The Patriot Poets: American Odes, Progress Poems, and the State of the Union 9780773555945

Table of contents :
Cover
THE PATRIOT POETS
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Philip Freneau’s Summa of American Exceptionalism: “The Rising Glory of America”
2 The Progress Poem in America, a Long View: Whitman’s “A Passage to India,” Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and Beyond
3 Repercussions of “The Bells”: Poe, Emerson, and the Bifurcation of American Poetics (with a Postscript on Tuckerman)
4 “Speaking as an American to Americans”: James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode” and the Idea of Nationhood
5 Confederate Poetics: Simms, Timrod, Lanier
6 Nineteenth-Century Poems by Women: Hannah Flagg Gould’s “Ode on Art,” Mary Ashe Lee’s “Afmerica,” and Harriet Monroe and the Great Columbian Exposition
7 Questioning America: Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation”
8 Between Two Wars (1): The Lost Causes of Allen Tate – “Ode to the Confederate Dead”
9 Between Two Wars (2): “America Was Promises” – Archibald MacLeish and “The Irresponsibles”
10 Between Two Wars (3): Odes for and against Silence – Millay, Taggard, Rukeyser
11 The Rising Glory of Africa: Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia
12 “America, You Made Me Want to Be a Saint”: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Acknowledgments

T HE PAT R IOT POET S

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mcgill-queen’s refugee and forced migration studies Series editors: Megan Bradley and James Milner Forced migration is a local, national, regional, and global challenge with profound political and social implications. Understanding the causes and consequences of, and possible responses to, forced migration requires careful analysis from a range of disciplinary perspectives, as well as interdisciplinary dialogue. The purpose of the McGill-Queen’s Refugee and Forced Migration Studies series is to advance in-depth examination of diverse forms, dimensions, and experiences of displacement, including in the context of conflict and violence, repression and persecution, and disasters and environmental change. The series will explore responses to refugees, internal displacement, and other forms of forced migration to illuminate the dynamics surrounding forced migration in global, national, and local contexts, including Canada, the perspectives of displaced individuals and communities, and the connections to broader patterns of human mobility. Featuring research from fields including politics, international relations, law, anthropology, sociology, geography, and history, the series highlights new and critical areas of enquiry within the field, especially conversations across disciplines and from the perspective of researchers in the global South, where the majority of forced migration unfolds. The series benefits from an international advisory board made up of leading scholars in refugee and forced migration studies. 1 The Criminalization of Migration Context and Consequences Edited by Idil Atak and James C. Simeon

preface

THE PATRIOT POETS American Odes, Progress Poems, and the State of the Union

STEPHEN J . ADAMS

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2018 isbn 978-0-7735-5471-9 (cloth) isbn 978-0-7735-5472-6 (paper) isbn 978-0-7735-5594-5 (epdf) isbn 978-0-7735-5595-2 (epub) Legal deposit fourth quarter 2018 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the J.B. Smallman Research Fund and the Department of English of Western University.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Adams, Stephen, 1945–, author The patriot poets : American odes, progress poems, and the state of the union / Stephen J. Adams. Includes bibliographical references and index. Issued in print and electronic formats. isbn 978-0-7735-5471-9 (cloth). – isbn 978-0-7735-5472-6 (paper). – isbn 978-0-7735-5594-5 (epdf). – isbn 978-0-7735-5595-2 (epub) 1. Odes, American – History and criticism. 2. American poetry – 19th century – History and criticism. 3. American poetry – 20th century – History and criticism. I. Title. ps309.o33a33 2018

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c2018-903884-5 c2018-903885-3

This book was typeset by True to Type in 10.5/13 Sabon

Acknowledgments

For Ruth Amo ergo sum, and in just that proportion Pound, Canto 80

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 3 1 Philip Freneau’s Summa of American Exceptionalism: “The Rising Glory of America” 16 2 The Progress Poem in America, a Long View: Whitman’s “A Passage to India,” Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and Beyond 34 3 Repercussions of “The Bells”: Poe, Emerson, and the Bifurcation of American Poetics (with a Postscript on Tuckerman) 58 4 “Speaking as an American to Americans”: James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode” and the Idea of Nationhood 100 5 Confederate Poetics: Simms, Timrod, Lanier

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6 Nineteenth-Century Poems by Women: Hannah Flagg Gould’s “Ode on Art,” Mary Ashe Lee’s “Afmerica,” and Harriet Monroe and the Great Columbian Exposition 166 7 Questioning America: Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation” 196 8 Between Two Wars (1): The Lost Causes of Allen Tate – “Ode to the Confederate Dead” 225

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Contents

9 Between Two Wars (2): “America Was Promises” – Archibald MacLeish and “The Irresponsibles” 253 10 Between Two Wars (3): Odes for and against Silence – Millay, Taggard, Rukeyser 292 11 The Rising Glory of Africa: Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia 314 12 “America, You Made Me Want to Be a Saint”: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” 337 Notes 351 Bibliography 405 Index 443

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Acknowledgments

I am privileged to have benefitted from the help of many individuals through the development and writing of this project. First among them I must name my Western University colleague Joseph Schuster. Mentors are generally thought to be older than their instructees, but in this case Joe Schuster has been a gracious younger mentor to an older colleague, unsparingly generous with his time and consideration. Other colleagues at Western who have made particular contributions are Anderson Araujo (now at Okanagan University), Brad Bannon (now at Tennessee), David Bentley, Chris Brown, Steven Bruhm, Jeremy Colangelo (now at Hunan Normal University), Tim Dejong (now at Baylor), Miranda Green-Barteet, Alison Lee, Mark McDayter, Riley McDonald, Zeinab McHeimech, Allan Pero, Thy Phu, Michael Sloane, Kim Stanley, Thomas Stuart, Leon Surette, and the late Lisa Zeitz. I am also pleased to thank Michael Milde, Jan Plug, and Bryce Traister (now at Okanagan) in their administrative roles. Elsewhere, I have special debts to Martin Griffin at the University of Tennessee; to Kurt Heinzelman, editor of Texas Studies in Literature and Language; to Demetres Tryphonopoulos, Brandon University, my long-suffering collaborator in Pound studies; as well as to Bernd Engler at the University of Tübingen, Germany, for his encouragement at the very beginning of this work. My gratitude extends to two anonymous readers for mqup, the one who approved my work from the first, and the other whose acute critique led to revisions and additions, which made this a much better book. In addition, I am grateful for various kindnesses to Betsy Erkkila, Sarah Ehrens, Christopher Hébert, Nicholas Hudson, Kenneth Price, Thomas Travisano, Thomas Underwood, and Alan Wald.

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Acknowledgments

I have many debts to students in the past decade or more who have not only witnessed my fumbling efforts to formulate the arguments of the following pages but who have also contributed in many different ways: Meghan Adams, John Allaster, Erin Aspenlieder, Michelle Banks, April Brander, Aiden Brydon, Chris Bundock (University of Regina), Donald Calabrese, Steve Carter, Michael Choi, Darren Danylyshen, Chad Dietrich, Coby Dowdell (King’s University College), David Drysdale, Jantina Ellens, Robin Feenstra, Trent Gill, Kevin Godbout, Ellen Gregory, Jenica Groot-Nibelinck, Mike Gyssels, Mark Henshaw, Dimitri Karkoulis, Karla Landells, Brenda McQuaid, Michelle Muller, Sarah Pesce, George Ramos, Mark Rhyno, Taylor Richardson, Cameron Riddell, Logan Rohde, Derek Shank, Michael Sloane, Jeremy Smith, Philip Spurrell, Julie-Ann Stodolny, Joel Szaefer, Peter Szuban, Katherine Sykes, Crystal Taylor, Nathan Tebokkel , Douglas Vincent, Steve Voyce, and Karen Yu. The staff at McGill-Queen’s have been supportive at every stage since I first submitted my work. They are too many to name, but I must include Jonathan Crago, editor in chief; Ryan Van Huijstee, managing editor; Mark Abley for his initial receptivity; Kathleen Fraser; K. Joanne Richardson; Jeremy John Parker for his cover design; and many others behind the scenes, including Elena Goranescu, Rob Mackie, Andrew Pinchefsky, and Jacqui Davis. A special thank you to Leanne Trask, Viv Foglton, and Beth McIntosh for many years of assistance in the English Department at Western and to the librarians on the front desk and behind the scenes at D.B. Weldon Library. And, finally, to my wife Ruth, our children Barbara and Richard, and to the rest of my immediate family for their unfailing patient support through my periods of absence, distraction, and frustration during the preparation of this book. Chapters 1 and 4 have been slightly revised from previous appearances in Texas Studies in Language and Literature 55 (December 2013) and in Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience, edited by Martin Griffin and Christopher Hebert (Nashville: University of Tennessee Press, 1917), respectively. We believe that the use of material under copyright quoted in this book falls under provisions for fair use. We are grateful, however, to the following for their permission: material by Allen Ginsberg reprinted with permission of HarperCollins Publishers; material by

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Archibald MacLeish reprinted with permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; material by Muriel Rukeyser reprinted with permission of icm Partners and the Muriel Rukeyser estate; material by Genevieve Taggard reprinted with the permission of Judith Benét Richardson; material by Allen Tate reprinted with permission of Farrar Straus Giroux; material by Melvin B. Tolson reprinted with permission of University of Virginia Press.

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Acknowledgments

The Backstory

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Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. John Adams, Letter to Benjamin Rush (18 April 1808) It’s safe to say, I think, that the American experiment is at an end. No, America might not be finished as in civil war and secession. But it is clearly at an end in three ways. First, to the world, as a serious democracy. Second, to itself, as a nation with dignity and self-respect. Third, its potential lies in ruins. Even if authoritarianism is toppled tomorrow, the problems of falling life expectancy, an imploding middle class, skyrocketing inequality, and so on, won’t be … Thus, in America today, there are no broad, genuine, or accessible civilizing mechanisms left. As a simple example, America’s best universities churn out … hedge-fund traders. Umair Haque (July 2017)

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On the House

Introduction

The idea for this book germinated more than twenty-five years ago at a particular moment while I was reading the last chapter of The English Elegy by Peter M. Sacks. That book concludes with a discussion of Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” and a contrast between English and American approaches to the elegy. I paused to think of other American elegies, and there were many. An unwritten book was there, to be sure, but I suspected it would soon be written by someone else. Eventually, Max Cavitch’s exemplary American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman appeared in 2007. But I paused a second time to think about other genres. What about the American ode, for example? I got stuck. Allen Tate’s elusive “Ode to the Confederate Dead” came to mind, and, with a little dredging, I remembered James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode” and William Vaughn Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” both from a decrepit anthology on the family bookshelf. Both were highly touted by the editor, though I had not seen them reprinted since. I was struck by the scarcity. Why does the ode figure so prominently in British poetry but not American? Why has this tradition appeared so faintly on this side of the Atlantic? Answers to this question, however, led me to much larger questions – about canonicity, about public poetry, about politics and poetry, about the purposes of writing poetry at all. I began to search out odes written by American poets. They were more plentiful than I thought, particularly in the nineteenth century, but most were short odes or routine public statements, like Lowell’s “Ode Written for the Celebration of the Introduction of the Cochituate Water into the City of Boston” or Sidney Lanier’s “Ode to the Johns Hopkins University.” I likewise found scores of odes to abstractions1 – odes to Happiness,

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The Patriot Poets

Freedom, and the Fourth of July, birthday and anniversary odes, and so on – which I read and mostly passed over. There were other odes, like Poe’s “The Bells” and Hannah Flagg Gould’s “Ode to Art,” which pose major issues in American poetics, and I have included a few of these. But the original trio of poems by Lowell, Moody, and Tate led me to consider the genre more narrowly. The weightiest, most fascinating poems that I collected all seemed to gather around crisis moments in American history. American poets turn to the ode for formal statements about the destiny of America itself. These considerations also led me to identify a second important genre in American poetry, hitherto unrecognized. The American “progress poem,” which I discuss in chapter 2, is a genre that offers a synoptic history of the nation, its past, present, and some prophetic future. Like the odes, these poems deeply involve themselves in questions of history, governance, and national purpose – what Aristotle would call the final cause of America. Recognizing this genre helps clarify a number of nagging questions about the American “epic,” or “long poem.” Thus, while the ode genre remains a principal focus here, it was only a starting point. This book consists of a series of contextualizations of selected odes and progress poems, while the underlying argument addresses these works with what I think is a coherent vision of American poetry at its most nationalistic and self-referential. While many of these poems have been little studied, I have not pursued what Edward Whitley has called “an abundance model” for my methodology.2 The poems included here, for the most part, have at some time and place in the past been admired and considered important (the outstanding exception being Tuckerman’s “The Cricket”). I have primarily concentrated on occasions when poets have turned to the ode or progress poem genre as an elevated rostrum from which to shape public thinking on matters of national importance. My efforts at historical contextualization have therefore turned this study into a narrative of American poems set into snapshots of those crisis moments, and, as such, this book resonates strongly with recent efforts to break down barriers between literary and political thinking in American studies. These crisis moments include America’s wars and their rationales, including the pivotal Civil War; issues of African slavery, emancipation, and continued racism ever since; related issues of immigration and its perceived threat to entrenched privilege; American imperial-

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ism and its intervention in foreign nations; issues of economic and social justice, equality, the administration of American democracy; and the relation of poetry to public and political discourse. Needless to say, these issues are as heated today as they ever have been. I would also note certain problems that do not arise in these poems as often as they might have: the Native American presence is seriously considered in Freneau but only sporadically thereafter.3 Women’s rights and women’s experience generally are scanted in a largely male-dominated canon. lgbt issues remain in the closet until Ginsberg. American thinking tends to see democracy as simple common sense, but the historical record tells us how extraordinarily difficult it is to achieve in practice, and that difficulty has left its mark in all these poems. American poets during the colonial period governed themselves by English rules and regularly included odes as well as “progress poems” among their productions. But with nationhood, as everyone knows, resistance to English models arose. The two seminal American poets before Whitman in the 1840s, Emerson and Poe, exerted great effort to elevate the standards of poetry, and in Emerson this takes the form of revolutionary innovation, creating a national literature by breaking ties with the past, with England, and creating a literature to express American freedom of thought. He wrote a number of important poems that in the textbook nomenclature would be classified as “pseudopindaric,” or “Cowleyan,” odes. This was the freest form available to poets before the advent of free verse itself. Emerson championed it for his great prophetic pieces like “Bacchus” and “Merlin,” while in his prose scolding critics who set too much store by the rules. Emerson’s “Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing” exhibits his wildest metrical extremes. Poe, on the other hand, attempted to elevate poetic standards by fetishizing craftsmanship, particularly at the auditory level of verbal “music”; yet his lyrics are frequently quite loose, varying stanzaic form within a poem (“Israfel,” “Annabel Lee”); and although he never called any of his pieces an ode, one of his best known works, “The Bells,” is unmistakably pseudopindaric. This same formal freedom turns up in later Americans, not just in Whitman’s free verse, but in writers like Herman Melville in his pseudopindaric Battle Pieces (1866), Emily Dickinson in her irregular quatrains, and even Sidney Lanier in “Corn” and “The Symphony.” These approaches to formal freedom in both Emerson and Poe left important legacies for the American writers that followed them.

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Resistance to English taste combined with the inevitable provincial time-lag may have discouraged nineteenth-century American poets from following the recent innovation of the romantics in their socalled “greater romantic lyric.” This pattern, so defined by M.H. Abrams, does not appear to have been recognized or imitated by the Americans. Certain poems of Whitman, like “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” might be said to qualify, as Abrams suggests, and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman’s complex and moving “The Cricket” was rediscovered far too late to enter the historical stream. But that romantic offshoot of the ode did not take root in the lost colonies. On the other hand, American poets who honoured closer ties with English tradition, and all its consciousness of Latin and Greek precedent, maintained the eighteenth-century neoclassical view of the ode as the appropriate vehicle for occasional poems. In the nineteenth century, as before, such poems were often intended not only to be read but to be recited. Normally classified with lyric poetry, odes of this kind have their roots not in song but in oratory. The “Harvard Commemoration Ode” of James Russell Lowell was written for recitation, as presumably was Poe’s “The Bells.” These pieces have had a troubled reception history. Like Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” they were acclaimed in their day and widely reprinted in anthologies for decades after they appeared. But they are now forgotten. Such poems seriously challenge what survives of the notion of canonicity. I fully endorse Cary Nelson’s insistence that poems once widely read or influential “need to retain an active place in our sense of literary history, whether or not we happen, at present, to judge them of high quality” (51). There is provincialism of time as well as of place. Yet the odes and progress poems studied here are still troubled by the romantic suspicion of occasional and public poetry: it is written to order, say the critics; it does not fully engage the poet’s sensibilities – and so on. But present canonicity is just one aspect of a much larger issue: the purposes of poetry itself. The poems that follow have, I believe, been written out of a particular passion, the passion not of the poet as individual but of the poet as citizen. The exemplary figure here is of course Whitman: “One’s self I sing, a simple separate person, / Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.” This opening inscription of Leaves of Grass, carefully framed in iambic pentameter, is sometimes taken to be an irresolvable contradiction. Classicist W.R. Johnson disagrees. Instead, he finds in Whitman an “audacious reinvention of an archetypal choral voice,” an

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“extraordinary fusion of solo and choral voices” (Lyric, 182). Just as the idea of lyric in the past two hundred years has “tended to take on the narrow connotations of solo poetry,” so the idea of self has come to mean “only the private individual in his inwardness or in his isolation from, his opposition to, his victimization by, the world outside him” (176). Johnson identifies the Olympian odes of Pindar as the exemplar of this “choral voice” in Greek writing, but – without claiming influence – he hears in Whitman a similar ability to speak for the community as a whole, to speak both as self and citizen. “The prime function of Greek choral poetry was religious and ceremonial” (55), and when Whitman takes the United States as his subject, themselves the greatest poem, his lyric oratory is apt to sound like the most solemn of odes because his subject is the religion of Democracy. Johnson’s claims, traversing centuries and disparate cultures, may seem grandiose, but they are compatible with the more common and historically plausible precedent for Whitman found in the syntactic versification of the biblical prophets. The prophetic poet assumes the traditional values of the culture and adapts them to current events. This impulse is not unique to Whitman but is shared with numbers of American poets who have turned to the ode to examine the state of the nation. The genre itself signals the importance of the occasion. Such poems are topical, and their thinking may be subtle, necessitating not just factual annotation but a grasp of the complex political and social anxieties in which they were written. They address both the moral judgment behind public decisions and the practical consequences of those decisions. If they do not convey the usual intimate feelings of lyrical poetry, they embody a kind of patriotic feeling, an emotional and intellectual energy envisioning the task proper to the nation, with deepest concern for its wellbeing. For all these reasons, the important poems that I discuss here have often been rejected and set aside by critics and readers. Some, like the Southern writers of the Confederacy, are downgraded for political reasons. Allen Tate’s widely admired “Ode for the Confederate Dead” now teeters at the edge of the canon. But most, I think, have been rejected simply because they do not conform to expectations of poetry’s supposed lyric purpose. Poems like Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” or Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation” were acclaimed in their day, when neoclassical standards still lingered, and reprinted in anthologies for decades afterwards. But the passion that they voice is social, not merely personal.

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“Ode” is a notoriously slippery term.4 The odes included here are either named as such by their authors or, like Poe’s “The Bells,” observe the conventions of pseudopindaric versification. Within these terms, I have concentrated on poems of considerable weight, not lighter pieces, “Anacreontic” odes, or shorter pieces. Most are public poems and assume a public voice of address – though a few simply toy with or even negate the idea of a public voice (Tate’s “Confederate Dead,” Millay’s “Ode to Silence”). I have passed over multitudes of routine occasional poems. With regret, I have excluded two superlative greater romantic lyrics, E.A. Robinson’s severely stoical “Man against the Sky” and its epicurean counterpart, Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning,” because their subject matter does not align with the rest of this book. On the other hand, I have included a few examples, like “The Bells” or Hannah Flagg Gould’s “Ode to Art,” for their bearing on American poetics. The ode may be a subgenre of the lyric category, but it is far from the monological text of Bakhtin’s thinking or the transcendent subjectivity of some theorists. The public voice and topical subject matter of most of these poems invoke an inter-discursive historical narrativity that creates dialogicality and at the same time de-idealizes its lyric purity.5 American poets intervene directly into the ongoing great experiment in democracy as events unfold, or as they become commemorated. There is a substantial heritage of such state-of-theunion poems that have been brushed aside, not just those of Lowell and Moody. My purpose is to reinscribe this heritage. Why are they left unread? Were the poems I had been contemplating rejected because they were bad art? They did not seem so to their contemporaries. My argument does not purport to explain “Why American Poetry Is Not American Literature,” with Joseph Harrington in his provocative essay. This is not a prescriptive demand for poets to become activists or politically engaged. More simply, it examines moments in which poets rise out of their political unconscious and employ their art to enact their citizenship. American poets in every generation have in fact engaged in controversies over slavery, the Mexican War, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Spanish-American War, immigration, the Great Depression, two world wars, and so on. Odes are formal position papers. Such poems strike me as “important” – important incontrovertibly for what they said when they said it. And they are supremely important to our understanding of the wider powers of poetry. Three broad issues impact my narrative. First, the ode has suffered from romantic suspicion of the occasional poem as nothing but insin-

Introduction

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cere ritual, as flat as all those royal birthday odes. The romantic generation in England responded by turning the ode into the solo meditation of the “greater romantic lyric,” though no one called it that until M.H. Abrams invented the term in 1965. English poets continued to write both kinds of ode without distinguishing between them; if Coleridge wrote “Dejection,” he also wrote “France: An Ode.” American poets, however, were slow to recognize the English innovation and continued to use the genre for occasional and political purposes. Even so, as Linda Gregerson says, “American poets have generally been wary of ‘forcing the Muse’ in the service of public occasion” (Ode, 121). Then, circa 1900, even before modernism began its campaign to erase the nineteenth century, American poets began to question the genre. Moody’s friend E.A. Robinson doubted “that anyone in 1900 could be serious in calling a poem an ode” (Brown, Estranging Dawn, 106), while one of Millay’s most fervent admirers complained that the ode was “as definitely out of 1920 fashion as pantalettes” (Atkins, 115). Ironically meanwhile, as academic poets turned away from the genre, or used it as a joke (Donald Justice’s “Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy”), outsiders from Mike Gold to Frank O’Hara began picking it up. The second issue points to deeper concerns about the purposes of poetry itself. Much has now been written about the reduction of all poetry to the state of “lyric.” Michael André Bernstein’s The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic (1980), still one of the best books on Pound, begins by framing this question in the broadest sense – the competition among “poetry,” “epic,” and “novel.” Bernstein takes his cue from the Marxist critic György Lukács, who argued that the novel had taken over the function of epic because “the novel is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given” (Bernstein, Tale of the Tribe, 3, my emphasis). Neither Lukács nor Bernstein refers to Bakhtin’s parallel argument that poetry typifies a language of “monoglossia,” while the language of the novel is “heteroglossia,” but the implication is much the same. The modern novel is the genre in which “modernity stands forth over epic’s dead body,”6 and this is because only the novel is capable of dealing with “the extensive totality of life,” the complexities and ambiguities of daily existence, private and public, including one’s public existence as a citizen. Poetry is not. A number of critics have pursued this allegation backward to its sources, the process conveniently termed the “lyricization” of poetry by Mark Jeffreys and expanded in Virginia Jackson’s Dickinson’s Mis-

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ery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005). In the eighteenth century, poets wrote pastorals, lyrics, satires, songs, epistles, hymns, fictional narratives, histories, epigrams, progress poems, elegies, georgics, ballads, burlesques, essays, odes, and so on. Virginia Jackson defines lyricization as the “historical transformation of many varied verse genres into the single abstraction of what critics now refer to as the postromantic lyric.”7 This concept is more comprehensive than it appears since it affects not just the criticism of poems but also the conventions of poetry reading as well as the roots of poetic invention itself. “Lyricization” delimited the poetic object and the purpose of the poetic object to that of the anthology lyric, short and self-contained and teachable, a solo utterance, a subjectivity in meditation, overheard. A pointe d’origin of this idea is impossible to fix, but Poe’s valorization of the short poem certainly holds a crucial position.8 Bernstein historicizes this triumphalist development in ways that would seem familiar to modernists like T.S. Eliot (see “From Poe to Valéry,” 1948) or Allen Tate, one of the prime movers of the neo-aesthetic New Criticism. Like Bernstein, Tate also points to Poe and even the Parnassian art-for-art’s-sake poets of the British fin de siècle as sources for a reshaped relationship between the “poetic artifact” – that is, the perfectly artificed lyric – “and the world of quotidian reality” (see “Our Cousin Mr Poe,” 1949).9 Both then point to Mallarmé as its reductio ad absurdum.10 The process of lyricization is now widely observed, though complex questions of cause and effect remain open. As Mark Jeffreys put it, “lyric did not conquer poetry: poetry was reduced to lyric. Lyric became the default form of poetry only as poetry’s authority was reduced to the cramped margins” (“Ideologies of Lyric,” 200). Form demanded attention over content. It is no coincidence that this process occurred simultaneously with the growth of the concept of “absolute” music and the rise of sophisticated interest in English prosody during the nineteenth century.11 But lyricization in the twentieth century clearly found its home in the New Critical classroom, where lyric poems short enough to teach conveniently were removed by force from their native habitats, made to stand for inspection naked, out of context, with no historical bearings, and spill their stories in their own words with no coaching whatever. Each poem, its author ruthlessly excluded, was nonetheless granted a legal fiction called a “speaker” – a “generic back-formation” from the dramatic

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monologue.12 And by this uncompromising process, the lyric poem became the way poetry as a whole was known. Or so we are told. In American poetry, the Mallarméan reductio ad absurdum was attained with Pound’s invention of “imagism,” an aesthetic of rigorous minimalism. But even as Pound advanced imagism and its successor vorticism, he was preparing to inaugurate his lifelong epic project, asking (in a footnote) “whether there can be a long imagiste or vorticist poem.”13 In Mark Jeffreys’s account, “the diverse projects of modernist, postmodernist, and poststructuralist poetics have shared the goal of regaining for poetry the central place that it lost when narrative prose displaced the epic and other narrative forms.” Pound had purified poetry to a single moment of insight, heir to Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” Poe’s “series of lyrics” called The Iliad, Pater’s “fine crystals” found in Wordsworth’s Prelude, Joyce’s “epiphanies.” But was poetry capable of dealing, in Bernstein’s phrase, with “the extensive totality of life” – including socio-political life? As Jeffreys notes, “Most of these recent criticisms of lyric share an expectation that the more lyrical a writer seeks to be, the more that writer will try to exclude history and otherness” (198). Lyricization, which was re-dialogized in Pound’s Cantos, is likewise complicated by the genre of the ode. While categorized as lyric poems, odes share many attributes of epic, and so they stand apart. They call for a high style – or at least an upper-middle-class style – and they often exhibit ambitions for the sublime. More closely related to oratory than song, they speak aloud. They deal with communal or national subject matter and, therefore, adopt a public, not a private, voice and a public object of address. The same can be said of “progress poems,” which easily slip into quasi-epic narrative as they develop their nationalistic pastpresent-future exposition. Odes and progress poems, being topical, are anything but self-contained or “autotelic.” Conspicuous exceptions to twentieth-century assumptions about lyric, then, these poems are susceptible to being misunderstood and rejected. This brings us to a third issue, the modernist aversion to political poetry in America. Here, I believe, we see not an evolving large-scale transatlantic process but an accidental coincidence of circumstances peculiar to America. At the moment when the New Criticism was beginning to vie for dominance, circa 1930, the Great Depression and rising military tensions abroad should have been preparing a ready environment for poetry about public and political topics. It did in England, where W.H. Auden and his circle, or poets like Hugh Mac-

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Diarmid and Roy Campbell, spoke out. Such writing did occur in America, but it was deflected in a variety of ways. Cary Nelson and Alan Wald and others have traced the struggles of poets on the political left, including black poets like Langston Hughes and any number of proletarian writers. In the context of Jim Crow segregation, conservative resistance to FDR’s New Deal, and moneyed privilege (not everyone was poor during the Depression), political poetry threatened to animate the spectre of race and the bugaboo of socialism. Archibald MacLeish, who began in the New Critical camp, demanded increasingly through the decade that poets address domestic and international crises in their work. But whether these voices were too weak, or simply out-manoeuvred by the rising New Critics working in tandem with right-wing isolationism on the political scene, is difficult to measure. Odes and progress poems were written but failed to leave their mark. At the same time, the New Critics were joined by others who fought to create room for the difficult new modernism by extinguishing the reputations of nineteenth-century writers, with all their moral and social consciousness, and for most of the century they succeeded. Theoretically, nothing in New Criticism discouraged political poetry. But when the Marxists and liberals like MacLeish demanded that poetry be politically engaged, Tate and the New Critics loudly resisted – while continuing to write politically for their own purposes. In practice, any poetry that appeared too partisan, especially on the left, was certain to be pronounced an “artistic failure.” New Critical lyricization is still a powerful habit even today. Witness Michael C. Cohen amid a sophisticated argument in his introduction to The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America (2015), an innovative study of broadside ballads and other ephemera. After tortuous explanation, Cohen reaches the conclusion that the meanings of such poems “cannot be isolated or read out of any poem’s words alone.”14 Cohen is fighting an all-too-familiar demon. The autonomous New Critical lyric – or a simulacrum of it – still haunts academe and must be ritually exorcised. Since the so-called “hegemony” of New Criticism has faded, critics of American poetry have been able to see it with new eyes. The “archive,” as opposed to the canon, of American poetry now looms larger, more various, less predetermined, than it had before. The great American modernists have not been banished, but they have been obliged to share space with a diversity of peers. Interest has grown in women writers previously ignored. African American writing has

Introduction

13

now taken its rightful place (though boundaries of disciplinary segregation persist), and other minorities are heard from. There may even be platforms for forgotten proletarians like Lola Ridge or Arturo Giovanitti, or populists like Sandburg or Benét, or provocative women like Genevieve Taggard or Muriel Rukeyser. Similar openness has reignited interest in American poetry of the nineteenth century beyond Whitman and Dickinson. This book remains a genre study focusing on certain important American odes and progress poems, many of which have attracted little critical attention. Unlike certain recent studies, however, I am interested in presenting the poems themselves. I am not, like Joseph Harrington in Poetry and the Public, “more interested in the history of poetry reading” than in “individual poems or poets” (3). My chapters set out relevant historical context for individual poems, plus close readings – which are not the prerogative of any one critical school but foundational to them all.15 This approach inevitably raises questions of selection and evaluation; but while I admire some poems examined here more than others, my personal taste is not the issue. These poems were written, all of them, to perform particular cultural work that was important in their time and that remains important to our understanding of America as it has developed. Most of these poems address the concept of nationhood within American culture, from the viewpoint of the ardent patriot or the acerbic critic, sometimes in the same person. When Jane Tompkins introduced the suggestive phrase “cultural work” in 1986, she shifted critical attention away from literary merit to the function of literature in its social context, setting questions of “success” or “failure,” so dear to the New Critics, aside. “Tompkins sees literature as part of a cultural conversation about problem solving, a blueprint for survival, agent rather than object of cultural formation” (Morey, Review, 260). In this sense, I do participate in Harrington’s concern with “the social form of the genre of poetry” (Poetry and the Public, 4). This approach breaks down the old disciplinary partition between “American Literature” and “American Studies,” with an assumption that writing, whether prose or verse, does not passively mirror the ideas and attitudes of its culture but actively constructs them. Recent poets have been far less hesitant to address public themes than they were during the extended debate between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov over the Vietnam War. Piotr K. Gwiazda, in US Poetry in the Age of Empire, 1979–2012, argues that “in the era of globalized economy, culture, and increasingly politics, U.S. poets take it

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upon themselves to perform the role of public intellectuals” (1). This role has long been expected of poets writing in languages other than American English. If the political odes and progress poems of the past have lain unread, as I lament, there is now a critical atmosphere in which they can be re-examined and found meaningful. If the Civil War is still being fought in American politics, we should consider why Lowell or Timrod thought it was worth fighting at the time. If American soldiers are still dying for American imperialist causes in Asia, we should remember Moody’s first “hesitations” of conscience about such causes, and how he risked being fired from his university position for expressing them. If conservative traditions are still so powerful in American governance, we should measure their current manifestations against those of the 1930s or the 1950s and ask what the word “conservative” means. I conclude with a personal disclosure. I write this affectionate narrative of American patriot poets as an expatriate foreign national. I was born and raised in the United States, in Minneapolis, where I pledged allegiance to the Stars and Stripes every school day. I received my undergraduate education at the University of Minnesota, where I was privileged to take a course from Allen Tate, who figures prominently in the following pages. In 1966, I left for Canada, finished my graduate work at the University of Toronto, a department then dominated by the Old Historicism, not to mention Northrop Frye and Marshall McLuhan. I took Canadian citizenship in 1973. I can claim to have experienced American identity from both inside and out. This background, I submit, allows me a certain distance from my subject, while my devotion to the welfare of American democracy remains, I hope, self-evident. In Canada, my professional life has been largely devoted to American literature, particularly the work of Ezra Pound. This focus has kept me in touch with the political turbulence of the mid-twentieth century and issues of international fascism, anti-Semitism, cultural diversity, and economic exploitation. My first attraction to Pound, however, was aesthetic: because of my own background in music, I studied his quest for metrical perfection and the music he actually composed, keeping politics at bay. But I came to realize that my true attraction to The Cantos and other American long poems was their capaciousness, their ability to burst the bounds of “poetry” and engage with history and current events, economics, mythography, farming, and fly fishing – the world at large. My argument here attacks the hegemony of lyric per-

Introduction

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fection as the sole measure of poetry, not to deny it but to make room for other contingencies of value. Poetic language may detain us with a “consideration of its intriguing, perhaps meaningless symmetries” in a game of “mental solitaire” (to borrow phrases from a recent reviewer), but it can do so much more. To put it another way, it is an injunction for teachers, critics, and poets to acknowledge poetry as a potent force beyond the boundaries of lyric expression. In a previous book, I have much to say about the aesthetics of lyric poetry. When Allen Tate asks querulously, “Who now reads Herrick?” I can still reply in the affirmative.16 It’s not an either/or issue. As for politics, my childhood began in a family of habituated northern white Republicans, with all the conservative social and racial attitudes of the 1950s. Like many in my generation, I moved to the Democrats as an undergraduate in the 1960s. So I can also claim memories, however dim, of the two major political parties from the inside. Now, as a Canadian, I find myself the beneficiary of my country’s all too slowly evolving socialism, having to resist being smug with American friends. I have seen the future and it works, more or less. My view, in short, is from the left: which in the present-day American tyranny of libertarian selfishness means simply a profound commitment to the pieties of liberal democracy and a belief in the reality of a common weal. But I preserve measured respect for a compassionate and intellectually grounded conservatism, when it can be found. Governments of whatever stripe require an acute loyal opposition. I do not claim objectivity, only an effort at fair mindedness.

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1 Philip Freneau’s Summa of American Exceptionalism “The Rising Glory of America”

Philip Freneau’s “The Rising Glory of America” is arguably the most important American poem of its age. Its composition is entangled in the historical events that created American independence, and it was written by a poet who (later) probably had more direct influence on the nation’s politics than any other poet in America’s history. (His closest competitor is probably Archibald MacLeish.) It articulates many of the formative myths in the cultural imagination that brought the American nation into being: the translatio studii and translatio imperii ideas that resurfaced in the nineteenth century as “manifest destiny”; the conflicting anglophilia and anglophobia of England’s rebellious offspring; the conflicting Whiggish trust in progress versus a romantic Noble Savagism; the so-called leyenda negra of depraved Spanish colonization; and the complementary (and later conflicting) visions of a Hamiltonian future built on commerce or a Jeffersonian future built on agriculture. The poem culminates in a vision of America as site of the biblical New Jerusalem, descending from the heavens and settling somewhere, roughly, in the vicinity of New Jersey, a vision presented with all its implications of Americans as an exceptional chosen people, a light to all nations, under the approving eye of God’s Providence. Yet the author is uncertain about biblical authority, and the poem reveals him in the act of hesitating between biblical literalism and deistic rationalism, as it does in the act of shifting allegiance from a providential to a political future, without making too fine a distinction between them. As such, it is a demonstration piece for Sacvan Bercovich’s familiar thesis about the transforma-

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tion of biblical myth into political rhetoric. The poem, I would argue, is artfully presented not merely to articulate these conflicting nationalist mythologies but to hold them in suspension. My impulse to write about Freneau arises from the neglect and apparent misunderstanding of a poem that holds such a focal position in the landscape of American poetry. A first step in reclaiming this text is to sever its dual authorship, to consider a work not by “Brackenridge and Freneau,” as it was in its first printing before the Revolution, but by Freneau alone. For even in these sophisticated days of fluid texts and literary collaborations, the ghost of Brackenridge has proven a distraction, even a source of outright error. Brackenridge was, of course, co-author of the 1772 printing of the poem, some version of which he recited at the Princeton commencement exercises. That poem is, in Susan Castillo’s words, “a complex and many-layered document, in which we can note not one but two authorial voices, which often coexist uneasily” (“Imperial Pasts,” 27). True as this may be, the 1772 text is also a confusing jumble, so it remains interesting as a historical rather than as a literary work. Fortunately, the nagging issues of text and authorship have been sorted out in a meticulous bibliographic study by J.F.W. Smeall. The poem began as an address written for the Commencement exercises at Princeton in 1771 on the hot topic of the day suggested by the university president John Witherspoon, visionary educator and signer of the Declaration of Independence. Since Freneau could not attend, it was recited as a graduation ode by Brackenridge on 25 September 1771 and “greeted with great applause,” according to fellow student James Madison (who was in fact absent because of illness). That text is not extant.1 But, in 1772, a conflation of Brackenridge’s poem with Freneau’s, which was cast in the form of a three-way dialogue, was issued as a pamphlet, preserving the dialogue device – perhaps, Smeall suggests, “because the two poets had distinct, almost contradictory images of American Indians, of the good life in America, and of America’s destiny” (265). This poem is a hodge-podge. As Smeall notes, neither poet’s portion shows awareness of the arguments of the other. Brackenridge says: “See the America of the past, incult, dreary, listless, Amerind; see the work that discovered and planted it; see the present glory of it and ask: how has this come about, if not through Agriculture, Commerce, and men like Whitefield? So now look to America’s future” (277). Freneau says: “see the uncharitable, luxurious rapacity of the Spaniards vis-a-vis the Amerinds; contrast our liberty-

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seeking British ways, given to peaceful treaty, pastoral simplicities, and science; so look to a future, when evil will have been extirpated, and ‘the lion and the lamb in mutual friendship link’d shall browse the shrub” (277). Although literary historians frequently refer to Freneau’s poem, few have considered it at any length, and most focus, for their own purposes, on this 1772 text. None has acknowledged the considerable artistic achievement of the 1786 poem. Kenneth Silverman considers the 1772 version in the context of the translatio studii idea, contrasting it with earlier “rising glory” poems by Dwight and Trumbull. Freneau’s view of history, he claims, “is neither cyclic like Trumbull’s nor providential like Dwight’s, but linear” (Cultural History, 232); yet the passages he quotes from the poem as Freneau’s are almost exclusively by Brackenridge. Silverman’s comment emphatically does not apply to Freneau’s 1786 poem, which is not linear but millennial. HansJoachim Lang takes account of Smeall’s work but passes over the collaborative poem quickly in order to contrast the later careers of the two men. Eric Wertheimer, in a probing article (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 1994), discusses both the 1772 and 1786 poems but without citing Smeall. Like Silverman, he thus attributes bits written by Brackenridge to “Freneau” (38/22),2 and he concentrates his postcolonialist reading on the themes of the Black Legend of Spanish conquest and the treatment of Amerind history. His analysis is acute, and he draws meaningful contrasts between the earlier and later texts; but his analysis misses the feelings of anxiety and internal conflict within Freneau’s 1786 poem. Even Susan Castillo, in an article that, citing Smeall, focuses exclusively on Freneau’s 1786 text, hedges by repeatedly dragging Brackenridge’s name into her title and into the text of her article, without explanation, as a kind of scholarly genteelism, despite Freneau’s clear statement that “the poem is a little altered from the original (published in Philadelphia in 1772), such parts being only inserted here as were written by the author of these volumes“ (my emphasis). Castillo describes the 1786 poem as “predominantly” by Freneau (“Imperial Pasts,” 28), and she blames its supposedly inconsistent characterization of the speakers on “the text’s dual authorship” (29). Nonetheless, her suspicion that the poem betrays some Brackenridgean residue is not unfounded. One part of Freneau’s mind embraces the rationalist, pragmatic attitudes of his collaborator. But another part questions. Freneau casts his poem as a three-way dialogue, a format often found in early modern books of instruction. Susan Castillo applies a

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great deal of erudition to the history of dialogic rhetoric in general, going back to Aristotle, and in the poetry of Puritan New England. She draws the distinction between Platonic (or dialectical) dialogue, seeking after absolute truth, and Aristotelian (or rhetorical) dialogue, considering all sides of a question. In practice, she finds that New England poetic dialogues exhibit a “hybrid” character, exhibiting “tension” or “instability” (41). But her conclusion muddles Freneau’s poem with the 1772 collaborative text: “Brackenridge and Freneau’s use of the dialogue form at this transitional moment, when America was no longer a colony but not yet an empire, is particularly fascinating. This dialogue is a particularly evocative reflection of the passage from colonial to post-colonial creole hybridity to neo-colonial (that is, imperial) expansionism that was taking place in the United States in 1787” (41). I endorse Castillo’s discovery of tension and hybridity in the poem, not to mention its fascination, but argue that Freneau’s poem by itself, without Brackenridge, exhibits these qualities. Freneau’s multivocalism is his own. As for Freneau’s literary antecedents – which have not been adequately studied – one must take into account not only the Puritan dialogue poem but the neo-Virgilian pastoral dialogue (with borrowings at the end from Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue plus Pope’s biblical adaptation in his “Messiah”) as well as the Whig “progress poem” that stands behind the whole rising glory tradition up to and including Barlow.3 One peculiarity of Freneau’s visionary politics in this poem is that it scarcely reflects the radical democrat of the French Revolutionary 1790s, and yet Freneau continued to polish and publish it proudly to the end of his days. By the 1790s, as is well known, Freneau had been hired by Jefferson, then in Washington’s cabinet, as translator. An unflinching advocate of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and the French Revolution, which deeply worried the Federalist wing of the administration, he was even more extreme than the Girondist Paine, identifying with the Jacobins. As a radical journalist, he incited the break between the Federalist faction and the Jeffersonian democrats. In the words of Vernon Parrington, Freneau, as “the leading editor of America,” “probably more largely than any other writer ... awakened a popular distrust of Federalist men and measures, which a few years later was to break the party” (Main Currents, 1:385). Washington, in anger, called him “that rascal Freneau” and tried to get Jefferson to fire him;

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Jefferson, on the other hand, maintained: “His paper has saved our Constitution, which was fast galloping into monarchy” (1:285). Even so, when Freneau wrote his poem these political tensions had not yet risen to the surface. Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian sentiments co-exist in the same mind, and that is precisely the state of affairs one finds in “The Rising Glory.” This mind too, at some undeterminable point on its journey towards deism, grapples with the claims of biblical literalism and never resolves the contradiction. One of the poem’s greatest fascinations is that, within its dialogue, it articulates opposing American myths at once, holds them in suspension without prejudicing one or the other, holds them while scarcely noticing any incongruity. It is a snapshot of the defining myths of the nation in their formation.

Despite Susan Castillo’s aesthetic strictures on the poem – she ascribes its “jagged and uneven character” to its “cut-and-paste origin” (“Imperial Pasts,” 28) – Freneau’s 1786 revision, shorn from Brackenridge, is a marvel of ordonnance. Much of the great strength of the poem lies in its lucid argumentative design. In 468 lines of vigorous blank verse (admitting an occasional Virgilian half line), Freneau rotates the sixteen speeches of his three speakers five times, finishing as he began with Acasto, who acts through most of the poem as debate moderator, introducing each new subject and allowing the others to comment, before he brings the poem to conclusion in prophetic splendour. Eugenio, speaking first, is a past-oriented and compassionate figure, eventually identifying himself with a proto-Jeffersonian pastoralism. Leander, on the other hand, is future-oriented, optimistic, a champion of commerce in proto-Hamiltonian manner. Neither voice gains the upper hand. The two together represent a debate not between Freneau and Brackenridge, as one might be tempted to say, but between competing impulses within Freneau himself and within colonial society at large. Both voices show a capacity for probing their topics, offering several possible solutions, and suspending judgment. Between them, looking to past, present, and future, they map a synoptic view of colonial American myth. Freneau’s poem is a concerted effort to make moral sense of the contingencies of history; it is, in short, an effort to justify the colonial settlement of the New World, either on rational or providential

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grounds. The first two rounds, in the typical pattern of the progress poem, look to the past, first speculating on the origins of the Native Americans, then commenting on the difficulties of European settlement. The next two rounds deal with the present, first the glories of agriculture, then the promise of commerce and science. Acasto then introduces the final round by summoning the great scene in Isaiah, chapter 6, calling the prophet to his mission: This might we do, if warmed by that bright coal Snatch’d from the altar of cherubic fire Which touched Isaiah’s lips – or if the spirit Of Jeremy and Amos, prophets old, Might swell the heaving breast – I see, I see Freedom’s establish’d reign; cities, and men, Numerous as sands upon the ocean shore, And empires rising where the suns descend.4 Eugenio, glancing backward, denounces recent British oppression, Governor Bernard, and the Boston Massacre of 1770; Leander, with “almost [a] shudder at the recollection,” turns to the future, when we will be “a pattern to the world,” and Acasto takes over with an extended portrait of the New Jerusalem. Here the exalted sound of the word “freedom” is heard, though the notion of human “equality” is entirely foreign to the poem. The opening round examines some of the more colourful conjectures about Indian origins, in a tone overtly sympathetic but ultimately ambivalent. Acasto begins by denouncing the hated Spanish, blaming their bloody conquest on greed for gold, while the British have come with benevolence in their hearts: Better these northern realms demand our song, Design’d by nature for the rural reign, For agriculture’s toil. – No blood we shed For metals buried in a rocky waste. The wilful blindness of Acasto’s claim to be innocent of bloodshed is transparent: but Freneau’s purpose is at one stroke to marginalize the Spanish threat, valorize the agricultural economy, and open the way for Eugenio’s temperate reflections on “the vagrant race who love the shady vale.” In a larger sense, the leyenda negra helps Freneau in his

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post-Revolutionary poem to moderate his attitudes towards the British, so recently the colonial oppressor and military enemy, but still a lesser evil than the Spanish, made brutal by gold “that prompts mankind to shed their kindred blood.” For Eugenio, the Indians are truly “kindred blood” because, however puzzling, they must be descended from Adam and Eve. Eugenio’s speeches are consistently more soft-hearted than Leander’s: they reflect the anxieties of a Freneau who, in Wertheimer’s words, “is never fully comfortable with the traditional British argument” for settlement (48 /34), a Freneau ever anxious about American moral justification. Eugenio thus strives to harmonize the Aboriginal fact with biblical record; and, despite Freneau’s later deism and Leander’s prompt rejection of Eugenio’s literalist “sophistry,” the young Freneau is still speaking from his experience as a student of theology. As Nelson F. Adkins notes in a careful study, Freneau’s biblical interest continued to the end of his life, and he advises that “any attempt to assert the precise moment of Freneau’s break with fundamentalist religious doctrine would ... be hazardous” (Freneau, 17).5 Thus Eugenio momentarily entertains theories that the Natives were products of a separate creation “in their own lands, like Adam in the east,” or that they somehow “high on the Andes” survived the Flood. But he quickly dismisses such thoughts: “this the sacred oracles deny.” His speculations then extend to the Arctic migration theory – they might be Siberians or Tartars or even “banished Jews” (the ten lost tribes) who came “over icy mountains, or on floats.” He then concludes with an even grander flourish of cosmological speculation, supposing that: In Peleg’s days, (So says the Hebrew seer’s unerring pen) This mighty mass of earth, this common globe, Was cleft in twain, – “divided” east and west, While then perhaps the deep Atlantic roll’d, – Through the vast chasm, and laved the solid world.6 Tectonic plate theory and the rift of Pangaea would not have startled Freneau, it seems. This fantasy is based on an obscure verse found amid the Genesis genealogies tracing the sons of Noah to the ancestors of Abraham: the name of one was Peleg, for in his days was the earth divided (the name Peleg means “division,” and the Hebrew word

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is used elsewhere in scripture for a rivulet or canal). Freneau proudly highlights his scriptural ingenuity with a footnote referring the reader to Genesis 10:25. Freneau may already have been acquainted with the primary biblical commentary of his theological studies in 1773–74, as Adkins tells us, through Matthew Henry’s Exposition of the Old and New Testaments ... with Practical Remarks and Observations (1708–10), where he read in volume 1: “The reason of the name of Peleg (v. 25) : Because in his days (that is, about the time of his birth, when his name was given him), was the earth divided among the children of men that were to inhabit it; either when Noah divided it by an orderly distribution of it, as Joshua divided the land of Canaan by lot, or when, upon their refusal to comply with that division, God, in justice, divided them by the confusion of tongues: whichsoever of these was the occasion, pious Heber saw cause to perpetuate the remembrance of it in the name of his son; and justly may our sons be called by the same name, for in our days, in another sense, is the earth, the church, most wretchedly divided” (1:78). Lee Huddleston (Origins, 40–5) has traced this idea back to Spanish writings of Benito Arias Montano (ca. 1570) and Miguel Cabello Valboa (ca. 1582). Freneau could have picked it up indirectly or he could even have hit upon it himself. But Leander, in a character-defining gesture, scoffs at Eugenio’s theories and pronounces the “true” source: Your sophistry, Eugenio, makes me smile ... But for uncertainties, your broken isles, Your northern Tartars, and your wandering Jews, (The flimsy cobwebs of a sophist’s brain) Hear what the voice of history proclaims: “History,” to Leander, stands for two empirical authorities: first, the record of classical explorers (like the Carthaginian Hanno in the fifth century bc) and, second, cold common sense. The Natives, he explains, descend from an errant shipload of ancient Carthaginians, blown off course to South America. This is the only moment in the poem when the two debaters are entirely at odds with one another, and their opposition survives intact from the 1772 text. The convenience of Leander’s theory – “the most persistent of all the transAtlantic origin theories” (Huddleston, Origins, 17) – is that it explains the relatively “civilized” and urbanized cultures of the Incas and the

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Aztecs: they are offshoots of a European civilization. (Significantly, the New World cities formed from “Indian architecture” in 1786 had been formed from “European architecture” in 1772.) Castillo notes a minor discrepancy in that the Carthaginians, being African, were “irrevocably Other” (33); but our knowledge of them is from comfortable Greek and Latin sources. For Leander is not only a “rational” historian but a believer in urbane science and commerce. Leander’s Indians are no pastoral forest dwellers but builders of “vast empires, kingdoms, cities, palaces / And polished nations,” “huge cities form’d / From Indian architecture.” Their destruction by “haughty Spain” is therefore all the more deplorable. Yet Leander too runs into difficulty: If some natives were capable of building a Cuzco or a Tenochtitlan, why are the locals so degraded? But here, amid this northern dark domain No towns were seen to rise. – No arts were here; The tribes unskill’d to raise the lofty mast, Or force the daring prow thro’ adverse waves, Gazed on the pregnant soil, and craved alone Life from the unaided genius of the ground. These lines have been added to the 1772 text – to supply, perhaps, Brackenridge’s view of the degraded Indian not otherwise expressed in Freneau’s poem. Leander in 1786 is forced to leave the question open: “This indicates they were a different race; / From whom descended, ’tis not ours to say.” A “different race” – from the Incas? from the human? Leander’s ambiguity ominously opens up the latter possibility. The local Natives are a species wholly Other, as he concludes with a vision of Aboriginal degeneracy. Unlike Brackenridge, Freneau omits references to “horrid rites and forms / Of human sacrifice” and seems too sympathetic by temperament with the Native American to expand on their degenerate condition as Brackenridge does.7 But the implications of Leander’s analysis are clear. Just as humanist thinking saw human degeneracy in the loss of the Greek or Roman Golden Age, so, remarks Robert Berkhofer, did it see the Indian as a sign of “the continuing degeneration after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden” (White Man’s Indian, 36); cultural diversity was evidence of “decline not progress, corruption not advancement,” and, accordingly, “Indians were portrayed as corrupt copies of the Jewish or other high civilizations of the past or, at worst,

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the very agents of Satan’s own degeneracy” (37). As Wertheimer demonstrates, this absence of “civilization” provided the European mind with justification in law for colonization (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 42–3/27–8). Significantly, however, Freneau’s analysis is neither linear nor single minded. It is tentative, open to diverse approaches – from biblical literalism to “enlightened” historicism – and it affirms no one solution. If Freneau’s poem is actively concerned with the Native presence, still felt in the white settlements, the absence of any reference to the African presence and debates about slavery is worth noting. John Woolman’s “Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes” had appeared in 1754 in Philadelphia, so the issue was emerging, but just in its beginning stages. Freneau, who later wrote poems attacking slavery in the Caribbean, does not yet sense it as a difficulty. In the second round, Acasto, still looking back in time, invites the two debaters to relate their versions of settlement. Eugenio emphasizes the need to escape the oppression of “Europe’s hostile shores” and praises the Quaker William Penn, “Solon of our western lands,” widely regarded as a just peacemaker. As in his first speech, he minimizes violence and deplores bloodshed – “what Indian hosts were slain / Before the days of peace were quite restored!” Leander, more bloody minded, interrupts with praise for the colonist’s struggle against “fierce Indian tribes” and the heroism of British general Wolfe at Quebec, “who, dying, conquered.” These lines were composed before the Revolution, and Wertheimer offers perceptive comments on the altered meaning of “awes” in line 188 (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 47–8/33–4) – the “subject host” now referring to Tory loyalists in Labrador or Cape Breton. Freneau has not only much abbreviated his praise of British courage – Wolfe is kept, but General Braddock is dropped8 – he has also mollified Leander’s animus against the Native tribes. Before the war, with “deadly malice” and “false design” they “murder’d half the hapless colonies”; after the war, with malice described as “vengeful” (acknowledging genuine wrongs suffered) they “murdered or dispersed these colonies.” The comments on the French, too, get softened. As enemies of the British they are no longer “that inglorious race / False Gallia’s sons,” but, more neutrally,“Gallia’s hostile sons.” The fourteen intervening years saw not only the British as enemies but also Lafayette’s intervention at Yorktown and Freneau’s personal trauma as prisoner of war recorded in his poem “The British Prison Ship.”

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Furthermore, Freneau heavily reworks Eugenio’s characterization of the new colonies: New governments (their wealth unenvied yet) Were form’d on liberty and virtue’s plan. These searching out uncultivated tracts Conceived new plans of towns, and capitals, And spacious provinces. With a parenthetic dig at Britain’s mulcting of its colonies (taxation without representation), he replaces the redundant 1772 phrase “liberty and freedom” with the self-congratulatory “liberty and virtue’s plan.” Eugenio’s “freedom” still retains the Puritan assumption that it entails the pursuit of virtue. Acasto’s lines opening the third round of debate may be read as merely transitional, but thematically they introduce the characteristic American gesture of disowning the past: “The dead, Leander, are but empty names.” And his phrase “ten centuries ago” ties his gesture to the millennial vision with which he will end the poem. After laying epic heroes like Ajax and Achilles in the dust, Acasto turns to General Washington, who now “prunes the tender vine” and raises “luxuriant harvests” from the soil. This entire passage is new, of course, to the 1786 text, but, strange to say, Freneau elides entirely Washington’s military leadership in the Revolution. The only reference to his war-like deeds goes back instead to his expedition with Braddock, “where wild Ohio pours the mazy flood.” (This reminiscence was prompted perhaps because the new passage replaces original lines praising Sir William Johnson in the French-Indian War.) Acasto’s privileging of agriculture might have been noticed already in his opening speech, where he describes an America “designed by nature for the rural reign, / For agriculture’s toil.” (These lines are also new in 1786.) Almost inexplicably, Freneau does not appeal to the Roman myth of Cincinnatus, so often used as template for the victorious general who retired modestly to his Mount Vernon farm; nonetheless, Washington as pastoral exemplar introduces the joint themes of agriculture and commerce that represent the present condition of America. One might have expected Freneau in the third and fourth rounds of speeches to allot agriculture to Eugenio and commerce to the brash modernist Leander. Instead, however, he allows both speakers to address both topics, implying, reasonably enough, that both sectors

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are essential to the rising nation. (Later American writers are not always as even handed.) Eugenio, returning to the Black Legend, expands on the moral superiority of peaceful American agriculture to Spanish bloodlust for gold. Leander then takes his cue from Eugenio and depicts an Arcadian scene. As Smeall points out (“Respective Roles,” 274–5), Freneau envisions agriculture in terms of “uncorrupted, family-farm pastoralism,” while Brackenridge was more interested in a “cash-market” that flows directly into his remarks on commerce. This is Brackenridge: Much wealth and pleasure agriculture brings; Far in the woods she raises palaces, Puisant states and crowded realms where late A desart plain or frowning wilderness Deform’d the view; or where with moving tents The scatter’d nations seeking pasturage, Wander’d from clime to clime incultivate. Brackenridge imagines an American wilderness populated by a few nomadic and negligible Indians, no more than a “desart”; his agriculture emphasizes wealth, or what Emerson termed “Commodity.” Freneau’s agriculture, on the other hand, is literary, a classical pastoral that emphasizes a life lived in stasis, security, and satisfaction. He alludes to Homer’s Laertes, a king who is also a commoner willing to dirty his hands in the “grateful soil.” As Wertheimer observes, his depiction “implicitly suggests the politics of radical Jeffersonianism” (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 46/32). True enough. But Freneau’s sketch is rather the pre-Jeffersonian pax Augustana of eighteenth-century pastoral so compellingly described by William C. Dowling. In the Georgics of Virgil as in the topographical poetry of the Augustans, Freneau’s lines on Washington reflect “the idea of literature as the republic-in-exile, the Greek or Roman polis as it has vanished from actual history and rematerialized inside language” (Dowling, Poetry and Ideology, 35). Yet to Freneau in 1786, the Roman republic-in-exile has, seemingly, been restored in the New World. “This is the moment at which the rise of Rome from an unimportant city in western Italy to dominance in the Mediterranean world had begun to transform itself into a cultural myth, its point being not the military and economic power exercised by Rome after its final victory over Carthage ... but the presumed source of that power in a polit-

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ical culture giving citizens a free voice” (34). Freneau recalls his countrymen to the landscape of the Virgilian Georgic, “to the simple life of field and vineyard from which their earliest glory had sprung, quietly insisting on the genuine source of imperial greatness in an agrarian virtue” (35). To Freneau as to Jefferson, it seems, “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God” (217). Yet Freneau’s exemplar is the future Federalist Washington, not Jefferson – the FederalistDemocrat rift has not yet taken place. Nor has the more subtle rift between the agrarian planter Jefferson and the radicalized egalitarian Jefferson yet appeared. The contrast between Freneau and Brackenridge is not absolute either. In 1786, Freneau incorporated the following lines: The inclosure, now, succeeds the shepherd’s care, Yet milk-white flocks adorn the well stock’d farm, And court the attention of the industrious swain – Their fleece rewards him well. Freneau notes the advance from fenceless sheep-herding in order to increase the sense of property and civility, perhaps taking his cue from Brackenridge’s nomads. But his reference to “inclosure” bears no hint of social tension or geographical limitation such as Goldsmith lamented in England in “The Deserted Village” (1770). The land is open, free, inexhaustible – the New World knows no physical limits and did not even begin to sense them until more than a century afterwards. Acasto’s transition to the fourth round of speeches on commerce is completely recast from 1772. It emphasizes the necessity of commerce not for the sake of wealth alone but as a civilizing force, adducing the biblical example of King Solomon’s trade with Golconda and Ophir. Agriculture alone is not enough: “Strip Commerce of her sail and men once more / Would be converted into savages.” Eugenio’s speech – preserved with minor revision apart from a few new lines on seafaring – thus gives commerce its due, along with its subsequent Hamiltonian vision. Both Freneau and Brackenridge see commerce as the economic engine that drives higher culture. Brackenridge is blunt: Philadelphia, he says, “The seat of arts, of science, and of fame / Derives her grandeur from the pow’r of trade.” In Freneau, commerce, in a classical topos that survives in American poetry to Whitman and Stevens, summons the Muses from the Old World to the New, “The

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last, the best / Of countries, where the arts shall rise and grow, / And arms shall have their day.” Even the peace-loving Eugenio makes allowances for the necessity of military power. Both writers make the assumption that commerce is an urban affair, as opposed to agriculture, but neither dwells on the rural versus urban conflict that was later to become so contentious politically. Both writers tend to equate commerce with science, thus making way for an encomium on Franklin. If Freneau’s 1786 poem treats commerce less enthusiastically than the 1772 co-authored text, as Wertheimer claims (“Commencement Ceremonies,” 46/31), the rapprochement of the two authors is nonetheless closest on this point. Leander’s reply to Eugenio hurries on to the future – “since we know the past” – and urges Acasto to unveil “the mystic scenes of dark futurity.” He urges a time when the “dreary wastes and awful solitude” of the supposedly empty hinterlands, “where Melancholy sits with eye forlorn” (Melancholy being prosopoeia for the hapless Indian), will be peopled by cultivated Europeans “from the Atlantic to the Pacific shores.” One is left uncertain whether Leander’s future is based on “reason from the course of things,” to use Brackenridge’s phrase, or an assumption of divine Providence. In Freneau’s poem, the two are inextricable. But his speech allows Acasto to venture his concluding prophecy, guarded in conditional syntax. Acasto is unconditional only in his certainty that the apocalyptic “trump of fame” will sound ruin to “all monarchy.” (The rousing anti-monarchism in the last four lines of Acasto’s speech is, of course, new in 1786 – after the Treaty of Paris but before Bastille.) Before Acasto welcomes the New Jerusalem, however, Freneau allows the peaceable Eugenio a lengthy digression on the war atrocities of King George’s soldiers. Here Freneau vents his bitterness against the British. And it is true that most of the paternal anglophilia of his undergraduate poem has been systematically erased in this 1786 recension. But traces remain, and they speak to the mixed feelings Americans have carried about their Old World, Anglo-Saxon heritage ever since. Thus Eugenio catalogues the wrongs: from the murder of the 1770 Boston Massacre (singled out in Freneau’s footnote), to the use of foreign mercenaries, to the imputed demagoguery of Sir Francis Bernard, to every bloody violation of men, women, and children. But even as he speaks, we cannot forget his previous repeated emphasis on the Black Legend and British moral superiority to the Spanish,

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nor the valorization of the culture imported from the Old World, nor specific instances of British accomplishment like the heroic Wolfe or Newton, “Britannia’s sage.” Acasto’s peroration on the coming New Jerusalem is unusually extended and detailed. Such allusion to the end of time is a commonplace rhetorical flourish to bring closure to such poems, and both Dwight’s and Trumbull’s rising glory poems conclude this way, but briefly, in no more than a line or two. Behind the rhetoric, of course, lies the American Puritan conviction that the New World would be the imminent site of the Second Coming. As Jonathan Edwards himself, in the final paragraph of “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” had declared only a few decades earlier, “God seems now to be hastily gathering in his elect in all parts of the land; and probably the bigger part of adult persons that ever shall be saved, will be brought in now in a little time.” But Freneau’s passage plays the scene of Revelation for all its worth. For contrast, a glance at Brackenridge’s concluding lines reveals a writer who employs the ready-made topos but systematically silences every biblical resonance: This is thy praise America thy pow’r Thou best of climes by science visited By freedom blest and richly stor’d with all The luxuries of life. Hail happy land The seat of empire the abode of kings, The final stage where time shall introduce Renowned characters, and glorious works Of high invention and of wond’rous art, Which not the ravages of time shall wake Till he himself has run his long career; Till all those glorious orbs of light on high The rolling wonders that surround the ball, Drop from their spheres extinguish’d and consum’d; When final ruin with her fiery car Rides o’er creation, and all nature’s works Are lost in chaos and the womb of night. Brackenridge too sees the “rising glory” of America ending only with the extinction of the sun. But to him, the presiding spirits of history are “science” and “freedom,” and they will bring about “luxuries,”

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“empire,” “kings” (in his pre-Revolutionary imagination), “renownéd characters,” inventive technologies, and art. His driving forces are rational and political, undiluted (but for Apollo’s “fiery car”) by any mythology. His freedom is not a Puritan freedom to follow virtue, but utilitarian and unconditional. Only the Doomsday note of his final line seems out of key. Freneau’s peroration, like Brackenridge’s, sees America as, in Silverman’s words, “not only the latest frontier of human questing, but also the last ..., the end of the historical process” (Colonial American Poetry, 232). But Freneau is unwilling to let go of the Bible. His future America, like that of Edwards, will be home to “myriads of saints” throughout the Millennium, and the only king in sight will be “their immortal king.” Imagery from Revelation – itself reworked from the Hebrew scriptures, primarily Isaiah – mingles with phrases from Milton, as the lion and the lamb “in mutual friendship linked, shall browse the shrub”: The happy people, free from toils and death, Shall find secure repose. No fierce disease No fevers, slow consumption, ghastly plague, (Fate’s ancient ministers) again proclaim Perpetual war with man: fair fruits shall bloom, Fair to the eye, and sweeter to the taste; Nature’s loud storms be hushed, and seas no more Rage hostile to mankind – and, worse than all, The fiercer passions of the human breast Shall kindle up to deeds of death no more, But all subside in universal peace. – – Such days the world, And such America at last shall have When ages, yet to come, have run their round, And future years of bliss alone remain. Acasto’s vision represents a future America beyond the reach of “Fate’s ancient ministers,” or, in Susan Castillo’s phrase, “beyond the toils of history” (“Imperial Pasts,” 38), echoing the thesis first propounded many years ago by David Noble: that America has “a covenant that makes Americans a chosen people who have escaped from the terror of historical change” (Eternal Adam, ix). This final covenant, unlike the previous biblical covenants, is given unconditionally, with no possi-

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bility of breaking faith. The entire passage survives nearly intact from the 1772 text, apart from the final lines emphasizing Freneau’s hope for universal peace. Freneau the incipient deist cannot yet bring himself to the dramatic moment reached by Joel Barlow one year later at the end of his Vision of Columbus (1787). There, Columbus, exalted by the visions shown to him, calls for the expected final Revelation: Command, celestial Guide, from each far pole, The blissful morn to open on my soul ... Let heaven, unfolding, ope the eternal throne, And all the concave flame in one clear sun, On clouds of fire, with Angels at his side, The Prince of Peace, the King of Salem ride. But his angelic mentor Hesperus emphatically refuses: “Enough for thee, that thy delighted Mind / Should trace the deeds and blessings of thy kind” (Barlow, Vision, Book 9, p. 254; Columbiad, Book 10, p. 336.). If Barlow explicitly refuses to show the coming of the Millennium, in Freneau’s mind the competing forces of reason and Providence, the categories of sacred and secular, remain muddled. Freneau’s 1786 poem is philosophically inconsistent. His thinking is more conflicted than the more purely Enlightenment minds of a Brackenridge or a Barlow. But it is therefore both more complex and more representative. It is the genius of “The Rising Glory of America” not only to hold these conflicting sentiments in suspension but to balance them in an aesthetically lucid design. “The Rising Glory of America” is a landmark, one of the most fascinating American poems of its century. Yet both Freneau and his ambitious prophecy have disappeared from the view of all but period specialists. Selections from his work remain in anthologies, but I doubt if he is much taught. There has not been an edition of his poems since F.L. Pattee’s three-volume “complete” set of 1902 and Harry Hayden Clark’s substantial selection of 1927. Freneau’s name fails even to appear in the eight-hundred-page Columbia History of American Poetry.9 Yet Freneau’s work is broader in subject and more various in prosodic form than that of any preceding American poet, not to mention most of his nineteenth-century successors. He still gets tagged as a “pre-romantic,” or he is dismissed as a political hack. Freneau composed many poems ostensibly sympathetic to Native

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Americans – not only “The Indian Burying Ground” but ambitious dramatic monologues like “The Prophecy of King Tamany” and “The Dying Indian” – and in his prose he assumed the Noble Savage persona of “Tomo-Cheeki.” He also employed dramatic monologue satirically in “George the Third’s Soliloquy,” wrote the graveyard Gothic “The House of Night,” the mythically heroizing “Pictures of Columbus,” a vividly realistic portrait from life in “The British Prison Ship,” and an important group of deist poems at the end of his life, not to mention poems on his Caribbean experience, with their ferocious attacks on slavery. These are impressive performances indeed.

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2 The Progress Poem in America, a Long View Whitman’s “A Passage to India,” Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and Beyond

Kenneth Silverman’s offhand remark that American “rising glory” poems like Freneau’s all derive from the English genre of the “progress poem” is very helpful – helpful, that is, if one is familiar with that genre in the first place, which I confess I was not (Cultural History, 229). The term, it seems, still has some currency, but it is apparently not widely understood or used, even among specialists of the period. Critical literature is sparse, and I discovered the best source of information in an old doctoral dissertation by John Richard Crider, “The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Progress Pieces” (Crider 1960). As I learned more, however, I discovered that this genre sheds a great deal of light not only on the “rising glory” tradition but on a number of later American poems that have engrossed me – poems like Whitman’s “Passage to India” or Hart Crane’s The Bridge – mid-length poems that engage with the whole history and (manifest) destiny of the United States. These are not epics; but if an epic is, in Ezra Pound’s words, “a poem including history” (Essays, 86), then so do these. Like the epic, progress poems articulate the heritage of cultural values belonging to a nation. But the progress poem is distinct from the epic, and the confusion of the two has had significant consequences for the development and theorization of the American long poem. Crider’s work is an old-school dissertation that enumerates, categorizes, and describes a large number of related texts, about two hundred pieces mostly in verse but a few in prose (e.g., Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress), many but not all of which bear the word “progress” in the title.1 The only American work that catches his attention is John

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Trumbull’s Swiftian satire “The Progress of Dulness” (1772–73), and he does not mention the rising glory poems. He divides English progress pieces into the biographical, like Bunyan’s narrative, that deals with an individual figure, and the historical, that deals with some element of society – the progress of “love,” or “civility,” or “poetry.” The treatment may be either realistic or allegorical. And this being the age of satire, any form might become the object of ridicule: no sooner did Lord Lansdowne publish “The Progress of Beauty” (1701) but some anonymous wag produced a “Progress of Deformity.” The most significant of these types is the one that concerns me here: the historical progress poem. This type, says Crider, takes as its subject “the historical manifestations of a human quality or activity and assumes the unity or continuity of this universal throughout its particular occurrences. The sense of unity is maintained and the gaps between specific manifestations are bridged through giving the central idea and its historical career concrete form: Most frequently, the abstraction is personified as a queen or goddess, or identified metaphorically with the sun, or both” (“Progress Pieces,” 113). The appearance of the type clearly parallels the rise of historical consciousness during the period. The historical progress poem typically focuses on a single human activity: religion, female beauty, the sciences, the arts, “Civil Society,” “Liberty.” In such poems, the historical sequence “seems first to have taken shape in the medieval and Renaissance ideas of translatio imperii and translatio studii” (158). However, “broad histories of civilization in one poem constituted a late and atypical phase of the progress piece” (168).2 The purpose of such poems is both didactic and epideictic. A poem like “Essay on Painting” (1778) by Blake’s patron William Hayley strives to stir up appreciation for that art. Historically, the effort is not so much to “teach history” in terms of important events, individuals, chains of causation – but to lay out a broad mythic template, according to the ideology and temperament of the author. The translatio studii idea naturally suggests a cyclical model of rise and fall, but this may be coupled with a larger narrative of overall decline or improvement. In the earlier phase, during the ancients versus moderns controversy, decline was favoured. John Denham’s “The Progress of Learning” (1668), one of the earliest pure examples, portrays the decline of learning since the Roman era. In a sombre foreshadowing of Pope’s Dunciad, Lucifer sends the printing press to complicate and confuse. Every man becomes his own interpreter. The poem is an attack on

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modern science, published one year after Thomas Sprat’s History of the Royal Society. The word “progress” at this point meant simply “movement,” the metaphor deriving from a monarch’s royal progress. The modern meaning of progress as “improvement” did not begin to appear, Crider claims, until the 1740s (“Progress Pieces,” 268), after the appearance of James Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36), but this is about a century late.3 Thomson’s long poem, which that good Tory Dr Johnson claimed he was unable to read, marks the first poetic stirring of Whig historiography. But Thomson’s own meliorist attitudes are confused by his profound admiration for the Greeks and Romans. Liberty has been called a “dissident Whig panegyric” (209), being simultaneously “the most flattering of all the verse-pamphlets in praise of the Whig dogma” (66, quoting C.A. Moore) and an attack on the Whig prime minister Sir Robert Walpole. In this quasi-medieval dream vision, the goddess Liberty first instructs the speaker of the poem in the attainments of civil liberty in ancient Sparta, Athens, and Republican Rome. This vision is clearly modelled after the final two books of Paradise Lost, where the Archangel Michael prophesies the coming history of humankind to Adam and Eve: their present tragedy will be redeemed through the providential power of a redemptive God. In Thomson, the site of Rome may lie in ruins, but a final and permanent home for the goddess Liberty will be found in Britain: “Hence Britain, learn – my best established, last, / And, more than Greece or Rome, my steady reign.” Progress pieces like Thomson’s are thus often accompanied by “a strong current of patriotism” (273): Liberty ends with a prophetic vision of British glory, an “enthusiastic prospect of empire, which will be established through British sea-power and commerce” (275). In accord with Whig ideology, commerce is the root of Liberty, and, furthermore, Liberty is the necessary condition for the well-being of the arts. In the words of the poet Mark Akenside, “great Poetical Talents and high Sentiments of Liberty do reciprocally produce and assist each other” (quoted 212–13). Thus the translatio imperii of Liberty becomes simultaneously a translatio Musarum. Crider focuses on pre-romantic English poetry, and his careful eye dims in later periods and scarcely glances across the Atlantic. His own appendix, which does not claim to be thorough, lists some twenty-two nineteenth-century pieces, including poems by Landor, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, and Christina Rossetti, not to mention “The Ages” by William Cullen Bryant. More recently, two other schol-

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ars have discussed the genre as it appears in Shelley’s “Ode to Liberty” and Anna Barbauld’s “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven.”4 The progress poem found its natural home in America, however, where the great mass of colonists, having entrepreneurial middle-class Whiggish sympathies, produced the rising glory phenomenon.5 John P. McWilliams lists twelve such poems written between 1769 (Alexander Martin’s “America”) and 1791, and his list does not include Joel Barlow’s mighty Vision of Columbus (1787) or its revision as The Columbiad (1807), which he notes is “best regarded not as an epic narrative but as a gigantic expansion of the rising glory orations” (McWilliams, “Poetry,” 161). Where the English poem “meditated upon a pastoral civilization,” the American was “relentlessly futuristic”: “In its most extreme form, it projected an entire culture upon a void” (160–1). Before 1769, however, the translatio imperii motif had already become popular as soon as Americans began to realize that imperium might sail across the Atlantic Ocean. As the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkeley had famously proclaimed, “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” His verses, written as early as 1726, but not published until 1752, were reprinted in the colonies repeatedly thereafter. In the same year, 1752, William Smith (not mentioned by McWilliams) attempted awkwardly to balance his patriotic fervour for America with his loyalty to the Crown, despite a conviction that England’s might was dying: ... since Death’s th’inevitable Doom Of every Body, th’Animal alike And Politic, who does not, pensive, see That even Britannia’s self, the finest State That e’er was built, tho’ founded on the Rock Of Freedom and of Right, must tumble down. (Andrews, “Smith,” 38) Twenty years later, Freneau and Brackenridge printed their collaborative poem, “the first full sounding of the Imperial theme,” according to Silverman, which “may be said to end the colonial period of verse.”6 The “rising glory” theme became so ubiquitous that, as Leon Howard remarked, “American poems that opened with the trouble with England and closed with the Day of Judgment” could only have flourished “in the hothouse atmosphere of optimistic patriotism” (Connecticut Wits, 136–7). If the American Revolution truly “took place in

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the minds of the people” (John Adams as paraphrased by Ezra Pound in Canto 33), then these rising glory poems create an index of this mental process. The crucial matter here, as William C. Dowling notes, is “the idea of poetry involved in the Augustan warfare against corruption and social decline, a real sense that individuals and societies are constituted in an essential way by systems of ideas or perceptions, and that literature may intervene in the process in a decisive way” (Poetry and Ideology, xv). The unprepossessing title of Dowling’s book disguises an argument that will resonate throughout these chapters. Since the modernist era of lyricization, we are accustomed to thinking with W.H. Auden that “poetry makes nothing happen” – “all the sadness of a presumed divorce between language and the world is in his utterance” (xv). But the authors of the rising glory poems wrote in a world “where poems are symbolic interventions with enormous consequences in the domain of the real” (xv). This concept of the important social and political and moral mission of poetry clings to all the subsequent writers of American progress poems, from Freneau and the Connecticut Wits, through Whitman, Lanier, Hart Crane, MacLeish, Rukeyser, Tolson, and Ginsberg. All stake their claims on the role that “poems may honorably and importantly play in the ongoing construction of the world.” They represent “what poetry ought to be” (xv). Timothy Dwight’s “America, or A Poem on the Settlement of the British Colonies Addressed to the Friends of Freedom and Their Country” serves as a typical example of the English historical “progress poem” in its American costume. Though not published until 1780, it was written before the Revolution in the fall of 1771 (Howard, Connecticut Wits, 83). Dwight’s political position was far removed from that of the radical Freneau, whom he denounced as “a mere incendiary.”7 Nonetheless, in Silverman’s words, “while differences of temperament, family, belief, and education distinguish the satirical Trumbull, the pious Dwight, and the anxious Freneau, their enlarged ambitions, reformist tendencies, and romantic leaning stamp them as members of a single generation” (Cultural History, 228). This is not to say that the pre-Revolutionary poets conceived of separation from England – certainly not Dwight, Brackenridge, or even Freneau. But their poems articulate the growing cultural self-confidence of the colonies and their certainty of a sunny future. They do not conceive a full-blown cultural nationalism in the manner of Emerson and Whitman but, instead, call

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on the colonies to join the international world of letters and moral society (229). Dwight’s historical narrative in 346 lines of heroic couplets divides neatly into three parts: past, present, and prophetic future. Nearly half the text surveys colonial history, first, like Freneau, speculating on the origins of the Native Americans – who, it seems, arrived as Tartars “thro’ the vast western Ocean” – and deploring their condition of barbarity and superstition. Dwight then touches on the period of exploration, on Columbus and Raleigh, and the Puritan flight from Charles I; he praises the early settlers, including the Quaker Penn and the Anglican reformer Oglethorpe; and he celebrates Wolfe in Quebec and British victory over the Catholic French. Catholics aside, however, Dwight, the grandson of Jonathan Edwards, is remarkably tolerant of diverse Protestant sects. The middle portion of the poem (lines 159–240) is a hymn of thanksgiving to God for the present prosperity, culminating in a theophany (a recurrent event is these poems): an allegorical female deity appears. Here she is named Peace, “descending from the sky,” the colonies thriving “like growing grain” amid the reign of “bright Liberty”: O Land supremely blest! to thee tis given To taste the choisest joys of bounteous heaven; Thy rising Glory shall expand its rays, And lands and times unknown rehearse thine endless praise. In the third section of the poem, Dwight conceives an allegory of meeting the personified Lady Freedom in a grove. These allegories are routinely feminine, perhaps to counterbalance the exclusively male personae of the historical record. Freedom shows him a sequence of three future visions. The first, anticipating the revolution to come, is a troubling glimpse of discord and warring heroes, followed by “white-rob’d Peace.” Then follows, as in John Trumbull’s “Prospect of the Future Glory of America,” an allegorical procession of the Seven Arts: Philosophy, Religion, History, Poetry, Sculpture, Painting, and Eloquence. (His list differs from Trumbull’s – Dwight has no time for Architecture or Music.) Finally there is the inevitable apocalyptic vision of future glory, with prosperity spanning the world. The heavenly kingdom will descend, and we shall see “Th’Almighty Saviour his great power display,” until the last trump, when God’s happy children “mount to worlds above, / Drink streams of purest joy, and taste immortal love.”

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The principal topoi of the American version of the genre, then, are these: (1) A three-part division into past-present-future, sometimes present-past-future. (2) A belief in historical progress, and an orientation to the future, though other mythic templates of history are possible. (3) A curiosity about origins or primitive roots. (4) A roll call: praise for admirable or heroic figures, blame for the corrupt and violent. In America, the blameworthy, in the spirit of Jonathan Edwards, are regularly associated with the Old World: “the other continent hath slain Christ ... God has therefore probably reserved the honour of building the glorious temple to the daughter that has not shed so much blood, when those times of the peace, prosperity, and glory of the church, typified by the reign of Solomon, shall commence.”8 (5) A vision of America as not merely the present beneficiary but as the completion and fulfilment of the westward movement of the translatio imperii, site of the Millennium, and concluding point of history. As Sacvan Bercovitch puts it: “Most Americans believed that history in the large sense [macrohistory] stopped with the American Revolution, but history in a more restricted sense [microhistory] did not. Rather, it continued as the setting in which Americans strove to keep faith with their special destiny. By contrast with Europeans, the Americans of the Middle Period lacked a sense of time ... If macrohistory taught Americans to be complacent, microhistory pressed them to locate themselves in an unending struggle between the forces of good and evil” (Jeremiad, 144–5).9 (6) A prospect of the future: under the pressure of Puritan mythos, the American poems are particularly concerned to anticipate the biblical Millennium. This assurance of millennial peace and prosperity became an assumption of the way things would be, or ought to be, in a New World cleansed of Old World sins. Peace is a kind of surrogate salvation, and it appears as an entitlement. (7) A Whiggish concern for commerce: economic prosperity as precondition for the rise of civilization and the arts. This eighteenth-century idea has produced a number of works on subjects that nowadays often seem anti-poetical. In England, John Dyer, in Book 2 of The Fleece (1757), surveys the history of the wool trade from primitive times to the efficient present-day British methods. In America, it helps explain oddities like Sidney Lanier’s economic odes “Corn” and “The Symphony,” in which this romantic and musical Southern aesthete exposes a Whiggish utilitarian impulse, and it further manifests in the usury theme of Ezra Pound’s Cantos. (8) Affirmation of translatio imperii. The New World under the banner of Liberty (however that

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word is understood) will be a light unto the world and show the path to the Old World still in chains. World leadership will, as a matter of course, endow the New World with imperial power. (9) Affirmation of a translatio studii that sometimes includes a translatio Musarum, made possible by the shift in political and economic power. (10) An appeal to fundamental imagery of light and sun. As Crider remarks, “sunlight imagery became a standard accouterment of the historical progress piece in regard to the rise in the East and the westward movement of the arts and sciences” (“Progress Pieces,” 251). Hence the “rising glory” motif (the phrase appears in Dwight’s poem, line 161). (11) Personification of a goddess (always gendered female). If neoclassical personification is, as Bertrand Bronson long ago argued, a sign of the diminishing power of religion – “the last historical effort to stave off the collapse of those sustaining postulates which for centuries had given dignity and importance to mankind” (Bronson, 177) – then such personified figures may be read as further signs of American slippage from a theist to a secular vision of the nation. If, as Robert Eisenhauer claims, the traditional ode is typically “energized by the invocation of a Weltgeist, Oversoul, et al., or a channeling of ghosts, poetical, political, tribal familial” (Ode Consciousness, ix), then this goddess or Muse figure is a point of contact between the shorter, more lyric ode on the one hand, and the epic on the other, ensuring a special status for the utterance. Before turning forward to Joel Barlow’s prolonged versions of the progress poem, I look backward to Anne Bradstreet’s extraordinary “Dialogue between the Old England and the New.” To approach this poem from a reading of the eighteenth-century progress poems is to be struck immediately by similarities. Like many of the poems studied in this book, Bradstreet’s “Dialogue” was written in response to a political crisis, most likely in 1643, early in the English Civil War and before the execution of Charles I in 1649 (White, Bradstreet, 164). The Bradstreets were Dissenters, not Separatists. They had not, like the Plymouth Pilgrims, given up the old country as a lost cause; instead, they were torn between an abiding patriotic devotion to England and a conviction that the established Church of England was gangrenous with Papism. Like the earl of Essex, executed by the Puritans in 1649 though praised in Bradstreet’s poem, the New Englanders struggled to remain loyal to the king even while their sympathies were wholly with the parliamentary party. Events were gradually making such a position untenable. News travelled slowly in 1643, but readers of

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William Bradford’s History are invariably surprised to discover how busy maritime traffic was at the time, so that alarming news from Old England arrived in a steady trickle. The fiction of the poem is a dialogue between an ailing mother and her strong, healthy Puritan daughter. Bradstreet’s personifications are not demi-goddesses – she would have recoiled from the suggestion – but they speak with communal authority. The dialogue format was often found in mid-seventeenth-century poetry and customary in books of instruction, including the dialogue of Brackenridge and Freneau, and it is not unlike the instructive personifications in Thomson’s Liberty or Dwight’s America. The daughter here not only comforts but instructs the ailing mother. Bradstreet’s survey of English history duly divides into clear past, present, and future segments. The New England daughter peers back into earliest times, even to Hengist, “that brave and valiant Dane,” and the two speakers review the violent history of the monarchy. Recent years have seen the corruption of true religion: Idolatry, supplanter of a Nation, With foolish superstitious adoration, Are lik’d and countenance’d by men of might, The Gospel is trod down and hath no right. Church Offices are sold and bought for gain That Pope had hope to find Rome here again. This corruption extends to the financial sector, to “Usury, Extortion, and Oppression.” And her lines on the Huguenot struggles in France, the 1641 massacre of Protestants in Ireland, and the Lutheran strife in Germany – “her people famish’d, Nobles slain” in the Thirty Years’ War – indicate that the corruption extends beyond England itself to the entire Old World. Given this state of affairs, Mother England bemoans the present dispute “’twixt King and Peers,” “’twixt Subjects and their Master.” But the New England daughter is more optimistic, even if unsettlingly bloodthirsty, about the future: Your griefs I pity much but should do wrong, To weep for that we both have pray’d for long, To see these latter days of hop’d-for good, That Right may have its right, though’t be with blood.

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After dark Popery the day did clear, But now the Sun in’s brightness shall appear. The earliest rays of Enlightenment sunlight shine on her hope for a monarchy newly washed in the blood of the Lamb: Go on, brave Essex, show whose son thou art, Not false to King, nor Country in thy heart, But those that hurt his people and his Crown, By force expel, destroy, and tread them down. Let Gaols be fill’d with th’ remnant of that pack, And sturdy Tyburn loaded till it crack.10 The New England is still hoping to reconcile her Puritan cause with her loyalty to King Charles. But in faithful Puritan fashion, she rationalizes this violence as the beginning of the imminent Apocalypse and the coming Millennium: Bring forth the beast that rul’d the world with’s beck, And tear his flesh, and set your feet on’s neck, And make his filthy den so desolate To th’astonishment of all that knew his state. This done, with brandish’d swords to Turkey go, – (For then what is it but English blades dare do?) And lay her waste, for so’s the sacred doom, And do to Gog what thou hast done to Rome. This needful slaughter of Romish and Turkish infidels accomplished, a providential God will bring about the conversion of the Jews, harmony among the remaining nations, and blessings to the surviving millennial remnant: Then fullness of the Nations in shall flow And Jew and Gentile to one worship go. Then follows days of happiness and rest. Whose lot doth fall to live therein is blest. The Second Coming will thus bring an end to both conflict and historical contingency.11 Although Anne Bradstreet’s “Dialogue” fulfills so many criteria of

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the historical progress poem, it in fact antedates in composition the earliest of the pieces in John Crider’s massive survey, which identifies the earliest examples as Sir Richard Fanshawe’s “Canto of the Progress of Learning,” eighteen Spenserian stanzas appended to his translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (1647), and Sir John Denham’s “Progress of Learning” (1668).12 The Tenth Muse lately sprung up in America may thus lay claim to having written the first poem in a significant new genre. The progress piece was fully at home in the New World from the very beginning. As McWilliams notes, Joel Barlow’s Vision of Columbus (1787), as well as its expanded revision The Columbiad (1807), are both best regarded not as epics but as gigantic expansions of the rising glory poems (“Early Republic,” 160–1). Yet the progress poem was from the beginning conflated with epic. This was true in Barlow’s own mind, as he struggled to explain why he was writing an epic that was not really an epic. Roy Harvey Pearce, in his once influential overview of American poetry, argues that The Columbiad establishes the precedent in American poetry for “an epic without the sort of linear, formendowing narrative argument which takes its substance and its very life from the hero, the supra-human being, at its center.” Pearce goes on to argue that four later poems – Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Crane’s The Bridge, Pound’s Cantos, and Williams’s Paterson – follow from Barlow’s work as “plotless epics in which poetical and moral objects are fused” (Continuity, 61).13 This view has been repeated frequently in discussions of the American long poem, but awareness of the progress poem template reveals a tension in such poems between narrative, which belongs to epic proper, and the eighteenth-century preference for an abstracting and expository kind of thinking, a sorting into past, present, and future categories. Progress poems may contain narrative, but they tend to subordinate it to the expository and argumentative modes – the modes that more often govern lyric. This is equally true of modernist fragmented epics in the tradition of Pound’s Cantos. The American epic without a hero is in fact not an epic at all, but a progress poem. The genre thus throws light on the fusions and confusions about epic form in American studies of the long poem – confusions that are themselves part of the tradition in the minds of poets and critics alike. Barlow himself lays great weight on the absence of epic hero and epic plot. His Columbus is wholly passive, a prisoner in chains. His Muse appears in the form of an Angel (named Hesper in The Colum-

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biad), a personified “guardian genius of the Western Continent” in Pearce’s phrase (Continuity, 64). Pearce does not mention the borrowing from Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost – another epic without a “hero” – and its appearances in progress pieces like those of Thomson or Dwight. But he is correct in saying that Barlow’s true subject is not Columbus himself but the American historical mythos: Barlow’s “actual hero is what he and his contemporaries liked to call the ‘republican institution,’ toward which all history, natural and human, progressed” (65). Barlow spends many pages telling the story of one Manco Capac – a prototypal Hiawatha of the Incas, who brought political coherence, morality, and enlightenment to his Aboriginal but urban civilization in South America. The fall of Inca civilization, however, is part of the rational cycle, in which “progress meant a sacrifice of a lower to a higher good” (64).14 Barlow’s conclusion in Book 10 articulates “an unabashed utopianism – a vision of the brave new world, at last unified through a universal language, so that all is caught up in one grand political harmony” (64). In this astonishing scene, Barlow envisions a prototypal United Nations, led by America upholding the torch of Liberty.15 Barlow’s poem was determined to be American, writes Christopher Phillips, “meant to celebrate everything that America could produce involving books.”16 However, his effort to write a democratic epic, according to Pearce, was frustrated because he “could not write a traditional poem”: “Subordinating fictional to real, moral design, he perforce creates a poem which works neither as would a traditional epic, in which fictional and moral design are fused and so move to a higher level of reality, nor as would the essentially propaedeutic poem which, subliminally, he seems to have wanted” (Pearce, Continuity, 66). To reply that Pearce’s assumptions are wrong, that Barlow was writing a progress poem, not an epic at all, would be facile, because Barlow, given the scale of his enterprise, himself wrestles with the epic model. Barlow dutifully employs the external trappings of epic, some of which Pearce enumerates: “The opening ‘I sing …’; the concentration on superhuman actions; the elaborate cataloguing and passing-inreview; the focussing on the ‘sublime’; the couplets which Pope and others had institutionalized as a proper vehicle for epic in English” (Continuity, 66). Barlow too takes pains to establish the heroic character of Columbus, in his preface if not in the poem itself: “this extraordinary man,” he tells us, “appears to have united in his character every trait, and to have possessed every talent, requisite to form and execute

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the greatest enterprises” (Vision, ix / Columbiad, xvii). Yet in his preface to The Columbiad, Barlow enumerates his objections to the epics of classical tradition. The “real design” of the Iliad, he says – that is, the moral as opposed to the fictional design – is “to inflame the minds of young readers with an enthusiastic ardor for military fame; to inculcate the pernicious doctrine of the divine right of kings; to teach both prince and people that military plunder was the most honorable mode of acquiring property; and that conquest, violence and war were the best employment of nations” (vi). Virgil’s Aeneid is “nearly as pernicious,” he says; “the real design of his poem was to increase the veneration of the people for a master” (vi–vii).17 Barlow does not portray the Native Americans as Latians, Christopher Phillips notes, “precisely because a repetition of the Aeneid narrative would cast America as a conquering heir” to the translatio imperii tradition, after a lengthy praise of the republican instincts of the South American Incas (Epic, 45). In all, Barlow insists that “there is one point of view in which I wish the reader to place the character of my work before he pronounces on its merit: I mean its political tendency” (Columbiad, v). Like Timothy Dwight, Barlow had his eye not only on his own accomplishment but on a collective effort “to elevate the entire cultural enterprise” of the American nation “to heroic stature” (Phillips, Epic, 43). Widespread discomfort with epic conventions in antebellum America is now well understood, but the remarks of Walt Whitman and Barlow both need to be considered in a wider context. English writers, not feeling the goad of literary nationalism like their American cousins, likewise articulated a wide range of opinions about every aspect of epic – form, fable, machinery, morality. From the middle of the eighteenth century, critics in England “looked with ever increasing skepticism on the rules and theories which almost countless commentators had handed onto them from Aristotle” (Swedenberg, Theory of the Epic, 94). Among many others, William Hayley in his “Essay on Epic Poetry” (1782) rejected the epic conventions once held to be necessary: Perish that critic pride, which oft has hurl’d Its empty thunders o’er the Epic world; Which, eager to extend its mimic reign, Would bind free Fancy in a servile chain; With papal rage the eye of Genius blind, And bar the gates of Glory on the mind!

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Hayley is best known to literary history as the sometime friend and patron of William Blake, whose “America: A Prophecy” is another important text that deserves mention in this brief history of the American progress poem. Hayley’s Longinian critical stance, in Herbert F. Tucker’s phrase, exhibits disdain “for the clipping of eagle pinions to critical specifications” (Epic, 47). Barlow not only read Hayley’s poem but was befriended by him when he visited England – “the only English literary figure who took much interest in Barlow’s work.”18 In The Columbiad, writes Tucker, he produced “one of the few American epics that had any impact in nineteenth-century Britain” (130). In America, much of the discomfort with epic arose from moral or Christian or even sexual squeamishness. William Cullen Bryant exclaimed that the conduct of the pagan gods is “so detestable that I am sometimes half tempted to give up them and Homer together.”19 But Whitman, like Barlow, rested his objections solely on grounds of the political unsuitability of traditional epic to the literature of the rising republic. Ironically, while objecting to the imperial designs of classical epic, Whitman produced the most powerful depiction in poetry of American unconscious imperialism, “Passage to India,” where the trope of translatio imperii, having given birth to manifest destiny, suddenly discovers in the technology of railroad, canal, and cable the material means for America’s global embrace. Earlier critics, focusing on the last three sections of the poem, exalted the spiritual nature of this embrace. Pearce the New Critic emphasized language, arguing that Whitman’s search for a democratic epic drove him in the direction of a common vernacular, a sublimation of slang – an impulse, he says, that takes on “special import when read in the light of Barlow’s performance in The Columbiad.” Yet both the spiritual Whitman and the New Critical Whitman are, unlike Barlow, untroubled by the epics of tradition: this new bard has “finally discovered the way to the poem made out of that ‘living language’ which will ‘warm the world with one great moral soul’” (Pearce, Continuity, 71). Discussions of Whitman’s epic ambition commonly focus on “Song of Myself” or on Leaves of Grass as a whole. For Pearce, “Song of Myself” marks the second stage in the development of the American plotless, heroless epic (Continuity, 72). For McWilliams, “instead of an elaborate proposition repeating the conventional phrase ‘Of —- I sing,’ America’s heroic poem would begin with a brash seriocomic, democratized assertion, ‘I celebrate myself’” (American Epic, 223). Whitman’s vernacular anti-hero, who “loafs” and “loiters,” is the prog-

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enitor of a fertile line of populist and affirmative American free verse poets.20 Critics habitually stumble over terms in discussion of these plotless epics, or epics without a hero, or democratic epics, or just “long poems.” Betsy Erkkila, however, persuasively resituated Whitman’s antebellum epic affirmations in the context of the painfully fracturing political union. The poems of that 1855 Leaves of Grass “were not, as is commonly assumed, a product of Whitman’s unbounded faith in the democratic dream of America; on the contrary, they were an impassioned response to the signs of the death of republican traditions he saw throughout the land and his growing fear that the ship of American liberty had run aground” (Whitman, 67). Setting Emerson to one side, she argues that “the poet Whitman describes in his 1855 preface ... bears the rhetorical traces of the revolutionary enlightenment. ‘The attitude of great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots’” (69). Whitman in 1855 was writing to a national crisis, and in the process he not only invented a new way of writing poetry, but, as classicist W.R. Johnson has claimed, he revived the art of “choric” poetry that was practised by Greek poets like Pindar, a kind of lyric that gives voice not to the isolated self but to the concerned citizen (Idea of Lyric, 176–95). This element in Whitman’s volume ties him directly back to his neoclassical predecessors, as Erkkila points out: “Wrestling with the same problems that Philip Freneau and Joel Barlow had in trying to create a distinctively American literature, Whitman seeks to reconcile politics and poetry, activism and art, revolutionary ideology and a revolutionary creation” (Whitman, 71). Christopher N. Phillips, in the most recent formulation, points out that Whitman did not add the phrase “and sing myself” – the Virgilian cano – to the first line of “Song of Myself” until the postwar 1881 printing of Leaves of Grass – in 1855. When he called for a new kind of poetry “not direct or descriptive or epic,” he revealed not a disavowal but a “fascinating tension” with epic: “The new work is not epic, but must go through it” (Phillips, Epic, 156). Pearce, McWilliams, Erkkila, Phillips, and many others all seem to posit an invisible link between the colonial writers and Whitman.21 Unfortunately, no one has been able to show that Whitman actually read Barlow, Freneau, Dwight, or any of the rising glory poets. But The Columbiad was well known by reputation, and Barlow’s radical politics were as congenial to Whitman as were his epic ambitions. Barlow had been a friend of Thomas Paine, whom Whitman’s father

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knew and admired, and whom Whitman honoured in Specimen Days (section 122). If my concern were with the epic genre, this lack of hard evidence would not be a problem. As Phillips notes, “through the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries, Americans expected an epic poem to be the benchmark of national literary achievement” (Epic, 8). In any case, it is harder to believe (though it is possible) that Whitman’s virtual replication of the American rising glory poem in “Passage to India” is, like Anne Bradstreet’s “Dialogue,” a mere accident of the Zeitgeist. Faith in progress, a confident orientation to a visionary future, and the translatio imperii are the very subject of Whitman’s poem, which is duly divided into present, past, and future segments, three numbered sections of the poem given to each.22 There is interest in the primitive roots of civilization – Adam and Eve “from the gardens of Asia descending” (88) – and a roll call of past explorers – Marco Polo, Batouta the Moor, Vasco da Gama, and inevitably “the chief histrion,” Columbus (152). All history leads to the invention of America, which in the final section becomes a kind of nasa launching pad to “sun and moon and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!” (240) – a cosmic future worthy the Millennium. Whitman celebrates science and technology with rapturous enthusiasm, while commerce – the underlying motive of all this exploration – is very much present.23 Gravely, Whitman prophesies the power of universal love encompassing all of humanity, even foreseeing the races “to marry and be given in marriage,” just as Joel Barlow had envisioned a future humanity in which the darker races will evolve to “a fairer tint” while Europeans gain “a ruddier hue and deeper shade” (Columbiad 2:120ff). Whitman’s prophecy is as optimistic as Freneau’s or Barlow’s, and even more clearly a benevolent hope for future world domination of the American idea. Not surprisingly, earlier critics of the poem muted this call for global sway, insisting that its intent is spiritual, a “paean to spiritual progress.”24 But as the postcolonialist implications of Whitman’s poem have gradually become inescapable, it has quietly slipped from many undergraduate anthologies. Significantly as well, where Freneau had displayed harmonious equipoise between commerce and agriculture, the urban Whitman in his enthusiasm for technological progress all but forgets agriculture entirely. His postwar praise of technology leaves him wide open to Allen Tate’s agrarian critique that Whitman is the poet of mechanized and corporatized industrialism (see below,

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55). Another element missing from Whitman’s poem is the goddess Liberty herself; but she makes an appearance in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” with a Spanish accent as Libertad. Whitman added this neoclassical allegory to his poem after the Civil War in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass.25 During the same period, in a closely related poem, Whitman produced a famous passage of translatio Musarum: I say I see, my friends, if you do not, the illustrious emigré, (having it is true in her day, although the same, changed, journey’d considerable,) Making directly for this rendezvous, vigorously clearing a path for herself, striding through the confusion, By thud of machinery and shrill steam-whistle undismay’d, Bluff’d not a bit by drain-pipe, gasometers, artificial fertilizers, Smiling and pleas’d with palpable intent to stay, She’s here, install’d amid the kitchen ware! In “Song of the Exposition,” Whitman ceremoniously introduces the Muse to an allegorical Columbia, and, in Lawrence Buell’s account, “make[s] grotesque a trope from the traditional repertoire of Eurocentrism, the translatio studii ... a trope that had been invoked to underwrite colonization efforts and subsequently the hegemony of the late colonial gentry” (“American Literary Emergence,” 420). The change of purpose of Whitman’s postwar poetry, with its new neoclassical overtones, is now generally recognized. To McWilliams, Whitman’s “epic of democracy” (American Epic, 233) is displaced to the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman placed the wholly rewritten and expanded “By Blue Ontario’s Shore” immediately after the Civil War poems, clearly intending to provide “a reinvocation of the muse suitable for a reunited nation ... It recalls Milton’s reinvocation at the beginning of Book Seven of Paradise Lost ... Libertad makes her promised appearance, looking perilously like an eighteenth-century Columbia who has been to Appomatox” (232). If James Perrin Warren attempts a refreshing defence of “Passage to India,” analyzing its unity of argumentation in the light of Whitman’s new-found ideas of Darwinian evolution,26 the ecocritic M. Jimmie Killingsworth associates the poem with Whitman’s alarming “Song of the Redwood Tree,” in which the tree, in dramatic monologue, joyfully sacrifices itself to the building of the nation.27 Killingsworth correctly identifies the subservience of nature to human power, “the kind of thinking all too eas-

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ily enrolled in the service of political imperialism.” Only recently, and remarkably late in its critical history, has the poem opened itself fully to postcolonial analysis, even of a half-apologetic kind. In “Passage to India,” Whitman “constructs a subtext of Western imperialism, and yet he eventually casts doubt on the political priorities of the imperial project he himself endorses.” Jerome Loving assures us in 1999 that Whitman’s imperialism is that of a democratic ideology “which must and will transcend its shortcomings but probably only (for now at least) by going beyond the material and the moral” (Whitman, 333). Yet Whitman’s global fantasy, we now more clearly see, “is related to the assumption of imperial hegemony on the part of the United States” and “directly committed to the commercialization and striation of Pacific space.”28 Within a few decades, America would find itself in possession of a number of Pacific territories, among them Hawaii and the Philippines. None of these writers, however, sees the “rising glory rhetoric” of the poem noticed by Erkkila as having wider generic significance in later American poetry. My view is that “Passage to India” was most likely intended to be a latter-day progress poem after the eighteenthcentury pattern; and furthermore, that it served as the principal model for Hart Crane’s The Bridge; and further yet, that The Bridge in turn became a formative model for Muriel Rukeyser’s “Theory of Flight,” for Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, a debt he freely acknowledged, and (to a lesser extent) for Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” a progress poem manqué haunted by the ghosts of Whitman, Blake, and Crane. The importance of the American progress poem has never been recognized. The link between Hart Crane and Whitman was loudly trumpeted by Crane himself; and every Crane critic discusses it, but there has been surprisingly little sustained examination. According to Pearce, Crane belonged to a generation of poets who had “to go to school to Whitman, not to worship him”: The Bridge was “Crane’s attempt to assure himself ... that America would again be ‘worthy to be spoken of’ as soon as the proper words could be found. In the right words, if only the poet could discover them, lay not only the means of poetry but its end” (Continuity, 101–2). Crane is thus, like Whitman, the Emersonian liberating God who can lead America to its destiny through the power of poetry. The structural analogy between “Passage to India” and The Bridge is a critical commonplace, and I have been so teaching it for years, but

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without recognizing the progress poem template. My sense now is that (echoing Silverman on The Columbiad), The Bridge is best regarded not as an epic but as an updated expansion of the rising glory poem, through the intermediary of Whitman. Crane’s “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” is a shorter sketch along similar lines (Colangelo, “Progress”). The critic who comes closest to this view is R.W.B. Lewis, who in 1967 described “Passage to India” as “no doubt the most seminal of Whitman’s poems for The Bridge as a whole” (Hart Crane, 243). Broadly speaking, Brooklyn Bridge is the artefact of technology that spans not just the East River but, like Whitman’s transcontinental railroad, stretches “from far Rockaway to Golden Gate.” It symbolizes the ties of communication that will eliminate the distances between peoples, cultures, and nations around the globe, accomplishing a spiritual Atlantis in the material world. The poem is suspended from three towering apostrophes, to the bridge itself in the “Proem,” to Whitman in “Cape Hatteras,” and to the “steeled Cognizance” in “Atlantis.” The poem falls into past, present, and future segments. The past looks back yet again to Columbus. Positioned on the same waters where Whitman cruised on the Brooklyn Ferry, the poem salutes Lady Liberty as it sets out in the “Proem”; and it later celebrates the Native American figure of Powhatan’s daughter, Pocahontas, who stands in as the tutelary goddess, finally to be metamorphosed and further eroticized in the “Three Songs.” Commerce takes its place in the advertising slogans of “The River” and the tea trade of “Cutty Sark,” but, like Whitman, Crane is more interested in celebrating scientific progress. Quoting “Passage to India” in his epigraph to the pivotal “Cape Hatteras,” he places Whitman (unhistorically of course) at the site where airplane flight became a reality. The second half of the poem turns to present time, and the picture is notably dispirited in “Quaker Hill” and “The Tunnel.” But in “Atlantis” (the earliest section of the poem to be written), the poet looks to the future, to the “Deity’s glittering Pledge” and the promised parousia of Atlantis – or is it Cathay? Crane’s imagination is firmly planted on American soil, so he escapes most of the imperialistic assumptions of “Passage to India,” but otherwise the template fits. One extraordinary feature of Whitman’s template is that his version of American history wholly bypasses the Civil War. Perhaps he thought he had dealt with the war sufficiently in Drum Taps and the Lincoln poems; perhaps he felt the painful war memories conflicted with the meliorist tone of his progress poem. Or maybe he was actually follow-

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ing the “rising glory” template. Recently, the Irish observer Justin Quinn has speculated that “the decline in Whitman’s poetry after the War” occurred because the later poetry “does not take into account the lessons of the War ... Whitman disengages thus from political events in favour of the idealistic sphere of mystic nationalism” (American Errancy, 19). But this omission of the pivotal tragedy of American experience was subsequently followed by Crane, Rukeyser, and Ginsberg. The “Indiana” section of The Bridge, where the son leaves home in search of El Dorado, has recollections of Whitman’s “Come Up from the Fields Father,” where the parents receive a letter bearing pathetic news from the Civil War battlefield. Crane’s evasion seems deliberate. The Southerner Sidney Lanier felt obliged to include the Civil War in his progress poem and, as we shall see, with ludicrous results. Melvin Tolson’s African American progress poem also makes significant reference to it, even though his subject is the nation of Liberia (an African mirror of America). An argument might be made that this phenomenon reflects a regional division in American historical thinking: Southern poets rightly see the Civil War as the single most crucial event in the making of America, however they interpret it, while Northern poets assume the conflict is done with, a pointless side-track, and err by leaving it out. On the other hand, each of these poems offers its own idiosyncratic realization of Freneau’s heavenly Jerusalem come to earth – from Whitman’s transcendent universes where, “the Elder Brother found, / The Younger melts in fondness in his arms” (223–4), to Crane’s Atlantis, to Tolson’s buzzing Futurafrique, to Ginsberg’s Rockland of safekeeping with Carl Solomon. Crane also blurs the political topic of his progress poem by adopting not a public but a private lyric voice. Only in his Proem and the final “Atlantis” is there a strong sense of public address, and even there it is full of subjectivities. As R.P. Blackmur wrote long ago, Crane “used the private lyric” to “write the cultural epic” (Language, 305–6). In Justin Quinn’s formulation, Crane on one hand “embraces the idea of America as a ‘City upon a Hill,’ with extra helpings of manifest destiny, but on the other, he realizes that this utopian idea of America is restricted to his private imagination of the country” (American Errancy, 21). Langdon Hammer sees this lyricization of his “epic” as an intensification of the gregarious Crane’s isolation as a result of his homosexuality. By his sexual and cultural identification with Whitman, he felt “permanently divided from friends like Tate.” Writing on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, he felt “symbolically excluded”

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not only from the heterosexual household of Tate and his wife Caroline Gordon – who had taken him in and then sent him packing – “but also from the nation” (Hart Crane, 173).29 But conflicts between the private and the public Crane raise jarring emotional discrepancies left unresolved. Crane’s execution of his design is by common consent uneven, ranging from the brilliance of most of the poetry to the forced rhetoric of “Cape Hatteras” and the flatness of a few other sections. I am inclined to blame this unevenness not on any fault in Crane’s design but on his catastrophic alcoholism – the faulty sections were all written very late in his disease. But at the time, Crane’s allegiance to the Emerson-Whitman tradition was trounced by two of his strongest friends and supporters. Yvor Winters was undergoing his own conversion from modernist young Turk to moralizing old curmudgeon, and Crane probably had no idea how virulent Winters’s campaign against “Whitmanian Rousseauism” had become. To Winters, The Bridge, although filled with “magnificent fragments,” demonstrated only “the impossibility of getting anywhere with the Whitmanian inspiration. No writer of comparable ability has struggled with it before, and, with Mr. Crane’s wreckage in view, it seems highly unlikely that any writer of comparable genius will struggle with it again.”30 Crane was disturbed enough by Winters’s review not only to reply to him but to send a copy of his reply to Allen Tate. Tate, for his part, had already drafted his own review, which was not much different from that of Winters. He told Crane in a now famous letter (after assuring him that his “case against Winters seems to be very strong”) that he, too, felt that Crane’s tribute to Whitman was, “while not excessive, certainly sentimental in places, particularly at the end of Cape Hatteras ... in some larger and vaguer sense your vision of American life comes from Whitman. I am unsympathetic to this tradition, and it seems to me that you should be too. The equivalent of Whitman in the economic and moral aspect of America in the last sixty years is the high-powered industrialism that you, no less than I, feel is a menace to the spiritual life of this country” (Untereker, Voyager, 621). As Jake Adam York has written, “most of the body of Crane criticism is eaten up with the cancers introduced by the first and overwhelmingly negative assessments of The Bridge by Yvor Winters and Allen Tate” (Architecture, 100).

