), 7–8, 11–33, 37; Bronk as figure in, 3, 11–12, 22–24, 29; “Of Being Numerous” linked to, 11–12 “The Natural Sciences” (Bronk), 159–60, 165 “The Nature of Musical Form” (Bronk), 128–29 New Criticism, 21, 28 Nicholls, Peter, 209n21, 210n29, 221n7 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 51–52, 60, 96–97, 145; Bronk and, 110, 137–38; Oppen and, 40, 55

index 236

section 6, 47; section 7, 48–50; section 8, 50–52; section 9, 52–54, 63, 88; section 10, 55, 83; section 11, 56–58, 62, 64; section 12, 58–61; section 13, 61–63, 64, 68, 83; section 14, 63–64; section 15, 64–65; section 16, 65–67, 84; section 17, 68–70, 101; section 18, 70–71; section 19, 70–71, 81, 105; section 20, 71–74, 84–85; section 21, 74–75; section 22, 74–75; section 23, 75–77; section 24, 77–79; section 25, 77–79; section 26, 79–86, 87, 96, 184; section 27, 86–88, 104, 196, 199–200; section 28, 88–89; section 29, 89–91; section 30, 91–92; section 31, 76, 91–92, 100; section 32, 92–94, 95, 105; section 33, 93–94; section 34, 94–97; section 35, 97–98; section 36, 98–102, 103, 104, 105; section 37, 102–103, 105; section 38, 103–104; section 39, 104– 105; section 40, 105; self-quotation in, 7, 40–42, 60, 71, 100–101 Of Being Numerous (Oppen), 6, 38, 69, 181 “Of the All with Which We Coexist” (Bronk), 135–37 Olson, Charles, 2, 202, 203, 210n30 “On Credo Ut Intelligam” (Bronk), 177–78 “On Lyric Poetry and Society” (Adorno), 50, 87 One and the Many, 211n7; anonymity of the individual, 63–65; Bronk and interchangibility of the individual, 123, 137, 141–42; as constituted by Bronk, 136–37, 139; crowd or mob imagery, 62, 64–65; human experience and, 49–51; individual identity and, 55, 82–83; particularity and poetic vision, 88, 96, 199–200; the people as abstraction, 78–85; the poet and the audience as, 50, 83–84 “Ontology Offers a Hindrance to Humanism” (Bronk), 158–59

nostalgia, 46, 49–50, 59–60, 69, 191–92 “Not My Loneliness, But Ours” (Bronk), 23 “Not to Cry Out, ‘How Long, Oh Lord, How Long’” (Bronk), 137–38 “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” (Stevens), 50, 52 Objectivism and Objectivist theory: empiricism and, 83–84; Imagism and, 20; modernity and, 20; the Objectivist Circle, 1; Oppen and rejection of Zukofskian, 24–27, 29, 30, 31, 83–84, 199–201; projective verse and, 202, 210n30; reality as constructed in, 24; sincerity and transparency as fundamental to, 27–29; Symbolism contrasted with in Altieri’s theory, 201–203; Williams’s formulation of, 28; Zukofsky’s formulation of, 3, 25–26, 28 “An Objective” (Zukofsky), 25–26, 210n29 “The Objectivist Tradition” (Altieri), 201 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 121, 130–32 “Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley), 203–206 “Of Being Numerous” (Oppen), 7; closure and conclusion of, 103–105; compositional process and revision of, 43; deceleration as essential to prosody, 40; disjunctive style in, 40; as exploration of the problem of the One and the Many, 40–42; illumination and seeing in, 30; impenetrability of reality explored in, 35, 43–47, 76, 85–86; as masterwork, 5–6, 39–40; “A Narrative” linked to, 11–12; as organic in development, 103–104; as philosophical poem, 40; section 1, 13, 41–44, 190; section 2, 44–45, 76, 103; section 3, 45; section 4, 45–46; section 5, 46–47;

index 237

Symbolism and, 89; women as figures in works, 7, 36, 94–97, 104 Oppen, Mary, 5, 91, 196, 212n14 organicism, 28 Origin (magazine), 3, 11 Orpheus, 31, 33, 68, 147–48 otherness, 23, 59, 81 “The Oxen” (Hardy), 72–74

