Poetics of Place: The Poetry of Ralph Gustafson 9780773562752

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Unauthorized Words
2 The Contradictory Lens
3 The Concentric Poet
4 Toward Plain Statement
5 To Give Intuition a Certitude
6 Earthly Music
Conclusion: Winter Prophecies
Notes
Works Cited
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
R
S
T
V
W
Y

Citation preview

A Poetics of Place

Ralph Gustafson. New York, 1950.

A Poetics of Place The Poetry of Ralph Gustafson DERMOT MCCARTHY

McGill-Queen's University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo

McGill-Queen's University Press 1991 ISBN 0-7735-0815-5

Legal deposit 1st quarter 1991 Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data McCarthy, Dermot A poetics of place : the poetry of Ralph Gustafson Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-7735-08 15-5

1. Gustafson, Ralph, 1909— — Criticism and interpretation, I. Title. ps8513.u7z77 1991 c811'.52 090-090453-4 PR9199-3-c88z77 1991

This book was set in Baskerville 10/12 by Caractera inc., Quebec City. Copyright page continues on page 323

For my father, who taught me

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Abbreviations Introduction

xi 3

1 Unauthorized Words 12 2 The Contradictory Lens

39

3 The Concentric Poet 87 4 Toward Plain Statement

133

5 To Give Intuition a Certitude

177

6 Earthly Music 229 Conclusion: Winter Prophecies Notes

279

Works Cited Index

319

311

262

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Acknowledgements

All quotations from the published works, unpublished papers, and correspondence of Ralph Gustafson appear with the permission of the author. For this, and for his full cooperation during the writing of the book, I am sincerely grateful. I would also like to thank the archivists at the Queen's University Archives and the University of Saskatchewan Library. I am grateful to Huron College for a sabbatical leave which gave me the time to begin this book and for a grant which helped during the early stages of the research. Parts of chapters 2 and 3 appeared in "Ralph Gustafson," Canadian Writers and Their Work, vol. 6 (Poetry), ed. George Woodcock (Toronto: ECW 1989), and in "The Concentric Poet: Ralph Gustafson's Rocky Mountain Poems" Poetry Canada Review 7, no. 4 (1986): 3-4, 8 and are reprinted with permission. My greatest debt of gratitude is to my wife, Jacques, who bore with my labours amidst her own.

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Abbreviations

Corners in the Glass (1977) Conflicts of Spring (1981) Directives of Autumn (1984) Flight into Darkness (1944) Fire on Stone (1974) Gradations of Grandeur (1982) Impromptus (1984) Ixion's Wheel (1969) Landscape with Rain (1980) "New World Northern: Of Poetry and Identity" (1980) PC Poetry and Canada (1945) Queen's The Ralph Gustafson Papers, Queen's University Archives, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario RAR Rivers among Rocks (1960) RMP Rocky Mountain Poems (1960) S Sequences (1979) Saskatchewan The Ralph Gustafson Collection, University of Saskatchewan Library, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan SH Sift in an Hourglass (1966) SI "The Sensuous Imagery of Shelley and Keats" (1930) TGC The Golden Chalice (1935) TVSB Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass (1972) WP Winter Prophecies (1987) CIG COS DOA FID FOS GG I IW LWR NWN

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A Poetics of Place

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Introduction

Both Ralph Gustafsoris earliest and his most recent poems are rooted in his place of origins, the Eastern Townships of Quebec. While he recognizes the oracular powers of the local, however, Gustafson also knows that "there comes a time when you've got to transcend the village pump."1 Gustafson is a much-travelled poet, but he has never transcended his origins in an escapist sense; in his view, transcendence of any kind is a temptation to which the poet should never succumb. Gustafson's appreciation of the local is a distinguishing feature of his genius. The intensity with which he encounters and responds to his immediate world, be it in Canada or abroad, is a passionate acknowledgment and valuing of its details, and, at the same time, a constant interrogation of them. The fullness of life, what Gustafson calls its "grandeur," is never enjoyed uncritically. In his poetry, we always attend a whole man speaking, in a speech that enacts wary celebration rather than weary cerebration. In 1979, Gustafson told Damien Pettigrew: "I've reached the conviction that an artist acquires a style which is concentric with his own personality, his knowledge and the instincts he was born with." He then qualified this view: "Personality in poetry is fine but there should be something projected beyond the personal element — a comprehension of the world."2 Travel, for Gustafson, has resulted not only in a rich body of work but also in a viewpoint which sees the local both in itself and as part of a rich network of association and memory. His sensitivity to where he is and to how time infiltrates and colours that awareness marks his best work. For him, the poetic moment is the felt presence of the powers in things — in air, light, shape, sound; in the smell and touch of things. Fifty-two years separate the publication of The Golden Chalice (1935), Gustafson's first book, and the first volume of his Collected

4 Introduction Works (1987). During that period, he has published more than two dozen volumes of poetry and has passed from youth to maturity, from apprentice to master, as have other long-lived poets. But what distinguishes Gustafson is that his maturity itself has passed through several phases. The distance Gustafson has travelled in his long career is evident if we juxtapose an early with a recent poem. "Quiet" appeared in his first book: The tumbled hills lie smooth with evening sleep; Vast twilights down the darkening valley drowse, Where solitude and empty silence rouse Wide murmurs, where far streams through shadow creep. Like pearls unstrung upon the hills, stray sheep From distant folds with lazy motion browse; And lost winds wander through the weary boughs Of trees near slopes with loneliness asleep. So dreams calm beauty in this quiet mood, Invests all motion with natural peace Of soft contentment; here, no thoughts intrude Of cloying opposition; none release The stuff of thick desires; here only brood Those breaths that bid the soul's mad rhythms cease.3 The most that can be said for this is that it is a competent if lifeless exercise of its kind. Despite its title, the poem is really a kind of literary noise - a collection of cliches and techniques, echoes and allusions, all of which are "poetic," but not poetry. Gustafson manages the requirements of the Italian sonnet form with little difficulty, but the poem remains a pallid romantic emblem, a stock stimulus for stock feelings. The landscape is intended to evoke "peace" and "contentment," but it is a purely literary landscape and a purely literary peace.4 The poem is an apprentice exercise. The hills may be Housman's and the valleys Meredith's; the sheep have probably strayed from Gray's country churchyard and the opposition between calm in nature and madness in the soul, between the "cloying opposition" of thoughts and the "soft contentment" of the landscape, would seem to derive from Keats, Tennyson, and Arnold - and from Lampman, of course, whose "April," "Heat," and "Among the Timothy" seem responsible for much of the imagery and most of the thought in the poem. (Lampman the sonneteer may also have inspired the choice of form.) But while "Quiet" is a patchwork of British and Canadian poeticisms, it also announces talents and concerns which eventually char-

5

Introduction

acterize Gustafson's mature work — as is evident when we turn to "A Slight Wind and White Flowers," from Conflicts of Spring (1981): The slightest wind moved the white wave Of saxifrage - the five-petal flower That tumbles stone walls, destruction that likes Spring. A bee clung and swung a stem of it, The wind not the only mover, teeming Propagation was also, Thigh-carried pollen. The sequence Only needed death in it To complete all topics possible To be thought of. But death wasn't In it this time, the afternoon Was too forgetful, sun on rockfoil, The bee at work, termination something That could take care of itself. Small Wars were on elsewhere but here were acts Without man in them — except that someone

Has to be around to make the act of perceiving. Luck had it that ambition wasn't around, Only life teeming and a day for it, Not to die in but to accomplish Divine events, acrobatics on stems, A slight wind and white flowers.5

The title announces a poem attentive to particulars, and yet there is also mystery, slightly suggestive of the numinous, in the combination of moving wind and fixed flowers. The slightness of wind should not be mistaken for the diffuseness of the earlier imagery; it is indicative of a sensitivity to gradations of sensory stimulus that the sonneteer lacked or was incapable of notadng. Sound still supports imagery, but the talent is more confident. This is the work of a poet sure of his voice rather than of an apprentice anxiously forcing its discovery. The alliterated w's accentuate the wavelike rhythm of the opening line, which crests with the final spondee. The s in "saxifrage" rounds back to "slightest," with sound aiding the enjambment, and the / introducing the next alliterative pattern. This poet looks closely at his subject — "the five-petal flower" — with perception attended by association and contemplation. The poem seems to grow into its form, instead of being forced into it. It only seems to do so, of course; the object here is to achieve a form which simulates "the act of perceiving" or what he elsewhere describes as the "instant of cognition."6

6 Introduction So the form plots a tension between perception and contemplation, sense and mind. This tension ebbs and flows rhythmically, from the initial perception of the wind and moving flowers to the revision of that perception in the final lines. In the meantime, the naturalistic observation of the saxifrage as the flower that "tumbles stonewalls" ushers in thoughts of destruction during a season of building. The bee appears, quite appropriately, going about its springtime business of hive-building and propagation, but its position on the swaying stem situates its efforts in a larger context - a context as ominous as it is wonderful. The bee clings and swings from the flower swayed by the wind, a slight but nevertheless perceptible reminder of the world of process and the laws of mutability which affect all builders and propagators — bees and poets alike. This is a world of movers and shakers, of winds of war and change, and of natural breezes. The moment needed only death to complete its inscape. The irony is that death is present, even though the poet puts it elsewhere. Attention to particulars can summon the larger world or hold it at bay. In Gustafson's lyric it does both, and the resulting tension is characteristic of his mature technique as well as of his vision. Sense and intellect, nature and man, the small local now and the larger world of contemporary politics, life and death, building and destruction, the banal and the glorious - all sway in delicate balance here. This is because Gustafson's form is tensile, elastic. Note how the low-key yet dramatic music of the fourth line, with its caesura and short but strong syllables, gives way to the romantic strain of the fifth (echoes of Shelley's west wind?), which in turn falls into a noisier, more 'modern' business in lines 5—7. Then this conglomerate orchestra is suddenly silenced for the conductor to announce, in the clumsiest of prose voices: "The sequence / Only needed death in it / To complete all topics possible / To be thought of." This shift to the prosaic is quite masterful. In "New World Northern: Of Poetry and Identity," Gustafson writes: "A poem cannot be left without its contexture of prose. ... The world is more than poetry. The value is the interplay between what the world is and what the poetry of the world is that insists on the tension."7 In "A Slight Wind and White Flowers," the drama erupts in the tension between the lyrical impulse generated by the perceiving self and the prosaic context provided by intellect, the thought of death. Tension is a fundamental aspect of Gustafson's technique - from the level of sound and diction, through rhythm and imagery, up to considerations of structure and form — and the poetic-prosaic tension within poetry is simply an expression of deeper contraries in his vision of human experience. Another tension in the poem is that between the poem itself and

7 Introduction its subject. Death was not present in the original moment, the poet says. Death is present, however, in the recreation or recollection of that moment by the poem. Indeed, death is active in the very tensions which make the poem so vital. The poem is made of poetic and prosaic contraries just as consciousness is composed of joy and sorrow, reason and unreason, beauty and squalor, life and death. The poem enacts this by establishing a contrary relation to its subject-occasion. The poem is both the "moment-then," the poet's original experience of "life teeming and a day for it, / Not to die in but to accomplish / Divine events, acrobatics on stems," and the "moment-now," or the "moment-then" recollected. The "moment-then" is thus systole to the poem's dilation; as Gustafson says, "poetry becomes what it releases meaning from" (NWN, 55). The poem completes its subject's occasion by revising it, by "reseeing" it in a way that discloses its fullness. This is all the more fascinating when we recognize that death invades the world of the poem with the poet himself, and so is not an invasion so much as a recognition of what was already present but unrecognized in the original moment. The turn toward death in the middle of the poem is the poem's disclosure of what the original image concealed or carried within it. The life-force signified in the growing saxifrage is a destructive force when the flower roots in stone walls. The afternoon may have been "too forgetful," but the poet remembers. Death is there with the poet self-consciously perceiving. Much as he attempts simply to witness the moment in the garden as a humble perceiver of events, he cannot avoid releasing ambitious death into the proceedings: "here were acts / Without man in them," he writes, "except that someone / Has to be around to make the act of perceiving." That exception is a paradise lost and found. "A Slight Wind and White Flowers" is anything but a slight lyric. I read it as an example of that "disclosure through description" which Charles Altieri has discussed as a goal of postmodernist poetry.8 The self-consciousness in this poem is ultimately ironic, a simultaneous presence and absence. It does not move toward a traditional modernist position of authority. The voice is as light and as playful as the wind itself, and situates itself amid the manifold world of flowers, bees, stone walls, small wars, and divine events. Gustafson resists the symbolic as much as he teases the immanent. In its humble but charged attention to particulars, in its intuition of the numinous, in its accuracy in gradations of sensation and response, in its shaping of itself to "the act of perceiving," in the flow of consciousness from sensation to association, and in its movement from self-consciousness through self-reflection to self-discovery, "A Slight Wind and White Flowers" expresses what I consider to be a postmodernist stance. The

8 Introduction

major irony in the poem is its palpable fraudulence as artifice, intention passing itself off as accident: "Luck had it that ambition wasn't around" —just a poet. "[Termination [was] something / That could take care of itself," but this very informal-seeming poem ends with a most formal elegance, the last line echoing the first with a significantly dying fall. The poem is straightforward but it does not indulge in what George Bowering has described as the "mystique of straight talk."9 In "Quiet," Gustafson's mask strains to countenance a nature that is oblique to human will, and the result is an exchange between the poet and nature which leaves the poet outside the world to which he seeks entry; a verbal world arises as a limited alternative. But in "A Slight Wind and White Flowers," poet, poem, and world are more fully interactive, if only in the act of resisting the others' propensity for absorption. There is continuity, however, between the romantic landscape of 1935 and the minimal ground of being and art in 1981. The imitative musician has become the master of counterpoint and personal harmonies, but the sensibility is still essentially romantic, obsessed with the moment's content and its disclosures. The voice, however, is craftier, and the vision subtler, richer. There is a certainty in the cunning that knows precisely how far that cunning can be trusted. The continuity is a matter of Gustafson's sensibility — the values, concerns, and perspective on life and art which have not changed essentially from the i ggos. The growth that extends this continuity derives from his life-experience and his continuous perfecting of craft; the latter bespeaks his profound commitment to the art of poetry, a commitment which itself expresses the moral and pragmatic nature of his sensibility. It is the immanentist predilection of this sensibility which provides Gustafson's poetry with its continuity through every stage in his development. His reading of Keats and Shelley as an undergraduate at Bishops in the late igaos brought that dimension to the fore early in his creative life. This reading of the great Romantics reinforced another dimension of his sensibility, his attraction to what he called the poetry of "vision" and the desire for transcendence. The coexistence of immanentist and transcendent impulses in his sensibility is what provides Gustafson with what I have called his contradictory perspective. It results in his poetry early on developing techniques of irony, and most of all, counterpoint. The latter should be considered more than a poetic technique, however: it is his vision. "Mythos," iri Flight into Darkness (1944), is a major expression of this contradictory perspective and was a turning-point in Gustafson's self-modernization during the 19305 and 19405; its image of man in a maze

9 Introduction

prefigures what I call the concentric stance of his later poetry. His first major modernist poem thus already contains its postmodernist supersession. Gustafson the romantic became a modernist during these years, but, as his essay Poetry and Canada (1945) shows, his poetic was a synthesis of romantic and modernist principles. That essay also contains Gustafson's crucial argument for the importance of the poet to national and cultural identity, and of the relation between poetry and self-identity to the poet. These latter concerns prevented his subscription to a full-fledged modernism, a poetic which he explicitly rejected in the late 19405. The retrospective Rivers among Rocks (\ 960) is the high-water mark of Gustafson's modernist phase. His other 1960 volume, Rocky Mountain Poems, is the dramatic turning-point volume. It is in this poem-sequence that Gustafson begins to assume his concentric stance and to turn toward his version of a postmodernist poetry. The argument between immanence and transcendence continues, but with the complex notion of grandeur that emerges in Rocky Mountain Poems, a creative compromise is struck. It is not until Fire on Stone (1974), however, that Gustafson begins to consolidate his later perspective. In that volume, "To Give Intuition a Certitude" is a major achievement in this regard. With the volumes of the 19705 and igSos which have followed, he has settled into his distinctive late voice and the latest style of his maturity. I have written this book because I believe Ralph Gustafson is a major Canadian poet of the twentieth century. I came to this judgment gradually. At first, I was struck by the achievement of individual poems like "Mythos," "Legend," "At the Ocean's Verge," "The Disquisition," "Ariobarzanes," "Or Consider Lilacs," "Aspects of a Cut Peach," "Hunter's Moon," and others. Then I realized that the number of poems of such calibre made his achievement at least equal to, if not greater than, that of many of the poets of his generation and certainly of those junior to him who have received much more recognition. The inequity here, I believe, is due to two factors: Gustafson has not managed his career as successfully as Layton, Dudek, Purdy, or Kroetsch; and he has never been a joiner — despite his charter membership in the League of Canadian Poets. He has never benefited from membership in a coterie. Unlike Bowering, Davey, Ondaatje, Kroetsch, Wah, Dewdney and such, Gustafson does not belong to a busy Department of Poetry, whose members review, explicate, preface, praise, and otherwise boost their own and each other's works, generating a support system out of all proportion to the body of writing it sustains and keeps before the public eye. Gustafson's achievement has been a quiet, continuous accretion of singular successes over a half-century of constant toil, to the point

io Introduction that by the igSos, in my view, he is the author of a score of major poems, and in Rocky Mountain Poems (1960) of a volume of great importance for modern Canadian poetry. Consequently, in this study I want to stress Gustafson's personal growth and individual maturation as a poet, as well as the literary-historical significance of that achievement in relation to the development of modern Canadian poetry. My critical approach is that of a biographically and historically tempered close reading. I am most concerned with the dynamics of expression — with an attempt to use criticism to show how this poet's craft is both his medium of expression and his means of discovery; how his craft is the confirmation of his knowledge and his knowledge the confirmation of his craft. From beginning to end in Gustafson's poetry, contradiction and ambiguity seem to be the empowering preconditions of poetic utterance, the dynamism that charges poetic form. Rhythm and form, furthermore, come to embody the interaction and interpenetration of the self and the world outside it. Form is the equilibrium between the expressive self and the circumambient universe - moral in its performative effect of expressing both a charged humility before the magnificence of the world and a vociferous judgment of the horrors of human error. In his mature work, poetic form becomes, for Gustafson, a form of selfmanagement. To these ends, I have used extensively both the poet's correspondence and the manuscript versions of his poems. The latter in particular are instrumental in my argument that Gustafson's approach to style has always been pragmatic and that in Rocky Mountain Poems he evolves a postmodernist perspective toward the relation between man and the world and poetry and experience. Also in Rocky Mountain Poems, Gustafson gives expression to what he later calls his sense of "new world northern," a mythopoeia which needs to be understood in the context of the reorientation to place and the imaginative inhabiting of the northern landscape which has dominated Canadian poetry in this century. For me, Gustafson is first and foremost a consummate craftsman with very few equals among his generation. I also believe that to study Gustafson the craftsman is to study the whole man. In Bowering's terms, his mask becomes him.10 I want to resist as much as possible the predilection in Canadian criticism to organize a writer's work into thematic parables. Poems are not theme-machines; their matter cannot be abstracted from their manner without a destructive simplification of their being. Gustafson has his themes, a core of concerns or obsessions, a complex of views, values, fears, and desires which recur in his life's work. But at any given time, in any given poem, the

11 Introduction view, value, thought, or feeling is bound up with the pressures and weather of the creative moment. The wilful exploration, the accidental discoveries of composition, the complicated combination of habitual and original process, tried and true method with sudden and truer risk - these, eventually, are beyond summary and all but the most superficial description. Moreover, a theme is simply a concern, a field of thought and feeling constantly open to invasion and excursion. In the poem, the thought and feeling are alive, on the move, elusive; only in criticism do poems become inert reservoirs of suspended thematic matter. My words, I hope, will move the reader to attend more to the poet's. As critic, I do not aspire to be the master of another man's ceremonies.

CHAPTER ONE

Unauthorized Words The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thick-sighted: thence proceeds mawkishness ... Keats, Preface to Endymion (1818)

In Gustafson's earliest poetry, the relation between style and sensibility is already evident. This relation can best be described as pragmatic and processive. Throughout his career, style serves sensibility. As sensibility develops and matures, the poetic style changes accordingly, until ultimately, in his most recent poetry, the processes of expression and the expression of process are one and the same. In his master's thesis at Bishop's, "The Sensuous Imagery of Shelley and Keats," Gustafson gives prose expression to the romantic sensibility that he attempts to articulate poetically in his first volume, The Golden Chalice (1935)- This early prose work is important for understanding his earliest poetry. In his praise of Keats's concept of negative capability and in his understanding of what he calls the "sensuous imagination," Gustafson first reveals the immanentist predilections of his sensibility, a predilection which remains constant throughout the various phases and styles of his career. A reading of The Golden Chalice reveals that, in his earliest work, Gustafson's admiration for the Romantic masters stifled his natural talents as much as it enabled important elements in his sensibility to find expression through adopting their masks. His experience in England during the 19305, however, brought an abrupt end to this first phase of his apprenticeship. After two of his poems were rejected by Geoffrey Grigson, the influential editor of New Verse, Gustafson consciously set about modernizing his poetry, a modernization in which New Verse itself played an important role.

W

hen he arrived in England in 1930, Gustafson was a fairly typical twenty-year-old Canadian, with an MA in English literature, who wanted to be a poet. A modern Canadian poetry was

13 Unauthorized Words

being written by 1930, but, like most Canadians, Gustafson was unaware of it. He had certainly not heard Arthur Stringer's plea for free verse in his Preface to Open Water (1914); nor was he aware of the Imagist works of Pound and Aldington, which J.M. Gibbon had discussed in The Canadian Bookman in 1919.' And while he was quite familiar with the poet F.O. Call, one of his professors at Bishops, Gustafson was more influenced by Call's devotion to the sonnet form than by his summons to Canadian poets to break with "the old conventions."2 Nor was Gustafson, as an undergraduate at Bishop's, aware that not far to the west of him, A.J.M. Smith, Frank Scott, and Leo Kennedy were using the McGill Fortnightly Review, and afterwards the Canadian Mercury, to achieve what Munro Beattie has described as "the second phase of modernism in Canadian poetry."3 Like most Canadians, Gustafson was not even aware of the first phase — the poetry of Raymond Knister and W.W.E. Ross. As Louis Dudek has argued, there was as yet no sense of a community of modern poets, or for modern poetry, in Canada at this time.4 It was not until the 19405 that poets began to see themselves in generational clusters and to differentiate themselves from older writers, styles, and world-views, and further, to associate in groups or networks around particular magazines with more or less clearly articulated views and standards - magazines like Preview and First Statement. By then, Gustafson had returned to North America and was living in New York, editing anthologies of Canadian poetry and prose for Penguin, New Directions, and the magazine Voices, activities which soon gave him extensive knowledge of contemporary Canadian writing and its achievements, which he could by then judge against his knowledge of contemporary British and American writing. But in the 19308, as Peter Stevens has noted, it was this lack of a "homogeneous community" which distinguished the collective situation of Canadian poets from that of their British counterparts.5 And this feature of the British literary scene must have contributed greatly to Gustafson's culture shock when he arrived in England. In the 19408 Gustafson would establish strong connections with many of these poets — Smith, Scott, and Ross, in particular — but in 1930 he knew nothing of their work. If he had known it, he would have been in a much better position when he arrived at Oxford, for much of the effort of the McGill Group, and of Smith especially, was an attempt to educate the Canadian public about British and American modernism. In 1930 Gustafson was committed, and not unthinkingly, to the kind of poetry that Smith would criticize in his rejected Preface to New Provinces as "romantic in conception and conventional in form."6 The critical movement that had begun with Smith's essays

14 A Poetics of Place

in the McGill Fortnightly Review continued throughout the 19308 in Canada, with Smith "wieldfing] an enormous influence,"7 but at Oxford, Gustafson was not in a position to benefit from any of this, even if he had been favourably disposed to the Montreal Group's views. In England, he was more likely to have encountered Smith the poet than Smith the critic, in the pages of New Verse in 1933 and 1934, when Smith's poems were being accepted by its editor, Geoffrey Grigson, and Gustafson's were being rejected. But even if he had read Smith at this time, and then the modernists Smith praised, Gustafson would not have responded sympathetically; for when the modern world did "impinge" on him in England during the early 19305, it did not result in the kind of poetry Smith valued. Then, Gustafson's disillusionment was that of a disappointed romantic, not that of an ironic modernist. If he had remained in Canada during the early 19305, Gustafson, on the evidence of the kind of poetry he was to publish in his first book, The Golden Chalice (1935), would have easily been absorbed into the romantic-Victorian poetic establishment which dominated the periodicals and anthologies. But when he arrived in England, Gustafson stepped into a vortex of social, political, and literary ferment for which he was not prepared and from which he could not emerge unchanged. It was these years in England which set him on his way to becoming an authentically modern poet. When he arrived in England, Gustafson had already written most of the poems in his first book, and by the end of his first year at Oxford, the manuscript of The Golden Chalice was almost complete.8 But between 1931 and 1935, when the book was finally published, a lot happened to Gustafson: he completed his Oxford BA, returned to Canada to teach for a year in Brockville, and then went back to London. Most important, though, by 1935 he was beginning to read contemporary poetry. As a result of this reading, and because of the events he was living through, Gustafson's outlook on poetry had changed. Thus, while it shows where Gustafson began as a poet, in the period 1929—31, The Golden Chalice does not give an accurate sense of where he was by ig35.9 The poems in The Golden Chalice (1935) tend to run together into a mawkish heap of convention, romantic cliche, and dated posturing, but the spirit that informs them is vital, intense, acerbic, and intelligent. It is a volume of juvenilia, but it would be a mistake to dismiss it out of hand; nor is it sufficient simply to note the skill with which the apprentice poet handles his conventional subjects. The poems reveal a complex poetic sensibility. What needs to be considered is the relation between that sensibility and its choice of poetic style. The

15 Unauthorized Words

latter soon changed in the 19305 - as it would again in the late 19505 and early 19605, and then again in the 19705 and igSos - but Gustafson's sensibility, and by that I mean that dimension of self which provisions both identity and creativity, has remained remarkably consistent throughout his development. It is this sensibility which should concern us most: the spirit that outlasts the poetic fashions it chooses to wear at different times during its various stages of exploration and expression. As these fashions go, Gustafson was already old-fashioned in 1931, but by recognizing what activated Gustafson's predilection for romantic language and traditional poetic forms in his early work, we can begin to trace the spirit that eventually achieves artistic maturity in the later styles.

G

ustafson's master's thesis is an important expression of the poetic sensibility encountered in his first book. The poems of the English Romantics - particularly those of Keats and Shelley - haunt the volume; in fact, the Keats of 'Sleep and Poetry' and Endymion, and the Shelley of Alastor and Prometheus Unbound, evoke in him such a self-conscious sense of his own belatedness as a romantic poet that he is driven to assume a series of unhappily combative postures in the process of trying to assert his own individuality.10 The thesis makes his poetic stance quite clear. He is, with Keats, a Worshipper of Beauty, and with Shelley, a Seeker of Unity. From his reading of Keats, Gustafson saw poetry as the celebration of beauty in the world through its evocation in sensuous language. Gustafson emphasizes that his Keats is no swooning effeminate, "but rather ... a virile, beauteous spirit, gifted with senses gloriously keen and receptive ... who was interested in humanity, though his poems may not have bemoaned its evils, ills and tragedies ... ."" It is important to recognize in this defence of Keats both the element of guilty, or at least self-conscious, social conscience, and the element of self-justification. Like the early Yeats's image of Spenser and Blake, or Rossetti's of Dante, Gustafson's image of Keats and Shelley is involved in his own self-definition as a poet. He describes them as 'two youths of heavenly genius' (SI, 100) and in The Golden Chalice youth is described repeatedly in terms of virility, passion, strength, and energy, and just as often is defended against age, authority, and fear of passion. This activity of self-definition is barely concealed in Gustafson's description of his hero: Keats is, with Spenser, the poet's poet. His life-long devotion to the "Principle of beauty in all things," his dreamy solitude, his separation from dated soon-

16 A Poetics of Place forgotten occurrences, theoretical philosophies, and localities, is perhaps the nearest parallel in English Literature to the ideal existence which we all visualize for a poet. (SI, i)

His discussion of Shelley is similarly double-purposed, but Shelley's role in Gustafson's self-definition is more ambiguous. Like Keats, Shelley "also worshipped a Unity in life, a perfection"; but whereas "with Keats it was never anything but Beauty, with Shelley the ideal takes many names: intellectual beauty, liberty, the spirit in Nature. But in the end it generally takes the name of love - a universal love that permeates all things of value" (SI, 6). Shelley the thinker, the allegorical preacher responsible for "the dreary wastes of 'The Revolt of Islam'" (SI, 9), repulses Gustafson. In his view, the "Superior Shelley" is the poet who "did not prostrate his art to unpoetic uses" (SI, 9). While Keats, through his sensuous imagery, continually evokes the beauty dwelling in all things, "The sensuous image in Shelley seems, with some exception, only present when the genuine poetic instinct has overmastered the intellectual idealizing" (SI, 17). Ironically, within a decade, Gustafson himself would be sharply criticized for the intellectual obscurity of his poetry; but in 1930 he is quite dogmatic: "Poetry is the rhythmic and musical expression of beauty in words," and the image is the paramount vehicle for achieving this expression (SI, 11). Gustafson's description of Keats's and Shelley's imagery does not reveal any very deep or sophisticated critical thinking about these poets, but the way in which Gustafson treats the poetic image does reveal an attraction to an immanentist perspective and value at the very outset of his career. In the thesis he emphasizes that the reader of Keats and Shelley must remember "the inclusive principle of which the [sensuous] image was ... example" (SI, 6—7). This "inclusive principle" is Keats's "Principle of beauty in all things" and Shelley's principle of Unity. In Gustafson's view, Keats saw beauty immanent in things and the poetic imagination makes this beauty manifest: "[Keats] worshipped beauty — a beauty made 'visible, audible, tangible' through the sensuous imagination of the mind" (SI, 5). By "the sensuous imagination" Gustafson seems to mean that mental activity which liberates, reveals, and expresses this world of immanence in verbal music. He quotes A.C. Bradle/s gloss of Keats's phrase "Beauty is truth, truth beauty": These two are apprehended in different ways: beauty in or through sense and imagination, truth in or by thought, knowledge or philosophy. But the two are none the less one and the same; so whatever is felt and imagined as

17 Unauthorized Words beautiful, if adequately expressed in intellectual form, will be found a reality truly conceived; and truth adequately transformed into the shape of sensation or imagination would have turned into beauty. (SI, 5)'*

What appeals to Gustafson is the synthesis of apparent discords that Bradley argues can be found in Keats's perspective. Gustafson then follows Bradleys rhetoric with his own significantly theological image of Keatsian unity: "Truth, beauty, power was his co-equal trinity" (SI, 5). Already, for Gustafson, the power of the poetic image derives both from its semiotic and sensual properties. The word is both sign and thing-in-itself. Further, Gustafson approves of Keats's notion of negative capability because this allows that which is in the world to come forth undisturbed by the ego of the artist: "The imagery of Keats is concrete, vivid, quiescent, impersonal, and always sensuous" (SI, 14). Unlike the impressionistic Shelley, Keats looks more closely at things. Motion and evanescence characterize Shelley's sensuous imagery, because Shelley's imaginative energy tends to use sensory experience as a springboard for his celebration of the "universal love that permeates all things of value" (SI, 6). Gustafson distrusts this intrusion of transcendence in Shelley. In Keats's poetry, "His beauty exists in itself (SI, 14). This immanentist element in Gustafson's sensibility is important and it is important that we recognize its existence this early in his thinking about poetry. Along with his distrust of transcendence and his approval of negative capability, it situates Gustafson as a romantic sensibility in the Wordsworthian rather than the Coleridgean tradition, as an immanentist sensibility rather than a symbolist. There are elements of contradiction: the theological image he uses to describe Keats's synthesis of truth, beauty, and power and the attraction of a Coleridgean concordia discors achieved by virtue of a quasi-sacramental imagination suggest the symbolist procedures of the Coleridgean tradition, and consequently, some of the strategies of high Modernism. These are contradictory elements which remain in Gustafson's sensibility, however, and to a certain extent explain some of its fundamental tensions. From the outset of his career, Gustafson gauges both streams in the romantic tradition, constantly testing and contemplating, but never, it seems, fully committing himself to either. He is most attracted, by virtue of temperament and perceptual abilities, to Wordsworthian involvement in the sensory particulars of the objective world, and to a descriptive-contemplative poetry authenticated by close experience. But he is also attracted, by virtue of his intellectual powers and philosophical-religious nature, to the Coleridgean procedures of the totalizing imagination, whereby the Many resolves into the One,

18 A Poetics of Place and harmony is achieved between man and the world through the acts of the creative imagination. Even in his modernist phase the tensions remain, and Gustafson resists the temptation to impose structure on the flux of experience. There is no greater evidence of this tension, on the level of technique, than his approach to poetic rhythm and language. With respect to the latter, his sense of the word as both sign/symbol and sensory object often results in a poetic style which literally embodies the argument within the self between immanentist and symbolist impulses. Gustafson's own sensuous imagery is a hallmark of his poetry in all its stages and is a continuous testimony to his immanentist stance; and yet, particularly in his modernist phase, there often seems a power struggle going on between intellect and sensuality in the poetry, often with unfortunate results.13

G

ustafson's undergraduate reading of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Lampman fed his ambition to be a poet, but also bred an insecurity commensurate with that desire. As often as the poet of The Golden Chalice proudly proclaims his youth, his self-consciousness betrays his vulnerability. The imagery of passion, vigour, sincerity, and strength is as much a strategic compensation for this insecurity as it is an amalgam of late nineteenth-century romantic cliches. The aggressive defence of Love and Beauty as values the modern world no longer credits is also a potent self-defence.14 Shelley's Prometheus provides Gustafson with a suitable mask, considering his needs in these poems. It permits the vulnerable youth to project his fears against a tyrannical "Age" - both in the sense of an authoritative maturity which he lacks, and of an era ignorant and indifferent to his merits. But while it presents him as "Titanic" and possessing "Ambition with an Olympian disdain" (TGC, 84), the Promethean mask is mostly bluster and blinds Gustafson to his strengths more than it helps him to define them. The poems of The Golden Chalice do not show a poet-youth "careless of staid rules / And cautious custom" (TGC, 73); quite the contrary, they introduce a poet who wants to impress by performing successfully within the rules and customs of traditional poetic practice; a poet who is ambitious for the notoriety which comes from the mastery, rather than the violation, of these codes. Thus, the violence and excess in much of the language in the volume are a consequence of Gustafson's sensibility being at odds with the imaginative strategy it is adopting. This is not to say that his sensibility was narrowly traditional, staid and formal, but rather that the romantic archetype which seemed so attractive to him was not the vehicle of self-expression he thought it would be.

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Ironically, it hypostatized the self that it seemed to liberate. The "Poet" of Shelley's Alastor was more amenable to Gustafson's early needs and this figure acts as a kind of palliating "half-self to the Promethean extrovert. The exile-wanderer, the perpetually frustrated quester, is a co-presence in Gustafson's poet-lover who tempers Promethean rage with a quieter, more elegiac ennui. But the overall effect in the volume is destructive; the assertions of the one are eroded by the laments of the other. Another reason Gustafson might have been attracted to the "Poet" figure of Alastor and Prometheus as masks is that both articulate the pain of separation and loss, and these experiences seem to speak to something deep in Gustafson's sensibility from the very beginning. The Golden Chalice is dedicated to his mother, and the language of the dedication makes her into a muse-figure: "In Memoriam: / Of Her who first brought Beauty, / My Mother" (TGC, 5). Like Alastor's "fair maiden," Prometheus's Asia, and Endymion's Moon-Goddess, Gustafson's muse is distant, separated from life by death. From the beginning, love, beauty, separation, and loss are conjoined in Gustafson's poetry, and the axes of love and grief, beauty and loss provide the poetry with its emotional coordinates. This is another foundation element in his sensibility — what he would express in later years as his sense of man's being doomed amid magnificence. What tonal coherence there is in The Golden Chalice derives from this sense of the interconnectedness of love and grief, which the title poem, the sequence "Sonnets of Love," and other lyrics express. This aspect of Gustafson's sensibility is also evident in his conflation of Shelley and Boccaccio in the volume. The epigraph on the title page is taken from Prometheus Unbound: How fair these airborn shapes! and yet I feel Most vain all hope but love; and thou art far, Asia! who, when my being overflowed, Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust. (I, 807-11)

Gustafson edits this passage to read: Thou "when my being overflowed Wert like a golden chalice to bright wine Which else had sunk into the thirsty dust."

In effect, this functions as a second dedication as well as an epigraph. Shelley's Prometheus laments his separation from his beloved Asia.

30 A Poetics of Place

Gustafson's "Thou" may be his Asia, the loved and lost woman of the sonnet sequence, or the mother-muse of the formal dedication. The epigraph identifies Shelley's poem as the source of the volume's title and so the first voice that we hear is clearly that of a Promethean persona. However, when we read the title poem, we are with Boccaccio, not Shelley. "The Golden Chalice" is a retelling of Fiammetta's tale from the Fourth Day of narratives in the Decameron. Where Shelley's chalice is a positive image of sexual love, albeit in a context of painful separation, Boccaccio's golden cup contains the heart of the murdered lover and eventually the poison which the heroine, Ghismonda, drinks to end her grief. Suffering, separation, and death figure prominently as the consequences of love in Boccaccio's tale and this distorts somewhat the image in the quotation from Prometheus Unbound. But the Romantic and medieval texts are used to express something basic in Gustafson's sensibility, and it is more than the complaint of passionate youth against the repressive authority of age. It is the intuition, deeply troubling, that the way to freedom is also the way to confusion and loss; that love, the poet's pre-eminent means of grounding an abstract identity in real joy, is often, paradoxically, the human ideal most indifferent to the pleading of the heart and least cooperative with the discipline of the will. Love dominates The Golden Chalice and it would seem to be more than sexual desire or literary mucilage. In "The Sensuous Imagery of Shelley and Keats," Gustafson recognizes that "Love" is Shelley's ultimate name for the ideal unity he sensed in "all things of value" (SI, 6), and Shelley's vision of eros as the cohesive force in man which opposes the evil that would undo him resonates in Gustafson's sensibility; in his early poetry, love expresses Gustafson's desire for coherence and unity in a world of apparent division. But Gustafson also senses love's infection, that it contains its own undoing, and this complication is another aspect of that core of sensibility which is to be found in these early poems. The metaphor of exile expresses this dark intuition in conventional terms and provides the book with its most important poem. "A Poet in Exile" (TGC, 75) is an awkward credo proclaiming the poet's defiance of his times. With its movement from complaint to resolution, and in its tactics of self-definition, it recalls Keats's "Sleep and Poetry." Where Keats criticizes the "dismal soul'd" who were not awake to the beauty around them, the poets whose "themes / Are ugly clubs" (lines 233-234), Gustafson argues that "No overwhelming loves of beauty leave / The squalid ugliness of thought reduced" (TGC, 75). Gustafson's poet is not at home in his world and so finds himself in a state of "strife." But the conflict is also internal, in that the sensibility is not comfort-

21

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able with the posture it has assumed. In their lament for the passing of youthful energy, the opening lines contradict the poem to youth which introduces the volume: The strenuous time of youth, of eager strife For love and beauty, careless of staid rules And cautious custom, free of all that cools The natural and impetuous lust for life, Has passed away. (TGC, 73)

The combination of ambition and anxiety, strain and release, fear and freedom, abstract idealism and physical desire in these lines is indicative of the poetry in the rest of the book. Keats and Shelley haunt the lines and imbue "love and beauty" with both abstract power and solid force, but the echoes of these ancestors also undermine the voice, causing it to speak in "unauthorized images."15 They are "unauthorized" in that the language does not embody the poet-author; it is hollow, and its hollowness is what makes it so echoic. But this is essentially the problem faced by Gustafson in his early poetry. He had to find or make a poetic language he could "authorize," or make authentic with his own presence. In The Golden Chalice, along with Keats and Shelley, Wordsworth, Arnold, Lampman, Tennyson, Rossetti, and a host of others — all congregate in his language for an ambivalent ghosting; they are admired predecessors, but the weight of admiration turns them into incubi and they leave the neophyte's words breathless. Emulation becomes empty gesture, a frantic and frustrated flailing in a sea of cliches.16 In "The Sensuous Imagery of Shelley and Keats" Gustafson rejected thought as a "side-issue" in poetry; in "A Poet in Exile" he rejects modern thought because it is a "slave / To flabby purposes" (TGC, 73). It is "An age of grovelling cynicism" and youth is paralysed. These are hardly original complaints, but the poem does articulate a personal need which, though still conventionally expressed, is actually a deep issue for Gustafson, and one that remains with him for the rest of his career. "Where there is no vision, the people perish" (Proverbs 29:18), and a central complaint in "A Poet in Exile" is that the poet lives in an age without vision. Vision is linked with faith and action by Gustafson, and in this complex of values he broaches some of the central concerns of his artistic and spiritual life, and of his essentially romantic sensibility. "Facts" dominate the modern world, are the currency of "progress"; but though these are the integers of modern value, they do not purchase a life of grace and beauty:

22

A Poetics of Place

Now no vital truths embrace The products that swift progress has unloosed; No vision values what machines achieve, No grandeur of design gives action grace ... (TGC, 75)

For Gustafson, value derives from "vision." The world of objective reality is valueless "If no broad vision bind the universe / To some firm purpose greater than the slew / Of snarling facts" (TGC, 74). Here Gustafson expresses his sense of the division of the world of fact from that of value which Whitehead argued was the core of romantic philosophy." "Facts," "progress," "confusion," and their like are the demonic integers of Gustafsoris romantic nausea. The lack of, or more likely, the indifference to vision in his contemporary civilization; the difficulties of separation, loss, or repression in love; the oppression of youth by age and convention - all these result in a sense of alienation in which the poet-youth feels he does not belong to his society, does not have a vital role to play in its life. The modern age does not credit the visionary poet; instead, it enforces a lower order of poetic aspiration. Realism, the age's artistic absolute, and Science, its absolute arbiter of knowledge, have either silenced or perverted a vital need and sacred trust. The trust is the poet's, the need both his own and mankind's. The poet needs his culture to recognize the value of visionary work, while the society needs such art to guide, explain, and validate its movement through history. By devaluing the poetry of vision in its artistic economy, society has made the visionary poet the poorest of the poor, and visionary poems worthless notes. For the young poet with romantic aspirations of personal achievement and cultural worth, this deprivation is a paralysing blow to his self-worth and artistic ambitions. For Gustafson at this time, vision is that act of imagination which brings coherence to the world, which gives purpose to action and meaning to experience; as such, it derives from his understanding of Shelley's "universal love that permeates all things of value." It allows faith to bridge the abyss of fact and the individual to maintain an identity distinct from the mass: No broad Miltonian faith now burns or fires A heart with music and immortal hate; Directs the steadfast will with stern control Despite the fell intent of circumstance, The opposites of single minds of state. (TGC, 74)

23 Unauthorized Words

Vision provides things, facts, with value for Gustafson, and as such it also derives conceptually from his understanding of Keats's "Principle of beauty in all things." Also, like Shelley's universal, Gustafson's "vision" makes the many into one, and it is through the effort of vision that confusion gives way to order. In his apparent need for "facts" to be subservient to vision, at this time, in his fear of "confusion," and in his repugnance at the nihilism which a life without vision seems to incur, Gustafson seems to contradict his valuation of Keats's negative capability: A million facts are spawned upon the earth By patient pedants, scientific brows, That isolated wear a potent worth, But unsubservient, can but arouse Confusion. (TGC, 75)

In so far as he yearns for human life to be meaningful and significant, and in so far as his poetry posits, tests, and questions such meaning and significance, Gustafson is attracted to, if not exactly allied with, the Coleridgean tradition of romanticism which "emphasizes the creative role of human consciousness as a force that actively transforms the flux of human experiences into coherent perceptual and axiological structures."18 But there is an equal amount of scepticism in Gustafson, which prevents his subscription to symbolist practices and principles. In particular, when he encounters the Coleridgean tradition in the New Criticism of the 19305 and 19405, he rejects the approach to the work of art as pure artifact independent of the world of social, cultural, and political values. Much as Gustafson has always been enamoured of the powers of the human imagination and its creations, he has been just as much mystified by their meaning and significance; the mystification is a combination of awe and ironic distance. Eventually, Gustafson comes to a different view from that expressed in "A Poet in Exile," though he never ceases to consider the problem of vision in an anti-visionary age. Eventually, Gustafson aspires to a poetry that gives to the facts of the world the coherence of vision while allowing them to retain their factuality. He achieves this in his maturity in his sense of what he calls the "grandeur" of things. But at the beginning of his career, vision, faith, knowledge, art, and the facts of human history are interrelated subjects of concern in his poetry which, as yet, he has no means of integrating or assuaging. When he uses "grandeur" in "A Poet in Exile," it is another unauthorized image; it is a term from

24 A Poetics of Place the high Romantic vocabulary of his models, rather than the profoundly personal logos that it becomes in his major philosophical work, Gradations of Grandeur (1982). In "A Poet in Exile," Gustafson, like the Keats of "Sleep and Poetry," eventually turns from complaint against his contemporaries to an affirmation of the continued presence of his ideals in the hostile world: "beauty is not lost though men are blind; / The world is no less wonderful and fair" (TGC, 77). The poet needs nobility of mind, strength of purpose, courage to act, and faith in his values, if he is to make a stand "against the welter of his time" (TGC, 80). Although the poet expresses a sense of alienation, that alienation does not become a passive isolation from the world that is hostile or indifferent to his values, like that expressed, for example, in A.M. Klein's famous "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape"; instead, Gustafson's poet takes up an aggressive opposition to this world, but an opposition which takes the form, most often, of the affirmation of those values. Gustafson's romantic nausea never led to a poetry of narcissism or despair. Instead he sought to base his poetry in the creative grounds of love and landscape, and to seek in his poetic experience a creative self that would express his vision of a communal sensibility that shared these values. From the very outset of his career, Gustafson's poetry has striven to be "a social and cultural force and not some form of individual therapy or self-regarding indulgence in the resources of the individual's imagination."19 In the 19305 Gustafson was a sensibility in search of a language. Events soon shattered any hopes of achieving "broad vision," and "grace" in action or art, while desirable, seemed misconceived as an aesthetic priority. It soon became clear to him that the language of The Golden Chalice was rotten and self-consuming. The lilacs, roses, and peonies were "withered blooms" indeed, drawing him onto a compost-heap of late-Victorian excess. The scarlet sunsets and crimson glories, the haunted twilights and silent dawns, the clinging, lingering, melting melodies and the flaming moons — this whole lexicon of rehearsed romantic sublimity was inhibiting his engagement with the twentieth-century world. The proud, impetuous poetyouth, with his keen mind and noble ambitions, needed to find a new way of talking if he were to survive his own nativity. But while circumstances forced Gustafson to reconsider his sense of grandeur, vision, and beauty, he did not abandon the values these terms expressed. In a world in which a belief in spiritual grace seemed foolish, he continued to defend aesthetic grace, and to seek amid that same world's graceless condition a redeeming grandeur. His concentration shifted from defining the goals of the artistic quest to a

25 Unauthorized Words

closer scrutiny of the questing activity itself; and, as the artistic process gradually became analogous to spiritual and visionary activity, aesthetic grace summoned spiritual consciousness in its broadest sense. Of the fifty-one poems in The Golden Chalice, forty are sonnets; the title poem is a narrative in Spenserian stanzas and all the other poems use rhyme and regular metrical and stanzaic forms. There is no attempt at free verse, nor, despite his admiration for Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, any blank verse. A number of poems are conspicuously modern in their diction, however, and others point toward the imminent remaking of his style. In "Brixham Harbour" (TGC, 71), he eases up on his romantic tendency to ennoble setting with sentiment, and is content to let description suggest, through the strength of its details alone, an immanent beauty and natural power. In "Cherbourg," the octave-sestet structure itself seems to express a conflict between a romantic impulse to intrude and a more modern reserve; and in its final lines, the image of a fisherman folding his net and drawing his boat up beyond the tide, indifferent to, even unconscious of the presence of "Ancient France" and its "heritage of kings, cathedrals ... [and] ... knights" (TGC, 71), is the kind of counterpointing of past and present, romantic grandeur and humble insignificance, which becomes a recurring feature of Gustafson's later work. "In Iffley Churchyard" (TGC, 57) and "Written in Kenilworth Castle" (TGC, 71) also look ahead to Gustafson's later explorations of the interconnectedness of beauty and loss, joy and mortality. The harder, more careful diction of "In Iffley Churchyard" distinguishes it from the rest of the volume: Like a mole the morbid keenness of my brain Unclogs a stifling passage underground, Below the muddy ends of tombstones, round The stumps of granite ragged with the rain; Between the groping Fingers of the yew, Down to the sunken graves it digs a way, Gnaws on the sides of coffins stuck in clay, Through costly timber warped with damp askew. Why not morbidly muse on the ugly scene, Repeat the common lesson of rotting flesh? Here at my feet the usual symbol crawls, A worm concludes the problem sages thresh Of paltry use, when beauty thus slips between: The sunlight burns; from the eaves a blackbird calls. (TGC, 57)

26 A Poetics of Place A hallmark of Gustafson's mature poetry is that it does not think at the expense of its music, and what is striking about this early poem is how it successfully sounds its meaning. The music results from the interplay of long and short vowels, with the vocalic effects enhanced by the alliteration and consonantal patterning. In the octave, the return to simple but powerful diction rooted in Old and Middle English parallels the mind's descent into its subject. Etymology ironically counters the poem's morbidity and predicts the turn in the final lines. As the vital roots of the language nourish it, the poem worms its way through the gloom of elemental issues to break out, finally, into the light and sound of the vivid world. The poem actually sounds this shift as the harsh k and g open out into the softer/, s, p, and b. Octave and sestet are thus musically entwined, like the worlds above and below ground, by the repeated and overlapping patterns. The first line of the sestet repeats the alliterative pattern and sounds of the first line of the poem; the repeated r in line 9 rounds back on line 4, and the hard c is sustained right through to the last word. A conventional form containing a traditional subject, "In Iffley Churchyard" draws to an apparently conventional close. But when the self-conscious poet suddenly interjects with a rhetorical turn back against the poem's flow, he gives the poem its conventional conclusion while lifting it beyond convention at the same time. The turn is both the satisfaction of the poet's formal obligation to the sonnet and an attempt to satisfy his own desire for self-signature. And what he signs is elemental to him, a fundamental obsession. The "common lesson of rotting flesh" is enunciated, ironically, in language that debases it - "the usual symbol" - but which at the same time gives it witty expression — "A worm concludes the problem sages thresh"; then, the lesson is abandoned as "Of paltry use, when beauty thus slips between." In its brevity and intensity, the final line is Imagistic and heralds a change in Gustafson's lyricism. In its counterpointing of light and dark, gloom and glory, human mortality and natural process, the final line also looks toward the more profound explorations of the later years; its ambiguity (the sunlight "burns" and the blackbird's call is a summons to mortality as well as to natural joy) presages the deliberations of maturity. There are other glimmerings of the later poetry in the first book. "Snowfall" (TGC, 66) and "Winter Scene" (TGC, 67) derive from his observations of the landscape and seasons of the Eastern Townships; he describes and contemplates this region in every stage in his development. The final image in "Winter Scene," "And from a lonely farm-house seen afar, / A lazy smoke uncurls across the night" (TGC, 67), is an early instance of a recurring imagery of domestic order

27

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amid the northern landscape which runs throughout the later North Hatley poems. "Nocturne in C Minor" (TGC, 89) introduces his lifelong passion for music and his constant allusion to it in his work. "Cathedral Dusk" (TGC, 68), "Les Chimeres" (TGC, 69), and "At Hamlet's Grave, Elsinore" (TGC, 63) introduce his fascination with both the sacred and secular traditions and their monuments as places of almost numinous power and experience in their husbanding of the presence of human generations; these poems express Gustafson's historical interests and show how it is sympathy and wonder that imbue these interests, more than any concern with satirical juxtaposition or an abstract belief in the value of tradition for its own sake. Taken together, however, the poems in The Golden Chalice construct a gilded cage. For all his energy and passion, Gustafson is too often trapped inside static and lifeless forms. He seems desperate to find an authentic voice and a language which will possess the authority of the poet's creative self. In this, the problems he faced in the early 19305 are those of any poet in his early work: the words control him. In Gustafson's case, they were the ghostly cerements of a dead authority which in its apparent promise to dispense power to the neophyte actually threatened to render him impotent in his prime. Gustafson's experiences in the 19305, however, jolt him out of this incapacitating stance toward his times, and in the poems collected in Flight into Darkness (1944), Gustafson has begun to discover how the creative self can use language rather than be used by it. Paradoxically, this required that he open himself to his times, and listen to the literary, social, and political events around him. In his attack on the modern world in "A Poet in Exile," Gustafson had identified as objects of calumny much of what the poets of the 19305 took from their world to be their distinctive imagery. If he wanted to be included among them, Gustafson would have to adapt, and in the poems he wrote during the mid- and late 19305, he did precisely that.

I

t is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the myth of the 19305 in Britain from the history of the decade, but the influence that these years had on Gustafson is very significant. He arrived at Oxford during the first year of the decade, the year of Eliot's Ash Wednesday and Hart Crane's The Bridge, of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and the death of D.H. Lawrence. For the younger generation of British writers, however, 1930 was marked more by the appearance of Auden's Poems and Waugh's Vile Bodies. It was also a year in which there were two million unemployed.20

28 A Poetics of Place As early as 1926, in the Preface to that year's Oxford Poetry, Auden had called for a contemporary poetry that would "at least attempt to face the circumstances of its time." For Auden, this meant facing "the Waste Land" of modern civilization.21 Auden's influence at Oxford continued long after he left, and was still powerful when Gustafson arrived. When Gustafson had poems published in Oxford Poetry in 1931 and 1932, the 1932 volume, edited by Bernard Spencer and Richard Goodman, was dedicated to Auden, Day Lewis and Spender. But in 1933, when Gustafson submitted poems to New Verse, one of the most influential publications of the decade, and one which was dominated by Auden's influence, his work was rejected by its editor, Geoffrey Grigson. Suddenly Gustafson was forced to confront the validity of his poetic style and values, their relevance to the world around him, and to consider his literary prospects if he were to continue with them. Grigson's rejection hurt. Gustafson himself has said of the changes in his style after this experience: "I wasn't emulating anyone, what I was doing was being indignant that it was thought that Spender, Day Lewis, MacNeice and Auden (almost contemporaries at Oxford) were writers of poetry better than my poetry";22 but his indignation did indeed give way to influence. New Verse has been described as "the magazine of the period" and "undoubtedly the most important periodical in the history of poetry in the nineteen-thirties."23 In its first issue, in January 1933, Grigson announced that the magazine favoured "only its time, belonging to no literary or politico-literary cabal"; but it was very much Auden's vision of the times that New Verse poets tended to express. Auden's "Song (I have a handsome profile)" began the first number, a poem in which he describes contemporary Britain as "a world that has had its day." The first issue also contained Herbert Read's essay, "Poetry and Belief in Gerard Manley Hopkins," so that, for Gustafson, the magazine would have been a source of critical and literary education, as well as an introduction to his contemporaries.24 Auden, Day Lewis, Spender, and MacNeice all appeared in New Verse, but so also did younger poets like Kathleen Raine, Theodore Spencer, Charles Madge, and Norman Cameron.25 But of all the poets Gustafson could have read for the first time in New Verse, two stand out in terms of his later career. In the issue for December 1933, Gustafson would have read AJ.M. Smith's "The Offices of the First and the Second Hour" and "News of the Phoenix," and then, two issues later, in April 1934, he would have come across "Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light" by Dylan Thomas. While Gustafson has denied being influenced by Smith, Thomas soon became important to him in his search for a new language during the i94os.26 Hopkins was impor-

29

Unauthorized Words

tant for this as well, and after Read's essay in the first issue, New Verse devoted a whole number to Hopkins in April 1935. New Verse ran from January 1933 until January 1939. The life of the magazine spans the years during which Gustafson abandoned the style of The Golden Chalice and began his arduous quest for a voice and style which would more successfully express him and his witnessing of his times. Samuel Hynes has written that "New Verse did not exactly speak for the generation — it was too individualistic for that — but it spoke to the generation, and so both recorded the changing consciousness of the decade and helped to change it by the judgements it made." One of those judgments, by his own admission, changed Gustafson's life.27 Stephen Spender's essay on modern literature, The Destructive Element, appeared in the same year as Gustafson's The Golden Chalice, and in one passage Spender could have been speaking directly to the Canadian poet-in-exile. Spender argued that "at some time in his life an artist has got to come to grips with the objective, factual life around him. He cannot spin indefinitely from himself unless he learns how to establish contact with his audience by the use of symbols which represent reality to his contemporaries. If he does riot learn this lesson, he ceases to be an artist, or he dies, like Keats or Shelley."28 Gustafson had indeed "spun" the poems in The Golden Chalice from within himself; they show a craft in excess of life-experience. But the events of the 19305 would soon remedy this deficiency. What Spender calls "the objective, factual life" entered Gustafson's poetry with a vengeance. In many ways, Gustafson was, in 1930, the romantic poet described in Spender's book; but he did not possess a poetic symbolism which would allow him to describe reality in ways his contemporaries would accept, nor was he temperamentally suited to such a symbolist poetry. While the younger poets of the 19305 had cut their teeth on Eliot's method of using the "fragments" of the modern world to symbolize modern experience, Gustafson had not even read Eliot by this point.29 The England of 1930 would have been daunting enough for a twenty-year-old just off the boat from Lennoxville, with all the excitement and promise that his romantic literary imagination would have aroused; but the England of "Auden Country" must have been overwhelming in a completely unexpected way. It must have been a bitter disappointment. Auden's Poems (1930) contained the first surveys of the social and political, moral and metaphysical territory of 19308 poetry. However, the voice heard in Auden's early poems would have been as much of a shock to Gustafson's expectations as he journeyed through the land of his literary gods as his own voice would

30 A Poetics of Place

have seemed alien and irrelevant - or colonial - to the young readers of Auden's poetry.30 Gustafson must soon have realized that his romantic-Victorian visa was no longer valid; he was a displaced pilgrim in the country of his ideals and he must have wondered if any of the shrines were still worth the price of admission, for he was the only one in line. And yet, Gustafson's romanticism placed him closer to his British contemporaries than he thought. When he wrote, in "A Poet in Exile," that Snarled politics dictate their selfish schemes And struggle with a tangled knot of words, While pompous journals spout their steady streams And label all that disagree absurd (TGC, 75)

he was venting an exasperation felt as well by poets like Auden, Spender and MacNeice at this time — even though he may have been referring to the very journals they were appearing in. They, too, were at odds with the age, and were looking about, with varying degrees of desperation and intelligence, for realistic faiths and resilient values; they, too, had begun as belated romantics. It was Auden, of course, who showed Spender, Day Lewis, and others the way toward a poetry that both engaged the public, external world and expressed the private, personal self of the poet. In Day Lewis's view, this "interplay and consonance between the inner and outward life, between public meaning and private meaning," is what distinguishes the poetry of the ig3os.31 It is also a characteristic of the poetry Gustafson wrote toward the end of that decade, and which marks the beginning of his modernization.

G

ustafson began 1936 with his first appearance in Saturday Night and his first poem to address directly a contemporary political issue. "On a Threat of War" repeats the personal complaint of youth against age which figures in a number of poems in The Golden Chalice, but the context of that complaint has become the specific fear that, as in 1914, youth was once again about to be sacrificed by age and authority. "This straight despair that slips its steel / Within our pliant hearts ignores / Our eager love" expands the narrower erotic focus of the earlier poems in order to politicize it in a broader polarization of youth-love-life and age-authority-death.32 War also figures prominently in the verse drama that Gustafson wrote at this time, Alfred the Great (1937), in which he tries to merge private and public meanings in a large-scale work. The two love relationships in the play raise the issues of personal desire and public

31 Unauthorized Words responsibilities, and of individual identity amid the rush of historical events. It is not a world in which love is safe or youth immune to public events. Gustafson told Earle Birney in 1942: "The contemporary parallel struck me forcibly."33 In Alfred the Great, Gustafson affirmed the personal value of love and expressed the fear of war that other writers were voicing at the time, but he was responding to the pressures of his times and to the writing of his contemporaries in his own way.34 While Alfred the Great drew on his reading in Anglo-Saxon for his Oxford degree, and showed his interest in history, more significantly it expressed his growing sense of the interconnectedness of personal and public values, and of the continuity of human history as a subject for poetry - views which characterize not only his poetry of the 19305 and 19408, but of later years as well. "April Eclogue," which dates from December 1936, reflects Gustafson's reading of Eliot and MacNeice. The city streets of the poem's setting recall the London of Eliot's "Preludes" and "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," and the form and tone of the poem recall MacNeice's "An Eclogue for Christmas." "By December there'll be war," the Poet asserts, and his partner in the dialogue complains, "It's April — and a man / Must find it out by calendar" (FID, 30, 31); the conflation of political despair and spiritual disgust is typical of the times, and further shows how Gustafson was allowing the times into his poetry, as much as he was absorbing the examples of Eliot, Auden, and MacNeice as commentators on those times.35 Satire, however, relied on a wit and invective that came easily to Gustafson. What proved more difficult for him during this transition period was his attempt to express a different element of his sensibility in the style and form of the modern lyric. Second only to the obsession with love in The Golden Chalice is Gustafson's concern with landscape, in particular with the landscape of his native Eastern Townships and the passing of the seasons there. As the 19305 drew to a close, Gustafson wrote a series of important nature lyrics. "From Sweden" was his first publication in the prestigious Poetry (Chicago): This troubled heart be still. The forest is at rest And no bird calls. Far is summer from these snows. The earth of any need Is distant now.

32 A Poetics of Place Still be thy striving. It is night. Across the snow a man goes home Whose window burns its simple light. (FID, 71)

Compression is the hallmark of this new lyricism, though conciseness does not eliminate scope, nor is there any loss of dramatic intensity. Gustafson had already proclaimed his "Nordic" sensibility in The Golden Chalice, and the northern setting announced in this title shows that "northness" persists as a matter of self-definition.36 The forest setting foreshadows later poems in which Gustafson presents similar moments of contemplative calm in the landscape.37 Spiritual, political, and erotic anxiety all can be sensed in the first triplet. The first line recalls, quite appropriately for 1937, Matthew 24:6: 'And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet"; but line 3 is an explicit reference to the first stanza of Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci": O, what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has wither'd from the lake, And no birds sing.

Fear of war, emotional deprivation, spiritual isolation — these are not imaged by the scene so much as they hover as part of its silence. The "striving" of the heart recalls the romantic strain of The Golden Chalice, but the repeated, if understated, imperative to "be still" reinforces a spiritual tone.38 "From Sweden" reveals a number of the formal mannerisms of 19305 poetry: the triplets, the variation of two-, three-, and four-foot lines, and the slant rhyme. The short lines, the terminal pauses, and the rhythmic diminuendo of the first two stanzas give the poem the "clipped" quality characteristic of many of Auden's lyrics at the time, but the conclusion is more characteristic of Gustafson himself — recalling the dramatic turn at the end of "In Iffley Churchyard" (TGC, 57). The last stanza, with its opening trochee, breaks back, rhythmically, against the momentum of the first two. The four beats in line 7 dramatically extend the voice after the premature finality of the preceding line, with its two beats and terminal pause. The sudden appearance of the archaic pronoun reinforces the increased intensity that comes with the extended line-length; the archaism here also prefigures what becomes a characteristic of Gustafson's later poetry, his tendency to take risks with his diction and disrupt a texture at a

33 Unauthorized Words

critical point in order to draw attention to some change in emotional direction or intellectual thrust. Here the effect draws attention to the drama implicit in the poem, the contrast between the deathlike placidity of the natural world and the turmoil of the human, with the final image of the "simple light" suddenly ushered in, with all its domesticity, as a kind of fulcrum balancing the two. There is a drama as well in the polarization that enters the diction with the archaism. The intensity that is released by "Still be thy striving" is immediately countered, not undercut, by the simple naturalism that follows it. Whatever personal angst impels the poem, it is neither dispelled nor symbolically resolved by the final image of the man walking home through the snow; the simplicity forestalls any tendency to lyrical overstatement or symbolist resolution. In its thoroughly secular character, this domestic image also mutes any religious association which a reader oversensitive to the possible allusions may try to impose on the poem. The lyric achieves a form of intensive energy rather than a statement of extensive meaning, and thus remains a vehicle of multiple suggestion as well as of straightforward lyric description. Undirected intensity is a flaw in the poetry of The Golden Chalice, but "From Sweden" shows Gustafson trying to bring his considerable lyric energy under control. He achieves this by means of the short lines and simple diction, the economic stanza form, the tight metre, and the off-rhyme. But of more importance for his later poetry, he also achieves this control through his use of quiet allusion and natural setting. "From Sweden" seems imagist in its procedures. The final image of the landscape recalls Pound's statement "... that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object."39 There may be a tendency to read the winter landscape in "From Sweden" as symbolic, but there is no obtrusive symbolism in the poem itself. Charles Altieri has written of modernist poets: They for the most part recognize that their creative activity is a response to some dynamic principle outside consciousness, but they do not look for that force in natural objects. Landscape is either ignored, aestheticized in imagist lyrics, or psychologized and made symbolic of mental rather than spiritual forces; it is rarely a source of wisdom or a goal consciousness tries to ally itself to. There remains a sense that natural energies are the source of poetic creation, but nature is only a dim source, not a ground for satisfying imaginative needs. These energies only drive the poet to reach beyond himself to higher levels of consciousness.4"

In part, it is Gustafson's regard for nature and landscape which prevents him from becoming a full-fledged modernist in the 19305 and 19408. He does look to the dynamic force in nature and natural objects

34 A Poetics of Place and as he develops, this close look is the origin of many of his most successful poems. Nature is, for Gustafson, from the outset of his career, "a ground for satisfying imaginative needs." His innate distrust of transcendent imaginative and spiritual motives makes him leery of trying "to reach beyond himself to higher levels of consciousness." But likewise he is leery of aesthetic and spiritual transcendence masquerading as immanence; he is wary of projecting onto nature those same imaginative needs in the form of "wisdom" or allied consciousness. "From Sweden" obviously doesn't ignore landscape, but does it "aestheticize" it or make it "symbolic of mental rather than spiritual forces"? In so far as it incorporates a depiction of the natural world in stylized language, the poem does aestheticize landscape. But it stops short of symbolizing a mental condition in the natural object. The landscape maintains its force in "From Sweden" because it remains a numinous presence rather than a symbolist counter, a presence whose significance is pre-sense, spiritual and emotional more than intellectual. "From Sweden" looks ahead to the wonderful poems of description-meditation that Gustafson writes in the 19705 and igSos. Gustafson's landscape poems of the 1930$ and 19405 should be read as his version of the paysage moralise ot 19305 poetry. Poems like "Final Spring" (FID, 39), "Crisis" (FID, 37), "Ectomia" (FID, 36), "Quebec Sugarbush" (FID, 40), and "Summer Garden" (FID, 72) do not allegorize the landscape in the manner of Auden, but rather imbue the imagery of the natural world with a force and energy, sometimes sinister, but always ambivalent, which binds it up with the world of human history and human feelings. However, because of the power and force of Gustafson's diction, this does not come off as a traditional projection of complicity onto the natural world; rather, nature's rhythms seem mysteriously both source and mirror of human history. The most successful examples of Gustafson's fusing of public and private selves, individual and collective values, in his poems of the late 19305, are the three nature poems he wrote between January and March of 1939. The first, "Prologue to Summer," begins with a reworking of an image from the earlier "Thaw": Quick at the maple's root The woodchuck garbles leaves, Flung from its tooth Flake of sun. (FID, 76)

This is superior to "The tooth of April chumbles /In the mud" (FID, 74) of the earlier poem. The quatrains also recall "Thaw," but the pattern of diminishing stresses recalls "From Sweden." "Prologue to

35 Unauthorized Words

Summer" is harsher, however, and more dynamic than either of these poems. Gustafson looks more closely at the natural world. He does not stop with the glistening surface but pushes deeper into the life of the earth; distanced observation has been replaced by an invigorating poetics of presence. An imagistic simplicity is used to present a complex transition in the natural cycle; detailed, intense imagery combines with strong music to show and sound the power of the lifeforce which is the poem's subject: Under the gangrened stump Slugs drag slime, The fieldmouse gnaws The crust of air. Smell!—the leaf-mould smokes, At the water-edge flapped By the waves a fish Belly-up stinking. (FID, 76)

The advance in technique over the poetry in The Golden Chalice is remarkable. The tension in the language, rhythm, and form is masterfully controlled. The short vowel in "stump" urges the run-on to "Slugs"; the alliterative si is further reinforced by the repeated g, which also develops the unpleasant sound and sense of "gangrened." The modulation of vowels in "fieldmouse" echoes the sound pattern of "gangrened stump" and moves the reader onward to the dramatic monosyllables of the last line, where "crust" echoes "stump" and "slugs," and "air" turns softly against the deeper, harsher music of "gnaws." The abrupt imperative — "Smell!" — forces the reader deeper into this world of assaulted senses. The placement of "flapped" and "fish" keeps the reader off balance and also prevents any decorous avoidance of the full impact of "Belly-up stinking." We see and smell the dead thing the instant we are thrown upon the line. The poem ends with Lawrentian vigour: Male-naked the air. Compel! Urgent the deed, urgent And muscular the dream Invaginate! (FID, 76)

In Poetry and Canada (1945), Gustafson wrote: "a poem must be heard. ... The music a poem makes contains more of the poem's meaning than its logic or syntax. ... The music of poetry is the ulti-

36 A Poetics of Place mate essence of poetry."41 The spondee-anapest-iamb in "Male-naked the air. Compel!"; the abrupt, long vowels quickly followed by the soft expansion of "air"; the caesura giving way to the dramatic "Compel!" - which echoes "Smell!" in sound and mood - these effects all work to hold the reader in thrall to the poem's progression. The trocheeiamb-trochee of "urgent the deed, urgent," with the repetition of "urgent" urging us to the muscular dream, is itself a muscular movement of the reader to the climactic "Invaginate!" Nor is there any obscurity here. What is at stake is the successful transference of sensual intensity to language. "The achievement to be observed," Gustafson wrote in 1945, "is that a poem's rhythm is also a part of its meaning; the mystery, the poet's identification of the space which an experience once occupied with the present time of moving through a poem's space" (PC, n).42 "Prologue to Summer" affirms life amid death, renewal out of corruption. Its energy is akin to Lawrence's vitalism and the poem evinces the poetics of enactment that Gustafson describes in Poetry and Canada. Gustafson's aesthetic values bespeak his stance toward the natural world. The poem conveys experience in terms of simultaneity, immediacy, and particularity; but most of all, it presents energy - the force of nature itself. The affirmation of "Prologue to Summer" should be understood in the context of other poems Gustafson was writing at this time in which contemporary events are blended with the seasonal cycles. "Winter Landscape" (FID, 73) synthesizes landscape and human body in a tightly controlled sequence which achieves force solely through the power of suggestion. In "Quebec Sugarbush" there is something in the life-force of nature itself which seems implicated in the coming of death: Something more than signature (The huge sedition of the hills) To sterile peace: The close conspiracy of hollows At the brittle ribs of snow, The broken pool And talk of men in iron woods Native to the inviolate blood. At strangled maples Where buckets are sweet with sap drives Telesphore of the crimson tuque His barrel from pail to tree. (FID, 40)

37 Unauthorized Words

In this poem it is possible to see Gustafson dislocating his language, as Eliot said the modern poet must, in order to become more comprehensive, more allusive.43 What the poem seeks to comprehend is the imminence of war, and it alludes to this at first in quite straightforward terms — "The iron forest's fearful peace," "the armament of summer," and such imagery (FID, 40). "Sterile peace" seems a metaphor for the appeasement policy that Britain and France followed with Hitler at the time. But toward the end of the poem, "strangled maples" moves allusion onto another level. The "crimson tuque" reflects ominously on the buckets of sweet sap, and "the inviolate blood" is both nature's and man's, as the trees recall a history of gallows and crucifixions. Such poems show that as Gustafson entered the war years he was settling into the first stage of his maturity as a poet, that of a secondgeneration modernist. Poems like "Crisis," "Prologue to Summer," "Winter Landscape," and "Quebec Sugarbush" show that he had learned from the many-headed MacSpaunday of the 19305. By the end of the decade, Gustafson was also beginning to learn from the "new romantics," poets like Dylan Thomas and George Barker, and the ancestor of 19305 neo-romanticism, Gerard Manley Hopkins. What needs to be kept in mind in this matter of poetic influence, however, is the question of the relation between style and sensibility; between the various tricks, techniques, and mannerisms that the poet picks up, discovers, and develops, and the complex of values, worldview, fears and desires, experience and its residues which that sensibility contains. A monolithic critical stance which regards style as identical to sensibility will not be able to follow Gustafson's growth as a poet. It will read him as a belated romantic who sheds his romanticism for a belated modernism. Such a stance is unable to proceed to Gustafson's poetry of the 19708 and 19805 without reading it back into the modernism of the 19405 and 19505. But the relation between style and sensibility in Gustafson's poetry is always pragmatic, processive, flexible, and selective; his sensibility takes what it can use, what it needs or thinks will satisfy its needs, from what is available to it and from what it can invent. It has usually rejected what it cannot use, and occasionally, it has misused what it mistook as useful. Self-knowledge is a process of trial and error, and for Gustafson, that process is itself the taking up, modifying, and eventually the abandoning of elements of poetic style that provide the sensibility with both self-knowledge and self-expression. Gustafson enters a modernist phase in the 19405 which lasts until the late 19505. His style during these years has many of the features of high modernist poetry, but it also has characteristics that differentiate it from that poetry. Gustafson uses a number of modernist techniques, but these do not

38 A Poetics of Place

make him a modernist ideologically. Gustafsoris is essentially a romantic sensibility. Furthermore, the experiences of the 19308 prevented Gustafson from assuming a completely modernist poetic. His belief that the poet must bear witness to his times in his poetry results in his version of a paysage moralise in some of his nature lyrics, and as he develops a more sophisticated modern style in the 19408 and 19508 this social connection in the poetry prevents it from ever becoming the academic poetry so beloved of the New Criticism of these decades. Gustafson's development during the 19308 shows that the times influenced him more deeply than the writers. He told a correspondent in 1970: "I suppose you can say I was compelled 'to modernize.' But not for the sake of fashion. I simply realized that the forms I was using were strangling some of the passion I wanted to convey. I felt too urgently about the world blowing its brains out to set down the feeling in a rhyme-scheme-sonnet. So I got liberated."44

CHAPTER TWO

The Contradictory Lens The key to modern romanticism is in the private poem, that is, the poetry of public appearances, which are, by the use of language, made full of private significance. Stephen Spender, The Destructive Element

To understand Gustafson's poetry of the 19405 and 19505, it is necessary to understand the nature and character of his relation with modernism, and to do this, it is important to stress that Gustafson engaged modernism first through the writing of its second generation — that of Auden, Spender, MacNeice and Thomas. His most intense reading of high modernism - the poetry of Eliot, Pound, Stevens and Yeats — did not occur until he was already moving beyond his modernist phase in the late 19505 and ig6os. When he was reading these poets, in order to teach their work to his classes at Bishop's, Gustafson's sensibility was already firmly in control of a style. But it is a sensibility which has remained as open to experience as it has to the processes of poetic expression which are generated by that experience. Gustafson's relation to modernism is best studied in a poem like "Mythos," from Flight into Darkness (1944), a poem whose thought and technique express the contradictory perspective of this first phase of his poetic maturity. "Mythos" expresses both the attractions of transcendence and the love of earth which configure Gustafson's sensibility. The approach to poetic form encountered in the poem is discussed by Gustafson in his important essay from this period, Poetry and Canada (1945). This essay also shows Gustafson addressing the same issues that A.M. Klein was addressing in the contemporaneous "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape." Gustafson uses the essay to bring together his thinking about the function of poetry for the poet, the reader, and the culture, and in the process, he begins to move toward the resolution of the contradictions in his own perspective in what will become the concentric stance of his later poetry. Poetry and Canada reveals the major roles played by Eliot, Auden, Spender and other writers of the 19305 and 19405 in Gustafson's

4o A Poetics of Place modernist phase, but this phase must also be understood in relation to the Hopkins revival of the 19305 and the neo-romantic movement in British poetry during the early 19405. The latter in particular is an important factor in the rejection of a high modernist position, which Gustafson announces in "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But ..." (1949). The high-water mark of Gustafson's modernist phase is Rivers among Rocks (1960), but the most important poems in that volume — "Legend," "Armorial," and "The Disquisition" - also announce the arrival of a new style, a style which expresses a poetics of place and moment. After "Mythos," "Legend" is Gustafson's second major expression of his sense of man's doom amid magnificence, and these two poems are the major works of his modernist style.