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Tate’s objections point clearly to the post-bellum Whitman who sang of Suez and apostrophized locomotives in winter. Would he have reacted differently if Crane had stuck to his original plan and depicted Whitman the Wound Dresser (Letters, 241)? Probably not. Whitman in any guise was persona non grata to Tate, the unreconstructed Southerner. Tate’s animus against both Whitman and Crane targeted their pretense of writing a national mythos rather than a sectional one (Aronoff, Composing Cultures, 163). The feelings in his letter compact a host of resentments, including the Union victory over the Confederacy, the unbridled industrialism and corporationism that ensued, not to mention the worldwide neo-futurist celebration of “machine art” (with its Marxist inflections) that was a phenomenon circa 1930. But while Crane already understood some of Tate’s reservations about his poem, these words probably stung even more than did those of Winters because Tate attacked not Crane’s literary understanding, in which he felt confident, but his historical understanding, in which he did not. For all Crane’s word-smithing brilliance, and a native intelligence that won the respect of formidable minds like Winters, Tate, and others, Crane was all too conscious of his poor education. Crane’s autodidactic reading was prodigious, but from the evidence of his letters, it was limited almost exclusively to literature. If one examines Lawrence Kramer’s annotated edition of The Bridge, for example, one is told that no one can “understand the pivotal ‘Cutty Sark’ section” without “detailed knowledge of the history of clipper ships and their trade.” Yet on turning to the notes, one finds no trace of such history. Was it transmitted to Crane verbally by sailors during their liaisons? Perhaps my own long immersion in the study of Pound’s Cantos raises false expectations, but Kramer sends us to Melville’s poems (little read in the 1920s), Moby Dick, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Burns’s “Tam o’ Shanter,” Plato’s Ion, Job, The Golden Bough, and a 1921 book on Turkey called Stamboul Rose – the last only for its title.31 No one could claim that Crane was ill read. But there is no inkling of the breadth of interests found in the classical education described by, say, Milton or Matthew Arnold and reflected in the wide-ranging curiosities of writers like Pound, or Eliot, or Tate, or even the medically educated Williams. Crane’s mind, furthermore, despite its adherence to certain broad ideals, was undisciplined. He never articulated his ideas at length in prose: indeed, writing prose was for him throughout his

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life a painful task. He is fluent in his letters (which bear comparison with those of Keats), but one wishes Crane had more fully developed the poetics of his “Modern Poetry” or the posthumously published “General Aims and Theories.” One wishes that The Bridge might have had some of the capacious curiosity of Pound’s Cantos or Williams’s Paterson. Even more, however, one wishes for profounder meditation on the historical matter of The Bridge. For this, Crane seems to have relied on the myths of the school primer (the “copybook” of “Van Winkle”) and on attitudes gleaned from Whitman’s Democratic Vistas and Waldo Frank’s Our America. Later in the writing of The Bridge, he plundered William Carlos Williams’s essays that became In the American Grain.32 In Tate’s blunt words, Crane’s history “is the history of the motion picture, of the most naïve patriotism” (Poetry Reviews, 101). Whitman’s reading was far more various than Crane’s. One aspect of this problem is Crane’s submission to the lyricization of poetry, his use of private lyric to write the cultural epic.33 My view is mollified somewhat by Jeffrey W. Westover, whose brilliant essay reads The Bridge through a postcolonial lens and illuminates in Crane’s imagery a good deal of social history not readily apparent. Although he cites Blackmur’s remark and suggests that Crane is “more interested in transcending American history than reporting it” (“Empire and America,” 134), he notes that Crane, writing his poem in 1926 on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, could not have been unaware of American “hemispheric hegemony” with the ownership of the property in a legal limbo since the Spanish-American War. He sees a “dialectic” (141) between his patron, Otto Kahn, who supported him, and the Otto Kahn who captained an industry that involved trains and ships and aeroplanes like those in the poem. He reads the unemployed hobos, the Indians dispossessed of their lands, and the placid golfing businessmen of “Quaker Hill” as part of Crane’s personal experience of the American cultural landscape. And if Kahn is honoured as the great “Chan” in “Atlantis,” he is the same man who delivered an address on “The Myth of American Imperialism” to the League for Industrial Democracy in 1924 (166–7). If Crane’s critics, like Whitman’s, have placed undue emphasis on the spirituality of the final sections of both poems, more recent critics have made their tacit imperialism far more audible. Killingsworth notes that Democratic Vistas too – contemporary with Whitman’s poem and its “prose companion” – celebrates Whitman’s “commitment to the technological version of manifest destiny” in which “spir-

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ituality” alternates as a critique of materialism and a rationale for it (Whitman, 78). If The Bridge, even in the “Atlantis” section, does not quite replicate Whitman’s possessive embrace of foreign lands (“Long before the second centennial arrives there will be some forty to fifty great states, among them Canada and Cuba”), its relationship of the spiritual to the material is just as ambivalent.34 Nonetheless, as I have said, the true subject of Crane’s poem, as of any progress poem, is not history per se but a mythic template of history. The Bridge remains important because – and was pronounced a “failure” because – it strives to maintain the millennial patriotic optimism Whitman had articulated in his great poem, as Freneau and Barlow had in theirs.

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3 Repercussions of “The Bells” Poe, Emerson, and the Bifurcation of American Poetics (with a Postscript on Tuckerman)

The ode as practised by American poets in the nineteenth century followed a very different path from that of its English cousin. In the previous century, both in England and the New World, poets had exercised the genre in all its varieties, and even the strict Pindaric found prominence in the work of Thomas Gray, who was preceded by Congreve, Collins, Akenside, and others. The Cowleyan pseudopindaric, however, was far more prevalent, practised by a long list of poets after Dryden’s “Ode in Memory of Mrs Killigrew” and his two Cecilia odes. Odes on political topics abounded. But the pseudopindaric was the loosest recognized form available to poets before the advent of free verse itself – the easiest to write, the hardest to write well – so that Dr Johnson dismissed it with contempt.1 The genre was further degraded by the countless productions of poets laureate for royal birthdays and other routine occasions. The ode was reinvigorated by the English romantics, when Coleridge and Wordsworth assimilated their meditations on nature to the “greater ode” (as opposed to the “lesser” Horatian ode) and invented the “greater romantic lyric.” Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” is doubtless the supreme achievement in our language in pseudopindarics, though the greater romantic lyric assumed a variety of verse forms. Yet despite considerable slippage of nomenclature, poetic form, and poetic occasion, it remains clear that the greater romantic lyric, identified in M.H. Abrams’s classic essay, was slow to reach America. Although Abrams cites Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” as an example, the ode in America typically does not resemble the greater romantic lyric. Instead, the American ode remained political and topical. Frederick

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Goddard Tuckerman’s “The Cricket” is so atypical that it seems the exception made to prove the rule. To test these statements, I begin with the two seminal poets of nineteenth-century America, Emerson and Poe. Largely through Harold Bloom’s writings over several decades, Emerson has returned to his rightful place in the American pantheon after having been neglected in the New Critical era. In 1988, Bloom proclaimed that, from Emerson’s moment to ours, “American authors are either in his tradition, or in a counter-tradition originating in opposition to him” (“Mr America”). This counter-tradition, in poetry at least, doubtless stems from Poe, left unnamed – pointedly perhaps – because Bloom’s project also seemed intent on writing Poe out of the American tradition. But Bloom was not the first to discern these currents. As long ago as 1900, Edmund Clarence Stedman, having compiled his vast anthology of nineteenth-century verse, declared, “it is now pretty clear, notwithstanding the popularity of Longfellow in his day, that Emerson, Poe, and Whitman [are] those of our poets from whom the old world had most to learn ... Years from now, it will be a matter of fact that their influences were as lasting as those of any poets of this century” (American Anthology, xxiv). American poetry has long been subject to critical binaries, but all of them boil down to an opposition between the Emerson-Whitman line and that of Poe. According to Roy Harvey Pearce in The Continuity of American Poetry (1961), American poets are either “Adamic” (that is, Whitmanic) or “mythic” (that is, academic or formalist). Philip Rahv’s once celebrated essay “Paleface and Redskin” (1939) falls likewise into place. Similar polarization is mirrored in the War of the Anthologies during the 1950s, when the “Adamic” advocates of Donald Allen’s New American Poetry squared off against the academic New Poets of England and America. More recently, Charles Altieri observed that poets during the 1960s grouped into the “symbolist” (sc. “mythic” or “metaphoric”) and the “immanentist” (“Adamic” or “metonymic”) (Enlarging the Temple, 29–52). At times, hostilities have erupted: Bloom’s advocacy for the Emerson faction has been vociferous and dogmatic, while antagonists during the War of the Anthologies took no prisoners. Clearly, Poe’s aesthetics are the ancestor of the New Criticism, while Whitman stands behind the counter-poetics of the New York, San Francisco, and Black Mountain groups. Like most widely held generalizations, these possess enough truth to make them attractive. Although the appeal of binary thinking in

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general has faded in recent decades, the habit persists, and always with some falsification. My purpose here is to re-examine the poetics of Emerson and Poe exemplified in their odes, both to affirm and to complicate this opposition. In broad terms, we know how this works: to Emerson, the poet is a visionary who has achieved “an original relation to the universe” (Essays, 7). He is “poet” in the widest sense, one who may realize his high thoughts in various ways, but insofar as he chooses verse, he remains foremost a prophet, even a “liberating god”: “The poet has a new thought: he has a whole new experience to unfold; he will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune.” To Poe, the poet is an author of verses pure and simple – a craftsman. “For Emerson, inspiration and expression are one process; Poe divorces the two.”2 Both, however, reserve poetry for exceptional purposes, never for “something to read in normal circumstances” (to use Ezra Pound’s expression3). Poetry and ordinary experience, the material of prose fiction, seems mutually exclusive. Hostilities between Emerson and Poe were personal and political as well as aesthetic. Poe’s visceral dislike of “the transcendentalists” erupts in “The Philosophy of Composition,” and, as a Southerner, he resented the abolitionism centred in Boston. As for Emerson, he famously rejected Poe as “the jingle man” and is reported to have commented on “The Raven”: “I see nothing in it.”4 His barbs against the “umpires of taste” whose “knowledge of the fine arts is some study of rules and particulars, or some limited judgment of color or form” (447) were probably not directed against Poe, but they may as well have been.5 The poetics of Emerson and Poe seem so antithetical as to be mutually exclusive – “diametrically opposite,” as undergraduates love to say. But there is significant overlap. First, both Poe and Emerson present poetry as a means of spiritual elevation and set it apart from ordinary life. Both “were idealists who saw an eternal spiritual verity underlying the material universe.”6 Poe takes pains to distinguish this spiritual effect from both intellect and emotion: “Now the object Truth, or the satisfaction of the intellect, and the object Passion, or the excitement of the heart, are, although attainable to a certain extent in poetry, far more readily attainable in prose. Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me), which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement or pleasurable elevation of the soul” (Essays and Reviews, 16). Thus Poe,

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despite the elusiveness of his actual religious convictions, reserves poetry exclusively to the spiritual sphere.7 The purpose of poetic contemplation is just that “intense and pure elevation of soul – not of intellect, or of heart” (16). Like Emerson’s Uriel, Poe’s figure for the poet is the angel Israfel. Elsewhere, in his early Drake-Halleck review, Poe describes the “intangible and purely spiritual nature of poetry” as a “radiant Paradise” which is “palpably marked out from amid the jarring and tumultuous chaos of human intelligence” (509). Emerson, whose vision of the poet is more comprehensive, argues that the poet is one “in whom these powers are in balance,” one who “traverses the whole scale of experience” (Emerson, Essays, 448). Emerson may look at a farm and read a “mute gospel” (29), and his visionary power may elevate even the ugly or the obscene; but the goal is invariably a higher spiritual Truth. “All that we call sacred history attests that the birth of a poet is the principal event in chronology” (451). The poet, he says, sees through material reality, “turns the world to glass, and shows us all things in their right series and procession. For, through that better perception, he stands one step nearer to things, and sees the flowing or metamorphosis; perceives that thought is multiform; that within the form of every creature is a force impelling it to ascend into a higher form. For poetry was all written before time was” (456). If Emerson’s version of “the whole of experience” is more capacious than Poe’s, it is just as radically skewed towards the realm of the spirit. Second, both Emerson and Poe place supreme value on “originality.” In both, concepts of imitation, tradition, or genre are stigmatized, even at the risk of what appeared to be bad taste. As Stephen Donadio remarked, “one compelling characteristic that Emerson shares with Poe is a kind of studied tastelessness – tastelessness sometimes carried to the point of preciosity” (“Emerson,” 86). If good taste is a badge of superior class, bad taste is the attribute of the democrat, as it is so often in American literature and popular culture. Emerson’s grandiose call for an “American Scholar” is only one among many for a new literature in a new world: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close,” and “poetry will revive and lead in a new age” (Essays, 53). Poe scoffed at this literary nationalism, but he was no less insistent on the need for “keeping originality always in view” (Essays and Reviews, 13) in his comments on plot construction in fiction and versification in poetry. In devising the form of “The Raven,” for example, he says, “My first object (as usual) was originality,” and he goes on to scold his fellow poets: it is

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clear, he says, “that the possible varieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite, and yet, for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing” (20–1). Yet beyond the trochaic octameter stanzas of this poem, Poe, for all his meticulous craftsmanship, habitually takes more licences than any poet of his period other than Emerson, shifting freely from one stanza form to another within the same poem. Poe is silent on this subject, however, while Emerson vaunts his liberties with metre: “The kingly bard / Must smite the chords rudely and hard, / As with hammer or with mace” (“Merlin”). Since Emerson was capable of writing unobjectionable metres elsewhere, his metrical insouciance may be seen as deliberate; but whether deliberate or not, the licences taken by this generation of American poets mark a significant loosening of versification before Whitman. If we focus on prosody, we find another significant parallel. Early critics of Emerson’s poetry were nearly unanimous in their dismay over his unorthodox versification. Hyatt Waggoner’s survey of criticism yields a collective view not only that the prose vastly overshadows the poetry but that the poetic technique is “lame,” “unscannable,” “careless,” “defective,” “inartistic,” and “slovenly” (Emerson, 26–31). It is reassuring, therefore, to discover that George Saintsbury (who had perhaps the acutest ear of any critic) thought that Emerson has “a distinct prosodic quality”; “the peculiar octosyllabic couplets of which he was so fond, though rough in appearance, are very characteristic,” and “his mixture of iambs and trochees (as in ‘Rhea’) is sometimes quite effective, as is that of varied metres in ‘Monadnoc.’” He concludes by noting anticipations of Whitman (English Prosody, 3:483). Poe however, unlike Emerson, staked his reputation on prosodic expertise. Yet his detailed account of classical metres in “The Rationale of English Verse” is riddled with errors visible to anyone who had suffered a whipping for false quantities in an English schoolroom.8 And like Emerson’s metrical vagaries, Poe’s licences with stanza have raised questions about his basic competence. W.L. Werner in 1930 argued that the irregularities of Poe’s stanzas “are not the inspired deviations of a master” but, rather, “lapses typical of a person who is trying to achieve good technique”; he noticed furthermore that, although Poe is harshly critical of false rhymes in other poets, his own verses are full of them, and he allowed them to stand through many revisions (“Poe’s Theories,” 164). Defenders predictably rushed to Poe’s rescue. My interest is not to revive these debates but to show how they shed

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light on American cultural attitudes towards poetry itself. Such licences in Emerson and Poe proclaim their originality. In Emerson they signify freedom from the restrictions of older prosodies. Poe, for his part (writing in a country whose education system was far removed from the class-stratified English schools), treats prosody as a kind of magic kit full of gizmos for mystification and enchantment. As James Russell Lowell wrote in “A Fable for Critics,” he “talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, / In a way to make people of common sense damn metres.” Either way, the result is that American poets, as Stephen Cushman argues in Fictions of Form in American Poetry, are paradoxically too much, not too little, concerned with questions of form and metre. Neither Emerson nor Poe sees the poet as a mere “man speaking to men” (in Wordsworth’s gendered phrase). He is more like an angel speaking to angels. Poetic experience is elevated to a realm of Platonic purity, stripped of its messy accretions of tradition. The “cultural work” of poetry, if that phrase is even appropriate, is exclusively spiritual. Perhaps the most significant point of agreement between them is that the common world of human society, history, politics, friends, and families are all but excluded from consideration. Emerson thought that a landscape was spoiled for poetry “if laborers are digging in the field hard by. The poet finds something ridiculous in his delight, until he is out of the sight of men” (Essays, 42). Neither Emerson nor Poe would think of composing a historical progress poem, or a Wordsworthian idyll, or a Coleridgean conversation poem. Both composed pseudopindaric odes, in a sense, but with very interesting qualifications. Politics is manifestly unbeautiful: it’s hard to think of any poetry less socio-political than Poe’s, and when he turned to the free pseudopindaric form, the result was “The Bells.” Emerson’s Merlin, on the other hand, “modulates the king’s affairs”; but while Emerson does address political or historical topics at times, he nearly always seems to be stooping from the clouds. Were it possible to imagine an American poetry of which Emerson and Poe were the sole progenitors, much would remain unchanged. It would still have high metaphysical flights into the sublime. It would still have Whitman and the line of free verse and open forms that flow out of him, with endless debates about alternative prosodies and “breath.” It would still have the unrestrained individualism and wild formal innovation, a poetry in which each poet has his or her idiosyncratic prosody or else an apologia for the lack of one. As W.H.

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Auden observed, where there is no traditional status given the poet, “it is up to each individual poet to justify his existence by offering a unique product”: “It is harder for an American than it is for a European to become a good writer, but if he succeeds, he contributes something unique; he sees something and says it in a way that no one before him has said it. Think of the important American writers,” he challenges. “Could any European country ... produce writers who in subject matter, temperament, language, are so utterly unlike one another or anybody else?”9 But the paradox remains: in the great experiment of elective democracy, notes Dana Gioia, where a person is defined to a significant extent by his or her politics, American poetry is normally seen either as an alternative to public, political, commercial, or communal life – or as irrelevant. “Everything, critics have insisted for decades, is the proper subject for modern poetry; unlike the art of the past, contemporary poetry excludes nothing.” And yet there is “a surprising paucity of serious verse on political and social themes”: American poetry “has been unable to create a meaningful public idiom. It has little in common with the world outside of literature – no reciprocal sense of mission, no mutual set of ideas and concerns ... At its best, our poetry has been private rather than public, intimate rather than social, ideological rather than political ... Most of our poets have tried to develop conspicuously personal and often private languages of their own” (Poetry, 115, 126–7). Fortunately, Gioia’s sweeping generalization is not strictly true. He overlooks Whitman, for one. But Emerson and Poe were the crucial pre-Whitmanic figures who defined for American poetry not so much its overt subject matter as the purposes that poetry should serve. Emerson’s “Merlin,” declares Bloom, “is dangerous in that it tempts our poets to a shamanism they neither altogether want nor properly can sustain” (Ringers, 305). Poe’s aestheticism, on the other hand, has tended to limit American poetry to an ornamental function. Emerson and Poe may exalt poetry to a high position through claims of transcendence, metaphysical or aesthetic, but they sideline it in the process. Major odes by Emerson and Poe sum up this binary all too neatly. If Poe’s “The Bells” is the consummate product of the jingle man, Emerson’s odes are for the most part placed in the mouths of higher beings – Uriel, Bacchus, Hamatreya, Saadi, Merlin. American poetics, like its politics, tends to polarize. There was in fact an available via media, suggested by the romantic Tuckerman, or the

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transatlantic Longfellow or James Russell Lowell later in the century – an Arnoldian compromise between classical standards and romantic subjectivity, an internationalist view that reproportions nativist Americanism and recognizes the continuities of American poetry with British and European traditions. Lowell, for one, is called a romantic, but he was capable of adopting the viewpoint of the citizen as well as of the individual. American poets and students of American Studies alike have shunned this middle path, and one result is that poetry has become either an alternative to public life or irrelevant.

Although Emerson and Poe both invested heavily in their vocations as poets, they are mainly valued today as writers of prose. They themselves participated, then, in that transfer of prestige in the hierarchies of literary genre from poetry to prose that took place during the nineteenth century. Emerson – who had no time for prose fiction and scolded Hawthorne for wasting his genius writing stories – chose the higher road in his philosophical essays, but Poe not only wrote prose fiction, he wrote it in its more grossly crowd-pleasing forms. This shift of prestige extends far beyond American literature, of course. It is axiomatic to the Marxist György Lukacs: the novel, he argued, “is the epic of an age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the immanence of meaning in life has become the problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.”10 Poetry, even in its epic form, thus deals with life as “unproblematic.” Bakhtin’s characterization of lyric poetry as “monoglossia,” preferring the “heteroglossia” of the novel, is a parallel development. Closer to home, John P. McWilliams traces this process in The American Epic: Transforming a Genre, 1770–1860, arguing that the epic genre in American literature too was taken over by the novel after Sir Walter Scott’s conflation of epic with romance. Verse romance maintained a lively presence for a time, notably in Longfellow, but the novel won the day. Herbert F. Tucker’s Epic: Britain’s Heroic Muse, 1790–1910 painstakingly documents this rivalry as it developed in England. The consequences of this shift appear already in the poetry of both Emerson and Poe. When Emerson was a transparent eyeball observing “the frolic architecture of the snow” (“The Snow Storm”) he was taking delight in the creative play of the Oversoul, reading the minutest particle through metonymic abstraction as the signature of the One

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in a way that might have pleased Jonathan Edwards. But when he was not writing neo-Wordsworthian observations of Nature, Emerson reserved poetry primarily for liberating gods with suprahuman magical powers such as might populate epic or romance – deities like Hamatreya, Brahma, or Bacchus, angels like Uriel, purveyors of shamanistic wisdom like Merlin. These speakers adopt the accentual metres of folk tradition and the posture of the “man of truth” (“Saadi”), the speaker of wise sayings variously described as “gnomic,” “orphic,” “prophetic,” or “aphoristic.” One common feature of these folk traditions is that they are dateless: “The archaic character of proverbs,” noted A.J. Greimas, constitutes “a placement outside of time of their meanings.”11 Another common feature recalls Lukacs’s claim that, in epic, the totality of life is “directly given”: in folk wisdom, according to James G. Williams, “there is an overwhelming preference to affirm and undergird society and tradition rather than the individual and novelty ... The individual internalizes the voice of the fathers and obeys it by guarding himself against disorder (folly)” (Those Who Ponder, 42). Ben Franklin’s Poor Richard clearly falls in line here, and just as clearly Emerson does not. Instead, he participates in the romantic tendency towards what Williams calls the “wisdom of counterorder,” a paradoxical overturning of common-sense folk wisdom clearly visible in William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell” and extending to figures like Nietzsche, Bernard Shaw, and Oscar Wilde.12 As Williams points out, this stance of counter-order also has some precedent in Hebrew scripture, in Koheleth and Job, and in the paradoxical sayings of Jesus himself; but the writers we describe as romantic practised it habitually. With these notions in mind, I turn to Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” a poem about history: Bulkeley, Hunt, Willard, Hosmer, Meriam, Flint, Possessed the land which rendered to their toil Hay, corn, roots, hemp, flax, apples, wool, and wood. “Hamatreya” begins with a litany of proper names, the point being that these half-remembered lives are meaningless. Emerson consigns them to the hellish spondees of Milton’s “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death” (PL 2.621): “Where are these men? Asleep beneath their grounds: / And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough.” There is grim truth in this, of course, a truth that Emer-

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son himself confesses renders him “no longer brave.” “Hamatreya” is an essential corrective to the pervasive human-centred view of Emerson that emphasizes secular “Self-Reliance” at the expense of “Fate” or “The Oversoul.” As Hyatt Waggoner remarks, the poem insists on “the necessary humbling, the religious sense of man’s utter dependence, that must, Emerson thought, precede any valid affirmation” (Emerson, 147). Harold Bloom, on the other hand – never a fan of humility – typically diffuses the issue, conceding that, while “Necessity speaks as the Earth-Song in ‘Hamatreya,’” it is then “defied by the Dionysiac spirit of the poet in ‘Bacchus,’” and the opposition then subsumed in “Merlin.” “The three poems together evidence Emerson’s major venture into his own cosmos in the Poems of 1846” (Ringers, 296). Yet it is easy to forget that “Hamatreya” was an occasional ode, written for the “Second Centennial Anniversary of the Incorporation of the Town, September 12, 1835.”13 Emerson’s presentation that day began with a recitation of his poem, but it continued with a lengthy discourse detailing the history of Concord. This speech is unlike almost anything else in Emerson, packed with historical incident, anecdotes of war and bravery (such as might ornament a heroic poem), defiance of British authority, and construction of the civic government of the New England town. We learn what Bulkeley did and why he was an important person. All along, Emerson exhibits admirable sentiments: “The virtues of patriotism and of prodigious courage and address were exhibited on both sides” of every conflict, he notes, “and, in many instances, by women.” And (mindful of President Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830) he laments the fate of the Native American: “It is the misfortune of Concord to have permitted a disgraceful outrage upon the friendly Indians settled within its limits, in February, 1676, which ended in their forcible expulsion from the town. This painful incident is but too just an example of the measure which the Indians have generally received from the whites.”14 Yet, he adds with a white man’s stoic resignation: “We know beforehand who must conquer in that unequal struggle. The red man may destroy here and there a straggler, as a wild beast may; he may fire a farm-house, or a village; but the association of the white men and their arts of war give them an overwhelming advantage, and in the first blast of their trumpet we already hear the flourish of victory.” Minute circumstances like those catalogued in the “Historical Discourse,” however, are the purpose of lowly utilitarian prose: “Hamatreya” itself is firmly situated in the ahistorical realm of proverb. It is,

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Hyatt Waggoner remarks, “perversely ahistorical”: “as far as we can tell from the poem, the Puritans had no religion at all” since the Old and New Testaments “repeatedly rebuke the idea of man’s ownership of God’s creation.” Such is the case, he observes, “even if the religion of the forefathers was as superstitious and untenable as Emerson thought it to be.”15 If we turn to Emerson’s essay on “History,” we encounter a more idiosyncratic prose: “There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has be-fallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. Of the works of this mind history is the record.” History (as I know it at least) is almost unrecognizable in these words. In the very first sentence it is reduced to “mind,” wholly subjectivized. The circumstantial detail of the “Historical Discourse” gets set aside, and (to use Gustaaf Von Cromphout’s word) history becomes “psychocentric.” Emerson, he says, “scorned the past as fact and exalted the past as meaning, knowing that only in the mind of the present could the past achieve existential reality. Since thought is reality, he regarded the past as a creation of the present, as a product of the retrospectively creative force of the mind of the present” (“Dialectics of History,” 54). Emerson’s prose advances a metahistory, to use Hayden White’s term, from which it is a short step to Van Wyck Brooks’s “usable past” or William Carlos Williams’s In the American Grain (Conrad, Refiguring America, 19–22). This is not quite the same as negation – it is not Henry Ford’s “History is bunk” or Carl Sandburg’s “The past is a bucket of ashes.”16 Although Emerson famously disowns the past in “The American Scholar” and the introduction to Nature, he gave “History” pride of place in Essays, First Series (1841), and in this essay, absolute truth is both subjective and historicized. As Van Cromphout puts it, “truth never is, but is always in the process of becoming, and this perception induced him to identify the absolute with history” (“Dialectics of History,” 55). The ever-evolving nature of truth in the mind of the poethero is incompatible with society’s conception of truth as something long established. “This one fact the world hates,” Emerson declares in “Self-Reliance,” “that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past” (Essays, 271). The hero’s historic function was to make truth pre-

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vail in a world clinging to traditional beliefs that, on account of their very “pastness,” were false. History is thus a record of the evolving metaphysics of human imagination. But where is all this in “Hamatreya”? The poem itself concludes in an unobjectionable and conventional moral: since death comes to rich and poor alike, avarice is pointless. One might dignify the point by calling it a Riffaterrean hypogram, and Emerson endows this conventional piety with drama of sorts in the “Earth’s Song” and defamiliarizes it with an invented Hindu name. But conventional it remains. “Hamatreya” the poem disavows interest in the circumstantial particulars of human activity described in the “Historical Discourse,” and it makes no attempt to explore the metaphysical complexity of the essay on “History.” Emerson’s other odes are equally didactic, and they do go beyond the conventional moralizing of “Hamatreya” in the direction of the paradoxical counter-order proverb; but both “Uriel” and “Bacchus” are removed from specific historical context. Uriel in Emerson’s comic parable – “the sharpest sighted Spirit of all in Heav’n” (Paradise Lost 3.691), the angel who interprets God’s will to the other angels – offends common sense when he declares “Line in nature is not found” and preaches paradoxically, “Evil will bless, and ice will burn.” He is banished from Heaven – that is, from Harvard – but, withdrawing into his cloud, continues “truth speaking.” Like Uriel, Emerson was banished from Harvard Divinity School for some thirty years after his shocking address. “Bacchus,” on a less theological plane, reads like an affront to the Temperance Society. Emerson was surrounded by reformers of all kinds, of course, but though he followed the activities of the Temperance Society, he apparently did not take serious interest in them. In “The Poet” he had declared that “bards love wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandalwood and tobacco, or whatever other procures of animal exhilaration” (Essays, 460), thus contributing to the decadent myth of the poet’s affinities with artificial paradise. Although he was no advocate of prohibition – “Make love a crime, and we shall have lust,” he wrote17 – he nonetheless cautioned that such quasi-mechanical means were “a spurious mode of attaining freedom.” Thus “Bacchus” too immediately turns his praise of inebriation into an inoffensive metaphor, explaining that his wine “never grew / In the belly of the grape,” and so Bacchus appears as sheepish as Snug the Joiner confessing that he is not a real lion.

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Emerson’s Channing Ode is far more complex and difficult than either of these, not only in its topicality but in its uncertain attitude. Its general circumstances are well known: President Polk’s Mexican War and the annexation of Texas threatened to add another large and powerful slave state and upset the balance of Congress in favour of the slave-holders. Emerson’s friend William Henry Channing, an arch abolitionist, asked Emerson to address the issue in a poem. The “Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing,” the manuscript dated June 1846, is his response (Allen, Waldo Emerson, 483–4), and Emerson’s most wildly irregular pseudopindaric ode has long been central to his work. Yet the critical history is spotty, and many details remain clouded. The poem is almost unique in Emerson’s poetry in addressing a specific socio-political problem. Recent criticism has focused on Emerson’s attitudes towards slavery and abolitionism, but the poem ranges far beyond that to consider issues of public avarice, political expediency, cultural appropriation, and international power – and the relation of all to the functions of poetry. Len Gougeon, writing against earlier critical emphasis on Emerson’s suspicion of all social reformers, has rightly called attention to his increasing sympathy for abolition in the mid-1840s. Yet even Gougeon concedes that earlier scholars missed this development because Emerson regarded his own “occasional discourses on specific social issues as largely ephemeral”: he left them unpublished, many were lost, and the majority of his important lectures on slavery were not delivered until after the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law.18 At the time of the Channing Ode, Emerson was more focused on a higher “national mission” than any specific political disputes.19 Here, Emerson explicitly refuses to write poetry from the viewpoint of the citizen. Poetry is reserved for the elevation of self. The specific occasion of the poem was long obscure, but Gougeon identifies it convincingly as the Boston funeral of one Charles Turner Torrey, a militant abolitionist who had died in a Maryland jail serving time for aiding slaves to escape (“Anti-Slavery Background,” 63–77). Torrey was a controversial figure: the foremost Unitarian church in Boston refused to hold his funeral service, and two years earlier Emerson himself had refused a request from Whittier to write a letter on his behalf. Emerson’s attendance at the funeral on 19 May 1846 was a matter of public notice. But Emerson’s journals, as Gougeon reveals, show a still divided attitude: Torrey is a “martyr,” his eulogist a “benefactor”; Emerson is disgusted by the “skeptics” of Park Street Church who would not let Torrey’s crowded funeral “spoil their carpets” and con-

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temptuous of the general public with its “appetite for pineapple and ice cream.” On the other hand, he regarded abolitionist accusations over Torrey’s death to be false rage and “make believe” (Virtue’s Hero, 110–11). No wonder then that the “angry Muse / Puts confusion in [his] brain”: she will not allow him to adopt the role of monologic bard. Emerson’s solution to this dilemma is elegant: deploying the trope of apophasis, Emerson refuses to discuss the most pressing issue, even as he places it squarely before the reader. What follows then is a rant, a chaotic diatribe against the evils of the time – but all of it, as it were, under erasure. A politician, for example, might employ apophasis to declare that she will not stoop to itemize her opponent’s well-known corruptions, his indecencies, his public intoxication. Even Emerson’s object of address in the poem is oblique: yes, it is a public declaration of Emerson’s views, yet it is directed towards the single individual Channing. Apophasis is a powerful tool of irony: it elevates the character of the speaker to a higher moral plane, while more subtly it also flatters the listener into tacit agreement. There is a further dimension to the figure observed by Reginald Gibbons: apophasis, he says, “acts as if there were hidden realms or realities within or beside or behind what is familiar to us,” just as in conversation, “we say more than we mean, but we are not able to discern all that extra meaning in what others say” (“Apophatic Poetics,” 39). The figure has a mysterious resonance, an intonational quality that makes Emerson’s poem highly performative. Though loath to grieve The evil time’s sole patriot, I cannot leave My honied thought For the priest’s cant, Or statesman’s rant. If I refuse My study for their politique, Which at the best is trick, The angry Muse Puts confusion in my brain. Emerson’s tone is both conversational and elliptical, both knowing and indirect, and he repeatedly leaves allusions open to the listener.

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Critics, for example, have uniformly assumed the “evil time’s sole patriot” to be Channing; but given Gougeon’s gloss, the reference must be to Torrey, who gave his life for his moral convictions. If Emerson did decline an invitation to speak at Torrey’s funeral, as Gougeon says, the phrase “loath to grieve” makes even better sense (Virtue’s Hero, 110–11). Emerson proceeds to spill his vitriol: But who is he that prates Of the culture of mankind, Of better arts and life? Go, blindworm, go, Behold the famous States Harrying Mexico With rifle and with knife! Or who, with accent bolder, Dare praise the freedom-loving mountaineer? I found by thee, O rushing Contoocook! And in thy valleys, Agiochook! The jackals of the negro-holder. The God who made New Hampshire Taunted the lofty land With little men. In a few short strokes, Emerson attacks political hawkishness, glib patriotism, sectional animosity, Northern racial hypocrisy, public mendacity, and (without naming him) the prating orator Daniel Webster. Critics have disagreed, however, about the exact thrust of these lines. David Bromwich decides that they are spoken by Channing accusing Emerson himself as the “one who prates,” while Gougeon reads them as Emerson’s self-accusation, his mea culpa. I am more inclined to agree with Carl Strauch and see allusion to Daniel Webster’s second speech at Bunker Hill, in which he flattered his New Hampshire constituents and expatiated on the leyenda negra of Spanish cruelty in order to justify his support for the Mexican War (“Background and Meaning,” 8–9). The solution to this moral failure, however, is not as simple as Emerson’s esteemed friend Channing would have it.

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What boots thy zeal, O glowing friend, That would indignant rend The northland from the south? Wherefore? to what good end? William Henry Channing was ready not only to withhold his taxes like Thoreau, but to renounce his nation altogether and secede. At the New England Anti-Slavery Convention in May 1846, he had presented a resolution “that the People of Massachusetts do here and now deliberately assert, that there is no longer a Union of these States, a National Constitution, a National Executive, that no citizen of these States is under any kind of obligation of patriotism, or of honor, to aid this act of unparalleled outrage upon a sister Republic” (Strauch, “Background and Meaning,” 7–8). Emerson saw clearly enough that, while such a move might distance Massachusetts from the sin of slaveholding, other sins would remain – the venality of Northern commerce, industry, and banking, plus the dependence of each of these upon the Southern slave economy. For the “wrinkled shopman,” then, Emerson concludes that There are two laws discrete, Not reconciled, – Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking ... Let man serve law for man; Live for friendship, live for love, For truth’s and harmony’s behoof; The state may follow how it can, As Olympus follows Jove. Much of the recent debate about Emerson concerns his ability to reconcile these two laws. Len Gougeon, leading the effort to de-transcendentalize Emerson, argues that there is no inherent conflict between his impulse towards self-reliance and his commitment to abolitionism in particular or democracy in general (“Politics of Democracy,” 185–

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220). But his arguments rely heavily on later work, and they take little account of the poetry. In his 1846 “Ode,” the two laws are clearly antithetical and unresolved. Emerson, in fact, makes enormous concessions to the law of Commodity, and (with only slight ironic qualification) applauds the march of progress: ’Tis fit the forest fall, The steep be graded, The mountain tunnelled, The sand shaded, The orchard planted, The glebe tilled, The prairie granted, The steamer built. But higher moral idealism is simply not possible in the realms of politics, society, or “things”; it can only be cultivated internally: “Let man serve law for man; / Live for friendship, live for love.” For present solace, there is only the assurance of Compensation (surely the feeblest element of Emersonian teaching): “Wise and sure the issues are. / Round they roll till dark is light, / Sex to sex, and even to odd.” And for the future there is hope that the Oversoul will someday extract honeycomb from carnivore, like Samson in the Hebrew parable. The over-god Who marries Right to Might, Who peoples, unpeoples, – He who exterminates Races by stronger races, Black by white faces, – Knows to bring honey Out of the lion; Grafts gentlest scion On pirate and Turk. The de-transcendentalizing school may desire to secularize Emerson entirely; but in this poem, hope for social justice is left to the Oversoul – a vaguely millennialist solution. Thus Emerson’s erasure of politics in this, his most political poem, is absolute.

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If Emerson’s long-term millennialist view of history allows him to accommodate enormous systemic evils, the reason lies in his complex – or one might say mixed, indecisive, or muddled – attitudes towards current events in present time. Emerson’s refusal to tie himself to the “one mania” of the abolitionists is well understood. But he was also conscious that absolute right is rarely found exclusively on one or the other side. Slavery is evil to be sure, but we are all involved in it, North and South – even the abolitionists wore cotton and drank rum. Daniel Webster is forced into political cant, but Emerson continued in his personal admiration for the man to the end, even after the great betrayal of 1850.20 Commodity may be the lowest manifestation of Nature, philosophically considered, but Emerson was a Platonic pragmatist who possessed, as James Russell Lowell wrote in “A Fable for Critics,” “A Greek head on right Yankee shoulders, whose range / Has Olympus for one pole, for t’other the Exchange.” Or as David Bromwich puts it, he had a “lover’s quarrel with Commodity, and liked to speak of its advancement in the language of manifest destiny.”21 How then do we understand the extermination of “black by white faces”? The passage is unquestionably an affront to Channing and a distancing from the abolitionist cause. In Emerson’s defence, Gougeon cites Emerson’s journals: “I hate the narrowness of the Native American Party ... Man is the most composite of all creatures ... [and as] by the melting and intermixture of silver & gold & other metals, a new compound more precious than any, called Corinthian Brass, was formed so in this Continent – asylum of all nations, the energy of the Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles & Cossacks, & of all the European tribes, – of the Africans, & of the Polynesians, will construct a new race, a new religion, a new State, a new literature, which will be as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages” (Virtue’s Hero, 116–17). Emerson’s “smelting pot” sentiment is reassuring. But even here, one remembers his certainty in the “Historical Discourse” of the “overwhelming advantage” of white man over red man – “in the first blast of their trumpet we already hear the flourish of victory” – and his certainty here in the “Ode” that the white race is “stronger” than the black. Emerson’s private views on the hierarchy of races are now well known (Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 200). His vision of the future is not racial harmony but assimilation, marginalization, and extinction. The Over-God “marries Right to Might,” and if He has joined them together, who is Waldo to put them asunder? If the Cossack eats

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Poland, why complain that America harries Mexico with knife and rifle?22 As Jenine Abboushi Dallal has demonstrated, Emerson’s attitudes towards the breakneck westward expansionism of the 1840s and the Mexican War itself were also divided. He rarely addressed the concept of “manifest destiny” directly, and when he did, it was usually in the context of the war with Mexico and the threat of increased power to the slave states; but, “like Thoreau and the abolitionists of his day, Emerson did not object to expansionism itself” (55).23 As he wrote in his journal for 1844, “the question of the annexation of Texas is one of those which look very differently to the centuries and to the years. It is very certain that the strong British race which have now overrun that tract, & Mexico & Oregon also, and it will in the course of ages be of small import by what particular occasions & methods it was done.”24 Emerson consistently argues, observes Dallal, “that the sordid facts of history – wars, slavery, the conquest and subjugation of one race by another – disappear when perceived on a grand scale” (56). His habit of seeing from the double perspective of both centuries and years explains many of his apparent contradictions; if he shrank from President Polk’s methods, he seems to have condoned the results. Scholarship in the past few decades has illuminated the depths of Emerson’s political thinking; but Emerson’s poetry remains untouched. After 1850, Emerson’s commitment to the abolitionist cause became far less ambiguous than it was in 1846. Len Gougeon and his followers protest that too little attention gets paid to his later statements, and they lay considerable blame at the door of Stephen Whicher’s biography, which ends at 1860 with the essay on “Fate” (Virtue’s Hero, 17–18). Yet, as the critics de-transcendentalize and retranscendentalize, this period remains not only the one most commonly read but also the one during which Emerson wrote his best poetry and impressed his figure of the Poet on American consciousness. Consistently, Emerson pushed his poetry in the direction of the timeless, the universal and proverbial. In the contentious words of John Carlos Rowe, Emerson’s transcendentalism “reveals itself to be at fundamental odds with the social reforms regarding slavery and women’s rights.”25 “Poetry was all written before time was” (449). The Poet remains, like its creator, aloof from the messy day-to-day moral uncertainties of politics.

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“The Bells” is an outrageous poem by any standard. It is utterly resistant to close reading, and its critical history has been not only slight but helpless to say anything beyond the obvious. An approach through “content” yields little more than four rites of passage in the human lifecycle, while an approach through “art” quickly degenerates into itemization of consonants and vowels. Suggestions for Poe’s “sources” of the poem are interesting mainly because none is wholly convincing, and the effort simply underscores the unprecedented nature of Poe’s project.26 It is the closest the nineteenth century came to pure “sound poetry.” “Much fun has been made at Poe’s expense,” writes one critic, who proceeds to describe “The Bells” poem as “cacophonous” and “annoying” (Wardrop, Word, 16–17). But the truth is, critics have not found a way to talk about it, and a recent volume of eighteen essays devoted to Poe’s poetry contains only passing references. Just recently, Jerome McGann in his brilliantly paradoxical The Poet Edgar Allan Poe has devised a means to approach it.27 Yet it remains one of the best known poems in the American canon. Poe’s editor, Thomas Olliver Mabbot, describes “The Bells” as “a great popular favorite [and] one of the finest specimens of onomatopoeic verse in English.” He dutifully recounts a colourful story about the circumstances of its composition, involving one Mary Louise Shew, who suggested the topic to Poe when he complained he could not write because of the noise of bells outside.28 This sounds like part of Poe mythography, but there’s no good reason to question it, and Professor Mabbot supports it with copious information about particular bells in the vicinity and reasons that they might be sounding, whether it was a Sunday or whether there may have been a nearby fire. Whether this snippet of biographical information bears on the significance of “The Bells” is just one of the questions it poses. “The Bells” perhaps achieved its greatest celebrity as a fixture in courses of elocution widely taught in American schools from the nineteenth century into the twentieth.29 Schoolroom elocution is probably best understood less as a means of improving communication than as a social tool for setting class boundaries; and the results included turning the natural production of human speech into an aesthetic artefact. “The Bells” was a favourite performance piece, so it became an easy target for ridicule as the study of elocution faded. Whether taken seriously or in jest, “The Bells” with all its flagrant onomatopoeia is a performance piece, a histrionic experience for the audience, an oral experience rich in the “mouth feel” of poetry for the

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reciter,30 a virtuoso display for Poe himself. Turning speech into artefact is its purpose. Poe’s legacy to poetry rests as much on the tendentious “Philosophy of Composition” as on his poems themselves, and readers often question its seriousness. Did he really compose “The Raven” in the rational, analytical way he tells us, choosing consonants and vowels for their “effect”? Or is his narrative just another Poe hoax? Poe’s account is open to suspicion not only because it comes after the fact but because it challenges every romantic notion of writing “from the heart.” But when Poe sat down to break his writer’s block and compose “The Bells” at the behest of Mary Louise Shew, might he not have turned to the calculating method he had already laid out and delivered to audiences on a number of occasions? “The Bells” in any case serves even better than “The Raven” as demonstration of the principles in the essay. To read “The Bells” as a demonstration text for Poe’s essay means to contemplate it as a whole, reflexively. “The Bells” represents what poetry should strive to become and the purpose poetry should serve. It is experiential and paradigmatic, an object of contemplation neither referential nor cognitive. It focuses on the universals of human experience, the archetypal rites of passage, to the exclusion of anything topical or political. It is wholly unified and short enough to make its “effect” in a single performance. This effect is a composite of poetic beauty on all levels – physical, emotional, and spiritual. It is composed on constructivist principles, not in a “fine frenzy.” Yet, as a “rhythmical creation of beauty,” it is a product of such a romantic imagination as is typified by Keats’s famous outburst, “O for a life of sensations rather than thoughts” (Letters, 68), wholly sensory, virtually drained of intellectual content, and thus innocent of the heresy of didacticism. It is not discursive. It shows rather than tells. Such a description would make it seem a model New Critic’s poem. Jerome McGann, taking his bearings from Yvor Winters, that formidable rationalist of a previous generation, notes that he “censures Poe’s poetry for its lack of content,” and he agrees, “in that the language of the poems is not precisely defining but precisely suggestive.” Poe’s style “works to unhinge both words and syntax from semantic certainty. That is the glory and the nothing of it.” Therefore we rightly say that they are “performative rather than expressive” (Poe, 114–15). Emerson, on the other hand, “regards poetry as a vehicle for expressing significant ideas” (120). McGann forgets, however, that Emerson’s ideas are always destabilized, continually turning into something else.

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Both Poe and Emerson thus compose their poetry in a rarefied ideational atmosphere – too rarefied for the common reader – so that it took Whitman to restore ordinary ideas to poetic speech. In that regard, Whitman is as conservative and populist as his fellow fireside poets. Poe consequently, as McGann among others observes, “rarely comments on the social and political events of his time” (146), being sealed up safely within his aesthetic theories. A similar silence – one might say a Southern silence – extends forward through later Southern poets, who cherished unpopular, vanquished, or (in Allen Tate’s word) “reactionary” political ideas but kept them, more or less, out of their poetry. Although most readers shrink from Poe’s tacit contempt for American democracy, McGann adds portentously, “we should take it just as seriously as we take Whitman’s sanguine views” (156). My approach is to read Poe’s poem not through verbal analysis but through a series of contextual frames. By the end, “The Bells” will, I hope, become comprehensible as a considered attitude towards life and art expressed through immediate symbolism. Each of these frames is intricate in itself, so I summarize beforehand: “The Bells” stands as Poe’s idiosyncratic extension of the tradition of odes to music, best known through the St Cecilia odes of Dryden (“A Song for St Cecilia’s Day,” “Alexander’s Feast”) and Pope (“Ode on St Cecilia’s Day”), all rich in virtuoso displays of onomatopoeia. But by Poe’s time, this tradition had already morphed through a number of instances to include poems about music and the passions, and even about pure sound. Such poems express human experience as purely auditory, ultimately stripped of rational activity. Meanwhile, by the time of Poe, the concept of music itself had undergone radical revision. Poe’s choice of the bell as his poetic emblem raises further issues of sound and signification (underscored by the obsessive onomatopoeia), the meaning of bells in the sensory world of Poe’s day, the aesthetic experience of bells as objects of contemplation, and the spiritual relationship of bells to the Divine. This approach follows in the path of John Hollander, whose Untuning of the Sky: Ideas of Music in English Poetry, 1500–1700 traces the conceptual transitions that underlie the St Cecilia tradition. In its earlier phase, music was understood through the Medieval-Renaissance concept of musica speculativa, an ideal Pythagorean music of the spheres – angelic music inaudible to the human ear, a macrocosmic harmony. The experience of human music – that is, Latin chant and sacred polyphony – could bring the listener both morally and physiologically in tune with this divine order. These earlier ideas never wholly died

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away, but gradually music began to be understood in less grandiose but more immediate terms through its operations on the emotions. This process coincides with the increased importance being gained by wordless instrumental music; and even before 1620, “Descartes could turn off the singing of the spheres as if with a switch when he began his Compendium Musices by saying: ‘The object of this art is sound. The end, to delight and move various affections in us.’”31 This reconceptualization of music as emotion led to the systematized musical Affektenlehre of the later baroque period. The terminus of Hollander’s book is 1700; but, in a later essay, “Wordsworth and the Music of Sound,” Hollander sketches subsequent developments into the early nineteenth century, culminating in Wordsworth’s extraordinary late ode “On the Power of Sound” (1828). Unfortunately, Hollander’s essay is only a sketch, and the larger intellectual history of Wordsworth’s woefully understudied “On the Power of Sound” still waits to be written. Hollander focuses on the poetic metaphors in eighteenth-century poetry that link music to the conventional locus amœnus and to the natural landscape – music figured as the audible voice of the romantic landscape. William Collins’s “The Passions: An Ode for Music” becomes an important stage in this transition, whose ultimate destination is the landscape of the romantic sublime, where the affects themselves become foregrounded ahead of musical sounds. Wordsworth’s unprecedented late ode articulates this feeling poetically and conceptually.32 Wordsworth’s poem – a sizable pseudopindaric in fourteen stanzas – is significant for its identification of sound in the abstract, as opposed to music, as an entity, an invisible nexus of power to be addressed. Outwardly it does not resemble “The Bells,” except to identify sound as an invisible power that gives providential direction to human life, though Poe, as we shall see, gives Wordsworth’s Christian mythos a characteristically perverse twist. Poe was a steady reader and admirer of Wordsworth. Poe indeed objected to Wordsworth’s didacticism – “He seems to think that the end of poetry is, or should be, instruction” (Essays, 6–7) – but this point is mixed with words of praise, and they appear in Poe’s earliest criticism, the preface to his 1831 Poems. Less well known is Poe’s later remark, that (unlike Donne and Cowley) Wordsworth and Coleridge used metaphysical knowledge properly because their aim was to stimulate poetic feeling “through channels suggested by mental analysis.”33 There is every likelihood, then, that Poe had read Wordsworth’s “On the Power of

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Sound” – a work that represents a major romantic development of the conventional ode to music. In Wordsworth, sound, the “Spirit aetherial,” is no longer the mythic music of the spheres beyond the reach of the ear. Yet it is invisible and numinous, so it remains a divine presence detectable by mortals through “the cell of Hearing.” The poem surveys sounds of many kinds, from the natural locus amœnus imagery surveyed by Hollander, predictable in a Wordsworth poem (“The headlong streams and fountains / Serve Thee, invisible Spirit”) to a range of human sounds, from the ditties of “happy milkmaids” to the “sailor’s prayer breathed from a darkening sea.” Wordsworth tropes all sound, natural and human, as “music” and as an instrument of divine mercy with the power to elevate human misery.34 Misery, on the abstract level, figures as “thought” in the first stanza, and later (in keeping with William Collins) as one of the “dangerous Passions.” Hearing is an Intricate labyrinth, more dread for thought To enter than oracular cave; Strict passage, through which sighs are brought, And whispers for the heart, their slave; And shrieks, that revel in abuse Of shivering flesh. Even votaries of God are subject to “a voluptuous influence / That taints the purer, better, mind,” while “the uplifted arm of Suicide” images ultimate desperation. Nor does Wordsworth focus exclusively on individual misery: in stanza 5, the young revolutionary poet he once was reappears to remind the reader of times “when civic renovation / Dawns on a kingdom,” and the sluggard must be roused to meet “the voice of Freedom.” The power of sound to transfigure human woes points to a cosmic music like the conventional music of the spheres, “Lodged above the starry pole ... flowing from the heart / Of divine Love, where Wisdom, Beauty, Truth / And Order dwell, in endless youth.” The final stanzas of Wordsworth’s profoundly Christian poem first render a psalm – “Break forth into thanksgiving, / Ye banded instruments of winds and chords” – and at last resolve into the voice of the unnamed God whose voice spake Fiat lux at the beginning of time, and will preside forever as the Word, the messianic Logos, beyond the end of time.

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Wordsworth’s analysis of sound raises two additional points. First, the concept of “music” itself was undergoing radical changes during this period. Second, there was an emerging awareness in philosophy of the phenomenology of acoustics to balance the overwhelming Enlightenment emphasis on optics. Walter Pater wrote his famous dictum “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” in 1873,35 too late for Poe to have read it; but Pater’s thought itself arose from a complex of developments emanating from German Romanticism – to which Poe made his own contribution in “The Philosophy of Composition.” German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus traces these developments in his magisterial summary The Idea of Absolute Music. This complex of ideas appeared in connection specifically with the rise of classical instrumental music in the eighteenth century. Until then, any music separated from sacred words was considered little more than low entertainment, and Emmanuel Kant famously, in his Critique of Judgement, considered wordless music, however delightful, as the lowest of the arts, lacking intellectual substance or moral purpose. It is unlikely that Poe was aware of Arthur Schopenhauer’s influential rebuttal, in Book 3 of The World as Will and Representation (1819), which inverts Kant’s hierarchy and places music as the highest art because it is uniquely capable of representing the metaphysical organization of reality. Schopenhauer was not widely read until after Poe’s death (when he was available to Pater). But as Dahlhaus demonstrates, this revaluation was simmering in many thinkers in the generations following Kant. Poe’s knowledge of his German precursors has always been a divisive subject among critics; but while we may agree that Poe’s acquaintance with the German language was slight, his interest was great.36 Two writers known to have interested Poe, Ludwig Tieck and E.T.A. Hoffmann, figure prominently in Dahlhaus’s narrative. Hoffmann, who was not only a writer but a composer of substance, is a crucial figure who insisted that wordless instrumental music was the “true music” (Dahlhaus, Idea, 7) and the goal of all music history (27). He was the first, according to Dahlhaus, “to speak emphatically of music as pure ‘structure.’” In his famous review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Hoffmann declared that “Beethoven’s music presses the levers of terror, of fear, of dread, of pain, and awakens the endless longing that is the nature of romanticism” (59). Hoffmann thus elevates the power of music through the rhetoric of the sublime. Absolute music is no longer entertainment, nor is it merely a medium for the expres-

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sion of feelings – a view that Hoffmann, like Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel before him, dismissed as “bourgeois” (71–2); instead, music is able to speak the unspeakable, manifest the invisible. And Hoffmann the composer, trained in the arduous rules of harmony and counterpoint, understood that the sublime could only be reached through the fabrication of an artistic structure. As for Poe, music is where “the soul most nearly attains that end upon which we have commented – the creation of supernal beauty” (Essays and Reviews, 688). As Dahlhaus sums up, “From the same ideohistorical root as the desire for a ‘pure matter’ in language and music comes the conception that a poet, by being nothing but a ‘literary engineer,’ evokes the ‘wondrous.’ Yet the quid pro quo of mechanism and magic, from craft and metaphysical meaning, which was just as characteristic of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe as it was later on for Mallarmé and Valéry, seems to derive from the romantic music esthetic of the late eighteenth century, whence it was transferred to poetics in Hoffmann” (Idea, 150). In order to respond to this inarticulate sublime, as the German thinkers quickly realized, the listener needed to adopt an attitude of aesthetic receptivity. Johann Herder, for example, argued that wordless music – “‘conceptless beauty’ existing ‘purposely without purpose’” (Dahlhaus, Idea, 79) – induced a state of devotion in which the listener withdraws from both self and world, and the music appears as an “isolated world for itself” (79). This discovery, Dahlhaus remarks, is “fundamental to the musical culture of the nineteenth century”: it led to the German invention of the symphony concert, to which the audience listens in silent reverence. “Great instrumental music, in order to be comprehended as ‘musical logic’ and ‘language above language,’ require[s] a certain attitude of aesthetic contemplation (most urgently described by Schopenhauer), an attitude through which it constituted itself in one’s awareness in the first place” (80). This attitude of aesthetic contemplation is quasi-religious – “for music is certainly the ultimate mystery of faith” (said Tieck), “the mystique, the completely revealed religion” (89). Poe’s access to these ideas, it is true, seems impossible to trace in detail. Yet they inform virtually every reference to music in Poe. They were pervasive in Germany well before Poe’s time, and American musicologists record the massive influx of German musicians into America from the eighteenth century onward, and their hold over the performance and critical attitudes of highbrow music in America throughout the period.

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The power of sound as divine metaphor ultimately derives from the properties of sound itself and the empirical physiology of human hearing. This takes us to a phenomenology of sound. There is a small but vibrant literature in this area, and my principal guide will be philosopher Don Ihde, whose Listening and Voice systematically unpacks what poets and musicians have known intuitively about sound all along. Ihde’s book ranges widely, from Husserl to audio technology. Like every writer in this rarefied field, he laments the hegemony of vision over hearing in the hierarchy of senses. Most philosophers, he notes, follow Aristotle, who declared: “Above all we value sight ... because sight is the principal source of knowledge” (Ihde, Listening and Voice, 7). The result has been a “history of philosophy with ... pages and pages devoted to the discussion of ‘material objects’ with their various qualities and on the ‘world’ of tables, desks, and chairs that inhabit so many philosophers’ attentions: the realm of mute objects. Are these then the implicit standard of a visualist metaphysics?” (50). We might suspect, Ihde says, that some of the questions most difficult for this visualist tradition might yield to the attention of listening: “Symbolically, it is the invisible that poses a series of almost insurmountable problems for much contemporary philosophy. ‘Other minds’ or persons who fail to disclose themselves in their ‘inner’ invisibility; the ‘Gods’ who remain hidden; my own ‘self,’ which constantly eludes a simple visual appearance ... It is to the invisible that listening may attend” (14). Ihde does not write as a theist, but his argument confirms the relationship between auditory experience and faith in the supernatural assumed by both Wordsworth and Poe in their meditations on sound. Other attributes of hearing enter into the mix. Vision separates: things are objectified “out there,” apart from self. Sound enters into us, fills us and sometimes overwhelms self, diminishing the outer world. As overwhelming music “fills space and penetrates my awareness,” says Ihde, “not only am I momentarily taken out of myself in what is often described as a loss of self-awareness that is akin to ecstatic states, but there is a distance from things” (Listening and Voice, 78). Emily Dickinson captures the terror of this experience in one of her best known poems: “Then Space – began to toll, / As all the Heavens were a Bell, / And Being, but an Ear.” Yet if touch is “the most intimate of the senses,” suggests composer R. Murray Schafer, hearing and touch meet in the experience of vibration, particularly in the lower frequencies of sound: hearing is “touching at a distance” (Tuning, 11). Vision is locat-

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ed in space. Sound surrounds us everywhere, it has neither back nor front. Vision establishes extension and solidity. Sound is shapeless. Vision is stable in time, and the duration of seeing is determined by the self. Sound is transient, heard and gone forever (especially before electronic recording); its duration is a given, beyond control of the self, vision is deliberate; we look, focus, or else close our eyes. Sound is inescapable: we have no earlids. As Ihde notes, it is “a penetrating, invading presence ... As noise, this penetrability may be shattering, even painful. The sudden scream at the moment of highest tension in the Hitchcock movie ... is rightfully described as piercing” (Listening and Voice, 81). This inexorability of sound is reflected etymologically in many languages: “Thus hearing and obeying are often united in root terms” (81). Jean-Luc Nancy drives his speculations even further than Ihde into the domain of cognition. Playing on the ambiguity that, in French, “entendre” means both “to hear” and “to understand,” he declares: Meaning and sound share the space of a referral, in which at the same time they refer to each other, and that, in a very general way, this space can be defined as the space of a self, a subject. A self is nothing other than a form or function of referral: a self is made of a relationship to self, or of a presence to self, which is nothing other than the musical referral between a perceptible individuation and an intelligible entity (not just the individual in the current sense of the word, but in him the singular occurrences of a state, a tension, or, precisely, a “sense”) ... A subject feels: that is his characteristic and his definition. This means that he hears (himself), sees (himself), touches (himself), tastes (himself), and thus always feels himself feeling a “self” that escapes [s’échappe] or hides [se retranche] as long as it resounds elsewhere as it does in itself, in a world, and in the other. (Listening, 8–9) Listening, then, pre-eminently among all the senses, constitutes the individual who “feels himself feeling a ‘self.’” Here are no transparent eyeballs: all is acoustic. To Nancy, listening is crucial in constructing not only the individual’s relationship to the outer world but also his own internal awareness of identity. “To be listening will always, then, be straining toward or in an approach to the self” (9). What of bells themselves? While much of the symbolism is apparent from even a superficial reading of the poem, some underlining

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may be useful. Most important is the centrality of the church bell to the soundscape of preindustrial Christian communities on both sides of the Atlantic. In the words of Murray Schafer, the church bell “defines the community, for the parish is an acoustic space circumscribed by the range of the church bell” (Tuning, 54); it is a centripetal sound, so “it attracts and unifies the community in a social sense, just as it draws man and God together” (11). This was true of the nineteenth-century American town to a degree that is obscured today: “while the contemporary church bell may remain important as a community signal or even a soundmark, its precise association with Christian symbolism has diminished or ceased” (175). To the preindustrial ear, the church bell articulated the numinous “sound of time”; it was “an acoustic calendar, announcing festivals, births, deaths, marriages, fires and revolts” (55), and its centrality indicated the centrality of church and God to the daily lives of all within earshot. Even among secular contemporaries, claims Schafer, “the sound continues to evoke some deep and mysterious response in the psyche” like a Jungian mandala that signifies “wholeness, completeness or perfection” (176). “Perhaps no artifact has been so widespread or has such longstanding associations for man as the bell” (173) And the bell as “artefact” makes it an ideal symbol for Poe. The bell is a human-made artefact, so its pealing is not the unmediated voice of Divinity. Nor is it the pure voice of Nature that Wordsworth or Thoreau might emphasize, nor even the whistling wind made manifest by the Aeolian harp, found in Coleridge or even the tone-deaf Emerson.37 The sound of the bell is created by a particular object, the work of a human artisan if you will, cast with expert care in a metal foundry. Its relationship to the spiritual reality that it represents is thus human-made symbolic mediation. “The Bells,” Poe’s penultimate poem, was written shortly after that curious cosmologico-theological treatise Eureka (1848). This text is often read for its quasi-scientific interest, but I see it as an almost desperate search for a benign theology within a materialist cosmos. The three big questions that Poe investigates are couched in scientific language – the creation of the universe, the nature of matter, and the ultimate destiny of the universe. But the driving motive is Poe’s obsession with the same existential questions that stand behind much of his fiction – the relation of soul to the material body, the fear of death, and the possibility of an afterlife whether blessed or demonic. If matter is made of atoms, light made of photons, electricity of electrons, why

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cannot spirit be made of some as yet undiscovered particle? References to Deity are swamped in pseudo-scientific speculation, and Poe tries to confine himself to generic language, preferring to write “Creator,” “First Cause,” “spirit,” “Original Unity,” “Divine Volition,” rather than “God.” Through a tortuous maze of reasoning that even speculates about multiple universes, Poe arrives at a happy ending. Eureka has even been claimed (absurdly) as evidence that Poe had rediscovered “the ideal sense of Beauty and Love” through which “man” can hope “to recover his lost Eden” (Carlson, “Poe’s Vision,” 9). Even though the forces of attraction and repulsion struggle in their opposition, Poe claims, “The Body and The Soul walk hand in hand” (Science Fiction, 256); and even though this struggle should lead the universe to collapse in final catastrophe, nonetheless, “the Universe is the plot of God” (292): “The absolutely consolidated globe of globes would be objectless – therefore not for a moment could it continue to exist. Matter, created for an end, would unquestionably, on fulfillment of that end, be Matter no longer. Let us endeavor to understand that it would disappear, and that God would remain all in all” (305). The rhapsodic tone of these final pages suggests that Poe, for the moment at least, had found his own justification of transcendence and the consolation of an apocalyptic God. This observation brings me back to onomatopoeia. Was it really annoyance at local church bells that triggered Poe’s unprecedented outburst? There had been nothing like it in the history of poetry, and sadly, a theoretical understanding of poetic (as opposed to linguistic) onomatopoeia remains little explored. Hugh Bredin’s “Onomatopoeia as a Figure and a Linguistic Principle” comments that it “would be a substantial scholarly task to trace the origin and vicissitudes of the theory of onomatopoeia” (556) – a task that no one has so far undertaken. “Rhetoricians are more impressed by figures that affect syntax and meaning than by figures affecting sound. Logicians and philosophers care mainly about propositions ... Saussure’s principle, that the relation of sound to meaning is arbitrary, holds virtually universal sway” (565). Nonetheless, Bredin makes a case for the significance of the figure, affirming finally that “onomatopoeia is, in some sense or other, a linguistic universal” (569). But the tentativeness of his speculations signals the current rudimentary understanding of literary onomatopoeia. Poe’s fascination with onomatopoeia raises fundamental issues about his relation to language. To linguists, onomatopoeia arises in

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two related debates – about the origins of language and about the nature of sound symbolism in language. To my knowledge, Poe makes no claims about the origins of language in onomatopoeia, the socalled “bow-wow theory” dismissed by contemporary linguists. But such a belief is implicit in his method, and it is worth comparing Emerson’s speculations in the famous passages in the fourth chapter of Nature, where he locates the origins of language in metaphor: “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance. Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line; supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow” (Essays, 20). Emerson thus appears to claim a direct correspondence between signifier and signified, buried in the half-conscious etymology, and he spins fantasies about the infancy of language, “when it is all poetry” (22).To Emerson, language arises from visual likeness, and its nature is essentially cognitive. However, as Gustaaf Van Cromphout has demonstrated, Emerson was enough of a Kantian to realize that “real facts” are beyond human apprehension, “that all so-called facts are humanly conceived or perceived phenomena” (“Language as Action,” 316–17). Thus to Emerson the relation between signifier and signified is a subjective action. If Poe (following Herder and Rousseau) conceived of language as arising from onomatopoeic imitation of natural sounds, then (in opposition to Saussure) he conceived a direct correspondence between signifier and signified. But in Poe’s perfect language this correspondence is auditory, emotive, and connotative. And it opens a gap between the material signified and the apparently immaterial (because auditory and invisible) signifier, parallel to the gap between body and soul that so troubled him throughout his life. Poe’s investment in onomatopoeia as sound symbolism is beyond question. His method appears to be intuitive – at least, I know of no previous guidebook averring that “the long o [is] the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant” (Essays and Reviews, 18). Nowadays, such certainties are nixed by the hegemony of post-Saussurean linguistics. Both Gérard Genette and Umberto Eco have written extensive accounts of this question, which goes back as far as Plato’s Cratylus, with overwhelming agreement that words have a merely conventional relationship with their referents. But there remains a niche of linguistics known as phonosemantics that studies onomatopoeic vocabularies, and the data are tantalizing.38 The ques-

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tion remains knotted: Is onomatopoeia a wholly subjective construction of the mind? Or is it an objective correspondence constituted by a perceiving ear? Poe never doubts the reality of onomatopoeia, but to a visually oriented disbeliever like Emerson he was merely a poet playing elaborate games with the accidents of sound in wholly decorative and insignificant ways – in other words, a jingle man. But if, in onomatopoeia, Poe was exploring meta-realities in language pushed to the side by other writers, wresting genuine affects from auditory poetic language, then he was a true discoverer. His quest for the transcendent ideal led through the material properties of language, its consonants and vowels, sound, and rhythm. By calling attention to the material properties of language, he clouds its common-sense transparency. His purpose as poet was to elevate his reader, through the “rhythmical creation of beauty,” to the transcendental reality of spirit. This is certainly what Baudelaire and Mallarmé and the French exponents of symbolisme and poésie pure all claimed for him. Poe’s “The Bells,” then, marks in its sensory but invisible pathway the process of cosmic time that generates human lifecycles. This power emanates from the celestial powers: it is sublime and requires a particular attitude of receptive, even reverential contemplation. But it is despotic, the voice of necessity, and if its tinkling is pleasurable at first, it gradually becomes obsessive and oppressive clangour. The noise, in Kenneth Silverman’s term, is “faith-destroying” (Poe, 403). The merely human ear cannot tolerate such apprehension of cosmic Truth, even if it were, against all appearances, as benign as Poe in Eureka convinced himself it is. Like Roderick Usher, who suffered from “that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable,” the speaker of “The Bells” is eventually overwhelmed by the inescapable pealing. Sound is invisible but allenveloping, invasive, autocratic – having in Poe’s version not the comfort of Wordsworth’s divine mercy, but ultimately terrifying. Framing a performance of “The Bells,” then, is akin to framing a sublime symphony within the acoustic space of a concert hall.39 It is, however, a dark and tragic symphony. Poe’s text is infused with the characteristic Gothic inevitability of his best tales: if “The Bells” is frivolous, it is the frivolity of a Totentanz. Here is its poetic irony. The milieu is ordinary, the human figures, such as they are, seem puppets on strings – virtually invisible, generic, depersonalized. Human volition has all but vanished. The progression from silver, to golden, to brazen, to iron bells is inexorable, and the sequence would make no

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sense if reversed. Existence, as Silverman writes, is “the plaything of a lying, sadistic Overlord of Life, the banquet of a Ghoul-God” (404). The bells seem to convey a message of sorts, but the message is “runic” – that is, a written language in an unreadable but assuredly mystical or sacred script – the secret of the cosmos set out plain as day, but undecipherable. Unless one reads the poem ironically. This is the strategy of Jerome McGann, who draws a distinction: “The sound of bells is not the sound of music. It is the sound of the quotidian world ... whereas music is the unheard sound of poetry.” Bells are human-made, belonging to earth, not heaven; they are keeping “the time of two different temporalities,” one sublunary, the other supernal (Poe, 181). McGann reinforces his assertion, which goes back to Professor Mabbot’s anecdote about Mrs Shew and the origins of the poem, by tracing Poe’s gaudy word “tintinnabulation” to a source in De Quincey’s Opium-Eater, which protests against the “persecution” of the chapel bells at Oxford (182). This reading is framed in McGann’s analysis of Eureka as a poem in prose that “raids the archives of science and cosmology for a language and a syntax that could replace the language and syntax of religion” (Poe, 98). For McGann, this raid is successful. But he goes on to say, everything in Eureka is to be understood “as a saying or a speaking,” “as a supposing or a fancying or an imagining” (McGann’s emphasis), and thus he obliges the reader willing to follow his sophisticated ironic turn – even if not based on a private knowledge of Poe’s biography and reading – into a state of perpetual uncertainty (99). I read Eureka as a genuinely personal spiritual quest. A second argument goes back to McGann’s proper emphasis on “The Bells” as a performative text. “The poem is a challenge to meaning because it is a challenge to recitation,” he claims, and draws extravagant issues with the uncertainties of emphasis and intonation that it poses (Poe, 180–3). The enemy here, as it is Poe’s enemy in “The Rationale of Verse,” is the tyranny of scansion. This argument overlooks two textbook facts. First, scansion never wields a tyranny. It is simply an abstract guide, a merely virtual gridwork, for the performer. Ask any Shakespearian actor. Emphasis and intonation are free variables that play against the metre of any poem. Second, “The Bells” is a pseudopindaric ode, its precise metre unpredictable from line to line – a fact McGann leaves unmentioned – so that any performance is naturally confronted with more options than usual.

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I must add one highly speculative postscript to this analysis: there is possible further provenance in common between Poe and Emerson – the doctrines of Emmanuel Swedenborg. Emerson’s admiration for Swedenborg is well known from his lengthy essay in Representative Men and elsewhere, though it seems to be considered an embarrassment and thus has been poorly studied.40 Poe, as usual, is harder to pin down, and few Poe critics mention it. I have already suggested the relevance of Swedenborg’s correspondences to the mirror effects in “House of Usher.” Edward H. Davidson ventures farther, citing from Roderick Usher’s library not only Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell but titles by Tommaso Campanella and Robert Flud – all of which “consider the material world as manifestation of the spiritual” – as books that Poe “had read” (Poe, 196). Davidson cites no evidence for this assertion. More recently, however, Lynn R. Wilkinson uses Swedenborg to explain Baudelaire’s first attraction to Poe. According to Wilkinson, Baudelaire’s earliest translation from Poe – his “Mesmeric Revelation” – seems “a strange choice for a first translation into French”; but “from the point of view of Baudelaire’s evolving interest in visionary systems and aesthetics, it makes perfect sense ... In translating ‘Mesmeric’ as magnétique, Baudelaire made explicit a distinction Poe’s narrative only implies, a distinction between two traditions among the followers of Mesmer: those who emphasized the therapeutic aspects of his theories and those who saw them in more cosmological terms, often marrying them with aspects of Swedenborgianism” (Dream, 237). The gaps in this chain of evidence are glaring. Yet if Poe had investigated the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg (as I suspect he did), he would have been impressed with the sage’s central doctrine of correspondences, which seems to be foregrounded in “The Fall of the House of Usher” (see above, note 10). Swedenborg would also have given Poe a vividly imagined account of angelic afterlife. Poe may have seen in Swedenborg’s correspondences (as the symbolistes certainly did) a metaphysical rationale for the linkage between poetic image and subjective realities, both spiritual and emotional, and, on the auditory level, between metre, onomatopoeic sound symbolism, and the same ineffable effects. If he had read farther in Heaven and Hell, he might have noted Swedenborg’s extended account of the language of the angels, a perfect language beyond the grasp of mortals in which a single spoken word conveys the substance of an entire printed volume – a kind of celestial Pakzip. In this language “they express affections through the vowels; with the consonants, they

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express the particular concepts that derive from the affections, and with the words they express the meaning of the matter” (261/210).41 Poe’s Israfel perhaps spoke this language: In Heaven a spirit doth dwell “Whose heart-strings are a lute”; None sing so wildly well As the angel Israfel, And the giddy stars (so legends tell), Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell Of his voice, all mute. One does not need Swedenborg to understand the point of Poe’s verses about the ideal angelic poetry; but such a context gives it added richness: Yes, Heaven is thine; but this Is a world of sweets and sours; Our flowers are merely – flowers, And the shadow of thy perfect bliss Is the sunshine of ours. If I could dwell Where Israfel Hath dwelt, and he where I, He might not sing so wildly well A mortal melody, While a bolder note than this might swell From my lyre within the sky. In “The Bells,” Poe achieved a nearly pure poem as a work of music: it is virtually non-cognitive, even non-referential, at least as nearly as an artefact made of words can be. Its repercussions sound through American poetics to the present time. The musical ideal emerges grossly in the eccentricities of Sidney Lanier’s “The Symphony” (and poetic “symphonies” by other poets – primarily from the South), as well as in Wallace Stevens’s equivalent in pure optical phenomenology, “A Sea Surface Full of Clouds.” More important, the concept of a poem judged as an artefact apart from its cognitive subject matter resonates through the decades of the New Criticism. The tradition that

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stems from Emerson, too, has its value of theoretical purity, its demand for new thought and traditional barriers of every kind smashed and tossed away. In a subtler way, it too does away not only with aesthetic traditions but also with the ballast of mundane realities, turning poetry into a medium for vatic prophecy and spiritual self-cultivation. The demand for originality and theoretical purity has left American poets of subsequent generations with a heritage that is at once a source of strength and a limitation. The American poet does not just write poems but must invent a new kind of poem to write. This is as true of major figures like Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, or Pound as it is of lesser phenomena like Stephen Crane, Marianne Moore, Vachel Lindsay, or e.e. cummings. The result is a sustained transport of poetic inventiveness and variety that no lover of American poetry would wish otherwise. But it has helped to confine poetry as a whole to a specialized niche.

Admirers of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman must thank Yvor Winters for drawing this unknown poet to our attention and must forgive his gross hyperbole. I do not have to believe that “The Cricket” is “the greatest single American poem of the nineteenth century” in order to find it profound and deeply moving.42 But though it has been picked up in some recent anthologies, it remains on the periphery of the American canon.43 Tuckerman, born to a well-established Boston family, lived a reclusive life in Greenfield, Massachusetts, contemporary with his distant relative Emily Dickinson. There is no evidence that either poet was aware of the other. Tuckerman was well educated, earning a law degree from Harvard, where he ventured at the risk of tainting his Episcopalian upbringing. His tutor in Greek was the transcendentalist poet Jones Very. Tuckerman never practised law and lived on a comfortable inheritance from his father. In 1847, he married Hannah Lucinda Jones, and they had three children together. But Hannah died after giving birth to the last in 1857, and Tuckerman fell into a state of mournful and never-ending remembrance. Three years later, he published his Poems privately and sent the volume to a number of literati: Alfred Tennyson replied with a complimentary note, Tuckerman visited him in January, 1855, and the two masters of poetic

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bereavement formed a lasting friendship. In the States, Longfellow and Hawthorne wrote admiring responses, and Hawthorne was particularly appreciative. The poems, mainly sonnets, went into commercial editions in England and the United States before Tuckerman’s premature death at the age of fifty-two. His book was well enough known to generate a couple of newspaper parodies, but Tuckerman’s name quickly disappeared.44 His work even escaped the eagle eye of Edmund Clarence Stedman, whose 1900 anthology of American poetry included figures as obscure as Emily Dickinson and Melville. Neither edition of Tuckerman’s poems in his lifetime included “The Cricket,” his most impressive achievement. Nor did Witter Bynner’s effort to recover Tuckerman’s sonnets in 1931. “The Cricket” did not emerge from the poet’s private notebooks until 1950, when it was printed (in an imperfect text) as a small-run pamphlet, and finally, in 1965, it became generally available in an Oxford edition of the complete poems, edited by Yvor Winters’s pupil N. Scott Momaday. Since then, there has been a biography, a Twayne monograph, a few doctoral dissertations, and a Selected Poems from Harvard’s Belknap Press (2010), plus a number of appreciative commentaries from critics like Edmund Wilson and Denis Donoghue, with Harold Bloom the one dissenting voice (Ringers, 219). I pause over “The Cricket” for several reasons. First, its poetic quality earns it a place in any broad survey of American poetry, particularly a survey of American odes. It is a rare example of the greater romantic lyric in nineteenth-century America. It is also a curious effort to mediate the ghostly voices of Poe and Emerson. Tuckerman was deeply read in English poetry, and the lushness of Keatsian imagery and Keatsian meditative structures, argument wedded to concrete image, clearly informs his poem. He was no American nationalist who rejected transatlantic English traditions for the sake of originality. “The Cricket” is also, like “The Bells” and like Wordsworth’s late ode, a poem about the power of sound. Tuckerman’s diction shares with Poe a penchant for obscure proper names with Hellenic resonances (Patriotic Gore, 492). Tuckerman’s chirping crickets, however, are not the human artefacts of Poe’s bells but voices of Nature, bringing them closer to the romantic traditions of Wordsworth and Emerson. Yet the black six-legged creature of the poem is primarily a maker of sound. Tuckerman was inevitably touched by Emerson’s proximity and influence in mid-century Massachusetts; the two men were personal-

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ly acquainted, and Tuckerman had studied with the mystical Jones Very. But Tuckerman viewed Nature through the eyes of a scientist. In the words of Momaday, “he was at home in the sciences of botany and astronomy, and he knew more than most men about geology ... He was not a pantheist, nor did he incline to pantheism. He was not a mystic, nor did he recommend the mystical experience. Tuckerman and Emerson were at odds on the most fundamental points.”45 As Stephen Burt puts it, Tuckerman is “our first dedicated American poet of the disenchanted biosphere.” He seems “closer to Nature, the scientific journal, than to Wordsworth’s Nature.”46 Virtually every one of Tuckerman’s critics – Bynner, Winters, Momaday, Golden, England, Burt – sees him as a tacit dissenting voice to Emersonianism. To this, Eugene England adds the background of New England Episcopalianism, which is rarely overt in the poetry but never denied Nature as the work of the creator (Beyond Romanticism, 36–45). All this accounts, perhaps, for Harold Bloom’s sniffiness. “The Cricket” may be read as Tuckerman’s challenge to Emerson’s assumption in his introduction to “Nature” that “all which Philosophy distinguishes as the not me, that is, both nature and art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, nature.” Emerson’s self-evident equation of the disembodied me to the whole of the cosmos is shown as absurd egotism figured in the chirping of a solitary cricket. If, as Patricia Yeager has argued, ambitions for the sublime are nothing more than “political fictions meant to aggrandize the male ego” (“Maternal Sublime,” 21), Tuckerman’s sublime is its humble antithesis. The poem begins by situating the speaker vaguely in time and place as he contemplates the presence of a lone cricket: The humming bee purrs softly o’er his flower, From lawn and thicket The dog day locust singeth in the sun From hour to hour: Each has his bard, and thou, ere day be done Shalt have no wrong. So bright that murmur mid the insect crowd Muffled and lost in bottom grass, or loud By pale and picket, Shall I not take to help me in my song A little cooing cricket?

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Every creature needs its bard: it is the conceit of a poetical taxonomist, or a Whitman constructing his all-embracing catalogues. But the imagery is already auditory and semi-disembodied – humming, murmuring, cooing. Soon the single chirping cricket becomes innumerable as the speaker drifts into dreamy, subjective reverie: No few faint pipings from the glades behind Or alder-thicks; But louder as the day declines, From tingling tassel, blade and sheath, Rising from nets of river vines, Winrows and ricks; Above, beneath, At every breath; At hand, around, illimitably Rising and falling like the sea, Acres of cricks!47 The world of outer nature expands in space to the far horizon; the great clouds of witness of the chirping crickets grow, and the natural sounds multiply and enter into the speaker as he sinks into poppyladen semi-consciousness. The dream extends in time as well, to memories of the dreamer’s childhood: Dear to the child, who hears thy rustling voice Cease at his footstep, though he hears thee still, Cease and resume, with vibrance crisp and shrill, Thou sittest in the sunshine to rejoice! Night lover too, bringer of all things dark, And rest and silence, – yet thou bringest to me Always that burthen of the unresting sea, The moaning cliffs, the low rocks blackly stark. These upland inland fields no more I view, But the long flat seaside beach, the wild seamew And the overturning wave! The dreamer’s subjective cosmos extends backward to childhood, and to erotic memories of courtship, and forward to death, the grave of his

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beloved, and the “crowning vacancy” – all surrounded by the seascape of infinite space and time. But space and time exceed the grasp even of the dreamer’s subconscious thought, which plunges into mythic fantasy. If I were to analyze “The Cricket” as a poetic symphony, this would be the scherzo: So wert thou loved, in that old graceful time When Greece was fair, While god and hero hearken’d to thy chime Softly astir Where the long grasses fringed Caÿster’s lip;48 Long-drawn, with shimmering sails of swan and ship And ship and swan, Or where Reedy Eurotas ran.49 Did that low warble teach thy tender flute, Xenaphyle50 Its breathings mild? say! did the grasshopper Sit golden in thy purple hair O Psammathe?51 Or wert thou mute, Grieving for Pan amid the alders there? And by the water and along the hill That thirsty tinkle in the herbage still, Though the lost forest wailed to horns of Arcady? The proper names are mysterious female objects of the generic male Eros, lost in a time out of time. But the scherzo too turns dark, as the god Pan is dead and the nymph Psammathe grieves – the grasshopper in her hair perhaps recalling Tithonus, grown too old for love and altered out of divine pity. Psammathe in myth is a figure for the grief of a bereft mother, an inconsolable loss.52 Tuckerman’s fantasy returns to the dark mourning of so much of his poetry. The Enchanter in the final stanza is unidentified,53 but he appears as a Gothic figure – like Hawthorne’s Rappaccini, or perhaps Emerson’s Merlin – his power activated by poisonous or hallucinogenic flora (“mandrake or dorcynium”). He seems to have gained an ability to understand the sounds of Nature as articulate messages. Nature has become a fount of mystic symbols that announce themselves spontaneously, or an auditory hieroglyph decipherable by the

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Enchanter alone. The speaker longs for such power, but it frustrates and eludes him: Like the Enchanter old – Who sought mid the dead water’s weeds and scum For evil growths beneath the moonbeam cold, Or mandrake or dorcynium,54 And touch’d the leaf that open’d both his ears: So that articulate voices now he hears In cry of beast, or bird, or insect’s hum, Might I but find thy knowledge in thy song! . . . . . So might I stir The world to hark To thee my lord and lawgiver, And cease my quest; Content to bring thy wisdom to the world; Content to gain at last some low applause, Now low, now lost Like thine, from mossy stone amid the stems and straws, Or garden grave mound, trick’d and drest – Powder’d and pearl’d By stealing frost, In dusky rainbow-beauty of euphorbias.55 The “rainbow-beauty of euphorbias” is associated with deepest winter, a touch of colour in the dark turn of the year. The rainbow binds the classical imagery to the traditional biblical emblem of hope, and possibly – if the euphorbia is understood as the poinsettia – with the promise of Christmas. The speaker’s wish for suprahuman knowledge is not granted, but the imagery leads him to an ambiguous and imperfect consolation at the end of the poem. Then Cricket! sing thy song! or answer mine! Thine whispers blame, but mine has naught but praises! It matters not. Behold! the Autumn goes The Shadow grows, The moments take hold of eternity; Even while we stop to wrangle or repine,

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Our lives are gone Like thinnest mist – Like yon escaping colour in the tree, Rejoice! rejoice! whilst yet the hours exist, Rejoice or mourn, and let the world swing on Unmoved by cricket song of thee, or me. The seasons come and go, human lives evaporate “like thinnest mist,” and the whole of nature becomes “naught in innumerable numerousness.” Though committed “to the hieroglyphs of nature” (Donoghue, “Tuckerman,” 369), he must confess that he cannot decipher them. The speaker hears the singing of the anonymous and innumerable crickets “ignorantly,” without comprehension or meaning, and he is left only to rejoice – “whilst yet the hours exist / Rejoice or mourn.” Samuel Golden describes “The Cricket” as “a happy poem.” It is not an adjective that I would use. It is, however, a poem in which grief is partially resolved, a sort of consolation achieved. As in Poe, the speaker of Tuckerman’s “Cricket” allows himself to be absorbed into an auditory world and becomes and individual who “feels himself feeling a ‘self’” (Nancy, Listening, 9). This self is not a transcendent ego, nor is it an empty negation. It is aware of its rightful, if infinitesimal, place in the cosmos. Death is inevitable, but life is a gift. There are signs of Christian hope, perhaps, but they are very faint if they exist at all. Whether there is cause to rejoice or cause to mourn, human feelings are indifferent. The poem comes to rest, acquiescent in its final realization of the limitations of human understanding and the insufficiency of the human imagination.

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4 “Speaking as an American to Americans” James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode” and the Idea of Nationhood

When I first encountered James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode,” I was a precocious young browser in an old anthology of American literature on the family bookshelf. At that age, my reading skills were too undeveloped to read through the poem. The editor’s note, however, assured me that “like all the later poems of the author, it is full of condensed thought and requires study” (Foerster, American Poetry, 772). So I turned the page. Later on, of course, I learned that the “schoolroom poets,” or “fireside poets,” wrote bad poetry; that they were sentimental, moralistic, simple minded; that they had been force-fed to schoolkids by schoolmarms for all the wrong reasons; and that they were safe to ignore. So they have been ignored and unread now by generations of students, the extravagant claims of one era replaced by the wilful ignorance of another. Through all this I privately sustained an affection for the poetry of Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier – even while the Brahmins, Lowell and Holmes, seemed unsalvageable. I turned to Lowell’s ode, then, in the spirit of Cary Nelson’s conviction that texts “widely read or influential need to retain an active place in our sense of literary history, whether or not we happen, at present, to judge them of high quality.” There is provincialism of time as well as of place: “Our tendency to regard the taste of the past as quaint merely establishes our own time-bound position” (Repression, 51). Only after study have I come to grasp and appreciate Lowell’s strenuous wisdom. Review of critical opinion is quickly dispensed with: no journal article about the Lowell’s ode has appeared since 1943. The tenor of passing references is typified by Edmund Wilson in Patriotic

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Gore: “It is a gauge of the mediocre level of the poetry of the Civil War that Lowell’s Ode should have been thought to have been one of its summits. One can understand Swinburne’s saying that, in contrast to Whitman, it did not leave in his ear ‘the echo of a single note of song’” (474). Even Lowell’s most recent editor – in what must be the most abject preamble to a poet’s work ever penned – declares, “there is nothing for us in such lines of the magnificence we find in ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’; Lowell’s ode has importance as an historical document, but its pulse has faded” (M. Kaufman, in Lowell, Poetical Works, xxvi). That Lowell’s poem may be experiencing a revival is signalled by Martin Griffin’s Ashes of the Mind: War and Memory in Northern Literature, 1865–1900, which appeared after this chapter had already been drafted. Griffin recognizes not only the pivotal importance of the poem but the demand that, in reading such a text – informed by “neither the lyric intensity of Romanticism nor the mythic intentions of modernism” – we must “make a more sustained effort to grasp [its] emotional and intellectual arguments” (23). Lowell’s mode is discursive and metaphorical. Griffin’s analysis focuses on the elegiac substance of the poem and its implications for the subsequent shaping of war memory in American culture. From the moment Lowell stepped forward to read his poem, “he was conscious of the fragility of memory and of the necessity of inventing it ... From the earliest moment, the literature of Civil War memory was entwined with the politics of Civil War commemoration” (15–16). My focus is on that moment itself, its sense of accomplished nationalism (however distorted it soon became), and the nature of the patriotic passion it articulates. For in its time, the poem embodied powerful feeling – an assurance that the terrible bloodletting had accomplished something positive. Edward Everett Hale declared: “There are passages in it that boys of generation upon generation will speak in school – and that will be remembered and repeated when people do not know whether Bull Run was a victory or a defeat” (Bail, “Commemoration Ode,” 182). Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote Lowell, “It is in my poor judgement not only your chef d’oeuvre – helping to reconcile your friends to your long silences – but also the first of American poems thus far” (Bail, 184). Edmund Clarence Stedman made an editorial exception in his monumental 1900 anthology American Poetry: “The reader will find but a few extended Odes other than Lowell’s Commemoration Ode or Stoddard’s majestic monody on Lincoln, either of which it

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would be criminal to truncate” (xvii). And Henry James affirmed: “No poet has ever placed the concrete idea of his country in a more romantic light than Mr. Lowell; no one, certainly, speaking as an American to Americans, has found on its behalf accents more eloquently tender, more beguiling to the imagination ... [E]ach time I read over the Harvard Commemoration Ode, the more full and strong, the more august and pathetic, does it appear.”1 Lowell’s poem addresses a formative moment in American history with as much wisdom as any American poet has ever brought to bear on the tensions within national feeling. Yet it remains glaringly, stubbornly unfashionable. Having tried it in the classroom, I can attest that it is a hard sell not just because of its nineteenth-century language but even more because of its suspect nationalism and patriotism – topics that threaten to fill the air with platitudes. Can such a poem be approached in the twenty-first century with any sympathy at all? Necessary first is to interrogate the prejudices, both literary and political, that stand in the way; second, to grasp the issues in Lowell’s immediate context. The result will be not only a deepened understanding of Lowell’s poem and the taste that created it but also insight into the present state of American Studies (which has turned a blind eye to it) and into the larger social and political functions of poetry. The prejudices run deep. They fall into three categories, ad hominem, ad ordinem, and ad genum – that is, against Lowell himself, against his social class, and against the kind of poem his ode represents. The ad hominem arguments, which somehow cast Lowell’s lifelong campaign against slavery in an unflattering light, were established by two seminal figures in the creation of American Studies. Vernon Parrington’s savaging of Lowell as vacillating, inconsistent, without political principle – a youthful radical who grew conservative, a Federalist in sheep’s clothing – is patently excessive. Van Wyck Brooks a few years later went even further, accusing Lowell’s abolitionism of intellectual dishonesty: “Cambridge boys are Cambridge boys even when they marry Maria Whites. The radical note in Lowell’s work was a kind of inverse ventriloquism, in which the voice appeared to come from the poet, while the actual speaker was his wife” (330).2 Both critics, however, are driven by ulterior motives: Lowell’s Hamiltonian sympathy with the industrial northeast is an affront to the Jeffersonian Parrington, while his insistence on cultural and literary continuities with England is an affront to Brooks’s Seven Arts nativism. Both Parrington and Brooks wrote at a time when Lowell’s criticism was

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still a live presence. But even now his Hamiltonian position remains offensive to agrarian New Critics, populists, neo-Emersonian romanticists, Poundians, Beats, Marxists, eco-critics, and so on. Both Parrington and Brooks, in badmouthing Lowell for betraying the pure abolitionism of his youth, leave the impression that he drifted thoughtlessly into complacent conservatism, and this impression has become an idée reçue echoed by every subsequent commentator. Yet the record reveals that, however centrist his political stance became – after the Civil War, when the punitive radical position against Confederate “traitors” had become counter-productive – Lowell never wavered in his abhorrence of slavery. A vocal supporter of the Republican Party from its inception in 1856, he encouraged Fremont’s campaign, and then in 1860 he was first a supporter of Seward; but Seward was too radical for his party, which, instead, turned to the more moderate dark horse Lincoln. Lowell embraced Lincoln’s candidacy, later taking pride that he had: “I did divine him earlier than most men of the Brahmin caste” (Letters, 2:342). Nonetheless, C. David Heymann cites Lowell’s 1861 essay “E Pluribus Unum” to argue that Lowell’s “respect for tradition and permanence” had softened his stand against racial injustice: “Slavery is no longer the matter in debate,” he quotes, “we must beware of being led off upon that side issue” (American Aristocracy, 118). But Lowell, as editor of the Atlantic Monthly, published that essay in the lame duck period after Lincoln’s election but before his inauguration, even as the Fort Sumter crisis was unfolding, knowing, as Lincoln did, that if Northern men had to march into battle, they would not do so merely to better the domestic arrangements of the African population. Heymann does not observe that, just before the election, Lowell had argued that “it is in a moral aversion to slavery as a great wrong that the chief strength of the Republican party lies,”3 or that three years later, during the presidential campaign of 1864, Lowell pronounced that “the single question of policy on which General McLellan differs from Mr Lincoln, stripped of the conventional phrases in which he drapes it, is Slavery” (Political Essays, 6:203). “It is Slavery, and not the Southern people, that is our enemy” (6:214). In all, Lowell’s statements throughout the Civil War, like Lincoln’s, are responsive to the Realpolitik of the times. They balance preservation of the Union – and by extension the American experiment in democratic governance – with the eradication of slavery. In fact, they equate the two. It makes no sense to diminish his commitment to both of these causes.

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Unlike some other abolitionists, in fact, Lowell is refreshingly free of covert racism. In one review, for example, he concedes a point to a Southern apologist because “he writes no nonsense about difference of races” (Political Essays, 6:164). Earlier, in 1849, he had been deeply distressed when he sponsored Frederick Douglass for membership in the “Town and Country Club,” offering to pay his entrance fee. But Douglass was blackballed by none other than Emerson – or so Lowell believed – who could not overcome his instinctive “colorphobia.”4 To take another small point: Daniel Aaron, whose brief assessment of Lowell is relatively balanced, remarks that “the times made him prudent, and the man who ‘swore fealty’ to abolitionism in 1839 was ‘editorially’ twenty years later ‘a little afraid of John Brown.’” One might reply that six days after Harper’s Ferry, such fear was reasonable enough. Furthermore, his fear may have been more partisan than personal – the shock of Brown’s violence was for the moment a political liability to the radical Republicans. The context of the remark, however, reveals that Lowell not only claims to be less fearful than his publisher, Ticknor, but that he is writing to his long-time friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the most radical of the “Secret Six” Boston supporters of John Brown – the only one who openly refused to flee prosecution – inviting him to contribute something for Atlantic Monthly.5 The issue of Lowell’s unwavering stance on slavery is vital to a reading of his ode, if only because it is never directly mentioned in the 426 lines of the poem. Yet it underlies Lowell’s position in every word. For Lowell, the fulfilment of American nationhood arrived with the eradication of the slave system. Ultimately, the reasons for Lowell’s silence on the subject are as interesting as is the argument he advances in the ode; but there can be no ambivalence in his feelings about slavery.6 Much of the animus against Lowell can ultimately be traced to suspicion of his social class – a glaring form of reverse snobbism. Van Wyck Brooks’s sneer about “Cambridge boys” is plain enough. Parrington, in one of his milder pronouncements, says it directly: “his impulses were liberal and his mind generous, but he was never strong enough to overcome the handicap [sic] of the Lowell ancestry” (Main Currents, 2:452). True, he had acquired a classical education and became a well-connected Harvard professor. An elitist to be sure. But the antebellum Brahmins, as any scholar of the period knows, were not the idle rich icons of entitlement that they have been portrayed. The Gilded Age had not yet dawned. Antebellum entrepreneurs had scarcely imagined the financial stratagems soon to be invented by the

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American corporation. As Martin Duberman writes, the intellectual heritage of Puritan Cambridge instilled an “injunction of simplicity,” which bred “self-discipline and ... a sense of responsibility to God and one’s fellow man” (James Russell Lowell, 4). Lowell the Brahmin was ironically self-conscious about the accident of his birth. More to the point, Lowell, as a knowing inheritor of the best Puritan tradition, was intellectually and morally committed to the equality of every human soul and to the betterment of society. Jefferson’s absolute that “all men are created equal” lies at the heart of his beliefs, in both the abolition of slavery and the institutions of American democracy.7 The two are inextricable. This Brahmin was a philosophical leveller. Nonetheless, Heymann heads his biographical sketch of Lowell with the title “Natural Aristocrat” and suffuses his entire narrative with the air of quasi-feudal family responsibility. Even Daniel Aaron writes that Lowell had come to see “a new beauty in slow evolutionary progress” (Unwritten War, 32), implying a position of habitual gradualism. Yet Lowell in 1865, as the victorious Union began to agonize over its policies for Reconstruction, argued against gradualism and demanded immediate full citizenship and franchise for the emancipated slaves. Lowell neither waffled in his position against slavery, as Parrington charges, nor traded in a phony brand of radical chic, as Brooks implies.8 Turning to Lowell’s literary criticism, the state of affairs is little different. Scholars of American poetry typically categorize their subject into vast binaries – from Roy Harvey Pearce’s division of “Adamic” from “mythic” poets, to Harold Bloom’s declaration that American authors are either in Emerson’s tradition “or in a countertradition originating in opposition to him” (“Mr America”). Lowell, however, escapes these binaries. Like his friend Longfellow, he represents a crucial third alternative that one might describe as traditionalist, but which I will call internationalist. His effort to find an aesthetic via media offers a less stimulating discussion point for students of American exceptionalism than either Poe or Emerson; but Lowell’s criticism remains the most articulate statement for his own time of this internationalist view. On one hand, Lowell was sympathetic to Poe’s formalism – he once despaired of ever making Emerson understand the importance of metre. “Few men are less sensible” than Emerson, he remarked, “of what makes a poem” (Criticism, 210). But he did not, like Poe, insist that the poet seek out originality in form, nor was his

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Puritan-derived moralism in any way akin to Poe’s privileging of aesthetic Beauty. More important, although Lowell and Emerson were close friends and neighbours, Lowell decried “that exaggeration of the individual, and the depreciation of the social man, which has become the cant of modern literature” (Criticism, 148). Furthermore, he resisted nationalistic calls for an American literature. We are in “too great a hurry to have a literature of our own,” he wrote (103); it is an “unhealthy hankering” (104); there is “no fear but we shall have a national literature soon enough” (111). Lowell was keenly aware of America as a European provincial colony; American society, he believed, was not yet mature enough to produce a great literature: “We are yet too full of hurry and bustle [111] ... We love concentration, epigrammatic brevity, antithesis ... Under such circumstances, we need hardly expect a new crop of epics” (113). Lowell emphasized not a break from English tradition but continuity, critiquing nationalists for writing “as if Shakespeare, sprung from the race and the class which colonized New England, had not been also ours!” (122). If, like Poe, he was a committed formalist, he was strong minded enough to breathe the heady Emersonian air and maintain a critical distance.9 Lowell’s awareness of American provincialism presages the more Eurocentric attitudes of later expatriates – James, Pound, and Eliot. Lowell was deeply read in English literature, knew several continental languages, and had a cosmopolitan experience of Europe. Thus his literary vision was to a degree transnational, even foreseeing a future literature as “a vast commonwealth, with no dividing lines of nationality” (Lowell, Criticism, 144). I emphasize Lowell’s transnational vision because it has a direct bearing on the subject of his “Harvard Commemoration Ode” – its expression of American nationalism and American patriotism. In Lowell’s poem these are not facile sentiments. They are better understood, in the context of Lowell’s thought, as considered philosophical positions.