opacity, 35–39, 210n26 Oppen, George: agnosticism of, 85–86; alienation and, 57–58, 188; allusion in works, 13, 26–27, 42–43, 60, 64–67, 71–73, 77–79, 85, 98–102, 213n33; ambiguity in works, 57, 82, 96, 183; Biblical allusion in works, 13, 42–43, 72–74, 76–78, 85, 95, 100, 182–90, 211n7; biographical information, 1; Bronk as figure in works, 3, 11–12, 22–24, 29; Bronk as influence on, 9–13, 30; as Bronk’s editor, 3, 18–21; clarity and, 24, 27, 31–32, 53–54, 93–94, 96, 199– 200; death in works, 17–18, 63, 65, 84, 102; as dialectical poet, 6–7, 52–53; as dialogical poet, 12, 33, 99; disjunctive style and, 1–2, 24, 35, 40, 42, 208n8; on Heidegger, 213n29; as hermetic, 23; influences on, 9–13, 30, 40–41, 92; irony in works, 13, 30–31, 35, 85, 92, 206; juxtaposition, 43–44; and lyric genre, 10, 181–97; Marxism and, 2, 11, 48, 58, 78, 87–88, 181–82, 193–95; mysticism and, 5, 53–54, 61; Objectivism and relation to, 24–27, 29, 30, 31, 83– 84, 199–201; and pastoral tradition, 48, 181–84; “the people” in works, 67; phenomenological reduction and, 30, 32; as philosophical poet, 1–2, 31–32, 37–42, 51–52, 86–88, 91–92, 100; as poet of witness, 32, 33, 41, 104; poetics of, 86–89, 92, 98–99; polyphony in works, 12, 64–65; prosody, 42, 55; selfquotation in works, 7, 32, 36, 37–38, 40–42, 60, 71, 100–101, 104; and sequence poem, 6–8, 16, 37, 52; “silence” during involvement with Communist party, 7, 38, 39, 50, 65, 195; silence in works, 74–75, 193, 212n19; skepticism and, 3, 24, 29–30, 32, 37, 72–73, 100; sociopolitical aspects of works, 45; subjectivity in works, 7, 30; substance, 76–77; subversion of narrative in works, 6–7, 13–14, 26–27, 43;

Paideuma (journal), 5 Paradise Lost (Milton), 15 paronomasia, 70 particularity, 35, 63–65, 74–75, 95–96, 112, 199–200 Pascal, Blaise, 167 pastoral, 46, 49–50, 182 Paterson (Williams), 21 “Patmos” (Hölderlin), 99–102 Pensées (Pascal), 167 Perloff, Marjorie, 48–49 pessimism, 1–2, 14, 33, 85, 97–98, 120–21 Phaedrus (Plato), 162 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 194 “plain style,” 2, 142–43 “The Plainest Narrative” (Bronk), 142–43 Plato, 129, 159–60, 162, 174 “Poem for the Nineteenth of March, St. Joseph’s Day” (Bronk), 170–72 poetic distance, 105 poetic vision, 10; as bidirectional in Bronk’s works, 145; and compositional process, 202–203; dislocation or distancing and, 70–71; as distinct from physical sight, 200; as ethical dilemma for reader, 135–36; illumination and, 86; as isolating, 63, 71; madness and, 101–102; Oppen and poet as witness, 33, 34, 41, 104, 199; poet as seer or prophet, 53, 101–102, 200–201; as salvific, 99; truth and, 87–88 Poetry (magazine), 3 Pope, Alexander, 159

index 238

in Bronk’s works, 112, 135–37; denial of, 21–22, 102–103, 160; as either nonexistent or transcendent in Bronk’s works, 126–27; as impenetrable, 35, 44–45; as indeterminate, 43; as infinite, 159; language as distorting filter, 24–25, 29–30; language as mediation, 67, 150; narrative or myth as evasion of, 102; Oppen’s philosophical construction of, 31–32; phenomenal world as false, 171; phenomenological reduction and, 30, 32; “statement language” and, 147; as subjective construct, 17–18, 22, 23, 29–30, 149–50; subjective, 17–18, 22, 23, 102–103, 160 recurrence: and temporality in Oppen’s works, 60, 62; Ourobouros as figure in Oppen’s works, 14–15, 26; of tropes in sequence poems, 8–9, 16, 30. See also repetition; solipsism relativism, 126–27 religion and theology: Bronk and, 137– 39, 170–72, 177–78; gnosticism, 95–97, 190; Oppen and Judeo-Christian tradition, 13, 72–74, 78–79, 182–83, 185–90. See also Biblical allusion and Christian imagery repetition: in Bronk’s works, 114, 122, 123–24, 134, 138–39, 141, 149, 160–61, 166–67; self-quotation, 7, 32, 36, 37–38, 40–42, 60, 71, 100–101 “Resolution and Independence” (Wordsworth), 195–97 Reznikoff, Charles, 1 Rimbaud, Arthur, 112 Romanticism, 39, 92, 131–32, 202, 204 roots and rootlessness, 68–69, 78, 90–91, 164–65, 188 “Route” (Oppen), 24, 27, 35–37, 53, 96, 200