T

he 19303 movement in England seems to come to a formal close with the departure of Auden and Isherwood for the United States in January 1939. Cyril Connolly believed their departure was "the most important literary event since the outbreak of the Spanish War," and Julian Symons has written that it "deeply shocked admirers to whom it seemed something very much like desertion."1 Gustafson had left England in the summer of 1938, but he had not abandoned any moral or political positions. He had become politicized as a result of his years in England, but his poems of the late 19305 and early 19405 show him to have become an engaged poet, not a partisan poet. He described his stance in an article he wrote for the Sherbrooke Daily Record, shortly after the Munich crisis of September 1938. He wrote, in "Poetry and Politics," that "poetry has little to do with direct politics, but ... everything to do with ultimate politics." He meant by this that poetry, by its very nature, is bound up with political reality: "Government means a Social Order; and a Social Order means everything that English poetry has dealt with for the last ten centuries: justice, peace, and the individual necessities of love and labour." Consequently, "In these years of doubtful grace, poets can't keep apart from politics."8 In this, Gustafson clearly showed that the years in England had changed him. But they had not changed him in any radical sense. At the heart of his sensibility was an unalterable belief in the value and authority of the individual. In "Poetry and Politics" he wrote that "poetry is something to which a human being may turn to clarify his own experience." Presumably, the poet is the first to turn to it in this way. One of the values of the poetic experience, for poet and reader, is the individual expression and communication which the poem embodies. Looking back on this period, in 1976, Gustafson admitted

41 The Contradictory Lens

that, while he couldn't avoid being affected by the decade's "depressing atmosphere with its apocalyptic dispersal," he had reacted against "the absence of the individual" in 19305 social poetry. MacNeice's poetry is the only exception he notes: "One senses physical presence in the poems of MacNeice, but only of the paradigm, the parable, in his contemporaries' work, Spender's abstract coward, Auden's unknown citizen, and Woodcock's 'boys that are marked to die.'"3 In 1938 he wrote: "I don't think you can make poetry partisan, and to that extent [Auden, Spender, and Day Lewis] are wrong ... they damage themselves by coming perilously near political propaganda; they prejudice themselves by forgetting that poetry is also private and lyrical."4 The concept of "physical presence" that Gustafson discussed in 1976 had its origins in his poetry and correspondence of the 19405, in his attempt to write what he then called a "muscular" poetry. In a sense, it was not a new development in his poetic thinking; it can be traced back to his undergraduate admiration for Keats's and Shelley's sensuous imagery. But he had to be reminded of it, and coincidentally, it was a faculty member at his alma mater who was responsible for the reminder. The letters Gustafson received from his MA supervisor, W.O. Raymond, show that he was still learning from his old teacher. Raymond encouraged Gustafson to read modern and contemporary poetry at the very time he was feeling indignant about his rejection by New Verse. In 1935 Raymond wrote him: Read Auden, Eliot, Lewis, Campbell, the Sitwells, Yeats, De la Mare, Ezra Pound, Frost, Robinson, Edna Vincent Millay, Vachel Lindsay, Amy Lowell, even (horror of horrors) Carl Sandburg, — the whole kit of them. Curse them, react against them as much as you like, but for heaven's sake read them, and read with as open a mind as you can bring to their perusal. Whatever their weakness and their sins, they are feeling for new rhythms, fresh idioms, living expressions of poetic beauty. ... Each age has to break up the old form, let the visible go to the dogs to bring the invisible into play.3

This was exactly what the disheartened Gustafson needed to hear in 1935. Raymond obviously considered Gustafson's years in England as a necessary apprenticeship. By 1940, he was looking to see the results; by then, however, Raymond was also looking with a different perspective. He admitted to Gustafson that he had experienced something of "a conservative reaction" to some of the poets he had recommended five years earlier. In 1940, Raymond hoped that "when you have absorbed all that is worth absorbing from the moderns, and find your final individual voice in its ultimate maturity, you will avoid

42

A Poetics of Place

the somewhat tortured syntax, and intellectual spider web spinning, which I think at times besets writers like Auden etc."6 In this, and in the rest of the letter, Raymond showed himself to be an astute reader of Gustafson's poetry and a wise counsellor; he was responding to Gustafson's poems in the Sewanee Review for April 1940 — "April Eclogue," "Think This No Folly," "Toponymy," "Crisis," "Final Spring," "Summer Garden," and "This Speaking Were Enough." He recognized that Gustafson's strength was indeed his "physical presence" in his poetry, and told him: "You have such an instinct for colour, light, sound, melody, — sensuousness in a large and genial way ... ." But Raymond saw in the poems of 1940 that Gustafson was falling victim to precisely that flaw in 19305 poetry Gustafson himself would note in 1976: "We have, not so much the disparagement of the particular, as the removing of emotion in parable. The end-result is an appeal to the head, not a movement toward the heart."7 In this transitional work, Gustafson was not successfully balancing the head and the heart, but was falling into intellectual obscurity, and Raymond cautioned him against it: "I feel that your acquaintance with the moderns has deepened your poetry, but now I should like to see you cut a little loose from Eliot, Auden, and their co-fraternity, along the lines of directness and naturalness of syntax, clarity and simplicity of verbal and rhythmical expression." From the evidence of Gustafson's poems written during the early 19405, it might seem he was not yet ready or willing to take Raymond's advice to make his style clearer, simpler, more direct and natural. But it may rather have been that he understood these principles differently, because he did adopt another piece of advice that Raymond offered in the 1940 letter. Raymond concluded his discussion with the opinion: "I think that literature must become more elemental, less consciously intellectually precocious, less clever, but richer in humanity." He repeated this call for a more "elemental" poetry in a letter to Gustafson a year later, in ig4i.8 Raymond's general hope for a poetry which was "more elemental" and "richer in humanity" seems directed at his understanding of Gustafson's particular strengths as a poet, strengths which are rooted in his sensibility and which first expressed themselves in his undergraduate response to the sensuous imagery of Keats and Shelley. The effect of Raymond's letters is evident in Gustafson's own correspondence. In 1941 he wrote Ronald Hambleton: "there is a danger in the esoteric"; a poem must embody "a nexus of mind and feeling." And in February 1942, in a letter to Earle Birney about a second Penguin anthology he was planning, Gustafson said he was on the look-out for "good writing not afraid of the muscular or the

43 The Contradictory Lens

colloquial with something to say about what's immediately defining Canada today." Two months later, he used the term again, in another letter to Birney: I subscribe heartily with your prescriptions for revitalizing poetry. I get sick to death with the cerebral pastiche that gets printed down here. I had hopes the war would pull the plug on the accumulated thirties. We might get a naked muscular body. I seem to sense that Canada is just running the bath? I tried to find some good vigorous and direct stuff to tail off my Anthology. But most of it had Audenitis or was held together with scaffolding.

It is clear from this that by 1942 Gustafson was consciously trying to advance beyond the 19305; also, he obviously didn't see his own poetry at this time as excessively "cerebral." The pejorative "Audenitis" suggests that he was working with other models and a letter to Birney later in 1942 identifies one of them, in the context of another remark about "muscular" poetry and its absence in Canada: "Alliteration and accent to make muscular so much tepid rhyme and metre. Is G.M. Hopkins read in Canada?" This suggests that Hopkins, along with Raymond, may be the source of Gustafson's thinking about the "nexus of mind and feeling" in a "muscular" poetry.9 G.S. Eraser describes Hopkins as a "dominating, though anachronistic, technical influence on the younger writers" of the 19308.'° Gustafson's reference to accent, alliteration, and Hopkins in his letter to Birney suggests that it was Hopkins's techniques that most interested him. (Though his close study of Anglo-Saxon poetry at Oxford had already resulted in the alliteration of Alfred the Great.) Nor would it have been Hopkins alone, in the late 19305, who would have moved Gustafson toward this particular rethinking of his approach to poetic style. The later 19308 saw the rise to prominence of a poet who, superficially, sounded a lot like Hopkins - Dylan Thomas. In the late 19305 and early 19405, as Gustafson reworked his style and struggled to integrate intellect and body in his poetry, Thomas and Hopkins were a mixed blessing — strong presences who showed a way for him to follow but whose strength, at times, made him too subservient to their example. Flight into Darkness (1944) abounds with Hopkins- and Thomas-like imagery. In particular, the imagery of the natural world — sun, sea, flood, green grass, roots, seeds, buds, worms; of the human body - flesh, loins, bones, eyes, ears, skull, and blood; of day and night,- dusk, moon, stars; and of language words, alphabet, signature — all echoes Thomas's early poems. Their co-presence is a gradual insinuation in his poetry. In "Basque Lover" (FID, 35), for instance, a poem which Gustafson wrote in response

44 A Poetics of Place

to the bombing of Guernica in April 1937," the rhyming quatrains reflect the formalism of 19305 lyrics, and there is a Jacobean quality (or the Eliot of "Whispers of Immortality') in the image of the dead man as lover embracing the earth — "Curious passion scuttles down / The alleys where the eyes are gone"; but in the compound "mountainfastness," the alliterative "Fatal lover lipping mud," and the ellipsis of "Lover lying grasses wan / Almost as interjacent bone," the new style is beginning to emerge. In "Atlantic Crossing" (FID, 85), written in July 1939, the Hopkins-Thomas presence is overwhelming, but in "Mythos," a poem written in February 1940, Gustafson is able to control his mentors sufficiently that they remain in the background, and it is his own voice we hear.

G

ustafson himself considered "Mythos" to be a turning-point poem for him;12 and it is indeed an important poem, not only in terms of the stylistic maturity it displays - stylistically it sets a pattern he would follow for the rest of the 19405 and into the early 19505 — but also because it presents the synthesis of romanticism and modernism which characterizes the first stage of his poetic maturity. The poem seems to make use of Icarus and Theseus in the modernist fashion set out by Eliot in his review of Joyce's Ulysses.13 Gustafson's poem does not draw any explicit parallel between the modern and mythical worlds; he leaves this as an option for the reader. But the poem is an attempted ordering and shaping of experience, and this experience is both personal and public. "Mythos" is a love poem; it is also a witness poem, like "Toponymy" and "Basque Lover." It is an ambitious poem, because not only does it try to integrate the public and private worlds, it also tries to find meaning in their mutuality. In 1940, many a modern Icarus fell daily from the skies above England and the English Channel, and warriors went forth to battle monsters in labyrinths from which return seemed hopeless. The background of war and the fear of death make all the more poignant the poem's affirmation of love as man's last resort and only hope in a time of extremity. In the poem, Gustafson juxtaposes the figures of Icarus and Theseus as models of men. The mythical high-flyer is courageous but also foolish: his desire for escape, or transcendence, is the doom of egotism; whereas Theseus's acceptance of his earthbound fate, terrible as it may be, leads him to the mysterious salvation of love. "Mythos" is as brilliant as it is dark, a poem that is at once both broad heaven and demonic maze. It is Gustafson's first major work, arid one which shows him focusing the contradictory lens of his mature sensibility. In a number of its features it is clearly a mod-

45 The Contradictory Lens

ernist poem, but in other respects it reveals that essentially romantic sensibility which excluded Gustafson from complete absorption into the modernist camp. The poem has an intricate structure which is the result of a series of parenthetical interpolations. These parentheses are the cul-de-sacs of the verbal labyrinth within which the poem's human and monstrous meanings merge. The reader has no choice but to turn into and out of them. The poem begins by focusing on Daedalus, the arch-maker, but no sooner is the focus set than it is split, and Daedalus's son, Icarus, comes into view: Once Daedalus in distant Crete (Who from his ivory tower steps To frown this antique telling false?) That father to young Icarus drowned Who naked on wings defiant soared, With the world a star between his feet Staggered, strafed by the sun, dashed To glaucous ocean flaming down Spurt of crimson plunged in foam His daring down (Star-dazed dare! Hurl then, hurtle the headlong winds Nor haggle joy in the gasping lungs, Moon-managed gallant of gales! Go, Greet the giant grapple of sun. On cunning wax and quill let Daedalus Limp shaking precautions beard.) (FID, 18)

Gustafson's irony is sensed immediately. A serio-comic tone is established at the outset, with the echo of the traditional narrative opening, "Once upon a time," and the heavy alliteration of "Daedalus ... distant." The distancing effect of the opening line also suggests a selfconsciousness, which is further expressed by the sudden interruption of the narrative flow by the first parenthesis. The apparent purpose of this interruption is an attempt to forestall scholarly opposition: the effect is to accentuate the sense that this will be a stylized, subjective version of the myth — indeed, the poem itself, as we eventually discover, achieves the status of a personal mythos for the poet. The reference to "distant" Crete and the self-reference of "the antique telling" also quietly raise the question of truth/falsehood

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A Poetics of Place

in relation to the poetic act, and the corollary of meaning/significance. This "naked," "defiant," and daring Icarus very much resembles the poet-youth of The Golden Chalice, and the poem's preference for Theseus over Icarus suggests that "Mythos" can be read as well as a poem of self-definition, in which Gustafson presents the poet-self he has made out of the ruins of that young tyro and his experiences of the previous decade. In the second stanza, Gustafson's imagery suggests that Icarus fell, tripped by the earth he sought to escape, as much as he was defeated by the sun that melted his wings. In this we have Gustafson's first caution — to himself and the reader — to be wary of transcendence or the transcendent impulse, in religion or aesthetics. "Staggered, strafed ... flaming down" also summons timely associations between the mythical figure and the fighting airmen. Hopkins can be heard behind the driving rhythm of "staggered, strafed," with the alliteration accentuating the appropriately falling trochees, which also effectively run back against the rising anapest-iamb series in the previous lines. (Hopkins is heard again in the third and fourth stanzas, with their echoes of "The Wreck of the Deutschland," "The Lantern Out of Doors," and "Carrion Comfort.") With the termination of the parentheses at the end of the fourth stanza, Gustafson resumes his narrative by returning to Daedalus, and echoing the poem's first line. The reference to the labyrinth ushers in the myth of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur. In Gustafson's retelling, Theseus is as "mazed" in his daring as Icarus is "Star-dazed" in his. Both fall. But where Icarus plummets to a watery grave, Theseus falls in love. For Gustafson, this descent is a perilous necessity. Once Daedalus in distant Crete ... Once built for Minos where the chalkcliffs brunt the sea a labyrinth (What Theseus-love shall penetrate, Plunge the mazing green miraculous To monstrous centre, nor burst the green And beast with bomb to no-solution Wisdom lost? O we have need The other way, trammelling the heart With faith, omphalos of globe and guerdon.) And Ariadne loved the flesh And solid heart of Theseus girded Through green to grapple and gave to Theseus

47 The Contradictory Lens Love who slew the Minotaur, the beast. (Shall not seven youths be saved And seven maidens sacrificed In Crete to assuage the beast once broken?) (FID, 18—19)

Icarus goes to "Greet the giant grapple of sun," to reach for "hazardous gold": Theseus grapples the green earth and the love-mystery at its "monstrous centre." Here, Thomas joins with Hopkins, as Gustafson's "mazing green miraculous" seems to have been seeded by Thomas's "green fuse," "green age," "green genesis," though Gustafson's beast has a definite affinity with Hopkins's "beast of the waste wood" in "The Wreck of the Deutschland."14 These connections reveal that Gustafson was not attracted to Hopkins and Thomas for technical reasons only. Both these poets spoke to him on much deeper levels. Hopkins's constant wrestling with his God and Thomas's similar struggle with the "doom in the bulb [that] the spring unravels" only corroborated Gustafson's own dark intuitions, and he was attracted to their techniques primarily because they served his expression of those intuitions. Gustafson did not share Hopkins's faith, but he certainly could appreciate his struggle. A number of poems in Flight into Darkness contain conflicting views of the presence or absence, involvement or indifference, of a God in human affairs, and initiate a process of interrogation that continues throughout Gustafson's career.16 Similarly, Gustafson would have responded to Hopkins's intense individualizing of the natural world. Poems like "Thaw" and "Prologue to Summer" already show Gustafson's increasingly detailed scrutiny of nature's particulars. As for Hopkins's linking of the Logos-Christ and what Thomas calls "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower," Gustafson's sensibility was already steeped in the immanence of Keats and Wordsworth, and his growth was taking him in directions that both Hopkins's and Thomas's poetry would have seemed to illuminate. In "Mythos," the monster that Theseus destroys at the heart of the labyrinth is related to Hopkins's "beast of the waste wood," which was also, by virtue of the paradox of his faith, Hopkins's Logos-Christ; it is also related to Thomas's demons of doubt and dark. But these relations remain in the background of the poem because "Mythos" expresses Gustafson's confrontation with his own very personal antagonist — his own contradictory nature. At the heart of the poem-labyrinth, Gustafson-Theseus destroys a multiple demon: man and beast — himself, in fact. But it is a ritual sacrifice, not a murder, an act of poetic augury; for he reads in his own entrails the lines of future

48 A Poetics of Place

poems. What the poet-hero discovers is love's mordant and beautiful mystery: Broken before him the torso lay, Bronzed beauty male the body but The head a bull, and Theseus stood Amazed no clue the labour done To solve the mind's snarled labyrinth. O glorious leave lone Icarus, elsewhere Lost, on coloured pinions chose Who dared the sun for hazardous gold Against the liquid sea. Whose wings Plain Theseus laughed at lost, yet faced The giddy exit, frowned. Half-turned To her, he heard the distant ocean Crash its foamy thunder down The beach, confused in sun and green He thought of marble Athens, mazed. Then Ariadne kissed his lips. (FID, 19)

A tremendous irresolution rides on these final stanzas. In a typical modernist procedure, the poem moves to stave off its dissolution by turning back toward its beginning. The reappearance of Icarus, and language like "frowned," "distant," "wings," and "crash ... down," recall the poem's initial energy. But this attempt at circularity is only partially successful. As a strategy for averting the ultimate dissipation that closure would bring, the quatrains, rhythms, and repeated diction do keep the narrative securely inside the unchanging cycle of myth. On a number of obvious levels, the poem has been there all along. But the very self-consciousness of the voice in the opening stanzas makes the poet keep one foot in historical and personal reality. And it is this duality of perspective in "Mythos," expressed in structural and metaphorical terms by the polarization of earth and sky, sun and sea, glorious Icarus and plain Theseus, once-upon-atime-in-distant-Crete and New-York-in-1940, the "mazing green" and "hazardous gold," that the poem's formal resolution cannot simplify or synthesize. I mean by this that Gustafson is successful in his use of the modernist mythical method to give order and shape to the experience adumbrated in the poem, but the experience, paradoxically, remains bafflingly meaningful. Gustafson does not take his

49 The Contradictory Lens

new-fledged modernism to the point where he imposes by poetic methodology what his sensibility cannot accept as truly experienced. For much as Gustafson might have been tempted, in "Mythos," to express an eros which, with full Shelleyan authority, might unify sea, sun, earth, and questing hero in a vision of consummate significance, this is not what he knows. Love has not clarified but rather has confused Theseus. What is clear is that man faces a choice of confusions, and Gustafson chooses the confusion of love. The labyrinth in "Mythos" is a symbol of human history and art — the Minotaur is Keatsian in its "Bronzed beauty" - but it is also an image of man's unconscious recognition of his lack of integration. It is the labyrinth of the human heart and body; of love, woman, and the man himself. The language is clearly sexual: "penetrate," "Plunge," "burst," "And Ariadne loved the flesh / And solid heart of Theseus," and the recurring parentheses are typographical and syntactical emblems of the poem itself as maze. But all these enclosures eventually open out, ironically, to amazement and illumination. Man must love to be most human; the lover must confront the selfish beast that threatens to consume his love. The man must take the woman, penetrate the labyrinth of mind and body; but like Theseus, he must enter with a permission that provides promise of a safe return. In "Mythos," Gustafson images the ambiguity of love as he had come to see it through the contradictory lens of his maturing sensibility. It is the beast in man that takes him to the maiden, and her cries of alarm that summon the hero from himself. He wins her by losing himself, while she sends him from her only to bring him, by the thread of love, back again to himself and her. Theseus's "mind's snarled labyrinth" is the confusion at the heart of passion. In "Mythos," Gustafson began to achieve a technique powerful enough to probe his darkest intuitions, and subtle enough to manage the complex ambiguities those intuitions harboured. This is evident in the way that he has his victorious Theseus put on something of Icarus's knowledge as he stands on the labyrinth's threshold. Icarus had fallen like a bomb from the sky "to no-solution / Wisdom lost." Theseus lingers a moment by "The giddy exit," and in that moment, woman, sea, sun, and earth, and all his human heritage crash upon his mind and senses. Amazement brightens but then begins to confuse vision. "Then Ariadne kissed his lips." For Gustafson, victory over the self makes love possible, but it is love which brings that victory. Theseus stands on the threshold of his sun-drenched world and frowns at the recollection of Icarus's vain ambition. For an instant, death, in the sound of the distant ocean, confuses his recently confirmed sense of reality. It is as if the learning in the labyrinth was

50 A Poetics of Place a dream. But then, in a conflation and reversal of myth-turnedromance, it is the sleeping prince who is wakened with a kiss, the kiss of utter reality in the figure of woman. As with the figures of Prometheus and the Alastor "Poet" in the early poems, Icarus and Theseus represent contradictory-complementary half-selves in "Mythos," and the poem shows Gustafson even more energetically engaged in the process of self-discovery and selfdefinition.16 In his preference for Theseus's earth-bound quest over Icarus's equally courageous attempts at transcendence, Gustafson again shows the antidote to the modernist ideology that his modernist style seems to express. His use of myth to associate personal and social experience, historical present and mythical past, does not result in any conceptual structure imposing order; rather, the meaning that is imaged is wonderful amazement, and the shape that is achieved hovers precariously on the brink of shapelessness, like a wave about to break. The total form of the poem is like a bubble, brilliantly but transiently reflecting the world, distorting it as well in its convexity; and always one is aware of the emptiness it contains. In the last line the bubble bursts. "Mythos" is a difficult poem, but not, necessarily, an obscure poem. Three years after he completed it, Gustafson wrote: "The poet ... must satisfy his feeling or thought or inspiration with proportion and movement which are an interpretation of it" (PC, 12). In "Mythos" there is a palpable tension between the proportion and movement provided by the quatrains with their four-stress lines, and the countermovement and different set of proportions determined by the interpolated parentheses of thought and feeling, the muscular alliteration and disruptive contortions of syntax. The verbal tension ironically erodes the poem's quest for a solidity of form to contain it. The poem operates on a number of levels. It is a cunning collocation of two myths which are allegorized as a result of their juxtaposition. Icarus is presented as man off-course; his bright ambitions have resulted in a flight into darkness where, as Gustafson states, "we have need / The other way, trammelling the heart / With faith, omphalos of globe and guerdon." This other way is Theseus's way to the omphalos-centre of love's maze, and it becomes Gustafson's way to the concentric poetry of his maturity. The confrontation with the self imaged by Theseus's exploits with both love and terror in the maze of experience prefigures the perspective and imagery of the concentric stance which marks Gustafson's advance beyond his modernist phase. Theseus is a man of love and human relationships, an explorer of the dark labyrinth as opposed to the ambitious son of science, the cocky technocrat and

51 The Contradictory Lens presumptuous rationalist whose flight into the reasonable daylight ironically plummets him into oblivion. Theseus suffers the mystery of the world and affirms its ambiguous, confusing joys. The poem's language attempts to enact the poet's sense of his relations with that mystery. Where it tends to obscurity, it does so properly, as any poem about human perception must, if it is honest. And "Mythos" is about perception; in its juxtaposition of Icarus and Theseus it shows two opposed stances or attitudes toward the world. Gustafson wrote "Flight into Darkness" in April 1940, two months after writing "Mythos." The dense quatrains of "Mythos" open out to six-line stanzas; the four-stress lines expand to five. This poem also paces thresholds: between innocence and experience; between yesterday's hope and present apprehension, anger and violence. A movement from spring to summer structures a loss of grace and recalls the premonitions of "Final Spring" and "Crisis." Although the poem does not end in despair, love and peace are doubtful. As the poem develops, Gustafson seems tempted by the cynicism that overcame many 19305 poets at the end of the decade. But in the final stanzas, he faces it down: We have waited important letters from the west, In evening cities heard the newspaper tossed Against the door, under the prosperous valley Guessed at oil, proved the legend false. We dream wisely who once had loved too well. And yet, coming on sun across An alien street, stand suddenly surprised As Galileo, before his midnight window, Cloak about his shoulders, coldly chose A fatal planet - first, listened while The solitary wagon passed along the road — Then aimed his contradictory lens. (FID, 16)

In a style as oblique as it is intense, Gustafson again makes Theseus's choice, described now as Galileo's. But for Gustafson, the "fatal planet" is earth, the world of love and suffering. Like Galileo, he is attracted to the music of the spheres, but he, too, listens to the music of the quotidian "first," the sound of solitary labour. Galileo's lens is "contradictory" because it shows the lover of earth unearthly worlds. Gustafson's perspective is likewise contradictory; its loving attention to painful experience results in the dark wisdom of sunlit places. "Flight into Darkness" and "Mythos" were written only two months

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A Poetics of Place

apart, yet they are quite different stylistically. The later poem is no less "muscular," but its movement is more expansive as opposed to the denser, contractive tensions of "Mythos." Gustafson allows his language, rhythms, and form to be determined by the varying intensity of his mind and the course of his thinking. In these two turningpoint poems, he does not force language or form upon his subject, but allows that subject to summon what it needs in the process of its self-discovery. The range of diction, technique, and voice displayed by these two poems suggests that there is an organic or processive quality to Gustafson's compositional procedures which makes his formalism more flexible, more serviceable; which is to say that his modernist characteristics have to do more with his poetic pragmatism than with his philosophical perspectives. In the 19305 and 19405, he was looking for a style that would serve him; occasionally, however, his poems suggest that he was serving a style. But even then, it is a sign of his ongoing search for that "nexus of mind and feeling" which the successful poem represented. IV light into Darkness is a very ig3os-sounding title for a book of JL poems, and most of the poems in it were written before 1941. "Toponymy," a poem written in response to the invasion of Poland, is an early example of what Gustafson eventually calls his "witness poetry": Lens and line Across the map deploy, Sight cornerstones Of man and boy. ... Have plummet point, Let civil eye survey The fatal length of limb The coign of clay. ... (FID, 27-8) The rhyming quatrains; the short two- and three-stress lines; the combination of technical and poetic, current and archaic dictions; the Anglo-Saxonisms of alliteration and ellipsis; the map and survey imagery — all recall 19305 poetry. But Gustafson's distinctive sense of the music of language is heard in the arrangement of short and long vowels, soft and hard syllables. The titles of the poems describe the mood of the volume. It is a poetry of "Crisis"; a doom is descending

53 The Contradictory Lens on the world of light and love. It is a time of "Final Spring," of urgency and anxiety. In "Ultimatum," written in 1938, he asks: "How shall this time be met ... ?" (FID, 33), and many of the poems in the volume question the poet's role during such times. Paradoxically, language seems powerless to do good, yet powerful to effect evil: "The workings of the hand are / Impotent / And on the tongue is dust" (FID, 33-4). Auden's diseased world has erupted; a corrupt civilization pollutes the lifegiving streams which flow between man and soil: To the sensitive lips the truth Within a word between a man and man The ploughshare and the earth Is ultimatum. This our need and words Sour The symbol in our hands water And there is no reply (FID, 34) Here flat diction, absent punctuation, and syntactic dislocation point to the terror and trauma of the times. The romantic quest had become a miserable forced march deeper and deeper into the maze of history. From one kind of romantic poet, we might expect a flight from or out of darkness. But Gustafson opens toward the darkness, the destructive element. It is as if darkness and light have become one and the same, and like the Theseus of "Mythos," who had to confront the opposite who was also himself, the poet must now know the dark side of history and civilization as he has known the light. Flight into Darkness thus expresses a young poet's sense of having reached the end of a road — perhaps the end of a youthful romanticism. He will have to find his way, like Theseus, back to the world of light and love and there withstand the harsh sun of his times. The volume collects Gustafson's first attempts to express his view of human experience in a contemporary style. The nature of his perspective required that style to balance contraries. When it fails to maintain that balance, the result is obscurity, the charge most of his critics levelled against him during the 19405. This is evident in a poem like "Excelling the Starry Splendour of This Night," which attempts to affirm human significance amid the vastness of the universe:

54 A Poetics of Place Slow wheel the crackling heavens hung within The pinpoint of an eye, my ear Is sensible and whorls archaic Music in its round. Look how the architecture of this night Is scarp and scaffold for an inch Of breath and all its glory margined By a breadth of palm! Whereby what mortal crevice, coign of skull Shall man be less, than all, this whole And aggregate of god; snuff With a pinch of logic, proof? (FID, 11)

Hopkins's "The Starlight Night" and "Spring" shadow Gustafson's poem; indeed, it can be read as a reply to them. Gustafson may agree with Hopkins that the world "is all a purchase, all ... a prize" and that man should "Have, get, before it cloy";17 but he cannot affirm unequivocally: Go tell the lips of lovers kiss a skull; The loin athletic, fathers dust! The great earth turns. The heavens move. Orion bends his bow. O mighty night and firmament of glory Here, on the yes of an eyelid hung! The broad hills break whereon you stand, O man, of god who gave. (FID, 12) Grandeur cannot be denied, but it must be seen in its totality, and only the contradictory lens can do this. Hopkins's presence in this poem is problematic, however. The lines are muscular to the point of painful contortion, and the reason for this obscurity is that, in the interest of achieving that "nexus of mind and feeling" which he told Ronald Hambleton was the mark of the successful poem, Gustafson condenses his utterances to the point that conciseness becomes cryptic. The somewhat repressed argument of the poem plays its echoes of "archaic / Music" against the anxious semitones of contemporary doubt. The result is that rhythm, sound, and sense collide and stutter to a crippled halt in the final line — a technical defeat for the poem which, ironically, best expresses the

55 The Contradictory Lens division between its heart and mind. Gustafson does not seem as sure of his experience in "Excelling the Starry Splendour" as he was in "Mythos," so he cannot override the Jesuit's ghostly presence to sound out his own music; but neither is he subservient enough to merely parrot the affirmations of "The Starlight Night." Consequently, the voice wavers between affirmation and analysis, not quite sure what it wants to do. Flight into Darkness is a transitional volume. In the year following its publication, Gustafson wrote: "No poet worth his salt sets out to obscure his meaning and bemuse the reader. ... To be disconnected from the knowledge that he is in communication is the poet's form of bankruptcy" (PC, 8, 14). To say that one reader's obscurity is another's delight does not deal with this issue, but the fact that Gustafson was aware of the charge against his poetry and did not consider it fair suggests that we should examine the background to his thinking about poetic style at this point in his development.

G

ustafson's aesthetic position during the 19408 and 19505 is outlined in Poetry and Canada, an essay he wrote for the Canadian Legion Educational Service which was published in July, 1945. The argument is in no way original, but the essay is nevertheless an important prose statement of Gustafson's thinking about poetry, poetics, and culture at this time. Also, Gustafson's essays are not only helpful for understanding his own poetic practice; they are documents of their times as well as statements of personal value. If "A Poet in Exile," in The Golden Chalice, anticipated Klein's "Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" by more than a decade, Poetry and Canada continues the argument of that early poem in a different key, and thus gives a contemporaneous prose expression to the argument of that wellknown poem long before it became the canonical work it now is. Romantic and modernist principles converge in the essay. Gustafson begins by responding to P.K. Page's criticism of his use of "pleasure" as a criterion of aesthetic value in his preface to the Pelican Anthology of Canadian Poetry (1942).18 As the essay develops, it is clear that Gustafson's view of the nature and function of poetry is, indeed, contingent upon the meaning of "delight" for him. "Poems may do a number of things," he writes, "but they must always give pleasure"; furthermore, both the poet and the reader "must experience delight" (PC, 1). He is quick to add, "By pleasure, I don't mean pleasantry" (PC, 2). For Gustafson, the poet's delight is the satisfaction that accompanies successful expression; the reader's pleasure derives from the addition to the self which is the consequence of the experience

56 A Poetics of Place

with the poem. This delight is neither purely aesthetic nor narrowly didactic in either case. He quotes Sidney's argument that the poet "cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion," and Coleridge's statement that "Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood" (PC, 1-2). Sidney's language recurs in Gustafson's discussion of poetic form later in the essay, and Coleridge's statement underlies Gustafson's later discussion of the "logic of the imagination" as a feature that distinguishes poetry from prose. The latter is an instance of the romantic-modernist cross-over in Gustafson's poetic, for the "logic of the imagination" is Eliot's phrase, and Eliot's argument that "genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood" can be read as an extension of Coleridge's.19 Gustafson's concern, like A.M. Klein's, is that the poet and poetry be taken seriously by society. If society misunderstands the nature of poetic pleasure, it will not understand the serious social function that the poet and poetry have. In Gustafson's view, the poet has a serious role to play in society because poetry shows society to itself. "It is a dangerous and wasteful fallacy that politicians cling to: that a nation can be accurately defined by butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers. ... the last six years have sufficiently proven that there are other things which a nation believes to be of equal importance. Those things find their highest expression in poetry (PC, 3). Gustafson had made this same point in "Poetry and Politics" in 1938. Now he refers to Arnold in support of his belief that "It is in poetry that the spirit of a nation most securely resides"(PC, 5).so What Gustafson means by "spirit" is actually "identity." He writes: "if a nation is to endure there must ... be self-recognition." Poet and poetry contribute profoundly to this self-recognition, "for poetry defines things not as they are but as they matter" (PC, 5). This is also the substance of his 1949 essay, "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But ...," in the Saturday Review.21 It is also consistent with "A Poet in Exile," in The Golden Chalice; for what Gustafson is discussing, as well as national identity and cultural self-recognition, is the poet's (and his own) personal identity and self-image, and their recognition by society. The connecting link is the concept of "value" and its role in the chain of identity-value-meaning. Poetry and Canada repeats Gustafson's earlier criticism of the rational and empirical traditions which underlie materialistic and utilitarian society. This is again a feature of his outlook which derives from his romantic sensibility. Gustafson's essay definitely shows that he believes poetry to be significant for the whole community, and he refers to Eliot's notion of the "logic of the imagination" because, as the essay also shows, he

57 The Contradictory Lens

is acutely aware of the gap between society and its language of value, and the poet and his. In Gustafson's view, identity for the nation comes from a collective recognition of its basic values; these values give it its meaning, validate and explain its history, and the nation only recognizes itself on their basis. Similarly, the individual defines himself in terms of his personal values; his values give his actions purpose and meaning, his life significance. Poetry is instrumental in both cases. "Poetry takes all life for its material, and returns it with delight and wisdom. Man is delighted by nothing as much as to know what he is within the universe which he inhabits" (PC, 5).22 The last sentence discloses the dimension of personal meaning and apology in this general discussion. It is Gustafson who is primarily concerned with knowing what he is within the universe, and by the mid-19408 he was using poetry - the actual process of poetic creation - to explore this question of personal identity. What is important to recognize is that Gustafson's aesthetic delight is also an existential peace or calm, related to a human being's selfknowledge. It is a man's delight to know who and what he is in the universe. Gustafson is projecting a highly personal value, indeed an obsession, into his general discussion of poetry and poetics. The general discussion of poetic technique which concludes the essay should be understood in this context of Gustafson's personal sense of the nature and function of poetry; for in it, Gustafson is not only outlining his own approach to issues like rhythm, structure, language, and form in poetry, but more significantly, his comments point to the idiosyncratic connection between poetic means and ends in his approach to poetry and individuation, self-knowledge and self-recognition.23 Gustafson argues that the poet is driven to write by certain "imperatives": It is these imperatives which are always with the poet. By virtue of the sensitivity of his perceptions, of his body, by virtue of the spirit stuffed within his frame, or the pentecost which is ever upon him, by virtue of all of these or other than these, whatever determined him a poet, it is these imperatives which dominate his existence and compel him to utterance lest he be nothing. Through his utterance experience finds value. Through poetry is there "a momentary stay against confusion" wherein all men can find tranquillity. (PC, 6)

Wordsworth, Eliot, and Frost gather in this paragraph, and Gustafson then links a classical figure to them by introducing the Aristotelian notion of catharsis, which he describes as "The poetic means whereby this tranquillity is reached." This raises the issue of obscurity. Cathar-

58 A Poetics of Place sis, tranquillity, delight cannot be experienced by the reader if the poem is unintelligible. "No poet worth his salt sets out to obscure his meaning and bemuse the reader. It is only to the whole man that a poem surrenders" (PC, 8). And he then repeats the quotation from Coleridge, that "poetry gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly understood."24 For Gustafson, the issue of obscurity, like that of delight-pleasure, should be understood in relation to the poet as well as the reader; for, given the nature and function of poetry as Gustafson understands them, the poet has as much, if not more, to lose from poetic obscurity than the reader. The successful poem leads to the cathartic experience for both; Gustafson describes this as "a cleansing of the emotions, a resolution of the spirit whose effect is one of pleasurable sublimation" (PC, 6). Poetic obscurity may "bemuse" the reader, but the confusion has more serious consequences for the poet, whose imperative to write in the first place was to clarify his own self-image. The reader can always close the book on an obscure poem; the poet, however, if he has been sincere in his attempt to express himself, has failed in that "resolution of the spirit" which is one of his deepest needs. For most readers of modern poetry, the issue of obscurity is rooted in the modern poet's techniques. Gustafson's line of thinking, however, is that the reader must not consider the poet's technique as a dimension that can be discussed or even considered separately from other dimensions of the poetic experience — most obviously, the dimension of meaning. The reader must give the poet the freedom to risk his meaning, which means that the reader must risk himself in the process. Gustafson broaches this by referring to Eliot's concept of the "logic of the imagination": the reading of poetry demands that more be called into action than the logic of reason. It demands the use of the logic of the imagination. Many readers are self-defeated by stipulating that poetry be in the form of grammatical statement, that it employ only the faculty of reasoning. When they are disappointed, they protest that the poem does not make sense. What they really are saying is that the poem is not prose. (PC, 8)

A poem's rhythms, shape, sound, and meaning must be "logical" if they are to avoid obscurity, but the logic is imaginative. A poem has shape. I do not mean that a rectangle or square can be made of its boundaries. I mean Sir Philip Sidney's "delightful proportion," that inner form without which the delight and the meaning are impoverished and

59 The Contradictory Lens incomplete. The form of a poem is the balance of pauses and progressions in space as language is spoken which proceeds with the meaning or connotations of the words used, and which is in itself so patterned and proportioned that it is self-satisfied and so made memorable in grace and completion to the hearer. (PC, g)25

What is important in this passage is the way "delight" and "meaning" are related; both are dependent upon the poem's "inner form." Also, Gustafsoris sense of form is quite dynamic here; it is a balancing of tensed and interacting elements — grammar and syntax, diction, rhythm and sound. Furthermore, Gustafson's words - "Self-satisfied," "grace," and "completion" - for attributes of this formal balance should not be interpreted in terms of the early Eliot's theory of the autonomous artifact, the view Eliot put forward in essays like "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Hamlet," and which was so influential for critical theory in the 19305 and 1940S. The overall context of Gustafson's remarks clearly establishes the vital relation of the poem to both individual and social-cultural processes — what he calls "self-recognition." The meaning of "delight" for Gustafson also prohibits any tendency to "pure" poetry. Gustafsoris experiences in the 1930s committed him to some of the modernist practices of Auden, Spender, and MacNeice, but not to the theory of aesthetic impersonality of Eliot. His sensibility, moreover, with its fundamental belief in individual expression and its need for self-definition through poetry, regarded poetry as precisely the opposite of the early Eliot's desired escape from personality; for Gustafson, the poem was the poet's opportunity to discover his personality.26 Gustafson discusses rhythm in poetry as a component of poetic form: "form in poetry is not to be thought of as static. The total shape a poem makes is in verbal movement" (PC, 10—11). Verbal movement is the effect of metrical patterns and variations in these patterns. "The achievement to be observed is that a poem's rhythm is also a part of its meaning; the mystery, the poet's identification of the space which an experience once occupied with the present time of moving through a poem's space" (PC, 11). He then quotes from Hopkins's "God's Grandeur," Donne's "Love's Infiniteness," and Tennyson's "Break, Break, Break" to illustrate the connection between rhythm and sense. What is striking here is the relation between poem as space-time and the experience-in-time it recreates or re-enacts. Gustafsoris sense of poetry is that it is essentially narrative-dramatic. A poem tells and embodies. The essence of the poetic voice is its identity, which itself derives from the poem's successful identification of its total shape with the imperative that originated it. "The poet...

6o A Poetics of Place

must satisfy his feeling or thought or inspiration with proportion and movement which are an interpretation of it" (PC, 12). This sheds more light on Gustafson's sense of "muscular" poetry — poetry which successfully embodies a "nexus of mind and feeling." Musculature is signature. Muscular poetry flexes the specific idiosyncrasies of the individuality it expresses; the poem's total shape - its rhythms, diction, sounds, and form — signs the self that utters it.27 In all of this Gustafson shows the Romantic foundations of his thinking about poetry. Charles Altieri writes that "the Romantic poet must see his poem as embodying experience, as directly presenting the act of prehension, instead of commentary after the fact on the nature of his thoughts or of objects confronting them ... [T]he poet needfs] to imagine his work as directly embodying the experience of value."28 Gustafson's sense of the poem's proposition and movement as an "interpretation" of the poet's feeling, thought, or inspiration should be understood in physical rather than intellectual terms. It is interpretation in the sense that a dancer interprets feeling, thought, or inspiration in the movement and proportion of a dance: interpretation as performance. Then the relationship between poem and experience is best understood through the metaphor of participation, which also describes the poem-reader relationship. Gustafson's valuing of the music in poetic language and his emphasis on rhythm in his discussion reinforce this view; so, too, does his preference for "muscular" as opposed to "cerebral" poetry. His poetic stresses the individuality-personality within the poem. The essay does not discuss imagination to any great degree and his list of imperatives behind poetic creation does not even refer to imagination. When he does refer to "Imagination," he maintains distance from it by describing it as a "secret": How the poet informs his poem with those qualities which make poetic communication a delight and a wisdom is without complete answer. No matter what uses and devices can be defined, the ultimate secret escapes under such aliases as: Inspiration, Grace, Magic, Imagination. ... the total fusion of a poem cannot be demonstrated, only experienced. (PC, 8)

This, too, prevents Gustafson from committing himself fully to the modernist glorification of the Coleridgean imagination as the power within the symbol and the creative force behind the form of the poem. Gustafson's view is akin to Herbert Read's, in Form and Modern Poetry (1932), an important work for the Neo-Romantic movement in Britain during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Read argues that "[poetic]

61 The Contradictory Lens

form is inherent in the passion" and illustrates his argument, significantly, with the poetry of Hopkins.29 Gustafson's comments on the mystery of poetry quoted above sound a lot like Read's statement in Form and Modern Poetry, that "Poetry is properly speaking a transcendental quality — a sudden transformation words assume under a particular influence — and we can no more define this quality than we can define a state of grace." There is a further resemblance between Gustafson's description of the poem as an embodiment, through its rhythms, proportions, and movement, of the original imperative that is its source, and Read's view that all art originates in intuition or vision and that these are "identified with knowledge" and "consciously objectified" in the work of art. This recalls, in particular, Gustafson's linking of aesthetic delight with knowledge-wisdom. Read's intuitionvision is "a state of concentration or tension in the mind" and "in the process of poetic composition words rise into the conscious mind as isolated objective things with a definite equivalence in the poet's state of mental intensity. They are arranged or composed in a sequence or rhythm which is sustained by this objective equivalence."30 Gustafson's view of the poem as "the poet's identification of the space which an experience once occupied with the present time of moving through a poem's space" (PC, 11) is also remarkably similar to Read's. Where Gustafson would part company with Read, however, is over the issue of transcendence. Gustafson also gives priority in his hierarchy of poetic elements to the "music" of poetry, whereas Read rejects such an emphasis. For Gustafson, not only is "a poem's meaning ... also in its sound," but "the music a poem makes contains more of the poem's meaning than its logic or syntax" (PC, 12—13).31 "The music of poetry is the ultimate essence of poetry," and what distinguishes poetry from prose: "Without it, there may be prose of proportion and movement. With it, the furthest reaches of man's spirit can communicate" (PC, 14).32 The tandem discussion of personal and national identity in Poetry and Canada shows that in 1945 Gustafson was still more in the sphere of influence of the 1930s poets than he was in that of older modernists like Eliot. Indeed, Gustafson's thinking about the social-cultural role of the poet recalls Spender's discussion in The Destructive Element (1935).33 The possibility of a connection between Gustafson and Spender the critic is also suggested by The Still Centre. In his Foreword to that volume, Spender acknowledges a change in his poetry as he articulates the disillusionment that overcame the older poets of the 1930s toward the end of the decade: "I have deliberately turned back to a kind of writing which is more personal."34 A year before, Gustafson had discussed Spender's poetry in his article

62 A Poetics of Place "Poetry and Politics," pointing to Trial of a Judge (1938) as a significant example of political art, but he had criticized Spender, along with Auden and Day Lewis, for lapsing into propaganda in their work. Gustafson stressed the personal essence of poetry, and Spender's return to a more personal poetry in The Still Centre would have reinforced Gustafson's own poetic values at this time. Referring to his poems in support of the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, Spender is at pains to explain their unheroic tone; he writes: "a poet can only write about what is true to his own experience, not about what he would like to be true to his experience." He then elaborates on this defence of the personal testament: Poetry does not state truth, it states the conditions within which something is felt to be true. Even while he is writing about the little portion of reality which is part of his experience, the poet may be conscious of a different reality outside. His problem is to relate the small truth to the sense of a wider, perhaps theoretically known, truth outside his experience. Poems exist within their own limits, they do not exclude the possibility of other things, which might also be subjects of poetry, being different. They remain true to experience and they establish the proportions of that experience. One day a poet will write truthfully about the heroism as well as the fears and anxiety of today; but such a poetry will be very different from the utilitarian heroics of the moment.38

At the heart of these remarks is the conflict between the public and the personal worlds which preoccupied so much 1930s poetry. Gustafson's discussion of the relation between personal and national identity in Poetry and Canada not only shows his consciousness of the conflict, but is itself his movement toward a personal resolution of it. During the 1930s and 1940s Gustafson developed a poetic which was extrovert enough to bear witness to political and social events, but which remained solidly rooted in the poet's individuality. In The Destructive Element (1935), Spender sets out to take stock of his modernist predecessors; in the process, he is also trying to assert his independence from them. His criticism of Joyce for his work's lack of connection to "any social structure," his rejection of Yeats's poetry for not being "soundly constructive," and his judgment of Eliot as failing to achieve a "synthesis" between the personal and public worlds all reflect his own moral aesthetic. The temptation Spender acknowledged is that provided by the romantic traditions to which he and his generation, and their immediate predecessors, were extremely vulnerable: the withdrawal into "eccentric and defiant individualism." The poems in The Golden Chalice showed that Gustafson, too, was

63 The Contradictory Lens tempted in that direction. But as his argument in Poetry and Canada shows, he had travelled something of a parallel path in looking for a relationship between the poet arid society which would evoke a poetry that was both personally satisfying and socially significant.36 In his discussion of the problem of belief faced by the modern writer, Spender engages issues which are central to an understanding of Gustafson's modernism. In Spender's view, the great modern writers of the previous generation had confronted the political-moral issues of the times but had failed to discover a way out of this confrontation in their art. Their failure is evidenced primarily in the problems of technique that their works raise, problems which are caused by the question of belief. Eliot in The Waste Land, Pound in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, Yeats in "The Second Coming," and James in his later fiction are all "grouped round the 'destructive element,' wondering whether or not to immerse themselves." Spender describes the "destructive element" as "the experience of an all-pervading Present, which is a world without belief." "The consciousness of a void in the present" has sent some modern writers to "search for some unifying belief in the past or in some personal legend" and others to "look forward to a world of new beliefs in the future." Here Spender polarizes his generation of poets with their politically committed art which looks from the present toward the future, and the work of their predecessors, which seems to look from the present backwards to history and myth. The Waste Land expresses the problem for both generations, but Spender sees no solution for his own proffered in that work. Eliot's poem is a poem without a subject because his problems of belief prevent him from constructing a synthesis of personal and cultural values: "What a writer writes about is related to what he believes. What he writes about also implies an attitude to the time in which he is living. ... if there is conflict between the belief of a man and the belief of the time in which he is living, the belief that should be positive in the man is turned negative, in its reaction to his contemporaries."37 This is precisely the position in which Gustafson found himself at the beginning of the 1930s. His personal values and beliefs conflicted with those of his times and he was on the brink of turning inward toward what Spender calls "eccentric and defiant individualism." Spender's discussion of the poet's predicament in the 1930s describes the forces impinging upon Gustafson and influencing his development of a modern poetic; but Gustafson did not follow Spender's prescription for belief by reconstructing the past or fantasizing about the future. Gustafson preferred to exercise his imagination by remaining in the present. The poetry of Flight into Darkness reveals

64 A Poetics of Place no escape into myth, history, or Utopian dream. When Gustafson does turn to mythology, as in "Mythos," the effect is to image the present in its full and complex grandeur, not to escape it or contrast it with a preferred mythological world. Gustafson never aspires to a Yeatsian Byzantium. Spender's study is an important critique of the romantic individualism that persists within modernism. His criticism of Eliot, the most significant influence, through The Waste Land, on the 1930s generation of poets, is very important. His view that "in the chaos of unbelief the time lacks, or has seemed to lack, all moral consistency" presents the problem of the modern artist in the 1930s in terms that are fully applicable to Gustafson. Moreover, the connection he makes between the problem of belief in the modern world and the problems of technique in modern literature bear directly on the discussion of the poet's relation to society in Poetry and Canada. Spender's description of the shortcomings of "eccentric and defiant individualism" also sheds light on Gustafson's development in terms of the reaction of the 1930s poets against high modernist strategies: The danger with writers who are strongly individualistic is that they are creating a culture which depends only on a personal experience and personal beliefs; which has no roots in the life around it; which is not the fruit of beliefs held by many people; which is blase, and not even rebellious. Therefore society may wake up at any moment and find that it can do without the individual creators of this art, because the art is the possession of certain people, and not the life-blood of the civilization.38

In Poetry and Canada, Gustafson addresses the issues behind Spender's warning, and argues explicitly for the vital connection between the poet and society in terms of their shared values as the basis for personal identity and national self-recognition.

T

he final component contributing to Gustafson's development in the 19305 and 1940s is the influence of the Neo-Romantic movement. Dylan Thomas's poetry was the most prominent force in this movement, which was, in part, a reaction against the mainstream of 1930s poetry represented by Auden; but Thomas himself did not join any of the formal or informal groups that figure in the movement's history.39 The first of these was known as the Apocalypse, and was headed and publicized by the poets J.F. Hendry and Henry Treece. The Apocalypse emerges out of the tradition of British anarchist thinking in the 1920s and 1930s and, in Tolley's view, "was as

65 The Contradictory Lens grandiose in aim as it was small in achievement."40 It eventually faded into "Personalism," the last phase of the movement in the 1940s. Gustafson was aware of the Neo-Romantic movement in all its phases. He reviewed Treece's Collected Poems for Northern Review in 1947 and mentions there the Personalist journal, Transformation.41 He had been reading Thomas since the late 1930s; and just as his poetry in the 1940s shows Thomas's influence, so his remarks on Treece in his review and in his essay "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But..." show that he was receptive to certain elements in Neo-Romantic thought and poetic practice. The writers associated with Apocalypse "stressed individualism and the importance of myth, disliked the type of poetry fostered by New Verse, and [were] generally more favourable to poetry of the romantic period than had been poets of the early 1930s." Gustafson's use of myth in his poems of the late 1940s should be considered against this Neo-Romantic background. His view of the imagination and of the relationship between the poet, his poem and the world, and the way his imagery functions, all can be understood in relation to Neo-Romantic principles. G.S. Fraser has described the most successful Neo-Romantics as "poets of the image rather than the statement"; they represented "a wish to get away from the colloquial diction and urban imagery and topical slant which Auden was felt to stand for[,] toward something more florid, more savage, more lavishly ornate." In the words of Alex Comfort, a Neo-Romantic writer and editor of the period, "Apocalypse was a planned attempt to inject more eloquence and a more archimagical touch into poetry which had become a bit dry in the hands of our immediate predecessors. ... It leaned heavily on what was in effect Bardic diction (odd that we didn't learn more from Yeats) and some of its purple rhetoric reads like a translation from Welsh set Bardic Odes."42 Comfort's remarks explain how Thomas would come to be considered a major Neo-Romantic poet. Hopkins, too, would be considered one of the movement's predecessors. Herbert Read, as a major British anarchist philosopher-critic in the 1930s, was a more recent figure in the background of the NeoRomantic movement. Read had also had a hand in Hopkins's resurgence during the decade. As noted earlier, Gustafson's attraction to Hopkins was both stylistic and philosophical, and these cannot be considered apart. Just as Spender, in The Destructive Element, discussed the modern artist's problem of technique in relation to his problem of belief, Read, in his essay in New Verse in 1933, discussed Hopkins's originality as a stylist in terms of his spiritual sensibility:

66 A Poetics of Place The space between self and dogma is bridged — there is a bridge, not an abyss of despair - bridged by doubt ... a creative gift or poetic sensibility is only consistent with such a state of spiritual tension and acuity. True originality is due to a conflict between sensibility and belief: both exist in personality, but in counter-action.43

Read's comments on Hopkins can be extrapolated to Gustafson, whose style in the 1940s and 1950s is very much an expression of "spiritual tension and acuity." His poetry, as is suggested by the argument of Poetry and Canada, attempts a bridge between the poet and his world, and the personality expressed by that poetry embodies a sensibility torn between doubt and faith, affirmation and denial, celebration and disgust. Read's approach to Hopkins also explains how Hopkins would be taken up by the Neo-Romantics as an important precursor. This was particularly true for the "Personalist" writers of the early 1940s. Personalism was the last phase of the Neo-Romantic movement and was publicized in the four issues of its journal, Transformation, edited by Henry Treece and Stefan Schimanski. In their Introduction to the first number, Treece and Schimanski attempted to differentiate between Apocalyptism and the new Personalism. They defined the former as A post-surrealist romantic Movement, started by J.F. Hendry and Henry Treece in 1938, which stated its belief in organic living, myth, anti-mechanism and anti-totalitarianism: it claims predecessors in Revelation, Webster, Blake and Hopkins, and believes in the functions of form and music in poetry as a means of limiting the uncontrolled subconscious.44

Personalism also claimed "anti-mechanism" as one of its principles, but it was to focus more on "the whole individual." In the second number of Transformation, in 1944, Treece and Schimanski elaborated on this notion of "the whole individual": [Personalism] sees in the person the key to the meaning of the universe and believes in the creative and not mechanical evolution of man; it acknowledges God as the creator of our being but it also stresses man's independence of God, for the realization of the individual is an end in itself, whereas the spirit of God is the link between the individual and the outside world.45

They concluded: "Man cannot live by bread alone and ... a purposive force, which aims at the creation of an idealist society, must guide and motivate his life." Personalism, for all its romantic orthodoxy, was

67 The Contradictory Lens not intended to be a return to the "eccentric and defiant individualism" criticized by Spender. "Social responsibility is one of the essentials of Personalism," Schimanski and Treece claimed; it is a philosophy "which aims at a balance, at a unity between the person and the social group and strives for integration of freedom with cooperation." Furthermore, according to Treece, "the artist becomes a whole being with relation to the other men in whose society he moves, because of his art." In his review of Treece's Collected Poems for Northern Review in 1947, Gustafson emphasizes this notion of balance between the individual and the collectivity; indeed, Gustafson describes Personalism as "a movement devoted to the premise that individualism and social responsibility are not incompatible." It is clear from the review that he had read Transformation, and he was emphasizing those Personalist principles that appealed to him. He writes that he approves of "the liberation of personality in such a way that society is at the same time served. In a time when the value of the individual is imperilled, support for this philosophy is to be welcomed." Ironically, Gustafson criticizes Treece for what he feels is the lack of "a satisfactory identification of his poetry with the society in which it exists" and for lapsing into a private mythology.46 Gustafson's 1949 essay "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But ..." shows that the influence of British Neo-Romanticism persisted for him at least until the end of the decade. Moreover, this essay also shows that Gustafson's attraction to Neo-Romantic principles was an expression of his inability to adopt a full-fledged modernism. By 1949, poetry and the criticism of poetry were dominated by the New Criticism. Gustafson begins his essay sounding very much like another Auden in America, announcing that "poetry is neither propaganda nor isolation." He then acknowledges the good done by the New Critics in freeing poetry from the claims of a utilitarian aesthetic: "Critics of the new school ... have shown the value inherent in a poem to be its realized poetry and nothing else; that poetry 'aims at nothing outside itself and can only be an instrument of the poet's practical will the less it is poetry."47 However, he then goes on to reject the New Critical position for stopping short of recognizing that poetry does indeed have value beyond the purely aesthetic: "Poetry, rather than striving to make the world go round, makes the world known." Poetry for the New Critics remains "isolated, if not academic," whereas Gustafson affirms that "The world known through poetry is of immense use." When Gustafson expands on the sense of the usefulness of poetry, the echoes of Treece and Schimanski are strong:

68 A Poetics of Place [My] present contention is that poetry has a "use" - a use beyond its own self-contemplation, a use which criticism is failing to publish, and in failing to do so is neglecting to acknowledge a weapon in the struggle against what that criticism most vehemently inveighs - our culture of measurement, the adulation of "progress," the monopoly of the scientific attitude of mind.

This is a restatement of his views in Poetry and Canada (i945),48 but his statement in 1949 that "the economic man ... is ... not the whole man" recalls Treece's reference to "the whole individual" and "a whole being" in Transformation 3 (1944). Gustafson defines this figure for himself, however: his whole man "is the Adam who defines measurement as stature; knowledge, as wisdom; the Thomas conditioned to admit only demonstrable truth." In this, he is repeating the Personalist attack on the hegemony of scientific, quantitative definitions of truth. Poetry, for Gustafson, can "put the brakes on science" and challenge the "deplored logic ... that the objective and verifiable alone is to be accepted as truth." He concludes the article by echoing his statement in Poetry and Canada: "No matter what it does, poetry is first of all delight," and urging consideration of "the humanistic role of poetry in contemporary society." To ignore or deny this role "is to leave poetry outwardly dislocated. It is to leave the poet denied of identification as a poet with the society in which he exists. But most certainly it is to ignore the value of poetry itself."49 There is a remarkable consistency in Gustafson's prose writing, from Canadian Accent (1944), through Poetry and Canada (1945), to the review in Northern Review in 1947 and the essay in Saturday Review in 1949. All these develop the viewpoint first expressed in "Poetry and Politics" in 1938, in which he first discussed the relation between the writer and his nation-culture. His first association with the NeoRomantic movement was shortly after this, in 1940—41, when his poem "Mythos" was accepted by Eugene Jolas for publication in Vertical: A Year Book for Romantic-Mystic Ascensions51 This anthology was published by the Gotham Bookmart Press in New York in 1941. The press was associated with the Gotham Book Mart, and its owner, Frances Steloff, was also the American editor for Poetry London. Edited by Tambimuttu, Poetry London issued its first number in February 1939 and was another outlet for Neo-Romantic writing. During his New York years Gustafson frequented the Gotham Book Mart regularly, attending readings and other literary events. Poetry London published Thomas, Read, Spender, Barker, Treece, Gascoyne, D.S. Savage, G.S. Fraser, and other writers associated with British Neo-

6g The Contradictory Lens

Romanticism, and Gustafson's knowledge of the movement may have begun with this journal.51 D.S. Savage, a poet and critic who wrote for Transformation as well as Poetry London, may have influenced Gustafson's thinking in Poetry and Canada. Gustafson's essay was written within a year of Savage's essay "Form and Poetry," which appeared in Transformation 3 (1944). Savage makes form the sine qua non of poetry: "where form does not exist poetry cannot exist either. ... It is, indeed, the communication of a vision of form within the confusion of experience through the technical medium of words that is the poet's essential business." Where Gustafson discusses "that inner form without which the delight and meaning are impoverished and incomplete" (PC, 9), Savage describes form as "an inherent quality, manifesting itself from within and determining the outward structure." Gustafson discusses the "total shape" that a poem achieves by virtue of its "verbal movement," and then proceeds to a discussion of poetic metre and rhythm (PC, 11). Savage writes: "'Form' is an elusive quality, and ultimately its existence can be grasped only by a total act of apprehension on the part of the reader. ... Form as a total quality manifests itself partially as Rhythm: it is the persistence of rhythm throughout the poem that is the primary agent in the creation of form. And rhythm shows itself externally as metre" Savage's Personalist bias results in more stress upon emotion as the "central impetus" in poetic creation than Gustafson expresses in Poetry and Canada, but Gustafson's reference to catharsis in his essay gives emotion a greater role in poetic experience - both for poet and reader - than any other element. Savage's remarks on the relation between emotion and form in poetry are worth quoting at length: poetry which is not integrated ... verse that is not informed by emotion ... lacks a centre. ... If a poem is to have form — organic, inherent form — it must, quite obviously, have a centre to which all its peripheral elements of description and reflection are polarized. Form is always the effect of rhythm, and rhythm is the expression of emotion, which is the energy radiated by the poet's mind when it is working at high tension, faced with the inner necessity of grasping and comprehending experience ... his emotion provides the centre around which the various elements of his thought and observation cohere, each element being polarized to the emotion and transfused with its peculiar quality. ... Such an impetus presumes a degree of necessity, of psychological compulsion, in the poet, directed upon his experience. The poet's urge, in fact, which drives him toward the act of creation, arises from a profound need to comprehend his experience, to discover within its appar-

7o A Poetics of Place ently haphazard disorder an inner significance, an inner wholeness, in fact, form. 52

Savage's discussion of the emotional impetus which is the source of poetic creation and the force within poetic form recalls Gustafson's discussion of the "imperatives which dominate [the poet's] existence and compel him to utterance" (PC, 6). Similarly, Gustafson's view that "Through his utterance [the poet's] experience finds value. Through poetry is there 'a momentary stay against confusion' where all men can find tranquillity (PC, 6) is very similar to Savage's description of the poet's "need to comprehend his experience" and "discover ... an inner significance, an inner wholeness." Savage's reference to "wholeness" might even be echoed later in Gustafson's conclusion to "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But ..." where he writes: "Poetry can't wind clocks, but it can tell the time. 'Wholeness of vision,' once it is realized, who knows, may at the least, blunt Thanatos."53 Finally, Savage's imagery of centre and periphery, and of polarization as the dynamic relationship between them, is similar to Gustafson's sense of the dynamic nature of poetic form in Poetry and Canada (PC, 9). Whatever he took from Auden, Eliot, Spender, Hopkins, Thomas, and the Neo-Romantics, however, Gustafson made over into principles of his own poetic, a poetic which was intended first and foremost to explain, defend, and promote the kind of poetry he needed to write. It might be possible to see Savage's centre-periphery image, for example, behind Gustafson's language in his essay on Lampman in 1947; Gustafson writes that in his most successful poems, "Lampman came directly into passionate contact with nature, made concentric the observed and the observer... "54 But the point to make is that Gustafson has quite brilliantly transformed Savage's image, if he is indebted to it at all. The image of concentric self and world, with the poet both inside and outside his subject, and his poem, is not only a fascinating conceptual paradigm with which to approach Lampman's poetry; it also suggests a way to approach Gustafson's own poems of the late 1940s and 1950s, poems which show him having fully assimilated what he needed to take from the modernism of the 1930s and 1940s. These poems were eventually published in Rivers among Rocks in 1960, another of Gustafson's volumes which shows the territory he had travelled rather than where he actually was as a poet in the year of its publication. Rivers among Rocks is indeed a map of the labyrinth that Gustafson as Theseus had explored in the years since Flight into Darkness. The title of the first poem in the volume, "Legend," refers both to maps and narratives, and suggests that for Gustafson story and place are indivisible; all man's adventures are plotted in the soil of his

71 The Contradictory Lens

origins, as likewise their conclusions. In 1960, Gustafson was newly married and about to return to Canada. He had found his Ariadne to help him out of the labyrinth.

A

year after the publication of Rivers among Rocks (1960) and Rocky Mountain Poems (1960), Gustafson wrote to W.O. Raymond:

Perhaps now I have won through to a willingness to be more direct, more lucid, in style. For what any of my work may be worth, I have been aware for some time and in many areas that a disadvantage I work against is a style of technique - it sought subtlety and sensitivity, and with a subject demanding these qualities, often came out "obscure." There was a cleavage of communication. It struck me when I gathered together poems for "RAR" [Rivers among Rocks}. I discarded many for that reason.55

It is noteworthy that Gustafson says he has "won through to a willingness to be more direct, more lucid, in style." The attitude, the stance must appear before the change in style can occur. Sensibility, again, is at the basis of style - but not just in the expressive sense; a style can be chosen and developed by the sensibility as much as it can evolve from within it. The poems in Rivers among Rocks are not arranged chronologically, but according to Gustafson's sense of their areas of concern.56 A number of poems still wear the borrowed clothes of Hopkins and Thomas: convoluted syntax, tongue-twisting, mind-bending inversions, difficult ellipses, a muscular but too-tense rhetoric. It is in the more recent poems that the new directness and clarity begin to show. In the love poems of 1956—57 — "The Election" (RAR, 17), "Beach with White Cloud"CRAR, 19), "Her Love as a North" (RAR, 20), "Of a Sphere and the Sphere of Love" (RAR, 27), and "In Time of Fall" (RAR, 28) — there is energy without strain, although he still overindulges his wit at the expense of clear emotion in a poem like "Her Love as the Lance Pierced" (RAR, 21). The meditative-philosophical poems, "A Candle for Pasch" (RAR, 10), "The Disquisition" (RAR, 6), and "Dr. Johnson Kicks Hocking's Shin" (RAR, 29), also evince a freer voice; the utterance is less likely to choke on the thought and feeling. His most successful poems in his modernist manner, "Legend" (RAR, 1), "Prolegomenon at Midnight" (RAR, 2), "Armorial" (RAR, 3), "At the Ocean's Verge" (RAR, 4), and "Gothic Fugue" (RAR, 8), combine subtlety and sensitivity without devolving into obscurity. The majority of the poems in Rivers among Rocks are not obscure, but they do represent the "domesticated modernism" that characterized poetry in the 1950s - a poetry of dense

72 A Poetics of Place

texture, allusion, ambiguity, and wit.57 The poems that deserve close attention are those in Gustafsoris transitional style of the late 1950s, and the earlier poems in which Gustafson manages to enliven modernist conventions with his own individuality. Gustafson channelled most of his creative energy during the early and mid-igsos into the writing of short stories and a novel. He also edited a new anthology of Canadian poetry for Penguin, which appeared in 1958. Indeed, he seems to have written no poetry between "Legend" in February 1950 and "Quebec Night" in September 1956. But then, from December 1956 to September 1959, he wrote the remaining poems of Rivers among Rocks, as well as the sequence Rocky Mountain Poems.58 Perhaps the combination of writing all that prose and reading a new batch of contemporary Canadian poetry during the early 19505 contributed to the change in attitude toward his style he describes in the letter to Raymond. Two other letters, written at the beginning and at the end of the decade, frame this change in attitude. In September 1950, only six months after he wrote "Legend," Gustafson wrote to John Sutherland: "I still remain rather numb whenever the judgement 'I have no idea what you are saying,' comes back. My stuff is so simple! Love of language and a radical human idea. Shaken well, it's simple to take!" Then, in February 1959, he admitted to Louis Dudek: "I'd rather be understood (I'm coming to maturity) than pure."59 He had just written "Fort Tryon Park" (RAR, 30), a poem in the new style of Rocky Mountain Poems. The war years intensified Gustafson's problems of belief. Most of his poems from the late 1940s are philosophical and religious in concern. Even his love poems situate eros in the context of cosmic doubts and spiritual anxiety. "Prolegomenon at Midnight," for example, which dates from May 1947, seems to announce the end of an affair, or at the very least a swerving of passion away from love's fixed mark. But the poem's pulsations open out into other concentric issues of which eros is the centre. A description of a lover's moon suddenly turns against its own artifice. The world of love no longer has a fixed and secure trajectory and the poet ponders his present dispensation; his musing is troubled by his use of rusted figures: "Youth is not sharp enough." The problems of heart and tongue, moreover, infect the loins; departed love, exhausted words, squandered seed threaten an aggregate despair: Thwarted by swagger and love's lavish, what Do we remember of the thousandth rose Or copulation's squander?

73 The Contradictory Lens What only solver but that daredown doter Launched like a lackluck whose heroics, none Of our laurel, target love? (RAR, 2)

The failures of April foreshadow the plot of winter and the ironic woods echo the empty sky; but the concentric interrogatives expand only so far, then begin to contract. A low-key but nevertheless resilient will rebounds in the final stanzas: Oh, nothing now but I must out of oceans Lift leviathan like a Job, my Ivloby Dangle on a hook. That is to say, nothing's left to do But drag up god in the wig of my words. The rest's A muddle of farewells.

Wit and humour have their place in the deliberations of the littoral. Like Thomas, who generated some of his greatest poems from seaside encounters, and whose presence is palpable in Gustafson's language here, Gustafson looks for salvation in life's salvage. "Prolegomenon at Midnight" is the second important poem Gustafson sets on the margin of land and sea. It looks back to the conclusion of "Mythos," which conflated the thresholds of beach and labyrinth, and ahead to "Legend," "At the Ocean's Verge," and other poems in his later volumes. The problem is articulate: how to keep from the sea's relentless taking what life builds on its uncertain shores. The answer is still the mystery of "Mythos": love. But the hero now is clearly composite. The "solver" is, ironically, both the "lackluck" phallus, whose seed is spent in its own contradictory tides, and the double-hooked tongue that fishes from oblivion what it needs to keep, only to see it unravelled by its own contradictory wit. "Prolegomenon at Midnight" refuses to compromise its subtlety and sensitivity, to cater to any fear of public censure. It is not obscure; its difficulties are crystal clear. The poem's eight stanzas are eight concentric circles, expanding and contracting, from self-criticism, to self-judgment, to self-encouragement. A world of process is feared and then proclaimed. At the centre of the circular maze the struggling poet once again finds only himself, "a figure merely," and finally his only hope is his poetry. If he is to fish a Protean god from the sea and learn its deepest mysteries, he will have to look to his gear, because only his words will tackle him. The art of this poem is its spirit. Busy with echoes and borrowings, its traffic with Thomas and

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Hopkins is dangerous but not fatal. The echoes remain like loud voices in an outer room. Furthermore, it is Gustafson we hear most clearly above the roar of leviathan; and while his swashbuckling may dazzle, it doesn't blind. The matter of belief in God, of course, is where all this self-interrogation comes to its thorny inconclusion for Gustafson. In a letter he wrote to the American critic Babette Deutsch in 1948, the division in Gustafsoris thinking about the religious issue is evident. Deutsch criticized him for being "clever about God" in a poem, and Gustafson replied: Mine is in essence an emotional reaction that I test like the devil with actual experience. But I take stock ... experience yells at me that actuality contradicts God or Genesis or the Divine Will or What-You-Will. The Church or an editorial in "Life" will never argue me into that resignation dearly beloved by pulpits. It's sheer bribery to leap over misery, accident and other uncomfortable facts.60

Gustafson goes on, however, to undercut conclusions drawn from sensory experience: "This constant informing of sensation with meaning often gives me the gripes." "Gothic Fugue" (RAR, 8) labours amid this turmoil of sense and intellect. Roses and orchards seduce the mind through the senses. It seems "As though the world had room for natural love." But such an inference is as random as the "amorous mathematics" of "She loves me: she loves me not," the original version of "He isn't: God is love" in the poem's third stanza. "What difference," he asks: The method's no more yokel than x and y, The amorous mathematics come out odd. ...

God's presence or absence, either conclusion is "odd" when considered from the alternate perspective, and Gustafson is attracted to both: The orchards fade. Among these northern vegetables, darkness falls, The whippoorwill proves his notes and all the heaven's Starry sky — configurations grounded In a cabbage.

The dying generations tempt the closet symbolist; the whippoorwill aspires to be the new Keats's nightingale, and the heaven is Hopkins's

75 The Contradictory Lens

starry sky. But nothing's proved, because all these configurations — dead god and dying earth, or distant divinity in the night sky - are "grounded / In a cabbage." Wit becomes redeeming grace and selfirony the only redemption. The cabbage is the human brain; immanence or transcendence, both are "grounded" in its labyrinthine folds. "Gothic Fugue" is an early score for Gustafson's later dances of process. Man finds himself in fear amid this world of process; but whistling in the dark proves no meaning, other than that the sadness is sweet and its relief short-lived. "At the Ocean's Verge" (RAR, 4) continues this dialectic; its seaside setting and imagery link it with "Legend," which was written ten months later, in February 1950. Gustafson describes how the very fullness of the world transfixes the transcendent impulse: I should pray but my soul is stopt. This is a bombast world: fig-trees, Snow, macacos, ocean's hurl And surf and surge ... All's mad majesty and squander, And x and y or zodiac Excreting wizard mathematics Like a slew of ebbtide worms Won't solve it. The sand is miles and packt And moonlights wash the gnawings of A million years. The globe cants so, It's miracle a man can walk it. (RAR, 4)

"And x and y or zodiac" and "wizard mathematics" recall the "amorous mathematics" and algebraic image of "Gothic Fugue"; "ebbtide worms / Won't solve it" recalls the wormlike "solver" of "Prolegomenon at Midnight." The echoes are a characteristic of Gustafson's poetry; they signify the continuity of concern from poem to poem and from one stage to the next in his development. (He comes back to this poem, for example, in Fire on Stone [1974], when he writes "Now at the Ocean's Verge," and in a sense enters into a dialogue with his earlier self.)61 "All's mad majesty and squander": the line expresses the contradictory view of magnificence and waste, plenitude and decay, the exhilaration and gloom that come with the recognition of entropy; "mad majesty" conveys a sense of energy without a plan, random misrule. It is Gustafson's vision of what he begins to call the "magnificence" and "grandeur" of the world. "Squander" recalls "Copulation's squander" in "Prolegomenon at Midnight," but the magnitude of the spilt life is now universal. "Squander" is Gustafson's

76 A Poetics of Place

verb of process; it describes a world continually spending itself, in constant transition; a world of changes which "wizard mathematics" may describe but cannot explain, cannot "solve." Nor can religion, with its transcendental yearning for a "kingdom come." Prayer proves no more than the whippoorwill's song: Try. Scour this heaven-hung kettle of fish The sweep has greater satisfaction Up a chimney cleaning soot With good soap after.

The world's residues are time's tangible record. History lives but the timeless cannot be heard: Hear how this ocean thurls and thunders! Crashing foams and ravels once Was muted marble Athens owned.

As he says in "Dr. Johnson Kicks Hocking's Shin," "Unheard music is not sweeter" (RAR, 29). Keats has been left behind. Man must settle for an earful. The fullness of time is the record of squander but, for Gustafson, this is man's only true scripture: that which he has written himself and himself been written into. "Dr. Johnson Kicks Hocking's Shin" is a straightforward admission of the wisdom of the senses: Reality is the expression of it. ... Reality is imperfection. Genesis must know temptation Or He cannot help Himself. Is it not so? Can He laugh? Does the whirlwind condescend To thistle or the worm to love? This planet postulates its pun: God's becoming. The moment's made. (RAR, 29)

The last line foresees the wonderful lyric in Gradations of Grandeur (1982), "And so the moment is all,"62 which he uses to title his The Moment Is All: Selected Poems, 1944-83 (1983). But at this moment, the continuity to note is that which Gustafson urges between creator, world, and man. It is a continuity which, if known, is known only

77 The Contradictory Lens

through sensory process. Listening to his lover play the piano, the Tightness of Eve's decision is once again proved; for even God needs our pleasure to relieve his boredom: Without your hands That move the hour, the hammer's action On the string, He sits beyond The pearly gates and twiddles thumbs.

For Gustafson, the churchmen, ironically, prove the antithesis of their case; if the physical creation is not a source of good, then the idea of a creator is preposterous. Then, as in "Gothic Fugue," the answer to the question — "who owns the vacuum" — is clear: "Nothing does" (RAR, 8). The hypothesis, however, that "God's becoming" remains an unresolved ambiguity: the music of the senses urges belief in a God who is all process, a handsome God, indeed; but the same senses limit belief in their own beautiful imperfections. Gustafson wrote "Legend" (RAR, i) in February 1950, but he positioned it first in Rivers among Rocks. As noted earlier, the title suggests both a map and a narrative - perhaps a map to find the rivers among rocks, and perhaps the beginning of the narrative of such a quest. (A manuscript version had "Parable" as an alternative title.) The setting, like that of "At the Ocean's Verge," recalls the earlier "Mythos," whose Theseus heard "the distant ocean / Crash its foamy thunder down / The beach." Like that poem from the early 19405, "Legend" is an important self-dramatization in mythopoeic terms. It is a tour de force in the volume, and the poems that follow seem to flow from its compacted energy. The hero is anonymous but he is clearly an Odyssean man. Washed up on a strange beach, his knowledge is of Helen, Ilium, and "her of Aeaea." The parable may be that of a coming into consciousness, an awakening into history, into the present-in-history, using the metaphor of a man climbing from the sea. Whoever is washed ashore at that place — Many come there but thrust by so fierce a sun The great cliffs cast no shadow, plunge a passage Inland where foliage and whistling paradise-birds Offer comfort - whoever has got up, Standing, certainty under his adjusting heels And height tugged by the tide, ocean rinsing From flank and belly, ravelling loins with wet, Whoever has stayed, solitary in those tropics,

78 A Poetics of Place The caverns of his chest asking acres, he, Doomed in that landscape but among magnificence, By shell and seafoam tampered with, his senses As though by her of Aeaea used, exquisite He, that salt upon his time's tongue, Knows, standing the margin ocean and sand, Ilium toppled thunder his ears, what's left Of Helen naked drag between his toes. (RAR, i)

The poem is one long sentence, and as in the earlier "Mythos," parenthetical interpolations pace the narrative progress and prepare the finale. The syntactic suspension and delay also give the poem an ebband-flow, wavelike movement. Rhetoric becomes mesmerism as the fabulation seems natural. Each movement toward narrative advance gives way to a counter-movement, which does not undo the advance so much as it withdraws it in another direction. However, each movement forward takes the narrative wave farther up the beach — "Whoever is washed ashore at that place ... whoever has got up ... Whoever has stayed ... he ... He ... knows" - until the final crescendo breaks with "He ... Knows ... what's left / Of Helen naked drag between his toes." In its approach to rhythm, structure, and form, "Legend" is a perfect illustration of the poetic Gustafson outlined in Poetry and Canada. Its form "is the balance of pauses and progressions in space as language is spoken which proceeds with the meaning or connotations of the words used, and which is in itself so patterned and proportioned that it is self-satisfied and so made memorable in grace and completion to the hearer" (PC, 9). Likewise, its "rhythm is also a part of its meaning; the mystery, the poet's identification of the space which an experience once occupied with the present time of moving through a poem's space" (PC, 11). "Legend" is a masterpiece of "proportion and movement" (PC, 12). The hero is thrown into "place," the narrative here and now. In this sense, he is not so much anonymous as eponymous: the identity he takes is taken literally from the ground he struggles to secure. He stands in the noon-hour of time, the "moment now" between past and future; all that he knows drags him by its undertow back toward oblivion. This moment is all. It is a survivor's moment; that of an Odysseus or any modern man looking for home, for respite from the compound violence of war, love, and god. His knowledge of Helen and "Ilium toppled," of Circe and a god's anger, is a burden that threatens to topple him unless he can adjust his heels and find some "certainty" in the shifting ground beneath him. The moment is leg-

79 The Contradictory Lens

endary: a fusion of past, present, and potential; and it is also personal: a moment of challenge beneath the "fierce" sun of the world. The future lies "Inland where foliage and whistling paradise-birds / Offer comfort" — the salvation of sensuous particulars, further experience. With the "ocean rinsing / From flank and belly, ravelling loins with wet," the moment is a birth and baptism into the world of "mad majesty and squander." "Doomed in that landscape but among magnificence" describes the man's situation and recalls the line in "At the Ocean's Verge." But this line carries the full burden of Gustafsoris experience as man and craftsman, and it will resound throughout the rest of his poetry. Place is our doom, the dimension of our mortality. Experience, "that salt" upon the tongue, cures our speech as it draws it forth to speak our sense of time-in-place. For Homeric man, or for modern man in 1950, the knowledge, as always, is of love and war. By 1950, a thousand Iliums had been toppled, atomic thunder had deafened the ears, and for Gustafson, his Helen was becoming a memory. His diction, syntax, and rhythm communicate the complexity of his hero's situation. Even the rhythmic typographical placement of the pronoun in line 10 is an emblem of the figure's isolation/extremity, the precariousness of this pivotal moment in his fortunes. It is a time of loss and survival. The only certainty he feels is the tenuous balance after weightlessness; the only elation, the queer composite of relief and sadness that follows his time with Circe. Technically, the poem looks back to the 19308 and 19405 and Gustafson's apprentice work in the synthesis of personal and public subjects. "Ilium toppled" takes the reader, parabolically, to the world of recent history; and the lost Helen keeps the poet close to personal experience. The poem recalls "Mythos" in this respect; but "Legend" shows more control and more independence. The poem is mythopoeic rather than mythical in its cast. Its power derives from the completely successful discovery of a form to enact the projection of self and thus achieve that "resolution of the spirit" which Gustafson had said was "inherent in all great poetry" (PC, 6-7). "Through his utterance experience finds value," he wrote in Poetry and Canada: "Through poetry is there 'a momentary stay against confusion' wherein all men can find tranquillity (PC, 6). "Legend" is a vivid presentation of such a moment, but it must be emphasized that its conviction is all in the momentary nature of its certainty; the poem is poised amid its process. It does not evaporate into the symbolist ether; its feet remain firmly in the brine and gravel, and its focus is on the magnificent confusion of the jungle which is its imminent sequel and immanent struggle. The doom amid magnificence is the vision that Gustafson possesses securely for the

8o A Poetics of Place first time in "Legend"; and although he will write many poems of historical and mythical reference in the future, from this point on he never really looks back. With it, he begins to develop his poetics of the moment. Where "Legend" reveals Gustafson's mythopoeic potential, "Armorial" (RAR, 3) is the most ambitious expression in his modernist manner of his historical sensibility. The poem attempts a formal conceit. Three stanzas form three zones in a poetic coat of arms. Each is discrete, yet they come together through interlocking imagery and the combinative force of the voice. History, once again, is process. Time past suddenly smothers the present: I lay down with my love and there was song Breaking, like the lilies I once saw Lovely around King Richard, murdered Most foully and all his grace at Pomfret, The roses of England stolen; our love Was like gules emblazoned at Canterbury Most kingly in windows and leopards Passant on bars of gold. This Was our heraldry.