Antebellum America, in the words of Henry James, possessed “no State, in the European sense of the word, and indeed barely a specific national name” (Hawthorne, 43). And Edward Everett Hale, in a popular wartime fiction, explored what it might be like to be “A Man without a Country.” The typical American looked not to the federal

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but to the state government for authority. Thus in the epilogue to his magisterial history of the Civil War, James M. McPherson devotes one paragraph to a revealing analysis of Abraham Lincoln’s prose. “Before 1861,” he remarks, “the two words ‘United States’ were generally rendered as a plural noun ... The war marked a transition of the United States to a singular noun.” Likewise, the “Union” also became the “Nation”: Lincoln’s wartime speeches betokened this transition. In his first inaugural address he used the word “Union” twenty times and the word “nation” not once. In his first message to Congress, on July 4, 1861, he used “Union” thirty-two times and “nation” three times. In his letters to Horace Greeley of August 22, 1862, on the relationship of slavery to the war, Lincoln spoke of the Union eight times and of the nation not at all. Little more than a year later, in his address at Gettysburg, the president did not refer to the “Union” at all but used the word “nation” five times to invoke the new birth of freedom and nationalism for the United States. And in his second inaugural address, looking back over the events of the past four years, Lincoln spoke of one side seeking to dissolve the Union in 1861 and the other accepting the challenge of war to preserve the nation. (Battle Cry, 859) Similar analysis underscores my major point about Lowell’s ode. In it, the word “union” fails to appear; but the word “nation” appears three times, at emphatic positions in the final sections of the poem. The central section – the stanza on Lincoln sometimes singled out for praise at the expense of the rest – describes Lincoln not as the “greatest” American but as the “first” American. Lincoln’s act of emancipation had finally brought Jefferson’s ideal of human equality to fulfillment (or seemed to) and had answered Dr Johnson’s pointed question, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negros?” (McPherson, Battle Cry, 876).10 Lowell’s poem, in a self-conscious way, enacts the sacramental moment when “Union” became “Nation.” The moment was, of course, extraordinary. Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox on 9 April 1865. Lincoln was assassinated on Good Friday, 15 April. The Harvard Commemoration took place barely three months later on 21 July. Every person present was aware of those who were absent, the young collegians who had died in the terrible war – some ninety-nine in number, including Lowell’s three beloved

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nephews, and Robert Gould Shaw, married to Lowell’s sister. Daniel Aaron, reading the Harvard biographies of these men, underscores “the idealism of the young patricians. Some were inculcated with the abolitionism of their families; the majority were not abolitionists at all. Most of them enlisted in order to put down ‘horrid Rebellion,’ and although war violated the religious convictions of many, the peril to the Union overcame their scruples” (Unwritten War, 160).11 Because of the war, the status of American nationhood, in the North at least, had become less provisional, less qualified by the narrow states’ rights arguments of the slaveholders (who nonetheless expected Northern states to enforce the Fugitive Slave Law). The Great Experiment in representative democracy was in less danger of being judged a failure, now that the resistance of the South to the results of the 1860 election had been put down by military force.12 American nationhood, and the patriotic feelings engendered by these events, thus became the topos of Lowell’s address. In such circumstances, it is no wonder that Lowell confessed to writer’s block when he sat to write his poem. But his political writings before and during the Civil War reveal that he had thought deeply about the idea of American nationhood. When the block released, the poem, he said, came in a great flood. For Lowell, the greatest achievement of the American imagination was its democratic system of government, a system that Old World observers expected to collapse under any pressure. If America has not yet produced a great literature, he argued more than once, it has produced a “great epic ... whose books are States, and which is written on this continent from Maine to California” (Criticism, 18). “If we have been to blame for the Columbiad,” he said, “we have also given form, life, and the opportunity of entire development to social ideas ever reacting with more and more force upon the thought and the literature of the Old World” (123).13 The United States is “not a mere partnership, dissolvable whether by mutual consent or on the demand of one or more of its members, but a Nation” (Lowell, Political Essays, 6:78). We are “a nation, and not a mass-meeting” (65). Conscious of contemporary struggles for national unification in Italy and Germany, Lowell saw in the American secessionist conflict not only the gravest test of democratic government but also the instrument that would bring American nationhood into being. As the Minutemen “began a conflict which gave us independence,” he wrote, so the present struggle “began another which is to give us nationality” (107–8).14

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“What was at first a struggle to maintain the outward form of our government has become a contest to preserve the life and assert the supreme will of the nation ... It was not against the Constitution that the Rebels declared war, but against free institutions” (205). In the end he was able to confound the teachers of political philosophy, who “had always taught us that democracies were incapable of the sentiment of loyalty” (223). “Never, perhaps, was any system of government tried by so searching a strain as ours during the last three years; never has any shown itself stronger” (225). Nowadays, many readers view patriotic sentiments like these with deepest suspicion. Naturally enough. Patriotism is often merely an excuse for a long weekend, Fourth of July fireworks and brass bands, symbols of conspicuous consumption. Even worse, it has been co-opted by right-wing political groups, under the banners of hawkish militarism and America-first nationalism. “My country right or wrong.” Foreign visitors are struck by the excesses of American patriotism. Against this, there is widespread feeling that America has failed to realize its social promise, that the equality of every man (and woman) remains a fiction, and, internationally, that military enterprises in Iraq, Latin America, Vietnam, and elsewhere have been morally indefensible. We are ready to agree with Dr Johnson that patriotism is “the last refuge of a scoundrel” (Boswell, Johnson, 615). Patriotism too is a communitarian attitude deeply at odds with Emersonian self-reliance and the mythos of the frontier. Tocqueville famously discussed this contradiction, and Walt Whitman was troubled by it, tucking his remarks away in a footnote to Democratic Vistas: “Must not the virtue of modern Individualism, continually enlarging, usurping all, seriously affect, perhaps keep down entirely, in America, the like of the ancient virtue of Patriotism, the fervid and absorbing love of general country? I have no doubt myself that the two will merge, and will mutually profit and brace each other, and that from them a greater product, a third, will arise. But I feel that at present they and their oppositions form a serious problem and paradox in the United States.”15 It is doubtful whether Whitman’s quasi-Hegelian synthesis has yet occurred, given that the most fervent patriotism so often cohabits the same brain with a profound suspicion of government. Until recently, political philosophers have ignored the question; but the past few decades have seen a spate of philosophical argument about the ethics of patriotism – whether it is a virtue, or a vice, or something in between, nuanced by qualifications or by the particu-

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lars of circumstance. I find this debate directly relevant to Lowell’s position in his ode. My purpose here is not to rehearse the philosophers’ arguments but to borrow certain distinctions to illuminate Lowell’s position. At a moment when feelings of every kind were running high, one of the virtues of Lowell’s poem is that he does not inflame them, nor merely express them, but instead holds them up to examination. First, Lowell’s patriotism is critical, neither naively emotional nor ethnocentric. It is not a worldly Machiavellianism. Nor does it appeal, somewhat surprisingly, to a common topos of contemporary sermons, that the Civil War was God’s punishment for the sin of slavery.16 As Lowell’s abolitionist prose reveals, his patriotism does not rule out sharp critiques of the status quo. The ode sets aside lesser personal motives for going to war – romantic adventure, masculinity, honour, group instinct. It minimizes sectional identification with the North and ignores regimental associations with particular states. The word “treason” (346) appears in stanza 10, which dismisses the Cavalier Theory of the Confederacy, but it does not otherwise dwell on “traitor” and “rebel,” nor does it vilify the South, nor even Lincoln’s assassin. Lowell is indeed fully aware that, in practice, “the masses of any people, however intelligent, are very little moved by abstract principles of humanity and justice, until ... some infringement upon their own rights” (Political Essays, 6:250–1). Yet his ode focuses on the idealism that Daniel Aaron discovered in those biographies of the dead students. Second, Lowell’s patriotism is founded on the Enlightenment proposition “that all men are created equal.” It is thus both limited and conditional on the maintenance of a particular social contract. He recognized that he was living in “one of those periods of excitement ... giving to the mere words country, human rights, democracy, a meaning and force beyond that of sober argument”; but he had absorbed the lesson of the French Revolution “that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work” (Political Essays, 6:229). The just political system can rise only out of the corporate ethical acceptance of “the rights of man,” in contradistinction to “feudal” and “Oriental” caste systems: America must decide “whether the Occidental or the Oriental theory of society is to mould our future” (29). In an operative community, the African slave is an equal person, not three-fifths of a person, and so is every present and future immigrant to the nation.

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Third, Lowell’s patriotism assumes a qualified American exceptionalism that verges, at times, on an oxymoronic transnational patriotism. America is exceptional in having been the first nation to attempt democracy on a large scale and in having invented its particular democratic form of government. But patriotic devotion is owed not so much to a particular nation as to an abstract principle that can be adopted by other sovereign nations. In one utopian moment, Lowell envisions “a single empire embracing the whole world ... one language, one law, one citizenship over thousands of miles, and a government on the whole so good that we seem to have forgotten what government means” (Political Essays, 6:81). This is, of course, the familiar secularized version of Puritan America as a “city on a hill” and a “light to all nations.” It receives expression elsewhere in the remarkable last book of Barlow’s Columbiad and in Whitman’s “Passage to India”; and, depending on one’s understanding of “empire,” it has ominous as well as benevolent implications. American dominance outside its borders had not yet been imagined, nor had the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, been abandoned. America’s subsequent drift towards foreign imperialism and corporate oligarchy is not ruled out by Lowell’s language. But his ideal is a transnational patriotism that envisions the American nation as one part of a larger global whole. Finally, Lowell’s patriotism is not a “constitutional” but a “covenanted” patriotism, a distinction pointed out by Igor Primoratz: constitutional patriotism is a concept developed by German thinkers Dolf Sternberger and Jürgen Habermas in the wake of the Nazi catastrophe. Attempting to sidestep the pull of ethnic and cultural bonds, Habermas proposes a purely political patriotism on the model of Switzerland and the United States. These nations, he claims, offer proof that a political culture in which constitutional principles can take root need by no means depend on all citizens sharing the same language or the same ethnic and cultural origins. A liberal political culture is only the common denominator for a constitutional patriotism (Verfassungspatriotismus) that heightens an awareness of both the diversity and the integrity of the different forms of life coexisting in a multicultural society (Primoratz, Patriotism, 20). But such a patriotism is too legalistic. More to the point, in antebellum America the Constitution itself was fatally flawed. Lincoln once compared the American Constitution to an “apple of silver,” as opposed to the Declaration of Independence, an “apple of gold” (Primoratz, Patriotism, 240). Lowell likewise saw the American Constitu-

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tion as a document damaged by its expedient compromises with slavery. “What do they mean by the Constitution?” he asks of Lincoln’s opponents in 1859. “Property?” They mean “that Labor has no rights which Capital is bound to respect.” (This comment is particularly pointed coming from a scion of northeastern industry, but it reflects Republican “free labor” policy.17) The other parties argue, he says, “not merely the narrow principles of a section, but the still narrower and more selfish ones of caste” (Political Essays, 6:31). They defend dogmas “which would serve equally well to justify the enslavement of every white man unable to protect himself” (51–2). The Republicans, on the other hand, are united by “a common faith in the principles and practice of the Republic” (43). These, he says, appeal “to conscience as well as reason ... bringing the theories of the Declaration of Independence to the test of experience” (45). A covenant, that is, involves not just divine blessings but obligations of faith in return. When the Southern states drew up their own document, Lowell scoffed at the Confederate parody of a Declaration of Independence “that hangs the franchise of human nature on the kink of a hair, and substitutes for the visionary right of all men to the pursuit of happiness the more practical privilege of some men to pursue their own negro” (70). “Their quarrel is not with the Republican party, but with the theory of Democracy” (71).18 Lowell’s position is very close to that expounded by John H. Schaar in his essay “The Case for Covenanted Patriotism.” The similarity is hardly surprising since Schaar’s primary spokesman for covenanted patriotism is Lincoln. Schaar sees his formulation as suitable to nations like the United States, whose ethnic and cultural diversity discourages a natural patriotism. In the United States, he argues, citizens, “a motley gathering of various races and cultures, were bonded together not by blood or religion, not by tradition or territory, not by the walls and traditions of a city, but by a political idea. We are a nation formed by a covenant, by dedication to a set of principles and by an exchange of promises to uphold and advance certain commitments ... Those principles and commitments are the core of American identity, the soul of the body politic” (238–9). Schaar’s notion of “covenant” is greater than a political contract like a constitution: it is invested with the emotional commitment of a religious bond, like the Yahwist covenants of Hebrew scripture or the Puritan “covenant of grace.”19 As Schaar notes, the chief task of political life, Lincoln said, was to inculcate the values of a “political reli-

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gion.” The survival of the covenant depends on “an informed citizenry, and the first task of leadership is the formation of such a citizenry” (240). As time passed, Schaar notes, America opened its doors to the stranger: “Only one restriction remained: the strangers had to become republicans” (242).20 Schaar’s advocacy of a “covenanted patriotism” is both more complex and more passionate than I can suggest here. And, as Margaret Canovan suggests, it is open to the charge of covert imperialism: “Although Schaar takes pains to stress that this kind of patriotism does not involve an imperialistic urge to impose one’s principles on others,” she observes, his concept of America’s “‘teaching mission’ does rather give the game away, at any rate to those on the receiving end of the instruction” (“Breathes,” 186). Nonetheless, Schaar’s purpose is analogous to Lowell’s in the 1860s – to generate “a revitalized radical politics in this country,” a politics founded on the proposition that all men, white and black, are created equal.21

Highly conscious of the genre of the public ode, Lowell was constrained from speaking with personal involvement, like Whitman in Drum Taps, or from the post-facto analysis that allows Melville his characteristic ironies in Battle Pieces. Elegiac feelings were admissible but could not be allowed to dominate. Instead, Lowell was obliged to speak with a public voice, using epideictic rhetoric, adopting the firstperson plural. And if he was aware of his own weakness for moralizing,22 he was aware too that the occasion called for acute moral analysis, and sentiments that would resonate with the public that listened to him, requiring an Augustan grandeur of generalization. These sentiments include some highly non-romantic, non-Emersonian attitudes, including the subordination of the individual to moral and religious forces “Outside of Self” (line 211), the inadequacy of poetic expression, and the superiority of action over word or thought. None of these attitudes is likely to win admirers in the persistent romanticism of the present day, but they are essential to his discourse. The goal of Lowell’s discourse is to affirm American nationhood, but the first half of his poem defines the power of the individual – defines, that is, in the sense of recognizing not only the claims of the individual but also the limitations. He begins with a common humility topos, offering only a “trivial song” (7) to the returning soldiers,

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underscoring the disparity with an ironic catachresis of “squadronstrophes” and “battle-odes” (9–10). Lowell’s poet is no liberating god but a mere mortal non-combatant. And turning first to the ceremonial occasion, he addresses Harvard as “Reverend Mother” (15) whose care is “Veritas” (37) – the motto of the college. However conventional, this opening gambit establishes several fundamental ideas: the relationship of the person to the scholastic institution and the heritage of human learning; and, with the metaphor of “Reverend Mother” (15), the relationship of the male person to family, to religious authority, and to the female; and, finally, the relationship of all of these to the ultimate reality of “Death’s idle gulf” (23): “No lore of Greece or Rome, / No science peddling with the names of things, / Or reading stars to find inglorious fates” – that is, no humanities, material sciences, or even religious prophecy – is sufficient in itself. Veritas as knowledge without application, as faith without works, is dead. Many in sad faith sought for her, Many with crossed hands sighed for her; But these, our brothers, fought for her, At life’s dear peril wrought for her, So loved her that they died for her, Tasting the raptured fleetness Of her divine completeness. (46–52) The gendering of Veritas, with the emphatic epanalepsis “for her,” metaphorically endows this action with male sexual drive, the fulfilment of Self in the Other. Stanzas 4 and 5 set these assertions in the context of two inexorable realities: the passage of time and the opposition of hostile forces. “What is there that abides / To make the next age better for the last?” If faith is worthless without action, however, individual human action is subject to doubt, the whims of Fortune, the discovery that “what men call treasure” is without value. The individual life unsupported by higher allegiances is no more than A long account of nothings paid with loss, Where we, poor puppets, jerked by unseen wires, After our little hour of strut and rave, With all our pasteboard passions and desires, Loves, hates, ambitions, and immortal fires, Are tossed pell-mell together in the grave. (82–7)

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Lowell’s puppet metaphor here raises the spectre of materialist determinism and, with its echo of Macbeth’s poor player “that struts and frets his hour upon the stage,” teeters on the brink of despair. Lowell is only playing devil’s advocate for cynicism, however. He draws back, making the turn to affirm the individual’s freedom of choice – “For in our likeness still we shape our fate” (90). The vision of bodies “tossed pell-mell together in the grave” (87) can only call to mind the death of Robert Gould Shaw, one of the ninetynine collegians whose absence was so deeply felt, though he remains unnamed. Shaw, whose family members were close to the Lowells, had of course died heroically leading his regiment of black soldiers in a futile charge on Fort Wagner in Charleston. Shaw was an abolitionist martyr. The story was and is well known, as was the story of his burial – denied an officer’s honours by contemptuous Southern soldiers and tossed recklessly into a common grave with his black company. Thus Shaw had shaped his fate through his own free will, so joining his “feeble light” (93) with that heavenly light “from fountains elder than the Day” (100). Decisive action will inevitably meet opposition; and although “Peace hath her not ignoble wreath” (118), the individual is bound to confront “the shock of hostile creeds” (114) – a creed like slavery, which finds support in a narrow literalist reading of the Bible. “Some day,” he declares, the live coal behind the thought, Whether from Baal’s stone obscene, Or from the shrine serene Of God’s pure altar brought, Bursts up in flame; the war of tongue and pen Learns with what deadly purpose it was fraught, And, helpless in the fiery passion caught, Shakes all the pillared state with shock of men. (123–9) Lowell figures this war of creeds in the struggle between Elijah and the priests of Baal on Mount Carmel, the association of Baal worship with child sacrifice making the allusion all the more appropriate. Curiously, in what I can only understand as unintentional ambivalence, Lowell seems uncertain whether the flame bursts from Baal’s altar or from God’s – the confusion probably arising because the South began the hostilities (see 1 Kings 18). The outcome “shakes all the pillared state,” and this phrase points to the transition to the less conventional argumentation of the ode.

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Lowell here introduces his eulogy of Lincoln as the one who found his individual fulfilment in service to the nation – the pivotal point of the poem, which then turns to explore the implications of nationhood. That Lowell depicts Lincoln, the “MartyrChief” (150) and “shepherd of mankind” (167), as a type of Christ is obvious. Lowell’s Unitarian Christ, however, is not a transcendent Person of the Trinity, but a Perfect Man, one of the people, the prime moral teacher and example. Furthermore, Nature, “choosing sweet clay from the breast / Of the unexhausted West,” has created this “first American” as a second Adam (see Genesis 2:7), with “nothing of Europe here” (185). Untouched by any feudal “names of Serf and Peer” (187), Lincoln is thus the type of the democratic Common Man: His was no lonely mountain-peak of mind. Thrusting to thin air o’er our cloudy bars, A sea-mark now, now lost in vapors blind; Broad prairie rather, genial, level-lined, Fruitful and friendly for all human kind, Yet also nigh to heaven and loved of loftiest stars. (178–83) Lowell’s lines may be contrasted with those of Richard Henry Stoddard, whose Horatian ode praises Lincoln in similar terms, but in a very different tone: And this he was, who most unfit (So hard the sense of God to hit!) Did seem to fill his Place. With such a homely face, – Such rustic manners, – speech uncouth, – (That somehow blundered out the Truth!) Untried, untrained to bear The more than kingly Care? Ay! And his genius put to scorn The proudest in the purple born, Whose wisdom never grew To what, untaught, he knew –

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The People, of whom he was one. No gentleman like Washington, – (Whose bones, methinks, make room, To have him in their tomb!) ... Common his mind (it seemed so then), His thoughts the thoughts of other men: Plain were his words, and poor – But now they will endure! ... No hero, this, of Roman mould; Nor like our stately sires of old: Perhaps he was not Great – But he preserved the State!23 Stoddard’s condescension to this untaught, uncouth rustic – no “gentleman” like Washington – is thick with class consciousness, an attitude one might carelessly impute to the Brahmin Lowell. But if Stoddard’s Lincoln is not “of Roman mould” (presumably because he lacked a classical education), Lowell’s is “one of Plutarch’s men” (190): Great captains, with their guns and drums, Disturb our judgment for the hour, But at last silence comes; These all are gone, and, standing like a tower, Our children shall behold his fame. The kindly-earnest, brave, foreseeing man. Sagacious, patient, dreading praise, not blame, New birth of our new soil, the first American. (201–8) Only at this point can Lowell avow that America is indeed a “Promised Land / That flows with Freedom’s honey and milk” (232–3), evoking – almost in passing – the familiar Puritan typology. This typology, however, forms the underlying template of the entire ode: the poem enacts a conversion moment, in Puritan terms, in which the entire nation has shed its egregious sin of slavery and has been reborn. The Union has embraced its new Covenant, which ensures liberty to every individual regardless of race, in return for the obliga-

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tion to live out one’s life in consonance with the ethos of the nation as a whole.24 The remainder of stanza 8 memorializes the war dead, finding consolation in the biblical story: “’Tis not the grapes of Canaan that repay, / But the high faith that failed not by the way” (253–4). Behind these casual allusions stands the weighty mythology detailed by Sacvan Bercovitch: at the beginning of the war, Lowell, as one of “the Jeremiahs of the industrialized Northern states,” had little doubt of God’s divine plan; and now at the happy ending, America has become “the realization of the kingdom of God” (Jeremiad, 173–4). The dead – all too smoothly – are figured as angelic guardians of the nation’s consciousness: I see them muster in a gleaming row, With ever-youthful brows that nobler show; We find in our dull road their shining track; In every nobler mood We feel the orient of their spirit glow, Part of our life’s unalterable good. (261–6) Stanza 9, parallel to stanza 4, then sets this consciousness of nationhood in the context of cosmic time, where even “the deep-bolted stars still shift and range.” If the past, he muses, is littered with “poor ghosts of kings, / Shadows of empire wholly gone to dust,” what shall become of this new nation? Lowell is no doubt mindful not only of mutability in general but also of the thinking that found democracies unstable. He promises no end to change, and his rhetoric in fact rises to a climactic affirmation of “a new imperial race” – the adjective disturbing in context. But his argument is otherwise consistent: “Yea, Manhood hath a wider span / And larger privilege of life than man” (310–11). The individual is subsumed into “Manhood,” and if the individual sacrifice is forgotten, it is compensated in “that high privilege that makes all men peers, / That leap of heart whereby a people rise” – not an empire but “a people,” a people in which all, white and black, are equals (216–17). Stanza 9 dismisses the alternative Southern interpretation of American origins with contempt: Who now shall sneer? Who dare again to say we trace Our lines to a plebeian race? Roundhead and Cavalier! (329–32)

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The Cavalier Theory, with all its class consciousness, has been proved wrong not by syllogism but by Northern victory; its feudal attitudes belong to the European past, a small affair by comparison: “Tell us not of Plantagenets, / Hapsburgs, and Guelfs, whose thin bloods crawl / Down from some victor in a border-brawl!” (339–41). The “sullen ears” of present-day Europe – the Old World that looked on expecting and hoping for a Southern victory – have been set tingling “with vain resentments and more vain regrets.” The Civil War was much larger than a mere family dispute, as it has often been figured. The outcome of the war allows Lowell to pronounce his blessing upon “a rescued Nation” (345). Stanza 11, shifting into ceremonious trochaics, is the summation of the ode: “The strain should close that consecrates our brave” (355), both living and dead: ’Tis no Man we celebrate, By his country’s victories great, A hero half, and half the whim of Fate, But the pith and marrow of a Nation Drawing force from all her men, Highest, humblest, weakest, all, For her time of need, and then Pulsing it again through them, Till the basest can no longer cower, Feeling his soul spring up divinely tall, Touched but in passing by her mantle-hem. (365–75) The empowering of nationhood, like religious faith, is reciprocal. Lowell’s superb biblical allusion is powerful and apt: if the nation draws strength from every one of its people, patriotic fidelity to the nation in turn blesses each individual with strength beyond the one, like the woman who was cured by the touching of Jesus’s garment (Luke 8). The poet bids the celebrations begin – cannons, bells, banners, beacon-fires “across a kindling continent” (389): The nation “is saved, and all have helped to save her” (391). But, looking to the future, the poet has yet one more affirmation: She that lifts up the manhood of the poor, She of the open soul and open door, With room about her hearth for all mankind!

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The fire is dreadful in her eyes no more ... No challenge sends she to the elder world, That looked askance and hated; a light scorn Plays o’er her mouth, as round her mighty knees She calls her children back, and waits the morn Of nobler day, enthroned between her subject seas. (392–405) Lowell’s internationalism proclaims itself as he inserts the nation into a global context. Less interesting than the “I told you so” taunt to Old World sceptics is Lowell’s vision of the “open door.” This unexpected turn at the end of the poem instantly broadens the definition of American nationhood that Lowell has been forming. Having looked to the injustices of the past and having fought a bloody war to correct them, Lowell now looks to the future, with hope for “all mankind.” Immigration patterns had been diluting the largely British Protestant population of the seaboard states since 1830, spurring the growth of xenophobic nativism. Lowell himself lived in Boston, a community that had been favoured by Irish immigrants in the wake of the 1840s Potato Famine – a population alien enough, Catholic enough, to give rise to a hostile political party, the Know-Nothings, a party led by a former president who was successful in several important elections, particularly in Massachusetts in the 1850s. Furthermore, many former Know-Nothings had joined Lowell’s own party, becoming free-soil Republicans. More recently, in 1863, violent and bloody antidraft riots in the Irish ghettos of New York City, partly stirred by opposition Democrats, had threatened the federal government’s ability to recruit manpower for the Northern army.25 In this context, Lowell’s enlightened welcome is particularly refreshing. If Lowell’s lines now bring to mind, anachronistically, Frédéric Bartholdi’s icon of Liberty erected in New York harbour in 1886, the association is more than coincidental. When, in 1883, Emma Lazarus published her now famous poem “The New Colossus” in a fundraising effort, Lowell wrote to the young Jewish poet: “I liked your sonnet about the Statue,” he said, “much better than I like the Statue itself ... [your poem] gives its subject a raison d’être which it wanted before quite as much as it wanted a pedestal” (Lehmann, “Colossal Ode,” 120–2). When Lowell’s ode includes in its closing prayer the belief that “No poorest in thy borders but may now / Lift to the juster skies a man’s enfranchised brow,” his notion of franchise embraces the future immigrant as well as the emancipated slave.

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The final stanza of the ode is indeed a prayer of gratitude for the survival of the nation “bright beyond compare”: What were our lives without thee? What all our lives to save thee? We reck not what we gave thee; We will not dare to doubt thee, But ask whatever else, and we will dare! (422–6)26 Lowell’s poem affirms what he considered to be the consensual cohesiveness of the nation – if only the slave-holding South could be reconciled to the Union victory and the full citizenship of its former slaves. That reconciliation, alas, has yet to take place.

This reading of Lowell’s poem ignores, of course, most of the complaints about its language – that the nineteenth-century high style is bookish, stilted, verbose; that the syntax is sometimes gnarled; that the expression sometimes approaches Arnoldian awfulness (see lines 108–9). And, in advocating the poem, I ignore the problematics of Lowell’s idealism, his underestimation of the persistence of Southern sentiments, his 1865 sense of accomplishment that fails to foresee the negations of Reconstruction, the rise of American imperialism, the unleashing of rampant industrialization and corporationism. But the “Harvard Commemoration Ode” is clearly an important poem, difficult enough, rich enough in its achievement. “To recover the poem for ourselves is,” in Martin Griffin’s words, also to restore “a lost memory of American literature” (Ashes of the Mind, 32). That such restoration is needed is surely a comment on the present state of American Studies. Literary scholars continue to do well with central figures of the current canon, and they have been assiduous in resurrecting any number of more or less worthy forgotten writers. But for those who were once widely read, respected, memorized, and quoted in their day, there seems to be a blind spot. While musicians revalue the likes of MacDowell and Amy Beach, and the art market heats up for the Hudson River painters – artists once thought derivative of European models and thus beneath notice – Lowell and the other “schoolroom poets” remain in their shrouds. As Cary Nelson has advised, scholars need to know who these writers were, and why

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they were powerful enough for subsequent generations to need to assassinate and bury them. The designation “fireside poets” reminds us that these writers were owned and read in literate homes, just as “schoolroom poets” reminds us that these were the writers promoted by educators. Poetry was a keeper of the national conscience, and its cultural work was valued. Edward Everett Hale, we have noticed, predicted that Lowell’s ode contains passages “that boys of generation upon generation will speak in school” – and so they did. Angela Sorby, for one, has recently noted that “schoolroom poetry can never be merely private; it is always intersubjective, involving cultural transmissions or exchanges” (Schoolroom Poets, xiii). There seems to be a revival afoot. Christoph Irmscher has recently advanced a similar case for Longfellow, who “pretty much invented poetry as a public idiom in the United States” and saw the writing of poetry as a civic virtue (3). And, in Songs of Ourselves, Joan Shelley Rubin treats Lowell and the schoolroom poets prominently in her study of poetry’s role in the articulation of American cultural values. Such poetry is not merely private, not merely “overheard.” It is populist and accessible, a public poetry intended to become part of the shared culture of an imagined community. Yet as Michael C. Cohen laments, Lowell’s ode in its time not only set a moral standard that “no temporal government,” certainly not the administrations of Andrew Johnson or Ulysses S. Grant could attain, but it also “commemorates the passing of the kind of public verse” that Lowell and his generation had championed. Such poetry, “which once shaped the social order” would have “a much less important place in the new, postbellum world” (“Whittier,” 279).

5 Confederate Poetics Simms, Timrod, Lanier

The Southern poets of the Civil War period pose formidable difficulties for the contemporary reader. They present themselves as poets in the mainstream of American tradition, yet they repudiated that tradition even as they laid claim to it. They identified with the South, yet bridled under the regionalist label. Their critics seek repeatedly to isolate distinctive Southern features in their writing, yet they resemble their Northern contemporaries in more ways than they differ. Above all, they were committed to the abomination of slavery. Even today, a fine Southern scholar like Coleman Hutchison feels the need for a disclaimer. His book is not an apology for the Confederacy: “I find almost nothing that is admirable in the politics and culture of the Civil War South ... it resounds with both racist and racialist rhetoric and makes the case again and again for an antidemocratic republic” (Apples and Ashes, 3). The relics of the Civil War in popular culture with all the racial animosities attached to them remain at the heart of American society, making such a disclaimer still obligatory. For me, a white male born and raised in a relatively liberal Northern state and now a Canadian by choice, I am doubly an outsider. I am aware of the fabricated and blurred realities behind “lost cause” nostalgia and the concerted efforts of Southern historians to rewrite the Civil War in their own favour.1 It is the only war ever, it seems, whose history has been written by the losers. Images of the slaveholding South are still today supplied to the popular mind by Gone with the Wind, and even in Canada my students express dismay when I call that beloved film an obscenity. In current affairs, I am repulsed by Southern voices daily – the continued policies of racism masquerading as “states’ rights,” the mad Tea Party, the wilful ignorance of science, stul-

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tified religion, public displays of the Stars and Bars.2 I search for hope in saner voices with a Southern drawl. The poets of the Confederacy are nonetheless too important to be left solely in the hands of Southern specialists. An essential part of the American tradition runs through them. Although Poe is sometimes said to have disappeared from the American scene after his death, a discernible line runs from Poe through three generations of Confederate poets before, during, and after the short life of that domain to the agrarian Fugitives and the academic New Criticism that held sway in the middle of the twentieth century. Paradoxically, this line stands not behind the rebellious outsider stream in American poetics but, rather, behind the academic and formalist. It champions the values of aesthetics, prosodic and formal virtues, musicality or “the condition of music,” and affiliations with classical and European traditions. It values aesthetic “treatment” over substantive “content.” With these values I find much to sympathize. The radical Emerson-Whitman stream, on the other hand, has tended to issue in outsider groups, mainly products of the urbanized North with a footloose, bohemian air and an idealistic aesthetic of democratic populism, social critique, and celebration of progress – from the Chicago Renaissance poets to the postwar Beats, the San Francisco group, the Black Mountain poets, the New York school, not to mention the majority of African American, Chicano, and Native American writers. These lines, of course, are discernible only from the distance of broad generalization. Up close, they become tangled. And there is still the expatriate internationalist strain in the looming figures of Pound and Eliot, H.D. and Gertrude Stein. Nonetheless, as John D. Kerkering has argued, within the Southern line stemming from Poe there lies a single “conceptual tradition” with different emphases: “Poe reveals a transcendental concern with romantic aesthetics, Timrod reveals a nationalist concern with Southern Confederate autonomy, and Lanier reveals a racial concern with Anglo-Saxon ethnic difference” (“Poe,” 193). White male Southern poets, it is true, defended slavery, favoured secession, and fought on the wrong side in the bloodiest of American wars. As American citizens, their loyalties were alienated by the fact of slavery, which extended to issues of class, politics, and religion, not to mention literary taste. Poe died before he was forced to commit himself, and he kept his white supremacist views out of sight. Simms, Timrod, and Lanier all supported the Confederacy vigorously, though

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only Lanier saw active combat at Chancellorsville and the Seven Days battle near Richmond. All of them suffered terrible personal consequences from the war. Only Lanier lived long enough to have to come to terms with his scarred citizenship, and in every way his position was more complex than that of his predecessors. William Gilmore Simms, better known as a novelist, was a poet of considerable significance, though his work was generally inaccessible until the 1990 memorial edition. He was a plantation owner with slaves and plenty of leisure to write, so he seems to have adopted a gentleman-poet posture, sometimes publishing anonymously or pseudonymously. Massively prolific, he rarely addressed political topics. Instead, there are romantic meditations on Nature in Wordsworthian or Waldeinsamkeit mode and gallant love lyrics. Most interesting are his narratives on white settlement and local Native American tribes, plus moving postwar pieces on the destruction of his treasured plantation Woodlands during General Sherman’s rampage through South Carolina. His 1866 anthology War Poetry of the South is a monument of Lost Cause mythography.3 Henry Timrod, for his part, was already weakened by tuberculosis when the war broke out, and though he enlisted, he was incapable of military service and even had to relinquish efforts at wartime journalism. His final years, dying in poverty and near starvation, suffering the death of his only son in October 1866, followed by his own a few months later, present a narrative of exceptional pathos. Sidney Lanier enlisted in the Macon Volunteers in July 1861 – letters to his father from the front show exemplary fortitude – he was captured in 1864 and shuttled as a pow through various Northern prisons. During his four months at Point Lookout he suffered severe malnutrition and nearly died from erisypelas as well as contracting the tuberculosis that surfaced in 1868 and eventually killed him. Both Timrod and Lanier died of tb at the age of thirtynine. Both were late developers who died young, so their significant work is scant. Yet their faith in poetry as a means not only of personal distinction but also of nation building and cultural survival in the face of military invasion and devastating social collapse is a faith all three poets held in common. Simms, eldest of the three, made a premature call for secession in his 1850 “Southern Ode.” Although his poetry rarely turned to political topics, he was a man of firm political convictions. He had remained a staunch unionist, in fact, throughout the Nullification Crisis of 1828–30, so much so that his newspaper, the Charleston Daily

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Gazette, lost its readership and failed in 1832 (Hanlon, America’s England, 161–2). In his 1844 address “Americanism in Literature,” he still writes as an American, not as a Southerner: “We have our own national mission to perform – a mission commensurate to the extent of our country” (Simms, Reviews, 9). But by 1850 his loyalties had shifted, and “Southern Ode” is an outright call to arms against the North, the cunning invader “usurping fast our rights and powers” (Simms, Poems, 186) – that is, the rights and powers of the sovereign state of South Carolina. In the ode, he speaks not as a Confederate nationalist – the Confederacy had not yet been imagined – but as a citizen of South Carolina, which Simms regarded (hyperbolically) as the most cultured corner of the globe.4 He portrays the North as a false lover: He proffers love, he prates of ties That still should bind our fates in one, Yet weaves his subtle web of lies To share and leave us all undone. The North, he argues, has played false with Texas, allowing Southern heroes to die at the Alamo fighting for the cause of slavery (which Mexico had outlawed) and then subverting that cause: Their bondsmen we, who wage the fight, Achieve the spoil and win the day; They, the keen knaves, with trick of sleight, The danger o’er, to steal the prey! Consistent with Southern practice, Simms justifies his rejection of Northern and national interests using the model of the American Revolution: They too, had ties, long sacred known, With loyal hearts they loved the true; But, when a tyrant filled the throne, They trampled throne and tyrant too. Boldly, he summons South Carolinians to “Strike, though we stand and strike alone!”:

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’Tis peace no more! for peace is rest, In mutual faith, so well bestow’d, That doubt and danger fill no breast, And lust and envy never goad. In the end, Simms cries out that, without fierce struggle, the only alternative for citizens of his state is to become “utter slaves to knaves at last!” The word “slaves” in this last line of the poem might seem an unconscious irony. More likely it is a taunt. Either way, it articulates the deep unspeakable anxiety of the South that the white man might have to accept even nominal equality with the African American. It also underscores the difficulty of divided citizenship that a narrow state’s rights position inevitably creates. Simms’s call to arms was deflected by the complicated and uneasy 1850 compromise that issued, among other measures, in the hated Fugitive Slave Act. But his poem is a dry run for many of the disputes that led to war a decade later.

Timrod, so-called Poet Laureate of the Confederacy, had no trouble writing as both a Southerner and an American even in 1859. In his essay “The Literature of the South,” he complained, like both Poe and Simms before him, that Southern writers were ignored by the Northern publishing establishment. Yet while he charges Northern critics with anti-Southern bias (Essays, 84), he at the same time censures the insubstantial readership of the South (83), characterizing the educated minority: the Southern gentleman may “know Pope and Horace by heart” but will have “never read a word of Wordsworth or Tennyson” (86).5 Said gentlemen could not be persuaded to read the writing of their own neighbourhood. Timrod argues that being an “American” writer (87) – and here he shifts to unionist language – does not require writing about American subjects. (In this he agrees with Simms.) He mounts a superb defence of literature itself, not “light reading” (91), he insists, but “a better preparative training than all the mathematics in the world, to the legal or political debater” (93–4). The Southern writer, he concludes, must “declare war equally against the slaves of English and Northern opinions” (98). Like Simms, Timrod began as a committed unionist before switching loyalties in his two major poems of 1861. During the Nullification

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Crisis of 1830, Timrod’s father had, like Simms, been a fierce unionist, publishing a poem titled “Sons of the Union!” and declaring that the nullifiers had “abrogated to themselves a power over the consciences of men, which can be exercised only by the being who created them.”6 The junior Timrod’s study of law after 1846 was conducted with one James Louis Petigru (1789–1863), known as “the Union man of South Carolina,”7 who remained during the war “nearly the only unionist left in Charleston (Cisco, Henry Trimrod, 63). Immediately after the war, in April 1865, Timrod worked briefly at the behest of Petigru’s friend, newly appointed federal judge George Bryan – “arguably the one living jurist in South Carolina with ‘unionist’ credentials.”8 Cisco’s biography cites phrases from a crucial 1875 letter by Timrod’s friend Paul Hamilton Hayne declaring that Timrod opposed secession, but it points out that most of these opponents, like Hayne himself, had given up on the federal government only after Lincoln’s election in November 1860.9 According to Hayne’s recollection after his death, however, Timrod “disapproved Secession, and fought (logically) against it!” He “published these patriotic poems – as he understood patriotism – only after Secession had become un fait accompli” (Hubbel, Last Years, 105–6). South Carolina secession was accomplished – precipitously and without dissent – at the state conference in December 1860. When word got out, “the bells of St. Michael’s rang in triumph, cannon roared, palmetto leaves waved in the air, the populace cheered, drums beat, and bales of cotton suspended by ropes swung from house to house.”10 Timrod, in a January 1861 letter to his sister, asks her for “a little blood and thunder, mixed with original allusions to the Palmetto flag,” and hopes to write a poem “worthy of the occasion” (Cisco, Henry Timrod, 63). On 4 February, delegates from the seven lower states convened in Montgomery, Alabama, where in six short days they had “drafted a temporary constitution, turned themselves into a provisional Congress for the new government, elected a provisional president and vice president, and then spent a more leisurely month fashioning a permanent constitution” (McPherson, Battle Cry, 257). As the Congress progressed in Montgomery, Timrod’s “Ode on the Occasion of the Meeting of the Southern Congress” was read in Charleston at a dinner party of distinguished citizens, “who were so delighted with it that they made up a handsome purse of gold and sent it to the author as a substantial evidence of their appreciation” (Thompson, Henry Timrod, 32). The poem appeared in the Charleston Daily Courier on 23 February.

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The result should hearten lovers of poetry: Timrod’s ode was a public event. Its “cultural work” took effect immediately. Notes in the Collected Poems detail multiple reprintings, including one in Boston in the Living Age for 30 March 1861. Meanwhile, the Montgomery Congress wrapped up its work, the seven states of the deep South attempting to project a rational, moderate image that would not alienate the undecided border states. “Ethnogenesis,” as the ode came to be called, should be read in this light. It is the work of a Southerner who had not decided until the last minute where his political loyalties lay. In this Timrod resembled Robert E. Lee himself, or Alexander Stephens, who voted Nay at the Georgia Secession Convention in 1861 but was nonetheless named vice-president of the Confederacy. Timrod’s argument is in no way tentative; but it is moderated both by the need to appeal to the wavering states of the upper South and by Timrod’s own peace-loving temperament. As for slavery, Timrod himself was too poor to own a slave, and his ode suppresses any reference to the institution. Louis D. Rubin writes that he does not know “just how enthusiastic Henry Timrod was about slavery” (“Poet Laureate,” 207), yet Timrod, like most Southerners, was persuaded that slavery was an essential part of God’s sacred design. In “Literature of the South,” he frames it in humanitarian language: “there are truths underlying the relations of master and slave; there are meanings beneath that union of the utmost freedom with a healthy conservatism ... of which poetry may avail herself not only to vindicate our system to the eyes of the world, but to convey lessons which shall take root in the hearts of all mankind.”11 Slavery, divinely appointed, should thus not only not be curtailed in the South but, rather, spread throughout the world. Thus, in good American tradition, “Ethnogenesis” holds up this pious, slaveholding, less-than-democratic republic as a light to all nations. “Ethnogenesis” might be imagined as Timrod’s progress poem, his “Rising Glory of the Confederacy,” since it opens with the dawning of a new nation and closes with optimistic prophecy of the future. But Timrod’s Confederacy has no past: his ode is argumentative in mode, and highly selective. Slavery is not mentioned, nor are the bitter congressional debates over its status, nor the Southern refusal to accept the lawful (and presumably divinely sanctioned) results of the 1860 election. Timrod’s history is limited to one line on the American Revolution (the South Carolina skirmishes at Moultrie and Eutaw). But the success of “Ethnogenesis” was a significant contribution to the for-

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mation of a Confederate nationalism. Its timing was perfect, and it helped “build a consensus at home, to secure a foundation of popular support for a new nation and what quickly became a costly war.” In so doing it contributed to the “self-conscious cultivation of special features of southern national character” that would “serve as justifications for political independence” (Faust, Creation of Confederate Nationalism, 7 and 10). “Ethnogenesis” locates these features in two areas: Southern religion and Southern social economy. Timrod demonizes the religion of the North, where the devil has “set up his evil throne, and warred with God” (line 35). Timrod’s religion looks backward to the comfortable literalism of popular belief, untroubled by liberal Unitarian or Emersonian currents from the North or higher criticism from Germany. The oppositional literalism and creationism of the twentieth-century Bible Belt appear in their formative stage, heated by countless sermons defending slavery with biblical infallibility, while under attack by progressive theologies. That the white race hold the black race in slavery is not merely permitted, it is a godly obligation. Simms, two decades older, held more relaxed, post-Enlightenment views, rejecting the Old Testament as a religious authority altogether and judging the New, “however true and good,” still “a wonderfully corrupt narrative” (Poems, 431). How much of this shift towards literalist faith resulted from pro-slavery propaganda I cannot say, but Timrod instead counts on what every South Carolinian – and every good Christian in those border states – knows to be true. There is no obscurity. The Bible in both its Testaments affirms slavery, while the North in its arrogance clamours for “creeds that dare to preach / What Christ and Paul refrained to teach” (lines 61–2). Corrupted by the “vile fanatic passion” of abolitionism and the “vague philosophies” of Unitarianism and transcendentalism, the North advances a religion “taking every mortal form / But that a pure and Christian faith makes warm” (69–71). Like the New England Puritans – but truer to the meaning of the literal Word – Timrod pictures the Confederacy following the lead of Moses through the wilderness and across “a redder sea” of coming bloodshed (83) to the holy land of the future. Timrod’s other argument is economic. Like Lanier after him, he saw Northern mercantilism as viciously competitive and dishonourable. Northern commerce, he declares, is guilty of “schemes that leave the neighboring poor / To starve and shiver at the schemer’s door,” while the South, in “scorn of sordid gain,” has justice on its side:

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Unblemished honor, truth without a stain, Faith, justice, reverence, charitable wealth, And, for the poor and humble, laws which give, Not the mean right to buy the right to live, But life, and home, and health! Most startling of all, Timrod prophecies a new Confederacy that will not only sustain itself in nature’s plenitude but will also be a blessing to the world at large: For, to give labor to the poor, The whole sad planet o’er, And save from want and crime the humblest door, Is one among the many ends for which God makes us great and rich! Christopher Hanlon, discussing Timrod’s transnational views and the interdependency of New and Old World economic interests, plausibly reads Timrod’s phrase “to give labor to the poor” as proposing extension of benevolent slavery abroad, and the Gulf Stream passage as a prospect of re-establishing the transatlantic slave trade and providing a “conduit for the South’s exportation of the slave system to distant lands” (160).12 In one way, this economic relationship parallels the general Southern cultural feeling for continuities between English and American literature and culture. In another, it foreshadows the staunch anti-capitalism that long figured in Southern agrarian sentiment. But the immediate concern of “Ethnogenesis” is practical, not hypothetical. Timrod, from the arguments available for the defence of slavery, rests his case on the one that looks to the welfare of the labourer. The largesse of King Cotton, “the snow of southern summers” as he tropes it, will keep the factories humming. By implication furthermore, the implied wage-slavery argument spotlights the misery of factories circa 1860 in both the Northern states and in England – brutal hours, paltry wages, insecure employment, occupational accident and disease, unregulated child labour. The injustices of slave labour may appear no more tolerable by comparison, but less exceptional. It seems suited to Timrod’s temperament that he would emphasize the one point that seems arguably humane. Still, his ode rests on the two issues of religious truth and economic regulation that continue in the twenty-first century to polarize the nation.

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Timrod followed the success of “Ethnogenesis” with a second irregular ode, “The Cotton Boll.” This poem is neither argumentative nor directly related to the Civil War that was well under way as it was being written in August 1861 (Cisco, Henry Timrod, 69) – or it would have been, had Timrod stopped at line 131 with his “dream of universal peace.” Apart from its concluding passage on the war, the poem is a meditation on the idyllic culture of the antebellum South, taking the single image of the cotton boll as its focus in the manner of Shelley’s skylark or Keats’s urn. The interconnected cotton fibres depict the interconnectedness of Southern culture internally, and the South with the world beyond; to Hanlon, “the cotton boll signifies a promise of geopolitical union, since its “gossamer bands / Unite, like love, the sea-divided lands” (America’s England, 154) This “staggering blend of complacency and chauvinism” (Plasa, “Tangled Skeins,” 3) thus qualifies both as a “greater romantic lyric” and as a document in the creation of the “lost cause myth” of the Arcadian plantation of genteel leisure, validating the aristocratic privilege of the land-owning gentry. Likewise, Sidney Lanier once exploded in frustration from his Georgia retreat: “I am convinced that God meant this land for people to rest in, not to work in. If we were so constituted that life could be an idyll, then this were the place of places for it” (9:191). Coleman Hutchison argues that Timrod’s choice of the irregular ode in these poems “makes a quiet claim about the intellectual capacity and refined tastes of the Confederate people.” Among other things, he notes, “they know their literary traditions” (Apples and Ashes, 13). This claim must be qualified by the paucity of readership and publication in the Southern states that Timrod himself had decried in “Literature of the South.” But Hutchison’s point does underscore the sophistication of Timrod’s immediate circle – people like Hayne and Simms – as well as his ideal of a literature rooted in the traditions of England. “The Cotton Boll” also invokes this conservative ideal through its Miltonic syntax (the first sentence encompasses twentyeight lines, the second nineteen) and its extended similes (see lines 132–45). Timrod’s aesthetic achievement here is even greater than in the lapidary “Ethnogenesis.” That complicated opening sentence encapsulates the King Cotton argument not through statement but through a poetic picture. The white male speaker reclines at his ease, while the “dusky fingers” and “boastful smiles” of well contented black slaves display the prize: the intermeshed white fibres of cotton. These synecdochic “dusky fingers,” significantly, remain the only

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depiction of slavery in the poetry of either Timrod or Lanier. The Confederacy, as Hutchison puts it, should thus “become an independent nation” because it was the source of roughly two-thirds of the world’s cotton. This implication of Timrod’s leisurely meditation aligns it with both the prevailing “agro-literary appeals” of Confederation literature and the classically established pastoral mode. It assures foreign readers that the Confederacy is a source of agricultural plenty, and it comforts native readers by yoking “desires for an autonomous southern literature” to “the region’s dominant economic interests” (Hutchison, Apples and Ashes, 9). The new-born Confederacy, of course, expected England to intervene in the conflict in order to protect the supply of cotton to its mills. Many in England, however, were already squeamish about American slave labour; more importantly, the British Empire had alternative sources of supply. The loss of production in the South quickly proved a godsend to overseas competitors, many of which, like India, were English colonies. As early as 25 February 1862, Timrod wrote to his sister in “despair of European intervention”: “We have over-rated the power of King Cotton. When King Wheat gets upon his throne, he is just as strong” (Poems, 184). “Ethnogenesis” had already made room for “long spears of golden grain” (line 17), but this particular miscalculation by Confederate politicians led to instability in the cotton market for decades to come.

“Trade, trade, trade, sang Lanier” – or so sang another poetical pow, Ezra Pound, remembering Lanier eighty years after his release from the Point Lookout. Pound, at the Prisoners’ Detention Centre in Pisa, 1945, had few books with him, so his citation in Canto 77 was a feat of memory.13 Few of Pound’s admirers, I think, suspect him of being an admirer of Sidney Lanier, but the connections are intriguing: besides their faith in poetry as a means of articulating an economics to counter the Hamiltonian capitalism of Northern industry, there are common interests in pure music (both were composers), in relations between music and poetry, in the niceties of versification, and in the larger functions of poetry within civil society. Much has been made of Lanier as a musician-poet, but far less of his political convictions. Lanier, in his autodidactic way, was forging a version of the artistmusician-poet-centred, just and enlightened culture that anticipated Pound’s equally idiosyncratic vision more than half a century later.

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Lanier carried on his struggle against “Trade” (always capitalized) throughout his career. Critics rightly complain that he never clarifies what he means by “Trade”: but it is clearly a code word for Southern hostility to the North. In the words of Edmund Wilson, if Southerners were “rescuing a hallowed bit of gallantry, aristocratic freedom, fine manners and luxurious living from the materialism and vulgarity of the mercantile Northern society ... you will find this ideal at its most poetic, its most fervid and its most pure-hearted in the work of Sidney Lanier.”14 Trade “is always his villain, and though we may sympathize with his scorn for commercial ideals, we may find him rather tiresome about it” (Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 460). As Rubin puts it, Lanier’s protest “remains abstract and unspecific, disembodied and, because without any grounding in the actual conditions of human needs and possibilities, sentimental” (“Lanier,” 122). The Southern economy depended on trade as much as the Northern – the cotton trade, as Lanier well knew – but in Lanier’s usage the word always implies Yankee shiftiness, rootlessness, price gouging, bankers’ profiteering, and, above all, a lack of “class.” Lanier’s critique of Trade is crude sectionalism, but there is enough truth in it to make it prophetic. The “wage slave” defence of the Southern institution, stripped of its racism, remains a valid critique of developing industrialism, labour, and compensation. Lanier’s diatribes against Trade, if stripped of their racism and sectionalism and class elitism, as Lanier struggled and failed to do, would remain a healthy humanist counterforce against postbellum rampant capitalism. Later generations of Southern writers struggled and failed with similar difficulties, and Lanier’s failure is instructive in his time and place. Lanier’s career was a troubled balancing act between his Confederate loyalties and his need to please a Northern readership. If Timrod and Simms had no trouble before the war writing unapologetically as Americans, Lanier had no such luxury. Unlike Timrod, Lanier had no family history of unionist sentiment behind him. He came of age in the most divisive decade of American history in small-town Georgia and went off to the Civil War when he was nineteen. He suffered political and personal catastrophe. Afterwards, appalled by Reconstruction, he witnessed “such a mass of crime and hatred and bitterness as even the four terrible years of war failed to bring about.”15 He was in many Northern eyes guilty of treasonous rebellion, and Southern readership, already small, had been made even smaller. He himself

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could express nostalgia for the antebellum South and, almost in the same breath, refer to himself as “born on the wrong side of the MasonDixon line” (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 5:liii–liv). This balancing act is a major part of Lanier’s fascination. White Southerners, traumatized by defeat, their world in rubble, were waging peace with all the passions of war. “They simply could not abide the presence of assertive blacks wearing uniforms and carrying guns”; they found intolerable “demonstrations by blacks of their public identities as citizens,” and their white rage led to violence against the institutions, homes, and bodies of blacks as well as of their white allies. In the words of David Blight, “the tragedy of Reconstruction is rooted in this American paradox: the imperative of healing and the imperative of justice could not, ultimately, cohabit the same house.”16 By this measure, Lanier’s conciliationist position was in constant jeopardy. Passionate in his enthusiasms, he threw himself with intensity into various grandiose, often uncompleted projects; yet, as a Southerner, he is suspected of hiding part of his true intention. Lanier’s attitudes towards the South, contradictory at any one time, were subject to change over the long period from Appomattox to his death in 1881. This might look indecisive, but, more generously, I think it reflects Lanier’s wrestling with great difficulties – personal, artistic, and political. Allowed by his father to attend a conservative Presbyterian school, Oglethorpe University in Midway, Georgia (1857– 60), Lanier developed there his lifelong piety plus a love of scholarship, of philosophy, of literature, and even of science. Besides the obligatory Latin, he acquired some facility with the French and German languages, and read whatever of the German romantics he could find – Richter, Novalis, Heine, Schiller, Lessing, Schelling, Tieck, Goethe. In his final year, he developed a reverence for science (not often found in Southern writers) through contact with a valued mentor, James Woodrow.17 He also found time to practise his flute, which he taught himself well enough to pursue as a professional career. In antebellum Georgia, says Lanier’s 1933 biographer Aubrey Harrison Starke, “it was part of the education of a gentleman to be able to perform upon a musical instrument, but the ability, like the ability to produce what passed for literature, was meant to be regarded as only incidental” (Sydney Lanier, 14–15). Timrod too could play the flute (Clare, Harp of the South, 50). Lanier’s gifts were exceptional, however; he even took his flute to war and entertained comrades with it in camps and Union

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prisons. With virtually no training, he composed pieces for himself – pieces that require considerable virtuosity but no more than rudimentary harmony and certainly no counterpoint.18 The many enraptured descriptions of his flute tone and technique might be dismissed as exaggeration but for the testimony of some of the best musicians in America at the time. When Lanier in 1873 played for Asger Hamerik, a Danish protégé of Berlioz and a composer of substance, Hamerik hired him on the spot as principal flute in an orchestra he was forming in Baltimore, despite the fact that Lanier did not even know the value of a dotted note.19 Hamerik’s judgment was corroborated by two leading New York musicians, Leopold Damrosch and Theodore Thomas. Lanier served in Hamerik’s orchestra – which later became the Baltimore Symphony – from 1873 to 1880, performing the standard repertoire of the time. Similar tales of extraordinary talent and nonexistent instruction are not uncommon in American music before the mid-twentieth century. Lanier’s music gave him a pulpit from which he could preach the virtues of humanistic high culture, an appreciation of the arts for their own sake, and a critique of the arid utilitarianism of so much in American culture. He did preach, and his aesthetic always had a moral component, but because it did, he also never lost sight of the function of art within larger society. Critical appreciation of Lanier as a poet has remained almost entirely within the purview of Southern critics. Like Timrod, however, Lanier had aesthetic ambitions that reached beyond the South. Although he wrote as a regionalist in his breakthrough poem, “Corn,” he wrote no partisan poems about the Civil War itself, with the important early exception of “The Tournament.” As his editor Garland Greever noted, he could be sharply critical of both South and North, so that no “single vehement pronouncement” can be said to represent his “whole view” (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 5:liii). On Reconstruction, he once cited a moderate article in the New York Round Table (7 July 1866) as the “most sensible discussion” he had seen (Starke, Sydney Lanier, 77). It urges a middle course between the punitive extreme of Thaddeus Stevens and the exculpation of Andrew Johnson. “The people of the South are ... bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh,” it argues. As for slavery, the North must not be pharisaical: it was “as much our sin as theirs. Our federal Constitution protected it, our two great political organizations supported it, and New York City, by its vast majorities, largely sympathized with it.”20 At his best, Lanier affirmed virtues of forgiveness and reconciliation: “With great calm-

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ness,” he wrote, the home-coming Southern soldier “cast behind him the memory of all wrongs and hardships and reckless habits of war, embraced his wife, patched his cabin-roof, and proceeded to mingle the dust of recent battles yet lingering on his feet with the peaceful clods of his corn-field” (5:303). But, as David W. Blight repeatedly reminds us, this ideal of “reconciliation” between South and North was accompanied by a tacit proviso that social equality for white and black populations would never be accepted. Reconciliation and racial equality were – and still seem to be – irreconcilable ideals (Blight, Race and Reunion, chap. 1). Lanier’s essay “Retrospects and Prospects” (1867) weighs with grand gestures the progressive and reactionary forces in history, and sees in the emancipation of Southern slaves evidence of a kind of spiritual meliorism that he calls “etherialization,” along with parallel movements in Europe, Russia, and South America (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 5:301).21 Earlier Southern scholars depicted Lanier as a man who ever felt kindliness “toward the Negro as an individual” – and “from the Negro he had devotion” (5:liii). In his 1880 essay “The New South,” he even looked forward to “the obliteration of the color line,” which he said could already be quantified “if we knew the actual proportion of the new small farms held by negroes ... There is, in Georgia at least, a strong class of small farmers which powerfully tends to obliterate color from politics” (5:346–7) – a state of peaceful co-existence without equality. Starke praises him as one of the first “to write in Negro dialect, and to record it correctly,” revealing one whose human sympathies art had enlarged (Sydney Lanier, 184–5). Yet one of his dialect poems, an uncollected piece called “Civil Rights,” takes a very different tone. Charles Anderson notes in the centennial edition that Lanier wrote it to protest Senator Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill, “which was considered in the South as tantamount to conferring social equality on the negro, and was the occasion of riotings” (1:341). Starke praises Lanier’s poem as an “unquestionably sincere” expression of the frustration of poor whites at “an attempt on the part of Congress to force blacks and whites to live together on a basis of social equality” (Sydney Lanier, 185–6). Sumner’s bill was not only an insult to the white supremacist habits and assumptions of Southerners (and many Northerners as well); it elevated the underlying terror of racial competition, most threatening to poor whites, and a fear that Southern agriculture could not support both populations. Apart from these dialect pieces – which adopt the satirical voice of Lowell’s abo-

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litionist Biglow Papers – Lanier makes no reference at all to racial issues in his poetry, and these dialect pieces he wanted to be kept anonymous.22 This is an excerpt: “But now, as I was sayin, when I jest had come to see My way was clear to like’em, and to treat’em brotherlee; “When every nigger’s son is schooled (I payin’ of the tax, For not a mother’s son of ’em has more than’s on their backs), “And when they crowds and stinks me off from getting’ to the polls, When Congress grinds their grain, as ’twere, ’thout takin’ of no tolls; “And when I stand aside and waits, and hopes that things will mend, Here comes this Civil Rights and says, this fuss shan’t have no end! Hit seems as ef, just when the water’s roughest here of late, Then Yanks had throwed us overboard from off the Ship of State. “Yes, throwed us both – both black and white – into the ragin’ sea, Without but one rotten plank; while they, all safe and free, “Stands on the decks, and rams their hands into their pocket tight, And laughs to see us both must drown, or live by makin’ fight! “For, Jeems, what in this mortal world of treuble kin be done? They’ve made this Southern plank so rotten, it will not bear but one!” .... “I tell you, Jeems, I kin not help it – maybe it’s a sin; By God! ef they don’t fling a rope, I’ll push the nigger in!” Starke is correct in stating, only half apologetically, that such violent expression was exceptional, and Lanier never reprinted the piece. Yet it stands as the extreme of Lanier’s white Southern voice, and the edi-

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tors’ efforts to defend it only make matters worse. Perhaps fortunately, Starke is unaware of another alarming dialect poem, “Them Ku Klux,” first collected in the 1945 centennial edition.23 Starke also has high praise for Lanier’s “southern chivalry”: for him it was “no hollow phrase” (Sydney Lanier, 122). No it wasn’t. Lanier set “Chivalry” in contradistinction to “Trade” and saw the war between North and South as a war between the two. As he wrote in a famous letter to Hayne: “Trade, Trade, Trade: pah, are we not all sick? A man cannot walk down a green alley of woods, in these days, without unawares getting his mouth and nose and eyes covered with some web or other that Trade has stretched across, to catch some gain or other ... You remember that Trade killed Chivalry and now sits in the throne. It was Trade that hatched the Jacquerie in the 14th Century: it was Trade that hatched John Brown, and broke the saintly heart of Robert Lee” (Centennial Edition, 8:224). He was not alone, of course; as Rubin notes, “the notion that the chivalrous South was threatened by the materialistic, money-worshiping North was a commonly held view before the war” (“Sidney Lanier,” 123). The term “chivalry,” however honourable in common usage, was also rife with assumptions about Old World aristocracy, social hierarchy, gender relations, and racial subordination, and thus it persisted both in lost cause rhetoric and in the Southern agrarianism of Allen Tate. Lanier’s first attack against Trade appeared in his “Confederate Memorial Address” (1870),24 though the theme had already surfaced in his juvenile novel Tiger Lilies (1867). At their best, Lanier’s diatribes point up the abuses of Northern industrialism, with its greed, its ruthless competitiveness, its financial corruption of the democratic system, its ruthless exploitation of workers and natural resources – the list is familiar, both then and now. There was systemic tension between Southern planters – and planters of all regions – and Northern bankers, the same tension later dramatized in Wisconsin author Hamlin Garland’s iconic story “Under the Lion’s Paw” (1891). Lanier saw the Civil War almost exclusively in these terms, and in this he was followed by a whole generation of Southern lost cause historians, who sought to minimize the provocation of slavery. But while we can allow some justice to Lanier’s critique of “Trade,” his elevation of “Chivalry” is deeply troubling. In chapter 46 of Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain diagnoses, “the Sir Walter disease”: “the character of the Southerner – or Southron, according to Sir Walter’s starchier way of phrasing it – would be whol-

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ly modern ... For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter. Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character as it existed before the war that he is in great measure responsible for the war” (304). Southern writers framed chivalry in high-minded ethical terms. As Lanier put it, chivalry, “which every man has in some degree in his heart,” “does not depend upon birth but ... is a revelation of God, of justice, of fair dealing, of scorn of mean advantages” (Centennial Edition, 9:122). But according to feudal custom, whether in the mind of Sir John of Gaunt or Sir Walter Scott, to be “in trade” is simply declassé. As Starke admits, “Lanier had much of the professional man’s scorn for those in trade” (his father was a lawyer), and “the southerner’s traditional but inconsistent contempt for certain ways of acquiring money” (Sidney Lanier, 202). (Among these, I would note, are vocations in the arts.) Southern thinkers “as self-proclaimed heirs to medieval chivalry,” in Genovese’s words, “understood true nobility to rest upon personal virtue” (Southern Tradition, 49). But chivalry has less to do with ethos than with class. And if with class, then slavery.25 Lanier could hardly have missed this application since the words “feudal,” along with “oriental,” were standard terms of reproach against slave-holders in abolitionist writing. Although Lanier is one of the few Southern writers who did not write about the plantation system (MacKethan, Dream of Arcady, 20), he celebrated its hierarchical vision, which layers society from the plantation owners at the top to slaves at the bottom, with various white classes uncomfortably sandwiched in between – those “in trade” just a notch higher, perhaps, than the “poor white.” His chivalry also aligns with his medievalism, and since America had no Middle Ages, ties its values to the Old World and, particularly, to the racially pure world of Anglo-Saxonism.26 This is a Southern society in which medieval tournaments were reenacted in costume before and even during the Civil War: “Men on horseback, armed with hickory lances, rode past posts from which rings were suspended, collecting the rings on the end of their lances for the glory of their ladies.”27 Lanier’s early poem “The Tournament” describes such an event, and his projected “verse novel” on the fourteenth-century French uprising known as the Jacquerie – eventually abandoned – was to have been a celebration of chivalry and perhaps a larger allegory of the war. The fragmentary state of the poem is for-

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tunate for Lanier’s reputation for, had he completed it, the American canon might have received the unthinkable – a poem in which aristocracy is glorified and the people are the enemy.28 The model for Lanier’s poem was Tennyson’s Idylls, but the germ came from the medieval chronicler Froissart, who wrote from the viewpoint of the aristocracy. The Jacquerie – so called because “Jacques” was a contemptuous name for peasant – arose in 1358 because of severe hardships among the lower classes during the Hundred Years’ War. Though the French nobility, disgraced by losses to the English, were internally divided, the peasant revolt was quickly crushed after its leader was lured by an offer of truce and unchivalrously beheaded. Lanier’s copy of Froissart survives, heavily marked,29 and we are told by his wife that he had “pored over [it] in his early childhood” (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 1:xxxix). He went on to study medieval literature in considerable depth and never gave up his fixation on chivalry, producing later in life a series of medieval texts for boys – on Froissart, Malory, the Welsh Mabinogion, the ballads of Bishop Percy.30 He began work on “The Jacquerie” late in 1868. As he wrote to his brother, “The subject is so beautiful and has taken so entire hold of me that I can scarcely think of aught else. But, unfortunately, I have only the very meagre account of the business given in Froissart, and am terribly crippled in my historical allusions by this fact” (Centennial Edition, 7:397 and 1:374). Six years later, in November 1874, he wrote: “It was the first time that the big hungers of The People appear in our modern civilization; and it is full of significance. The peasants learned – from the merchant-potentates of Flanders – that a man who could not be a lord by birth might be one by wealth: and so Trade arose and overthrew Chivalry. Trade has now had possession of the civilized world for four hundred years: it controls all things; it interprets the Bible, it guides our national and almost our individual life with its maxims; and its oppressions upon the moral existence of man have come to be ten thousand times more grievous than the worst tyrannies of the Feudal system ever were. Thus in the reversals of time it is now the gentleman who must arise and overthrow Trade” (9:121–2). In his researches, however, Lanier discovered the towering Histoire de France by Jules Michelet, a post-Enlightenment republican and ardent supporter of the people. Michelet stood Froissart on his head, yet Lanier desperately needed him for information, and he wrote in December 1872 that Michelet “managed to advance very largely my conception of the Jacquerie” (8:287–8). Charles Anderson (1:xl)

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opines that Michelet is closer to Lanier’s final conception of the poem than Froissart, but Lanier’s letter clearly shows his persistent disgust that “a man who could not be a lord by birth might be one by wealth.” Trade – that is, the middle class – “has now had possession of the civilized world for four hundred years.” “It controls all things,” it even “interprets the Bible.” The man of trade is clearly the New Englander incarnate. Lanier dropped work on the poem after 1874, and it seems to me likely that Michelet’s proletarian sympathies clouded the issues for Lanier to the point that he simply lost his youthful impetus. When he turned to edit his Boy’s Froissart in 1879, he curiously makes no reference to the Jacquerie in his introduction, nor does he annotate the chapter itself.31 Lanier spent much of his career attempting to fuse his passions for poetry and music. Both are subdivisions of the same art of sound, two species of one genus, and both are morally uplifting. In this, Lanier drew his sights partly from Poe. He was not uncritical; Poe simply did not know enough, he thought (Starke, Sydney Lanier, 272, 440). And faithful to his religion, Lanier rejected Poe’s adoption by the budding art for art’s sake movement.32 “Art is a means; it is not an end,” he insisted. “Art exists that man may accomplish his destiny” (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 1:312). At the same time, however, he held that “all ideas may be abolished out of a poem without disturbing its effect upon the ear as verse” (2:21), thereby opening the way to movements from poésie pure to sound poetry. In The Science of English Verse (1880) he conflates his youthful medievalism with his later pursuit of the Anglo-Saxon language into a faith that the native rhythms of AngloSaxon give him a key to the true music of poetry. A great deal can be made of this. Jason R. Rudy, following the lead of Reginald Horsman, concludes that Lanier’s interest in Anglo-Saxon was racially driven and resulted from a desire to establish Americans as “a chosen people with an impeccable ancestry.”33 Caution is needed: Anglo-Saxon has its own attractions, and advanced literary study at the time assumed a mastery of philology. It is too easy to draw a straight line from a study of Anglo-Saxon poetry to a belief in white Anglo-Saxon supremacy. But “Anglo-Saxon” was (and still is) a freighted word in racist rhetoric, allied to future expressions of the “white man’s burden,” and its appeal as such to Lanier is undeniable. Lanier’s theory was drawn in part from Poe, dressed up with Lanier’s superior musical understanding. If he ostentatiously rejects one of Poe’s errors in a passage of his Science of English Verse, he silent-

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ly adopts another (Allen, American Prosody, 280). These origins are manifest in Lanier’s 1875 review of a volume by his friend Paul Hamilton Hayne, in which he singles out Hayne’s “Fire Pictures” as “quite the best of this collection,” praising it as worthy to be placed beside “The Bells.” Indeed, Poe might have ghost written Hayne’s “Fire Pictures.” Here is a sample: O! the fire! How it changes, Changes, ranges Through all phases fancy-wrought, Changes like a wizard thought; See Vesuvian lavas rushing ’Twixt the rocks! the ground asunder Shivers at the earthquake’s thunder; And the glare of Hell is flushing Startled hill-top, quaking town; Temples, statues, towers go down, While beyond that lava flood, Dark-red like blood, I behold the children fleeting Clasped by many a frenzied hand; What a flight, and what a meeting, On the ruined strand!34 “It is a poem to be read aloud, a true recitativo” Lanier gushes: “The energy of its movements, the melody of its metres, the changes of its rhythm, the variety of its fancies, the artistic advance to its climax, particularly the management of its close, where at one and the same time, by the devices of onomatopoeia and of rhythmical imitation, are doubly interpreted the sob of a man and the flicker of a flame so perfectly that sob, flicker, word, rhythm, each appears to represent the other, and to be used convertibly with the other in such will-o’-wisp transfigurations as quite vanish in mere description” (Centennial Edition, 5:327–8). Lanier’s tone here reveals not just his devotion to Poe but to the musical aesthetic standing behind “The Bells.” This aesthetic also informs Lanier’s two musical-economic odes, “Corn” and “The Symphony.” These two odes are among the most bizarre exhibits in the American archive. In both, he bids to elevate and moralize prosaic economic topics through the magical power of music. “Corn” is a mellifluous,

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indeed “mystical,”35 summons to the planters of the South to abandon King Cotton in favour of more diversified crops – in Starke’s words, “a little treatise in agricultural economy, far-sighted and sound” (4). “The Symphony” is a broader appeal to the entire nation to abandon “Trade” and devote itself to an agricultural civilization modelled on “Southern Chivalry,” cast in the form of a four-movement poetical symphony. The North may have won the war, but Lanier’s South bids to win the peace, or at least to infuse Southern virtues into the nation as a whole. While the hostile binary of Northern Trade versus Southern Virtue is absolute, he presses his equation of poetry and music as two divisions of the art of sound. His poem, he wrote, attempts not “to hear with eyes” but “to see with ears” (Starke, Sydney Lanier, 206). Lanier’s “Corn” has never been understood, I think, for what it is, a Civil War re-enactment fantasy that predicates the continued struggle between trade and chivalry and, tentatively, the emergence of a New South. The poem is an uneasy mélange of agro-economic counsel, rapture with Nature, surfeited melodiousness, near-prurient eroticism – all cast as an allegory of Southern chivalry standing in defence of Southern “culture.” That is the word Lanier puns in line 42, yoking together Southern high culture with agriculture. The poem divides into five sections. In lines 1–38, the most remarkable feature is not the conventional communion with Nature but the florid musicalmetaphorical language. Rhyme-saturated tercets (not couplets) are thick with assonance and alliteration. Nature is eroticized, almost fetishized – leaves are like “women’s hands,” boughs embrace with “mighty tenderness,” “The copse-depths into little noises start / Anon like talk ’twixt lips not far apart” – so that the speaker becomes masculine and aroused. When he encounters the cash crop, however, in the second section (lines 39–79), the vegetation becomes male and military, an “army of the corn” where “stately corn-ranks rise.” The speaker notices one particular stalk, taller than the rest and out of line with them, waving “his blades” in “the battling hedge,” and he apostrophizes: “Thou lustrous stalk, that ne’er mayst walk nor talk, / Still shalt thou type the poetsoul sublime.” Lanier’s allegory creaks with absurdity: Did we have to be reminded that corn can neither walk nor talk? As Rubin remarks, personification as a “poet-soul sublime” is all “a bit much to make even of a very Wordsworthian stalk of corn” (“Sidney Lanier,” 119). Yet Lanier presses on. This gallant, if fibrous, vaguely phallic poet-soul sublime plunges into battle, “Teaching the yeoman selfless chivalry /

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That moves in gentle curves of courtesy.” In a desperate reach for the sublime, Lanier’s corn stalk stands like a brave Confederate soldier, “smiling in [his] future grave,” “Thine epitaph writ fair in fruitage eloquent, / Thyself thy monument.” Lanier’s metaphysical wit fails to convince. In the following two sections, Lanier takes comfort for the death of the gallant corn stalk because such sacrifice enables the rebirth of “The New South,” as he was to envision it six years later in an essay by that title. First the poet plays his role, building his “hardihood” From antique ashes, whose departed flame In thee has finer life and longer fame; From wounds and balms, From storms and calms, From potsherds and dry bones And ruin-stones. Here the “antique ashes” are both the ashes of Old South plantations and the poetry of chivalric tradition. The poet fuses cyclical green with an eternal Shelleyan “white radiance”: “So dost thou marry new and old / Into a one of higher mould; / So dost thou reconcile the hot and cold.” The poet’s imagination merges old and new into something greater, a greater poetry, as the Old South gives way to the New. But not before Lanier inserts a warning parable against trade – in the shape of Northern banks and the old dependency upon cotton. Lanier’s parable had ramifications beyond the state of Georgia. The economic restructuring of the cotton market was worldwide, and it had spurred a major reconfiguration of other sectors of capitalist economies on a global scale. With the collapse of slavery, cotton production suddenly became economical in India, Egypt, Brazil, and elsewhere. “In 1865, it had become clear that a novel combination of land, labor, capital, and state power had to be found to secure the fabulous amounts of inexpensive cotton needed by cotton manufacturers the world over.”36 “To set up as cotton growers, peasants and farmers from Berar in India to the Nile Valley in Egypt borrowed from moneylenders financed by European banks” (Beatty, Age of Betrayal, 78). In the American South, cotton planters were desperate both to regain their former prosperity and to save their acres from falling into black hands; they likewise turned to the banks, who would loan to white borrowers more readily than to black. In fact, “to keep blacks from

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owning land white men abandoned economic rationality – whites would accept a lower price from a white buyer rather than sell at a better one to a black” (79). But regardless of race, the return on crops rarely covered the cost of debt, and the cycle of futility commonly ended with eviction. These problems were exacerbated by the Great Depression of 1873, when in September of that year Jay Cooke & Co. of New York collapsed, triggering widespread bank failures, factory layoffs, and an economic instability “that lasted, with intermittent periods of recovery, nearly to the end of the century.” Eric Foner calls it “the first great crisis of industrial capitalism” (Reconstruction, 512). Lanier felt his poem was important, but it tackles a bigger subject than he realized. The Old South of King Cotton is played out. But before giving up his land and his “coquette Cotton,” the hapless farmer tries the banks: He sailed in borrowed ships of usury – A foolish Jason on a treacherous sea, Seeking the Fleece, and finding misery ... He staked his life on games of Buy-and-Sell, And turned each field into a gambler’s hell. The cotton grower inevitably finds himself “a gamester’s catspaw and a banker’s slave,” and disappears into the “oblivious West.” Capital triumphs.37 Lanier’s “Corn” ends on a note just faintly hopeful. The poet, who has already risked absurdity by reminding us that his corn captain is unable to walk or talk, repeats the tautology in an effort to make him symbolize a hope for permanent residence: “O steadfast dweller on the selfsame spot / Where thou was born, that still repines not – / Type of the home-fond heart, the happy lot.” Emerson in “Self-Reliance” had offered praise to the “sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet” (Essays, 275). To the Southerner Lanier, such a rootless lad was a mere creature of commerce, “whose flimsy homes, built on the shifting sand / Of trade, for ever rise and fall.” As Starke commented, “Bohemianism seemed to Lanier philosophically an attitude of despair” (Sydney Lanier, 171), and he reserved his nostalgic praise for the established resident, as he had in an earlier poem titled “The Home-

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stead.” Land ownership ensures hereditary stability and a way to ensure the stability of class structure, denying upward mobility to poor white and poor black alike. After the war, however, the Southern planter in “Corn” is now a tragic “gashed and hairy Lear,” exiled from his kingdom and now returning to his native hillsides in true feudal fashion to restore his royal lineage: Yet shall the great God turn thy fate, And bring thee back into thy monarch state And majesty immaculate. Lo, through hot waverings of the August morn, Thou givest from thy vasty sides38 forlorn Visions of golden treasuries of corn. Attempting to balance traditional chivalric virtue with progress, manly potency with agricultural science, past with present poetry, Lanier’s bathetic final line foresees a New South that will tend and defend its soil “With antique sinew and with modern art.” Within a few months, Lanier drafted “The Symphony,” a companion poem to “Corn.”39 Starke praises this as the first of Lanier’s “truly national poems,” “not against the evils in southern life, or in Georgia life, but in the national life” (Sydney Lanier, 205). Summoning analogies with Thomas Hood’s “Song of the Shirt” and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Cry of the Children,” he relates Lanier’s economic vision to John Ruskin’s “Unto This Last” and Ruskin’s vision of art as redemption from wage slavery. In “The Symphony,” Lanier pits villainous “Trade” against various abstractions – Art, Nature, Chivalry, God. Lanier “anticipated much modern thought about industrial problems,” wrote Edward Mims in 1905. And later, with sincere piety, “All the chivalry and kindliness and tenderness of Lanier come out in this poem, and they have their explanation in his thorough assimilation and championship of the Christian faith” (Mims, Christ of the Poets, 194). Upon this rather amorphous argument is superimposed the structure of a four-movement symphony (perhaps “symphonic poem” since there are no breaks between movements). This structure may seem arbitrary, but Lanier has tacitly absorbed what one musicologist has described as the “master-narrative” of the romantic symphony since Beethoven: a troubled opening that progresses systematically to a triumphant major-key conclusion (Burnham, Beethoven Hero,

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29–65). Lanier’s experiments undoubtedly drew as well from his understanding of Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk, and possibly German romantic notions of “tone-painting” or “color-hearing” (Gabin, Living Minstrelsy, 37–8). I cannot say if Lanier knew Théodore Gautier’s “Symphonie en blanc majeur” (1852), but he had little of the synaesthetic temperament of the symbolistes. Jack De Bellis regrets this as a deficiency; but Lanier’s poetic figures owe more to medieval allegory and its descendent in the moralizing emblem – the same emblem tradition from Quarles that Poe tried (unsuccessfully) to erase from “The Raven” and “The Bells.” Even Lanier’s best poems, “Sunrise” and the beautiful “Marshes of Glynn,” owe much to this tradition. But Lanier’s “Symphony” is I think the first to adapt the multi-movement symphonic pattern to poetry, imitated by later poets, including Southerners like John Gould Fletcher, Conrad Aiken, and Melvin Tolson, as well as Stevens’s “Peter Quince” and Eliot’s Four Quartets. Beyond symphonic form, Lanier appeals in equally arbitrary fashion to symphonic orchestration in his use of six instruments to “voice” his themes: violins, flute, clarinet and horn, oboe and bassoons. All of this is quite superficial, of course, though it won Lanier the admiration of many Northern literati, most importantly the poet and translator of Goethe, Bayard Taylor. Like “The Bells,” “The Symphony” invites admiration for its onomatopoeia, and it also takes more technical risks than Lanier had allowed himself in “Corn.” The first movement, for example, is written mainly in accentual tetrameters that hover between iambic and trochaic. Milton introduced this technique in “L’Allegro” and “Il Penseroso,” but few dared follow, though Lanier probably knew recent works like Christina Rosetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862). Lanier goes farther, using frequent anapestic rhythms, irregular end rhyme, and occasional internal rhyme. It’s fast moving and recitable. The second movement slows down, turning to an iambic pentameter base, but that base immediately signals its instability with a remarkable tetrameter couplet: ᵕ ͞ ǀ ᵕ ͞ ǀ ᵕ ͞ ǀᵕ ͞ ᵕ So sank the strings to gentle throbbing ᵕ ͞ ǀ ͞ ǀ ᵕ ͞ ǀ ᵕ ͞ ᵕ Of long chords change-marked with sobbing –

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The adjacent stresses on the phrase “long chords” challenge accepted practice, but they have obvious onomatopoeic justification. This is the only place in the poem where Lanier risks so bold a stroke. The lengthy passage continues, freely mixing lines of various lengths with the normative pentameter. The Scherzo and Trio movement contrasts a fallen woman, her “purchased lips” the victims of trade, with the fair lady, her virtue rescued by the chivalric (and decidedly pre-Freudian) thrust of the “straightforward horn.” In the Scherzo proper, the lines rise from quick regular tetrameters to stretched, consonant-clotted pentameters in a kind of metrical crescendo. The Trio section moves for the first time into stanza structure, the refrain “Fair Lady” suggesting medieval balladry as the upright knight battles to preserve not only the lady’s virginity but his own. Then, as the knightly horn disappears “into the thick of the melodious fray,” the final movement is taken over by an oboe, “like any large-eyed child,” and a pair of “ancient-wise bassoons.” Lanier builds to a resounding cadence with quadruple and quintuple reiterated rhymes. Taken simply as a technical performance, “The Symphony” is more sophisticated than “The Bells,” as well as weightier in its overt message, however bizarre. As Starke put it, “Lanier’s mind was often confused; commonplace never” (“More about Lanier,” 38). Lanier’s prosodic experimentation, to be honest, is timid in comparison with experiments by others at the same time in both America and England. It is another of Lanier’s balancing acts between Southern conservatism and an innate desire for innovation. Classical education with its study of Latin versification in particular, though common to American colleges generally, remained pervasive in the South and, with it, a collateral appreciation for the niceties of English prosody. If Emerson had disparaged metrical strictness as picayune and Whitman had abandoned it altogether, vowing in his Quakerish way to avoid all unnecessary ornament, Southern poets cherished prosodic polish and luxurious style. Poe had done his part to raise metrical consciousness in the South, and Lanier of course preened himself on metre.40 Lanier was, as Edmund Wilson noted, the first American poet after Poe “who made any serious study of the mechanics and traditions of his art” (Patriotic Gore, 505). Well before he wrote The Science of English Verse, Lanier had steeped himself in medieval English, including the alliterative-accentual poets. He even considered applying for a profes-

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sorship when Johns Hopkins could find no suitable candidate (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 10:85–6). He also followed the careers of Swinburne, Morris, and the other Pre-Raphaelites. In a letter of October 1866, he noted that Swinburne “has suddenly shot up into the foremost place among modern poets” and took time to copy a poem for his father (7:251). Predictably, he expressed no interest in Swinburne’s radical politics and he was scandalized by his eroticism. Comparing the poetry of Bulwer-Lytton with Swinburne’s, he wrote to Hayne in 1868, “Truly as I detest the foul imagination of the latter, there can be no question as to the vast superiority of his poetic genius” – even if Bulwer is a “gentleman” who “deals with no “Petronian abominations” (7:395). His qualified respect for Swinburne persisted even after he had caught wind of Swinburne’s dismissal of his own poetry in favour of Whitman’s (9:298). Lanier’s fascination with prosody is plausibly attributed to his professional involvement with music. But his over-riding concern, I think, was the rejuvenation of Southern culture and the Southern ethos as a whole after the war. These relationships are foregrounded in Meredith Martin’s ground-breaking study The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930, which gathers a web of relationships between prosody and national culture at large. Martin deals only with the English scene and she mentions Lanier only twice in passing, but her argument is highly relevant to the American South. An initial assumption, she says, is of “literature as a civilizing force” – in particular “the idea that English prosody could civilize the masses” (6–7). Lanier’s writings are less concerned with the masses per se than with the civilizing power of poetry and music in the educated South, but he agrees that this force is both aesthetic and ethical. “Nineteenth-century scholars who were trained in the classics wanted to translate the prestige- and character-building discipline of the classical languages into English poetics” (7). Such notions were reinforced by Lanier’s understanding, through Wagner and others, of music as an agent of social betterment. Second is the “association of verse structure with the political ideas of its makers” and the hope that prosody could help “stabilize and define” national identity. In Lanier, this appears in the relation of his prosody to his medievalism. His fascination with early English metric, along with his chivalric ethos, confirm his underlying Cavalier interpretation of Southern history. Yankee descendants of the lower-class Puritans – Emerson and Whitman for

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example – were given to undisciplined irregularities. Third is a serious interest in pedagogy to disseminate the civilizing forces of the arts. Thus Lanier’s Science of English Verse is a textbook for the poetically and musically literate, just as his Boy’s Froissart and Boy’s Malory were efforts to indoctrinate his culture with medieval virtues. Meredith Martin’s book details these points as they shape the English tradition; but Lanier saw American culture, Southern culture above all, as an extension of upper-class English culture, and that is (as Jack Kerkering emphasizes) a specifically white culture.41 The cultural significance of “The Symphony,” however, reaches beyond prosody. Starke’s claim that this is the first of Lanier’s “truly national poems” is part of his larger narrative, which presents Lanier as a fully reconstructed Southerner deserving to take his place in the American pantheon (Sidney Lanier, 160). This narrative he derives from Edward Mims’s 1905 study: Lanier’s recognition as an American poet was confirmed, the story goes, by a commission to write two major works for the centennial celebrations of 1876, his “Centennial Cantata” and a longish poem called “Psalm of the West.” These poems are thus prize exhibits in claims for Lanier’s abandonment of regionalist preoccupations and his acceptance of fully American nationalism, which is to say American citizenship. Starke even likens him to Whitman as “a poet of democracy” (252). This narrative is challenged by Jack De Bellis, who sees both “Cantata” and “Psalm” as “sidetracks” (Sydney Lanier, 97), and Jason R. Rudy, who argues that Lanier was “on the wrong side of the Whiggish history that recognizes Whitman’s and Emerson’s poetic visions as quintessentially American” (“Manifest Prosody,” 264). But the early narrative persists. Lanier the American patriot, however, remained a covert neo-Confederate regionalist. To discover in “The Symphony” Lanier the unreconstructed Southerner, one must read a coded language, like the doublespeak of politicians. “Trade” is a convenient abstraction. To the Northern reader Lanier’s disparagement signified a progressive, humanitarian objection to the less admirable consequences of industrialism. To the Southern reader, “Trade” simply signified the North. Lanier, obliged to seek his reputation in the North, had great trouble publishing his regionalist piece “Corn,” so he was therefore much more circumspect writing “The Symphony.” Here are three examples. First, he appeals for the poor, who “stand / Wedged by the pressing of Trade’s hand”:

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“Each day, all day” (these poor folks say), “In the same old year-long, drear-long way, We weave in the mills and heave in the kilns, We sieve mine-meshes under the hills, And thieve much gold from the Devil’s bank tills, To relieve, O God, what manner of ills? – What is this but a repeat of the familiar wage-slave argument in defence of African slavery, with the Southern term omitted? The North is as oppressive as the South ever was, the poem whispers. Second, Lanier appeals to God: But who said once, in the lordly tone, Man shall not live by bread alone But all that cometh from the Throne? Hath God said so? But Trade saith No: This is nothing but the familiar demonizing of the godless North for refusing to bow to the word of God, particularly the Bible’s clear instructions condoning slavery – but with reference to slavery removed. Third, the poem laments the sufferings of women: What shameful ways have women trod At beckoning of Trade’s golden rod! Alas when sighs are traders’ lies, And heart’s-ease eyes and violet eyes Are merchandise! O purchased lips that kiss with pain! O cheeks coin-spotted with smirch and stain! O trafficked hearts that break in twain! These are the prostitutes that traffic the streets of Northern cities, like the haughty women of Zion in Isaiah (chapter 3), where “Men love not women as in olden time” – the time of Mosaic law, or the chivalrous, Christian Middle Ages, or the equally chivalrous Old South, when southern belles and courtly gentlemen alike treasured their virginity. The positives in the poem, ultimately, are sexual purity and music, the two bound awkwardly together: “Music is Love in search of a word.” Trade, however, is unqualified evil. Lanier offers no alter-

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native, subsuming the entire nation, North and South, in an economy founded on agriculture (and slave labour) like the Old South. On the basis of “The Symphony,” Lanier received two important invitations to contribute to the American centennial celebrations in 1876, both through his new Northern ally Bayard Taylor. For the unreconstructed Lanier, these posed an obvious dilemma: the works would have to celebrate the very Union that he had suffered in a bloody war to dismember. The first came from the widely read Lippincott’s Magazine for a poem of some length to be published in the July 1876 issue. According to the centennial edition notes, the invitation arrived on 26 September 1875, but despite reporting to his wife in October that “the whole idea of the poem has come to me in a whirlwind of glory” (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 9:255), he put off work until mid-February the following year. His procrastination may have been due in part to bouts of tubercular hemorrhaging, but work was also interrupted by the second invitation, which reached him late in December with urgency for completion. This was the text for a cantata to be sung at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and the composer, Dudley Buck, could not start his work without Lanier’s words. The text was not finished until mid-January, so it was not until 16 February that Lanier said he had begun writing the longest poem in his oeuvre (730 lines), which he finished in draft on 4 April. Lanier’s “Centennial Meditation of Columbia: A Cantata” has received some critical attention, while the “Psalm” – Lanier’s longest poem – has not. The “Cantata” was the focus of the opening of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876, the first world’s fair held in the United States. Bayard Taylor had recommended Lanier to Joseph Hawley, who wanted to commission a poet who was not from New England. Lanier was paired with Connecticut-born composer Dudley Buck. The exhibition was a celebration of American technological progress, and it celebrated all the most innovative commerce of the Gilded Age. Although Lanier had not yet read Whitman, his official poem would necessarily take up the same topics as Whitman’s “Passage to India,” with its trinity of modern wonders, or at least his “Song of the Exposition” (1871); and if both of these commissions clashed with his hatred of Northern trade, they at least harmonized with his reverence for science. Lanier produced his “Cantata” in a hurry, the composer pressing him for the text, and a meditation on Columbus was de rigueur for

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the occasion. The device of the angelic prophecy may have been remembered from Barlow’s Columbiad, though there’s no evidence. As musician-poet, Lanier hovered like a mother hen over Buck, who, though he was quite capable of working on his own, received Lanier’s instructions with patience. Lanier’s marginal notes for the music are printed with the text, though actually composing such music lay far beyond Lanier’s capacity. The grandiose occasion thrust Lanier into national prominence. The opening of the exposition was celebrated, amid the worst scandals of Grant’s presidency, in a concert that began with a commissioned premiere from Richard Wagner, no less – his “American Centennial March” (Overold, “Genesis and Reception,” 179–87). There was also a hymn by Whittier set to music by John Knowles Paine. But the Buck-Lanier “Cantata” was the featured work, performed by an oversized chorus and orchestra. It was a triumph, and the bass solo, the angel’s prophecy, had to be repeated as an encore.42 There was public criticism of Lanier’s text, however, both before and after the event, and Lanier, ever thin-skinned, kept the controversy alive with his pedantic reply.43 Lanier’s “Psalm of the West” is a truly laboured performance, yet it adds a curious progress poem to the American archive – a revisioning of the American nation that makes room for white Southern chivalry. Lanier’s original title was “To the United States of America” (Centennial Edition, 1:348), and his vision of the reunited American nation fulfills the pattern of a past-present-future historical vision common to the genre, though in disproportionate measure. It is tempting to think he had seen Whitman’s “Passage to India,” but most likely he had not.44 In an elaborate, almost Blakean mythological scene, Lanier announces his plan: The East and the West took form as the wings of a lark. One wing was feathered with facts of the uttermost Past, And one with the dreams of a prophet; and both sailed fast And met where the sorrowful Soul on the earth was cast. Past and future unite geographically as East and West – not North and South – in accord with the translatio studii motif. Following the manifest destiny of westward expansion, Lanier displays a myriad metrical forms, flattering the educated reader’s powers of recognition.45 The historical narrative occupies the bulk of the poem (lines 89–637), while present and prophetic future are finished off in fewer than a

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hundred remaining lines. Atlantis gets mentioned (line 95), and Columbus inevitably becomes a looming presence, Lanier devoting no fewer than eight numbered sonnets to him (256–367). The Pilgrims arriving in the Mayflower receive due attention, plus a lengthy account of the American Revolution, all with showy tribute to the state of Massachusetts. It hardly needs saying that Lanier populates his poem entirely with white actors: there is no mention whatever of either Amerind or African. Most surprising, however, is the extended treatment of the Norse voyages. Lanier brings them unhistorically as far south as the Florida coast (lines 111–64). The only purpose of this unique narrative, as far as I can surmise, is to reinforce Lanier’s fixation on the Germanic and Nordic origins of the American people, shifting attention from the darker-skinned (and Catholic) Spanish or Italian, not to mention the black African.46 In this context, one might summon for contrast another American progress poem, published only a few years earlier, that also saw two voyages leading to the settlement of the New World. James Monroe Whitfield’s poem begins like this: More than two centuries have passed Since, holding on their stormy way, Before the furious wintry blast, Upon a dark December day, Two sails, with different intent, Approached the Western Continent. One vessel bore as rich a freight As ever yet has crossed the wave; The living germs to form a State That knows no master, owns no slave. She bore the pilgrims to that strand Which since is rendered classic soil, Where all the honors of the land May reach the hardy sons of toil. The other bore the baleful seeds Of future fratricidal strife, The germ of dark and bloody deeds, Which prey upon a nation’s life. The trafficker in human souls Had gathered up and chained his prey.

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These lines from “Poem Written for the Fourth Anniversary of President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation,” by the black poet James Monroe Whitfield (1822–71), focus immediately on more salient issues of American settlement – settlement by both European and African populations – than do Lanier’s. Whitfield’s piece has only recently been recovered, and the complete text was not republished until 2011.47 The contrast makes Lanier’s preoccupation with the Vikings all the more problematic. Lanier had little difficulty writing the history of discovery and settlement, but the Civil War itself presented a serious obstacle. It begged to be acknowledged, but no display of Southern partisanship would be tolerated. Lanier’s solution was to incorporate with minimal revision the poem he had already written in 1867 as “The Tournament, Joust the First,” an ungainly, not to say ludicrous allegory of North and South as “Head” and “Heart,” with all his personal sympathies, of course, for Heart. In other words, Lanier’s views of the Civil War seemingly had not altered since then. His ballad stanzas still signify, as they did from the beginning, an allegiance to his medievalist ethos. But he now surrounds the conflict not only with a gesture of reconciliation – Heart and Brain! no more be twain; Throb and think, one flesh again! – but with a new note of religious understanding: Now, O Sin! O Love’s lost Shame! Burns the land with redder flame: North in line and South in line Yell the charge and spring the mine. Heartstrong South would have his way, Headstrong North hath said him nay. For the pious Lanier, all history is religious history: he sees the war not only as a struggle between chivalry and its opposite, but theologically in terms of “sin,” and as such he can accept the results (however reluctantly) as God’s Providence. Both North and South have been “headstrong,” both have sinned, both suffered. Lanier at this point even comes close to voicing a war guilt that the South itself never experienced.

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The movement of the entire poem is governed by a varied refrain that appeals to God the Creator as providential “Master”: Master, Master, poets sing; The Time calls Thee; Yon Sea binds hard on everything Man longs to be: Oh, shall the sea-bird’s aimless wing Alone move free? (244–9) History is thus an unfolding of God’s predetermined plan, an unfolding that, sub specie aeternitatis, is not a Whitmanic call to linear progress but a divine stasis in a reassuring theological aevum. This is established in the very peculiar opening of the poem, which sets America, the land of “Freedom,” in an unexpected light: Land of the willful gospel, thou worst and thou best; Tall Adam of lands, new-made of the dust of the West; Thou wroughtest alone in the Garden of God, unblest Till He fashioned lithe Freedom to lie for thine Eve on thy breast – Till out of thy heart’s dear neighborhood, out of thy side, He fashioned an intimate Sweet one and brought thee a Bride. Cry hail! nor bewail that the wound of her coming was wide. Lo, Freedom reached forth where the world as an apple hung red; Let us taste the whole radiant round of it, gayly she said: If we die, at the worst we shall lie as the first of the dead. Knowledge of Good and of Ill, O Land! she hath given thee; Perilous godhoods of choosing have rent thee and riven thee; Will’s high adoring to Ill’s low exploring hath driven thee – Freedom, thy Wife, hath uplifted thy life and clean shriven thee! Her shalt thou clasp for a balm to the scars of thy breast, Her shalt thou kiss for a calm to thy wars of unrest, Her shalt extol in the psalm of the soul of the West. Lanier’s poem never returns to unpack that peculiar epithet “willful gospel” in the opening line. But freedom, it seems, is a product of both man’s proud individual will and the female Eve’s temptation to sin. In Lanier’s Southern eyes, it is a suspect quality, as dangerous as too much knowledge – of good and evil, of nature or science. Free-

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dom is a mixed blessing: it leaves a wide wound in its coming, and it can be justified only when mankind can “whiten his spirit” (line 20) through Lanier’s idiosyncratic adaptation of the medieval doctrine of felix culpa: For Weakness, in freedom, grows stronger than Strength with a chain; And Error, in freedom, will come to lamenting his stain, Till freely repenting he whiten his spirit again; And Friendship, in freedom, will blot out the bounding of race; And straight Law, in freedom, will curve to the rounding of grace; And Fashion, in freedom, will die of the lie in her face; And Desire flame white on the sense as a fire on a height, And Sex flame white in the soul as a star in the night, And Marriage plight sense unto soul as the two-colored light Of the fire and the star shines one with a duplicate might; And Science be known as the sense making love to the All, And Art be known as the soul making love to the All, And Love be known as the marriage of man with the All – Till Science to knowing the Highest shall lovingly turn, Till Art to loving the Highest shall consciously burn, Till Science to Art as a man to a woman shall yearn. These remarkable lines are the most Whitmanic in the poem, with their insistent anaphora, and their appeal to “Sex” – a word that had not previously sprung from Lanier’s poetic pen. They speak of a faith born in an ultimate purification of spirit – “from the wedding of Knowing and Loving,” that is, from the wedding of head and heart, the reconciliation of North and South, as Lanier’s faith rises in breathless anapests: “And the Time in that ultimate Prime shall forget old regretting and scorn, / Yea, the stream of the light shall give off in a shimmer the dream of the night forlorn.” The reconciliation would seem complete. God even confronts a “full-finished Babel of sound” without anger, “For not out of selfish nor impudent travail was wrung / The song of all men and all things that the all-lover sung” (87–8). The differing tongues of all men and races will be comprehended. Lanier’s Confederate face again peeps through his unionist mask, however, when he describes the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower, who, “Godly Hearts that, Grails of gold / Still the blood of Faith do hold” (405–6). These Puritans may “still” hold their true “Faith” in 1620, says

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the undertone, but as Yankees and not true Christian Southerners, they will be sure to lose it. Lanier’s Southern literalist piety is muted in this poem, but he hedges his bets. If the Civil War was a conflict between true believers in the word of God and abolitionist fanatics and heretics in the North, the outcome is puzzling, punishment for a national transgression not fully understood. Lanier doesn’t bring himself to say as much, but he leaves the door open. Lanier’s lines may sometimes suggest Whitman, but they are metrical. His anapestic pentameters, however, have no strong associations with past tradition. Playing Lanier and Whitman against each other has recently become a favourite critical gambit, and, as Jason Rudy has suggested, “Both poets believe that poetry might in some ways be constitutive of the nation” (“Manifest Prosody,” 258). Yet Lanier, he suggests, rejected Whitman’s view. In fact, Lanier’s attitude, when he finally read Whitman in 1877, was characteristically divided. On first encounter, he thrilled to Whitman’s accomplishment and wrote him a letter of compliment, saying that he had spent “a night of glory and delight” reading Leaves of Grass, despite disagreeing with him “in all points connected with artistic form” as well as (blushing) “those poetic exposures of the person which your pages so unreservedly make” (Starke, Sidney Lanier, 306–7). On further consideration, however, he formulated his disagreement in both artistic and political terms: “This poetry is free, it is claimed, because it is independent of form. But this claim is also too late. It should have been made at least before the French Revolution. We all know what that freedom means in politics which is independent of form, of law. It means myriad-fold slavery to the mob. As in politics, so in art. Once for all, in art, to be free is not to be independent of any form, it is to be master of many forms” (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 4:51). Rudy phrases it as a strict binary: “Whitman looks forward to the forms of the future; Lanier’s psalm relies structurally on established forms of the past. Whitman’s politics anticipate a United States that will continue to evolve; Lanier’s poetry of the future insistently keeps one foot moored in historical precedent” (“Manifest Prosody,” 258). This formulation needs finer tuning. Lanier first of all pays Whitman the compliment of consideration from an academic podium, an audacious gesture in 1881. The object of both poets is “Freedom” in the abstract, and as a covenant that demands individual responsibility, though Lanier secures its restraints with a tighter religious rein. More ominously, as we know, Lanier’s Southern notion of political freedom is not extended equally. But if

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Lanier never abandons metrical form, he insists on exploring, like Poe, resources not sanctioned by long tradition in order to be “a master of many forms.” Viewed from this angle, the myriad prosodies of Lanier’s “Psalm” might dimly foreshadow Pound’s Cantos.