Pound, Ezra, 1, 2, 20, 62, 69, 201, 202– 203, 206 “Power, the Enchanted World” (Oppen), 27, 62–63, 183–84 The Prelude (Wordsworth), 15–16, 165, 222n3 primitive, 59 Primitive (Oppen), 8, 49 “Pro Nobis” (Oppen), 8 “Projective Verse” (Olson), 202, 203, 210n30 Promethean (magazine), 4 prophecy: and madness, 101–102; poet as seer, 53, 101–102, 200–201 prose and the prosaic: abstraction as reaction to encroachment of prose, 38; Bronk and, 20–21, 108–109, 126, 156, 176; as encroaching on poetry, 38, 126; Oppen’s use of, 86–88 prosody: Bronk’s, 20–21, 107–11, 118, 124–25, 126, 129–32, 140–41, 151, 158, 160, 161, 165–67; deceleration, 42; as “protection” of poetry, 126 Proust, Marcel, 147 “Psalm” (Celan), 184, 189–90 “Psalm” (Oppen), 6, 10, 25, 92, 181, 184–90 Psalms, 184–87 Purgatorio (Dante), 182 quietism, 97, 139 quotation: pseudoquotation in Oppen’s works, 64–65; self-quotation in Oppen’s works, 7, 32, 36, 37–38, 40– 42, 60, 71, 100–101. See also allusion Rakosi, Carl, 1 “Rational Expression” (Bronk), 172 “The Real World” (Bronk), 153–54 reality: as beyond sensory experience, 152–54, 159–60; boredom as revelatory of, 61, 102; as cherished or worthy of, 29–31; death linked to, 17–18, 134–35; decentering and subjectivity

Sagetrieb (journal), 5 San Francisco Review (journal), 11 Schreiber, Maeera, 211n7

index 239

science, 157–60, 208n10 Scroggins, Mark, 209n25 Seascape: Needle’s Eye (Oppen), 8 self-quotation, 7, 32, 36, 37–38, 40–42, 60, 71, 100–101 “The Sense of Passage” (Bronk), 33, 147–49 sequence poems, 6, 7–8; contexts for emergence of, 27; recurrence of tropes in, 8–9, 16, 30, 36, 37–38, 60 sexuality, 75, 122–23 Shakespeare, William: Bronk as influenced by, 1, 145, 146–47, 164–65; Oppen as influenced by, 40; Oppen’s allusions to Hamlet, 15, 57, 64, 67 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 174, 203–206 shipwreck imagery, 47–50, 52–55, 71, 88–89, 200 “The Signification” (Bronk), 156 silence: Oppen’s during involvement with Communist party, 7, 38, 39, 50, 65, 195; Oppen’s use of, 74–75, 193, 212n19; as response to truth, 74–75, 154–56 Silence and Metaphor (Bronk), 145, 154–55, 175 sincerity, 25–29 skepticism: agnosticism of Oppen, 85–86; Bronk and, 2, 3, 11, 22, 32, 126, 127, 151, 158; crisis of modernity and, 14; disjunctive poetics and skepticism about language, 24; Oppen and, 3, 24, 29–30, 32, 37, 72–73, 100 “The Snowman” (Stevens), 115–16, 118 Socrates, 162 solipsism: Bronk’s philosophical position as distinct from, 122; Oppen as concerned with, 11, 15, 22–23, 209n21 sonnets, 109–12 Stark, Bradford, 4 stars, 127 “statement language,” 147 Steiner, George, 189–90 Stevens, Wallace, 2, 50, 52, 144, 174, 206;