The subtle but dramatic run-on of the opening line quietly adumbrates the poem's future. As a love poem, "Armorial" is indeed a broken song. History breaks in on the present; death breaks in on life; pastoral becomes elegy. The momentary pause at the end of the first line briefly establishes an image of erotic success; "Breaking," however, undercuts as it completes the phrase. With its dramatic caesura, the second line prepares the poem for the violence to follow. The first light of romantic passion gives way to the more complex hues of the mature love-cycle. In "Legend," man encounters place as his doom. In "Armorial," history is that doom's machinery. The pastoral and heraldic imagery links nature and history, man-in-place and man-in-time. Human events and natural cycle are grafted in the language of rose and lily. The pageantries of history and nature are subsumed in the poet's song, which, with its own pageantry, discovers the broken nature of human joy. In the first stanza, the speaker affirms his present love amid the presence of history. The landscape becomes a background for their bodies, which are like heraldic emblems. But already there are sinister bends with the falling rhythms, heavy alliteration, and enjambments plunging the lovers into history. The dissonance between "my love" and "our love" suggests a division between sensa-

8i

The Contradictory Lens

tion and consciousness; the lover is not immune to the abstracting effect of metaphor, nor is present love safe from the encroachment of the mind's history. The second stanza argues valiantly the hopeless case of immediate love, but the omnipresent preterite spells its doom. Our love was larks and sprang from meadows Far from kingdoms, which regal grew With rod and bloodred weed and rush Where water ran; this was our love, The place where she chose, I could not but come, A field without myth or rhetoric. She lay down with love and my hand Was gold with dust of lily. This Was our province. The full force of the narrative's time-scale takes effect. To believe that the place of love is "A field without myth or rhetoric" requires a naivete of continental magnitude or an institutional simple-mindedness. The line is ironic. What it tells is tolled in the broken chime of "rod and bloodred weed," the stumble of "I could not but come," and the treacherous confusion of "gold with dust of lily." The "gules emblazoned at Canterbury" becomes "bloodred," and then in stanza 3, the actual blood of the killed Richard in. Other images develop relentlessly toward their demonic inversion in the final frame of the poem, incapable of resisting their implication in the passage of time. There was song in that kingly country But I saw there, stuck like a porcupine On Bos worth Field the arrows through him, That regal and most royal other Richard, runt and twitch in a ditch, His hand wristdeep in lily where Henry Tudor rolled him, the gules Of England draining on his shirt. My love wept. The song that was breaking in stanza I actually breaks open with the interruption, "But I saw there, stuck like a porcupine" in line 20. The "kingly" images in the windows of Canterbury give way to the grotesque "kingly country" of Bosworth Field. The "regal" meadows where the lovers lay in stanza 2 are drained of the dead king's blood

82 A Poetics of Place by the ditch he lay in; and the speaker's hand covered in golden lilypollen has become Richard's "hand wristdeep in lily." The terse coda "My love wept" rounds back to the phrase in line 1. It may be the poet's lover or his own emotion that weeps; whichever, it is the burden of history that provokes the tears. The history may be personal or cultural, or the recognition that both are interlocked. "Armorial" dates from December 1958. The previous January, Gustafson had addressed the issue of historical consciousness and its presence in poetry in "The Disquisition" (RAR, 6), and this poem may be read as an apologia; it summarizes his perspective, both philosophical and aesthetic, at the end of the decade - but in doing this, it is Janus-faced, looking back over the modernist phase of the 1940s and 19508, and forward to his development beyond modernism in the coming years. The first section is a litany of values: All right, write it down: Who wore hate, who crown. Nothing is that is Not stated: lover's kiss, Poem, praise; fall Of stone, poise; all 's a rhetoric in the mind Until ice burn the wind, Until love is in bed, Breath out of head, Until stone crush worm, Until John Plowman is warm. Which is why the church Is hipped, spinsters arch, Eggheads elevated — The word's not stated, Made flesh, thought As handsome, seen as good. Wherefore no person lives Until he is alive: No poetry's in the head; As none is written until read. (RAR, 6)

The colloquial tone, couplets, and minimal decorum are used to make an argument which is both urgent and exasperated. Compared to some of the poems from the 19408, these lines seem anorexic. A streamlined, aggressive wit keeps the voice sharp and to the point. The disquisition begins by surveying the objects of the poet's dis-

83 The Contradictory Lens course: first of all, to bear witness to history - the lesson of the 19305 - "Who wore hate, who crown." The poet as time's amanuensis, but not a court reporter: his record is a statement; it utters his presence. Then, from history to eros, art, and the deeper expressions of value: what counts — "lover's kiss, / Poem, praise." Particular, palpable experience, and the poem its complement, and a speech that is the value of its prize. The "fall / Of stone, poise:" the poet sees autumn in every act of architecture, man's and nature's, but the life in these forms in always poised, tensed, suspended between bravado and collapse. Marble Athens or young maple, the poet's senses know the grace, the delicacy of the process's shapeliness. But all this is mental and unproved unless it is communicated and taken over by the reader. Gustafson makes it clear he rejects the modernist rhetoric of the symbol; he has no truck with a disconnected aesthetics. He rejects the churches for the same reasons; they are as empty as their words are insubstantial, void of Logos. The Word is not made flesh in the modern church, nor is the word substantial in the symbolist poem. For Gustafson, the poem is vital; its vitality is its action, movement, and force: the power of the thing-initself. The consanguinity of Gustafson's aesthetic and philosophicalreligious perspectives is clear here: "no person lives / Until he is alive" and "Nothing is that is / Not stated." But "The word's not stated" until it achieves that state of corporeality in the reader's consciousness; nor is man fully alive until he lives without fear of the flesh, until he knows his state. In Gustafson's view, churchmen and symbolists alike deny this in their religion and aesthetics; they do not see word or flesh as "handsome," nor do they see that what's handsome is "good." "No poetry's in the head; / As none is written until read." The poetic process requires the reader's participation; without it there is no resurrection, just empty tomb. The reader is the complementary witness. The poem cannot be cerebral only; it must be taken up/into the reader's life. The poet's exhilaration, his inspiration, reverses as the reader resuscitates the poem with his own breathing, which itself had been started by the poem's; in the process, each completes the other. The first section of "The Disquisition" thus adumbrates in a highly concentrated manner the essential vitalism of Gustafson's aesthetic and philosophical outlook. Incarnation, immanence, organicism are metaphors that burden discourse with their histories; but the key is the sense of process that invigorates Gustafson's forms, even his most formal. His epistemology continues to focus on the act of proclamation, the self-consciousness that defines the poet and which can hobble him into silence or provoke him beyond his insecurity. "Nothing is that is / Not stated": we know what we say; what we cannot say, we

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fear. What's before speech may be a knowledge, no less true; but it remains unknown, beyond the poet's grasp or definition. I have given this first section of "The Disquisition" such a lengthy gloss because its programmatic significance is crucial for a recognition of how Gustafson develops beyond his period of modernist fellowtravelling in the 19405 and 1950s. But the danger of concentrating on the aesthetic issues in these lines is that their confluence with his other values may be understated, which would be a serious misreading. The first section clearly identifies the acts of the poem and poetic process with the movements of lovers in bed. The word must be made flesh as love must be made, if either is to be real. To write the poem is to make love, nor should the reader be bashful: "Love is cold pudding / In the sky and in the ridding." The poem doesn't make the world, it makes the poet's love of the world the ground on which the interrelated communities of poet and reader, poet and world, and reader and world can stand. The final sense of the incarnate world is that its flesh of sound and sense is a solid communing. The second and third sections of "The Disquisition" expand the argument against repression. Gustafson continues the earlier arguments of "All that is in the world" and "Dr. Johnson Kicks Hocking's Shin." For the poet, the profoundest argument for the goodness of creation is the evidence of his own creative drives. The poetic process, in its celebration of the body of language, either repeats a cosmic process or attests a perspective which can do without transcendental ratification. Either way, the world is good, life is holy, and the poet wholly right in his commitment to them. In the end, there are no transcendent images of a creator-god made manifest, or of immanent process proving coherence; there are only poems in which poets and readers wonder. In the fourth and final section of the poem, Gustafson resumes his focus on the singular moment: History wakes in him only The need to hold Helen; Have Warr and Owen home; See Richard in his tomb; Jesus' hands. The dates Do not matter. Who states Life wears the crown; Not he who owns a man's Soul and builds hospital For him to die in; but Digs in tomb to accost Cleopatra's dust.

85 The Contradictory Lens

This also provides an understanding of that dimension of Gustafsori's sensibility which is sensitized by history. History is not an abstraction for him. It is not the stuff of system or science; it is not a jumble of fragments to be put into a structure or probed for lost patterns. Nor is Gustafson a mere tourist, flitting from tomb to tower, collecting ashes and proclaiming them angel dust. His historical sense is a dimension of his imagination's generosity and its ardour. The thought of Helen erects a contemporary passion. The dead war-poets, Bertram Warr and Wilfred Owen, arouse anger at the waste of war now. Sympathy, compassion, the feeling of fellowship in the human community, these are history for Gustafson. History is man and woman; even Jesus is a man before he is god, if he ever was or is, for Gustafson. "The dates / Do not matter" because Gustafson's historical sense, paradoxically, is not a worship of the past but part of his praise of the present; history is the lover's kiss, the poem, the praise ongoing, in the present, in the human consciousness. What Gustafson experienced during the 1930s is significant here. In his development of a modern technique during that decade, he began to formulate the poetics of statement that he outlines in "The Disquisition." But statement in a modern poem cannot escape self-consciousness. This is crucial for Gustafson because it marks his personal experience of the relation between the problems of belief and the problems of technique which Spender discussed in The Destructive Element. Spender had identified the personal response to history-as-it-happens as the confrontation crucial to the development of a contemporary aesthetic: "in certain events, the war, the revolutions, is the subject; after that ... the immense difficulty of the technical problem begins." In his comments about the solution to the problem of technique, Spender articulates a view which also illuminates Gustafson's historical sensibility: the technical problem will only be solved if we realize that the moral subject exists. It is not true to say that poetry is about nothing; poetry is about history, but not history in the sense of school books; a history which is the moral life, which is "always contemporary." And the pattern, the technique, is the organ of life.63

History is thus part of Gustafson's bearing witness to the processes of life. Even Cleopatra's dust emits an erotic scent which only the dead would deny. And his style, accordingly, seeks to be an "organ of life," part of that all-encompassing eros which is the origin of every created thing and creative act.

86 A Poetics of Place This reading of "The Disquisition" prepares the way for Rocky Mountain Poems (1960), the volume published the same year as Rivers among Rocks, in which Gustafson takes his first major step beyond the modernist style of poems like "Mythos," "Legend," and "Armorial." The poems that end Rivers among Rocks, "The Blue Lake" (RAR, 41), "Quebec Night" (RAR, 42), and "Quebec, Late Autumn" (RAR, 43), are all set in the Eastern Townships and presage Gustafson's return to the region in 1963, when he accepted a position in the English department at Bishop's. By 1963 he had lived out of the country for more than thirty years, but his return was inevitable. He had told W.W.E. Ross in 1944: "My roots are certainly in the eastern countryside," and his many years of residence abroad had not weakened those connections.64

CHAPTER THREE

The Concentric Poet A man's work stands around his personality and together - or nothing. Ralph Gustafson

Gustafson's sensibility has remained essentially romantic and has been best served by those poetic techniques which seem to discover meaning in the process of their own unfolding. In Poetry and Canada (1945)» he argued that, through his poetry, the poet clarifies his experience. Thus the processes of poetic creation are also the processes of the poet's self-definition. It was Gustafson's attitude toward technique as open, pragmatic, and ontological rather than interpretive, and the stance toward the purpose and process of poetic creation which this attitude toward technique reflects, which took him beyond his modernist phase. His experiments with modernist styles in the 1940s and 1950s should be seen in this pragmatic light and against the background of his continuing exploration of the ways in which poetic language and form embody the poet's stance within experience. In the later 1950s, this exploration begins to turn away from the envisioning imagination of high modernism and back toward the immanentist spirit. Rocky Mountain Poems (1960) represents the rediscovery of his romantic roots after this modernist interlude, but it also represents a major advance beyond his modernist phase toward his version of a postmodernist poetics. Rocky Mountain Poems is a turningpoint volume in Gustafson's career; it is also an important work in the history of modern Canadian poetry. As an example of what Gustafson himself calls the "sequence," it prefigures the interest in the long poem or poem series in postmodernist Canadian poetry during the 19703 and 1980s; and the poems themselves express what amounts to Gustafson's own version of an open, processive, indeterminate, but not unassertive postmodernist stance. n the 1980s Gustafson recalled his meeting with William Carlos I Williams in the Gotham Book Mart in October 1940. Williams

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told Gustafson: "The centre in the self is what determines poetry. Keep that protected, he said. And good luck."1 It is Gustafson's search for that self and a concentric relation between it and his writing that led him to the new style of Rocky Mountain Poems (1960). When he returned to poetry in the late 1950s, after years of working on short stories and an autobiographical novel, Gustafson recognized, partly consciously and partly intuitively, those aspects of modernism which were counter-effective to his sensibility's needs. In James Breslin's view, the formalist poetry of the 1950s was dominated by "the poet's persistent representation of the self as powerless, passively suffering the burdens of a splintered, chaotic world." In this world, "Order is achieved ... only by separating art from life, and transcendence quietly reappears in the image of the well-made autotelic poem as a kind of secular eternity. ... The imagination is valorized — by being dehistoricized."2 Gustafson, however, had never lost his sense of "the existential freshness of the world," and, as poems like "Armorial" and "The Disquisition" show, his sense of the presence of history prevented any use of the imagination which did not bear witness to the conflux of time and place in consciousness. His dissatisfaction with the New Critic's notion of the "autotelic poem" had been recorded in "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But ..." in 1949. Rocky Mountain Poems (1960) shows Gustafson moving in a direction similar to that of the younger poets discussed by Breslin, toward a poetry of "physical movement — the literal, the temporal, the immediate."3 Gustafson's technique in Rocky Mountain Poems becomes the means of seeking out and disclosing the meanings discovered in things, what he begins to call the "grandeur," "majesty," and "magnificence" of creation. This redirection in style consequently resulted in parallel advances in the poet's self-definition. As Robert Duncan has written, "a changing aesthetic ... is also a changing sense of life." Gustafson's technical advances have always been generated by the forward momentum of his imagination's need to engage and explore the world around him, "where imagination," in Duncan's words, "appears as an intuition of the real."4 Spender's view of the artist in the 1930s was of a man who must fashion political, moral, and aesthetic order from chaos in order to serve his responsibility to the collectivity and satisfy as well his own personal needs. For many postmodernist poets, the techniques adopted by Spender's generation, and modernism itself, have become the "destructive element" to be escaped and survived. Gustafson's relations with modernism, however, are more evolutionary than Oedipal, adversarial only to the extent that they reflect a present selfs recollection of a previous life. In the 1950s, building on the redefinition of self that he had experienced

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during the political 1930s, Gustafson further refined his sense of the self at the heart of the poetic process. He came to see the centrality of the "person" in poetry, not in egocentric terms, but rather in the sense of the self as contained and concentric with its world, its language, and its acts of expression in poetry. The search for a "muscular" style which would communicate a "nexus of mind and feeling" in the poem during the 1940s took him, eventually, toward a more open and flexible poetry. His sense of the poem's movement and proportion as performing its feeling, thought, or inspiration advanced his understanding and practice of poetry as self-definition through recognition and discovery. Gustafson described this deeply personal function of poetry in Poetry and Canada (1945) when he described catharsis as "the resolution of the spirit." "Mythos," that major poem from 1940, presents the argument within the self in terms of a tension between the yearning for belief in a cyclic, mythic process, and a more immediate encounter-exploration of the self in chaos. The former impulse might have taken the poem in the direction of a public ordering and personal transcendence of that chaos through a version of Eliot's mythical method. But Gustafson's poem rejects his sensibility's transcendental yearnings and looks instead to the human conditions of its being. It is these conditions of being, as he discovers in Rocky Mountain Poems, which eventually prove "more instructive."5 The image of man in the maze of being in "Mythos" prefigures the stance of the concentric self in the later poetry. This stance toward experience is more fully embodied in "Legend" (RAR, 1); its image of man struggling to keep his balance on the changing ground beneath his feet is Heraclitan in its sense of experience as a constant flux and consciousness as a continuous interaction with that field of change. The sun, the foliage, the birds, the roar of the ocean and the scrape of shell and sand, the undertow of history and the forward thrust of time, the myriad of elements rushing upon the man in that poem, compose what Dennis Lee has called the "cadence" of time and place, "a kind of taut cascade, a luminous tumble."6 The poet must listen to that cadence, which "is initially without content; but when the poem does come, the content must accord with the cadence." Lee senses the cadence of time and place as "a presence." In "Legend," Gustafson begins to give expression to his sense of the cadence he hears in the world and in his experience, and moves closer to giving, in Conrad's phrase, "the highest kind of justice to the visible universe."7 Rocky Mountain Poems should be read as a sequence of poems in which the poet listens to, observes, and engages the cadence of landscape as a presence in his life, but also as a series of poems in which he con-

90 A Poetics of Place templates the presence of his own consciousness, physically, intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, in that landscape. It has been argued for some time now, by critics like Frank Kermode and Ihab Hassan, that the relations between modernist and postmodernist art are characterized as much by continuity as they are by discontinuity; indeed, recently another theorist, Jonathan Arac, concluded that "It remains wholly unsetded whether the relation of the 'postmodern' to the 'modern' is more a break or a continuity."8 How the critic-theorist views the relations between these movements often depends on the attitude toward one or both, and the possibilities are complex and various. Hassan, for example, is an apologist for the postmodern because he sees it as a break with a modernism he finds objectionable. Jurgen Habermas and Terry Eagleton, however, attack postmodernism precisely because of that break. Jean-Francois Lyotard, like Hassan, is another apologist, but for the opposite reasons: Lyotard sees postmodernism as continuing, or reinventing, modernism.9 Gustafson's evolution since the 1940s and 1950s is evidence that a postmodernist perspective and style can issue from a modernist interregnum without any violent rejection of the earlier poetic but simply a recognition of its growing inadequacies. What he found inadequate in modernism was the notion of the work of art as an autonomous object; the use of history and myth as surrogates for lost transcendental order; the use of form to turn open, indeterminate, and mysterious experience into closed, logocentric, and mystifying poetic order. What had attracted Gustafson to modernism in the first place was its "modernity": its irony and ambiguity; the propensity to difficult and subtle thought, and complex and strenuous music; its intercourse of sense and spirit; its fundamental obsession with language, and with the relation between the use of language and the successes and failures of civilization. While Gustafson's poetry since the 1960s does not share what one theorist describes as "the essential characteristic of postmodern literature: the mockery of the canonical literary forms of 'official culture,'" the perspective expressed in his post-1960s writing does reflect a "postmodern literary imagination" in that it "insists on the disorienting mystery, the ominous and threatening uncanniness of being that resists naming."10 Gustafson's sense of man's doom amid magnificence is precisely what predisposes him toward a postmodern view of the world as mysterious, dangerous, uncanny, and beyond the traditional strategies of logocentric discourse. It is precisely this world that he witnesses in Rocky Mountain Poems, and the quality of that witnessing required him to develop a style capable of recording his sensibility's struggle with the fear, awe, doubt, and joy occasioned by his encoun-

91 The Concentric Poet ter with the land. In poems like "Into the Tonquin Valley" (RMP, 11), "At Moraine Lake" (RMP, 18), and "In the Yukon" (RMP, 36), Gustafson, to a significant degree, corroborates the view that "the postmodern creative imagination is a state of mind informed not by the will to power over being but by negative capability. ... In acknowledging the play of differences that time always already disseminates and defers as its case, the postmodern imagination descends from the panoptic and summary heights of the 'Over-all' into the horizonal realm of its occasion and achieves a stance of deference in the face of being."11 Gustafson had recognized his temperamental attraction to the perspective and practice of negative capability as an undergraduate at Bishop's. Even in his modernist phase, as poems like "Mythos," "Armorial," and "The Disquisition" show, he rejected the modernist spatializing of time and countered such homogenizing of myth and history with his own version of an historicized space — the presentation of place in its temporal character as the context of individual acts of human consciousness. In Rocky Mountain Poems, Gustafson further elaborates his view of man's situation-in-the-world; a view, however, which he does not need any Heideggerian ontology to describe. He relies on his own sensibility and craft to provide him with the vision and language suitable to the occasion. The poet defers to the magnificence of the world before him, but at the same time, he allows his intelligence and acquired authority of craft their presence in his stance. For Gustafson, the fullness of being-in-the-world does not necessitate any totalitarian suppression of that personal and collective history of language which, paradoxically, plays a major role in bringing the poet to the occasion, in language, where he can successfully articulate "a stance of deference in the face of being." The process of Gustafson's development makes it impossible to hold to descriptive categories like romantic, modernist, and postmodernist in any essentialist way, but rather only as terms crudely descriptive of the expressive trajectories observed in the poems themselves. In poems like "Prolegomenon at Midnight," "Gothic Fugue," and "At the Ocean's Verge," Gustafson enters the Heraclitan world of process. In "Prolegomenon at Midnight" he begins to discover the concentric stance of his ultimate maturity. In "Legend" he recognizes that identity is discovered in place and begins to chart a poetics of the moment which will express that sense of self which comes with presence in place. It is the continuing presence of the immanentist sensibility in Gustafson that is the basis for his own kind of postmodernist poetry in the 1970s and 1980\s. In this poetry he paradoxically resolves the

92 A Poetics of Place tensions in technique and sensibility by achieving a style which is constantly dialectical: it is at once sensuous and spiritual, physical and intellectual, intensive in its focus on particulars and extensive in its contemplative scope. Rocky Mountain Poems marks Gustafson's turning toward this late style and the stance it expresses. The years of work that Gustafson put into his autobiographical short stories and novel during the 1950s obviously brought home to him the centrality of the "person" in creative work. When Gustafson wrote W.W.E. Ross in 1956, "A man's work stands around his personality and together or nothing," he was expressing a Yeatsian sense of the relation that the work bears to the poet's life as the record of his continuous search for self-understanding.12 The image also expresses the new sense of the concentric self that begins to be evident in Rocky Mountain Poems.

Rocky"Contrary Mountainto Poems containsofeighteen Thetheshortest, the Grandeur God," ispoems. ten lines; longest,

"Into the Tonquin Valley," is 109. Line-length, for the most part, is short, with two or three stresses, and short phrase-units which run together and pile up for effect.13 Regular syntax and colloquial language predominate. Divergence from these norms always marks a significant change in tone, intensity, or ambition, and seems quite deliberate. All of the poems are written in free verse and only one, "Contrary to the Grandeur of God," does not use a fixed left-hand margin. The poems develop quickly and rhythmically, with incremental effects used to tie longer constructions together and build toward moments of statement, understatement, or strong emotion. Run-on, unpunctuated lines alternate with lines which are broken down into units of individual words. The poems are a sequence and should be read as such. The travel diary or log is the "analogical form" which underlies the series.14 The narrative-descriptive impulse, the consistency of voice, the specificity of settings and their proximity to each other, the recurring references and repeated activities related to climbing and hiking in the mountains and observing specific features in the landscape provide the sequence with unity and coherence. Of the eighteen titles, sixteen denote setting or the position of the speaker. The two exceptions are "Contrary to the Grandeur of God" (RMP, 17)15 and "The Single Delight" (RMP, 28): the latter is descriptive but also allusive - it refers to the flower which figures in the poem and to the love between the speaker and his companion; and the former is allusive and ironic — echoing Hopkins's well-known title and identifying the target-stance at which the speaker aims his

93 The Concentric Poet

barbed wit. All of the titles are thus descriptive and particular and introduce poems which are sharply focused and intensely engaged with the specifics of the natural setting and the physical, emotional, and intellectual experiences of the figures in it. The most important poems in the sequence in terms of Gustafson's development are "Into the Tonquin Valley" (RMP, 11), "At Moraine Lake" (RMP, 18), "On the Yukon Run" (RMP, 34), and "In the Yukon" (RMP, 36). The others, with the exception of "In the Valley of the Ten Peaks" (RMP, 16), are all remarkably successful poems, but we can look at two of them as being representative in their procedures. "On the Columbia Icefield" is representative of Gustafson's descriptive practice in the poems: Over the great end broken up from its lake back over a continent we got grip getting to the glacier, three miles in, the grimed slow ice clawed by the cogchain. We dared crevice off the snowroad sun left raised, night-deep. Sludge stood traction, cab pulled. We took pictures, camera cold. We were up there, were noble. Down, out of it, at the end broken in its lake, we touched the green ice the green fire. (RMP, 15)

The terse, two-beat lines and the conjunction of hard consonants and long vowels in the opening lines convey the effort of scrambling over

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the ice, struggling for a foothold. Line breaks, sound patterns, and enjambment are particularly important. The line breaks are used as a rhythmic and tonal device to add depth to the narrative-descriptive surface. Breaking after "great" and "broken" in the first two lines is particularly effective in communicating the specific quality of the natural scene being encountered and the enjambment of "lake / back" reinforces the developing sound pattern of the b, k, and hard c; this pattern then leads into the vivid muscularity of "we got grip / getting to the glacier / ... the grimed / slow ice / clawed / by the cogchain." The repetition of certain consonant pairs — gr, br, gl, sl, cl — enhances the music that begins to gather in the echoic clusters: end / broken / miles in / cogchain; great / lake / glacier; broken / over / slow ice / crevice / snowroad / Sludge stood, etc. The absent articles and connectives reinforce the sense of short breath and effort in the climbing activity. But one failing of this minimal style is that it does not clearly demarcate the ironic colouration of some of the utterance. Developing from the notion of the dare in "We dared crevice," an image which is well accommodated by the Anglo-Saxon atmosphere evoked by the ellipses, syntax, and alliterated sound, Gustafson builds to an ironic undercutting of the mild hubris present in the narrative voice: "We took / pictures, camera / cold. We were / up there, were / noble." He tries to achieve an italicized effect with "noble" through the line break after "were," but it doesn't quite come off, even with the immediate fall into "Down, / out of it."16 Like so many of the poems in the sequence, "On the Columbia Icefield" describes an ascent followed by a descent in which the physical activity described in the narrative often results in a parallel emotional or intellectual process. Here, the poem descends swiftly to the conclusion, a return to the starting-point of journey and narrative, the glacier's "end broken / in its lake." Significant at the conclusion is the push beyond narrative to an Imagistic intensity in which "touched" rounds back on the earlier "we got grip" to develop a softer, more complex irony than the attack on hubris in "noble." The conclusion draws out the deeper impulse in the narrative, which itself suggests a deeper purpose in the literal exploits - the desire to communicate a contact with the natural world that occurred on a level deeper than any "cold camera" is capable of recording. "Green" recurs throughout the sequence as a realistic natural image, but also as token of the world of natural forces and process which Gustafson has always been drawn to, and which his sensibility senses to be the source of deep value. In Rocky Mountain Poems, he is constandy meditating the problems of reality and rhetoric in relation to a natural sublimity and its expression in language. These closing lines recall

95 The Concentric Poet the statement in "The Disquisition": "all / 's a rhetoric in the mind / Until ice burn in the wind /... No poetry's in the head" (RAR, 6). Later versions of the conclusion to "On the Columbia Icefield" are less successful, but nevertheless show Gustafson's care for precision and further reveal that what he wants to convey at the end of the poem is a particular nuance of an emotional-intellectual imperative within the physical experience.17 This self-reflexive, self-interrogating aspect of Gustafson's revisions is evident in many of the changes he makes to Rocky Mountain Poems over the years, and examination of the manuscript versions of the poems shows that it was present in the original composition process as well, particularly for the major poems in the sequence. The first drafts of the poems came to him in rushes of inspiration; as he told a correspondent years later: "I have never experienced such completeness given immediately as I did in writing down those Rocky Mountain poems. I was ready for the mountains emotionally and, fortunately, my technique was ready to serve the emotion."18 Gustafson's comment suggests that, to a certain extent, the poems in Rocky Mountain Poems may be read in relation to the romantic tradition of poetic sincerity which David Perkins has discussed. The various versions of the conclusion to "On the Columbia Icefield" bear out Perkins's observation that "sincerity require[s] both an utmost precision and a wide inclusiveness, an ability to catch both the exact shade and the whole scope of meaning." These aesthetic goals are not necessarily inconsistent, however, until they are joined "with the romantic ideal of intensity, and especially when intensity is sought in the current guise of compression." Perkins notes that sincerity then becomes a very practical problem for the poet and it is precisely this problem that hounds Gustafson in the conclusions to this poem. The problem comes to the fore as well in the major poems in the volume.19 "On the Columbia Icefield" is typical of the narrative-descriptive lyrics in Rocky Mountain Poems which adhere closely to the formal analogue of the diary or log entry, but which also contain the impulse toward a lyrical suggestion of intense, even numinous, experience. The later revisions show that Gustafson is still trying to develop a technique to convey the latter dimension of his experience; or perhaps it is more precise to say that he is always questioning the technique he chooses as to its effectiveness. Inherent in this revisionary activity are the deeper issues of epistemology which have concerned him since the late 1950s; namely the presence of meaning in the numinous power of the objective world, the role and the equally tantalizing power of mind or imagination in the human experiences of that world, and the co-presence of each power in the powers of

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poetic composition and language use. What does mind give or take in the act of perception; what does language, or consciousness, do in acts of narrative and description which attempt to engage the sense of the numinous in the world — these questions are raised in a major way in Rocky Mountain Poems, particularly in poems like "Into the Tonquin Valley," "At Moraine Lake," and "In the Yukon." But before we look at these in the depth they deserve, we should look at one more representative lyric in this volume, "The Trail under Mount Michael," which also brings out some of the major issues in the volume as it plays the temptations of the sublime against the more selfevident returns of sensual joy. We struck a berry patch. All thought of the snow peaks left With them; Sweet strawberries. In the mouth They broke on the palate, The wild juice, Whose seeds are on the outside. At the upper end of the lake I washed them in glacial water. All that day the sweet berries Kept our heads to the ground. (RMP, 27)

This, too, is quite straightforward. But we should not be duped by its simplicity. Thought seems abandoned for sensual delight, but what actually happens is that a different mode of thinking replaces thought's vertical aspirations with an intellect grounded in concrete particulars. "On the Columbia Icefield" ended with a yearning for an essence that was contacted, eventually, not on the glacial highland but in the melt below. So, too, in this poem essential experience is encountered on the trail beneath their feet rather than in the distant "snow peaks" above them. The "wild juice" of the berries calls the poet to the things of this world, whose essence, paradoxically, is external - the "seeds are on the outside." With "heads to the ground," they encounter a lower-level sublimity than that encountered on mountaintops, though no less sublime for that. "The Trail under Mount Michael" unfolds according to what Charles Altieri has called the "scenic method": "The central aim of the art is not to interpret experience but to extend language to its limits in order to establish poignant awareness of what lies beyond words. There is virtually never any sustained act of formal, dialectical

97 The Concentric Poet thinking - or any elaborate, artificial construction that cannot be imagined as taking place in, or at least extending from, settings in naturalistically conceived scenes."20 Altieri discusses this as a dominant mode in postmodern poetry and sees in it a number of contradictions and tensions. Many of these derive from the issues raised by the problematic aesthetics of sincerity discussed by Perkins. Much of Gustafson's poetry, in Rocky Mountain Poems and after, employs a kind of scenic method in its fusion of narrative, descriptive, and meditative activities. But what is significant in "The Trail under Mount Michael" is that there is a dialectic embedded in the poem, and further, the poem is notable for its restraint in avoiding the push toward a "poignant awareness of what lies beyond words." As is evident from the poetry of Rivers among Rocks, Gustafson doubts the existence of that "beyond" as much as he is perplexed by his concern with it. The major poems in Rocky Mountain Poems address the contradictory pulls of empirical experience and transcendent impulse, and the poetic issues of sincerity and rhetoric, realism and artifice which these tensions educe. In Altieri's view, these issues are best located in the problems of self-presentation which the poet encounters when he moves to bridge the gap between himself and his community through his act of expression.21 As we have seen in Gustafson's poetry of the late 1930s and 1940s, much of his effort during these years was in working toward a poetry in which personal and communal needs were accommodated. By 1960, Gustafson's aesthetic, though changing, was changing on top of a fixed moral base. Consequently, while he does engage poetic questions relating to what Altieri calls "the condition of speaking," he does not engage them in vacuous detachment, or from a position of nihilist suspension. He is continuing to seek out methods of expression which will lead to the greater exploration of those philosophical questions to which his sensibility has prejudiced his poetry from the beginning. What must always be kept in mind when reading Gustafson in his postmodernist phase is that he is building on thirty years of poetic practice, not starting from scratch. Thus he develops by reacting to his own earlier selves and their poetic voices. The only revision that "The Trail under Mount Michael" undergoes is in Ixioris Wheel. Gustafson changes "I washed them in glacial water" to "We washed them in glacial water" (IW, 28). It may seem minor but it isn't, because it reminds the reader of an important dimension of the sequence: its witnessing of human love and companionship. The speaker is not alone; his experiences are shared, even though he finds himself in a setting which invites romantic isolation. Whether the motive behind the change is historical or rhetorical accuracy, the

98 A Poetics of Place implicit proximity or explicit presence of the loved one in the scenes sets the first person's speaking within a circle of human love which is concentric both to his own individuality and to the greater circle of the circumambient mountains.

I

nto the Tonquin Valley begins the sequencea. In its first draft, the poem is titled "In the Valley of the Tonquin"; the revision maintains the specificity of location but the change in preposition brings out better the actions of entry and initiation which the poem details. The holograph is 100 lines. It expands to 109 in the book. The revisions from the holograph to the book are extremely significant for what they reveal about Gustafson's version of a postmodern stance toward the poetic subject. "Into the Tbnquin Valley" is a poem about stance or attitude toward experience and, as an entry poem into the volume, it initiates the reader into what becomes a process of exploration and discovery for Gustafson. Though this implies that the sequence is linear in its development, with a traditional structure of complication, climax, and resolution, this is not the case. The sequence ends with an ascent and a departure which are a continuation of the process, not its completion. The poem begins by informing us of the humility and sense needed to walk successfully in this landscape. There was a care needed; stones On the path could break the ankle. We had walked in, care Far from us, the valley In the mountains, green, The crests snowpeaked above Us, ten thousand feet, Eleven, westward to The Ramparts, the greatness cragged And broken, lying on the mind Until the mind gave in, Creation only itself, Vast, tumultuous, without Time, only itself, Laid there, the mind without cause. ... (RMP, 11)

"Care," in these lines, refers to visual alertness in line I and anxiety in line 3. The word yokes together the world of the present moment, the narrative present, and the larger narrative of human affairs of

99 The Concentric Poet

which the lives of the speaker and his companion are a part. The former demands a respect and humility born of common sense; the terrain is dangerous and fear evokes a smartness. What's needed for a safe climb is also needed for a safe life, but as it happens, the narrative eventually discloses how the speaker and his companion went on this particular excursion without sufficient care. The mountains overwhelm them, at first with apparent security, and then by their indifference. The sheer physical magnitude of the mountains is more than the mind can handle. What Gustafson describes as "the greatness cragged / And broken" defies intellectual or emotional containment; "cragged" and "broken" bring out the fractious, uncongenial quality in the landscape which is ultimately resistant to any attempt to organize it by diminishing or aestheticizing it. Gustafson uses "broken" to describe features of the landscape throughout the sequence, and its recurrence further signifies this world's resistance to any effort at seeing it whole, literally or symbolically. Another element that recurs in the narrative sequence is the experience of defeat; on a number of occasions, the poet and his companion are prevented from reaching destinations by obstacles placed in their way by the terrain. What successes are recorded seem as aleatory as they are consequential. This challenge to human will begins in "Into the Tonquiii Valley" with "the greatness ... / ... lying on the mind / Until the mind gave in." What the mind gives in to is a magnitude of sensory input which overwhelms its habitual processes of ordering; in particular, what are short-circuited are those processes whereby the new is assimilated into previous experience and understood by the mind as a variation on that history. The mountains defy the imperial gestures of the historical consciousness. The mind confronts "Creation only itself, / Vast, tumultuous, without / Time, only itself." The landscape seems timeless in the sense that it seems to bear none of those signs of human presence which calibrate human existence. Time, here, is geological not human-historical, and so seems beyond the comfort-giving linearity of temporal narrative that the eye imposes on civilized landscapes. The mind can find no "cause" in human terms for the features of this landscape. When Gustafson moves to express this sense of the landscape's utter otherness, he begins the process of working out a stance toward the experience he is narrating. That this is a process is clear from the revisions which occur between the holograph and the published version. The manuscript reads: The mind without cause, there was No cause for it except

1 oo A Poetics of Place Magnificence, except We should walk in Creating the magnificence That was there, that did not exist Until we should think it.22

The first typescript of the poem reads "Until we should conceive it," but then "conceive" is crossed out and "think" is returned (RMP ms). The more significant change occurs, however, in the first published version, which reads: There was no cause for it Except magnificence, Except we should walk in Beholding the magnificence That was there, that did not exist Until we beheld it. (RMP, 11)

The cragged and broken greatness is now described as "magnificence," but this term refers to both cause and effect. By replacing "Creating" with "Beholding," and "think" with "beheld," Gustafson shows a major attitudinal shift in his view of the relations between mind and world. Even though the use of "behold" recalls Wallace Stevens, Gustafson's revisions suggest a shift away from the modernistsymbolist view of these relations in which the poet, in Altieri's terms, "seeks to transform nature into satisfying human structures," toward the immanentist view of the postmodernist poet who "stresses the ways an imagination attentive to common and casual experience can transform the mind."23 Indeed, the whole thrust of Gustafson's Rocky Mountain Poems is counter to the activity of imagination suggested in a poem like Stevens's "The Poem That Took the Place of a Mountain." "Creation only itself, /... Time, only itself" are clearly not "satisfying human structures" in Gustafson's view of them; but while the experience being narrated is hardly "common and casual," Gustafson is likewise resisting the traditional procedures for transforming such experience into the satisfying aesthetic category of the sublime. He uses "magnificence" to describe his sense of the mountains' uncompromising otherness and the poem goes on to record the poet's response to that otherness in language that both recalls and rejects traditional aesthetic strategies toward Canadian landscape - from the failed attempts at the picturesque and sublime of Susanna Moodie to the expressionistic projections of Margaret Atwood. The use of

101 The Concentric Poet the verb "behold" is particularly effective because it captures the tension in Gustafson's changing poetic, a tension which is still a consequence of his contradictory perspective and which impels him to express that perspective through contrapuntal techniques. The verb conveys the act of perception as an act both of the mind and of the senses; and while it is hardly a "muscular" verb, its force is in its reference to tangible experience. The perception it describes is not passive: the mind gives in, creation is only itself, magnificent in being only itself; and yet the human response is to behold a magnificence which it acknowledges is beyond human agency but which is not magnificent until the mind and senses accord it so. "The mountains are just themselves," Gustafson told his wife while writing the poems.24 The challenge for the poet is to write the poem which allows them to remain so - the poem which does not take their place through an usurping imagination - but which acknowledges their being while at the same time not denying the scope and power of the human response to them. Gustafson seems to have approached this challenge quite consciously, but also by relying on his intuitive sense that counterpoint is the best way of articulating the desired concentric relations of poet, poem, and world. He recalled for H.A. Buckmaster in 1973: "Technically, I cast the poems in a form apparently easy-going and colloquial - thus counter-pointing the grand formality imposed by the mountains."25 It is significant that he sensed the "formality" as coming from the mountains; indeed, "imposed" upon him by them. Gustafson's formal response is thus ironic, but nevertheless it remains a reaction-response rather than an imposition. In this, his poetic moves toward that openness to cadence which Dennis Lee describes, as well as toward a poetry which is based in what Robert Duncan has described as "the possibility that the locus of form might be in the immediate minim of the work, and that one might concentrate upon the sound and meaning present where one was, and derive melody and story from impulse not from plan."26 The tension in Gustafson's perspective remains latent in his language. His term, "magnificence," for example, draws out both the grandeur of the natural scene and the presence of the human witness in that scene. Its French and Latin derivation draws attention to its presence amid simpler diction and thus to the act of language itself. "Magnificence" thus refers both to the mountains and to the quality of the human experience in beholding them. He is working toward a poetry which will allow, in this case, mountains to be mountains, but which will also not diminish the value of the human experience. But his use of "magnificence" remains ambiguous. While writing "On

102 A Poetics of Place Yoho Pass," he told his wife, Betty: "We confer magnificence. The mountains are just themselves." But then, three days later, Betty records in her diary: R says we are in magnificence; this is the way it is in the core of magnificence. But that a man to stay in there needs my innocence! I don't claim anything, he says. I just appreciate what is given. He gets tired turning everything into poems so he can possess them, so he says. He doesn't seem worn out though! He worked all day today saying that without me the whole business here is just geology and biology. I turn everything into meaning (so he says), meaning: love! He says he's going to put it into a poem. He writes beside me. ...2'

This passage explains a great deal about the ambiguity of Gustafson's use of "magnificence" as a term describing something immanent in nature and also something conferred by man upon the world. The passage records Gustafson's dissatisfaction with a poetics that seeks to "possess" the world, and his desire for a poetics that is content to "appreciate what is given" - or, in Duncan's terms, one that would "concentrate upon the sound and meaning present where one was, and derive melody and story from impulse not from plan." Gustafson is clearly on the threshold of working out such a poetic in Rocky Mountain Poems because the sequence does precisely what Duncan describes: poem after poem presents "the sound and meaning present where one was," and the "meaning," as Betty Gustafson's diary entry makes plain, is "love." The poet's feeling toward his companion parallels the openness of his response to the landscape which allows him to remain "in magnificence" throughout the act of composing the poem. This requires a disclaiming, rather than a claiming, of possession — an aesthetic "innocence," paradoxical as that must be; and in the sequence as a whole, this is precisely what he achieves. The next movement of the poem actually corroborates this sense of the mutual magnificence of the human and natural worlds. The narrative situates the poet and his wife as lovers in the landscape. The holograph is clearer in its meanings than any of the subsequent versions: Peaks Ranged round that valley, roaring With its river, five thousand Feet below us, the snow above. We were in love, walking The trail, the switchback, not Thinking of love, love being

103 The Concentric Poet Between us, as the majesty Already created, the snow peaks. (RMP ms) In Rocky Mountain Poems this becomes: Forest Ranged round that valley roaring With its river two thousand feet Below us, the snow above. We were in love, walking The trail, the terraces, not Proving love, love being Between us, as the vastness If they were to be there, the snowpeaks. (RMP, 11-12) In Ixioris Wheel and Selected Poems, Gustafson changes this to: As the vastness if they were to be There, the snowpeaks, love Was between us, walking the trail, The terraces. (IW, 14; SP, 76) (Sequences and The Moment Is All return to the version in Rocky Mountain Poems.) The changes show Gustafson seeking a language and rhythm to communicate a sense of connectedness between human love and natural majesty. He is most successful in the holograph version: there the sense of love as a co-presence as silent and majestic as the mountains is clearly conveyed. The power, beauty and indifference of nature are evident in the lines of description which lead into the narrative passage. In the narrative lines, the way he uses punctuation to break up what would otherwise be a rather sentimental statement insinuates the "cragged / And broken" landscape into the world of human relationships. The ambiguity in the syntax is also effective; furthermore, the natural semi-pause that comes with the line break after "majesty" allows the simile to refer back to "love" as well as forward to "snow peaks." Replacing "majesty" with "vastness" serves to curtail the projection of emotion which is evident in the original simile, but the addition of "If they were to be there" only clogs the sense. Similarly, "Proving," while in one sense it may add precision, in another puts too fine a point on the issue. However, in each instance, the aim of revision seems to be to achieve a greater precision — as in the change of "five thousand feet" to "two thousand feet." The poem then narrates an account of the descent to the river and

104 A Poetics of Place the climb up the far side of the valley. The language begins to echo earlier moments in the poem; they drink from the streams "carefully, / The snowpeaks in our throat," and when they continue they go on, "knowing / There was no end to majesty" (RMP, 12). The ascent, however, becomes difficult: The trail climbing among Boulders, the pack heavier, Cutting the shoulder, the heat Bearing down on us, the eye No longer concerned with glory. (RMP, 1 2)

They must choose between a higher and lower trail; the former is shorter but less interesting, the latter straight but hard going. He can feel the narrative moment pulling toward symbolic event. The holograph reads: We could see What choice was. There Was no metaphor. We chose One fact. On mountains One does not try out metaphors. (RMP ms)

In Rocky Mountain Poems this becomes: we could see What choice was. There was No parable in it. On mountains One does not try out metaphors. (RMP, 13)

This is a moment of significant self-consciousness in the poem. An opportunity to develop an allegory presents itself, but the poet resists; though not without acknowledging it first, which allows him, paradoxically, to have it both ways: a parabolic significance is present even in the nominal statement of its absence. Nominally, he chooses to keep the poem tied to fact and rejects the larger metaphors of symbolic statement. Even recognizing the ambiguity in the gesture, this is still an important indication of the stance Gustafson is taking toward the relation of poem to experience in the volume. The climbers then encounter their defeat: We climbed two hours, but it was A mistake. We got up the trench,

105 The Concentric Poet The thought of upland meadow In our minds and a walk To the chalet. But the wish Defeated us, muskeg, brush, Mosquitoes which covered arms And lids and nostrils, that brought Panic, a telephone wire, Cut across above, The only marker, a straight Line above bog and no trail, Defeated us, turned us back. (RMP, 13)

As the narrative proceeds to its conclusion, the climbers turn back defeated by elements hostile, or at least uncongenial, to their desire: This was a pity: Without majesty. We had Sought it. I brushed her legs, Crushing the blood and mosquitoes Off while she got In jeans over her shorts And turned her back. I loved her And that thought was the worst Back through the muskeg, standing her While I looked for ground Folded, pushed to by us, Until we had reached what we knew Was the path we had struck over. (RMP, 14)

The poem seems to turn against itself here. Earlier, walking the trails with "care / Far from us," their love seemed to partake of the vastness and majesty of the mountains around them. Now that love becomes a caring fraught with anxiety. The valley has become the chasm that opens between human desire and the external world in which that desire seeks to realize itself. This sudden defeat by an indifferent nature is the humbling initiation recounted in "Into the Tonquin Valley." The final lines of the poem are the most heavily reworked and the revisions show Gustafson trying to express accurately the two realities and their respective values. The problem is to allow each world, the human and the natural, to retain its significance and not fall victim to the parabolic imagination which would make one subservient to the other. To present the human figures in a posture of abject defeat

106 A Poetics of Place

would be to falsify the sustaining force of their love, but also it would make the poem into the parable he earlier resisted its becoming. To the reader, in retrospect, the poem marks an initiation, but it avoids becoming allegorical in the process of its composition. Also, Gustafson does not want to relegate the landscape to the status of a mere backdrop against which the poetic imagination performs some symbolic sleight-of-hand. This would falsify both the reality of nature and their experience of it. The path that the poem eventually takes parallels that of the narrative; it turns back to its earlier discoveries - cuts its losses, so to speak - and presents the mutual independence of man and mountains in terms of the magnificence "that did not exist / Until we beheld it." The parallel between this magnificence and human love is thus complete. The holograph reads: There is nothing of majesty In peaks, little of sense Amongst rocks tumbled Crushed up, broken over From the Pacific.... (RMP ms)

In the typescript this becomes: There is little of majesty By themselves in peaks, Nothing of magnificence, Amongst rock moved, crushed up, Broken over from the Pacific. ... (RMP ms)

But the version in Rocky Mountain Poems is taken from a later addition to the holograph: There is no unconferred Majesty in peaks, amongst rock Moved, crushed up, Broken over from the Pacific. ... (RMP, 14)28

Gustafson then adds the line from the typescript, "Nothing of magnificence," to the concluding lines of description: Over strata younger, laid over By stone a mile high, Above us already a mile High where the trail was,

107 The Concentric Poet Nothing of magnificence: Stone last in the sun, marked By life of the sea. (RMP, 14)29

The holograph version is interesting because of the apposite relations

of "majesty" and "sense." The image of the "tumbled / Crushed up, broken over" rocks recalls the "cragged / And broken" greatness of the opening lines. The temptation for the romantic poet has always been to read into that greatness a sublime magnificence. Gustafson has resisted this interjection, while at the same time acknowledging the impulse. By dropping "little of sense" in the typescript version and adding "Nothing of magnificence," he makes clear his stance toward the natural world he has encountered. To opt for the romantic sublime here would be to inject "sense" or meaning into the landscape, something he refuses to do. This refusal is clearer in the published poem. "Majesty" is "conferred" on experience by man. The final lines of "Into the Tonquin Valley" actually recount the defeat of the romantic sublime by Gustafson's "new world northern" poetic, a poetic which seeks to record the human response to the Canadian landscape as accurately and as honestly as possible, but more important, without the covert sentimentality of Frye's "tone of deep terror" or Atwood's defeated survivors. Gustafson's metaphor of majesty/magnificence is eventually subsumed by the more inclusive "grandeur," a term he raises to mythopoeic status in Gradations of Grandeur (1982). This metaphor relates to a problematic issue which comes to occupy Gustafson's thinking more and more in the decades after Rocky Mountain Poems, namely, that of the mind's reading of the world. The incongruity of the mind's beholding magnificence and also conferring it is symptomatic of Gustafson's inconclusive meditations in "Into the Tonquin Valley'; immanence and projection once again seem simultaneously present and contradictory. Creation is only itself, and sufficiently so, and yet the mind does not want to leave it alone; or perhaps it is better to say that the mind seems incapable of leaving the landscape unimagined. "Into the Tonquin Valley" is a self-conscious poem which narrates an encounter with the world of the post-Heisenberg mindscape as much as with the world of the Canadian Rockies, and it shows Gustafson to be concerned with communicating simultaneity in terms of a reconstruction in narrative of an experience-in-context. His approach to the poetic line, his syntax and punctuation, also show him to be aware of the temporal implications of grammatical norms, and he pushes strenuously against the linear configurations which those norms impose by trying to communicate a sense of the nar-

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rative-contemplative process. Sensitive to both the connotative and the denotative aspects of language, he seems, however, to resist the symbolism of the former for the particularity of the latter: he refuses to cast his narrative as parable. In the end, Gustafson keeps to what is at hand. The poem is both attentive to its origins and to its own processes of deliberation. What emerges, finally, is a stance that tries to balance between contradictions which the poet's sincerity will not allow him to deny. In the 1940s, Gustafson chose Theseus over Icarus as his model, feet on the ground rather than imaginative flight. But that does not mean he chose to inhabit a world of imaginative impoverishment. Rather, the effort is in using the imagination to attend that world. This, ultimately, is what his use of "behold" signifies. It recognizes the truth of Heisenberg's hypothesis that the observer affects what he observes. However, while Gustafson recognizes that a poem is what Charles Simic calls "prejudiced"30 by the subjectivity that it expresses, he does not see that prejudice as perforce limiting the range of language available to him, perhaps because the sensibility it expresses, in his case, is torn between immanent-transcendent and imaginativeprosaic attendance. For Gustafson, the particular need not be a tyranny, nor imagination be an evasion of the mundane or actual. The 1930s and 1940s taught him the fate of poetic fads and the diminishing half-lives of their concealed absolutes. In "Into the Tonquin Valley," Gustafson begins Rocky Mountain Poems, and in the process begins the postmodernist phase in his own career, with another "raid on the inarticulate," using language which is "neither diffident nor ostentatious" but "An easy commerce of the old and the new."31 "Magnificence" and "majesty" are defiant in their evocation of past traditions, but Gustafson refuses to replace them with words that would be ostentatious in their diffidence. Besides, it is the efficacy of these traditional metaphors that he is concerned with testing, on the pulse of his own experience, in the processes of his own response.

A

t Moraine Lake" (RMP, 18) considers the relation between language and experience in explicit terms. Its opening line, "Canada, a country without myths," announces the poem's discursive nature and identifies the conceptual framework for its meditations. It is a meditative poem, but its thoughts revolve around the particulars of their locale and avoid rising into abstract mountain air. Charles Altieri has argued that "The characteristic postmodern poem does not proceed by abstract meditation but seeks to create a specific attitude or model for imaginatively perceiving relationships in a given

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situation, which - as attitude, not as symbol or statement - defines and gives value to a more general perspective or experience."32 In "Into the Tonquin Valley," when Gustafson, looking back on their moment of misjudgment, said definitively: "There was / No parable in it" (RMP, 13), he was attempting to define what he was in the process of discovering: an attitude which recognized that there was no symbolic meaning in the event, simply the sense of coming up against the "Vast, tumultuous" world. By refusing to become a parable, however, "Into the Tonquin Valley" becomes paradoxically a model for subsequent poems. It shows that Gustafson is moving beyond his affiliations with the modernist view of the relation between imagination and experience, in which the poem symbolizes an order created from chaos by an act of mind, toward a postmodernist view in which imagination is the sensitive attendance of the whole man upon a world whose grandeur is its exclusive otherness, a world which poems can only engage in a posture tensed between reflection and reaction. In "At Moraine Lake" (RMP, 18), Gustafson further considers what this poetic stance can straddle. If "Into the Tonquin Valley" contemplated the relation between mind and world, this poem considers the contents of consciousness and how they prejudice perception. "At Moraine Lake," too, is a poem of process and self-argument. But where the first poem's structure was provided by the analogue of the diary narrative, "At Moraine Lake" unfolds as a process of thinking and feeling, its form determined by the cragged and broken features of a mindscape in which history and culture, local landscape and domestic setting, time and art, all interact. Once again the differences between the holograph manuscript and the published versions are instructive. They reveal an argument between a perspective which would exclude everything from the poem but the "moment-now," and a more inclusive model of consciousness which lets the mind's associations register. The tension is greater in the revised versions; the first draft of the poem, which is also shorter, is more relaxed, although not completely at ease. Canada, a country without myths. But we need none. I sit By the fire and think of history, Here in the cabin by the lake. The Cinquefoil and the Single Delight, Flowers, grow on a bank, Wild, where moss was, Plantagenet or Wordsworth,

no

A Poetics of Place

Whatever, of worth or passing, Pass through my mind, but I Belong here, the flowers In a glass, placed, themselves, Above on a mantel, and the fire Beneath. Being is instructive, Without likening thing to thing. The emotion, the imagination, Are instructed from themselves. I bend, here, in the dark, And lay a log to the flame, Content to assume nothing But my history. (RMP ms)

In Rocky Mountain Poems, Gustafson revises the opening: Canada, a country without myths. We need none. I sit by the fire And let my native wit buzz, Here in the cabin by the lake, The whole of Hybla's in this hive — The walk round Babel to Consolation Lake our boots set out to dry Wet from trying to get to Quadra The pink snakeweed and the harebell, Flowers which grew on a bank that stand Now in a milkjug above on the mantel The fire beneath. (RMP, 18) Something is gained and something is lost in the revision. In the first draft, myth quickly conflates with history and the conjunction at the beginning of the second line makes the defensive posture less strident, less aggressive, in effect, than the revised version. Also, the original opening moves more easily into the particulars of the setting and establishes more gracefully the compensatory powers of sensory awareness. But the compensation is hardly needed, for the deficit of myth seems balanced by the historical consciousness. "The Cinquefoil and the Single Delight," the flowers he sees on his mantel, summon associations with the royal and literary history of Britain, "Plantagenet or Wordsworth." But these associations are merely the involuntary reactions of the mind, "Whatever, of worth or passing." The poet's stance is firmly situated in the sensory moment: "I / Belong here, the flowers / In a glass, placed, themselves, / Above on a mantel,

111 The Concentric Poet

and the fire / Beneath." The awkwardness of these lines is itself expressive of the poet's concern with a precise notation of his physical and emotional relation to place. The revised opening smooths the roughness of these lines, but the other revisions create an even greater tension between sensory immediacy and the poet's mythicalhistorical sensibility. His "native wit" seems capable of recognizing things for what they are, but what they evoke, it seems, is also a part of what they are. The issue is, once again, epistemological, and the tension in Gustafson's perspective is very similar to the dialectic encountered in the late Stevens. There is, in fact, a passage in Stevens's poem "The Sail of Ulysses" which is uncanny in its relevance to "At Moraine Lake." Stevens's seventh section begins: The living man in the present place, Always, the particular thought Among Plantagenet abstractions, Always and always, the difficult inch, On which the vast arches of space Repose, always, the credible thought From which the incredible systems spring, The little confine soon unconfined In stellar largenesses - these things Are the manifestations of a law That bends the particulars to the abstract....

In his revisions, Gustafson presumably replaces his "Plantagenet abstractions" with particular place names because he cannot repose "In stellar largenesses." His scepticism urges a focus on "the difficult inch," "the present place." And yet, his sensibility, for all its resistance to belief in "a law / That bends the particulars to the abstract," is nevertheless attracted to "the vast arches of space" and the "incredible systems" that imagination and desire can spring from credible thoughts. Stevens writes: Each man Is an approach to the vigilance In which the litter of truths becomes A whole, the day on which the last star Has been counted, the genealogy Of gods and men destroyed, the right To know established as the right to be. The ancient symbols will be nothing then.

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We shall have gone behind the symbols To that which they symbolized, away From the rumors of the speech-full domes, To the chatter that is then the true legend, Like glitter ascended into fire.33

Gustafson's Canada is a propitious ground for the activity Stevens describes. Its lack of myths is Gustafson's version of Stevens's "poverty," the condition essential to "the living man's" discovery of what is behind myth, "the chatter that is the true legend." But there is a danger in Stevens's "vigilance," in that intense scrutiny may excite itself into hallucinatory delusion. Aware of this danger, Gustafson's revisions show him trying to balance "the particular thought / Among Plantagenet abstractions." In the process, some of the revisions do seem counter-productive. Hybla, Babel, and later Odysseus usher in a variety of mythic traditions; but then, when he picks new flowers and replaces the cinquefoil and single delight with snakeweed and harebell, he seems to want to move away from heraldic associations to floral names which are also concrete images. But this is the apparent process of the poem's thinking/feeling its way toward its own attitudes. In the manuscript version, Gustafson quickly moves from physical act or sensory event to thought, and back again; from thoughts of history to a close look at the flowers on the mantel, to thoughts of English kings and poets, to the fire; from thoughts of "Being" and how the emotions and imagination "Are instructed from themselves" to the pleasures of smoking and the joy of brightly burning birch. In the published versions, however, the interplay of past and present in the poet's consciousness becomes a subject in the poem's own self-consciousness. Referring back to the boots set out to dry, he writes: dry feet and love Sum it up - I meant the boots As narrative not Odysseus Smelling somewhat of the heat — But let them stand, I can think Of comprehension such that jug And squarenailed boots are scarlet birds In circles. (RMP, 18)

The published versions of "At Moraine Lake" explore more fully Gustafson's predicament as a poet whose consciousness contains a great deal of history and myth, but who lives in a country which

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seems beyond that knowledge, or at least resists explanation by it. Gustafson, however, refuses to apologize for the scope of his sensibility or the multilayered consciousness which he brings to experience. He comes to recognize this as his necessary stance in "At Moraine Lake" and in Rocky Mountain Poems as a whole. As he moves beyond his modernist phase, the magnificence and wonder he experiences in the world come to accentuate both the grandeur of human imaginative achievements and their essential distance from the elemental universe. Imagination no longer transforms mountains into vast, but nevertheless manageable, symbolist cathedrals; it leaves them as mountains and transforms instead the man who beholds their unmanageable tumult. In "At Moraine Lake," however, no sooner does Gustafson admit the mythic sensibility than he seems to undercut it with banal particularity: "The plumbing in the kitchen / Shakes the roof, my love cooks beans" (RMP, 18). But the point is that the relationship between mythic consciousness and sensory immediacy is not such that the one undercuts the other or renders it banal. Gustafson's argument seeks to move beyond such a simplistic binary opposition by carrying the elements of history, myth, literary tradition, and experience of the moment along in one continuous stream of thought and feeling. Being instructs when it is only itself, "Without likening thing to thing." In Rocky Mountain Poems the relevant lines become: Being Is instructive. I make coffins For alarmclocks with it. (RMP, 19)

Attention to the quotidian is a way of burying the alarming and selfimposed restrictions of clock time upon human experience. Gustafson then reuses language which he had cut from the beginning of the poem: I think Of history: Plantagenet, a piece Of broom to sweep the kindling out, Like Caesar caulked to keep the winds Away. My mind leads on from flowers: Plantagenet's a plant. Emotion Is instructed from itself. I bend here in the dark and get More fire up, as I shift the birch The flames break out. Symbols will do,

114 A Poetics of Place This cry of "myth" here in Canada Is a linguistic lack. Myths Lie about us in our infancy. Take her of the foam somewhere where It's warmer. Look, I am occupied with The irrevocable decisions of the ants. (RMP, 19)

The linguistic play with "Plantagenet" and "broom," the brush and the plant, is a sign of the richness of language which gives the lie to the charge that Canada is a country without myths. The greatest myth, and the motherlode from which the mythopoeic imagination takes its material, is language itself. And for Gustafson, language itself often seems "instructed from itself." It is this aspect of his poetic, his profound belief in the mystery of language, that allies him with a postmodernist like George Bowering, who writes: "The centre and impetus, the world and the creator of poetry is language."34 Venus on a half-shell would be a weird fossil in the Rockies, but that does not mean the mountains are not the locus of mythopoeic energies. The manuscript version is much clearer on this point, and more moving in its expression. Loving attention to particulars, building and keeping a log fire, for example, has its own rewards. "Content to assume nothing / But my history," the poet is complete in the sensory moment and presumes no more than the feel of the fire, the taste of his cigarette. But then, As I move the birch, the flames Break out. I think: life Gives back when loved - banality Being truth. The cry Of "myth," here, in Canada, Is a linguistic lack. The Cinquefoil, examined Has dignity, I note. It matters little - managing To get the two thoughts Together. I write them down For service' sake. The logFire still burns; Outside, the round of peaks. (RMP, ms)

The mythopoeic imagination releases myth from the quotidian the way the log breaks out in flames when it is moved by the poet: "life /

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Gives back when loved." Any lament for absent myths in Canada is a sign of the lamenter's lack of imagination, of mythopoeic intensity and linguistic power. Gustafson's consciousness has come to a point in the process of the poem where it holds these two thoughts together — life is only itself; but like the cinquefoil, it has dignity; and the cry that Canada lacks mythologies is a lie. Gustafson understands their relation, but this insight in the mountains, particularly these mountains, "matters little." Nevertheless he notes it in the poem, "For service' sake," and then returns his attention to the fire and the mountains outside. The published version tries to close more dramatically, with a Pound-like flourish of centaurs in their dragon-world. The juxtaposition of "her of the foam" and the ants is striking and witty, and in keeping with the more strenuously argumentative tone of this version of the poem; but it is quite different from the quiet affirmation of the first draft. Gustafson never reinstates "imagination" in the poem, to have it instructed, along with "emotion," from itself; but in Ixion's Wheel, he does change "Emotion" to "Passion," and: "My mind leads on from flowers" becomes "My mind gets smart on flowers" (IW, 21). In its self-conscious, almost apologetic tone, the latter further exemplifies how the published versions are more public poems, conscious of an audience other than the poet's self. Also, Ixioris Wheel drops "Symbols will do, / This cry of 'myth' here in Canada / Is a linguistic lack." The motive seems to be to let the images of the burning log do the arguing, which is commendable, but the result is that "Myths / Lie about us in our infancy" suddenly seems too bold, and its allusion seems more a gesture of wit than of subtle argument by example, which is how it functions in the original draft of the poem. As such, it is wonderfully telling. Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," from which Gustafson takes his line, suddenly looms up at the end of the manuscript version of "At Moraine Lake" as itself a mountainous analogue for Gustafson's poem. In it, and in the volume as a whole, Gustafson commits himself to Wordsworthian strategies. His poetry becomes a "perpetual benediction" to the complex grandeur of experience and a poetry of "obstinate questionings" regarding the meaning of that grandeur. For Wordsworth, "Heaven lies about us in our infancy"; for Gustafson, this is one of the many myths that man now finds at his feet. But this does not mean Wordsworth's language is in ruins, or his truths. The heaven that lies about man's childhood is the same world of sensory particulars that Gustafson keeps his eyes lowered to at the end of "The Trail under Mount Michael" or throughout "The Walk in Yoho Valley." Gustafson's irony is warm and compassionate, not

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bitter or cynical in the modernist fashion. Heaven lies about modern man in his ruin, but for Gustafson it may always have been there, in the world at man's feet. The poet in Canada, in relation to world literature, is still in his infancy. Heaven and mythology are his for the making. What he must do, in Gustafson's view, is acquire the language he has lacked — lacked through no fault of his own, but because of his new-world situation. The poet must learn to speak in the language of his maturity, not in the infantile squawk of competing realisms, but with the full resonance of human imagination and experiencein-place — beginning with the ants. In "At Moraine Lake," an explicit invitation to consider Wordsworthian mythopoeia tails off into an echo of Poundian self-criticism. The poet's closing preoccupation "with / The irrevocable decisions of the ants" recalls Pound's claim that "The ant's a centaur in his dragon world."35 The new style seems to want to shrug its learning off, as if embarrassed by the burden, but it doesn't. Language is still the only game in town for the poet and Gustafson has no intention of walking into it naked. Nor does his concern with sincerity lead him into any fanatical repudiation of the older players. New-world pragmatism and old-world tradition are not mutually exclusive for Gustafson, who remains refreshingly free of the anxieties of influence which plague so many younger writers in the postmodern period.36 As is evident from "Into the Tonquin Valley" and "At Moraine Lake," by the 1960s Gustafson was clearly trying to write a poetry in which narrative, description and meditation, thought and feeling, past and present, affirmation and doubt — whatever breaks out from the flames — is held by the language that notes it. The final lines of "At Moraine Lake" suggest that Gustafson is opting for American rather than European models. In turning his attention to the ants, he recalls the Pound of the Pisan Cantos, the Williams of red wheelbarrows and white chickens, and the Stevens of "the plain sense of things."

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he humbling of "On the Columbia Icefield" is a recurring experience in the sequence, present in "In the Valley of the Ten Peaks" and "On Mount Revelstoke." In the latter, it comes once again as the climbers discover glory at their feet. However, what humbles the poet is his companion's response to the flowers: But as they were she loved them, coming to those banks passed by a summer's grace

117 The Concentric Poet before, that hillside counted, innocent of tenure and surprise. (RMP, 32)

In The Moment Is All, Gustafson changes this to But as they were, natural, without claim, astonishment, she loved them ... (MIA, 81)

which underscores the generosity that the poet sees in his lover's response to the flowers, a response which makes no demands upon the natural world, and which makes clearer his own "dispossession" in the poem's conclusion: In those fields where flowers were she stood, and in that witness was I dispossessed. (RMP, 32)

It is a moment in which the worlds of poet, lover, and nature all intersect and yet remain separate. The poem is another expression of the postmodernist attitude or stance that Gustafson is developing toward experience and its embodiment in poetic language. The dispossession he undergoes here is the humbling of the ego in its desire to possess what is outside it, be it another human being or the natural world. It is also, however, the poem's dispossession of its subject, as the new attitude seeks a poetry of disclosure rather than fabricated order. This does not mean that it is not an ordered or structured poetry. The revisions, the self-consciousness, the rhythms, syntax, and diction are all carefully considered. But the poet's goal is clearly a freeing up of the subject in itself, more than a controlling or shaping of it into something it is not. Rocky Mountain Poems is a map of feeling and thought in a highly particularized landscape. This means that technique is constantly tested. The challenge for the postmodernist Gustafson is to write a poem which is both precise and inclusive, which is the utterance of "a man speaking to men" and yet sufficiently crafted to communicate completely. In "The Walk in Yoho Valley," for example, Gustafson wants to convey a sense of

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Wordsworthian wonderment at natural glory, and he attempts this through highly alliterated, fast-paced lines, by dropping connectives and articles, and by lacing the poem with understatement. It is a poem full of risks. Patterned repetitions of words like "dazzle" and "dapple" and the continuous alliteration push the poem to the brink, but it is pulled back from a collapse into artificiality by the close regard of particulars - what he calls "immeasurables": Lousewort and pinchmoss Detaining stars, stipples of sticks, Bark wrinkles and root loops And other things thrown around, As birds' wings, beedes' backs, And snails' glens; flies in fine Fettle, butter- and dragon-, wobbled And stood over streams and blossom. Gravely elk grazed, an tiered. Gorgeous glades ranked river. We had dark chocolate under glaciers, Squares of it, eating for energy. (RMP, 25)

The language regenerates an experience which has generated it. The language is itself the "beholding." Gustafson told Wendy Keitner that this was "sheer comic bravura-writing."37 Alliteration and rhythm, however, have been hallmarks of Gustafson's poetry from the beginning and are central to his voice in every poem, not just when he indulges in "bravura." Their centrality relates to his sensibility, and, specifically, to its immanentist dimension. The rhythm and alliteration in this poem are his major means of conveying the force, power, or numen in the place. Altieri writes: The numinous is not symbolic, not a vision of a reality beyond the familiar; rather it inheres in particular stances toward natural facts that exhibit the mind adjusting and accommodating its energies and its needs to the energies and structures disclosed by science. Religious awareness in poetry, then, becomes a matter of syntax rather than of symbolism, a matter of forging through language models of an attentive mind that sustains certain types of balances between its own ways of connecting perceptions and relationships manifesting the world's capacity to satisfy desires for value.38

The poems of Rocky Mountain Poems are "religious" in the sense that they attempt to forge a balance between mind and world which satisfies a deeply personal desire for value. The latter has been a constant in Gustafson's poetry since The Golden Chalice. His syntactic

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crafting in Rocky Mountain Poems bears out Altieri's argument, but his use of rhythm and alliteration does so even more. Energy bursts from the driving rhythms and alliterative clusters in "The Walk in Yoho Valley." The place speaks through the poet in quasi-oracular fashion; but the poet is also speaking, and his spirit is a co-presence in the poem, a human presence whose utterance is only partly empowered by the experience that evokes it. Gustafson's language - its rhythms, sounds, and syntax - enacts the poem as a way of knowing because it is infused with the powers of moment and place which invoke the poem as witness in the first place; powers, however, which are taken in and "turned" by the voice-vigilant poet.