“Psalm of the West” appeared as promised in Lippincott’s for July 1876. Since then it has seldom been read. But long after Lanier’s death, it emerged in a critical dispute. Starke’s biography of Lanier, which appeared in 1933, creates a narrative about a regional poet emerging from the limitations of his Southern upbringing to become a fullfledged American speaking to the entire nation and indeed the world. Starke’s critical acumen is dull, his judgments those of his time, his narrative dubious, but his scholarship is impeccable. It remains the standard biography. His book, alas, fell into the hands of Allen Tate, reviewer for The Nation, who savaged it. Actually, Tate pays little attention to Starke and concentrates on savaging Lanier, who was still considered the leading American poet from the South and part of the nineteenth-century canon that modernism needed to destroy. Perhaps unwisely, Professor Starke – no match for Tate’s practised cut and thrust – answered Tate’s review in order to set certain facts straight (and discredit the reviewer by the way). Tate’s acidulous reply was printed with Starke’s letter, to be followed by two longer essays on Lanier from Robert Penn Warren and John Crowe Ransom, plus an essay by Starke entitled “The Agrarians Deny a Leader.” Starke may have been at a disadvantage in debating skills, not to mention numbers, but he had the weight of fact on his side. Why was Tate’s review tightened to such an extreme emotional pitch? Part of his motive was aesthetic. Tate could hardly admire a poet so far removed from New Critical criteria of excellence as Sidney Lanier. The destructive criticism of Tate, Warren, and Ransom is a romp. Warren completed the job by including an assault on one of Lanier’s humbler lyrics, “My Springs,” in the first edition of Understanding Poetry (1938). Significantly, Tate in his review slips in his preference for two other Southern poets, the lapidary Timrod and, more surprisingly, the Georgia-born Thomas Holley Chivers, whose main claim to fame is his association with Poe (“Southern Romantic,” 67). But Tate’s real animus was political, directed against “Psalm of the West” and Lanier’s late essay “The New South.” Tate had recently edit-

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ed (anonymously) the twelve essays collected as I’ll Take My Stand (1930), the primary document of his agrarian movement. His reading of “Psalm of the West” was that Lanier, in seeking a postwar reconciliation between hostile factions, had betrayed the South, had turned his back on his own diatribes against trade, and had sold out to Northern industry. Lanier’s essay only confirmed the point: “Having convinced himself in an essay called ‘The New South’ that the South would become, after the break-up of the plantations, a region of securely rooted small farmers, he was at liberty to misunderstand the social and economic significance of the Civil War, and to flatter the industrial capitalism of the North in a long poem, ‘Psalm of the West,’ a typical expression of Reconstruction imperialism. ‘There is nothing sectional,’ writes Mr. Starke, ‘in this chant of the glory of freedom.’ On the contrary it is all sectional – with Northern sectionalism” (70). Tate’s reading is so outrageously wrong that poor Professor Starke was understandably confused. Not only did Tate have his chronology backward – the essay appeared several years after the poem – but he failed to recognize, or was unwilling to acknowledge, that Lanier anticipated the agrarian propaganda in many significant respects. In rebuttal, Starke pointed out that the economist Herman Clarence Nixon, in I’ll Take My Stand, quotes Lanier three times with approval.48 Furthermore, “The Psalm of the West” has nothing whatever to say about Northern industrialism, though it once (only once) makes Lanier’s usual jab at “Trade’s blood-shotten eyes” (line 155). In hindsight, Tate’s desire to dislodge Lanier’s reputation is plain; but politically he also recognized the generic similarity of Lanier’s “Psalm” to Hart Crane’s progress poem The Bridge. His own halfdamning review of his friend’s magnum opus had caused him personal pain to write – a pain intensified by Crane’s recent suicide in April 1932. In his review of Starke, Tate declared: “From Lanier’s ‘Psalm of the West’ ... to the late Hart Crane’s ‘The Bridge,’ the heritage is unbroken: apart from the vast superiority of Crane’s genius the defective sensibility of the two poems is the same. There is the necessity felt by both poets to approach the subject – in this case the same subject, the American spirit – as fact and symbol, as private experience and public knowledge; and the two elements of the poems are not brought together” (“Southern Romantic,” 68). Tate read Lanier’s poem as anticipating the identical faults he found in The Bridge, which I discuss in chapter 2 (see pages 54–6). Similarity seems to be the consequence of genre – there is no reason to believe that Crane had read

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Lanier or that Lanier had read “Passage to India.” But the association caused Tate to read Lanier’s poem – insofar as he read it at all – carelessly and to react to its technological occasion and to Starke’s Whitman comparison. There is yet a deeper motive. Tate’s review opines that Edwin Mims’s much slighter 1905 book on Lanier “will probably remain the standard work” – because Starke’s thorough research presents more information about Lanier than anyone should ever want (“Southern Romantic,” 67). Mims, it turns out, had been Tate’s professor at Vanderbilt, in fact his bête noire. Thomas Underwood’s biography of Tate is filled with stories of the clashes – personal, literary, and political – between the high-toned, dandyish professor and his prickly student: “Whenever Mims discussed Southern literature, he seemed to be more concerned with its role in the South’s social and political history than with its aesthetic value ... He would shortly publish The Advancing South (1926), frequently spoke out for social and economic modernization, belonged to the Law and Order League, and referred to himself as a citizen with a capital ‘c’” (Allen Tate, 38). Nothing more significant is happening in this country today, according to Mims, “than the rise to power and influence of constantly enlarging groups of liberal leaders who are fighting against the conservativeness, the sensitiveness to criticism, the lack of freedom that have too long impeded Southern progress” (Sydney Lanier, vii). Mims’ book on Lanier contains an entire chapter on “The New South.” There we read that Lanier’s essay is “disappointing” because to Lanier “the New South means small farming” (268). Mims welcomes modern industrial farming in which marketing left the farmer’s hands, processing was done by companies, and products “entered the commodities market and became part of an international system of buying, selling, and shipping” (Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 21). From that point until thirty pages later, Mims forgets Lanier as he expatiates upon what the New South has truly become. Not surprisingly, it still includes Jim Crow: “The political equality of the negro guaranteed in the Fifteenth Amendment and the attempt to give him social equality,” he writes, “were stubborn facts which seemed to overthrow the more liberal ideas of Lincoln” (Sydney Lanier, 274–5). But otherwise his vision is progressive. The modern Southerner is working towards a New South in which factories and industry prosper, large farms are diversified, and public education thrives. Northern money has become a benefactor. Literature and the arts have not yet

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succeeded, but they soon will. Mims’s rhetoric rises to a thrilling pitch in praise of exactly the kind of industrial New South that Tate had set his face against. It is no wonder, then, that in attacking Lanier as a social prophet, he was in fact attacking Edwin Mims – so much that Starke despairs: “I still fail, after considerable effort, to understand that Mr. Allen Tate could ever once have read ‘The New South’” (Sydney Lanier, 547). Tate was wisely silent after the exchange of letters with Starke, but his cause is taken up by Warren and Ransom, also fellows of Edwin Mims at Vanderbilt. Warren’s essay, which evidences greater familiarity with Lanier’s poetry, gets at the soft underbelly of Lanier’s thinking, his belief in progress as “etherialization” and his resolution of conflict in “love” – which, he notes, “apparently was the name he bestowed on any emotional disturbance” (“Blind Poet,” 43). Both Warren and Ransom launch withering attacks on Lanier’s evasion of the Civil War in “Psalm of the West.” Warren quotes: “They charged, they struck; both fell, both bled; Brain rose again, ungloved; Heart fainting smiled, and softly said, My love to my Beloved.” Heart and Brain! no more be twain; Throb and think, one flesh again! Lo! they weep, they turn, they run; Lo! they kiss: Love, thou art one! (632–9) He remarks drily, “In the year 1876 this must have struck some as slightly unrealistic” (34). Where Warren is reasonable, however, Ransom, seventeen years his senior and so closer to both Civil War and Reconstruction, is politely vicious: Lanier’s “Tournament,” he says, “was not written like a soldier,” and he supposes that it might have been written in 1862, before the poet had seen battle. Whenever it was written, however, he notes that “between the war and the Centennial was a long interval in which no reconciliation had occurred; on the contrary, Brain had filled the interval with humiliations for Heart; and Heart had been very surly” (“Hearts and Heads,” 561). For Ransom as for Tate, Lanier’s agreement to write such a poem at all was worse than careerism: it was a treasonous betrayal of his Southern heritage. So was Lanier’s hope for rec-

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onciliation, even on his own white supremacist terms. Ransom snarls, “He did not remain in the South; he got out as soon as he could” (557).49 “Lanier’s love for his enemies was premature; their enmity was still active,” says Ransom. “The plainest duty of the South happened to be the one which was humanly the easiest: to offer contumacious resistance” (559). “Contumacious resistance” is an excellent phrase – a noble, aristocratic, Latinate phrase – for describing white Southern behaviour during the 1950s Civil Rights era and to a significant degree ever since. The Civil War remained and still remains an unhealed wound. Its aftermath continues to polarize the nation along religious, economic, political, and, above all, racial lines. One can look gratefully at the efforts of earlier Southerners to heal the rift. If Lanier’s “love for his enemies was premature,” as Ransom charged, the record shows that he did his best to rise to it. At his most enlightened, Lanier strove to envision a New South where small farms cultivated by black farmers lay side by side with whites in idyllic prosperity. Unrealistic perhaps, but preferable by far to a life of “contumacious resistance.” Lanier hoped for a New South, but he preserved his own nostalgia for the Old, for the “lost cause,” and the nostalgia persists – one might say festers – even today. Although Henry Timrod was even better prepared than Lanier to strike a heartfelt truce with the American nation after the war, his Magnolia Cemetery Ode remains a moving statement of the cause lost:50 Sleep sweetly in your humble graves, Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause; Though yet no marble column craves The pilgrim here to pause. In seeds of laurel in the earth The blossom of your fame is blown, And somewhere, waiting for its birth, The shaft is in the stone! Meanwhile, behalf the tardy years, Which keep in trust your storied tombs, Behold! your sisters bring their tears, And these memorial blooms.

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Small tributes! but your shades will smile More proudly on these wreaths to-day, Than when some cannon-moulded pile Shall overlook this bay. Stoop, angels, thither from the skies! There is no holier spot of ground Than where defeated valor lies, By mourning beauty crowned. “The shaft is in the stone.” Like Excalibur waiting for the return of King Arthur with all his monarchial pomp and chivalry, the lost cause waits to be reborn. A young Allen Tate more than half a century later was to return to this spot in his “Ode to the Confederate Dead”; however, he proved himself not just unable but also unwilling to reanimate these sentiments. For Tate in 1926, the Old South was a delusion, and any New South he could happily live in had not yet been imagined.

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6 Nineteenth-Century Poems by Women Hannah Flagg Gould’s “Ode on Art,” Mary Ashe Lee’s “Afmerica,” and Harriet Monroe and the Great Columbian Exposition

The reader who has proceeded this far may notice that very few poems by women have appeared: to be exact, one – Anne Bradstreet’s “Dialogue between the Old England and the New” in chapter 2. There has certainly been no shortage of female poets in America. Nearly half the writers included in Clarence Stedman’s 1900 anthology American Poetry are women, and before that, three large tomes, the first entitled American Female Poets, the others both entitled The Female Poets of America, competed for the market in the 1850s. The poet Caroline May and the indefatigable Rufus Griswold both published their volumes in 1848 (Griswold achieving at least seven more editions by 1873), while the artist-poet Thomas Buchanan Read arrived one year later in 1849 (five more editions by 1852). The corpus of women’s writings assembled by these editors, however, suffers from what Paula Bernat Bennett called a “close-to-mind-numbing sameness” – that safely poetical “sense of beauty,” which, to Griswold, was “the means through which the human character is purified and elevated.” All of these editors, Bennett writes, represented their poets aspiring to an “idealizing genteel standard.”1 The poems in these collections are thus overwhelmingly short lyrics on decorous topics. As Caroline May notes in her preface, “few women, besides the author of Zophiël, have written poems of any considerable length,” and because few ladies enjoy “sufficient leisure from the cares and duties of home ... the greater part of the following poems have been derived from the incidents and associations of every-day life.” Furthermore, May apologizes for the brevity of her bio-

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graphical notes: “No women of refinement, however worthy of distinction ... like to have the holy privacy of their personal movements invaded. To say where they were born seems quite enough,” she writes. “Several of our correspondents declared their fancies to be their only facts; others that they had done nothing all their lives; and some – with a modesty most extreme – that they had not lived at all.”2 By this account, feminine codes so deeply internalized, the reclusiveness of an Emily Dickinson comes to seem far less exceptional, and the voluminousness of female publication in the nineteenth century all the more remarkable. In fact, given the disapproval of most males, particularly husbands, any publication at all by women writers was an inherently political act. Common wisdom in the twentieth century long accepted this account of women’s poetry in the nineteenth century – making an exception only for Emily Dickinson. The anthologies of May, Griswold, Reade, and, later, Stedman provided ample evidence. As late as 1966, Barbara Welter’s widely reprinted essay “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860” codified these qualities as piety, purity, domesticity, and dependence. Her essay had an “enormous impact” on American Studies – it “seemed to be everywhere,” exclaimed Mary Kelly (“Commentary,” 67). In the past few decades, however, scholarship has begun to resift through the archive of women’s writing, revealing much greater diversity among the poets, along with a greater range of genre and subject matter than previously suspected. The widespread commitment of these nineteenth-century women to sentimentality and idealized domesticity voiced by Caroline May was real enough, and Shira Wolosky has agreed that male poets were more confident “participating in public national formation” (Major Voices, xi). But women’s diffidence has been over-generalized. Sentimentality itself has been interrogated as a social construction doing its cultural work in the female domestic sphere – sometimes ignoring its glaring visibility in male poetry. All generalizations about women’s poetry have become increasingly perilous. Nineteenth-century women’s poetry, declares Paula Bennett, “is neither univocal nor transparent” (Anthology, xxxix). I begin, then, with a preliminary survey of odes written by women, but with certain caveats. Few of the major figures have been adequately collected or edited, so it is often difficult to comprehend their oeuvres; they continue to be known largely through anthologies, selected editions, or the chances of availability online, leaving us dependent on the wisdom of editors.3 Second, the recovery process

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itself is afflicted with the difficulties of all scholarship – blind spots or the erection of new binaries to replace old ones. Wendy Dasler Johnson, in a recent study of Lydia Sigourney, Frances Harper, and Julia Ward Howe, probes the concept of “sentimentality” through the eyes of contemporary rhetoricians (e.g., Hugh Blair and others), read by these poets. It is a productive approach; but, of course, male poets read the same books and were often every bit as “sentimental,” while Johnson wholly ignores the effects of the eighteenth-century tradition of Sensibility. My purpose, then, is not to contrast female and male poetry but, more simply, to shine a light on the archive from the peculiar angle of this study and bring to the surface a number of poems that lie outside the stereotyped feminine realm. As Wendy Dasler Johnson observes, “a comparison of poem titles by women to those by men in antebellum anthologies suggests striking similarity, not difference, in topics” (Rhetoric of Sentiment, 24). If women were somewhat less inclined to compose public addresses on affairs of state than were their male counterparts, the record reveals more writing on political affairs than Griswold or Caroline May would want us to believe – albeit more of it appearing towards the later part of the century after their anthologies appeared. Poets like Emma Lazarus and Sarah Piatt are now recognized for their political verse, and the most powerful Civil War song of all, Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” is so familiar we sometimes forget what a vivid poem it is. Like Howe, most women who ventured political verse cast it in lyric forms – stanzas or sonnets – like “A Loyal Woman’s No” by the rebellious Lucy Larcom; or “Written on the Fourth of July, 1864,” by Alice Cary; or “The Hero of Fort Wagner” (on Robert Gould Shaw), “John Brown,” or “Garibaldi in Piedmont” by her sister Phoebe. Both Cary sisters, like many other women, contributed to the flood of eulogies after Lincoln’s assassination. Black women understandably seem even more determined to enter the activist arena. Frances Harper, best known for her novel Iola Leroy, produced lyrics on the Emancipation Proclamation and the 15th Amendment as well as reflections on African colonialism like “Death of Zombi.” For the present study of ode and progress poem, women’s voices are set at further disadvantage. The ode itself has a taint of gender. Classically, Homer had set the bar for epic, Sappho for lyric. Women for centuries confined themselves to the lesser genres, and the ode, with its

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claim to the public ear and its aspiration to the sublime, the highest rank of lyric, has been treated with caution.4 Susan Stanford Friedman discussed this issue in a classic essay on Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh and H.D.’s belated imagist epic Helen in Egypt (“Gender and Genre Anxiety,” 203–28). This historical avoidance, Friedman argues, has diminished the female poet’s capacity for selfauthorization, the effect of a major long poem to authenticate a poet’s entire career (“Long Poem,” 721–38). But recent recovery efforts have complicated these claims as well. Even within the masculine genre of the epic, research has revealed Lydia Sigourney’s Traits of the Aborigines (1822), precursor to Hiawatha and many subsequent Indian poems, including her own Zinzendorff (sic) (1835), on a subject crucial to H.D. a century later. Maria Gowen Brooks’s Zophiël (1825) deals with a biblical heroine most unfortunate in her husbands, and Frances Harper’s Moses (1869) deals with the deliverance narrative that offered God-given solace to slavery and its aftermath.5 Moses presents an enticing analogy to Timothy Dwight’s The Conquest of Canaan, both works turning biblical subjects into American historical allegory. How much this genre anxiety affected women’s odes is hard to determine. Women did write odes, but very rough numbers suggest that they were less prolific than men; one search on the ProQuest Literature online database produced thirty-nine odes by women and 271 by men for the same time period.6 Like odes by men, most of these odes by women turn out to be devoted to slight occasions, like the “Original Ode Written for the Anniversary of the Essex Agricultural Society” (1861) by Mary Abigail Dodge, better known by her pseudonym Gail Hamilton as a fiercely crusading women’s rights journalist. Even this, however, is a patriotic wartime call for the Union to oppose “the tread of the traitor” that “pollutes the wrongèd earth.” The very act of writing for such a public occasion pushes the boundaries of female roles. Many odes by women, otherwise unexceptional, have a similar edge, like Frances Sargent Osgood’s pseudopindaric “The Cocoa-Nut Tree,” which Cheryl Walker instances as “an example of blatant phallus worship” (American Women Poets, 107), or Adah Isaacs Menken’s pseudopindaric take on the grisly biblical story of “Judith.”7 One of the best known of these pieces is “Ode to Sappho” by Elizabeth Oakes-Smith (1806–93), which focuses on the legend of the female poet driven to suicide by the rejection of her lover:

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Wert thou, O daughter of the lyre! Alone, above Leucadia’s wave art thou, Most beautiful, most gifted, yet alone! Ah, what to thee the crown from Pindar’s brow! ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ What hast thou left, proud one? What token? Alas! A lyre and heart – both broken! According to Yopie Prins, this is not Sappho the lesbian (a later myth), but Sappho the spurned poetess, victim of both suicide and the erasure of her works.8 Oakes-Smith elsewhere involved herself more directly in debates about gender and women’s rights, including speculations about gender ambiguity; in 1848, she published a short story under her male pseudonym Ernest Helfenstein, “On Beauty, Vanity and Marble Mantels,” at the same time that Julia Ward Howe was beginning to work on her unfinished novel The Hermaphrodite – both works probing ambiguous physiology as a trope for the social construction of women’s roles.9 There are also numbers of more or less conventional odes to abstractions on the eighteenth-century model, particularly early on. Sarah Wentworth Morton wrote several of these – “Ode for Mercy,” “Ode for the Element of Fire,” “Ode to Time” (twice over), and an “Ode for Music, inscribed to George Washington” (a conventional piece on Washington having little to do with music).10 Morton was a wellknown Boston socialite of the Federal period, her portrait by Gilbert Stuart housed in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Later odes to abstractions include Lydia Sigourney’s pseudopindaric “The Friends of Man” (1835), in which the friends are “Memory” and “Hope,” looking backward and forward; and two poems simply called “Ode” by Julia Ward Howe from her 1857 and 1885 collections (the abstractions being “Love” and “Freedom”). Among these earlier writers, Hannah Flagg Gould (1789–1865), for my purposes, stands out. Her biography seems uneventful, and she remains a shadowy figure, hardly touched even by the recovery efforts of recent scholars, with the exception of Janet Gray in Race and Time (1997). Unmarried, she devoted much of her life to caring for her father, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, and many of her poems are patriotic. Reference works fix her position, typically, through male relationships – a brother who was a respected classicist and a nephew, Benjamin Apthorp Gould, who was a noted astronomer. She was a

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prolific poet, including poetry written for children, and if much of her work is conventional, it is superior in the skill and variety of its prosody, and its topics exhibit an exceptionally wide-ranging invention. There are anti-slavery poems plus sympathetic works about Native Americans, including nostalgic poems on “Pocahontas” and a lengthy elegy on “The Death of the Sagamore,” plus an acerbic piece on Andrew Jackson’s ruthless Indian removal, “The Cherokee at Washington” – an address to the president set in the mouth of a dignified Cherokee chief. There is the remarkable “Child’s Address to the Kentucky Mummy,” which is about well-preserved ancient human remains found in a Kentucky cave. “Erin’s Son in America,” published in 1850, answers to Know Nothing agitation against Irish refugees from the Potato Famine. There is a poem “To the Siamese Twins,” another about “The Mastodon,” which raises issues of geology, and an “Address to the Automaton Chess-Player,” which may be the earliest poem about artificial intelligence. Hannah Flagg Gould wrote at least eight odes altogether. Her two Fourth of July odes (a favourite occasion for both male and female poets throughout the century) are written to familiar Scottish airs, “Draw the Sword, Scotland” and “Scots wha’ hae”; “The Liberty Tree: A National Ode” is equally conventional but very melodious. She wrote two odes on the Revolutionary War: “Liberty: An Ode for the Celebration of the Battle of Lexington” and “Lexington’s Dead.” The second of these was written for the public occasion upon which, in 1835, on the sixtieth anniversary of the battle, seven of the eight Minutemen who died at Lexington were disinterred and recommitted beneath the 1799 memorial obelisk. Gould shows strong historical consciousness not only here but also in her “Pilgrim Land: An Ode,” on the landing of the Mayflower, and “Ode for the Second Centennial Anniversary of the Settlement of a New-England Town,” an occasion like that which inspired Emerson’s “Hamatreya.” Then did a new creation glow With Order’s primal rays; While here the sons of God below First sang Jehovah’s praise The desert opened like a flower Unfolding to the sun; And great the work for every hour, Two hundred years have done!

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Her vision evokes the eighteenth-century rising-glory metaphor of creation both sacred and secular: “the Spirit, by our fathers, moved / Upon the face of Night,” the sun bringing light to the “chaotic darkness” of the “forest-child,” the earth yielding its wealth to the “genial sway / Of Culture’s wand.” Gould’s “Ode on Art” (1845), perhaps the most rewarding of the many odes to abstractions that I’ve examined, offers a late neoclassical alternative to the prevailing romanticist poetics:11 When God had of earth laid the viewless foundation, – The pillars had reared which the firmament buoy, – The stars of the morn sang in glad celebration, And thus, “all the sons of God shouted for joy.” In the blue vault sublime Hung the clear lamps of time, Their beams shedding warm on the young, teeming earth: Sun and soft dewy hours Spread the grass, leaves, and flowers; As Nature awoke, hymning Heaven at her birth ... Her pupils are grand master-builders of nations; To kings give they throne, sceptre, vesture, and crown; They spread earth and sea with her fair new creations; They prop up the states that would else crumble down! Freedom’s broad banner waves, Armour her foemen braves; While, warm from the depths of the heaven-kindled heart, Music wafts praise, to rise Up the far-ringing skies; And all as the gifts of man’s good angel, Art! … All hail to the Craftsmen, with hands that can labor, – With arm nerved by purpose, and deeds spreading wide! For these are the helper, the friend, brother, neighbour! And poor but for them were the great world beside. Ever be this their aim, – In the cause and the name Of man’s Friend on high, that their works all be done, Meekly who sojourned here, Loved the poor, dried the tear, And wrought, when below, as the Carpenter’s Son.

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’Tis they give to Commerce her ark on the ocean, To Science her wand, and her star-sweeping wing; They give temple, altar, and book to Devotion, Through all the earth proclaiming our Saviour and King. By the fond sisters three, Faith, Hope, and Charity, The last still the first, breathing life for the whole, Be a house theirs, that stands High, and “not made with hands,” Though earth melt, and skies pass away as a scroll! The “art” of Gould’s title is clearly not the romantic idea but, rather, is more closely related to older notions of material techne, a tonic contrast to the spiritualized debates of Emerson and Poe. Without more information I cannot speculate on particular sources, but they seem traceable back to the sensationalist Lockean aesthetics of Hutcheson, which were prevalent in colonial America. Art is given to humankind at creation. It is an innate faculty. Rather than human-made and unnatural, it arises out of benevolent divine plenitude. It is related to human goodness, the innate moral sense. It creates the material substance – “throne, sceptre, and crown” – of abstract concepts like nationhood, so that it is a social force, not a private one. (A voice whispers, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”) Art springs from wealth and prosperity. It creates the material world to be seen, the material basis for intellectual ideas, ultimately the material form of human prosperity. There is no hard distinction between the useful arts and poetry. The lines “Water and fire at strife / Give the fleet courser life” sound, if I am not mistaken, like a metaphor from the steam engine, the creation of power out of conflict. Human labour channels art as a divine force that provides material support for all human commerce, science, even religion itself. Gould’s poem, like the rising glory poems, ends with a vision of the Millennium. Freneau and Brackenridge had both expressed similar confidence in their collaboration (see above, 28–9), and traces of the neoclassical political ode survive in Lowell and Moody. Gould’s “Ode to Art” may work with pre-romantic concepts no longer fashionable in England, perhaps, but they are concepts deeply embedded in American culture. The intimate relationship of culture and commerce is a theme not unfamiliar to readers of Pound’s Cantos. A few other remarkable antebellum political odes appeared. Eliza Townsend (1788–1854), a resident of Boston, is described in Griswold’s headnote as “the first native poet of her sex, whose writings

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commanded the applause of judicious critics – the first whose poems evinced any real inspiration, or rose from the merely mechanical into the domain of art.” Townsend first came to attention with her “Occasional Ode,” a three-hundred-line-long denunciation of “Corsica’s detested son” Napoleon, which Griswold says thunders “with a vehemence and power which remind us of the celebrated ode of Southey, written nearly five years afterward.”12 The introductory notice to her posthumous Poems and Miscellanies (1856) describes Townsend as “strongly conservative” on nearly all subjects – literature, religion, civil, and social matters; but her conservatism, rather than “blind adhesion to the past,” was “a settled conviction that the principles upon which she formed her judgments were sound, salutary, and righteous.” Her feelings about Napoleon aligned with Federalist alarm about the French Revolution and its aftermath. In 1813, her “Ocean, a Naval Prize Ode,” also nearly three hundred lines long, apostrophizes the ocean with historical allusions from the Punic Wars to the present, even touching upon Stephen Decatur’s adventures on the Barbary Coast, as a way to support American naval efforts in the War of 1812. Later, in 1832, she published a timely “Ode to Whom It Concerns,” in which she pleads with South Carolina, “Star of the South,” not to secede from the Union over the Nullification Crisis. For us may better views betide Than such a half survey, Nor narrowing mists prevail to hide What truth the times convey; But patriots still, afar or nigh, Till civil discords cease, Echo impartial Carey’s sigh, For party not, but “Peace!” As the author’s note explains, Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland, went to his death in the English Civil War convinced that, regardless which side won victory, injury “would ensue to the common weal.” Anxieties about civil war already hang over this poem. The prolific Lydia Sigourney (1791–1865) wrote a number of odes and poems in pseudopindaric form. Several of these are conventional, like “The Friends of Man,” mentioned above, or the “Ode on the Fiftieth Anniversary of American Independence” (1827), a

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thanksgiving for “patriot martyrs” in general, with no mention of the coincidental deaths of John Adams and Jefferson on that same day. More poignant is a reflection on tragic womanhood, “Lady Jane Grey, on Seeing a Picture Representing Her Engaged in the Study of Plato.” Perhaps most striking is “Napoleon’s Epitaph” (1837), a hypothetical search for anyone willing to inscribe words on the bloody tyrant’s gravestone: Then Earth arose, That blind, old Empress, on her crumbling throne, And to the echoed question, “who shall write Napoleon’s epitaph?” as one who broods O’er unforgiven injuries, answer’d, “none.” Sigourney shares her detestation of Napoleon with Eliza Townsend, but her expression is more ingenious and indirect. Neither poet, however, seems to relate the American War of 1812 to Napoleon’s pressure on England’s navy. Aside from these poems on Napoleon, American odists female or male paid little attention to the affairs of Europe. An exception is Anne Charlotte Lynch (1815–91), who published her sole volume of Poems in the turbulent year 1848. (Lynch took her husband’s name [Botta] when they married in 1855.) Lynch was the daughter of an Irish Catholic patriot who was imprisoned by the English after the 1798 uprising. This, plus her experience as a famed hostess who entertained literary celebrities both European and American, gave her a more cosmopolitan outlook than most of her fellow citizens. Besides two Fourth of July odes, one finds a lyric calling for Ireland’s independence, another calling for Hungary’s independence from Austria, a poem in praise of Swedish women’s rights activist Fredrika Bremer, another praising the poet Lamartine for his short-lived career as idealistic leader in the Second French Republic, a daring lyric entitled “Eros,” an ardent sonnet called “Love,” and “Dawn-Day in Italy,” an ode denouncing Pope Pius IX for his opposition to the Italian Risorgimento. Such interest in European affairs was rare in poets of the time. Perhaps only James Russell Lowell’s “Ode to France, February, 1848” exhibits a similarly keen grasp of the midcentury European turbulence.

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African American women who wrote poetry also turned occasionally to the ode. In 1876, H. Cordelia Ray was invited to compose a poem for the unveiling of the Freedman’s Monument in Washington, dc, celebrating the Emancipation Proclamation. Frederick Douglass was the speaker, and Ray’s poem “Lincoln” was recited by the black civil rights leader William E. Matthews. The event itself, however, exposed conflicting feelings within the black population. Already at its unveiling, the monument, which depicts a freed black slave kneeling at the feet of Lincoln, was felt to be demeaning, It was, of course, planned and executed entirely by whites. Frederick Douglass was overheard to say that the monument “showed the negro on his knee when a more manly attitude would have been indicative of freedom.” In his speech, Douglass argued pointedly that Lincoln “was pre-eminently the white man’s President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men,” and emphasized that the monument was to Lincoln rather than to emancipation.13 None of Douglass’s dissatisfaction is reflected in Ray’s poem, seven ten-line stanzas of tame rhyming couplets praising the “martyred chief.” Like James Russell Lowell, Ray sees the moment of emancipation as the moment when American nationhood was truly accomplished.14 Such tensions between grateful acceptance of the white man’s benevolence and the expectation of absolute equality establish a conflict that runs through much black poetry of the period. In July 1885, the African Methodist Church Review published one of the most surprising and important American poems of the nineteenth century: “Afmerica,” a poem of more than two hundred lines by an unknown Mary Ashe Lee. A year later, the poem was reprinted, minus its introductory twenty-six lines, in volume 1, number 1 of The Negro, a short-lived Boston periodical devoted to “critical discussions” of race problems in the United States. This shorter version then appeared in the Southern Workman (October 1886), published by the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Finally, extracts including the missing lines appeared in Mrs N.F. (Gertrude) Mossell’s book The Work of the African-American Woman (1894). The reprintings are remarkable, if only because the poem is not a short filler. The four black editors all considered the poem important. No white editor took notice. The only modern reprinting of “Afmerica” occurred in Paula Bernat Bennett’s 1998 anthology, not with an informative headnote but in a final selection of miscellaneous newspaper verse, arranged chronologically. The only context provided is a footnote stating that this

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“important poem was reprinted at least three times.” The newspaper in which Bennett found it, the Southern Workman, was a publication of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute – now the thriving Hampton University in Hampton, Virginia. Bennett gives no information about Mary E. Ashe Lee’s life or circumstances – even her dates are question marks. Since then her achievement has been noticed, as far as I can find, only by three historians of black religion. No literary study has followed up on Bennett’s recovery of “Afmerica.” It waits to be fleshed out. For a start, I must first point out that Bennett’s text of the poem is not complete. The original printing includes the important introductory passage.15 Second, the outlines of Mary Ashe Lee’s biography that I am able to piece together reveal a woman of considerable education, character, and connection.16 Mary Ashe was born in Mobile, Alabama, on 12 January 1851. Her parents are described as living “in good circumstances,” “prominent in business and benevolence.” They were apparently free and had sufficient resources to buy a farm in southwestern Ohio near Wilberforce University in 1860, just in time to escape the Confederacy. Wilberforce, founded in 1856 by the African Methodist Episcopal Church (ame), was the first black liberal arts institution in the United States. Mary Ashe graduated from Wilberforce in 1873 with a bachelor of science, and, having already established a reputation as a writer, she was appointed to write the class ode (not extant). She then was hired to teach public school in Galveston, Texas, but in December 1873 she married Benjamin F. Lee, professor of pastoral theology at Wilberforce, who later became president of the university and then senior bishop of the ame. Information about Benjamin F. Lee is, not surprisingly, more plentiful.17 The ame had been founded by Richard Allen and others in 1793, after they had been forced from their knees from prayer in a non-coloured section of St George’s Episcopal Church, Philadelphia (Hobson, Mount of Vision, 6). Lee was a respected leader in his church, an editor, eventually senior bishop, and two buildings were afterwards named in his honour.18 Mary played an important supporting role to her distinguished husband, wrote articles for the Christian Recorder and the ame Quarterly Review, plus a regular column in Ringwood’s Journal, a fashion paper published in Cleveland. Preaching was a male preserve; women were active and vocal in the ame Church from the beginning but were not ordained until 1948 (31). Through this time, she gave birth to nine children, lost three in infancy, and raised six to

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adulthood. It is no wonder that her poetic output is small. She hoped at some point to publish a book of poems, but it never appeared. Yellin and Bond’s bibliography lists eleven poems published in the ame Christian Recorder. There seems to have been at least one other longer piece, “Tawawa” (the Native name for the site of Wilberforce), in the metre of Hiawatha, excerpted in Mossell. Mary Ashe Lee died in 1932, having seen her son Benjamin Jr become a respected doctor and her daughter Effie Lee Newcombe a writer of children’s books and poetry connected to the Harlem Renaissance Paula Bennett imputes to “Afmerica” the provenance of its third appearance in the Southern Workman published by the Hampton Institute, but it really belongs with Wilberforce University and the ame. The ideological distinction is consequential – another reflection of divided attitudes among African Americans. Hampton had been founded in 1868 by an idealistic white benefactor named Samuel Chapman Armstrong, whose purpose was to provide black and Native American students, both male and female, vocational training. The “temporal salvation of the colored race,” he wrote, “is to be won out of the ground. Skillful agriculturalists and mechanics are needed rather than poets and orators” (Armstrong, Education for Life, 21). Both former slaves and former buffalo hunters thus had an opportunity to become productive employees. Hampton’s most successful alumnus was Booker T. Washington, who helped to found Tuskegee Institute along similar principles in 1881. Wilberforce and the ame, however, made no compromise on issues of academics or racial equality. An account of the church published in 1866 makes this very clear. One year after Appomattox, the ame calls for the immediate “removal of every civil, legal, and political disability under which the nominally free do now and will suffer,” looking to the church to forward the “cause of human amelioration, intellectually, morally, civilly and religiously considered” (Payne, Semi-Centenary, 93–4). Wilberforce was founded for “the work of Mathematical and Classical Training ... for Christian ends” in 1856, and opened for the benefit of the black race, “and not theirs only, but also for every race that may desire to enjoy the advantages” (113). Like Hampton, Wilberforce particularly welcomed Native American students. There is no compromise with “an unreasonable and wicked prejudice” (160). The resounding consequence of this idealism is clear in the ame narrative of Frederick Douglass’s meeting with President Andrew Johnson, who suggested “the hated scheme of African Coloniza-

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tion.”19 Douglass’s reply is an unyielding declaration of equality, the responsibilities of American exceptionalism, and a Whitmanic global embrace. “Oh, no, Mr. President! We are not going to do that.” We are struggling for an idea, “the unity of races – the brotherhood of man”: “The United States is the greatest nation on the face of the globe, and the richest fruits of her civilization shall soon be found on the Pacific coast, from whence it shall march over the Eastern hemisphere, illumining, retouching, and growing grander. Then, if the question ‘Whether the white and colored races can live side by side, on terms of political equality, without detriment to the former?’ be decided against us here in America, it is decided against us in the whole world; for American influence is destined to be predominant everywhere” (Payne, Semi-Centenary, 159–60). As Judith Weisenfeld noticed, “Afmerica” was written in the context of “ongoing discussions among whites and blacks of colonization schemes,” but instead, Mary Lee prophesies a future America “in which the nation embraces its diversity” (19). Little did she suspect how long that future would take to materialize. The publication of “Afmerica” in 1885 situates it midway between the end of the Reconstruction period, with the Hayes-Tilden compromise of 1877, and the ultimate legalization of Jim Crow segregation with Booker T. Washington’s Atlanta Compromise and the Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. It was a messy, confusing period. From hindsight, we are inclined to fix on those events that betrayed the promise of emancipation. The panic of 1873 and the resulting unemployment triggered massive labour agitation, which was brutally suppressed. The American landscape began to be peopled alarmingly with jobless tramps. Two Byzantine Supreme Court decisions of the 1870s having nothing to do with race affirmed the prerogatives of states’ rights, and immediately the states used them to disenfranchise blacks (Foner, Reconstruction, 531–4). The rise of the robber barons created gross inequalities of wealth for white and black alike. Party politics on both sides was stultified by corrupt political bosses and backroom deals. In the 1890s, privileges of “personhood,” long denied to slaves, were given by the Supreme Court to corporations. But from Mary Ashe Lee’s perspective in the midst of these events as they unfolded, the position of the American black was still hopeful, as it was to the younger Paul Laurence Dunbar, whose equally hopeful “Ode to Ethiopia” appeared in 1896. Amendments to the Constitution had abolished slavery and established equal rights to cit-

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izenship and the vote, at least in theory. Blacks had had a taste of political power and self-sufficiency. Educational opportunities were opening up. Lee and her husband had enjoyed them personally and were deeply committed to the possibilities of self-improvement and self-fulfillment offered by higher education for deserving black students, both male and female. As late as 1900, Bishop Benjamin Lee was preaching words of unalloyed hope from the ame pulpit: The nineteenth-century, “the mightiest of all the centuries,” he declared, is ending. “The century that eliminated from civilization slavery and serfdom ... In this century science has brought all parts of the world about the common center of human interest and necessities. In this century the races have come into more intimate and significant contact than ever before.” The future can only be brighter.20 Lee’s hope seems poised between faith in progress and faith in the Millennium. The timing of “Afmerica” places it in the shadow of one other event not mentioned in the poem but probably implicit in it. In 1884, Frederick Douglass, about a year after the death of his first wife, married his secretary Helen Pitts, a white woman. A shock of scandal ran through both the white and the black populations. Not only was this a conspicuous violation of the intermarriage taboo, it even reversed the more frequent pairing of white man and black woman. The racial purity of the Southern belle was at stake. For Douglass, as Waldo E. Martin notes, this marriage embodied “his commitment to assimilationism, integrationism, and a composite American nationality,” but “public reaction was intense and predictable.” In white newspapers he was a “lecherous old African Solomon,” while black papers called his marriage “a slight, if not an insult” to coloured ladies. Douglass was supported by his closest friends, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who all agreed that it was consistent with his belief that “color distinctions were artificial and absurd.” Given the size of the mixed-race population already in existence, Douglass reasonably protested that “what the American people object to is not a mixture of races, but honorable marriage between them” (Martin, Mind of Frederick Douglass, 98–100). As Martin writes, he and ame leaders shared beliefs in a social reformism based on “orderliness, constructive change, and reason” (166, 178). It is likely that the issue of racial intermarriage prompted by Douglass has a presence in Mary Lee’s poem. The African Methodist Episcopal Church Review itself was, from the beginning, a high-toned intellectual journal aimed at the educated African American intelligentsia. Besides predictable articles on black

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issues and intricacies of Wesleyan theology, it ran essays on “Dickens,” “Mirabeau,” “Socialism” (in the Paris communes), “The French Language of the Thirteenth Century,” and “A Plea for the Co-Education of the Sexes.” There was a catalogue of idiomatic phrases useful in Latin composition and a debate, pro and con, over the ordination of women. In “Shall Our Schools be Mixed or Separate?” F.L. Cardozo, a South Carolina Republican and the first black politician elected to state office, pondered the advantages to black children of segregated schools. Benjamin Lee appeared in volume 1 with an article on “Our Theology.” The issue of intermarriage did not figure prominently, but there was a brief editorial titled “Miscegenation: Redemption,” which was mainly a hostile notice of the Liberia experiment,21 and, later in volume 3, there was a more interesting piece by Pennsylvania lawyer Theophilus J. Minton asking “Is Intermarriage between the Races to Be Encouraged?” Minton’s answer is an emphatic “Yes.” Again the issue is first tied to colonization, and not just in Liberia: there are also proposals for Haiti and New Granada, or a Territory of the Union “sequestrated from the other States ... where no white man would be permitted to enter or settle” (Minton, “Intermarriage,” 284). Minton notes the failures of such attempts with Indians and the Native populations in South Africa, plus the logistical impracticality of herding together a throng of some 7 million American blacks. The remaining options are that “the negro will, therefore, have either to remain a distinct and separate race, occupying a subordinate place ... or he will have to destroy all lines of distinction by assimilating the manners, customs and racial characteristics of the Caucasian ... producing a national homogeneousness” (285). “A distinctive negro civilization,” with its own schools, colleges, or businesses, is “not only not desirable, but indeed ... reprehensible,” for it would “create class distinctions, and foster the race prejudice of which we desire to free ourselves” (286). Debate over the intricacies of cultural assimilation is ongoing, naturally, not only among blacks but also among Native and the more voluntary immigrant populations. The postbellum “freedmen’s schools” brought the issue to a focus, and poetry – reading, writing, elocution – played an important role for assimilation in the curricula (Kete, Reception, 18–19). Phillis Wheatley was the shining example. “Afmerica,” by Mrs M.E. Lee, B.S., shows every sign of embracing these views, which seem congruent with those of Douglass and of the ame Church at large. Here are the opening lines, absent from Paula Bennett’s printing:

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Hang up the harp! I hear them say, Nor sing again an Afric lay, The time has passed; we would forget – And sadly now do we regret There still remains a single trace Of that dark shadow of disgrace, Which tarnished long a race’s fame Until she blushed at her own name; And now she stands unbound and free, In that full light of liberty. “Sing not her past!” cries out a host. “Nor of her future stand and boast. Oblivion be her aimed-for goal, In which to cleanse her ethnic soul, And coming not a creature new, On life’s arena stand in view.” But stand with no identity? All robbed of personality? Perhaps, this is the nobler way To teach that wished-for brighter day. Yet shall the good which she has done Be silenced all and never sung? And shall she have no inspirations To elevate her expectations? From singing I cannot refrain. Please pardon this my humble strain. The evidence in these lines of an African American individual’s feelings of shame for her or his history is difficult to interpret from this distance of time, particularly by a white reader. It is a complex emotion: How much is shame at a lineage of slavery, and how much a shame at African ethnicity itself in the context of white American society? How much is shame at a history of ongoing sexual abuse by white slave owners, and how much is shame at mixed race per se? How much of this shame has been bred by white culture, with its (hypocritical) Christian ideals of sexual purity, and then internalized? How much bred by black culture itself? How widespread or deeply ingrained were these feelings? Why did subsequent black editors omit these lines, and why did Mrs Mossell reprint them? I find these questions unanswerable, but Mary Lee’s poem assumes their existence and stands firmly

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against them, proclaiming the individual black identity as it now exists, neither blind to its history nor apologetic for it. Lee’s opening passage strikes a tone of what leaders much later called “Black Pride,” while at the same time negotiating a view of racial equality. These lost opening couplets address the poem directly to the black reader, especially the black female reader. Removing them – and thus removing significant psychological conflict from the text – has the advantage of opening the address to the white reader as well, leaving the speaker’s race indeterminate. The poem then proceeds for 209 more lines of iambic tetrameter divided into fifteen stanzas, each except the last having three cross-rhymed quatrains and a final couplet. The rhyming is sometimes approximate. What emerges is a portrait of Afmerica, an allegorical young mixed-race American black woman who becomes “the very exemplar” not only of her race, not only “of True Womanhood and the genteel life-style” (Bennett, Public Sphere, 67), but of American citizenry altogether. Mary Ashe Lee first presents this representative figure, then endows her with a history, which is the history of the nation itself, and then looks to her hopeful future. She challenges two of the most ingrained racial taboos of American society: the first is Crèvecoeur’s famous account of “this new man,” the American as melting together of all white European nationalities – Afmerican turns out to be not only female but also, visibly, a meld of both European and African blood (68–70); the second recalls Leslie Fiedler’s account, so daring in 1960, of the crime of racial “miscegenation” – a word that was coined as a political scare tactic during the 1864 presidential election and that has happily all but disappeared from usage in the course of my lifetime. It recalls the host of state laws proscribing marriage between races – laws that were not declared unconstitutional until as late as 1967. Given the terror (in Fiedler’s words) “that finally all distinctions will be blurred and black and white no longer exist” (Fiedler, Love and Death, 414), Afmerica stands boldly as both white and black – rather than neither white nor black. The poem effectively sets aside the American social construction of “Black.” To place this in a larger context, Shira Wolosky distinguishes four categories of immigrant assimilation in America – all imagined “with the emphatic exception of the color line.” The narrowest, the KnowNothing view, sees American culture as essentially English, rejecting everything else as alien; this attitude had a resurgence in the 1890s, and it is thriving as I write. Second, an attitude of “inclusive singular-

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ity” accepted diverse peoples but expected them to conform to established Anglo-Saxon norms. Third is the melting pot of Crèvecoeur, a composite culture in which peoples of all nations “are melted into a new race of men” – Americans. “Finally, there is the model of plural identities, each maintaining its distinctive identity, whose very diversity is seen as defining the American character” (Poetry and Public Discourse, 125–37). None of these types dares breach the colour line in the way Mary Ashe Lee imagines, but her poem prefigures the third type, a future composite American citizenry that includes the African. Her Afmerica is beautiful not only for her cheeks “as brown as chestnuts dark” but her brow “of pure Caucasian hue.” As the product of (enforced) interracial union, she is not only an embodiment of the sexual power asymmetry between white master and female slave but proud of it. She is the distillation of races in the new American of the next century. “Afmerica” is thus an audacious American progress poem seen through African American eyes. Like all progress poems, “Afmerica” falls into three sections – present, past, and future. The opening three stanzas present Afmerica, “the problem of the age,” in disarmingly familiar poetic phrases for her beauty, a maid both strange and well known, “of every hue and every shade.” When slavery prevailed, Lee reminds us, “she was a normal creature then.” Slavery created the conditions that made her representative. Now after emancipation, however, her status is less certain. Then begins the history of the African woman in the New World, seven stanzas beginning with Phillis Wheatley and the earlier “Knickerbock days” of New York, proceeding through the period of George Washington, then to the heavy fieldwork to feed the cotton gin, enduring forced labour with the help of Jehovah, until “brave Lincoln” made his proclamation “on the first of sixty-three.” The stanza on the Knickerbock days (before New Amsterdam was ceded to the English in 1664) establishes black presence in the New World from the very beginning, when this “strange child, called African, / Began to make her history, too.” Slavery is a sin, and New England is honoured for having “washed her hands” of it; but Lee’s depiction of early slavery is relatively sunny. Phillis Wheatly (sic), “the purest type / Of Afric intellectual might,” was “content to play her part.”22 Lee’s simile comparing Wheatley to mummy wheat suggests that she regarded the experience of Africans in their native habitat as buried out of sight and without opportunity until their contact with white civilization.

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The experience of slavery, particularly for women, became more intense when they were “forced within the fields t’appear / The labor of the men to share.” Before that, docile slave women were entrusted with nursing a Washington, or given all the “household care,” leaving the white mistress to her indolent ennui. There is no overt suggestion of sexual abuse anywhere in the poem, unless the word “drudge” in line 80 has a sexual connotation. But Lee is clear that it was the forced labour of the slave that made economic prosperity possible, that slavery “Brought to perfection Southern soil, / And swelled the commerce of those lands.” If Lee’s pietism depicts a sad but faithful Afmerica turning to Jehovah for deliverance from her slavery in Egypt, she also holds out the biblical command of the fifty-year Jubilee with its requirement for the manumission of slaves (Leviticus 25:8–13) against the hypocritical Christian slave-owners. Likewise, while figuring the Civil War as a providential component of salvation history and praising Lincoln for emancipation, she carefully records his action as a “war necessity” that applied only to the rebellious Southern states. Lee shows Afmerica not as the savage ruffian of lost cause Reconstruction historiography but as fully prepared for her freedom: So freedom found her not without Fair education in the North. In Southern cities too, no doubt Her acquisitions proved her worth. In many of her homes were found Refinement true, and some degree Of culture there. Lee’s emphasis on education, refinement, and culture effectively signifies assimilation into Caucasian middle-class society, not as a denial of ethnicity but, in Christopher Z. Hobson’s term, as “a political outlook that can be termed prophetic integrationism.” This notion, Hobson assures us, “despite the later connotations of Douglass’s term ‘assimilation,’” implies “nothing race-effacing” but, rather, “a fierce sense of the particularity and assertiveness of African-American life.”23 This debate remains ongoing. Although it reflects the advantages of Mary Lee’s own background, it also underscores her sincere determination as an educator to share it with all her people. Characteristically, she seals her point with an allusion to Jesus’s Parable of the Talents (Matthew 25), the servant given the least by his master proving the most successful.

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The final five stanzas of “Afmerica” may now be read as overly insistent; but this over-insistence itself tells us the urgency of the issue as it appeared in 1885. Americans recognize themselves as “mixed and intermixed” of “all nationalities”: “Behold, this colored child is thine!” The father is dared to say that he denies his child. It is a paternal duty owed her. Lee devotes a full stanza to rejecting the hated back-toAfrica movement. “Her home is here,” as planned by Providence, she insists. “Her ancestors, like all the rest, / Came from the eastern hemisphere: / But she is native of the west.” Lee ends by reaffirming the talent and potentiality of black women, mixed race or otherwise. In song and music, she can soar; She writes, she paints and sculptures well: The fine arts seem to smile on her. In elocution, she’ll excel; In medicine, she has much skill. She is an educator, too; She lifts her voice against the still. To Christ she tries man’s soul to woo. In love and patience, she is seen In her own home, a blessed queen. This litany of woman’s opportunities includes higher education and professions like medicine and ministry that continued to be denied to women, black or white, for decades afterwards. Of course, it also includes the traditional option of “blessed queen” of the household (not to mention temperance crusader). Lee closes her poem by addressing the male reader, encouraging him to guarantee the woman’s security and “don that lovely courtesy / Which marked the chevaliers of old.” (Chivalry, it seems, is not a monopoly of the Southern plantation owner.) Afmerica thus stands as an American patriot looking toward the future perfection of the nation’s ideals. As a later ame leader Reverdy C. Ransom declared in 1935, “the Negro is a fool who does not stand erect, hold his head high, and claim everything in it from My Country ’tis of thee to The Star-Spangled Banner” (Hobson, Mount of Vision, 194). Lee’s “Afmerica” offers a unique view of African American aspirations and anxieties in the period after emancipation. Her views on mixed race, however, were not unique. Joel Barlow had envisioned a future composite humanity in which the darker races will evolve to “a

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fairer tint” while Europeans gain “a ruddier hue and deeper shade” (Columbiad, 120ff), while Whitman had foreseen races “to marry and be given in marriage” (“Passage to India,” 33). According to Christopher Z. Hobson, “several writers believed a new people would arise through intermarriage: ‘This western world is destined to be filled with a mixed race,’” Henry Highland Garnet asserted in his 1848 lecture.” Others turned white biases upside down: “If the negro must go, must lose his identity,” George L. Ruffin insisted, “the white must also go and lose his identity.” This prophecy does not foresee the disappearance or submergence of a weaker race, as some believed, but a fulfillment of God’s Providence. “He who made all nations of one blood,” William J. Simmons declared, would “reduce this conglomerate mass to one distinct nationality.” Others turned the Southern apologists’ interpretation of the sons of Noah passage against them. If Asia was allotted to Shem, Europe to Japheth, and Africa to Ham, the exceptional America was “beneficently reserved” by Providence “as a common continent, for the reunion of all the sons of Adam in the bond of common brotherhood” (all quotes from Hobson, Mount of Vision, 84–5). But reality is harsh. American laws against interracial marriage were not to be overturned by the Supreme Court until the Loving v. Virginia decision in 1967. After the Civil War, politicians framed the Southern conflict with the North “in terms of its fear of racial amalgamation.” As Alex Lubin has written, “interracial intimacy was at the crux of national remembrance of the Civil War through the 1930s,” and after, Southern courts struggled to maintain sexuality and race to be solely an issue of state’s rights (Romance and Rights, 4–5).

Harriet Monroe is remembered not as a poet but as the feisty editor of Poetry Magazine, which had such a momentous impact on the development of American modernism. The modernist myth of the obtuse lady editor who failed to see the brilliance of Pound and Eliot still persists, despite the research accumulated since Ellen Williams’s pioneering study.24 Monroe can now be saluted as an impassioned patron who had the personal presence to stand diplomatically firm against gargantuan egos like Pound, Amy Lowell, and many others clamouring for attention. Twenty years earlier, however, as a young poet in 1892, Monroe was writing in the genteel nineteenth-century mode. She produced a

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number of patriotic lyrics in pseudopindaric form, and her Columbian Ode did its best to scale the sublime. Related by marriage to the eminent architect John Wellborn Root, she sought to give voice to the Progressive era and bring the arts to the American frontier. As Daniel J. Cahill notes, she was proud of her “Columbian Ode,” and “through the many years that followed its initial publication, she frequently recited the poem from memory for visitors to the office of Poetry” (Harriet Monroe, 99). The irony is that, as editor of Poetry, Monroe adamantly refused to accept any overtly political poetry. From her perspective, however, a patriotic poem was not “political”: it spoke with public assent. Her “Columbian Ode” was read to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World on 21 October 1892, “before an audience of more than a hundred thousand persons.”25 Chicago marked the point where the edge of American civilization touched the frontier, the very site where Frederick Jackson Turner was soon to outline his Frontier Thesis of American history. The exposition was a triumphalist tableau of the new corporate America, ironically framed in the outer world by the financial panic of 1893 and the bloody Pullman Strike of 1894. For the recitation of Monroe’s ode, actress Sarah Cowell Le Moyne was brought from New York, and musical settings of three passages penned by the distinguished composer George Whitefield Chadwick were played by musical forces numbering in the thousands. Afterwards, Harriet Monroe accepted a laurel wreath from President Benjamin Harrison. The poem, 375 lines printed in a twenty-three-page souvenir booklet, amounts to a progress poem, a paean to the tutelary goddess Columbia, celebrating the past and future of America.26 Columbus himself incarnates the divine prerogative of manifest destiny, part of the tradition that stretches from Barlow’s Columbiad to Hart Crane’s “Ave Maria.” Monroe’s ode outdoes even Whitman in her assertion of American exceptionalism with her promise, like the grand Zionist prophecy in Micah 4:1–5, that every nation will worship the one true god of Democracy together in universal peace: Lo! Clan on clan The embattled nations gather to be one, Clasp hands as brothers ’neath Columbia’s shield, Upraise her banners to the shining sun.

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Along her blessed shore One heart, one song, one dream – Man shall be free forevermore, And love shall be supreme. (16) Although the language of Monroe’s grandiloquent Chicago boosterism is dismayingly generalized, all the major components of the Columbian mythology ring clear. No poem in the American archive, not even The Columbiad itself, paints such an exalted picture of the Italian adventurer. The poem begins by calling the nations to assemble – Spain first (the war with Spain was six years in the future), England (but not Ireland), and France (with her gift of the Statue of Liberty). The exposition is a physical realization of the assembly of nations that ends Barlow’s Columbiad. Like Lanier’s “Psalm of the West,” Monroe remarks on the Vikings in Vinland but fails to notice Africa and its inhabitants. She does, however, include “the calm Orient ... From hoary Palestine to sweet Japan.” She is not strictly Eurocentric, then, but her eye rests only upon regions that claim to be civilized. Although she later proclaims “Open wide the doors” (17), she is not clear how wide open they should be. Columbus himself appears as the virtuous adventurer of American legend, with no hint of conquest, greed, or bloodshed. The New World is personified as a goddess, much like Powhatan’s daughter of Hart Crane’s Bridge: She “dwelt in forests” where she heard “Two oceans playing with the lights / Of eve and morn” (12). She tends a prelapsarian garden for Columbus’s arrival: “Not with his brother is man’s battle here” (13), no murderous Cain to threaten the peace. Columbus comes with “new weapons” – with “axe and oar,” “with mallet and with spade” (14) – to construct a modern infrastructure. According to Monroe, the New World has been kept “safe with God till man grow wise” (10). The Old World is corrupt, and Columbus has to “slip from the leash of kings” (11) to find freedom. But he does not find freedom directly. There’s a population of troublesome Indians. When their presence comes to mind, the prelapsarian Eden suddenly turns into “a prisoned world” (9) where “wild men starve and slay,” pre-conscious, subhuman, eking out a bare subsistence while “the dumb years passed with vacant eyes” (10). They are hostile savages, the enemy:

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Then men in league with these – Brothers of wind and waste – Hew barbs of flint, and darkly haste From sheltering tents and trees; And mutter: Away! away! Ye children of white-browed day! Who dares profane our wild gods’ reign We torture and trap and slay. (15) Monroe dismisses them with startling ruthlessness, and their only hope is that a benign Columbus and his fellow Europeans, “armed with truth’s holy cross, faith’s sacred fire” (16), might someday baptize and civilize them. The Chicago Exposition itself, guided by pioneering anthropologists like Frederick Ward Putnam, had at least taken efforts to present a more sympathetic representation of Native Americans. But in the spirit of the World’s Fair, emphasis fell on the future, in faith that “Science” and “Knowledge” would ultimately bring forth the Millennium: Then shall Want’s call to Sin resound no more Across her teeming fields. And Pain shall sleep, Soothed by brave Science with her magic lore, And War no more shall bid the nations weep. Then the worn chains shall slip from man’s desire, And ever higher and higher His swift foot shall aspire; Still deeper and more deep His soul its watch shall keep. Till Love shall make the world a holy place, Where Knowledge dares unveil God’s very face. (22) The Chicago Exposition was a major showcase for the coming century. Electrically lighted streets were a novelty, and the White City, as the grounds were called, was illuminated by Nikola Tesla’s new alternating current rather than Thomas Edison’s direct current. The physical structures, which covered six hundred acres of land, made impressive presentations of sham Roman imperial architecture to embody the imperium of corporate capitalism. The principal buildings were “covered with a composite plaster-like material called ‘staff’” to create “an illusion of marble and classic monumentality.” The very ephemer-

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ality of the show made the White City seem “all the more ideal: the momentary realization of a dream.”27 The fair introduced multitudes of technological innovations like elevators and the electric chair. Familiar consumer goods appeared for the first time – the zipper, Cream of Wheat, and Cracker Jacks – plus Edison’s kinetoscope, early voice recording, and George G.W. Ferris’s new Ferris Wheel on the Midway Plaisance (from which the word “midway”). “The Midway was also home to some less seemly exhibits. People of faraway regions were placed on display like animals: Lapps, Eskimos, Zulu, and opium smokers from China” in a specially constructed “joss house.”28 The Chicago Exposition did its best to be progressive, but organizers stubbornly prevented delegations of women and African Americans from participating in the planning. The decision to exclude them was upheld by President Harrison. Refusing to appoint a single African American to the 208-member Board of Commissioners, Harrison, in the words of activist Ida B. Wells, established “a precedent which remained inviolate throughout the entire term of Exposition work” (Davis, “Stage Business,” 191). Frederick Douglass appeared, but “as a commissioner from Haiti – not as citizen of his own country” (Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 220). Women’s visibility remained more prominent, including a major Women’s Building designed by a female architect, Sophia Hayden; but the emphasis fell predictably, in Alan Trachtenberg’s words, on domesticity, “the unique, and uniquely virtuous, powers of women as mothers, homemakers, teachers, and cooks” (221). Blacks withdrew entirely, their only presence a tiny exhibit by the Hampton Institute sponsored by the Federal Department of Education. According to Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the displays of ethnicity, which included many Native American tribes, were “designed to demonstrate the primitiveness of the non-white (non-European) cultures,” leaving “no confusion about who was and who was not inherently a true, ‘civilised’ American.”29 In this light, Harriet Monroe’s Columbian Ode might be contrasted with a more intimate poem, Ina Coolbrith’s “The Captive of the White City.”30 The captive in question was Rain-in-the-Face, the Native chief held personally responsible for the death of General Custer at Little Big Horn in 1876. Custer, despite his inept defeat, was widely regarded as a martyred hero – witness Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s nine-hundred-line heroic poem “Custer” (1896). Rain-in-the-Face had been placed on exhibit at the fair, complete with trappings imported from Montana – namely, the very cabin in which Chief Sitting Bull and his son had

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been killed, along with several others, in the army’s bungled attempt to apprehend him. Coolbrith’s poem is remarkable not only for its sympathy with the Native American – in this it parallels Longfellow’s “Revenge of Rain-in-the-Face” – but also for calling explicit attention in a note to the claim “that the land upon which Chicago is built was never fully paid for.” The poem bears another explanatory note in its 1895 Songs of San Francisco printing: “In the Midway Plaisance of the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893, there was, by permission of the United States Government (so read the record), under guard in the log cabin owned by Sitting Bull, and in which that chief and his son were killed, the Sioux Indian immortalized by the verse of Longfellow, and whose name will go down in history as the slayer of General George A. Custer, in the fight on the Little Big Horn.” Coolbrith’s disdain for the humiliation of the man is icy enough without being overstated. Furthermore, if “pain, suffering, self-sacrifice, and loss” are intrinsic to the sentimental subject of the century’s female writers,31 as Paula Bennett writes, Coolbrith’s poem brings two of its most powerful icons, the “Dispossessed Native” and the “Grieving Widow,” into headon collision as she imagines the Widow Custer suddenly encountering her beloved husband’s murderer in this very public place. The effect is not to magnify the sentimentality but to destabilize it with an ingeniously contrived tableau vivant enacted amid the crowds of the Great Exposition, nexus of consumer capitalism, barbarous entertainments, and marvels of the future. The grieving widow is the icon of the ruthless new corporationism and its cost to the civilized white, as Rain-in-the-Face is the icon of the Vanishing Red. The tone is complex, like Coolbrith’s sober, poetically formal treatment of the vaguely risible Native name (which was still a playground joke in my own childhood). It is utterly true to the brutality underlying the expansive nation’s optimism. Rain-in-the-Face himself, one must note, solemnly denied having killed the American general.32 The irony is heightened, however, when one realizes that Rain-inthe-Face was just one of hundreds of “primitive” peoples at the Chicago Exposition, which prided itself for showcasing the new science of anthropology. He was a very minor attraction, not even mentioned in most accounts, and only Erik Larson’s popular history (in a chapter titled “Freaks”) confirms that he could be seen there on the midway, sitting in a rainstorm with “green paint that streamed down his face” (Devil in the White City, 313). Such human spectacles had long been commonplace – circus sideshows, Wild West shows – each with its

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own version of Chang and Eng or a Hottentot Venus. But Chicago went about its work systematically, with help from leading anthropologists, the US Indian Affairs Bureau, and its Canadian counterpart the Department of Indian Affairs, importing Hopi bread makers, Powhatan quarry workers, Kwakiutl with totem poles from the Northwest Coast, and Inuit from Labrador. There were huge plaster casts of Maya ruins and Colorado cliff dwellings. A reconstructed street from Cairo, a village of Turkish Jews, and a tribal band from Dahomey were among the most popular exhibits on the Midway Plaisance. The fifty-nine Inuit probably had the worst experience, two children dying from sickness, adults forced to wear fur clothing in hot weather and virtually imprisoned when they objected.33 For many Native Americans, memories of the Ghost Dance movement and the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee were very fresh. The entire episode amounted to a triumphal procession of the vanquished after decades of expansionism. Rain-in-the-Face himself had minimal anthropological value, his exhibition serving only the morbid curiosity of the public. The ethics of these presentations were not unchallenged. Emma Sickles, who had acted as a mediator at Wounded Knee, attacked anthropologist Frederic Putnam and his department for committing “one of the darkest conspiracies ever conceived against the Indian race.” But her protests accomplished little (Hinsley and Wilcox, Coming of Age, 34). One other woman dedicated an ode to the Columbian Exposition, the African American poet Mary Weston Fordham (ca. 1862–1905) of Charleston, South Carolina, where she was a teacher. Little is known about her outside of her volume Magnolia Leaves (1897), which bears a perfunctory introduction by Booker T. Washington. Like Harriet Monroe, she, too, depicts Columbus’s invasion of the Americas as a benevolent incursion, with emphasis on his religious mission. Her Natives look on in wonder at the sanctity of the Spanish arrival: And the warriors started forth Like fawns through the forest trees; When lo! what a wondrous, solemn sight– “Pale Faces” on their knees! Before the Holy Cross, Each with uncovered brow, Prayed the mighty God, that His blessings e’er Might this fair land endow.

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Mary Weston Fordham pairs her “Chicago Exposition Ode” with an “Atlanta Exposition Ode,” addressing a lesser event two years later in 1895. The Atlanta Exposition was more a trade fair for the cotton states, though, like Chicago, it exhibited the technologies of the coming century. It is best remembered, however, as the site of Booker T. Washington’s controversial, humbly pragmatic Atlanta Compromise Speech, which counselled the African American to keep peace with the white population in exchange for the security of menial employment: “A ship lost at sea for many days suddenly sighted a friendly vessel. From the mast of the unfortunate vessel was seen a signal: ‘Water, water. We die of thirst.’ The answer from the friendly vessel at once came back: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ ... The captain of the distressed vessel, at last heeding the injunction, cast down his bucket and it came up full of fresh, sparkling water from the mouth of the Amazon River. To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land ... I would say: ‘Cast down your bucket where you are.’ Cast it down, making friends in every manly way of the people of all races, by whom you are surrounded” (“Atlanta Address,” 584). Fordham’s ode turns Washington’s vivid parable neatly into verse: “Cast down your bucket where you are,” From burning sands or Polar star From where the iceberg rears its head Or where the kingly palms outspread; ’Mid blackened fields or golden sheaves, Or foliage green, or autumn leaves, Come sounds of warning from afar, “Cast down your bucket where you are.” The conceit is ingenious, but as C. Vann Woodward said long ago, it amounted to “a renunciation of active political aspirations for the Negro” (New South, 323). H. Cordelia Ray, author of the “Lincoln” ode discussed above, looks forward in another poem, her “Ode on the Twentieth Century (A Dream Prospect),” to a New Jerusalem in America ornamented with images from the Heavenly City of Revelation, “a hall of weird magnificence / All studded o’er with scintillating gems,” “a temple whence / Flows wisdom like a river.” Ray’s approach is broad: she does not refer to racial issues at all, nor does she assume a racialized reader. The

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coming of Jerusalem, unfortunately, was to be interrupted by America’s next wars, its gallant expedition on behalf of Cuban liberation, followed by its less gallant offensive in the Philippines, plus two world wars after that. H. Cordelia Ray’s poem is nothing more than a hopeful dream: but in my mind I can envision her solemnly joining hands with Afmerica on one side and Rain-in-the-Face on the other, staring uncertainly into the coming century, waiting.

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7 Questioning America Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation” Lies! lies! It cannot be! The wars we wage Are noble.

William Vaughn Moody’s realization that America was in the midst of an ignoble war marks a major turn in the development of the American political ode, just as it marks a major turn in developing conceptions of American nationhood and citizenship. Moody’s shock of lost innocence is the nation’s lost innocence. The Treaty of Paris signed in December 1898 brought the SpanishAmerican War to an end. Spain ceded control of Cuba and Puerto Rico to the United States, to the approval of most Americans (with residual traces of the leyenda negra) and of many Cubans unhappy with Spanish colonial rule. In the same stroke, however, Spain also handed over its colonies in the Pacific, the islands of the Philippines and Guam (in return for $20 million). Filipinos under Emilio Aguinaldo, like the Cubans, had been fighting for their independence from Spain before the Americans intervened; but when they realized that the Americans were themselves about to assume colonial control, they continued fighting against their new masters until Aguinaldo was captured in March 1901. These events have left faint imprint on American cultural memory: the war with Spain lasted only a few months in the summer of 1898, and there were relatively few American casualties. As for foreign casualties, they mattered as little then as they do now. Puerto Rico and Guam, plus the enclave at Guantanamo, are the only relics that endure, besides dim memories of the Battleship Maine and Teddy Roosevelt charging up San Juan Hill. But for Moody, the turn from the righteous struggle in Cuba, as it was

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commonly perceived, to bloody fighting in the distant Philippines marked the turn from a just war in which right and wrong are clearly black and white to a morally dubious, greedy, imperialist grab for distant real estate inhabited by a strange brown people. President McKinley himself was unsure what he was about: when he realized the Philippines “had dropped into our laps,” he confessed, “I did not know what to do with them” (Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 156). For Americans generally, the Philippine War marks the beginning of a nearly continuous sequence of military interventions in Asia fraught with issues of military strategy, economic interest, colonialism, racism, and moral rationalization. Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” which registers his questioning of American motives, appeared in Atlantic Monthly for May 1900, and it evoked considerably more response than the publication of a poem usually receives: one analysis claims that Moody “became at a bound the best known poet of his time.”1 By that time, even the conflict with Spain was a fading memory that had brought satisfaction to nearly everyone but the Spanish. But the Philippine War was America’s first incursion into Asia, virtually its first outside the western hemisphere,2 and it was still ongoing. Moody’s anti-imperialistic poem, despite its essentially very conservative tenor, anticipates in many ways the progressive standpoint of contemporary postcolonialism. Moody’s intervention came from an unexpected quarter. Moody had developed a promising reputation, but he had not yet gathered his poetic work into a book, and he had published nothing remotely political. His work primarily dealt with large religious and metaphysical issues: before the “Ode” he had just completed the largest work in his oeuvre, Masque of Judgement, a symbolic blank verse closet drama in five acts plus a prologue, in which creation is seen as a “necessary conflict in the mind of God, who acted in a compulsive ‘demand of joy’ and ‘necessity of grief’” (Brown, Estranging Dawn, 98). This grandiose Miltonic theodicy is more typical of Moody’s output than the handful of political poems by which he is best known, all produced during the years 1900 to 1902. Moody had been brought up a pious Methodist in the town of New Albion, Indiana, the sixth of seven children. His family was not impoverished, but neither was it wealthy, and Moody’s parents both died before he reached eighteen. A wealthy uncle, however, seeing his special gifts, paid his way through Harvard. In this Moody resembles Sidney Lanier, but that a Harvard education gave him significantly greater advantages than Oglethorpe

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University gave Lanier. Moody mixed with faculty like Santayana and William James, and developed lifelong friendships with the author Robert Morss Lovett, composer Daniel Gregory Mason, novelist Robert Herrick, poets Trumbull Stickney, Bliss Carman, Percy McKaye, Ridgely Torrence, and others; upon graduation, he was hired by the University of Chicago, where Lovett was already settled, and there his network extended to the Chaucerian John Matthews Manly, Renaissance historian Ferdinand Schevill, and author Hamlin Garland. Moody’s specializations were medieval and seventeenth-century literature and drama. At Harvard, he had absorbed a general disdain for American provinciality (Brown, Estranging Dawn, 19–20), so he diversified his scholarly life with extensive travels, usually in the company of a male friend – Lovett, Manly, Schevill, or Garland – and usually involving strenuous outdoor activities like biking, hiking, and mountain-climbing. These took him through France and England, Italy and Greece, and later the Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Hopi regions of the American West. Whenever teaching did not require his presence in Chicago, he divided his time between Boston and New York, or London and Paris. Accounts of Moody’s character focus on his strenuous “ethic of intensity” (Brown, Estranging Dawn, 101). His scholarly publication was prolific – a large-scale First View of English Literature (1905) co-authored with Lovett, plus editions of Milton, Bunyan, Scott, and others, for school use. His religious life had grown at Harvard from early piety to a progressive and muscular Christianity; but he never escaped the grip of his early Methodism, which at times enveloped him in a quasi-mystical aura. Lovett writes, “while in Crete he had for a second time a vision of the actual presence of Christ, recorded in ‘Second Coming.’ No one who knew Moody can doubt that these were real experiences.”3 Though he was introspective and not gregarious by nature, both Lovett and Manly in their panegyric introductions to his work are moved to an extravagance that nowadays might raise eyebrows: he possessed, writes Manly, “a vigorous, well-knit body in which every organ of power and sensation was perfect ... Not in less degree than a Greek in the age of Pericles was he an epicure of life, a voluptuary of the whole range of physical, mental, and spiritual perfections. To recognize this, one had only to look upon his body, sensitive to every delight and exuberant with vitality; to be suddenly fixed by his wonderful eyes, light, clear blue, and shining like large gems.” This sensitivity was no weakness, Manly assures us, but “vigor and health of mind and character”

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(“Introduction,” xiii). Lovett is likewise smitten by Moody’s “magnificent bodily health” (“Introduction,” xliv). This purple prose with its fixation on Moody’s masculine physique, one must remember, comes from friends who had just seen a strong man inexplicably cut down in his prime by a brain tumour at the age of forty-one. There is little question, however, that Moody was more comfortable with men than women. Moody’s biographer, Maurice F. Brown, dwells on the teenage poet’s exceptionally close relationship with a doting mother who was slowly but surely dying, and although Brown is averse to psychological speculation, he remarks tersely on Moody’s “oedipal issues” and his “neurotic dread of intimacy” (Estranging Dawn, 63–4). Moody’s poems “The Daguerrotype” and “Until the Troubling of the Waters” are uncharacteristic explorations of this personal experience. His few relationships with women were distant and involved protracted correspondence. “Through idealization and withdrawal,” Brown writes, Moody “guarded against the possibility of more mundane involvements while protecting a tenuous spiritual friendship” (85).4 Harriet, whom he eventually married, was a Chicago socialite and divorcée about twelve years older than himself. He conducted a lengthy friendship with her, again with much correspondence, and did not marry until May 1909, when he was already feeling the first effects of his tumour. He died in Colorado, where the two had travelled for his health, in October 1910. After Moody’s death, Harriet reappears in literary history as patron to a number of writers, among them Hart Crane (Dunbar, House in Chicago). Moody’s political views must be construed mainly from his poems. Unlike Whitman, Lowell, or Lanier, he wrote no political prose. His published letters reveal relatively little interest in current events. His views on the American adventures in Cuba and the Philippines line up with the anti-expansionist views of a smallish but significant minority of the public. As Brown notes, “Arguments for America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ and annexation of the territories were strong. In response, an Anti-Imperialist League had been formed, and it gained wide support in both Chicago and Boston.”5 How perfectly in agreement Moody’s thinking was with them is not clear. One thing that is clear, however, is Moody’s admiration for the abolitionist martyr, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the moral compass of his poem. While on a European bicycle trip, Lovett recalls a “glorious morning” in the Italian Tyrol walking round the Marmolada, “taking our bath in the snow”: “I found in my mail the Boston Weekly Transcript

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with William James’s oration on the dedication of the monument to Robert Gould Shaw, which gave the keynote to the ‘Ode in Time of Hesitation.’”6 The date was 4 June 1897, and the unveiling was a major event on Boston Common. The story of Robert Gould Shaw is one of the most moving of the many left by the Civil War. Born into privilege as the only son of prominent Boston abolitionists, Shaw was, at the age of twenty-five, tasked by the governor of Massachusetts with training the first regiment of African American soldiers to fight in the war. Many questioned whether such men would or could fight, whether they would accept military discipline, whether they should be trusted with guns. Shaw trained his regiment, led them through Boston to cheers, scattered jeers, and a skirmish with Irish immigrant Copperheads. As he led out, Shaw turned to salute the old abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who was shedding tears (Whitfield, “Sacred,” 5–6). Shaw did his best, against bureaucratic resistance, to ensure equal respect and equal pay for his men. Having first demonstrated in lesser combat that they could fight well, Shaw led a courageous and wholly useless assault on Fort Wagner in Charleston harbour on 18 July 1863. The assault failed, and Shaw was killed with nearly half his men. When the Confederates buried the dead, they refused to give Shaw’s body the separate burial normally due to officers: “We have buried him with his niggers.” There was Northern agitation to have the body moved, but Shaw’s father refused, saying, “We hold that a soldier’s most appropriate burial-place is on the field where he has fallen” (McPherson, Battle Cry, 686–7). Colonel Robert Gould Shaw became the embodiment of heroic self-sacrifice to the ideals of racial equality that the American nation hopes to represent. James Russell Lowell, whose niece Shaw had married, wrote his elegy “Memoriae Positum,” and Shaw’s spirit breathes through Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode.” But Shaw’s accomplishment was not just empty gallantry. His 54th Massachusetts Infantry set the standard for subsequent recruitment of black soldiers, and they provided manpower crucial to tipping the scale in favour of eventual Union victory.7 Although Moody’s genteel ode is absent now from standard anthologies, readers today are most likely to encounter Shaw in Robert Lowell’s iconic poem “For the Union Dead,” in which Augustus SaintGaudens’s bronze memorial to Shaw and his black infantry also serves as an imperilled moral compass during the earliest days of the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Visitors to Boston may encounter Saint-Gau-

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dens’s masterpiece itself on Boston Common, where it still stands beside a congested city street. As Kathryn Greenthal writes, “The inevitability implicit in the work is not limited to the movement of Shaw and his men but instead marks the passing of endless lines of young men marching off to endless wars. The work seems to throb with the sound of drumbeats, their cadence formed of such words as war, valour, patriotism, death, grief, waste” (Augustus Saint-Gaudens, 145). If James Russell Lowell wrote the first elegy for Shaw, his greatgrand-nephew’s poem stands in a long line of poetic memorials including Moody’s, the most elaborate, plus a number of earlier short poems, one by the black poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, which (uniquely) despairs that Shaw’s sacrifice was made in vain.8 Steven Axelrod has examined this rich intertextual poetic conversation in his now classic article “Colonel Shaw in American Poetry.” The Shaw story also entered American music in the first movement of Charles Ives’s masterpiece Three Places in New England (1911–14) and, later, in Edward Zwick’s powerful film Glory (1989). The story of Saint-Gaudens’s monument, complex and well documented as it is, largely affirms the principles for which it was created, though inevitably it exposes some underlying ironies as well. The desire for a monument emerged as early as 1865, when an emancipated slave in Charleston raised money for a statue of the white commander alone, while Shaw’s family insisted that the black soldiers be included (Marcus, “Shaw Memorial,” 8). Various proposals failed, until the sculptor Saint-Gaudens was invited to imagine the fitting monument. The arduous process of working from his first concept, an equestrian bas relief, to the unprecedented final creation is told in Saint-Gaudens’s Reminiscences and has been retold many times since. Kirk Savage notices a few condescending remarks about blacks made by the sculptor (Standing Soldiers, 232), but Saint-Gaudens took enormous pains to create portrait busts of Shaw’s soldiers from live models, and he included twenty-three life-like figures of black soldiers in his design. As Savage concludes, “he was able to elevate the white hero without demoting the black troops” (203). Saint-Gaudens put off other lucrative commissions as he undertook a labour of love that extended from his first invitation in February 1881 to the unveiling in June 1897. The Brahmins did not want a generic monument: they wanted a unique work of art. And the monument Saint-Gaudens gave them is unique in many ways, a celebration of a heroic lower-ranking officer, of common soldiers, of black soldiers – “the most intensely felt

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image of military commemoration ever made by an American” (Robert Hughes, quoted in Marcus, “Shaw Memorial,” 10). Aesthetically, “sculptural precedents for the Shaw Memorial are practically nonexistent” (16). It is a monument that fuses the genres of equestrian statue (almost free standing), high and low relief, and historical painting. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. William Vaughn Moody could only read about the ceremonies held on Decoration Day, 1897. The governor of Massachusetts and the mayor of Boston were present, along with Saint-Gaudens and the architect Charles McKim, who designed the setting; Harvard president Charles W. Eliot; members of the Shaw family; and the elite of the city. Most moving were the sixty-five veterans of the Massachusetts 54th who survived the assault on Fort Wagner, including (incredibly) the flag bearer, Sergeant William H. Carney, the first black recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor (Washington, Story of My Life, 1:111). The obligatory ode was recited by Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Axelrod, “Colonel Shaw,” 526); but the featured speaker was William James. James’s speech was copiously excerpted in the newspaper Moody read in Italy, and it is often cited in the voluminous critical literature that surrounds Robert Lowell’s poem, which quotes it. James had difficulty writing his speech, which he described privately as “some mugwumperie” (Whitfield, “Sacred,” 18). He had not fought in the war, though both of his younger brothers had not only fought but had also served under Shaw himself, and had been wounded – Wilky very seriously. But his speech was a moving celebration of Roman republican virtues. “Look at the monument and read the story,” he said: “Southern leaders in congressional debates, insolent in their security, loved to designate them by the contemptuous collective epithet of ‘this peculiar kind of property.’ There they march” (40). He focused beautifully not on Shaw’s conventional valour, but on “that lonely kind of courage (civic courage we call it in times of peace).” “Of five hundred of us who could storm a battery side by side with others, perhaps not one would be found ready to risk his worldly fortunes all alone in resisting an enthroned abuse” (57–8). He did not, however – as Stephen Whitfield observes pointedly – draw attention to “the betrayal of the negro” that had taken place in the United States over the previous three decades (19). Moody probably did not read about the other speaker at the ceremony, Booker T. Washington. I had read several accounts of the event myself without learning of Washington’s presence, until I consulted

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Saint-Gaudens’s Reminiscences. Washington, the most respected black leader of his day, president of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and champion of black education, was a natural choice, and his inclusion was wholly fitting. But ironies abound. Not only was his address slighted by the press, but present-day critical attitudes towards his career now diminish its significance. His words, however, were – and still are – challenging: “Colonel Shaw succeeded in making the negro a soldier because he had faith in him as a man,” he said. “The black man who cannot let love and sympathy go out to the white man is but half free. The white man who would close the shop or factory against a black man seeking an opportunity to make an honest living is but half free ... The full measure of the fruit of Fort Wagner and all that this monument stands for will not be realized until every man covered with a black skin shall by patient and natural effort, grow to that height in industry, property, intelligence, and moral responsibility, where no man in all our land will be tempted to degrade himself by withholding from his black brother any opportunity which he himself would possess. Until that time comes this monument will stand for effort, not victory complete.”9 Recent critics may dwell on Washington’s position of pragmatic compromise with Jim Crow and the nation’s “abandonment of idealism,” and, according to Stephen Whitfield, Washington’s speech echoed the “gradualism” and “economic determinism” asserted two years earlier in his Atlanta Compromise speech (“Sacred,” 13). Critics forget, however, that William James’s student W.E.B. DuBois had not yet come on the scene, and furthermore that even DuBois at first supported Washington’s policy of accommodation. The year 1895 marked a high toll of lynchings in the Southern states, and the notorious Plessy v. Ferguson decision was handed down by the Supreme Court in 1896. Growing up as a black male in Alabama then was even more difficult than it is today. How much of this extraordinary background Moody absorbed is impossible to know except from the poem he wrote. But he wrote the poem early in 1900 only a few blocks away from Saint-Gaudens’s monument, which he had plenty of time to contemplate, and his contemplations could not help extending to the degradation of American national idealism that had occurred since Appomattox. When it was unveiled, writes David W. Blight, it stood alone in Civil War memory. “By that time the sectional reunion was virtually complete, founded on a racial apartheid that was becoming the law and practice of the

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land.”10 As Albion Tourgée put it, “The South surrendered at Appomattox; the North has been surrendering ever since” (Blight, Battlefields, 155). The victorious North had allowed this postwar infection to enter every aspect of American life. Civil Rights amendments had passed, but Senator Sumner’s Civil Rights Bill intended to enforce the 14th Amendment – the bill that had so outraged Sidney Lanier (see 137–9) – was drastically watered down after his death (1875). The period witnessed the rise of unregulated laissez faire capitalism in the socalled “Gilded Age,” the “Age of the Robber Barons,” the “Age of Betrayal.” From the money scandals of Grant’s presidency, it saw the evolution of political machines and demagogic party bosses, and the slithery manoeuvring that unknotted the Hayes-Tilden impasse and brought Reconstruction to an end in 1878. In the South, apologias for the Confederacy began immediately in 1866 with Edward A. Pollard’s mammoth The Lost Cause: A New Southern History of the War of the Confederates, which he concluded by declaring, “All that is left the South is the war of ideas” (Blight, Battlefields, 159). It was a war the South was winning, for lost causism “had achieved a remarkably wide appeal; it had captured the white American historical imagination, and the ‘loss’ in war by the South had become for many (including northerners) a ‘victory’ over the experiment of racial equality during Reconstruction.” Lost cause mythology had become “a civil religion” (Blight, Battlefields, 155). But more than ideas were in play: the Ku Klux Klan was founded, violence spread, lynchings rose to record levels. The decade before the unveiling had seen two of the most damaging Supreme Court decisions in American history. Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which confirmed segregation and the rights of Jim Crow, was so little newsworthy that the New York Times buried it with the railroad news (Whitfield, “Sacred,” 12). Earlier, Pembina Silver Mining v. Pennsylvania (1888) guaranteed corporations the rights of a “person” under the 14th Amendment – which was originally intended to guarantee equal rights not to businesses but to emancipated slaves. This warped interpretation of American law is still in effect as I write. The Supreme Court, reflecting the postwar racial tensions of the American public, thus twisted the ideals of upright men like James Russell Lowell and Robert Gould Shaw. American politics in 1900 was itself muddled thoroughly. At no time, I think, has the metaphor of “left” versus “right” had less meaning. President McKinley, a Republican, was firmly pro-business, while his volatile vice-president, Theodore Roosevelt, proved to be anti-trust

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and pro-reform. The most progressive politician on the scene from either party, the Republican Roosevelt was nevertheless a bellicose expansionist. Democrats, the party of immigrants and labourers, were split in even more confusing ways. The party that had run two candidates against Lincoln in 1860, one in the North and another in the South, was still divided along sectional lines. It was less inclined to admit new states (fearing they would be Republican), and President Cleveland did not support the annexation of Hawaii. McKinley, however, always elusive as to motive, signed an agreement to annex Hawaii as an American territory soon after his inauguration in 1897. Democrat William Jennings Bryan, the Great Commoner, had lost to McKinley in 1896 and was to lose again in 1900 and to Taft in 1908. He supported “free silver” on populist grounds (against a gold faction within his own party, though he attracted support from silver-Republicans); he supported prohibition on deeply conservative religious grounds. A third party, the Populists, also named Bryan as its candidate, but paired him with a different running mate for vice-president.11 In 1898, Bryan vigorously supported McKinley’s war against Spain and the Treaty of Paris, then turned around and questioned American goals in the Philippines, running as an anti-imperialist in 1900.12 Americans, secure behind the Monroe Doctrine and two oceans, had long looked down upon European colonialist rapacity, even as they were fulfilling their own manifest destiny westward. Bryan was no pacifist but, rather, a “peace activist” on religious grounds: “When the United States waged war, it had to be either in self-defense or for the purest humanitarian motives ... empire clearly did not qualify” (Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 222). The outbreak of the Boer War in October 1899 further exacerbated feelings against British imperialism. As for the cautious McKinley, raised in a conservative small-town Methodism like Moody and “one of the most pious presidents ever to hold office” – he was driven (contrary to his reputation) by a humanitarian Social Gospel. He was appalled by Southern attitudes towards emancipated blacks, defended striking miners in court when no one else dared, and “refused to stay in a New Orleans hotel that did not allow African-Americans to meet him there” (157–8). A veteran of some of the bloodiest fighting in the Civil War, he was a reluctant belligerent, and only humanitarian reasons could persuade him to go to war. It was an era of good intentions, and “as distasteful as it now seems, McKinley and other Americans of his era did not see a conflict between benevolence and

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empire; they did not see the term ‘progressive imperialist’ as inherently contradictory” (157–8). Amid such confusion, it is hardly surprising that another group emerged known as the Mugwumps, political independents who freely bolted from one major party to the other as individual conscience dictated. Originally they were Republicans who turned Democrats to support Grover Cleveland in 1884; but their only true point of consensus was to hold individual morality above party loyalty. During the Philippine controversy, this group became the core, though not the exclusive membership, of the Anti-Imperialist League, first organized at a meeting in Boston (where else?) in November 1898 in the office of economist Edward Atkinson.13 It included “representatives of nearly every reform movement prominent in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century” – Mugwumps, liberal Republicans, municipal reformers, welfare reformers, single taxers, pacifists, prohibitionists, defenders of Indian rights, free traders, plus surviving abolitionists, and large numbers of clergymen (Harrington, “Movement,” 217) – and, one must add, Southern segregationists fearful of future statehood for coloured Filipinos. It was clearly not a coherent body and soon faded; after backing Wilson’s entry into the First World War, the remnant dissolved in 1920. Reasons for opposing American expansion were mixed and often contradictory, and there were personal hostilities between many in the group; but for nearly all, opposition was founded on abstract principle, the political doctrines found in the Declaration of Independence, Washington’s Farewell Address, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – “that a government could not rule peoples without their consent, and that the United States, having been conceived as an instrument of and for its own people, should not imitate the methods or interfere in the affairs of the Old World nations in any way” (Harrington, “Movement,” 211–12). As James Russell Lowell declared – and he was quoted repeatedly – the United States would endure “so long as the ideas of its founders remain dominant” (Beisner, Twelve against Empire, 15). The documents cited, one must notice, are all fixed texts and absolutes, not renegotiable social contracts like the compromising Constitution. This is both the strength and weakness of the anti-imperialist position: it was based on clear principle, but it was unbending and fixed in the past. Anti-imperialists were wide open to charges of unresponsiveness to a changing society. That moment when the American nation had achieved its purpose, the moment cel-

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ebrated in Lowell’s “Harvard Commemoration Ode,” had become an idealized millennium, enduring and yet somehow fragile and needing to be handled with reverence, like the marmoreal stasis of the countless generic Civil War memorials. Hence the paradox that antiimperialism attracted support from both radical reformers and deeply conservative individuals like Moody. McKinley’s supporters are easier to explain. The fate of the Philippines entered public debate only after commitments had been made – “public will was not freely exercised upon the question” (Hofstadter, “Cuba,” 178). The moral distinction between fighting in Cuba and fighting in the Philippines, furthermore, was too subtle for the American public to grasp, and besides, the Mugwumps stood for puritanical abnegation in the face of the overwhelming rhetoric for expansion. Manifest destiny and American exceptionalism, with their compulsion to evangelize democracy and “freedom,” were as strong as ever. Richard Hofstadter traces the rising “jingoism that had raged for seven years before the war actually broke out” (158). Humanitarian arguments against imperialism were met by humanitarian arguments in favour. “Protestant clergy were the most ardent supporters of imperialism” (Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 223), desiring to convert the heathen to Christianity – not at first understanding that 90 percent of the Filipino population was already Catholic. “Christian imperialists believed they did not face an opportunity but an obligation” (225). Militarily, the strategic location of the archipelago in relation to China was obvious, especially in the face of the Boxer Rebellion (1899–1901) and instability there. As William Dean Howells commented sardonically to Henry James, “our war for humanity has unmasked itself as a war for coaling stations” (Harrington, “Literary,” 666). Finally, there were decisive commercial interests, as American capitalism sought new markets. Even though Andrew Carnegie opposed the Philippine adventure – he was “almost fanatical on the subject” (Harrington, “Movement,” 219-20) and flamboyantly offered to buy Philippine independence “with a personal check for twenty million dollars” – most American capitalists (who had had little passion for humanitarian intervention in Cuba) supported the war in the Philippines.14 Newspapers denounced the anti-imperialists as “national slanderers” and raised the spectre of treason (Miller, Benevolent Assimilation, 107). Moody’s poem might have cost him his job, said Lovett, had he been teaching at a different university (115–17). “The most assertive and usually most obnoxious of imperialists” was Senator

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Albert J. Beveridge (Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 230): “God’s hour has struck,” he declared. “The American people go forth in a warfare holier than liberty – holy as humanity ... And of all our race He has marked the American people as his chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world ... This is the divine mission of America.” His rhetoric – endlessly quotable – figures him as the villain of the piece in anti-imperialist accounts of the Philippine War; but he, too, was a reformer of sorts, an extremist example of right-wing Protestant reformism “that would usher the entire world into the golden age of the new millennium.” “God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation!”15 Beveridge is a prime example of the American politician, still abundantly with us, who equates Christian piety with capitalist righteousness. “The Philippines are ours forever,” he proclaimed in his widely publicized January 1900 maiden speech in the Senate: “And just beyond the Philippines are China’s illimitable markets. We will not retreat from either. We will not repudiate our duty in the archipelago. We will not abandon our opportunity in the Orient. We will not renounce our part in the mission of our race, trustee, under God, of the civilization of the world.” “The power that rules the Pacific, therefore, is the power that rules the world,” and he added, for good measure, we shall “establish the supremacy of the American Republic over the Pacific and throughout the East till the end of time” (Gillett, Hoar, 258–9). “I would rather take part in organizing our colonial system than to do anything else on this earth ... It means more for humanity, more for our country and a larger place in history” (Braeman, Albert Beveridge, 26). The systemic racism of the time surfaced on both sides. Good intentions abounded, of course, and while William Howard Taft referred condescendingly to his “little brown brothers” (Rafael, “White Love,” 195), he was also working hard to ease the abuses of Spanish colonialism and the wholly European Catholic hierarchy (Preston, Sword of the Spirit, 228–9). But McKinley’s touted policy of “benevolent assimilation” masked the deaths and atrocities of bloody warfare. Secretary of State Elihu Root could claim in public “without any hint of irony, that a war which claimed thousands of Filipino lives and led to the torture of numerous others was also accompanied by the self-control, patience, [and] magnanimity of American soldiers and ‘characterized by humanity and kindness to the prisoner and non-combatant.’”16 The assumption was that Filipinos were unable to look after

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themselves, so Root could stress the link “between benevolence and discipline.” Contrast was drawn – with dramatic photographs – between “civilized Filipinos” and “wild Filipinos” (Rafael, “White Love,” 200–4). Racism on the anti-imperialist side was, if anything, worse. Speaker of the House Thomas B. Reed, the most prominent Republican to oppose McKinley, freely used terms like “yellow-bellies” and “naked Sulus” (Harrington, “Movement,” 224), while prominent Democrat Carl Schurz warned that Philippine annexation would open the gates to “Spanish-Americans with all the mixture of Indian and negro blood, and Malays and other unspeakable Asiatics, by the tens of millions!” (Beisner, Twelve against Empire, 27). When the relatively enlightened Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine with him at the White House, a nation-wide outcry was led by the pious William Jennings Bryan: “When Mr. Roosevelt sits down with a negro,” he fulminated, “he declares that the negro is a social equal of the white man” (Miller, Benevolent Assimilation, 123). The imperialists were paternalistic racists while their opponents, at least in the South and West, were almost invariably race haters (122–3). The position of American blacks themselves is curious. Naturally they were preoccupied with injustices at home. Theodore Roosevelt’s action in Cuba, however, held special interest, because blacks featured prominently in the charge up San Juan Hill, and Roosevelt’s selfadvertising account in The Rough Riders (1899) made much of the mixed race of his soldiers. “Many Negro households took pride in the military performance of black regiments in the Spanish-American War. In an era in which black opportunities were scarce, prints depicting the charge of black troops up San Juan Hill had the symbolic value of more recent sports and musical figures.”17 Amy Kaplan’s reading of this event and Roosevelt’s popular account of it sees, persuasively I think, San Juan Hill as continuing the Civil War “in an imperial national discourse,” collapsing and undoing “the thirty-year history separating the two conflicts by waging an ideological battle against Reconstruction” (“Black and Blue,” 219). Kaplan’s analysis is acute, but it omits one striking analogy that I’m sure would have impressed anyone at the time, and was certainly not lost on Moody. Roosevelt in his account was tacitly casting himself as the hero in a re-enactment of the white Colonel Shaw leading his black regiment uphill against Fort Wagner – only this time with a happy ending. The victory at San Juan Hill thus celebrates once more the affirmations of

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Shaw’s martyrdom, just as it ironically affirms the rightness of the racial status quo in America at the turn of the century. Amid this welter of contradictory motives, both national and personal, Moody’s own position is difficult to bring into focus. Lovett credits Hamlin Garland and Henry Blake Fuller as the friends most responsible for drawing Moody into the anti-imperialist group (“Introduction,” xlvii). Garland was a disciple of economist Henry George, an enormously influential critic of industrialism and a neo-physiocrat advocate of land value and public ownership of natural resources. Moody seems to have identified as Republican, but he was not bound by party loyalty. Writing to Daniel Gregory Mason during the 1896 campaign, he said: Prepare to be shocked beyond speech ... I have been trying to make up my mind which side has the least injustice and unwisdom to its account in this matter. Living here in the heart of debtor’s country I have come to see that the present regime cannot possibly endure. Free silver is undoubtedly a desperate remedy – perhaps an insane one; but the slow asphyxiation which the vast farming population of the West is undergoing from the appreciation of deferred payments on their gigantic mortgage debt, due to the inadequacy of the maximum gold coinage to keep pace with the growth of values – calls for immediate relief of some sort. I have seriously thought ... of doing a little stumping during the fall vacation, but on which side my voice and vote will fall is still a matter of debate with me. (Moody, Some Letters, 74–5) Moody’s only extended remark on the war in progress is found in a letter he wrote from Paris to Harriet Brainerd in July 1902, two years after publication of his “Ode”: I was glad to get the clippings about Cuba, and Senator Hoar’s speech. Poor blundering, grudging, generous land! To free Cuba with one hand, and with the other quietly remove all possible chance for her to live decently – or indeed to live at all. Of course I know that the one hand is the hand of the whole people, and the other that of a commercial interest, and I don’t mean to belittle the magnanimous deed; but why, O why, did it have to be smutched and spoiled? As for the recent disclosures in the Philippines (which were doubtless the real occasion of Hoar’s speech)

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they are too sickening to talk or think about. Shall we ever be able to hold up our heads again? The little flag you sent me on the Fourth of July seemed striped and stained with that innocent blood. I wonder how we shall wash it out, and let the flag take the air again like a thing of joy; till then it cannot gladden me nor any other eyes over the whole earth. (Letters to Harriet, 136–7) Republican senator from Massachusetts George Frisbie Hoar had been staunchly opposed to Philippine annexation from the start, and Moody admired him. On 22 May 1902, speaking to the Philippine War, after summing up the praiseworthy achievements of previous American generations, he asked: “Are we to have a place in that honorable company? Must we say, ‘We repealed the Declaration of Independence. We changed the Monroe Doctrine from a doctrine of eternal righteousness and justice, resting on the consent of the governed, to a doctrine of brutal selfishness looking only to our own advantage. We crushed the only republic in Asia. We made war on the only Christian people in the East. We converted a war of glory to a war of shame. We vulgarized the American flag ... We inflicted torture on unarmed men to extort confession. We put children to death. We established concentrado camps. We devastated provinces. We baffled the aspirations of a people for liberty’” (Gillett, Hoar, 265). In 1900, Moody knew little of American war atrocities – the torture, concentration camps, and civilian deaths – that were becoming visible two years later. In the poem, however, Moody shares the patriotic idealism of Hoar’s speech – his concern for first principles of the founding fathers; his concern for the liberty, democracy, and religion of an oppressed people with brown skin; his love of the flag; his recoil from violence committed in its name. Both also see foreign possessions as a form of capitalist greed and identify imperialist pressures with the special interests of commerce in opposition to the people at large. Moody’s poem also admires American behaviour in Cuba, as does Hoar in his speech, though by 1902 Moody had developed misgivings due to the restrictions of the Platt Amendment.18 Moody’s ode is a poem of “hesitation,” not commitment. Given the public confusion of political aims at the time, the poem’s strength is to weigh and deliberate. Unlike the expository development of Lowell’s “Harvard Commemortion Ode,” Moody’s poem follows the vacillation of his feelings. As David Henry pointed out, “he is not the scourging prophet nor the fiery reformer,” and he never wholly loses

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“trust in the future welfare of his country” (William Vaughn Moody, 52). His poem, that is, remains bound within the genteel conventions of its day. Even the designation as “Ode” has an archaic feel – Moody’s friend Edwin Arlington Robinson doubted “that anyone in 1900 could be serious in calling a poem an ode.”19 It adopts an elevated tone but does not (like some of Moody’s other work) reach for recherché vocabulary, and, despite its topicality, it is not obscure on first reading. The ode is cast in nine sections that can be treated as three unequal parts. The first three sections are framed in an immediate dramatic present, beginning with the speaker standing on Boston Common before Saint-Gaudens’s monument. Before the solemn bronze Saint Gaudens made To thrill the heedless passer’s heart with awe, And set here in the city’s talk and trade To the good memory of Robert Shaw, This bright March morn I stand, And hear the distant spring come up the land; Knowing that what I hear is not unheard Of this boy soldier and his negro band, For all their gaze is fixed so stern ahead, For all the fatal rhythm of their tread. The land they died to save from death and shame Trembles and waits, hearing the spring’s great name, And by her pangs these resolute ghosts are stirred. (1–13) The Shaw Monument anchors the poem in time and in space, a point of solemnity and fixity. The cross-rhymed elegiac quatrain helps set the tone, as does Moody’s beautiful management of the interplay between syntax and the free rhyming of the pseudopindaric convention that characterizes the entire work. Its genre ties it to James Russell Lowell’s “Harvard Ode,” then the most famous example of the type, so that Moody’s questioning summons up Lowell’s meditation on the meaning of the Civil War and appears starker by contrast. The speaker concentrates on the two major elements of Saint-Gaudens’s design, “the boy soldier and his negro band,” and imagines, despite “the fatal rhythm of their tread,” that they hear the present noise around them, both the preoccupied “talk and trade” of the busy populace and the natural sounds of seasonal change. Moody seems hypersensitive to this auditory dimension as his imagination moves in

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wider circles. In section two, the word “heedless” provides an emphatic link, underscoring the public carelessness of its heroic past, but the speaker’s imagination enlarges the positive imagery of coming spring as it journeys southward to Virginia and the Carolinas, Florida and the Gulf of Mexico (where Cuba lies, now pacified). In the presence of the Shaw Monument, North and South are again at peace. The third section brings the first movement of the poem to a remarkable climax. The direction now moves from east to west in a grand Whitmanic diorama that crosses the continent, mimicking the manifest destiny, the translatio imperii, of American settlement. This poem so critical of imperial conquest nonetheless celebrates the rise of the American nation on the continent; but, in the process, Moody endows this continent with a past and with inhabitants. The place names are significant: they are not only geographical – Cape Ann, the Lakes, Chicago, the Rockies – but more, they summon history. Oswego and Sault Sainte-Marie remind us of the Native and the French (non-Anglo-Saxon) predecessors. The Pictured Rocks bring to mind petroglyphs of pre-Columbian antiquity, in contrast with Chicago, “gigantic, wilful, young,” newly remade with tall modern buildings after the Great Fire of 1871. The “dim rites” and “primal gods” of the Arizona territory (not yet a state), additional preColumbian references, combine with medieval “shawms” and Old Testament “phylacteries” and dancing “before the unveiled ark” to extend human time backward, until we meet geological time in the “sluggish glaciers” of Alaska: While Shasta signals to Alaskan seas That watch old sluggish glaciers downward creep, To fling their icebergs thundering from the steep, And Mariposa through the purple calms Gazes at far Hawaii crowned with palms Where East and West are met, – A rich seal on the ocean’s bosom set To say that East and West are twain, With different loss and gain: The Lord hath sundered them; let them be sundered yet. (54–63) As the westward movement reaches the Pacific, the reader expects some sort of rhetorical culmination. But at this point, Moody makes an unexpected turn: “The Lord hath sundered.” The passage immedi-

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ately summons two of Rudyard Kipling’s most controversial poems, both widely known, disputed, and parodied at the time: his “Ballad of East and West” (1889) and “The White Man’s Burden” (1899) – the second subtitled “The United States and the Philippine Islands.” Halpern describes the allusion as “unfortunate” (William Vaughn Moody, 75), but Moody’s gesture is subtle. The more direct verbal allusion, to “Ballad of East and West,” is popularly assumed to mean, from its first line, that there can never be understanding or equality or détente. But a reading of the entire stanza complicates the meaning of that first line, as does the narrative of the ballad: Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, When two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth! The ballad tells a simple story of the power struggle between colonizer and colonized, with the two strong men chivalrously recognizing each other as equals. “The White Man’s Burden,” even more notorious, raises more immediate and complex issues, though it, too, is capable of ambiguous construction. Writing directly on point, Kipling sent this poem to his friend Theodore Roosevelt before it was published, urging him to back annexation (which he was doing in any case): “Now go in and put all the weight of your influence into hanging on permanently to the whole Philippines,” adding a proviso, “America has gone and stuck a pickaxe into the foundations of a rotten house and she is morally bound to build the house over again from the foundations or have it fall about her ears”20 Moody would not have known this, but he was certainly aware of the poem published in McClure’s a few months earlier, when it immediately entered the public debate over the Philippines. Assuming that he did, these lines must be read as rebuttal, Moody throwing Kipling’s own words back at him. Is Kipling pushing for American engagement or American isolation? The ambiguities of both of Kipling’s poems, plus the irony of Moody’s absolute final line, render his position uncertain. Sundered? The divine fiat sounds like an apologist’s biblical defence of racial segregation and dominance – but this seems unlike Moody. I have found

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no indication how he viewed the Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling. There was apparently no link between the anti-imperialists and later American isolationism; Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, for example, was a strong expansionist but vigorously opposed American membership in the League of Nations. The dramatic sound of distant guns of section 4, however, tells the consequences of engagement. The references to Alaska and Hawaii, too, bring to mind America’s most recent acquisitions. Although controversy over “Seward’s folly,” the purchase of Alaska from Russia in the midst of the Civil War, had long since died away, the annexation of Hawaii was still contentious since it, too, raised problems of imperialist ambitions, racial injustice (Queen Liliuokalani had been deposed by the white minority), and international law (disputed even today). The “immense symbolic importance” of the Pacific coast itself, too, comes into play, as Richard Hofstadter underlines in his trenchant analysis: although there was still plenty of land in the interior, “to the minds of the 1890s it seemed that the resource that had engaged the energies of the people for three centuries had been used up” (“Cuba,” 149). Walt Whitman had seen the Pacific coast as an invitation to further discovery and domination in “Facing West from California’s Shores,” not to mention “Passage to India.” On the other hand, many poets since Whitman have imagined the Pacific coast as the discovery of an unromantic limitation to expanding desires.21 In short, the Pacific coast, ever since Keats looked into Chapman’s Homer, has been a locus both for romantic wonderment and for the questioning of human expansive power. Moody’s point in making these allusions is, I think, to raise these questions in all their ramifications. This is the point of hesitation. Part 2 of the ode – the largest – stretches through sections 4 to 7 and confronts the Philippine War itself, the five sections alternating between Colonel Shaw’s nobility in the past and national shame in the present. This alternation injects a dramatic element of personal crisis into the poem, as the speaker’s innocent patriotism is challenged by political realities. The force of this personal element can be judged by contrast with Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s wholly ceremonial and perfunctory public recitation at the unveiling. Sections 4, 6, and 8 are charged with positive feelings raised by Saint-Gaudens’s monument. After the “sounds of ignoble battle” reach his ears in section 4, the speaker questions:

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Must I be humble, then, Now when my heart hath need of pride? Wild love falls on me from these sculptured men; By loving much the land for which they died I would be justified. My spirit was away on pinions wide To soothe in praise of her its passionate mood And ease it of its ache of gratitude. Too sorely heavy is the debt they lay On me and the companions of my day. I would remember now My country’s goodliness, make sweet her name. (68–79) His desire to be “justified” is political, but it is biblical as well – to be declared righteous before God. This is a patriotism that looks to the “land for which they died,” that is, the land principled by integrity and equality, both legal and sacramental. The speaker feels this patriotism as a “wild love,” but in each case this love of country is contaminated by reminders of the Philippine catastrophe. Section 6 moves from high abstraction to the physical scene of Colonel Shaw and his men waiting through the night for battle the next day. Crouched in the sea fog on the moaning sand All night he lay, speaking some simple word From hour to hour to the slow minds that heard, Holding each poor life gently in his hand And breathing on the base rejected clay Till each dark face shone mystical and grand Against the breaking day. (97–102) Moody alters history for dramatic and symbolic purposes – the attack began late in the day, not early morning – possibly so the event may resonate with the parallel scene in Shakespeare’s Henry V, where the king encourages his soldiers’ patriotism before Agincourt. Even more, Shaw’s “breathing on the base rejected clay” summons up the Gospel of John (20:22), where the risen Jesus breathes on his disciples. Shaw is identified with the risen Saviour. In this context, Moody’s references to the black soldiers as “slow minds” and “base” clay seem less conde-

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scending; and, despite this residue of racial stereotyping, their faces shine “mystical and grand.” They swept, and died like freemen on the height, Like freemen, and like men of noble breed; And when the battle fell away at night By hasty and contemptuous hands were thrust Obscurely in a common grave with him The fair-haired keeper of their love and trust. Now limb doth mingle with dissolvèd limb In nature’s busy old democracy. (112–19) The free blacks and newly emancipated slaves of Shaw’s regiment embody the principle of political liberty as forcefully as any bodies can. Moody reminds us of the well-known story of the “fair-haired” Shaw’s burial with his black soldiers, with his wonderful periphrastic phrase for their common grave, “nature’s busy old democracy.” White or black, rank or file, in that place are truly equal. Their deaths have justified the “spiritual wrong” of the nation, “expugnable but by a nation’s rue.” Moody appeals to that topos of many sermons, that the Civil War was a sacrifice for the national sin of slavery. But the wouldbe redemptive Shaw rises like an accusing spectre to point his finger at the nation’s present shame. Section 8 brings this sequence to a climax: Was it for this our fathers kept the law? This crown shall crown their struggle and their ruth? Are we the eagle nation Milton saw Mewing its mighty youth, Soon to possess the mountain winds of truth, And be a swift familiar of the sun Where aye before God’s face his trumpets run? (170–6) Moody here brings the voice of the prophet proclaiming the law of scripture. The prophet is Milton, his “eagle nation” foretelling the American emblem with a resonant passage from Areopagitica: “As in a body, when the blood is fresh, the spirits pure and vigorous,” cries the prophet, “so when the cherfulnesse of the people is so sprightly up ..., it betok’ns us not degenerated, nor drooping to a fatall decay, but cast-

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ing off the old and wrincl’d skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again”: “Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks: Methinks I see her as an Eagle mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazl’d eyes at the full midday beam; purging and unscaling her long abused sight at the fountain it self of heav’nly radiance; while the whole noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those prognosticat a year of sects and schisms.”22 For at least two centuries, Milton had served as an emblem of American freedom of thought, largely on the basis of Areopagitica. “Consider what nation it is whereof ye are, and whereof ye are the governors; a nation not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious and piercing spirit, acute to invent, subtle and sinewy in discourse, not beneath the reach of any point the highest that human capacity can soar to” (Milton, Prose Selections, 254). The young, vigorous nation, shedding its corruption, looks directly into the sun of heavenly radiance. The entire passage portrays Milton’s ideal republic, “become young again,” having not just the wherewithal “to guard well its own freedom and safety” but also to “bestow upon the solidest and sublimest points of controversie and new invention” the powers of free rational discourse.23 Moody concludes this climactic stanza with deliberate bathos, pursuing Milton’s imagery of “timorous and flocking birds” and returning the poem to the level of present-day disgrace: Or have we but the talons and the maw, And for the abject likeness of our heart Shall some less lordly bird be set apart? – Some gross-billed wader where the swamps are fat? Some gorger in the sun? Some prowler with the bat? (177–81) As so often in American poetry with a Puritan heritage, Moody is adept at dealing with symbolic emblems. The other sequence in Moody’s alternating sections dwells upon the disgrace of Philippine engagement. In section 5, the speaker’s realization that America’s wars are not always noble is first met with denial: We have not sold our loftiest heritage. The proud republic hath not stooped to cheat And scramble in the market-place of war; Her forehead weareth yet its solemn star.