Bronk and, 115–19, 125, 146, 218n29; “The Snowman,” 115–16, 118; “Sunday Morning,” 118, 125, 218n29 “The Story in It” (James), 60–61 subjectivity: and decentering in Bronk’s works, 112, 135–37; Oppen and, 7, 30; Other and, 23; subjective reality as evasion of truth, 17–18, 22, 23, 102–103, 160 sublimity, 53–54; beauty and, 129–30, 133; in Bronk’s works, 112–13, 125–33; emotional intensity and, 206 “Sunday Morning” (Stevens), 118, 125, 218n29 Symbolism, 28, 36–37, 39, 89, 201–203 “Symbolist and Immanentist Modes of Poetic Thought” (Altieri), 201–203 Symposium (Plato), 129, 174 Taggart, John, 108–10, 117–18 “The Tell” (Bronk), 160–62, 167 temporality, 58–64 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 14 “Tenochtitlan” (Bronk), 129–30 That Tantalus (Bronk), 132, 133, 140–45, 175 theology. See religion and theology This in Which (Oppen), 6, 7–8, 30, 69, 181, 184, 188 Thoreau, Henry David, 1, 123 “Tintern Abbey” (Wordsworth), 92, 165–66, 174–75, 202 “To Elsie” (Williams), 79 To Praise the Music (Bronk), 33, 108– 109, 133, 145, 147, 153, 164, 175, 176 “To the Poets: To Make Much of Life” (Oppen), 69 transcendence: Bronk and, 32–33, 114, 116–17, 126–27, 133, 135, 137–39, 168, 178; Oppen and, 59–60, 92, 188 transparency: language as filter or distortion, 24, 29–30; in Objectivism, 27–28; in Oppen’s works, 43–45. See also clarity

index 240

of seeing, 30; physical vision, 200. See also blindness; poetic vision

truth: allegory as to means to approach, 128; art’s relationship with, 162; beauty and, 93–94, 96; Bronk and, 110, 119–21, 126–27, 128, 140–43; clarity and Oppen’s construction of, 24, 27, 31–32, 93–94, 199–200; as conditional, 199; the false as paradoxically, 171; futility of human efforts to attain, 119–21, 162; Heraclitean flux and dynamic nature of, 46–47; as inexpressible, 140–41; infiniteness and, 24–25; narrative as false and unable to convey, 110, 142–43; Oppen and, 24–26, 27, 31, 92–94, 185–86, 188, 199; poetic vision and, 87–88; reality as subjective construct, 17–18, 22, 23, 29–30, 149–50; relativism and, 39, 126–27; silence and, 74–75, 154–56; sincerity in Objectivist theory, 25–26, 28–29; subjective reality as evasion of, 17–18, 22, 23, 102–103, 160; truthfulness as alternative to, 24–26, 25–26, 93–94 “Truth as a Far Country; as a Piteous Ogre” (Bronk), 128 Turner, J. M. W., 53

Wakoski, Diane, 213n32 “The Wants of Life” (Bronk), 168 war: in Oppen’s works, 63–65; toy soldier image in Bronk’s works, 120–21; Vietnam war, 70–71; World War II, 54 “The Wasteland” (Eliot), 22, 68–69 “We Want the Mark of Time” (Bronk), 123–24 Weil, James, 132 “Western Wind,” 203–204 “What Are Poets For?” (Heidegger), 101 Whitman, Walt, 1; quoted in Oppen’s works, 105 Williams, William Carlos, 1, 2, 21, 27, 28, 39, 62, 119, 208n17; Oppen and, 79, 212n13 witness, 33, 34, 41, 104 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 51–52, 67, 99, 100, 154–55 “The Woods, New York” (Bronk), 111–12 word play: Bronk and, 116, 128–29, 144– 45, 152, 158; Oppen and, 48, 70, 95–96 Wordsworth, William, 15, 21, 30–31, 92, 165–66, 174–75, 177, 195–96, 202–203, 222n3 “World, Worldó” (Oppen), 9 The World, the Worldless (Bronk), 3, 11, 32, 125–26, 130, 152–53, 175 “The World” (Bronk), 12, 163–64, 167, 172 “The World” (Vaughan), 127, 163–64 World War II, 54

Un Coup de dés (Mallarmé), 53 underworld, 31, 62, 68–69 “Unsatisfied Desire” (Bronk), 172–75, 176 untitled works by Bronk, 155–57, 162 vacuity, 100 Valéry, Paul, 107, 112 Vaughan, Henry, 127, 163–64 Vietnam War, 70–71 Virgil, 182–83 “Virgin and Child with Music and Numbers” (Bronk), 32 vision: illumination and the possibility

Yeats, William Butler, 145, 193 Zukofsky, Louis, 1, 3–4, 11–12, 25–26, 32, 200, 201

index 241