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he last two poems in the volume develop the process of selfdefinition which begins this new phase in Gustafson's poetry. "On the Yukon Run" returns to the issues raised in "At Moraine Lake," and in doing so shows that Gustafson cannot and should not resist dealing with immediate experience inclusively, in the context of his whole imagination and memory. "In the Yukon," the last poem in the book, broaches the same issues, but in the process an intense imaginative energy thrusts his deliberations into an authentic mythopoeia. "In the Yukon" is an altogether different order of lyric from the rest of Rocky Mountain Poems, and a complete surprise as a finale. The volume ends with a literal flight into a new setting and then a poem in that setting which reaches beyond the sequence that contains it. The effect is characteristically ambiguous: the new beginning evades the minor catastrophe of closure by bridging the major fatality of ultimate questions. "On the Yukon Run" sets out to describe a plane flight and to convey the emotion generated by the view of the mountains from the plane: We were suddenly smooth, airborne, Details slipped away, The Pacific banked in our window, We climbed. Hoodooed Baker floated; we had seen Her grounded the crown all glow. But this was different, she hung, A golden empire, nothing base. (RMP, 34)

As the plane climbs, the poem plummets into rhetoric. But Gustafson recognizes it; he has lost control of the emotion and, as usually happens with unchecked feeling, it runs to cliche as the path of least resistance

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and easiest expression. The metaphors of crown and empire, the limp wit of "nothing base," spell imminent doom. So the poet interrupts: This strut is noble But false:

He stops and begins again, but he allows the false start to remain in the poem. Like Purdy in "Trees at the Arctic Circle," Gustafson lets the error remain because the error is the first step in the poet's finding his way and in the poem's finding itself, its cadence. He refocuses on the scene below: We were above peaks The range incredible, Col on col Strode easily, The Fraser a silly access Obvious, smashed gold. All was gold, the sun our companion, Quickgold the mountain lake we couldn't get to, A goat's looking-glass somewhere, Beauty not to be got to, unnamed, We saw a dozen, Glaciers gold, peaks, systems, confrontations, climbs, All gold. (RMP, 34-35)

Because of the vantage-point above the mountains, it is as if he is seeing the landscape for the first time, and yet he is actually looking at his recent past, the sites and terrain they had hiked and climbed. The "moment-now," as always, is infiltrated by the past; "the mountain lake we couldn't get to" is Lake Summit and the experience recounted earlier in the sequence in "On Yoho Pass." "Beauty not to be got to" echoes "One doesn't always get / What he set out to" in the earlier poem (RMP, 26). The revised beginning, however, retains an image from the false start. The repetition of "gold" is risky because it carries with it the aura of an insincere rhetoric, a poetic diction based on convention and outmoded metaphorical systems like crown-empireauthority-majesty; the latter is a dangerous train of associations, considering Gustafson's attempt to make "majesty" and "magnificence" into terms of personal value earlier in the sequence. But he defiantly keeps "gold" and repeats it, almost mantrically, because he obviously feels it to be the right word for descriptive, rather than evocative, purposes. He says as much in the poem:

121 The Concentric Poet All gold. That was the sun of course; loud sun, Broad ruckus; cruising That height, 13,000, It was easy — given a godnod, Luck; driven Nowadays machinery is good. (RMP, 35)

No busy old fool, just "loud," brash, glinting off snowpeaks and glaciers, the sun is still Gustafson's "lyrical pivot," but it is also the broad fact of experience here. And just as the sun's light and heat pervade the scene, the sun-gold image pattern keeps the poem facing toward its energy source. Thoughts that run through every flyer's mind at one time or another then enter the poem: "Aren't planes amazing machines! ... I hope this one is in good shape," etc. But in Gustafson's mind, these thoughts lead to ruminations on larger issues: We rode empirically On many great men, Minds: Da Vinci, Cayley, Santos, Wright, Goodmen with details. We missed melting, Near sun; Icarus, Mallory, Lacked luck and were legend. We generalized, swiftly got there, What was to work against, Not needed. We rode roundly, What we were, borne golden; Beat bother. (RMP, 35)

Language instructs itself, it seems; note how "We rode empirically" puns on the rejected, but apparently not censored, "A golden empire," and how this punning echo is itself roundly echoed in "borne golden." The poem's infrastructure seems to want to collapse in on itself. The voice begins with a movement into high metaphor only to stop and self-consciously censure the impulse. The poem then proceeds on a different foot but that too seems to end up in its mouth, as the repeated "gold," the teasing "empirically," and the flagrant "borne golden" all multiply the ironic self-reference. The "many

122 A Poetics of Place great men" are all intellects — "Minds" — but more important, they are all "Goodmen with details." They were also all visionaries, as their focus on details served to realize their imaginations' desires. In this respect, like Gustafson, empirical wizards and logical dreamers, they looked at the world through contradictory lenses. Their successes came from balancing the real with the more real, and knowing the melting temperature of each. The failures - "Icarus, Mallory" - were not so wise, or so lucky. As the poem draws to its conclusion, the voice resurrects an Anglo-Saxon ruckus. As has been noted, alliteration is one of Gustafson's signature techniques; he usually gives way to it whenever he's feeling good. It is an authentic cadence present in all the stages of his stylistic development. Here, the falling rhythms and the alliteration, because of their Anglo-Saxon echoes, broaden the poem's scope. Recollections of personal and legendary hubris, all the proud generations before their fall, the glow of good feelings reflecting in the mirror of the moment, but the knowledge, too, that there is no reflection without the mirror's dark side; all this is latent in the curt "Beat bother." The poem ends with apparent high spirits, but Gustafson knows that this strut, too, is noble but false.39 He knows in his bones that all flight is short-lived; we all come back to earth eventually. The "glaciers gold, peaks, systems, confrontations, climbs" in Rocky Mountain Poems are more than the literal features of narrative and description. Their haphazard configurations are analogous to the poems' emotional and intellectual processes. The sequence and these processes end with one of Gustafson's finest poems, "In the Yukon." It is quintessential in its embodiment of the contradictory, yet concentric, features of his sensibility: In Europe, you can't move without going down into history. Here, all is a beginning. I saw a salmon jump, Again and again, against the current, The timbered hills a background, wooded green Unpushed through; the salmon jumped, silver. This was news, was commerce, at the end of summer The leap for dying. Moose came down to the water edge To drink and the salmon turned silver arcs. At night, the northern lights played, great over country Without tapestry and coronations, kings crowned With weights of gold. They were green, Green hangings and great grandeur, over the north Going to what no man can hold hard in mind, The dredge of that gravity, being without experience. (RMP, 36)

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The first line recalls the beginnings of "At Moraine Lake" — "Canada, a country without myths" (RMP, 18) - and as in that earlier poem Gustafson begins by juxtaposing Canada and Europe. The omnipresence of human history in the European landscape transforms it into a vast cemetery, its ground springy underfoot with the dead and dying centuries it has absorbed. Gustafson juxtaposes the landscapes through contrasting vertical images: the foot sinking into the humus of Europe and the salmon jumping against the current in Canada. Yet no sooner does he affirm by contrast, than he undercuts the affirmation by recognizing the doom in the salmon's effort. The struggle for life, paradoxically, goes "against the current" of life, which is a continuous flowing to death and dissolution. In the Yukon, biological, geological, natural time seems a perpetual renewal: the salmon laying its eggs, "the timbered hills," the moose at the water's edge. It seems a world where "all is a beginning," and yet it all begins with death. The salmon's regenerative drive is doomed to assume the form of a "leap for dying." The "news," the "commerce" are old business. These natural truths, moreover, are consonant with the lessons of civilization for the salmon's "silver arcs" are as precious as any artifice. The irony, however, is not artificial; it is generated by close observation and deep intuition. This irony toughens the paradox of the poem's sonnet form: the reference to a European lyric tradition by a poem which rejects that crowded anthology for the yet uncut volumes of the virginal north. But the poem's contrasts quickly give way to synthesis. The north is described as a "country / Without tapestry and coronations, kings crowned / With weights of gold," and yet "The timbered hills a background, wooded green / Unpushed through" are a tapestry of green and silver thread, the salmon's "silver arcs" glinting in the play of the northern lights which are like "green hangings." This is the natural grandeur of the world. The curtain of land and light is "Unpushed through," but the poem ends with a visionary glimpse of the other side. What draws the salmon to its procreative death also summons man to his death-defying creative acts, and the poet to his poems. "What no man can hold hard in mind" is his own death, his extinction, or the resumption of "being without experience." The verbal in this final phrase is a gemlike pivot in the poem's spiral into and out of its own propelling anxieties. Its grammatical ambiguity compounds the ironies and paradoxes that produce the poem's torque. As participle, it refers to the man who, being without the experience of death, cannot know it: man knows in his pulse the gravity that drags all living things back to their core; Gustafson certainly does; but he cannot hold that as knowledge "hard in the mind" until he

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passes beyond the world of empirical fact. As a gerund, it makes "being without experience" apposite to that "gravity" which pulls us toward that unknown, the fact beyond empirical knowledge which, if it were to be known, would mean the dispossession of all knowledge. The effect of this sense of knowledge as an ultimate unknowing is to play an almost sinister, retrospective irony back on that line in "At Moraine Lake" - "Being / Is instructive" (RMP, 19). "In the Yukon" comes to a vertiginous close. The tensions are unresolved and unrelaxed. The suffocating surfeit of experience represented by a European consciousness is contrasted with the equally fatal void at its polar extreme. Both worlds are ruled by the same law of gravity. Gustafson begins as a poet burdened with the drag of Europe. In Rocky Mountain Poems he confronts the temptations of a new-world weightlessness. What he realizes is that this would be an illusory liberation, necessitating an amputation that would bring only a different kind of handicap. The poetic stance that emerges in this poem straddles past and present and braces for the future. Death and "bother" suddenly loom up at the end of the volume which had begun by celebrating the grandeurs of nature and the magnificence of human love. As he wrote in his first draft of "At Moraine Lake," I bend, here, in the dark, And lay a log to the flame, Content to assume nothing But my history. (RMP ms)

The dark surrounds, mortality pervades every moment, but the poet builds his fires and makes his own light and warmth. His acts, poetic and otherwise, are self-consuming, but Gustafson recognizes that, whatever illumination and warmth are possible to him, they issue from that self-consumption of life and language. The final lines of "In the Yukon" and the earlier image of the salmon make it clear that Gustafson should be considered in relation to those poets for whom, as Dennis Lee has written, "the cadence of what is abounds only when we meet it in its fullest grounding in non-being."40 "In the Yukon" resumes the topics of "At Moraine Lake" and "Into the Tonquin Valley," and particularly the destructive dichotomy of "native wit" (RMP, 18) and mythical-historical-literary consciousness, which those poems addressed. "At Moraine Lake" showed that for Gustafson the polarization was fallacious and, if he were to subscribe to it, would lead to both an impoverished poetry and a lobotomized selfhood. That earlier poem argued a self-definition which sought an integration of a consciousness vigorous in its attention to the

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"moment-now" but unashamedly cognizant of the momentum within its acts of attention, a momentum deriving from the inescapable pressures of the conscious and unconscious residues of past experience which prejudice his perception and identify it as his distinctive stance toward both his experience and his art. "In the Yukon" is grounded in the psychic terrain first surveyed in "At Moraine Lake." Its ultimate achievement is a sense of self rooted in a mythopoeic integration of man-in-place, a /oco-centric selfhood which is the psychic core of the concentric system of man-poet-poem-world. As an ending to Rocky Mountain Poems, "In the Yukon" is an image of utter dissolution, of ultimate dispossession; and yet it is a poem of joy, of beholding, of yet another overwhelming of the self by a power beyond comprehension to which the imagination entrusts its regeneration. Formally, the poem parodies its own gestures at monumentality, rejoices in its self-erosion. It is a new-world sonnet, with the ghost of its former self haunting its green mansions. It is also a triumphant act of self-definition for the poet which results from his confronting his most intimate fears, fears which will hound him with increasing tenacity in the years to come, and force him to affirm himself over and over again against their pressures. A poet's selfdiscovery seems doomed to become, eventually, his self-haunting. The image of the salmon in "In the Yukon" is a complex premonition, despite its clarity as an image, of this cycle of identity, and the poem is one of Gustafsoris clearest presentations of his vision of creation's doom amid magnificence. The poem does not evade that doom or transform it; there is no supervention of reality by aesthetic strategy or conscription of a rhetorical nobility through an inverted irony. There is affirmation, but the pull of that gravity is real and undenied. What "On the Yukon Run" defies the last poem in the volume credits, giving the devil his due. But for Gustafson, this Lucifer has become the necessary angel that bothers the process toward its wholly natural conclusions.

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aken as a whole, the poetic sequence in Rocky Mountain Poems comprises a process of self-definition in which the poet reconsiders his stance toward technique and subject. In writing these poems Gustafson crosses a threshold into a new phase in his development. The reconsideration and self-definition occur within and by way of Gustafsoris moulding of narrative, descriptive, and contemplative voices into a single speech. There are two immediate pressures which bear upon the poems: the impact of the landscape and the concurrent power of the love felt between Gustafson and his wife.

126 A Poetics of Place The configurations of apposite and contrary relationships which the poems detail within and between the human and natural, the subjective and objective, worlds outline Gustafson's focus in his subsequent work. Even his political consciousness, the source of his "witness" poetry during these years, is present in the sequence. "The Walk in Yoho Valley" begins in a lowland gloom: "The state of the world / At this time was not good: / All men were dying" (RMP, 24). In Rocky Mountain Poems, there are pressures which are immediate, particular, and personal and those which are vague, broader, more public in origin - all of which arouse in Gustafson an imaginative response that becomes his distinctive stance toward his material. With regard to the broader, literary background to this response, Altieri's summary of the situation by the end of the 1950s is apropos: In the fifties the display of artistic intelligence had come to seem either a decadent aestheticism, putting very little pressure on actual realities, or a surrender to a narrow Christian humanism represented by second-generation New Critics. Juxtapositional styles and complex levels of internal relationships had been developed by modernists precisely to locate new sources of mental energy in an age dominated by simple poetic descriptions on the one hand and political bombast on the other. These styles had grown enervated, and lyric richness had become the end rather than the means the poets had expected it to be. It seemed that poetry could be saved from decadence only by shifting the basic use of poetic intelligence from concerns for aesthetic complexity to concerns for emotional intensity and speculative scope, even if the price had to be the rejection of traditional expectations about craft and about coherent symbolic patterning as a structural principle.41

In so far as Gustafson was reacting against external pressures, this describes his situation in the late 1950s. The early poems in Rivers among Rocks show his modernism in full bloom, but then the later poems in that volume show him beginning to move beyond that aesthetic, particularly the new poems of love and landscape: "Beach with White Cloud" (RAR, 19), "Quebec Winterscene" (RAR, 32), "In Time of the Fall" (RAR, 28), and "Quebec, Late Autumn" (RAR, 43). It is in the ways in which he cannot be fitted into Altieri's summary of the reactions against a decadent modernist aestheticism during the 196os, however, that we begin to see the distinctive stance Gustafson achieves during this and subsequent decades. From the 1930s onward, he had opened his poetry to the pressure of "actual realities" and he continues to do this in his "witness" poetry of the igyos and 1980s. But while he also continued to both value and question the Christian ethos, Gustafson never surrendered to the

127 The Concentric Poet

"narrow Christian humanism" of the later New Critics. In his 1949 essay, "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But ..." he had parted company with the New Critics on ethical and aesthetic grounds, and his dissatisfaction with a Christocentric poetics pre-dates this.42 Gustafson would never abandon, however, the juxtapositional styles and levels of internal relationships of modernist poetry, precisely because, in Altieri's language, they still "locate new sources of mental energy" for him. Counterpoint is basic to Gustafson's poetry because it comes to him as naturally as breathing; it is part of his sensibility's genetic make-up. What he sees when he looks at the world is contradiction, inconsistency, and tension; and he sees much the same when he looks at himself. The consequence is a poetry of internal dialogue and dialectic. As he moves beyond his modernist phase, however, Gustafson does not follow the reaction into the confessional or surrealistic schools of the period. His poetry contains emotional intensity and speculative scope, but it continues to base its expression on the principle that emotional sincerity is not compromised by the demands of technique; indeed, for Gustafson, technique is always both the test and the proof of the poet's depth of sincerity. His prose criticism in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s constantly argues in defence of craftsmanship and against the fallacious equating of conscious technique with poetic dishonesty. The poems in Rocky Mountain Poems are fresh, open, agile creations; they tense and relax in a muscular rhythm that captures the poet's physical, emotional and intellectual engagement with his subject and his language. Most of all, it is the mind that seems to have been freed up to engage the process of poem-as-experience. Writing about these poems to Irving Layton, Gustafson said: They're rather colloquial and easy going ... but I think they ve caught mountains and their devastation of human pretensions. ... They're overwhelming in beauty and brutality and set down in the middle of Canadian existence. ... That month in the Rockies overwhelmed me -joy, passion, grandeur, humility, constant. The Romantic approach — but I'm sick to death of intellectual piddling. Intelligence, yes. But joy first - snowcaps and dust.43

The language in this letter reveals just how concentric Gustafson's poetry is to his sense of self. Rocky Mountain Poems constantly expresses the "devastation of human pretensions" by the immensity of the landscape, and once again, Gustafson's contradictory lens focuses on the "beauty and brutality," "snowcaps and dust" in that world. The repetition of "overwhelming ... overwhelmed" reinforces the sense of humbling that runs through the poems, but also the

128 A Poetics of Place experience of numinous power in the natural world that both attracts and mystifies him. Gustafson makes no apology for his "romantic approach," but the giving of priority to "joy" over "intelligence" is an important admission; it links him with the poetic reaction of the 1960s described by Altieri. However, the fact that he keeps the intellect as a co-presence in poetry distinguishes him from those 1960s poets who abandoned it as a diseased modernist organ. Gustafson did not have to abandon a modernist use of symbolism as a structural principle in his poetry because he had not consciously developed any such patterning. In 1945, when W.W.E. Ross pointed out to him the recurrence of the sun in his poetry as an apparently personal symbol, Gustafson replied: I was particularly struck by your remark on the use I seem to make of "sun". One other person has commented on this use. But until you pointed it out I was not aware that the word was such a lyrical pivot. You're right. I am doubtful whether I should give this any investigation. Sun if anything is spontaneous, and I am inclined to hazard the danger of over-use. At least, I am sure I won't be caught making invocations to it.44

Gustafson's response is that of a poet who recognizes a locus of creative power but who also has the instinctive good sense to know that the source is a mystery and best left unanalysed. His reference to "sun" as a "lyrical pivot" is instructive: the phrase connotes the energy and movement that the image obviously holds for him, but it also underscores the craftsman's perspective from which he prefers to regard it - as if to look at it intellectually or analytically would be to risk making a true mystery into a false. It is appropriate here to remember that the etymology of "mystery" includes the sense of occupation, handicraft, or art, originally in relation to medieval tradeguilds or companies, as well as the more common meanings of the word as something hidden or secret, or a religious truth or doctrine. For Gustafson, poetic craftsmanship includes some of all these "mysteries" in various degrees at different moments in the creative process. There is much about poetic technique which is common knowledge, and as necessary as any set of tools for a particular job. But there is also a dimension to the craft which is hidden even to the craftsman, and Gustafson is quite content with this mystery and does not presume to rationalize or formulize it. This, too, is part of his attitude or stance toward his poetic materials which derives from his essentially immanentist sensibility. In this respect, it is significant that when Gustafson's revisions in Rocky Mountain Poems are considered, they are always spot-specific revisions; that is, they are not made to

129 The Concentric Poet

make the sequence more unified or coherent as a sequence. And yet the book is definitely a processive work, the poems following from each other in a linked series. Those elements which contribute to the book's wholeness, however, are not deposited in revision — they are there in the first scribblings in situ, in the processive quality of the narrative-descriptive-meditative voice and the wonderful scrutiny of flowers, rocks, ice, the gold and green light, and the many other unavoidable features of the world he beholds.

G

ustafson's growth as a poet can be charted in terms of his search for an authentic voice, a poetic form in which the poet stands concentric with word, experience, and world. But authenticity of voice for him has more to do with the spirit in the form. The form and language of "In the Yukon" contrast with a poem like "At Moraine Lake," but the poems are linked by their explicit polarization of Europe and Canada. "In the Yukon" further tests the possibility of the resolution of that dichotomy and thus it derives its form from the extension and final formation of those tensions in the sequence. But it is important to recognize the way in which the formal allusion functions in the poem; it is part of the total meditation, the curtaintapestry that Gustafson eventually pushes through to confront "what no man can hold hard in mind." The poem thus tests the concept of poetic form itself, as that which neither poet nor poem can avoid, and further, as that which requires an inescapable "going down into history." No forms can be original in the vernacular sense, because they would be unrecognizable. All forms are original, however, in the sense that they partake of fundamental elements: voice, language, rhythm, and time. Gustafson's approach to form has always been pragmatic. The angel of the spirit is polymorphous, whereas critics often tend to be one-eyed evangels. Gustafson's approach to form is immanentist; form serves the spirit that inhabits it, it must get the job done. Gustafson's critical prose does not distinguish between form and content in the mechanical sense. The poem is like the track of the subatomic particle; it is a record of the spirit, its after-image, showing us where it has been by appearing to still be there. And so Gustafson evolves his own science, from romantic sonnets through modernist lyrics, to postmodernist shapes, always on the move, oscillating back and forth between the savage field of the new and the familiar cemetery of the old. Only a fool, it would seem, would stop too long in either locale, for the consequences would be fatal in both grounds: silence. Like Dennis Lee, Gustafson desires "a clear high style"; a style, as Pound described it, capable of inviting the gods

130 A Poetics of Place

home to the hearth of the human heart.45 There are many such invitations in postmodernist poetry; for the reader, however, the issue is to discover those poems in which the invitation has received a response. As Gustafson develops beyond Rocky Mountain Poems into the volumes of the 19705 and igSos, he seems, on a number of occasions, a most fortunate host. Rocky Mountain Poems sprang Gustafson loose from the trappings of his modernist phase, which began in the 19405, but it is not until the poems of Fire on Stone (1974) that he consolidates his new style. Unfortunately, Gustafson's years as an academic at Bishop's placed him in an environment which acted as a brake on the growth that was beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Sift in an Hourglass (1966) and Ixioris Wheel (1969) are heterogeneous collections, much like Rivers among Rocks (1960), in which many poems bear the stylistic features of a reactivated modernism, while others continue the procedures of Rocky Mountain Poems (1960). The years Gustafson spent at Bishop's seem to have distracted or delayed him from capitalizing on the achievement of Rocky Mountain Poems and exploring further the stylistic and philosophical territory opened up by those poems. Nevertheless, Rocky Mountain Poems remains the turning-point volume in Gustafson's progress toward a distinctively personal stance which revises and reuses, rather than rejects, its romantic and modernist history. This stance, which I have chosen to call postmodernist, places the poet as a presence unembarrassed by his desires, values, and claims upon the world, and undefeated by their contradiction by that world. The concentric relations of man and world, poet and poem, and poem and world that Gustafson begins to develop during the 1950s, and in Rocky Mountain Poems at the end of that decade, contrast with the egocentric formulations of both romantic individualism and modernist formalism because they express the self in relation to the world in terms of co-presence rather than confinement or transcendence, and they express the world in relation to the poem in terms of process rather than static containment. Gustafson allows the world to remain outward and objective, and yet he is not a naive realist. He is neither the prisoner of history nor the hostage of reason. His concentric poetic puts him "alive at the centre of everything."46 In a poem like "In the Yukon," the circumference of the real contracts and that of the self expands, until poet and world seem to dance, interlocked, in the same circle, to the same rhythm. That rhythm is the essence of the poem's mythopoeic quality and it is generated by the synthesis of discrete, even dissonant elements, particularly the pas de deux of doubt and affirmation. Doubt is a constant companion in Gustafson's poetry, but in "In the Yukon" he opens to the creative

131 The Concentric Poet

element in doubt itself, to the mystery that shows forth as the doom in all magnificence, human or natural. The sense that this poem makes, particularly in its final lines, does not set "genius against experience,"47 but paradoxically includes its own unmaking by that being which is always more instructive than any human poesis. These issues which emerge from a close reading of Rocky Mountain Poems are worth considering in some depth because they bear on an understanding of Gustafson's humanism. In his poetry of the 1970s and 1980s, Gustafson's concentric stance toward world, language, and self results in a humanistic ethos which is very different from that attacked by critics like Tallman and Davey during the 1960s. This latter humanism is indeed egocentric, imperialistic, and repressive in its relations with the world, no matter how benevolent its rhetorical claims.48 Gustafson's concentric humanism, however, contains no hidden compulsion to mastery but only the desire to know, through recognition rather than fiat, our place in a world he has come to see in terms of Heraclitan process. Thus, while his poetry continuously strives for synthesis, it is always aware of the vectors of potential distortion present both in his acts of attention and in language itself. In the 1960s and 1970s, Gustafson was more and more taken by Pound's efforts in the later cantos, and Gustafson's poetry expresses a humanism which is wary of the vortex of egocentric projection, and strives to maintain the humility and openness of a stance concentric with the world, a stance in which mind and reality cohere by virtue of the magnificent doom they share. In George Bowering's view, "Men fabricate the perspectives of time and space in order to place themselves at the centre of phenomena. What is needed is a lesson in humility."49 Gustafson's experience in the Rockies was of a temporal and spatial order that centred him, rather than one which he fabricated. His poems acknowledge the absolute otherness of the land and the overwhelming power of its natural forces. By conferring magnificence upon them, Gustafson does not challenge those forces or seek to abrogate their authority, so much as he seeks to know more deeply the source of his own authority as a poet in relation to that natural world. His humility before the land is undeniable, though his sense of the value of personal statement remains unrepressed. In Rocky Mountain Poems, Gustafson comes to know time and place, ultimately, as the magnificent dimensions of his own doom. Rocky Mountain Poems reveals not only a major shift in Gustafson's own poetic but also prefigures a larger shift in contemporary Canadian poetry. This shift - or reaction - has come to be called postmodernist and is, to a large extent, associated with the poetry and criticism-cum-promotion initiated by the Tish group of poets and

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A Poetics of Place

publicists in Vancouver in the 1960s and continued throughout their professional diaspora since then. What is remarkable, however, is that Gustafson achieved this development himself through evolution rather than revolution, a number of years before the work of this group. And in my view, poems like "Into the Tonquin Valley," "At Moraine Lake," and "In the Yukon" surpass any written by the members of that avant-garde, just as Rocky Mountain Poems surpasses any volume yet produced by them.

CHAPTER FOUR

Toward Plain Statement Content can be made its own sensation Ralph Gustafson

The cross-Canada trip of 1959 signalled Gustafson's return to the country and, eventually, the region of his origins. After a year spent travelling in Britain, Europe, and Scandinavia, in 1963 Gustafson accepted a position in the English department at Bishop's and bought a house in North Hatley, a village just a short drive from Lennoxville. While teaching at Bishop's, he and his wife continued to travel, during a sabbatical year and in the summers, and this provided Gustafson with experience and inspiration which countered the effect of the university setting and academic occupation. Particularly during the late 1960s and early 1970s, when he journeyed to Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Japan, and the South Pacific, travel not only kept him alert to contemporary world events but forced him to consider those events in relation to a context that was personal in its basis for judgment and yet broader than the perspective afforded by academic life on a small, rural campus in Eastern Quebec. His experiences in Czechoslovakia, for example, resulted in "Nocturne: Prague, 1968," the first of a series of poems dealing with political and social events in Canada and abroad that Gustafson wrote during the late 1960s and early 1970s. These were published together in Themes and Variations for Sounding Brass in 1972, the same year that his first Selected Poems appeared. In "Ariobarzanes," the most important poem in Sift in an Hourglass (1966), Gustafson begins to come to terms with the modernist masters - Yeats and Pound - who had replaced the romantic models of his youth. "Ariobarzanes" should be read in relation to Yeats's "mask" poems and Pound's notion of the "repeat in history." In his Foreword to the Revised Edition of the Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1967) Gustafson discusses Pound's influence on contemporary Canadian poetry and at the same time attempts to explain his own adaptation

134 A Poetics of Place of modernist practice and how it differs from that of the younger poets then dominating public attention in Canada. This foreword, and an expanded version of it, "New Wave in Canadian Poetry (1967), along with an important review of George Woodcock's poetry, "Worthwhile Visitations" (1976), show Gustafson in the process of rethinking his poetic, both in order to justify what he had already achieved as a poet and to make clear, if only to himself, where he was heading.

L

ike Rivers among Rocks (1960), Sift in an Hourglass is a carefully constructed book. Divided into three sections, the poems in the first, which gives the volume its title, all sift life and death.1 They also sift language itself. And the motion or drift of the poet's mind, as it combs experience with the teeth of words, gathers eventually in the last poem in the section, "On This Sea-Floor" (SH, 26).2 The second section, "Dramatis Personae," contains poems dealing with literary and historical figures, living and dead, and poems of personal relations. The third, "The Year of Voyages," is a section of travel poems. The "Dramatis Personae" poems are evidence of Gustafson's return to Canada, and particularly, to an academic setting. Most of the characters are literary, and the poems reflect Gustafson's intense reading for his teaching at Bishop's, as well as his desire to pay homage to poets like Browning, Yeats, Pound, and Pratt. The poems to Canadian poets like Irving Layton, F.R. Scott, and A.J.M. Smith express the sense of community that Gustafson began to develop after his return to Canada, when his relationships with these poets began to benefit from a closer physical proximity. "Ariobarzanes," the final poem in the "Dramatis Personae" section, is the most important. A tour de force, and the longest poem Gustafson had written so far, it is the extended recollection of a mercenary ordered to guard one of Darius ill's concubines; Darius has gone into exile after his defeat by Alexander. "Ariobarzanes" is another example of Gustafson's historical consciousness and his ability to use apparently alien subject matter and settings to express personal concerns. In this respect, it provides an effective transition into the travel poems. The poem has five sections and runs over three hundred lines. The look on the page resembles that of a Pound canto; there is a broad range of line lengths, from one to thirteen syllables, and drop-lines and variable margins are employed throughout. But Pound has influenced more than the typography. Gustafson's close reading of the Cantos in the early 1960s clearly corroborated his view of the ability

135 Toward Plain Statement of poetry to include history. Also, as Gustafson became more interested in the poem sequence, an interest that would manifest itself in the works gathered in Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass (1972), Pound's methods in the Cantos offered Gustafson a variety of ways in which he could develop his own public poetry on a smaller scale. He told Damien Pettigrew in 1979 that he "found important affirmations, technically, in the Cantos."3 In "Ariobarzanes," the alternation of subjective and objective viewpoints, the minimal and highly elliptical narrative thread, the vivid sensual particulars, repeated with a subtly variegated phrasing to provide each section and the poem as a whole with a texture and structure as delicate as a leaf-pattern, the irregular line lengths and the ear for the sea-surge of emotion and attention, and the alliteration, parallelism, and dramatic juxtaposition of elliptical, fragmentary clusters with more conventional syntactic and prosodic units all remind one of Pound's approach to the long poem. Gustafson's use of Ariobarzanes also recalls Pound's use of a figure, moment, or event from myth or history as a "luminous detail" to highlight the past and illuminate the present.4 But the subtlety and beauty of Gustafson's poem are all his own, the result of his characteristic crafting of sensuous image and musical phrase, his formal agility, and his ability to let the poem build gradually toward coherence by patiently allowing its materials to release and confirm their own potential. "Ariobarzanes" is a poem that needs to be heard to be fully appreciated, and it gives certain pleasure to speaker and listener alike. It is a dramatic poem which achieves its effects on a number of levels. There is the surface drama of the character and his situation. Ariobarzanes, the mercenary, embodies (or "en-voices") Gustafson's view of life as a hazardous contract between the man who serves and the world which serves him his fateful circumstances. This world demands and offers constant physical contact and the mercenary is, by virtue of his temperament and the nature of his trade, alert and sensitive to the light and colour, the smells and textures of the surroundings in which he must serve and survive. Ariobarzanes is also a mercenary who is aware of Plato and Homer; he is a man who sifts his body's lore for intellectual gleanings. The drama of his situation derives from his being a mercenary on a losing side; he is on the run and the poem is a recollection of the last days before he takes ship to Scios; further, he is strongly attracted to the woman his employer has charged him to protect. There is yet a further dramatic tension that comes from the relation between the poet and the persona. The poem shifts between thirdand first-person voices, mysteriously conflating creator and creation,

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allowing Gustafson to explore his obsessions with life and death, sense and intellect, history and the "moment-now." Gustafson wrote to his friend, John Glassco, about "Ariobarzanes": "I... tried to convey only essences ... - Persia, sensuality, the passage of a civilization, the crux in a personality, our own transient civilization," and this certainly sounds like a Poundian program for the poem: the close focus on essentials, the sense of place and the place of the senses, the fascination with turning-points or historical thresholds, the sense of things ending and beginning again, the centrality of the person and the connections between past and present, what Pound conveyed in his concept of the "repeat in history."5 The poem begins in the third person, but the narrative point of view quickly merges with the subjective reverie of the character: The white snow melted and he was here on the top of Murghab the mount that looks toward Pasargadae Cyrus' city a whole day's climb you'd think the snow would stay as the snow on Pelion so high up as the marble of Persepolis (the hundred pillars snow-white) (SH, 54)

The alliterative association of places - Pasargadae, Pelion, Persepolis — enhances the subtle fusion of narrator and character in a single, fluid consciousness which moves over time as easily as it ranges through space. "The white snow," "the snow on Pelion," and "the marble of Persepolis /... snow-white" begin a strand of images which will combine with other strands to provide the poem with its sinuous structure. These image patterns also act like musical chords against which Gustafson plays contrapuntal melodies for dramatic effect. For example, after the snow and marble of the opening lines, two contrasting colour patterns follow; first, a green amber/bronze pattern, and then the image of sweat beading in the black hair of the mercenary's armpit: the bronze doors beaten in naked gods or the green lizard in amber she played with,

137 Toward Plain Statement set on her scrolls, he standing at her bronze door his weight taken on his hand on his lance high up waiting guarding what? the nails of her feet painted silver her hair undone and done up again her scrutiny her laugh her hand brushing the black under his arm as she passed to the garden peacocks the black that was sweated: he was young guarding the whore of the king of Persepolis (SH, 54)

The tension builds through the rhythms and sounds. Sensuality becomes tension as sounds gather as if by their own impulse into a sexually charged music; the vowels convey the desire and the consonants urge that desire toward action. Sound and rhythm also bring specific details forward for particular notice — "the nails of her feet," for example, with its echo of "in naked gods," or "her scrutiny" and its echo of "her scrolls"; and the repeated aspirates - "his weight ... his hand ... his lance ... high up ... her feet... her hair ... her scrutiny ... her laugh ... her hand ... his arm" - develop the sense of desire labouring against a tenuous control. The section concludes with a delightful deflation: though the snow melted the rock against his ass was cold (SH, 56)

The reverie of lost opportunity gives way to the narrated recollection of the way it was. The music mocks itself. The second section is the shortest. The centre of consciousness is unidentified, except by the gloss in the margin, which states: "He reflects on the herb given Odysseus by Hermes against Circe" (SH, 56). Each section has a marginal epigraph or tag, in a smaller, italicized typeface in the manner of the glosses in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." The association with Coleridge's poem is intriguing, but the references to Odysseus, Circe, and the moly continue the poem's Poundian orbit. There is a strange, Mauberley-like quality to Ariobarzanes. Despite the obvious differences between this man of action and Pound's paralysed aesthete, Gustafson's mercenary has an

138 A Poetics of Place aesthetic sensibility and in section two the concern is with the apparent antinomies of "intellect and passion" and Ariobarzanes has obviously read A Draft of XVI Cantos: Moly!

and yet to lie with her for a year Both both! intellect and passion. (SH, 56)

To lie in Circe's bed and come away clear-headed: paradoxically, the war between intellect and passion seems to be man's greatest evidence of the coherence of process. Helios, Pound's great arbiter and Gustafson's "lyrical pivot," is both warmth and light, passion and lucidity; but for man, these seem as divided against themselves as day from night: Light light! sun on the diamond pale blue and blood crimson broken burning and on snow patterns on garden in moon the intellect clean cold in thought Helios! Helene! Troy burned in that light! the bed honeyed and left unkempt grove against grove musk and brought together the towers taking the smoke the waves of smoke brought against the pillars marble and soot clipped yew and diamond antinomies of the Goddess, the Bitch brainpan in the glans acorns for Circe's men (SH, 56) The section establishes the parallel between Darius's collapse before Alexander and Troy's before the Greeks, the concubine within Persepolis and Helen in Troy, the "repeat in history." The consciousness is the poem's - that is, the poet's and the character's. The poem as

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Toward Plain Statement

well repeats its music from section one, using the echo to give the new material resonance, sound and imagery countering fragmentation with coherence. The third section continues this descant on "the passage of civilization" by homing in on "the crux of personality"; the personality is that of the mercenary but the sensibility is clearly the poet's. A fourthcentury BC mask has been moulded to the face of a twentieth-century

man: There is a pledge of death in all things yet he turned from himself knowing, the market place having no less the big answers the bronze-monger at the stall the white bulls the horsesmith's hide apron the crowd standard for Friday mornings the celery wilting and the oranges the iron scales hanging, as men are aware of such things caressed by her hand and with certainty forgotten now the night's oils and the varied ways never possible enough these things known and still to be known between his legs as men think of them standing at the carved marble temple or at Troy burnt (SH, 57) In his Preface to Sequences (1979), a book which reprints "Ariobarzanes" along with Rocky Mountain Poems and other poem sequences, Gustafson explains the approach behind a passage like this: A poem resides in its verbal craft and of all the constructions which a poem may take, the sequence, the poem by sections, is the one, I think, most peculiarly contemporary. The architecture accommodates the modern temper. Its structure and complex of meditation, irony and extension, convey the contemporary world of incompletion and, at the same time (in accordance with Poe's injunction) maintain tension. It accommodates our imperative for lyricism, resolution (in the musical sense), comprehensible ambition, and, to the extent of these successes, supplies coherence if not inclusive unity. A further demand by this age of romantic survival is met: the structure satisfies the personal desire to shape heterogeneous experience. ... The world is in enough fragments. (S, 6-7)

140 A Poetics of Place In "Ariobarzanes," the "complex of meditation, irony and extension" is found in the blend of narrative, reverie, recollection, and allusive commentary. The fundamental irony is both thematic and formal: the delineation of a coherent sensibility through the presentation of fragments of consciousness. The Cantos, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Homage to Sextus Propertius are analogous palimpsests, as well as The Waste Land, of course; indeed, Eliot's Tiresias seems close beside Gustafson's character as he watches the evacuation of the city before the arrival of the advancing army of Alexander in section four. But Gustafson's mercenary is not Eliot's paralysed witness either; he leaves the ruined city: and I left behind there in the broken marble the alabaster fragments the jaw broken that had sucked the honey (SH, 60)

Even in defeat he is still in touch with life. In the final section, Gustafson's language draws together all the previous patterns into a gradual crescendo of affirmation: the sands were gold sucking in seafoam the laced sands as I rode high on the cliffs the stallion the sidling cream stallion snuffing the air salt and the musk my thighs pressed on the white apron of the harness citron on leather ... - I wheeled and held the flanks the pheasants green-crested and tailed made a cry in the tall grass I rode outward the black smoke on the hill below, the white foam laced on the sand the gulls wheeling the wings stretched on air (SH, 60—1)

141 Toward Plain Statement

The finale is a chorus of echoes, but the variation in the repetition is emblematic of the experience being recounted — the taking of action in the context of failure, the new beginning that emerges from an exhausted resolution. The green-crested pheasants recall "the green lizard in amber" and the garden peacocks; the black smoke recalls the black hair; the white foam, the marble and the moonlight in the palace. "Experience is a cliff-edge" (SH, 62), the mercenary concludes, and there is the sense of life as a continuous threshold, like the moment on the beach in "Legend" or at the entrance/exit to the labyrinth in "Mythos." The past stretches out behind, static and solid, yet a momentum pushes us out over the edge into the unknown, into the free fall that is our illusion of freedom over the gravity that dictates our final arrival. Like Rocky Mountain Poems, "Ariobarzanes" ends with a new beginning. But also like that earlier sequence, it moves toward the future by propitiating the past - as if to welcome the unknown, one must first acknowledge the known: I shall live yet to spend my days. ... smelling her hyacinthine hair gemmed with emerald my lip was cut by it tasting of lemon or saffron as in the grooves of her thighs ...

Tomorrow I shall sail to Scios sacrificing three doves. (SH, 62)

The cut lip, the blood of sacrifice; experience makes a text of the body. The poem itself is a mercenary act for the poet whose voyages are cycles of knowing and forgetting, discovery and remembering. Sift in an Hourglass (1966) was published six years after Rocky MounO tain Poems, and yet in it Gustafson seems to turn back rather than advance from that turning-point volume. Ixion's Wheel (1969) also seems to hesitate to take up the challenge of the 1960 volume. Perhaps the sudden pressures of academic life — the scramble to prepare courses, the interruptions of concentration, and the consumption of energy — distracted Gustafson from his recent achievement. The times themselves, with growing unrest in Quebec, and political tur-

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moil and military mayhem in America and Asia, also would have taken Gustafson into poetic territory that recalled an earlier phase in his poetic development - the engaged poetry of the 1930s and 194os - rather than the recent stances of Rocky Mountain Poems. The turmoil of the times also seems to have summoned the impulse to order and a reconsideration of the role of the imagination and its relationship to experience.6 Such a reconsideration occurs in "Man Is the Creator Of." This poem goes through a number of rewritings before it achieves its final version. As always, for Gustafson, revisions are rereadings and rehearsals; in each, the poet is listening to the poem, trying to hear what it wants to say. The first draft bears the title, "Not Latent Pantheism," which seems to deny an immanentist perspective. It begins on a strong note: It is man himself creates All things — not these stars Alone, that misty moon that hovers Now in the west beautiful... ... not these things By themselves do it, tell us, make us, What we wish to know: an end Of suffering, wintering; the first spring, Faith, rock, prettiness; or grandeur Swept through the heart by the sight of stars ... ... oh not the beauty of the world Does this by itself, Gives us grace. We must do It by ourselves.7

For all its assertiveness, this beginning seems unsure of itself. The assertions are quickly qualified: by "Alone" at the beginning of line 3, and then by "not these things / By themselves" and "not the beauty of the world / ... by itself." The thinking, or the intuition, is not yet clear. Gustafson's concern is with the relationship between mind and world and the role that mind plays in the positing of value in experience; but in so far as the voice seems to want to locate the source of value in the perceiver, the language emphasizes a collaborative generation of value by man and world. Beauty and grace are experiences as well as values, and they reside within the world as much as within man. And yet "We must do / It by ourselves" seems to contradict the sense that "What we wish to know" comes from collaboration.

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When Gustafson changes the title in his first typescript to "Not Beauty but the Heart," the poem moves toward a resolution of this uncertainty. The second title emerges from the effort going on in the poem's final lines. The manuscript ends: That grace and dignity, we created It, the heart is the mirror, child, house, Stars, quartz, arm in the mud.

In the first typescript this becomes: That grace and dignity, the heart is Mirror of, shines back, Child, house, stars, creator Of; quartz, arm in the mud. (SH ms)

The revision gives prominence to the heart-mirror metaphor, and the parallelism - "Mirror of / "creator / Of - lays down the intricate sense of value as simultaneously created and reflected/discovered, as coming from within the perceiver and from within the world. The second title identifies the "heart" not so much as the source but as the reflective medium through which "grace and dignity are known. Grace and dignity are the felt features of beauty in the human and natural worlds. Gustafson seems to be stating a version of Coleridge's "we receive but what we give," but his view does not deny nature's role as creative collaborator; for the corollary to the poem's initial affirmation is that man alone cannot give grace and dignity to the things of the world. Values are empty figures and the world a gross indiscretion, it seems, until each encounters the other in discrete acts of identification, acts that issue from the human heart. There is an affinity here with Margaret Avisons conceit of the "optic heart."8 Gustafson's acts of perception are creative in the sense that creativity is the making or telling of relations, and perception is the active collaboration of the desiring mind and the numinous world. "Numinous," however, is a post facto description, not an a priori assumption; the latter would make perception into an act of faith, where seeing is believing in the unseen. For Gustafson, the object of perception is discovery, and his commitment remains to processes of discovery rather than projections of desire. The tension between discovery and desire remains a constant, however, and the metaphor of the heart as mirror images the mystery of man's relations to the world, relations the poet cannot express, it seems, except by transgressing or defaulting. The second typescript

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bears the final version of the title, "Man Is the Creator Of," which Gustafson takes from his original opening. This final tide makes the poem somewhat head strong; it claims more than the poem itself seems prepared to support, or, at least, support unequivocally: Not the sleight Beauty of the world does this By itself, gives grace. Rock Is rock, holds together. The rose Burned when we overcame Suffering, by our actions the moon Shattered in gold givings, rode The shard back of the beetle, lethargy Overcame by spike and guy. That day, you gathered branches. Grace and dignity the heart shines Back, beauty is the mirror Of; child, house, creator Of; quartz, arm in mud. (SH, 16)

The final version stresses the collaborative interaction of man and world in the achievement of value. Action and energy: as always for Gustafson, the interaction is a version of eros. "Aspects of Some Forsythia Branches," the first poem in Sift in an Hourglass, is another meditation in place. In its descriptive-meditative procedures, it is typical of many of Gustafson's poems in his later volumes. An object or scene, or an object in a scene, is scrutinized and then scrutiny opens out to thought; the focus on the particular ' is sharp and tightly framed, which makes the poem a speculum, dilating the scrutiny for the purpose of speculation. Gustafson recognizes the value of Williams's rubric, "No ideas but in things," but he is not so simple-minded as to take this literally. As Howard Nemerov has noted: "Most ideas are not contained in the mere names of things, nor even in the description of things, and have to be supplied from elsewhere."9 When Gustafson looks at the world, he looks with the eye and with the mind. He does not seek to transcend, as Blake would, "corporeal" vision, but neither does he attempt to repress the intellectual faculty. In "Aspects of Some Forsythia Branches," the interaction of mind, eye, and natural object is a process of collaborative unfolding and as thought and feeling intensify, the natural scene releases its truths. The form of this poem is also typical of its kind in Gustafson's later

145 Toward Plain Statement work. It unfolds, rhythmically, in three stages. In the first, the poet observes what has caught his attention: a glass vase containing some forsythia cuttings. This attention involves him in the world and process of branch and bud. Close regard quickly becomes a seeing into and beyond: Waiting for these dry sticks in a vase — Cut (with deliberate shears taken From the third drawer down on the left) from the bush In snow - complicated with leaf And yellow in the earth elaborated, even In the wintering sun; as the spiral of a protein Divides and duplicates the thrust Of love, the hereditary nose of Caesar, Alexander's brow and Jennie's Mole; the aggregation of a galaxy: So the April science of a bunch Of sticks cut for an etched glass vase — Waiting for these to flower in a March Room — waiting for all this business — As an act of love, a science of gravel, A suffering, is this not done With reliance? (SH, 13)

Waiting for spring and the cycle of renewal to begin, the poet conjoins natural process and human desire. The parenthetical detail, the poet's sense that he should note the precise locus, emphasizes the deliberateness that attends both the cutting of the branches and the shaping of the lines; for, as the poem develops, the poet attends its lines' elaboration and growth, a process analogous to that of the forsythia branches. The root of the meditation is the poet's Wordsworthian seeing of relations between particulars, and from those relations a unanimity in the cycle of generation that further links plant and human life, the "moment-now" with history, and all with the process of writing the poem. The division and duplication on the level of the protein are at the core of the poem's thought. Contemporary discussions of DNA and the genetic code provided Gustafson with a scientific analogue to his intuitive knowledge: science, love, suffering are one study for him, a single history. The second stage of the poem follows from the rhetorical question that concludes the initial observation: "is this not done / With reliance?" As in "Man Is the Creator Of," what Gustafson studies here

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is the interaction of man and world; the cut branches are an occasion to speculate on a transaction that has taken place and what that transaction mirrors: One way, dry sticks Lead to buds, presumably wanted, To yellow eventually. What trivial aspects Can be got! We handle love For small purposes. Yet they serve. Shrubs are cut for what is believed in. Somewhere death's in it. Dignity Is demanded even for the dead. (SH, 13)

The truth is trivial: man relies upon the cycle of rebirth and renewal, in his world and in himself. His reliance is a dependence and a confidence. Both demand faith: "Shrubs are cut for what is believed in." And faith is the complement of death. As in "In the Yukon," Gustafson again confronts the implication of mortality in man's most vivid perceptions. Death is present in the budding forsythia as a result of the cutting that initiates the process, just as it was in the salmon's leap. Implicit in the divisions and duplications of love, it is death that gives our small purposes their dignity. Attention recognizes the mystery of the commonplace. The final movement in the poem is a brief recapitulation, or rereading, of its discoveries - a capitulation to the power of the trivial: So we cut branches two Days ago. Take great precautions. Go carefully through a door. Stand Among deathbeds as though among heroes, Pausing in winter along windy corridors With the knowledge ahead of us, to wrap our throats. (SH, 13)

The process of the poem has brought death to the surface, the major leaf upon the dry sticks, the flower that life generates and love feeds. Gustafson is fascinated by the mysterious collaboration of life, love, and death. Another poet might conceal mystification in vision, but Gustafson's craft here keeps his ideas in a tight orbit about the things that generate them. There is no transformation. The augury of spring is realistic, but the spring presumes a winter and a knowledge, ironically, that we can depend on. As he writes in "Ariobarzanes": "There is a pledge of death in all things" (SH, 57). The poem dilates into Gustafson's characteristic double vision, the balancing of sense

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and premonition. Like the cut-glass vase, it is a transparent receptacle, a refractory showcase for the cold pastoral that is both within us and without us. But the poem is also, like those dry sticks, ceremonial, an action and process through which man and nature serve and complement each other, recognizing, finally, the dignity of trivial relations. As such, the poem is poised, confident in its own understated achievement, yet humbled by its contents, an example of Gustafson's view of the relations between mind, poem, and world. "The Exhortation" is another spring poem. Its imagery recalls the previous poem and its opening statement is a corollary to Gustafson's deepest intuition that man is doomed amid magnificence: Griefs love's origin. We cry For the loss, ourselves, the green rain In a month that has no runnels rich With hunger where the red currant-bush Was sharp all winter; the root, the tuber Closeted in cellars, strange as mandrake Taut with seed that in a burial Springs; our need the rough month Of March. (SH, 14)

Nature continues to instruct him. To be human is to love, naturally, and naturally, to love is to suffer. Yet only love can assuage that suffering. This knowledge may be as common as what the furrow turns up — "The imagery is garden / Stuff — but for Gustafson it is essential matter. With wit, irony, and pathos, Gustafson exhorts the reader to love in spite of love, to plant himself in the mortal garden:

See, I'll unravel it: to plant a root You have to bury it. He who loses His life shall find it, etc., or, In rusted terms: we have to love. There's a grief to it. Then, you have Your miracle.

The imagery develops simultaneously on two levels: that of abstraction, love, and that of physical reality, sexual intercourse. The allusion to Christian precept complicates the play of mind and body and infiltrates physical and emotional experience with spiritual parallels. They are all of a piece, for Gustafson; the insight is archaic and yet

148 A Poetics of Place always in need of renewal. His practice here is Poundian: to "make it new" is to see it afresh. He refers to Pound explicitly in the poem, as well as to Donne and Christ. Like these, Gustafson exhorts us to live knowingly; if he were to be less hortatory, as some of his critics have demanded, Gustafson says he would be less himself, "less / The man." He would also compromise his deeply moral understanding of the poet's role and responsibility: to be a champion of life and yet to be true. A poem is a moral act for Gustafson. By moral he means that the poem must be true to its occasion; only that way will it remain "hard as coins though the currency / ... fluctuate" (SP, 11). And for Gustafson, it is his grief that keeps him true. But it remains, as well, a matter of balance: joy is just as real and must be announced. The "miracle" that he exhorts man to partake of is Pound's, Donne's, and Christ's: the reduction of self to essentials, the dying into experience which is a resurrection into self-renewal, the cycle of passion, exhaustion, and recovery. It is, moreover, the miracle of poesis: the cross of language becoming the flowering tree, the poet hung up, exposed in his exhortation, exalted in his descent into himself and the nature of things. The paradox is flippant because it is a recognition of the play at work in the universe and in individual human experience, and to be too serious about this would also be untrue. Gustafson's last line in "The Exhortation," "Understanding is lack of death" (SH, 15), is the poem's ultimate paradox. It is an ending which looks back to the poem's beginning: if we can understand that grief is the origin of love, then death is useful. But such an understanding requires an act of imagination: the loosing of reason in order to understand the flippant truth of paradox, and the losing of the self in the understanding that reason alone is useless against death. To understand that grief is love's origin is to begin to use our own consumption toward a possibly redemptive consummation. In the first draft of "The Exhortation," instead of "Griefs love's origin" the poem had begun: "Ritual's love's origin" (SH ms). The sense of the latter is that the meaning and value which myth expresses are not abstract or imposed upon experience; they are not external to that experience. Rather they emerge, like myth itself, from the repetition of actions which attention makes ceremonious. Myth is generated by a state of mind and heart which is itself dependent on a stance taken toward experience: the collaboration of mind, heart, and body in a singlespirited process of enacting value as an extension of that stance. Ritual is that stance in action, so to speak, and for the poet, the poem and its writing are ceremony and ritual if they express this attention to experience and maintain a perspective which is concentric in its relations to the mythic process itself: the process of the poem as ritual

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and ceremony is the enabling of language as an expressive medium, and the disclosure of what was previously hidden. For Gustafson, the fascination with what's hidden is his impetus for looking closely. It is his desire to see things whole. His stance is planted in this desire and the speculations which attend his acts of scrutiny are ceremonial in their dealings with whatever aspect of human experience is being considered. The poem ritualizes consciousness and the consequence is that, whatever aspect of existence it encounters, it treats it as holy, as worthy of total attention because of its potential fullness. Thus contemplation discloses the grief latent in love and the potential for love in grief. But the myths that poetic rituals originate do not conclude the processes they enact; on the contrary, myths are themselves acts of recognition which by virtue of their origins in acts of attention remain open and tentative, and continually test the efficacy of the very ceremonies that enact them. The evocation of each poem is heard against the background of the silence from which it has been called. The paradox that grief is love's origin parallels the mystery that the poem begins in silence, and that when he speaks, the poet must not traduce this paradoxical priority. A mother's grief at the death of her child, for example, reminds Gustafson of the limits of language and the blankness which circumscribes its concentric ceremonies. This poem is titled, appropriately, "The Silence," and in it Gustafson asks: How shall the heart hold This? all This that is Inexpression? The mother makes no sign That her child is dead. Who shall make a flourish Over the dead? (SH, 24)

Death is uninspiring: it takes the breath away. And yet the "Inexpression" of grief is a sign; it signifies the silence that is itself "in expression." Again the puns and paradoxes of language's flippant mysteries reveal the irrepressible play that flourishes in grief: This is a hard thing to reason. Shall we reason it Without singularity, Expression?

150 A Poetics of Place We must not think that we have heard All the silences Of all that is sad Without reason. The death of a child makes no sense, but to leave it to that silence, without expression, is to ignore it, to turn away from knowing it as an event of singular significance. The failure of reason may predict the fullness of understanding, even that understanding which is the lack of death. Death and silence must inspire the poet, just as his words must be shadowed by their own undoing; otherwise their defeat is total and the myth that emerges is a myth of utter contradiction, in which silence is a ceremony without a celebrant, a ritual without a purpose. Gustafson clearly agrees with William Carlos Williams that "Silence can be complex too, / but you do not get far / with silence."10 Gustafson's sense of man's doom amid magnificence is not a perspective of despair. Quite the opposite. It is a recognition that the silences beyond reason, and even, it seems, beyond articulation, are, finally, what give words their power and poems their fatal purpose. The poem that is deaf to its own silences cannot hear its destiny and the poet who does not credit those silences, consciously or unconsciously, departs from the truth.

I

n "Ariobarzanes," the travel is imaginary, but in the final section of Sift in an Hourglass, "The Year of Voyages," and in Ixion's Wheel (1969), the travel is literal. These poems are set all over Europe, in Paris, Milan, Florence, Ravenna, Gothenburg, Stockholm, London, Durham, Stratford, and other places of cultural, historical, or simply personal significance. Travel, for Gustafson, is what it is for anyone, a form of recreation: the change of place that is as good as a rest. But it is also a physical expression of his desire to avoid a blinkered perspective in his poetry. In 1973 he wrote: "TRAVEL shows up superstition; truth is put in relation: upshot is there's ONE GOD = ineffable light."" In Gustafson's travel poems, the concentric stance is expanded outward from the known centre of self and domestic world, toward the periphery where self in a new place is refreshed, recreated, and then recentred. The travel poems are not recreative of the self in the sense of a redefinition of its stance, however, so much as in the sense of a refining, or even refinding, of the self in the context of strange surroundings. Those surroundings, because of their novelty, elicit a sensitivity and attention and provide a background or

151 Toward Plain Statement circumference which brings the self into a sharper relief or relation to the world. The foreign place offers elements of a new vocabulary for the poet to speak his abiding concerns. In this way, Gustafson's travel poems are of a piece with the poems set in Canada, in his home region of the Eastern Townships. They are not attempts to "postcard" places but rather notations of response, association, and observation. These are idiosyncratic, of course; for what Gustafson sees, feels, and thinks on top of a Milan cathedral, or at Shakespeare's grave, or in an art gallery in Gothenburg is a continuation of his intellectual, emotional, and spiritual life. An almost surreal encounter with a man "Selling Cokes from a red refrigerator / On the roof of Milan Cathedral," for example, forces him to consider "the indeterminate profit / ... of martyrs and the shareholders in a better Company" (SH, 69). The historical failure of organized religion to maintain the life of the spirit unsullied by materialistic interests, either those of wealth or power, has concerned Gustafson from the beginning of his career. And a visit to the workyard in Florence where Michelangelo worked on his David sets him to thinking of the effort of the sculptor releasing the shape from the marble. The subject, almost naturally, requires a monologue in the manner of Browning, and the result is "Michelangelo Looks Up Not Sleeping: The Duomo Workyard, Florence" (SH, 71). Gustafson imagines Michelangelo feeling sorry for himself, weary and impatient after three years of labour on the piece. What fascinates Gustafson is that the sculptor was working with a flawed piece of marble, one with a "knot" in it, which presented a serious problem in terms of what he could do with it. "They told me - no one can make / The knot possible" (SH, 71). Michelangelo, however, did the impossible by carving the figure in the act of turning, thus turning the impossible into the possible. For Gustafson, the pun travels well. The poem is a successful monologue in character and at the same time an occasion for Gustafson to reconsider his own understanding of form in poetry. The poet, too, works with a flawed medium, a medium of vast potential but also profound limitations. The artist must develop the craft to turn those limitations into strengths that realize the potential. The epigraph to Ixioris Wheel is taken from the end of Pound's Canto cxni: When the Syrian onyx is broken. Out of the dark, thou, Father Helios, leadest, but the mind as Ixion, unstill, ever turning.12

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By 1969, Pound was clearly a major mentor for Gustafson. "Father Helios" is the same sun that figures in "Ariobarzanes." When questioned by Pettigrew about the role of light in his poetry, Gustafson was expansive: I think of light in a non-institutionalized religious sense, something like, "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God." ... I mean, "Illumination." Pound is the great man with light at the present time. He refers to light as "immaculata" and the sun as the source of growth and the life-force which, of course, it is. ... 1 use light in a literal sense, the kind we find in the seasons of the year. I also use it in a metaphorical way. To put a middle ground under this discussion of light, I believe poetry is more than just itself. It is an illumination of experience. The metaphor suffuses my poetry."

Pound's Canto cxin begins with an image of the zodiac, "the 12 Houses of Heaven," and of "Pater Helios turning." The canto then ends with the sun and zodiacal wheel juxtaposed with the mechanism of Ixion's punishment. As a poet of process, Gustafson's travel poems record his constant movement beneath and toward the sun. His mind, "unstill, ever turning," revolves in place, moving into and out of the darkness of history, into and out of the brightly lit arenas of the present. Pound's conflation of the divine cycle with its demonic reversal is precisely the fusion of contraries which Gustafson's own perspective, experience and intuition have made his constant study. There is another line in Pound's Canto cxin which could serve as epigraph to Gustafson's travel poems: "God's eye art 'ou, do not surrender perception."14 Gustafson's travel poems continue that process of perception as "beholding" which he presented in Rocky Mountain Poems. His travels are acts of perception; his reading of the text of the world, its times and places, the relentless, even anxious enactment of a deep imperative to know what can be known. Ixion is the Greek Cain; but Zeus fixed him to the revolving wheel not because he murdered his kin (he purified him of that crime) but because he tried the chastity of Hera. Eros and thanatos figure prominently in his biography, but it is the erotic imperative that gets him into eternal trouble. And it is irrepressible desire which, as both eros and intellect, keeps Gustafson moving through his cycles, a condition which is as much a blessing as it is a curse. In "Ramble On What in the World Why," a poem in Landscape with Rain (1980), he refers to travelling as itself a form of poesis:

153 "Toward Plain Statement Making a meaning out of everything that has happened, The there-it-is, plainsong, pitch and pinnacle: All is blanket-plucking otherwise. ... Meaning is wearying, hammers, Level, hacking out hunks of marble to raise Cathedrals. I travel to get out of it to walk in them And run slambang into gospels of course, Pegasus loose and the barndoor slammed.15

The making of meaning is unavoidable. Even when the mind tries to escape itself, it runs into its needs coming the other way. In Gustafson's most successful travel poems the journey is a complete revolution of Ixioris wheel; the poet's self revolves in place and moves through its particulars to a new view of its unchanging centre. The self remains the pivot, the hub of the turning mind. As he notes elsewhere in Landscape with Rain, to be "Cut off / From this, from first handlings, the heritage / Of what's our own, is fatal" (LWR, 74). The essence of his travel poems is the intercourse of self and world, where that self is original yet latent. Each journey adds a ring to the growing tree of consciousness, but the core remains, contained and concentric. For Gustafson, wherever he goes, the water-barrel that stood outside the carriage-shed in childhood remains, indelible in his mind, because all his journeys are centred by that self formed by the place of origins. Eli Mandel, in reference to the travel poems of Purdy and Birney, has written: "Often the suggestion is that the 'foreign' space discovered bears its symbolic freight of time, history, and culture. For Birney and Purdy, in particular, the past or distant place speaks as a metaphor of the present and familiar. Occasionally, the image of a journey or of distance reflects the perception of those for whom emptiness has for too long been a burden."16 For Gustafson, the burden of travel is not symbolic, nor is the foreign or distant place a metaphorical voice speaking in exotic tones about the already known; for Gustafson, "the advantage of being yourself (LWR, 74) is that wherever you are is as exotic as it is familiar, as historical as it is present, and as mysterious as it is known. The emptiness that burdens Gustafson is more an anxiety which, paradoxically, is occasioned by his experience of the overwhelming plenitude of existence; a fullness that his instincts tell him to handle, but his common sense says is beyond human managing. The only surety is in the well-kept record, in the consciousness that countenances hooped barrels and familial parlours, as well as Greek isles and dusty olives. To forget what you know is fatal.

154 A Poetics of Place The more successful travel poems articulate Gustafson's historical consciousness, that dimension of his sensibility which oscillates between fascination and awe, ironic penetration and considered humility. His interest in history is his insatiable desire to know the course of human being. He is interested in the great figures of the past only in so far as they reveal their humanity, because it is this which lifts them out of history and keeps them present. A passage from Betty Gustafson's diary during the writing of Rocky Mountain Poems is relevant here. On 18 August 1959, she wrote: "He says he hopes readers of his book won't approach it as if it were a tourist guidebook. He has always been mistaken by his critics when he writes about travel and the past. He says such visits and artifacts are only his springboard into the present; that we have to remember the past if we are to have a valid future."17 Thus the pharaoh Akhnaten, for example, fascinates Gustafson because of his instruction to his craftsmen to represent him as he was, hook-nosed and pot-bellied, so that "Almost the human, the humour, / Breaks through" (IW, 67). While looking at the image of Akhnaten in the Cairo Museum, Gustafson intuits the image-maker — "This artist laughs" — and there is a moment of fraternity. "On the Heresy-Akhnaten: Cairo Museum" expresses Gustafson's interest in the human story within history; he focuses on the human being as the irreducible element within the abstraction, and travel poems like this counterpoint the minor and major, the singular and the vast complexity of time in a way that inverts their relations so that the individual comes forth in relief against the background that threatens to swallow him. The felt presence of the ancient artist whose caricature preserves the pharaoh's humanity is significant in this respect. The relationship between the artist and the man of power parallels that between the poet and his poetic subject. This interest and identification occur in "Agamemnon's Mask: Archaeological Museum, Athens." The poem can be read as programmatic of Gustafson's approach in the better poems in the last two sections of Ixioris Wheel. Like Purdy in "Lament for the Dorsets," Gustafson is looking at an ancient artifact and observation-scrutiny leads to historical meditation; that meditation then divides into a selfreflexive consciousness of the artisan-craftsman responsible for the artifact. In Gustafson's poem, the object of scrutiny is a gold deathmask which was once believed to belong to Agamemnon. Scholarship, however, has identified it as belonging to an earlier figure: Flattened, beaten out, The mask of gold. But an earlier king, they say,

155 Toward Plain Statement Miscalled by Schliemann Digging around, over-anxious, His mind on windy Troy And that return to Argos' Scented bath - (IW, 78)

This preamble is important because it sets up the poem's anti-romantic attitude to history. The past looms up in such exotic places with all the grandeur of a romantic abstraction - "windy Troy" - but also with the equally romantic reconstitution of such an abstraction in the act of imaginative particularity, the apparent rejection of the abstract for the sensory — "Argos' / Scented bath." Both versions, however, are illusory constructions, and Gustafson is aware that his desire to know the past is prey to the delusions that lurk in all such "Digging around." The poet does not want his poem to "miscall" the past, to evoke any such illusion to placate its own "over-anxious" self-consciousness. Thus the misattribution itself becomes instructive and disciplines Gustafson's meditation on the actual figure represented by the mask: Some Achaean king, Loved, I suppose, Who also had children, Was important, As the rest of us, Eating the red bean, Digesting the day, Without legend, Praying the gods, Without much hope, Then dying: (IW, 78)

Thinking about the face that was once beneath the mask, he thinks about the human within the historical. The short lines, the terminal pauses, the tone of this reduced obituary, all reduce the grandeur in scale to human essentials that consequently bring the figure forward into the reader's present and presence. Paradoxically, it is the anonymity of the figure that makes him kin, as well as the laconic language and ironic interjections of the voice. The two-beat lines build to the anticlimactic, single beat of "Then dying," and this ironic progress is coloured by the tonal increment of "Some ... also ... As the rest of us ... Without legend ... Without much hope." The parallelism of the latter phrases is repeated in the final movement of the poem, as the poet shifts his thoughts from the mask to the maker:

156 A Poetics of Place The gravesmith. Out of love, Beating the fine gold, The drained face laid away, Without much trouble, Without complication, Without much trouble to anyone. No matter. Let it be Agamemnon's. (IW, 78)

The triple repetition in the final lines, picking up the sound of the earlier phrases but in a context of new sense, is another instance of how Gustafson listens to the way a poem develops from within itself. The meditation comes to the end of its life-span without any fanfare. The poem does not turn, as it might, to make any claims for the defeat of death by art; nor does it draw any undue attention to the artifact or artificer. Rather, what has caught Gustafson's attention is the configuration of goldsmith, mask, and dead man. The goldsmith makes the mask "Out of love," but this may be love for his craft as much as for the dead king (or both — it is not specified). Only the intuition of love's presence, or its recognized evidence, is noted. And for all the artistic success, the fact of "The drained face laid away" remains. What also remains is the understated parallel between the poem's subject and the poetic procedures which that subject duplicates. The poem as a mask is a commonplace of modern poetic practice after Browning and Yeats, and Gustafson is well aware of the trope. In this poem, the dangers of the poem's "miscalling" rather than invoking its subject are unobtrusively met and their potential intrusions masterfully forestalled. In as much as the literal mask has been shaped from the impress of the original features, Gustafson's voice in the poem takes shape from the internal pressures pushing outward, centrifugally, from the experience, and the refining of those features by the poet's centripetal counter-pressure as he works those impulses into the form they seek. The result is thus a poem "Flattened, beaten out," a shape that remains as witness to what is absent, its original occasion, and as the voice of what is continuously present, the process of its making. "The Philosophy of the Parthenon," on the other hand, is an explicit statement of aesthetic values and practice: Proportion is all things of beauty. Dimension, go beyond dimension, Calculation, measure nothing,

157 Toward Plain Statement Only in relation, the cornice balanced Against the line, the line against The truth, not as an existence But as a meaning, the marble line The respect to itself, the incumbent gods. (IW, 82)

The emphasis on proportion, balance, and relation expresses Gustafson's sense of the poem as a composition of discrete elements which are essentially irrefrangible, but which are capable of being brought together in a way that does not violate their nature or distort their particular virtue. Composition is not the imposition of balance, relation, and proportion, but their calling forth from the materials in which they reside as potential. This potential composition is the making of a possible truth, but only "as a meaning," "not as an existence"; that is, truth is itself a something found in the relations, the balance and proportion, and does not exist apart from the specific occasion in which it is found. Such truths are like "incumbent gods," to be called forth, and can be evoked only with the proper "respect." This respect refers to the poet's attitude toward his materials, and the posture of invocation itself. The Parthenon "speaks" to Gustafson in this way, and the travel poems are full of such numinous encounters. Cathedrals, graveyards, fountains, mosaics, tapestries, temples, arches, museum displays, plazas, glaciers, canals, concerts - whatever the object or the place, in the most successful poems of travel the object or space suddenly discloses an aura or presence within it which occasions the ceremony of the poem. In this way, the best travel poems also express Gustafson's immanentist sensibility. What may appear as a cryptic, or too personal, shorthand notation of a place or occasion is a synecdochic transcription of its numinous details. "Franz Liszt: Tivoli" is a good example: Fountains, A thousand fountains In amongst trees, The black cypresses. Here at Villa d'Este The old man walked, Honey in his tea, Writing to princesses, His feet In the carpet slippers — Composing the future.

158 A Poetics of Place Birds threaded the sound of water. "Wie lang?" How long? Who refused to jump through Europe's hoop. The sound of waters remembers An old man, The black cypresses cast shadows Among the waters. (IW, 84) The poem's procedure is first to focus on the objects in place, the fountains and the cypresses. Then that focus is opened, or sharpened, to allow the vision to emerge: what comes forth, the honey and tea, the carpet slippers, composes the centre of the poem — both in the sense of giving it shape and setting its atmosphere. This presence then actually speaks, with a signal quotation: "'Wie lang?'" which the poet then translates into his own voice, literally taking it over and making it into his own question. The openness of his stance toward the occasion results in his possession of and by the spirit of the place and its human figure. Homage domesticates the alien, and what that homage respects is the value Liszt represents for Gustafson: "Who refused to jump through Europe's hoop." The poem concludes, characteristically, with the juxtaposition of life and death: the vital, recollecting waters, and the cypresses and their shadows. The aura of place and moment is allowed to dissipate as quietly as it formed. A poem like "Franz Liszt: Tivoli" should not be read as the guest-book observations of a sanctimonious kulturtrager. The homage and ceremony of the travel poems are identical in kind, manner, and purpose to Gustafson's nature lyrics set in the Eastern Townships or his poems in the Rockies, or even his political, "witness" poetry. The sensibility remains consistent in all of them; what varies is the degree of intensity, attention, and successful transcription of process. The technique does not always serve the impulse and sometimes the impulse does not warrant the technique. But when he is most successful, the poem warrants its occasion.

I

n the midst of his teaching and travelling in the mid-19608, Gustafson also revised his Penguin Book of Canadian Verse. (The first edition of this anthology appeared in 1958 and built on his earlier Pelican Anthology of Canadian Poetry (English) [1942].) The new edition coincided with Canada's centennial and in his Foreword Gustafson commented on the new developments taking place in Canadian poetry during the 19605. The occasion also provided him

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with an opportunity for a brief statement of his own poetic at the time, in the context of explaining his criteria for choosing the contemporary poets for the revised volume.18 Gustafson came to find himself in a strange position in the ig6os. He valued the intentions behind much of the new poetry and was enthusiastic about the work of younger poets like George Bowering, Lionel Reams, John Newlove, Tom Marshall, and Gwendolyn MacEwen, but he could not accept the way these intentions often translated into technique. His position was made all the more frustrating for him because, although he had studied Pound and Williams closely himself, and learned from them in his poetry, so that a volume like Rocky Mountain Poems (1960) had opened new territory as well as introduced a new technical openness both for his own and for Canadian poetry, his efforts and example went unacknowledged or misunderstood. The younger poets either ignored him completely or labelled him as an antiquated modernist-humanist without going to the effort of reading him closely. To a certain extent, what attracted Gustafson to the work of these younger poets was their corroboration of his own intuitions. What he saw in them was a projection of his own interests, needs, and tendencies. Kearns's black humour, Marshall's elemental philosophies, Newlove's mad desire for answers, and MacEwen's affirmation of the holiness of the suffering self — these are also basic features of Gustafson's own poetry. These "fresh sensibilities" confirmed his own mature outlook, the "disillusioned affirmation" that had come to characterize his poetry since Rivers among Rocks (1960). 19 Likewise, what he admired technically in their poetry was the indebtedness he shared with them to the objectivism and immediacy of Williams and the technical range of Pound, though Gustafson could not subscribe to the dogmatism of Olson's and the Black Mountain School's interpretation of the Pound-Williams revolution. But while acknowledging the "correct objective" of the new poetry, Gustafson had strong reservations about the poetic means. In the essay in Canadian Literature, he wrote: "I am convinced that the shift in methodology is (and was) needed and salutary. I am not at all convinced that what is being made of this formal revolution is salutary. I am second to no one in his admiration of Ezra Pound. He is the great maker. But some grave warnings are in order. ... The 'Poundians,' by and large ... are not writing well. ... Harm is being done."20 This "harm" was the consequence, in Gustafson's view, of a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of poetry and of poetic language on the part of the younger poets, a misunderstanding that had led to poetry's "misadventure with music":

160 A Poetics of Place Poetry ... is not music. ... Poetry uses language. However much we strain to prevent it, poetry to be itself carries a burden of logical meaning. Music uses aural structures and is thereby dramatic. This language cannot do. Without its integument of syntax and grammatical structure, the poem is undramatic. Without the drama of syntax there is no tension. Poetry must resolve more than sound and rhythm; it must also resolve its linguistic meaning. I do not find this sad. I find this inevitable. The poet has the greater challenge.21

The emphasis on drama reflects Gustafson's fundamental attitude to poetry as the resolution of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual elements. This resolution does not mean the transformation of dynamic experience into static form, but rather the crafting of grammar and syntax into a formed tension which resolves the challenge given by experience to the medium. Poetic tension is the coiling of the poem's energies in its syntax and grammar in a way that permits those energies to be released in the act of communication, when the reader catalyses the poem through an engagement with the sound, rhythms, and meanings of its language. Such pronouncements put Gustafson in the strange situation of being one of Canada's most Poundian of poets and yet disagreeing with a vociferous group of poet-publicists who claimed authority from the same master. Moreover, as these poet-publicists consolidated their positions by taking up positions in university English departments, founding small presses and periodicals to publish their own and similar, "approved" works, and writing essays, prefaces, reviews, and appreciations of each other's efforts, Gustafson's position soon became marginal. His voice of one was no match for the coterie's, whose "Labels and righteousness and pieties" soon replaced openminded discussion. His recognition of the value of some of the new methodologies went unrecognized, just as his own practice went unread. What he held to was his belief that poetic expression must also be communication. While "Some of the modern poetic structures are as strict as serial music," Gustafson judged most of them to be "unholy messes — the result of not perceiving the difference between music and language, the typewriter and rhythm, the lungs and the intellect."22 The commitment to communication, the traditional sense of the contract between the poet and the reader, persists with Gustafson because it derives from his moral aesthetic and from his life-experience. The special role and responsibility of the poet are not to be thrown off in order to indulge private aesthetics. The 1930s had taught him the vital importance of the poet as moral witness and public voice. Engagement with the times is one of the poet's vital signs, for Gustafson, and stylistic extremism, be it modernist density

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(as he learned in his own writing) or postmodernist abandon (as he was learning from the younger poets), was the death of poetry as a living organism in the social and political world.23 Similarly, the violation of natural rhythms meant the destruction of the vital element in poetry; and Gustafson stresses that rhythm is physical and intellectual. These views gained Gustafson more enemies than friends in the 1960s, but he did not abandon them. In 1976, reviewing George Woodcock's selected poems, Gustafson repeated his judgment of tendencies which by then had become the canons of the new establishment: Most new poetry in Canada constitutes not a structure but a continuum; a process of cognitions. Poetry is not a process; it is a product. In our comparatively recent self-awareness, the sufficiency of a poem is thought to be the evacuation of the sensitive, social Canadian soul. Tone-deaf, open-ended gestures dominate. The formal satisfaction of expectations is regarded as the property of the dead. Where it is not forgotten, it is deliberately denied that the poet first of all is neither savant nor sensitive plant. The man may be, but the poet first of all is not. The poet is artist, the maker of what is distinguished in itself, of what can stand alone without him; the golden bird on the golden bough that sings to drowsy emperors, as Yeats has it. A poem is not its content, not only; a poem is a verbal disposition that provides the inviolable meaning of the content. Poetry is crafty.24

The rejection of poetry as process in this passage, like the earlier denial of poetry as music, needs qualification. What Gustafson rejects is a poetry that does not have the energy, conviction, or intelligence to carry its processes through to their full potential, but rather abandons impulses half-formed and partially expressed, leaving the poem a combination of the unknown, the unknowing, and the unknowable. Gustafson cannot take seriously the work of art which does not take itself seriously. This means that the poem must show evidence of being worked, of being made rather than excreted, and of being made by a poet sensitive to sound, rhythm, and form. The allusion to Yeats overstates his point, and it is an overstatement that should be understood in terms of Gustafson's exasperation with poetic trends in the 1970s, rather than as a precise metaphor for his views. His own poems in the 1970s are not Byzantine toys or dead artifacts; indeed, they are products of a craft that is itself a process, and we should try to think of Gustafson's poetic as one which combines the notion of process with that of craft. At the risk of overstating his view, Gustafson emphasizes the dimension of writing that is con-

162 A Poetics of Place scious, willed, and cunning. He does not deny the unconscious, mysterious, and miraculous dimensions of the poetic process, but he reacts against that species of contemporary poetics which conceals lack of talent in a self-justifying rhetoric of sincerity. Gustafson's comments on the relation between poetry and music in the later 1970s show that his statements in the 1967 Foreword were too argumentative to be a precise, or at least complete, presentation of his thinking. In "The Sequence," his brief introductory essay to Sequences, in 1979, Gustafson discusses the "poem by sections" in terms which clarify the element of contradiction in the previous statements that "Poetry ... is not music" but "Poetry is at one with music in structuring beautiful sounds, and this sound is also the meaning."25 He also discusses the poem as a progression which is processive in its dynamics but at the same time a "construction" by the poet. As examples of the "poem by sections" or poetic sequence, Sequences reprints Rocky Mountain Poems;26 "Ariobarzanes," from Sift in an Hourglass; "Six Preludes," from Rivers among Rocks; and recent sequences written during the 1970s. This kind of poem, he argues in the preface, "accommodates the modern temper. Its structure and complex of meditation, irony and extension, convey the contemporary world of incompletion and, at the same time ... maintain tension" (S, 7). While critical of "open-ended gestures" in the Woodcock review, Gustafson recognizes that poetry must accommodate the open-ended nature of experience. His view of this accommodation, however, is not mimetic but rather expressive. The poem as a construct is an expression of the concentric relation of self and world, a relationship which he characterizes in terms of tension, resolution, and coherence: [The poem sequence] accommodates our imperative for lyricism, resolution (in the musical sense), comprehensible ambition, and, to the extent of these successes, supplies coherence if not inclusive unity. A further demand by this age of romantic survival is met: the structure satisfies the personal desire to shape heterogeneous experience, sublimates the need of quotidian accomplishment; it can, if it wills, serve as a chronological poetic journal, the momentum of which approaches the conceptual and physical continuity of the narrative. The sequence provides worthwhile evidence of the progress of a soul. The world is in fragments. (S, 7) "Worthwhile evidence of the progress of a soul" echoes the title of Gustafson's earlier review, "Worthwhile Visitations." The echo is significant because it draws attention to the continuing centrality of the individual, the person, in Gustafson's poetic. He had praised Woodcock's volume because it had "offered what we are supposed

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to be offered by a book of poetry — structures, visitations that are more than processes without form; cogencies that don't exist on their own dramatized self-indulgence."27 Woodcock's poetry is most successful when it expresses the "personal, immediate." Gustafson links the metaphor of visitation with the concepts of structure and process; poetry is the coming together of internal and external pressures, the poet's visitation by forces beyond his control and his visiting upon them his own impulses and needs. The process is dynamic and the interaction produces a structure and form which eventually cohere independently of the original process of formation but which nevertheless retain the vitality of their creation. The qualification of "resolution (in the musical sense)" is significant because it makes clear that Gustafson does not see what he calls, in the Woodcock review, the "formal satisfaction of expectations" as the construction of epistemological order where none exists; poetic coherence is not "inclusive unity" but rather the concentricity of the poetic self in a finite but unfinished progress toward meaning. A poem's form is a resolution of its own potential impulses, its entelechy; it is not a closing-off from experience, or a closing-in, but rather it is more an isometric tensing of its own specific muscularity against and around the objects of experience and language with which it exercises. It is in his acceptance of the musical analogy that Gustafson acknowledges the processive quality of poetry: A poem is superior to the extent that the verbal music heard is the meaning; otherwise, it is prose. As an art, music has the superiority over poetry in that thought in music is sensuous. Poetry without thought is vapid. Its struggle therefore is not to become prose. In its greatest reaches it achieves the condition of music. But whatever the degree, the poem to be a poem must be rightly heard and rhythmically felt. The poet can be as non-verbally tonedeaf as Yeats was, but his ear must hear, his pulse must respond. The sequence is close to the construction of music; at best, it achieves a nearness, almost an identity, with music. The shaping of the turmoil of contemporary experience can best be achieved by the procedures of music through which the sequence moves: the progression of exposition, development and resolution. (S, 7)

The processes of poetry are akin to "the procedures of music" because, although poetry cannot render thought in the pure sensuality of sound, it makes use of the musical properties of poetically ordered language to maintain an intensity of expression that distinguishes it from prose. Gustafson's use of "procedures" in his phrase

164 A Poetics of Place is significant because not only is it cognate with "process" but it also appears in the title of his most important prose work in the 19708, "Poetry as a Moral Procedure." From a poet's point of view, the procedures of music are a matter of technique. For Gustafson, a poet's technique is moral, however, because it is the extension-expression of his perspective and intentions; a poet's technique implies his values as much as the so-called "content" of his poetry. Gustafson makes it clear in "Poetry as a Moral Procedure" that his title does not mean "The Moral Function of Poetry." The latter implies that the poet already has all the answers when, for Gustafson, the poet "simply asks the right questions." Poetry "doesn't set out to have a moral function; it sets out to delight and make significant."28 In this, Gustafson has not altered his thinking since Poetry and Canada (1945), and the rest of the essay reveals the consistency in his perspective over the decades. But there is a shift in emphasis in the essay to the experience of the reader of poetry. "What the reader sets out to is delightful discovery - of himself ... and of a world ordered." The sense of the poem as a provisional ordering of experience is implicit here; each poem is "a world ordered" and what the poet hopes is that the reader will experience "a structural delight that will change his life forever." Gustafson's tone is tongue-in-cheek, but he is serious about the underlying sense that, when a reader engages a poem deeply, then he comes away changed. It is as if that "structural delight" alters the reader's own configuration of self and sensibility. For Gustafson, this configuration coheres ultimately in the presence or absence of compassion. Since the 19605, this virtue has come to occupy the moral centre of Gustafson's poetry. It can be seen to have its origin in the humility that is the essence of the immanentist sensibility and that sensibility's reverent respect for life and nature. In the essay he returns to his first models, Keats and Shelley: "The 'thisness' of this world, the quidditas, the haecceity, is obtained only by Keats' 'Negative Capability1 - the elimination of the egocentric so that the poem is at one with itself." The concentric stance, again: and Gustafson also acknowledges Shelley's view of imagination as compassion when he quotes from A Defence of Poetry: "A man to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own."29 Auden had expressed this as "We must love one another or die"; but Auden had also argued that "poetry makes nothing happen."30 Against Auden, Gustafson marshals his years of living, thinking, and

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writing, and the poets he has admired and studied, including Auden. His counter-argument is that while poetry may not make anything happen in the dramatic and simplistic sense of revolutionary politics, it can nevertheless lead to significant action. For Gustafson, significance, or the recognition of meaning, no matter how limited or local, is itself action. Meaning is active in the sense that it is a vital intellectual, emotional, and moral process, a vital sign that the individual is engaged in "the progress of a soul." Compassion is an act of the imagination for Gustafson and it is adjunct to the concentric stance of his poetry. The poem is centred in the self of the poet, but in the act of imagination that self expands to assimilate and be absorbed by the world that surrounds it. Compassion is an act of the imagination in its moral relations with other life which recognizes the innate value and sanctity of that life, human or natural, animate or inanimate. "The quotidian, the seemingly least triviality is brought by poetry to a sacramental significance." This is the "ceremony" of poetry, and it is for this reason that "The poet by his very id and instinct is celebrant."31 It is also for this reason that poetry is profoundly useful. For Gustafson, as for Shelley, poetry "adds spirit to sense" and is, in his own words, "exalted pragmatism."32 The Shelleyan infiltration of sense by spirit is the action of imaginative perception that Gustafson identifies with "beholding" in Rocky Mountain Poems. In the superior travel poems of Sift in an Hourglass and Ixioris Wheel, this beholding becomes the active engagement with the instress of the foreign place or the spirit immanent in the historical object. Compassion is evident in the poet's intuition of the human within the historical. The travel poems bear witness to Gustafson's sense of tradition as ethos. In the Introduction to the 1958 edition of his Penguin anthology, Gustafson distinguished between tradition "in the sense of the handing down of an ethos" and "Tradition in the sense of formal ceremonies."33 It was the confusion between these two senses of tradition that, in Gustafson's view, had led to "a great deal of waste motion" in terms of the nativecosmopolitan controversies of the 1940s and 1950s in Canadian criticism. Gustafson had always respected the "formal ceremonies" of the past, but recognized as well that they were not prescriptive rituals for the present. What was more abiding was the sense of tradition as ethos, as "spiritual heritage," which the poet may or may not make something from, but which he could ignore only through ignorance or arrogance. The former led to a naive new-worldness; the latter, to the dogmatic prescriptions of a barely concealed anxiety. Either way, poetry ceased to be a moral procedure for Gustafson.