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Here is her witness: this, her perfect son, The delicate and proud New England soul Who leads despisèd men, with just unshackled feet. (87–93) The witness of “this delicate and proud New England soul” is evidence “that our shame is done” and that America does not go to war merely as to a “market-place.” The speaker assures himself – knowing otherwise. The “just unshackled feet” can be those of either Shaw’s emancipated slaves or Filipinos released from Spanish tyranny (Halpern, William Vaughn Moody, 75–6). This sense of shame returns in section 7. “Surely some elder singer” is called for, a Whitman, or a Whittier: Our fluent men of place and consequence Fumble and fill their mouths with hollow phrase, Or for the end-all of deep arguments Intone their dull commercial liturgies – I dare not yet believe! My ears are shut! I will not hear the thin satiric praise And muffled laughter of our enemies, Bidding us never sheathe our valiant sword Till we have changed our birthright for a gourd Of wild pulse stolen from a barbarian’s hut. (150–65) This is the bitterest language of the poem. Moody does not stoop to name names in his attack, but he could not have avoided thinking of the noisy Senator Beveridge as he wrote of “fluent men of place and consequence” intoning their “dull commercial liturgies.” The identity of the “enemies” would seem to be the other cynical European imperial powers who had suffered holier-than-thou criticism from Americans. Again there is a mock-gesture of denial: “I dare not yet believe!” And the passage climaxes with another biblical allusion, Esau selling his birthright for a mess of pottage – “pulse” (Genesis 25). Postcolonialist readers will bridle at Moody’s reference to the Filipinos as “barbarians,” but the passage invites a possible ironic inflection as the American colonizer discards the emblems of his “spiritual sway” in order to grip more firmly the slave-driver’s whip and the jailer’s keys. The third part of the poem, section 9, is perhaps the most problematic. Like most of the anti-imperialists, Moody draws a distinction between American military intervention in Cuba and that in the

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Philippines. The anti-imperialist Teller Amendment to the 1898 Treaty had guaranteed Cuban independence, a magnanimous act in Moody’s view.24 Even William James had judged American intervention in Cuba to be “perfectly honest humanitarianism” (Hofstadter, “Cuba,” 161). The state names in the poem – Alabama, Maine, Idaho – refer to battleships sent by McKinley in response to Cuban insurgency. Moody does not even bother to mention the explosion that sank the Maine in February 1898, with great loss of American life, nor does he mention Theodore Roosevelt’s black soldiers at San Juan. Both events had been widely publicized and had already entered American legend.25 San Juan, however, enters the poem significantly, and Roosevelt’s victory clearly balances the past glory of Colonel Shaw’s noble defeat: ... at the lifting of a hand sprang forth, East, west, and south, and north, Beautiful armies. Oh, by the sweet blood and young Shed on the awful hillslope at San Juan, By the unforgotten names of eager boys Who might have tasted girls’ love and been stung With the old mystic joys And starry griefs, now the spring nights come on, But that the heart of youth is generous, – We charge you, ye who lead us, Breathe on their chivalry no hint of stain! Turn not their new-world victories to gain! (191–202) Setting aside the irony that Roosevelt himself was “more than any other single man responsible for our entry into the Philippines” (165), Moody focuses on the bloody self-sacrifice of the American armies in Cuba, their generosity, their youth, their freedom from national greed; but he also expands on the physical beauty, the chivalry, even the virgin manhood of the soldiers. In many ways, Moody seems a Northern counterpart to Sidney Lanier: they share the same ethic of intensity – while disavowing Pateresque aestheticism – and a love for the sister arts (Moody was an avid painter). Both developed toughminded religious convictions, developed at university from ardent youthful piety. Both despised trade and commerce. Lanier’s agrarian stance is paralleled by the Henry George influence (through Hamlin Garland) on Moody. Both identified with Anglo-Saxon and medieval

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literatures, and with the virtues of medieval chivalry (or Scott’s romantic version of it), including its admiration for virginal masculinity and its inherent class elitism – an attribute of nearly all the anti-imperialists, according to Miller (Benevolent Assimilation, 120). Moody was more committed to democratic equality, and he was blessedly free of Lanier’s largely covert racism or he could never have written his ode. But their shared qualities draw attention to their near contemporaneity rather than to their regional origins. Moody’s poem concludes with a prophetic warning to the nation’s leaders, and a curse: Tempt not our weakness, our cupidity! For save we let the island men go free, Those baffled and dislaureled ghosts Will curse us from the lamentable coasts Where walk the frustrate dead. (211–15) The nation has acted generously with Cuba: Moody urges the same generosity to the Philippines. If Americans are God’s chosen people, as sociologist Robert Bellah has written of these lines, the “chosenness that slips away from the controlling obligations of the covenant is a signpost to hell” (Broken Covenant, 60). As with unwary individuals, so with unwary nations. Divine retribution will come, Moody intones (echoing St Paul’s Thessalonians), like “a thief in the night” (line 208): For manifest in that disastrous light We shall discern the right And do it, tardily. – O ye who lead, Take heed! Blindness we may forgive, but baseness we will smite. (223–7) Good intentions that go wrong may be forgiven, but venal intentions never. In Steven Axelrod’s words, “Moody’s optimism is limited to affirming the bare possibility of moral regeneration, not predicting its coming to pass. Moody’s poem is essentially a drama of disillusion” (“Colonel Shaw,” 533). The warning goes out to the leaders, but the disillusion is deep and personal. Moody’s “Ode in Time of Hesitation,” once so highly admired, has disappeared now from the anthologies. It was a final vestige of the nineteenth-century genteel high style in 1900, and Moody died sud-

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denly in 1911, just before the advent of modernism. Just when his ode was rejected as hopelessly old fashioned, America’s war with the Philippines simultaneously slipped from public consciousness. The cultural work of poetry as keeper of the moral conscience of the nation slipped with it. As for the Philippines, their commercial benefits as an American possession proved disappointing, and, as early as 1907, Theodore Roosevelt himself described them as “the Achilles’ heel of our strategic possession” and advocated complete independence (Hofstadter, “Cuba,” 187) – which did not in fact come until 1946. For years, Harold Bloom referred contemptuously to William Vaughn Moody as a metonym for the fickleness of literary reputation, the poetic flash in the pan. The political postures Moody strikes in his poem are subject to critique as well: he fully embraces American exceptionalism, and his innocence, like the nation’s, is unbelievably intact. He sees American commercial interests as corrupting but not beyond redemption through highly unlikely acts of national selfabnegation. He seems almost apologetic at having to criticize his government. He does not reject war as an instrument of national policy. He discounts the significance of evil consequences from the most noble of intentions, including his own. Yet the moment of America’s forgotten war with the Filipino people was a crucial turning point in American history, and Moody’s poem brings to it a complexity of feeling that is worth revisiting. Interest revived in the long-forgotten Philippine War during the second half of the twentieth century with the outbreak of hostilities in Vietnam. One critic complained prematurely in 1957 that Moody’s ode did not “speak directly to us of things that matter” (Eckman, “Moody’s Ode,” 80), but the fault lay in the narrowness of the critic, not in the poem. American trans-Pacific interests have increased since 1900 in a steady swell. The heat of conflicting emotions on the home front during the Vietnam conflict brought forth an instructive case of duelling historians. In 1972, Daniel B. Schirmer published Republic or Empire: American Resistance to the Philippine War, a study that begins with Vietnam in its opening sentence and continues an implied comparison throughout as it emphasizes American economic interests. Then, in 1979, four years after the fall of Saigon, Richard E. Welch, Jr, in Response to Imperialism: The United States and the Philippine-American War, attacked Schirmer’s study as relentlessly presentist and emphasized differences between the two brutal conflicts. But historical literature on the period, the wars, the individual leaders, the imperi-

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alist ethos, and its opposite has multiplied enormously since the 1970s, and current perspectives are broader. Michael H. Hunt and Steven J. Levine’s Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (2012) argues that the four wars – in the Philippines, in the Pacific against Japan, in Korea, and in Vietnam – were not unconnected but, rather, were all “phases in a US attempt to establish and maintain a dominant position in Asia sustained over seven decades against considerable resistance” (1). In this context, Moody’s dismay at his nation’s self-aggrandizing colonialism in the Philippines marks the beginning of a long sequence of public poetry critical of American colonialist policies. Moody’s own social engagement as a poet lasted only two years, from 1900 to 1902, when he wrote a handful of other political poems besides his ode: “The Quarry” praises American peace initiatives in the Chinese Boxer Rebellion through an animal fable about an eagle (the United States) and an elephant (China). “The Brute” comments on human evolution in a tone congruent with American Naturalism. Most admired, however, is “On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines,” Moody’s sardonic final contribution to political verse in 1902. Cary Nelson, urging us to reread Moody, notes that the poet presents the “common soldier as a victim of the culture’s ideology, rather than as a figure of evil,” adding acidly, “that was a distinction, notably, that neither the poets writing about the Vietnam War in the 1960s and 1970s nor the left in general was able to make” (Repression and Recovery, 50): A flag for a soldier’s bier Who dies that his land may live; O banners, banners here, That he doubt not nor misgive! That he heed not from the tomb The evil days draw near When the nation robed in gloom With its faithless past shall strive. Let him never dream that his bullet’s scream went wide of its island mark, Home to the heart of his darling land where she stumbled and sinned in the dark. (21–30) “With stylistic changes,” as Stuart Creighton Miller noted, “the poem could almost have been written for one of America’s ‘grunts’

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returned from Nam in a flag-draped pine box” (Miller, Benevolent Assimilation, 275). Moody’s ode demonstrates that the American poet can achieve his finest work meditating on the most difficult public questions that face the American nation, without giving up complexity of expression or deep personal feeling. Steven Axelrod’s summation of Moody’s importance is worth repeating. His Hesitation Ode is “the first of the twentieth century’s numerous poems about the artist’s relationship to the state.” In it, Moody “assumed the position of spokesman for intellectuals and artists, performing the intellectual’s vital function, in Hans Morgenthau’s phrase, of speaking truth to power.” His poem “represents an act of conscience of enduring significance, especially so since the issues it raises are far from resolved” (Axelrod, “Colonel Shaw,” 533). But the moral suasion of Morgenthau’s fine phrase must be taken together with Reinhold Niebuhr’s proviso: “Moral judgments are executed in history, but never with precision,” he wrote. “Every execution of moral judgments in history is inexact because of its necessary relation to the morally irrelevant fact of power.”26

8 Between Two Wars (1) The Lost Causes of Allen Tate – “Ode to the Confederate Dead”

It is no coincidence that Allen Tate opens his 1938 essay in self-interpretation,“Narcissus as Narcissus,” by appealing to Poe – “Our Cousin Mr. Poe,” as he later names him. Tate was the first to acknowledge these continuities. Still, no one I think has noticed how thoroughly Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition” informs Tate’s essay, not only its substance but its design. Poe begins by setting aside the romantic notion of inspiration or, as he calls it, “a species of fine frenzy.” Tate begins by dismissing current psychological approaches to the question – the pop Freudianism of Robert Graves or fellow Southerner Conrad Aiken, “the psychologists or geneticists of poetry” (and biographers in general). The question of poetic origins is irrelevant.1 Instead, his focus is on intention – Poe calls it “effect” – placing it in the reader’s subjectivity. “Poets, in their way, are practical men,” he says: “they are interested in results” (Tate, Essays, 594). But these results are defined in strictly aesthetic terms. Both poets in this way turn to the texts of the poems they wrote, and the decisions they made producing them. As Tate says, even though poetry “cannot be brought to ‘laboratory conditions’” (a swipe at I.A. Richards), “the only real evidence that any critic may bring before his gaze is the finished poem” (594). In an earlier essay, “Poetry and the Absolute” (1927) – a sketch for the emerging theory of New Criticism and precursor to Cleanth Brooks’s “Heresy of Paraphrase” (1949) – Tate identifies this transcendent absolute in a grandiose gesture with the purpose of all poetry: “And of all the ends toward which poetry as an art strives, the most important is a signification of experience that becomes absolute, within the dimensions of the poem. This signification, this absolute,

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is creativeness, the unique quality of all good art. It may be neglected in a transitional period amid the diatribes of the schools about properties – rhyme, metre, “correctness” of diction. The criterion by which it may be detected varies, of course, with the preparation of critics; it varies with taste. But the material of poetry is forever much the same: the facts of a few organic processes” (Essays, 46). The uniqueness of the critical object, then – its haecceitas, or as Walter Pater put it, its virtù – is the focus of the critic. Again, Tate confesses his true lineage: “There is probably nothing wrong with art for art’s sake,” he says, “if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago” (“Narcissus,” in Essays, 595). A few years earlier, in 1934, he had echoed Oscar Wilde: “Poetry finds its true usefulness in its perfect inutility.”2 In this sense, Tate is even closer to Poe than are any of Poe’s moralistic followers like Lanier. At this point, Tate launches into discussion of his particular subject, the “Confederate Ode”: “That poem is ‘about’ solipsism,” he writes, “a philosophical doctrine which says that we create the world in the act of perceiving it; or about Narcissism, or any other ism that denotes the failure of the human personality to function objectively in nature and society.” Poe, for his part, reserves the identification of the subject of his poem, another inward state, to the very last: “The reader begins now to regard the Raven as emblematical – but it is not until the very last line of the very last stanza that the intention of making him emblematical of Mournful and never ending Remembrance is permitted distinctly to be seen.” In both cases, however, the subject is identified with a highly unsatisfactory label – certainly nothing approaching the true virtù of either poem. But the critic is not concerned with the merits of the philosophical “idea,” only with the virtù of the poem. Tate takes great pains to relate this purported subject (solipsism) to the ostensible subject (the Confederate dead), a relationship that he confesses to be wholly arbitrary. Like Poe’s “emblem,” the Confederate dead serve as well as any pedagogue’s classroom exemplum used to explain solipsism. As Davidson charged, “the Confederate dead become a peg on which you hang an argument,” functional but uninteresting in themselves (Poe, 186). In “Narcissus as Narcissus” Tate agrees: “Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically” (Essays, 597). Lest the reader dwell on what’s being left out here, both poets fill the remainder of their essays with shoptalk, explaining fine points of metre, diction, structure, refrain, phonetic effect, symbolism, all with a

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great show of conscious, rational decision making. Both go so far as to parade a show of numbers to assure outward fixity: “the extent of a poem may be made to bear mathematical relation to its merit” (Essays and Reviews, 15), Poe insists. In an algebraic poem, Tate likewise supposes – in the earlier essay, not “Narcissus” – “the formula for metaphor is A = ax2 + bx + c. … A equals the value of the equation, its function: the absolute form” (“Absolute,” 45). “Narcissus” then concludes with a discussion of genre not found in Poe, a discussion of the designation “Ode.” Tate confesses that he began with the title “Elegy,” reflects on the traditional Cowleyan pseudopindaric, fills in more detail about dactyls and caesuras, but ultimately comes down to his major point: “I suppose in so calling it I intended an irony: the scene of the poem is not a public celebration, it is a lone man by a gate” (Essays, 602). Irony, we know, was the sine qua non of a good New Critical poem, if not in 1925, then at least by 1938. The traditional ode, with its expectations of panegyric and eulogy, is virtually ruled out, a thing of the past. Even in 1900, Edwin Arlington Robinson had wondered “that anyone in 1900 could be serious in calling a poem an ode” (Brown, Estranging Dawn, 106). It is one of the strangest peculiarities in the history of the American ode that, just when the genre became passé, hopelessly old fashioned, among academic poets, it was taken up by non-academic outsiders, populist bards in the Whitman line – leftist poets like Stephen Vincent Benét and Genevieve Taggard or, after the war, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and others. Among academic poets it was treated as a joke (Berryman’s “Ode to That Boring Shit, James Thomson”; Donald Justice’s “Ode to a Dressmaker’s Dummy”). Robert Lowell pointedly refused the name, writing “For the Union Dead” in reply to Tate’s “Ode.” The problem lies in the slippery term “ode.” Tate’s claim rests on the classical understanding of ode as a public poem, yet his poem more closely resembles the “greater romantic lyric” – where the speaker is alone, speaking to himself. When Davidson criticized the poem for not being “about” the Confederate dead, Tate retorted, “Was Keats’ Nightingale Ode about Nightingales?” (Donald Davidson Correspondence, 188). Tate’s insistence on the irony of “Ode to the Confederate Dead” in a peculiar way, however, aligns his poem with that other gran rifiuto in the American tradition, Emerson’s “Ode Inscribed to W.H. Channing,” in which Emerson refuses, through the trope of apophasis, to stoop from the transcendental absolute of poetry to address politics with all its messy topicalities. Tate likewise maintains his absolute – an

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aesthetic absolute – which he refuses to stain with messy ideas. Not that he rules out ideas altogether. Tate does not really, as Langdon Hammer maintains, aim for “a poetry purified of moral, social, and religious aspirations” (Hart Crane, 82). This is a common misreading of Tate and the New Criticism generally. Rather, Tate aims for a purified criticism: “No particular philosophical outlook, monism, dualism, pluralism, is exclusively important for poetry; though some outlook is both inevitable and desirable. A philosophical monist has no greater claim to absolutism in poetry than a philosophical dualist. It is impossible to say, with any precision, what Shakespeare was; Blake was a monist; Racine, a dualist. It all depends on the poet’s sheer poetic ability: all great poets are absolutists. There is nothing beyond their poetry” (49). As he declares at the end of his essay, “No school of critics has developed, by attending exclusively to the properties of poetry as a fine art, an elaborate aesthetic attitude” (51). New Critics did not forbid moral, social, and religious topics – though they undoubtedly had that effect on later poets. Tate’s own poetry, taken as a whole, is highly charged politically – yet both the subject of his ode and its apophatic refusal mystified his Southern colleagues. Donald Davidson, his closest friend among the Fugitives, said in a 1928 review that he would expect Tate to be “more concerned about the French Symbolists, say, than the battle of Chancellorsville” (Singal, War Within, 200). Privately, however, the Confederate-flag-waving, never-to-be-reconstructed Davidson demanded, “Where, O Allen Tate, are the dead? You have buried them out of sight,” adding, “Your Elegy is not for the Confederate Dead, but for your own dead emotions” (186–7). Robert Penn Warren called Tate’s poem “the Confederate morgue piece” (Underwood, Allen Tate, 124). Neither, I think, would be any happier to discover that the poem is about “solipsism” than I am. Tate’s poem, rather, gestures apophatically at disinterest in the Confederate cause in the act of conducting an ironic meditation on its presence. Read in this way, Tate’s “Ode” does not so much omit the Confederate dead as include them and question the purpose of their deaths. As I read Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” the subject is both more specific and more objective than “solipsism,” though not unrelated to it. Tate’s poem – its title recalling Henry Timrod’s moving Magnolia Cemetery ode – seems to me perhaps the last in a series of modernist American meditations during what Joseph Kuhn calls “the new prestige of historicism in the period 1890–1930” (Allen Tate, 264)

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or, to borrow Hayden White’s term, “metahistory.” I do not intend to discuss the philosophical background of this phenomenon, which would take us to heavyweights of German philosophy like Hegel and Nietzsche, Dilthey and Heidegger, and others. But questions of historical epistemology raised by these thinkers began to percolate through certain American poems early in the twentieth century. Is the past a reality or a construct? Is history a science or an art? Are there “universals” in history – Platonic? Viconian? Hegelian? Marxist? Freudian? Is it subject to “laws”? And, if so, can it be learned from? What is the role of the historian – passive chronicler? interpreter? inventor? These questions burned in more than one poetic imagination at the time. Most apparent of these poets are the profoundly historicist modernists Pound and Eliot. But the earliest, surprisingly, was Robert Frost, whose “The Black Cottage” (ca. 1906) – possibly his densest poem intellectually – focuses on a widow, the one-time inhabitant of a decaying cottage, whose husband died years earlier in the Civil War. Frost contrasts her imagination, not far removed from the eternity of Emerson’s Oversoul, with that of the young preacher-narrator, a worldly Jamesian pragmatist.3 Pound’s “Near Perigord” (1915) is more specifically historicist in its Browningesque probing of documentary evidence, informed speculation, passionate imagination, and avowed ignorance in relation to a very minor episode in medieval Provence. It opens the way for the historicist explorations of The Cantos. William Carlos Williams adopts a thoroughly sceptical position, questioning both historical knowledge and usefulness, in his neglected major poem “History” (1920). It recounts a museum visit to view relics of Egyptian pharaohs. The marble museum itself is metaphorically both a temple to the past and a public toilet for flushing waste. The body once contained in the sarcophagus, “built to endure forever,” was once “Uresh-Nai, priest to the goddess Mut” (probably an allusion to Duchamp’s urinal, exhibited under the name “R. Mutt”). He who was once the object of love is dead and gone. The ancient priest’s own monologue proclaims himself “arrogant against death,” but the poem ends outside the museum, watching passers-by in the New York park: “Are not these Jews and – Ethiopians?” Williams, a profoundly historicist writer in his In the American Grain and Paterson, is also most resistant to the antiquarian: “Nothing is good save the new” (Imaginations, 23), he cried. “Life is above all else at any moment subversive of life as it was a moment before” (Letters, 24–5).

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The poem closest to Tate’s “Ode,” however, is T.S. Eliot’s “Gerontion” (1920). Harold Bloom would call it the precursor poem and condemn Tate as hopelessly belated.4 But the issue of historicism has implications as pressing for a post-Reconstruction Southerner as it does for a post-Versailles European. Both wrote as displaced persons – Eliot as American in London, Tate as Kentuckian in New York.5 The European situation, however, was very different from the economic boom of the American 1920s; the social and political ruptures of the Great War had left a mass of uncertainties not widely felt in the United States until the 1929 Crash. Many of the great transatlantic modernists – Eliot, Pound, Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis – had already lost faith in the viability of Western democracies, believing them not only de facto oligarchies, but oligarchies “ruled by the wrong ‘few’” (Surette, 4). Tate as Southerner was predisposed to this belief. Tate identified himself as a Southerner, yet after he left Vanderbilt he spent much of his adult life living elsewhere. The contradictory nature of his career emerged as soon as he was accepted into the Fugitive group, the only undergraduate member and the most fiercely “modernist.” The Fugitives were not modernist – most were writing in traditional styles, including John Crowe Ransom, whose first book, Poems about God (1919), he later disowned. To H.L. Mencken, in his notorious essay “Sahara of the Bozart” (1917), the idea of a Southern modernist was as far-fetched as an oboe player in Arkansas. The story of the twenty-three-year-old undergradute’s very public dispute with Professor Ransom over the merits of Eliot’s “Waste Land” is a central fixture of Fugitive mythology, and the young Tate was a heated evangelist for international poetic modernism on Eliot’s model in Nashville, Tennessee (Underwood, Allen Tate, 81–2; Tate, Memoirs, 41). Tate’s writing after the Fugitive period was nearly always preoccupied with Southern issues, if not directly as in the “Ode,” then indirectly as in the Aeneas poems, or with southern Gothic themes (“Ode to Fear,” “The Wolves”). Thomas A. Underwood’s biography clarifies the salient experiences behind Tate’s love-hate relationship with the South, and the personal and political dilemmas it entailed. His father was remote, itinerant, an Episcopalian turned “Robert Ingersoll freethinker” who dragged the family ineffectually from place to place. His mother was a domineering, fundamentalist, would-be daughter of antebellum Virginia who invented her own family mythology claiming relationship to Robert E. Lee. Tate was certain she knew her stories were not true, but she

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repeated them “so often, with such richness of accumulated detail,” that she believed them (Memoirs, 8). He had two older brothers, both successful in business, and one, Ben, was wealthy and generous enough to support his artistic younger sibling through hard times. “When I went up to Cincinnati to see my brother,” he told Malcolm Cowley, “I found that Industrialism had been profitable beyond my best nightmare” (159). On one hand, then, Tate was a Southerner through and through, with the mental outlook, the resentments – and the ugly Jim Crow racism – of his region. But he was confronted, too, with contradictory and unacceptable visions of his place. There were too many Souths. He was well acquainted with conflicting philosophical theories of history, as his 1926 review of Spengler reveals. And he was bonded with the other Fugitives by what he later called, ironically, “a common historical myth,” the myth of the lost cause.6 As an adult, he rejected what he called the “moonlight and magnolias” school of Southern thinking with contempt, and to his enormous credit he was unable to stomach Gone with the Wind the novel and walked out of the movie (Underwood, Allen Tate, 213). Yet if he was drawn in by lost cause propaganda, he was also sceptical. He sympathized (against the grain) with Mencken’s view of the South in its present state as a cultural Sahara (49) – a view not far removed from that of Timrod and Lanier sixty years earlier. In July 1925, as Tate was working on his poem, the Scopes Monkey Trial took place in Dayton, Tennessee, and was broadcast nationwide on radio to the great intellectual embarrassment of the South and the discomfiture of Tate.7 As he remarked to John Gould Fletcher in 1927, “The stupidity of our people turns me in rage against them, and I wheel in greater rage against their enemies” (quoted in Singal, War Within, 240). On the other hand, Tate was confronted at Vanderbilt not only with its “Athens-of-the-South” aspirations to classical learning (which he internalized fully), but with the “New South” vision of his optimistic professor Edwin Mims. Mims, the author of a Lanier biography, was working on The Advancing South (1926), a book that extols burgeoning signs of progressive thinking, liberal politics, and commercial awakening at that moment in the region. Tate could only see this “New South” as a sell-out to Northern financial interests, and his prolonged personal antagonism with Mims is detailed in Underwood’s biography. He was encouraged in his conservative views by the unreconstructable Donald Davidson. “Davidson could not envision the backward look as being a problem,” says Louis Rubin. “Tate

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knew better” (Wary Fugitives, 105). Tate, then, was well poised to understand the problematics of historical knowledge. If Davidson flanked Tate on the right, however, his Ohio-born friend Hart Crane appeared on his left, along with more vocal leftists like Edmund Wilson and Malcolm Cowley, with whom Tate and his wife Caroline Gordon mingled in New York, the cosmopolitan city where the battles of modernism had already been won. The complex personal and poetic relationship between Tate and Crane, both practising a tightly knotted elliptical diction derived in part from T.S. Eliot’s quatrain poems, has been well documented in biographies of both poets, particularly Langdon Hammer’s study subtitled Janus-Faced Modernism.8 Crane is unquestionably the more alluring of the two, the romantic poète maudit struggling to come to terms with his alternately flagrant and self-loathing homosexuality. Crane first approached Tate by letter, having divined their compatible aesthetics even from Tate’s juvenile poems. Crane’s critical eye was acute, and he matured earlier as a poet. In the years when they were close, 1922 to 1926, Tate was just finding his voice, while Crane was simultaneously diverging from his Eliotic stance and slipping into helpless alcoholism and depression. Tate’s friends Wilson and Cowley were for their part committed communist sympathizers, with both of whom Tate retained genuine but uneasy collegiality (Underwood, Allen Tate, 160–71). If anything, Tate’s experience in the American North solidified his Southern partisanship, but it forced him as well to see it with a healthy dose of irony from the outside. The subject of Eliot’s dramatic monologue “Gerontion” is, like that of Tate’s “Ode,” particularly difficult to formulate. But my reading sees it as a portrait (in reaction against the poet’s Emersonian upbringing) of the unsupported, once self-reliant individual sinking into material and spiritual dissolution. Like “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men,” “Gerontion” wrestles with the spiritual anxieties that led to his Christian conversion in 1928. The speaker of Tate’s “Ode” experiences similar anxieties and a similar disconnect from his past, including his religious tradition. Tate, like Eliot, like Poe, and like most Southerners, was implacably hostile to “the Lucifer from Concord” (Rubin, Wary Fugitives, 4). Tate’s speaker sees the world – or rather, fails to see it – through a cloud of Berkeleyan idealism, the narcissistic solipsism that the poet identifies in his essay. He is all too keenly aware of the elusiveness and subjectivity of historical fact.

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The indebtedness of “Gerontion” to the sceptical historicism Eliot had found in The Education of Henry Adams has long been recognized – Tate’s own review of Eliot’s Poems, 1909–1925 calls the volume “a spiritual epilogue to The Education of Henry Adams.”9 It is a scepticism that Eliot had addressed in his dissertation on F.H. Bradley and again in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” But one other work is useful to bring into this already crowded picture – Van Wyck Brooks’s influential essay “On Creating a Reusable Past,” published in the Dial in 1918. Brooks too is keenly aware of the elusiveness of historical fact, but he finds it an advantage, not a defect. His premise is the very postmodern sounding proposition that “the spiritual past has no objective reality: it yields only what we are able to look for in it” (Early Years, 220). This subjectification of history is what Tate means, I think, by “solipsism,” a peculiarly modern form of neurosis (compare Kuhn, Allen Tate, 267–8). Both Brooks and Eliot speak to a literary past, a literary “tradition” or “culture” at large, but while Eliot comprehends “the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country” (Selected Essays, 14), Brooks’s past is the much younger, sparser one of American writing. His past celebrates Washington Irving and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr, as literary eminences and, in 1918, still lacks Melville in fiction and Emily Dickinson in poetry. More to the point, Eliot’s tradition is a given, an archive of texts received and well sorted. It is flexible, not fixed, since every truly new work readjusts the entire canon, but Eliot repudiates Brooks’s tradition, which is wholly arbitrary.10 Cut off from the past, Gerontion was “neither at the hot gates / Nor fought in the warm rain.” He is locked in a material, dying body which has lost “sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch,” waiting to be “whirled / Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear / In fractured atoms.” If he is cut off from past tradition, presumably he has not expended that “great labour” Eliot tells us is required, so his sin is that of acedia. (Eliot knows the labour is greater for an American like himself than for any native-born Englishman, who lives with the past at his fingertips.) His spiritual desiccation is, as Denis Donoghue has written, “an appalled sense, on Eliot’s part, of the availability of words to provide us with specious worlds.” Mere words, however, “have to be redeemed, converted into the Word of God [of] which silence is the only decent analogy. Thereafter, purified, the word can participate in a correspondingly authenticated world, verifiable by experience. If the words

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are not converted – if they persist in being their mere selves – they remain signs of our egotism” (“Gerontion,” 945–6). In this respect, Gerontion shares the self-regarding solipsism of Tate’s speaker at the cemetery gate, and he lives through the desolation of his unauthenticated world. According to Rubin, “however much Tate’s imagination was stirred by the aesthetic possibilities of the antebellum, aristocratic South, it was never really a recoverable objective for him” (Wary Fugitives, 96). The speaker in Tate’s “Ode,” like Van Wyck Brooks, senses no reality in the spiritual past; but in this, like Gerontion, he finds not freedom but despair. The gravestones point to the inevitability of death, with no hope of redemption: names fade and even the angels rot. And though his outward circumstances are very different from Gerontion’s in postwar Europe, he suffers the same acedia of spiritual incapacity. He, too, is “postwar” – a different, more distant war, but similarly catastrophic. Tate’s speaker, however, faces an additional difficulty not present in Eliot. He has not only not fought in this war, but he has acquired traditions about it – false, obfuscating, sentimentalizing traditions that he knows he must unlearn and cast off. In all this, he is both an Everyman and a specifically Southern Everyman. If he feels the temptation offered by Brooks’s arbitrarily “usable” history, he cannot yield to it because he has already experienced too many conflicting narratives, too many falsified versions of the South. Tate’s “Ode” is an honest and courageous poem for a Southerner to have written in the 1920s, and an essential one still. The Confederate soldiers that Davidson thought absent from the poem are there, but only as ghostly presences that populate the central passage: Turn your eyes to the immoderate past, Turn to the inscrutable infantry rising Demons out of the earth they will not last. Stonewall, Stonewall, and the sunken fields of hemp, Shiloh, Antietam, Malvern Hill, Bull Run. Lost in that orient of the thick and fast You will curse the setting sun. Cursing only the leaves crying Like an old man in a storm

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The soldiers led by Stonewall Jackson (whose name resounds with the harsh diction of “stone” and “wall” repeated throughout the poem) are demonic, rising out of the earth only to slaughter each other like the dragon’s teeth of the Cadmus legend. The four Civil War battles, Rubin observes, were all bloody but inconclusive; they all ended when nightfall, the accursed “setting sun” (Spengler’s Untergang), made further combat impossible (Wary Fugitives, 108), leaving only a lone, mad Lear to curse that he gave away his kingdom for a whim – a figure he shares with Lanier’s “Corn.” As Daniel Singal remarks, “he tries to picture the soldiers charging in fury ... but his strict empiricism enables him to see only the dead leaves blowing about him” (War Within, 238). These comments suggest the difficulty of reading Tate’s modernism. The meanings are buried in the internal resonances and the allusive suggestiveness of the language, so that discovering the meaning of a Tate poem is like peeling an onion. The Latinate diction presents an air of great precision but operates suggestively through what I.A. Richards once called pseudo-statement. The movement of the poem is associative; there are very few discursive markers. This elusiveness operates on several levels. Much is made by critics, beginning with Tate himself, of the shadowy figure standing by the cemetery gate, never entering.11 But he slips into the poem quietly, at the end of the second paragraph as “you,” and while it has become customary to refer to him as “speaker,” the text leaves uncertain whether he is one figure or two, speaker or listener or both: Autumn is desolation in the plot Of a thousand acres where these memories grow From the inexhaustible bodies that are not Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row. Think of the autumns that have come and gone! – Ambitious November with the humors of the year, With a particular zeal for every slab, Staining the uncomfortable angels that rot On the slabs, a wing chipped here, an arm there: The brute curiosity of an angel’s stare Turns you, like them, to stone, Transforms the heaving air Till plunged to a heavier world below

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You shift your sea-space blindly Heaving, turning like the blind crab. Dazed by the wind, only the wind The leaves flying, plunge (1–26) These identities are shifty: if “you” addresses the reader, then the reader becomes the you “who have waited by the wall” in line 27. The opening lines fix the masses of military dead in a world of moral discipline, followed then by the shadow of amoral material disintegration, absorbed “into the Great Other of a neo-Lucretian nature” (Kuhn, Allen Tate, 225). The reader seems to be posing questions to himself in these barely murmured lines. You know who have waited by the wall The twilight certainty of an animal, Those midnight restitutions of the blood You know – the immitigable pines, the smoky frieze Of the sky, the sudden call: you know the rage, The cold pool left by the mounting flood, Of muted Zeno and Parmenides. (27–33) Here, where the shadowy figure is more visible, Tate claims in his “Narcissus” essay to introduce a second theme, “the theme of heroism, not merely moral heroism, but heroism in the grand style, elevating even death from mere physical dissolution into a formal ritual” (Essays, 599). Mere moral heroism, he says, is merely “personal and individual,” but a heroism of “active faith” cannot be achieved “in the fragmentary cosmos of today.”12 Perhaps it is my own insensibility, but this heroism, if Tate intended it as such, seems scarcely registered in the passage itself, if at all. Instead, the weighty names of the two Eleatic philosophers stand as antonomasia for the paradoxes of infinity and inconclusive dialectic. If this speaker (whoever he is) cannot connect emotionally or intellectually with the Confederate soldiers, his language is also riddled with paradoxes of theology.13 A providential “sacrament” is also “casual,” performed off-handedly or by chance; an “eternity” is “seasonal”; the “vast breath” of the Holy Spirit (in a magnificent phrase) “sough[s] the rumour of mortality.” There is “impunity” – but given under a Calvinistic watch that determines “election” under strict judgment.

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Yet the plain sense of the assertions seems to deny the operations of the Spirit – the “rumour of mortality” is confirmed by the fading names and the brute stares of damaged angels on the tombstones. If, as Tate puts it elsewhere, “Man is a creature that in the long run has got to believe in order to know, and to know in order to do,” the issues of religious belief and historical epistemology are intimately entwined” (Essays, 7). Yet Tate’s man at the gate can believe neither in orthodox religion nor (to use Robert Bellah’s phrase) in the “civil religion” of the South. Like Gerontion, Tate’s man at the gate is faced with a self-contradictory set of words. Even the elegiac platitude that these bodies “are not / Dead, but feed the grass row after rich row” drips with self-denying irony. Like Gerontion, he is guilty of acedia, unwilling to expend the spiritual effort to discover his true tradition. The unexpected introduction of a “sea space” and a “blind crab” symbolize to Tate the “locked-in ego”: “The creature has mobility but no direction, energy, but ... no purposeful world to use it in” (Essays, 597). Together they suggest void eternity and dissolution, perhaps recalling Prufrock’s “pair of ragged claws” or the watery world of Paul Valéry’s “Le Cimitière Marin” – both precursor texts to Tate’s poem.14 The unbelief of this Southern Everyman is a cultural symptom. Tate a few years later in I’ll Take My Stand argued that the Old South “did not have the proper form of religion to support the kind of civilization it was developing. Its Protestantism was suited for a mercantile and technological order, but it would not support the section’s Agrarian culture.” The antebellum South was “a feudal society without a feudal religion” (Anonymous, I’ll Take My Stand, 166). The poem speaks to this suspicion that the lost cause of the Old South already carried the seeds of its own failure: its cause lost was an Aristotelian – or Augustinian – Final Cause. The plunging leaves in line 26 introduce the varied refrain that Tate added with great effect to his poem in 1930.15 The image is a common topos, found in similes of Homer, Dante, Milton – they take on “the imagined quality of damned beings,” writes Dupree (Allen Tate, 46) – but perhaps most suggestively from Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” where they symbolize the constancy of change as both destructive and creative force. In the final stanza, Shelley compares the words of the poet to “dead leaves,” cut off from their vital source of inspiration, but he wishes them nonetheless to “quicken a new birth.” Thus if one sees them, like Dupree, as “a grim parody of religious ideas of salvation” (46), one might also see them more hopefully as organic renewal.

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That possibility, however, is left only to the final five lines of the poem. Before that, the speaker expands his reflections on the visionary soldiers: Now that the salt of their blood Stiffens the saltier oblivion of the sea, Seals the malignant purity of the flood, What shall we who count our days and bow Our heads with a commemorial woe In the ribboned coats of grim felicity, What shall we say of the bones, unclean, Whose verdurous anonymity will grow? The ragged arms, the ragged heads and eyes Lost in these acres of the insane green? The gray lean spiders come, they come and go; In a tangle of willows without light The singular screech-owl’s tight Invisible lyric seeds the mind With the furious murmur of their chivalry. (54–74) The bowed heads and ribboned coats seem to offer the “commemorial woe” of a ghostly ceremony of some kind, attended by surviving veterans perhaps – the speaker not counted among them. The ceremony and the chivalry in this, the most heavily rhymed passage in the poem, suggest a social order that also excludes the speaker, an oxymoronic “grim felicity” revealed to be hollow. Ceremony is a civic, public effort to understand, to withstand however ineffectually the pressures. The oxymoronic “malignant purity of the flood” suggests that the Civil War was both evil and yet providentially cleansing, like the biblical Deluge (one recalls the Northern charge that the war was punishment for the sin of slavery), while the “bones unclean” evoke Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones, the bones of the righteous dead soldiers awaiting an implausible resurrection. The “ragged arms” and hungrily “lean spiders” have Eliotic counterparts in the ineffectualities of “Prufrock” and “Gerontion.” The passage becomes a subversion of that vaunted “Chivalry” that Southern apologists so highly prize. Night is the beginning and the end And in between the ends of distraction

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Waits mute speculation, the patient curse That stones the eyes, or like the jaguar leaps For his own image in a jungle pool, his victim. What shall we say who have knowledge Carried to the heart? Shall we take the act To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave In the house? The ravenous grave? (77–88) This concluding passage evokes nightfall in a locution that echoes the self-cancelling paradoxes of “Gerontion” (see lines 36–46): “Night is the beginning and the end / And in between the ends of distraction / Waits mute speculation.” But the spectacular image, of course, is the jaguar leaping at its own reflection, which Tate himself identifies as the only symbol of solipsism, “the Narcissus motif,” in the poem (Essays, 607). It appears unexpectedly, but grows out of the other predatory beasts of the poem and points to the “ravenous grave,” the medieval tempus edax topos that forms the root concept of the entire graveyard meditation. The “jungle pool” brings forward “The cold pool left by the mounting flood” in line 26. The jaguar also perhaps carries recollections of Pound’s big cats, associated with visionary theophany in poems like “Heather” and Canto 2, and even more specifically, the Blakean “Christ the Tiger” of “Gerontion.” But its leaping points rather to a gesture of self-destruction, an allegory of both the spiritual denial of the speaker and the historical conflagration of Southern society. Given these conditions, Tate’s “Ode” comes to rest upon two alternatives, phrased as questions: “Shall we take the act / To the grave? Shall we, more hopeful, set up the grave / In the house?” The point of the first question is obvious, but the meaning of “the grave in the house” is mysterious. It is Tate’s equivalent to Eliot’s “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” in “The Waste Land,” a sign of faint hope.16 It suggests the need to face mortality, death as essential part of life, but also the irrevocable pastness of the dead soldiers and the cause they died for. It suggests some kind of domestic shrine to the household gods of daily living, like Roman penates – acceptance of a present time that includes dutiful reverence for one’s forebears, a much reduced version of that “active faith” that Tate identified as “heroism.” The more hopeful of these alternatives is hinted in an epilogue:

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Leave now The shut gate and the decomposing wall: The gentle serpent, green in the mulberry bush, Riots with his tongue through the hush – Sentinel of the grave who counts us all! Though the wall is decomposing, the “gentle serpent” is not only a reminder of the serpent in the Garden, the inescapable sin of everyday living, but it is green and lively. A sentinel, it is always on guard.17 The speaker has at least set his own lands in order. The glaring omission in all this discussion, of course, is slavery, or race, or any inkling of the reason for the fighting. Tate’s Civil War poem of Confederate introspection erases the presence of race in both the historical past and the present memory of it. This omission is consistent, as we have seen, with other formal Southern odes by Timrod and Lanier, and Tate’s poem is framed in such a way that the African American presence seems impossibly remote. Yet the racial implications of the poem, not to mention the racist reputation of its author, have no doubt caused Tate’s very great and complex meditation to disappear from many anthologies. That Tate held the racist opinions and feelings of most of the Southern white population of this period is well documented. Underwood’s biography confronts his racism squarely, and despite Tate’s efforts to avoid the issue and especially to keep it out of his poetry, his attitudes appear not only anecdotally and in private letters but peppered through much of his prose in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1933, asked by Lincoln Kirstein, editor of Hound and Horn, to explain the agrarians’ position on race, Tate wrote a long letter that included remarks on miscegenation. The letter never appeared, but Underwood summarizes: “The negro race is an inferior race,” Tate wrote, adding that “miscegenation due to a white woman and a negro man” threatened the whole family. “Our purpose,” he continued, “is to keep the negro blood from passing into the white race.” Unwaveringly, he concluded, “The psychology of sex says that a man is not altered in his being by sexual intercourse, but that the body of a woman is powerfully affected by pregnancy. A white woman pregnant with a negro child becomes a counter symbol, one of evil and pollution.”18 The mixture of white supremacy and racial sexism (with its barely suppressed assumption of white male droits du seigneur) are truly shocking, and Underwood admits that this letter “represents Tate at his worst.” Just a

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few pages later, in relation to the notorious Scottsboro case, Tate is recorded as saying, “You have no idea what it is to live – and not merely sympathize from Boston or New York – with another race; and for that and all the complicating reasons I see the negro question in terms of power. When there are two unassimilable races one of them must rule” (Allen Tate, 293).19 When Tate edited the twelve essays of I’ll Take My Stand (1930), he discouraged contributors from bringing up the subject of race, and he was disappointed when Robert Penn Warren submitted “In the Briar Patch,” a spirited defence of Jim Crow segregation. He preferred to ignore the issue. Nonetheless he printed the essay, and when Davidson and Andrew Lytle protested that Warren was too liberal, Tate replied that Warren’s views of Negro education seemed to him “sound” and in the best interest of blacks.20 Worse, the essay by Frank Owsley, a highly honoured historian of the South, perpetuates the worst Southern myths of Reconstruction, complaining that helpless whites suffered under the governance of African savages, “some of whom could still remember the taste of human flesh.”21 Little can be said to cushion the shock of such remarks. Tate’s attitudes were, however, complex from the beginning, and they became more so in later years, when he expended spiritual energy trying to purge himself of this failing. Tate had spent significant time with (relatively) racially enlightened Northern friends like Hart Crane, Malcolm Cowley, and Edmund Wilson, so he could view Southern attitudes from the outside and recognize that, although racism was present everywhere, it assumed peculiar intensity in his native society. He confronted his own racism in his fine novel The Fathers (1938) and in his poem “The Swimmers” (1951), both of which turn on scenes of racial violence. “The Swimmers” was supposed to be a segment of a longer autobiographical poem, and when I was a student at Minnesota in the mid1960s, its completion was still highly anticipated. But it never happened. Instead, in 1950, after a number of earlier social failures with black poets like James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, and even Countee Cullen (whose aesthetic was close to Tate’s), he surprised the world by writing a supportive introduction to Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia. In 1962 he scolded his lifelong friend Donald Davidson for leaving half of the Old South out of his account, the half “that included the Negro” (Tate, Memoirs, 38). He was openly sympathetic to Martin Luther King’s non-violent resistance, he denounced segregationist politicians like Ross Barnett of Mississippi and George

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Wallace of Alabama, and he was disgusted when “half illiterate Red Necks” unfurled the Confederate flag: “There is no dignity in displaying it as a symbol of the oppression of the Negro,” he wrote. “It once stood for the best of the South; it now stands for the worst” (295). Underwood’s biography stops with The Fathers in 1938, so we have no detailed narrative of this transformation.22 The process was no doubt difficult; and, as Underwood justly observes, Tate never wholly “overcame his prejudices nor kept them from being known publicly” (Allen Tate, 296). I cannot help speculating that his turn was deeply involved with his formal conversion to the Catholic faith in 1950. This religious declaration was a long time coming. Tate’s ancestry on his mother’s side had Catholic origins, and Tate’s own essay for I’ll Take My Stand dealt with “Religion in the Old South.” It is an outrageous argument, virtually blaming Southern Protestantism for the loss of the Civil War since it was a theology too “weak” to support a “feudal” society. Yet Tate put off his formal conversion until twenty years later, and my guess is that qualms about his own racism (not to mention his own sexual behaviour) prevented his commitment, even after his wife, Caroline Gordon, entered the Church in 1947.23 An indirect glimpse of this process may possibly be recorded in a brief chapter of Jacques Maritain’s Reflections on America (1958), in which he addresses the racial tensions of the nation. Tate and Maritain became personal friends in 1948 when Tate and Caroline Gordon lived in Princeton. Maritain’s powerful influence on Tate, particularly his The Dream of Descartes (1944), is recorded both by Radcliffe Squires, Tate’s first biographer (199), and by Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr, in Three Catholic Writers of the Modern South (61–5).24 Maritain’s brief chapter on “The Race Question” in his Reflections (49–57) was, he says, written “by hearsay” not direct observation, and his language reflects thoughts that may plausibly have arisen from Tate’s conversation. Conflicts arise, he notes “between the mores and the law,” “between the feelings and behavior of large parts of the white population, and the Federal law.” He makes concessions: one must look, he writes, “with understanding and sympathy at the difficulties with which many men of good will, who are aware of their duties toward colored people, but bound by their own local traditions, are confronted in the South.” He even allows that many Negro families may be happier under segregation than otherwise. But – he says firmly – “the question is not a question of happiness but of human right.” Maritain’s brief analysis – as tepid as it seems now – exhibits shrewd insight into

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human behaviour toughened by the thinking of a rationalist theologian and moralist; Tate’s interaction with him could hardly have failed to affect him positively.

To return to the period of Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead”: the young Tate, having confronted his own epistemological and spiritual uncertainties about the Southern past, seems to have set out deliberately to repair them, arriving at both his own personal understanding of the war and a considered outlook on current politics. Tate read much history, spending a great deal of intellectual effort on a review of Spengler’s Decline of the West, that once modish work that sees recurrent patterns in the rise and fall of civilizations. He was also impressed by Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, a work that addresses the rise of scientific thought through the past three centuries, concluding with Whitehead’s own version of “process theology.” Most important, Tate undertook the writing of two Civil War biographies for popular consumption, Stonewall Jackson and Jefferson Davis. Tate was not a historian, as Rubin points out; the biographies are polemical. He had already decided what the lives “were supposed to mean,” and he mainly worked “at fitting the biographical material into his thesis” (Wary Fugitives, 98). Nonetheless, the background reading and the writing got Tate’s hands dirty with historical detail. How much of this understanding – quite apart from his silenced racism – can be read backward into Tate’s “Ode” is a question each reader must decide. Tate’s visit to England in 1928, with its quasi-feudal class-determined society, triggered a brief resurgence of American egalitarianism, and he declared himself a “confirmed democrat” (Singal, War Within, 242). But Tate’s ultimate pointe d’arrivée was a political position deeply critical of democracy. When asked in April 1927 to write a biography of Stonewall Jackson, writes Underwood, Tate was ecstatic: “The project turned out to be the first stage in his decade-long quest for a new Southern father” (Allen Tate, 128). But though the first biography gave Tate “opportunity to vent his hostility to Northerners who wrote Southern history” (131), Jackson is a relatively one-dimensional figure.25 The second biography, however, Jefferson Davis: His Rise and Fall (completed in July 1929), turned from conventional military history to the heart of Confederate politics and Confederate failure. Both books are filled more

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with military narrative than actual biography, but, unlike Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis has rarely been an object of Southern hagiography. His conduct of the war revealed not only personal character flaws, but the flaws of the Confederacy itself, and Tate’s openly partisan biography was forced to confront both. Tate’s two biographies coincide with the development of his celebrated, or notorious, agrarianism and his editing of the twelve essays in I’ll Take My Stand (1930). Since these agrarian essays have been widely discussed and the biographies very little, my excursus from Tate’s poetry here focuses on Jefferson Davis and Tate’s Civil War. The dates must be observed precisely: first, these views were fully articulated after, not during, the composition of the “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Second, these views, particularly the critiques of Northern industrialism and finance capitalism, were formed before, not after, the great stock market crash in October 1929. All three books appeared during Herbert Hoover’s presidency.26 The Crash only confirmed beliefs that had already been expressed, and Roosevelt’s New Deal had not been thought of. Jefferson Davis himself emerges as a Southerner who is admirable personally but is inadequate to the crises of war. Although “perhaps the most disinterested statesman in American history, he seemed too remote and uncompromising to be a politician” (Jefferson Davis, 7). His “habit of omnivorous reading” made him “the best informed, possibly the best educated, man in the United States Senate” (58). His character, honour, and integrity made him “almost saintly” (198); his kindness to his own slaves illustrates “all the virtues and none of the vices of the slavery regime” (74). In his conduct of the war he was not guilty of positive blunders but of “excessive caution” (200). His loyalty to the incompetent General Braxton Bragg – Tate’s prime scapegoat – was an “act of madness” (194), his “sole major blunder as President” (244). Davis becomes a type of Coriolanus, whose patrician superiority was rejected by his own people. “It was to his credit that he wished to display the Christian virtues of charity and forbearance,” writes Tate, “but what his country needed was the Machiavellian virtue of policy” (141). Tate’s narrative vilifies the Yankee at every opportunity. As Paul A. Bové puts it, Tate affirms Davis’s strict reading of the Constitution in order “to make the victors into rebels so that foundational authority will remain with the South” (“Agriculture and Academe,” 187). The Northerners wished to “ride over the South rough-shod” (Jefferson

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Davis, 12), and – repeating an old Scots joke – they “kept the Sabbath and everything else they could lay their hands on” (52). The great wealth of the Southern plantations, he says, was “largely illusory” since “the bulk of the profits from a cotton crop went to enrich the Yankee merchants” (45). When Northerners immigrated to the South, they brought their unhealthy mercantile values with them: many from New Jersey or New England states settled there “because they saw an opportunity of getting rich quickly” (31). The profit motive, it seems, is a sectional vice quite alien to the South itself. The anti-humanistic consequences of Northern industrialization have turned the populace into “machines without memory” (136). More questionable is Tate’s treatment of states’ rights. His own sympathies lie firmly with the state rather than the central government, yet he sees that Davis’s inability to exert control over the Confederate states was his undoing. The Constitutional lawyer in Davis held that “each State is sovereign” (Jefferson Davis, 10), and his West Point textbook, William Rawle’s View of the Constitution of the United States of America (1829), assured him that “the secession of a State from the Union depends on the will of the people of such a State” (61). When the states did secede, he was caught off guard by the fuss.27 After the war, in confinement, he steadfastly refused Andrew Johnson’s pardon, insisting that secession did not constitute treason (Blight, Race and Reunion, 57). Yet the Confederate Constitution bore within itself the very same contradictions: “It reverted to the Articles of Confederation for an explicit statement of the sovereignty of the states, but it declared, nevertheless, that the Confederacy was permanent” (Jefferson Davis, 20). The very name of the new “nation” was derived from the failed Articles of Confederation. Davis found himself penned in on every side by states’ rights doctrinaires, including his own vice-president Alexander Stephens, and the troublesome Governor Joseph Brown of Georgia – “they helped the Union as efficiently as an army of 40,000 men” (128), Tate writes. When Davis in desperation was forced to institute a draft to supply manpower for the central government, Brown thundered that “his noble state would fight the South and the North together to preserve her rights” (251). Even Robert E. Lee, normally immune to criticism, “never saw the war as a whole: he was fighting for Virginia” (183).28 In what seems an ultimate irony, Davis complains that his enemies have held public meetings “in some of which a treasonable design is masked by a pretense of devotion to state sovereignty” (228).

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Tate’s depiction of race is also muddled. Despite Fugitive disavowals of Southern romanticism, passages in the biography paint Arcadian pictures of the antebellum plantation and the devotion of loyal slaves (Jefferson Davis, 39–42, 47–9). Paradoxically, writes Tate, “out of the great evil of slavery had come a certain good” (41). Later we are told that “the Negroes were docile, and for the most part devoted to the cause of the Confederacy,” exhibiting a “devotion that somewhat puzzled the Abolitionists” (204–5). He concedes that the slaves suffered “disadvantages” – the humiliation of “slave” status and the inability to rise in society – but otherwise, he claims (reciting the familiar wageslavery argument), they were no worse off than the “modern industrial laborer” (41). This rosy picture takes darker tones, however, when he relates an anecdote about a black servant made unhappy by being educated “beyond her station,” noting that the “educated Negro” today is in “much the same plight” (36). Public schooling has never been a priority in the South, regardless of race – the South never produced a Horace Mann. Tate is struck by the “irrationality” of English millworkers who refused “to approve of slavery even under starvation” (82). In one particularly ugly passage, he recites the evaluation by slave traders of the relative suitability for slavery of the various African tribes (37–8).29 Given this picture, I expected Tate’s treatment of arming the African population as soldiers, as the North had done in March 1863, might be erased altogether, but he gives it ample discussion. “Farsighted men,” he says, urged the impressment of slaves early in 1864 in the face of a desperate shortage of soldiers, even though, he notes, “it would have meant the doom of slavery” (Jefferson Davis, 230–1). Davis refused. One year later he was willing, but it was too late. The “variety of prejudice against Negro soldiers was so great that it was almost impossible to frame a policy regarding them so that it would meet all objections and yet be effective” (262). Furthermore, in the eyes of states’ rights doctrinaires, to draft slaves was to expropriate property: “it would be both inconsistent and revolutionary to permit the Richmond government to summon the slave population for any purpose” (262). Not even Robert E. Lee himself “could unseat the power of race prejudice” (264). In the end, the resolution that passed in March 1865, just weeks before Appomattox, merely allowed Richmond to “ask for” slaves from their masters, and ultimately “not a single colored soldier reached the firing line” (264)

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The Jefferson Davis biography is filled with numerous “what ifs” explaining the Confederate defeat, though Tate recognizes that “Confederate history is too complex to be explained by simple, isolated causes” (Jefferson Davis, 179). Nonetheless, beneath the apologetics for the Southern defeat lies Tate’s more disturbing distrust of democracy itself. This is a deep-rooted Southern fear, responding to the daily visible presence of an oppressed hostile population. Jefferson Davis’s political philosophy, Tate tells us, was superior to Lincoln’s: “Lincoln’s deficient education and his lack of a large social experience issued in a too optimistic view of the political capacity of men, and impelled him to visualize a political monstrosity – a pure democracy” (198). Tate was realistic enough to contrast Davis’s opposite failing: “he constantly forgot that the Confederacy was a political experiment” – an experiment in restricted class democracy, where liberty for the privileged white population is buttressed by the necessary enslavement of the black. In his patrician contempt for the people, he forgot that the free whites also “needed to be coaxed and coddled” (171). Tate aligns his distrust of democracy in explicit opposition to Thomas Jefferson. The “older and riper societies” of the South, he writes, “supplied the explicit doctrine that Southerners, except for Jefferson’s moment of heresy, had believed all along” (42). The repudiation of Jefferson’s “heresy,” Tate observes, culminated just four years after his death, “when the Virginia Constitutional Convention disclaimed the doctrine of the rights and the equality of man.” Though his presentation is touched by irony, Tate’s scorn for Jefferson’s “heresy” and his insistence on the necessity of class stratification (whether by race or not) are plain.30 What, then, was the Civil War really about? The peroration of Tate’s biography addresses this question with a climactic flourish. It was not fought, as Jefferson Davis seemed to believe, for constitutional liberty, for the individual state’s right to choose its own destiny and secede from the Union. It was not, not assuredly, about slavery. No, he says cryptically, the North’s “real interest in abolishing slavery was in all respects identical with the interest of the United States, in 1917, in making the world safe for democracy” (Jefferson Davis, 286–7). That interest is financial, and Tate wags a finger at the coincidental rise of tariffs and Northern abolitionist societies. Even these issues, however, obscure the larger picture. There is “no evidence that Davis – or any of the Southern statesmen after Calhoun – understood the historical

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meaning of the sectional struggle,” he wrote with a sweeping Spenglerian gesture: “Theirs was the last stand, they were the forlorn hope, of conservative Fundamentalist Christianity and of civilization based on agrarian, class rule in the European sense ... The issue was class rule and religion versus democracy and science” (83–4). He concludes with the same apocalyptic tone: “The South was the last stronghold of European civilization in the western hemisphere, a conservative check upon the restless expansiveness of the industrial North, and the South had to go ... All European history since the Reformation was concentrated in the war between the North and the South” (287). Tate might be credited with prophetic powers, if we recall that these sentences were written only a few weeks before the “restless expansiveness” of the New York Stock Exchange triggered the agonizing Depression of the 1930s. And it points directly to the agrarian credo of I’ll Take My Stand, advocating the “stable spirit of ordered economy” thought to be represented by the South. The North, guilty of gross avarice, was caught in snares of its own making. The feudal South, he believed, not only “produced a genuine ruling class,” but it produced the only “social system that imposes a check upon the acquisitive instinct.” “Only the agricultural order in the past has achieved this” (Anonymous, I’ll Take My Stand, 53), and the primary agrarian “solution” to contemporary disorder is a return to outdoor toilets and subsistence farming (as if cotton, tobacco, and indigo were not cash crops). According to Daniel Joseph Singal, this belief amounts to a philosophical materialism “in which the ownership of property determine[s] social relations and even, to some extent, human nature” – a materialism that brought him “close to Marxist thought” (War Within, 244). Or in Mark Jancovich’s words, “farmers should attempt to achieve self-sufficiency as a way of achieving independence from the cash-nexus of capitalist relations” (Cultural Politics, 13). But Tate forgets that even in the lifetime of Sidney Lanier, industrial farming had already moved into the agricultural system of the American West and was spreading. He was no more prepared than anyone else when the Dust Bowl appeared in 1934. He was still unable or unwilling to harmonize an American democratic society with an agrarian community of men responsible to “a definite physical legacy – land and slaves” – which “checked the desire for mere wealth and power” (Anonymous, I’ll Take My Stand, 53). In the agrarian writings that followed after the two biographies, Tate assumed a highly idiosyncratic political position, a position so

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impracticable that it was abandoned by most of its adherents before the Dirty Thirties were done. Tate himself was ironic about the “eventual success” of his proposals, aiming at best for a moral victory, to the great annoyance of Davidson.31 He stood between the two political extremes of the decade, innately fearful of Marxist communism, on the one hand, and anxious to distance himself from fascist nationalism – for which his position was easily mistaken – on the other.32 Eugene D. Genovese has summed up five general tenets of what he describes as The Southern Tradition in his 1994 book of that name. I enumerate for convenience: 1 “Opposition to finance capitalism and, more broadly, to the attempt to substitute the market for society itself”; 2 “Opposition to the radical individualism that is today sweeping America”; 3 “Support for broad property ownership and a market economy subject to socially determined moral restraints”; 4 “Adherence to a Christian individualism that condemns personal licence and demands submission to a moral consensus rooted in elementary piety”; 5 “An insistence that every people must develop its own genius, based upon its special history, and must reject siren calls to an internationalism – or rather, a cosmopolitanism – that would eradicate local and national cultures and standards of personal conduct.” (98) Genovese fully acknowledges the racist guilt of Southern history, but he makes every effort to disentangle from it a tenable theory of Southern conservatism.33 The points I would emphasize here are number 3 and number 1, support for a “market economy,” which to the agrarians must be a local, self-sufficient farmers’ market economy, and opposition to “finance capitalism,” which refers to industrially mass-produced commodities with healthy profit margins, plus virtual money generated mathematically by interest or stock market investment.34 On the negative side, capitalism to the agrarians was a totalitarian enterprise, which, in Mark Jancovich’s analysis, “organized all human relations through the cash-nexus” (Cultural Politics, 13). The positive side of this picture has proved to be largely a utopian fantasy: Tate’s vision of the South is authoritative but tendentious – though the move to small

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local farming still has its idealistic advocates, and Tate’s critique of commodity and finance capitalism retains its relevance today. Listening to today’s Southern politicians, in fact, I find it hard to imagine Genovese’s conservative tradition that “always traced the evils of the modern world to the ascendancy of the profit motive” and to “the conversion of small property based on individual labor into accumulated capital manifested as financial assets” (Southern Tradition, 34). The agrarians, said Tate, looking back, were concerned neither with “neo-Confederate nostalgia” nor with “material well-being” but with “the erosion of the quality of individual life by the forces of industrialization and the uncritical worship of material progress as an end in itself” (Rubin, Wary Fugitives, xiv). Like Ezra Pound, Tate viewed “material well-being” as enjoyment of the essentials of life rather than as a commodity culture of wealth for its own sake, the conspicuous consumption of manufactured goods and debased mass entertainments. Tate had begun to formulate his hostility to the capitalist status quo well before the Crash of 1929, but this hostility aligns him with those writers of the 1930s on every degree of the political spectrum who suspected that something was grievously wrong with the underlying structure of American society. As M.E. Bradford concluded, “if the Agrarians are antiscientific, antirationalist ‘small-republic’ men, it is for ethical, not economic reasons” – even if such ethical reasons include a race-based class system. Looking closer to the present, Tate’s physiocratic faith in moral improvement derived from direct physical contact with the soil, stripped of its tacit racism, aligns him too, as others have noted, with powerful ecological advocates of today. Tate’s position on the fragmentation of American culture outlived his agrarian convictions and lasted throughout his life. Eric Aronoff teases out the interrelationships between Tate’s concepts of cultures and literary form in a subtle analysis of his use of the words “culture,” “tradition,” “nation,” and “history” (Composing Cultures, 160–75). Crane’s celebration of American culture in The Bridge failed, Tate argued, because America has no unified culture, only regional cultures. “Milton himself could not write a Paradise Lost now,” he said. Epic, the embodiment of “a culture,” is impossible: “Eliot is right in saying there are no important themes for modern poets. Hence we all write lyrics” (165). Unlike Eliot, however, who posited a tradition based on “all the poetry that has ever been written,” Tate shifted the universal “tradition” to regional “cultures” – there are “several different Americas” (167). If Crane attempted to create a mythos of American history, Tate inquired “which American

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history?” (168). By the same reasoning, Tate’s Southern vision could recognize no single American nation. In all of this, the salient consequence of the Civil War for Tate was the final eradication of European models of governance in monarchy and aristocracy, which came about through the inefficacy of a democracy that had degenerated into financial oligarchy. In his review of Herbert Agar’s The People’s Choice, Tate (paraphrasing Plato’s Republic, Book 8) constructs a grand historical metanarrative in which three different “rationalizations of power” succeed each other – monarchy, aristocracy, and plutocracy – each of which “conceals both its origin and the nature of its rule not only from the people but from itself” (“Where Are the People,” 231). Monarchy and aristocracy both are bound by natural limits and “pay” for their power by the need to protect the people, to set “a high standard of public and private conduct that the masses can respect,” and to diffuse through society “the materials of civilized living in sufficient quantity to bind all classes together in a single culture” (232). The modern plutocracies of capitalism, however, feel no such obligations, and, being amoral, “fail to pay a price” for their power. Already in 1869, soon after Appomattox, it had seemed to Charles Francis Adams that “we have no word” for this new reality, this “government by monied corporations” (Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 1). Democracy, notably in this scheme, “is not a state, but an intermediate or transitional stage in politics from the older forms to capitalism” (232–3). In America, democracy “was not perpetuated, but was crushed out of existence by the Confederate War” (234), leaving the Union thereafter to a fictitious democracy “in which the popular vote is manipulated by the bosses for the benefit of the money power.” Agar’s book, writes Tate, is “the most remarkable popular history that has yet been written on America” (234).35 In the face of historical experience, while it is easy to ridicule Tate’s faith in the moral obligations of king and aristocrat, his ultimate target, the manipulation of democracy by unrestricted financial powers concealed from the voting public, was and remains a very perilous reality.36 Given the distribution of wealth in America at the time I am writing, Tate’s prophecy is difficult to deny. Yet, as Genovese ultimately concludes, the Southern conservatives’ critique of finance capitalism “has always existed in severe tension with their distrust of big government.” They “continue to gag on the government intervention in the economy that, under present international conditions, may well be essential to combat it” (Southern Tradition, 99).

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America has always seen itself as the Great Experiment in democracy, at least in the North. But the conservative South has never really believed in democracy. The idea that “all men are created equal” is dismissed as one of “Jefferson’s pieces of French sentiment and humbug” or, more decorously, as not the “better side of Jefferson”; instead, the South has favoured “an organic conception of society, profoundly anti-egalitarian yet still dependent upon popular validation.”37 It believed, and still widely believes, in a quasi-feudal class system with blacks at the bottom, white trash next, then working and professional classes up through the wealthy elite. It is a holdover still from the slave system, when of course true democracy was non-existent. This class hierarchy was preserved through Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era; but it was gravely tested by the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. Since then, the minimization of public education has proved the most effective way to preserve it.

9 Between Two Wars (2) “America Was Promises” – Archibald MacLeish and “The Irresponsibles”

In the August 1936 Poetry magazine, a reviewer denounced a widely read poet for writing the wrong kind of poetry. The reviewer had no doubt what the “right” kind of poetry ought to be – he uses phrases like “severe economy” and “exact meaning” and he misses a sense of “privacy” in the poet’s references. “Ease” on the part of both poet and reader is a demerit: the poet is too “indulgent to the reader’s attention,” a fault deriving from the “bardic romantics” of American poetry, “the bearded dynasties of Longfellow and Bryant.” The poems lack ambiguity, indirection, irony. Damning terms pile up through the extensive review, the poems exhibiting “juvenility” in the “reckless vulgarity of their style,” such that “any daily editorial writer” might improve upon them. They are not the work of a “genuine poet,” he says, “chiefly because the book illustrates so flatly the distinction between bard and poet.”1 I am less concerned with the justice of this review than with its prescriptive nature. Poetry in order to be “genuine” must be highly compressed, obscurely allusive, and difficult. It must not be accessible to homespun commoners, the vulgus. The poet in question, Stephen Vincent Benét, had earned, the reviewer concedes, “one of the largest popular followings of the past two decades.” In fact, he had done the unthinkable: his highly readable book-length poem on the Civil War, John Brown’s Body (1928), displaying cautiously modernist narrative techniques and an array of verse forms, had “swallowed the marketplace whole,” becoming Knopf’s bestselling title for the next decade (Gilpin, John Brown, 106). His verse is “a virtual guide-book of native myth and folklore.” Yet Benét is not a “genuine poet” but merely “a

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bard,” and the critic, Morton Dauwen Zabel, concludes by offering advice to “humanitarians” aspiring to become poets: “(1) avoid hortatory sentences: they usually induce nothing but a false sense of power; (2) stop writing declarations, summons-to-arms, and ‘addresses to contemporaries’: they are safer in the hands of editorial writers and platform orators; and (3) beware of prophecy: it may be the surest way of deluding a valid ambition to poetry.” Zabel is clearly not concerned merely with the tools of rhetoric in poetry; his animus is directed at editorials and political suasion, against prophecy as wisdom spoken to power. Zabel, long associated with Poetry magazine’s staff, was highly respected as a scholar and a maker of taste; his review probably “initiated the plunge of Benét’s reputation among the American literati” (Izzo and Konkle, Benét, 11), so that today his name is virtually erased from the canon, despite an ambitious, widely read long poem and a handful of resonant short stories.2 “Being a fan of Benét sometimes feels like being a member of a secret cult” (1). An earlier blacklisting had come, however, from Allen Tate, who savaged John Brown’s Body in The Nation in 1928. Tate as usual conceals his rancour under a surface of civility: while he admits that “the story gathers suspense as it goes and often attains to power,” and even that the Invocation is “one of the best recent productions” by an American poet, he charges Benét’s poem with “hair-raising defects” and “literary incompetence.” But Tate’s review, written while he was composing his own Civil War biographies, rests on Benét’s failed historicism. The poem, Tate says, fails because, while “the Civil War interests Mr. Benét, it has no meaning for him” (Poetry Reviews, 72–4). These reviews betray a host of entangled prejudices – aesthetic, cultural, political. They forbid poetry in the Whitmanic manner, oratorical or exclamatory, and require elliptical compression and erudition – difficult poetry. Anything different risks being “popular” and therefore, presumably, trivial. It defines the critic’s task as, first, evaluating the poetic work by a single particular standard and, second, judging it on stylistic grounds only, without regard to subject (though it does so on the sly). It rules out political poetry not explicitly but by implication. Political odes are verboten, especially if they betray patriotic sentiment. They leave no room for the requisite irony. In a democracy political positions have to be explicable to the vulgar masses.3 Tate’s political motivations are clear enough – by 1928 he had arrived at his personal interpretation of the Civil War. I know nothing of Zabel’s

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party politics, but his sneering reference to poetic “humanitarians” is revealing.4 Zabel’s critical position at Poetry was consistently, in the phrase of Alan Filreis, to “garrison modernism against materialist encroachments” in a “defensive antipolitical poetics” – that is, to severely restrict the scope of poetry, thereby narrowing not only its readership to a specially trained few but also delimiting the allowable purposes of poetry itself. Marxist critics of the period are regularly accused of being tendentious and ideological, but they were no more so than the emerging New Critics. While I disagree emphatically with Joseph Harrington that the combative young New Critics were “not interested in judging a poem on its own terms” (my emphasis) – the young New Critics were sincere in their aesthetics – I do agree that “they were interested in setting the terms themselves and institutionalizing them.”5 Harrington’s analysis of Tate’s position as representative high modernism is, in fact, one of the most astute available. Like Eliot and the early Pound, he writes, the modernist artist was “a self-possessed and contained subject who can adopt a disinterested universal perspective from which political authority can be critiqued” (57); but this disinterested perspective must be protected not merely from the interference of censorship but, equally, from a political philosophy like Marxism imposed from above and from the tyranny of the majority, whether that be the pressures of populism or the dictatorship of the commercial market. There is much to be admired in this ideal of the sacrosanct position of the writer, artist, or poet. But we are far less likely now to believe in the possibility of such disinterested objectivity and far more likely to question the existence of “universals” beyond the basic facts of human biology and mortality. And Harrington is correct in demonstrating that Tate’s politics, however much wrapped in layers of irony and indirection, are far from disinterested.6 Despite Harrington, Nelson, Filreis, and others, however, the antipolitical stance was not new with the New Criticism. That animus was already inscribed into the editorial policies of Poetry magazine from the time of its founding by Harriet Monroe in 1912. Anne Frances Herzog devotes the first chapter of her dissertation on Muriel Rukeyser (Rutgers, 1993) to these policies and their dogmatic application in the journal. When Monroe and her assistant editor Alice Corbin Henderson championed a “universal” poetry, a non-materialistic poetry “whose ‘soaring spirits’ evade the world from which they write” (Herzog, Faith and Resistance, 18), the ghost of Emerson can be

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heard. “During the period of 1912–1917,” she writes, “Poetry magazine persistently articulates a poetics of individualism; in keeping with the ‘fate of the individual man,’ the individual’s emotions, and the individual poet’s experience are cited as the true origin of ‘good’ poetry. Political poetry ... moves beyond the perspective of the single individual’s experience and emotions and is involved in cultural work which exceeds ‘the fate of the individual man.’ ... Thus, the political poet who writes from a communal perspective, and in fact, may be writing self-consciously against what he/she sees as the failure of bourgeois individualism, is necessarily in conflict with this particular aesthetic norm” (Herzog, Faith and Resistance, 6–7). This anti-political stance was firmly entrenched before the advent of Zabel and the New Critics, and in June 1934, Harriet Monroe, under pressure from the left, reaffirmed it in her article “Art and Propaganda.”7 Still, the 1920s had been different. American poets of every description jostled elbow to elbow in the little magazines, where readers could browse a boutique of different modernisms. Pound and Eliot were identifiable leaders from across the ocean and “difficult” modernists, but they published together with nativists of Chicago – Sandburg, Masters, and Lindsay. Difficult writers like Hart Crane and Marianne Moore appeared out of nowhere. Ransom, Warren, and Davidson were heard from the South. Cummings was considered the outermost fringe of the avant garde, and Williams, the most truly innovative of the nativists, was admired grudgingly. Pound’s imagism entered the market under the banner of the “demon saleswoman of poetry” Amy Lowell – leading H.D. and Fletcher and others. Unaligned figures like Jeffers and Aiken and MacLeish called for attention, while colourful personalities like Mina Loy and Elsa von FreytagLoringhoven flitted around the edges. Others, like Robinson and Frost, Wylie and Millay, continued practising styles established before modernism became de rigueur, and a younger generation of dogmatic traditionalists included figures like Robert Hillyer and Arthur Davison Ficke. The Harlem Renaissance was taking place largely in its own segregated bubble. It was a spontaneous poetic flowering unlike any the nation had seen. Then the 1930s began sifting and sorting, distilling Eliot into an ideology. This process was crucial in the canonization of, in Cary Nelson’s words, “a formally experimental but politically disengaged modernism” (Repression and Recovery, 22), and it largely determined which poems from this thriving period continue to be read and anthologized.8

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The cause for this process is attached to the growth of the New Criticism. But the causation is not a direct result of New Critical theory, which neither demanded formal experimentation nor excluded political subject matter (though it expected subject matter to be “universal”). Allen Tate himself was a highly political poet who escapes Cary Nelson’s generalization. The process was also ambivalent: from Milton A. Cohen’s point of view in Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics, by 1931 modernism was out, proletarianism was in. From Alan Filreis’s, poets on the political left in the 1930s freely identified themselves with the avant garde, but by the Cold War, they were left “to a narrow range of poetic languages and genres ... used to achieve a specific political effect” (Counter-revolution, 30). America itself became a bewildering political maze in the 1930s, and debates over the very viability of American democracy were being waged with great urgency, an urgency, to be sure, less pressing than that in faraway Europe – the Tennessee agrarians and the editors of New Masses were not mobilizing troops. But faith in the status quo evaporated. Increasingly, literary journals debated the desirability of a public poetry, usually affirming that poets should stick to their own business and leave politics to the experts. The question would have made no sense at all to Philip Freneau or Walt Whitman or James Russell Lowell, and it did not deter William Vaughn Moody in 1900. If, as David Barber has written, “no one today could recover, or wish to recover, the innocence of MacLeish’s visionary ambition” to create a politically engaged poetry (36), that may reflect the unprecedented nature of the question in the heyday of high modernism. The question had once made sense, however, to Poe and to Emerson, as we have seen; and by the date of Zabel’s 1936 review, the nature of “genuine” poetry had already become narrowly determined. Stephen Vincent Benét belonged with the group that suffered most from this winnowing process – the populist modernists on the political left. This includes a large group of modernist writers who used poetry for public statements, patriotic or critical or both, extending from the Chicago poets of the previous decades – Sandburg, Masters, Lindsay – through Benét, MacLeish, candid Marxists like Rukeyser or Fearing, and the pessimist outsider Jeffers to the postwar Ginsberg and the San Francisco Beats and after. Their poetry is direct – it usually means what it says without recourse to subtle nuances of irony or ambiguity – it is metrically insouciant (often but not always using a post-Whitmanic free-verse line), and it is unsparing with words. It

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claims to speak for “the common man” (usually gendered male), it is unashamedly political, and it sometimes has a strong oral, performative element (Sandburg, Lindsay, Ginsberg). It is deeply rooted in popular culture and mythology – the attitudes and vocabulary of the street. African American poetry is a vital branch of this tradition, from Langston Hughes (who owes a great deal to Sandburg and Lindsay) and James Weldon Johnson to Gwendolyn Brooks and Ishmael Reed. These poets are often read together in smaller groups under sociopolitical subheadings – black poets, women poets, communist poets, hyphenated American poets – but rarely, I think, are they seen as part of a larger continuous tradition stretching from Lindsay and Hughes and Lola Ridge to the present. Zabel’s specious distinction between a “bard” and a “poet” belongs with the successful campaign to create a space for difficult high modernism. But the poets mentioned here are some of the more prominent belonging to a counter-tradition of nonelitist populist modernism. The vertiginous profusion of political opinions during the 1930s meant that each writer had his or her own views on the relationship between poetry and politics, and these views shifted freely. For the present discussion I isolate three strands: the rightist agrarian group (Tate, Ransom, Donaldson), the Marxist New Masses group (Mike Gold, Taggard, Rukeyser), and the centre-leftist New Deal group (Benét, MacLeish, Millay). Benét, said by MacLeish to be “as nearly the national poet as anyone has been since Whitman,” was hostile to both fascism and Marxism and consequently attacked by both sides. “At the moment,” he remarked in 1936, “every element I dislike most in the country is allied against Roosevelt.”9 Benét’s The Burning City (1936) opens with a group of political poems, including his once admired “Litany for Dictators” plus three odes. It closes with three dystopian “Nightmares,” important contributions to American science fiction, and unusual pioneering specimens of versified sci-fi. The middle section presents less effective lyric poems, marking Benét’s “alternative versions of poetry’s social function”; to Cary Nelson they seem “almost schizophrenically segregated” (123), though more charitably the alternative voices might be read as claims to versatility. The “Litany” and “Ode to the Austrian Socialists” reveal a peripheral awareness of global events rare for an American nativist. The Austrian incident was relatively local in the welter of world affairs following Hitler’s rise to power in March 1933; but it took an inordinate length of time before the outer world took his bel-

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ligerency seriously. Mussolini was still widely admired, not only by right-wing poets like Pound and Stevens,10 but by sophisticated politicians like Churchill and FDR, while the Bolshevik Stalin was seen as a constant threat. Benét’s “Litany” and his “Ode to the Austrian Socialists” might be seen as purely proletarian writing, though he never won much favour from the New Masses group. “I’m not very sold on Marxism as a doctrine,” he said in February 1934: the Marxists “have built it into too cast-iron a theory,” and the leaders here “are a little too witch-burning to suit me” (Letters, 265). He supported Roosevelt’s New Deal passionately, and devoted the energy of his last years to patriotic wartime radio propaganda. He vehemently rejected Thoreau’s dictum – often attributed to Jefferson – that “the best government is the government that governs least,” noting “that was never true of any civilization more complex than that of a free hunter” (392). His work is steeped in Americana – according to his friend MacLeish, he was “more conscious of being an American than any other man I ever knew” (ix). He was deeply concerned about the relations between his art, his wider audience, and the crises of his time. Writing to James T. Farrell in April 1942, he made a strong statement, either even-handed or confused, depending on one’s own position: “I cannot agree that either [Van Wyck] Brooks or MacLeish wish to ‘politicize’ writing, set up a certain kind of state writing, put artists in uniform ... It would seem to me they are asking for larger work, not smaller ... which doesn’t mean that we should all immediately write nothing but poems on the downfall of Hitler. And you have quoted Milton to the point, but he also wrote ‘I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed.’ I don’t think poetry should put its head in a bag – I don’t think it should be the exclusive possession of an intellectual few. That is my only quarrel with the dogmatist intellectuals. But I would burn no books and suppress no writers” (394–5). “Ode to Walt Whitman” is firmly grounded in the circumstances of the mid-1930s, but its political expression is more indirect than the Austrian Ode. Really it is a conflicted ecological poem, written before that concept had come into vogue: it descends directly from Emerson’s supra-humanistic “Hamatreya,” assimilating Whitman not to the American people but to the American land. It is conflicted because Benét perpetuates the disastrous teaching of Emerson in chapter 5 of Nature: “Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use. When a thing has served an end to the uttermost, it is wholly new for an ulterior ser-

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vice” (Essays, 28). Yet it focuses on the social and ecological depredations that created the Dirty Thirties. The four parts of the ode resemble the “movements” of poetic symphonies by Lanier or Aiken. The poem does not use music thematically, but the formal allusion lends it a high aesthetic flavour. It is a sprawling, garrulous piece, studied in its knowledge of Whitman’s life and works, but the argument is clear: part 1 shows aged Whitman on the day of his death; part 2 shows the speaker of the poem, pluralized as a communal “we,” in dialogue with Whitman’s ghost about the present state of the nation; part 3, scherzando in short lines, shows Nature close-up in the arbutus flower resiliently surviving human abuse; part 4 returns to Whitman, with all his failings, and in a concluding passage that recalls “The River” section of Hart Crane’s The Bridge, assimilates Whitman to the waters of the Mississippi and ends in a passage of quasi-symphonic sublime. Part 1 presents a very human Whitman as an old man dying in pain, bravely, while the footsteps of Death steadily approach. The language is colloquial – even Zabel calls it “charming.” The natural world – not prettified, its snow marked by “the strong urine of horses” – is particularly watery, with “freshets” and “Spring rains,” even Whitman’s desired gravesite: “I have picked out a bit of hill with a southern exposure. / I like to be near the trees. I like to be near / The water-sound of the trees.” The lengthy section culminates in a moving extended simile: – It is so they die on the plains, the great, old buffalo, The herd-leaders, the beasts with the kingly eyes, Innocent, curly-browed, They sink to the earth like mountains, hairy and silent, And their tongues are cut by the hunter. Oh, singing tongue! Great tongue of bronze and salt and the free grasses, Tongue of America, speaking for the first time, Must the hunter have you at last? .... And they said that in death you looked like a marvelous old, wise child. Benét may have drawn his thought from a letter in which Emerson tells Carlyle that Leaves of Grass is “a monster with buffalo strength and terrible eyes” (Claudel, “Poems as Laurels,” 86). It is a reminder of the indiscriminate slaughter and near extinction of the iconic Ameri-

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can species (there is later reference to shooting “the ten thousand skydarkening pigeons”) and to the wasteful harvesting of buffalo tongues as a gourmet delicacy, leaving carcasses to rot where they fell. In part 2, the ghost of Whitman in present time asks, with a Marxist locution, “Is it well with you, comrades?” Benét’s reply first attempts a positive tone – “we have linked the whole land with steel and the hard highways,” “we have fought new wars and won them” – but after recalling the Great War and even the Philippine conflict (“in dark-faced islands”), the poem abruptly turns: “There is a rust on the land.” In three large paragraphs, the speaker’s collective voice describes the desperation of unemployment and poverty, the “waste land” of the dust bowl, and the piracy “lacking even a pirate’s candor” of finance capitalists – “Men of paper, robbing by paper, with paper faces, / Rustling like frightened paper when the storm broke”: “There were many such in my time. I have seen the rich arrogant and the poor oppressed. I have seen democracy, also. I have seen The good man slain, the knave and the fool in power, The democratic vista botched by the people, Yet not despaired, loving the giant land, Though I prophesied to these States.” Benét replies with the grim alternative given by the polarized politics of his decade, the communist-fascist binary: “Now they say we must have one tyranny or another / And a dark bell rings in our hearts.” / “Was the blood spilt for nothing, then?” The poem never answers the ghost’s terrible question. Instead, Benét, having visited the messy world of politics, reverts to the rarefied aesthetic world of poetry, repeating the answer of the Earth Spirit in Emerson’s “Hamatreya,” gesturing towards the eternal resilience of creation. In part 3, the frail arbutus, though “man can tear it, / Crush it, destroy it,” is “careless of man.” In part 4, Whitman is “an old fraud,” “an adept self-advertiser,” even a “Charlus” (alluding to his homosexuality via Proust), and he is identified with a gallery of frustrated literary spirits – Sterne, Swift, Keats, and even Poe.11 The poem closes with a final lament for “the factory town with the dirty stoops,” the “sham castles for imitation Medici,” but “never Monticello, never again,” before it rehearses a litany of historical memories and state names associated with “the restless-hearted / Always, forever, Mississippi, the god.”

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Benét’s prolix and uneven poem has its faults: Zabel scores points, and Parry E. Stroud’s attempted rebuttal can only be called lame (Benét, 39–42). Neither critic, however, makes any effort to account for the poem’s raison d’être: Benét’s grave sense of America’s failure to live up to its promise. To me, the portrait of Whitman seems just, the devices of the footsteps in part 1 and the dialogue in part 2 both work effectively, and the climactic buffalo simile in part 1 and the course of the Mississippi River in part 4 are genuinely moving. But if Benét resolves his ode on the spiritual high ground of the poetic sublime, another “Ode to Walt Whitman,” published almost simultaneously, turns in a different direction. Mike Gold is remembered as the militant editor of his own communist literary journal New Masses and author of the paradigmatic proletarian novel Jews without Money (1930). His Whitman ode, like Benét’s, celebrates the revolutionary liberator who “broke with the ‘eternal values’ of feudal literature and proclaimed the here and now” (Freeman, “Introduction,” 19). Gold’s poem appeared in New Masses on 5 November 1935, just weeks before Benét’s Burning City, and, according to Ezra Greenspan, it “conveys little of Whitman’s powerful optimism,” concentrating instead on the nation’s “squandered promise of greatness, beauty, and love” (Sourcebook, 82). Greenspan seems to have read only the first half of Gold’s poem, however, since the conclusion takes a radical turn consonant with Marxist optimism, celebrating “a strong and beautiful America,” and singing “Of sun, of moon, of Communism and joy in the wind / Of the free mountain boys and girls – / It will come! It will come!” As early as 1921, Gold had written a testimonial to “the heroic spiritual grandfather of our generation,” converting the “prophet of individualism” into one who “knew the masses too well to believe that any individual could rise in intrinsic value above them.”12 Gold admitted that Whitman made “one mistake, and it was the mistake of his generation.” He “dreamed the grand dream of political democracy, and thought it could express in completion all aspirations of proletarian man.” Yet despite Granville Hicks’s more accurate assessment of Whitman’s often strident individualism, Gold persisted in asserting Whitman’s role in the “native tradition of a cornfed socialism” (Tuerk, “Gold on Whitman,” 18–19). The argument of Gold’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” is programmatically optimistic, but it begins in the same Depression-era disillusionment as Benét’s. The first four sections, more concentrated verbally

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than Benét’s, present Whitman’s idyllic world destroyed by “killer babbits” and “little benitos”: Your ocean is now a garbage dump Where millions of young greenbaums sport And must swallow colon germs B Americanoes at twelve a week – Section 2 places the speaker himself in this impoverished ghetto, “Born on Rat and Louse street / Near Tuberculosis avenue – / In my unfortunate cradle.” Like Benét, Gold fills his ode with Whitmanic allusions, the “cradle” here recalling Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking.” Section 3 introduces a female figure, suggesting Whitman’s habitual gender balancing, offering a proletarian Muse, perhaps recalling Hart Crane’s Helen on the streetcar in the opening of “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen.” Mike Gold’s Whitman is no Charlus (Gold was far from gay friendly). But she too is a victim of urban capitalism: You smelled bad, poor girl Of swollen feet, rouge and cash registers – My chest touched your little breasts – The subway crush married us – I dreamed among the gum-chewers – “I sang the body electric” – In section 4, Gold’s “Goofy young Greenbaum rooting for love / In the garbage of New York” is on the verge of losing faith: I gagged at Walt Whitman His son of the open road and splendid silent sun – Lies, lies, a lazy poet’s lies on a printed page Meant for rich college boys – “Poetry is the cruelest bunk,” he concludes (with a steely glare at T.S. Eliot): “A trade union is better than all your dreams.” But the turn of the poem in section 5 brings the general strike, 14 April 1934, the voices of “greenbaums and kelleys ... actually singing on a picket line,” and the voice of the spirit of Lenin, who had died in 1924:

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And Lenin said, scorn not the dream – See, see new skyscrapers for Manhattan Communist factories for human love – A pure ocean, and sunlit homes not tenements – Streets for sun and friendship And no more Tuberculosis avenues – And no more hell in a basement – Son of Walt Whitman, to strike is to dream! Gold’s “Ode to Walt Whitman” celebrates the putative success of the 1934 general strikes – described by one normally cautious historian, David M. Kennedy, as “open class warfare ... orchestrated by bellicose radicals” (Freedom Fear, 292). It displays not only the exclamatory, hortatory rhetoric typical of much New Masses poetry but also some lively figurative language in its vivid antonomasia and anthimeria (“benitos,” “tuberculosis avenues”). If this warfare is no longer what Maxwell Geismar half a century ago called a “buried history” (7) – buried by the postwar persecutions of the House Un-American Activities Committee (huac), Senator Joseph McCarthy, and the general angst of the Cold War – the literary production of the 1930s is still in the process of being resifted. Quite apart from the successes and failures of its politics, however, the literary ethos of the New Masses was inescapable at the time. If it was not, as Michael Denning maintains, “the first time in the history of the United States that the left ... had a central, indeed shaping, impact on American culture” (3), it was a literary movement that attempted to impose on writers a prescriptive purpose and subject matter. Delmore Schwartz was astute enough to suggest that the prescriptive nature of New Critical reviewing was a reaction to prescriptive Marxist criticism, and since then the Bolshevik versus modernist binary has themed any number of essays.13 As Denning notes, “the unlikeable face of cultural prescription” oversees “every moment of political art, indeed every cultural initiative” in terms of agitprop apologetics or denunciations: “Too often, the vitriolic denunciations of a Michael Gold ... are taken as the preeminent examples of the cultural politics of the Popular Front” (Cultural Front, 57). Denning and other critics, like Filreis, Alan M. Wald, and Robert Schulman, have shown that the literary perspective of the New Masses left was more nuanced than the simplistic “with-us-or-against-us” binary that it often seems to be.14 Granville Hicks, Joseph Freeman, Stanley Burnshaw, even Mike Gold

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himself – all read the previous generation of high modernists with genuine appreciation and insight, and they were capable of allowing a measure of free expression to their writers. But, ultimately, every writer in the present moment of crisis was held to a responsibility to advance the revolution. The tradition derived from Poe was quickly morphing into the New Criticism. The Emersonian tradition was more amenable to political subjects, but it embraced many liberal writers like Benét and MacLeish who rejected Marxism and tried to steer a moderate middle path. The New Critics, furthermore, happened to be mainly Southerners, from the one region of the nation deficient in urban industrialism, relatively innocent of immigrant incursions and labour strife, and lacking radical literary traditions. As Denning writes, “whereas the cio working class had deep roots in European radicalisms – Jewish socialism and communism, Italian anarchism, and Finnish communism, among others – the southern migrants came with little history of left-wing radicalism ... The failure of the cio’s southern initiatives – both the pre-war Textile Workers Organizing Committee aimed at the largest group of southern industrial workers, and the post-war Operation Dixie – loomed larger and larger as Dixie became America” (Cultural Front, 36–7). Any demand for a proletarian literature, then, remained a product of the urbanized North. A convenient entry into the New Masses perspective may be found in Joseph Freeman’s introduction to Proletarian Literature in the United States: An Anthology (1935). Freeman is at pains to align literature to the Marxist class struggle, while at the same time repositioning the claims of “art.” “Whatever rôle art may have played in the epochs preceding ours,” he announces, “whatever may be its function in the classless society of the future, social war today has made it the subject of partisan polemic ... The Communist says frankly: art, an instrument in the class struggle, must be developed by the proletariat as one of its weapons. The fascist, with equal frankness, says: art must serve the aims of the capitalist state. The liberal, speaking for the middle class which vacillates between monopoly capital and the proletariat, between fascism and communism, poses as the ‘impartial’ arbiter in this, as in all other social disputes. He presumes to speak from above the battle, in the ‘scientific’ spirit” (9). While the primary enemy is the “fascist,” the most caustic abuse is typically poured out on the “liberal.” Yet within a page Freeman also assures us that art “is distinct from party program,” that it has its own function, “the grasp and transmis-

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sion of experience,” and that no “party resolution ... can produce art, or transform an agitator into a poet” (10–1). Although “the free exercise of the personality in human relations and in art is not in itself a bad thing,” nevertheless, “as long as the mass of mankind consists of exploited workers,” such art has little purpose. “Such an art can have little real meaning for those who fight for bread” (17).15

The poet whose career embodies these conflicts most sharply is Archibald MacLeish, “from the early Thirties through World War II perhaps the most controversial poet in America” (Barber, “Image of Mankind,” 38). From the evidence of recent history, however, MacLeish’s reputation seems to have become as invisible as Benét’s, his name not even mentioned in the thousand-page Cambridge History of American Poetry (2015). Received opinion sees MacLeish as a “weathercock,” blown in the wind by every shift of poetic fashion, or, as Arthur Mizener once phrased it, “a tortured series of unconnected allegiances” (“Poetry,” 501). I prefer to see him as a poet who began his career as a successful lyricist with a fine ear and expert craftsmanship, who then made an embattled conversion against dominant literary fashion to a politically committed public poetry.16 In this, he was precursor to similar career trajectories followed by Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich in the 1950s. The appearance of radical conversion in MacLeish is intensified by the success of his early poem “Ars Poetica,” an artful statement of imagist poetics (“For all the history of grief / An empty doorway and a maple leaf”) with its final words quoted ad nauseam by subsequent New Critics, “A poem should not mean / But be.” Written in 1925 in response to reading Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on the Chinese ideogram (Donaldson, MacLeish, 149–50), “Ars Poetica” became MacLeish’s C# Minor Prelude, impeccable but a lifelong burden. As recently as 1910, notes Joseph Harrington, traditionalist poetics had “coincided with a large-scale movement for social reforms and struggle over the meaning of democracy.”17 By 1925, modernism had virtually eliminated politics as an acceptable subject for poetry, and MacLeish’s ambition was not to combat modernism but to make it amenable once again to its traditional subject matter, including politics. His aim was not to stoop to writing populist poetry, but to make highbrow modernism available to the people.

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Scott Donaldson’s biography depicts a privileged MacLeish, descendant of Elder Brewster who arrived on the Mayflower, an athletic extravert at Yale, where he made many advantageous connections. His biography reads like a Who’s Who of American power, counting among his personal friends Dean Acheson, McGeorge Bundy, Felix Frankfurter, Christian Herter,18 and later Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself. Writing more than one hundred features for Fortune magazine on a variety of mostly non-literary subjects, he became one of Henry Luce’s most valued staff members. His degree was in law, but in 1923 he left a promising legal career behind and dedicated himself to writing. He spent time in Paris, mingled with the Sylvia Beach milieu, and took up a troubled lifelong friendship with Hemingway. He missed meeting Pound, but conducted a respectful correspondence with him (Pound using a “heavy hammer”19 on MacLeish’s poetry), and in 1958 he became the prime mover behind Pound’s release from legal limbo in St Elizabeths Hospital. MacLeish’s conversion to a poetics of public speech, as Donaldson’s biography shows, was not sudden. Even in his early years he was conflicted about the right relationship between art and politics, and suffered attacks from both high modernists and dogmatic Marxists. His poem “Invocation to the Social Muse,” which appeared in the New Republic ten days before FDR’s election, created some controversy – largely because it is unclear where MacLeish himself stands. Allen Tate was stirred to reply in two political poems, two of his finest, “Aeneas in New York: To Archibald MacLeish” and “Aeneas in Washington.”20 During this time, circa 1932 to 1936, MacLeish’s poetic reputation reached its zenith, making him an irresistible target. He received a Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his long poem Conquistador, which was favourably reviewed by both the agrarian Tate and the Marxist Horace Gregory (Donaldson, MacLeish, 217). It has since fallen out of favour, possibly because it deals with Mexico rather than the US proper, but its narrative of the destruction of the Aztecs by Cortés deserves to be revisited for its postcolonialist, Latino, and Aboriginal interest, not to mention its inherent value. The work belongs (like MacLeish’s familiar lyric “You, Andrew Marvell”) to the same translatio imperii tradition that informs early American attempts at epic. Here, however, I focus on two works that share characteristics with the American progress poem, “Frescoes for Mr Rockefeller’s City” (1933) and “America Was Promises” (1939).

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A major cause célèbre occurred with the publication of “Frescoes for Mr Rockefeller’s City,” first as a cheap twenty-five-cent pamphlet in 1933, then collected in Poems, 1924–1933. The poem is deeply entangled with the notorious episode of the large fresco that John D. Rockefeller commissioned from the Mexican painter and outspoken communist Diego Rivera for Rockefeller Center (still under construction) and then destroyed. At first sight, the destruction of Rivera’s work seems the flagrant suppression of artistic freedom by a mercenary capitalist. On 10 May 1933, the New York Times printed the story on its front page beside another about Hitler burning books in Berlin (Herner, “Diego Rivera,” 256). As usual, the truth is not so simple. The Rockefellers were informed and passionate patrons, “among the most important patrons of art in the United States” (Herner, “Diego Rivera,” 235), and had taken special interest in Mexican artists as well as filmmakers, hoping to encourage closer ties between Mexico and the United States and counteract Hollywood’s degrading Latino stereotypes (240). They had a record of allowing wide freedom to their artists and made no objection to caricatures of themselves (236). The commission was for a major work of public art, sixty-three by seventeen feet, with an uplifting theme much needed at the time: “Man at the Crossroads with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a New and Better Future.” Rivera won the commission (Picasso and Matisse had backed out) and promised an image of human technological, scientific, and ethical evolution. The iconography would fuse modern images in keeping with the international machine aesthetics prevalent at the time into a vision of an achievable earthly paradise. Rivera’s style incorporated elements of Native American arts and current popular culture – he considered Disney a proletarian master (ignoring Disney’s own politics) and thought Mae West “the most wonderful machine for living I have known” (242). He had already produced similar public work in San Francisco and Detroit. During the painting, however, he was feuding with fellow muralist David Alfano Siqueiros and was attacked by Joseph Freeman in New Masses as “a counter-revolutionary artist in the service of imperialism.”21 Suddenly, Rivera altered his iconography to place the figure of Lenin prominently as guide for humanity, amid caricatures condemning Stalinists, Nazis, and wealthy partying capitalists.22 Word got out. On 24 April 1933, the New York Times printed “Rivera paints scenes of Communist activities while John D. foots the bill.” On 4 May, Nelson A. Rockefeller wrote Rivera asking him to remove Lenin’s portrait;

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Rivera refused, but offered to include American heroes like Lincoln and John Brown. As dickering went on, Rockefeller paid Rivera the $14,000 still owing, the building itself was surrounded by guards, and the mural covered. On 11 February 1934, a quiet Saturday night, the unfinished mural was dismantled and dumped. Frescoes for Mr Rockefeller’s City had already appeared as a pamphlet on 22 June 1933 (Donaldson, MacLeish, 226). MacLeish’s fieldwork in Mexico for Conquistador had introduced him to Rivera’s work, and he had written most of his poem before the scandal broke. MacLeish’s job at Fortune, which started with Henry Luce’s founding of the magazine in the fall of 1929, had prepared him as well. Fortune was targeted for the wealthiest survivors of the Depression, lavishly produced and illustrated, filled with news about the vacations of millionaires, plus ads for Pierce-Arrow and Tiffany’s. Writing for Fortune, MacLeish was associated with the politics of wealth, but the staff for the magazine was oddly weighted on the liberal side of the scale, with figures like James Agee and Dwight MacDonald as well as MacLeish. MacLeish considered Luce politically naïve. The January 1933 issue had a major feature on the progress of Rockefeller Center, and the February issue a feature on Rivera’s murals in Detroit; both are anonymous, but MacLeish would have been keenly aware of them, if he did not write them himself. The poem is a modernist sequence of six sections that draw from elements of the American progress poem, strip them of narrative, and rearrange them as quasi-visual panels, they become an ecphrastic travesty of allegorical murals representing past, present, and future. The past is represented by two sections on westward settlement: “Wildwest” depicts the conquest of Amerind lands – through Chief Crazy Horse’s massacre of General Custer (“No one could tell of the dead which man was Custer”); it ends with a reminiscence of Josiah Perham, founder of the Northern Pacific Railway, who, unlike Crazy Horse, had never even seen the land (Falk, MacLeish, 65). “Burying Ground by the Ties” focuses on the transcontinental railroad eulogized by Whitman – through the immigrant workers who died while actually building it: “Niggers we were, Portuguese, Magyars, Polacks”: “Do not pity us much for the strange grass over us: / We laid the steel to the stone stock of these mountains: / The place of our graves is marked by the telegraph poles!” As a fresco, these sections recall the often reproduced allegory of pioneering “American Progress” by John Gast (Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 26–7), and, indeed, the

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sequence opens with “Landscape as a Nude,” which figures the American land as a mythopoeic female emblem of Liberty like those that populate the American progress poem from Timothy Dwight to Hart Crane. (Ironically, the Fortune article on Rockefeller Center notes that supervisor Roxy Rothafel had three commissioned sculptures removed from the site because they were nudes and he didn’t like them.) But the land is sensuous, fertile. “Oil Painting of the Artist as the Artist” brings the sequence into present time, first with an effete Europeanized artist “washing his hands of America.” Offended by the vulgarity of Tennessee, the violence of Texas, he prefers the Italian cypresses “mentioned in Horace or Henry James,” while his work reduces the physical reality of the land to mere pigment. Thus he prefigures the high modernist “irresponsibles” of MacLeish’s later essay, artists who turn their backs on social responsibility. “Empire Builders” imagines five panels devoted to the extractors of wealth from the land – Messrs Harriman, Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan, Mellon, and Bruce Barton (a well-known advertising executive) – all presented centrally, while “America lies to the westsouthwest of the switch-tower.” Meanwhile, the “original document under the panel paint” reveals a letter from Meriwether Lewis to Thomas Jefferson from the Pacific coast: Many men will have living on these lands. There is wealth in the earth for them all and the wood standing And wild birds on the water where they sleep. There is stone in the hills for the towns of a great people ... The documentary device of the painted-over letter is borrowed from Pound’s Cantos, and it became a common feature of poetry through the decade. As Donaldson notes, Frescoes reads to this point very much like a revolutionary text (MacLeish, 229); but the final section, “Background with Revolutionaries,” turns to satirize the Marxist comrades themselves: they do not, as they suppose, represent the future of the nation. This section, with its mocking invocation of Lenin, suggests that it was conceived, or at least elaborated, after the Rivera fiasco. The poem depicts Meriwether Lewis’s sense of the American continent as a physical, sensuous space, filled with the means for living a productive life; the “empire builders” by contrast see only bank stocks, profits, and mortgages.