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T

he early 1970s saw the publication of a sequence of poems which Gustafson titled Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass (1972). In the Introduction to Sequences (1979), he described this as "set on the theme of compassion" (5, 6). The poems which compose the sequence respond to the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the Kent State murders, the murder of Pierre Laporte during the October Crisis of 1970, and atrocities in Bangladesh, Biafra, Cambodia, and Vietnam. The title is taken from 1 Corinthians 13: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal." Charity, compassion, witness: Gustafson exercises his moral aesthetic most explicitly in this public poetry. By calling it "witness poetry," Gustafson reveals the continuity of his poetic. "Witness" denotes the poetry as testimony, but the term has both religious and political connotations, and as his remarks in his essay "Witness Poetry" show, both associations are appropriate. Like his travel poems, Gustafson's witness poetry is a version of his poetry of perception. But as we have seen, perception, for Gustafson, is not the passive taking in of experience; rather, it is the simultaneous recognition and measure of value in the data which the senses deliver, so that in the process of beholding, the poet's response possesses a world which has already possessed him. Gustafson's poetry on public issues is further evidence that his earlier modernist phase has worked to his advantage in developing a stance in the postmodernist period. From the outset, Gustafson's immanentist sensibility has been expressed in poems which quest inwardly through place, object, and experience for meanings which his sensibility then questions, or at least considers as possible delusions of the desiring self. His perspective has always been modern in its ironic self-consciousness and leery of the sources of the mind's questing powers. The modernist affirmation of the hegemony of mind over the world was never one of Gustafson's absolutes. Even during his modernist phase, Gustafson remained a traveller between two camps. But it is that part of his sensibility which remains attracted to modernist concepts of the imagination and poetic craft which provide Gustafson with a basis for public poetry in the postmodern period. In 1938, Gustafson had argued that "a Social Order means everything that English poetry has dealt with for the last ten centuries: justice, peace, and the individual necessities of love and labour."34 It was his experience during the 1930s that laid the foundation for the public poetry of the 1970s. His remarks on tradition as ethos or spiritual heritage in the 1957 Introduction to his Penguin anthology show that this tradition remains a basis of value in his

167 Toward Plain Statement poetry. Also, poems like "At Moraine Lake" in Rocky Mountain Poems, and "Man Is the Creator Of in Sift in an Hourglass, reflect his complementary views with regard to the mythopoeic imagination. His public poetry itself, as we shall see, recognizes the gulf between human values and historical experience which, Altieri argues, forces the poet "to distinguish between social values and a deeper ground for values carried by the tradition but never realized."35 Seen against this background, Gustafson's disagreements with the directions and practices of contemporary Canadian poetry in his 1967 Foreword to the revised Penguin Book of Canadian Verse and in "New Wave in Canadian Poetry" take on an added significance. His harping on the necessity for craft and a clear understanding of the medium of poetry, his argument that poetry is, in Pound's terms, as much "the dance of the intellect among words" as the discovery and manipulation of the music in language, are Gustafson's way of keeping poetry open to the necessity of public statement.36 When style becomes self-serving, it loses its connection to its vital source - the concentric mysteries of man and world. His sense of what he called the "harm" being done by much 1960s poetry's conscious scorn or naive indifference toward fundamental matters of poetic craft was that it was leading to a poetry devoid of thought, judgment, and carefully considered moral stance. In his own poetry of the early 1970s, Gustafson aspired to a concentric stance which allowed a poetry of discourse and judgment that was more than egotistic rambling, confessional lament, or paranoid apocalypse. This stance situated the self within a tradition which is both a history of failure and a potential for the renewal or replacement of value. The stance is contingent, dramatic, juxtapositional, contradictory. The constant emphasis Gustafson places on drama, tension, and counterpoint in his prose writing, which is evident as well in the procedures of his poetry, derives from this desire to be a poet who constantly challenges as much as he is challenged by experience. In Theme and Variation for Sounding Brass, the drama and conflict derive not so much from the gulf between Gustafson's perception of contemporary events and an attempt to make or reconstruct a viable social myth as from his juxtaposition of those events and the paradoxical presence-as-absence of those humane values which the agents in the events demonically represent. The discourse does not devolve into any simplistic morality, however, for Gustafson recognizes the confusion in evil as well as the horror. In compassion, he urges a composite value which is as latent in man as potential as it is evident in history as failure. Gustafson defines witness poetry as "poetry which uses the actual headlines of the day; the creative use of the immediate to affirm

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justifications that are without time."37 It is this conjunction of the immediate and the timeless that provides such poetry with its moral and emotional drama. But Gustafson's does not seek merely to dramatize contemporary events. In 1942, writing about war and poetry, Earle Birney commented that the most valuable war poetry was "not so much about the bloodshedding as the meaning of it,"38 and Gustafson's witness poetry, in its attempt "to affirm justifications that are without time," seeks the value in apparently meaningless experience which makes man in his suffering more than a helpless victim of historical circumstances. The moral perspective that Gustafson takes to this poetry is a version of immanence in that it perceives in the immediate event transhistorical significance and value: "Great themes, those absolutes of birth, coupling and death, are the constant of poetry. But it is the passionate detail, the actual moment, that give them worth."39 Whereas Pound took his "luminous details" from the past, for the purpose of illuminating the course of history, Gustafson takes his "passionate details" from the present: "In those moments which are intimate with us we most readily find our truths; the present is where we most memorably live." But Gustafson's purpose remains Poundian, moral illumination: "The poet commits himself to all living moments, private or public, to any and every epiphany, resolving the moment into radiating significance."40 "Nocturne: Prague 1968" is a poem of twenty-one sections and begins with a stanza of natural imagery: The fields are cool and the shadows on the fields yield to the wind and sun. Then, it was early August, Prague, a hundred miles over these green fields, over Franconia, and the grass free to the winds and the winds to the sky ...41

Two-beat lines gust into three and then fall back to two beats again. The rhythm is coloured by the internal music of "fields," "yield," "green," "free," and the repetition of wind and sun. It is a paysage moralise: "the grass [is] free to the winds / and the winds to the sky" and "the shadows on the fields / yield to the wind and sun." Repetition and parallelism build the drama. The second section introduces the political subject by shifting from the countryside to the cities, from the openness of the natural world to the immurement of the political.

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The wind over the fields becomes "Brezhnev stuttering / with anger"; the shadows yielding to the sun and wind become Brezhnev "yielding on all important points"; and then Brezhnev's paranoia blossoms into anger, and the interplay between "white with anger" and "the white dagger of Czechoslovakia / . . . pointing to the heart of Russia" (TVSB, [1]) is a masterful communication of the process whereby fear converts into aggression and paranoia fulfils its own prophecy. In the third and fourth sections, Gustafson continues to transform the earlier patterns: the shadows are now night-shadows and they take on the dimension of sound: "the treads on the road" (TVSB, [i]). The fields are emptied of their grain and the season's end presages political change: There is no denying that summer ends when the grain is taken in, and the fields are rough, and there is no longer sun and shadows in the waving grain. (TVSB, [2])

Gustafson maintains a fairly constant rhythmic base, fluctuating between two- and three-beat lines, upon which he works his incremental effects and subtle transformations of imagery. The meaning grows organically out of this process of increment and transformation; the significance is in the changing tones and colours of the repeated terms. In his 1967 Foreword to the revised Penguin anthology, Gustafson wrote that a poem is dead "in which the manipulation is not accumulation and is not worth the poetry gained." The poetry that is "gained" in "Nocturne: Prague 1968" illustrates this. The development between the fifth, sixth, and seventh sections is particularly instructive: There is always love, small talk at the bars, arguments, amiable enough though serious. ...

becomes Then there is force, there is steel and orders given to young men

170 A Poetics of Place not knowing much about it but obeying orders, going to a new country. ... and looking forward to girls and talk and beer at the tables, well-meaning enough, doing what they are told but enjoying it.

and then, There is always the possibility of crushing an idea. (TVSB, [2])

Gustafson has written that "The only way to write political poems — which is a way of saying: to write moral poems — is to bring the stuff straight into the backyard of the individual heart"; he is also aware, however, of "that danger of engaged poetry — that content makes the poem."42 To avoid this danger, the poet must find "The way content can be made its own sensation."43 In these lines, the incrementation builds dramatically toward the evil at the poem's climax, but not toward any easy or self-righteous moralizing. The repetition links those about to be oppressed with the agents of that oppression by the undeniable humanity — the ever-present eros — that pulses in both. Political content is imaged in terms of feeling. The question which the poem as a whole asks is why that common humanity, so powerful an agent in human life, is so easily trampled in political action. The poem moves through its remaining sections, turning over and over with increasing irony the terms that key its deliberations. Ideas are crushed as easily as flowers; what is needed is more planning, if the garden is to survive. "[S]ome poet wrote a poem / about fields, green fields" (TVSB, [3]), but the field of language is too easily invaded by reality: What is it possible to propose against tanks, against armour on the roads, in the streets of Czechoslovakia? Green fields? September? A proclamation of seasons? Steadier, more reliable than ritual of flowers is metal,

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Toward Plain Statement

revolving turrets, pragmatic sun. (TVSB, [4])

The turning sun of nature is usurped by the blazing tank-turret; the rituals of nature and poetry are superseded by the politics of metal and machinery. The poem concludes honestly, with an admission of defeat. Resistance is reduced to symbolic gestures, but these, ultimately, are all that the poet can deal in. The final section focuses on the poet's situation: In late autumn, on the shores of the Massawippi, it comes home to my mind, the denial, even the intimacy of love, how, when Prague

is silent. (TVSB, [6]) It is the poet's responsibility to witness such events and through his witness bring them "into the backyard of the individual heart." Otherwise the country is reduced to a map of silence: "No sound of consolation. / No word of grievance" (TVSB, [5]). "Nocturne: Prague 1968" makes no claim to console Czechoslovakia's political grief; in its final honesty, the poem gives utterance even to a doubt in its own fundamental absolute: love. But even in that doubt, it affirms the struggle of love against silence, intimacy against indifference. "Fantasia on Four Deaths" responds to the killing of four students by National Guard soldiers at an anti-war demonstration in 1970. As in "Nocturne: Prague 1968," it is the confusion at the heart of the event, as much as the violence, that holds the poet's attention: '"One set / Of kids against another,' / The father said. They did / What they could. It was inevitable" (TVSB, [8]). This particular moment is one in a sequence of outrages; the victims of Kent State are kin to those in Prague and in Asia: "blood on her blouse / (Prague on her blouse, / Vietnam on her blouse)" (TVSB, [7]). The flower that one of the students puts in the barrel of the guardsman's gun recalls the broomstick in the tank-turret in "Nocturne" (TVSB, [5]). And as in "Nocturne," Gustafson ends "Fantasia" by once again affirming against the despair that threatens to silence poetic utterance: O, it is tragic. We thought to build peace, Peace. The floating dead

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On the Mekong River are This nearer campus. I slip From parable, sarcastic wit, Didactics O to plain Statement! These four are dead, This blood coagulates, This waste, so vastly huge The human heart must harden Lest the loss, compassion For a history, forget The hour I sit where life Renews itself: this lake, This territory green and lovely, Claimed by song, by bird Provoking now this air, You'd know the name of it, I'm not very good at birds ... The burden is mordent. (TVSB, [8—9])

One of the important features of Gustafson's witness poetry is that it does not evade the self-referential implications of its own procedures. By its very nature, such poetry lays itself open to charges of empty rhetoric, hypocritical self-aggrandizement, and pious self-righteousness. On a deeper level, it raises questions central to the twentiethcentury poet, questions about the efficacy and purpose of art in the face of modern history. Gustafson recognizes the terrible eloquence of silence in the face of such history, but he also recognizes that such silence is man's ultimate defeat. History may reduce the poet "to plain / Statement," but it must not reduce him to that ultimate selferasure which despair or disbelief in the worth of his utterance mean. The ironies of natural renewal may be cruel, but the poet must persist in claiming "This territory green and lovely." Gustafson writes his witness poetry with the belief that the poetry of compassion is justified only if it contributes to a politics of compassion. He rejects Auden's view that "poetry makes nothing happen" and believes instead that poetry can effect change by working upon human awareness and sensitivity, by contributing to the metamorphosis, in Pound's phrase, of "ideas into action." In "Ricercare: And Still These Deaths Are Ours," he questions the point of newspaper photographs of the suffering in Bangladesh: more wondrous Is the fact of a man taking a picture Of suffering, a man not hungry, with a camera. ... (TVSB, [10])

173 Toward Plain Statement

The magnitude of the suffering overwhelms the witnessing sensibility. Exasperation, cynicism, anger: what is the response? So, there it is. A bunch Of shots for a text. The world is such That all we can do is send our love. Unnecessary, this visual horror! We know! We know. Of course we know. But it is not true, that after the first Death there is no other. We need These deaths. We forget. Already we have forgotten. We write these histories! We must exist In death, until there is no other! (TVSB, [12])

As the photographer must take his pictures, the poet must write his histories, because each silence that punctuates his utterances is a forgetting. The poet witnesses that we must live amidst these deaths until we choose to act against them. "The world [is] in hostage to its arrogance" (TVSB, [16]), but the poet must continue to negotiate its release, and in his witness poetry Gustafson, while acknowledging the magnitude of what has already been lost to death, persists in his belief that it is possible to reclaim what despair has yet to forfeit. "Witness poetry hopes," Gustafson writes: "It leaps to claim the supreme moment of being alive."44 This "supreme moment" is the moment-now, the precious quotidian, and though "Time is against it... poetry is for it." This perspective underlies the moral urgency in Gustafson's poetry and this moral urgency is what's behind his harping on the importance of craft in poetry. The poem's success, the efficacy of its witness, depends on the quality of the poet's craft. In "Witness Poetry," he argues that "The starving child in the poem depends on the rhythm; the atom bomb depends on the music; the sensibility to the legs blown off the child in Belfast depends on prosody. Else, write in prose; else, sway the symposium; else, run for parliament." Speaking specifically about "Coda: I Think of All Soft Limbs," he concludes that that poem's meaning would be "better expressed in prose if the pulse of the three-beat line is not the indignation; the structure of the words, the tone, the consonants and vowels, not the concept's meaning."45 After Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass (1972), Gustafson develops a poetry in which political and social witnessing is integrated with his philosophical, religious, and emotional concerns. Integration, consistency, and continuity characterize his volumes of the later 19705

174 A Poetics of Place

and the 1980. These are remarkable for the large number of lyrics in which personal and public, moral, philosophical, and aesthetic concerns coalesce in a poetry of stylized statement which is singularly plain and yet intensely presented.46 In Themes and Variations for Sounding Brass, however, Gustafson set out to write a political poetry based on the ethical value of compassion and to link a series of responses to events in Czechoslovakia, Bangladesh, the United States, Vietnam, and Canada into a single poetic sequence.47 However, Gustafsoris sense of witness poetry partakes of the contradictory perspective which is basic to his sensibility; in this case, it urges a poetry which morally engages the world of good and evil by speaking against the violations of human values in a particular event, but it also seeks to comprehend that evil in terms which transcend its manifestation in that event. The contradiction that seems to arise is between the implicit imperative to action in the moral procedures of witness poetry and the passive, almost acquiescent "wisdom" that comes with the poetry's attendant philosophical procedures: Public actualities are brought into the private procedures of the heart and are there left, motivating and memorable. At that juncture, poetry so committed is one with the procedure of all poetry: that integration which makes even of turmoil a justification, of suffering and all its concomitants an acceptance; and since in that acceptance resides compassion and understanding, so makes of suffering a wisdom, of poetry's procedures an explanation of good and evil.48

This passage deserves close reading. In its language and structure, it is an emblem of the tensions in Gustafson's contradictory perspective as they manifest themselves in his thinking about the relation between poetry and contemporary events, between poetry and good and evil. Nor is it a static configuration: the passage is a series of transitions, of becomings, which the repeated "procedure" links to the various private, public, historical, poetic, intellectual, moral, and emotional processes which compose poetry for Gustafson. The first transition is from "public actualities" to "the private procedures of the heart." The latter reminds us of the |centrality of the individual in Gustafson's poetic. The final transition is from "poetry's procedures" to "an explanation of good and evil." The latter reminds us of the fundamental obsession in all of Gustafson's poetry: the concern with meaning, significance, and value. Between these two transitions is a series of cross-overs which link the first to the last. The whole, however, is one continuous process which begins with the inward movement from the world of events into the private world of the

175 Toward Plain Statement

"heart," but which ends, after the poetry's procedures are completed, with the movement outward, back to the world of experience, with the heart now in possession of an "explanation" of that experience. The explanation is in terms of the values to be discovered or extracted from the experience, which in turn are taken up in the poet's stance toward subsequent experience. For Gustafson, the underlying desire is to see experience as significant rather than meaningless; to know life to be meaningful, even if the meaning is farcical or absurd; to feel that it is worth persisting rather than giving up. For this reason, he argues that "Poetry is a religious procedure accomplished by secular exaltation."49 What is exalted is the particular experience itself, whatever its character. The exaltation is the recognition and articulation upon discovery of the value immanent within it. What Gustafson means by "secular exaltation" is the "integration" that follows from the procedures of poetry, the resolution of "turmoil" into "justification" and "suffering" into "acceptance." The danger - that justification and acceptance seem to mean acquiescence to the evil in history or current actualities - is turned aside if we recognize that Gustafson's primary concern is comprehending both the particular event and its universal quotient; and further, that the poem's desire to comprehend these is a procedure that rides the temporal divide between the past/ present and the future. Justification and acceptance are sought in the unavoidable, undeniable facts; the compassion and understanding which hope to turn wisdom from suffering are active processes of the heart and the will which continue to be active in subsequent experiences, not in terms of acquiescing to suffering but in working to avoid lessons that have already been learned. Compassion is twosided: it suffers and it protests; it seeks to comprehend and to defend. Gustafson knows this. He also knows that to let any experience slip away without an attempt to understand its value is to waste life. It is for this reason that for him the procedures of poetry, in conjunction with those of the heart, must try to render public actualities "motivating and memorable."50 In his witness poetry, as in all his poems, Gustafson shows himself to be "more human than critical." The phrase is Scarlatti's and appears in the second epigraph to Sift in an Hourglass (1966): Therefore show yourself more human than critical, and then your Pleasure will increase. To designate to you the Position of the Hands, be advised that by D is indicated the Right, and by M the Left. Live happily. (SH, [6])

The composer's advice and instruction are profoundly appropriate

176 A Poetics of Place

for Gustafson, a poet committed to the art of music and the musical art in poetry, and a poet whose ultimate pleasure is in the glimpses of meaning that art affords. Gustafson shows himself most human in the affirmations of his contradictory self, his motives and his memories acknowledging the left and right, to and fro impulses of his sensibility. His commitment is to joy; to living, happily or not, by working toward an art in which the two hands play together, their counterpoint a successful collaboration toward one music. Gustafson continues to write witness poems after Theme and Variations/or Sounding Brass (1972), just as he continues to write poems based on travel experience after Ixion's Wheel (1969). But in the volumes of the later 19708 and the igSos, the poetry integrates place and event with the preoccupations that precede them. There are signs of this integration in Soviet Poems (1978), a sequence which combines the elements of travel and witness poetry, and in Fire on Stone (1974). The latter was Gustafsoris first collection of new work after his Selected Poems (1972), and it won him the Governor-General's Award for Poetry in 1975. With Fire on Stone Gustafson recovered the ground won in Rocky Mountain Poems (1960). Corners in the Glass (1977) then begins to work that ground intensively and the cycle of volumes published in the igSos organized around seasonal motifs, Landscape with Rain (1980), Conflicts of Spring (1981), Directives of Autumn (1984), and Winter Prophecies (1987), are the climax of his career.

CHAPTER FIVE

To Give Intuition a Certitude the truth is there's no design, just process Ralph Gustafson

With Fire on Stone (1974) Gustafson finally begins to recoup what he had gained in Rocky Mountain Poems (1960) but had not developed in his poetry of the ig6os. He won the Governor-General's Award and the A.J.M. Smith Award for Poetry for the volume. In it, "Now at the Ocean's Verge" is a major rethinking of his sense of being, and "To Give Intuition a Certitude" is a major statement of this revised perspective, which is also an important expression of his relation to modernists like Pound, Yeats, and Stevens. The latter continue to instruct Gustafson in Corners in the Glass (1977) and in his summa poetica, Gradations of Grandeur (1979). n "To Will Shakespeare, Gent.," a poem at the end of Man's Wheel,

I Gustafson reports to the Bard on the condition of the world: ... you, Sir, would not like it. Opinion is in earnest and fame is cheap, The best indifferent and ends are all. Keep To your grave. Vulgarity converts the cost: That spire you lie under, nightly lit: Thumbmarks, passion: ceremony lost. (IW, 120)

In Fire on Stone (1974), Gustafson continues to bear witness to the world, but more important, he begins to redress the conditions of lost ceremony by casting about in that world with the purposes of salvage and renovation. By making the procedures of his poetry concentric with those of his heart, he sets about retrieving through his own ceremonies the rituals that have been lost. The full renovation of ceremony does not occur until the volumes of the igSos, but in

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Fire on Stone and Corners in the Glass (1977) the poet begins the labour of gathering, reshaping, and refining what is at hand for the purpose of rebuilding the broken music of the world. The obstructions to ceremony are both material and mental; the mind falters in the face of the physical mess of history. The poems of satire in Fire on Stone describe the values, the beauty, the gods that haunt our ruins. The poems of sensual pleasure - of the transient joys of the body and the physical world - sparkle like dust in the sunlight above the rubble. The poems of death, illness, and corruption cut across that sunlight to cast the volume's brightest moments into shadow. Gustafson was seriously ill during the two years between Selected Poems (1972) and Fire on Stone, and the new poems reflect various stages of collapse, danger, and recovery. "North Cape" begins the volume in the cold light of the Arctic sun, at midsummer, in Norway's Porsanger Fjord. From the stern of a ship, Gustafson watches "Gulls congregate / At the rubbish thrown."1 Elsewhere on the planet, life is being trashed by a parody of solar warmth: "napalm / Warms an occupant" of a hut in Vietnam, and "Armies move their object / Underground." "Sunday Morning at Hammerfest" is a sequel to "North Cape": "Bells call / to the God who made it, / this world of fjord / and rock" (FOS, 14) and silence suddenly becomes a summons: "worship / takes over, the habit / in the heart." Habit puts the poet in church but he looks beyond it for his ceremony. The Christian church elicits Gustafson's "respect only"; he "hates the bloody / palms and feet / of overstretched Christ / (though he loves / the man)."2 The poem concludes with a wonderfully witty gulling of the Holy Ghost: as

for that gull there, now airborne over floating rubbish; the miracle of flight. (FOS, 14)

Once again transcendence is mocked, but not utterly displaced. The lost ceremony of transubstantiation is recovered, renovated in the metamorphic procedures of poetry, which discover something wholly miraculous in the earthly hovering of the bird: the creature has the ability to escape the rubbish of its condition but that rubbish is the necessity that not only fascinates it, but nourishes it as well. The image is a perfect emblem of Gustafson's own ambivalence toward spiritual transcendence.

179 To Give Intuition a Certitude This religious musing continues in the other introductory poems. Location shifts from Norwegian fjord to Caribbean shore; from Bali to Japan, and then Greece. The meditation shifts from Christ in the New World - "He can't be / Without purpose" (FOS, 15) - to "The ancestral, gentle gods" adored in temple music whose "sweetness is of itself, its structure / Adoration" (FOS, 16); from the "Perversity" of listening to Sibelius's transcription of "cold / Lakes listened-to" in a hotel room in Kyoto, while "Plum blossoms / Fall on the hulls of ships" and a "madman hacks at / Michelangelo" (FOS, 17), to the despair that "beauty / Is done" in a world that jumbles "Brahms, bongos, pitched-out latex, / Immortal plastic, Pergolesi / ... Pigiron, billyboards, Bach!" (FOS, 18). The opening sequence descends through this gloom to the bitter sense that "People aren't worth the world" (FOS, 18), and the volume's first climax: "Now at the Ocean's Verge." This poem revises the earlier "At the Ocean's Verge" of Rivers among Rocks (1960). In that poem, the impulse to prayer was "stopt" or blocked by '^a bombast world" in which "All's mad majesty and squander" (RAR, 4). Neither "wizard mathematics" nor religion had proved able to "solve" the questions of purpose and meaning. In the later poem, these "great expectations" of science and religion continue to be disappointed; but whereas in "At the Ocean's Verge" this overwhelming of the human resources of intelligence and imagination led to a muted desperation, in the sequel the years seem to have brought an alteration in the poet's stance. "Now at the Ocean's Verge" begins awkwardly, recalling the earlier observation: "The globe cants so, / It's a miracle a man can walk it," but then finds its footing amid the particulars of the shore: After great expectations, what It is the time of life declares, that Was there, is as the ebbtide shows: These miles of sand packt and under a slant Moon, the piling granite throw of surf, Nothing but the beauty of itself. Conch and shell and tugged weed cling To the wave and are thrown. I turn to the seamark, Climb descensions of pebbles and under the moon Sit arms on knees, the night of stars, Each in apportioned stance, intolerable before The initialling mind. Indigence is all. Concrete heaven only must suffice,

180 A Poetics of Place What expectations thought was possible: Reduced sand; a grasp, whorled and beautiful, Tossed by the tide, this accessible, Reached for, empty shell. (FOS, 21)

The world has "Nothing but the beauty of itself to offer man, and this must satisfy his needs — physical, intellectual, and spiritual. To seek their satisfaction elsewhere is to extrapolate desire into delusion. The conditions of man's unknowing are the keys to his understanding; his knowledge is in his wonder at the particulars of conch, pebble, and weed. Both this and the earlier poem counsel living in the here and now, but the later poem seems more resourceful; paradoxically, perhaps, because it recognizes that real knowledge may only come with reduced desire. The shell image at the end of the poem is especially resonant and is typical of Gustafson's talent for bitter-sweet revelation. The image recalls its appearances in works by two poets greatly admired by Gustafson - Yeats and Wordsworth.3 In "The Song of the Happy Shepherd," Yeats uses the sea-shell as a symbol for the art of poetry and contrasts it with "the optic glass," symbol of science. In the shepherd's view, "the cold star-bane / Has cloven and rent [the scientists'] hearts in twain, / And dead is all their human truth." He advises the poet: Go gather by the humming sea Some twisted, echo-harbouring shell, And to its lips thy story tell, And they thy comforters will be, Rewarding in melodious guile Thy fretful words a little while, Till they shall singing fade in ruth And die a pearly brotherhood; For words alone are certain good.4

In the companion poem, "The Sad Shepherd," Yeats undermines this belief in the consolations of poetry. The shell there symbolizes the external, objective world of nature which is indifferent to human suffering or pleasure; it is still a symbol of poetry as an art of language, but it situates language in that objective world, and so the poet's request for subjective consolation is denied by the virtual indifference of the creation to its creator.5 In "Now at the Ocean's Verge," Gustafson's "turn to the seamark" parallels Yeats's "sad" shepherd's

181 To Give Intuition a Certitude

return to the shore; but the shepherd's defeat becomes Gustafson's redefinition of expectations. In "Now at the Ocean's Verge," the poet's impulse to search for a transcendent meaning in the stars is countered by the gravity of sublunar reality and overruled by his own contradictory intuition that the affirmations he seeks are not to be found in the world beyond his reach. The poem returns Gustafson to the argument between mind and world. "The initialling mind" looks to the night sky and yearns to see it as a text disclosing meaning, its configurations of stars forming a legible script, no longer an impossible cipher. "The initialling mind" is the mind that initiates meaning by writing upon the world, imposing its own signature-identity upon experience. To such a mind, the infinity of particulars that it confronts is "intolerable." Gustafson's poetry shows that he is not immune to the anxieties of mind which result from such intolerance; but over the years, he has moved toward a stance of disciplined reserve in which transcendent needs are held in check by the heightened valuing of what is actually "accessible" — the world of the beautiful, empty shell. This discipline comes from the recognition that, in man's condition, "Indigence is all"; that is, the limits to what man can know are set by the extent and nature of his desires. Man's poverty is the source of his potential wealth. Consequently, "What expectation thought was possible" is indeed possible when we realize that "Concrete heaven only must suffice." The paradox of "Concrete heaven" is what comes to centre Gustafson's view of the world of particulars and their disclosure of the universal. "After great expectations" the poet turns to examine the "Reduced sand" and what is plainly within man's reach. Gustafson's language is a wonderful sounding-out of this perspective. Hard and muscular, "grasp" conveys the urgency of the human desire to hold and the recalcitrance of the world to be held. Similarly, I turn to the seamark, Climb descensions of pebbles and under the moon Sit arms on knees ...

is a larger-scale example of Gustafson's masterful crafting of language to convey, concretely and sensually, the intellectual and emotional tensions in his perspective. Intellectually, the lines image the defeat of a yearning for transcendent meaning. Emotionally, they convey not only that defeat, but the turn from frustration to the moment of dejection which becomes a respite before recovery. The

18a A Poetics of Place rising rhythm of "I turn to the seamark" is halted and turned back against itself as the slight terminal pause is followed by the falling rhythm of "Climb descensions." The counterpoint is all the more effective because of the continuation of the k of "seamark" in the hard c of "Climb." "Climb descensions" is a stroke of genius: it juxtaposes ascent and descent, action and abstraction, hard and soft vowels, harsh and sibilant consonants - all of which communicates not only the literal, sensory experience of climbing up a loose pebble beach but also the emotional feeling to support the sense in these lines of effort suddenly collapsing into resignation. The evening-out of the rhythm into the series of anapests and iambs settles the anxiety and sets up for the intellectual and emotional resolution which then emerges in the poem. The other predecessor ghosting "Now at the Ocean's Verge" and Gustafson's shell image is Wordsworth, who, in Book v of The Prelude, uses the shell, like Yeats, as a symbol of art. The last three lines of "At the Ocean's Verge" echo Wordsworth's anxiety about the built-in obsolescence or perishability of man's creations of intellect and imagination. Wordsworth's question: "Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad / Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?" is picked up in Gustafson's lines: "Crashing foams and ravels once / Was muted marble Athens owned."6 In Wordsworth's poem, a "Friend" sits on the sea-shore thinking about geometry and poetry, or the products of science and reason and those of imagination, all of which contribute to "The knowledge that endures." Gustafson's speaker contemplates "wizard mathematics" and religion, but the point of the contemplation is the same: the relations between mind and nature. In the dream sequence of The Prelude, Book v, the "Guide" who appears to the sleeper carries two symbolic objects, a stone and a shell. Both are books: the former, "To give it in the language of the Dream, / Was Euclid's Elements"; and the latter, '"Is something of more worth.'" The dreamer is ordered to hold the shell to his ear, whereupon he hears "in an unknown Tongue, / Which yet I understood, articulate sounds / ... which foretold / Destruction to the Children of the Earth."7 In "Now at the Ocean's Verge," Wordsworth's "Shell / of a surpassing brightness" has become Gustafson's "whorled and beautiful, / Tossed by the tide, this accessible, / Reached for, empty shell." "Tossed by the tide" reflects the world of hazard, that of Wordsworth's dream and Yeats's indifferent nature - what Gustafson describes as a world "under a slant / Moon." But where Wordsworth's shell speaks "in an unknown Tongue, / Which yet I understand," neither Yeats's nor Gustafson's shell provides such a clear-cut message. Wordsworth's "articulate sounds" have become for

183 To Give Intuition a Certitude

Yeats either a "melodious guile" or an "inarticulate moan." But for Gustafson, the shell is "empty" of sound; it does not even contain the echoes of Yeats's nature's "hollow, pearly heart." For Gustafson, the shell is not a symbol. It is nothing but itself. It does not issue any prophetic blast foretelling the destruction of the Children of Earth; rather it speaks, silently, of the beauty of emptiness and the access of accident. Wordsworth's dream-vision reveals to the poet's alter-ego the solidarity of nature and imagination, and "A joy, a consolation, and a hope" are born with the recognition of that bond. The dreamer believes in the truth of the dream: the stone and shell were dreambooks but also only a stone and a shell, and this was possible because he possessed "a perfect faith in all that passed."8 But Gustafson is unable to invest imagination with that much belief; instead, he redefines imagination and faith, rejecting both "The initialling mind" and the desire for transcendence. What is "reached for" is what is "accessible" to the body's "grasp" and the mind's beholding. Man cannot be satisfied by dreams; for Gustafson, imagination is an appetite that requires satisfaction in the substantial terms of here and now. "Now at the Ocean's Verge" revises a poem like "Man Is the Creator Of." The shell is beautiful and empty, but its attributes are its own, not projected. Imagination has become for Gustafson a process of investigation rather than of invention. His ear for the sea-surge is becoming more and more attuned to the contrapuntal cadence of ebb and flow, absence and presence, emptiness and plenitude. The poem's ceremonies must derive from rituals that behold this rhythm but which constantly guard against the tendency in all ceremony to displace the experience that occasions it. "Stare into the Sun" (FOS, 22) is a kind of theological sequel to "Now at the Ocean's Verge." The world of "Reduced sand" is considered in relation to the God who made it, and the result is not so much a reduced divinity as a notion of a God circumscribed by his own processes, and, consequently, as "helpless" as he is absolute. For Gustafson, God is the emptiness of the shell as well as the thundering sea-surge. The contradictions of divinity defy the mind, and one consequence of that bafflement is a universe of apparent randomness. But just as Gustafson redefines imagination as investigation rather than invention, he refocuses faith as worldly rather than otherworldly. To stare into the sun is possible but unhealthy. To base one's daily living on an otherworldly perspective is similarly confusing, or worse, paralysing: Men tread and plunge to fathoms. This crust's Uncertain, he's shaken; bewildered, in his arms

184 A Poetics of Place Holds, disconsidered by indifference, Love. (FOS, 22)

The irresolvable issues of faith and belief are balanced or even precluded by the exigencies of love. Man should turn to what is within his grasp, accessible to the heart. The mystery is that in loving another human being and the particulars of the world at hand, man encounters his most convincing intuitions of divinity: Blaspheme who will. God is all things. Irreproachable, shattered grace, the hatred's His, He blazes in the impoverished stars. (FOS, 22)

These "impoverished stars" parallel the "Reduced sand" of "Now at the Ocean's Verge" and the "shattered grace" is that of the luminous particulars of "Concrete heaven." In these poems, Gustafson regroups his imaginative energies, collecting his resources and his wits. He had ended an earlier poem, "Nails at Nijo," with the self-admonition: "Out of mud, / More lotus, more lotus!" (FOS, 17). "Now at the Ocean's Verge" and "Stare into the Sun" represent the low point of the volume's descent to a minimal perspective, to the mud and muck of the human situation. From this point Gustafson begins to nurture the possible flower. The procedures are described in many of his titles: "Meanwhile, These Perfect Details," "The Tin Can Turned Back from Transcendence," "Faith Is a Concrete Object," "To Give Intuition a Certitude," "O Mud, Thou Vile Sublime." It is a world of perfect details, but the perfection lies in their imperfection; the world is "unfinished" and its "ragged sublime mocks us" (FOS, 23). What it mocks is our desire for a perfection that is terminal, inscribed, closed, and conclusive; an apotheosis which would be apocalypse. Gustafson turns away from this transcendence: "Far better live dependably, opining / Nothing not central to the illusions of the day" (FOS, 24). "Truth is visible," he says in the epigraph to "The Tin Can Turned Back from Transcendence" (FOS, 24). But his procedures are not those of glib affirmation or cheerful whistling in the dark. The lost ceremonies are truly lost; it is their replacements that must be found. If "The grandeur was when men adapted to nature," Gustafson recognizes that we have proceeded too far to expect that we can simply revise our perspective of "damned nature beaten" (FOS, 27). This is neither defeatism nor acquiescence, but an aspect, again, of his intuition that our failures and mistakes are as much part of the "shattered grace" as our successes. And there

185 To Give Intuition a Certitude

is the further intuition that this grace is itself entropic - consummated by its expenditure - as in "The Metaphysics of the Glow-Worm Grotto" (FOS, 26). What is certain is that process is relentless and the rhythms that triumph erase the most careful calligraphy "When we more than awaken / To the intensest moment we finally fear" (FOS, 36). Beginning in winter, the volume moves toward spring, conscious of the natural rhythms and the passage of time those rhythms measure. An urgency pressures the poet. The recent brush with death diverts the poet's attention from the present to the past. "Sun clashes memory" in "Serenade for Eight Winds" (FOS, 38); but with an effort and language similar to Yeats's in "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," Gustafson uses the retrospective impulse to turn back to the present, to commit himself to whatever future he has left after his almost fifty years as a poet: 0 I'd submit, protest, submit again, Music, poem bungled; defend the bosh. Nothing short of preposterous will do: Fifty more on fifty guaranteed. 1 have no memory of the hyacinth's rust, Cognizance of winter is but a matter For asides, perfection occupies The mind, the giving-out of ironies: How the articulate flesh is first of all And time without priority. (FOS, 39)

To give priority to "the articulate flesh" is Gustafson's aim in his later poetry. To speak through the body of the world is to give faith a concrete object.

T

his procedure of the heart leads to the second climax in Fire on Stone, the poem "To Give Intuition a Certitude," which is a further consolidation of the paradoxical poetic of his maturity, paradoxical because of its combination of immanence and poesis. The title recalls Stevens in its directive effect. More and more, in his later volumes, Gustafson uses Stevens-like titles for his poems and Stevens also provides him with a number of his epigraphs. But it is another giant of early modernism whose influence is felt most in "To Give Intuition a Certitude": the Pound of the Cantos, particularly of the Pisan Cantos of ig48.9 Gustafson's title is also the first line of the

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poem. The first section thus begins: "To give intuition a certitude / That is the thing," and then proceeds from this to posit a series of Poundian metamorphoses: That is the thing: that the Light May become crystal; that the root Earth-covered, dusted with mud Trampled by centaurs, hoof in soil, That the root be yellow blossoms, petals; That she may touch you, fragile as flake And as cool, the desire known without reason, The logic not known, who takes syllogism To love? the need made immediate. (FOS, 54)

A stylistic and conceptual microcosm of the whole, this first section coheres through its parallelisms and repetitions, the incremental effects of phrasing, grammatical structure, rhythm, and sound. Sound, in particular, is a remarkably subtle force. The vowel and consonant patterns colour the rhythm, which is a basic, four-stress measure, and reinforce the structure of thought. A tlth pattern dominates and the vowels are modulated to work with this and the other consonant patterns. A series of soft a, e, and i sounds begins in line i, which then ends with the contrasting long i in "Light"; the change in vowel tone draws attention to the word on a sensory level first, and that attention issues in recognition of the word's signification of image and concept, the significance accentuated by the capital. The enjambment leads the reader from the long i of "Light" to the long a and e of "May become," but then, while the consonantal music hovers with the repeated hard c in "become" and "crystal," the vowels shift back to soft o and i, a and e. The short-long sound pattern of the second line repeats that of the first, ending as it does with the long vowel in "root," which wittily connects with "Light" by means of its slant-rhyme, but which contrasts with it as an image: dark/bright. At the beginning of the third line, the stressed long vowel in "Earth" reinforces the effect of the run-on from "root," but then Gustafson lightens the line with the contrasting soft and short u, repeated three times, in "covered," "dusted," and "mud." The monosyllabic "mud" plays with the t and d sounds in the line and its slightly incongruous semantic relationship with "dusted" sets up the startling effect of "Trampled by centaurs, hoof in soil," which follows dramatically. "Mud" and "Trampled" are also part of the pattern of m sounds in these lines. Metamorphosis is the conceptual burden of the music, and the changes, like an alternating current of imaginative energy,

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run both ways. The m sound in "May become," picked up in "mud" and "Trampled," suggests that the "Light" may become mud as well as crystal, that the centaurs may trample the delicate glass under hoof. The m sound modulates subtly into n later in the section, showing how sound can be used structurally to bring the lines together. N and o recur in "known," "reason," "not known," and the section ends with a series of echoes from the earlier patterns; "who takes syllogism / To love? the need made immediate" reworks the long and short vowels of the opening lines, as well as the t, m, and n sounds. The collaboration of rhythm and sound in these lines produces a physical sense of urgency or desire which illustrates the poem's thesis: what makes intuition a certitude is the force of desire itself. Rhythm and sound, to use language from later in the poem, "make palpable what goes on: / The intuition of his love" (FOS, 55). The caesura is also used as an efficient device to pace the drama of the changes which are wished, particularly when he offsets "petals" or halts abruptly with the rhetorical "To love?" The enjambments are just as cunning. Syntax forces the reader to accelerate through the turn after "Light," only to be suddenly pulled up short by the metaphor and caesura; we trip and slip over "root" and "mud," and trample like centaurs, half in and half out of the expanding construction, only to be taken up by the sudden metamorphosis of root into blossoms and petals. After this, the pause after "petals" is a breath-taking for poet and reader, but especially for the reader, if he wants to glimpse the laurel unwrapping to Laura, "That she may touch you, fragile as flake / And as cool," the tips of the blossoms becoming fingertips in a syllogism of intuition and feeling. In this way, the poem proceeds to argue, or urge, its intuitions into certitude through the force and energy of its rhythms, sounds, and imagery. The movement from flower to woman is a magic moment and, despite the Poundian echoes, solely Gustafson's. The seed of desire is made flesh and the knowledge that follows is beyond reason. This logic of intuition evokes other echoes, as we reason not the need, and thus the poem begins in both stylistic and conceptual terms as an echo chamber full of sensual and intellectual melodies. To give to its intuition the force of certainty and to make that valuing credible is what every poem seeks to do. For Gustafson, this entails the expression of an aesthetic consummation of poet and word, poem and world, which must be as convincing as the physical consummation of man and woman. The imperative is simultaneously, and comprehensively, aesthetic, imaginative, spiritual, and sexual. The enterprise is yet another way of envisaging the concentric relations of man/poet and poem/world which are the aesthetic and phil-

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osophical ideals of Gustafson's maturity. In the second section of the poem, Gustafson uses Chartres Cathedral, as Pound uses Malatesta's Tempio in the Cantos, to image the way that man works ideas into action or makes palpable what he feels and desires. The complex structure of glass and "Multifoliate stone" makes the craftsman's "pace visible, faith visible" (FOS, 54) and gathers, in the process, the many parts into a coherent whole. The coherence, however, is not that of conclusion but of desire. Section two introduces the parallel between the edifice and the poem, or even between the building and the volume, Fire on Stone, as a cathedral of desire. The parallel is developed further in section three, in terms of the metaphorical relations between poem and sculpture, poet and stonemason, but in section two it is developed in terms of the imagery of "Great pillars" with "windows set between, / Crimson between, blue and ochre / Seasoned, pitted at back by rain, / Colour shattered thus" (FOS, 54). The stainedglass windows set in the cathedral walls are texts, "books / Without grammar and hornlight," like poems set in a volume. The imagery of dark and light in this section continues from the first, where it is implicit in the contrast between the world of light and the world of the earth-covered root. For Gustafson, the world is the marriage bed of light and dark, fire and stone, and life and art are movements in an intricate nuptial dance. Wisdom is to be found in the intercourse of particulars, in the "networks" of colour, light, and shadow. Section three makes explicit the parallel between church and poem, poet, stonemason, and vitraillist. But it also places the parallel in a process of universal dimensions. The section repeats the structure of section one but on a smaller scale (ironically, considering its expanded scope) and links a series of discrete activities and differentiated worlds through the force of the poem's intuited truth — that in all its forms, the essence of the creative principle is the desire to make from intuition a palpable truth: So, poem segregates Principle; granite is thus charged, Inflexion through point and mallet Scared with the core of the flame; Is musk: structured in the mind: Compulsions, as oceans move on shore-lines; Thus the lover distils by movement The hidden charges of the heart. (FOS, 55)

The conjunction, "So," is meant to have the force of intuition more than of rhetoric behind it, and it is heard, silently conjoining all the

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activities and worlds contained in the lines. Man as mason, poet, composer, or lover: his body calls forth his desire's fulfilment. The shape of the stone in the sculptor's hands, the line unravelling with the poet's breath, the music heard in the composer's mind — all are "Compulsions," and must come forth as naturally, as inexorably, "as oceans move on shore lines" or as the lover moves in his lover's body. It is this "movement," the process of transforming desire into action, need into satisfaction, which "distils" the essence of being alive for Gustafson. Gustafson's use of "Inflexion" is wonderfully rich in these lines. As a term referring to the bend, curvature, or angle in an object, it refers to the image of the sculptor-mason shaping the granite, and recalls the imagery of "Great pillars, vaulted, ambulatory" in section two. As a term referring to the modulation of the voice, the change in pitch or tone in the act of speaking or singing, however, it further links sculptor and poet and develops the notion implicit in the section, of creation as poesis or making. Finally, as a grammatical term, referring to the changes in the form of a word in order to express different grammatical relations or semantic functions, it pushes beyond the notion of poesis to link both artist figures in a universal creative process in which the medium, no matter which, shapes its user-creator as much as it is shaped by him, in the sense that the "inflexions" are reflections of innate properties, powers immanent in the medium which the artist must discover, recognize, and adapt. It is important to remember that the parallel established in sections two and three between the poet/poem and the sculptor-vitraillist/stonewindow is explicitly between the former and "books / Without grammar." Here the poem amplifies the sense of "the desire known without reason, / The logic not known, who takes syllogism / To love?" of section one. The processes by which intuition is certified as real in art are both known, in the technical business of the craft, and unknown, in that the certitude that is achieved is only complete and convincing if it is also sensed as given by the medium, released by that which is beyond the artist's powers, a gift of "the god ... inside the stone," as Pound expresses it in his essay on Cavalcanti.™ This ambivalence between the placing of certitude in poesis and in immanence is evident in Gustafson's use of "charged" and "charges" in section three. The degree of ambiguity in "granite is thus charged" depends upon the length of the pause given by the semicolon and the inferred presence of the conjunction, "so," in the parallel construction, as much as upon the properties of the metaphor itself. The difficulty raised by the term is itself illustrative of the contradictory aesthetic at work here, because two senses are possible. First, the

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granite is charged by the craftsman; the medium is given its energy and force through the agency of the artist's "Inflexion," his shaping it with "point and mallet / Seared with the core of the flame." The artist has the power to shape the medium so, and to inspirit it with his power, because his techniques/tools are stronger than the medium that suffers them by virtue of their being the instrument of his desire, which, presumably, is "the core of the flame" and the heart of the artist's impulse to "make palpable what he goes on: / The intuition of his love." However, it is also possible to reverse the flow of energy and power in this process and to see the granite as charged with its own "virtu" to use a relevant Poundian term, meaning "power" or "potency." With this reading, a shift in the meaning of "charged" from the active giving of energy from without to the release of energy latent within the medium occurs. The granite possesses its own power, like the ocean, and it is this fire in the stone that sears the artist's chisel and mallet; and it is this immanent structure in the music which takes shape in the composer's mind, just as it is the immanent but "hidden" passions of the heart which the lover's action "distils" — a release which is as much given as it is extracted. "The hidden charges of the heart" increases the ambiguity because of the senses of "magnetic" or "electrical" charge which are evoked by the phrase, senses which are even more active when the Poundian presence is acknowledged in the poem. The fourth and fifth sections of the poem repeat and build on the patterns already established. "No man endures by reason / Alone and thought — foolishness that need not / Be said" (FOS, 55) is not as rhetorical, in the pejorative sense, as it seems. The first line echoes the line in section two: "The durance of things, held in networks," and reminds us that the purpose of intuition becoming certitude is that man needs more than faith; or, more precisely, for Gustafson, faith or intuition are not complete until they are palpable, embodied in act or artifact. The "foolishness that need not / Be said" is said precisely because the poem is engaged in its own processes, and not, ironically, in pronouncing ex cathedra. Gustafsoris intuition is strengthened by the evidence of predecessors and the "durance" of what they have made, which, in the forms of cathedrals or literary traditions, comes down to him as intuitions "held in networks," organizations of human desire. It is those predecessors' imaginative desires which organized these "networks" and which continue as presences in their creations by virtue of their craft, and, consequently, are responsible for their continued force as "presences" in his world — literally and imaginatively. The last section of the poem is a coda: "That the desire / Be without

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reason; that the logic be love" (FOS, 55). The language, structure, and syntax recall the opening lines of the poem and the sense recapitulates the poem's central hypothesis. But what is important to recognize is that Gustafson ends the poem in the same hortative voice with which he begins; there is no slippage, by dint of rhythm and desire, into a delusory assertiveness. Rather the poem remains a precise emblem of its own desire, an intuition charged with an urgency to be certified as true but as yet hovering in a middle ground of hope. The poem charges the poet with a task that is, however, hopelessly torn between the attractions of poesis and the sense of power that comes in poems with the making of certitude from intuition, order from chaos, and the contradictory view — which is, ironically, as yet more powerful as an intuition than certitude — that whatever order, meaning, and significance are to be had are to be discovered and not made, because they are immanent in things, like "the hidden charges of the heart." The difference in viewpoints is the difference, perhaps, between an intuition as yet uncertain of its reality, and a belief which is becoming increasingly doubtful because it seems more a projection of an anxious, inscriptive will than an intuition realized by the metamorphosis of desire. The two meanings of "durance" are indeed relevant: does the poet confine and restrain by his imagination, or discover what is latent and lasting?11 When Gustafson writes, in section five of "To Give Intuition a Certitude": "So the least with pot and word / And brush make palpable what he goes on: / The intuition of his love," he is presenting his version of one of Pound's articles in his famous "Credo": "I believe in technique as the test of a man's sincerity."12 In his Confucius, Pound glosses the Chinese ideogram for "sincerity" as "The precise definition of the word, pictorially the sun's lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally. The right hand of this compound means: to perfect, bring to focus."13 For Pound, if an artist's technique results in "the precise rendering of the impulse," he is sincere.14 For Gustafson, to give intuition a certitude is "to perfect, bring to focus" that intuition, to render the impulse precisely. Pound's image of "the sun's lance coming to rest on the precise spot verbally" resonates in Gustafson's image of the "granite ... charged, / Inflexion through point and mallet / Seared with the core of the flame," and there is in Pound's discussion of sincerity and technique the same ambivalence between an aesthetics of poesis and immanence which figures in Gustafson's poetic. This is evident when we consider Gustafson's poem in relation to some of the Poundian texts which provide it with its imagery and some of its conceptual background. What then becomes clear is not only that Gustafson's "intuition" is analogous to

192 A Poetics of Place Pound's "impulse," in his discussion of technique, but also that the poetic articulated in "To Give Intuition a Certitude" is indebted to Pound's immanentist theory of the "Tuscan aesthetic" of Guido Cavalcanti's poetry as discussed in the essay on that poet in Literary Essays, and to the influence of that theory upon Pound's own use of the imagery of light, crystal, intelligence, and process in the Cantos. The imagery in the first section of Gustafson's poem is distinctly Poundian. "Light" and "crystal" recur throughout the Cantos, beginning as early as Cantos III and IV, but are particularly important in Cantos LXXIV, LXXVI, and LXXXIII in the Pisan Cantos of 1948. The later Canto cxvI also refers to "the great ball of crystal."15 The image of the centaur also appears early, in Canto Iv: "The Centaur's heel plants in the earth loam," a line which is preceded, significantly, by a reference to Cavalcanti.16 In "The Serious Artist," Pound had also written: "Poetry is a centaur. The thinking, word-arranging, clarifying faculty must move and leap with the energizing, sentient, musical faculties."17 This sense of poetry as a collaboration of the rational and irrational, or intellectual and physical, is exactly what "To Give Intuition a Certitude" explores, and what Gustafson has argued throughout his career. The movement from "Light" to love in Gustafson's poem may derive from Pound's interpretation of Cavalcanti's canzoni, "Donna mi Prega." Pound's translation and commentary on this poem form the basis of his essay "Cavalcanti"; another version of his translation appears in Canto xxxvI. In his essay, Pound suggests that Cavalcanti's poem on the nature of love is also "a sort of metaphor on the generation of light."18 The imagery of sun, light, and fire is active in Gustafson's poetry from the beginning; he was a poet of Helios long before he read Pound, but Pound's conflation of light, love, intelligence, and sincerity, along with such specific notions as the medieval concept of virtu and the Confucian concept of "process," provides Gustafson's poem with a rich and complex background. In his "Donria mi Prega," Cavalcanti discusses love in terms of its virtu, its power or potency. He describes it as an active force, an agency; as such, it is both an emanation and a magnetism, radiating and attracting energy. Because of this, Pound thought he recognized connections between Cavalcanti's notion of love and various medieval philosophical notions of the nature of light. Cavalcanti begins his poem by warning his reader that he is addressing his discourse to those already experienced in love. The subject cannot be argued rationally; the truth of his poem can only be "proved" by the senses and by experience:

193 To Give Intuition a Certitude I for the nonce to them that know [Love] call, Having no hope at all that man who is base in heart Can bear his part of wit into the light of it, And save they know't aright from nature's source I have no will to prove Love's course or say Where he takes rest; who maketh him to be; Or what his active virtu is, or what his force; Nay, nor his very essence or his mode; What his placation; why he is in verb, Or if a man have might To show him visible to men's sight.19 By maintaining Cavalcanti's personification in his translation, Pound develops the sense that love as a power is a dimension of human virtu, the essence of an individual's being. In his Introduction to his volume of Translations, writing again on Cavalcanti, Pound defined "La virtu" as "the potency, the efficient property of a substance or person," and went on to describe it in terms of magnetic energy: just as "modern science shows us radium with a noble virtue of energy," so in this medieval philosophy "Every thing or person was held to send forth magnetisms of certain effect."20 Like love, then, virtu, this power of the person, radiates outward and attracts inward, and it is this sense of the person that Gustafson expresses in section five of "To Give Intuition a Certitude," when he writes: So the least with pot and word And brush make palpable what he goes on: The intuition of his love. What man "goes on" is his virtu, this emanating-attractive force. Pound's linking of love and light through the metaphor of radiation derives from a series of metaphors in Cavalcanti's poem: In memory's locus taketh he his state Formed there in manner as a mist of light Upon a dusk that is come from Mars and stays. Love is created, hath a sensate name, His modus takes from soul, from heart his will; From form seen doth he start, that, understood, Taketh in latent intellect —

194 A Poetics of Place As in a subject ready place and abode, Yet in that place it ever is unstill, Spreading its rays, it tendeth never down By quality, but is its own effect unendingly Not to delight, but in an ardour of thought That the base likeness of it kindleth not.21

What is important as well in these lines is the linking of love with light-as-form, and both of these with the "intellect." For Pound, as for Gustafson, the implication of eros inpoesis is a profound intuition that every act of artistic creation certifies. In "Cavalcanti," Pound describes this poet as representing a break with medieval asceticism and its "belief that the body is evil" and a turn toward "The conception of the body as perfect instrument of the increasing intelligence."22 The procedures of love thus parallel those of the poetic imagination. Both create by beginning "From form seen" which "Taketh in latent intellect" and then, "ever ... unstill," redirect that energy outwards "in an ardour of thought." In Cavalcanti's description, Love's virtu, his strange property sets sighs to move And wills man look into unformed space Rousing there thirst that breaketh into flame.23

In Gustafson's language, Thus the lover distils by movement The hidden charges of the heart.

Gustafson absorbs Pound's affiliated concepts into his own thinking about the interaction of eros and poesis in the figure of the poet-lover because Pound's reading and translation of Cavalcanti corroborate his own ambivalent understanding of the creative process. In Canto xxxvI, Pound alters his translation in a number of instances. One important change comes with the lines just quoted: "And wills man look into unformed space / Rousing there thirst." In the canto, this is altered to: And [Love's] strange quality sets sighs to move Willing man look into that formed trace in his mind And with such uneasiness as rouseth the flame.24

195 To Give Intuition a Certitude The first version describes the power of love as an impulse to create form out of "unformed space"; love abhors a vacuum, it seems, and to be loveless is to inhabit such a space. As a metaphor for an act of imagination, this presents the imagination as the form-making power of the mind. The second version, however, presents love as something received, which impresses itself on the mind, which then traces its form in a loving response. As a metaphor for the imagination, this presents imagination as responding to rather than creating, as recognizing rather than projecting form: once again, there is a contrast between a poetics of poesis and a poetics of immanence. Pound's immanentist reading of Cavalcanti is evident in his discussion of the poet's language.25 The virtu or power in Cavalcanti's language derives from his sense of words as themselves participating in the "world of forms" which they express or interpret; in Pound's view, it is this sense of the world which has been lost by modern man: We appear to have lost the radiant world where one thought cuts through another with clean edge, a world of moving energies ... magnetisms that take form, that are seen, or that border the visible, the matter of Dante's paradiso the glass under water, the form that seems a form seen in a mirror, these realities perceptible to the sense, interacting. ...26

In the opening section of "To Give Intuition a Certitude," Gustafson presents his intuition of this "radiant world." The section describes, to use Pound's language, "a world of moving energies ... that are seen, or that border the visible" and which are, as the poem urges, "realities perceptible to the sense, interacting." When Pound describes Cavalcanti's metaphors as "metamorphic," he identifies his sense of the way language is part of this world of intercoursing energies. Metamorphosis is a central thematic metaphor in the Cantos, and it centres Gustafson's poem as well. To see intuition become a certitude is the first transformation which, in its abstraction, contains all the others: the light becoming crystal; the root becoming yellow blossoms; the dreamt caress becoming satisfied desire; need transformed into satisfaction. The process, in each instance, is from the immanent to the imminent, and then, the "immediate" — to use Gustafson's own term in the poem. In each instance, the movement is from the invisible or intangible to the visible and physical, the same movement described by Cavalcanti in his poem on love and interpreted by Pound as a metaphor for the process of light. Gustafson's poem, too, is about the world of process, or the immanent agency of light-love. Gustafson's image of "the hidden charges of the heart," in the sense

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of magnetic charges, recalls Cavalcanti's image of love's virtu as a magnetism: "Love doth not move, but draweth all to him."27 Pound makes much of this sense of virtu as magnetism in his Cavalcanti essay and uses the image to define the "metaphysic" behind the "Tuscan aesthetic" of Cavalcanti and of the later Provencal poets. He links this metaphysic to that of Egyptian sculpture, "sculpture with something inside it": "The best Egyptian sculpture is magnificent plastic; but its force comes from a non-plastic idea, i.e. the god is inside the statue. ... The force is arrested, but there is never any question about its latency, about the force being the essential, and the rest 'accidental' in the philosophic technical sense. The shape occurs."28 As he says in Canto LXXIV: "the stone knows the form"; the sculptor knows the stone he shapes by interacting with it. The result is illumination, the form of light released, or as he writes in the same canto: "in coitu inluminatio." The knowledge or illumination that comes from intercourse is the light of love, be it in the act of love between man and woman, or in the interaction of man with the physical world. In Gustafson's poem, the desire in section one "that she may touch you" and make immediate the need, is Gustafson's expression of his own belief that "in coitu inluminatio." The premise, again intuitive, is that love is the paramount way of knowing the world and through the world, oneself. Pound affirms this in his rewriting of the Cartesian "cogito ergo sum" as "Amo ergo sum" in Canto LXXX, which Gustafson quotes approvingly in his essay, New World Northern (NWN, 59).30 The configuration of love, light, sincerity, and self-knowledge in Pound's writing thus corroborates Gustafson's own developing perspective.31 In the image of the cathedral in the second section of "To Give Intuition a Certitude," Gustafson presents his sense of the forms that love/light takes in the world. The cathedral is a construction of stone and glass, a composition of "shattered" colour, which recalls the "shattered grace" of "Stare into the Sun" (FOS, 22). This reflects Gustafson's sense of man's doom amid magnificence and recalls his description of the world as a "shambles" in that earlier poem. Elsewhere in Fire on Stone, he describes the world as "this shambles of magnificence" (FOS, 63).32 For Pound, "Le Paradis riest pas artificiel / but spezzato apparently / it exists only in fragments."33 So, too, for Gustafson, it is a world of "shattered" light in which man's desire must find its moments of perfect form, in which his intuitions must find their momentary certitude. "To Give Intuition a Certitude" condenses much that is at the heart of Gustafson's later, postmodernist poetry. It expresses the perspective that emerges from and holds him to the concentric stance he

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desires in this poetry. It is not necessary to recognize all the Poundian background to the poem in order to grasp what it urges; the poem proceeds through the force of its rhythms and imagery, the tension in its structure and music, rather than through the force of allusion. But Pound's influence is significant, in that he is clearly instrumental in Gustafson's redaction in this poem of the tension in his poetic between his belief in poesis and his intuitions of immanence. "To Give Intuition a Certitude" does not resolve that tension but allows it to break into flame, to itself illuminate his deepest intuitions of the world as a field of interactive forces which summon the poet for recognition and intercourse. The emblems of ars and amor record this interaction and complement each other like two sides of a medallion. Furthermore, this poem is an important example of how Gustafson could use a Poundian modernism to move himself toward his own postmodernist stance.

T J. o Gustafson. Give Intuition a Certitude" another for It sets the programis for muchturning-point of his poetry poem after Fire on Stone. The procedures of his poetry are now one with the procedures of the heart and both seek to participate, through loving attention to particulars, in the all-inclusive processes of nature. Participation becomes affirmation. Fire on Stone thus begins in the gloom that ended Ixion's Wheel, in the sense that "the world is worse" and "ceremony lost" (IW, 120); but then, after the descent to the world of the beautiful but empty shell of "Now at the Ocean's Verge," Gustafson gathers his energies and commits himself to the celebration of that world through the recognition of its potential. In "To Give Intuition a Certitude" he formulates a poetic which will replace the lost ceremonies of romantic and modernist poetry with the personal rituals of the intuitive imagination. In the poems which follow "To Give Intuition a Certitude" in the volume, perception itself becomes ceremonial and poetic technique seeks to be no more and no less than an extension of his concentricity with a world of overwhelming potential. Style is now the force-field created by the overlapping of these concentric circles of poet and world, self and place, consciousness and the moment-now. A poem is thus, in a number of senses, a disposition; it is an attitude or stance toward its subject — which comprises both the poet and itself as artifact, as well as its content. It is also an evidence of dis-positioning, a collision and interaction of forces which produce a realignment and repositioning perhaps even a recentring - of the circles in relation. But in all of this, style does not dispose perception so much as it is disposed by

198 A Poetics of Place it; nor does it dispose language so much as it reposes in the disposition that issues it. At the centre of the poet's disposition, however, is love; anc1 in a poem significantly titled "Green Disposition," Gustafson attempts to urge into certitude his intuition that what man needs most is most accessible to him in the world around him. The poem begins with a cluster of contrasts: The world's a green world. The phlox is red: Against the stone wall brilliant the clusters Stand out appointing the grey and green of Cedar hedge and wall - counterpoint Of His brilliance, the garden in His mind When thrown were primal suns, green Assertions. (FOS, 63)

As the poem continues, it is clear that this is the same setting as in "Anniversary" (FOS, 60), the world of cedar hedge and garden flowers, birch, lake, and stone wall. It is also the same world of shattered grace, shattered light, as in "Stare into the Sun" and "To Give Intuition a Certitude." It is the world of the beautiful empty shell of "Now at the Ocean's Verge," the earthly garden which is a fragmented paradise, a perfect replica of the Creator's shattered ideal, "the garden in His mind." These lines juxtapose the actual garden around Gustafson's house in North Hatley with the archetypal Eden, and in the process juxtapose the poet's creative act with the archetypal act of "primal" creation. The literal, sensory contrast of colours - green, red, and grey - is the "counterpoint" of the "primal suns" and "green / Assertions" of the original universe. The counterpoint metaphor deserves close attention. As a musical metaphor, it refers to a form of composition in which a melody is added to a given melody or plain-song, with the second melody accompanying but also playing against the first. The term can also mean a contrary point or antithesis in an argument. As this poem develops, it would seem that both senses function in it. The human garden does seem, at times, to be the antithesis of a divine ideal, but the whole impetus of Gustafson's imagination is toward the certification of his intuition that the relation between the human and natural worlds and a transcendent ideal is more like that of musical counterpoint; that is, a harmony, beyond the ear of reason but not of imagination, composed of hopeless contradictions from the viewpoint of rational understanding, but of potential resolutions from the perspective of imagination. The first line of "Green Disposition" echoes Pound's admonition in

199 To Give Intuition a Certitude Canto LXXXI: "Learn of the green world what can be thy place /In scaled invention or true artistry."34 Pound, of course, with "scaled invention" also plays with the language of music to discuss the perspective man should take to his world; he goes on: "Pull down thy vanity." Gustafson is sympathetic to Pound's ethos of humility, but his counsel is more affirmative, and more constructive. Gustafson urges love. The danger of Pound's "Pull down thy vanity" is that man will turn inward to blindly tend his cabbage-patch, whereas Gustafson would have him a more generous gardener. After juxtaposing the fallen "green world" that we know with the Eden we can only extrapolate from it, Gustafson juxtaposes yet a third world, the garden man can make within the "green world": Looked up from this vantage, the hill And trees and hedge and lawn are green, only Birch tree, bark white, is against This ordering, this green world, enclosing round Red rose and saffron marigold And yellow rose arranged not by God This time but proof of how this shambles Of magnificence when brought to arbitration By our love is provident enough Of joy. In this garden-world of scraps Of God, the world is green. The claim of snow Is only time's matter, no dominion. Scarlet phlox and stone affirm green. (FOS, 63) The world that man is born into is "This ordering, this green world." It contains him, and what he does with his life, he does with and to the things of this world. Gustafson's profoundest urging is that man act in this world with love. The phrase "this shambles / of magnificence" recalls the line in "Stare into the Sun": "Divinity defies the mind and consequence / Is shambles" (FOS, 22); it also recalls his description of man in "Legend," in Rivers among Rocks, as "Doomed in that landscape but among magnificence" (RAR, 1). The imperative to love is so urgent for Gustafson because, as he argues in these and other poems, man is his own doom. Gustafson's God is "absolute" but "helpless," as he puts it in "Stare into the Sun"; "God is all things," but his grace is shattered (FOS, 22). The use of "provident" in the climactic lines of "Green Disposition" reinforces this: there is no Divine Providence, for Gustafson, only human caring. The "scraps of God" in this "garden-world" are compost not for faith but for action; the broken God is in all things, in this immanentist theology,

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the virtu, the power that love and imagination contact in their acts of attention. The reappearance of "magnificence" in this poem suggests further that Gustafson is beginning to regain the perspective and stance that he had begun to develop in Rocky Mountain Poems (1960). Other language in the final lines of "Green Disposition" recalls the two senses of "counterpoint" that presented themselves at the beginning of the poem; "arbitration," "provident," and "claim" form a nexus of wit and verbal play which, while bringing the poem to the climax of its serious affirmation, also offers evidence of that affirmation's basis in concrete experience. If the relation between the fallen world and Eden is that of antithesis to thesis, then the world of "Red rose and saffron marigold / And yellow rose" created by the poet from the "shambles / of magnificence" is their synthesis. The poet as gardener is man as lover of earth; his creativity is his "arbitration / By ... love" of the apparently irreconcilable demands of earthly and transcendent values. This "arbitration" deals with the laws of time, "The claim of snow," and of space, "dominion"; the pun on "matter" disposes of both, and the added pun, "no dominion" — that is, no lordship and no such Dominion of Canada - disposes of those literary critics like Frye, Eli Mandel, Warren Tallman, and Margaret Atwood who have described the Canadian literary landscape as a harsh and cruel land and the Canadian literary imagination as dominated by winter and fear.35 For Gustafson, the imagination, as it encounters "this garden-world of scraps / Of God," is, like the world itself, "provident enough." He would agree with Pound: "ubi amor ibi oculus."36 So, "the world is green"; it burgeons and grows. It grows best when tended well, with "true artistry" rather than "scaled invention"; that is, with love. For the poet, this also means with imagination. Such tending is what allows the seeds of intuition to blossom into the flowers of certitude rather than fall on the waste land of lost ceremony and abandoned faith. The title of "Cadenza with Green Sail" connects it with "Green Disposition"; but while it looks back to that poem in terms of imagery and argument, formally, with its long lines and triplets, it looks ahead to Gustafsoris long philosophical poem Gradations of Grandeur, which was published in its first edition in 1979. The long lines and the three-line stanza also recall Wallace Stevens. If Pound helped Gustafson to explore his sensibility's immanentist intuitions, Stevens reinforced his faith in the creative power of imagination. But for Gustafson, Stevens is also a poet of the "concentred self," whose stance toward reality corroborates his own. In "Credences of Summer" Stevens writes:

2o1 To Give Intuition a Certitude Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times The thrice concentred self, having possessed The object, grips it in savage scrutiny, Once to make captive, once to subjugate Or yield to subjugation, once to proclaim The meaning of the capture, this hard prize, Fully made, fully apparent, fully found."37

The ambiguity of "once to subjugate / Or yield to subjugation" is akin to that in Gustafson's own fusion of immanence and creation, and Stevens's ultimate "possession" of the object, the proclamation of its "meaning" as that which is "fully found" only when it is "fully made," also finds its equivalent in Gustafson's later poetic. "Cadenza with Green Sail" echoes this passage and others in Stevens's poetry: Why, then, this world is brought to great conclusions. The extensions of this factual night are beauty, The way the mind sees the mud and stones. Not the humid day, the dark in the cellar Where old music records that whirled, wilt, Where the invisible rust has a going at it, Not these are the reality, not in themselves, Not the bare statement is satisfactory To what we demand that is more than what it exists in, What's beyond stark-staring is the meaning. (FOS, 64)

The issue, here, is the difference between the mind's "extensions" beyond or from the factual, and an act of transcendent imagination. Gustafson has always turned back from the latter. Earlier in Fire on Stone, in "The Tin Can Turned Back from Transcendence," he had asserted: "What I wish is poems ... / ... Not ladders," and he had punned on "extensions" in the sense of extension-ladder and the poem as projection beyond the world of concrete experience where "This is / This, isn't it?" (FOS, 24). He had concluded: "Far better live dependably, opining / Nothing not central to the illusions of the day." "The Tin Can Turned Back from Transcendence" contrasts the centripetal imagination that looks to the here and now with the centrif-

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ugal imagination which seeks the periphery of experience in order to move beyond the boundaries of sensory experience. In "Cadenza with Green Sail," "extensions" echoes the earlier poem, but the word means differently; it refers to "The way the mind sees the mud and stones," and that perspective is not transcendent so much as it is adjunctive and complementary. The "factual" particulars of "mud and stones" are absolute in themselves as objects, but as elements in human experience, in the total act of human perception, they are parts of a whole, the whole being the admixture of perspective to sensation. For Gustafson, perspective or stance is that complex of consciousness and desire which is the virtu within awareness, and without which the "mud and stones" of the world go unrecognized, unknown for what they are. And what they are is what we see in the light of our need: "the bare statement" is insufficient "To what we demand that is more than what it exists in." This recalls Stevens's assertion in "The Poems of Our Climate" that even in a world of "complete simplicity," "Still one would want more, one would need more."38 Gustafson would also agree with Stevens's later assertion, in "The Sail of Ulysses," that Need makes The right to use. Need names on its breath Categories of bleak necessity, Which, just to name, is to create A help, a right to help, a right To know what helps and to attain, By right of knowing, another plane.39

For`12345Gustafson,"another plane" is "What's beyond stark-staring," or "the meaning." It is to recognize the "categories of bleak necessity," "the mud and stones" of the world, for instance, and by naming them, re-know them; the total act of perception is an act of re-cognition. This, in\tevens's phrase from "Credences of Summer," is "The meaning of the capture," or imagination's paradoxical subjugation of F necessity by yielding to it through the imagination's acts of desire. This is the way the world becomes "this hard prize," or, as\`Gustafsonwrites, the way the mind sees the world of "factual night" as a world of "beauty." And what Gustafson sees is not the transcendence of the particular but its fulfilment; as Stevens writes in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven": "The point of vision and desire are the same."40 So for Gustafson, "the meaning" in the particular is "Not the fiery mist in Orion's sword / But the coming suns, not the star but its nightly / / Reflection in the lake, nor the lake's stasis / But the walk beside it"

203 To Give Intuition a Certitude

(FOS, 64). It is the immanence of the virtu in things, and the cohabiting of human and natural powers as inseparable companions. The language of concentric vision that Gustafson uses in "Cadenza with Green Sail" echoes that of Stevens in "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven": The self, the chrysalis of all men Became divided in the leisure of blue day And more, in branchings after day. One part Held fast tenaciously in common earth And one from central earth to central sky And in moonlit extensions of them in the mind Searched out such majesty as it could find. ... Reality is the beginning not the end, Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega, Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals.41

Gustafson's poem describes this division of self in perception: Any example will do: the moisture drawn down In a majesty of moon and icicle that winter; This morning, the blue-sails down the lake, The green or blue depending on how the refraction Of light meets the eye. Who hoisted Green and what do we make of it? ... So you look at these stars and think wondrous Extensions, such as eternal comprehension Of space and star, coincidence constructing Time — the whole panoply done for the sake of Silver, a tension of silver over mud, Stones; my love; the irrevocability by which A thing is; great propagations! And so, in the relation of yardstick and yardstick, Where I mediate the world is a green sail. I get through it by dint of honesty. (FOS, 64)

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As with Stevens, so for Gustafson, the total act of perception is a "mediation" between "central earth" and "central sky." Gustafson agrees with Stevens that "Reality is the beginning not the end"; Stevens's "Naked Alpha" is for Gustafson "the irrevocability by which / A thing is." But Stevens's issue of reality into "the hierophant Omega" is not the consummation that Gustafson's imagination achieves, nor does Gustafson's imagination urge such finality. The "great conclusions" of "Cadenza with Green Sail" are "wondrous / Extensions" which cannot transcend their earthly base or ignore the self-consciousness that attends their formulation. The interrogative "Who hoisted / Green and what do we make of it?" is an immovable anchor that keeps Gustafson's affirmations honest. Gustafson's "great conclusions" are thus "great propagations." As such, they are extensions in time and space which are acts of a procreative imagination, an imagination which disseminates beliefs that are the outcome of the intercourse between fact and intuition. What the poem propagates is the transmission of the compounded energies of poet and world. In "Green Disposition," Gustafson used the metaphor of "arbitration / By ... love" to describe the way the imagination functions in "this shambles / of magnificence." At the end of "Cadenza with Green Sail" he uses the related metaphor of mediation: And so, in the relation of yardstick and yardstick, Where I mediate the world is a green sail. I get through it by dint of honesty.

The significance of these lines depends on the sense of "mediate." As a transitive verb, it means to divide into two equal parts, but also to effect by mediation or arbitration, to settle a dispute. Both meanings are active here. What Gustafson arbitrates in his poetry are the equal but divided worlds of objective fact and subjective need or desire. His poems seek to recognize these, however, as complementary parts of a whole. Such recognition calls into play the meaning of "mediate" in its intransitive form: to act as a connecting link or to intervene for the purpose of reconciling. The imagination is the agency of mind in the act of total perception which links, which establishes bonds, which makes of perception a "beholding" of the world. This beholding is not the imposition of meaning by transcendent extension beyond concrete experience, but the recognition of the potential in experience. It is the discovery that Stevens affirms in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," when he writes:

205 To Give Intuition a Certitude But to impose is not To discover. To discover an order as of A season, to discover summer and know it, To discover winter and know it well, to find, Not to impose, not to have reasoned at all, Out of nothing to have come on major weather, It is possible, possible, possible.42

To discover by recognizing what is there, and "not to have reasoned at all," was Gustafson's argument in "To Give Intuition a Certitude," when he wrote: "That the desire / Be without reason; that the logic be love." For Gustafson, as for Stevens, to mediate between the world of the green sail and what is beyond it is to "Exile desire / For what is not" and to affirm love for what is.43 For both, the effort is manifest in the poet's language. Gustafson agrees with Stevens that "The imperfect is our paradise," and also that "in this bitterness, delight / ... Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds."44 "I get through it by dint of honesty," Gustafson says; this is all the poet can do, and it is what he recognizes as the achievement in the lives of great artists like Brahms and Beethoven: Having lived properly, writing Music, noting various importances Such as major resolutions, Great scopes and heart-leaps

While missing nothing humanly minor? (FOS, 80) Fire on Stone, with its descent to recognition and ascent to affirmation, with all its moments of magnificence and gloom, is one continuous meditation. The volume is composed of "Cribs and mouldings" (FOS, 36), its architecture arising from the ways life and art shape each other. The overall form of the book is an arc of consciousness that springs from the fundamental tensions in Gustafson's sensibility which provide his poetic with its contradictory perspectives and coincident polarities. The volume marks a major advance in his writing after the work of the mid- and late 19605. His reading of Yeats, Pound, and Stevens in the course of his teaching at Bishop's resulted in a release of energy which catapulted him into the further consolidation of his postmodernist poetic in the volumes of the late 1970s, Corners in the Glass (1977) and Gradations of Grandeur (1979),

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and then onto the high plateau of poetic confirmation in the poetry of the 1980s.

I

n his review of George Woodcock's selected poems in 1976, Gustafson had taken issue with Woodcock's view that the poet should focus on the "exotic and unfamiliar" as subject matter that can be "transferred into myth." Gustafson wrote: "On the contrary, the village pump, one's own backyard is the place of poetry. The ragand-bone shop of the human heart. Move that into myth, into universality if you will, but start elsewhere at grave poetic peril."45 Corners in the Glass (1977) starts, literally, in Gustafson's backyard, with a series of poems set in quiet winter days and nights, with the snow falling softly on the trees and hedges, the few winter birds shattering the air with their song, and sun and stars reminding the poet of the universe that contains him. As with Fire on Stone, Gustafson organizes Corners in the Glass so that it begins in winter and moves forward into the seasons of growth and fruition. Winter is a gentle season in "Wednesday at North Hatley," the first poem in the volume, and allows the poet to proclaim, quietly, the minor victory of his enduring a major illness: It snows on this place And a gentleness obtains. The garden fills with white, Last summer's hedgerow Bears a burden and birds Are scarce.46

The sotto voce of these opening lines begins the gentle music that subtly gathers the rising, iambic-anapestic rhythm into a momentum that is halted by the inevitable counterpoint of rhythm and suggestion in "Bears a burden." The "burden" of music and emotion is the fragility of the moment, the brevity of the victory. "The grosbeak / Fights for seeds, the squirrel / Walks his slender wire" are observations which re-emerge at the end of the poem as natural parables: There is a victory; The heart endures, the house Achieves its warmth and where He needs to, man in woollen Mitts, in muffler, without A deathwish, northern, walks.

207 To Give Intuition a Certitude Except he stop at drifts He cannot hear this snow, The wind has fallen, and where The lake awaits, the road Is his. Softly the snow Falls. Chance is against him. But softly the snow falls. (CIG, 13)

Rhythm and punctuation put death in its place in these lines, as one presence among many; as, in fact, a component of a larger liferhythm through which man moves in place. The music and rhythm - the repeated sounds of "walks," "winds," "where," and "awaits"; "snow," "fallen," "softly," "falls"; and the interplay of iambic and trochaic units — communicate the coexistence of vital and fatal energies: "the road / Is his" but "The lake awaits"; "Chance is against him," but for the moment, it is unfolding slowly and "softly." The lightness of Gustafson's touch is most effective in the final lines, where the subtlety of suggestion marked by the catalectic "falls" in the last line complements the use of the image at the beginning of the previous line and makes, through repetition, an image that brackets the human figure in a world of process which quietly illustrates the "chance" that he must contend with. The burden of Gustafson's technique in a poem like "Wednesday at North Hatley" is to articulate an affirmation that is credible because of its sensitivity to its own degrees. To overstate is to lose credibility and to understate would undermine the moment's force. To affirm in a contemporary poem is to balance not so much joy and despair as grief and despair; to recognize that poetry is "The truth / Plus trouble," as he puts it in "Partial Argument" (CIG, 37). Consequently, Gustafson aspires to write poems whose "music / Holds every nuance of the attentive heart" (CIG, 14). A great deal of the "trouble" in poetry is thus the writing itself. "Schubert, I Think It Was, I Was Listening To" went through fourteen versions before the poet settled on its final lines: Each man his centre of arrogations, And still this music to be heard; This quiet here with stars, A grace acknowledged, this coming night A short loss Before tomorrow's rising up of sun. (CIG, 14)

Here the "attentive heart" acknowledges the arrogance of the artist and the humility of the man, the greatness of the music and the

208 A Poetics of Place contrapuntal majesty of the quiet, the presence of the darkness and the imminence of light. The ultimate nuance is the accedence of "grace" to "loss," but with the triumph of darkness itself undermined by the formal victory of the long line of light over the short line of dark. Loss is the pivotal experience in the recovery of art. The penultimate line is an implacable fulcrum which balances both the "coming night" and the retumescent "rising up of sun." It is because of such moments that Gustafson can feel, in "Morning's Light," that "Even the suffering's worth it" (GIG, 15). "The jonquil is white, the oriole / Sings? No? Then surely there is / Remembrance, that first ecstasy?" This recalls the Wordsworth of the "Ode: Intimations of Immortality," as does Gustafson's language at the end of the poem: There is a sobering beyond all Comprehension. It is this leaving Of suffering, of birds, oriole and elm And remembrance and lake's side, And hearing of music. (CIG, 15)

The echo of Wordsworth's "sober colouring from an eye / That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality"47 once again counterpoints joy and grief within the larger harmony of his perspective. It is a perspective which recognizes "Such beauty in the world, / Such enormity, such cancellations" and regards all of these as "Challenges, senses / To be devoted to, high metaphysics / To accept or deny God's done for!" (CIG, 18). The imperative is "to have life, / Domesticities" and for the poem to hold close to "the world to be praised" (CIG, 18). At the centre of this world is the "home," the physical, emotional, and spiritual habitation that man makes from his time and place. In the midst of the winter world, "The kitchen light / Of the neighbour's, / Square gold in white winter / And dusk, asks affirmation" (CIG, 23). There is an urgency in these poems, a sense that there is not a moment to waste. Knowing that "Chance is against him," and that "The World Comes Up Suddenly" (CIG, 20), the poet looks to fix himself in the quotidian and the concrete. The great universal questions are not denied but they are not given prominence. While he still yearns for answers to his questions about divinity and the purpose of life, and while, as in "A Short Lust for Stars," he can almost believe that "death [would be] acceptable / To be there. To know!", he is not prepared to pay the price of such knowledge. The knowledge he values is the truth of "What's graspable." "I'll have the concrete," he writes in "Trio for Harp and Percussion" (CIG, 34); "I'll /

209 To Give Intuition a Certitude

Have earthly music, heard, / Unsphered, no choirs squeaked / In eternal passacaglia" (CIG, 35). When he looks to the sun, it is because he feels its warmth upon his body and is struck by its light infiltrating his world. The "earthly music" continues to be that of counterpoint for Gustafson. The music of "magnificence" contains the harmony of contrasts: Sole of a shoe, Hermes' sandal; skullcap, halo; Digested mushroom, Helen's shoulder; Earth a heaven! Well, not quite. But what the world can do in time. (CIG, 36)

What the world does in time is change, and Gustafson seeks a poetry that is turned, like clay on the potter's wheel, upon these changes: a poetry which is "Metamorphosis manipulated / By eardrum, pulse and pate!" It is a poetry which is both "Husks and blossoming, sun and mud" (CIG, 36) and which affirms both the beauty and the treachery in the beauty. Gustafson remains critical of those academicians who have institutionalized terror in their literary cartographies. In Corners in the Glass he expresses his understanding of the meaning of "northness", his defining characteristic of the Canadian imagination. It is the perspective that is generated by experience in a landscape of extreme seasonal differences and physical contrasts. "North," as he reveals in "In the Yukon," is the direction of death; and life, for Gustafson, is a relentless journey north. Man moves there, pulled by that fatal gravity. But Gustafson's career develops a poetic which acknowledges and accepts that process, and which turns that gravitational pull into a kinetic energy; and this, in his view, is a quintessentially Canadian act of ingenuity, like making electric power from the Fundy tides. All things reduce, in time, to "what no man can hold hard in mind" (RMP, 36); or, as he says in "Canto for Pan," "time unravels all things borne" (CIG, 39). But for Gustafson, it is man's part in this process to ravel what he can, what he needs; to braid the world around him in a counter-movement that affirms his presence: I count the ribs of elm bark Desperate for sensation, Cram stars, disposition overhead; Seek adherence, here-exactness, footplace, Rank mud first, nearest-dust,

2 10 A Poetics of Place and yet Chew stalks with intellect, headwork brag about; Brain brings cognizance, Categories are brought about by it. ... (CIG, 40)

"World Increases with Thought of It" is the title of this poem, which describes this "increase" as the consequence of "ranking" or the application of value to experience. For Gustafson, this is what it means to "think" about the world; it is to "count" what the attentive heart brings before consciousness; it is to "adhere" to the sensuous particulars of the world, to know them in their "here-exactness," but also to consider them as the ground upon which intellect stands, has its "footplace." The "increase" is not a metaphysical or transcendental supplement. The "categories" that are "brought about" by "headwork" are the divisions of value the poet needs to make in order to make sense of what would otherwise be the overwhelming of consciousness by sensation. In this, Gustafson continues his attempt to balance the two activities of his imagination which have coexisted in his sensibility and his poetry from the beginning: the activity of the imagination as a response to the numinous world of immanent force, and the activity of the imagination as the creation of value from the objective world of fact. Intuitively, Gustafson recognizes the error of each when taken to its extreme or considered as exclusive of the other. The danger of the latter view of imagination is the creation of illusions which corrupt or transform reality into something that cannot be grasped as true. That Gustafson is aware of the difficulty in maintaining a balance between these perspectives is evident throughout his later poetry. Whenever he achieves it, the occasion is only that, not a res ting-point; the balance must be sought over and over again in every poem. In "The World Increases with Thought of It" he images this balance as a conference or conjoining of objective and subjective realities: "Structures of night confer, conjoin / With architectures of thought" (CIG, 40). His language is tantalizingly ambiguous in its delicacy; "confer," when used intransitively, as it is here, can mean "to conform with or to," or "to converse, talk together, consult." The two senses conjoin the two activities of imagination that issue from Gustafson's sensibility.48 This symbiosis of immanence and poesis in Gustafson's poetry is found in two poems which are juxtaposed in Corners in the Glass: "The Overwhelming Green" (CIG, 43) and "The Moment Is Not Only Itself (CIG, 44). The titles themselves point to the two different, yet related, imaginative experiences. "The Overwhelming Green" recalls

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"Green Disposition" in Fire on Stone, and as in that poem, so here a moment of intense sensual pleasure displaces thoughts of origin and causality; it is a "moment centred on / Itself," as he says of another such experience (in "Ostinato," CIG, 67). The poem begins with a characteristic manipulation of sound and sense: The green was overwhelming, Verdant or, trembled Against the sky, the sky Light blue, a blue That deepened as the eye Held on. It would have been Deprivation not to have Taken on death to see this. (CIG, 43)

A three-stress line lays down the base rhythm, but it's the way Gustafson works rhythm with sound that provides the lines with their propulsive force. Long and short vowels unfold in contrapuntal patterns; alliteration, repetition and incidental rhyme support the evolving structure of thought and feeling. The stress on "green" delivers a rhetorical as well as a prosodic effect. (As in the earlier "Green Disposition" [FOS, 63], the image is conceptual as well as sensory.) The sound of the long e continues through the stanza in "deepened" and "been," and is even cut into the ending of "Taken," because of the consonantal echo, before it is repeated finally in "see." This long e works in conjunction with the long o in "overwhelming" and contrapuntally with the short e in that word. The latter sound is picked up in "trembled," in the first syllable of "Deprivation" and in "Held," before it, too, is cut into "Taken" and then clearly echoed in "death." These two vowel patterns progress contrapuntally through language which is juxtaposed conceptually: "green," "deepened," "been," "see" connote the vitality of the sensuous moment, while "overwhelming," "trembled," "Held," "Deprivation," and "death" evoke the fatality implicit in all sensual joy for Gustafson. The way the two patterns merge in "Taken on" is masterful, with its connotative conjunction of senses: to "take on" death in the sense of a pugilistic challenge, and to take it on in the sense of a mantle of mortality - both of which serve Gustafson's perspective in the poem. The contrast in vowel sounds in the first line also accentuates the effect of the final soft and unstressed syllable which, with the pauses, delivers the sense of wonder and awe behind the line. Despite the punctuation, the force of this initial dramatic statement is carried over into line 2, as "Verdant or" repeats and subtly modulates the ver sound from "over-

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whelming." The alliteration brought about by the elision of the t in "Verdant" to the monosyllable and then its repetition in "trembled" pulls the line together, but the caesura maintains the line as a balancing of halves, which again is expressive of the emotional and conceptual burden of the lines. Caesura is particularly effective in slowing down the following lines and accentuating their emotional weight, a weight that is carried primarily by the double repetition in parallel constructions of "Against the sky, the sky / Light blue, a blue." The wonder comes through in the long i and u vowels, which extend the long e pattern, and in the incidental rhyme of "sky" and "eye." Rhythmically, Gustafson orchestrates the stress patterns in these lines to accentuate the meaning. After the rising pattern of iambs in line i, he counters with the falling rhythm of line 2, subtly substituting a caesura for the unstressed half of the second trochee. The rhythmic irregularity here intensifies the sense of "overwhelming" and the effect of the natural moment on the poet. He shifts back to iambic trimeter in line 3, the iambic foot giving emphasis to the repeated "sky," before he turns into the spondee of "light blue." This manoeuvre is particularly effective because the stress on the first syllable enlarges the rhyme with "sky," and this intensifies the rhythm and sound effects already given force by the enjambment. The assonance in these lines is highlighted by this iamb-spondee-iamb sequence; "the sky and "a blue" are thus linked metrically as well as conceptually and imagistically. The continued enjambment of "That deepened as the eye / Held on" is effective because of the quickened pace caused by the pyrrhic, and the emphatic halt of the caesura after the spondee, "Held on." The climax of thought, sound, and rhythm comes in the last line of the stanza and the technique is typical of Gustafson's late style: the slight shock produced when contraries are suddenly brought into relation. The effect begins when a line which is simple in terms of rhythm and diction runs over into a line which is much less straightforward. Six monosyllabic words suddenly give way to the four-syllabled "Deprivation"; the effect is enhanced by the rhythm: iambs rise into trochees and a dactyl. Each line is driven to the next in order to requite grammatical deprivation. The falling rhythm of the dactyl "not to have" results in a definite rhetorical impetus being given to the beginning of the last line - "Taken on death to see this." The witty turn - death, the ultimate deprivation, diminished by the intense pleasure of this moment of natural beauty — is registered subtly, quietly, with the loose parallelism and echoes of the lines: "Held on'V'Taken on," "have been'V'to have / Taken." As these lines reveal, Gustafson's technique is deceptively simple. It

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continues to rely on the qualities of music accessible to language, on the meaning and emotion that are conveyed by sound and rhythm; but it also continues to marry the intellect with the senses. There is a great deal of "headwork" in these lines. The simple diction, for example, draws attention to the polysyllabic words and once they have our attention we recognize the conceptual link between "overwhelming" and "Deprivation"; the thrust of these lines is the belief urged by sensory pleasure that life's deprivations are occasionally requited, the vacuum richly filled, and death, the ultimate deprivation, is a diminished absolute in the face of these overwhelming moments. Mortality is not too expensive a price to pay for such joy. What also diminishes in the context of such a moment is the worry about causality. In an earlier poem in the volume, "The World Comes Up Suddenly" (CIG, 20), a poem which could have been titled "The Overwhelming White," Gustafson described the sensation of being caught in a sudden snow squall. The effect was a total blindness; in that white-out, "Mind disappeared," and along with mind went all thoughts "of galaxies and suns, and black holes / ... Infinitely contracting, going crackers / Infinitely ... Religion. Rip-offs / Flung forever" (CIG, 20). Gustafson did not allegorize the experience; he comments: "Not that the storm was irony. It was / ... As it was." The effect in "The Overwhelming Green" is similar; the sensory moment turns him away from "God / And Paternity and supernal / Intimations" to consider only the flowers at his feet. He sees a peony: Intimations - there To be looked at, used, itself, Common, affianced and adjunct To a meaning or not, just As you wished, in love or not Or however you made the peony Be because you looked at it In a certain state because The song sparrow broke Into song or over your shoulder, Should you look up, A hill with trees and a house, Or that you had to get on To something else but meanwhile

Looked at the peony that was there. (CIG, 43) The grandeur is the flower "that was there," just as the storm "was / As it was." The flower is "adjunct / To a meaning or not." Gustafson

214 A Poetics of Place wants to let the flower be and yet at the same time allow it to be more than it might be. He recognizes the role of mind in perception, but his moments of greatest value are those occasions when the mind is overwhelmed by the world, not when the mind overwhelms. His use of "affianced and adjunct" in these lines is important in this respect because it emphasizes the otherness and independence of the flower, but also its potential role in an intuition of relationship. "The Overwhelming Green" reasserts Gustafson's preference for "earthly music" (CIG, 35), but the poem which follows it, "The Moment Is Not Only Itself," immediately reminds us that preference does not preclude choice but emerges from it.49 While raking leaves in autumn, suddenly the poet hears in his mind Chopin's Prelude in Eb Major: "I / Leaned over to get autumn in bags / And suddenly it was April" (CIG, 44). The title of the poem asserts that reality in its fullness is discovered in such conjunctions, the mysterious supplements that memory and imagination provide as adjuncts to experience. The question, as always for Gustafson, is just what to make of such moments, for he cannot resist making something from them. The answer is, of course, poetry; but the danger is a poetry that either makes too much or too little of them, or which makes over the experience into something else. Here, autumn must not be lost or evaded; the mind's intuitive leap to metaphor must not abandon the ground from which it pushes off. But neither must it repress that impulse to leap. Gustafson cannot explain the conjunction of bagging leaves and Chopin, of autumn and spring: It Was October, almost the end of it. Air was gentle up from the lake, It smelled of branches, there was a crow's caw, The sun was hot. It was spring; so. Perhaps that was the craziness brought Chopin In my head, that Prelude when The year was finished. Affiance fools The brain. As in love often. What is real is what the heart Has. (CIG, 44)

He is leery of pushing the moment too. "Affiance" recalls the lines in "The Overwhelming Green" which described the peony as "Common, affianced and adjunct / To a meaning or not" (CIG, 43). But it is important to note that it is the "brain" that is capable of being fooled.

215 To Give Intuition a Certitude The intuition is real; its decipherment and articulation as meaning are the problem.50 "The Moment Is Not Only Itself moves toward its inconclusion with an echo of "Cadenza with Green Sail." In that poem, Gustafson asked: "Who hoisted / Green and what do we make of it?" (FOS, 64). Here, thinking of the sudden hearing of Chopin, he writes: "What chose / To have it there is your own guess" (C/G, 45). Gustafson does proffer his own explanation, though it, too, is more "guess" than supposition: My guess is the way senses Are lived. Not to deny autumn Its own glory, turned leaves Affirming April are their prologue Brought to bear, high mindings, Signals of thought, code of body Left exquisite and tall doings, Structures of intolerance that make end Of foliage, of summer, descendings, however You finish it, not matter. (C/G, 45)

Once again, it is a matter of maintaining "adherence, here-exactness, footplace" (C/G, 40) while recognizing "conjunction"; "senses / Are lived," for Gustafson, through their completion in thought. His senses are thus parts of speech in the body's language and the poet's task is to translate what his senses say into the language of the poem. In this instance, Gustafson must not deny autumn its glory; he must let it be as it was; but he must likewise affirm his sensed intuition that turned leaves are a prologue to spring. The falling leaves are thus "Signals of thought," a natural semaphore which his senses have decoded because of the conjunction of his own body's "code" with that natural language; they are "Structures of intolerance" which make the end of foliage and of summer into a pattern of "descendings" the significance of which "is your own guess"; however you finish the thought, it does not matter. What has mattered is the coincidence of autumn and spring, mind and senses, memory and anticipation. The poems which follow "The Overwhelming Green" and "The Moment Is Not Only Itself extend their procedures. A number record the loving presence of the wife-companion; the poet watches her with the same attentive heart that scrutinizes the miracle of the peony in "The Overwhelming Green." The world is "Unfinished and hurt" but "My love waters gardens so they grow" (C/G, 46). She is the poet's ultimate proof that "What is real is what the heart / Has" (C/G, 44).

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Her presence is a force in his life that balances his growing sense of death's imminence: "Day / Sets and not many to count. / She hums" (CIG, 47). His love for Betty accentuates his premonitory sense: Love means dying. Who's aware Of the anonymous flaw who's not in love? Nothing much matters really. ... (CIG, 48)

But at the same time this love provides the moments of domestic experience with an intensity that contracts time: "Forever's now to those who love" (CIG, 49). These love poems then give way to a series of travel poems which follow naturally because they are recollections of journeys made together and of shared experiences. Moreover, although the poems have foreign settings — Altamira, Paestum, Lindos, Etna - their world is one with that of the North Hatley poems because it is the same world of contrasts and contradictions. The travel poems lead into a sequence of "witness" poems on contemporary world affairs which Gustafson titles "Phases of the Present." The tone of these poems is extremely bitter and sarcastic. As Gustafson's joy is overwhelming in his moments of imaginative "increase," so too are his repugnance and anger at the barbarism of recent history. Nor is it an objective commentary that he offers in these poems; rather, the anger is self-lacerating and the bitterness partakes of a profound personal shame. "The Newspaper" seems to achieve its force through its sheer cruelty: That photo of the little Jew in the cap, Back to the gun held by the Nazi With splay feet aware of the camera, The little boy his hands in the air, I turn over. I don't want to see it. As a member of the human race. I am Civilized. I am happy. I flap the Newspaper with the picture over So that when it is picked up to be taken Down cellar to be put with the trash I won't see it. I am sensitive. The little boy is dead. He went Through death. The cap is his best one. He has brown eyes. He does not Understand. Putting your hands Up in front of a carbine prevents The bullet. He is with the others.

317 To Give Intuition a Certitude Some of them he knows, so It is all right. I turn The paper over, the picture face Down. (CIG, 58) This poem proceeds to its paradoxically heartless/heart-broken conclusion by means of a relentlessly precise technique. The absence of internal pauses in the first four lines means the reader is assaulted by the images without any chance to catch a breath. Panic looms. The details are spare but evocative, particularly because of the carefully chosen language which seems distanced but is actually loaded with sentiment. The shift to the shorter sentences and fragments conveys the rise in emotional pressure. The repeated first-person pronoun in the middle lines draws out the dramatic confrontation going on between the witness and the victim, who challenges in the subsequent repetition of "he" and "his." The terrible wit evident in the repetition of "over" and "down" draws out the horror of the event — of the original murder and of the witness's sense of helplessness. The poem is a savage indictment of the mentality that seeks to put such knowledge in the basement of the human mind, out of sight with the other psychic trash; to make of history a bundle of discarded newspapers. And yet the poem understands the gesture. It does not allow this understanding to overrule the moral challenge, however: the vicious parallel drawn between turning the newspaper photo face down and the boy being turned face down into a mass grave by his murderers implicates the speaker in the atrocity. And then, of course, as the reader turns over the page, yet another irony lashes out. For Gustafson, the witness is not innocent and witness poetry is not a poetry of self-righteous outrage or moral superiority. It is a poetry of the broken heart rather than of moral outrage. The latter is too often the result of an "abstracted stance" and produces a poetry of "horror and despair by rote"; as he writes in his review of Woodcock's poetry of the 19308: "The world in general suffers and dies. So it does. But to stop at that distance is to be too far removed from the heartbeats in the wrist."51 The poems in "Phases of the Present" hover on the brink of panic. "It is a beastly world" (CIG, 62) in which man is by far the most savage predator. "The hour is doom" (CIG, 66) and there is no philosophy to explain or redeem us; but there is, for Gustafson, a ground upon which man can face his times: "the area where despair finds its answer and where death is triumphed over by the very thing its recognition gives meaning and strength to: individual love."52 For Gustafson this is both the love of another human being and the love of place. The last poem in the sequence, "Osti-

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nato," juxtaposes the poet's knowledge of what is going on in the world with his loving attention to a scene in nature. The two worlds are one and simultaneous in his consciousness; they do not cancel each other out but rather oppose in a tensed balancing, and it is from their opposition that the poet would gather his "provision" (CIG, 67). In Corners in the Glass, the emotions seem sharper, the contrasts more violent, than in Fire on Stone. There is an urgency in the voice which mutes the poet's wit; it does not silence it, but in the later volume intellect seems increasingly humbled by the heart. In the year that Corners in the Glass was published, Gustafson retired from teaching at Bishop's. He was sixty-eight. While he would continue to travel, he would not travel on the scale of his earlier world journeys. The house and locale in North Hatley come to dominate the poetry of the 1980s, serving as the omphaloi of both his immediate observations and his far-reaching meditations. This is evident in the new poems included in Sequences (1979), a collection which gathers the various poem-series from his earlier books.53 In "Winter Sequence," Gustafson reasserts his sense of what it is to have a northern perspective: March is a muddy month below. In the mountains, snow Still, stripped larch, Aspen, but mostly green, Bent green, Firs, the spruce, the cedar. By the fire I sit, Contend with March. But by the heart's north I cope, Nothing claims the tenure of the heart, Winter, farness, Nor lake ice so that the foot Walks water, That greatness. Fourfold seasons, Not their indifference Matters to the northern heart, That far green And distance, That claiming north. (S, 103)

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The echo of "At Moraine Lake" (RMP, 18) in "By the fire /1 sit" is a telling coincidence. In that poem he had rejected the view that Canada is "a country without myths" by calling us to the myth of the here and now, the world of the concrete, sensory moment and the interplay of season, landscape and natural process in human consciousness. Twenty years later, Gustafson has fashioned his own myth from the particulars of his northern landscape and his heart's attention to its "Fourfold seasons." His imagination is not cowed by their "indifference" or by the landscape's extremes of cold and distance; instead, it feels "claimed" by the north. This is not just his resignation to death, to "The dredge of that gravity"; it is his intuitive sense of being at home in the northern world, of belonging, and of not needing to transcend it. This is a mythopoeic coherence which is essentially an extension of the poet's individualism, the integration of self in the particularities of place and time which has come to Gustafson with his poetic maturity. By the late 1970s, Gustafson's lyrics take on a mythopoeic quality which convinces by virtue of its apparent artlessness. A fine example of this power generated by the mystery of the mundane is "Country Walking," the last poem in the sequence titled "Proposition for Gold Trumpets": Glittering with sun as the wind moved Were all the leaves of the tree. It was a concordance between heaven And the earth. Below, evening fell, No shadow, but a deepening green. Birds came and went. The time Seemed holy though there was no proof, The leaves trembled in the sun and the tall Green was standing from some force, The birds sang for some reason. It was clear something was at work, Not only sensation. The man built The new lattice-work under His verandah and the sound of nails hammered Was on the air. Five strokes And the nail was in. Something was built. You could hear that. An improvement. On the upper leaves sun still trembled Like gold, like beaten gold, and the air Overhead was darkening blue and the birds sang. (S, 122)

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Gustafson is at his best when he is most celebratory, and he celebrates when he is most attentive to the powers that cohabit his world. Here, the attentive heart encounters sun, wind, birds, trembling leaves, and deepening green as presences it would be impious not to acknowledge, but which only a fool would try to rationalize: "The time / Seemed holy though there was no proof." The moment was an accidence of "Some force"; "The birds sang for some reason." The moment, again, is not only itself: "It was clear something was at work, / Not only sensation." But the poem does not lecture. Though it totters on the brink of discourse, Gustafson exhibits remarkable restraint. The poet builds his lattice of words. It is a design that is based on the premise that a structure's strength comes where components cross. The concordance of elements may even comprise a strength of cross-purposes. Something is built: the poem as home improvement. Gustafson ended the 1970s by turning to a major project, a long poem-sequence which would present his aesthetic, moral, and philosophical values as a coherent body of thought and feeling. Gradations of Grandeur is the summation of five decades of living and writing. (The poem first appeared in 1979 and was then reissued, with revisions, in 1982.) It is his "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," but the epigraph to the work is a quotation by Pound: "The essential thing in a poet is that he builds us his world."

T

he image of the lattice in "Country Walking" (S, 122) is a fitting metaphor for the structural dynamics of Gradations of Grandeur. Gustafson builds his world in this poem by overlapping the constituents of his world-view: personal experience and history, the sacred and the secular, art and politics, sensation and abstraction, joy and despair, memory and the moment-now. Along with such terms as "magnificence" and "majesty," "grandeur" has been a term Gustafson has used in his poetry to refer to the totality of the physical universe and human existence. The phrase "gradations of grandeur" expresses his sense of the interconnectedness of all things in nature and in human experience. The first section begins: Gradations of grandeur descend And all is reality, sitting here In the sun, the mind's integrations Proof, accumulations ply on ply Real as diamonds dug.54

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The poem is Gustafsoris most sustained meditation on the questions of belief, value, and meaning which have presided in his work from the very beginning. It is an attempt to consolidate his aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical thinking. The result is not only a major work of his maturity as poet and thinker; it is also a major contribution to the tradition of the long poem in Canada. In its successful merging of lyricism and discourse, philosophy and aesthetics, it is exemplary as a poetic discussion of difficult material in a language and form that are accessible but at the same time appropriate to their task. Gradations of Grandeur does not attempt the scope of Pound's Cantos; it is rather on the scale of Stevens's longer poems, which it recalls in its use of short sections composed of three-line stanzas, interconnected by recurring images and motifs. The poem is composed of sixty-four sections, with a break, significantly titled "Intermission," after section thirty-two. The sections build, "ply on ply," from the initial affirmation of section one, "The world is worth living," to the ultimate credo of section sixty-four, "The moment is all." Like Pound's Cantos, Gustafson's poem presents the poet's ethos: his character, values, and disposition toward experience. Like Stevens's "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," it is a discourse on the relations between mind and matter, the significance of human creativity in relation to physical experience, and the limits of human understanding in the light of that creativity. The poem is composed of affirmations of belief and strategies of affirmation. The opening section introduces imagery and terms which carry much of the subsequent burden of meaning. The section's epigraph affirms the poem's central belief: "The world is worth living" (GG, 7). The sun is the most prevalent image in the poem, as it has been throughout Gustafson's poetry. As the centre of the galaxy and the source of light, life and warmth, it expresses the paradox of a distant yet all-pervasive divinity. Its rhythms of presence and absence are the arch-rhythms of existence itself. Its daily and seasonal gradations of light and warmth are the paradigm for the interconnectedness of all living things. The sun compels a number of the lyric moments in the sequence, in which Gustafson's belief in the worth of living is made palpable. The natural movement from dark to light, from storm to clean, sunlit air, is a movement Gustafson intuits as a preternatural language: "Sunshaft struck through salted green, / Compounds hitched like a hooky alphabet" (GG, 37). This language of Helios has eros for its grammar: "The hot sun down, gases /... And minerals collide with love" (GG, 53). The collisions are glorious coincidences:

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Mind-boggling was the day. There was sun and a clear air. There was no fear of heart Or lung or joint, the beginning of the end Anonymous, across the world no one Was inflicting death but in three places, The television was turned off, The colour was highly placed, blue With white clouds, a quick bird Across, ruby-throated, Lear Was read, most of the world revisited, Delphi to go back to, Ravenna, mostly It was the radiance of roots working, natural Visitation, the iridescence, Green, of a red-headed fly, Absurdity, evolutions of The inexplicable, tendrils, the wasp, Unswallowable sea-urchins, and of course The mean mean enough to sit there Insensitive. Someone pushed a lawn-mower. Rabelais and Jesus had just met. (GG, 59)

This lyric, with its epigraph of "glory, glory," is an instance of "the mind's integrations," the poet's management of the "accumulations ply on ply" of his experience, be it sensory or intuitive, as "assortments" which fulfil him. Such "accumulations" urge his belief that "There's a margin for joy" (GG, 13), that "Intuition is durable" (GG, 14), and that "Being is positive" (GG, 15). The "mind's integrations" are the product of imagination and will, both of which are contained in Gustafson's notion of love. To see the world as gradations of grandeur is a matter of choice, as much as of perception, a choice of intuitions. Yeats wrote that "In dreams begin responsibility";55 for Gustafson, "Drv ams compel, sort the world" (GG, 17) and "Being impels, compels the blood" (GG, 14). The poet's dreams or intuitions have the force of "assertions" and these assertions "assort the world" (GG, 17). To give intuition a certitude is to believe in the reality of the dream-intuition: "Guess is certainty when it's

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love" (GG, 18). But the intuition must be acted upon: "Instinct is not enough" (GG, 20); "Ceremonies are needed" (GG, 21): Ceremonies shape instinct, Manners that are moral, the word In action, music which is itself. Beauty is that which is least waste, Voltaire's garden, the sun's extravagance Dug for. ... (GG, 21)

The shaping power of ceremony is the love within it, guiding the action toward ritual. Imagination is thus the will to love, and works of the imagination are any acts that are shaped by this will; they provide the continuity which gives an individual life its aim and the tradition of art its lasting value. But "Love / Lacking: indifference, the deadly harm" (GG, 20). For Gustafson, art embodies the tradition of life-affirming human choices. Its vitalism is the wavelike motion of the ocean of being in which man floats. To choose art is to choose life over death, love over hate, and hope over despair. The consequences of this choice include the discovery that "Mighty solaces inhere" (GG, 7): We come to know. Not all comes At once. Suffering is first, Joy and the loss of it, fact And reduction, malice. Wisdom is Accumulation, music is got to, Not taken for, as everything. (GG, 19)

To live without art, to live without love, is to live in confusion: "But this alone be sure of: lacking / Art, a mess. Art's humanity, / And that, the way to beckoning heaven" (GG, 23). As a creative act, the work of art for Gustafson is love in one of its "guises" and thus "a sacrament of praise" (GG, 34). As the latter, it is an act of homage to a world the poet considers sacred; moreover, it is a participation in the divinity immanent in that world. "Pursue particularities" (GG, 45) is the strategy Gustafson advises for such participation; or, "Anyway make love" (GG, 44). The masters Gustafson refers to in the poem are all figures who have realized that "The world is for choosing" (GG, 30) and that "The choice is to love beauty" (GG, 31). Style is thus an expression of the artistic will;

224 A Poetics of Place style not only tests the artist's sincerity, it is itself the characterization of his choice: Style is action shaped, structure Done, the form without waste, And time ordered, to Tightness come. (GG, 35) For the poet, the danger is that "Words can trivialize" (GG, 38). In his pursuit of the immanent particular, he must recognize the radiance of the thing in itself and that the act of the poem is an imaginative beholding, a witnessing to the world's continuous "becoming," which he courts with his desire: The act only will do. A need Of poems, a contemplation of flowers Is a desire for the act, Not their satisfaction, their business In a sacrament of praise. A fresh day can so bring longings Only virtues will do, absorptions Of colour, consanguinities of great Green, identities of gold ongoings Such as make men fools For sun ... What sudden deliverances stand for, what Will do so we exhaust infinite Possibilities on acts of becoming. (GG, 57) As an act of becoming, the poem is coincident with the world it praises; its poetic processes seek their amalgamation with "the majesty the becoming" that evokes them (GG, 58). The aesthetic goal is thus spiritual: "Only Godhood will do" (GG, 58): The temple is holy to our becoming, Each past suffering saved, the casting Off of this unknowing to be died For, so we become that radiance. (GG, 58)

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"Epiphanies are got to" Gustafson proclaims, "The instant when nothing need be explained, / Without need of challenge, the existence, / When the poem is" (GG, 61). The poet plots his way to the achievement by recognizing the potential in imperfection. Artistic effort is the striving toward "completion, the moment / Of arrival" (GG, 61), in which the poem becomes an entrance, an altar; but "The achieving is all" (GG, 62); the glory is in the process: Better than perfection, the perfecting, Knowing the knowing is surpassable, Imperfection to be the awareness If the stone is to be carved, the possession To be had, of the entrance, of the altar. (GG, 62)

It is from the imperfect particulars of his own experience that the poet selects the elements of his sacramental acts: "Therefore each one in his god's / Name, his paradise his own, / His imperfections a vine and a trellis" (GG, 63). Gradations of Grandeur concludes with a sequence of lyrics which reaffirm the access of grace in the fully lived moment and the capacity of art to register such a moment as the actuality of a fully loved world: "The moment enough, the god achieved" (GG, 65). "Brevity is always included" (GG, 72) and Gustafson's affirmation is a continuity of discrete moments, not a continuous dogmatism. Light and dark alternate. The process depends on "The accidental," on "Haphazards, transmutations," the "Recognitions not set" by presupposed significance (GG, 67). "The universe is up to something" (GG, 69) but the design is beyond the grasp of body and intellect. Moreover, the affirmation must include the evidence for denial; the selection must be representative: That the statement have reference to experience, That the vision has been earned, that irony Validates the metaphysics. (GG, 70)

In the final lyric in the work, Gustafson sums up his faith in his poetic as a way of knowing the world deeply and respectfully, as a way of making attention prayerful and the imagination an organ expressive of man's deepest powers of communion with the physical world, his fellow man, and the divinity that inhabits them in time and space:

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And so the moment is all, neither Desire nor repugnance except for the want Of waste, the hurt assigned, another His love denied, his difference decried; Peace in the avenue of elms, autumn's Turning, the ridge of the valley come To the westering sun, the interim our Design, insistence of our dream To tell what was, what is to come, Finally that which we do. Only The praise of love, the humour gained, The permanence of temporary gods. (GG, 74)

Gustafson's dream of design is, ultimately, his wish for his own completion, that individuation of self which centres an individual's integration within the totality of his world and its multiplicity of processes. Whatever hope Gustafson sees for the future of the race is a hope for individuals. Art, or for him, poetry, as the product of an individual act of creation and the object of another individual's attention, is a source of human strength and a reservoir of human wisdom. "Man is devious" (GG, 11) but "Stupidity can be overcome" (GG, i o). "The creative mind uses suffering" after it has been used by it (GG, 10). The evil and the suffering, the errors and disasters cannot be denied; they have to be part of the wisdom. And they are part of it because "Wisdom's / A shaping"; as "our own will / Shapes action," we must will to be wise (GG, 20). And this willing, for Gustafson, is the agency of love. "Love / Lacking: indifference, the deadly harm" (GG, 20). To turn away from art, from the good and the beautiful, from its fraction of the human best, is to fail ourselves; it is to worship the gods of destruction and despair. What Gustafson shows in Gradations of Grandeur is that despair is a choice; that man chooses it over its alternatives. To reject affirmation is not necessarily to choose despair, but man is deluded if he presents despair as a condition forced upon him by circumstances or history. Gustafson makes his choice of perspective clear. It is a choice that is urged upon him by his intuitions, but it is not a blinkered perspective. Gradations of Grandeur is a highly dramatic work. The voice is at various times sly and self-conscious, brazen and ecstatic; witty, sarcastic, devout, blasphemous, banal, exotic, humorous, elegiac, prosaic, hieratic, colloquial, elliptical; it is one voice with many tongues

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in as many cheeks. And yet its speech is not garbled. It is a comprehensive and comprehensible witnessing. The shifting tonalities dramatize fluctuations of thought and feeling, gradations of poetic intensity. Structurally, sections qualify or even contradict each other, often sequentially. The poem builds as a form-in-tension, which has been Gustafsoris approach to poetic form from the beginning of his career. The tension is a consequence of the interaction of aesthetic and religious desire. For Gustafson, the poem's need is the poet's thirst for communion with that divinity he senses as immanent in experience. The poem aspires to be an altar, a place of ceremony, a platform for the offering of self and work to a creative divinity it seeks humbly to reciprocate. The aesthetic moment for Gustafson is thus a consummation and epiphany. The sequence begins and ends affirming the value of human experience. The poet's words and rhythms seek a synchronicity with experience's clash of contraries which, when achieved, discloses the shaping of body and soul. The facts of time and space, in limiting the power of the human dream, paradoxically accentuate its magnificence. The grandeur of the whole is intuited in the fully attended moment and that "moment is all" and sufficient to affirm. Gradations of Grandeur gathers together the insights and intuitions of scores of lyric moments and shapes them into a coherent vision. Experience has convinced Gustafson that life is significant; that there is meaning to be taken from its accidents, continuity to be discovered in its changes; that there is a "permanence of temporary gods." The value of intuition is proclaimed, and of ceremony. The stupidity and evil of man are recognized and their stain upon human achievement is seen to be considerable. But stupidity and evil are not the only constants in history. From season to season the sun shines, the earth turns and grows again and again through its cycles. And man, too, continues to hope and to win his temporary joys. Dignity can be recovered, if not preserved. Nor can creativity be denied or long suppressed. For Gustafson, man's greatest hope is his connection with earth's vital processes; his creativity, love, and spirit surge from forces immanent in the physical world. The creative impulse demands that he choose this world, engage it in his art, and use that art to look honestly and closely at himself and his actions. Only a humour rooted in deep compassion and a sure grasp of the physical realities of sexual love and natural beauty will keep man and his art sane during such an investigation. Only a deep reverence for life will provide his affirmations with the techniques capable of carrying his conviction. Gustafson acknowledges his desire for transcendent certainty, but he continues to salt it with a down-to-earth pragmatism - a benign seep-

228 A Poetics of Place ticism and an open mind, rather than a dishonest cynicism or a dogmatic pessimism. Life is holy, that's enough. Human acts can and should aspire to be, in the phrase he takes from Stevens, "sacraments of praise." The universe seems to be up to something, and for the intuitive man, what seems is as real as anything else. For a poet like Gustafson, what he utters must be shaped by the integrity of that intuition.

CHAPTER SIX

Earthly Music The poem is accurate love. Ralph Gustafson

The last decade has been Gustafson's most prolific, with five volumes of new poems; Landscape with Rain (1980), Conflicts of Spring (1981), Directives of Autumn (1984), Winter Prophecies (1987), and The Celestial Corkscrew (1989); two volumes of selected poems, The Moment Is All (1983) and At the Ocean's Verge (1984); a new edition of his collected short stories, The Vivid Air (1980); the revised edition of Gradations of Grandeur (1982); a witness poem published in pamphlet form, Solidarnosc: Prelude (1983); a collection of old and new Impromptus (1984); and yet another revised edition of The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1984). In 1987, Sono Nis Press published The Collected Works of Ralph Gustafson in three volumes: Plummets and Other Partialities, a collection of prose, and the Collected Poems, in two volumes. Despite another bout of serious illness in 1985, Gustafson's energies and desire have not diminished and the poems continue to arrive. Landscape with Rain, Conflicts of Spring, Directives of Autumn, and Winter Prophecies, taken together, form a cycle, or another of Gustafson's "sequences," but with the components being whole books rather than individual poems. Each volume contains sections of witness poems, love poems, poems set in foreign places or recollecting earlier travels, and, always in the majority, descriptive-meditative poems set in and around the house in North Hatley. In the latter, Gustafson brings to perfection his personal form of the postmodern lyric of attention - the poem that centres itself in the recollected moment, a moment which forms itself in the tension between the centripetal focus on the sensory particulars being described and the countervailing centrifugal impulse of the meditative mind that uses those particulars as a swimmer uses the edge of the pool to push off from, in an effort to get to a larger centre of thought and experience. The close observation of the seasons in these volumes is Gustafson's

230 A Poetics of Place way of coming to terms with time; the changes in his own body, in his perspective, come to seem contiguous with those in the landscape and the natural world. In staying close to the seasons and the landscape, Gustafson's poems fuse the poet with the world of process. Working in the garden, walking the land, the poet is seen as belonging to the place, and preparing, ultimately, to merge with it. The settings of house, garden, and environs form the fixed but constantly changing ground of Gustafson's sense of being in the world. By now, the familiar activities have become personal ceremonies. Gustafson lives in a sacral world; his loving attendance to its particulars is a recognition of its sanctity. Pruning bushes, potting plants, cutting flowers are acts of homage and praise, and his poems are appendages to those rituals, praising, in their own processes, the rhythms and forces that inhere in their creation. The news headlines continue to blow through this world and the poems; human suffering and failure are ever-present. So are the sky and stars and the thoughts and questions they always urge upon Gustafson about an absent, helpless god and the human need for meaning and value. And in every season and setting there is the continued presence of the wife, lover, and companion, whose love has come to embody, for Gustafson, the most convincing answer to all his questions of meaning and value. "Or Consider Lilacs," in Landscape with Rain, and "The Sun in the Garden," in Conflicts of Spring, are the mature expression of Gustafson's postmodern perspective and the synthesis of sensory attention, spiritual celebration, and moral witness which occurs in his later poetry, and in "Aspects of a Cut Peach" and "Hunter's Moon," in Directives of Autumn, Gustafson produces two of his finest poems. Gustafson's phrase for this sacral world is "new world northern," which he uses as the title for an important essay in the University of Toronto Quarterly in 1980.' The local world of North Hatley and the whole northern half of the continent are included in the phrase. "New World Northern" is Gustafson's ultimate myth of place, of northern experience; it is a world defined by its location but always "new," a world in which space and time seem to have merged in a single dimension. It is a world in which Gustafson feels totally at home and constantly excited: "The 'ill-defined' space around the Canadian poet evokes restlessness, awe, perhaps humility. ... Contrasts and seasons make up our Question. The answer will always be coming. Becoming" (NWN, 62-3). Terror is not his response to the vastness that surrounds him: "Nature is indifferent. We have got over the illusion that external objects are actuated by human feelings" (NWN, 63). The years of looking closely at this northern world have resulted in definite convictions: "We are not an undefined space. This harsh and

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lovely land is not ambiguous" (NWN, 65). In Gustafson's view, the Canadian poet should welcome his overwhelming: "Thunderstruck before the country's potential, its poets flounder in exuberance and choice, not in terror.... The vast reaches diminish hubris and burnish love" (NWN, 65). At the heart of his myth of the "new world northern" is the intuited reality of man's identity in love — the belief that individuation resides in the praxis of amo ergo sum; in Gustafson's poetry, this means that the loved place and the loved one have become concentric circles of affection which, paradoxically, invite him within their self-enclosures only to release him to celebrate his most selfless acts. " T azuli Fire," the first poem in Landscape with Rain, predicts the _Li volume's progress, while at the same time introducing the poetry's basic procedures. The description of a commonplace domestic occurrence gives way to a conventional association, and then these suddenly open up to a pointed statement of perspective which we immediately recognize as containing the poet's central concerns: a rekindled fire is likened to love, which in turn is likened to God. The lyric concludes with a gathering of the senses of sight, sound, and feeling in the single image of "listening": Flames, scorch-colour, inlaid with shadow, as of a quickening wind or blown light, I listen to. ... (LWR, 13)

The image of the poet as "listening" to the world, to the things in the world which can suddenly "break into lazuli fire " expresses both the poet's attitude of attentiveness to particulars and the sense that these particulars are "inflammable," are charged with a latent energy in themselves which can be ignited by the coincidence of accident and attention. For Gustafson, "reality includes its own meaning" (NWN, 53); this is the constant surprise that overtakes him as a poet, because it is through the poem that this meaning is released: Poetry becomes what it releases meaning from. ... Of a sensational nature, constituted of concrete words and the impulse which words given motion make, being conceived as heard movements equivalent to the emotion of the concreteness we deal with in experiences, poetry becomes what it gives motion to. ... The poem is accurate love. Its formal structure, controlling

232 A Poetics of Place rhythm and music, determined by the sensational words it exposes, endowed by conceptual communication, signifies. (NWN, 55)

This recalls Gustafsorfs discussion in Poetry and Canada (1945), particularly his statement that "a poem's rhythm is also a part of its meaning; the mystery, the poet's identification of the space which an experience once occupied with the present time of moving through a poem's space" (PC, 11). The emphasis on movement, on kinetic form, has not changed over the years. But the sense of the poem achieving that form in the process of releasing energy, meaning, or significance from the object of its "accurate love" is a significant refinement of his poetic stance. Gustafson's language in this passage is instructive. The statement that "The poem is accurate love," in conjunction with the image of endowment in "endowed by conceptual communication," expresses the interaction of poem and world in terms of gift exchange: the world as bride and the poem as dowry. The male poet, it would seem, is both groom and father, receiving and giving. The poem as ceremony marries him to the world; as dowry, it enriches the bride and groom's union. But what is important to note, in this metaphor of dowry-endowment, is that the poem enriches that which is already valued: it amplifies, or completes, the communion as communication. Like the exchange of marriage vows, it renders formal what is tacit in the event. As in life, so in poetry, it is all-important that the love be "accurate." Lovers and poets alike must know exactly what they love; otherwise, their unions may prove short-lived, and their poems divorced from reality. Knowing what one loves is a matter of common sense and instinct. For the poet, his love for the world must not be blind; it must see the bride whole and as she really is: "This discovery of endowed reality comes about through instinctive poetry, the procedure that is irrational about reality" (NWN, 54). For Gustafson, terms like "inspiration, divination, rapture," despite their long and noble traditions, are not accurate descriptions of this procedure because "they imply the leaving hold of reality, the supersession of desire over fact, they imply frenzy, superstition. A sober ecstasy is required. Poetry is real, it is what is" (NWN, 54). "Or Consider Lilacs" is an example of this "sober ecstasy," this openness to the bride-world in her wholeness: Thick white of lilac, fragile smell Of 1's, of night shifting on green; The leaf is a pointed oval, each white Clasp double; a bough of them heavy.

233 Earthly Music Lilac poised, counterpoised Against children hostage in a train In Holland — nothing of use, The silence, before the second blow, Of Agamemnon murdered. Not sufficient perhaps Even for those suffering Who place white lilac in water For comfort. The smell Fills the room ... And the sadness is right, death being Loss. The lower structuring of a blossom is of four Then three petals and uppermost, two across Cross-placed. The power of nine. Golgotha that much. (LWR, 44)

The almost seamless connections between sensual particular, abstract thought, contemporary fact, and mythological association in this poem are typical of Gustafson's mature technique and mark a sig-

nificant advance over the witness poems of the 1970s. The poem attends the world of lilacs and of political terrorism in a way which

is accurate to both. It begins with a keen sensory focus and a deceptively fragile stasis. The repeated l sound creates a sense of energy poised for release, the bough overladen and ready to break. The break occurs in the second stanza. Against the beauty and fragility of the flowers, Gustafson juxtaposes the image of the Dutch children held hostage by the terrorists. The associations evoked by the linking of the flowers and the children are kept understated. Then the contemporary world of violence suddenly opens backward to disclose the contemporaneity of mythic time. The beautiful flowers are as useless against this world of violence as the children are helpless against their captors. The flowers' beauty is as silent as the moment when Clytemnestra paused before finishing Agamemnon; as silent, too, as the years that separate contemporary culture from one informed by classical mythology. "Agamemnon murdered" recalls Yeats's allusion in "Leda and the Swan" — "A shudder in the loins engenders there / The broken wall, the burning roof and tower / And

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Agamemnon dead"2 — and this reminds us of the generation of poets at the beginning of the century who tried to inform modern civilization of its classical heritage, a generation whose enterprise Gustafson has continued in his own way. Gustafson's procedure in "Or Consider Lilacs" exemplifies his view, stated in "New World Northern," that the "task of the poem" is "to shape this heterogeneous world of experience so that, in its existence of harmony and order, the poem be praise though what it communicates is suffering" (NWN, 57). The poem moves from the personal, the poet's here and now, the flowers in the room in his house in North Hatley, to the public and international world of terrorism in Europe, to the mythic and literary worlds of Aeschylus's Greece and AngloIrish modernism. Throughout this movement we are aware of a continuity in thought: the problematic relations between beauty and fear, art and suffering; the mysterious resilience of fragile beauty in a violent world; the thought that while some things never change, others are ever new. The poem concludes with a final conjunction of times and places. There is a return to the local and the particular, with a close focus on the details of the lilac. A prosaic description of the flower suddenly gives way to a merging of Quebec and Golgotha; contemporary victims merge with the archetypal victim through the agency of the flower - which is still a flower, the lilac that is there, but which has generated the association when "considered" by the attentive mind, the association seeming to sprout from the sounds seeded in "two across / Cross-placed." Gustafson has never doubted the efficacy of language to the extent that other modern writers have; words are still capable for him. Nor has the stutter of self-consciousness driven him into silence. In Gradations of Grandeur he writes that irony is mandatory for the poet (GG, 64); but in his view, this does not cancel affirmation. For Gustafson, the value of affirmation is in the activity of assertion, in the process of choosing to affirm and commit that affirmation to expression. But even in this, Gustafson's perspective recognizes that, in Whitehead's terms, "Language halts behind intuition."3 In "Ramble on What in the World Why" (LWR, 25), "It all comes down to making oneself one / With sea-slime." For Gustafson, language connects man with his world. It is a means of communion, of becoming one with things by becoming aware of one's relation to them. The essence of that relation is the notion of process. Language connects man with his world by virtue of its own processive being, which is itself implicated in the total process of that world. In Whitehead's view, process is not only "an inexorable fact" in the universe, but "By means of process, the universe escapes from the limitations of the finite. Proc-

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ess is the immanence of the infinite in the finite."4 Gustafson's language "reconciles the separated areas of fact and value." It is more than a system of notation for the world of sensory particulars; it seeks to probe beyond fact to value. The writing takes the poet to a point where intuition takes the extra step, "to evoke," in Whitehead's terms, "a vivid feeling of what lies beyond words."5 Gustafson's poems, however, do not assert their status as symbolic structures but rather are flagrant manipulations of the world in the way that a lover caresses the loved one in order to encourage that release which will signify consummation for both. Gustafson's poet "grasps his symbols"; he manhandles his words because they are practical instruments in the intercourse of man and world. But for all their efficacy as instruments of relationship, poems cannot reveal more than the sum of their parts. Words celebrate the "what" of the world; they cannot express the "why" because, while man makes his meaning through his relations, he cannot fathom the ultimate purpose. With Whitehead, Gustafson knows that "understanding is never a completed, static state of mind. It always bears the character of a process of penetration, incomplete and partial."6 The things of this world do turn Gustafson's gaze "heavenwards" whenever he pauses to ask why; as he writes in "Dirge for Gardens": "What's it for has a way of getting into the best / Of labour, though I suppose ambition is worthy of its abrasions" (LWR, 80). But Gustafson's ambition does not exceed his grasp. He will not say more than he can see, and so even when his gaze turns heavenwards, "What holds the centre is sun, sun" (LWR, 38). The sun, its light and warmth, continues to be his central image. So that even when he does write of Christ, as in "Good Friday" (LWR, 39), the sun lords it over the dying god. Gustafson can grasp the fact of the crucified Jesus, but what he makes of "the god / Business" is the human need to defeat death. O I am up there loving Him until he die. Symbol Of light, questionable god, sufficient Goodness though we truly die. (LWR, 39)

The dying man and the setting sun: what can be made beyond the facts cannot be grasped: "we truly die" - that we know. And so

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Gustafson remains with God on earth and with poems that praise his presence: "All is news of God ... / God's His least thing, not / To he given up to be got to" (LWR, 52). Even other gods are recognized as this presence: They say the gods don't come down here. I wail in the sun Not despairing And the breath of happiness Brushes my sleeve. (LWR, 53)

This waiting in the sun is the same as the "listening" described in "Lazuli Fire." It is the posture of expectant joy and a perspective that celebrates immanence. It is important to recognize, moreover, that while Gustafson's poems celebrate immanence, they do not incarnate it. He writes in his essay "The Saving Grace" that the poet's epiphanies are "profane": His poem is not the world but the world with something done to it. Poetry is not a substitute for anything, above all for religion. Poetry may give the poet solace and assurance and redemption but he knows that his poem is still only but a wig of words, not the real thing; no less necessary if divinity is to lie exhibited, but still not the incarnation.7

Here Gustafson's self-consciousness as a modern poet comes close to undermining his claims for the poem's value as a revelatory vehicle. But his final qualification is a major assertion of the poet's role: it states, in effect, that divinity needs the poet in order to effect its revelation. The ambiguity is characteristic of Gustafson's constant pivoting between a stance which posits poetry as the quasi-divine fiat of the transcendent imagination, and a counter-position which credits poetic creativity as the enabling act of an imagination whose amatory powers are coincident with a numinous force immanent in the world and whose revelation issues in the intuition of the artist. "The poet is the man who withdraws from the experience and isolates the illumination and significance of the moment."8 Landscape with Rain contains a number of poems in which Gustafson does precisely this and in each, as he says in "A Dime as Astonishment," "Facts stand. / Invest love — they're what we are" (LWR, 55). It is the poet's investment of love/imagination in the "facts" of the world which pays the dividend of reconciliation between fact and value which Gustafson considers a prime function of poetry. This isolation of "the illumination and significance of the moment"

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characterizes the title poem of Landscape with Rain, which is also one of the volume's strongest lyrics. The poem is a reprimand to the poet for thinking too much of death and for allowing that preoccupation to affect his attention to the things of the moment: I looked at the landscape quickly as though I had not deserved it. Too much time Had passed and I had not observed The flash of colour that the leaves show As rain falls turning the under Sides to silver with the weight. The hills move with translucence. I was careless how the heart revives, The sight of a horse standing and how As the moon goes through the night the resonance Of silence is without birds or any Hindrance to completion. Light astonishes The mind with new wonder at dawn. (LWR, 40)

The repetition of the first-person pronoun in the opening lines conveys the egocentricity that is the source of the blindness being described. The expansion-contraction of the rising rhythm runs through six lines before the first end-stopped line. This is then followed by the dramatic short sentence: "The hills move with translucence." Alliteration supports the movement here, which is predicated on the turn from the past to present, the change in tense corroborating the change in attitude to be described in the second half of the poem. The pattern created by "Sides ... silver ... sight ... silence" is particularly effective as a premonitory sound system for the major metaphor of "Light," which is also prepared by "weight" and "night" in the preceding lines. The pattern of aspirates is also an important structural element: the repetition of "had," followed by "hills ... how ... heart ... horse ... how," and climaxing in "Hindrance." Rhythm and sound thus build to the crescendo of "Light astonishes / The mind with new wonder at dawn." The literal illumination of the world at sunrise is described as a moment of apotheosis in which reality is once again seen as "endowed"; the vision has come about "through instinctive poetry, the procedure that is irrational about reality," as he describes it in "New World Northern." The mind is "astonished," or rendered senseless, by the overwhelming of the senses. The illumination is wonderful, the knowledge beyond the light of reason. The second half of the poem remains in this newly discovered present:

238 A Poetics of Place These things are felt with guilt As the days pass and nothing of them Has been seen except the concern Of their going. I now walk with suspense, The going not less real but stopping An uneven of times with astonishment, getting Where I have to with adequate concern, Time shortens very quickly, But seeing at least how the moss Is green in patches under the rain Where the boulder stands exposed and the lake Is come on grandly swept. (LWR, 40)

Stopping with astonishment is the precise limit of Gustafson's poetry. It may be that "Door-slam and stability, that's / What's wanted"; but he recognizes that All things have their last, Shoes, yardarm, entrances, given shortly, Shortly take back their permanence. (LWR, 41)

It is in such moments of astonishment, fitful and evanescent as they may be, that Gustafson sets himself against the temper of his poetic times. Gustafson is one of the "Watchers" who "acknowledge the worth of worship" (LWR, 57). He admits that the "search for the celestial possible / Is a hoo hoo hoo," but affirms nevertheless: "Blessed be the sun and the conundrum / Of God if this day last and we are not / Shovelled under" (LWR, 63). In Patrick Grant's description of postRenaissance secular thought, "The new thinkers ... denied consistently that the human mind can abstract from any object any such thing as 'substantial form' or conceive thereby some 'idea' of the object as part of a divinely-patterned hierarchy of perfections created according to a blueprint in God's mind, and therefore immanent in nature. The senses, simply, are not to be trusted to read Divine Ideas in the Book of the World." This tradition of thought has had profound consequences for the modern poet; "If transcendent ideas are no longer expressed truly (however partially) in images, and if words no longer reveal the fixed essences of things, the traditional function of poetry in helping us to interpret the world for our spiritual edification, is clearly under duress."9 Gustafson is both part of this tradition and in reaction against it. From the outset of his career he has sought a reconciliation in his poetry between the world of objective fact and the world of

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personal value. His experiences and development as a poet in the 1930s took him to the heart of this issue and what he discovered was that the reconciliation, if it were possible at all, was possible only through the agency of the individual imagination. There were no external sources for it. By the 1960s and 1970s, he had developed poetic procedures which affirmed a world of value within history. These poetic procedures were intuitive rather than logical, and sensual-erotic rather than abstract. Gustafson breaks with the tradition Grant describes by virtue of his trust in his senses as a source of knowledge; he is within that tradition, however, in that he refuses to convert sensation into ideas, or at least, to give his intuition a certitude beyond what he can honestly assert is valid. But while Gustafson queries transcendence, he does not doubt "the traditional function of poetry in helping us to interpret the world for our spiritual edification." Quite the opposite. Gustafson is unshaken in his belief in the capacity of language, and of poetry in particular, to illuminate life. His modernity shows, however, in that the illumination is dependent on the accuracy and craft of the language-user: "Accurate use of language subverts fate, directs destiny, ensures humanity and enables happiness."10 The core of Gustafson's poetic vocabulary is a repertoire of images which by the 1980s have assumed an almost totemic aura in his work. As has been noted, the sun is the most important and the most noticeable. Other images are the boat or sail seen in the distance on the lake; the heard but unseen bird; flowers; the colours - silver, gold, green, blue, and crimson; music; cathedrals and stained glass. These images are signa, in David Jones's sense of the term: tokens of a world of radiant otherness. As such, they mediate between the world of objective fact and a world of numinous force which the poet intuits as immanent in the things these images represent. For Jones, the poet is the maker of signs and "poiesis should and sometimes does make radiant 'particular facts' so that they become intimations of immortality, or if the reader won't stand for that, then intimations of some otherness of some sort."11 Like Jones's, Gustafsoris world is sacral, and his art partakes of the ceremony of sacrament; hence his fondness for Stevens's phrase, "a sacrament of praise," to describe poetry (NWN, 59).12 It is "the complicated simplicity" (LWR, 58) of Gustafson's imagery which is the essence of its charm, its power to convey the numinous. This is particularly evident in "A Gentle Rain Persists," a poem complementary to "Landscape with Rain": A rain persists and good men die. Light goes, the dusk comes on.

240 A Poetics of Place Even to those who persist with music Mortality invites itself, Schubert, Haydn, one with wit his wig Askew, Schubert coaxed, hoodwinked To love. Encyclopaedias spill over With deductions, yet great men offer Lives, and all the while, on wharves, Marketable oranges, commercial lengths Of pipe, sacks lean over. The rain persists. Drops on the glass Refract the light, red in movement, Green, the impulse of music. ... (LWR, 34)

Gustafson's style has always been elliptical. What is remarkable in the later poetry, however, is the way he retains the music while paring down to essentials. The echo of Portia's speech on mercy (The Merchant of Venice, iv.i.182f.) is a subtle resonance in these lines and amplifies the understated sense of doom. But as always, it is the interplay of light and dark that holds Gustafson's attention, and which has always mystified, saddened, and exhilarated him. The technique in the final lines of this poem is typical of the "Hammerwork / Sophisticated with innocence" (LWR, 87) which is the hallmark of his late style. The rhythmic counterpoint of "Drops on," "red in movement," and "of music" draws out the charge in the imagery. The play in "Drops," with the momentary suspension caused by our not knowing if it is a verb or noun, adds wit to the solution. The light does not vanish so much as it metamorphoses into colour and movement, and is taken in by the rain. The transformation is tragic; the water passes from translucent to blood red — which completes the subtext of "Encyclopaedias spill over / With deductions" — but the process does not stop with the blood-letting. After the red of sacrifice comes the green of life, and from both, "the impulse of music." The poet's process matches in persistence the rhythms of rain and light. The poem, too, refracts the spill of experience, mixing its red and green into an unscientific but nevertheless marketable orange.

C

onflicts of Spring (1981) continues to work the ground of Landscape with Rain (1980), but drives deeper into the preoccupations which characterize the later poetry. In these volumes of the 19805, the achievement is that of further cultivation, of increasing the yield

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of the territory the poet has long since staked out, cleared, and made his own. As he writes in "The Definition of Here": This northern Canada of changes here Is provident, come by the globe canted So, making all things, heart And mind, provident. (COS, 27)

The play on "canted" reminds us that Gustafson's poetry itself turns on the world's mixed providence; his beloved light is most dazzling when encountered obliquely, broken by the sharp edges of fact, refracted by the very medium that transmits it. This is precisely what is contemplated in the title poem of the first section of Conflicts of Spring, "The Sun in the Garden." The title recalls a poem by MacNeice, "The Sunlight in the Garden," which Gustafson had quoted and praised in "Poetry as a Moral Procedure."13 But it is Stevens who gets the poem under way, by eliciting Gustafson's disagreement with his statement '"A poem need not have a meaning / And like most things in nature / Often does not have'" (COS, 15). The existence of meaning, the experience of nature, the significance of poetry — these are what's on Gustafson's mind. Stevens's view disappoints him and he is frank in his dismissal: Stevens is "slipshod": "He was in the insurance business, / He ought to have known better." Gustafson then proceeds to focus on the particular, the potential knowledge that is to be found in the world before him. The poem is a characteristic blending of description, narration, and contemplation, the three elements interwoven by the voice. As he says in "New World Northern": "Thought is in contention with sensation; the state of the poet's command of style mediates; the poem is in tension" (NWN, 59). It is this bifocal attention to the world of thought and sense which gives Gustafson's poetry its combination of breadth and depth. The poet sits at a table in his garden, his attention focused on a slug crawling into his saucer. The garden is literal — the backyard in North Hatley, and archetypal - the creative ground from which experience is made conscious. Scrutiny pushes toward insight; the pivot, as always for Gustafson, is an ironic perception of the interrelatedness of man and world, beauty and ugliness, life and death — the orderly confusion of purpose and process: I examine this slug that has crawled up Into the saucer of my cup of tea. It has two protrusions out of its head And apparently absorbs food

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Through its foot's peristalsis: Repugnance after my sugar. Also after the roses. The garden Looks like it. The protuberances Move out almost imperceptibly But it doesn't fool what it senses Or me. Beauty is taken in, Blind repugnance or not. It squashes. I snip it with my fingers off The saucer, enough of it had. I walk The rest of the day in the garden knowing Something is futile. I have meaning. I have to counteract it. I look up Evolution, religion, love. (COS, 15)

Eventually, the irony is self-reflexive, as the poet recognizes he is implicated in the very repugnance he abhors. The slug going after the sugar in his saucer, having already fed on the roses in the garden, is an image of the Heraclitan process that Gustafson considers in his later poetry. It reveals the way beauty is consumed by ugliness, the way all things are used by life. But this elementary paradox is hardly an insight at this stage in Gustafson's contemplation of the world, and a note of unrest persists in the voice. The poet's destruction of predatory ugliness does not affect the vulnerability of beauty in any way; instead, it seems to prove that he himself has been "taken in," has acted blindly in repugnance to something he does not understand. He has indeed been "fooled" and walks the rest of the day with a feeling of futility. But what is it that's futile? Planting roses? Tending the garden? Trying to counteract ugliness? All of these figure in the statement: "I have meaning." But because of what he has just done to the slug, the statement may mean that "I have meaning as a destroyer of life." The ambiguity of "I have to counteract it" plays toward this sense. The impersonal pronoun can refer back to his "Knowing / Something is futile," which he must counteract; it also can refer to "I have meaning." The conclusion, "I look up / Evolution, religion, love," does not resolve the ambiguity; if anything, it intensifies it. The abstractions not only suggest the blindness of his act of destruction, but also the hubris of man's sense of knowledge about the mysteries of the world process and the acts of destruction which these abstractions have been used to condone. He seems to have forgotten the insight of Landscape

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with Rain: "It all comes down to making oneself one / With sea-slime" (LWR, 25). The gardener destroys the garden creature, but in the process, the custodian of beauty may have blinded himself to the larger beauty of a world in which roses and slugs are interdependent. Killing the slug is a serio-comic climax to the descriptive-meditative drama. It is an all-too-human act of impatience with what Gustafson has described as the absurdity of not knowing the whys and wherefores of life in the garden. The poem thus begins with an affirmation of meaning as intention, only to devolve toward confusion, or meaning in tension. The second section develops from the puzzlement that concludes the first: What gave matter its propensities Agitates me. I want the answer, Dying to get it is no answer, I'm here now with circumstance, Not exalted with God. (COS, 16)

The rage to know is undiminished; the poet is part slug himself, propelled through the garden by his desire to understand the mystery, and as much mystified by his desire to know as he is by the mystery itself. He is "downed / By reasons why"; but he is not depressed enough to want to exchange mundane mysteries for heavenly resolutions: Swept up into Light (to use the word That doesn't dogmatize) such death, Such suction into the Absolute, Is rip-off, counterfeit, wormy hook. Currency while the grass is green And sun a personal insult not To ascribe it, is the only downright coin. There it shines. Here I am.

For Gustafson, the long look toward the Absolute always rebounds into the close view of the world around him. The unknown, unknowable is "There," but "Here I am," and the distance between there and here is the measure of man's unknowing. The epigraph to Conflicts of Spring is another quotation from Stevens: "The desire to be at the end of distances." Gustafson's poetry comes from this tension, this sense of distance and separation; and a Gustafson poem is, literally and metaphorically, a form of desire. It is the voice of lambent desire that quietly ends "The Sun in the

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Garden." In the third section, he takes stock of his change, what he possesses of the sun's "downright coin": The lilac-leaves sustain a boding wind, Constant the trees in movement; silver shows Everywhere. There will be rain, Jerusalem will fall Whose east i[s] annexed, prognostications fail, Rugged Arabia has a different god, Twenty score days the hostages have sat in rooms Of Allah. The spider is bent in his intricate web, His weight a bias, and faith's a windy branch. I sit in the reasonless sun, certainly discount Leafy gold, take what profit is: The impatiens flower's red, immediate love, The founding of a music heard, the having. (COS, 17)

The lilacs recall "Or Consider Lilacs" (LWR, 44), and as in that poem, international political events infiltrate the poet's field of vision. The trees in movement image the Heraclitan world. "There will be rain" recalls "A Gentle Rain Persists" (LWR, 34), and the echo of that poem about mercy renders the allusion to the American hostages in Iran all the more poignant. The lilac leaves ambiguously "sustain" the poet's fears; in the spider's web of contemporary circumstances, earthly silver is valued more than solar gold. Dogmatism has made faith a windy branch, dangerous to climb out on. The sunburnt poet nevertheless resolves to profit from his own exchange. The red flower mocks his earlier impatience and reminds him of the enduring joys of "immediate love," of the surety of "a music heard"; "the having" is worth the price. "Faith's not enough," he writes in the final section: "Perception is the satisfaction" (COS, 18). The senses are a continuous baptism: There is a mountain stream I put My hand in, the rush of slanted water Laves the fist and wrist around, The extremest sense in the world So cold I yank my hand out Before I become God. That's The only handout, not faith: Knowledge so if I go back To the mountain stream I can trust Cold. (COS, 18)

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Gustafson's sense of his new world northern remains oracular. He knows he "can trust / Cold." He would like to have "The concrete stream" and know "Why the cosmos / Is ordered," but that is an "insatiable tall order." So he settles for his earthly absolutes: Then I'll shrug here in the sun Warm enough for love and the impatiens Flower red down the garden path. (COS, 18)

For all its cold, the new world northern is "Warm enough for love." As he says elsewhere in the volume: "People will be careful of the world who / Have learned to get through winter" (COS, 42). The poem ends in the garden where it began, with the poet focused on his senses and having made a choice. The poem has proceeded from observation, to action, to contemplation, to end in resolution. The process is not complete, however, until it issues in decision. "The Arrival of Wisdom" looks back over the ground covered in a poem like "The Sun in the Garden" and concludes: "Of course the truth is there's no design, /Just process" (COS, 19). "Faith is an ignorance. Love without hurt / The only choice" (COS, 19). The only counterweight to Gustafson's worrisome absolutes is the certainty of particulars, and in particular, the certain satisfaction of human love. For Gustafson, the only hand-out God gives in the world is what you can hold in your hands; the man who holds out for more is asking for disappointment and frustration. Gustafson knows this so well because he is his own worst pupil. He constantly rejects his own counsel. But by this point it is more a wilful forgetting than a rejection of hard-won wisdom; it is a forgetting for the purpose of poetry and further meditation. In "Design," for example, the close scrutiny of a leaf found in a snow-bank seems to contradict "The Arrival of Wisdom": On the snow the leaf-skein rested, Refutation of itself, the very Design and articulation of answer, That network and reticulation served By the stem held between my fingers And lifted from the drift of snow, The paradigm of an answer to the chaotic Stars, nothing left of heaven. (COS, 33) Suddenly, a hand-out seems a discovery of order:

246 A Poetics of Place Order expressed itself Today even in the way a sun Went out and the moon slammed. Stars Undo and this scaffolding of leaf Is contradiction, is nothing's mockery. I come to this though stars shatter.