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Frescoes was well received, and Tate’s friend Cleanth Brooks judged the sequence to be MacLeish’s “most ambitious successful poem” (Modern Poetry, 125). But MacLeish had enemies both right and left. He was disliked by Zabel at Poetry and by Louise Bogan, newly named poetry editor at the New Yorker. Tate was coolly respectful of the poetry but caustic about MacLeish’s politics, which, to Donald Davidson, were unforgivable. On the left, Edmund Wilson despised him – presumably (thought MacLeish) because “[I] used to play football at New Haven” (Donaldson, MacLeish, 170). But the cruelest attacks by far came from Mike Gold and the New Masses group. Gold’s review of Frescoes appeared in New Republic, shrewd in its way but cast in the bilious partisan language of Marxist critics under the title “Out of the Fascist Unconscious.” Much of Gold’s critique addressed the apparent anti-Semitism of one line in the anti-Marxist satire, and MacLeish conceded by quietly altering the name Comrade Levine to Comrade Devine before its reprinting later that same year. Gold was the son of Rumanian Jewish immigrant parents, so his sensitivity in the year of Hitler’s accession to power is understandable, but his review magnified the issue out of all proportion and obscured stronger arguments. MacLeish’s reverence for the American land, said Gold, amounted to a “mystic geography,” part of a larger “mystic nationalism,” which is the “first stage of the true fascist mind.” These signs, “somewhat veiled in cauls and mysteries of the poetic womb,” point directly to MacLeish’s “fascist unconscious,” cleverly disguised in outwardly wellintentioned liberal attitudes. Patriotic nationalism and attachment to one’s native landscape are the foundation stones of Hitler’s appeal to the German people: “The fascist author is permitted, like Mr. MacLeish, to chant the pathos and heroism of Labor, even to fight against those who would degrade it. Only against those workers who become class conscious, and themselves revolt against their slavery, are torture-squads to be directed. Yes, labor is heroic, pathetic, and has its place in the hierarchy of values; it has been created eternally to serve, and is to be offered mystic compensations, nothing sordid and real like bread or freedom, but the glory of the fascist Integral State” (“Fascist Unconscious,” 295–6). Gold has no trouble producing examples of MacLeish’s reverence for the American landscape. Ergo, MacLeish is a Nazi in the making – subconsciously. Gold’s argument is seductive, even though the fallacies are transparent; and, as so often with psychoanalytic arguments, there is a kind of implicit blackmail, leaving MacLeish no way to deny

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his “fascist unconscious” because, by definition, he cannot know whether he has one or not.23 Gold has been given credit for inventing the notion of a “political unconscious,” and his accusations were echoed by others: MacLeish was trumpeted by Margaret Wright Mather in mock German as “Der Schoene Archibald,” while Nazi and Fascist accusations were hurled by Rolfe Humphries, John Strachey, and “Obed Brooks” (Robert Gorham Davis), who calls MacLeish “the first poet to be mentioned ... when one is thinking about Fascism in America” (325). Obed Brooks, however, appends a note to his review observing that MacLeish’s play Panic, performed in March 1935, with a young Orson Welles in the lead, indicates that he has “partially freed” himself from the “evasiveness of his former social writing” (329). The note, significantly, has nothing to do with any change in MacLeish, and much to do with a new policy directive from the Communist Party pushing for stronger ties with potential liberal supporters.24 As for MacLeish himself, he remarked that his poem had been “successful at least as in so far as the penetration of the Communist hide is concerned” (Letters, 262). At one point before writing Frescoes, MacLeish had seriously considered becoming a member of the Communist Party; but he felt too American to submit to a European theory. Personal friends like Malcolm Cowley and John Dos Passos had taken the step, and the party gathered significant support from the literary left; but in reality it remained a tiny force, polling scarcely 102,000 votes in 1932, its highest number (Kennedy, Freedom Fear, 222–3). Members were generally ignorant of American history and culture – nearly two-thirds urban immigrant Finns and Jews – and in later life MacLeish recalled going to a meeting with Carl Sandburg, both breaking down in laughter, and being “literally, physically, thrown out.”25 In “The Poetry of Karl Marx,” dated February 1934, he insists that the poet must soak himself in his own time, “not in theories about his time developed almost a hundred years before and in another country” (Time to Speak, 44). Earlier, MacLeish had made a naïve appeal “To the Young Men of Wall Street,” the new generation of capitalists, to mend their elders’ ways: “The power of communism over its adherents ... is emotional and spiritual. Look at the Rivera frescoes in Chapingo and see what force moves through them. Read the manifestoes of the Soviets and see to what emotions they appeal. And ask yourselves what reason there is in heaven or earth or out of it why a man earning five dollars a day should believe in capitalism in any of its forms.” But his talk of “uni-

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versal disgust with the whole existing order” is not known to have had the least effect whatever. The point of his April 1934 essay “Preface to an American Manifesto” is that the “revolutionary movement in America” has failed because it is “conceived, delivered, and nurtured in negatives” (Time to Speak, 17). MacLeish, sickened by the Great War (and by the loss of his younger brother Kenneth), described himself as a pacifist in 1935 (Kennedy, Freedom Fear, 333). But unlike most Americans, he was keenly aware of the deepening crises overseas in Europe and Asia as well as continuing hardships at home, and his biographer’s judgment that ”his views evolved more out of principled idealism than personal opportunism” is certainly correct (Donaldson, MacLeish, 288). Essays between 1935 and 1940 crescendo. In 1936, he praises Sandburg’s The People, Yes – Americans are “not only a nation but a people” (Time to Speak, 40). In 1937, he calls attention to the Spanish Civil War in Spain and spreading fascism (Time to Speak, 97–102; Letters, 286–7). That year his play The Fall of the City (starring Orson Welles and Burgess Meredith) – the first radio drama in verse – deals abstractly with the terror of military defeat. In 1938, “Public Speech and Private Speech in Poetry” presents his most elaborate argument that artists must speak to current crises. In June 1939, “Poetry and the Public World” distinguishes the “modern” poetry of Laforgue and Eliot from “contemporary” poetry adapted to new conditions: “not until contemporary poetry writes the Hamlet of Laforgue and Eliot out of its veins” will it “reduce to the order of recognition the public-private world in which we live” (Time to Speak, 95–6). Shortly afterwards, America Was Promises appeared in cheap pamphlet form, like Frescoes and several of his important essays. On 23 August, word came of Hitler’s non-aggression pact with Stalin, and on 1 September, Hitler’s invasion of Poland. By this time, MacLeish had accepted Roosevelt’s appointment to the Library of Congress and was an employee of the US government with personal access to the president. In May 1940, after the fall of France, MacLeish issued, again as a cheap pamphlet, his most polemical essay “The Irresponsibles,” described by David Barber as “the first influential assault on intellectuals for failing to oppose fascism” (“Image of Mankind,” 46); it has also been seen, as Jeffrey Segal argues, as the climax of a long assault on the rise of modernism from many directions.26 “Where the modern scholar escapes from the adult judgments of the mind by taking the disinterested man of science as his model,” wrote MacLeish, “the modern writer

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escapes by imitation of the artist ... He sees the world as a god sees it – without morality, without care, without judgment” (Time to Speak, 118–19). Writers and scholars, he concluded, “emerged free, pure and simple into the antiseptic air of objectivity. And by that sublimation of the mind they prepared the mind’s disaster” (121).27 By this time, MacLeish had left pacifism far behind and was an active pro-interventionist in the European war, so over-zealous in his demand for propaganda that his enemies called him “fascist” – though his demand for political art was more an echo of his Marxist affinities.28 Another pamphlet, The American Cause, argues the need for war if necessary to defend democracy. It appeared in November 1941, a few days before Pearl Harbor. When MacLeish received his invitation from Roosevelt to head the Library of Congress in May 1939, he was in the midst of writing America Was Promises, and deferred his duties until October specifically in order to finish the poem in which he had invested his deepest beliefs. America Was Promises is the culmination of his efforts to find a public voice. He published little poetry through the next decade. His poem stands clearly in the progress poem tradition, showing a neat past-present-future arrangement, with a heavy emphasis on the historical past, starting (inevitably) with Columbus and early explorers, then the founding fathers Jefferson, Adams, and Paine. The present and future sections are shorter and much more abstract. At the last minute, fearing right-wing criticism, MacLeish tried to alter his title to a more affirmative “America Is Promises,” but the text had already gone to press, and he let the title stand in all subsequent printings – an indication of deeply divided attitudes within the poem. One year earlier, MacLeish had published a photographic book, Land of the Free, writing lines of free verse to accompany eighty-eight photographs, mostly by Dorothea Lange, nearly all from the collection of the Farm Security Administration recording the economic devastation of the Great Depression. It is precursor to the more famous James Agee-Walker Evans collaboration Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The haunting photographs linger over the poverty, the economic and ecological destitution, the hopelessness of the people. MacLeish calls his text a “soundtrack” at the beginning, suggesting a newsreel, but at the end “a book of photographs illustrated by a poem” (89), and in the plural first person he underscores the communal sense of fearful uncertainty: “We wonder ... We don’t know ... We’re asking.” It is useful to see this work as a preface to America Was Promises: it sets the

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desperate tone of the poem and its material conditions, including its rural and agricultural focus, and in the end attempts to answer the question hopefully. In its formal conventions, America Was Promises abandons the closely wrought verbal artifice of earlier lyrics for a far more open form – a decision that again foreshadows choices made by Robert Lowell and Adrienne Rich two decades later. MacLeish’s poem seems to meld the public voice of Ezra Pound in his most recent Cantos (which also feature portraits of Jefferson and John Adams29) with the proletarian rhetoric of the New Masses poets. From Pound, MacLeish takes his disjunctive syntax, disconnected passages, bits of imagism, and bits of documentary. His versification, though irregular, is closer to loosened up iambics than anything in Pound. From the proletarian writers he takes his hortatory rhetoric, particularly near the end: “Listen! Brothers! Generation!” There are traces of Whitman’s “Passage to India” and Crane’s The Bridge as well, and, like both poems, MacLeish’s parable of American nationhood elides the Civil War altogether. All three poems leap from the aspirations of colonial settlement to a version of futuristic hope without acknowledging the great rupture at the centre of the nation’s history. Significantly, MacLeish, who sees the failure of the nation in the greed of finance capitalism, is least convincing in his note of hope. The poem opens with a figure of westward voyage: Who is the voyager in these leaves? Who is the traveler in this journey? Deciphers the revolving night: receives The signal from the light returning. Tropes of westward voyage and night versus day evoke familiar translatio imperii motifs, while deciphering and signalling introduce concepts of coded communication; “dead kings” in their “remembered sepulchres” point to the Old World left behind. The interrogative rhetoric sustains a sense of wonder and uncertainty. Subsequent lines imagistically suggest the “first light” of dawn (the old “rising glory” motif) and the natural beauty of “hollyhocks” and “butterflies” in the New World – though a true imagist would not have written the abstract word “beauty.” Evidences of approaching landfall – “the tropic bird which does not sleep at sea” – recall the annotations in Columbus’s log versified by Crane, but MacLeish does not mention Colum-

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bus by name, preferring to keep him the generalized allegorical “voyager.” This preference for non-specificity, which creates problems for MacLeish’s poetic language throughout the poem, is perhaps a bid for New Critical “universality.” The second part of the historical portion of the poem, and the most complex passage of all, evokes three leaders from the early Republic in reverse chronology – Jefferson, John Adams, and Thomas Paine. MacLeish’s portraits lack the particularity of Pound’s as paraphrase lacks the particularity of quotation. On first reading, I was offended by the reductive caricatures of these three great men; but I understand them now as deliberately contrived representations attached to current politics. In each case, the founding father is undermined by avarice and apathy. Jefferson, the agrarian, generates “liberty a farmyard wide,” “self-respect and common decency.” MacLeish wrote three years earlier that “only the power of Jefferson and his friends” had prevented the writers of the Constitution from “rooting out of their document every generous and democratic word” (Time to Speak, 40). But his successors, who merely built “liberty to fit the parlor,” are “twoday settlers,” “lawyers with the land-grants in their caps.” They have “turned the promises to capital.” John Adams is ancestor of industrial millionaires and the pseudo-aristocracy of moneyed families: “Enlightened selfishness gave lasting light. / Winners bred grandsons: losers only bred!” The Aristocracy of Wealth and Talents Withered of talent and ashamed of wealth Bred to sonsinlaw: insane relations: Girls with open secrets. Only the revolutionary proto-communist Tom Paine really “knew the People”: Whatever was truly built the People had built it. Whatever was taken down they had taken down. Whatever was worn they had worn – ax-handles, fiddle-bows; Sills of doorways: names for children: for mountains. Yet when the time to speak arrived, “the People did not speak.” In each case, the great experiment in American democracy has devolved into an oligarchy of the powerful:

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These who speak with gunstocks at the doors: These the coarse ambitious priest Leads by the bloody fingers forward: These who reach with stiffened arm to touch What none who took dared touch before: These who touch the truth are not the People. These images bring the poem into present time and may indicate specific individuals, though I remain uncertain who they might be.30 Where one might expect a reprise of desperate pictures from Land of the Free, however, the subsequent passage dwells in a vague way on regret for lost opportunities and tries to maintain a positive feeling through natural images – “leaves: stones: clouds: beasts: shadows” – before declaiming “there is an answer.” Again, MacLeish’s answer is frustrating in its generality. “Believe the promises are theirs who take them!” he exclaims: Believe unless we take them for ourselves All of us: one here; another there; Men not Man: people not the People: Hands: mouths: arms: eyes: not syllables – Believe unless we take them for ourselves Others will take them for us: for others! MacLeish here adopts hortatory rhetoric from the communist wing but turns it from a communal to an individualistic exhortation: “Men not Man: people not the People.” It is a statement of faith in a democracy of free agents, if not the status quo. It is a call to action rather than words; but the patriotic emotion is unmotivated and diffuse, the action far too unspecific. Unlike Mike Gold, MacLeish has no readymade program to point to, but he uses the rhetoric as if he does. The call to “take” sounds like a giddy appeal to the transvaluation of selfishness, even violent revolt (“Grub first, then ethics” said Berthold Brecht31), but it sorely minimizes both the accessibility of material wealth and the power to act among the social outcastes of the time. Looking back on the poem, I think the ending might have been stronger even if MacLeish had merely come to rest on a partisan hurrah for the New Deal.32 Predictably, critical reception of America Was Promises polarized. Admirers included poet Karl Shapiro, liberal journalist Walter Lipp-

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mann, and composer Nicholas Nabokov (cousin of the novelist), who set the poem as a symphonic secular cantata. MacLeish’s old enemies, however, seized on the work with scorn, and the poet’s reputation sunk noticeably during the decade that followed. To Zabel it was “a text-book in error and tastelessness.” To Randall Jarrell, it was a “malicious” self-parody. To Louise Bogan, interestingly, it was “a kind of official poetry” lacking “the strict checks and discipline of poetry written for itself” (Donaldson, MacLeish, 331–2). Poetry “written for itself” had become, like Zabel’s non-bardic poetry, the prescribed criterion for all poetry. These comments dutifully address the artistry of the poem, not the strengths or weaknesses of its position, which are conspicuously ignored. The shortcomings of America Was Promises simply confirmed the inevitable damage of political activism to poetry, a parable of what not to do. MacLeish understood the direction of the critical winds, so in defiance he chose this poem for Whit Burnett’s anthology This Is My Best (1942), in which ninety-three of the “greatest living authors” chose the works that best represented them. MacLeish’s apologia spells out in simplest terms what he considers the moral of the poem. That act of spelling out, more than anything else, measures the distance MacLeish had travelled from the supposedly disinterested high modernists to the populists.33 America Was Promises wanted to be a comprehensive presentation of America, but it is just as remarkable for what it did not do. While it attacks finance capitalism and political oligarchy, it does not illustrate their effects. It misses the eloquence of Dorothea Lange’s mute visual images. It confines itself to the nation in its rural aspect, and it avoids cities, ghettoes, and the urban unemployed. It overlooks the ecological blight of industry and factory farming. It erases the issues of women, the ethnic conflicts of immigrants, the brutalization of African Americans. Except for one line, it is silent on the ballooning international pressures of 1939 just ready to burst that September. MacLeish remained passionately devoted to “the American idea” (Time to Act, 41), to the principles of democratic governance and human liberty, as he said, “not because high-minded persons have persuaded us of these things but because our life upon this continent has persuaded us” (37). Nonetheless, his efforts to put this passion into his poem fell short, and the shortcomings of MacLeish’s poem are not only aesthetic but also political and cognitive. The MacLeish of the 1930s at his best is a considerable poet who rises in Conquistador to a humanitarian view of deadly power politics in

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action. His inability to carry off America Was Promises, in which he invested so much effort, was taken by many to prove the intractability of political subject matter. But the decade came to a close with one additional ode – complete with a historical progress poem wrapped inside – that suggests otherwise, and it came from an unexpected source in Allen Tate. It is a poem that mocks MacLeish’s essay “The Irresponsibles” by name and directly addresses the Second World War as it was unfolding. Tate’s poetry, as I note in the previous chapter, is pervasively political; he was clear, in theory at least, that the responsibility for rising above partisanship rests with the critic, not with the poet.34

Tate’s “Ode to the Young Pro-Consuls of War” is a bitter, ironic, even funny attack on American entry into the Second World War, published in March 1943, even as the bloody fighting on two separate battlefronts was poised in doubt. Unlike the better known “Ode to the Confederate Dead,” it addresses a specific political situation in which the very survival of the American nation was at risk. From the perspective of today, Tate’s position seems almost inexplicable. The first critic to examine the poem ventured the adjective “un-American” (Meiners, Last Alternatives, 126), and the poem, which I think one of Tate’s best, seems to have embarrassed his strongest admirers. Tate’s extreme anti-interventionist position demands contextualization. It was, in fact, not extreme at all before the war began. As Wayne S. Cole points out in his massive study of American isolationism, “in the 1930s most Americans were isolationists” (Isolationists, 8). In 1940, when war was raging in Europe, far across the Atlantic, and Hitler’s armies had overrun much of eastern Europe, Denmark and Norway, the low countries, and all of France, and Britain was struggling for survival, American sympathies lay mainly with Britain in opposition to Hitler, but public opinion strongly resisted entering the fighting. Hitler’s surprise attack on Stalinist Russia in June 1941 complicated the situation. Americans were firmly anti-communist, and many simply wished the Germans and the Russians would exterminate each other.35 “The idea of defending freedom and democracy by aiding Stalin’s totalitarian Communist regime seemed ludicrous and almost profane” (Cole, Isolationists, 434). The narrative of Roosevelt carefully massaging public opinion into support for Churchill is well known, and MacLeish was one of his most active supporters.

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During the period between the outbreak of war and American entrance into it, non-interventionist arguments of all kinds were articulated by both Republicans and Democrats, from ultra-conservative senators like Robert Taft to progressives like William Borah and Robert LaFollette, Jr (Cole, Isolationists, 8). The tiny Communist Party was firmly non-interventionist until Hitler invaded Russia, when it flipped (Kennedy, Freedom Fear, 435). In 1940, the militant but noninterventionist labour leader John L. Lewis endorsed Republican Wendell Wilkie for president (462). As Cole points out, prewar isolationists were not uninterested in the larger world: most were not pacifists, and most were not conservatives. Nor were they unpatriotic. “Most were not pro-Nazi, pro-fascist, or pro-Axis” (Isolationists, 6–7). Isolationists were, however, opposed to intervention in foreign wars, or other “entangling alliances,” or organizations like the League of Nations. They cherished American sovereignty, favoured building up the army for defence of the continent, but, suspicious of overseas imperialism, resisted enlarging the navy. When fighting broke out, Americans showed little support for Germany and great sympathy for Britain, France, and (if they thought of it) China. Similar feelings pervaded every socio-economic group, almost every ethnic group, and every region of the country, although, rather surprisingly, isolationists were “least numerous in the South” (8). In March 1941, Congress entered vigorous debate over Roosevelt’s “lend-lease” plan to supply British armaments – “one of the most spirited and important debates in the history of American foreign affairs,” writes Cole. “A comfortable but not overwhelming majority of the American people supported lend-lease and that support grew in the course of the debate.” Opponents, though largely sympathetic to Britain, favoured “aid-short-of-war” and recoiled from war itself; they feared extending the presidential powers of FDR to de facto dictatorship (Cole, Isolationists, 414). There was widespread speculation whether Hitler might attack mainland America. As debate became intense, “isolationists came under increasingly damaging attacks, and as their public image grew more tarnished, the fainthearted were reluctant to speak out on the noninterventionist side,” and the noninterventionist became “suspect and had to be prepared to have his reputation besmirched and his wisdom and even his loyalty questioned” (417–18). In the end, the lend-lease plan was approved (in the House the vote was 260 to 165), yet about 80 percent of Americans still opposed an outright declaration of war. “By openly committing

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the United States government to financing the British war effort,” however, “America became Britain’s co-belligerent in all but name” (Kennedy, Freedom Fear, 471). Throughout this debate, isolationists received support from three quarters. Powerful newspapers owned by Bertie McCormick (Chicago Tribune) and his cousins Joseph Patterson (New York Daily News) and Cissy Patterson (Washington Times-Herald) continued their campaign even after Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt referred to them acidly as “the McCormick-Patterson Axis” (Kennedy, Freedom Fear, 472).36 The America First Committee, organized in Chicago in September 1940, was led by General Robert E. Wood, who had retired to become ceo of Sears (Cole, Isolationists, 379 and passim). And the aviator-hero Charles Lindbergh, who admired German advances in flight technology and was decorated by Hitler in 1938, became “the most formidable challenge to Roosevelt’s leadership” (458): he was convinced that Britain could not win and argued that America should not “police the world.”37 Tate’s position is difficult to fix with exactitude. Underwood’s biography stops with publication of The Fathers in 1938, so Tate’s thinking during the war years must be pieced together mostly from the letters. These are preoccupied with literary exchanges and personal issues, and the radio crackle of war politics emerges infrequently. According to Radcliffe Squires’s sketchy account, Tate suffered “war jitters” (Tate, 157) and worried about the effect of the war on literature and culture, mixed with worry about his own livelihood.38 He seriously considered enlisting.39 In the midst of this uncertainty, a surprise offer arrived from Archibald MacLeish, who wanted to create a “Consultant in Poetry” position at the Library of Congress for Tate. This occurred during the so-called Sitzkrieg period between Hitler’s occupation of Poland and his resumption of fighting in western Europe in April 1940. The enormity of the war had not yet sunk in. Tate was suspicious of MacLeish, whom he thought “at least one fourth fake,” and was urged by his friends to decline. Davidson thought MacLeish’s offer “brazenly calculating.” Tate did decline, but MacLeish generously kept the offer open until September 1943, when Tate accepted and then persuaded MacLeish to find a position for their mutual friend John Peale Bishop.40 These years also triggered an abundant creative period in which Tate produced not only his “Ode” but some of his greatest writing in “More Sonnets for Christmas,” “Winter Mask,” and “Seasons for the Soul,” a wartime spiritual statement that consummates Tate’s poetic career as Four Quartets consummates Eliot’s.

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Passages from Tate’s letters show him struggling to align his political distaste for current American politics and culture with the fact of war. Like fellow modernists in Europe, Pound and Eliot, Tate was convinced that the status quo of the democratic, capitalist nation state was unsustainable. Democracy, he had long ago concluded, was merely a transitional stage to a de facto oligarchy of the rich, a transition that had already occurred. In May 1940, as the Netherlands and Belgium crumbled, he was convinced that he was witnessing “probably the way capitalism must collapse in terms of war” (Tate, Lytle-Tate, 157). He wrote to John Peale Bishop: “The war has me hanging on the radio all day and half the night. I still don’t believe the Germans will win, but the allies will take so long to fight them off that we shall get into it, and I will go to gaol as an Isolationist, or worse. As you know, I have strong sympathy for the Germans politically & economically, but not ‘culturally’; the result is a perfect neutrality” (Tate, Lytle-Tate Letters, 166). The same day to Andrew Lytle: “[They are] dead wrong about the Germans ever attacking this continent. I think Lindbergh is right. My feelings are divided between hatred of the British and love of the French, and on the other side I dislike the Germans. So I don’t stand anywhere” (155). One wonders, of course, whether Tate’s “dislike” of “the Germans” outweighed his “strong sympathy” for their politics. Lytle for his part thought Lindbergh had designs on the presidency. At this point, Tate was somewhat less convinced of German victory than Lindbergh, but he was equally convinced that Hitler could not attack North America.41 Three weeks later, as Hitler turned against France, Tate wrote again to Bishop: I am afraid now you are right: the Germans will win. I incline to the belief that the Nazis will ignore England for a while after the clean-up in Flanders, and attack France ... the British are already defeated in so far as effective combat is concerned. For several years I’ve thought that Nazism had us in the position of heads-Iwin, tails-you-lose. In order to fight them, we shall have to be like them; even if we won a war against them, they would still be the victors. It seems to me that the sooner we accept this probability, the easier we shall feel. It is curious that Hitler has not yet made a mistake, while Russia no less than Britain has made nothing else. There may be a moral in it. If we see Communism as an extension of capitalism (as I’ve always seen it), the failures of Britain, France

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and Russia indicate the proper way for a civilization to collapse, in terms of war. (Tate, Republic of Letters, 166) And a week later, on 8 July: “The first shock of the war is over for me, and I cease to hang upon the news ... If it comes to an issue between our sort of fascism vs. the German, I’m willing to fight; but for democracy, no. I have a quite credible report (from the man who heard it) that Lord Lothian recently said privately that democracy (i.e. laissezfaire capitalism) is done for even in England, and that they don’t even want it back. – I don’t either” (167).42 The shocker here is the phrase “our sort of fascism.” It is impossible to know exactly what Tate means without more detail, but just four years earlier, Tate had faced the question head on. His publisher and editor of the journal American Review, Seward Collins, admitted openly in a published interview in 1936 that he was a fascist. At the same time, “fascist” had been no more than a routine catcall among the New Masses group applied to anyone who was not party-line communist, including MacLeish; but, on Seward Collins’s lips, it was obviously more real. Tate attempted damage control, distanced himself from Collins, but continued to contribute to American Review until it folded. His response was decidedly equivocal. At the same time, having supported aspects of the New Deal earlier on, he clearly equated capitalism with laissez-faire and came to believe that “the Roosevelt administration was laced with Marxism.”43 In 1940, however, “fascism” clearly applied to the totalitarian dictatorships of Mussolini and Hitler, so Tate’s embrace of the term is painful to accept. On the other hand, he distinguishes “our sort of fascism” from Hitler’s, saying that he is “willing to fight” for ours. Presumably he means a kind of de facto oligarchical fascism. His unwillingness to fight for democracy is consistent with his belief that democracy had already become something else, and, as I’ve noted, he considered enlisting. There is no record of Tate’s reaction to Pearl Harbor in the correspondence, apart for one unsavory reference to Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms” in his January 1942 State of the Union address: in the South, writes Tate, “nobody knows what the four freedoms mean, and those who have heard of them resent them pretty severely because of the effect they will have on the negro situation” (Tate–Bishop Letters, 187). On 15 December, however, he had written anxiously to Cleanth Brooks about the “doings” of MacLeish at the Library of Congress, which, added to Van Wyck Brooks’s and the workings of FDR’s Donovan

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Committee, convinced him that “something like a conspiracy is under way to suppress critical thought in the United States ... It all adds up to Dr. Goebbels” (Tate-Brooks Letters, 83). The position taken in Tate’s poem, then, was hardly mainstream, but neither was it as far removed from certain streams of wartime public opinion as first appears, even though isolationist voices generally kept mum after Pearl Harbor. The poem is in its way a nervy, even courageous statement, taking a slant look at the deadliest of human affairs with a disarming air of comedic foolery. Tate’s satire is verbally concentrated, like all of Tate’s poetry, self-consciously borrowing its stanza from Michael Drayton’s 1606 “Ode to the Virginian Voyage.” The allusion underscores the theme of translatio imperii in that poem since the Virginian voyage to Jamestown was the Southern version of the Pilgrims’ voyage to New England, even more deliberately purposed to enlarge the British colonial empire, just as the Roman “proconsul” was the instrument for securing the Roman Empire. The stanza, with its short trimeter and dimeter lines and tight rhyming, is, as Tate noted, a perfect tool for satire.44 Tate dedicates his poem, with considerable significance, to the French poet-diplomat St John Perse.45 The poem is designated “ode” – Tate having no fear that his ironies will be mistaken – but it also assumes the outline of a short progress poem: five stanzas establish the present state of affairs, six historical stanzas survey major American wars (Revolutionary, Civil, and the First and Second World Wars), and the last seven, in the mock-spirit of MacLeish and Van Wyck Brooks, exhort the young American “partisans of liberty” to go out and “win the world” for the American empire of the future. A major part of the poem’s concentration is that Tate manages to fuse both his political and his literary satire so that they are inextricable. Tate establishes his outrageous irreverence in the first stanza, referring to Pearl Harbor as the place “Where the sky falls / With a Pacific boom.” The punning oxymoron of “Pacific boom” is so jarring that it almost obscures the reference to Chicken Little’s alarm that the sky is falling. The ruling figures here are Swiftian meiosis and tapinosis (understatement and degradation). War planes are “angry bees,” the “puny” Japanese are “yellow mimes,” imitators of the Caucasian West, and the “German toad” is apparently not deadly (German Tod) but just an ugly amphibian. Later, in stanza 11, we are bit by the “Jap beetle.”46 Tate mocks wartime demonization of the enemy by minimizing it. The poet, wondering what “a poet alone” might do, turns first to

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American history with the same belittling eyes: the American Revolution is played out with “Toy sword, three-cornered hat / At York and Lexington,” while in the Civil War, “The Gray went down, / Down like a rat, / And even the rats cheered” – “I am certain that the trouble with the South is that it doesn’t want to be Southern,” wrote Tate in despair to Donald Davidson, as he was composing his poem (Donald Davidson Correspondence, 333). The ninth stanza illustrates the effectiveness of Tate’s compression: Where Lou Quatorze held fête For sixty thousand men, France took the German sword But later, bored, Opened the gate To Hitler – at Compiègne. Compiègne, the site where Germany had signed the humiliating Armistice in 1918, was the site where Hitler forced France to surrender on 22 June 1940, in the same railway carriage. The reference to Louis XIV summons up all the greatness of French culture, now a thing of the past; while “bored” more subtly hints at that culture having become aesthetic, effete, irrelevant – “Proustian” – preparing the assertion in the next stanza that “Proust caused the fall of France.” Amid Tate’s witty ironies, the reader can hardly help wondering what the soldier dodging bullets in the trenches might make of it. Tate tells us of “boys” in “lunging cubes / Crouching to explode,” and we know that “explode” is both transitive and intransitive. Mayhem happens to both enemy and self, and I think of Randall Jarrell’s ballturret gunner (“When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose”). Tate’s poem makes light of the horror, but not to minimize it; instead, he moves the spectacle to a more abstract level, the level where poets and philosophers are supposed to excel, where they can grapple with the big questions without choosing sides. Wallace Stevens had finished his “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction” in 1942, adding a postscript addressed to “the soldier,” which he called the “only thing I have ever felt any doubt about” (Letters, 442). The other great modernists had all found in the war years an impulse to make their personal credos and defences of poetry, including Eliot’s Quartets, Pound’s Pisan Cantos, H.D.’s Trilogy, and Tate’s Seasons of the Soul. Tate’s political arguments had mainly been conducted at the level of

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abstract ideology, and, as recently as December 1942, he had angered Donald Davidson by declaring their agrarianism a “success” – “I never expected it to have any political influence,” he explained (Donald Davidson Correspondence, 328–34). But Tate discovers that he is prevented by the demands of the MacLeish-Van Wyck Brooks school, being told that he must press for solutions. Returning to the moment of Pearl Harbor, Tate looks mockingly to the future: It was defeat, or near it! Yet all that feeble time Brave Brooks and lithe MacLeish Had sworn to thresh Our flagging spirit With literature made Prime! Cow Creek and bright Bear Wallow, Nursing the blague that dulls Spirits grown Eliotic, Now patriotic Are: we follow The Irresponsibles! Bear Wallow and Cow Creek seem to be locations in the TennesseeNorth Carolina region, associated perhaps with manifest destiny and American westward expansion across the Appalachians, or perhaps with the hyper-individualist Southern hillbilly, the least likely figure ever to become either patriotic or Eliotic. Tate is also making fun of MacLeish’s own transition from Eliotic modernist to super-patriot poet. “Go and win the world,” he urges them, adopting MacLeish’s own rousing tone. Go, with “zeal pro-consular” and with an “imperial eye.” Winning the war would leave America no restraint on its desire for world domination. Their incursion using the latest tools of aviation technology is, in fact, no more than updated barbarism – not the flight of the American eagle, but “pterodactyl flight” in “reptilian” bombers. They might accomplish the prophecy of Columbus and Walt Whitman’s passage to India, but at what cost? Take off, O gentle youth, And coasting India

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Scale crusty Everest Whose mythic crest Resists your truth; And spying far away Upon the Tibetan plain A limping caravan, Dive, and exterminate The Lama, late Survival of old pain. Go kill the dying swan. For Tate, even winning the war, winning the world, will destroy every surviving vestige of humane culture. He finishes with an unexpected twist. Everest, the roof of the world and emblem of spiritual heights and the fictive Shangri-La, becomes a mere military guidepost; the Dalai Lama, embodiment of cultural and spiritual wisdom, is the enemy.47 So is the dying swan, archetype of the poet. Tate’s conclusion anticipates what historian John Lewis Gaddis, in The Cold War: A New History, describes as the paradoxical concept that has underpinned the balance of world power ever since: the warning of Carl von Clausewitz that nations resorting to unlimited violence would inevitably be consumed by it. “States themselves could become the victims of war if weapons ever became so destructive that they placed at risk the purposes for which wars were being fought” (52). Tate would substitute the word “culture” for “state,” but the insight is the same. He was writing prophetically before the atomic bombs were released upon Japan, but his dire vision of mutual cultural annihilation is forceful enough. Critical response to this shocking poem seems impervious to shock. Radcliffe Squires spends a page on prosody, mentions the dispute with MacLeish, and describes the ode as part of Tate’s “quarrel with positivism” (Tate, 159–62). Robert S. Dupree does away with the war altogether: “it is not the political enemy – the Germans or the Japanese – whom the poets must fight but man’s own destructive hatred within” (Tate, 148). Ferman Bishop omits the poem entirely. Earlier critics are better. John L. Stewart, praising it as “one of the late, great poems” (Burden of Time, 383), dismisses MacLeish’s essay as “preposterous” and describes the politics of the poem as “a terrible indictment of the new imperialism which destroyed old cultures in the

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name of the commonweal.” Aesthetically, the poem rests “at the height of Tate’s achievement in formal beauty and artistic merit” (407–8).48 Only R.K. Meiners attempts to disentangle the political and aesthetic motives of the poem: “I would not say that the war was the active cause of Tate’s loss of faith in history and society,” he writes, “but the war seems to have become the final symbol of how far the dehumanization of man had progressed” (Last Alternatives, 125–6). The only full and favourable account is by M.E. Bradford, a Southern cultural historian whose conservative political views resemble Tate’s own.49 MacLeish’s “The Irresponsibles” was a bone in the throat for years. Isolationists, according to Wayne Cole, “despite their support for the war effort ... continued to believe that they had been right before Pearl Harbor, that Roosevelt and his policies had been both unwise and evil, and that history would vindicate them” (Isolationists, 507). But isolationism became less tenable when, in 1947, Harry S. Truman pronounced his Truman Doctrine and set the Cold War in motion. Tate for his part formalized his Catholic religious faith in 1950, began to moderate his racial attitudes, and made some concessions of error: but his critical position remained unchanged. The war and its aftermath beginning to clear, every airplane in the sky sporting an atomic bomb (or so we feared), Tate wrote a belated reply to MacLeish, “To Whom Is the Poet Responsible?” In it he strikes a position that seems – antipathetic as I am to his politics at large – reasonable enough in itself, but not reasonable enough to dissolve the impasse. To begin, Tate makes important concessions: he cannot dismiss MacLeish’s argument because there truly was at the time “a moral and political apathy in the western countries, and there was no decisive stand against Nazism until it was too late to prevent war” (Essays, 19–20). (Tate forgets to mention that he was one of the last to take such a stand.) Tate gives MacLeish due respect, not anger or derision – he had seen enough of the generosity of the man to do otherwise – and he even admits that he finds MacLeish’s politics “more congenial than Mr. Pound’s” (26). Neither poet had any respect for Wall Street capitalism or heavy industry. But he makes much of the Marxist affinities in MacLeish’s politics. This was wickedly alarmist in 1950 America but not untrue and, thus, fair game in debate. Tate then dwells at length on the parallel responsibilities of scientists and philosophers for the political state of affairs – a red herring argument by analogy. Significantly, he rejects the warning of philosophers that “things will continue to go badly until men behave more rationally” (23). The like-

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lihood of such an event Tate sensibly sets aside, though he resorts to prejudicial labelling: “Rationality usually turned out to be liberalism, or the doctrine that reason, conceived in instrumental terms, will eventually perfect us” (24). A palpable hit in its way, this argument points to the superficiality of certain facile liberalisms and aligns Tate’s position with an embrace of the irrational in human behaviour. Finally, Tate’s essay comes to rest on what I might call an argument for holistic poetry. “The poet has a great responsibility,” he declares; “it is the responsibility to be a poet, to write poems” (Essays, 26). But Tate goes beyond the common caricature of the New Critical poet fashioning well-wrought urns – bibelots produced for aesthetic satisfaction only. If the relation between poetry and the other arts to social action “was not sufficiently considered in the attacks and counter-attacks of the past ten years,” he concedes, “no one knows precisely what the relation is” (26–7). Nevertheless, the effort to write directly to a particular crisis is apt to produce a “willed poetry,” out of touch with the “total complex of sensibility and thought, of belief and experience in the society from which the poetry emerges.” Tate does not explain why writing to a concrete political crisis must produce a “willed poetry,” while writing to another subject may not. In a stronger formulation, he declares that the responsibility of the poet is to the culture, not to the state: “The state is the mere operation of society, but culture is the way society lives” (16). The poet’s responsibility is to “the reality of man’s experience.” “He is responsible to his conscience, in the French sense of the word: the joint action of knowledge and judgment.” He is responsible for “the mastery of a disciplined language which will not shun the full report of the reality conveyed to him by his awareness: he must hold, in Yeats’ great phrase, ‘reality and justice in a single thought’” (Essays, 27). This is a restatement of the high modernist defence of poetry, and it is a powerful and persuasive argument.50 It denies the charge that poetry is monological and cannot embrace the extensive totality of life. My problem with it is not that it is wrong but that it is unintentionally exclusionist, setting up a false binary, not in theory but in critical practice. It returns us to Morton Dauwen Zabel’s distinction between the “genuine” poet and the mere bard, or the maker of what Tate would call “willed poetry.” This distinction is rooted in a romantic concept of inspiration, which is updated to the pseudo-psychological notion of a “unified sensibility.” As Eliot put it, in a familiar passage, “Tennyson and Browning

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are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose” (Essays, 287). Eliot’s famous passage in his essay on “The Metaphysical Poets” has its roots in the Age of Sensibility and early romantic associationism, when the strength of a person’s feelings, the capacity to allow one’s sensa to stimulate one’s emotions, was considered a gauge of moral sensibility – and that word “sensibility” has rung its changes for a couple of centuries now.51 Poetry must be felt through the whole being. The argument does not theoretically eliminate ideas, even everyday political ideas, but it has tended to do so de facto. Modes of exposition and argumentation disappear, and even prose fiction is demoted in the hierarchy of genres. The soliloquy of the lyric poem is the pre-eminent genre. Alastair Morrison’s analysis of this process applies not only to prose fiction but to non-lyric genres of poetry. “The social attributes of prose fiction are no reason why the New Critics could not have focused on it. There nevertheless seem to have been reasons why they did not. ‘Formalism,’ supposedly an approach devoid of ideology, thus enfolded a discrimination which was profoundly ideological in its effect, and very likely in its intent ... It preferred, and encouraged the study of, texts which themselves represented anti-argumentative and anti-instrumental values” (60). Tate subscribed to the notion that the capacity of poetry to affect the aesthetic sensibility in turn enlarges the ethical sensibility: it increases one’s capacity to be more fully human. But unlike many of his fellows, Tate demonstrated in his poetry that a “genuine” poet can incorporate ideas, even political ideas, into “genuine” poetry. It was in Tate’s contrarian nature to take the Marxist imperative with a double twist and write non-Marxian politics in rebuttal. In Bakhtinian terms, his theory mounts a defence for the monologic lyric, but within it he found a capacity to produce dialogical poetry. But for too many poets influenced by the New Criticism, the response was to avoid political topics altogether. As for the Marxist imperative itself, the anti-communism of the 1950s drove it underground. The collapse of European powers with the end of the Second World War left a political vacuum for the United States and the Soviet Union to fill. Truman’s upset victory over Dewey in the 1948 election was won largely on the basis of scaring the hell out of the American people about communism, and the Truman Doctrine of the “containment” of communism dominated American foreign policy until the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet state. Anxieties over communists and their potential to use the atomic bomb governed

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political and social decisions of every kind at home. The House UnAmerican Activities Committee, which “casually ruined the reputations and careers of those it decided to investigate” (Donaldson, MacLeish, 398), and the unscrupulous antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy, turned patriotic left-wing nationalists of the 1930s into seditious enemies of the state in the 1950s. As Cole argues, both huac and McCarthy borrowed some of their smear tactics from FDR’s campaigns against the isolationists. Archibald MacLeish, for his part, while continuing to write a more embittered public poetry (Actfive, 1948) and his successful verse drama J.B. (1958), used his legal expertise to combat malfeasances of government power, to defend freedom of speech, to protest American support for dictators like Franco, and also finding time to engineer the freedom of Ezra Pound through a special act of Congress. MacLeish’s file with the fbi runs to six hundred pages, “longer than that of any other writer” (Donaldson, MacLeish, 355).

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10 Between Two Wars (3) Odes for and against Silence – Millay, Taggard, Rukeyser

When I first came upon Edna St Vincent Millay’s “Ode to Silence,” one of the longest poems in her collected work, the title seemed to promise a strong woman’s account of female silencing by a patriarchal culture. My expectation was quickly dashed. The poem I held in front of me was a puzzle indeed, an odd mythological fantasy of some kind, and as I began investigating, I found mostly hostile opinions. Millay’s reputation among academic readers has been mixed, of course, but “Ode to Silence” has not been a favourite even among her admirers. Early reviewers passed over it or dismissed it – “an artificial ecstasy” that “smacks of the schoolroom,” “written not in water but on a college blackboard,” “one of her least successful poems.”1 Later critics have passed by in silence. Diane Freedman’s 1995 collection of critical essays on Millay gives “Ode to Silence” no mention at all. Elizabeth Atkins, writing in 1937, likes the poem but dislikes the title – an ode, she says, was “as definitely out of 1920 fashion as pantalettes,” while Greek mythology was “forbidden to poets by the despots of the poetry magazines and anthologies” (Millay, 115). I knew that Millay was an uneven poet, but I had always admired her best work. My puzzlement slowly turned to fascination, drawn to this seemingly ambitious poem that was still untouched in the criticism. Since then, I have not only found other admirers of Millay’s “Ode,” but I have taught it several times and received a number of essays upon it: “Ode to Silence” has proved a favourite among my students. And I think I understand better why it has been ignored. Millay’s critics have rehearsed the story of her troubled reputation many times. She was admired extravagantly when she burst on the

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scene as the wide-eyed child of “Renascence” and began publishing her early collections. Like Robert Frost, she established her style before experiencing the first wave of modernism, so her forms and diction were premodernist, though her persona embodied the New Woman of the 1920s. Later, she ventured free verse and addressed some modern subjects, but her style never radically changed. She is quite properly grouped with several other female poets of the time in the “nightingale tradition,” as Cheryl Walker has called it (Masks, 12) – poets like Elinor Wylie, Amy Lowell, Hilda Doolittle, Sarah Teasdale, or Louise Bogan, who wrote elegant, melodious verses largely (apart from Lowell and H.D.) in traditional forms about the common emotions, often in first person, though as Cheryl Walker observes, she is “the single poet in this group who is politically engaged” (139). All show strong links with nineteenth-century traditions, perhaps with an added touch of ironic self-consciousness. Millay belongs neither with the radical modernists (Stein, Moore, Loy) nor with the progressive populists (Ridge, Taggard, Rukeyser). Millay’s political turn did not take place until the Sacco and Vanzetti tragedy in 1927, and it makes no appearance whatever in “Ode to Silence.” There is no point trying to relate her poem to the 19th Amendment allowing women to vote, nor to Margaret Sanger’s family planning movement, nor to any other events circa 1919. Millay’s reputation began to decline in the 1930s as a result of the same New Critical campaign to enforce Eliotic impersonal modernism discussed in the preceding chapter. Millay, even earlier than Archibald MacLeish, who was born in the same year, tried to inject political activism into her work beginning in 1927 and increasingly through the next two decades and throughout the Second World War. Like MacLeish, she unapologetically deployed whatever celebrity she had for political purposes. She was attacked, like him, both for her political stance and for corrupting the aesthetic purity of poetry. She was also attacked as a woman voicing political views and, most notoriously, as a woman deficient in male intelligence. John Crowe Ransom’s outrageous essay “The Woman as Poet” concentrated on the latter point, while Allen Tate, in his major essay “Tension in Poetry,” concentrated on the first. Millay knew she was opening her reputation to these charges but insisted on doing so and, thus, became a trailbreaker for others (like Rukeyser, Taggard, and Rich) to follow.2 It was not until the late 1970s, when the new wave of feminist critics began to re-examine these poetic “nightingales” and reinstated Mil-

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lay’s achievement; yet Cheryl Walker can still ask “why late-twentiethcentury women have been so uncomfortable with her” (Masks, 136). These later developments, however, have little bearing on Millay’s “Ode to Silence,” which was written during a productive summer in 1919 and published in her Second April (1921). The poem is a mythological quest narrative on the standard epic topos of a visit to the underworld. There is no known occasion or motivation for the poem, and the negation of its subject, Silence, sets up multiple paradoxes: the speaker of the poem quests after Silence and discovers it in Oblivion. The closest precedent I can recall is Rochester’s paradoxical meditation “Upon Nothing,” which Alexander Pope imitated, in a rare departure from heroic couplets, as “On Silence.” The plot is simple: Millay’s unnamed speaker is revealed at the beginning in mid-conversation with the Muses – five are named, Clio, Calliope, Thalia, Melpomene, Terpsichore – asking them where “your other sister” Silence may be found. This strange quest raises a level of tension. No motive is mentioned. We do not know if the journey is voluntary or not. Silence departed long ago, the Muses tell her – they are not hostile but a trifle condescending – so the speaker vows to seek her underground, where dark Persephone stares on a stagnant stream that moats the battlements of Hell. The speaker seeks down the dolorous labyrinth but looks, too, among the upper gods where feasting is. No luck. But there is a garden “which a dream diurnal paints.” Mnemosyne’s footprint is not there, we learn, and of Silence “only her shadow once upon a stone.” But now both shadow and the garden are gone. The nameless seeker cries out in alarm, “you have done her body an ill.” But compassionate Euterpe, muse of lyric poetry, turns and says that there is a gate beyond Death, beyond Heaven and Hell. Hell is a thoroughfare that has had notable travellers, Herakles and “he who loved Eurydice too well,” but beyond lies Oblivion, from whence none has returned. The speaker exults: “I shall not climb again, but drink a chilly thin green wine.” Leaving behind the press of the “restless, clamorous Nine,” the speaker turns to join the tenth sister Silence in the realm of Oblivion. This strange, apparently nihilistic narrative has been dismissed by both admirers and detractors. Jean Gould tells us that “the subject was probably provoked by the constant noise of the city, particularly in the neighborhood and apartment house on 19th Street, where the Italian families replete with children were always shouting at one another, arguing, banging on the piano” (Poet, 109). If this is true and not (as I

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suspect) a fantasy spun from a remark in one of Millay’s letters,3 it tells us no more about the poem than the story about Poe’s upset with the clangour of church bells tells us about “The Bells.” Cheryl Walker’s hint is no better, taking the poem as “only a brief interlude, after which the speaker will presumably return to the world” (Masks, 152). Both of these suppositious readings render the poem no more than a lengthy jeu d’esprit. Elizabeth Atkins in 1937 admired its aesthetic surfaces: “the succession of vowels and consonants makes, as always in her poetry, a violin timbre of which one used to suppose that Yeats alone ... possessed the secret” (Millay, 115). Edmund Wilson in 1952 remembered it fondly as a celebration of “an inner sanctuary that is like the grave of ‘Renascence’ – a garden which lies ‘in a lull,’ like it, ‘between the mountains and the mountainous sea’” (“Epilogue,” 613). But he reveals no more. Critics have skirted past “Ode to Silence,” I think, because it refuses to fit into any of the critical narratives about Millay. The poem overturns the optimistic little-girl-born-again narrative of “Renascence.” It suggests nothing of the scandalous, bohemian, bisexual free-loving New Woman persona. It subverts the common depiction of the flamboyant celebrity poet who cultivated publicity and feminine ambition. There is no hint of the political activist and progressive spokeswoman who lay ahead, nor of the talent prematurely destroyed by alcohol. The poem undercuts efforts like those of Arthur Davison Ficke to present Millay as an anti-modernist response to “negativity” – as Elizabeth Atkins worded it, “T.S. Eliot was leading a flock of followers straight on into the desert of nihilism among the cacti and Joshua trees of symbolism ... whereas Millay was walking the Maine seacoast of her childhood” (93).4 Finally, this “Ode” complicates Debra Fried’s arguments about Millay’s mastery of the sonnet form. A female poet is excluded from the “masculine” hierarchy of genres, she says, and Millay’s success with the sonnet is an act in defiance of these traditional norms (Thesing, Critical Essays, 234). The ode, however, is the highest of the lyric genres, and Millay’s single effort challenges its masculine assumptions of gravity and sublimity – but it does so through a wholly abject, virtually suicidal female speaker. Though Millay calls her poem an ode, there is no effort to construct a public or representative voice of any kind; rather, the poem is a denial of voice: as Homer teaches, “It is woman who gives shape to absence, elaborates its fiction.”5 The ode genre normally implies something of the priest-prophet-bard addressing the culture as a whole; but here the

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aspirations of the female speaker to the masculine sublime are ironically undercut by her goal of Oblivion. Or is it a female speaker? I carelessly made this assumption in class, when a student pointed out that the text leaves the speaker’s gender carefully unspecified.6 Millay’s avoidance of gendering points to the studiously open-ended nature of her allegory. If the speaker is female, the narrative becomes a psychological allegory of feminine abjection, choosing death and oblivion over life and public exposure, a paranoid fear of revealing vulnerabilities. Her natural role is the victimized Eurydice, not the brave Orpheus. If the speaker is male, or generically male/female, the narrative is a psychological depiction of an Everyman choosing death over life. If we take the speaker specifically as an ungendered “poet,” the narrative becomes an allegory of the difficulties of the writer’s artistic and personal demands and choices, when and where to write, what to write about, whether to write at all. The speaker’s journey to the Underworld is an archetypal epic venture normally undertaken by a male hero, an Odysseus or an Aeneas, who learns what he needs to know and then returns to restore his governance. The knowledge of the dead is metaphorically the essential knowledge, both outward and inward, necessary to achieve power. The poem directly refers to male figures who entered the depths and returned – Herakles, or Orpheus the lover of Eurydice (though neither Dante nor Christ). This journey, however, has no return, no triumph – only eternal obscurity. And the figures that people the poem, including the speaker if we choose to gender her, are exclusively female – the Muses, their tenth sister Silence, their mother Mnemosyne, mentioned only in passing. Mnemosyne is not only the mother of the Muses: she is Memory, the antithesis of Oblivion. This movement from the all-female world to the embrace of “Oblivion” might be read psychoanalytically. Freud did not theorize his “death wish” (Todestrieb) until 1920, just after Millay wrote her poem; but Nancy Milford’s biography relates quite graphically her affair with Floyd Dell, editor of the communist Masses (forerunner of New Masses). After being held off sexually for some time, he accused her: “You pretend that you have had many love affairs – but the truth, my dear, is that you are still a virgin. You have merely had homosexual affairs with girls at college” (Savage Beauty, 157). The embrace of Oblivion, then, might reflect the author’s embrace of the male body and heterosexual normativity or, conversely, her shaken preference for lesbian attachment. This psychological allegory might even be pushed

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to a theological level, figuring some form of mystical kenosis, or emptying of self, whether Christian or otherwise. The likelihood of this reading might seem small, unsupported as it is by anything else in Millay’s writing; but then, “Ode to Silence” is very different from her other writing. The question would then be to determine what such a kenosis would mean for a woman like Millay. In broadest terms, perhaps, the speaker’s search for Silence and Oblivion may simply represent the easy path, acquiescence to the role prepared for womankind – which the ambitious, sexually ambiguous, flamboyant Vincent Millay must exorcise in order to survive for herself. If the speaker, however, is understood as the allegorical poet, or the female poet in particular, the narrative realigns into a different pattern. The noise of the world becomes the distraction of everyday life. The Muses embody the noise, perhaps, of Bloomian poetic anxiety, or possibly the noisy conventions of “patriarchal poetry” (to borrow Gertrude Stein’s phrase). Perhaps the female Muses of patriarchy offer little but frustration to the female poet; or perhaps the Muses embody the call of an Eliotic impersonal modernism, or whatever modernism was in the air by 1919, that the female poet thinks destructive. Each of the Muses is negated, but they lead her on, attempt to guide, and fail in the end to direct her. Finally, Euterpe points her to the region of Oblivion, where Silence can be found, though found only in total isolation from her other sisters. Silence is thus one of the Muses but not one of the Muses. Is Oblivion the destiny of the nightingale, the exclusively lyric and virtually anonymous female poet? Is Silence the sibylline alternative to the egocentric masculine bard?7 Is Silence the negation of Music? Or perhaps, is Silence the condition that makes music possible – in a Cagean sense? John Cage repeatedly reminds us that true silence is impossible – in an anechoic chamber one still hears the rumble of the bloodstream and the twitter of the nervous system. True silence is found only in death. Or is silence a condition of survival and promised renewal for the female lyricist to leave the noise of patriarchal tradition behind her, to shed the burden of the past, accept the inadequacy of female precursors, and enter the unknown? Millay was no fan of anonymity: she expressed great care for her reputation and wrote of it later in a 1941 letter defending her political propaganda, saying that she knowingly harmed her poetic reputation by writing it: “Have you the slightest conception of what this reputation means to me, who have been building it carefully for more than twenty years, taking a long time, months, sometimes as

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long as several years before permitting a poem to be published ... You see by the dates on the poems in this book that they were written in furious haste” (Letters, 312). For such a poet, Oblivion is a choice that demands careful explication. It is resignation to an artistic, even spiritual failure and death, or the fear of both. As such, it has mysterious, contradictory psychological resonances, even read as a non-gendered poem. As a feminist document, even more. Odysseus himself, when he encountered the shade of the lowly shipman Elpenor in Hades, was required to perform a proper burial and display the man’s name on his oar. But must the female poet forego such rites and declare to the world, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Were I committed to a single reading of “Ode to Silence,” I might describe it as a dream fantasy in which the speaker embodies and acts out the social pressures upon her to be a “Poetess,” a figure memorably depicted by Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins – repeatedly forgotten and revived. One remembers the condition of near anonymity set out for women poets by Caroline May in her 1848 anthology (see above, 166–7). If “much of the nineteenth century is devoted to canonizing poetesses who are, as they were, ironically forgotten in the very process of being remembered,” then “what are we hoping to uncover by exhuming dead poetesses from a dusty century?” Peering into “the crypt of literary history,” we find the poetess enacting “her own apparent historical obscurity”; she seems not to be “the content of her own generic representation: not a speaker, not an ‘I,’ not a consciousness, not a subjectivity, not a voice, not a persona, not a self.”8 The generic anonymity of the romantic poetess is Millay’s nightmare. As she faces the modern century in her waking life, she must experience it in order to exorcise it. Or to put it in different terms, Millay’s questing speaker can be seen as a monological lyric poet seeking her (or his) anonymity in the oblivion of solipsism. The “Ode to Silence” thus prepares the way to the more public voice of later poems. Such a reading seems plausible. But there is no way to pin it down. This ode to utter annihilation still offers an unsolved and insoluble riddle. Having lived with it for a number of years, however, I cannot dismiss it as insignificant. It is not simply the complaint of a poor female poet done in by patriarchy but a suggestive tableau vivant symbolically enacting her complex ambitions and vulnerabilities, and thus a significant document in poetic feminism.

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The career of Germaine Taggard in some respects shadows Millay’s, but Taggard remains little studied and little known. The inaccessibility of her texts remains a glaring lacuna in our understanding of the poetry of her time. To this day, she is “excluded from literary history” because her writing “is simply not in print or not readily available,” having followed the pattern of the nineteenth-century female poetess going out of print after death and disappearing.9 Taggard is now remembered, if at all, as a leftist political poet, as she would have desired, but her name is one that only spooks the margins. This is true in Daniel Aaron’s Writers on the Left (1960), and even in Cary Nelson’s ground-breaking Repression and Recovery (1989), neither of which offers sustained discussion. William Drake and Alan M. Wald do better, with short surveys of her career. But to date, only Nancy Berke’s Women Poets on the Left and, to a lesser extent, Nina Miller’s Making Love Modern dwell long enough to offer serious consideration. Taggard, with her fusion of nightingale craftsmanship and social conscience, makes an opportune transition from Millay to Rukeyser. Contrary to her political reputation, Taggard’s earliest volumes place her unmistakably among the singing “nightingales” of Cheryl Walker’s book – even though Walker excludes her by name. She is a female aesthete writing exquisite lyrics, mostly “about love and marriage and having children,” as she later confessed with embarrassment (Berke, Women Poets, 111). Her third volume, Words for the Chisel (1926), was in fact praised by the young Allen Tate: “Miss Taggard is one of four or five women poets who in the last five years have won dignified popularity, and she is particularly distinguished in having written consistently better than any of them. She is the best craftsman. Her work is intelligently sustained; it is economical ... Miss Taggard obviously will not rest until all but the most inoffensive redundancy is eliminated.”10 Although Tate praises her “devotion to poetry as an art,” he quickly, in the old beauties-and-faults manner of reviewers, blames her for rewriting the same poem too many times. Had Tate anticipated the left-wing topics that Taggard was to promulgate over the next two decades, I am sure he would have framed this critique differently. She had already begun to establish herself as a political radical when she edited May Days in 1925.11 As Berke notes, she moved almost seamlessly from a “revolution of the word” to a “revo-

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lution in the streets” (6), or from lines of poetry to “bread lines, picket lines, and party lines” (88–91). The real distinction of Taggard is that her poems never show the least tension between aesthetics and politics that so bedevilled other American poets; she continued to be published by prestigious publishers like Harper and Knopf, even as her work appeared regularly in Mike Gold’s New Masses. Alan Wald’s biographical prêcis fills in the broad outlines: born in Washington state in 1894, Taggard was raised in Hawaii by missionary parents – just after President McKinley annexed it as an American possession – and educated at the University of California, Berkeley, where her leftist politics began. She moved to New York City in 1920, worked for a publisher, and experienced the heady life of 1920s Greenwich Village, where she married, gave birth to a daughter, had an abortion, and enjoyed the requisite affairs to qualify as liberated – two on record, with playwright Maxwell Anderson and Marxist critic Max Eastman. Her first husband was a Jewish radical with ambitions to be a novelist, but he was mentally unstable and ended his life in an asylum. Meanwhile, Taggard’s career produced a steady stream of slim volumes, the founding and editing of a little magazine (which brought her close to women like Elinor Wylie and Louise Bogan), plus The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson (1930), a pioneering academic study. In the late 1920s, Taggard formed a liaison with Kenneth Durant and married him in 1934. Durant was American press secretary for the Soviet Union from before its recognition by Roosevelt in 1933, and both he and Taggard remained fiercely supportive of Soviet interests for the rest of their lives. This did not prevent her from teaching at Bennington and Sarah Lawrence, and she continued to publish poems and short essays in New Masses and elsewhere. Altogether she wrote or edited some eighteen books. In May 1948, Taggard received an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but she was too ill to collect it and died that November at the age of fifty-four from complications of hypertension (Wald, Exiles, 229–33). The political stance in her correspondence through the major phase of her career, notes Alan Wald, “reveals a zealous obstinacy in her devout credence in the guilt of the framed-up victims of [Stalin’s] Moscow Trials. She accredited every allegation about Trotsky and his followers colluding with the Nazis.” While many other American leftists were disheartened by the Stalinist purges, Taggard remained loyal. At their peak, “she venerated the Soviet Union as ‘A country come forever past the shade / The dark, the stormy death that on this planet

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lies.’” Taggard’s career, says Wald, showed the possibility of absolving intellectual and moral doubts about Soviet communism through “a political piety of the emotions.” Thus the poems that Taggard herself prized most “were those optimistic about the hopeful possibilities of Communism” (Wald, Exiles, 232–3). Feminist critics looking for points of contact with Taggard must face the truth that her attitudes on this front were also aligned with the New Masses party line – essentialist, heteronormative, not notably progressive. Commenting on Millay – “the only girl that’s at all like us,” she wrote to Josephine Herbst (Drake, First Wave, 174) – Taggard averred that “all the nervous vitality that flows into a great poem begins in physical fertility, just where in the past it has almost always ended. In short, the creative woman before our time usually had twelve children; she seldom wrote poetry” (Thesing, Critical Essays, 137). She seems uncertain whether the problem is sociological or biological. With startling conservatism, she declared that “marriage is the only profound human experience; all other human angles are its mere rehearsal” (Miller, “Love in Greenwich,” 67). In Mike Gold’s view, writes Berke, proletarian writing was masculine, bourgeois writing feminine. Proletarian realism assumed “the muscular, toiling sensibility of the male worker” (Women Poets, 93).12 Nancy Berke’s feminist analysis shows Taggard as “an active feminist voice in Greenwich Village bohemia,” but her later activism caused her “to put gender issues on the back burner” and confine her treatment “within the context of the communist left’s discussion of the Woman Question” (27).13 Fortunately, Taggard’s doctrinaire blinders negate neither the breadth of her poetic sympathies nor her artistic quality. She wrote major poems on the Spanish Civil War, on progressive Soviet institutions (a retirement home on the Black Sea), and on African American issues (tributes to Marian Anderson singing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, another to African American spirituals printed in the naacp [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] journal). Her single ode, the “Ode in Time of Crisis,” takes up the cause of immigrant and refugee, an issue otherwise drowned in the deluge of other social crises in the prewar 1930s, and it appeared in New Masses on 29 October 1940. The poem was commissioned by the New York City chapter of the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, a group that had been founded by the American Civil Liberties Union in 1933 to look after the rights of immigrants in the United States. Taggard had previously shown interest in the immigration issue in a few other poems –

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“Autumn Song for Anti-Fascists,” “Coast of the New World,” “To Herndon, Leider, Levinger, and Many Others.” Immigration has been a social issue in the New World, of course, ever since the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock and showed no sign of going home. James Russell Lowell addressed anti-immigration sentiments, unexpectedly, in the final stanza of his “Harvard Commemoration Ode.” And, as I write, the occupant of the White House is proposing to build a wall on the border with Mexico. In 1940, too, the strains were immense. There was a vast influx immediately following the First World War, complicated by the Red Scare of 1920 following the Russian Revolution, American strikes in the previous year, and an assassination attempt on the US attorney general.14 So the federal government nervously passed the Emergency Quota Act in 1921, which simultaneously set numerical caps on the total number of immigrants and quotas on their nationalities. Throughout the decade there was constant friction between “old stock, Protestant, smalltown, and rural America, and an immigrant-stock, Catholic, and big city America” (Daniels, Coming to America, 281). The new immigration laws “brought an entire era of American immigration history to an end. The century of immigration was over” (287). Numbers dropped from 800,000 in 1920 to 300,000 in 1921. Further complications arose with the Great Depression, with its desperate thousands of unemployed. President Hoover issued an executive order to American consulates abroad to enforce immigration guidelines with rigour. For five years thereafter, more individuals emigrated from the United States than arrived seeking citizenship. President Roosevelt rescinded Hoover’s order in 1936, but the behaviour of State Department officials did not change. The most tragic phase of this process began in 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power in Germany. American immigration law did not discriminate between “immigrant” and “refugee.” Roosevelt, so progressive in other ways, seems to have been unable or unwilling to grasp the gravity of the problem. His adherence to the status quo, writes Roger Daniels, “led to one of the major moral blots on the American public record” (Coming to America, 296). Roosevelt “deplored” the events in Germany, but despite pressures from Jewish advisors and a League of Nations conference on Jewish and non-Jewish refugees, he did virtually nothing. The American public was staunchly anti-immigration. Equally, the American public was unapologetically anti-Semitic. According to Elliott Robert Barkan, an opinion poll in 1938 reported

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that “60 percent of Americans objected to the presence of Jews in America.” Another “found that one-third of the respondents would approve an anti-Jewish campaign and nearly another third would not object to it. Jews were seen as the greatest menace to the nation” (Still They Come, 50). Individuals in the State Department remained rigidly obstructionist (Daniels singles out one Avra M. Warren, head of the Visa Division), and Roosevelt’s radio spokesman assured the nation that “our plans do not involve the ‘flooding’ of this or any other country with aliens of any race or creed” (300). Horror stories multiplied. The bipartisan Rogers-Wagner Bill, which would have admitted twenty thousand German refugee children, never reached the floor of Congress. These larger issues were deeply intertangled with political struggles that were very familiar to Taggard. Taggard’s youth in Hawaii made her comfortable within a diverse society of Portuguese, Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiians, and Caucasians (Drake, First Wave, 171). According to the summary account with the Papers of the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, however, there was an upsurge in arrests and deportations in the early 1930s: “Many of the cases handled by the Committee in its early years were of a political nature, involving individuals who faced deportation because of their labor union activities or their association with radical political parties or organizations. During this time also, the Committee assisted many European war refugees and other persons fleeing from fascist and totalitarian regimes. The Committee, for example, supported the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade – Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War.”15 Taggard’s “Ode in Time of Crisis” addresses its subject on a level of oratorical generalization, unfortunately avoiding specifics. It does not single out the Jewish crisis. But it bolsters its argument with metaphor, plus Taggard’s distinctive auditory technique, developed from her apprentice nightingale period. The poem falls into four sections: the first invokes the hortatory gesture, “Not here, go elsewhere!” The second depicts the national attitude, the American populace terrified like frightened children, and counters with the paradoxical thesis of the poem, twice repeated, “the alien is the nation.” It is paradoxical because, if a nation is an imagined community, aliens are by definition excluded; but America, insists Taggard’s compressed aphorism, is a community of aliens. The third section figures the antiimmigrant attitude as self-destructive, suicidal, imprisoning. The fourth

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section apostrophizes the countrymen, warning against the dangers of making “every man we jail the enemy,” undermining the potential of the nation by our own terror. Now in the fright of change when bombed towns vanish In fountains of debris We say to the stranger coming across the sea Not here, not here, go elsewhere! Here we keep Bars up. Wall out the danger, tightly seal The ports, the intake from the alien world we fear.16 The gist of the poem is elementary, direct, didactic, but oral recitation reveals its power through the heavily freighted internal rhymes and assonances – not just the obvious (“sea,” “debris,” “errors,” “terror”) but the less so (“towns,” “fountains”). The verse is as sonically laden as are those of Swinburne, but its irregular rhythms keep it from becoming soporific. The underlying metre is iambic, but the line lengths are unpredictable, enjambment variable, and the syntax more like discursive prose than the patterned phrases of poetry. Taggard was perhaps recalling Amy Lowell’s experiments in “polyphonic prose” but applying the technique to subjects of greater importance. The result is a distinctive voice, and an elegant, highly individual resolution of the tension between politics and aesthetics – though probably too idiosyncratic to encourage followers. How shall we release his virtue, his good will If by such pressure we hold his life in jail? The alien is the nation. Nothing else. And so we fail and so we jail ourselves. Landlocked, the stagnant stream. So ends the dream.

Muriel Rukeyser was, through the latter part of the twentieth century, nearly as shadowy a figure as Taggard. Through the advocacy of Adrienne Rich and other feminist poets, she has latterly been reinstated as a woman who wrote on social and political issues, wrote ambitious book-length poems, and tackled “masculine” subjects like aviation, the

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Spanish Civil War, and coal mining. Although she was a prolific, highly visible writer in the first decade of her career from 1935 to the mid1940s, she suddenly disappeared – a fact normally blamed on her insistent left-wing politics, certainly a major factor in the Cold War period, but also due to a poetics and a poetic language that flouted the prevailing New Critical values.17 Recent critics have focused on The Book of the Dead (1938), her major documentary text on the unconscionable role of Union Carbide in the Gauley Bridge silicosis catastrophe. Typically, Poetry magazine attacked it as poetry “modelled after leaflets,” “an immediate and transitory art as opposed to one which aims for permanence” (Maas, “Lost,” 102). William Carlos Williams, however, compared Rukeyser’s documentary skill in this poem with Pound’s – she knows “how important it is not to twist [words] in order to make ‘poetry’ of them” (“Rukeyser’s US,” 141). Her example as much as Pound’s informs the poetry of Williams’s Paterson, and The Book of the Dead stands with no diminution beside it. Rukeyser would still be a major American poet had she stopped writing after her second book. But she developed an important career that has yet to be properly assimilated into American writing. Rukeyser’s auspicious first volume, Theory of Flight (1935), was selected for the Yale Younger Poets series by Stephen Vincent Benét, who recognized something out of the ordinary and went to some lengths to promote it.18 The centrepiece of the volume is “Theory of Flight,” a poem of nearly a thousand lines, in eight sections, consciously patterned after Hart Crane’s The Bridge. It directly answers Crane’s call a few years earlier for a neo-futurist modern poetry that “can absorb the machine, i.e. acclimatize it as naturally and casually as trees, cattle, galleons, castles and all other human associations of the past” (Crane, Poems and Selected Letters, 261–2). Louise Kertesz, in her excellent survey of Rukeyser’s poetry – which in the absence of a biography remains the only extensive introduction – devotes her analysis of the poem to detailed comparison with Crane (Poetic Vision, 1–44), so I need only highlight certain points. First, “Theory of Flight,” although modelled after Crane’s paradigmatic progress poem, modifies the paradigm significantly. The past, even a “usable past,” is almost entirely omitted. Rukeyser’s “Preamble” prays exclusively to “secular deities – earth, time, sex, space” (Rosenthal, Our Life, 55). Where Crane turns from his “Proem” to Columbus and schoolboy history, Rukeyser places “The Gyroscope,” a short section that celebrates an instrument of navigation that embodies tech-

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nology and the mysteries of physics. Rukeyser, in her Marxist-inflected optimism, looks almost entirely to present and future.19 Second, “Theory of Flight” celebrates precisely that element of The Bridge that Allen Tate found objectionable: its “excessive” and “sentimental” Whitman tribute in the “Cape Hatteras” section, which Tate understood as a tribute to the “high-powered industrialism” of American life.20 Rukeyser, like Crane, presents the scientific imagination as parallel to and equal to the poetic imagination, hopeful for the American future. In a rare backward glance, she presents Leonardo da Vinci as the embodiment of this artist cum engineer: Walks down the street Kaleidoscope a man where patterns meet his mind colored with mirage Leonardo’s tomb not in Italian earth but in a fuselage designed in the historic mind time’s instrument blue-print of birth. Third, as Kertesz obligingly points out, Rukeyser also reaches back specifically to the precursor poem of The Bridge, Whitman’s “Passage to India” in its celebration of technological America (Poetic Vision, 17). Fourth, if Crane defended himself to Tate by pointing out his (and Whitman’s) attacks on American materialism, and if Crane’s critics have sometimes concentrated on the bleakness of “The Tunnel” section of The Bridge and the questioning ambiguities of his language, almost forgetting the patriotic optimism of his larger purpose, Rukeyser is unsparing in both her positive affirmations and her assaults on corporate capitalism. The death of the pilot in her version of “The Tunnel” is suffused with pathos but also with self-sacrificial heroism. The corporate “Committee-Room” is demonized, the hordes of Tamburlaine or Genghis Khan equated with those of Calvin Coolidge on Wall Street, the victims of “voting men” enumerated and mourned – Sacco and Vanzetti, the labour organizer Tom Mooney (still unjustly imprisoned at the time of writing), and the black man Hilliard, lynched and

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then burned while still alive in the 1890s. “What numbers of lynched Jesuses have not been deified.” Like Crane and MacLeish before her, Rukeyser both pays obeisance to T.S. Eliot – we have “fallen in waste places,” she writes21 – and strikes out for a more optimistic modernism. She even borrows the biblical imagery of her precursors: airplanes are “bushes burning” in the sky, while she witnesses Elohim intermittent with the soul, recurrent As Father and Holy Ghost, Word and responsive Word, Merging with contact in continual sunbursts, The promise, the response, the hands laid on, The hammer swung to the anvil, mouth fallen on mouth, The plane nose up into an open sky. The tone of Rukeyser’s long poem ranges widely, from acidic to ecstatic; and if it reveals signs of immaturity – she was twenty-one years old when she wrote it – “Theory of Flight” is a significant American progress poem that affirms Rukeyser’s faith in “Bruno, Copernicus, Shelley, Karl Marx.” Rukeyser the revolutionist turned more than once to the polarizing figure of John Brown as metaphor of the need for reform, accompanied if necessary with violence, “certain,” as he said in his final statement, “that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood.” As John Lowney has said, “No figure symbolized the radical ideal of interracial solidarity for the Popular Front more than John Brown” (History, 35–6). In her second long poem, The Book of the Dead (1938), John Brown appears as a framing device for her protest against the plight of the stricken coal miners, many of them African American, of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, a site all too close to Harper’s Ferry. In the second section of her poem, Rukeyser recalls the Revolutionary War that freed the colonists and the Civil War that freed the slaves, weaving her own words through those of the memorial plaque commemorating Brown’s raid: War-born: The battle at Point Pleasant, Cornstalk’s tribes, last stand, Fort Henry, a revolution won; the granite site of the precursor execution sabres, apostles of john brown leader of the War’s brilliant cloudy raid at harpers ferry

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And at the end, “dead John Brown’s body walking from a tunnel / to break the armored and concluded mind.” Rukeyser was not insensitive to the bloodshed that Brown stood for; nevertheless, his fanatical demand for moral reform was not only decisive at one crucial historical moment but still required in the present: “In this country,” she writes, “one man who cut through to the imagination of all was John Brown, that meteor, whose blood was love and rage, in fury until the love burned away” (Life of Poetry, 35). She celebrates “that meteor” (echoing Melville’s “The Portent”) in a major poem titled “The Soul and Body of John Brown.” Rukeyser’s critics mention it frequently but never pause over it.22 She does not call the poem an ode, but it qualifies by virtue of its irregular stanzas and its public voice. Behind the man, as Rukeyser well knows, stand eighty years of bitter controversy that encapsulate the Civil War antagonisms of the nation. John Brown’s body had not lain mouldering for long before his soul had passed into the voices of Civil War soldiers, both North and South. As David S. Reynolds says, “No one in American history – not even Washington or Lincoln – was recognized as much in drama, verse, and song as was Brown” (John Brown, 444); and Julia Ward Howe’s great hymn securely transformed Brown’s religious zeal, fusing the Union marching song with American apocalyptic mythology (John Brown, 4–5). At that time “most northern writers insisted,” says Reynolds, “that his spirit still stalked the earth”: “Hanging would not kill John Brown” (462–3). After the war, however, Southern lost cause writers gained ascendancy and demeaned the significance of John Brown: “It was no accident that the most negative portraits of Brown came during the years between 1880 and 1950, a time when Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan ruled in the South and were tolerated from afar in the North” (Reynolds, John Brown, 486). Historians appealed to Freud and claimed “paranoia” and “mental derangement.” Brown was vilified: various writers ascribed his motives to a mania for killing and stealing, and even went so far as to deny “that he entertained any long-cherished plan for the abolition of slavery.” This “Brown-bashing,” writes Reynolds, “continued through much of the twentieth century” (488). Meanwhile, as the New Criticism “depoliticized” Emerson, Thoreau, and the transcendentalists, a young and as yet unreconstructed Robert Penn Warren published his 1929 biography of Brown, depicting him as a “homicidal maniac.”

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Rukeyser’s 1940 eulogy of John Brown, then, is an act of leftist defiance harking back to a bloody strain of progressive idealism in the Civil War. Rukeyser’s reading of history, as Anne Herzog points out, resisted the “totalizing” narratives of conventional history, and probed “history’s unlit corners and unmarked passages”: there is in any history, wrote Rukeyser, “the buried, the wasted, and the lost” (Life of Poetry, 85). She thus produced a body of poetry “profoundly marked by historical reconsideration” (Herzog, Faith and Resistance, 40). Rukeyser praises John Brown as the antithesis of a Thoreau-Gandhi model of passive resistance. Brown’s idealism is belligerent. As Michael Denning has pointed out, while official patriotism during the 1930s invoked Lincoln, the far left was more likely to invoke John Brown (Cultural Front, 131): “The remarkable resurgence of interest in John Brown which can be seen in W.E.B. DuBois’s 1935 [sic] biography, Mike Gold’s Battle Hymn, and Jacob Lawrence’s series of history paintings, is a rarely noticed part of the Popular Front culture ... Since Earl Browder from Kansas, the Communist Party often linked Browder to John Brown and the spirit of Ossatowanmie [sic]. The banners at the Communist Party’s Popular Front Convention of 1936 were of John Brown and Frederick Douglass” (499).23 In order to cast light on Rukeyser’s poem, Denning’s account needs to be sorted into two strains: the politics of labour and the politics of race. Although Brown’s exclusive focus was racial liberation, labour radicals also adopted Brown as their hero. As early as December 1881 in New York, on the anniversary of his execution, and again four years later, leaders drew the parallel between chattel slavery and wage slavery, and Eugene V. Debs, the great socialist campaigner and founder of the Industrial Workers of the World (iww), evoked Brown repeatedly. So did Clarence Darrow, and so did Mother Jones (Reynolds, John Brown, 499–500). African American writers naturally glorified John Brown as much as white historians denigrated him. W.E.B. DuBois, five years after his classic The Souls of Black Folk (1904) and fifty years after Brown’s execution, published what he considered his best book, his biography John Brown (1909). In that same year, DuBois helped organize the naacp, which its founders considered “a direct descendent of the old League of Gileadites founded by John Brown” (494–6). Rukeyser, who had been arrested at the age of nineteen protesting at the trial of the Scottsboro boys, was a lifelong crusader for racial equality. Her eulogy for John Brown rises from her work naturally.

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Rukeyser’s poem, however, is not really about John Brown, whose body is left to “stand on sudden air” at the beginning of the text. Biographical sources, if any, are irrelevant. There is little in the poem about Brown, or even about his execution. Even more disconcerting, there is little about black Americans, slavery, the Civil War, or the postwar racist social Darwinism that DuBois pillories in the last chapter of his biography. From this perspective, the poem is instead about Civil War memory or, more precisely, the process of Civil War memory – what Reynolds describes as the “significant misreadings” of Brown that shaped the course of American history (John Brown, 7). A first reading of Rukeyser’s poem may give the effect of a profusion of words with little motivation, structure, or coherence.24 There are a few quotations included for documentary particularity. “I designed to have done the same thing / again on a larger scale,” said Brown, prophetically envisioning the grand Civil War that he would not live to see. And “If I tell them the truth, / they will say I speak in symbols,” he said, articulating the mystery of prophecy itself, “without the snap of a gun,” he said, hoping for a bloodless coup.25 The soul of John Brown, the Edwardsian Calvinist (Reynolds, John Brown, 464), was that of a Hebrew prophet, and Rukeyser underlines the point with allusions to Ezekiel and, in her epigraph, to Joel. The prophets of the Hebrew Bible all took the stance of speaking wisdom to power at great personal risk; they sometimes stood with the king, but far more often against him. They are the conscience of Judaism. Late in her life Rukeyser remarked: “We are talking about the endless quarrel between the establishment and the prophets, and I hope to be forever on the side of the prophets” (Kertesz, Poetic Vision, 366). Rukeyser, though conversant in Yiddish, was not a fully practising Jew, but she was intensely conscious of her heritage, and at no time more than at the coming of the Second World War.26 She was keenly aware of the crises in Europe and American barriers against Jewish refugees, and she wrote about herself movingly in a sonnet “To Be a Jew in the Twentieth Century” (1944), which has since been included in two Jewish prayerbooks (Kaufman, “Not the Study,” 48). The significance of Joel in her epigraph is that he was the most warlike of the prophets, inverting the pacifism of Isaiah and Micah: “Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears,” he declaims; “let the weak say, I am strong” (Joel 3:10). Joel prophesies the need for war, a Hebraic jihad, to achieve the New Jerusalem of biblical Zionism. This Zionist myth is as formative in American thinking as it is in Judaeo-

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Christianity generally, and as were both to the ideal Marxist classless society of the future (von Rad, chap. 22). Rukeyser’s poem was printed in Poetry in June 1940, at a time when the American public shrank from entering the war against Hitler, and in it she assumed the belligerency of both John Brown and Joel, urging the nation into a just war: “Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision!” Rukeyser’s poem thus enacts the practical consequences of John Brown’s seemingly foolhardy venture as it inflames the imaginations of the living – “the trial of heroes follows their execution.” In so doing, the poem does not move by discursive argument. In this historical ode, Rukeyser’s view of history is strictly presentist. As William Carlos Williams puts it in “The Virtue of History,” the central chapter of In the American Grain, “That of the dead which exists in our imaginations has as much fact as have we ourselves”; beyond this living imagination of the past, we are better if all the rest were “annihilated,” erasing “all memory of past things from our minds” (189). The purpose of history – like the purpose of poetry – is not truth in the abstract, but empowerment. Not long after publishing her poem in Poetry, Rukeyser published a short article called “The Usable Truth,” a title she ascribes to Melville (208) but which unmistakably recalls Van Wyck Brooks’s “usable past” or, as she might have called it, a “choosable past”: “If we are free people,” she wrote, “we are also in a sense free to choose our past, at every moment to choose the tradition we will bring to the future” (Life of Poetry, 21). Here, under the pressure of the war that everyone knew was coming, she calls for a purposeful poetry – because mere honesty, she says, is not enough – an “attitude of poetry, capable of facing the tragic, the complex, the fantastic, capable of meeting the process of reason that works, not in the single-track a, b, c, d, of logic, but rather in the cluster-to-cluster progress, but rather of an emotional sequence moving from group to group of idea and feeling” (207). As Raphael C. Allison has shown, the early 1940s were a pivotal period of transition in Rukeyser’s outlook, when the ties of her early Marxism were loosening as she turned to a form of American leftist pragmatism, partly shaped by the ideas of John Dewey (also an acknowledged influence on William Carlos Williams). This transition intensified when she was hired by Archibald MacLeish to work in FDR’s Office of War Information helping to create war propaganda for the US government (Bergman, “Rukeyser Imbroglio,” 560–1). But one stable feature in this transition was a highly presentist attitude towards history. “The Soul and Body of John Brown,” then, has

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no use for the incidental details of Brown’s adventures. These may be forgotten. The poem depicts only what remains of Brown’s living soul in the activist minds and emotions of the living populace. This is not a Civil War poem at all, then, but a Second World War poem. To read it is not to follow a discursive argument but to trace the “cluster-to-cluster progress” of an emotional wave: His grave was the floating faces of the crowd, and he refusing them release rose open-eyed in autumn, a fanatic beacon of fierceness leaping to meet them there. Autumn turns to spring, then “all the living summer.” Angry voices deride John Brown, but they are left behind. The people carry on with their lives, lovers “in naked embrace,” “mild slavers, moderate whores.” When the black slaves have gone, the “slaves under factories deal out identical / gestures of reaching,” “lost in the factory repetitions.” The lovers serve a double purpose: they symbolize the vital fertility of the populace and its sleep, its need to be awakened. The living vegetation changes, and the soul of John Brown is a tree, “greengrown with sun on it,” and finally: After the tree is fallen and has become the land, when the hand in the earth rises and touches and after the walls go down and all the faces turn, the diamond shoals of eyes demanding life deep in the prophet eyes, a wish to be again threatened alive, in agonies of decision part of our nation of our fanatic sun. At the very end of the poem, the speaker finally assumes the first-person plural – “our nation,” “our fanatic sun” – assuming the status of a public, communal, bardic voice. This kind of loose, associative procedure is not the expected convention for this kind of poem, so it still is perplexing. M.L. Rosenthal in 1950, during the height of the New Critical era, apologizes for Rukeyser’s “faults,” as if she were attempting to write one kind of poem and failing; but he proceeds to acknowledge that most of Rukeyser’s poetry demands “a different context from that generally given serious critical attention nowadays” (Our Life, 47–8). Rukeyser had already dis-

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tanced herself from the New Critics in her statement of aesthetic, The Life of Poetry (1949): She had “high regard” for some of the current academic poets, she wrote, but she could not accept their poetics because “they are thinking in terms of static mechanics ... When Emerson said that language was fossil poetry, he was leading up to these contemporary verdicts. If we can think of language as it is, as we use it – as a process, in which motion and relationship are always present ... we will be closer ... The critics of the “New” group, going on from there, see poetry itself as fossil poetry.”27 As several critics have pointed out, Rukeyser traced her own poetic ancestry back to Melville and Whitman, whom she described as the “poet of outrage” and the “poet of possibility” (Life of Poetry, 83), and her assumption of the bardic, public voice of Whitman violated current expectations not just for any poet but even more for a “she-poet” (as she was once called). Her work, said Adrienne Rich, fearlessly addressed “the largest questions of her time – questions of power, technology, gender.” Her work drew on “every political and social breakthrough gained by women since Dickinson’s death in 1886,” and she assumed “the scope of her own living to be at least as large as Whitman’s” (“Beginners,” 66–7). A logical end for this chapter would be the “Transcendental Etude” of Adrienne Rich herself, who claimed Rukeyser as her foremother, and produced a masterly greater romantic lyric that crystallizes her poetic thinking through the second phase of her career. But that would stretch this book well beyond its terminus, circa 1960, and “Transcendental Etude” has already attracted considerable attention. So I finish here with only a gesture of admiration.

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11 The Rising Glory of Africa Melvin Tolson’s Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

Given the depth and cultural ramifications of Melvin B. Tolson’s poetry, it is still too little known. His neglect has so dominated discussion, in fact, that substantive criticism has been slow to emerge from the chatter.1 Here, I approach his work as a white reader, American by birth but Canadian by choice, with an avowed predilection for American high modernism. Tolson seems to me not only the pre-eminent African American poet of the Jim Crow era by virtue of both his poetic achievement and his understanding of race and its relationship to American nationhood. He is to me the pre-eminent American poet since Hart Crane – race notwithstanding – who continued, in the face of every reason for doing otherwise, to sustain a hopeful view of American democracy. His Republic of Liberia holds up a black mirror for America to see itself, and the reflection shows not the expected grimace of a Simon Legree but an image – however much shaped by wishful thinking – of an African republic that fulfills the promise of American democratic exceptionalism. In 1953, however, neither wishful thinking nor exceptionalism were what black readers wanted, on the eve of the Supreme Court decision that ended legalized segregation and triggered the Civil Rights era. Nor have they been realized, as they appear to be in Tolson’s poem, either in Africa or in America. The myth of American exceptionalism has meanwhile come under intense hostile scrutiny. Nevertheless, the need for a positive, idealistic national goal of some kind, like Hart Crane’s “Atlantis,” is the mandate of this kind of poem, and Tolson’s Liberian Futurafrique fulfills that mandate courageously. Some African American critics have faulted Tolson’s embrace of the white poet’s modernism as a kind of assimilationist Uncle-Tomism.

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This attitude strikes me as self-defeating. Most black writers in the twentieth century have helped themselves unabashedly to the modernist ethos without muting their racial voices. Nor do I see an obligation to construct Tolson’s modernism as ironic, as does Dan McCall, who portrays a Tolson “running wild in the white castle of learning ... [saying] I am a Negro and have made my meals on what I hooked from your white kitchens and now that I have made my way into your study – see here – I make off with your library.”2 The library of modernism is public, not private, and it is not segregated by race. Tolson’s career is neatly segmented. A latecomer to poetry, he spent his early years scraping together an education with the help of two allblack universities and a good deal of self-teaching. He continued this learning process as a teacher, first at Wylie College in Texas and then, from 1947 on, at Langston University in Oklahoma. Neither institution was close to any major centre of culture, either geographically or intellectually; but in both places Tolson became a legendary teacher, challenging, inspiring, and flamboyant by turns.3 He also developed powerful skills as a public speaker, oratorical skills that inform the performative qualities of his verse, which in Libretto and elsewhere adopts a resounding public voice. He was also active politically, absorbing Marxist theory through his reading while making practical efforts to organize local sharecroppers, both black and white, at great personal risk.4 His commitment to public service even included four terms as mayor in Langston, Oklahoma, at significant cost to his writing. Earlier at Wylie College, the personal energy he gave to coaching the debate team led to a series of startling underdog victories in which the Wylie Forensic Team defeated teams from larger white universities, captured the Texas state championship, and then went on to defeat the national champions from the University of Southern California in April 1935 (Farnsworth, Tolson, 50–4). This extraordinary coup in debate became the subject of a major Hollywood film, The Great Debaters (2008), starring Denzel Washington as the young Tolson. Tolson’s early career was a time of prose poured into his columns for the Washington Tribune from 1937 to 1944, now collected as Caviar and Cabbage. While Tolson produced these essays, while teaching, studying, coaching, and leading secretive labour activities, he also put together his first volume of poetry. It failed to reach publication in the 1930s, only appearing posthumously as A Gallery of Harlem Portraits (1979). The imprint of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology is clearly visible. Tolson was discouraged by this failure, but he contin-

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ued to hone his craft.5 In 1940, a competition induced him to enter his poem “Dark Symphony,” which won the prize from the prestigious Atlantic Monthly and encouraged him to produce enough material for another volume, Rendezvous with America (1942). “Dark Symphony” itself is divided into “movements” in the manner of Southern symphonic poems since Lanier. The volume as a whole still aligns with the tradition of populist modernism deriving from Whitman, filtered through Sandburg, Lindsay, and Benét, intertwined with poets of the Harlem Renaissance, primarily Langston Hughes (Farnsworth, Tolson, 36–8). Tolson had by then all but completed a master’s thesis on the Harlem Renaissance writers for Columbia University.6 Unlike the free verse Harlem Portraits, much of Rendezvous is cast in metrical forms, including some virtuoso displays: “A Song for Myself,” for example, is a prosodic tour de force in rhyming iambic monometer, a humble undoing of Whitman’s massive ego. This volume marks Tolson’s belated poetic debut at the age of forty-four. In 1947, Tolson was approached by the government of Liberia, led by the progressive president William Tubman, and invited to be the African nation’s poet laureate and write its centenary poem. How this unprecedented invitation came to be is not clear,7 but Tolson’s imagination was ignited and he set to work. He wrote the first draft of his Libretto for the Republic of Liberia in less than a year. Tolson had already been studying Eliot and Pound, as well as Crane and Tate, plus Dylan Thomas, not to mention Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. He submitted his poem for magazine publication, but it was rejected by both Poetry and Atlantic Monthly (Farnsworth, Tolson, 138). Tolson then, whether courageous or foolhardy, sent his African poem to Tate, of all people, hoping to win critical approval. Tolson’s embrace of poetic modernism and his choice of the Southern white supremacist Tate as his poetic sponsor did Tolson’s reputation more harm than good, at least in the short term. Joy Flasch writes that Tate at first refused, saying “he was not interested in the propaganda of a negro poet.”8 Farnsworth questions this story (Tolson, 139), which remains anecdotal, and he draws a convincing picture of the professional relationship between the two (138–51). Tolson’s decision to approach Tate was influenced by an earlier exchange, in which Tate had rejected a Tolson submission with a show of courtesy that may or may not have been sincere (138).9 Tolson was aware that he was breaking down many barriers with his new poem.

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For Tate’s part, if my speculations about the influence of Jacques Maritain and his conversion to Catholicism in 1950 are correct (see 242–3), he may have seen an opportunity to evince a new-found racial tolerance. Besides, by July 1950, when Tate’s preface appeared in Poetry (along with the TI section of the poem), he had published his most successful volume Winter Sea (1944) and two collected editions of his own work. His younger protégées, John Berryman and Robert Lowell, were building their own reputations, the latter noted for the densely gnarled language of his early volumes. Tate had also become a central figure in the front-page scandal surrounding the first Bollingen Award, given by the Library of Congress to Pound for his Pisan Cantos (1948). Horrors of the Holocaust filled the news, and Tate was put to the severest imaginable test defending his vote for Pound as a vote for form over content (to put it in journalistic terms). Then, when another white poet was wanted to introduce Tolson’s third and final volume Harlem Gallery (1965), the choice fell to Karl Shapiro, who – Jewish and militantly populist – had cast one of the two votes against Pound. Shapiro bitterly attacked Tate and Eliot and the rest of the committee for their decision, and Tolson then became, willy-nilly, a pawn in the noisy skirmish of poetics.10 Libretto itself is too long for most anthologies or course syllabi, and difficult to excerpt. Furthermore, its African subject is (seemingly) remote, its allusions obscure, and its language tortuous – despite footnotes Tolson added for publication. The poem of more than seven hundred lines has to be swallowed whole or not at all: “Drink deep, or taste not the Liberian spring,” as Tolson quipped (Farnsworth, Tolson, 171). Despite critical praise, the physical book itself was not easily accessible. White readers in 1953, despite Tate’s praise, were still condescending or dismissive about any effort to break the colour barrier in the high arts – not just in poetry but in music, opera, visual arts, theatre, and film. Tolson himself had no reservations about Tate’s introduction: “I see the Preface as our literary Emancipation Proclamation,” he wrote to Tate.11 Black readers, however, read Libretto with its suspicious introduction in more complex ways, and its reception remains an informative object lesson in the complex problems of self-definition facing black writers in America. Much of the criticism focused on its erudition and inaccessibility to black readers. Margaret Walker had already complained of the “almost esoteric nature” of Rendezvous with Ameri-

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ca (Farnsworth, Tolson, 95). When J. Stanford Redding condemned the professorial footnotes, Tolson responded acidly that Redding had not reviewed the poem but his own prejudices against modern poetry. “Away with the simple Negro!” he exclaimed. “This is a book to be chewed and digested. If Negro scholars don’t get busy on it, white scholars will” (166–7). Tolson was charged with betraying his people and writing for white critics. He was compared to other black writers who minimized their race, like Countee Cullen and Robert Hayden. Only one black critic, Lorenzo D. Turner writing in Poetry, was wholly positive.12 This debate was given another twist when Karl Shapiro, in his introduction to Harlem Gallery, praised Tolson for “writing Negro.” So it may have seemed to white readers, but to black readers he was not Negro enough (274–5). I am forcefully reminded of the famous exchange between Ralph Ellison and his leftist admirer Irving Howe, whose views on black writing were doctrinaire: “We must express ‘black’ anger and ‘clenched militancy,’” Ellison replied, “and between writing well and being ideologically militant, we must choose militancy. Well, it all sounds quite familiar and I fear the social order which it forecasts more than I do that of Mississippi.” This issue is all the more intense in that Tolson’s vision in Libretto is both racial and trans-racial. Tolson had had his fill of white racism in the American South, but he also had experience of many friendly and supportive whites. He knew that his own origins included Irish and Native American ancestry as well as African: “my roots are in Africa, Europe and America,” he said, characteristically framing his race in “encompassing rather than antagonistic terms” (Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 110). He well understood that in America “black” is a sociological, not a racial, category (Tolson, “Poet’s Odyssey,” 184). He embraced his black identity, nor could he escape the fate of being pigeonholed by white critics, who reduced his work, in Cary Nelson’s words, to “a matter of black self-interest rather than a national concern” (Repression and Recovery, 166). His thinking was, however, as Farnsworth suggests (Tolson, 41), aligned most closely with the earlier generation of black leaders who emerged at the naacp conference of 1933 in Amenia, New York, during the depths of the Great Depression. They wished to move beyond the “race men” of the previous generation like DuBois and James Weldon Johnson, who had “overlooked the obvious relationships between the Negro’s problems and the larger issues confronting the nation”: “the welfare of white and black labor is inseparable.” The wage-slavery defence of slavery is correct insofar as it elevates

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the issue from that of race to that of labour and compensation. Tolson’s trans-racialism is clear in the title poem of Rendezvous with America, in which he addresses “kikes,” “dagos,” “chinks,” and “bohunks,” as well as “niggers,” in a sweeping Whitmanic roundup of stigmatized minorities. It is clear, too, in his poem “Esperanto,” in which divisions are divisions of language, as they are in Libretto: “Yellow and Black and White, / We mouth a Babel tongue.” Libretto was thus the victim of exceptionally bad timing. Brown v. Board of Education was decided by the Supreme Court in the following year, and the interminable (and yet unfinished) dismantling of racial segregation slowly began. Liberia seemed far removed from the streets of Birmingham and Detroit to blacks and whites alike, and the period when Tolson’s poem might have made its impact was preoccupied with violence closer to home. Prominent blacks like Paul Robeson were harassed by the American government, engaged in its queasy Cold War with the communist idea. In 1958, Langston Hughes issued his Selected Poems – by which he became known to several generations of readers – self-castrated of his most radical work (Nelson, Repression and Recovery, 197–8). Just before Tolson’s death in 1966, the new Black Arts movement began to agitate for a racially centred aesthetic created by and for blacks only.13 His Liberia seemed less a mirror to America than a pedantic evasion. Tolson – who wrote privately in 1961, “I guess I’m the only Marxist poet Here and Now” (Farnsworth, Tolson, 145) – was fortunately not prominent enough to attract the attention of huac, but he was already seen by younger black readers as the product of an older generation. Finally, Liberia itself is a subject that bristles with problems and paradoxes. Superficially, it served as a poster image for African promise, the sole independent democratic nation (then) on the continent. The nation was founded in 1820 by American slaves wishing to return to their African homeland – or at least that is the polite version. As Tolson well knew, the purpose of the American Colonization Society was to reduce the free black population in America by shipping them back where they came from. Individuals who made that first intrepid voyage on “the black Mayflower” did so involuntarily and in terrible conditions. Half of them died within the first year. Most, if not all, had their roots in other parts of Africa. And the survivors who formed the beginnings of the new nation promptly organized a hierarchical society with themselves in positions of power and the indigenous natives at the bottom – a situation that persisted a century later when Tolson wrote his poem.

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Finally, in the first decades of the twentieth century, Marcus Garvey made Liberia the focus of his vision of yet another back-to-Africa movement, a plan opposed not only by W.E.B. DuBois in the United States but also by the Liberian government. The very concept of Liberia was embedded in these and other controversies.14 Tolson, though anti-colonialist in all his politics, chose not to highlight the colonialist implications of these events. Tolson, however, defended his decision on the basis of genre: he was writing a poem to celebrate the nation’s centennial. He thought of it, as his correspondence with Tate and Tate’s introduction both make clear, as a pseudopindaric panegyric celebrating Liberia, and his footnotes suggest that he prepared poetically by immersing himself in Dryden. There was much to celebrate. Liberia during the war, though not engaged in combat, had played an important role in support of the Allies, supplying nearly all the rubber and providing airports for use in the North African campaign. In 1943, William Tubman became president (i.e., president for life), and he, over the next quarter century, did “more to bring his country and its political class into the modern world than all his predecessors combined” (Ciment, Another America, 188). Tubman, like many African leaders, enjoyed a lavish personal life – a palace and a yacht. His “presidency” was fully authoritarian, increasingly so as years went by. Yet he “understood that Liberia’s prosperity lay with the new, U.S. led, postwar free trade order” (198). He astutely capitalized on an “open door” policy, allowing foreign investment and trade in Liberia’s rubber plantations and iron ore deposits. Little Liberia “boasted the second-highest economic growth rate of any nation in the world” (202). Liberia was a founding member of the United Nations. Internally, Tubman made sincere efforts to create “a new era in settler-native relations,” to better conditions for women, and his Unification Act of 1964 “finally put an end to the second-class citizenship of 98 percent of Liberia’s population” (203– 5). He built schools and sent young Liberians to be educated abroad. Tolson was proud that, when he began to write, “there were only two independent black countries in Africa. Now there are thirty-three” (“A Poet’s Odyssey,” 192). Tubman himself could not foresee that this progressive nation would crumple so quickly after his death in 1971. In 1953, Tolson could praise postwar Liberia without embarrassment and lay out a positive vision of its future glory.15 Libretto, however, had greater ambitions. Farnsworth cites an undated note from Tolson’s journal that reveals his principal models: “‘The

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Bridge’ is a way out of the pessimism of ‘The Waste Land’; the ‘Libretto’ is a vista out of the mysticism of ‘The Four Quartets’” (Tolson, 171). Nearby, Tolson wrote, “I believe Crane lacked a perspective of himself against the backdrop of history.” Tolson often claimed similarities (not immediately obvious) between his poem and Crane’s Bridge, and Tate, too, affirmed that “Mr. Tolson is in a direct succession from Crane.” Both aligned themselves in respectful opposition to T.S. Eliot. To begin at the end, Tolson’s “vista” from Eliot’s “mysticism” in Four Quartets points to his more pragmatic version of a Marxist-inflected Christianity rooted in social justice.16 Where Eliot withdrew into the self-abnegation of the “negative path,” Tolson chose to see Liberia as a premonition of a Christian-Marxist egalitarian government. In TI, he equates “Marx the exalter” with “Christ the Leveller” (361–3).17 As Farnsworth makes clear (Tolson, 74, and elsewhere), Tolson the Methodist preacher’s son consistently viewed Marxist ideals through the lens of a radical Christianity far removed from Stalinism. He desired “a synthesis of socialist and Christian ideals, rather than their mutual exclusion” (Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 119). Tolson’s resistance to Eliot’s “mysticism” is not a secular resistance to Christianity, but to its neglect of social application. The earlier relationship is even more instructive. Tolson recognized that Crane conceived The Bridge as a rejection of the “pessimism” of “The Waste Land.”18 He apparently recognized as well the flimsiness of Crane’s historical knowledge and determined to better him. Crane’s optimism was based in large part on his faith in material technology – the cars, trains, ships, and airplanes celebrated in his poem. Tolson admires this aspect of Crane – as Tate, one recalls, emphatically did not – and he replicates it in the imagery of Libretto. Tate may be congratulated for seeing past his own deeply held antipathies and praising this Marxist poem at all, but his introduction has left the critical legacy of devaluing the climactic “Futurafrique” passage at the end: “The movement breaks down into Whitmanesque prose-paragraphs into which Mr. Tolson evidently felt that he could toss all the loose ends of history, objurgation, and prophecy which the set theme seemed to require of him as an official poet” (Tate, Introduction to Libretto, n.p.). As in his objections to The Bridge, Tate is here guilty, I think, of conflating his political and aesthetic views. If Crane is the model for Tolson’s dense metaphorical language, his genre, and his technological faith, however, Pound gave him courage to indulge in free-ranging and recondite allusiveness. The Cantos –

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read with none of the conveniences available nowadays – set the standard, and Pound’s camaraderie with black American soldiers in the Pisan Cantos possibly appealed to him, if his fascist loyalties did not. The Pisans also introduce Pound’s first engagement with the anthropologist Leo Frobenius and his legendary city of Wagadu (present-day Ouagadougou, capital of Burkina Faso) – both mentioned in Libretto.19 These derivations from Crane and Pound mark Libretto as not only an occasional ode but an ambitious modernist “long poem.” The subject of Liberia is, after the first third of the poem, remarkably backgrounded. “Africa,” the larger subject, is really metonymic for the black race, both African and American. Tolson’s modernist long poem is nominally Liberian but emphatically American.