The contradiction, however, is part of the process and one of the many conflicts of spring which the poet notes. In the title poem of the volume, he recognizes that Trees are green for us only for a time No matter how they go on For whatever proclamations of indifference, Hullaballoo. (COS, 20)

But then, in "Segment of Ten Minutes," he can proclaim that Never having clasped life so tightly As in the leaving of it, I listen to the call Of birds as though trees were an ultimate purpose. (COS, 22)

This self-consciousness is an important quality in Conflicts of Spring. It constantly qualifies the impulse toward affirmation and keeps the poet honest, mindful of fact and what his body knows. In Gustafson's view, however, this self-argument is the essence of poetry. "Poetry is restless from the absurdity of not knowing; the refusal of the heavens to answer is its subject-matter."14 But this is obviously a formulation based on his own obsession and a corollary to his statement in "New World Northern" that "The poet is born responsible to his personality" (NWN, 60). And it is the relation between style and personality, their concentric interinvolvement, which results in the coherence and continuity in Gustafson's mature work. In the interview with Damien Pettigrew, he discusses this interrelation in terms of rhythm and form: The essential physical impulse of poetry is rhythm. ... the interaction of the pulse of the poem on the page and the reader. ... It all depends on style and that, of course, depends on personality. I judge a poem as good by its structure. By that I don't mean formalism. I don't demand either a sonnet or free verse but there must be a structuring of that first primal impulse. It's a matter of control, mastering your technique so that when you write down the primal impulse, it flows inside a controlled and ordered framework. ... His sense of

247 Earthly Music form, the structure of an emotion, will keep the poet on the correct road to the epiphany even though he might not know what ultimately he has said.15

The poet "listens" for that "primal impulse" and then, having heard, it is up to him to bring it forth in its fullness. "The cadence given is tyrannical but in it is all that is benignly needed" (NWN, 58). This primal rhythm is "a grace to be obeyed, the grace containing all that must be made" (NWN, 57). Gustafson understands this sense of the poet's completion of something that is given to him in musical terms, in "the idea of a musical 'resolution,' where the whole symphony is subsumed in a coda. ... I've always tried to achieve that resolution in my poetry." His dissatisfaction with much of contemporary poetry is in "its lack of musical resolution of the initial impulse"; in his view, its open-endedness is most often merely "an unstructured smokescreen to avoid technical accomplishment.""5 And this, for Gustafson, makes the poetry useless; for "The very usefulness of a poem ... is its intelligible architecture, its shaped resolution, its counterpointed harmony" and "The scoffers of syntax, coherent cadence, proseurs of the amorphous, each shatters the poem as ... outwardly significant object" (NWN, 56-7). A good example in Conflicts of Spring of a poem which illustrates this interrelation of personality and style is "Among the Wheatfields." Like "The Sun in the Garden," this poem also interacts with a poetic predecessor. "Among the Wheatfields" recalls a poem by another sun-worshipper, Archibald Lampman, whose "Among the Timothy" is a similar meditation-in-place. Gustafson's poem is briefer, more intense; it comes to the point sooner, and spends less time creating atmosphere. Lampman's poem is a crisis-lyric in which the poet attempts to find relief from what he senses is a destructive self-consciousness. The relief comes when he releases himself to the redeeming particulars of the natural world. Gustafson's poem presents a similar moment-in-nature but, where Lampman's attention to natural detail leads him, ultimately, toward a mystic transcendence, a oneness with the sun "Till flower and blade, and every cranny brown, / And I are soaked with him,"17 Gustafson's concentration leaves him deeper in the world, and even more reluctant to lose it. Gustafson's acts of attention always counteract the transcendent impulse, though "Among the Wheatfields" does open with a gesture toward eternity: The sky had amplitude, so had the great fields. I had difficulty in claiming the sky so wide was The horizon. So windswept was the grass

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I stood there, a probable of contemplation In the wideness of eternity. (COS, 26)

Gustafson prefers to think rather than dream. It is significant that he uses "amplitude" rather than "majesty" or "magnificence" in the opening line. He usually uses the latter terms to refer to the vastness of creation as an imagined or intuited order. Here, "amplitude" suggests something quite different, a vastness that threatens to overwhelm, that has not yet been dealt with. The lines that follow it convey precisely this sense of a beleaguered perceiver who has "difficulty in claiming" his world. Unfocused perception is leading toward a dissolution of self and identity. The next step in the poem is typical of Gustafsoris genius in such moments; and by genius, I mean his sensitivity to what he has described as the "grace" that is given to the poem by its "primal impulse." The resolution is latent, as a potential, in the moment of the poem. The inviting but dangerous long view is replaced by the close-up on what is at hand. The potential vacuum of eternity is suddenly filled by a four-inch heart. The grace is in the force of the turn: the poet looks within himself to know where he is. The inward view does not exclude what is outside the self but rather connects them. Gustafson's self-perception is bifocal; it is an expression of his myth of the new world northern which is predicated on the origin of self-identity in one's sense of place. This is his imagination's greatest strength, its reason and triumph. As he wrote in "The Moment Is Not Only Itself," "What is real is what the heart / Has" (CIG, 44), and the heart has all it needs; he turns from the wide horizon, the windswept grass, and contemplation of "the wideness of eternity," to take his bearings with the compass of his own heart: My heart was small, it is four Inches across, but I knew the directions found there, I knew in its compass was all I needed to know Of width, of limits farthest from supposition.... (COS, 26)

The repeated "Knew ... knew ... needed to know" drives home the simple truths: The progress of wind in the stalks, the wheatspears Rust-colour, the rasp of particular love. I awaited the final knowledge of knowing, The consolidation of eternity, yet what I knew, The place where I was wholly, was already what Those absolutes are. (COS, 26)

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The wind is the "boding wind" of "The Sun in the Garden"; it is also Shelley's west wind, the wind of process. The ominous connections between "wheatspears" and "Rust-colour" are emphasized by the almost violent enjambment. In "the rasp of a particular love," the touch of a poet who is as sure of his thinking as he is of his technique is fully evident; moreover, the phrase is a perfect example of the poet's listening to that tyrannical cadence which occasions a poem and which is "all that is benignly needed." The music of the phrase, its combination of harsh and sibilant sounds, captures the tension in the image and completes the bloody business of "the wheatspears / Rust-colour." The progress of the wind is itself a kind of love — the love of Helios, the force that through the fuse drives the flower; the amoral, indifferent, inhuman, and unconscious mystery that renders human feeling as fragile as it is heroic. The ambivalence of this image of process is continued in the ambiguity of "Rasp"; this refers to the sound of the wheat rubbing together, with a possible sexual innuendo; but it is also an image of an abrasive tool used to scrape down a surface, and thus suggests the darker, destructive side of love. The turn away from external absolutes is thus a discovery of a paradoxical, finite eternity in the moment here and now. This moment is similar to those in the Four Quartets where Eliot rounds on himself to rediscover the present in the backward glance, the known in the unknown or forgotten. Here, Gustafson turns inward and discovers the manageable magnitude of his immediate world, "The place where I was wholly"; the pun is surely acceptable, for to look with such love upon the world of the slug and the rose is to make it whole and holy again. Gustafson ends "Among the Wheatfields" with a gesture that distinguishes him from Lampman in the same way that "The Sun in the Garden" challenged Wallace Stevens. Gustafson defers Lampman's consummation and instead joyfully accepts his "fieldwork" as a labour he cannot live without: The trouble of final Exaltation, this fieldwork finished with, The going, was still given over to that which I would Not have: completion, joy without desire, The whole field done with that is joyful death. (COS, 26)

If having all the answers is to have death, then Gustafson opts for more fieldwork, more labour in the sun. His acceptance of incompleteness, for all his apparent rejection of formal open-endedness, is a major strength in his later poetry. While his intellectual and emotional need for spiritual certainty is doomed to major frustration by

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the facts of the human condition, and his aesthetic beliefs are prey to constant irritations and minor embarrassments by the modes of cynicism, scepticism, and ironic cool which dominate the age, he nevertheless attempts to displace his spiritual deprivation by an imaginative transformation of daily living. This transformation is no transcendental evasion of reality, but an attempt to see the One in the Many, to apprehend through sense and intuition the fullness and complexity of existence in the individual moment. Self-consciousness hobbles the spirit and the body at times; if he tries to displace his ' disappointment with statements that earth is enough, with the satisfactions of perception, he is also aware he may merely be substituting an absolute of the will for an absent divinity. But it is this doubt that drives the poetry and demands that every poem have its sequel, as his imagination shuttles back and forth from fact to faith, from the imminent to the immanent, weaving in the process the lines of light and dark that form them. The second section of Conflicts of Spring is framed by two poems which express this measure of growth in terms of the heart's "concern" for this world. In the first, "The Woods, Still Winter," the poet finds himself for a moment in a still centre, a beloved clearing in the woods in the middle of a heavy snowfall: He thinks of the impossibility perhaps Of coming tomorrow. The woods need The man in it somewhere; concern. With his finger he takes the white rim Of snow away from his boots, looks up At the winter a moment; moves on. (COS, 41)

Mortality attends his joy as always. But what is more important here is the sense of belonging, the compelling intuition that the man is part of the process; also, that the still centre is the hub of a moving wheel of process. Winter is moving toward spring and the man is ripening with it. The man "moves on." Gustafson's poetry now has the man securely centred in his world and this world the immediate centre of his being. But that being is, in Gustafson's myth of identity-inplace, a constant becoming. Contraries converge in the new world northern; their tension is what makes the self so sinewous in its rooted grasp of earth. In the last poem in this section, "Gold Bird, Green Boxes" (COS, 48), spring blossoms from all its conflicts, and this process is a paradigm for the unity of self which emerges from man's participation in the world's changes and accumulations. The poet's earthly music complements this oracular world, just as nature's relentless proc-

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esses, when husbanded by the attentive heart, guide the self through its "inextricable advancements." In Gustafson's late poetry, the "combined strengths" of man and nature are "The whole consideration." With "concern" or "care" man comes to know his place, in the sense of being at home in the world, but also in the sense of intuiting his place in the natural scheme. There is too much to know all at once, but the whole movement of Gustafson's career has been the gradual accumulation of knowledge in the patience of time and at the disposition of those instructive powers immanent in unfolding experience. "The World at Violence," the third section of the volume, addresses another dimension of the conflicts of spring: the evil, cruelty, and suffering that are likewise "Entanglements" (COS, 48) which poet and man must witness and endure. In "Overtones," echoes of the imagery of wind and movement in the earlier poems link the social and political world of violence to that of nature already celebrated in the book. The murder of Mountbatten, the American hostages in Iran, war in Cambodia, the imminence of nuclear catastrophe are the cries of occasion in these poems. The section parallels "Phases of the Present" in Corners in the Glass and "State of Affairs" in Directives of Autumn. The conundrum that haunts Gustafson in these recent witness poems is stated boldly in "Thoughts on a Narrow Night": It would seem that God is in nature But not in history. Roses bloom And are pretty. We can smell them. We also Smell ovens. ... It's the lack of divine Intervention that's unaccountable. Loaves and fishes. But divinity since then? Best leave contemplation of history out of it And go smell jonquils. (COS, 55)

Of course, Gustafson cannot ignore history and he considers it again in the "Six Impromptus" (COS, 63-8) and "Rondo in Triads" (COS, 74). As the volume moves toward its end, anxiety and fear recur. A sense of the worlds end is pervasive, but out of this doom Gustafson lifts his vision to the magnificence of existence. In "Definition in the Coolness of Thought," he provides a kind of shorthand coda to the volume and to his deepest intuitions of personal identity: As if, as it were, the sun Should be the body,

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The core of sustaining self Hewed to the soul, as if Of heaven the tension and attention Were this implementation, This container,

This meanwhile and Sole means were exaltation. ... (COS, 81) To be concentric with world and cosmos is to make the sun "The core of sustaining self / Hewed to the soul." The consequence of such a perspective is a poetry of "tension and attention." The "Sole means," the soul's method, is Sol's "exaltation," the lifting up of self and world by a centring of the attention in acts of love, love for another and for the world of the "other," the mysteries beyond but containing one's own mystery. In "Epic Quit at the First Stanza," he recalls sitting on the gate-stone of the ancient Greek city of Tiryns, "Where Jason came / And Hercules ruled" (COS, 82). The poem does not celebrate that mythic past, however, but the poet's love in the present: It was with my love though; not Argo And the gold fleece, Mycenae itself, Counted. ...

What counts is what the heart numbers. For Gustafson, the present extends that mythic past but his focus is on the moment of present splendour. Myth and history inform life; they give depth to the background and context of experience; they give the present density. But the myths themselves matter "less than / Our knowing them" (COS, 82). It is the quality of consciousness that matters; myth, history, art are elements in the "profusion" of life which the poet recognizes as his inheritance. That heritage does not usurp the present because it is already one with the present, dormant until consciousness regenerates it. For Gustafson, this heritage is a burden to consciousness to the extent that "The sun on our shoulders where Tiryns crumbled / And crickets sang" is a reminder of man's doom amid magnificence. Poets are not crickets, however: Unlike the noisy cricket Deaf to its own song, The poet singly listens To the sawing of His own hind legs.

253 Earthly Music The irreplaceable reconstitution Of desirable experience Is what he scrapes out but not The only thing He euphorically means. (COS, go)

Everything that comes to hand and mind is a piece of that puzzle of "irreplaceable reconstitution"; the contradiction is typical of Gustafson's irony. The reconstitution of human wholeness, that most "desirable experience" of the self in the world, is an impossible desire; but the poet is the last man to be rational in his desire, paradoxically, because he is "Too sane to be crazy / But crazy as a hope / To keep on scraping" (COS, 90).

T

he tide of the first poem in Directives of Autumn (1984), "Wheel of Fire," recalls Ixion's Wheel (1969), and in using the image of the wheel of fire to represent the mind's endless turning in place, Gustafson links his "nagging propensity for answers" with that myth of divine retribution.18 Ixion was bound to his burning wheel by Zeus for trying to possess Hera, but the origin of the mortal's doom was his refusal to pay the bride-price to his father-in-law. It is a rich association to consider Gustafson's intellectual obsession with ultimate answers as a representative human doom deriving from impiety, the refusal to give in return for what has been given. The bride-world that the poet husbands is not truly married until the poet gives value in exchange. The bride-world becomes a demonic "axis ever turning" (DOA, 13) of place and body, unless mind and body are as generous to place as the world is to man. Intellect is chained to the body that contains it, and both turn in place unable to know more than their cycle of doom until they see, in that very doom, the redemptive possibilities of love. Until there is that generosity of body and spirit, until there is that act of imagination, the "garden" remains fallow. "Philosophy marks the garden scene" (DOA, 14); it is Gustafson's belief that Adam-Ixion must recognize his bride-world, his Eve, as his most necessary seminar. "Only man's / Perception the crux of worth," he writes in "Meditation Sufficient for Monday" (DOA, 15); and "the crux of worth" is for Adam-Ixion "the axis ever turning." It is on the cross of the senses that man suffers the wisdom of the worldbody. That man's doom is magnificent is the essence of what Gustafson has learned from his time on the cross; it is what leads him to conclude that "God is laughter. Has / To be" (DOA, 15), and that "The ultimate commends its incidents" (DOA, 16). Moreover, it is

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from the coincidence of "abundance" and "frustration" that the poet must take whatever solace he can: "Abundance is at work, frustration / Is at work. It all works out" (DOA, 19). If man's perception is his worthiest source of value, then "The Mind Needs What the Poem Does" because the poem's profane epiphanies are the closest it can come to the answers it seeks without abnegating the world it knows for one beyond time and space and hence beyond the only language it understands. What man creates in meaning is The world we live in though the rocky Earth is what we ride on. (DOA, 23)

The "wheel of fire," "the axis ever turning," is the earth itself; its revolutions must turn man out of his stupor and stupidity. Art, and poetry in particular, "Conceive a new design" (DOA, 25). "All this uproar under the stars / Only art makes sense of (DOA, 26) because "Only art grips the soul" (DOA, 28) with the palpable force of physical truth. The first section of Directives of Autumn concludes with "Ceremony Is Called For" (DOA, 30). Ceremony is both action and state of mind, a harmony of body and spirit that derives from the imagination. For Gustafson, "ceremony ennobles all" (DOA, 30) in that it is a physical expression toward life that recognizes value to be inherent in both parties to the transaction. The value emerges from the interaction; it is not given or received by man or world, the one to the other, but is produced in the ceremonial act/mind itself. When he subscribes to Pound's rewriting of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum as "amo ergo sum," Gustafson affirms an attitude toward experience which is the basis for treating experience ceremonially. "Amo ergo sum" revises the Cartesian division of mind and body; it relocates the mind in the senses, and makes the poet's language an extension of those senses. Gustafson gives intuition as well the power and role of a physical sense. His language is generated from them in a search for their own certainty in meaning, order, and significance. These latter are thus not imposed by the mind upon intuition and sensory experience, but rather affirmed by the spirit-senses themselves as love, joy, grandeur — and, of course, doom. It is for this reason as well, the embedding of thought in sensory experience, that God as pure idea is a hopeless enterprise for Gustafson. The pure idea is beyond him, because the pure mind is not something he thinks with. He thinks with his mindbody and thus his meditations are palpable handlings of his brideworld. God is at most, for Gustafson, an intuition, an interrogation; as idea, God exists only in the evidence of the racing pulse. To

255 Earthly Music acknowledge the possibility of the divine in his poetry is thus an inevitable consequence of its ceremony. For Gustafson, along with human love, it is the design of art which provides the greatest compensations man has for his condition of unknowing, and this satisfaction itself must be considered as evidence of a saving grace. If the first section of Directives of Autumn presents art or poetry in terms of a thesis, the poems in the second section, "State of Affairs," compose the antithesis. These poems correspond to those in "The World at Violence" in Conflicts of Spring and "Phases of the Present" in Corners in the Glass, and they put pressure on the values and affirmations of the poems in the first section. The fighting in Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran; the persecution of dissidents in Argentina and Russia; the starvation in Ethiopia; the children who are the ubiquitous victims of violence, be it the violence of war or famine, or the chance malevolence of deformity at birth; these are the subjects of the poems. The sun is notably absent in the poems in "Man Untestamented," the first section in the volume, but it appears immediately at the beginning of the second. In "The Day Was One of Sun," Gustafson's totem "confounds the end / Of August" and in the process urges that "Love is possible" "Despite Syria and serious consequences" (DOA, 33). The new world northern is saved by its geography: Lucky With Canada, proximities of northern seas, Prosperous summer's federation, This day is for true devotion, adherences Whose accurate accounting proves the worth Of love. (DOA, 33)

One of these "adherences," however, soon becomes that of the poet to the world of victims. For Gustafson, the equilibrium of poetry is not a static but a dynamic tension. In opposition to the image of "adherences," which is an image of erotic, connective power, a number of poems in this section are dominated by the metaphor of edges. This image ushers in the world of division and distinctions, of things seen in terms of their cutting edges, which lacerate, fragment, and resist the imagination's effort to hold them together. The dissolution of the loved world is encountered most dramatically in "Aspect of a Cut Peach": Succulent as morning were the pieces of that peach. Cut on the china plate of mint foliage

256 A Poetics of Place Around the rim, a cool gathering circle Of indentation holds the fragments of quench And question. What has this to do with hunger And Ethiopia? Rotten weather in Ontario Raised the rarity of that peach. The skin peeled Back like a sexual nonpresbyterian pleasure, What of the cry of children that runs off The guilty blade of silver? Heaven is doomed Here. Only in paradise are peaches Prized purely and is pith succulent. (DOA, 41)

The fragmented world of sensuality is arranged within a circle of appetite that gathers and holds the pieces in a gratifying order. The gratification, however, is not innocent; "quench" brings "question," and the knowledge of the famine in Ethiopia interrupts the succulent morning. The question "What has this to do with hunger / And Ethiopia?" turns on the notion of "lucky Canada," where even "Rotten weather in Ontario" produces succulent fruit. The moment has been spoiled, however; the interrogative exacerbates a self-consciousness that holds the sweetness of the peach in the mouth long enough to sense a bitter after-taste. Such pleasure cannot be pure. "Heaven is doomed / Here." In a quasi-surreal manner, the drops of peach juice running off the blade of the paring knife turn into the cries of the dying children; the blade itself assumes an affinity with weapons of torture and death. Earthly joy is composite of earthly suffering. The poem is circular - the last word is also the first - but its circularity, like "the axis ever turning," is that of the earth's doom amid magnificence. "Only in paradise are peaches / Prized purely and is pith succulent." Here, that pure joy is doomed to ambiguity and ambivalence; it is a presence that reminds us of absence, a satisfaction that reminds us of its imperfection. "Aspect of a Cut Peach" is another example of a Gustafson poem as a form-in-tension. A peripheral circularity is strained by the internal pressures which emanate from the question at the circle's centre. A combinative energy rounds back upon its origins, in an attempt to gather and hold the discrete elements within the perimeter of its organizing desire. At the centre of that circle, however, is the disruptive force of the interrogative, which is explosive rather than combinative (though its fractious effect is the consequence of the explosive combination of "Ethiopia," "Rotten weather," "Ontario," "skin peeled") and which consequently strains the elastic capacity of the lyric to contain its counter-statement. The poem, like consciousness itself, contains its own subversion, but its total form, like its

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overall success, depends on this conjunction of statement and question, joy and shame, satisfaction and unrest. The image of edges emphasizing division and difference appears in "Anatomy of Melancholy" and "The Road by the Lake." In the first, a silver winter sky over the lake at North Hatley contrasts with an image of a bleeding marine in Beirut. The horizon adumbrates a world of lethal edges: the divisions and contrasts between the violence in the Middle East and the pastoral peace of the poet's world, between the silver of the winter sky and the black hair and bloody flesh of wounded soldier on the ground. The poem concludes, like "Aspect of a Cut Peach," with the tension maintained; the resolution of the poem's form is, paradoxically, its resistance to resolution. The initial impulse toward a celebration of natural serenity has been countermanded by an influx of conscience and consciousness that undermines any unqualified participation in that serenity. In fact, serenity gives way to melancholy: But the cold sky Lent a melancholy, a melancholy The natural feelings of well-being, Or at least a semblance of well-being, Could not overcome. Otherwise Winter was alright, was natural. (DOA, 42)

The tension in the poem is brought to a high pitch of understatement in these lines. The final sentence is more than melancholic; it is profoundly disturbed. The sense of things being natural washes over the various horizons in the poem, raising questions about the meaning of the events in the Middle East in terms of human nature. Here, the form-in-tension plays a balance of human and natural worlds against a melancholy that implicitly doubts such balance is benign. In "The Road by the Lake," the poet moves against this melancholy, but the world continues to lacerate the heart that tries to grasp it. The moon is "Thin as an edge" and seems a blade poised above the speaker, but there are things that can soften its fall: Melancholy is not unavoidable But there are certain things: the certainness Of what is said; the commonness that changes Name only. The mist that is come Over the moon is an example of what 1 mean - but that is not it...

258 A Poetics of Place I would have common kindness and high art, Not what all would understand At once but could strive for, awakening To wonder and achievement, and a certain honour For those who only love - a quiet Road beneath whatever moon. (DOA, 43)

The tone and language recall Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter," another poem written in the face of deep melancholy. The Yeatsian connection is appropriate, too, because Gustafson's final stanza is something of a prayer on behalf of the ceremonious life, a life inspirited by "wonder and achievement." But Gustafson is praying under great pressure in "State of Affairs." The section comes to a close with a downpour of gloom in "Rain" (DOA, 47). This is no longer the "gentle rain" of "A Gentle Rain Persists" or the astonishment of "Landscape with Rain." This world seems to be coming apart at its seams: Great Statements, Generalities will no longer do, Details, leaks, wrong adjustments And angles are what it's about. The world So drenched it cannot last. (DOA, 45)

The centre no longer holds. The poem's formal order, its seven threeline stanzas, are hopelessly at odds with its own energies, which spill noisily from its melancholic restraints. In the world of "Rain," the sun is an absent deity. In "State of Affairs," Gustafson's divinity, as always, remains distant and helpless. In the last poem in the section, "Coda," when the sun does finally appear, it has become confused with the dogmatic God of the Creationists and the Moral Majority, a confusion which links it with its horrific mutation, the ultimate glow of the inevitable nuclear sunset: Visions fade.

Time remains. Mutants walk, the last in the sun. (DOA, 47) The poems in the third section of Directives of Autumn, "Through Clear Crystal," illustrate a kind of synthesis emerging from the conflict between art as thesis and experience as antithesis in the first two sections. Suffering penetrates the celebration and praise of these

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poems, but it is refracted and then absorbed in the ceremony of the poet's outlook. The image of the crystal recalls Corners in the Glass. In 1975, Gustafson told Earle Birney that the "colour of crystal has haunted me all my life."19 The image is that of a translucent, light-transmitting world rather than that of the opaque, lightresistant state of affairs in the previous section. The imagery of edges and angles is replaced by that of penetration, and the light passing through the glass marks as well the triumphant return of the sun. Through clear crystal the sun's rays Shall break, break in colours. The force of light shall see to it. (DOA, 51)

These lines compress the activity of art, the quality of the medium, and the condition of the artist into a single image. The poet must make himself and his language like "clear crystal" in order for the "force of light" to "break in colours." The accumulation of experience is what gives the poet his angularity; and it is from these facets of his self that his poems take their colours as they refract the light that inspirits them. This refraction marks the individuality of his creations and the shattered light is the glory that he celebrates. The mystery is that, though broken, the "force of light" remains undiminished; it contains its own restitution. Gustafson's weakness is his strength. Much as he may be dipped in transcendent yearning, his heel remains vulnerable to earth, and the more personal poems in "Directives of Autumn," the title section of the volume, consider the subject of time passing and the imminence of his own death. In "At the Turning of Leaves" he wonders if all that he has done has been enough; or, if there is time yet left to do more. He can't be sure, "And the wisdom does not help, not now / As you stand, summer really over" and "You cannot calm the heart standing /Too late amid the commerce / Of leaves"; moreover, "belief is "no help" in such an accounting (DOA, 65). All that he can do is resign himself to the inevitable and recognize the integrity of the process which engulfs him. Death is one of "The integrities each season promised" (DOA, 68). This resignation is most poignant in "Hunter's Moon," one of Gustafson's most moving poems: The moon was gold and the leaves were gold. The red leaves had fallen and the pallor Of the soft aspen was lighted, as gold,

260 A Poetics of Place By the hunter's moon, the first full Moon of October. She stood on the verandah, Facing that upper gold moon (My arms lightly, closely around her As if the time would come now). Foliage was fallen thickly, the lawn Uncertain, the dry brown leaves Fallen. Across the pathway The last flowers, a further frost Was promised. She did not like the deer To be in the forested hills. It is a hunter's Moon, she said. But it was beautiful, The dense covered hills, the moon above, The moment, the way it was, The moment. (DOA, 69)

In his essay "The Interplay of Music and Poetry," Gustafson writes: "Poetry may provide heaven but obstructs it too. Its argument is soilbound. ... To measure the world we need the poem, though music measure heaven. So that the world be partial, we need music."20 The music in this poem is a precise measure of Gustafson's love of earth, his love for his wife, and his reluctance to leave them though he knows he must. The music as well evinces the poet's control of his fear of death by turning that fear into an affirmation of what is to be lost. In "The Saving Grace," Gustafson writes: "despair is what poetry cannot be, being, as it is, on the side of life."21. In the first line, the four beats of simple iambic-anapestic stress, the long vowels and the repeated "gold," the simple grammatical construction and the end-stop establish the mood of quiet joy. The diction is kept simple and the repetition of "leaves," "gold," "moon," "fallen," "hills," and "moment" keeps the poem turning on its pivotal emotion. Alliteration, echo, and repetition are used masterfully, with the whole effect that of grand understatement. The climax of this control is in the parentheses, the typographical symbols themselves embracing the poet's love and fear, the latter spoken only in "As if the time would come now," and mirroring the image they contain. The peace is charged with tension. The deer in the forested hills is doomed to the hunter, death. But there is a richness or ripeness in "the pallor / Of the soft aspen." And although it is a hunter's moon, "it was beautiful." Such a death is integral to the season, and would even be beautiful, "the way it was."

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In "Toccata," in the final section of Directives of Autumn, Gustafson writes: The north makes an aesthetic difference. Its worth is not to be diminished, It is a corrective of artistic concerns. (DOA, 88) Gustafson's poetry received its great "corrective" in his overwhelming encounter with the new world northern which he expressed in Rocky Mountain Poems (1960). In that volume, Gustafson did not turn away from his earlier poetry, however, or from the world that poetry represented, so much as he sharpened his focus on them. The correction was not an admission of error so much as an adjustment of course, an altering of direction based on the discovery of the "aesthetic difference" that close scrutiny of the particulars of place made to his work. Moreover, with that scrutiny, new "concerns" became manifest. A world of numinous power, force, and grace opened to him. The quotidian gave forth in mystery and wonder. Perspectives were opened by the "radiance" that shone upon and from within the world of flower and rock, lake and house. The world at large remained Gustafson's field of vision, but his attention was now centred by the spirit of place that had come to inhere in all his writing. The volumes after Fire on Stone (1974) are a continuous celebration of the universal in the local. One of the many strengths of this "music of the exact piano" (DOA, 88), however, is that it never forfeits to the universal its origins in the immediate, just as it never prefers the idea to the sensation or intuition that evoked it. The volumes of the 19805 are among Gustafson's strongest. The love of place, the love of wife, the love of man, and the love of art are the four quadrants of their world and they cohere in the poetry through the charm of a craft that itself now seems a force of nature.

Conclusion: Winter Prophecies all falls into place Ralph Gustafson

With more than twenty volumes of poetry, the short stories, the Penguin and other anthologies, and a career that spans six decades, Gustafson is a pre-eminent Canadian poet of this century. Yet the criticism he has received has been largely confined to brief reviews in newspapers and literary periodicals. A critical "line" did develop in the reviews of Gustafson's early work. Readers were impressed by his "technical finish" but balked at the "bookish flavour" of his language.1 This soon became a tendency to discuss Gustafson's poetic manner at the expense of his matter, and what soon congealed was the image of the talented but obscure modernist who occasionally broke through to clarity in the later poems of love or landscape. This image received its definitive potting in the first edition of the Literary History of Canada (1965), when Munro Beattie organized Gustafson's career into what has become the three-phased paradigm of his generation: "infatuation with the mannerisms of late romanticism; response to the possibilities of modernism; and creation of his own style."2 The latter development is marked, in Beattie's view, by the two 1960 volumes, Rivers among Rocks and Rocky Mountain Poems. The shortcoming of this view is that it treats these two volumes as similar when they are quite different. The new ground and the stylistic breakthrough of Rocky Mountain Poems are not recognized by Beattie, perhaps because he was writing still under the fall-out from the prosodic complexity and obscurity of Gustafson's 19405 poetry, at the same time as he was coming under the sway of the thematic criticism that would dominate literary discussion in Canada in the 19605 and 19705. The thematic approach in Canadian criticism in particular has retarded recognition of the most important feature of Gustafson's career, his continuous growth and change, because thematic criticism

263 Conclusion

tends to be spatially rather than temporally prejudiced, and to homogenize or flatten out temporal development in the process of magnifying the various themes it wants to "discover" and "explore." Thematic criticism in Canada has generated a critical language riddled with spatial metaphors — in works that describe themselves as surveys, outlines, explorations — and with other tropes that express a "from-there-to-here" perspective and mentality. Beattie's thematic perspective associates Rocky Mountain Poems with poems like "Quebec Winterscene," "On the Road to Vicenza," and "Quebec, Late Autumn" in Rivers among Rocks as "poems that capture the sense of place."3 This view is blind to Rocky Mountain Poems as poetry, as a poetic sequence, and as poetry that breaks away from the other, more retrospective 1960 volume. Most reviewers did not recognize the significance of Rocky Mountain Poems in Gustafson's career, or its importance for post-war Canadian poetry. Along with Gustafson's sequences from the late 19508, it initiates the surge of interest in the long poem or poem-sequence which develops in the ig6os and 1970s, but which certain postmodernist Canadian poets seem to think they invented themselves.4 With the award-winning Fire on Stone (1974), however, Gustafson attracted some reviewers whose commentary reached beyond the surfaces of his poetry. Robin Skelton's "Ralph Gustafson: A Review and Retrospect" is the most important critical discussion of the poet between Louis Dudek's 1961 essay in Culture and Wendy Keitner's 1979 study. Skelton is one of the first critics to emphasize the significance of Gustafson's "understanding and love of music" for his poetry, suggesting that contrapuntal structures are basic not only to Gustafson's poetic method but to his sense of poetic truth as well. He also drew attention to Gustafson's "witness" poems, praising Gustafson as a master of the public poem because he "subordinates himself to his perceptions, to the truth of the 'moment-when'." Skelton, moreover, saw the significance of Rivers among Rocks and Rocky Mountain Poems. Up to Flight into Darkness, he described Gustafson as remaining "within the mainstream tradition of English lyricism," but with the 1960 volumes, he extended traditional forms and in the process "came into his full strength."5 The first book-length study of Gustafson appeared at the end of the 1970s: Wendy Keitner's Ralph Gustafson (1979), published in the Twayne World Authors series. Drawing from her doctoral dissertation, "Ralph Gustafson: Heir of Centuries in a Country without Myths" (Queen's University, 1973), Keitner sets out to counteract what she describes as "the fixed ideas that [Gustafson's] writing is insurmountably erudite and too Eurocentric to have direct relevance for

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the average reader or student of Canadian literature ... "6 With her dissertation, the Twayne book, and her essay, "Gustafsoris Double Hook," in Canadian Literature in 1978, Keitner deserves credit for trying to bring Gustafson and his work into greater prominence. However, her approach to Gustafsoris writing is typical of academic criticism in Canada during the 1970s. It considers the poems as delivery vans for themes. Dominated by Frye's and Atwood's theories of the Canadian imagination, Keitner sees Gustafsoris poetry to be riddled with conflicts. Indeed, in her view, it is because of his "key thematic concerns — such as the conflict between passion and intellect or between religion and art" — that Gustafson occupies a place in the mainstream of Canadian literature.7 While Keitner is undoubtedly correct in her understanding of Gustafson as an example of "the general development of Canadian poetry from its beginnings in imitation of British models, through a period of modernization following the lead of key British and American writers, to a more vigorously independent maturity,"8 her organization of Gustafsoris poetry into patterns of thematic dichotomies oversimplifies it and fails to comprehend the way tensions function in it.9 Keitner's critical strategy for making Gustafson a mainstream Canadian writer, albeit well intentioned, results in concealing his individuality by making him seem like a number of other poets of his generation. Further, her thematic approach is forced to see conflicts where they do not really exist, and to overstate as conflicts what would be more accurately described as tensions or disparities. For example, there is no "conflict" as such in Gustafson's poetry between civilization and wilderness, or Europe and the New World. The image of conflict is too violent, and too extreme. Nowhere in Gustafson's poetry is it apparent that he could exist in either "world" exclusively; moreover, "civilization" and "wilderness" are themselves much too abstract, and again, too extreme, to mean anything precise in relation to the poems. To think in such terms is to impose opposition where there is in fact, and in effect, only difference. Gustafson's sensibility is composed of attractions which, as attractions, are elements of affinity rather than theses in disagreement. At no time does Gustafson's poetry juxtapose passion and intellect as antinomial absolutes; on the contrary, their mutual infusion is one of the hallmarks of his style and their co-presence as elective desires is essential to his perspective. Nor do art and religion conflict in his work. From the beginning he worships those masterworks which transcend sectarian dogma and is repulsed by those features of all historical religions which are lifedenying or counteractive to human joy and fulfilment. Indeed, rather than placing these two realms of human interest in conflict,

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Gustafsoris perspective recognizes their affinity, the spiritual dimension of art and the trans-institutional, aesthetic value of religious tradition. Finally, the "contest between forces of human tradition and desire and those of geography — a struggle, as many writers have envisioned it, between love and death," is simply not there in Gustafson's poetry.10 There is certainly no contest between love and death, for as he points out on many occasions, death is in love, from beginning to end; there is no contest because death has already won. Gustafson's greatest affirmations of life always include an element of "keening," but what Richard Rorty has written in another context is relevant here: "There is no such thing as the fear of inexistence as such, but only fear of some concrete loss ... [the] individual sense of what was possible and important. ... Anyone who spends his life trying to formulate an answer to the question of what is possible and important fears the extinction of that answer."11 As for the conflict between tradition and geography, this is something of an academic Procrustean bed in Canadian criticism. But in Gustafson's poetry, the land does not defeat human desire; only death can do this. And tradition continues to nourish man on the land, or not, as man wills. The absence, presence, significance, or meaninglessness of tradition in Canadian literary or general culture has nothing to do with winter, the Laurentian Shield, the vastness of the prairies, the overwhelming indifference of the Rockies or the Arctic wastes. What Gustafson's poetry shows is that tradition is a matter of individual culture and consciousness, of individual energy and will. When Keitner writes that "The conflict between local and international loyalties which shapes Ralph Gustafson's career is a manifestation of what might be termed a general Canadian identity crisis," the needs of her thesis are clearly distorting her view of the subject.12 The circumstances of Gustafsoris life took him to England to further his education, to New York to continue a relationship, and eventually back to Canada and the Eastern Townships because that was the first opportunity after his marriage of obtaining a secure income. His many travels to Europe and other parts of the world result from his love of travel and his curiosity about the planet. None of this can or needs to be explained by a conflict of "loyalties."13 The notion that Gustafson has ever undergone an "identity crisis" in the sense that Keitner suggests is even more far-fetched. He has been a Canadian poet from his earliest poetry. But more important is it to recognize that he has been a poet. The thematic approach, confused as it so easily becomes by nationalistic, sociological, and academic issues, more often than not distracts us from the poems as poetry. The British poet Philip Larkin has urged that "a poet should be judged

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by what he does with his subjects, not by what his subjects are. ... Poetry isn't a kind of paint-spray you use to cover selected objects with."14 It is in its implicit derogation of the critical activity of judgment that thematic criticism does the most disservice to the literature it discusses. In Gustafson's case, what has been needed has been a close look at "What he does with his subjects," how he proceeds as a poet writing poems and how the poems then issue to the reader. The taxonomy of thematic criticism too often treats the work as something dead and waiting to be cleaned out and stuffed with academically approved preservatives, rather than as a work whose life is waiting to be engaged, whose challenge is its desire for an audience, and whose value is in its vital processes not the abstracted residues of paraphrase. Paraphrase is inescapable, of course, and this study certainly has not avoided it. Nor need it be avoided, as long as it is understood that, in Eliseo Vivas's terms, "The paraphrase is not the object and cannot exhaustively point to it; it is merely a means by which a reader can be helped to find the object."15

W

ithout Definition," a poem in Impromptus (1984), challenges the impulse to paraphrase in its very title, while the poem itself addresses the problems faced by its own language. Comparison with an earlier version shows that, as always for Gustafson, the creative process is the search for the right words. The poem recollects a mountain descent. In the first published version, it begins: It was a day amongst others, inevitable, Not unusual, of exaltation, above desire, A day of mountains, a glacier the whole horizon, Across the distance, dazzling, beyond having it More than the visual sensation, inaccessible To claim other than it was there, vast, Broken, white against blue that it had itself To scale: that day: completion: of what it was, Consummation. 16

The version of these lines in Impromptus (1984) shows Gustafson refining the rhythm, sound, and sense in the search for an accurate definition: It was a day amongst others, of exaltation, Inevitable, not unusual, above desire, A day of mountains, a glacier the whole horizon,

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Across the distance, dazzling, beyond having it Other than the visual sensation, inaccessible To action, acknowledgement without possession Other than it was there, vast, broken, White against blue that it had itself to scale: That day: completion: of what it was, Consummation.17

Moving "of exaltation" to the end of the first line strengthens the line rhythmically; it also introduces the phrase more emphatically. Also, by preceding "Inevitable, not unusual," the phrase renders those modifiers ambiguously bi-referent - to "day" and "exaltation." The reinforcement of "above desire" by "beyond having it" is maintained. But the change of "More" to "Other" shows the delicacy of Gustafson's touch. The revision to a weaker phrase (weaker rhythmically and in force of sound and denotation) better communicates the greater power of the natural phenomenon. The revised version then expands on this sense of the glacier's awesome otherness; "inaccessible / To claim other than it was there" becomes "inaccessible / To action, acknowledgement without possession / Other than it was there." The additional language is more than a refinement; it is the poem taking a greater hold on its object: the mysterious experience of human relation to the natural world and yet that world's apparent being beyond relation. The original phrase, "inaccessible / To claim," was effective but too strong. The hard consonant, long vowel, and iambic punch overpower the rest of the phrase and thus counter the sense Gustafson wants to develop. By shortening the phrase and using the softer "action," he strikes just the right note. He also gains the effect of the alliteration, which enriches the counterpoint between "action" and "acknowledgement"; "acknowledgement without possession" is a precise description of the mentality that the poem wants to convey. The additional language also results in his being able to use the original phrase, "Other than it was there," in a parallel position to the phrase it echoes, "Other than the visual sensation." Much of the diction in these opening lines is that of abstract definition: "exaltation," "sensation," "possession," "completion," "Consummation." The second section of the poem seems to want to counter these abstractions. It is indented from the left margin, as if the poem is relocating itself, taking up a different stance for a new attempt. The shift to a more explicit narrative voice also suggests the desire to replace abstraction with concrete anecdote. While there are fewer changes in this section, they are quite significant. The final version reads:

268 Conclusion We descended from the mountain, carefully, Careful not to disturb that balance: Life had, given, not taken ... It could have been anywhere — The Aletsch Glacier — Monte Rosa — Mount Cook we walked on, there By plane — the Rockies, the Coast Range? What does it matter? Or what year? We loved as we came down: The flower had five filaments Of pink outward to the edge of each Petal. The spoken word has sometimes No reason to exist. A rock Demands touch. Conception is The right ecstasy. Details, luminous, Sensed, thought. "Exaltation" Is not the right word. "Description" Is out. We were alive coming Down (not righteous, not apart), Ultimate, as creation is, As worship without a god is, As the instant of arrival, you remember It? touching fire while touching ice? (7, 57)

The careful descent from the mountain has become the careful construction of the poem. The "completion" of that moment in experience does not need the poem to validate it; the poem now seeks its own completion. But there is a complex "balance" involved that keeps the poem parallel with the recollected experience, and which is composed in a similar equilibrium of disparities. The tension in the original experience arose in the effort "not to disturb that balance" which inhered between the human and natural worlds, between the action of perception and the "acknowledgement without possession" of that world of otherness. In the poem, the balance that must be struck is between the poet's desire to recollect the experience and the otherness of the language used to manifest the recollection. The poem becomes increasingly self-conscious about its language as a consequence of this tension. Gustafson maintains the balance and the vital parallelism between poem and experience through his notions of grace and gift. The play in "Life had, given, not taken" conveys the sense of a meaning possessed as a result of grace, as something "given" to the poet rather than "taken" from experience. The first comma in the phrase is piv-

269 Conclusion

otal. The impulse in reading is to suppress it, to read "Life had given, not taken," but by breaking the two verbs into three, Gustafson can maintain the conjunction of disparate senses: the experience was possessed, but what was possessed was a grace, a gift, not something to be owned but something to be acknowledged and returned. The return is the poem itself, the completion of the gift-exchange by passing on in act or spirit the generosity that has been received. This notion of the reception and return of a gift is carried into the language of love in "We loved as we came down." The first version of this line was "It made us see as we came down." The revised line builds on the "completion"-"consummation" pattern of the first section, whereas the original extends the imagery of "visual sensation." The second version is an improvement because it advances more forcefully the spirit of the poem. As the poem draws closer to its own self-discovery, it paradoxically begins to question and reject its language. Consummation occasioned silence in the experience: "The spoken word has sometimes / No reason to exist." In the poem, however, it evokes a conscious rigour; "A rock / Demands touch," the poem demands that its language conceive the "right ecstasy." The earlier "exaltation" is judged inadequate. Nor will "Description" do. Suffice it to say that the ecstasy was "Ultimate," in the sense that there was nothing beyond it which could be investigated or analysed. Gustafson offers three similes trying to define this "ultimacy" but settles in the end for a parting metaphor: "touching fire while touching ice." This echoes the conclusion of "On the Columbia Icefield" (RMP, 15), but more significant than the echo is the return to metaphor itself. The poem does not end so much as it proceeds as far as it can before it would have to assume a form of expression which, by virtue of a more fixed definition, would falsify the experience. "'Exaltation' / Is not the right word." The experience remains "without definition." The poem remains honest and as accurate as the poet can make it in its presentation of a state of mind and body which beheld the world in terms of an "acknowledgement without possession." To define would have been to possess, or make a false claim to possession, and Gustafson's attitude does not recognize such propriety as valid or even worthy.

I

n Winter Prophecies (1987), the fourth in his series of seasonal volumes, this perspective of "acknowledgement without possession" continues to be responsible for the poetry's blending of humility and force; of a recognition of the world's awesome vitality and the celebration of the human achievements of love and art; of fear and dis-

270 Conclusion

gust at human stupidity and cruelty, and joy in the resources of earth and sea. "Let us look to the affirmative earth," he counsels in "Let Us Be Tender about the Earth."18 At the same time, the facts of life on this same earth continue to plague Gustafson with their reminder of mankind's continued ignorance about ultimate matters. In his 1961 essay on Gustafson and Eli Mandel, Louis Dudek points out the importance of Gustafson's spiritual concerns for his poetry and interprets the omnipresent "verbal tensions" as deriving from the traditional conflicts between spirit and flesh, mind and matter, man and God.19 Dudek is mostly discussing the Gustafson of Rivers among Racks and Rocky Mountain Poems and he prefers the former volume because he feels that the metaphysical struggle which he values in Gustafson's poetry is glossed over by the other volume, in which the God of the earlier poetry is replaced by the imagery of "magnificence."20 But Dudek's essay is more illustrative of the cosmopolitan-native controversies still present in Canadian criticism in the early 1960s than it is helpful with Gustafson's poetry. He misreads the significance of Gustafson's use of "magnificence" and its associated metaphors in Rocky Mountain Poems when he says that they "gloss" Gustafson's spiritual concerns. In fact, they do just the opposite: they bring those concerns forward quite forcefully. What happened in Rocky Mountain Poems was that Gustafson began to explore the intuitive basis of a divinity immanent in earth, but not to the exclusion of such traditional questions as the reality and truth of a Creator, the Christian God, the meaning of Christ, and the existence of a transcendent spiritual authority. The poetry after Rocky Mountain Poems explores these and other spiritual-religious issues constantly. But it also gives increasing expression to the poet's experiences with the earth itself as spiritual and religious. Dudek is quite correct to identify the importance of Hopkins to Gustafson, but his emphasis is off target. Gustafson's poetry, if anything, shows that rather than being diverted from the senses by God, Gustafson is taken toward his propositions of divinity by his senses. It is quite incorrect to say that Gustafson recognizes "the actual, the real, the world of the senses" as the "only" absolute. The derogation implicit in that "only" would not be acceptable to Gustafson, for whom, as for Blake and Lawrence, the senses are holy. Also, "the actual, the real" clearly includes more than just "the world of the senses" for Gustafson. Intuition, imagination are as real, and so, too, are the experiences evoked by works of art. And finally, Gustafson's development has taken him to an elaboration of his sensibility's fundamental intuition of the paradoxical coexistence of the absolute as absence and presence, as distant,

271 Conclusion helpless God and historical Jesus, as immanent in sacred earth and human ceremony and apparently absent in dumb circumstance and human history. Gustafson's perspective defies definition by any simple structure of binary opposition, attractive as such explanation may be to the critic. My own description of that perspective as "contradictory" is also inadequate, a paraphrase which points toward but cannot touch the poetic object it attempts to behold. In Winter Prophecies, "Postscript" addresses the kind of opposition identified by Dudek: And so to the great theme: God and sex, Both inextricably at one And one denied the other ... Acceptable, acceptable. OK, No more objection, just that the union Is inscrutable, but love In it, as long as love is in there somewhere, Nothing if not that, making Both justifiable ...(WP, 16)

It is significant that he writes "justifiable" rather than "justified"; the inscrutability of life is "acceptable" given that love is acknowledged. But life does not justify itself; for Gustafson, as for Milton, that is the poet's task. And the contradictions that compose life cannot be resolved by isolating their elements, for the elements themselves are only defined in the "friction" that announces their presence. This is evident as well in his most recent references to transcendence. In "Sun on the Water," the title itself images the fusion of elemental realities. He begins: "We could use transcendence, / That unheardof greatness"; but his examples of that greatness are essentially human and earthly experiences: "standing / On Everest," "love - that / Quality of surpassing," "pain / Ignored, borne with." His metaphors are all physical: "the rebuff a sail makes / In a going about, the perfect / Serve, a loving together";21 but they are joined in an ultimacy which is predicated on the interpenetration of matter and spirit: "Any of those things / That stand for the extremest soul / Recognized" (WP, 23). It is this interpenetration and connectedness that mark Gustafson's maturest vision and which allow him to affirm that "The world is exhilarating / Even in its final preparations" (WP, 26). The poems in Winter Prophecies are "Instances of preparation / ... And readiness" (WP ms, 21), a phrase the poet revises to ironic ack-

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Conclusion

nowledgment as "Instances of assumption" (WP, 27). The proximity of that "being without gravity" which he encountered at the end of "In the Yukon" (RMP, 36) is overwhelming — or almost overwhelming. The poet now looks at the world with the intensity of a man who is leaving a beloved landscape and who does not know when or whether he will see it again. Preparation and readiness describe the action and mood of "Variations on a Theme of Indian Summer," but they are combined with a most moving regret: The air was full of leaves, Wayward, but over, over. I had known this, Four weeks ago The ground was covered and I had raked The leaves from the lawn into bags. But this was different. The falling leaves so many There was ending, the meaning As in a music ending Come to and its music wanted. This was prophecy, assignable, Most of all to him Who loves. Indifference, indifference Is best, the beauty only what is And not employed, a season. Now through the air even In the sun the leaves falling Invest the heart. It is too Bad, this falling. (WP, 51)

This is a poignant expression of what Stevens calls "an inevitable knowledge."22 Gustafson's love of the world takes him deep into its heart, making his own concentric with it; their rhythms, like a music ending and still wanted, are mysteriously synchronized. This synchronicity, however, is the result of discipline. The poet must listen to the world, and to the poem. In an earlier version of this poem, he had written "the beauty only what is / And not known" and "the leaves falling / Overtake the heart" (WP ms). By changing "known" to "employed" the poet captures precisely the nuance of a beauty that is known but not possessed, and "invest" conveys a truer sense of that "inevitable knowledge" which conies to Gustafson from his sense of the lateness of being.

273 Conclusion

In "Meditation, It Being Warm," the sun itself is indifferent - "The day had been clouded, / Then from under the shade the hot / Sun flung its hotness a sudden /Metaphor but meaning nothing / Ultimately, the sun would shine on death" (WP, 56) - but this neutrality is a condition sufficient for human joy, and ultimately, the empowering pre-condition of poetic utterance: "here was sun, sun enough / To make the cerements I had been given / Deathless, so to speak" (WP, 56). The indifference of nature is involved in the quality of man's knowledge of his place in the world and what makes certain accidents of nature seem more than coincidences evocative of wonder. The neutrality of the laws of nature and the physical world becomes a ground for numinous possibilities in Gustafson's poetry. In the end, it is this world of concrete wonder that he values most: Only the seasons matter. Snow on apple blossom, Summer come, skies With broken cloud and rains, Winter with their harvest. Assign truth elsewhere. Only the seasons matter. (WP, 59)

Ultimately, for Gustafson, "all falls into place" (GG, 18). Place is man's doom, the source of his being and the field of his becoming. Man's enduring wisdoms counsel his falling into place with earth's rhythms and processes, accepting his doom amid their magnificence. Whether or not that acceptance is forthcoming, however, man cannot evade the inevitable falling to earth of his own death. In his most recent poetry, Gustafson's preparation and readiness for that fall are quite evident. In this, the poetry is the culmination of a career which has seen the poet develop an art that is at home in the world because its artifice expresses a consciousness concentric with that world. In his interview with Damien Pettigrew, Gustafson stated: "I've reached the conviction that an artist acquires a style which is concentric with his own personality, his knowledge and the instincts he was born with. The poem can be good formally but it remains far less rich without the man and the personality behind the poetry." He went on to qualify this, however, by saying that "there should be something projected beyond the personal element — a comprehension of the world. ... an awareness of the world outside the self."23 In Gustafson's concentric stance, the rhythmic and formal properties of the poem itself often embody the interaction and interpenetration of the self and the world outside it. This is the sense of his remark in his preface to Impromptus

274 Conclusion (1984): "Certainly, in the making, there is the greatest sense of freedom and delight, qualities safeguarded by the form" (I, 11). Man lives and knows his experience bounded by the forces of the world that contains him, and, for Gustafson, the poem expresses this experience of existence within limits by achieving an equilibrium between expressive self and circumambient universe, an equilibrium made from the language that is one of the world's givens but which is not possessed until it is returned in the exchange of art. In that exchange, it is possible for the poet "to achieve not only the style which means excellence but to find the identity of the man who is in the style" (/, 11). Richard Poirier has argued that [modern] literature assigns less space and volubility to persons than to the various technologies and structures of which they have become the mere instrumentalities. ... more often than not the techniques have no emanation from a discoverable human agency. The style cannot be traced back to a character, even to some imaginable psychological shape called the author. Organizational schemes, stylistic fashions seem to blanket, to smother the human presences which they might be expected to serve.24

In his later poetry, Gustafson has sought and achieved a style which does indeed serve his presence in the world, yet not so as to usurp that world's presence in the poem. His style is, in Poirier's sense, mimetic of the selfs "performance" in the world. The "potentially destructive impulse to mastery is present in Gustafson's poetry in the form of his desire to know more than the poem seems capable of delivering.25 This desire, however, has as its corollary the fear of departing from the truth in the poem. Gustafson's sincerity is thus a tension of poised desires, and the result is usually a poem that meditates its own processes as it relies on those processes to mediate its vital obsessions. Gustafson's later poetry is what David Perkins has described as "the poetry of sincerity" which "embodies the twofold striving of a sincere mind to be open to experience and to obtain beliefs by which we can guide ourselves." But in order to be compelling and credible, the poetry of sincerity must also be the poetry of the "process of thought" that led the poet to the insight.26 For Gustafson, this becomes a matter of managing the self in the poem. In the mid-ig6os, he told Henry Beissel: "I always have quite a time keeping myself out of my poems — that is, when I begin to feel passionately, I want everybody to feel passionately. And yet this business of impersonality (pace, T.S. Eliot) is nonsense. The trouble with most new Canadian poems is that one can't tell who is writing — no achieved personality. My fault is that I sometimes get hortative."27

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Conclusion

The "achieved personality" is both the process and the image of that "self-management" which is the poem; it is the "personality" that comes to the reader through the voice of the poem, and the momentary coherence of self that the poet achieves in the articulation. This is the intrinsic cohesion of style and experience that underlies Gustafson's constant admonitions regarding craft. He told Pettigrew: "I judge a poem as good by its structure. ... there must be a structuring of that first primal impulse. It's a matter of control, mastering your technique so that when you write down the primal impulse, it flows inside a controlled and ordered framework."28 Gustafson's importance for modern Canadian poetry is first and foremost as a poet. This is not to deny the major, and still unrecognized, contribution he has made as an anthologist or the historical significance of the popular Penguin anthologies — more important than the academic collections that have received, understandably, more academic attention. The evolution and expansion of his mythopoeic vision of the "new world northern" is a major expression of the reorientation to place and the imaginative inhabiting of the northern landscape which characterize Canadian writing in the second half of this century. But even this should be understood in the context of Gustafson's lifelong development of his craft. It is Gustafson's commitment to craft that has kept him from the two great pitfalls of modern poetry: the opposed extremes of inwardness and objectivity. His poetry has kept to a middle course and as a consequence presents a middle ground in which self and world meet to each other's enhancement. It is in this middle way that Gustafson's poetry is most "realistic" and that his career may be described as a relentless concern with "the true stature of things."29 His long poem, Gradations of Grandeur (1982), is a major report of his findings, but all of his books contain poems of explanation, analysis, and discovery in this respect. To attend Gustafson's craftsmanship, as this discussion has attempted, is to study the whole man. He does indeed evolve from romantic to modernist, and belongs to the generation of Canadian poets who adapted modernism to the Canadian situation. What is remarkable, however, is that, while belonging to that broad generational movement, he remained independent of the factions, cliques, and coteries which often composed it. The 19305 and 19405 were Gustafson's years of dark travail, when he suffered his anxieties of influence while using the examples of poets like Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Thomas, and Hopkins to break free of a moribund romantic heritage. But what is even more important to recognize is that, since the early ig6os, not only has Gustafson moved beyond that modernist

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phase, he has done so by extending the modernism of poets like Pound and Stevens rather than rejecting it. His poetry of the 19705 and 19805 is a unique amalgam of traditional modernist principles and practices and elements of more recent postmodernist thinking. Gustafson's poetry of the moment, in which "the moment is all" (GG, 74), avoids what has been described as "the first major problem for a poetics of immediacy, its assumption of the possibility of a kind of brutal forgetting of all that we know."30 For Gustafson, the totality of the moment-now is composed of the fullness of time and the whole content of accessible consciousness. Further, it is his sensibility, and its inherent propensity to irony, ambiguity, and humour, which is the basis of this aesthetic immediacy, just as it was the force behind his modernist style. Gustafson's profound humility before the world is particularly evident in "The Red Marker," a poem in Winter Prophecies in which time and place, past, present, and future are conjoined in a poetic action of great poignancy: The presumption of death: That lift of dust In the turn of the rising wind And that which belongs to dust. I knew the taking years ago. And still I have not gone to All the world, the world A future. There is Music I do not know. Yesterday I put the red marker Where I wanted the white birch planted So as not to spoil the view, Not thinking the care Was unjoinable. (WP, 47)

Like the Whitman of "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," the poet looks from his own past to a time when he will be part of another's heritage. The view is generous because he feels responsible. His thought is for that future generation's vision. He wants it to be unobstructed, and yet not without content. The early version of this poem ended with "The green spadix, the thrust, / For someone else" (WP ms). There is no more telling gesture than this setting of a marker for a future

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planting, this multiform and complex signing of land, language, and self. "Sincerity becomes a poetic value," in David Perkins's view, "only because it is first a moral virtue. It advances in esteem as certitude grows more difficult."31 Gustafson's search for certitude has been predicated on his sensibility's intuitive search for what is utterly real in experience. That search has taken him outward, throughout the world, only to end where he started; the real looms up from the world at his doorstep, what he discovers is what he has always known. Gustafson's poetry hugs the ground of its being. It has grown, quietly and steadily, over the years, until now it presents a broad and full view to the beholder. What we see is a world of signs, totems more ceremonial than sacramental, personal yet offered up to us to share. Perhaps that is their greatest utility, their invitation to celebrate. Gustafson's poetic consummations are self-consumed, however. They celebrate and worship but they do not incarnate. The poet remains a fallen angel. But if the Word remains, it remains only in the forms of its fallen angels, in the glory of that shattered light which Gustafson's poetry perpetually exalts, that access of magnificence. His poetry thus counters "the disharmony, the structural collapse, the pollution of right ritual, the violence and disgrace of our times."32 Magnificence is undoubted, and it is in that certain affirmation that their "right ritual" gains a share of the glory it witnesses.

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Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Pettigrew, "Interview with Ralph Gustafson," 27. 2 Pettigrew, "Interview," 27. 3 Gustafson, The Golden Chalice, 55. Further reference to this volume (TGC) will appear in the text. 4 The poet's delight in the music of language and his orchestration of sound in support of imagery are recognizable: the soft consonants and smooth hills of line i, for example, and the harder effects of the alliterated u's and ds emphasizing the contrast in light and location of the valleys in line 2. Alliteration, onomatopoeia, assonance are the poem's strongest aural features, along with metrical regularity and precision of rhyme. The transitions of sound in "folds with lazy motion browse" are effective, but they don't quite compensate for the awkwardness of the inversion. Syntactical inversion demanded by the rhyme-scheme renders a number of other lines awkward, and often inversion seems to appear simply because it is "poetic"; the result is always unhappy. (An unnecessary confusion results in line 9, where "calm" may be taken for a verb before it is identified as the modifier of "beauty.") The imagery is generally lifeless and unparticular. Nor does sound always fit sense: "solitude and empty silence" seem incapable of "rous[ing] / Wide murmurs." "The stuff of thick desires" is a sticky embarrassment, and "Natural peace" and "soft contentment" are bankrupt phrases hardly capable of arresting a "soul's mad rhythms." 5 Gustafson, Conflicts of Spring, 31. Further reference to this volume (COS) will appear in the text. 6 Gustafson, Foreword to the revised edition, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse, 33. 7 Gustafson, "New World Northern: Of Poetry and Identity," 55—6. Further reference to this work (NWN) will appear in the text.

280 Notes to pages 7-13 8 Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 22. 9 Bowering, A Way with Words, 169. 10 Bowering writes: "Straight talkjdoes not work in poetry because there are no straight lines in the universe. The idea of straightness is thus an imposition of will upon nature. Similarly, those poets who would claim to come to the reader naked are emperors pretending that they are wearing no clothes. ... Thus the good poet's mask, formed by the truth of the imagination, is worn not to hide but to reveal the truth of the emotions" (A Way with Words, 169). CHAPTER ONE: U N A U T H O R I Z E D W O R D S 1 See Dudek and Gnarwoski, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, 3, 9-20. Gustafson does refer to the "School of Imagists" in his MA thesis, but the context of his remark makes clear he was unfamiliar with their work; see Gustafson, "The Sensuous Imagery of Shelley and Keats," 12. 2 In his Preface to Acanthus and Wild Grape (1930); see Dudek and Gnarowski, The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada, 21. In 1928 Lionel Stevenson noted the popularity of the sonnet form with Canadian poets and singled out Call as a sonneteer who used the form to deal with "the new theme" of the city; see Stevenson, "The Human Touch in Canadian Poetry," 73. In retrospect, Gustafson himself saw Call as a transitional figure, describing him as "a poet combining the conventional world of poetry with the coming world of modern poetry. The transition is in the title of his second book of poems, Acanthus and Wild Grapes' [sic]"; see Gustafson, "The Story of the Penguin," 72. 3 Beattie, "Poetry (1920—35)," 242. 4 See Stevens, The McGill Movement, 10. Nor did the publication of New Provinces in 1936, containing the works of Smith, Scott, Kennedy, Finch, Klein, and Pratt, change matters much. The contributors did not form a coherent party and New Provinces was not a manifesto. It was, rather, an informative anthology showing a variety of modern styles in transition — and in Pratt's case, a transitional style hesitating to be modern. The concerns and assumptions behind these individual styles would become the values informing the literary arguments of the 19405, out of which a modern consciousness in Canadian poetry finally did emerge. Two years after New Provinces, two other anthologies of Canadian poetry appeared; and as Peter Stevens has pointed out, though one of these, New Harvesting, edited by Ethel Hume Bennett, was published with the subtitle "Contemporary Canadian Poetry, 1918-1938," and contained works by Finch, Kennedy, Livesay, Pratt, Scott, and Smith, neither it nor A New Canadian Anthology, edited by Alan Leighton, presents modern

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5 6 7 8

9

Notes to pages 13-14

Canadian poetry as we now see it in the second half of the century; see Stevens, "The Development of Canadian Poetry," 325-6. As late as 1939, Dorothy Livesay was still complaining of a lack of criticism with a modern sensibility which would give coherence to the developments in Canadian poetry which she felt had occurred during the 19308. She was still looking, she wrote, "for some genuine expression of experience, related to the way people live and struggle in Canada" (Livesay, "An Open Letter to Sir Charles G.D.Roberts," 34—5). While there were obviously a number of poets who defined themselves by virtue of their modernity, in the 1980s and 1930s, it was not until the 1940s that a collective consciousness began to emerge, and with it a collective consciousness of modern Canadian poetry. See Stevens, "The Development of Canadian Poetry," 157. See Dudek and Gnarowski, The Making of Modern Canadian Poetry, 38. Stevens, "The Development of Canadian Poetry," 65. Gustafson to Wendy Keitner, 39 April 1973, The Ralph Gustafson Papers, Queen's University Archives, Kingston, Ontario; hereafter cited as Queen's. Gustafson himself has said that when he left Canada for Oxford, he was "a linguistically phony romantic" (Gustafson to Wendy Keitner, 31 January 1971, Queen's). At Bishop's, he had immersed himself in the poetry of the English Romantics for his MA thesis. While his teacher Frank Oliver Call had, as has been mentioned, played a role in the free verse debate in Canadian poetry after the First World War, Call's influence on Gustafson actually reinforced the young poet's emulation of outworn romantic models. In 1972 Gustafson told Keitner: "I owe a lot to Frank Oliver Call"; Call's poetry course at Bishop's "was the first glimpse I had of contemporary poetry (outside of Roberts and Carman) ... he used to read every poem I wrote then" (Gustafson to Keitner, 2 2 September 1972, Queen's). Call's encouragement may have helped Gustafson, but his advice, if Gustafson heeded it, would have retarded his development. Their correspondence shows that, throughout the 1930s, Gustafson's old teacher was urging Keats, Shelley, and even Swinburne as models. In 1940, Call wrote Gustafson that he thought his recent poems in the Sewanee Review were the work "of a poet who is under the spell of Spender, Auden etc. Keats and Swinburne have their pitfalls, but I believe that their influence will be alive and powerful, when the Spender-Auden school is dead and forgotten" (F.O. Call to Ralph Gustafson, 6 June 1940, The Ralph Gustafson Papers, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan; hereafter cited as Saskatchewan). Gustafson's self-description, however, suggests that a distinction can be made between his "phony" romantic language at this time and the sensibility it expressed.

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Notes to pages 15-28

10 See Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (1970) and Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973) for the major discussions of this sense of a poet's problematized relation to the tradition. 11 Gustafson, "The Sensuous Imagery of Shelley and Keats," 3. Further reference to this work (SI) will appear in the text. 12 See Bradley, A Miscellany, 189. 13 For the interrelation of romanticism, modernism, and postmodernism, see Altieri, Enlarging the Temple (1979); Altieri's discussion has provided me with much of the conceptual framework for my reading of Gustafson's development beyond his modernist phase. 14 See, for example, poems in The Golden Chalice such as "Vision" (9), "To Those Concerned" (61), "Immutability (62), and "A Poet in Exile" (73). 15 The phrase is Shelley's, taken from an unpublished manuscript and quoted by Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, 299. T.S. Eliot's statement on youthful imitation is apropos here: "It is not from rules, or by coldblooded imitation of style, that we learn to write: we learn by imitation indeed, but by a deeper imitation than is achieved by analysis of style. When we imitated Shelley, it was not so much from a desire to write as he did, as from an invasion of the adolescent self by Shelley, which made Shelley's way, for the time, the only way in which to write" (Eliot, Selected Prose, 108-9). 16 For the definitive discussion of the ambiguous nature of all such literary parasitism, see Miller, "The Critic as Host." 17 See Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 30-2. 18 Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 36. 19 Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 33; see Altieri, 32-3, for his use of "nausea," "narcissism," "creative ground," and "creative self." 20 Seaman, Life in Britain between the Wars, 35. 21 Quoted in Hynes, The Auden Generation, 31. 22 Gustafson to Keitner, 31 January 1971, Queen's. 23 Skelton, Poetry of the Thirties, 25; Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties, 203. 24 New Verse, 1 (1933), 2, 3, 6-7, 11-15. 25 In the second number, Gustafson would have read William Empson's "Bacchus" and Allen Tate's "The Meaning of Life." Empson's poem is a dense lyric which uses a series of parenthetical units to break up the flow of thought - much as Gustafson would do later in "Mythos"; see Flight into Darkness, 18. (Further reference to this volume [FID] will appear in the text.) Within months, Gustafson could have read Tate's "The Mediterranean" and "Aeneas at Washington," poems which weave Greek myth and modern history, in much the same way as his own "Mythos," "Legend" and "The Election"; see Rivers among Rocks, 1, 17. (Further reference to this volume [RAR] will appear in the text.) Louis MacNeice's "An Eclogue for Christmas" appeared in the April 1934

283 Notes to pages 28-30

26

27

28 29

30

issue, and Gustafson has acknowledged MacNeice's influence on his own "April Eclogue" (FID, 29), written in December 1936. Smith actually appears in New Verse more often than Thomas, in a total of eight issues, the last being in January 1938. His "Resurrection of Arp" appeared in the same issue as MacNeice's "An Eclogue for Christmas" (April 1934), and his "Ballade Un Peu Banale" in the same issue as Thomas's "When once the twilight locks no longer" and "I see the boys of summer in their ruins" (June 1934). Gustafson told Keitner that "[A.J.M. Smith and I] share a deep concern for craftsmanship. My admiration for his work may have set an occasional limit to my exuberance about what was moving me but certainly I am not conscious of ever being "influenced" (Gustafson to Keitner, 29 April 1973, Queen's). Hynes, The Auden Generation, 114. Gustafson told Keitner that Geoffrey Grigson's rejection of his poems was a "dramatic incident that changed my style top-to-toe.... That did it. I read into contemporary poetry like crazy and changed my own style. Because of no one poet. Just to bring myself up to date" (Gustafson to Keitner, 8 January 1971, quoted by Keitner in "Ralph Gustafson: Heir of Centuries in a Country without Myths," 122). Gustafson had submitted "Study in Metal" (TGC, 60) and another poem to Grigson, who returned them with the comment that he thought "Study in Metal" to be "rhythmically commonplace" (Grigson to Gustafson, 1 February 1933, Saskatchewan). Spender, The Destructive Element, 23—4. As he told Sheila Ascroft in 1970, "No one ever told me at university that T.S. Eliot was alive, or Pound or Yeats. At Bishop's we stopped with Swinburne! At Oxford, they never even got to Swinburne!" (Gustafson to Ascroft, 21 February 1970, Queen's) Nor does this seem to be an exaggeration; in his MA thesis in 1930, Gustafson refers to Swinburne's "The Garden of Proserpine" (1866) and "A Forsaken Garden" (1878) as "two of the best of our modern poems" (SI, 12). Gustafson told Keitner: "The love poems in Golden Chalice are out of my head; written in Oxford under the heady influence of Keats and Shakespeare" (Gustafson to Keitner, 19 March 1976, Queen's). Gustafson does not seem to have enjoyed his time at Oxford, at least to begin with. From his correspondence with FO. Call at Bishop's, it is clear that he had complained about his first year abroad. Call wrote back to Gustafson: "I am very sorry that you have not found Oxford more congenial. But I know how unsympathetic and selfish the average Oxford man is" (Call to Gustafson, 8 March 1931, Saskatchewan). Gustafson seems to have suffered from the environment described by Spender, whose years at Oxford overlapped with Gustafson's. In World within World, Spender describes the attitude of English "public-school boys" at Oxford "who thought that not to come from a public school was as ridic-

284 Notes to pages 30-2

31 32 33

34

35

36 37

38

ulous as to be a foreigner" (33). Spender also describes "the hierarchy of colleges" that existed (35). Not being a product of an English public school, and then being at Keble rather than one of the prestigious colleges, Gustafson would have experienced this snobbism, and poems like "Taxidermy" (TGC, 58) and "Study in Metal" (TGC, 60) are specific complaints against student life at Oxford. Day Lewis, The Buried Day, 217, 218. Gustafson, "On a Threat of War," Saturday Night, 25 Jan. 1936, 3. Gustafson to Birney, 13 April 1942, Saskatchewan. At least one contemporary reviewer recognized what Gustafson was up to; Clara Bernhardt noted the "startling parallelisms" between Gustafson's play and "European events of the past few months"; see Bernhardt, "Introducing Gustafson," 26. Gustafson has also admitted his intention in the play in "The Story of the Penguin," 74. There are, however, a number of parallels between Alfred the Great and Auden's earlier Paid on Both Sides (1930). Auden's feud between the Nower and Shaw families is similar to Gustafson's war between the Saxons and Danes. Auden, too, uses a pair of doomed lovers who come from the warring factions, and who dramatize the struggle between the forces of love and death in contemporary civilization. The Anglo-Saxon world and Old English poetry also underlie both plot and style in Paid on Both Sides. The satirical impulse continued in "Rhyme for the Modern Child," his first appearance in the Canadian Forum, in November 1937; in this poem he attempts to "Sing a song of gas-masks / The government supply," and attacks the incompetence of government leaders to deal with the threat of war; see Gustafson, "Rhyme for the Modern Child," Canadian Forum 17 (November 1937):262. He repeats this exercise in "Rhymes for the Modern Nursery," a more direct satire of statesmen, armament-makers, church, and clergy, in Saturday Night 22 (July 1939): 24See "Ode on the Nativity of a Poet" (TGC, 87). In this respect, "From Sweden" also recalls "Winter Scene" (TGC, 67), but the activity in these lines is much more complex. "Winter Scene" concludes: "And from a lonely farm-house seen afar / A lazy smoke uncurls across the night" (TGC, 67). The domestic image in both poems may also look back to Lampmaris sonnet, "In November": "Far off the village lamps begin to gleam, / Fast drives the snow, and no man comes this way"; see Lampman, The Poems of Archibald Lampman (including At the Long Sault), 117. There may even be an echo of Newman's "encircling gloom" and "kindly light" in the imagery of night and the man walking toward the "simple light" of home in the last stanza. Compare "The Pillar of the Cloud":

PI

285 Notes to pages 32-7 "Lead, kindly light, amid the encircling gloom, / Lead thou me on; / The night is dark, and I am far from home, / Lead thou me on." See Newman, Verses on Various Occasions, 156. 39 Pound, "Credo," in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 9. Pound continues: "if a man use 'symbols' he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk." 40 Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 37-8. 41 Gustafson, Poetry and Canada, 12-14. Further reference to this work (PC) will appear in the text. 42 Evidence that all of this is quite consciously taking place in the process of composition-revision, and that it is valid to talk of a poetics of presence in this poetry, can be found in a letter that Gustafson wrote to Birney at this time, in which he discusses the following stanzas of "Ectomia": For us no longer is the night Sharp with the silver grit of stars, Does scalpel of sun scrape sight. Smell the tamarack how Curt-clean flank of the wind From moon-flood rocks, metallic snow (FID, 36) Gustafson told Birney: "My attempt... was to make sensuous imagery fuse — come simultaneously. As sensations do when experienced. (A series of parallels, rather than hyphens). The effect I hoped would be, not cumulative, but immediate. And so 'curt-clean' serves both 'smell' and 'wind' - and I was impatient with punctuation, fatal to fusion" (Gustafson to Birney, 25 November 1939, Saskatchewan). Gustafson would modify his views - actually his sense of the proportion of meaning carried by sound in poetry - in later years, but the fusion of sound, rhythm, and image in bringing forth the poem's subject, in making it palpable, always remains central to his poetics. This derives from his reading of Keats and Shelley, and his understanding and belief in the power of sensuous imagery to make manifest what is immanent in experience. 43 In his essay, "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921), Eliot wrote: "We can only say that it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results. The poet must

286 Notes to pages 37-43 become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning" (Eliot, Selected Prose, 65). If Gustafson had not read the essay by this time, which is unlikely, he would have come across this passage in New Verse; see Armitage, "The New Wyndham Lewis," 13. 44 Gustafson to Sheila Ascroft, 21 February 1970, Queen's. CHAPTER TWO! THE CONTRADICTORY LENS

1 Connolly, quoted in Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1939-45, 7; Symons, The Thirties, 164. 2 Gustafson, "Poetry and Politics," 4. 3 Gustafson, "Worthwhile Visitations," 90—1. 4 Gustafsoris "Poetry and Politics" contradicts Keitner's view that, in his Preface to the Anthology of Canadian Poetry (English) (1942), Gustafson was "grappling with the divergent and ultimately irreconcilable tendencies in Canadian poetry in the period between the wars: a tendency toward a type of poetry which would be 'unconcerned with anything save its own existence' and a contradictory tendency toward a type of poetry which would 'become increasingly aware of its duty to take cognizance of what is going on in the world of affairs'" (Keitner, "Ralph Gustafson," 47). Gustafson's English experience during the 1930s resulted in his developing a poetic which, while it gave priority to the expression of the poet's individuality, defined that individuality in moral and social terms. Indeed, Gustafson's poetry of the 1940s often reconciles what Keitner describes as "irreconcilable " and does so because Gustafson rejected the tendency to "pure poetry" that emerged during the period. Poetry and Canada (1945), and his other prose writings during the 1940s, by their strenuous argument for the interconnectedness of personal and social values and of individual and cultural identities, and for the value of the poet and poetry to the national well-being, make clear that Gustafson was not torn between contradictory views of poetry at all, and it is rather misleading to say that his aesthetic position is eventually "a middle one, between a wholly aesthetic, art-for-art's sake stance and a fully pragmatic engage one" (Keitner, "Ralph Gustafson," 53). 5 Raymond to Gustafson, 9 August 1935, Saskatchewan. 6 Raymond to Gustafson, 29 May 1940, Saskatchewan. 7 Gustafson, "Worthwhile Visitations," 91. 8 See Raymond to Gustafson, 19 October 1941, Saskatchewan. 9 Gustafson to Ronald Hambleton, 3 February 1941, Saskatchewan;

287 Notes to pages 43—56 Gustafson to Birney, 14 February 1942; 13 April 1942; and 14 December 1942, Saskatchewan. 10 Fraser, The Modern Writer and His World, 294. For a detailed discussion of Hopkins's influence on specific 1930s poets, see Gardner, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889): A Study of Poetic Idiosyncrasy in Relation to Poetic Tradition, I, ch. 7, "Hopkins and Modern Poetry." 11 Gustafson to Dorothy Livesay, 21 June 1976, Queen's. 12 See Gustafson to Keitner, 31 January 1971, Queen's. 13 Eliot had written: "In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. ... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (Eliot, "Ulysses, Order, and Myth," in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, 177). 14 See Thomas, The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas 1934-1952, 10, 24, 47; and Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Gardner and MacKenzie, 58. 15 See, for example, "Idyll for a Fool" (FID, 87), "Lyric Sarcastic" (FID, 84), "On the Struma Massacre" (FID, 51), "Epithalamium in Time of War" (FID, 47) and "Excelling the Starry Splendour of This Night" (FID, 11). 16 Keitner undervalues the significance of Icarus in the poem; she writes: "Icarus comes into the poem only because he is the son of Daedalus who built the labyrinth; the exploration of the labyrinth by Theseus with the help of Ariadne is the actual point of departure of the thought of the poem" (Keitner, "Ralph Gustafson," 141-2). Keitner repeats this point in her Ralph Gustafson, 58—9. Thirty years later, the distinction between Icarus and Theseus is still meaningful for Gustafson. In Soviet Poems (1978), he writes: "Theseus walked out of his labyrinth because he had his feet on the ground; Icarus flew too near the sun" (22). 17 Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 66, 67. 18 See Page, "Canadian Poetry 1942," 9. 19 For Eliot on the "logic of the imagination" see "Preface to Anabasis," in The Selected Prose, 77; for the enjoyment-understanding argument, see "Dante," in Selected Prose, 205-6. Eliot is a strong presence in Gustafson's essay; as well as these, see his "The Music of Poetry," in Selected Prose, 107-14. 20 Auden had made a similar point in his Introduction to The Poet's Tongue (1935), a popular anthology he edited with John Garrett: "Artistic creations may be produced by individuals, and because their work is only appreciated by a few it does not necessarily follow that it is not good; but a universal art can only be the product of a community united in sympathy, sense of worth, and aspiration; and it is improbable that the artist

288 Notes to pages 56-8

21 22

23

24

can do his best except in such a society" (Auden, The English Auden, 329). Gustafson still possesses his copy of The Poet's Tongue, a gift he received for Christmas 1935. See Gustafson, "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But...," 10. Auden also addresses the question of poetic subject-matter in his Introduction to The Poet's Tongue; see Auden, The English Auden, 328. Also, in his Introduction to Poems of Freedom (1938), Auden wrote: "The primary function of poetry, as of all the arts, is to make us more aware of ourselves and the world around us" (The English Auden, 371). He might have taken support for this from Eliot's The Music of Poetry, published in 1942, just three years before he wrote Poetry and Canada, for Gustafson's essay certainly illustrates Eliot's view that in "the critical writings of poets ... the poet, at the back of his mind, if not as his ostensible purpose, is always trying to defend the kind of poetry he is writing, or to formulate the kind that he wants to write" (Eliot, Selected Prose, 107). Eliot is a strong presence in Poetry and Canada, and it is significant that it is this later Eliot, the poet-critic who was prepared to admit to the presence of personality in poetry where before, in essays like "Tradition and the Individual Talent," he had denied or repressed it, who comes to influence Gustafson. In this essay Eliot also asserted that "while poetry attempts to convey something beyond what can be conveyed in prose rhythms, it remains, all the same, one person talking to another" (Selected Prose, 111). Although he quotes Coleridge, Eliot may also be behind this subject in the essay, for he, too, broaches the issue of meaning-obscurity in The Music of Poetry. Eliot does not use the term "obscurity" but does argue that "the meaning of a poem may be something larger than its author's conscious purpose" and that "only a part of the meaning can be conveyed by paraphrase ... because the poet is occupied with frontiers of consciousness beyond which words fail, though meanings still exist" (Eliot, Selected Prose, 111). Auden, too, in another essay from 1935, discusses the issue of communication in terms of the gap that opens between poet and reader when, ironically, the poet attempts to communicate. In "Psychology and Art To-Day," Auden wrote: "The artistic medium, the new situation, which because it is not a personal, but a racial property (and psychological research into the universality of certain symbols confirms this), makes communication possible, and art more than an autobiographical record. Just as modern physics teaches that every physical object is the centre of a field of force which radiating outward occupies all space and time, so psychology states that every word through fainter and fainter associations is ultimately a sign for the universe. The associations are

289 Notes to pages 58-9 always greater than those of an individual. A medium complicates and distorts the creative impulse behind it. It is, in fact, largely the medium, and thorough familiarity with the medium, with its unexpected results, that enables the artist to develop from elementary uncontrolled phantasy, to deliberate phantasy directed toward understanding" (The English Auden, 337). Auden's remarks bear directly on Gustafson's discussion of obscurity in Poetry and Canada. When Gustafson goes on to address the issue of poetic technique, he is dealing with the necessity of a compromise between public and private languages which is implicit in Auden's discussion and which Auden and other 1930s poets achieved in their most successful works. It was a compromise Gustafson was still trying to reach in the 1940s, as some of the poems in Flight into Darkness show. 25 The reference to the prose-poetry distinction, and the discussion of form in terms of balanced pauses and progressions, may also owe something to Eliot's The Music of Poetry, Eliot had written: "Dissonance, even cacophony, has its place: just as, in a poem of any length, there must be transitions between passages of greater and less intensity, to give a rhythm of fluctuating emotion essential to the musical structure of the whole; and the passages of less intensity will be, in relation to the level on which the total poem operates, prosaic - so that, in the sense implied by that context, it may be said that no poet can write a poem of amplitude unless he is a master of the prosaic" (Eliot, Selected Prose, 112). In a footnote to this passage, Eliot refers to Arnold's famous "touchstone" argument; Gustafson also refers to this Arnoldian notion in his essay (PC, 7). Auden, too, may be in background here. Gustafson's discussion (like Eliot's) bears some resemblance to Auden's discussion of rhythm as "the result of the combination of the alternating periods of effort and rest" in his Introduction to The Poet's Tongue', see The English Auden, 327. There is also a distinct echo of Auden in Gustafson's correspondence at this time. In a letter to W.W.E. Ross, in June 1943, Gustafson wrote: "I agree with your test of memorable language" Auden begins his Introduction to The Poet's Tongue with: "Of the many definitions of poetry, the simplest is still the best: 'memorable speech'" (The English Auden, 327). Keats, however, may be behind both statements, with his declaration that poetry "should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance," a statement which Gustafson also quotes in his essay (PC, 6). For Gustafson's letter to Ross, see Whiteman, A Literary Friendship, letter no. 10. 26 Gustafson told Pettigrew: "I started off impressed by the 'New Criticism' begun by Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom. ... That gave me a sense of the dignity and integrity of a poem for itself. But then I gradually discounted the advocacy for the lack of personality in poetry" (Pettigrew,

290 Notes to pages 59-61

37

28 29 30 31

"Interview," 27). For Eliot's early views on personality and its place on poetry, see his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919), in Selected Prose, 37-44. Gustafson actually uses the term "musculature" in his Introduction to the Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1958), 26, in reference to the poetry of A.J.M. Smith, E.J. Pratt, and Earle Birney. Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 31. Read, Form in Modern Poetry, 53. Read also states that "upon the nature of [the poet's] personality depends the form of his poetry" (5). Read, Form in Modern Poetry, 35-6, 39-40. Gustafson used this connection between music and meaning to justify his technique in Epithalamium in Time of War (1941). In a letter to W.W.E. Ross in 1943, he wrote: I'm glad one or two of the Lyrics Unromantic are proving memorable. I agree with your test of memorable language. It proves form, and music, and a word-sequence with at least something of inevitability. So much of the Canadian writing leaves with me a general impression, a diffused emotion unsquared by the medium, or a sentiment without finality, or a finality without projection. In other words, liquidity without craft! I confess to a joyful encrustation in Epithalamium in Time of War. I believe that its music will obviate its being a "difficult" poem. Its sound is its meaning, as well. But its wordage is concrete and concentrated. Highly formalized. But I think right for an epithalamium - with no time for the traditional leisure of the pastoral. (Whiteman, A Literary Friendship, letter no. 10)

From his comments on Lyrics Unromantic, it is also clear that by 1943 Gustafson had worked out his understanding of what he called a poem's "total shape" (PC, 11). 32 In The Music of Poetry, Eliot had written: "the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from the meaning"; but Gustafsoris emphasis is greater than Eliot's (Eliot, Selected Prose, 110). Eliot refers to Edward Lear's nonsense poetry for illustration, as does Gustafson. Eliot also discussed the "music of poetry" in his Introduction to A Choice of Kipling's Verse (1941), rpt. in T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber 1957); coincidentally, Auden reviewed this book and quoted Eliot on "musical rhythm" in the New Republic, 24 October 1943; see Auden, "The Poet of Encirclement," in Forewords and Afterwords, 352. Read, too, may be present here; see his use of "essence" in the distinction he makes between prose and poetry in Form in Modern Poetry, 36. The sentiments also recall Pater, but Gustafson's aesthetic does not share Pater's (or Eliot's) yearning to transcend personality See Pater,

291

Notes to pages 61—2

Conclusion, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. For Gustafson, poetry discovers, fulfils, and expresses personality. He is committed to the communication, not the transcendence, of the self. In his concluding paragraph in the essay, he writes: "To be disconnected from the knowledge that he is in communication is the poet's form of bankruptcy" (PC, 14). 33 As a poet, Spender figures directly in Gustafson's adaptation of modernist principles and practices to his romantic sensibility. In Poetry and Canada, Gustafson quotes from Spender's "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great" (PC, 8). This poem dates from 1933, but a sign of its impact on Gustafson is that, as well as quoting from it in his 1945 essay, he uses a phrase from it, "the vivid air," as the title for his 1982 collection of short stories. "I Think Continually of Those Who Were Truly Great" raises the issue of poetic predecessors and their influence, a central question for the poets of Spender's generation. In the poem, the "truly great" are Lawrentian figures whose living did not compromise "spirit" or "blood." Such living expressed in art would be the "muscular" poetry that Gustafson admired and aspired to write himself. Spender's poem, and his poetry in general, also rely heavily on light-sun symbolism. Coincidentally, W.W.E. Ross noticed the importance of the sun in Gustafson's poetry and pointed this out to him; see Whiteman, A Literary Friendship, letter no. 34. Spender's pentecostal image in his poem also recalls Gustafson's use of this image to describe the poet's creative imperative in Poetry and Canada (PC, 6). Spender's use of "delight" and the image of "the blood drawn from ageless springs / Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth" not only recalls Gustafson's use of the term, but the "springs / Breaking through rocks" resonates in Gustafson's choice of Rivers among Rocks as the title of his next book. (Spender's poem first appeared in New Signatures [1932], edited by Michael Roberts, and then in Poems [1933], though the literal source for Gustafson's 1960 tide is, of course, Job 28:10; also, the literal source of Gustafson's use of "delight" is presumably Sidney, whom Gustafson quotes earlier in the essay [PC, 1]). In Flight into Darkness Gustafson's "Basque Lover" is similar to Spender's poem on a victim of the Spanish Civil War, "Ultima Ratio Regum," in his 1939 volume The Still Centre: also in this volume, Spender's "Darkness into Light" has affinities, most strikingly in imagery but also in argument, with Gustafson's poem "Flight into Darkness." 34 Spender, The Still Centre, 11. 35 Spender, The Still Centre, 10. Spender's use of "proportions" to describe the relation of poem to source-experience is strikingly similar to Gustafson's use of the same term for the same purpose in Poetry and Canada (PC, 9, 12).