Edward Brunner writes that no poet in the 1950s “manipulated the conventions of the symphonic epic of high modernism as boldly, as shrewdly, and as exhaustively” as Tolson. But then he seems to take his praise away: Libretto, he says, appears “strangely old fashioned – about twenty-five years out of date.” Brunner’s 1950s, however, are an era of disengaged New Critical lyrics invested “in not wanting to consider” an alternative historical narrative.20 With hindsight, of course, this is just half the story. In 1953, when Libretto was finally published, Pound was far from finishing his lifework and even farther from being accepted as canonical, or even sane. Williams published the first part of Paterson in 1946 and the fourth in 1951. Zukofsky was writing, but invisibly. Across the Atlantic, David Jones’s Anathémata appeared in 1952. The first bits of Charles Olson’s Maximus appeared in 1953, but H.D.’s Helen in Egypt not until 1961. Work by Ginsberg, Duncan, Berryman, Dorn, Snyder, and others all appeared after 1953. It was if anything an abundant period for the modernist long poem. But Brunner is correct: most lay in the future, and all outside the prevailing canon of acceptability. Brunner goes on to say that few works besides Libretto “captured so fervently ... the sense that a truly new beginning might be possible out of the ruins of Europe” (Cold War Poetry, 144). Tolson, writing a socially engaged poetry from the beginning of his career, responds directly to W.E.B. DuBois’s despair on the first page of his 1947 study of Africa: having long believed that Europe and North America represented “the

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best civilization which the world had ever known” with the promise of going on “from triumph to triumph until the perfect accomplishment was reached,” he wrote, “our present nervous breakdown, nameless fear, and often despair, comes from the sudden facing of this faith with calamity.” Tolson’s Libretto grandly rejects these fears and erects his Edward Bellamy-like Futurafrique upon the ruins of white colonialist power. The Afro-centric viewpoint of the poem enabled Tolson to focus, as Brunner observes, “not only on historical matters but on the question of what fails to get recorded in history” (152).21 Tolson, furthermore, sensitive to the architectonics of The Bridge, was capable of seeing the simple past-present-future template of the progress poem through Crane’s baroque laminations of metaphor. The first six sections of Libretto, named for the ascending scale DORE-MI-FA-SOL-LA, suggest a rising progress in the historical past, Liberian intertwined with American. TI, depicting the bewildering complexity of present issues, acts as leading tone to the inevitable tonic DO, where Tolson as prophet envisions millennial hope for a global Congress of rational nations building a future upon scientific and material progress.22 His global Congress is an uncanny refiguration of Joel Barlow’s at the end of The Columbiad. Tolson, in Keith D. Leonard’s words, “casts his poetic persona in the role of the American Jeremiah, a prophet called to identify how citizens of the United States are not living up to their ideals” (Fettered Genius, 219). These three segments of Libretto are roughly equal in length at two hundredplus lines each, but differently subdivided. Tolson’s poem, then, has roots in three major poetic genres: the pseudopindaric occasional ode, the modernist long poem, and the progress poem. To begin, the past is given six short parts: four spotlighted moments of Liberian history and two of general comment. The topos of praise is continuous, but Tolson keeps darker realities present as well. The opening DO section uses the call-and-response format of oral cultures combined with highly troped and allusive language: Liberia is not this but that. While the ingenious metaphor of Liberian sparrow overtopping American eagle, with its Aesopian praise of the underdog, has received considerable comment, the unflattering alternatives have not, but they are recorded with full apophatic force: Liberia is called a sideshow freak, a corpse of the “dark continent,” an illiterate black man’s X. We are assured it is not – while the text places each negative on record. Even the positive points are questionable:

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You are Libertas flayed and naked by the road To Jericho, for a people’s five score years Of bones for manna, for balm an alien goad! (29–32) The goddess Libertas, who always manages to make an appearance in progress poems, has been for the duration of this centennial victim of an “alien goad” in need of a Good Samaritan. FA, the other generalizing section, is equally complex, blending symboliste imagery with simple allegory. Tolson has already identified Europe as “an empty python” (86), so we recognize the full-fed python in FA as Europe, with all its predatory colonialism; the eagle as America, with its hypocritical reverse-colonialism; and the Blakean tiger as Liberia itself, with its pent up energies and its power to choose good or evil. The threefold refrain, “in the interlude of peace,” points to python, eagle, and tiger, archetypal evils, well fed for the moment, tributes to the benign governance of President Tubman; but it suggests too that the more usual state of affairs is war (like the war recently ended). In keeping with Blake, Tolson’s imagery is full of moral ambiguity, the three creatures representing both predation and power. The “Bola boa” is identified with the serpent in the Garden of Eden (“mosaic” is a pun on Moses, traditional author of Genesis), instrument of humankind’s fall, but also the felix culpa of later theology. The eagle is a “pouched assassin” associated with piracy (“corsair”) and abducted slaves. But it has seized “the blood / red feathers of a cock” (132–3). The reference is obscure but, if I am correct, the red cock crowing in the new dawn was a motif of 1930s communist movements, the new dawn bringing in the new Marxist order.23 Tolson, presenting it as the bloodied prey of the American eagle, hints that President Tubman’s reforms were fully compliant with Western capitalist interests in the region. They had no whit of Marxist inflection (like those of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo only a few years later, summarily cut down by the cia). But the Typhoon-Tyger (assuming that this third creature is Liberia itself) is endowed with Blakean energy via orthography and metonymy, flexing muscles of self-interest. Four historical tableaux in the first part of the poem begin with RE, a sketch of the pre-Liberian Songhai Empire refracted through the lens of the “Good Gray Bard in Timbuktu.” Tolson (note to line 80) acknowledges only one source, W.E.B. DuBois’s The World and Africa (1947). DuBois’s account of Songhai is very brief (210–12), but both

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writers exhibit a successful African empire and an autonomous civilization with sustainable political and economic power and an educated class supported by universities: “Solomon in all his glory had no Oxford, / Alfred the Great no University of Sankoré” (79–80). DuBois declared the Songhai Empire the “greatest development of civilization in Africa, after Egypt,”24 and both he and Tolson take pains to parallel European developments. Tolson does not refer directly to the Songhai “Empire,” only “an imperial quilt of tribes.” It is a utopian artefact of nationhood that reached its zenith under Askia the Great, just lawgiver and contemporary of England’s Queen Elizabeth I: Black Askia’s fetish was his people’s health; The world his world, he gave the Bengal light Of Books the Inn of Court in Songhai: Beba mzigo! The law of empathy set the market price, Scaled the word and deed: the gravel-blind saw Deserts give up the ghost to green pastures. Tolson’s quilt of allusion stitches together Askia’s African justice with England’s contemporary tradition of common law and Muslim learning from India, and shows all at work in the marketplace, where blind justice is “scaled” – that is, uses true scales, calibrated with musical precision – while the desert gives up the ghost to “green pastures.” The phrase “green pastures” in the last line has Judaeo-Christian resonance.25 It is a place of racial harmony, home to both white scholar ElAkit and black humanist Bagayogo (83–4). But the fourfold refrain of the Good Gray Bard also traces the destruction of Songhai at the hands of both European and Asian, both Christian and Muslim foes: And the locust Portuguese raped the maiden crops, And the sirocco Spaniard razed the city-states; And the leopard Saracen bolted his scimitar into The jugular vein of Timbuktu; Dieu seul est grand! Tolson’s “Good Gray Bard” brings to mind the quasi-oral American Whitman, but curiously, Tolson’s note deflects attention to the poet laureate of the British Empire, Tennyson. Both references are operative. Libretto toys with three Tennyson works – his 1839 student poem “Timbuctoo,” his utopian “Locksley Hall,” plus the imperialistic “Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington” (see footnote 54).26 Tolson presents

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Tennyson as the voice of British colonialism in a dispassionate modernist way, lacking postcolonial outrage and thus likely to disappoint some readers. Tolson’s main interest, I think, is to portray the poet’s purpose as the articulation, even the creation, of a nationalist vision. The same holds true of Tolson’s citations of Whitman’s “Passage to India,” and even Kipling, condemned in one place as the stinkbug who tries to peddle perfume in his “White Man’s Burden” (see above, 213–14).27 Libretto lines up these Western poets with the oral poets and griots of African tradition (line 168): Tolson’s ideal poetic voice is embedded in its culture, fully engaged, centripetal and Bakhtinian. Tolson’s historical narrative is sketchy, and his notes are coy about sources,28 but he concentrates on American entanglements. DO notes Liberia’s “mimic flag” (43) and slips in a tacit tribute to Ben Franklin, with his “lightning rod,” “rope,” and “key” (14–15). If Liberia is “a moment in the conscience of mankind” (56), that conscience is American and much in need of balm.29 MI, SOL, and LA focus on the American conception of the African state and two of the original Americos – Elijah Johnson and Jehudi Ashmun. MI is the most circumstantial, dealing with the American founders amid the antebellum conflict of “Yankee capital” versus “the feudal glory of the South” (102): Tolson thus frames the conflict as broadly socio-economic (encompassing both Marxist interpretation and Southern lost cause apologetics), but the individuals raise the specific moral-political disputation into view. Frederick Douglass overwhelms the Copperheads, while abolitionists like Robert Finley, Bishop Meade, and Dr Charles Torrey (whose death occasioned Emerson’s great ode),30 are pitted against – but also work cooperatively with – slave-holders like Bushrod Washington, son of the first president, and Francis Scott Key, lawyer and patriotic hymnist.31 Henry Clay, the pro-slavery apologist, desperately tries to hold America together. Liberia is born out of bitter divisions over slavery and race, and offers the mother nation both “a balm for conscience” (115) and a potential solution to its self-inflicted “dilemma” (144). Tolson omits detailing the wretched fate of those first “Black Pilgrim Fathers,” with their retracing of the Middle Passage in reverse, and jumps instead to the outcome of their venture more than one hundred years later, when Liberia played a crucial role combatting the Nazi incursion into North Africa. He ensures that the reader’s first view of Liberia in the poem is synoptic and positive. Elijah Johnson in SOL brings his more successful pilgrim company to the African Promised Land two years later, in 1822. Tolson’s refer-

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ence to “the horned American Dilemma” (143–4), together with his footnote, raise the controversy over Gunnar Myrdal’s massive and influential study An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). Myrdal’s work is sometimes depicted as though it were hostile to African American aspirations, but it was not: Myrdal provided documentary support for the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. the Board of Education, and it was greeted positively on the whole by black intellectuals, including W.E.B. DuBois, whose review hailed it as a “monumental and unrivalled study” (Review, 124). Others, however – including Ralph Ellison, DuBois’s protégé Herbert Aptheker, and Tolson’s colleague Oliver Cromwell Cox – mounted penetrating attacks. Ellison, the mildest of these, faulted Myrdal for leaving progress up to the moral reform of white Americans rather than demanding a systemic revolution that would create “a democracy in which the Negro will be free to define himself” (Shadow and Act, 304). Aptheker waged an uncompromising Marxism: the issue is “a material one, not a ‘moral’ one.” There is no dilemma for believers in “democracy and full rights for all people” (Negro People, 66). Cox, however, began from a fully nuanced critique of Myrdal’s argumentation and ended by producing a classic work in the field of sociology, Caste, Class and Race: A Study in Social Dynamics (1948). Like Tolson, Cox thinks beyond the “Negro problem” to larger principles of social structure.32 In Tolson’s poem, all of this controversy lies compact in Myrdal’s word “dilemma” (and a meagre footnote), with the vexatious insinuation that African Americans somehow present a “dilemma” by their very existence. The first half dozen tercets in SOL emphasize the reversed Middle Passage motif, but the focus soon shifts to issues of language. Johnson “flenses midnight” in the “whale’s belly.” Puzzled by this striking vocabulary, I tried to see Jonah in the picture; but no, Tolson seems to have picked up this precise word and its entire context from “The Monkey-Rope” chapter of Moby Dick. There Melville describes the Aboriginal Queequeg deep in the bowels of the submerged whale as its flesh is stripped, or “flensed,” kept from drowning only by a “monkey rope” held by the white Ishmael. Melville toys with this picture, white man and black like an Italian organ-boy and his monkey, but he sees past the racial insult to a deeper bond between the two, “so that for better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honour demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down

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in his wake. So, then, an elongated Siamese ligature united us. Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother ... I seemed distinctly to perceive that my own individuality was now merged in a joint stock company of two; that my free will had received a mortal wound; and that another’s mistake or misfortune might plunge innocent me into unmerited disaster and death.” Melville’s allegory is consonant with Tolson’s picture of both the relation of Liberia to America and of the mutual interdependency of black and white peoples. The passage goes on to introduce the concept of “cosmic deepitalki,” which Tolson glosses as “a secret language no white man understands” (footnote 163),33 and the phenomenon of gibbering tomtoms and Aboriginal griots, wise men or “living encyclopedias” (footnote 168).34 Tolson’s Johnson re-enters the experience of oral culture, language and the culture embedded in it forming a material link between the quick and the dead, what “a man owes man to man” (169). The presence of the dead, of the cultural past, remaining alive in language is emphasized by the line “He hears the skulls plowed under cry.” Tolson’s note cites a poem by William Sharp (writing under his own name), “The Last Aboriginal,” but nothing like the phrase appears there – only a melancholy portrait of some future last Australian Aboriginal left alive. (Sharp’s poem was doubtless motivated by the grim predictions of racist social Darwinism.) The extended geographic compass suggests that Tolson is interested in oral cultures at large, not Liberian or African cultures exclusively. The last fifty lines of this section are filled with proverbs that Tolson culled from a gigantic tome, Racial Proverbs: A Selection of the World’s Proverbs Arranged Linguistically, edited by Selwyn Gurney Champion. Neither Champion nor his Africanist contributor offers any conceptual understanding of this material, but though the passage in Libretto seems much too long, Tolson’s purposes are clear. As Michelle Toumayants notes, Tolson at one of his last readings devoted nearly ten minutes to reading and explicating these proverbs, “roughly fifty percent of the time he discussed the poem in its entirety” (“Poetic Proverbs,” 7). First, Tolson is combatting the notion articulated by French writer Eugène Guernier (1882–1973) that “l’Afrique n’a pas d’histoire.” Proverbs may be ahistorical; but, to Tolson, they preserve the verbal wisdom of the anonymous dead, so they are evidence of a living history. Second, they are wisdom of the folk, and thus counter the critics’ complaints about Tolson’s obscurity. Third, proverbs are poetry – self-contained, condensed packets of wisdom, point-

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ed by trope, rhetorical balance, and auditory linkage – the poetry griots were expected to devise for their people. Last, they are specifically modernist poetry. “The Africans have their own avant garde in oral literature,” Tolson brags in note 168: they can be “esoteric,” capable of puzzling their listeners with “more than the seven ambiguities.” To finish, Tolson rounds off the section with Christian references – a saying of Jesus, which fits the proverbial matrix exactly, and an allusion to Yahweh’s Covenant with Noah, which Brunner’s notes underscore as a Cold War reference and a hope for future peace.35

In LA, Tolson turns to Johnson’s friend, the white religious idealist Jehudi Ashmun, whose exploits first crossed Tolson’s consciousness as a student at Lincoln University, which had been founded as the Ashmun Institute. Framed with images of geologic time, Ashmun, “a white man spined with dreams” (240), declares “My Negro kinsmen, America is my mother, Liberia is my wife, And Africa is my brother.” (251–4) The circumstance of Ashmun’s white race makes a convenient bridge to the long and difficult TI section, which moves the poem into present time, where Tolson’s transracial position asserts itself most forcefully. To Brunner, the poem argues that “no one ethnic group has a particular claim on being oppressed or on oppressing others” (footnote to TI) – a formulation that Brunner feels obliged to label “controversial.” The vision of the poem extends far beyond Liberia (which is never even mentioned in TI), beyond the America of Jim Crow, to encompass all divisions of race, social class, and nationhood worldwide. Tolson in a surprise move disengages his view of present-day Liberia to focus on the postwar wreckage of Western civilization. There is no praise for President Tubman’s progressive administration, nor for the benefits of Firestone and the rubber industry, nor for any other narrow concern. Tolson’s present is keenly aware of the catastrophes of the recent war and growing Cold War conflicts but wraps them in the history of human destruction and victimization.

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The language of TI is notoriously dense, but the basic theme is simple and the external structure lucid. A diagram is useful. There are thirteen stanzas in all.36 The first eight are governed by apostrophe, “O Calendar of the Century.” The prevailing trope is congeries, the Whitmanic catalogue, piling up exempla in a great heap; if Tolson’s expression is too obscure in one, the next is apt to suffice. In the tradition of postcolonial “Afro-pessimism” (Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 114), the wreckage is nearly overwhelming; but beginning at stanza 9 is a fourfold anaphora, “The Höhere of [blank’s] children / is beyond …” German Höhere is an adjective meaning “higher” or “greater” used here as a noun.37 These stanzas mark a positive turn within TI. The final stanza forms a discursive conclusion. All but two stanzas are punctuated with “Selah,” an exclamation from the Psalms notoriously uncertain in meaning. (It is most often taken as an instruction for music or ritual activity.) 255 261 272 297 322 347 365 378 403 413 424 439 462

O Calendar of the Century .... “Ecce homo!” .... O Africa, Mother of Science .... Elders of Agâ’s House .... Between pavilions .... Like some gray ghoul .... O Age of Tartuffe .... O East ... O West .... The Höhere of Gaea’s children / is beyond .... The Höhere of God’s stepchildren / is beyond .... The Höhere of X’s children / is beyond .... The Höhere of one’s pores En Masse .... Between Yesterday’s wars / now hot now cold ....

Selah Selah Selah Selah Selah Selah Selah Selah

Selah Selah Selah

Tolson’s first three stanzas focus on Africa, but the republic given birth (256) is not just Liberia celebrating its centenary but the ideal republic of his imagination. It has a Capitol (263), which may be Rome, the “weeping widow Europe” (267), or Washington, or Monrovia. The “Great White World” is reduced to the status of mere “boy” (270). Tolson’s footnote cites a line from Coriolanus in which “boy” is an insult, but it is of course a common American racial slur: the Shakespearian usage renders it transracial. The apostrophe to Africa as “Mother of Science” carries a note of odic praise, with reminders of geologic antiquity in Gondwanaland (277) and the site of fossil human

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origins. Throughout the poem, languages carry their own burden of significance apart from their content: thus “lachen mit yastchekes” (274) is Yiddish, summoning the recent holocaust as well as the translation in the footnote, “laughing with needles being stuck in you; ghetto laughter.” It enters the grand catalogue of human suffering in the poem. Likewise, Africa may have been elbowed into social retardation, but the Old English elbolga identifies the colonialist culprit. If this section begins by focusing on Africa, it ends with a metonymic litany of cultural confluence, appropriation and assimilation: “Jordan flows into the Tiber, / the Yangtze into the Thames, / the Ganges into the Mississippi, the Niger / into the Seine” (287–90). Stanzas 4, 5, and 6 develop this theme with shifts of focus. Stanza 4 attaches the victimization within cultures to class divisions: All cultures crawl walk hard fall, flout under classes under Lout, enmesh in ethos, in masôreth, the poet’s flesh, intone the Mass of the class as the requiem of the mass. (304–11) Significantly, Tolson attaches this cultural elitism to elitism in poetics as well: “Let Brahmin pens kill / Everyman the Goat” (316–17). Stanza 5 attacks the military state, whether “by crossbow, harquebus, cannon, or Pegasus bomb” (325). While conscious of the ideological conflicts of the recent war, Tolson does not forget how intermeshed they are with historic class conflicts: “Before hammer and sickle or swastika, two / worlds existed: the Many, the Few. / They sat at Delos’, at Vienna’s, at Yalta’s, ado” (341–3). Stanza 5 abstracts the failures of all ideologies to the root cause in human greed, “old Profit, the bald rake paseq, wipes the bar, / polishes the goblet vanity, / leers at the tigress Avarice” (348–50), as they careen apocalyptically to some disastrous end, where “Marx, the exalter, would not know his East” nor “Christ, the Leveler, His West” (361–3). The references to East and West may arise from the journalistic shorthand for communist versus capitalist, but they take us back to Kipling as well, whose “Ballad of East and West” was described by DuBois in The World and Africa as the “epitaph” of European civilization, the “uncounted cost of

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property, life, and youth” come to an end with “the use of atomic energy” (14–5). Stanzas 7 and 8 sum up in general terms. It is an “Age of Tartuffe” (365), of moral hypocrisy, and Tolson appeals to Rochester’s sweeping “Satire against Mankind” with its ridicule of the human pretense to reason, and in the next stanza to Albert Camus. Camus’s essay “The Artist as Witness of Freedom” justifies the function of the artist in a world devastated by war. The artist, he argues, can say “in all peace of mind that he is no man’s mortal enemy” (534). The essay recalls M. Desfourneau (sic), official executioner for the French government, who threatened to go on strike. The government has since, says Camus, “substituted the rubber stamp for the axe” (535). The four stanzas that depict “the Höhere of Gaea’s children” turn the argument suddenly – and not unproblematically – to the positive. Tolson heaps up another congeries of human failures that “the Höhere,” the higher part of humanity, must transcend. The list in stanza 9 is a set of miscellaneous metonymies: rejected are Rimbaud’s “dérèglement de tous les sens” – which may stand for a denial of empirical understanding, or rational understanding, or (as Brunner suggests) artistic understanding detached from social engagement.38 Rejected are gold, the “seeking of cows” (i.e., theft), apartheid, Sisyphus’s despond (existential futility, with another glance at Camus), and so on. Stanza 10 focuses more narrowly on modernist negations to be left behind – “das Diktat der Menschenverachtung, / la muerte sobre el esqueleto de la nada.” Stanza 11 seems to focus on positives turned negative – the “maggot democracy” of government, the “filets d’Arachné” of overly subtle art (425–6). “The Orizaba with its Bridge of Sighs” refers to both the failed ideals of the Treaty of Versailles and the “failure” of Hart Crane,39 who leapt to his death from the same ship fourteen years later. Stanza 12 reiterates the egalitarian vision of all the world’s peoples “En Masse” (439) – the phrase inevitably evoking Whitman’s all-encompassing worldview. East and West, once seen by Kipling as eternally divided, are in fact as necessary to each other’s existence as conjoined twins: O East, O West, On tenotomy bent, Chang’s tissue is Eng’s ligament! Selah!

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One difficulty in these stanzas goes back to the exact meaning of Tolson’s “Höhere.” I glossed it with deliberate ambiguity as “the higher part of humanity.” If Tolson is referring to the higher human faculties of reason and compassion, he may be on safe ground. But his word could also refer to some kind of elite – an upper class, a meritocracy of the intelligent, or even a cadre of efficient government overseers. These options would violate principles affirmed elsewhere in Tolson’s writings – but they are troublesome and not ruled out in these passages.40

The final DO begins with sixty-six lines of recapitulation, eleven sixline stanzas in rough accentual hexameter, the densest and knottiest writing in the poem. They act as a dissonant appoggiatura resolved in the final triumphant tonic triad. The focus shifts back to Africa – with its allusion to the Frobenius-Fox African Genesis (491) and its “O Africa” apostrophe (496) – but remains preoccupied with discovering hope in the postwar wreckage. Since the chief difficulty is detecting the argument amid the welter of detail, I venture a reductive stanza-by-stanza paraphrase: (1) Tolson begins with images of drought (as seccas), disgust, and female infertility if not necrophilia – “the old she-fox,” “hole in a privy,” the “taschunt [vagina] a corpse’s,” “mummy truths.” (2) He reviews the futility of previous Western efforts – the aria of a son-of-abitch (“old sookin-sin”), fame that “didn’t outlast a night,” ten British pounds to feed the poor. (3) He notes the universal rule of money and (4) the peril of pure chicanery. (5) He notes the failure of wise leaders – Lincoln, Whitman – to destroy injustice, colonialism, with enlightenment. (6) He notes the efforts of “naïfs” to discover a universal language in music, or in mathematics, or in Esperanto or Volapuk. (7) He affirms evidence of the equality of persons – human pretenses to majesty dwarfed by the biological bond of the “solo espasmo sexual” or the moral bond of the golden rule – all destroyed in war over “a few acres of snow.” (8) He lists the small things that lead to graver consequences – “pin-pricks precede blitzkriegs,” “a cromwell’s pike” dishonors a skull, and (9) the end of seeming greatness in death and oblivion. He ends (10) with images of ultimate destruction – hurricane winds, “the walls come tumblin’ down,” the “seven trumpets” of Apocalypse, and (11) a desolation where “no mourners go crying,” civilization nothing but a “mountain of rodinsmashedstatues.”41

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The following transitional twenty lines sum up the destructive panorama of the poem using the conventional “ubi sunt” topos of mutability – “Where is the glory of the mestizo Pharaoh?” Included in Tolson’s litany is an equation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf with the work of ninth-century Muslim scholar Al-Jahiz, which argued “the superiority of the black race over the white” (footnote 567): neither extreme is acceptable. (Let it be recorded, however, that Al-Jahiz never advocated genocide.) But this section also turns emphatically to “Tomorrow” and the crucial final section of DO,42 its hymn to “Futurafrique.” This section, which Tate disparaged even while admitting it is written with “great energy,” reads with relative ease, with the clarity of enlightenment after the opacity that went before. There are twenty-six verse paragraphs, each an impossibly long-breathed single sentence: seven are marked with the phrase “The Futurafrique,” four with “The United Nations Limited,” three with “The Bula Matadi,” and three with “Le Premier des Noirs,” all summed up in nine marked “The Parliament of African Peoples.” The first four markers turn out to be the futuristic names of an automobile, a train, a ship, and an airplane. Geographically, the vision begins in Liberia, with references to place names, then widens to Africa as a whole, then encompasses the globe, with emphasis on American places. This hope placed in the United Nations (recently established in 1945) and W.E.B. DuBois’s future African Parliament maintains the radical prophecy of a world congress under American leadership depicted a century and a half earlier by Joel Barlow in the last book of The Columbiad. It is a millennial future of reason, cultural cooperation, and peace.43 Tolson’s language is no less allusive than before, but it is now wry and playful rather than intense. “Futurafrique” as the name of a car is funny and perhaps even mocks President Tubman’s weakness for lavish living. But as Tolson endows Monrovia with a non-existent automobile factory and a subway, he also sees an unlikely monument to Parsifal-Feirefiz – commemorating an episode in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s saga in which the Aryan grail seeker recognizes a black man as his brother. He equates a Tubman University, blooming with co-eds (a nod to women’s education), with truth-giving Mount Sinai. Medical advances are remembered in the footnotes to “70A” and “Swynnerton,” and even the ultra-hygienic “soapy” Waldorf-Astorias. The future will be “atom-fuelled.” Leaving behind “the bygone habitat of / mumbo-jumbo” (629–30), Africa will take its place beside the other

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continents, “the sunflower magnificence of the / Oriens,” “the snowlily” white Europa (612–15), the Auster and the Americus. Subsequent paragraphs expand upon these themes. The train, the United Nations Limited, “volts over” the yesterday of empire builders of all races, the Zulu Chaka, the Pharaoh Cheops, the British colonialists Stanley and Livingstone, the racially persecuted Seretse Khama.44 The “diesel-engined” Bula Matadi carries a cargo from Tel Aviv (in newly founded Israel), from Hiroshima (risen from the nuclear ashes), and even from the deep South of Picayune, Mississippi. Le Premier des Noirs – named after the black Haitian leader Toussaint L’Ouverture who claimed equality with the white Napoleon – flies over Monrovia’s “glass skyscrapers on / pavonine Cape Mesurado” and the now “iron cur-/tainless Kremlin” (using the phrase just put into currency by Churchill in 1946). The Parliament of African Peoples is, of course, intercontinental as well, with an emphatic American accent. Tolson reminds us of Bunker Hill, of Lincoln University’s Ashmun Institute (renamed “Ashmun International House”); he alludes to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and to Poetry magazine’s populist motto (paraphrased from Whitman) “To have great poets there must be great audiences too” (721–2); he affirms President Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (739). He decries the current red-baiting (“cicerones of the / witch hunt under the aegis of / Flag and Cross”) and upholds Marx (“unto each / according as any one has need”) (745–6). Communist and capitalist peacefully co-exist in the Cameroon People’s Republic and the United States of Outer Ubangi (753–5). He supplants the self-abasing elements of religion, both Christian (“the zymotic zombie / cult of God’s wounds”) and Muslim (“the fetid fetish Zu’lkadah”) with the optimistic “Kiowa anthem” translated “All is Well” (724–9). The closing lines wrap up Tolson’s Libretto with a flourish of echoes. Tolson’s unlikely vision in this poem, an optimistic American patriotism that rejects the deeply ingrained binary of race, is a moral and cultural as well as artistic achievement. If it is trans-racial, it is also wishfully post-racial, a nation where a spectrum of complexions is merely ornamental, a future Afmerica that fulfills Joel Barlow’s prediction of a place where darker races will evolve to “a fairer tint” while whites gain “a ruddier hue and deeper shade” (Columbiad 2.120ff). It has taken half a century for Tolson’s few readers to grasp. Timothy Dejong puts it in affective terms: Tolson’s poem offers an “unfashion-

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able hope,” he writes – hope that is not only “out of fashion” but “unable to be fashioned” (“Affect and Diaspora,” 124), underscoring the wishful thinking of his millennial fantasy. Libretto offers “an optimism that persists despite Tolson’s refusal to overlook or mitigate the past injustices borne by and in Liberia (and by extension, the African continent)” (111). And by extension in the American nation. His is not “the false ‘to be or not to be a Negro’” choice imposed on him by so many critics, both white and black. In Keith D. Leonard’s formulation: “Tolson’s art makes his complex formalism simultaneously an extension of an unacknowledged African past, a revision of the known Western past, and a prophecy of a quasi-socialist revolution, a unification of presumed opposites that produces the biggest, baddest African American self in African American poetry” (Fettered Genius 203).

12 “America, You Made Me Want to Be a Saint” Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl”

Ginsberg’s “Howl” is revered and reviled as the cultural icon of a movement, the event of an age, or (as he called it) an “elegy for the generation” (Ginsberg, Letters, 121). It has been talked about, smothered in the trappings of scholarship (much of it generated by Ginsberg himself), and even on occasion analyzed as a poem. It is fixed in the American canon. Ginsberg’s admirers see “Howl” as a sharp break from an older, more confining academicism. But Ginsberg was never – pace Norman Podhoretz and other detractors – anti-intellectual or even anti-academic. Marjorie Perloff, in an essay that I fault only for being too short, argues that “Howl” springs in a direct line from modernism and emphasizes its complexity of figurative language and its richness of irony and comedic detachment (24–43). In the present context, however, “Howl” presents itself as a dark underside to Melvin Tolson’s technologically driven Marxist utopia. Densely allusive and literary, it forms a bleak dystopian terminus to a long series of prophetic American progress poems. Ginsberg’s critics sometimes stress his Jewishness in relation to the prophetic voice he developed in his poetry. But in his “America,” he professes a desire to become “a saint.” This secular, politically subversive, homosexual Jew made an implausible candidate for sainthood; but his cry ties him, as he well understood, firmly back to the Protestant origins of New England with its dream of a community of saints working to realize God’s will on earth. Even his habits of speech reflect it: he refers to the Hebrew Bible as “the Old Testament” (Letters, 141); he describes “Howl” as an attempt to “justify,” using the vocabulary of Milton’s Puritan theology (Howl: Original Facsimile, xi). In Justin Quinn’s analysis, however, Ginsberg’s community of saints is

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a society of antinomians. “Howl” is the most prominent twentiethcentury example of Sacvan Bercovitch’s tradition of the jeremiad, or, as he labelled it, “anti-jeremiad.” Bercovitch, revising Perry Miller, laid the emphasis not on the writer’s denunciation of society’s sinful backsliding but on the “unshakable optimism” of the writer’s faith in “the inviolability of the colonial cause.”1 Ginsberg shifts the emphasis back. His Moloch-driven America is beyond redemption, as he withdraws into the sanctuary of the bughouse. If it is the Nekuia of the epic quest, as Catherine Davies suggests, it is a picture of America as Hades, not the millennial Holy City of Zion.2 However, as Paul Breslin observes, Ginsberg is not only the radical child of his time but its disciple as well (Psycho-Political Muse, 22). An ideal America still survives by implication in his lines, and there is lingering hope for the betterment of the nation. “Howl” is heir to the formative influences that generated the American progress poem. Most near at hand is the “Old Left” thinking of his parents, his mother Naomi’s communism, his father Louis’s more moderate socialism.3 This is the Depression-era thinking that had produced Benét’s “Ode to Walt Whitman,” Mike Gold’s “Ode to Walt Whitman,” and MacLeish’s “America Was Promises” – poems that Ginsberg, had he spoken of them, would surely have rejected as too soft. Ginsberg at home was steeped in this milieu, but he came to maturity just as American conservatives were rewriting the 1930s. Ginsberg looked farther back to more respectable ancestors, preferring to be named with Kit Smart rather than, say, Kenneth Fearing (Ginsberg, Selected Interviews, 20). His lifelong preoccupation with Blake is well known, as is his experience of the “auditory hallucination” of Blake’s voice (36–7). He does not tell us whether Blake’s accent was Broad Street or Brooklyn, but Blake’s presence haunts this entire American tradition as a kind of auditory hallucination. The poet of “America: A Prophecy” (1793), born of the same Dissenter stock that populated the New World, is audible in Joel Barlow, who personally befriended Blake’s patron William Hayley. Decades later, Walt Whitman was surprised to receive a letter from England from one Annie Gilchrist, widow of Blake’s first biographer Alexander Gilchrist. She had read Whitman’s poems and, recognizing a sympathetic soul, wrote to the American poet proposing marriage, sight unseen. Whitman courteously declined. Ginsberg in his exchange of letters with Richard Eberhart, one of the first sympathetic readers outside his own circle, insists that the

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point of “Howl” is not “destructive or negative.” It is instead – echoing Blake – about “our suppression of natural ecstasy (as in Whitman, Crane)” (ms 154). His liberation of “natural ecstasy” is in the first place erotic – a liberation of sexual, and particularly homosexual, expression. This expression is literal and orgasmic, but it is also erotic in the broader figurative sense, as it is in Blake and in Whitman. “The special meaning of the ‘Calamus’ cluster of Leaves of Grass,” remarked Whitman dryly in 1876, “mainly resides in its political significance.” As David S. Reynolds notes, Whitman’s notion was part of a more widely held view that “the health of the nation depended vitally on love between friends” (Whitman’s America, 401) or, in Whitman’s words, “the sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and south, east and west.”4 Ginsberg’s identification with the queer Whitman – “dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher” – is total.5 Both struggled to resolve the democratic paradox of the individual and the collective that Whitman sets at the very beginning of Leaves of Grass, the tension between the “simple separate person” and “the word En-Masse” (see 6–7). In Whitman’s era, when homosexuality was not a recognized category, expressions of male love were open and commonplace. But in the 1950s, when it was stigmatized and persecuted, when even the aclu refused explicit support (a policy not reversed until 1967) (Davies, Whitman’s Queer Children, 81), the formation of gay subcultures was a natural defence, as in the sociopolitical scene of the San Francisco Beats and the micropolitics of Frank O’Hara’s New York City Odes (1960).6 As Gregory Woods reminds us, Ginsberg’s courageous outing of his sexuality is not only a personal victory but a political challenge (Articulate Flesh, xx). A vital part of the political meaning of “Howl” lies here. Ginsberg identified as well with the queer poète maudit Hart Crane, whose spectral presence in “Howl,” not as strong as Blake’s or Whitman’s, is still palpable. Ginsberg seems to think of Crane as a splendid but tragic failure, both as an unfulfilled gay man and as a political poet of America. In his letters, he speaks of “Hart Crane at last moments of knowledge before he hit water” (Letters, 73), and “the shining pathos in inchoate awareness at the end of Crane’s Bridge” (61). Ginsberg, however, seems surprisingly oblivious to the link between Whitman and Crane that Allen Tate was so quick to point out: “The equivalent of Whitman in the economic and moral aspect of America in the last sixty years,” Tate lamented, “is the high-powered industrialism that you, no less than I, feel is a menace to the spiritual

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life of this country” (Unterecker, Voyager, 621). Whitman’s celebration of technology in “Passage to India” and the great New York Exposition of 1871, and Crane’s neo-futurist insistence on poetry of the machine, his sacramental exaltation of the engineering of Brooklyn Bridge, his mythic Whitman gaping in wonder at the aeronautics of Kitty Hawk, are strangely discordant with Ginsberg’s Moloch. Hart Crane, it is true, vigorously defended Whitman against Tate’s accusation: “[Since] you, like so many others, never seem to have read his Democratic Vistas and other of his statements sharply decrying the materialism, industrialism etc. of which you name him the guilty and hysterical spokesman, there isn’t much use in my tabulating the qualified, yet persistent reasons I have for my admiration of him” (Unterecker, Voyager, 623; Crane, Letters 1916–1932, 353–4). In Democratic Vistas, we do find Whitman’s tirades against American society: our “unprecedented materialistic advancement” is “canker’d, crude.” It is “saturated in corruption.” It threatens “to eat us up, like a cancer.” And yet, as Bercovitch notes, Whitman’s ideal America never contradicts the gildedage American reality that he sees: “The extreme business energy, and this almost maniacal appetite for wealth prevalent in the United States,” Whitman claims, “are parts of amelioration and progress.” “My theory includes riches, and the amplest products, power, activity, inventions, etc. Upon them, as upon substrata, I raise the edifice design’d in these Vistas” (Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 198–9). Ginsberg, like Crane, is blind to this element of the post-bellum Whitman. Before Ginsberg began forming ideas for “Howl,” he thought of his poetry as personal, lyrical, and only in the process of writing did he find he could be a political poet. “I never saw the possibility of political poetry before,” he wrote to his brother in August 1954, “but the international political situation seems to me to have at last palpably revealed its final necessary relation to moral or spiritual justice.” He saw an America “lost in a mad dream of plastic lampshades.” “There’s an obvious relation between the evils of competitive usury capitalism and the whole senseless self-righteous psychology that goes with it and the present fact of our being humbled and beat down by the rest of the world who are plain sick of us” (Letters, 99). The Second World War had entrenched a massive American military possessed of the atomic bomb. The international situation at the time was dominated by the French collapse at Dien Bien Phu in July 1954, and their quick withdrawal from colonial Indochina. The Korean War had been suspended in uneasy armistice exactly one year earlier, but a peacetime

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military draft continued. In June 1953, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed by the American government for passing secrets of the atomic bomb to the Soviets – an event that Ginsberg and his friends followed warily. Southeast Asia hovered in a political vacuum. President Eisenhower visited the region, was tempted to intervene militarily – but (despite mounting internal pressure from the military hierarchy) refused, for the time being. At home, the pathological bluster of Senator McCarthy was beginning to dissipate by 1954, but the Red Scare antedated McCarthy and outlived him. Harry S. Truman, formulating the Truman Doctrine of containment that set the tone for the Cold War in 1947, had “scared hell out of the American people,”7 and fears of Soviet-style communism lingered everywhere. Every airplane overhead seemed a potential Russian bomber, as schoolchildren dove under their desks for cover.8 Just as threatening was the “Lavender Scare” (Johnson, Lavender Scare), which equated homosexuality with political subversion. Jim Crow still gripped the South; the Supreme Court had just ruled in Brown v. the Board of Education, but nothing had yet happened. Ginsberg was absorbing the spontaneous prose of Jack Kerouac and seeking mentorship from William Carlos Williams back home in New Jersey. Current poetry struck him as “mealy-mouthed, meaningless, abstract, tight-assed, scared, academic, uninventive, attitudinized, afraid to show feeling” (Letters 127). If Whitman’s voice struck him as “a bit oratorical,” it was nonetheless “a healthy and very ancient voice that he had to speak in” (Interviews, 110) – ancient in that it derived from the Hebrew prophets who addressed their wisdom to a collective people or, as in Ginsberg’s first line, a “generation.” Whitman offered a way to speak as an individual citizen to a diseased American society. The three parts of “Howl” can be read against the present-past-future template of the progress poem. Part 1, which leaps like Crane’s bridge “from far Rockaway to Golden Gate,” deals with individuals in present-day New York and San Francisco, America’s western gateway to Asia. Part 3, the hymn of sympathy with Carl Solomon in Rockland, focuses on a single case and looks to an ambiguous future. Part 2, the denunciation of Moloch, looks backward to historical origins. It was sketched in October 1954, as Ginsberg in a peyote-induced hallucination conflated the Sir Francis Drake hotel building in San Francisco with the “cannibal dynamo” of Fritz Lang’s dystopian film Metropolis (1927) (Interviews, 46; Letters, 108–13). Moloch, who personifies the root causes of all social injustice, was a Canaanite god who demand-

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ed child sacrifice, a practice forbidden by Hebrew scripture. Ginsberg may have remembered him directly from Torah – “And thou shalt not let any of thy seed pass through the fire to Moloch” (Leviticus 18:21) – or from Milton’s Paradise Lost – “besmear’d with blood / Of human sacrifice, and parents tears, ... / Their children’s cries unheard that passed through fire / To his grim Idol” (1.392–6). To Paul Breslin, Moloch in Puritanical fashion embodies the demonic world, balanced after the fact by the angelic world of “Footnote to Howl” (“Origins,” 25). Moloch, the “sphynx of cement and aluminum” (79), embodies the puzzling, speechless power that demands ritual sacrifice of youth, whether “boys sobbing in armies” (80) or lives corrupted by usury capitalism. Moloch represents “the mechanical feelingless inhuman world we live in and accept” (Ginsberg, Letters, 132). Part 2 is the least satisfactory part of “Howl.” Maybe because I read it as a progress poem, I would like to see more historical awareness of the causes of social malaise. Certainly less exclamation. Moloch is too diffuse an allegory. As James Breslin asks, “what, after all the cathartic frenzy, is Moloch supposed to represent?” (“Origins,” 27). He is as diffuse an abstraction as the deadly sin of Avarice, or “late capitalism.” He is not developed sufficiently even to allegorize the descent of democracy into oligarchy prophesied in Plato’s Republic. Ginsberg’s 1986 notes identify him not only as the god of Canaanite myth but also as Blake’s Urizen – an altogether different mythology – throwing in Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message” after the fact (Howl, 139). But McLuhan’s phrase, introduced in Understanding Media (1964), looks forward to a world dominated by electronics – radio, TV, film, even computer, while “Howl” looks wholly backward to a mechanized world – “Moloch whose mind is pure machinery!” (83).9 Ginsberg is still fixated on the same industrial mechanisms, the dark Satanic mills that had enthralled Crane and Whitman and infuriated Tate, just as they had affected his own socialist father Louis Ginsberg, who both admired and denounced them in his own “Ode to Machines.” Part 1 is the great achievement of “Howl.” It is sometimes printed by itself, though its meaning is grossly altered thereby. Interest in “Howl” would be less now were it not for the vitality and experiential density of its language – a quality often denied by nay-sayers and rarely demonstrated by enthusiasts, and a quality that Ginsberg never, I think, subsequently matched. Marjorie Perloff is among the few who have managed to “shift the discourse from the biographical-cultural preoccupation, which continues to dominate most studies of Gins-

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berg’s work, to a close look at the actual texture of ‘Howl’” (“Lost Battalion,” 32). She finds a poem inhabited by “mythic, rather than everyday” creatures, expressed through “a consistent use of tropes of excess – catachresis, oxymoron, transferred epithet – as well as rhetorical figures of incongruity” (33). In other words, “Howl” is written not carelessly but in an achieved poetic rhetoric of its own. Each of its tropes enfolds a narrative of social critique that must be unpacked. The celebrated “hydrogen jukebox” is an elliptical metaphor with a streak of synaesthesia that fixes the pop music fortissimo of the young as a retaliation against anxieties about the Bomb, with a look askance at mechanical means of reproduction. Neal Cassady, who hyperbolically “sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset,” is the superhero of sexual freedom in a world where even straight sex is unmentionable or scandalous. Throwing “potato salad at ccny lecturers on Dadaism” is an enacted parable exposing the hypocrisy of academe, an experiential act of defiance reduced to a bit of processed information. There is subtle allusion: the reference to the “El” of urban transit in line 5 is also a Hebrew name for God. There is witty play with the vernacular: the “heavenly connection” is both theophany and illegal drug deal. The pathos of the multiple narratives is mingled with a rich vein of humour. Ginsberg has, as well, a fine natural ear – he grew up not only with his mother’s paranoid schizophrenia but his father’s household recitations of Milton (Miles, Ginsberg, xx). Ginsberg confessed to a juvenile thrill in Poe’s “The Bells” (Interviews, 245) and being “all hung up on cats like Wyatt, Surrey and Donne” (Kramer, Ginsberg, 110). Although his own endless talk about “breath” is a bore, useless as prosody, it works in “Howl” only because his long lines hyperventilate; exceeding the physical human breath; mimetic of the hyper-mania of the work itself; they burst the bonds even of the Whitmanic free-verse line. “Howl” is popularly read as a celebration of free-wheeling sex, drugs, and even madness. Fortunately, it is not so simple. The politics of the poem is oppositional, but its binaries are not absolute. The sex, and particularly the gay sex, was overt enough by mid-fifties standards to invite prosecution for obscenity, but Ginsberg’s vocabulary for the gay male – “loveboys,” “fairies” – is far more negative than, say, Frank O’Hara’s. As Edmund White wrote in his introduction to Ginsberg’s Interviews, “He did more than anyone else of his generation to overcome his gay self-hatred and to take a pro-gay militant stand” (xvii). The self-hatred is guarded in the poetry, but even apart from the noto-

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riously masochistic self-abnegation in the “Elegies to Neal Cassady” (1968), undeniable: “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy.” In these days of sexual knowingness, the shock value of this line must be recovered historically. In 1955, D.H. Lawrence’s overtly heterosexual Lady Chatterley’s Lover was still too explicit for the US postal service, and psychiatrists considered homosexuality an illness to be cured. The line was “crucial” to Ginsberg in the composition of “Howl” because the scream was a scream “with joy.” Even now that diction generates a slight paradoxical frisson. In his notes, he calls this line “the iconoclastic ‘shocker’ of the poem” because it challenges a stereotype; but he goes on to confess that, having written it, he was liberated from worrying about what “would reach the eyes of his family” (126). It is Ginsberg’s coming out. Not for nothing was Whitman his “courage teacher.” As he remarked rather sententiously to Eberhart, “Without self-acceptance there can be no acceptance of other souls” (Letters, 138). The treatment of drugs in “Howl” is also double-edged. We read about “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo,” but these same hipsters are “poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed ... smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats” (3–4). While some may have “studied Plotinus Poe St. John of the Cross telepathy and bop kabbalah,” most were less ambitious. There is relatively little in the poem about opening the doors of perception, compared with the grim “fell out of the subway window” (William Cannestra) or “disappeared into the volcanoes of Mexico” (Malcolm Lowry). His own experimenting with drugs seems to have begun as a dutiful effort of expanding consciousness attempting to replicate his Blake hallucination, or attempting to break down his own identity and seek “a more direct contact with primate sensation, nature” (Miles, Ginsberg, 325). This was his ambition when writing “Howl.” By 1963, after trying heroin, mescaline, peyote, lsd, psilosybin, and ayahuasca, “he encountered an inhuman serpent monster, a vision of death, and it got so that if he took drugs he would start vomiting with anxiety” (325). He came to the conclusion that he had “misunderstood Blake, and that Blake’s ‘Human form divine’ meant living completely living in the human form” (326). Ginsberg, his renunciation of drugs recorded in “The Change,” seems to have escaped more serious addiction, but he experienced the feelings of liberty and elation reported by many addicts in early recovery.

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Madness in the poem, too, is sometimes given a simple positive construction. Ginsberg seems to be foretelling the theories of R.D. Laing, the anti-psychiatrist whose Politics of Experience (1967) argues that mental illness is an individual’s method of coping with a society gone bonkers.10 But the thread was most likely picked up from Antonin Artaud via Carl Solomon. Artaud held that “every lunatic ... is a person of superior lucidity whose insights society thinks disturbing to it,” yet all his “rebellion against rebellion” leads him only to “one of the many large nuthouses” being built everywhere (Howl: Original Facsimile, 118). Ginsberg knew the terrors of actual insanity close at hand – he records them unforgettably in “Kaddish” – and he never denied its biological reality or the efficacy of medications. Justin Quinn sees this as the fundamental issue in Ginsberg’s work, relating it to the underlying antinomian strain in American experience from Puritan times: Naomi’s madness, he argues, forces Ginsberg to confront the question of “how to maintain his own ‘mystical vision’ when she seems [to] present a grotesque mirror-image of it.” “Kaddish,” he writes, “acknowledges the challenge to an aesthetic like his own that is fundamental in its social critique. No other Beat writer acknowledged and explored this difficulty so profoundly” (American Errancy, 81–2). Ginsberg, having signed the papers for Naomi’s lobotomy, never lost his sense of guilt. Madness in the poem may reflect a “neurotic culture” (Letters, 12), but it does not cease to be madness. As Bercovitch says of Melville, witnessing the “cultural schizophrenia” that he saw all round him, he could neither believe in America nor rest content in his disbelief (Jeremiad, 191). As Ginsberg wrote to Richard Eberhart, the poem says in effect “I am still your amigo tho you are in trouble and think yourself in a void” (Howl: Original Facsimile, 152; Ginsberg, Letters, 132). My emphasis on the elements of gay self-hatred, the negative effects of drugs, and the hellish insanity in “Howl” risks making Ginsberg sound like a petit bourgeois moralist. Indeed there is that streak in him. But, as James Breslin insists, “Howl” is not the work of an angry young man. Ginsberg was nearly thirty when he wrote the poem: he did not float into San Francisco “on a magic carpet, dressed in long robes, with flowing hair, hand cymbals and a ‘San Francisco Poetry Renaissance’ banner,” but in a business suit looking for a job in – of all things – market research (“Origins,” 85). He saw himself as “a fair-haired boy in academic Columbia” (Letters, 131). The difference is that both Ginsberg and the Ginsberg persona have full personal knowledge of the

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mental hells he describes – madness, bad trips, the sexual abjection, all the self-destructive behaviours – and he does not judge them or condemn them. The individuals who populate his poem, having given up the maniacal appetite for “the heterosexual dollar,” feel themselves as rejects and failures, and he demands to know why. They seek ecstasies that find “no social form organization frame of reference or rapport or validation from the outside” (Letters, 131), ecstasies sexual or spiritual or both, and he demands to know why not. More than anything else, “Howl” is a protest against the tyranny of the majority, a besetting sin of democratic governance. Ginsberg’s poem sees through the paradox of American liberty, the pressure of majority rule, and understands that the conforming majority must suffer the lunatic philosophies of both tyranny and anarchy. Ginsberg is typically seen as the leftist critic of McCarthyist Cold War America, but he was also driven out of communist Cuba and Czechoslovakia as a dangerous undesirable. The teaching of “Howl” is the insight of Blake, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” which was put into sociological theory by Emile Durkheim: laws, in order to be known, must be broken. Thus crime is necessary. Social deviance is the mother of innovation. “Much Madness is divinest Sense,” as Emily Dickinson put it; but she added a warning: “’Tis the Majority / In this, as all, prevail.” In a democratic system, the tyranny of the majority is the greatest danger: “Assent – and you are sane – / Demur – you’re straightway dangerous – / And handled with a Chain.” The chain as a way of dealing with mental aberration was no literary figure but a literal possibility for Dickinson and Ginsberg both. On the other hand, the grotesque comedy of “Howl” is paradoxically a creator of community. Laughter is an affirmation of the normative and an acknowledgment of the transgressive. The subculture of “Howl,” the bard himself included, is obliged to see its own absurdity. I was surprised to read Ginsberg’s reply to Kenneth Koch, who asked him about the ideal life for a poet: “Retiring from the world,” he said, “living in a mountain hut, practicing certain special meditation exercises half the day, and composing epics as the sun sets” (Diggory, “Urban Pastoral,” 103). The gregarious, charismatic Ginsberg seems as unlikely to be a hermit as a saint, but one way of coping with a crazy world is to withdraw from it. Somewhere in the background of all the efforts to redefine the individual outside the narrow social role prescribed for it lies the inner serenity of mens sana in corpore sano. That is the meaning of Rockland in Part 3 of “Howl.” The asylum is just that, a safe retreat,

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and the poet’s repeated “I’m with you in Rockland” is, at least in part, a promise of temporary security: “ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you’re really in the total animal soup of time” (72). One may think of the mental institution as a hostile place where hopeless cases are permanently warehoused, and psychiatric treatment is an instrument of institutional sadism. This is the cliché of anti-psychiatry that Mark Doty assumes when he writes of “the ferocious ‘normalizing’ force of the mental hospital ... with its policing of consciousness, its brutal intervention into unacceptable states of mind” (“Human Seraphim,” 16). But one may also think of Rockland as a mental retreat – “like a hotel,” “a very convenient monastery” (Ginsberg, Interviews, 64–5) – where “it’s safer in hospital than outside” (Howl: Original Facsimile, 132). Withdrawal is a sort of Thoreauvian idyll where the individual self is healed and strengthened.11 Ginsberg the hermit must, however, like the compassionate Buddha, return. Ginsberg’s last major poem is his apocalyptic “Plutonian Ode” (1978). It signals its importance by the generic designation “ode,” which he had not used since the juvenile poems of Empty Mirror (1947–52). In 1975, Ginsberg together with poet W.S. Merwin had toured the Rockwell Corporation near Boulder, Colorado, maker of nuclear triggers for hydrogen bombs. In June 1978 he wrote his poem after “one of his typical all-night writing marathon[s],” and then, next day, he and Peter Orlovsky and others (including journalist Daniel Ellsberg) were arrested “as they sat meditating on the railroad tracks, blocking the passage of a trainload of nuclear waste” (Miles, Ginsberg, 425; Ginsberg, Letters, 531–2). The poem is unapologetically didactic, printed in the Collected Poems with lines numbered, twenty-two footnotes, and a photograph of the demonstrators. It is cast like “Howl” in three sections: present, past, and future. It mixes factual information with a range of mythologies, commonplace and esoteric, its language freighted with allusion but lacking the figurative density of “Howl.” The rhetoric of Part 1 is first person in a kind of exorcism – “I manifest your Baptismal Word” – and eventually assumes the mode of curse: Destroyer of lying Scientists! Devourer of covetous Generals! Incinerator of Armies & Melter of Wars! Judgment of judgments. Divine Wind over vengeful nations. Molester of Presidents. Death-Scandal of Capital politics! Ah civilizations stupidly industrious! Canker-Hex on multitudes learned or illiterate!

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The poem identifies “Doctor Seaborg” – Glenn T. Seaborg (1912– 99) – as its principal villain, the Nobel-laureate scientist responsible for the synthesis and investigation of many transuranian elements, including plutonium. We are given terrifying statistics: “Ten pounds of Plutonium scattered throughout the earth is calculated sufficient to kill 4 billion people.” “300 tons of Plutonium, estimate circa 1978 of the amount produced for American bombs.” (I have not attempted to verify Ginsberg’s numbers.) We are given specifics of the militaryindustrial complex: plutonium plants “in Pantex, Texas, and Burlington, Iowa, managed by Mason & Hanger-Silex Mason Co., Inc.” On the mythic level, Ginsberg draws on the chthonic resonances of “plutonium” as the name of the element: there are references not only to Lord of Hades and Persephone but to Eleusis, the Furies, Nemesis, and “black sheep throats cut” (Odyssey 11 via Pound’s Canto 1). These are intermingled with astrological signs of the zodiac – “the Bull,” “Twins.” There are Judaeo-Christian references to “Baptismal Word” and Ecclesiastes (“Is there a new thing under the Sun?” “I chant your absolute Vanity”). Sophia, in Proverbs 8 said to be the first of Yahweh’s creations, provides a link between Jewish scripture and the gnostic and esoteric traditions that interested Ginsberg. The Great Year in line 11 goes back to his undergraduate study of Yeats, which Gregory Corso pointed out is related to the half-life of plutonium. Line 16, “Sabaot, Jehova, Astapheus, Adonaeus, Elohim, Iao, Ialdabaoth, Aeon from Aeon born ignorant in an Abyss of Light” refers, we are told, to “archons of successive aeons born of Sophia’s thought, according to Ophitic and Barbelo-Gnostic myths” (suggesting that he had been studying Hans Jonas and perhaps the Nag Hamadi revelations). Such allusiveness, however mixed and ill-digested, lends gravity, even an air of Miltonic learning, to Ginsberg’s language – though oddly there is no reference to Faust or the Dantean Ulysses, damned for violating the allowable limits of human knowledge. Part 2 of the poem turns to third person, as “the Bard surveys Plutonian history from midnight lit with Mercury Vapor streetlamps.” Part 3 turns to the future in second-person apostrophe, “O Poets and Orators to come, you father Whitman as I join your side, you Congress and American people.” The grave language of the “Plutonian Ode” lacks the excitement of Part 1 of “Howl,” but the gravity it retains is the wisdom of a revered elder statesman, now in 1978 a figure of celebrity. Philip Glass, a composer who, like Ginsberg, has roots in

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both pop culture and the avant garde, provided “Plutonian Ode” with symphonic music in 2002. Ginsberg, probably America’s most widely read poet during his lifetime, had attained the status of national hero and patriot – a status often given poets in other languages but so very rarely to writers in English. Ginsberg had become a true American populist poet, in the rather ill-sorted line that includes Sigourney, Longfellow, Frost, and the poet he most resembles technically, Sandburg, and he continued to deploy his celebrity in support of the national ethos as he understood it. He was “representative” in the paradoxical sense that, as Paul Breslin tells us, he participated to some degree in nearly all the advanced literary movements of his day, yet belonged to none of them entirely (“Origins,” 22). He was “radical” in the sense described by Bercovitch: “to be American for our classic writers was by definition to be radical – to turn against the past, to defy the status quo and become an agent of change” (Jeremiad, 203). Ginsberg’s radical, antinomian, laissez-faire individualism retained its populist appeal throughout his career because it derives from the centre, not from the margins, of American tradition. Looking back, I no longer read “Howl” in the City Lights edition, slim enough to slip into one’s back pocket. Young readers are now more likely to encounter it in a textbook. And, in his bid to be regarded as a major poet, Ginsberg has left us with a mammoth Collected Poems, organized chronologically, complete with scholarly apparatus – indices of titles and first lines, bibliographic information, footnotes, and fully reprinted introductions to individual volumes. “Howl” and its “Footnote” fill only nine of its more than seven hundred pages. If that is not enough, Ginsberg saw through press an oversize coffee-table book presenting the genetic typescripts of his major poem, multiple revisions (so much for spontaneity!), detailed annotations, illustrations, sources, an account of the obscenity proceedings – all carefully packaged in the identical format of the published manuscript of T.S. Eliot’s “Waste Land” that had appeared just twelve years earlier. The volume also supplies Carl Solomon’s own wistful reflections on the unwanted fame thrust upon him by Ginsberg’s appropriation of his name and his private experience. Solomon corrects factual “errors” in the poem. Neither he nor the poet was ever in Rockland (143); they met as patients in the New York Psychiatric Institute. He did not throw potato salad at ccny lecturers on Dadaism; they were lecturing on

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Mallarmé (131). We are now obliged to see “Howl” by hindsight, in the hands of the poet clothed in a business suit, no longer naked, and mocked for it mercilessly by Time Magazine (Henry, “New York,” 10–11). This is Ginsberg the successful careerist, the celebrity, famous for being famous more than for being read, tireless in his public appearances, clean living (more or less) since his renunciation of drugs, personally rearranging his own books to advantage in bookstores, and giving his brother inside tips on investment in the art market. “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large – I contain multitudes.” Ginsberg’s achievement, however, in these two major poems, is to force American readers to face an unacceptable outcome for their historical destiny. Since the beginning, as we have seen repeatedly, Americans have placed their faith, both religious and political, in progress. Americans have no imaginative template for regress. It cannot happen. In “Howl” and “Plutonian Ode,” Ginsberg diagnoses two versions of the terminal illness of America, one prolonged and lingering, the other quick, both emerging from deep within the vital organism of the nation.

From the beginning of this project, I planned to end with Ginsberg, a fitting counter-blast to all that early patriotic optimism in Freneau and Whitman. But life goes on. The ode continued to be largely ignored by mainstream poets but popular with bardic outsiders like Michael McClure and John Weiners. In 1960, Frank O’Hara published his lifeaffirming volume of Odes as a fine art book, with illustrations by Mike Goldberg. Paul Carroll’s Odes appeared in 1969. I might have included Frank McGrath’s fine Korean War poem, “Ode for the American Dead in Asia” (1972), or James Wright’s “Centenary Ode: Inscribed to Little Crow, Leader of the Sioux Rebellion in Minnesota, 1862” (1971), or Adrienne Rich’s consummate achievement in the greater romantic lyric, “Transcendental Etude” (1978). American poets have taken up political themes more readily in recent years than they did during the great debate between Levertov and Duncan – whose “Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar” (1960) is another postwar political ode that returns us straight to the origins of the genre. The American poet is probably destined forever to speak more easily as a unique self than as a citizen. But poetry must be free to encompass both voices if it hopes to embrace the extensive totality of human experience.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1 Bernd Engler’s phrase. Engler is my only predecessor in this field: Die amerikanische Ode, and “From Providential to Secular Rhetoric: Fourth of July Poetry, 1776–1876,” 85–111. 2 Whitley, American Bards, 189. See also Erkkila, “Revolution in the Renaissance,” 17–32. My approach to reclamation has been narrower, except in chapter 6. 3 Native Americans are usually recognized in the historical progress poems, but rarely in the political odes. They are imagined only in past tense, and as Max Cavitch notes, American Elegy, 111, antebellum elegists who treat them find both “a source of self-recrimination” and “the possibility of compensation for losses.” That is, elegies simultaneously lament the disappearance of the Native and assuage the poet-speaker’s guilt. 4 Definitions begin with classical origins, which set up numerous contradictions – Pindar, Sappho, the Greek dramatists, Anacreon, Horace – followed by English variants identified with Cowley’s pseudopindarics and the romantic poets. Here, only one “Horatian” ode, Richard Henry Stoddard’s on Lincoln, makes a brief appearance in chapter 4. The true Pindaric form, rare enough in British poetry, is almost non-existent in American. “The National Ode,” Bayard Taylor’s centennial poem for 4 July 1776, is an example. 5 Compare Rajan, “Romanticism and the Death of Lyric Consciousness,” 206. 6 Tucker, Epic, 4. See Lukácz, Theory of the Novel (trans. Anna Bostock); and Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” (1935), in Dialogic Imagination, 3–40. A parallel is found in Van Wyck Brooks’s The Opinions of Oliver Allston (1941), which sees all modernism as derived from Mallarmé and the art for art’s sake movement, thus trivial when set beside, say, Tolstoy. For a needed argu-

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ment against the marginalization of poetry by Americanist cultural criticism, see Cavitch, American Elegy, 84 and passim. Jackson, “Poet as Poetess,” 57. Jackson’s argument, given the sui generis nature of Dickinson’s writing, raises the question whether hard cases make bad laws. Note Jonathan Culler’s objection that Jackson “does not tell us how she thinks we should treat Dickinson’s verse if we do not approach it as lyric; whereas I think that a critical history of lyricization should lead us to a more capacious understanding of the lyric tradition that is not restricted either to the idea of the decontextualized expression of subjectivity or ... the model of the dramatic monologue.” See Culler, “Lyric, History, and Genre,” 67. Many critics, including Jackson, take it back to John Stuart Mill, who argued that the purpose of poetry is to express feelings and, thus, limited poetry to passive emotion. See his “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties” (1833). Poetry, he says, has as its sole object “to act upon the emotions” (345); it “is the natural fruit of solitude and meditation; eloquence, of intercourse with the world. The persons who have most feeling of their own, if intellectual culture have given them a language in which to express it, have the highest faculty of poetry (349). The purview of poetry is thus private feeling, a discovery Mill made during the mental crisis he famously describes in his Autobiography, when he cured his anxiety by reading Wordsworth. Mill the Utilitarian thus rescues poetry by finding a therapeutic use for it. This process, as Jackson also points out (9), is tied to nineteenth-century print conventions for poetry. It was given a major boost by Poe’s valorization of the short poem in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and “The Poetic Principle” (1850). Then Walter Pater, on the other side of the Atlantic, declared that “lyrical poetry, precisely because in it we are least able to detach the matter from the form without a deduction of something from that matter itself, is, at least artistically, the highest and most complete form of poetry,” and that it succeeds best with “a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding” (Renaissance, “School of Giorgione,” 131). I have been unable to find any linkage between Poe and Pater. See also Harrington’s comments on public and private as “categories of understanding that are constructed historically” (Poetry nd the Public, 11; and Blasing, Lyric Poetry, passim). Bernstein, Tale of the Tribe, 4–5. Compare Tate: “There is probably nothing wrong with art for art’s sake, if we take the phrase seriously, and not take it to mean the kind of poetry written in England forty years ago” (Essays, 595). Johnson takes an even darker view, seeing in Mallarmé “the uselessness, the

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impossibility, of writing poetry, which, for Mallarmé, would be equivalent to the uselessness of living his life.” Such nihilism parallels the “solipsism” that Tate claims his ode is about (Idea of Lyric, 10; and chapter 7 below) and possibly Millay’s “Ode to Silence” as well. Dahlhaus, Idea of Absolute Music; and Martin, Rise and Fall of Meter. Tucker, “Dramatic Monologue,” 144–56. Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, 94. As Bernstein points out (Tale of the Tribe, 52), Pound was politicizing 1920s poetry well before the Auden generation politicized the 1930s. Cohen goes to extremes: for example, his assertion that “in the nineteenth century, poetry is not a genre [Cohen’s emphasis]” (Social Lives of Poems, 11). He immediately backtracks, explaining that the century certainly understood “poetry” to be “something distinct from other forms of writing.” He tries again: the abstraction “poetry,” he says, “has no meaningful affiliation with any nineteenth-century object.” But he backtracks: poems “did have clear, legible relations to specific genres, formats, media, modes of circulation ..., and nineteenth-century readers knew how to read these relations in ways that twentieth-century readers did not.” Puzzled, I then discover that “magazine verse” took on meaning “through its location in the magazine,” and “this force cannot be isolated or read out of any poem’s words alone” (my emphasis). Cohen’s animus finally reveals itself to be the bogey, still in 2015, of the hypostatized New Critical autotelic poem. Compare Eagleton: “almost all major literary theorists engage in scrupulously close reading,” citing Bakhtin, Adorno, Derrida, Kristeva, and Cixous, among others (How to Read a Poem, 2). Tate’s poem “False Nightmare.” See Adams, Poetic Designs. CHAPTER ONE

1 On the basis of the commencement program, Smeall believes that Brackenridge recited only his own poem. On the other hand, Freneau published his poem as “Being part of a Dialogue pronounced on a public occasion.” 2 My page references for convenience are given for both versions. Wertheimer also refers to the “1771 text,” but, as Smeall demonstrates, the earliest printed text is 1772. 3 I pursue this relationship in chapter 2. Silverman (Cultural History, 229) rightly notices the “progress poem” as the genre of the “rising glory” poems. 4 This last line prophesying “empire” and developing the “rising glory” metaphor was added in 1795. Smeall describes Acasto’s words as “hesitant, melancholy” – “less a vision than a prayer for vision” (275).

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5 Marsh, Philip Freneau, 33–4, emphasizes Freneau’s early conversion to deism, but my point is the persisting attraction to both beliefs. 6 This last line was added in 1809. On early theories of Indian origins, see Huddleston, Origins of the American Indians; and Berkhofer, White Man’s Indian. Much of the literature on Freneau focuses on his Native American themes. Besides Wertheimer, see Cavitch, American Elegy, 72–9. 7 My text of the 1772 collaborative poem is taken from Pattee’s century-old edition as emended by Smeall, 1:49–84. 8 The lines on Braddock are presumably by Brackenridge; but Freneau may here be excising his own lines. For a British reflection on the loss of the colonies, see Davis, “Poem That Ate America,” 125–49. 9 Parini and Miller, eds. Supplements include The Last Poems of Philip Freneau and The Newspaper Verse of Philip Freneau. The prolific, topical, frequently pseudonymous Freneau presents formidable editorial problems, but a new edition is desperately needed. CHAPTER T WO

1 The genre was identified in 1920 by Griffith, who lists ninety-four titles. An additional thirty-four were added by Aubin in 1934, and others by Swayne in 1936. Crider adds another sixty. Crider’s methodology may be compared with the new “abundance model” described in my introduction, page 4. 2 Crider (122–45) builds on Aubrey Williams’s seminal discussion of the “medieval and Renaissance idea of translatio studii, the idea of transplantation from age to age and from country to country of cultural treasure” (120). His summary focuses on the concept of civis from the Goths to the Britons, paralleled by the enduring idea of Rome as urbs aeterna from Virgil to Augustine to medieval Europe. Biblically, a source is traced to the allegory of the Four Kingdoms in Daniel (a topic that engaged Anne Bradstreet at some length). Politically, it takes up the concept of “mixed government” in which “the one, the few, and the many would act as effective checks on one another” (143, citing James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, 1656). Poetically, “sunlight imagery became a standard accouterment of the historical progress piece in regard to the rise in the East and the westward movement of the arts and sciences” (251) – hence the “rising glory” motif. Tucker keeps this concept active in his Epic. 3 The true date is decidedly earlier, in the early or mid-seventeenth century. As J.B. Bury declared, “it was in the atmosphere of the Cartesian spirit that a theory of Progress was to take shape” (Idea of Progress, 65). 4 See Buxton, “Shelley”; and Levine, “Eighteenth-Century Jeremiad.”

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5 Bercovitch contrasts the European “vertical” model of “class harmony” with the New England “road into the future” (Rites, 34). 6 Silverman, Colonial American Poetry, 420–1. In a footnote, Silverman mistakenly describes John Trumbull’s “Prospect of the Future Glory of America” as the “first articulation of the theme in verse,” but prefers the BrackenridgeFreneau poem as more successful. The comment is a rare acknowledgment of Freneau’s aesthetic quality, but see Robert Pinsky’s acute appreciation in “American Poetry and American Life.” 7 Pinsky, “American Poetry,” 10. Freneau, for his part, condemns Dwight indirectly in his poem “The Rising Empire” (1795): “Bards of huge fame in every hamlet rise, / Each (in idea) of Virgilian size.” 8 Edwards, “Thoughts on the Revival of Religion in New England.” Quoted in Brum, American Thought, 89. 9 Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 144–5. The footnote cites Rush Welter (1820–60). Compare Noble, Eternal Adam. 10 According to White, Anne Bradstreet, 166, the final couplet was omitted from the second printing published posthumously in 1678: “After the restoration of the monarchy, extreme penalties were inflicted on the Regicides and other Puritan leaders ... Bradstreet probably thought it best to delete so vindictive a wish from her comments on the Civil War itself.” 11 White, Anne Bradstreet, 170–1, attributes this teaching to John Cotton, who was on friendly terms with the Bradstreets, but it was a widely held Puritan doctrine. 12 Crider’s appendix lists earlier works, including John Donne’s “Love’s Progress” (Elegy 18, written in the 1590s) and his “Progress of the Soul” (dated 1601), but sets them aside. 13 My discussion is indebted here to Tucker, Epic, 21–2. 14 For excellent detailed discussion, see Wertheimer, Imagined Empires. 15 As McWilliams notices, he also foretells a Panama Canal, airplanes, submarines, a universal language, and a system of international commerce as “man’s only deterrent to global war” (“Early Republic,” 161). Comte de Volney in the same year, 1787, envisions a similar assembly of nations to examine and resolve world conflicts: “A scene of a new and astonishing nature then opened to my view. All that the earth contains of people and of nations; men of every race and of every region, converging from their various climates, seemed to assemble in one allotted place; where, forming an immense congress, distinguished in groups by the vast variety of their dresses, features, and complexion, the numberless multitude presented a most unusual and affecting sight” (Ruins of Empires, chap. 19). Barlow’s earliest poem, “The Prospect of Peace,” written for the Yale commencement of 1778,

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already articulates a millennial vision of the future. Howard, Connecticut Wits, 314–18, discusses Volney’s contribution to Barlow’s revisions in The Columbiad. Phillips, Epic in American Culture, 34, notes that the paper and type were of American manufacture and that spelling incorporated reforms suggested by his Yale classmate Noah Webster. Yet the democratically minded Barlow himself was embarrassed by the material book as an expensive luxury object. When Barlow allows that had Virgil written it “one or two centuries earlier than he did, his readers would have glowed with enthusiasm,” he is probably thinking of the analogy with Dwight’s Conquest of Canaan (1785), with its mythos of providential conquest. Buel, Joel Barlow, 266. There is no evidence that Barlow and Blake ever met, but another common bond with Hayley was through their mutual friend Thomas Paine. In December 1793, when Paine was arrested in Paris during a purge by Robespierre, he left the manuscript of The Age of Reason with Barlow to see through publication. See Buel, Joel Barlow, 179–80; and Leary, “Joel Barlow and William Hayley.” Paine, as is well known, was acquainted with Whitman’s father, and both Whitmans, senior and junior, admired him unreservedly. Bryant, Letter to John Howard Bryant, 24 January 1868, Letters, 5:248. Tucker, Epic, 347, calls attention to similarities between the “elephantiasis” of Philip Bailey’s Festus, which quintupled its size in successive editions from 1839 to 1901; Victor Hugo’s La Légende des Siècles (1859–83); and Whitman’s magnum opus. This epic-but-not-epic argument finds its reductio ad absurdum in Miller, The American Quest for a Supreme Fiction, which argues that Whitman created the American epic by not conforming to epic expectations of form, action, character, setting, subject, and theme. See chapter 3. The classic analysis is Golden, “Passage to Less Than India.” See Erkkila, Whitman, 37–8: “Like Herman Melville in his more optimistic moments, Whitman wrote from an essentially eighteenth-century view of commerce in which, as Joel Barlow said in The Vision of Columbus, ‘the spirit of commerce is happily calculated ... to open an amicable intercourse between all countries, to soften the horrors of war, to enlarge the field of science and speculation, and to assimilate the manners, feelings, and languages of all nations.’” On Whitman’s immediate political context, see Reynolds, “Politics and Poetry.” Harold Aspiz, in Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial Experience, 101. Neither Libertad nor the parenthetical asides to the Mother appear in the earlier versions, “Poem of Many in One” (1856) and “Chants Democratic”

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(1860). The poem is probably the most heavily revised of all Whitman’s poems. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America, 500, notes that popular Darwinism included an expectation, like Emerson’s, that weaker races would eventually become extinct through the intermarriage of races. See his comment on “ethnologist.” Compare Killingsworth, Whitman, 77. I have wondered whether Whitman’s redwood is possibly related to the speaking tree in the Old English “Dream of the Rood.” Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial Experience, 183, quoting Wertheimer, Imagined Empires 162; and Eperjesi, Imperialist Imaginary, 52. See Westover, “Empire and America,” 130. Crane, Hart Crane and Yvor Winters, 145. John Unterecker, Crane’s biographer, says, “so far as I can discover, Crane had read almost nothing of Emerson.” See Piculin, “Critics,” 191. Kramer, Hart Crane’s “The Bridge,” xiv and 59–69. I once conducted a casual survey of Crane’s reading mentioned in his letters. In five months, between December 1919 and May 1920, he mentions Pound’s Pavanes and Divagations, Eliot, Maupassant, Stevens, Barrie’s Daisy Ashford, Twain’s 1601, Waldo Frank’s Our America, Masters, Catullus (translated by Edgar Saltus), Maugham’s The Moon and Sixpence, Saltus’s Imperial Purple and a play called Heliogabalus, Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, Sherwood Anderson, Kenneth Burke, Rabelais, Villon, Apuleius, Marianne Moore, Williams, Vildrac (translated by Bynner), Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Stendahl’s Charterhouse of Parma, Paul Gaugin’s Noa Noa, Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, and Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, plus a mass of little magazines – Little Review, the Modernist, Smart Set, Dial, the Liberator, the Pagan, the Plowshare, and the Freeman. True, Crane did read Spengler (at Tate’s insistence), Whitehead, and a few other non-literary writers; but this list, I think, represents his steady diet. See Slate, “William Carlos Williams.” Albert Gelpi places the problem in the incompatibility of Crane’s symboliste poetics with the democratic robustness of Whitman (Coherent Splendor, 383 et seq.). Tate’s review hints at the problem: “Mr. Crane is a myth maker, and in an age favorable to myths he could have written a mythical poem in the act of writing an historical one” (Poetry Reviews, 102). Blackmur, Language as Gesture, quoted in Westover, “Empire and America,” 129. For Tate too, The Bridge is “a collection of lyrics” (Poetry Reviews, 102). Killingsworth, Walt Whitman, 78–80: “The god-poet, we are told, will reclaim the dead earth as a resource to be refined into transcendental Nature fit for nurturing the human soul. But for the present, the earth must remain under the dominion of the engineers and materialists.”

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CHAPTER THREE

1 See Johnson’s Life of Cowley: “This lax and lawless versification so much concealed the deficiencies of the barren, and flattered the laziness of the idle, that it immediately overspread our books of poetry” (Lives , 1:32). 2 Mulqueen, “Poetics of Emerson and Poe,” 6. Mulqueen’s is the best of essays that deal with this contrast. See also David Anderson, Garmon, Patrick F. Quinn, and Rubeo. 3 Pound, “Homage to Sextus Propertius,” I. 4 These obiter dicta, reported second hand, are often quoted but rarely cited. “Oh, you mean the jingle-man!” — Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1859, referring to Poe, quoted by Howells from personal conversation with Emerson in “My First Visit to New England [Part 4],” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. 89, August 1894, 450, and later collected in Literary Friends and Acquaintance (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900). In her article “Recollections of Poe,” Home Journal, 15 March 1876, Mrs E.O. Smith briefly records a passing conversation with Emerson in regard to “The Raven,” about which she says that Emerson stated: “I can see nothing in it.” On Poe’s views of Emerson, see Silverman, Poe, 265, 492–3, and passim. 5 Emerson, Essays and Lectures, 447. Emerson’s “The Poet” appeared in 1844, while “The Philosophy of Composition” was only published posthumously in 1850. But Poe was known as both poet and critic by the time of Emerson’s essay. 6 Mulqueen, “Poetics,” 5. Harrington, Poetry and the Public, 28–9, argues that poetry is in popular writing of the early twentieth century “not a classification of texts, but an immaterial cure or tonic ... Poetry is at once spiritual, practical, and virtually detextualized.” Thus John Stuart Mill’s application of Wordsworth as a cure for his depression had a long afterlife. 7 If the experience of Beauty is mysteriously elevating, the experience of the Unbeautiful is the reverse. Poe explores this possibility in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” where Roderick Usher is an artist in every medium, a hypersensitive soul – a literary descendant of eighteenth-century sensationalist aesthetics and Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling (could such a man have risen to the occasion of producing descendants). But struggle as he may to create Beauty, his very being is somehow overdetermined by the symbolic construct in which he lives – by “the method of collocation of these stones – in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around – above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn.” The celebrated mirror

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effects of Poe’s story make it an aesthetic anti-parable, the perverse corollary of his aesthetic theory. Stovall observes a parallel in the story of Margaret in Wordsworth’s The Excursion, Book I, the passage composed in 1797 as “The Ruined Cottage.” Edgar Poe the Poet, 184. Jerome McGann adumbrates the relation of Poe to the doctrine of Sensibility in The Poetics of Sensibility, 96–7 and 146–7, and Brett Zimmerman takes a different approach in “Sensibility, Phrenology, and ‘The Fall of the House of Usher.’” Omond, English Metrists, 159–65. McGann’s emphasis on intonation is of course an important contribution to this debate. Auden, “American Poetry,” 365, and introduction to Henry James, American Scene, xx–xxi. The later essay is a revision of the earlier. Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 56. Compare Bernstein, Tale of the Tribe, 3–6. Quoted in James G. Williams, Those Who Ponder, 27, from Du Sens: Essais sémiotiques (1970): 313. Compare Emerson’s statement, “the nerves of the world were electrified by the proclamation that all men are born free and equal” with Van Cromphout’s supplement, “It is the proclamation that establishes the reality, though the proclamation derives its authority from the assumption that the reality was already a fact before it was proclaimed” (Van Cromphout, “Language as Action,” 328). The Emersonian line of American poetry tends to a similar fondness for gnomic or proverbial expression. Compare Dickinson, Stephen Crane’s existential parables, Frost, Stevens, not to mention countless newspaper poets (“Only God can make a tree”). Emerson, “Historical Discourse at Concord.” See his letter to Martin Van Buren. The enforced removal known as the “Trail of Tears” did not begin until October 1936. Waggoner, Emerson as Poet, 151–2. Eco-criticism makes much of human dominion over the earth as given in Genesis, and we rightly question Emerson’s naïve assertion in Nature that “Nothing in nature is exhausted in its first use” (Essays, 28). Nevertheless, Waggoner’s account of Puritan stated doctrine is correct. See also Paryz on Emerson’s dual conception of value in “the land”: “the land that exists as a physical entity has relatively low value, as it is ‘cheap,’ while the land that can be embraced and explored by the spirit ... represents the true value” (Postcolonial and Imperial Experience, 85). The source of Ford’s dictum is obscure. Sandburg’s phrase appears in his poem “Prairie.” My student Douglas Vincent pointed out to me that Emerson, drawing from the Vishnu Purán, allows the Earth’s Song to break down the temporal illusions of humankind, but Earth itself is material and thus illusory. By omitting any consoling idea of transcendence, he avoids a facile

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transcendence while problematizing illusory human life within the world of diversity. Emerson, Emerson in His Journals 267. Mikics, Annotated Emerson, 517, compares the drinking songs of Hafiz, and cites Emerson’s 1843 journal: “I take many stimulants & often make an art of my inebriation.” Gougeon, Virtue’s Hero, 2; and Collison, “Emerson and Antislavery,” 180. Reynolds also makes a strong case for Emerson’s anti-slavery position and his support for John Brown, though he remained a “closet radical.” Reynolds, John Brown, 444, 482–4 and passim. I am thinking of Bercovich’s argument in Puritan Origins of the American Self that “if Emerson differs from the chauvinist by his Romantic self-reliance, he differs equally from the Romantic Antinomian by his reliance on a national mission” (175). Emerson’s Journals reveal mixed feelings before and after Webster’s death in October 1852. In July, a couplet: “Why did all manly gifts in Webster fail? / He wrote on Nature’s grandest brow, For Sale” (Emerson in His Journals, 437). But pondering after Webster’s death, he wrote, “Nature had not in our days ... cut out such a masterpiece. He brought the strength of the savage into the height of culture. … He was a statesman, & not the semblance of one” (437). Bromwich, “Emerson’s Ode,” 218. See also Emerson, “Trade of New England”; and the discussion in Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial, 89–91. The allusion is to the Krakow uprising of February 1846, and the bloody consequences of the following months. There is an analogy between the plight of the serfs and that of the African slaves, with perhaps a sympathetic memory of the Polish nobleman Kosciuszko, who fought for the colonies in the American Revolution. Mikics, Annotated Emerson, 511, cites Emerson’s 1846 journal, which indicates scant sympathy with the Poles: “When the last Polander is gone, the Russians are men, are ourselves, & the Pole is forgotten.” Horsman, detecting traces of the leyenda negra, sees Anglo-Saxon superiority looking down on Mexicans, “a mixed inferior race with considerable Indian and some black blood” (quoted in Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial, 78). Dallal, “Imperialism UnManifest,” 47–83. See also Paryz, Postcolonial and Imperial Experience, chap. 3, 75–96. Journals 9:74, quoted in Dallal, “Imperialism UnManifest,” 55. Compare the following: “These rabble in Washington are really better than the snivelling opposition. They have a sort of genius of a bold and manly cast, though Satanic ... Mr Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his sons to it. They calculated rightly on Mr Webster. My friend Mr Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax. On him they could not calculate. The abolitionists denounce the war &

Notes to pages 76–81

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give much time to it, but they pay the tax” (Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, June–July 1846, 358–9). Rowe, “Hamlet’s Task,” 21. See Gougeon’s reply: “Emerson,” 185–220. A case for Schiller’s “Das Lied von der Glocke” made by Kenneth Cameron is dismissed by Hansen and Pollin: “All such poems have generic similarities determined by their subject matter.” Although readers “have searched for connections between Schiller’s poem and Poe’s ‘The Bells,’ [and] despite Kenneth Cameron’s creative associations, it is impossible to establish any connection between the ‘Song of the Bell’ and Poe’s text” (German Face, 84). See Frye, Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe; and McGann, Poet Edgar Allan Poe. My own discussion was written before reading McGann. Poe, Collected Works, 3:429–30. For publication of the poem, see also Schultz, “Edgar Allan Poe Submits ‘The Bells,’” 166–81. According to Sorby, Schoolroom Poets, xxix, “scant attention has been paid” to the place of McGuffy’s Readers in teaching children how to read poetry – which included “how to read with their voices, how to breathe while they read, and how to use their bodies as vehicles for performance.” As Sorby’s discussion suggests, elocution inculcated the relationship between printed text, phonics, intonation, dramatic presence, and emotion in poetry. Abrams, Fourth Dimension. Hollander, “Music of Poetry,” 236. For fuller discussion, see Hollander, Untuning of the Sky, 173–80 and passim. Another German parallel is found in Ludwig Spohr’s Symphony No. 4 in F, op. 86, subtitled “Die Weihe der Töne,” “The Consecration of Sound,” written in 1832, after Wordsworth’s ode. Spohr’s symphony, then widely acclaimed, is inspired by a poem of the same name by his friend Carl Pfeiffer, and Spohr requested that the poem be read aloud at every performance. The likelihood that Poe was aware of Pfeiffer’s poem seems slight. Pfeiffer’s poem is printed with translation in the liner notes to Spohr’s Symphony No. 4, conducted by Howard Shelley (Hyperion cda67622), 2007. Poe, Essays and Reviews 263–4; Jacobs, Poe, 169. Jacobs notes that, by the 1830s, Wordsworth had won wide acceptance in America. According to Stovall, Edgar Poe the Poet, 128, Poe’s response to the Lake Poets here arose “in part from real pleasure in what he read, and in part from a vain and boyish delight in confuting persons of respect and authority.” A precursor is found in “The Solitary Reaper,” where music, abstract sound, and the sounds of an unknown language merge (with a dollop of eroticism) into a single, revitalizing experience. There is a class of romantic poems that valorize auditory experience in terms of spirituality, among

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them Shelley’s “Skylark,” his “Ode to the West Wind,” and all those Aeolian harp pieces gathered in Abrams’s essay “The Correspondent Breeze,” 25–43. Pater, “The School of Giorgione,” in Pater, Renaissance. 129. Hansen and Pollin in The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1995) unfortunately take a purist view, making much of Poe’s errors of citation and grammar, and derogating work that he may have read merely in translation. “Poe’s use of German is second hand and fraught with errors obvious to anyone with formal training in the language” (Hansen and Pollin, German Face, 3). Nevertheless, we learn that tales of Tieck, Hoffmann, and la Motte Fouqué flooded the American mass market (7). Roderick Usher’s library includes the (misquoted) title of Tieck’s “Journey into the Blue Distance” (Das alte Buch und die Reise ins Blaue hinein). As for music, there has been little study of Poe’s knowledge of music. Hansen and Pollin make no reference to it in their book. Yet American musicologists record the influx of German musicians into America from the eighteenth century onward and their hold over the performance and critical attitudes of highbrow music in America throughout the period. One tantalizing curiosity is that Hansen and Pollin confirm “the only German writer Poe read (in translation) with deep appreciation” was Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (85). That author’s best known work, Undine, was the subject of Hoffmann’s best known musical work, his opera Undine, often cited as the first German romantic opera. Poe’s references to music are always rhapsodically romantic. “I lament my want of ear, but never quite despair of becoming sensible to this discipline.” See Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, 326; Abrams, Correspondent Breeze, 25–43; and Matteson, “Emerson and the Aeolian Harp,” 4–9. See Genette, Mimologics; and Eco, Search for the Perfect Language. On the phonosemantics side of the debate, see Magnus, Gods in the Word. Poe’s poem is in fact the begetter of a line of quasi-symphonic poems, largely the productions of Southern poets: Sidney Lanier’s “The Symphony” and poems by Aiken, Fletcher, Tolson, and others, not to mention Eliot and Stevens. Rachmaninoff’s The Bells, which sets Poe’s poem in Russian translation, is a large-scale choral symphony in four movements. Hotson is the most detailed in “Emerson and the Swedenborgians,” plus several other essays, but little since 1930. Mikics, Annotated Emerson, 42, attributes to Swedenborg’s theory of language Emerson’s oracular proposition in chapter 4 of “Nature,” “Nature is the symbol of spirit.” My curiosity about Swedenborg is indebted to conversation with Leon Surette. A strong case for Swedenborg’s presence is also made in Jane WilliamsHogan’s conference paper “Light and Dark in the Art of Edgar Allan Poe.” Swedenborg’s profound influence on the development of symbolism and

Notes to pages 93–7

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imagism is rarely recognized. Wilkinson’s book makes a start. See also Andrzej Sosnowski and John Kelly on Pound. Winters, “Discovery,” 458: “It is one of the great meditations on death to be written since the seventeenth century, along with Le Cimitière Marin, Sunday Morning, and Thanatopsis. It is probably the single greatest American poem of the nineteenth century; and the British poems of the same period which can be compared with it are few indeed.” England, Beyond Romanticism, 279-81, lists anthologies up to 1987 that include Tuckerman’s work. Subsequent biographical information is drawn primarily from England and Golden, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman. See Momaday’s introduction to The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, xix–xxi; plus Golden, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, 44–8. The parodies are noted by Mary Loeffelholz, who suggests astutely that “The Cricket” lies outside the American tradition “exactly because its form and diction are so close to the British tradition of the romantic ode” (“Other Voices,” 302–3). Momaday, introduction, in Tuckerman, Complete Poems, xxiii. See also Donoghue: Tuckerman is a reader of Nature who, refusing Emersonian or Swedenborgian correspondences, “yielded up the consolations of ‘correspondence’ very reluctantly but with a scruple that he could not put by” (“Frederick Goddard Tuckerman,” 368). Burt, “Introduction to Tuckerman,” xiii. “Cricks” is an onomatopoeic version of apocope, dropping a syllable from the end of a word. The five mss of the unpublished poem differ mainly in matters of punctuation. My text is taken from Ben Mazer’s edition. I quote extensively because the text is still not readily available. An ancient river in Asia Minor that empties into the Aegean Sea near Ephesus. An ancient river near Sparta, the birthplace of Hyacinth. Unidentified. Mazer identifies Xenaphilus as a Pythagorean philosopher said to have written on music. A nereid in Ovid’s Metamorphoses 11:346–406 Golden, Tuckerman, 112, notes that “Psammathe, fearing her father’s wrath, exposed her infant Linus, whom she had borne to Apollo. When the child was torn to pieces by dogs, Psammathe’s grief was so intense that it revealed her as the mother. The songs of mourning for Linus became an annual rite, and Psammathe’s dirges became the well-known Linus songs.” The grasshopper possibly recalls Tithonus, a figure of lost love in old age, probably a reference to Tennyson’s “Tithonus,” which was published in 1860 though written many years earlier.

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53 He is identified in some footnotes as Tiresias, but I’m not sure on what authority. 54 Mandrake is a poisonous and hallucinogenic Mediterranean plant. Its forked root, thought to look like human legs, was considered a fertility agent and was reported to shriek if uprooted and cause the death of its gatherer. Dorcynium (or more properly “dorycnium”) is also a toxic European plant. 55 Euphorbia is the botanical name for the genus Euphorbiaceæ, the most familiar variety being the poinsettia. Then known as “euphorbia pulcherrima,” these flowers have been sold in the United States during Christmas season from the 1830s. See “Poinsettias at Christmas,” http://www.why christmas.com/customs/poinsettia.shtml. CHAPTER FOUR

1 James, American Essays, 93–4. In a second essay published after Lowell’s death, James hedges: it is “the very nature of the English ode to show us always, at its best, something of the chill of the poetic exercise” (115). 2 See Parrington, Main Currents, 2:451–63; and Brooks, Early Years, 513–37. Duberman, James Russell Lowell, 33, describes Maria as “the abettor rather than the originator of his sympathies.” McGlinchee, James Russell Lowell, 29, remarks that Lowell’s letters and notebooks “indicate a feeling for the suffering poor and show that the Abolitionist spirit was well-rooted in him even before the eventful date of December 2, 1839, when he met Maria White.” 3 Foner quotes this comment to place Lowell on the radical side of Republican ideology (Free Soil, 110). Lowell’s Republican arguments were consistently moral rather than economic. 4 Duberman, James Russell Lowell, 185. Compare 78–9: “Lowell did not deny Negro ‘differences.’ Moreover, he believed that certain differences were innate, not simply environmental.” But in denying racial inferiority, Lowell “fell into the opposite one of lauding the ‘nobler’ qualities of the Negro.” For racist attitudes among the transcendentalists, see Reynolds, Whitman’s America, 219–23. 5 See Aaron, Unwritten War, 32; and Lowell, Letters, 42. The raid at Harper’s Ferry took place on 16 October 1859 and was not resolved until 18 October. Lowell’s letter is dated 24 October. 6 The reasons for Lowell’s silence are subject to speculation. Among them one must consider: (1) that Lowell’s own position was well known; (2) that the nation at large was simply tired of the issue, which had been “solved,”

Notes to pages 105–12

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nominally at least, by the Emancipation Proclamation; (3) that Lowell had to speak in his poem to a larger, more encompassing issue; and (4) that he was well aware that, the war accomplished, the most crucial issue facing the nation was reconciliation. The gendering of Jefferson’s phrase is apposite: Lowell was far less progressive on issues of women’s rights than on race. The one strain in Lowell’s work that retains critical favour is his vernacular writing: “A Fable for Critics” and the two series of Biglow Papers. According to Edmund Wilson, he wrote “the best dialect verse ever written in the United States” (Patriotic Gore, 479). Lowell’s preface to the second series of Biglow Papers shows a grasp of American speech and vocabulary that won the praise of H.L. Mencken: “he did a great service to the common tongue of the country and must be numbered among its true friends.” See Mencken, American Language, 84. I do not see Lowell as a transcendentalist, pace Griffin, Ashes of the Mind, 53–4. Griffin (Ashes of the Mind, 33–4) places this discussion of “nation” under a question mark: “It was not an uncontested term in the discourse of 1865. It is clear that the word had been (and, as they saw it, legitimately) appropriated by those in the North who regarded the defeat of the Confederacy as the final victory in a historic, costly but utterly justifiable struggle to save the Union.” Harvard men also enlisted as Confederates, 250 in number, of whom sixtyfour were killed. See Richardson, William James, 55. Lowell wrote to Charles Nordhoff, 31 December 1860, “If the Republicans stand firm we shall be saved, even at the cost of disunion. If they yield, it is all up with us and with the experiment in democracy” (Letters, 1:345). Compare Whitman in his 1855 preface, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem” (Leaves of Grass, 616). For comments on Italy and Germany, see Lowell, Political Essays, 6:81–2. Democratic Vistas. Compare Tocqueville, “An American attends to his private concerns as if he were alone in the world, and the next moment he gives himself up to the common weal as if he had forgotten them ... The human heart cannot be thus divided” (Democracy in America, 350). As Griffin notes, Lowell is intensely focused on the justification for the experience of the war ... , a process in which the moral thought – the selfdefinition – flows effortlessly into the political belief” (Ashes of the Mind, 226). But Lowell’s moral thought is not grounded on Calvinist Providential theology. Foner, Free Soil, chap. 1.

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18 Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution, analyzes the degree the Constitution is affected by the demands of slaveholders. Here, Lowell is closer to Garrison than to Salmon P. Chase’s argument that the writers of the Constitution loathed slavery. See Foner, Free Soil, chap. 3. 19 Compare Bercovitch: this covenant was both “a conditional pact between God and a civic community for certain temporal ends ... [and] the terms of unmerited redemption for the elect” (Jeremiad, 33). 20 One might add that they had also, de facto, to become capitalists. 21 Lowell was less cognizant of the Native American. He denounced government policies in his youthful Class Day poem – “a despoliation never equaled ‘except by the Saracen disciples of Mahomet’” – but he never took up the cause. See Duberman, James Russell Lowell, 27 and 357. Schaar, it is worth noting, wrote in 1972, at the height of the Vietnam War and the popularity of Richard Nixon. He cites Susan Sontag’s Trip to Hanoi (1968): “Probably no serious radical movement has any future in America unless it can revalidate the tarnished idea of patriotism” (quoted in Schaar, “Covenanted Patriotism,” 235). 22 In “A Fable for Critics,” he writes of himself: “The top of the hill he will ne’er come nigh reaching / Till he learns the distinction ’twixt singing and preaching” (Lowell, Criticism, 201). 23 Text from Stedman, American Anthology, 282–4. 24 Genovese contends that “the Yankee interpretation of the Constitution prevailed not because it was intellectually superior but because the North won a test of physical strength ... It would be hard to imagine a clearer example of the doctrine that might makes right – a doctrine supposedly anathema to liberals” (Southern Tradition, 28). Needless to say, I disagree. 25 See McPherson, Battle Cry, 7 and 608–11. On Republicans and KnowNothings, see Foner, Free Soil, “The Republicans and Nativism.” 26 Compare Emerson’s “Voluntaries”: “When Duty whispers low, ‘Thou must,’ / The youth replies, ‘I can.’” Lowell must have known that these lines alluded to Robert Gould Shaw. CHAPTER FIVE

1 See, for example, Davis, Cause Lost; and Bové’s sardonic 1986 account of the “Professional Southernist,” who is “both a monumental historian and an antiquarian” and too often “a hagiographer” (“Agriculture and Academe,” 172). Southern studies have matured considerably since then. 2 Many such displays were taken down shortly after I wrote. 3 Hutchison, “Surplus Patriotism,” 141–63.

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4 Hubbell quotes Simms: “South Carolina, sir, was the flower of modern civilization. Our people were the most hospitable, the most accomplished, having the highest degree of culture and the highest sense of honor, of any people, I will not say of America, sir, but of any country on the globe” (Last Years, 50–1). 5 Timrod does not consider demographics: half the scattered population was enslaved and forbidden by law (in most states) to be literate. Schools were few, and only a small percentage of the white population was literate. Timrod collaborated with Simms and Hayne to found Russell’s Magazine, intended as a Southern counterpart to the Atlantic Monthly, but it failed. See Parks, Henry Timrod, 79; and Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse, 53. 6 Cisco, Henry Timrod, 28–9. Cisco is a Confederate apologist, and his biography betrays his bias. It is the only biography, and there is no edition of Timrod’s newspaper writing, nor of his letters. For a summary of his war experience, see McNeely, “Henry Timrod.” 7 Hubbell, Last Years, 8. “Unionist” did not mean “abolitionist.” Genovese notes: “Virtually every important Unionist in the plantation states and many – probably a large majority – of the Unionists in the border states staunchly supported slavery and argued that secession and war could only result in a general emancipation” (Southern Tradition, 111). 8 Cisco, Timrod, 112. Clare in 1936 praised Judge Bryan’s activity after the war because his “assertions concerning the Constitutional rights of the Ku Klux Klan prevented the conviction of many members” (Harp of the South, 19). 9 Cisco, Timrod, 127–8. Hubbell quotes more extensively from the letter. Paul Hamilton Hayne was an almost selfless supporter of Simms, Timrod, and Lanier. After Timrod’s death, he sought to edit the poems: “I would rather a hundred times over, have brought out Timrod’s book than mine” (Hubbell, Last Years, 99). He was certainly minimizing Timrod’s Confederate loyalties. On the other hand, Reynolds points out that 82 percent of the popular vote in 1860, both South and North, was for Unionist candidates, and even the disunionist Breckenridge was a reluctant secessionist (John Brown, 442). 10 Simms, History of South Carolina, quoted in Clare, Harp of the South, 58. 11 Timrod, Essays, 91. Reynolds notes that earlier apologists for slavery, like Jefferson, considered slavery “a useful but unfortunate system,” but by Timrod’s time they “had come to regard slavery as a highly beneficial – indeed essential – institution”: “The shift in attitude came in the late 1830s, when John Calhoun called slavery ‘instead of an evil, a good – a positive good,’ because it served whites while it civilized blacks” (John Brown, 439). 12 Hanlon, America’s England, 160. Hanlon’s argument is compelling, but he errs in dating “The Cotton Boll” prior to “Ethnogenesis,” and I disagree that

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“Ethnogenesis” is a “confused” poem. Genovese notes that, after “the bloody June Days in Paris in 1848,” Timrod “was celebrating southern slavery as the model of social relations for a new world order in which republican liberty would flourish for the propertied classes and in which security and at least minimal material comfort would be guaranteed to the laboring masses” (Southern Tradition, 34). Pound had access to M.E. Speare’s anthology A Pocket Book of Verse (New York: Washington Square, 1940), which he found “on the jo-house seat.” It included Lanier’s “Song of the Chattahoochee.” Wilson, Patriotic Gore, 438–9: “The old South which the Southerner idealized, which he may be found idealizing today and which the Northerner has come to idealize too, was mostly located in time in the eighteenth century; and in geography especially in eastern Virginia, colonial and post-Revolutionary, that powerful and wealthy society, self-confident and self-contained and ruled by a few hundred families who were themselves pretty nearly autonomous.” Quoted in Starke, Sidney Lanier, 112. In March 1867, Lanier published under a pseudonym an article attacking “The Sherman Bill” (Centennial Edition, 5:209–12), which was actually an effort by moderates to enact less punitive measures for Reconstruction than the extreme Republicans called for. Clearly, Lanier saw nothing moderate in the move. Citations are from the 1945 centennial edition of Lanier’s works in ten volumes. Blight, Race and Reunion, 57 and 110. James Woodrow was uncle to President Woodrow Wilson, and the two shared a high moral tone. After Lanier’s death, Woodrow was drummed out of the church for espousing Darwinism. See Gabin, Living Minstrelsy, chap. 5, for more details. Lanier’s music mss are held at Johns Hopkins. Starke, Sidney Lanier, 165, 169. Starke makes this extraordinary statement without citation. Anonymous, “The Duties of Peace,” 424. Journalist Charles Astor Bristed described the Round Table as not always loyal to the North, but “not as coppery as Bardolph’s nose.” It was often severely critical of Lincoln’s conduct of the war. See Mott, History of American Magazines, 320. The essay was written in 1867 but not published until 1871 (5:liii). “The rascals have put my name to it, – when I expressly instructed the Herald not to do so. Not that I’m ashamed of it all, – but May is still in the country and I did not want the negroes to have any ground for twisting me into an enemy” (9:114). 1:192–3. The poem claims that reports of bloody Klan violence are Yankee

Notes to pages 139–42

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exaggeration and lie. The note suggests that the poem was written in response to Sumner’s Senate speech of 21 December 1870, denouncing President Grant for not suppressing the activities of the Ku Klux Klan (1:376). Blight, Race and Reunion, 108–22, gives a harrowing summary of kkk activities, and the 1872 report of the Congressional subcommittee, which was divided not only along partisan lines but also along lines of historical reporting. Republicans, “while understanding that ‘reluctant obedience is all that is to be hoped for’ from white Southerners’ … were adamant about the need for federal enforcement,” while Democrats in “the minority report fashioned an elaborate version of the victimized and oppressed South, and argued vehemently that most of the alleged Klan violence simply had not occurred” (121). See 5:266–7. Feminist arguments against the ethos of chivalry are relevant here: Lanier spoke out heatedly against women’s suffrage in his commencement address to the Furlow Masonic Female College in Americus, Georgia, 30 June 1869, and his views again follow sectional lines: “I am afraid, because certain suggestions float about in the air that a time may come when you will no longer be loveable, when we can not love you, and when, by consequence, chaos will come again. I am afraid, because yonder in Europe, yonder in the North, I hear certain deluded sisters of yours crying aloud that women must vote, that women must hold political office” (5:230). The diatribe continues for several pages. Genovese argues that conservative Southerners “prefer a society of orders based on a hierarchy that recognizes human inequality” and that, while “their viewpoint has often accompanied racism,” the conjunction is only historical, not necessary (Southern Tradition, 27). I am unconvinced. Horsman argues that two of the strongest influences on the concept of Anglo-Saxon superiority in America were Thomas Carlyle and Sir Walter Scott, whose Ivanhoe was the model for romantic Chivalry. Scott and Carlyle were major sources for Lanier. See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, 38–42 and 62–5. Starke, Sidney Lanier, 122. Charles Anderson (Lanier, Centennial Edition, 6:330) notes that such events were common; Lanier’s brother Clifford attended one in Kinston, North Carolina, in January 1864. “Alnwyck Castle” (1827) by Connecticut poet Fitz-Greene Halleck expresses similar nostalgia for aristocratic virtues. He read Froissart in the Thomas Jones translation, published in 1845. Introductions to these volumes but not the full texts are included in volume 4 of the centennial edition. De Bellis, Sidney Lanier, 39–45, includes the fullest discussion of “The

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Jacquerie” and reaches quite different conclusions from mine. Lanier published only a few songs from “The Jacquerie,” but longer fragments of the poem can be found in 1:171–90 – “while Chivalry stood tall and lithe / And flashed his sword above the stricken eyes / Of all the simple peasant-folk of France” Ere yet young Trade was ’ware of his big thews Or dreamed that in the bolder afterdays He would hew down and bind old Chivalry … (172) See also Lanier, Boy’s Froissart, chap. 88, 262–3. Daniel Helbert, “Future Nostalgias,” 18, has recently (and extravagantly) claimed that “Lanier’s nostalgia for the Middle Ages … is not an escapist fantasy, but rather a conscious, historically informed, ‘reflective nostalgia’ that is didactic, revisionist, and futurist.” His poem, “Clover,” inscribed to Keats, is a “solemn protest against the doctrine of Art for Art’s Sake, which has led so many of our young artists into the most unprofitable and even blasphemous activities,” he wrote in a letter (Starke, Sydney Lanier, 263). Rudy, “Manifest Prosody,” 253. The relation of Medieval Studies to current white supremacist movements in the United States and elsewhere is an ongoing concern. See Sturtevant, “Race, Racism, and the Middle Ages.“ Hayne, Poems of Paul Hamilton Hayne, 110–11. Howells’ word. Lanier’s eroticism was possibly too much for the prudish Howells. Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire,” 1419. MacPherson notes that the war had “wiped out two-thirds of the assessed value of wealth in Confederate states [much of it in the persons of slaves], two-fifths of the South’s livestock, and more than half its farm machinery. ... While Northern wealth increased by 50 percent from 1860 to 1870, Southern wealth decreased by 60 percent” (War That Forged a Nation, 46–7). Compare the similar parable in Lanier’s dialect poem of 1871, “Thar’s More in the Man Than Thar Is in the Land,” in which one Farmer Brown buys cheap land that “couldn’t make nuthin’ but yallerish cotton” from a frustrated farmer, sows wheat and corn, and prospers. “Corn,” written after the 1873 panic, has even greater economic thrust. Starke notes that corn, unlike cotton, will grow on the hillsides, bringing more land into production (Sidney Lanier, 194). Neither Lanier nor Starke considers soil depletion. The centennial edition dates the first draft of “Corn” to July 1874, the first draft of “The Symphony” to March 1875. Lanier once dismissed Timrod: “he had never had time to learn the mere craft

Notes to pages 151–4

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of the poet – the technique of verse.” But he reversed his opinion at the behest of Hayne, who wrote to him: “I have heard Timrod, for hours, discuss with scholars of the ‘first water,’ such men as Prof. Gildersleeve, formerly of Göttingen, now of the U. of Virginia, – the profoundest questions associated with both English and Latin prosody, displaying a subtle and minute acquaintance with his subject, which surprised those with whom he conversed. Excepting Edgar Poe, I don’t believe the Southerner, nay the American has ever existed, whose knowledge of the ‘technique of verse’ surpassed Timrod’s” (5:160–1). Kerkering, “Music of Racial Identity,” 149–50. Kerkering argues that Lanier’s insistence on the Anglo-Saxon roots of English prosody aligns with the “cultural analogy that aligned Southerners with the Anglo-Saxons and Northerners with the Normans.” However, Lanier’s interest in Anglo-Saxon was driven “not by lingering sectionalism but by a desire for national reunification.” This ideal reunification is clearly directed at white Americans. When Lanier taps into the notion of a “sense of rhythm which is well-nigh universal in our race” (154), there is a lingering odour of Anglo-Saxon supremacy about it all. An English parallel can be found in William Barnes’s curious volume English Speechcraft (1878), which aims to purge the English vocabulary of all words not of Anglo-Saxon origin. Hopkins, among others, was greatly interested in it. Buck’s “Cantata” is published in American Victorian Choral Music. For Kerkering, the “Centennial Cantata” is the primary exhibit in his analysis of Lanier’s Anglo-Saxonism. He contrasts Whitman, who emphasized the differences between American English and the language of England, whereas Lanier “equates the American and English languages, insisting both are Anglo-Saxon.” Differences between the two nations, he insists, are “separate from and subordinate to the continuity of Anglo-Saxon form ... all are unified by the ongoing presence of racial rhythm” (“Music of Racial Identity,” 162). The content of the “Columbian Meditation” amounts to little more than a catalogue of the events of American settlement with an angelic prophecy at the end, and, as such, it is a fragmentary progress poem, a prelude to the more ambitious “Psalm of the West.” But Lanier’s correspondence with Buck, his answer to his critics, and examination of the text itself, reveal preoccupation with the “abrupt vocables” of Anglo-Saxon (148), which, Kerkering argues, “replace the heroic figure of Columbia with the real hero, ‘our Anglo-Saxon tongue’” (154), uniting the New World with the Old in an eternal racial bond. Both Kerkering and Jason Rudy set Lanier in hypothetical debate with Whitman. Rudy argues that “Lanier’s imagining of America through poetic form takes obvious aim at Whitman’s free verse” (“Manifest Prosody,” 257).