292

Notes to pages 62-7

36 Gustafson also would have had to agree with Spender's comment that Eliot had "ignored the kind of artist whose creativeness is stimulated by a perpetual tension between the objective world, the world of nature, and his own inner world.... To Eliot, as to most modern writers, nature, except in the sense of Georgian nature poetry, does not seem to exist" (Spender, The Destructive Element, 20, 160). Gustafson's sensibility, with some of its deepest roots in the landscapes and seasons of the Eastern Townships, must have been alienated by this aspect of Eliot's kind of modernism, and the landscape poems in Flight into Darkness which he wrote in the late 1930s are poems inspired, in Spender's terms, by the tension between the inner world of love, fear, and anxiety, and the objective natural world. 37 Spender, The Destructive Element, 13, 14, 15, 189, 189-190. 38 Spender, The Destructive Element, 16, 181. 39 See Salmon, Poets of the Apocalypse, 4. 40 Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties, 363. 41 Gustafson, "Reviews," rev. of Collected Poems, by Henry Treece; Lough Derg and Other Poems, by Denis Devlin; A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, ed. Oscar Williams, Northern Review 1, no.4 (1947):33—542 Tolley, The Poetry of the Thirties, 364, 365; Fraser, The Modem Writer and His World, 324; Comfort is quoted in Salmon, Poets of the Apocalypse, 9. 43 Read, "Poetry and Belief in Gerard Manley Hopkins," 15. 44 Schimanski and Treece, "Towards a Personalist Attitude: Introduction," 14. 45 Schimanski and Treece, "Towards a Personalist Education," 1. 46 Schimanski and Treece, "Towards a Personalist Attitude," 15; Treece, "Notes on Poetry," 128. Gustafson, "Reviews," 33, 34. The connection between British Neo-Romanticism and the Canadian literary scene continued in 1947, with the appearance of E.K. Brown's review of volumes by Birney, Dudek, Souster, and John Coulter, "Recent Poetry from Canada," in an issue of Poetry (Chicago) devoted to the British Neo-Romantics; see Poetry 79, no.6 (1947). The connection may have been established much earlier in the 1940s, however; a Canadian "neoromantic", Irving Layton, in an essay in First Statement in 1943, argued that Auden and his followers were "no longer relevant" and "a new romanticism" was blossoming in Britain. Layton recognized individualism and naturalism as aspects of this new poetry, and also saw it as a reaction against the 1930s: "This emphasis upon personality, which borders upon the religious, is all the more significant since it directly contradicts the arid intellectualism of the earlier poets." Layton refers to Treece, Tambimuttu, Alan Rook, and W.R. Rodgers in his essay; see Layton, "Politics and Poetry," 17—21. 47 Gustafson, "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But...," 10. Gustafson's use of

293

48

49 50

51

52

53

Notes to pages 67-70

"realized" recalls Schimanski's and Treece's language in "Towards a Personalist Education." Gustafson had first discussed the deleterious consequences of a materialistic, progress-obsessed cultural mentality for the arts in reference to the development of Canadian literature in his Foreword to Canadian Accent, in 1944. See Gustafson, Foreword, Canadian Accent, 7—8. In his views about the special usefulness of poetry, Gustafson was also in the same camp as writers like Pound and Auden, as well as agreeing with Personalist values. Pound's statements in "The Serious Artist" (1913) that "The arts give us a great percentage of the lasting and unassailable data regarding the nature of man, of immaterial man, of man considered as a thinking and sentient creature," and that "the arts provide data for ethics," are consonant with Auden's view that "Poetry is not concerned with telling people what to do, but with extending our knowledge of good and evil, perhaps making the necessity for action more urgent and its nature more clear, but only leading us to the point where it is possible for us to make a rational and moral choice." Gustafson's argument is allied with both these positions. See Pound, "The Serious Artist," in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, 42, 46; Auden, Introduction to The Poet's Tongue, in The English Auden, 329. Gustafson, "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But..." 11. The irony here is that Gustafson's poem, presumably chosen by Jolas for his anthology of "verticalist" writing because of its reference to Icarus, is actually quite "anti-verticalist" in its argument. There are some interesting coincidences; for example, in the first issue, a poem with the title "Prolegomenon," by George Reavey, affirms faith against the "encroaching night" with language that parallels Gustafson's "Prolegomenon at Midnight," which dates from early May, 1947. In the issue for May-June 1941, Day Lewis's "Threnody for a Starry Night" appears; the first version of Gustafson's "Excelling the Starry Splendour of This Night" was written in November 1941. Savage, "Form and Poetry," 114, 118. Savage himself is indebted to other Neo-Romantic writers, most notably Herbert Read, for the concept of organic form and the relation between personality and poetic creativity that Read outlines in Form and Modern Poetry. Savage's phrase "inner necessity" is also used by Tambimuttu in the first number of Poetry London; see "First Letter," Poetry London 1, no. 1 (1939). The confluence of views between Savage and Tambimuttu is evident from a comparison of the latter's "First Letter" and Savage's essay "Poetry and Life," in the same issue. Whether or not Gustafson read Savage's criticism in the 1940s is not certain, though he still possesses his copy of Savage's book The Withered Branch (1950). Gustafson, "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But..." 11.

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Notes to pages 70-90

54 Gustafson, "Among the Millet," 34. 55 Gustafson to Raymond, 24 April 1961, Saskatchewan. 56 The first poem in the book, "Legend," dates from February 1950; but "Triptych for an Ancient Altar" was written in 1945, "Prolegomenon at Midnight" and "The Meaning" in 1947, while ten other poems also predate "Legend." All further references to this volume (RAR) will appear in the text. 57 The phrase is James Breslin's; see his From Modern to Contemporary, 13—

1758 A version of Rivers among Rocks was sent to McClelland and Stewart in May 1958; a revised manuscript, with some new poems added, was sent in February 1959. The book did not appear, however, until late December 1960. Rocky Mountain Poems was written during July and August 1959, and appeared in November 1960, a month before RAR; see Whiteman, A Literary Friendship, letters no. 50, 52, and 53 for background information to these volumes. 59 Gustafson to Sutherland, 7 September 1950, Saskatchewan; Gustafson to Dudek, 16 February 1959, Saskatchewan. 60 Gustafson to Deutsch, 3 January 1948, Saskatchewan. 61 Gustafson, Fire on Stone, 21. Further reference to this volume (FOS) will appear in the text. 62 Gustafson, Gradations of Grandeur, 74. Further references to this volume (GG) will appear in the text. 63 Spender, The Destructive Element, 19. 64 Whiteman, A Literary Friendship, letter no. 21.

CHAPTER THREE: THE CONCENTRIC POET 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9

Gustafson, "Meeting the Great Man," 57. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary, 39, 59—60. Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary, 59. Duncan, "Towards an Open Universe," 224, 198. Gustafson, The Moment Is All: Selected Poems, 1944-83, 65. Further references to this volume (MIA) will appear in the text. Lee, "Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space," 34. Conrad, Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," 145. Arac, Postmodernism and Politics, xii. See Kermode, Continuities (1968) and History and Value (1988), ch. 7, and Hassan, Paracriticisms (1975); also, Bradbury, "Modernisms/Postmodernisms," in Innovation/Renovation, ed. Hassan and Hassan (1983). See Hassan, Paracriticisms (1975); Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity (1980), rpt. as "Modernity — An Incomplete Project" in The

295

10 11 12 13

14 15 16

17

18 19

Notes to pages 90—5

Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Foster (1983); Eagleton, "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism" (1985), rpt. in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. Lodge (1988); Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1984). For a discussion of opposing and complementary views of postmodernism, see Jameson, "The Politics of Theory" (1984), rpt. in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. Lodge (1988). Spanos, Repetitions, 20, 24. Spanos, Repetitions, 236. Whiteman, A Literary Friendship, letter no. 37. In a letter to Robert Gibbs, Gustafson wrote: "I've always been fearful of handling verse-lines of more than six stresses - I feel better with five and I find I use 4 more than not" (Gustafson to Gibbs, 30 December !979, Queen's). See Holden, "Postmodern Poetic Form: A Theory," in Poetics, ed. Mariani and Murphy, 14—34. All references to Rocky Mountain Poems will appear in the text (RMP). In the version of the poem in Selected Poems (1972), Gustafson drops "were" and adds a clear tonal indicator: "We were / up there, / big deal, / noble. Down, / out of it, /at the end broken" (Gustafson, Selected Poems, 79. Further references to this volume [SP] will appear in the text.) The revision makes clear an important element in the poem, which recurs throughout the whole sequence, namely the challenge to human pride and the self-image of the speaker presented by the mountains and nature. In Ixioris Wheel (1969), the ending reads: "touched / cleanly / the green ice / the green fire" (17). Further references to this volume (IW) will appear in the text. Selected Poems (1972) retains this but changes the line formation to "touched cleanly" (SP, 79), which is also the version in Sequences (1979). (Further references to this volume [S] will appear in the text.) However, in The Moment Is All (1983), Gustafson replaces "cleanly" with "truly" (MIA, 62). The movement from suggestion, in the version of Rocky Mountain Poems, toward an ever-increasing abstraction in the later volumes is symptomatic of an ongoing meditation not only about the experience itself, but about the poem's abilities and procedures to convey the experience fully. Gustafson continues to be impressed by this experience in the 1980s; see "Without Definition," in Impromptus (1984), 57. Further references to this volume (I) will appear in the text. Gustafson to H.A. Buckmaster, 25 August 1973, Queen's. Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity, 6. My discussion of Gustafsoris poetry in relation to the pressures and strategies of sincere expression is indebted to Perkins's study. While Gustafson is in no measure a victim of what Perkins calls "the pathology of sincerity," he is more than passingly acquainted with its symptomatic concerns, as is evident in

296 Notes to pages 97-116

20 21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34

35 36

poems like "Into the Tonquin Valley" and "At Moraine Lake" in Rocky Mountain Poems. Altieri, Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, 11. See Altieri, Self and Sensibility, ch. 1. "Into the Valley of the Tonquin," ms. in the Rocky Mountain Poems file in The Ralph Gustafson Papers, Saskatchewan; hereafter cited as RMP ms. Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 17. For important instances of Stevens's use of "behold," see his poems "The Snow Man" and "Nomad Exquisite," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 9, 95. The quotation is taken from an entry in Betty Gustafson's diary, dated 20 August [1959], excerpts from which Gustafson included in his letter to H.A. Buckmaster, 25 August 1973, Queen's. Gustafson to Buckmaster, 25 August 1973, Queen's. Duncan, "Towards an Open Universe," 224. Excerpts from Betty Gustafson's diary, 20 August [1959] and 23 August [1959], included in Gustafson to Buckmaster, 25 August 1973, Queen's. This revision seems indebted to his conversation with Betty; see her diary entry for 20 August [1959], quoted above. The only subsequent change occurs in Ixion's Wheel and is retained for the other reprintings. He changes "Nothing of magnificence" to "Nothing of establishment" (IW, 16). See Simic, "Negative Capability and Its Children," in Poetics, ed. Mariani and Murphy, 54—5. Eliot, Collected Poems, 203, 221. Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 16. Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, 392, 391. Bowering, Introduction, The Contemporary Canadian Poem Anthology, I, 2. Gustafson would not accept any of Bowering's more extreme statements in this Introduction, however; for example, that "the poet must not fancy himself so much as to abrogate a power over language, language their elder and better. Like children again, they know enough to be seen and not heard, to let language, which knows so much more than they do, speak. Language ... is not spoken. It speaks." Such a view would strike Gustafson the craftsman as patently silly. Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 521. David Perkins has discussed these in relation to the romantic tradition of sincerity: "a fanatic sincerity may suppose that merely to be influenced by other writers ... somehow clouds the purity of self-expression. There is plainly no answer to this dilemma, except to say that it rests on a fallacy: the self is realized not by exclusion but by assimilation; sincerity is not achieved by casting off influences - an attempt both impossible, and, were it possible, dishonest to one's experience - but rather by integrating them with each other and with all that one has encountered in

297

Notes to pages 116-34

the past. But though we have to do with a fallacy, it has nevertheless had pervasive effects. Poetry since Wordsworth reveals a continuing temptation to confuse sincerity with originality, and then originality with idiosyncrasy, as though one were most oneself by being most unlike other people" (Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity, 10). 37 Gustafson to Keitner, 29 August 1975, Queen's. 38 Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 128—9. 39 He doesn't censor it, however; though his revision of the ending for Ixion's Wheel does bring an irony closer to the surface: "We rode roundly, / Greatguys; / Beat bother" (IW, 36) 40 Lee, "Cadence, Country, Silence," 52. The poem also illustrates Lee's dialectical sense of poetic form: "a good piece of writing bespeaks encounter with emptiness as its first source; a good piece of writing bespeaks encounter with things, things most as they are, nothing but things alive with their own mode of thingness, as its first source. ... both descriptions must be true of any piece of writing - and simultaneously or it will degenerate into portentousness or banality" (Lee, 50-1). 41 Altieri, Self and Sensibility, 39. 42 In 1969 Gustafson recalled that in the early 1940s he had become "fed up with the Christian apparatus as a metaphor for poetry." He felt that "Unless the poet could be as concentric as Hopkins or Eliot, Christianity as a poetic metaphor was about as good as June and a moon" (Gustafson, "Virtue Is Not Enough," 73). 43 Gustafson to Layton, 9 March 1960, Saskatchewan. 44 Whiteman, A Literary Friendship, letter no. 25; for Ross's reference, see letter no. 24. 45 Lee, The Gods, 59; see Pound, "The Tree," in Personae, 3. 46 Heller, "The Hazard of Modern Poetry," in The Disinherited Mind, 270—1. 47 The phrase is Duncan's; see "Towards an Open Universe," 198. 48 See, for example, Warren Tallman, "Wonder Merchants: Modernist Poetry in Vancouver during the 1960's," and Frank Davey, "Introduction to Tish 1—19," in The Writing Life, ed. Gervais (1976). Tallman and Davey are anything but innocent prosecutors; their 'land-humanism" seems just as egocentric as the tradition they attack, and egregiously blind to its own pitfalls. 49 Bowering, A Way with Words, 9. CHAPTER FOUR: TOWARD PLAIN STATEMENT

i The phrase is taken from Hopkins's The Wreck of the Deutschland, which also provides the book with one of its two epigraphs: "I am soft sift /In an hourglass - at the wall / Fast, but mined with a motion, a drift, / And

298 Notes to pages 134—53

2

3 4

5

6

7 8 9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

it crowds and it combs to the fall." See Hopkins, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, 52. This is another of Gustafson's important seascape poems, a series which began with "Mythos" in Flight into Darkness (1944) and "Legend," "At the Ocean's Verge," and "Prolegomenon at Midnight" in Rivers among Rocks (1960). With "Now at the Ocean's Verge" in Fire on Stone (1974), the series becomes a self-conscious sequence, which is continued further in the recent "At the Ocean's Verge Again"; see Gustafson, Winter Prophecies, 64. Keitner notes the importance of the sea-shore setting and discusses it in relation to her sense of the thematic conflicts in Gustafson's poetry; see Keitner, Ralph Gustafson, 84. Pettigrew, "Interview," 26. See Pound, "I Gather the Limbs of Osiris," in Selected Prose 19091965, 21-43. Perhaps Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius more than his Cantos is Gustafson's model in "Ariobarzanes." Gustafson to Glassco, 10 September 1964, Queen's. For Pound on the "repeat in history," see The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 19071941,210. Drafts of a preface for Man's Wheel (1969), for example, reveal him reworking the statement "Poetry witnesses the power of the imagination over experience" to "Poetry is witness to the power of the imagination over history." Significantly, Gustafson drops the idea of a preface to the volume altogether. A note scribbled over the typescript reads: "critics ought to learn their own jobs"; but the deletion may also reflect his own indecision regarding the power and purpose of imagination in relation to experience and history (Gustafson, "Man's Wheel File," Queen's). Gustafson, "Not Latent Pantheism," manuscript in the "Sift in an Hourglass File," Queen's; hereafter cited as SHms. See Avison, "Snow," in Winter Sun, 17. Howard Nemerov, "Image and Metaphor," in Poetics, ed. Mariani and Murphy, 146. Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," in Selected Poems, 148. Gustafson to Keitner, 1 June 1973, Queen's. Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 790. Gustafson has said he was "getting interested in EP" around the time of Dudek's Atlantis (1967), and was reading Williams at the same time; see Susan Stromberg-Stein, Louis Dudek: A Biographical Introduction to his Poetry, 104. Pettigrew, "Interview," 26. Pound, The Cantos, 790. Gustafson, Landscape with Rain, 25. Further reference to this volume (LWR) will appear in the text. Mandel, Another Time, 82-3.

299 Notes to pages 154-66 17 Attached to Gustafson's letter to H.A. Buckmaster, 25 August 1973, Queen's. 18 An altered and expanded version of the Foreword appeared as the essay "New Wave in Canadian Poetry" in Canadian Literature, in the same year. In the title he gave to the essay, Gustafson alluded to Raymond Souster's anthology of the previous year, New Wave Canada: The New Explosion in Canadian Poetry (1966). Gustafson's Foreword and essay should be read as his reaction to Souster's claim that the poets in New Wave Canada represented a "new direction" in contemporary Canadian poetry, a direction influenced by American poets like Charles Olson and Robert Duncan, with Williams and Pound behind them. According to Souster, beginning in Vancouver in 1961, the group of poets affiliated with the magazine Tish had "spear-headed the new direction" of Canadian poetry. From this group, he had included David Cull, David Dawson, James Reid, Fred Wah, and Daphne Buckle (Marlatt) in his anthology, as well as eastern Canadian poets like Victor Coleman, Robert Hogg, bp Nichol, David McFadden, and Michael Ondaatje, who he said had been influenced by their western counterparts. In the 1967 Penguin anthology, Gustafson included Ondaatje and George Jonas from Souster's collection, and he also published work by two Tish poets not in New Wave Canada — George Bowering and Lionel Kearns. 19 See Gustafson, Foreword to the revised edition, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1967), 31—2. 20 Gustafson, "New Wave in Canadian Poetry," 10. 21 Gustafson, Foreword to the revised edition, 33. 22 Gustafson, "New Wave in Canadian Poetry," 10. 23 For a recent critical argument along these lines, see Maclulich, "What Was Canadian Literature?" 24 Gustafson, "Worthwhile Visitations," 90. 25 Gustafson, Foreword to the revised edition, 33-4. He had argued the second point in Poetry and Canada (1945); see PC, 12-13. 26 With the addition of "Return to Maligne Lake" and "In the Coast Range" (S, 32,33), which were not in the 1960 volume. 27 Gustafson, "Worthwhile Visitations," 90. 28 Gustafson, "Poetry as a Moral Procedure," 62. 29 Gustafson, "Poetry as a Moral Procedure," 69, 73. 30 See "September 1, 1939" and "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" in The English Auden, 245, 242. 31 Gustafson, "Poetry as a Moral Procedure," 67, 71. 32 Gustafson, "Poetry as a Moral Procedure," 74, 73. 33 Gustafson, Introduction, The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1958), 19. 34 Gustafson, "Poetry and Politics," 4.

300 Notes to pages 167-80 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46

47 48 49 50

Altieri, Enlarging the Temple, 237. See Pound, Literary Essays, 25. Gustafson, "Witness Poetry," 8. Birney, Spreading Time, 60. Gustafson, "Witness Poetry," 9. Gustafson, "Witness Poetry," 12. Gustafson, Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass, [1]. Further reference to this work (TVSB) will appear in the text. The poem was set to music by the British composer Richard Arnell and performed as a mixedmedia event at Bishop's in March 1970; it was performed at Hofstra University in New York and was also broadcast by the CBC; see Keitner, Ralph Gustafson, 122-3. The success of "Nocturne: Prague 1968" led to the CBC's commissioning of two other mixed-media works by Gustafson. "Coda: I Think of All Soft Limbs" was also scored by Arnell, and "Ricercare: And Still These Deaths Are Ours" was written to accompany a television broadcast of pictures from the war in Bangladesh. Gustafson to Gary Geddes, 28 December 1976, Queen's; Gustafson to Henry Beissel, 21 March 1977, Queen's. Gustafson to Robert Gibbs, 30 October 1979, Queen's. Gustafson, "Witness Poetry," 10. Gustafson, "Witness Poetry," 14-15. Soviet Poems (1978), for example, a sequence written during a government-sponsored tour of the Soviet Union with Al Purdy in 1976, merges the moral perspective of witness poetry with the earlier procedures of the "voyage" poetry. "Aubade: Quebec" witnesses domestic atrocities: the murder of Laporte, the mutilations and deaths caused by FLQ terrorism. Gustafson, "Witness Poetry," 8. Gustafson, "Witness Poetry," 8. For an important criticism of this volume of witness poetry, see M. Travis Lane, "The Fundamental Question about Poetry," 113. CHAPTER F I V E : TO GIVE I N T U I T I O N A CERTITUDE

1 Gustafson, Fire on Stone, 13. Further reference to this volume (FOS) will appear in the text. 2 A draft of the poem bears the title "Sunday Morning of an Ex-Christian"; in the "Fire on Stone File," The Ralph Gustafson Papers, Queen's. 3 The shell image also figures in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, III,iii.4, a work Gustafson knew intimately as a student at Bishop's, as well as in another poem by Yeats; see "Meditations in Time of Civil War," in Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, 200.

301 4 5 6 7 8

Notes to pages 180-95

Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, 8. Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, 9. Wordsworth, The Prelude, v, 47—8, in Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose, 343. Wordsworth, The Prelude, v, 93-9, in Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose, 344. Wordsworth, The Prelude, v, 109, 114, in Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose,

3459 Pound's influence can be felt throughout the volume, but especially in this poem and "Atlantis" (FOS, 35), "Four Exaltations for Sea-Shell, Pulley, Pan Pipes and Golden Clarion" (FOS, 41), "Nightpiece in Asia Minor" (FOS, 45), "The Day Finished" (FOS, 48), and "Green Disposition" (FOS, 63). 10 Pound, Literary Essays, 152. 11 "Durance" is an unusual word; it means "duration" or "endurance," but also "forced confinement" or "constraint." The ambivalence in the history of the word plays back into the ambivalence of Gustafson's poetic already discussed in relation to section three. Gustafson may have encountered the word in the title of an early Pound poem, "In Durance," in Personae. Pound uses the term, punningly, in its negative meanings of confinement and constraint, in a poem in which he laments his separation (while a lecturer in Kansas!) from "my kin of the spirit." (See Pound, Personae, 20.) Pound's poem, however, is also about artistic predecessors, those who come to him "surging of power" and "bearing old magic," and in section five of his poem, Gustafson goes on to name some of those with whom he feels kinship: Donatello, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Aquinas, Beethoven; kinship not in the sense of feeling equal to their intuitions, but of sharing in the impulse that he feels is basic to all creative effort: the desire to give intuition a certitude. 12 Pound, Literary Essays, 9. 13 Pound, Confucius, 20. 14 Pound, Literary Essays, 9. 15 See Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound, 11, 13, 15, 429, 449, 457, 459, 528, 795. 16 Pound, The Cantos, 16. 17 Pound, Literary Essays, 52. 18 Pound, Literary Essays, 161. 19 Pound, Literary Essays, 155. 20 Pound, Translations, 18. 21 Pound, Literary Essays, 155—6. 22 Pound, Literary Essays, 150, 152. 23 Pound, Literary Essays, 156-7. 24 Pound, The Cantos, 178. 25 "In Guido the 'figure,' the strong metamorphic or 'picturesque' expres-

302

26 27 28 29 30 31

Notes to pages 195—6

sion is there with purpose to convey or to interpret a definite meaning." Pound, Literary Essays, 154. Pound, Literary Essays, 154. Pound, Literary Essays, 157. Pound, Literary Essays, 152. A variant of this phrase occurs in Canto xxxvI, the Cavalcanti canto: "inluminatio coitu." Pound, The Cantos, 430, 435, 180. See Pound, The Cantos, 493. In Confucius, Pound writes: "The virtu, i.e., this self-knowledge [looking straight into the heart and acting thence] is the root" (73). Later in the same work, he sheds more light on the relation of light, virtu, self-knowledge and sincerity in action: As silky light, King Wen's virtue Coming down with the sunlight, what purity! He looks in his heart And does.

- Shi King, IV, 1,2, 1. Here the sense is: In this way was Wen perfect. The unmixed functions [in time and in space] without bourne. This unmixed is the tensile light, the Immaculata. There is no end to its action. (187) "There is no end / to its action" recalls Cavalcanti's description that love "ever is unstill." Pound's language recurs in his Canto LXXIV: in tensile in the light of light is the virtu "sunt lumina" said Erigena Scotus Light tensile immaculata the sun's cord unspotted "sunt lumina" said the Oirishman to King Carolus, "OMNIA, all things that are are lights" (The Cantos, 429). The ideogram is that of hsien3, which translates as "manifest" (Brooker, A Student's Guide to the Selected Cantos of Ezra Pound, 311). It underscores the sense of "in the light of light is the virtu"; that is, that light is an

303 Notes to pages 196-210

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

emanation or extension of power. All things have power or potency; all things emanate energy. In the 1948 Faber edition of the Cantos, which is the edition Gustafson possessed at the writing of "To Give Intuition a Certitude," Canto LXXIV juxtaposes a different ideogram, that of Ming2, with these lines. (See also Canto LXXXIV [539].) In Confucius, Pound glosses this ideogram to mean "The sun and moon, the total light process, the radiation, reception and reflection of light; hence, the intelligence. Bright, brightness, shining. Refer to Scotus Erigena, Grosseteste and the notes on light in my Cavakanti" (20). Gustafson alludes to the passage in Canto LXXIV in another poem in Fire on Stone, "Four Exaltations for Sea-Shell, Pulley, Pan Pipes and Golden Clarion," which is a kind of homage to Pound, when he quotes Erigena's Latin and Pound's phrase "Light tensile" (FOS, 44). For Gustafson, as for Pound, "the total light process" is man's inhabiting of and possession by the world of light, the world of radiant energies. This occurs most memorably in love and in art, but these two realms, like their respective activities, partake of the same process, which is that of making intuition or feeling palpable and concrete. Gustafson images this in his poem by linking the figures of stonemason-sculptor, poet, composer, and lover. For each, in Pound's language, "light is the urging" (The Cantos, 449). Gustafson expresses this same imperative in his own terms: "That the desire / Be without reason; that the logic be love." See Pound, Confucius, 73, 187. Pound may have contributed to this image, too, with his reference to "a nice quiet paradise / over the shambles" in Canto cxvI (The Cantos, 796). Pound, The Cantos, 438. Pound, The Cantos, 521. For his disagreement with such critics, see Gustafson, NWN, 62—4. Pound, The Cantos, 606. Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 376. Stevens, Collected Poems, 193-4. Stevens, The Palm at the End of the Mind, 393. Stevens, Collected Poems, 466. Stevens, Collected Poems, 468—9. Stevens, Collected Poems, 403-4. Stevens, Collected Poems, 373. Stevens, Collected Poems, 194. Gustafson, "Worthwhile Visitations," 91. Gustafson, Corners in the Glass, 13. Further references to this work (C/G) will appear in the text. Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," in Wordsworth: Poetry and Prose, 581. The first draft of "World Increases with Thought of It" contains language which brings out the tension between immanence and poesis in

304

Notes to pages 214—15

terms of the traditional division between a consciousness that communes with the world and a self-consciousness that abstracts that communion into "cognizance": I seek adherence, The flesh first, defecation, Touch, sight of moon, Foot, one with bestial air, Waste, stalk renewed, I am one with ground, tree, And yet this intellect is cognizance. I fail to find death in this. The science of night conjoins, Beauty is a knowledge, And these years decide anew. "World Increases with Thought of It," manuscript, in the Corners in the Glass file, The Ralph Gustafson Papers, Queen's. 49 "The Moment Is Not Only ItselP' also recalls a poem from Fire on Stone, "Existence with Music" (FOS, 66); both poems evolve from the overhearing of music during a moment of natural observation or action in nature. In "Existence with Music" a hummingbird appears while the poet is listening to Mendelssohn's "Spring Song": "It was a mighty coincidence this conjunction / Of iridescent green and banal melody" (FOS, 66). The value or the meaning is "adjunct" to "the conjunction, the flashed / Instant," for Gustafson: the hummingbird as it was, the music, and the poet whose witness was the alembic within which the random events assumed the grace of coincidence. Something very similar happens in "The Moment Is Not Only Itself." 50 The way Gustafson arrives at "Affiance" is interesting. In the first version of the poem, these lines read as follows: "Imagination fools the brain. / As in love - sometimes. But what is real / Is what the ecstasy says"("The Moment Is Not Only Itself," manuscript, in the Corners in the Glass file of The Ralph Gustafson Papers, Queen's). The replacement of "Imagination" by "Affiance" is instructive. It is more elision than replacement, for what it illustrates is the perspective Gustafson has on imagination which sees it as a dimension of eros. "Affiance" means "trust in, or on; confidence, assurance"; and "plighting of faith on agreement of marriage." Gustafson replaces "imagination" with a term that refers to the commitment of faith; further, a term which refers more specifically to the trust which forms the foundation for a marriage. The elision makes clear his view of imagination as an organ of perception which can alter what it

305 Notes to pages 217-20

51 52 53

54

takes in from the external world. The ambiguity is troubling to him, as is evident in the change of "sometimes" in the draft to "often" in the final version. The resolution, however, is characteristic of Gustafson. The ineffectual abstractness of "But what is real /Is what the ecstasy says" is replaced by the unequivocal affirmation of "What is real is what the heart / Has." The final arbiter of reality is the "heart": what is real is what the heart has kept concentric to its own centre. Gustafson, "Worthwhile Visitations," 91. Gustafson, "Worthwhile Visitations," 91. Rocky Mountain Poems; Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass; Soviet Poems; "Six Preludes" and "Four Songs for Antiquated Music" from Rivers among Rocks; and "Phases of the Present," "Improvisations," and "Trio for Harp and Percussion" from Corners in the Glass. Three new poems are also inserted into the Rocky Mountain Poems sequence: "At Takkaka Falls," "Return to Maligne Lake," and "In the Coast Range"; see S, 21, 32, 31. A version of "Return to Maligne Lake" appears as "Rocky Mountain Return" in Corners in the Glass (CIG, 69). With the inclusion of these poems, the version in Sequences is "the first appearance of Rocky Mountain Poems in entirety (S, 6). Gustafson, Gradations of Grandeur (1982), 7. All further references to this volume (GG) will appear in the text. "Gradations" is used in a similar sense by Pound, in Canto LXXXIV: quand vos venetz al som de 1'escalina fjOos gradations These are distinctions in clarity ming2 these are distinctions (The Cantos, 539) Gustafson's "ply on ply also recalls Pound's Canto IV: Thus the light rains, thus pours, e lo soleills plovil The liquid and rushing crystal beneath the knees of the gocls. Ply over ply, thin glitter of water; Brook film bearing white petals. Forked branch-tips, flaming as if with lotus. Ply over ply The shallow eddying fluid, beneath the knees of the gods. (The Cantos, \ 5) The image of the stair in the line from Dante's Purgatorio XXVI in Pound's Canto LXXXIV is picked up in Gustafson's "descend," just as his "diamonds" echoes the images of "clarity" and "crystal" in these cantos. fj9os

306 Notes to pages 320-60 translates as "custom, usage, habit; mores, disposition, temper, character"; the ideogram, as "bright, clear, intelligent; to understand, to cleanse, to illustrate" (Confucius, 20). The echoes amplify Gustafson's aim in his poem: he is setting out to make his distinctions in clarity, to affirm his "norm of spirit" (The Cantos, 540) to make intelligent and clear his understanding of the interrelatedness of life, of man and nature, by bearing witness to his own life's accumulations of thought, feeling, and intuition. 55 The statement is one of the epigraphs to Responsibilities (1914); see Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, [100]. CHAPTER SIX:

EARTHLY MUSIC

1 Gustafson, "New World Northern: Of Poetry and Identity," University of Toronto Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1980), 53-65; rpt. Brick: A Journal of Reviews 13 (1981), 10-15. Further references to this essay (NWN) will appear in the text. 2 Yeats, The Poems: A New Edition, 214. 3 Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 68. 4 Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 73, 75. 5 Whitehead, Modes of Thought 7. 6 Whitehead, Modes of Thought, 60. 7 Gustafson, "The Saving Grace," 19. 8 Pettigrew, "Interview," 29. g Grant, Six Modern Authors and Problems of Belief, 4. 10 Gustafson, "The Necessary Art: Poetry and Language," 24. 11 Jones, Epoch and Artist, 16. 12 The phrase is taken from Stevens's poem, "Peter Quince at the Clavier," The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 92. 13 Gustafson, "Poetry as a Moral Procedure," 71. See MacNeice, The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, 84. 14 Gustafson, "The Saving Grace," 14. 15 Pettigrew, "Interview," 28. 16 Pettigrew, "Interview," 28. 17 Lampman, "Among the Timothy," in The Poems of Archibald Lampman (Including At the Long Sault), 13. Gustafson had participated in the Lampman Symposium at the University of Ottawa in 1974; see The Lampman Symposium, ed. Lorraine McMullen (Ottawa: Tecumseh Press 1976). 18 Gustafson, Directives of Autumn, 14. Further reference to this volume (DOA) will appear in the text. 19 Gustafson to Birney, 22 December 1975, Queen's. 20 Gustafson, "The Interplay of Music and Poetry," paper delivered at the Ezra Pound Symposium, York University, UK, March 1984. 21 Gustafson, "The Saving Grace," 17.

307 Notes to pages 262-4 CONCLUSION: WINTER PROPHECIES 1 Alan Creighton, rev. of Lyrics Unromantic, 100. Sandwell was the earliest critic to note Gustafson's major qualities; he described Gustafson as "a profound moralist," considered the strain placed upon his language as intentional, and praised him as "easily the most cultured of our young modernists. ... He is difficult, but not often obscure; the difficulty arises from the tremendous and unaccustomed tasks he assigns to a single word, or an adjective-noun combination; but we always find after study that the word will do the work" (Sandwell, "Notable Modern," 14). Gustafson also received some positive notices in his correspondence. EJ. Pratt described Lyrics Unromantic as "pure sculpture" and Flight into Darkness was "beautiful sculpture" (Pratt to Gustafson, 18 November 1943; 4 June 1948, Saskatchewan). A.J.M. Smith commended the influence of Hopkins, Thomas, and Barker in Epithalamium in Time of War (1941) and described "Dedication," in Flight into Darkness, as "one of the greatest of Canadian poems" (Smith to Gustafson, 26 June 1941; 16 January 1941, Saskatchewan). Earle Birney, too, praised Lyrics Unromantic, telling Gustafson that he enjoyed most "that singing quality you are able to get without any sacrifice of modernity in diction. You have more Elizabethan abilities than any other contemporary poet I know" (Birney to Gustafson, 6 December 1942, Saskatchewan). 2 Beattie, "Poetry (1935-1960)," 783. 3 Beattie, "Poetry (1935-1960)," 784. 4 At the end of the decade, D.G. Jones, however, described Rocky Mountain Poems as Gustafson's "outstanding achievement and surely one of the lasting contributions to be made to Canadian poetry" (D.G. Jones, "Voices in the Dark," 71). For a self-canonizing discussion of the contemporary Canadian long poem, see The Long Poem Anthology, ed. Ondaatje (1979). 5 Skelton, "Ralph Gustafson," 167, 173, 175—6. 6 Keitner, Ralph Gustafson, [9]. 7 Keitner, Ralph Gustafson, [10]. One conflict in particular marks Gustafson's centrality: "The contest between forces of human tradition and desire and those of geography — a struggle, as many writers have envisioned it, between love and death - is a central motif in works stretching from Susanna Moodie through Ned Pratt to Al Purdy. It is also one of the most dominant themes in the writing of Ralph Gustafson" (Keitner, Ralph Gustafson, 19). 8 Keitner, Ralph Gustafson, [10]; compare Beattie, "Poetry (1935-1960)," 783-4. 9 In "Gustafson's Double Hook," for example, Keitner argues that "Gustafson typically writes with a double vision, bringing into focus simultaneously both the beauty and the brevity of life" (45). This sort of comment is innocuous enough; it can be made about almost any lyric poet. How-

308 Notes to pages 264—70

10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18

ever, Keitner forces a divided self upon Gustafson when she polarizes his interest in Europe and its artistic traditions and his love for Canada and its geography. There is an element of validity in her generalizations that "By the end of the 1960's, Gustafsoris two separate styles, one direct, the other allusive, hitherto elicited by two distinct orders of experience: one of Canadian nature and weather, the other of European art and myth, and conveyed by two different types of imagery: one geographical and the other historical, begin to merge" (49); however, the idea that these "orders of experience" are "distinct" compartmentalizes Gustafson's consciousness in order to identify its thematic constituents, in order to "thematize" it, in effect, and the result is a misleading view of both the man and his poetry. Keitner, Ralph Gustafson, 19. Rorty, "The Contingency of Selfhood," 11. Keitner, "Ralph Gustafson," 28. See also Keitner, Ralph Gustafson, 154. Larkin, "The Art of Poetry xxx," 69-70. Vivas, Creation and Discovery, 134. Vivas continues: "While the paraphrase points to that aspect of the object that is revealed through the poem, it does not help us discover that aspect which is revealed in the language itself. The language of the poem reveals the object in itself, by means of its character as language, in the sense that the values and meanings which constitute the object of the poem are conveyed to the reader as what they are in or by means of its prosodic character and the felt morphological structures which make up the poem" (134—5). Thematic criticism in particular does not contribute to the reader's discovery of what is "revealed in the language itself of Gustafsoris poetry. Keitner's reading of Gustafson is not totally lacking in a discussion of his poems as poems. She does note, for example, that "One of the main characteristics of Gustafsoris mature poetry ... is this ability to structure syllables and phonemes in patterns so that the sound echoes the sense of the poem. His current reputation as a craftsman is based principally on this skill in weaving the verbal texture of his poems" ("Ralph Gustafson," 160). But for the most part, her discussion of technique is a prop to the exposition of theme, and consequently based on a style-content division which is an extension of the thematic mentality's need to see dichotomy and conflict before it can recognize a subject. Gustafson, "Without Definition," Poetry Canada Review, no. 62 (1984-5): 21. Gustafson, Impromptus, 57. Further reference to this volume (I) will appear in the text. Gustafson, Winter Prophecies, 13. All further reference to this volume (WP) will appear in the text.

309 Notes to pages 270-7 19 Dudek, "Two Canadian Poets," 146. 20 Dudek, "Two Canadian Poets," 148. Dudek's reading of Gustafson is not supported by the poetry after the 1960 volumes, however; nor does his view illuminate Gustafson's poetry in the 1960 volumes satisfactorily. Once again, Gustafson is victimized by a critic's need to systematize his subject. Dudek's binary model simplifies Gustafson, categorizes him; and even though he describes Gustafson as a "mixed" case, Dudek's reading nevertheless firms up into definitive boundaries what are more often indefinite thresholds in the poems themselves. Dudek's strategy also incorporates Gustafson in a critical structure which only further serves to reduce Gustafson's poetry to an example of something else. According to Dudek, Gustafson is an example of an international phenomenon: the "division ... between a poetry of mythological abstruseness and apparent remoteness and a poetry of direct and immediate relation to concrete issues" (Dudek, "Two Canadian Poets," 145). 21 In the typescript manuscript of this poem the latter phrase is "a coming together," a much more effective contrast; typescript of Winter Prophecies with the author's emendations, in my possession; herafter cited as WP ms. 22 Stevens, Collected Poems, 503. 23 Pettigrew, "Interview," 27. 24 Poirier, The Performing Self, 8. 25 Poirier, The Performing Self, xiv. 26 Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity, 23. 27 Gustafson to Beissel, 10 March 1965, Queen's. 28 Pettigrew, "Interview," 28. 29 Heller, The Disinherited Mind, 272. Heller writes: "in speaking about poetry we always mean more than poetry, just as poetry always means more than itself. ... Its meaning is the vindication of the worth and value of the world, of life and human experience. At heart all poetry is praise and celebration. Its joy is not mere pleasure, its lamentation not mere weeping, and its despair not mere despondency. Whatever it does, it cannot but confirm the existence of a meaningful world - even when it denounces its meaningfulness. Poetry means order, even with the indictment of chaos; it means hope, even with the outcry of despair. It is concerned with the true stature of things. And being concerned with the true stature of things, all great poetry is realistic." 30 Breslin, From Modern to Contemporary, 68. 31 Perkins, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity, 108. 32 Gustafson, "The Saving Grace," 14.

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Works Cited

WORKS BY RALPH GUSTAFSON Poetry

The Golden Chalice. London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson 1935. Alfred the Great. London: Michael Joseph [1937]. Poems (1940). Rpt. from the Sewanee Review 48 (April-June 1940): 236-44. Epithalamium in Time of War. New York: privately printed 1941. Lyrics Unromantic. New York: privately printed 1942. Flight into Darkness. New York: Pantheon Books 1944. Rivers among Rocks. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1960. Rocky Mountain Poems. Vancouver: Klanak 1960. Sift in an Hourglass. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1966. Ixioris Wheel. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1969. Selected Poems. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1972. Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass. Sherbrooke, Que.: privately printed 1972. Fire on Stone. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1977. Soviet Poems: Sept. 13 to Oct. 5, 1976. Winnipeg: Turnstone 1978. Gradations of Grandeur. 1979; rev. ed. Victoria: Sono Nis 1982. Sequences. Windsor: Black Moss 1979. Landscape with Rain. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1980. Conflicts of Spring. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1981. The Moment Is All: Selected Poems, 1944—83. Modern Canadian Poets. Toronto:McClelland and Stewart 1983. Solidarnosc: Prelude. Sherbrooke, Que.: privately printed 1983. At the Ocean's Verge: Selected Poems. Redding Ridge, Conn.: Black Swan 1984. Directives of Autumn. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1984. Impromptus. Lantzville, BC: oolichan 1984.

312

Works Cited

Twelve Landscapes. Toronto: Shaw Street 1985. Winter Prophecies. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1987. The Collected Poems of Ralph Gustafson. 2 vols. Victoria: Sono Nis 1987. The Celestial Corkscrew and Other Strategies. Oakville: Mosaic 1989. Prose "The Sensuous Imagery of Shelley and Keats." Dissertation, Bishop's University, 1930. "Poetry and Politics." Sherbrooke Daily Record, 1 October 1938: 4. "Anthology and Revaluation." Rev. of The Book of Canadian Poetry, ed. AJ.M. Smith. University of Toronto Quarterly 13 (1944): 229—33. Poetry and Canada: A Guide to Reading. Ottawa: Canadian Legion Educational Services 1945. "Reviews." Rev. of Collected Poems, by Henry Treece; Lough Derg and Other Poems, by Denis Devlin; A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry, ed. Oscar Williams. Northern Review i, no. 4 (1947): 33—5. "Among the Millet." Northern Review 1, no. 5 (1947): 26—34. "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But ... ." Saturday Review of Literature 32, no. 12 (19 March 1949): 10—11. "New Wave in Canadian Poetry." Canadian Literature no. 32 (1967): 6—14. "Portrait of Ned." Queen's Quarterly 74, no. 3 (1967): 437—51. "Virtue Is Not Enough." Rev. of All There Is of Love, by Sandra Kolber; Passage of Summer, by Elizabeth Brewster; Heaven Take My Hand, by David Weisstub; Rocky Mountain Foot, by George Bowering; The Whole Bloody Bird, by Irving Layton. Canadian Literature no. 42 (1969): 72—7. "Poetry as a Moral Procedure." Fiddlehead no. 106 (1975): 62—76. "Worthwhile Visitations." Rev. of Notes and Visitations: Poems 1936— 1975, by George Woodcock. Canadian Literature no. 71 (1976): 89— 92. "Witness Poetry." Malahat Review 51 (1979): 8—16. "A Preface and Some Poems: Canada's Kinship with Scandinavia." Northward journal: A Quarterly of Northern Arts no. 18/19 (1980): 75—7. "New World Northern: Of Poetry and Identity." University of Toronto Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1980): 53—65. "Meeting the Great Man." In William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet, ed. with an intro. by Carroll F. Terrell. Orono, Maine: National Poetry Foundation/ University of Maine 1983: 57—8. "The Story of the Penguin." Canadian Poetry no. 12 (1983): 71—6. "The Saving Grace." Canadian Literature no. 97 (1983): 14-22. "The Necessary Art: Poetry and Language." Poetry Canada Review 8, no. 1 (1986): 24. Plummets and Other Partialities. Victoria: Sono Nis 1986.

313

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Anthologies Edited and with an Introduction or Foreword by Ralph Gustafson Anthology of Canadian Poetry (English). Harmondsworth: Penguin 1943. Voices. Special Canadian Issue. No. 113 (Spring 1943). A Little Anthology of Canadian Poets. Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions 1943. Canadian Accent: A Collection of Stories and Poems by Contemporary Writers from Canada. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1944. The Penguin Book of Canadian Verse. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1958; rev.

1967' 1975. 1984. Collections of Short Stories The Brazen Tower: Short Stories. Tillsonburg, Ont.: Roger Ascham 1974. The Vivid Air: Collected Stories. Victoria: Sono Nis 1980. Archival Collections The Ralph Gustafson Papers, Queen's University Archives, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario. The Ralph Gustafson Collection, University of Saskatchewan Library, Saskatoon, Canada. WORKS BY OTHER AUTHORS

Abel, Darrel. "A Practice Flight." Rev. of Flight into Darkness, by Ralph Gustafson. Poetry [Chicago] 66 (May 1945): 100—2. Abrams, M.H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W.W. Norton 1971. Aiken, Conrad. "Theme with Variations." Rev. of Flight into Darkness, by Ralph Gustafson. New Republic, 2 April 1945: 453. Allison, L.M., and W.J.R. Keitner. "Ralph Gustafson: A Bibliography in Progress, 1929—1972." West Coast Review 9, no. 1 (1974): 29—38. Altieri, Charles. Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during the 1960s. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press 1979. — Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press 1984. Arac, Jonathan. Introduction. In Postmodernism and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac. Theory and History of Literature, volume 28. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1986. Armitage, Gilbert. "The New Wyndham Lewis." Rev. of One Way Song, by Wyndham Lewis. New Verse no. 7 (1934): 13.

314 Works Cited Auden, W.H. Forewords and Afterwords. Selected by Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House 1974. - The. English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927-1939. Ed. and pref. Edward Mendelson. New York: Random House 1977. Avison, Margaret. Winter Sun. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1960. Bate, Walter Jackson. The Burden of the Past and the English Poet. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap 1970. Beattie, Munro. "Poetry (1935-1950)." In Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Gen. ed. and introd. Carl F. Klinck. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1965: 751-84. — "Poetry (1920-35)." In Literary History of Canada: Canadian Literature in English. Gen. ed. and introd. Carl F. Klinck. Rev. ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1976: II, 234—53. Bernhardt, Clara. "Introducing Gustafson." Rev. of Alfred the Great, by Ralph Gustafson. Canadian Bookman 20, no. 5 (1939): 26. Birney, Earle. Spreading Time: Remarks on Canadian Writing and Writers, Book I: 1904-1949. Montreal: Vehicule 1980. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford 1973. Bowering, George. A Way with Words. Ottawa: Oberon 1982. — The Contemporary Canadian Poem Anthology. Vol. 1. Toronto: Coach House 1983. Bradbury, Malcolm. "Modernisms/Postmodernisms." In Innovation/Renovation: New Perspectives on the Humanities. Ed. Ihab Hassan and Sally Hassan. Madison: University of Wisconsin 1983: 311-27. Bradley, A.C. A Miscellany. London: Macmillan 1929. Breslin, James E.B. From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1984. Brooker, Peter. A Student's Guide to the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber 1979. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. and pref. Thomas Moser. New York: W.W. Norton 1968. — The Nigger of the "Narcissus". A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. and introd. Robert Kimbrough. New York: W.W. Norton 1979. Creighton, Alan. Rev. of Lyrics Unromantic, by Ralph Gustafson and For This Freedom Ton, by Mary Elizabeth Colman. Canadian Forum, December 1942: 278-9. Day Lewis, Cecil. A Hope for Poetry. 5th ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1942. — The Buried Day. New York: Harper 1960. Dudek, Louis. "Two Canadian Poets: Ralph Gustafson and Eli Mandel." Culture 22 (1961): 145-51. - and Michael Gnarowski, eds. The Making of Modern Poetry in Canada: Essential Articles on Contemporary Canadian Poetry in English. Toronto: Ryerson 1967.

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Duncan, Robert. "Towards an Open Universe." In The Poetics of the New American Poetry, ed. Donald Allen and Warren Tallman. New York: Grove 1973: 212-25. Eagleton, Terry. "Capitalism, Modernism and Postmodernism" (1985). Rpt. in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. David Lodge. London and New York: Longman 1988: 385—98. Eliot, T.S. "Audiences, Producers, Plays, Poets." New Verse 18 (1935): 3-4. — On Poetry and Poets. London: Faber and Faber 1957. - Collected Poems 1909-1962. London: Faber and Faber 1974. - Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot. Ed. and introd. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Farrar Straus and Giroux 1975. Fraser, G.S. The Modern Writer and His World. Harmondsworth: Penguin 1964. Gervais, C.H., ed. and introd. The Writing Life: Historical and Critical Views of the Tish Movement. Coatsworth, Ont.: Black Moss 1976. Grant, Patrick. Six Modern Authors and Problems of Belief. London: Macmillan

1979. Habermas, Jurgen. "Modernity versus Postmodernity" (1980). Rpt. as "Modernity - An Incomplete Project" in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, Washington: Bay Press 1983): 3-15Hassan, Ihab. Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations of the Times. Urbana: University of Illinois 1975. Heller, Erich. The Disinherited Mind: Essays in Modern German Literature and Thought. London: Bowes and Bowes 1971. Hewison, Robert. Under Siege: Literary Life in London 1930—45. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson 1977. Hopkins, Gerard Manley. The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. 4th ed. Ed. and introd. W.H. Gardner and N.H. MacKenzie. London: Oxford University Press 1967. Hynes, Samuel. The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s. 1976; rpt. New York: Viking 1977. Jameson, Fredric. "The Politics of Theory: Ideological Positions in the Postmodernism Debate" (1984). Rpt. in Modern Criticism and Theory, ed. David Lodge. London and New York: Longman 1988: 373—83. Jennings, Humphrey. "Eliot and Auden and Shakespeare." New Verse 18 (1935): 4-7Jones, David. Epoch and Artist: Selected "Writings by David Jones. Ed. and introd. Harmon Grisewood. London: Faber and Faber 1959. Jones, D.G. "Voices in the Dark." Rev. of Ixioris Wheel, by Ralph Gustafson, and five other books. Canadian Literature no. 45 (1970): 71—2. Keitner, Wendy Joan Robbins. "Ralph Gustafson: Heir of Centuries in a Country without Myths." Dissertation, Queen's University, 1973. — "Gustafsoris Double Hook." Canadian Literature no. 79 (1978): 44—53.

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1979Kermode, Frank. Continuities. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1968. — History and Value. Oxford: Clarendon 1988. Lampman, Archibald. The Poems of Archibald Lampman {including At the Long Sault). Ed. and introd. Margaret Coulby Whitridge. Toronto: University of Toronto Press 1974. Lane, M. Travis. "The Fundamental Question about Poetry." Rev. of Selected Poems and Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass, by Ralph Gustafson. Fiddlehead 96(1973): 106—114. Larkin, Philip. "The Art of Poetry xxx." Paris Review 84 (1982): 43-72. Layton, Irving. "Politics and Poetry." First Statement a, no. 1 (1943): 17—21. Lee, Dennis. "Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in a Colonial Space." Open Letter 2, no. 6 (1973): 34~53- The Gods. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart 1979. Livesay, Dorothy. "An Open Letter to Sir Charles G.D. Roberts." Canadian Bookman 21, no. 1 (1939): 34—5. Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition (1979). Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1984. Maclulich, T.D. "What Was Canadian Literature? Taking Stock of the Canlit Industry." Essays on Canadian Writing no. 30 (1984—85): 17—34. MacNeice, Louis. The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice. Ed. and introd. E.R. Dodds. London: Faber and Faber 1979. Mandel, Eli. Another Time. Erin, Ont.: Press Porcepic 1977. Mariani, Paul, and George Murphy, eds. Poetics: Essays on the. Art of Poetry. Ocean Bluff, Mass.: Coastal Composition 1984. Miller, J. Hillis. "The Critic as Host." In Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom. New York/London: Seabury/Routledge and Kegan Paul 1979: 217— 53. Newman, f.H. Verses on Various Occasions. London: Longmans, Green 1910. Ondaatje, Michael, ed. The Long Poem Anthology. Toronto: Coach House 1979. Page, P.K. "Canadian Poetry 1942." Preview no. 8 (1942): 9. Perkins, David. Wordsworth and the Poetry of Sincerity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1964. Pettigrew, Damien. "Interview with Ralph Gustafson." CV/II 4, no. 2 (1979): 26—30. Poirier, Richard. The Performing Self. New York: Oxford University Press 1971. Pound, Ezra. Translations. Introd. Hugh Kenner. New York: New Directions 1963. — Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. Ed. and introd. T.S. Eliot. New York: New Directions 1968. - Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects. New York: New Directions 1969. — The Cantos of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions 1971.

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1971. - The Selected Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941. Ed. and introd. D.D. Paige. New York: New Directions 1971. - Selected Prose 1909-1965. Ed. and introd. William Cookson. New York: New Directions 1973. Read, Herbert. Form in Modern Poetry. London: Sheed and Ward 1932. - "Poetry and Belief in Gerard Manley Hopkins." New Verse no. 1 (1933): 1115Rorty, Richard. "The Contingency of Selfhood." London Review of Books 8 (May 1986): 11-15. Salmon, Arthur Edward. Poets of the Apocalypse. Boston: Twayne 1983. Sandwell, B.K. "Notable Modern." Rev. of Flight into Darkness, by Ralph Gustafson. Saturday Night 60 (3 February 1945): 14. Schimanski, Stefan and Henry Treece. "Towards a Personalist Attitude: Introduction." Transformation no. 1 (1943): 13—17. — "Towards a Personalist Education." Transformation no. 2 (1944): 1—7. Savage, D.S. "Form and Poetry." Transformation no. 3 (1944): 113-122. Seaman, L.C. B. Life in Britain between the Wars. New York: G.P. Putnam 1970. Skelton, Robin, ed. and introd. Poetry of the Thirties. Harmonds worth: Penguin 1964. — "Ralph Gustafson: A Review and Retrospect." Mosaic 8, no. 2 (1975): 167— 79Spanos, William V Repetitions: The Postmodern Occasion in Literature and Culture. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University 1987. Spender, Stephen. Poems. London: Faber and Faber 1933. — The Destructive Element: A Study of Modern Writers and Beliefs. 1935; rpt. Philadelphia: Albert Saifer 1953. — The Still Centre. London: Faber and Faber 1939. — World within World. London: Hamish Hamilton 1951. Stevens, Peter. "The Development of Canadian Poetry between the Wars and Its Reflection of Social Awareness." Dissertation, University of Saskatchewan 1969- Ed. and introd. The McGill Movement: A.J.M. Smith, F.R. Scott, and Leo Kennedy. Toronto: Ryerson 1969. Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Alfred A. Knopf 1969. — The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. and pref. Holly Stevens. New York: Random House 1972. Stevenson, Lionel. "The Human Touch in Canadian Poetry." Canadian Bookman 10, no. 3 (1928): 73. Stromberg-Stein, Susan. Louis Dudek: A Biographical Introduction to His Poetry. Kemptville, Ont.: Golden Dog 1983. Symons, Julian. The Thirties: A Dream Revolved. London: Cresset 1960.

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Index

Akieri, Charles, 7, 33, 39, 60, 96—7, 108—9, 1 18, 126, 282 Atwood, Margaret, 100, 107, 200, 264 Apocalypse, 64-5 Arac, Jonathan, 90 Arnold, Matthew, 56, 289 Auden, W.H., 28, 29-30, 32, 34,41,54,62,64, 65- 164-5, 172. 275. 284, 287, 288-9, 290, 293 Avison, Margaret, 143 Beissel, Henry, 274, 300 Birney, Earle, 30, 42—3, 153, 168, 259, 285, 307 Bowering, George, 8, 10, 114. 131 Bradley, A.C., 16-17 Buckmaster, H.A., 101 Call, F.O., 13, 14, 281, 283 Cavalcanti, 192—5, 196 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 56, 58, 60, 137 Conrad, Joseph, 89 Davey, Frank, 131 Day Lewis, Cecil, 28, 30, 41,62,293 Deutsch, Babette, 74 Dudek, Louis, 9, 13, 72, 263, 270-1, 298

Duncan, Robert, 88, 101, 102 Eagleton, Terry, 90 Eliot.T.S., 29, 31,37,39, 44,56,57,58, 59,61, 62, 63, 64, 89, 140, 249, 274,275,282,283,2856, 287, 288, 290, 292 Empson, William, 282 First Statement, 13 Frye, Northrop, 107, 200, 264 Geddes, Gary, 300 Gibbs, Robert, 295 Grigson, Geoffrey, 12, 14, 38, 283 Gustafson, Betty (journal), 101, 102, 154 Gustafson, Ralph: and immanence, 7—9, 12, 16-18,25,34,47,75, 79, 83-4, 87,91-2, 1012, 107—8, 118—19, 130, 142, 157, 164-8, 175, 185, 189-97, 199, 200-1, 203, 210, 223—4, 227—8, 234-9, 250-1,270-1; and modernism, 7, 9, 13, 17-18, 33-4, 37-8, 3940,44-51, 52, 55-64, 67, 70—2, 80-92, 100, 109, 113, 128-32, 159-

66, 185, 197, 234, 262, 271—7; and neo-romanticism, 37, 60, 64—71; and postmodernism, 7, 9, 10, 88-132, 159-65, 166, 167, 229-39, 271-7; and romanticism, 4, 6, 8, 9, 12-27,29-30,37-8, 44-5,53,55-62,64,80, 87, go, 95, 97, 107, 127, 130, 139, 155, 197,275 Gustafson, Ralph (books): Alfred the Great (1937), 30—1,43; Conflicts of Spring(1981), 3, 176, 229,240-53,243,255; Corners in the Glass (1977), 176, 177, 178, 206-18, 251, 255, 259; Directives of Autumn (1984), 176, 22g, 251, 253—61; Fire on Stone (1974), 9, 130, 176, 177206, 261, 263; Flight into Darkness (1944), 8, 27, 39,43-55,63-4,263, 292, 307; The Golden Chalice (1935), 3,4, 12, 14-17, 2g, 30, 31,32, 33,46,62-3, 118, 283; Gradations of Grandeur (1982), 24, 76, 107, 177, 200, 220-8, 234, 275; Impromptus (1984), 2669, 273—4; Ixion's Wheel

320 Index (1969), 97, 103, 115, 13O,

141,

150,

151—8,

165,177,197,253,298; LandscaopewithRain (1980), 152, 153, 176, 229, 231—41), 243; The Moment Is All ( 1 9 8 3 ) , 103, 11 7; Rivers among Rocks (1960), 9, 40, 70, 71-86, 12(1, 130, 134, 291, 262, 263, 270; Rocky Mountain Poems (1960), 9, 10, 71, 72, 86, 87—132, 141, 142, 152, 154, 159, 162, 165, 176, 200, 261, 262, 263, 270, 305, 307; Selected Poems (1972), 103; Sequences (1979), 103, 139,21820; Si/i in an Hourglass (1966), 130, 133, 13450, 165, 175; Soviet Poems (1978), 176, 287; Theme and Variations for Sounding Brass (1972), 133, 135, 166—76; Winter Prophecies (1987), 176, 229, 269-77 Gustafson, Ralph (poems): "Agamemnon's Mask: Archaeological Museum, Athens," 154— 6; "All That Is in the World," 84; "Among the Wheatfields," 247—50; "Anatomy of Melancholy," 257; "Anniversary," 198; "April Eclogue," 42, 283; "Ariobarzanes," 9, 133, 134,141,146,150, 152, 162; "Armorial," 40, 71, 80-2,88, 91; "The Arrival of Wisdom," 245; "Aspect of a Cut Peach," 9, 230, 255-7; "Aspects of Some Forsylhia Bushes," 144-7; "At Hamlet's Grave, Elsinore," 27; "Atlantic

Crossing," 44; "At Moraine Lake," 91, 93, 108—16, 119, 123, 124, 125, 129, 219; "At the Ocean's Verge," 9, 71, 73, 75-6, 79, 91, 179, 182; "At the Ocean's Verge Again," 298; "At the Turning of Leaves," 259; "Basque Lover," 43—4, 291; "Beach with White Cloud," 71; "The Blue Lake," 86; "Brixham Harbour," 25; "Cadenza with Green Sail," 200-5, 215; "A Candle for Pasch," 71; "Canto for Pan," 209; "Cathedral Dusk," 27; "Ceremony Is Called For," 254; "Cherbourg," 25; "Coda," 258; "Coda: I Think of All the Soft Limbs," 173; "Conflicts of Spring," 246; "Contrary to the Grandeur of God," 92; "Country Walking," 219—20; "Crisis," 34,42, 51; "The Day Was One of Sun," 255; "Dedication," 307; "Definition in the Coolness of Thought," 251—2; "The Definition of Here," 241; "Design," 245—6; "A Dime as Astonishment," 236; "Dirge for Gardens," 235; "The Disquisition," 9,40, 71, 82-6,88,91,95; "Dr. Johnson Kicks Hocking's Shin," 71, 76, 84; "Ectomia," 34, 285; "The Election," 71, 282; "Epic Quit at the First Stanza," 252; "Epithalamium in Time of War," 287, 290; "Excelling the Starry Splendour of This Night," 53-5, 287,

293; "The Exhortation," 147—9; "Existence with Music," 304; "Fantasia on Four Deaths," 171—2; "Final Spring," 34,42, 51; "Flight into Darkness," 5 1 — 2 , 2 9 1 ; "Fort Tryon Park," 72; "Four Exaltations for Sea-Shell, Pulley, Pan Pipes and Golden Clarion," 303; "Franz Liszt: Tivoli," 157—8; "From Sweden," 31-4, 284; "A Gentle Rain Persists," 239—40, 244, 258; "Gold Bird, Green Boxes," 250—1; "The Golden Chalice," 20; "Good Friday," 2356; "Gothic Fugue," 71, 74-5. 77,91; "Green Disposition," 198—200, 204, 211; "Her Love as the Lance Pierced," 71; "Her Love as a North," 71; "Hunter's Moon," 9, 230, 259—60; "Idyll fora Fool," 287; "In Iffley Churchyard," 25—6, 32; "In the Valley of the Ten Peaks," 93, 116; "In the Yukon," 91, 93, 119, 122—5, 129,130-1,145, 209, 272; "In Time of Fall," 71; "Into the Tonquin Valley," 91,92, 93,98-108, 109, 125; "Landscape with Rain," 237—8, 239, 258; "Lazuli Fire," 231, 236; "Legend," 9, 40, 70—1, 72-73, 75, 77-80,89, 91, 141, 199, 282; "Les Chimeres," 27; "Let Us Be Tender about the Earth," 270; "Lyric Sarcastic," 287; "Man Is the Creator Of," 142-4, 145, 183; "Meditation, It Being Warm," 271;

321 Index "Meditation Sufficient for a Monday," 253; "The Metaphysics of (he GlowWorm Grotto," 185; "The Moment Is Not Only Itself," 2 10, 2 1415, 248, 304; "Morning's Light," 208; "Mythos," 8, 39-40,44-51,64,68, 73. 78, 79,89, 91, 141, 282; "Nails at Nijo," 184; "The Newspaper," 216— 17; "Nocturne in C Minor," 27; "Nocturne: Prague 1968," 168-71; "North Cape," 178; "Now at the Ocean's Verge," 75, 177, 179-83, 184, 197, 198, 298; "Ode on the Nativity of a Poet," 284; "Of a Sphere and the Sphere of Love," 71; "On a Threat of War," 30; "On Mount Revelstoke," 116—17; "On the Columbia Icefield," 93-6, 116, 269; "On the Heresy-Akhnaten: Cairo Museum," 154; "On the Road to Vicenza," 263; "On the Struma Massacre," 287; "On the Yukon Run," 93, 119-22, 125; "On Yoho Pass," 102, 120; "Or Consider Lilacs," 9, 230, 232—4, 244; "Ostinato," 2 1 1 , 2 1 1 — 1 8 ; "Overtones," 251; "The Overwhelming Green," 210-14; "Partial Argument," 207; "The Philosophy of the Parthenon," 156—7; "A Poet in Exile," 20-4,27,30,55,56; "Postscript," 271; "Prolegomenon at Midnight," 71,72-4,75,91,293; "Prologue to Summer," 34-6,47; "Quebec, Late

Autumn," 86, 263; "Quebec Night," 72, 86; "Quebec Sugarbush," 34, 36-7; "Quebec Winterscene," 263; "Quiet," 4, 8; "Rain," 258; "Ramble On What in the World Why," 152-3, 234; "The Red Marker," 276-7; "Rhyme for the Modern Child," 284; "Rhymes for the Modern Nursery," 284; "Ricercare: And Still These Deaths Are Ours," 172-3; "The Road by the Lake," 257— 8; "Rondo in Triads," 251; "Schubert, I Think It Was, I Was Listening To," 207—8; "Segment of Ten Minutes," 246; "Serenade for Eight Winds," 185; "A Short Lust for Stars," 208; "The Silence," 149—50; "The Single Delight," 92; "Six Impromptus," 251; "A Slight Wind and White Flowers," 5—8; "Snowfall," 26; "Stare into the Sun," 183—4, 196, 198, 199; "Study in Metal," 283, 284; "Summer Garden," 34, 42; "The Sun in the Garden," 230, 241—5, 247, 249; "Sun on the Water," 271; "Taxidermy," 284; "Thaw," 34, 47; "Think This No Folly," 42; "This Speaking Were Enough," 42; "Thoughts on a Narrow Night," 251; "The Tin Can Turned Back from Transcendence," 201—2; "Toccata," 261; "To Give Intuition a Certitude," 9, 177,185-97, 198; "Toponymy," 42, 44, 52; "To Will Shakespeare,

Gent.," 177; "The'Frail under Mount Michael," 96—8, 115; "Trio for Harp and Percussion," 208; "Ultimatum," 53; "Variations on a Theme of Indian Summer," 272; "The Walk in Yoho Valley," 115, 117—1 9, 126; "Wednesday in North Hatley," 206-7; "Wheel of Fire," 253; "Winter Landscape," 36; "Winter Scene," 26, 284; "Winter Sequence," 218—19; "Without Definition," 266-9; "The Woods Still Winter," 250; "The World Comes Up Suddenly," 213; "World Increases with Thought of It," 209—10; "Written in Kenilworth Castle," 25 Gustafson, Ralph (prose): Foreword to the Revised Edition of the Penguin Book of Canadian Verse (1967). 133-4, 158-62 167, 169, 299; "The Interplay of Music and Poetry''(1984), 260; Introduction to the f'einguin Rook of Canadian Verse (1958), 165, 290; "New Wave in Canadian Poetry (1967), 134, 159, 167, 299; "New World Northern" (1980), 6, 7, 196, 230—2, 234, 237, 241, 246; Poetry and Canada (1945), 9, 35-6, 39, 5 5 - 7 0 , 7 8 - 9 , 8 7 ,. 164, 232; "Poetry and Politics" (1938), 40, 56, 62, 68; "Poetry as a Moral Procedure" (1975), 164-5, 241; "Poetry Can't Wind Clocks, But..." (1949), 40,56,65,67-8,70,88,

322 127; Preface to Pelican Antlwlogy of Canadian Poetry (1941;), 55; Preface to Sequences (1979), 139, 162-3; "The Saving Grace" (1983), 236, 260; "The Sensuous Imagery of Shelley and Keats," 12,15—21; "Witness Poetry" (1979), 167-8, 173. '74-51 "Worthwhile Visitations" (1976), 134, 161—3, 206, 217

Index

Mandel, Eli, 153, 200 McGill Fortnightly Review, 13, 14 Nemerov, Howard, 144 New Criticism, 67, 88, 126—7, 289 Newman, Charles Henry, 284-5 New Provinces (1936), 13 New Verse, 12, 14, 28-30, 41,65,286 Oxford Poetry, 28

Habermas, Jurgen, 90 Hambleton, Ronald, 42 Hassan, Jhab, 90 Hendry, J.F., 64-6 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 28, 37, 4o, 43-4, 46-7, 54,59,61,65-6, 71,74, 92, 270, 275, 297 Jolas, Eugene, 68 Jones, David, 239 Jones, D.G., 307 Keats, John, 15-18, 20-1, 23,24,29,32,41,42, 47-49,74, 164,285,289 Keitner, Wendy, 263—6, 283, 286, 287, 298, 308 Kermode, Frank, 90 Klein, A.M., 24, 39, 55—6 Kroetsch, Robert, 9 Lampman, Archibald, 3, 70, 247, 249, 284 Larkin, Philip, 265-6 Layton, Irving, 9, 127, 292 Lee, Dennis, 89, 101, 124, 129 Livesay, Dorothy, 281 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, go MacNeice, Louis, 28, 30, 31,39-41,241,275, 282, 283

Page, P.K., 55 Perkins, David, 95, 97, 274, 277, 296-7 Personalism, 65-70 Poirier, Richard, 274 Pound, Ezra, 33, 39, 63, 115, 116, 129-30, 133, 134-5- 137-8, HO, 148, 151—2, 159, 167, 168, 172, 177, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192-7, 198-200, 220, 221,254,275,283, 293, 298, 301, 302-3, 305-6 Pratt, E.J., 307 Preview, 13 Purdy, Al, 9, 120, 153, 154 Raymond, W.O., 41-2, 43, 71 Read, Herbert, 28, 60-1, 65-6, 290, 293 Rorty, Richard, 265 Ross, W.W.E., 13,86,91, 128, 289, 290, 291 Savage, D.S., 69-70, 293 Schimanski, Stefan, 66—7 Scott, F.R., 13 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 6, 15-22, 29, 4 , 4 2 , 49164-5, 249- 282, 285, 300

Sidney, Sir Philip, 56, 58 Simic, Charles, 108 Skelton, Robin, 263 Smith, A.J.M., 13, 28, 283, 307 Spender, Stephen, 28, 29, 30,39,41,61-4,67,85, 88, 283-4, 291-2 Stevens, Peter, 13, 280—1 Stevens, Wallace, 39, 100, 111—12, 116, 177, 185, 200-5, 221, 228, 239, 241, 243, 249, 272, 275 Stringer, Arthur, 13 Souster, Raymond, 299 Sutherland, John, 72 Tallman, Warren, 131, 200 Tate, Allen, 282, 289 Thomas, Dylan, 28, 37, 39,43-4,46,64,65,71, 73, 275, 283 Tish poets, 131—2, 299 Transformation, 65—70 Treece, Henry, 64-8 Vivas, Eliseo, 266, 308 Whitehead, A.N., 22, 234-5 Whitman, Walt, 276 Williams, William Carlos, 87, 116, 144, 150, 159, 298 "witness poetry," 166-76, 216-18, 300 Woodcock, George, 41, 161—3, 206, 217 Wordsworth, William, 47, 57, 115, 116, 180, 182— 3, 208 Yeats, W.B., 39, 62, 63, 65, 91, 133, 161, 177, 1803, 185, 221, 233-4, 258, 283, 300

323

Permissions

page iv continued Parts of chapters two and three appeared in "Ralph Gustafson," Canadian Writers and Their Work, vol. vi (Poetry), ed. Robert Lecker, Jack David, Ellen Quigley (Toronto; ECW 1989) and in "The Concentric Poet: Ralph Gustafson's Rocky Mountain Poems," Poetry Canada Review 7,4 (1986): 3—4, 8 and are reprinted with permission. All quotations from the works of Ralph Gustafson appear with the permission of the author. Quotations from Rivers among Rocks, Sift in an Hourglass, Ixioris Wheel, Fire on Stone, Landscape with Rain, Conflicts of Spring, Directives of Autumn, Winter Prophecies, The Moment [s All: Selected Poems 1944-83, all by Ralph Gustafson, used with permission of the Canadian Publishers, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, Quotations from Rocky Mountain Poems by Ralph Gustafson used with permission of Klanak Press, Vancouver, BC. Quotations from Sequences by Ralph Gustafson used with permission of Black Moss Press, Windsor, Ontario, Quotations from Gradations of Grandeur (1982) used with permission of Sono Nis Press, Victoria, BC. Quotations from A Literary Friendship: The Correspondence of Ralph Gustafson and W.W.E. Ross, ed. Bruce Whiteman, used with permission of ECW Press, Toronto, Ontario. Quotations from Impromptus by Ralph Gustafson used with permission of oolichan books, Lantzville, BC. "The Song of the Happy Shepherd" by W.B. Yeats is taken from W.B. Yeats: The Poems: A New Edition, ed. Richard J. Finneran, published by Macrnillan (London) Ltd., and Macrnillan Publishing Company, New York, 1983. Quotations from Ezra Pound: Personae. C. 1926 by Ezra Pound; Ezra Pound: Cavalcanti Poem. C. © 1966 by Ezra Pound; Ezra Pound: The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. C, 1935 by Ezra Pound; Ezra Pound: The Cantos of Ezra Pound. C. 1934 by Ezra Pound.; Ezra Pound: Confucius: The Great Digest, The Unwobbling Pivot, The Analects. C. 1947, 1950 by Ezra Pound; Ezra Pound: Translations. C. © 1954, 1963 by Ezra Pound, All Rights Reserved, Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Quotations from "Credences of Summer," "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction," and "The Sail of Ulysses" are from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens and The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a, Play by Wallace Stevens, edited by Holly Stevens. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.