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45 Allen enumerates them (American Prosody, 291). Rudy discusses many; but pace Rudy (“Manifest Prosody,” 254), these forms emphatically do not include free verse. 46 Could Lanier possibly be echoing here the common belief that the Gullah dialect, prevalent among African Americans of the Georgia and Carolina coast, was a corruption of Old English? Lorenzo Dow Turner later demonstrated that Gullah is largely derived from African languages. See Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949). 47 The entire text is available in The Works of James M. Whitfield, 215–28, and substantial excerpts may be found in Sherman, African-American Poetry of the Nineteenth Century, 86–93. Whitfield was a vocal advocate of the antebellum Negro Emigration movement. He spent his last years in California, where he wrote this poem. See Whitley, American Bards, 21–65. “For Whitfield,” he writes, “the prospect of leaving the United States entirely and of creating an Afrocentric nation elsewhere ... [was] not abandoning America so much as transplanting it to another location” (25). Both Whitley’s book and Jennifer Hartding’s article on Whitfield focus exclusively on the 1853 volume America and Other Poems; the Emancipation Proclamation poem is thus not mentioned. 48 Starke, “Agrarians,” 551–2. J. Atkins Shackford’s “Sidney Lanier as Southerner” merely expands upon Starke’s arguments. C. Vann Woodward cites Lanier’s “The New South” in his classic Origins of the New South, 175–6: “It was an inspired vision, and it represented everything that the Southern farmer was not and had not ... The new myth fulfilled the old Jeffersonian dream of an independent yeomanry, self-sufficient lords of a few acres. Later elaborations pictured this yeomanry ‘breaking up the plantation system’ ... and vindicating the Civil War as the bringer of ‘economic democracy’ to the South. ‘Emancipation freed the poor whites more than it did the Negro!’ This cliché was heard so often that it came to be repeated even by respected Southern historians.” 49 Baltimore, it seems, was not sufficiently Southern for Ransom, who also fails to consider that employment for a flautist was limited and that the deep South is hard on tuberculosis. 50 Subtitle: “Sung on the occasion of decorating the graves of the Confederate dead, at Magnolia Cemetery, Charleston, S.C., 1866.” I am curious about the tune employed since the metrical structure is almost non-existent in current hymn books. Timrod’s poetry mainly ignores chivalry; his use of Tennyson’s Arthurian Idylls is discussed by Christina Henderson, “Nation of the Continual Present.”

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CHAPTER SIX

1 Bennett, Poets in the Public Sphere, 19. As Kete notes, Griswold’s character portraits “offered a particular model of femininity ... that diminished the challenge to conventional gender hierarchy otherwise posed by the concept of a woman participating in the public sphere of the literary marketplace” (31). 2 May, American Female Poets, v-viii. Zophiël is a book-length poem by Maria Gowen Brooks. See Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse, 31–44. 3 Modern anthologies include Walker, American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century; Gray, She Wields a Pen; Rattiner, Great Poems by American Women; Bennett, Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets; and Wolosky, Major Voices, plus several volumes in the Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, especially the four volumes of Collected Black Women’s Poetry edited by Joan R. Sherman. 4 Yeager, “Maternal Sublime,” 21, reads traditional manifestations of the sublime as “political fictions meant to aggrandize the male ego.” 5 On Sigourney, see Phillips, Epic in American Culture, 187–219; on Brooks, see Groves, “Maria Gowen Brooks,” 38–46; on Harper, see Rutkowski, “Leaving the Good Mother,” 83–104. 6 The database itself contains 22,661 poems by women, 92,793 by men. These figures are very rough given different search parameters. 7 Walker repeats the story that Menken’s father was “a free man of color,” but the question of her birth, like much of her biography, is thoroughly ambiguous. See Eiselein’s introduction to Menken, Infelicia and Other Writings, 15–17. Most of Menken’s verse is in relatively free form. 8 Walker, American Women Poets, 73; or Rattiner, Great Poems by American Women, 43. For further discussion, see Prins, Victorian Sappho, 231–4. There were rare attempts at Sapphic metre in English, for example Elizabeth Akers Allen, “Ode to Aphrodite” (1891). 9 For background, including the scandal surrounding Rufus Griswold, see Patterson, “Hermaphroditish Disturbers,” 513–33; Howe, Hermaphrodite, edited with an introduction by Gary Williams. 10 Cavitch, American Elegy, 80–107, discusses the Washington in the funeral elegies. 11 Text from New Poems (1850), 48–50. This work was printed separately, inscribed on the “Order of services at the thirteenth triennial festival and first semi-centennial celebration, of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, at the Melodeon, on Thursday, October 2nd, 1845”; and later as “Ode sung at the grand social banquet given by the Massachusetts Horticul-

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tural Society to the American Pomological Society, at its quarter-centennial anniversary, September 12, 1873, in the Boston Music Hall. Words by Miss Hannah F. Gould.” According to Kete, not until Bryant and Sigourney (ca. 1815–17) did Americans begin “to value poetry that stressed the importance of emotions,” and she dates the dramatic shift of taste to circa 1830 (“Reception,” 22). From the evidence of Simms and Timrod, the shift occurred somewhat later in the South. Griswold notes that Napoleon was divisive, that “the splendid genius of Napoleon was not yet revealed in all its magnificence,” but that “those whose opinions were fruits of anything else than passion were commonly led by a conservative spirit to distrust the man and to credit the worst views of his actions” (Female Poets, 38). In other words, Napoleon inspired raptures of the sublime in romantics, but conservative women like Townsend and Sigourney came down firmly in support of moral sentiments. See Savage, Standing Soldiers, 117–22. As Savage explains, the statue became the visual icon of Emancipation for the American public. A replica was erected in Boston, it was pictured in textbooks and on a 1940 commemorative stamp. “As late as the 1960s the monument was still prominently featured in magazine articles about African American landmarks, despite its popular epithet ‘Shine, sir?’” (120). Douglass’s speech was reprinted in an appendix to his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (Hartford: Park Publishing, 1881): 489–502. A text of Ray’s “Lincoln” is printed in Walker, American Women Poets, 361–3; as well as Barrett and Miller, Words for the Hour. Ray’s poems are reprinted in volume 3 Sherman, Collected Black Women’s Poetry. In her book, Bennett notes that the printing is an “excerpt,” but the anthology text is presented as if complete. See Mossell, Work of the African-American Woman, 81–5. These facts are drawn from three sources: Mossell, Work of the African-American Woman; Scruggs, Women of Distinction; and Majors, Noted Negro Women. Benjamin F. Lee was born 18 September 1841 in Bridgeton, New Jersey. In November 1864 he became a student at Wilberforce, graduating in 1872. He became a member of the ame in 1862, was ordained in 1870, and became an elder in 1872. He married Mary E. Ashe in December 1873 and became professor of pastoral theology, homiletics, and ecclesiastical history at Wilberforce. He became president of Wilberforce in 1876. Under his leadership, 1,149 students were registered, and forty-one graduated (Smith, History, 349). In 1884, he resigned to become editor of the ame’s weekly, the Christian Recorder, in which Mary published most of her poetry. In 1892, he resigned and became a bishop of the ame Church, becoming senior bishop

Notes to pages 177–85

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in 1915, and retired circa 1921. His professional life was not without controversy; internal differences are hinted at in William Seraile’s biography of another churchman, Fire in His Heart: Bishop Benjamin Tucker. He experienced opposition in his candidacy for bishop (74), he involved himself in labour strife (92), he supported vigorous missionary efforts in Africa and Haiti – to be led by black Christians (118–19, 123, 128) – and he led the opposition to Booker T. Washington’s critique of ame clergy (138). Lee died in Wilberforce, Ohio, on 12 March 1926. The B.F. Lee Theological Seminary at Edward Waters College in Jacksonville, Florida, is named for him, as is the Health Center at Wilberforce University. Payne, Semi-Centenary, 106. The passage continues by condemning a move to “concentrate the colored people of the South ... in a particular State or territory, giving said State or territory equal rights with each of the others under the Constitution.” This scheme would have amounted to a form of constitutional gerrymandering or, worse, a reservation system like that foisted upon the Cherokee in Oklahoma. Such a move would be nothing less than concession to wicked prejudice, ignoring “the great principle which gives organic life to the government, which may be embraced in the word homogeneousness” (160). Smith, History, 2:210. Lee goes on to lament that his church “is still assailed by those who ‘count gain Godliness.’” Lee was not alone in his hopefulness. It was a prevailing message of the ame. Compare R.H. Cain’s sermon in Payne, Semi-Centenary, 146–8, and Ransom’s message in 1935 (quoted in Hobson, Mount of Vision, 5): “Fifty million unborn Americans of African descent shall, a few generations hence, lead America to achieve that brotherhood which transforms the children of men into the spirit and likeness of the children of God.” The word “miscegenation” first appeared as the title of an anonymous pamphlet posing as having been written by Lincoln Republicans and recommending racial intermarriage to achieve an improved human race. See Lubin, Romance and Rights, 7–8. Also indispensable is Sollors, Interracialism. As Randall Kennedy notes in that volume, 144–6, interracial marriages were prosecuted more intensively after the war than before because whites, feeling the claims of black equality for the first time, insisted on every method available to ensure white supremacy. Wheatley regularly appeared as a “type” of black intellect in nineteenth-century black poetry, and she was known to white readers, having been included in anthologies of May, Griswold, and Stedman. Hobson, Mount of Vision, xi and 194. “This viewpoint seeks African-Americans’

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integration as full partners in the larger society, not on that society’s present terms but on the basis of the changes needed to provide full freedom.” Hobson (14–16) argues that Bercovitch’s term “jeremiad” is inadequate to black prophetic writing. Williams, Harriet Monroe. On “The Columbian Ode” see Massa, “Columbian Ode,” 51–69; Schulze, “Pioneer Modernism,” 68–109; and Ehlers, “Making It Old,” 37–67. The Columbian Ode, headnote. “Cantata,” sung at the opening of the Chicago Auditorium, 1889, appeared in her first volume Valeria. “Washington,” “Lincoln,” and “Democracy” are reprinted in Rattiner, Great Poems. Monroe’s autobiography, Poet’s Life, 120, includes an original plan that even more closely fits the progress poem template. She devotes considerable space, 108–44, to the exposition and her brother-in-law, architect John Wellborn Root. Larson, White City, 22, says that Monroe herself was in love with Root: her 1896 biography of him “would have made an angel blush.” Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, chap. 7, esp. 215 and 230. Paraphrased from Neal, “What Remains.” Badger, Great American Fair, 104. See Wells, Reason Why; and Horan, “Ida B. Wells-Barnett,” 132–50. I confess to straining my definition of ode to include this poem. Bennett, introduction to Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets, xxxviii– xxxix. There is a biography: Rhodehamel and Wood, Ina Coolbrith. Her visit to the exposition is described on pp. 224–7 of their book. There is also a portrait of Coolbrith in her San Francisco “bohemian” milieu in Tarnoff, The Bohemians. Besides her closest friends Bret Harte and George Stoddard, she entertained Yellow Bird (John Rollin Ridge), Jack London, Joaquin Miller, Ambrose Bierce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Mary Austin, John Muir, and Isadora Duncan in “the most famous artistic salon in northern California” (Walker, American Woman Poets, xxiii). Coolbrith’s poem is printed in Walker, American Woman Poets, 326–9. Rain-in-the-Face’s own recollection of the famous battle was recorded by Charles Alexander Eastman: “When the troops were surrounded on two sides, with the river on the third, the order came to charge! There were many very young men, some of whom had only a war staff or a stone war club in hand, who plunged into the column, knocking the men over and stampeding their horses. The soldiers had mounted and started back, but when the onset came they dismounted again and separated into several divisions, facing different ways. They fired as fast as they could load their guns, while we used chiefly arrows and war clubs. There seemed to be two distinct movements among the Indians. One body moved continually in a circle, while the other rode directly into and through the troops. Presently

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some of the soldiers remounted and fled along the ridge toward Reno’s position; but they were followed by our warriors, like hundreds of blackbirds after a hawk. A larger body remained together at the upper end of a little ravine, and fought bravely until they were cut to pieces. I had always thought that white men were cowards, but I had a great respect for them after this day. It is generally said that a young man with nothing but a war staff in his hand broke through the column and knocked down the leader very early in the fight. We supposed him to be the leader, because he stood up in full view, swinging his big knife [sword] over his head, and talking loud. Someone unknown afterwards shot the chief, and he was probably killed also; for if not, he would have told of the deed, and called others to witness it. So it is that no one knows who killed the Long-Haired Chief [General Custer]. After the first rush was over, coups were counted as usual on the bodies of the slain. You know four coups [or blows] can be counted on the body of an enemy, and whoever counts the first one [touches it for the first time] is entitled to the ‘first feather.’ ... Many lies have been told of me. Some say that I killed the Chief, and others that I cut out the heart of his brother [Tom Custer], because he had caused me to be imprisoned. Why, in that fight the excitement was so great that we scarcely recognized our nearest friends! Everything was done like lightning. After the battle we young men were chasing horses all over the prairie, while the old men and women plundered the bodies; and if any mutilating was done, it was by the old men. I have lived peaceably ever since we came upon the reservation. No one can say that Rain-in-the-Face has broken the rules of the Great Father. I fought for my people and my country. When we were conquered I remained silent, as a warrior should. Rain-in-the-Face was killed when he put down his weapons before the Great Father. His spirit was gone then; only his poor body lived on, but now it is almost ready to lie down for the last time. Ho, hechetu! [It is well].” See Eastman, Indian Heroes and Great Chieftains, 147–51. 33 Most of my information is from Hinsley and Wilcox, Coming of Age in Chicago. The Inuit sued successfully in court and won freedom from confinement, but organizers after the fair refused to transport them back to Labrador and continued to exhibit them (42–5). CHAPTER SEVEN

1 J.F. and Adaline Glasheen, “Moody’s ‘An Ode in Time of Hesitation,’” 121. On the basis of his new fame, the Harvard Monthly requested a poem, so Moody produced “The Anniversary,” published that October. It baldly repeats the themes of the “Ode,” but Moody never reprinted it.

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2 Decatur’s expedition against the Barbary Pirates is an exception. 3 Lovett, “Introduction,” xlix–l. Compare Brown, Estranging Dawn, 135–6. The fixation on Moody’s masculinity may reflect anxieties felt after the Oscar Wilde scandal. Brown notes Moody’s “distaste for effete aestheticism” (41). Daniel Gregory Mason does not comment on Moody’s physical bearing, except that his manner was “awkward, so that undergraduates of a complacent local clique found it easy to dismiss him as ‘Western’” (Some Letters, vii). Brown’s biography is sparse in its probing of Moody’s psychology or his ideas about poetics, politics, or religion. There are two collections of correspondence, but much is left unpublished. 4 Although Moody as a young art student created a life-size image of the Venus de Milo (Brown, Estranging Dawn, 7), and his letters seem attentive to women around him, he was offended by women on bicycles – “to the healthy male mind, woman is not a forked animal” (28) – and wrote more than once on the “evil effects of domestic love” (85). 5 According to Brown, “Arguments for America’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ and annexation of the territories were strong. In response, an Anti-Imperialist League had been formed, and it gained wide support in both Chicago and Boston. In Chicago there were rallies in the spring and fall of 1899, supported by most of Moody’s friends – Paul Shorey, William Morton Payne, and H.B. Fuller had publicly urged attendance at one of them. William Jennings Bryan, who had roused Moody’s attention in 1896, spoke out against expansionism. A large contingent of Harvard faculty, headed by President Eliot and William James, ranged themselves on the side of the League” (Estranging Dawn, 115). Fred Harrington says there were such leagues in a dozen cities before 1900 and a central association with headquarters in Chicago (“Movement,” 223). 6 Lovett, “Introduction,” xliii–xliv; and Brown, Estranging Dawn, 103–4. William James’s younger brother Wilky, an officer under Shaw, was wounded at Fort Wagner and never fully recovered. James Russell Lowell’s nephew Charles married Josephine Shaw Lowell; as his widow she became a prominent social activist. See Waugh, Unsentimental Reformer. The Boston Transcript was a Republican newspaper that nonetheless opposed McKinley’s expansionist policies in the Philippines (Harrington, “Movement,” 214). 7 “Lincoln suggested more than once that black troops may have tipped the balance in favor of a Union victory. Black troops at the end of the war made up about 10 percent of Union armies. Lincoln once said, ‘the emancipation policy, and the use of colored troops constitute the heaviest blow dealt to the rebellion ... at least one of those important successes could not have been achieved when it was but for the aid of black soldiers’” (Marcus, “Shaw

Notes to pages 201–6

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Memorial,” 8). Black Union soldiers elicited a Confederate law condemning any white officer in command to be summarily executed. The notorious massacre at Fort Pillow followed. Ironically, the first black regiment was raised in South Carolina: it was immediately disavowed by the Confederate government (Marcus, “Shaw Memorial,” 5), which finally passed a law by a vote of 40 to 37 allowing for black soldiers only in the last desperate weeks of the war (MacPherson, Battle Cry, 831–8). Allusions by Southern apologists to “thousands” of black soldiers in the Confederate army are a belated lost cause fantasy (Blight, Beyond the Battlefields, 154). According to Flint, “No poems written before 1900 even hint at the possibility that Colonel Shaw’s sacrifice was in vain. Quite the contrary, all earlier poems have seen Shaw’s mission as divine, his sacrifice successful” (“Black Response,” 212). As Stephen Whitfield notes, Dunbar composed his tribute “in an era in which an average of over two blacks a week were lynched” (“Sacred,” 21). There is also a sonnet on Shaw by Henrietta Cordelia Ray. Washington, “Shaw Monument,” Papers 4:300–2. Washington’s account of the event is in chapter 14 of Washington, Story of My Life 1:111–12. SaintGaudens, Reminiscences 1:108. Blight, Beyond the Battlefields, 160. See also Blight, Race and Reunion, chap. 8 and passim. Hofstadter’s “Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny” places the war in the context of 1890s phenomena, including the maturation and bureaucratization of American business, the rise of populism, and – invoking the voice of Frederick Jackson Turner – the “closing” of the frontier. See especially Hofstadter, Paranoid Style, 148–9. The ratification vote was close, winning by only two votes, while an amendment to pledge Philippine independence, analogous to the Teller Amendment, was defeated by Vice-President Hobart’s tie-breaking vote. See Harrington, “Movement,” 222. Harrington, “Movement,” 216. The list of those affiliated with the movement includes many of the most prominent literary and political figures of the day: Charles Francis Adams, Jr, Jane Addams, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edward Atkinson, Ambrose Bierce, Andrew Carnegie, Grover Cleveland, John Dewey, Finley Peter Dunne, Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Samuel Gompers, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, William Dean Howells, Henry James, William James, Josephine Shaw Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, William Vaughn Moody, Carl Schurz, Mark Twain, and Henry Van Dyke, among many others. Twain was one of the most outspoken; his anti-imperialist essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” appeared in the North Ameri-

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can Review for February 1901. Stuart Miller sees elitism on both sides of the question, claiming that “both sides tended to be contemptuous of the common man” (Benevolent Assimilation, 120). Beisner, Twelve against Empire, 165. Beisner’s chapter on Carnegie details his peculiar self-contradictory positions (165–85). Those with business interests in Hawaii, fearful of competition, also opposed the war. Compare Bellah, Broken Covenant, 38. Beveridge, “Support of an American Empire,” 704–12. Rafael, “White Love,” 186. Estimates of casualties in the conflict vary widely, but all confirm a significant loss of life on both sides. Richard Welch says that 126,500 American soldiers saw service, suffering 4,200 killed and 2,800 wounded: this represents “a casualty rate of 5.5 percent, one of the highest of any war in American history.” The Filipino side suffered between 16,000 and 20,000 killed (other estimates being much higher). “In addition, perhaps 200,000 Filipinos died of famine, disease, and other war-related calamities,” many in a widespread epidemic of cholera. Financial cost to the US was over $400 million, “a figure twenty times the purchase price paid Spain (Welch, Response, 42). Stephen J. Whitfield, 23. See Marks, Black Press. Support was not unanimous: see Frances Harper’s pacifist appeals “Do Not Cheer, Men Are Dying” and “The Burdens of All,” both 1900. Cuban independence was granted in the 1898 treaty by virtue of the antiimperialist Teller Amendment, but Senator Platt of Connecticut argued the constitutionality of America’s right to acquire and govern new territories; Senator Hoar vigorously dissented (Gillett, Hoar, 245–51). In 1902, the Platt Amendment placed severe restrictions on Cuban sovereignty and asserted American interests (mainly in the sugar industry), including a perpetual lease for a military base at Guantanamo. York, Architecture of Address, 157, appears to misread Moody completely, writing that his “real purpose” is “to consecrate the beaches of the world with American blood – starting with the beach in South Carolina, then turning to the beaches of Cuba and the Philippines implicated in the Spanish-American War.” Brown, Estranging Dawn, 106. No one has ever suggested that the mountaineering figure in Robinson’s own ode “The Man against the Sky” (1916) may represent Moody. See also Brown, “Moody and Robinson,” 185–94. Bratlinger, “Kipling’s White Man’s Burden,” 172. He notes that many found Kipling’s preaching to Americans, and particularly “The White Man’s Burden,” offensive. In Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 179–80, Gatewood writes, “Dozens of poems entitled ‘The Black Man’s Burden’ appeared in the months immediately following the publication of Kipling’s work,”

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and he cites an editorial in The Colored American (18 March 1899): “With all due respect for the alleged genius of one Rudyard Kipling, his latest conglomeration of rot about the ‘white man’s burden’ makes us very, very tired. It has ever been the dark races who have borne the world’s burdens.” Theodore Roosevelt, despite relatively inclusive views of blacks, was less tolerant of Indigenous peoples. In The Winning of the West (1889), he saw wars with “the savages” through the lens of social Darwinism, depicting them as “righteous,” however horrible, whether waged between American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and Tartar, or New Zealander and Maori. See poems by Herbert Bashford and Joaquin Miller in Edmund Stedman’s 1900 anthology American Poetry, plus Robert Frost, “Once by the Pacific,” Robinson Jeffers, “Continent’s End,” Yvor Winters, “The Slow Pacific Swell,” Muriel Rukeyser, “Palos Verdes Cliffs,” Thom Gunn, “The Discovery of the Pacific,” Galway Kinnell, “On the Oregon Coast,” and Alicia Ostriker, “Staring at the Pacific, and Swimming in It.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Prayer to the Pacific” presents an Amerind speaker looking with longing at her Asian place of origin. Milton, Prose Selections, 258–9. Moody calls Areopagitica Milton’s greatest prose work: “Milton’s revolutionary spirit next led him to attack the censorship of the press. The time-honored institution of the censorship he saw to be an intolerable hindrance to freedom of thought,” and he launched against it “all the thunders and lightnings of his magnificent rhetoric” (Moody, Lovett, and Boynton, First View, 142). Part of Senator Teller’s motivation was more commercial than magnanimous. Colorado, his home state, was a major producer of beet sugar, in competition with Cuban sugar. There was also widespread fear of Spanishspeaking, black, and Catholic immigration – a fear still today reflected in the ambiguous status of Puerto Rico. These fears, however, did not seem to affect Moody. Moody, in 1904, planned to watch election returns through the night with his friend Edwin Arlington Robinson, expressing feelings of regret that “the vision in the light of which our country was created and has grown great, will soon fade, and one more world-dream will have been found impossible to live out ... the America that we have known and passionately believed in, will be no more” (Letters to Harriet, 211). Roosevelt won in a landslide, defeating Alton B. Parker, who won only the Southern bloc. Shortly thereafter, Roosevelt discovered Robinson’s poetry, personally wrote a review of it, and – indirectly at Moody’s suggestion – offered Robinson a government sinecure. Details are outlined in Percy MacKaye’s introduction in Moody, Letters to Harriet, 26–9.

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26 Quoted in Blight, Race and Reunion, 5. Morgenthau, incidentally, was dismissed as advisor to the State Department by President Johnson because of his criticism of the Vietnam War. CHAPTER EIGHT

1 “Narcissus as Narcissus,” in Tate, Essays, 593. On Graves and early New Criticism, see Childs, Birth of New Criticism. Also Foust, “Aesthetician of Simultaneity” 17–25. 2 “Three Types of Poetry,” in Tate, Essays, 196. Harrington argues, “it is this lumping of all notions of utility” – whether political or moral or spiritual or therapeutic – “that marks the crucial rhetorical intervention of modernist critics in shaping the social form of poetry” (Poetry and the Public, 38). Morrison argues that this emphasis on aesthetic inutility is a politically subversive position intended to undermine “the rapaciously utilitarian technocracy of the modern world – and specifically of the Northern states – as well as a legalistic, rational individualism which was eroding authentic community and faith” (49). Both statements are true, but they obscure the transformation of poetic inutility from a descriptive to a prescriptive counsel. 3 Adams, “Black Cottages,” 39–52. 4 See Garner, “Anxious Odes,” 93–9; and Bromwich, “Parody,” 333. Hollander writes that Tate’s “Ode” is “a poem full of the beauty of broken echoes,” and he finds sources as well in Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams (Figure of Echo, 96–8). 5 See Underwood, Allen Tate, 6, on the deliberate confusions over Tate’s birthplace. 6 Tate, Memoirs and Opinions, 33; Kuhn, “Speaking from the Earth,” 171–84, reads Tate’s ode in the context of nineteenth-century lost cause poetry; unfortunately, he tends to blur the line between specific allusion and conventional trope. 7 According to Underwood, Allen Tate, 125, Tate was incensed by the “liberal attack” against the conservative Christian values prevalent in the South. He was thus driven to a defensive position, without of course embracing biblical literalism. See Jancovich, Cultural Politics, 22–3. 8 Hammer’s book should be supplemented by Underwood’s judicious critique (Allen Tate, 339–40). 9 Tate, “Poetry of Ideas,” 172–3. Bercovitch remarks, “Adams is not a Victorian sage calling halt to a rampant industrial capitalism. He is a prophet reading the fate of humanity, and the universe at large, in the tragic course of American history ... To this end, Adams offers himself as a chronometer, in a self-

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portrait which despite its many vivid personal touches evolves into something of a mythic representation of non-being” (Jeremiad, 195–6). Claire Sprague’s introduction to Brooks’s early work is the only place where I’ve seen these famous essays of Brooks and Eliot brought together; but she gets the relationship wrong. Eliot’s “selective, discontinuous version of the English literary tradition is the outstanding contemporary example,” she says, of Brooks’s arbitrarily constructed past (Brooks, lii). Rather, Eliot sees each element of his tradition as subject to revaluation but one may not simply wish it away. Gray, “Cultural Truths,” 39, condemns the “Stalinist notion” that the past is free “to be shaped according to the prejudices of the present.” Fry begins The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode with a meditation on Tate’s figure at the gate: “Not only is the ode from its first appearance a vehicle of ontological and vocational doubt ... but it also raises questions more steadily than any other poetic mode about the aesthetic shibboleth of the unified whole” (1–2). My student Robin Feenstra suggests an analogy between Tate’s man at the gate and the speaker of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush.” Stewart’s hostile analysis is worth noting. Tate originally wrote “Heraclitus and Parmenides”: “Heraclitus taught that knowledge is based on perception and all unity disintegrates into flux ... Parmenides taught that what truly is cannot change or be divided; therefore the phenomenal world in which change appears is a delusion. Their systems do not agree, but in the poem the philosophers symbolize aspects of scientific naturalism. Heraclitus stands for the physicist’s argument that the known world consists of random movements of particles; Parmenides represents the scientific view that the true reality is shaped by impalpable universals ... Tate replaced Heraclitus with Zeno … [but] the point, however, remained the same” (Burden of Time, 379–80). Stewart dismisses the poem as “a piece of rather facile pessimism” (383). “As I look back over my own verse, written over more than twenty-five years, I see plainly that its main theme is man suffering from unbelief; and I cannot for a moment think that this man is some other than myself.” Quoted in Rubin, Wary Fugitives, 81, from a 1950 symposium. See Humphries, “Cemeteries,” 54–67. Valéry also appeals to “Zénon, cruel Zénon! Zénon d’Elée!” The Eleatic philosophers are credited with the concepts of infinity and dialectic, and Zeno is prized for his logical paradoxes. Tate, however, denied reading Valéry before 1928. See Tate, Memories and Opinions, 52. Compare Kuhn, Allen Tate, 225ff. Kingsley, “Texts,” 176–7. Kingsley shows that Tate’s alterations of the first

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1926 version are more stylistic than substantive. Bishop notes that Tate removed the dates 1861–1865 from below the title of the earliest versions, weakening the memorial tone of the poem (Allen Tate, 85). I thus disagree with Ernest Suarez and others who read the poem as wholly negative (“Writing the South,” 799). Squires, Allen Tate, 82, notes that “when Aeneas prays at his father’s grave, a serpent wriggles up from the earth. The serpent was the spirit of his lineage, the spirit of the past, present, and future of the house.” Underwood, Allen Tate, 291 and 402. A wrinkle in Tate’s racial hierarchy appears in his assumption that the white race is inferior to the Chinese and that Caucasians would relate to the Chinese in a biracial society as Negros to Caucasians (Genovese, Southern Tradition, 88). The remark appears in a private letter to John Wheelwright, but Underwood refers to parallel passages in Tate’s “A View of the Whole South,” Essays, 423–5, 426. Underwood, Allen Tate, 292 and 403. Compare Davidson to Tate, 21 July 1930, Donald Davidson Correspondence, 250–1. Warren’s essay supports the status quo of segregation but scandalized Davidson by allowing that the black worker had been systematically exploited in the South. See Jancovich, Cultural Politics, 25. Anonymous, I’ll Take My Stand, 62. Owsley was the author of State Rights in the Confederacy (1925), then considered the standard work on the subject. Suarez, “Writing the South,” 806, notes Tate’s embarrassment at publication of the Kirstein letter, plus “a mixture of guilt and defensiveness” in his postconversion correspondence. Underwood’s biography includes an account, innocently headed “Sources and Acknowledgements,” of the difficulties confronting Tate’s biographers, quoting Ned O’Gorman, who relinquished a projected biography because the record is not only littered with “lies, deceptions, half truths, fake truths, family loyalties, friendships, literary feuds,” enough that “render even a birth date suspect,” but there remains the question of “Allen’s erotic life”: “He lived out a literary ‘soap opera,’” and “many of the ladies with whom Allen slept are alive ... Many of them are distinguished, and some of them are ‘celebrities’” (Allen Tate, 418). For another approach to Tate’s conversion, see Haddox, “Contextualizing the Catholic Turn in Southern Literature,” 173–90. Haddox argues that Tate was attempting “to preserve the iconicity of southern literature beyond all historical change by investing it with the authority of an absolutist faith” (174). Such an argument, though true, overlooks the spiritual component of Tate’s conversion. Fuller discussion of Tate and Maritain appears in Kuhn, Allen Tate, 193ff.

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25 The most extensive discussion is Davis, “Turning to the Immoderate Past,” 241–53. 26 Tate, a Southern Democrat, viewed a vote for Hoover with contempt (Rubin, Wary Fugitives, 75). The first-generation modernists who were Tate’s models, Eliot and Pound, had already decided that democratic capitalism was dysfunctional. See Surette, Dreams, xii and passim. Bové also discusses the biographies in “Agriculture and Academe,” 184–93. 27 Lost cause historians have frequently argued that the Civil War was unnecessary. Reynolds states the counter-argument in John Brown, 438–9 and passim. 28 Tate’s emphasis. In 1929, Tate wrote to Davidson, “We cannot merely fight against centralization; we must envisage a centralization of a different kind, having organization and discipline” (Donald Davidson Correspondence, 230–1, quoted in Genovese, Southern Tradition, 73). 29 More than once Tate praises General Nathan Bedford Forrest, noting his personal kindness to his slaves (Jefferson Davis, 41), but he is silent on Forrest’s responsibility for the massacre of black pows at Fort Pillow and his postwar organization of the Ku Klux Klan. 30 Tate endorses the views of Thomas R. Dew, president of William and Mary University, and the even more outspoken views of William Harper, a justice of the South Carolina Supreme Court: “Dew called upon Christianity to justify slavery, while his opponent, the abolitionist Devil, was quoting Scripture for his own purpose. But while he fortified his arguments with the two authorities most convincing to the Southern mind – the Bible and the literature of the Ancients – he thoughtfully added that slavery was economically profitable” (Tate, Jefferson Davis, 43). As Bradford says, “Equality as a moral or political imperative, pursued as an end in itself – Equality with the capital ‘E’ – is the antonym of every legitimate conservative principle” (Genovese, Southern Tradition, 72). 31 Tate to Davidson, 9 November 1929, Donald Davidson Correspondence, 241. As Kuhn points out, Tate later claimed that agrarianism was “ultimately a religious rather than a political movement,” and that “the economy was only ‘the secular image of religious conviction’” (Allen Tate, 143). Tate, unlike Eliot, may also have been guided by Spengler’s argument for impersonal historicist forces beyond human control. See Surette, Dreams, 37. 32 In response to his editor Seward Collins’s espousal of fascism, Tate said: “I am so deeply opposed to fascism that I would choose communism if it were the alternative to it.” See Tate, “Fascism and the Southern Agrarians”; and Underwood, Allen Tate, 202–9 and 239–42. Genovese argues that the South was guilty of the racial oppression of African Americans but relative-

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ly free of other prejudices like anti-Semitism or anti-Catholicism (Southern Tradition, 25). I cannot help adding that, as I write, Genovese’s description is unrecognizable in the face of current Republican policy. Genovese takes pains to separate his “Southern tradition” from both libertarianism and the religious right of literalist Protestantism. The devotion of Republicans to capitalist free market economy remains constant. The present-day South has clearly lost contact with Genovese’s “Southern tradition” over the past two decades. Point number 4 refers to a Christian individualism constrained by social agreement, not by government, and thus open to differences of denomination, including Catholic, but hostile to atheist free thinking and presumably to non-Judaeo-Christian religions. Non-Christian faiths were hardly a consideration to conservative thinkers, and the Confederacy itself was close to declaring itself a Christian nation; but separation of church and state prevailed (Genovese, Southern Tradition, 44–5). Point number 2 simply points to the opposite vice of the North –the lack of a coherent social and religious morality. Point number 5 implies states’ rights but, more generally, values a diversity of local social attitudes over national or international (or legislated) “melting pot” homogeneity. This last point suspiciously resembles a code for white Anglo-Saxon homogeneity, at least in the South, which had never experienced the integrated diversity of widespread immigration. Tate, “Where Are the People?,” 231–5. Or, as Bradford insists, dominance of the “atomistic or impersonal corporate business and the omnicompetent state are for the Agrarians two faces of one phenomenon. Both lead finally to Marxism” (Remembering, 69). The complex developments of agrarianism during the 1930s can be traced conveniently in Bingham and Underwood, Southern Agrarians and the New Deal, which reprints two crucial essays by Tate, “The Problem of the Unemployed: A Modest Proposal” and “A Whole View of the South,” as well as writings by many others. The introduction surveys the extensive critical literature, both literary and historical. Agrarians, states’ rights notwithstanding, were fairly sympathetic to Roosevelt’s New Deal, and social scientist Herman Clarence Nixon, included in I’ll Take My Stand, chaired the 1935 Southern Policy Commission, the closest agrarian to have direct influence on Roosevelt’s Brain Trust (Bingham and Underwood, Southern Agrarians, 7). See also Shapiro, “Southern Agrarians.” Alfred St Clair’s opinion in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, chapter 23; and Bradford, Remembering, 69–70. Bradford was still denouncing “compulsory integration in the schools” (71) in 1985.

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CHAPTER NINE

1 Even in 1989, Jeffrey Walker introduced the subjects of Bardic Ethos and the American Epic Poem – Whitman, Pound, Crane, Williams, and Olson – as “splendid failures.” Each one, Walker argues, speaks “with a voice equipped to foster revolutionary change in their reader’s consciousness ... and ultimately to alter and direct the national will.” Each seeks “victory in the forum of public (ethical, political, economic) values” (xi–xii). 2 I would add the three Nightmare Poems, unusual examples of science fiction in verse and significant contributions to the genre. His story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1937) has been made into an opera by Douglas Moore and a classic film by William Dieterle. “The Sobbin’ Women” (1937, after the Sabine Women) became the Stanley Donen musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). See Gilpin, “Stephen Vincent Benét and the Silencing of John Brown’s Body,” in Gilpin, John Brown Still Lives, 106–19. 3 Jancovitch’s analysis, Cultural Politics, 49, does its best to clarify: “Tate did not claim that the act of writing should be autonomous from society, and in fact was highly critical of any such position. He argued for intellectual independence, but only to the extent that the act of writing should not be dominated by economic or political interests and so denied its own specificity. Writers should engage with society through a critical investigation of that society.” 4 Filreis labels him “conservative” but also notes that he had praise for Genevieve Taggard. See Filreis, Counter-revolution, 6 and 16. 5 Filreis, Counter-revolution, 61. See Filreis’s discussion of Zabel (Counter-revolution, 61–3 and 191–3) as well as Harrington, Poetry and the Public, 6. Some accounts portray these efforts by the New Critics as a kind of conspiracy to “take over” the teaching of literature in universities; they saw it as a principled effort to improve cultural education. 6 When Harrington identifies Tate’s position with that of “conservative liberalism” he is not being paradoxical but, rather, pointing out the shifting meanings of the word “liberal” taking place at the time. Insofar as Tate’s idiosyncratic thinking can be categorized, he is correct in describing it in terms of nineteenth-century classical laissez-faire liberalism, as opposed to the rising social liberalism of the New Deal 1930s. Harrington mentions Tate’s celebration of “a putative agrarian squirearchy in the antebellum South” (58), but he does not press the relationship to slavery and post-slavery social conditions, nor does he discuss the shift from classical to Keynesian economics. Tate’s imputation that the artist somehow had more inde-

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pendence when his patrons were aristocracy and clergy, rather than the “cash-nexus,” is also dubious. To Tate and most writers, the word “liberal” referred to newer efforts of social reconstruction. The older view was invested in social stability, slowing down the democratization of politics, and balancing the tensions between “individual autonomy on the one hand and the desire for cultural consensus on the other” (60). Harrington supplements but does not supplant Jancovich’s analysis in Cultural Politics. Monroe, “Art and Propaganda,” 210–15. Herzog’s chapter is worth consulting, but it does exaggerate the “elitism” of Poetry’s policies, given the journal’s advocacy of the populist Chicago Renaissance poets. See also Pound, Letters; and Williams, Harriet Monroe. Henry Rago, editor 1955–69, continued the non-political policy after the war. See Filreis, Counter-revolution, 20. Nelson, Repression and Recovery, 22. Compare Harrington’s analysis of the American poetry reading public in the preceding decade, Poetry and the Public, 21ff. Fenton, Benét, 278. For Benét’s politics, see 276–96 and passim. Compare Jancovich’s categorization of four camps opposed to the rising New Criticism: those who “supported a cultural market and the cash nexus; NeoHumanism; Marxism; and academic scholasticism” (Cultural Politics, 14). Academic scholasticism – a belief in fixed canons, knowable history, and a single correct interpretation for every text – has, I think, few survivors. Supporters of a cultural marketplace that determines literary value by book sales are an influential but silent group, at least in academia. New Humanism no longer calls itself that, but its faith in rational, secular, non-romantic cultural values is widespread. Marxism remains formative in much of current academic theory. These categories still have no place for leftist nonMarxist New Dealers like Benét, MacLeish, and Sandburg. I use the “right” versus “left” metaphor only for convenience. Pound and Stevens, for example, shared few political beliefs apart from admiration for Mussolini. “The “terrible corpse of France” is obscure to me, unless it is the French communist novelist Henri Barbusse, who died in August 1935. See Gold’s “Homage to Barbusse” in Change the World, 154–8. “Towards a Proletarian Art,” in Gold, Mike Gold, 67–8. Whitman, he added, “still lived in the rough equalitarian times of pioneer America,” but his successors “were caught in the full rising of the industrial expansion” and “could not possibly escape its subtle class psychologies” (69). See Schwartz, “Poetry of Allen Tate”; Macdonald, “Kulturbolschewismus Is Here”; and Segall, “Kulturbolschewismus Is Here.” Segall’s article is relatively nuanced; Macdonald reveals a strong personal animus against MacLeish.

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14 Denning sees Gold and his Marxist confreres as one segment of a larger “Popular Front,” but his definition of this movement is so broad that discussion at times becomes confusing. The Popular Front was forged, he says, “from the labor militancy of the fledgling cio, the anti-fascist solidarity with Spain, Ethiopia, China, and the refugees from Hitler, and the political struggles on the left wing of the New Deal.” It became “a radical historical bloc uniting industrial unionists, Communists, independent socialists, community activists, and émigré anti-fascists around laborist social democracy, anti-fascism, and anti-lynching.” He then stirs “Socialist, feminist, and syndicalist insurgencies” into the mix (Denning, Cultural Front, 4). Denning’s approach is useful for seeing past the orthodoxies of each segment, but it requires him to situate each figure according to his or her particular concerns. Lowney, History, 9, attempts to bracket it historically between the 1935 shift in Soviet policy, “which subordinated the revolutionary claims of class warfare to the formation of a united front with liberal and leftist organizations against fascism,” and the 1939 non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin. 15 Compare the nine essential elements in Mike Gold’s definition of proletarian literature in “Proletarian Realism,” including his belief that “every poem, every novel and drama, must have a social theme or it is mere confectionery” (Mike Gold, 207), even though two pages earlier he claimed that proletarian literature is a “living thing ... not based on a set of fixed dogmas.” 16 Articles by David Barber and John Timberman Newcomb appeared simultaneously in 1990 exploring this view. Newcomb focuses on the distance between MacLeish and his mentors Eliot, Pound, and Yeats: he “is not best seen as a high modernist” but in his “politically and culturally progressive conceptions of the character, function, and value of poetry” (“Archibald MacLeish,” 9). 17 Harrington, Poetry and the Public, 30; later, Harrington discusses a Good Housekeeping article by Gene Stratton-Porter titled “Let Us Go Back to Poetry,” depicting poetry reading and writing as an essential part of a “traditional, rural, pious, conservative” culture (42–4). Every discussion of MacLeish focuses on his “conversion” and his demand for a public poetry. But received opinion, while it may admire MacLeish’s civic conscience, still favours the lyric poetry. 18 Respectively, secretary of state for Truman, national security advisor to Kennedy and Johnson, justice of the Supreme Court, Massachusetts governor, and then secretary of state for Eisenhower. 19 Donaldson, MacLeish, 173. MacLeish met Pound only twice. 20 The first appeared in New Republic, 14 December 1932. See MacLeish’s complimentary letter to Tate dated circa July 1933 (Tate, Letters, 261–2).

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21 Herner, Diego Rivera, 247. Joseph Freeman’s attack under the pseudonym Robert Evans appeared in New Masses, January 1932. Siqueiros’s appeared in May 1934, after the destruction of the mural. 22 Herner, Diego Rivera, 247–8. Rockefeller himself is shown taking a woman’s hand “while a group of high society ladies play cards and behind them a tray of champagne glasses is passed around” (252). Important space was given to soldiers wearing gas masks and equipped with technology for killing (253). 23 As Filreis puts it, “this interpretive practice enabled the communist literary critic to read antagonism to revolutionary change as latent even when the writer under question was consciously a near or imminent ally,” and he quotes another reviewer to say that one became so adept “that it was easy to prove how political reaction lurked behind the purest love sonnet” (Counter-revolution, 199). Needless to say, the method has not died out. MacLeish replied to a similar accusation by Rolfe Humphries: “I am not a Fascist and have never been one. I am as strongly opposed to a dictatorship of the Right as of the Left – more strongly in fact because a dictatorship of the Right is an actual possibility in America ... I believe in the classic American tradition of democracy as the only form of government which offers intellectual and personal freedom and responsibility to an adult human being” (MacLeish, Letters, 268). 24 Donaldson, MacLeish, discusses Frescoes 226–33. See 263–4 for the directive from Moscow. 25 Donaldson, MacLeish, 237. Sandburg himself was the son of immigrants and spoke with a strong Swedish accent. (His readings of poetry are among the most beautiful ever recorded.) Even in the 1880s, notes Trachtenberg, labour forces were largely made up of immigrants and “seemed to represent a foreign culture, alien to American values epitomized by successful representatives of capital” (Incorporation of America, 88). 26 Segall, “Kulturbolschewismus,” lays emphasis on the humanist group led by Irving Babitt and P.E. More, with whom Tate had a major dispute. 27 For controversies following MacLeish’s essay, see Donaldson, MacLeish, 335–8. Harrington notes that, while MacLeish turned to cheap prints and radio plays, Tate and Ransom “had abandoned the popular press for academic quarterlies” (Poetry and the Public, 50). 28 See Donaldson, MacLeish, 333–40. Compare Barber, “Image of Mankind,” 47–8: “MacLeish insinuated that those opposing his point of view were leaning toward treason ... He appeared to want to burn books and regiment minds in the interests of a party line.” 29 This includes Pound’s Eleven New Cantos (1934), which MacLeish knew upon publication. See MacLeish, Letters, 263–4.

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30 The “coarse ambitious priest” suggests Father Coughlin. See Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 227–34. 31 “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral,” in the song “Wovon lebt der Mensch” from Die Dreigroschenoper. 32 Barber’s analysis of MacLeish’s public voice is acutely critical, though ultimately positive. Public poets “must accept a measure of responsibility for established institutions ... [and] live with their complicity,” but he finds that, while MacLeish accepted his responsibility, “he demanded that others accept responsibility also – his idea of it ... MacLeish’s poetry of that era did not show a mind exploring complexity or its own relation to power.” He was clearly one of Cary Nelson’s “naïve, idealistic, pre-Vietnam” poets who “imposed a unitary vision of America on the actual culture he lived in” (“Image of Mankind” 39). 33 “There was Thomas Jefferson who saw the spiritual promises of a new world of the human spirit, and thought they were promises made to the idea, the ideal of man. There was John Adams who saw the fat farms, the busy trade, of the new Republic, and thought their promises were made to the well-to-do and the intelligent – the Aristocracy of Wealth and Talents. There was Tom Paine who saw the wild American shore and vast American forests and thought the promises ... [were] made to all men everywhere. The poem tells of these men and tells how the promise did not come true of itself for any of them ... Unless the people of a country, the whole people of a country, make the promises come true for the sake of the people, others will make them come true. And not for the sake of the people. For the sake of others” (Burnett, This Is My Best, 123–4). The unflattering portrait of John Adams seems to me better suited to Alexander Hamilton, whom MacLeish elsewhere describes as “the Scotch bastard from St. Kitts” who took away the revolution and, with the money-lenders, “buried it in the world’s greatest document” (MacLeish, Letters, 281). 34 Tate attacked Marxist criticism as “positivistic,” focused entirely on doctrine as opposed to the specifically poetic properties of poetry. Compare Jancovich, Cultural Politics, 50. 35 “If we see that Germany is winning we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way kill as many as possible.” Senator Harry S. Truman, who added, “I don’t want to see Hitler victorious under any circumstances” (quoted in Kennedy, Freedom Fear, 482). 36 Kennedy, Freedom Fear, 472. MacLeish attacked them in print and in public addresses as “the enemy not of the government of this country, but of its people” (Donaldson, MacLeish, 355–6). See MacLeish, A Time to Act, 9–31. 37 Cole, Isolationists, 419. Cole, who discusses Lindbergh extensively, also wrote

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a favourable biography. FDR for his part was convinced that Lindbergh was a Nazi (Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 433) and actively discredited him. The fbi under J. Edgar Hoover, however, “found no grounds for legal action against him” (Cole, Isolationists, 484–7). He was Poet in Residence at Princeton from 1939 to 1942, but the position had no security. He “left Princeton in the summer of 1942” for the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, on the invitation of fellow-agrarian Andrew Lytle and remained there for rest of the war (Squires, Tate, 147–56). Squires’s chapter reminds us too that Tate was busy writing some of his best critical essays, that he fielded “a staggering number of requests for help in obtaining awards and scholarships” (147), and that he undertook the mentoring of pupils like Robert Lowell and John Berryman. He wrote to Andrew Lytle on 26 January 1942: “In this dilemma, I am considering an army or navy job ... There are all kinds of jobs in both branches” (Tate, Lytle-Tate Letters, 178), but Lytle discouraged him: “You were speaking of it primarily as a stop gap, but it might prove to be a right long gap,” adding, “but then all men may need the experience of war” (180). Tate, Lytle-Tate Letters, 152–3; Donald Davidson Correspondence, 321. Bishop was offered a position but died of a heart attack a few days after accepting. MacLeish addressed such “scornful voices and cynical voices” in a February 1941 speech: “You have heard ... the voices which urge the Americans to be realistic and to think of no one but themselves ... the voices which argue that American towns are too far away for bombs to reach and therefore that falling bombs mean nothing in America – the voices which tell us that fascism will win in the end and that it is useless, therefore, and unwise beside, to say what fascism is, or to give American aid to those who fight against it, or even perhaps to fight to save ourselves – the voices which tell us that the world will never be perfect; that we can’t police the world; that we’ll have to trade with the winners whoever they are” (Time to Act, 39–40). The reference to Lord Lothian is curious. A proponent of appeasement in Neville Chamberlain’s cabinet, he remained Churchill’s ambassador to the United States. In this diplomatic position, he alighted from his plane in November 1940 and, “with flatfooted lack of ceremony” announced to waiting reporters, “Well boys, Britain’s broke. It’s your money we want” (Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 465). Lord Lothian died suddenly the following month, but not before Hitler had made him the channel of secret peace overtures to Britain. Underwood, Tate, 244. See the entire discussion of the complex entanglements, 239–44. Singal remarks that “throughout this period Tate’s actual pronouncements on social policy closely resembled those of the New Deal

Notes to pages 284–8

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liberals, while his rhetoric often came out sounding quasi-Marxist” (War Within, 250). He cites Malcolm Cowley’s surprise that Tate, “writing from an apparently opposite point of view ... arrived at the same sort of social judgments that a good radical critic might reach” (251). On the other hand, his equation of capitalism with laissez-faire and the New Deal with Marxism strongly suggests the McCarthyist thinking of the 1950s. Tate, Republic of Letters in America, 197, 198. Emerson’s “Ode to W.H. Channing” also seems indebted to Drayton’s stanza. The ode genre has had a close relationship to political empire at least since Horace. See Gregerson, “Ode and Empire,” 117–28. St John Perse (Alexis Léger) was a French poet and diplomat exiled by the Vichy government. He had been translated by T.S. Eliot himself, and was greatly admired by both Tate and MacLeish. Tate first met Léger when both were employed by the Library of Congress during the war. “We had come at the invitation of our friend Archibald MacLeish,” wrote Tate in 1950, “who has done more than any other American to convey to our public the quality of St.-John Perse’s art” (Memoirs, 76). For MacLeish’s relationship with Léger, see Donaldson, MacLeish, 324–35. Léger had intended to give up writing poetry, but eventually he gave MacLeish an envelope containing his work Exils, with a note, “Do what you want with it. It has at least afforded me the opportunity of making this gesture of confidence towards a poet I admire and a man I love.” The invasive species of beetle had become a major pest in the 1930s. John Peale Bishop praised the poem in typescript, but remarked, “There is a confusion in your emotional attitude toward the war – which God knows I share – but I am not sure you have resolved the conflict, or, for that matter made clear the issues that clash” (Tate, Republic of Letters, 199). MacLeish records a story told by St John Perse, which may have a bearing on Tate’s Lama: “In the middle of the Gobi Desert, someone translated for him the beautiful guttural pronouncement of a migrant lama: ‘Man is born in the house, but he dies in the desert.’ For days he puzzled over the deeper romantic meanings of the phrase, until in a lamasery on the border of the desert he had it explained to him in brutally mundane terms. ‘A dying man must be exposed outside the tent so as not to infect the dwelling-place of the living.’ So much, Léger added, ‘for the incurable associations of ideas of literary culture!’” (Donaldson, MacLeish, 325). Tate intensely disliked Stewart’s book. See Tate, Lytle-Tate Letters, 381–2. Bradford remarks that Tate’s view of history “goes against the grain of the widespread American assumption that our future history will (as has our past) follow a linear progression toward perfection,” but that “the stum-

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blings of the Ugly American all across the globe, the record of our wellmeaning attempts to export and impose (on an international scale) a way of life that is not, even yet, fully acceptable to its own citizenry, to and upon other peoples with very different histories and characters ... have not exposed Tate as a poor prophet” (“Angels at Forty Thousand Feet,” 55–6). 50 Compare Cleanth Brooks’s chapter “The Heresy of Paraphrase” in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, where he compares the meaning of a poem to that of a painting: “it is a pattern of resolved stresses” (203). 51 Robert Archambeau sketches the historical entanglement of aesthetics and ethics from Shaftesbury and Schiller through Coleridge to I.A. Richards in “One and a Half Theses on the New Criticism.” Lyric poetry – the lowest of the classical genres – was valorized in John Stuart Mill’s 1833 essay “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties,” which may be the common source of both Poe’s and Walter Pater’s preference for the short poem. See introduction, note 8. CHAPTER TEN

1 Maxwell Anderson and John Hyde Preston, in Thesing, Critical Essays, 37 and 151; Parks, “Millay,” 45; Gould, Poet, 109. 2 Michailidou, “Edna Millay,” 7–22. Thesing summarizes the ups and downs of Millay’s reputation in his introduction, Critical Essays, 5–20. For discussion of the Ransom-Tate attacks, see (for example) Patricia Klemans in Thesing, Critical Essays, 202–4; Ostriker, Stealing, 47–8; Clark, Sentimental Modernism, 249–50; Walker, Masks, 5–7. Ransom and Tate were anticipated by Edd Parks’s 1930 Sewanee Review article. Ransom’s essay has boomeranged against his own reputation. 3 Gould’s unscholarly biography gives no sources, but this is the relevant passage: “I’ve not finished the ode – though I’ve done a good bit on it and some other things besides – you bum, the people downstairs do play the piano! – It’s as bad as 19th Street for a truly music-loving population – ‘I shall hate sweet music my whole life long’!” (Millay, Letters, 12 July 1919, 89). 4 This poetry, rejoices Atkins, “was pre-symbolist, pre-vorticist, pre-Dada, prejazz, pre-imagist, pre-vers-librist” (Millay, 112). 5 Roland Barthes, quoted in Schweik, Gulf So Deeply Cut, 6. 6 Here I am particularly indebted to my students Sarah Pesce and Joel Szaefer. 7 Kramer, “Art of Silence,” 153–64, suggests that female poets are not “bards” but “sibyls.”

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8 Jackson and Prins, “Lyrical Studies,” 521–3. Zellinger’s “Edna St Vincent Millay and the Poetess Tradition” does not mention “Ode to Silence.” 9 Dickie and Travisano, “Introduction,” in Gendered Modernisms, x, rightly deplore the textual barriers to a number of women poets. The comment about nineteenth-century poets is paraphrased from Wolosky, Poetry and Public Discourse, 2. Rukeyser’s poems have been re-issued in much improved form, but she is in need of scholarly attention. As for Taggard, her poems are out of print, and my own inquiries to Harper met with disinterest. Millay, for all her prominence, also needs to be edited properly so that later works, like Conversation at Midnight (1937) and The Murder of Lidice (1942), are brought into the canon. 10 Tate, Poetry Reviews, 45. His phrase “dignified popularity” is, I suspect, intended tacitly to exclude Millay as undignified. His time frame, “the last five years,” supports this. 11 Berke, Women Poets, 28. May Days is a fascinating collection, including work by modernists like Bodenheim, cummings, Lindsay, and Sandburg; leftwing poets like Floyd Dell, Max Eastman, Joseph Freeman, Louis Ginsberg (Allen Ginsberg’s father), Mike Gold, Rolfe Humphries, John Reed, Louis Untermeyer, and Edmund Wilson; prominent women like Léonie Adams, Louise Bogan, Babette Deutsch, Amy Lowell, Millay, Elinor Wylie, and Marya Zaturensky; and Harlem Renaissance figures like Claude McKay and Jean Toomer. Any profits were promised to International Workers’ Aid. 12 Drake, First Wave, 175, quotes a letter to Josephine Herbst: “Mike is writing at last & cigar in mouth pronounces as many bromides about women & Art as he once did about communism ... one can be very fond of him, but never get any comfort from him of an intellectual sort.” Drake’s citations from Taggard’s letters suggest a far more acute feminist observer than do any of her published writings. Denning in Cultural Front, 127, notices its leftist “gender unconscious,” “the belligerent masculinism of the proletarian avant-garde and the militant labor movement and the sentimental maternalism of the Popular Front representations of women ... Figures like Michael Gold and Philip Rahv saw themselves threatened by both a ‘feminine’ genteel tradition and a ‘feminine’ mass culture.” 13 Nina Miller also treats Taggard as a feminist writer, though she offers a critique: “Several points bear repeating here: first, alongside the implicit critique of a culture which denies female sexuality and power, there is in Taggard an equal, if not stronger, tendency to fall back into the widely prevalent notion of female sexuality as inherently pathological. Second, simply at the level of relative emphasis, male violence has not nearly the prominence of destructive female sexuality in the poems and furthermore tends

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Notes to pages 302–5

to be subsumed to sexual violence per se. Just as often, the suggestion of male violence is deflected by an ostensibly larger object of critique, such as bourgeois materialism. So while violence in men reflects their societal victimization, destructiveness in women has the status of a biological essence. Third, the use of conventional paradigms of love and gender identity as the framework for their very critique suggests the belief — or hope — that these are not incompatible projects, that change can and should be contained within traditional gender relations” (“Aestheticized Love,” 75). Barbara Foley and Paula Rabinowitz argue that the dominant narrative of the literary left in the 1930s is masculinist; but both focus on prose fiction and disagree with each other on major points. See Foley, Radical Representations, 40–2. Daniels, Coming to America, chap. 11, provides most of my information, but he does not mention the Red Scare of 1920. In postwar years, the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born worked on behalf of many individuals facing deportation because of the notorious McCarran Act, but it was itself harassed with litigation by the federal government, and much of its energy “was directed against a 1953 order by the Attorney General of the United States that the Committee register with the Subversive Activities Control Board (sacb) as a Communist-front organization. The case was in litigation for thirteen years. In April 1965, the Supreme Court, unable to settle the constitutional issues involved in the case without fresh evidence, sent the case back to the sacb. In April 1966, the sacb vacated the registration order against the Committee, thus bringing the litigation to an end.” There is apparently no evidence that the committee had ties to the Communist Party. See the note on the University of Michigan Library Collection of Papers at http://quod.lib.umich.edu/s /sclead/umich-scl-acpfb?rgn=main;view=text. Text from Taggard, Long View (1942). Bergman, “‘Ajanta’ and the Rukeyser Imbroglio,” has detailed the internal politics that led to the petty and grossly sexist hatchet job done on Rukeyser by the editors of the Partisan Review. Rukeyser was accused by the Trotskyite editors of “backsliding” and excessive “Americanism,” partly because she had been hired by MacLeish to work in the government’s Office of War Information. Bergman shows that the editors were repelled by populist elements in Rukeyser’s aesthetic, which they considered beneath the dignity of high art. Dwight MacDonald and Clement Greenberg led the attack “on any artist’s involvement in popular media” (Bergman, “Rukeyser Imbroglio,” 560). Bergman does not mention Dwight MacDonald’s personal enmity towards MacLeish, evident in his 1957 Memoirs of a Revolutionist, which per-

Notes to pages 305–10

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20 21

22

23

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397

haps recoiled against Rukeyser. This episode was preceded by John Wheelwright’s doctrinaire Marxist and misogynistic review in 1938. During and after the war, Rukeyser was under close surveillance by the FBI. See Kertesz, Poetic Vision, 177–81 and 271–6; plus Daniels, “Muriel Rukeyser and Her Literary Critics,” and Flynn, “‘The Buried Life and the Body of Waking,’” both in Dickie and Travisano, Gendered Modernisms. Benét rejected the book for the Yale series in 1934 in favour of Agee’s Permit Me Voyage, but tried to find it a publisher. Failing that, he bent the rules and chose it for 1935. Later, he helped Rukeyser secure a grant for her Willard Gibbs biography. See Benét, Letters, 244–7, 269–70, 409. Rosenthal, Our Life, discounts Rukeyser’s early Marxism: she was “a writer in the optimistic activist-idealist tradition of meliorism that runs through American philosophical thought” (51–2). Rosenthal was writing in 1950 when “Marxism” was a dangerous alarm signal. See above, chapter 2, 54–5. Kertesz (Poetic Vision, 8), citing Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry (221), writes perceptively that she wanted “to stand against the idea of the fallen world, a powerful and destructive idea overshadowing Western poetry.” If Crane considered himself a visionary poet, Rukeyser claimed that she “did not want a sense of Oneness with the One so much as a sense of Many-ness with the Many. Multiplicity no longer stood against unity. Einstein, Picasso, Joyce, gave us our keys” (223). Louis Untermeyer described it as “perhaps Miss Rukeyser’s most important work up to date”: “In a steadily mounting chorus of contrasted voices, the poem proceeds to its affirmative climax” (quoted in Kertesz, Poetic Vision, 170–1). Thurston, Making Something Happen, 206–7, reads the poem as a movement through the seasonal cycle that “develops the characterization of Brown as a messianic figure,” though “Brown’s rising is neither mystical nor meek.” DuBois’s biography was published in 1909. The name of the Kansas town is now given as Osawatomie. Battle Hymn is a play by Mike Gold. Jacob Lawrence, the African American artist, produced several canvases and prints on the subject of Brown. On the fraught relationship between DuBois and the Popular Front, see Hutchinson, Blacks and Reds, esp. chaps. 2 and 6. Witonski, “Language of Water,” 338, cites Craig Werner’s “three-part process” typical of an Adrienne Rich poem but also many of Rukeyser’s: first, a “conceptual framework” based on some understanding of the past; second, “a chaotic flux of experience” in which the original principles “inevitably prove less clear in practise than they seem in theory”; and third, a reconsideration of ideas in relation to that experience. Notice the resemblance to Abrams’s account of the greater romantic lyric.

398

Notes to pages 310–16

25 The first and third quotation are from Brown’s final words; the second I cannot locate. 26 See Janet Kaufman, “‘But Not the Study’: Writing as a Jew,” on Jews facing annihilation in Europe and pressure to assimilate in America (47) and Rukeyser’s relationship to Jewish thinkers who “transcended the boundaries of Judaism” (51). 27 Rukeyser, Life of Poetry, 166–7. As Witonski points out, the book is unconventional partly in its advocacy of outsider art: “Anticipating the Beats, the Black Arts Movement, the feminist movement, and many others, Rukeyser includes blues, American Indian songs, songs by children, sailors, soldiers, lumberjacks, mental patients” (“Language of Water,” 346). CHAPTER ELEVEN

1 See especially Bérubé, Marginal Forces: “Canonization is a different affair for writers of different races “precisely because American writers of different races have historically been assigned radically different author functions” (61). 2 Dan McCall, who wrote in 1966, is quoted in Farnsworth, Tolson, 173; Bérubé, Marginal Forces, 203; and McHale, Obligation, 62–3. 3 The political weather of Texas played a part. David Gold, “Nothing Educates Us Like a Shock,” 226, writes: “The University of Texas Board of Regents [in 1944], fearing Godless Communism, homosexuality, and President Roosevelt in equal measure, waged a bitter campaign against left-leaning faculty, attempting to fire tenured sociology professors who supported the New Deal, firing untenured instructors for their support of federal labor laws, and trying to ban John Dos Passos’s USA from English classes. When President Homer Rainey protested these and other actions, he himself was fired ... earning the university a nine-year censure by the aaup.” Gold’s essay examines Tolson’s teaching methods and his conception of rhetoric. Compare Thomas, Extraordinary Measures, 105–7, on Texas racism in the 1930s. 4 Farnsworth, Tolson, 156, comments that “by 1950 Tolson was distinguishing Marx from Soviet communism as markedly as he distinguished Christ from the Christian churches of America.” 5 Flasch says that Tolson stopped writing “for several years” after this rejection, but Farnsworth, Tolson, 62–6, shows that Flasch was probably taking her interviews with Tolson too literally. At this point in Tolson’s development, he was just emerging from the shadow of nineteenth-century poets to Sandburg, Masters, and Frost as representative moderns. 6 Farnsworth, Tolson, 40. He cites Tolson’s critique of Harlem Renaissance writers who “portrayed the sensational features of Negro life, which were

Notes to pages 316–20

7

8

9

10

11 12 13

14

399

exploited for the entertainment of white readers,” contrasting the “new school of Negro writers,” including Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright, who were more “earthy, unromantic, and sociological.” Flasch, Toslon, 72, and Farnsworth, Tolson, 108–9, both speculate on the process, but neither version can be confirmed. See also Schultz, Afro-Modernist Epic, 47–8. Tolson never set foot in Liberia, but he read voraciously, including glowing reports in the magazine Liberia Today, published by the Liberian Embassy in Washington (Schultz, Afro-Modernist Epic, 39). Flasch, Tolson, 74, cites her source as Dudley Randall, “Portrait of the Poet as Raconteur,” Negro Digest 15 (January 1966): 56. Despite Farnsworth’s denial, the story sounds convincing, and I see no reason for either Tolson or Randall to have invented it. Tate’s attitudes towards race were well known. Oliver Cromwell Cox, Tolson’s colleague at Wiley College, quotes one chilling sentence from Tate in his classic study Caste, Class, and Race, 560: “Lynching will disappear,” wrote Tate in 1934, “when the white race is satisfied that its supremacy will not be questioned.” Tolson cites Cox’s book in footnote 143. Tolson enrolled at Fisk in 1919 and then transferred to Lincoln University in 1920, so he was too early to have mingled with Tate and the Fugitives across town; but Tolson well understood that his participation in such a group would have been unthinkable. Farnsworth, Tolson, 145–6, quotes a 1961 letter in which Tolson comments ironically on Shapiro’s feud with the “Eliot faction.” Shapiro argues that Libretto is “the Negro satire upon the poetic tradition of the Eliots and Tates” (quoted by Flasch, Tolson, 80) – a claim that would absurdly reduce the claims of the poem. Compare Thomas, Extraordinary Measures, 112. Farnsworth, Tolson, 146. Bérubé, Marginal Forces, 172, notes that Tate’s imprimatur was less troublesome in 1953 than it was in 1965. See Farnsworth, Tolson, 169. Countee Cullen may be the “pedant / with a gelded look” in lines 2–3. Tolson thus goes unmentioned in The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945 because African American poetry is covered solely in an essay on the Black Arts Movement. Harlem Gallery is treated negatively by McHale because Tolson’s “cultural politics are those of an earlier generation” (Obligation, 60). The implications of the Marcus Garvey/W.E.B. DuBois debate over Liberia have not been explored in relation to Tolson’s poem. Farnsworth, Tolson, 20, notes that the central character in an early unfinished novel by Tolson is Marcus DuBois. Although DuBois mentions Liberia only in passing in The World and Africa, Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 112, notes that he “was invested in the success of Liberia because it represented the possibility of an

400

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22

Notes to pages 320–3

autonomous and flourishing postcolonial African democracy – one that might set an example for other cultures within and around the black Atlantic.” Hobson, Mount of Vision, 90–103, gives a useful summary from the viewpoint of a religious historian. Farnsworth, Tolson, 165, refers to Tolson’s praise of George Schuyler’s Slaves Today, a novel about Schuyler’s experience during a three-month stay in Liberia in 1931. He laments the conditions of native Liberians, stating in his foreword that his purpose is to “help arouse enlightened world opinion against this brutalizing of the native population in a Negro republic” (6). Nielsen, “Deterritorialization,” 245, argues that Tolson saw Eliot as a “dead end” and allied himself with “more pluralist modernists ... like Williams, Hughes, and Crane contra Eliot.” Dejong has pointed out to me the apparent error in Tolson’s footnote 363, referring to Acts 5:32–6. Acts 4:32–6 is where we are told that the earliest Christians held all things in common. Brunner’s notes further confuse the citation, referring to chapter 3 and then quoting chapter 4. In his article, Dejong argues that, to Tolson, “democracy is enacted not merely as a system of political organization, but as a state of affective codependence” (“Affect and Diaspora,” 119). “What do you think of Eliot’s The Wasteland?” Crane asked Gorham Munson. “It was good, of course, but so damned dead” (Crane, Letters of Hart Crane, 105). Traces of Pound’s Cantos can be found in Tolson’s reference to the river, not the city, Wagadu (88); the voyage of Hanno (n480); the reference to Frobenius (n419); and to Guido d’Arezzo’s musical notation (519), celebrated in Canto 83. C.K. Doreski’s article in the Pound journal Paideuma focuses on the Cabbage and Caviar prose. Brunner, Cold War Poetry, 142. Like most critics, Brunner conflates the progress poem with the “epic.” Brunner’s footnotes to Tolson’s Libretto (including footnotes to Tolson’s footnotes), printed in Cary Nelson’s Anthology of Modern American Poetry, are a major achievement of scholarship, invaluable to the study of Tolson’s poem. Thomas, Extraordinary Measures, 117, remarks that Libretto offers an “Afrocentric alternative to Pound’s syllabus – not because the poets chose different sources, but because Tolson offers a quite different perspective for reading them.” Dejong, “Affect and Diaspora,” 127, suggests the term “Afro-futurism,” borrowed from Mark Dery. Tolson, “Poet’s Odyssey,” 191: “The Latin word for poet is ‘seer,’ a ‘prophet.’ The Hebrews seemed to have the same idea in the Old Testament, as we see in the Psalms of David and the Songs of Solomon.”

Notes to pages 324–6

401

23 It is so used in Henry Roth’s novel Call It Sleep (1934). The phrase recalls Karibu wee! (line 84), translated in Tolson’s note as “the rooster crows,” a sign of African hospitality. Emma Lazarus’s poem “The Crowing of the Red Cock” is a statement of militant Zionism. 24 Songhay at the height of its power under Askia the Great “was a remarkable state from any point of view. Its organized administration, its roads and methods of communication, its system of public security, put it abreast of any contemporary European or Asiatic state. It was as large as Europe.” The emperor “was obeyed with as much docility on the farthest limits of his empire as in his own palace.” “Gao, Timbuktu, and Jenne were intellectual centers, and at the University of Sankoré gathered thousands of students of law, literature, grammar, geography, and surgery. A literature began to develop in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The University was in correspondence with the best institutions on the Mediterranean coast. Art, especially in building and manufacture, reached a high level. The system of labor rested in part on domestic slavery, but that slavery not only protected the slave from exploitation and poverty, but left the way open, with no barrier of class or color, for him to rise to high positions of state. The clan organization of the artisans gave each one a chance for individual taste in his work and no fear of hurry or hunger” (DuBois, DuBois on Africa, 211). 25 The phrase may also allude to Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Green Pastures (1930), the first on Broadway with an all-black cast. it shocked audiences by portraying “De Lawd” as a black man. I wonder if “gravel” is not an undetected misprint for “gavel.” 26 As Leonard points out (Fettered Genius, 217), Tolson reads Tennyson’s ode as a poem about “the defeat of tyranny.” 27 Line 194, so identified in Tolson’s note. 28 DuBois’s The World and Africa mentions Liberia only in passing. Charles Morrow Wilson’s Liberia (1947) concentrates on the present-day nation, with great emphasis on the rubber industry; his slender account of the founding (9–17) mentions Henry Clay and Jehudi Ashmun, but none of the other names in Tolson’s poem. 29 Leonard, Fettered Genius, 217, emphasizes Tolson’s reference to Zola in footnote 56 as “an artist who can spur the conscience of mankind to the ideals that Liberia allegedly represents.” 30 See above, 70–2. 31 Tolson mentions Bushrod Washington’s “signatures of blood” (109) as a sign of his slave dealings, but Francis Scott Key’s complex dealings are unspoken. Key owned slaves and emancipated his own, but he was a deter-

402

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34

35

36 37

38

39

40

Notes to pages 327–33

mined anti-abolitionist who for that reason had to resign from the Board of the American Colonization Society. Cox argues that caste is a product of ancient cultures, “while race, as it is known in the modern world, grows out of the capitalistic need for designating a large group of people as a cheap supply of labor and hence is of relatively modern origin” (Farnsworth, Tolson, 56). Cox devotes a chapter to detailed critique of Myrdal, whose work he derides as “mystical” (Caste, 509–38). Brunner is doubtless correct in identifying Tolson’s source as William J. LaVarre (1898–1991), though he cannot produce an exact citation. LaVarre worked for the US State Department and wrote several books about his travels up the Amazon in South America, but not Africa. Tolson’s note mentions French linguist and ethnographer Maurice Delafosse but gives no specific citation, except to say that he feared mass production technologies introduced by missionaries and traders “would contaminate art for art’s sake in Africa” (footnote 168). Delafosse’s The Negroes of Africa: History and Culture (1931) contains much discussion of these “living encyclopedias,” but I find none of the fear Tolson mentions; instead, Delafosse concludes with a note of qualified optimism. The African Negroes, he writes, have been isolated too long from “the more favored Europeans”: “they have lost much time and will not be able to catch up in a day or a century” (281). “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Matthew 8: 20). Brunner’s note 224–6 mentions an Anglo-American foray to Mt Ararat in search of Noah’s ark, accused by the Soviets (not unreasonably) of spying. Or eleven if one counts only instances of “Selah.” I do not suspect any numerological significance. An online dictionary gives examples: “die höhere physische Belastungsfähigkeit eines Sportlers” translates “an athlete’s higher greater physical resilience,” or “höhere Bildung” translates “higher education.” One idiom, “höhere Gewalt,” translates “act of God.” See footnote 404. Tolson may be remembering that Rimbaud gave up his art to participate in French African colonialism and the slave trade. See Rimbaud also in footnote 422. DuBois, in The World and Africa, mentions that he sailed to France aboard the Orizaba in 1918 to “try to impress upon the members of the Peace Conference sitting at Versailles the importance of Africa in the future world,” but he says, “I was without credentials or influence” (8). The word reappears twice in the final part of the poem: in line 629 the

Notes to pages 333–8

41 42

43

44

403

Höhere are inhabitants of an ideal “cosmopolis,” elevated above tribalism. In line 731, the Höhere are equated with the “Violent men” – that is, the advocates of the American Declaration of Independence, the colonial leadership that quickened “the death-in life of the / unparadised” (732–3). Compare Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” pt. 5: “For two gross of broken statues, / For a few thousand battered books.” Footnote 555 refers to “Blake, The Bard,” probably his poem “The Voice of the Bard” (in which the word “tomorrow” does not appear), but possibly to Thomas Gray’s Pindaric ode “The Bard,” for which Blake made illustrations. Tolson’s model was probably the Parliament of Man passage in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”: “Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d / In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world. / There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, / And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.” That does not negate my point about Barlow. See Tolson, “Poet’s Odyssey,” 192. Brunner does not identify Seretse Khama (Cold War Poetry, 641–2), a tribal chief in colonial Bechuanaland who was educated at Oxford and married a white English woman. There was such outrage at the interracial marriage in both England and in Africa that he was forced into exile in order to avoid possible military action by apartheid South Africa. Later, in the 1960s, Khama became the progressive first president of independent Botswana and was knighted by the British Crown. See Dutfield, Marriage of Inconvenience. CHAPTER T WELVE

1 Bercovitch, Jeremiad, 6–7. He defines the “anti-jeremiad” as “the denunciation of all ideals, sacred and secular, on the grounds that America is a lie” (191). Ginsberg in “Howl” certainly sees the hypocrisy of America, but he does not denounce idealism itself. On the “anti-jeremiad” and Beat writers, see 191–7. Georgelos, in “Allen Ginsberg and the American Jeremiad,” argues from a Marxist perspective that, “while appearing to oppose the nation and threaten its existence through the vehemence of his or her protest, the American Jeremiah can be said to reinforce the very culture he or she protests through an alternative vision of the national mission” (27); Ginsberg’s long lines may “breathe life and power into his reader so that he or she also becomes cosmic,” but this very act is a form of implied “imperialism” (31). Ginsberg’s anti-jeremiad, like the jeremiad proper, ultimately maintains the American order. 2 Davies, Whitman’s Queer Children, 91–106.

404

Notes to pages 338–47

3 Lee, “‘Howl’ and Other Poems,” 367–88; and Ramirez, “Ghosts of Radicalisms Past,” 47–71. 4 See 1876 preface. See Reynolds’s discussion (Whitman’s America, 391–403), placing Whitman’s notion of “adhesiveness” in its contemporary context. 5 “A Supermarket in California.” The sexual inheritance is part of Beat mythography, repeated in Edmund White’s introduction to Ginsberg’s interviews: “He had slept with Neal Cassady (the model for Kerouac’s ‘Dean Moriarty’), who’d slept with Gavin Arthur (President Chester Arthur’s grandson), who’d slept with Edward Carpenter (the English Victorian champion of homosexual love), who’d slept with Walt Whitman” (Ginsberg, Selected Interviews, xiii). 6 See Boone, “Gay Language as Political Praxis”; and Shaw, Frank O’Hara. 7 The words were Senator Arthur Vandenberg’s, quoted in LaFeber, Cold War, 45. 8 Personal memory. 9 To be fair, McLuhan himself was still preoccupied in The Mechanical Bride (1951) with machinery and print. 10 Not surprisingly, Ginsberg was invited by R.D. Laing to speak at a conference. See Miles, Ginsberg, 393 and 398. 11 Ginsberg’s interview allows that Carl Solomon “was having problems because he was getting shocked.” But he left hospital, after a period of “questioning my sense of my own reality,” not (like many others) with “a total self-rejection.” “It gave me a tolerance toward doctors.” Later in the Langley-Porter Clinic in San Francisco he sought psychotherapy from one Dr Hicks, which proved beneficial.

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to readings of major poems. Aaron, Daniel, 104–5, 108, 110 Adam, 22, 36, 49, 116, 157, 187 Adams, Charles Francis, 251, 379n13 Adams, Henry, 233, 382–3n9 Adams, Pres. John, 38, 175, 274–6, 391n33 Agar, Herbert, 251 Agee, James, 269, 274, 397n18 Aiken, Conrad, 148, 226, 256, 260, 362n39 Allen, Donald, 59 Altieri, Charles, 59 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 301, 339 American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, 301, 303, 396n15 Anacreon (Anacreontic ode), 8, 351n4 Anderson, Charles, 137, 141–2, 369n27 Anti-Imperialist League, 199, 206–7, 209–10, 215, 219–20, 378n, 379–80 anti-Semitism (Jews), 14, 271, 302–3, 386n34

Aristotle, 4, 19, 46, 84 Arnold, Matthew, 36, 55, 65, 121 Aronoff, Eric, 55, 250 Ashmun, Jehudi, 326, 329, 335, 401n28 Auden, W.H., 11, 38, 64, 353n13 Axelrod, Steven, 201–2, 221, 224 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8–9, 65, 290, 353n15; monological, 71, 298 Barber, David, 266, 389n16, 390n28, 391n32 Barlow, Joel, 19, 32, 37–8, 44–9, 57, 154, 186–9, 323, 335, 338, 356n23, 403n43; The Columbiad, 52, 111 Baudelaire, Charles, 89, 91, 357n31 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 83, 147 Bellah, Robert, 221, 237, 380n15 Benét, Stephen Vincent, 13, 227, 253–4, 257–63, 265–6, 305, 316, 338, 387n2, 388n9, 397n18 Bennett, Paula Bernat, 167, 176–8, 181, 183, 192, 373n3, 374n15 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 40, 76, 118, 338, 340, 345, 349, 355n9, 360n19, 366n19, 375–6n23, 382–3n9, 403n1

444

Berke, Nancy, 299, 301, 395n11 Berkeley, George, 37, 232 Bernstein, Michael André, 9–11, 352n, 353n13, 359n10 Berryman, John, 227, 317, 322, 392n38 Bérubé, Michael, 398n1, 399n2 Beveridge, Sen. Albert J., 207–8, 219, 380n15 Bishop, John Peale, 281–3, 383–4n15, 392n40, 393n47 Blake, William, 35, 47, 51, 66, 154, 228, 239, 324, 338–40, 342, 344, 346, 356n18, 403n42 Blight, David W., 135, 137, 203–4, 245, 368–9n23, 378–9n7, 379n10, 382n26 Bloom, Harold, 59, 64, 67, 94–5, 105, 222, 230, 297 Bogan, Louise, 271, 278, 293, 300, 395n11 Brackenridge, Hugh, 17–20, 24, 27–8, 30–2, 37–8, 42, 173, 353n1, 354n8, 355n6 Bradford, M.E., 250, 385n30, 386n35, 386n37, 393–4n49 Bradstreet, Anne, 41–4, 49, 166, 354–5nn10–11 Bredin, Hugh, 87 Breslin, James, 342, 345 Breslin, Paul, 338, 342, 347 Bromwich, David, 72, 75 Brooks, Cleanth, 225–6, 271, 283–4, 394n50 Brooks, Maria Gowen, 167, 373n2, 373n5 Brooks, Obed [Robert Gorham Davis], 272 Brooks, Van Wyck, 68, 102–5,

Index

233–4, 259, 283–4, 286, 311, 351n6, 364n2, 383n10 Brown, John, 104, 139, 253–4, 269, 307–12, 360n18, 387n2, 397nn22–3, 398n25 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 147, 169 Browning, Robert, 229, 289–90 Brunner, Edward, 322–3, 329, 332, 400n17, 400n20, 402n33, 40235, 403n44 Bryan, William Jennings, 205, 209, 378n5 Bryant, William Cullen, 36, 47, 100, 253, 373–4n11 Calhoun, John C., 247–8, 367n11 Canovan, Margaret, 113 capitalism, 131, 133–4, 146, 161, 190, 192, 207, 263, 272, 282–3, 306, 340, 342, 382–3n9, 385n26; finance capitalism, 244, 249–51, 275, 278, 288; laissez faire, 204, 283, 387n6, 392–3n43 Carnegie, Andrew, 207, 379–80n13 Cassady, Neal, 343–4, 404n5 Castillo, Susan, 17–20, 24, 31 Cavalier Theory, 110, 118–19, 150 Cavitch, Max, 3, 351–2n6, 354n6, 373n10 Channing, W.H., 70–3, 75 Churchill, Winston, 259, 279, 335 Civil War (American), 5, 8, 14, 50, 52–4, 100–21, 123, 127–33, 134–7, 139–40, 144, 156, 161, 163–4, 168, 185, 187, 200, 203, 205, 207, 209, 212, 215, 217, 229, 234–40, 242, 243–8, 251, 253–4, 275, 284–5, 307–12, 372n48, 385n27

Index

Civil War (English), 41–3, 174, 355n10 Clay, Henry, 326, 401n28 Cleveland, Pres. Grover, 205–6, 379n13 Cohen, Michael C., 12, 122, 353n14 Cohen, Milton A., 257 Cole, Wayne S., 279–81, 288, 291, 391–2n37 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 9, 58, 63, 80, 86, 394n51; “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” 55 Collins, Seward, 283, 385n32 Collins, William, 58, 80–1 colonialism (post-colonialism), 18–19, 49–51, 56, 197, 205, 214, 219, 267, 275, 319–20, 324, 333, 338, 360–1n24 colonies: in Africa, 168, 179, 181, 319, 323, 399–400n14, 402n38, 403n44; American-owned, 208, 219, 223; British in America, 5–6, 20, 22, 25–6, 37–9, 106, 173, 354n8; British Empire, 133, 284, 326, 331, 335; French, 402n38; Spanish, 16, 196, 208 Columbus, Christopher, 32–3, 39, 44–50, 153–5, 188–90, 193, 213, 274, 276–7, 286, 305 commerce, 18, 20–1, 24, 26–9, 36, 40, 51–2, 64, 130, 134, 153, 173, 185, 207, 210, 212, 220, 222, 231, 245, 356n23; banking, 134, 139, 145–6, 152, 270; business, 141, 177, 181, 205, 340, 345, 379n11, 380n14, 386n35; commodity, 27, 74–5, 249–50; corporation, 49–50, 105, 111, 121, 162, 179, 188, 190, 192, 204, 251, 270, 306,

445

347, 386n35; industry, 54–6, 73, 102, 112, 118, 121, 139, 146–7, 151, 161–3, 231, 244–6, 248–50, 265, 276, 278, 288, 306, 339–40, 342, 347–8, 382–3n9, 388n12; markets, 133, 145, 162, 208, 218–19, 249, 325, 386n33, 388n9; profit, 245, 249–50, 270; trade, 28, 40, 52, 55, 133–4, 139–42, 144–7, 149, 151–3, 161, 194, 206, 320, 360n21, 391n33 Confederacy, 7, 55, 103, 110, 112, 123–65, 177, 200, 204, 234, 240, 243–7, 250–1, 365nn10–11, 367n6, 367n9, 370n36, 378–9n7, 386n34; Confederate flag, 228, 242 Constitution, 20, 73, 109, 111–12, 136, 179–80, 206, 276, 366n, 367n8, 375n19, 380n18, 396n15; Confederate, 128, 245 Coolbrith, Ina, 191–2, 376n31 Copperheads, 200, 326, 368n20 Cowley, Abraham (Cowleyan ode), 5, 58, 80, 227, 351n4, 358n1 Cowley, Malcolm, 231–2, 241, 272, 392–3n43 Cox, Oliver Cromwell, 327, 399n8, 402n32 Crane, Hart, 34, 38, 44, 51–7, 161–2, 187, 199, 232, 241, 250–1, 256, 260, 263, 270, 295, 305–7, 314, 316, 321–3, 332, 357nn30–2, 387n1, 397n21, 400n16, 400n18 Crazy Horse, Chief, 269 Crèvecoeur, Hector, 183–4 Crider, John Richard, 34–7, 41, 44, 354nn1–2, 355n12 Cullen, Countee, 241, 318, 399n12

446

Cushman, Stephen, 63 Custer, Gen. George A., 191–2, 376–7n32 Dahlhaus, Carl, 82–3 Dallal, Jenine Abboushi, 76–7 Daniels, Roger, 302–3, 396n14 Darwin, Charles, 50, 310, 328, 357n26, 368n17, 380–1n90; evolution, 223, 268 Davidson, Donald, 226–8, 231–2, 234, 241, 249, 256, 271, 281, 285–6, 384n20, 385n28, 385n31 Davies, Catherine, 338–9 Davis, Jefferson, 243–8 De Bellis, Jack, 148, 151, 369–70 Declaration of Independence, 17, 206, 211, 402–3n40; Confederate, 112 Dejong, Timothy, 318, 321, 330, 335–6, 339–400n14, 400n17, 400n21 Dell, Floyd, 296–7, 395n11 Denning, Michael, 264–5, 309, 389n14, 395n12 Depression: of 1929, 9, 11–12, 248, 262–3, 269, 274–5, 302, 318, 338; Panic of 1873, 146, 179, 370n37; Panic of 1893, 188 Dickinson, Emily, 5, 13, 84, 93–4, 167, 233, 300, 313, 346, 352n7, 359n12 Donaghue, Denis, 94, 99, 233, 363n45 Donne, John, 80, 343, 355n12 Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.), 124, 169, 256, 286, 293, 322 Douglass, Frederick, 104, 176, 178–81, 185, 191, 309, 374 Dowling, William C., 27, 38

Index

Drake, William, 299, 301, 303, 395n12 Drayton, Michael, 284, 393n44 Duberman, Martin, 105, 364n4, 366n21 DuBois, W.E.B., 203, 309–10, 318, 320, 322, 324–5, 327, 331, 334, 397n23, 399–400n14, 401n24, 401n28, 402n39 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 179, 201, 379n8 Duncan, Robert, 13, 322, 350 Dupree, Robert S., 237, 287 Dwight, Timothy, 18, 30, 38–9, 41–2, 45–6, 48, 169, 270, 355n7, 356n17 Dyer, John, 40 Eastman, Max, 300, 395n11 Eberhart, Richard, 338, 344–5 Edwards, Jonathan, 30–1, 39–40, 66, 310 Eisenhauer, Robert, 41 Eliot, Charles W., 202, 378n5 Eliot, T.S., 10, 55, 106, 124, 148, 187, 229–34, 238–9, 250, 255–6, 263, 273, 281–2, 285–6, 289–90, 293, 295, 297, 307, 316–17, 321, 349, 357n31, 362n39, 383n10, 385n26, 385n31, 389n16, 393n45, 399n10, 400n16 Ellison, Ralph, 318, 327 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 27, 38, 48, 51, 54, 58–76, 77–9, 86, 88–9, 91–5, 97, 103–6, 109, 113, 124, 130, 146, 149–51, 171, 173, 227, 229, 232, 255–7, 259–61, 265, 308, 313, 326, 357n26, 357n30, 358n2, 358nn4–5, 359nn11–13, 359nn15–16, 360nn17–22,

Index

361n25, 361n37, 362n37, 362n49, 363n45, 366n26, 393n44 England, Eugene, 95, 363n43 Engler, Bernd, 351n1 epic, 4, 9, 11, 26, 34, 37, 41, 44–50, 52–3, 55–6, 65–6, 106, 108, 168–9, 250, 267, 294, 296, 322, 338, 346, 351–2n6, 254n2, 355n13, 356nn20–1, 387n1, 400n20 Erkkila, Betsy, 48, 51, 351n2, 356n23

fbi, 291, 391–2n37, 396–7n17 Fiedler, Leslie, 183 Filreis, Alan, 255, 257, 264, 387n5, 388n7, 390n23 Fletcher, John Gould, 148, 231, 256 Foner, Eric, 146, 179, 364n3, 365n17, 366n18 Ford, Henry, 68, 359–60n16 Fordham, Mary Weston, 193–4 Forrest, Gen. Nathan Bedford, 385n29 Frank, Waldo, 56, 357n31 Franklin, Benjamin, 29, 66, 326 Freeman, Joseph, 265, 268, 390n21, 395n11 French and Indian War, 26 French Revolution, 19, 110, 159, 175 Freneau, Philip, 5, 16–33, 34, 38–9, 42, 48–9, 53, 57, 173, 257, 350, 353n1, 354nn5–6, 354nn8–9, 355nn6–7 Freud, Sigmund, 225, 229, 296, 308 Fried, Debra, 295 Friedman, Susan Stanford, 169 Frobenius, Leo, 322, 333, 400n19 Frontier Thesis, 188, 379n11 Frost, Robert, 229, 256, 293, 349, 359n12, 381n21, 398n5 Fry, Paul, 383n11

447

Gaddis, John Lewis, 287 Garland, Hamlin, 139, 198, 210, 220, 379n13 Garvey, Marcus, 320, 399–400n14 Genovese, Eugene D., 140, 249–51, 366n24, 367–8n7, 367n12, 367–8n12, 369n25, 384n18, 385n28, 385n30, 385–6n32, 386n33 George, Henry, 210, 220 Georgelos, Peter, 403n1 Ginsberg, Allen, 5, 38, 51, 53, 227, 257–8, 323, 337–50, 403n1, 404n5, 404n10–11 Ginsberg, Louis, 342, 395n11 Gioia, Dana, 64 Gold, Mike, 9, 258, 262–5, 271–2, 277, 300–1, 309, 338, 388n12, 389nn14–15, 395nn11–12, 397n23 Golden, Samuel, 99, 363n52 Gone with the Wind (Mitchell), 123, 231 Gordon, Caroline, 54, 232, 242 Gougeon, Len, 70, 72–6, 360n18, 361n25 Gould, Hannah Flagg, 4, 8, 170–4, 373–4n11 Grant, Pres. Ulysses S., 107, 122, 154, 368–9n23 Gray, Janet, 170, 373 Gray, Thomas, 58, 403n42 greater Romantic lyric, 8–9, 58, 94, 132, 227, 313, 350, 397n24 Gregerson, Linda, 9 Gregory, Horace, 267 Griffin, Martin, 101, 121, 365nn9–10, 365n16 Griswold, Rufus, 166–8, 173–4, 373n1, 373n9, 374n12, 375n22

448

Gwiazda, Piotr K., 13–14 Habermas, Jürgen, 101 Hale, Edward Everett, 101, 106, 122 Halpern, Daniel, 214, 219 Hamilton, Alexander, 16, 20, 28, 102–3, 133, 391n13 Hamilton, Gail [Mary Abigail Dodge], 169 Hammer, Langdon, 53–4, 228, 232, 382n8 Hanlon, Christopher, 125–6, 131–2, 367–8n12 Harper, Frances, 168–9, 373n5, 380n17 Harrington, Joseph, 8, 13, 206–7, 209, 255, 266, 352n8, 358n6, 382n2, 387–8n6, 388n8, 389n17, 390n27 Harrison, Pres. Benjamin, 188, 191 Hawaii, 52, 205, 213, 215, 300, 303, 380n14 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 65, 94, 97, 106 Hayden, Robert, 318 Hayes, Pres. Rutherford B., 19, 204 Hayley, William, 35, 46–7, 338, 356n18 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 128, 132, 139, 143, 150, 367n5, 367n9, 370n34, 370–1n40 Herbst, Josephine, 301, 395n12 Herder, Johann, 83, 88 Herzog, Anne, 255–6, 309, 388n7 Heymann, C. David, 103, 105 Hicks, Granville, 262, 264 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 101, 104, 379–80n13

Index

Hitler, Adolf, 258–9, 268, 271, 273, 279–83, 285, 302, 311, 334, 389n14, 392n42 Hoar, Sen. George Frisbie, 208, 210–11, 380n18 Hobson, Christopher Z., 177, 185–7, 375n20, 375–6n23, 399–400n14 Hoffmann, E.T.A., 82–3, 362n36 Hofstadter, Richard, 207, 215, 220, 222, 379n11 Hollander, John, 79–81, 361n31, 382n4 Homer, 27, 47, 168–9, 215, 233, 237, 295 homosexuality (gay), 53–4, 232, 262–3, 296, 337, 339–40, 343–4, 398n3, 404n5; Lavender Scare, 341; lesbian, 170, 296–7; lgbt, 5 Hoover, Pres. Herbert, 244, 302, 385n26 Horace (Horatian ode), 58, 116, 127, 270, 351n4, 393n44 Horsman, Reginald, 142 Howard, Leon, 37–8, 355–6n15 Howe, Julia Ward, 168, 170, 373n9 Howells, William Dean, 207, 358n4, 370n35, 379–80n13 huac (House Unamerican Activities Committee), 264, 291, 319 Hughes, Langston, 12, 241, 258, 316, 319, 400n16 Humphries, Rolfe, 272, 390n23, 395n11 Hunt, Michael H., 223 Hutcheson, Francis, 173 Hutchison, Coleman, 123, 132–3 Ihde, Don, 84–5

Index

immigration policy, 4–5, 8, 110, 120, 181, 183–4, 200, 205, 265, 269, 272, 278, 301–4, 381n24, 386n34, 390n25 imperialism, 4–5, 14, 19, 41, 47, 51–2, 56, 111, 113, 118, 121, 190, 197, 206–11, 213, 215, 222–3, 268, 280, 286–7, 325, 403n1; empire (American), 9, 21, 24, 30–1, 37, 111, 118, 205–6, 222–3, 270, 284, 353n4, 355n7 Irmscher, Christoph, 122 isolationism, 12, 215, 279–82, 284, 288, 291, 391–2n37 Jackson, Pres. Andrew, 67, 171 Jackson, Gen. Stonewall, 235, 243–4 Jackson, Virginia, 9–10, 298, 352n7, 395n8 James, Henry, 102, 106, 207, 270, 359n9, 364n1, 379–80n13 James, William, 198, 200, 202–3, 220, 229, 365n11, 378nn5–6, 379–80n13 Jancovich, Marc, 248–9, 382n7, 384n20, 387n3, 387–8n6, 388n9, 391n34 Jarrell, Randall, 278, 285 Jefferson, Pres. Thomas, 16, 19–20, 27–8, 102, 105, 107, 175, 247, 252, 259, 270, 274–6, 365n7, 367n11, 372n48, 391n33 Jeffreys, Mark, 9–11 jeremiad, 338, 375–6n23, 403n1 Johnson, Pres. Andrew, 122, 136, 178–9, 245 Johnson, Elijah, 326–9 Johnson, James Weldon, 241, 258, 318

449

Johnson, Pres. Lyndon, 382n26, 389n18 Johnson, Samuel, 36, 58, 107, 109, 358n1 Johnson, W.R., 6–7, 48, 352–3n10 Johnson, Wendy Dasler, 168 Joyce, James, 11, 316, 397n21 Justice, Donald, 9, 227 Kahn, Otto, 56 Kant, Immanuel, 82, 88 Kaplan, Amy, 209 Keats, John, 37, 56, 78, 94, 132, 215, 227, 261, 370n32 Kennedy, David M., 264, 272, 280–1, 391–2n30 Kennedy, Pres. John F., 389n18 Kerkering, John D., 124, 151, 371n41, 371n43 Key, Francis Scott, 326, 401–2n31 Killingsworth, M. Jimmie, 51–2, 56–7, 357n34 Kipling, Rudyard, 213–14, 331–2; “white man’s burden,” 142, 213–14, 326, 380–1n20 Korean War, 223, 340, 350 Kuhn, Joseph, 228, 233, 236, 382n6, 383n14, 384n24, 385n31 Ku Klux Klan (KKK), 204, 308, 367n8, 368–9n23, 385n29; lynching, 203–4, 306–7, 379n8, 389n14, 399n8 Laing, R.D., 345, 404n10 Lanier, Sidney, 3–4, 38, 40, 53, 92, 124–5, 130, 132–65, 189, 197–9, 204, 220–1, 226, 231, 235, 240, 248, 260, 316, 362n39, 367n9, 368n13, 368n15, 368nn17–19,

450

368–9n23, 369n24, 369nn26–7, 369–70n31, 370n32, 370n35, 370nn37–8, 370–1n40, 371n41, 371nn43–4, 372n46, 372n48 Larcom, Lucy, 168 Larson, Erik, 192, 376n26 Lazarus, Emma, 120, 168 Lee, Benjamin F., 177–8, 180–1, 374–5n17, 375n18, 375n20 Lee, Mary Ashe, 176–87 Lee, Gen. Robert E., 107, 129, 139, 230, 244–6 Lenin, 263–4, 270 Leonard, Keith D., 323, 336, 401n26 Levertov, Denise, 13, 350 Lewis, John L., 280 Lewis, R.W.B., 52 leyenda negra, 16, 21–2, 72, 196, 360n22; black legend, 18, 27, 29–30 Lincoln, Pres. Abraham, 52, 101, 103, 107, 110–12, 116–17, 128, 156, 162, 168, 176, 184–5, 194, 205–6, 247, 269, 308–9, 333, 351n4, 368n20, 374n14, 375n21, 378–9n7 Lindbergh, Charles, 281–2, 391–2n37 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 59, 64–5, 94, 101, 105, 122, 192, 253, 349; Hiawatha, 45, 169, 178 lost cause theory, 124–5, 132, 139, 164–5, 185, 204, 231, 238, 308, 326, 378–9n7, 382n6, 385n27 Lovett, Robert Morss, 198–9, 207, 210, 378n3, 378n6, 381n23 Lowell, Amy, 187, 256, 293, 304, 395n11 Lowell, James Russell, 3–4, 6–8, 14, 63, 65, 75, 100–22, 137–8, 173,

Index

175–6, 199–201, 204, 206–7, 211–12, 257, 302, 364nn2–4, 364–5n6, 365nn7–9, 365n12, 365n14, 365n16, 366n18, 366nn21–2, 366n26, 378n6 Lowell, Josephine Shaw, 108, 378n6, 379–80n13 Lowell, Robert, 200–2, 227, 266, 275, 317, 392n38 Lowney, John, 307, 389n14 Lukács, Georg, 9, 65–6 Lynch [Botta], Anne Charlotte, 175 Lytle, Andrew, 241, 282, 392n38, 392n39 McCarthy, Sen. Joseph, 264, 291, 341, 346, 392–3n43 MacDonald, Dwight, 269, 388–9n, 396–7n17 McGann, Jerome, 77–79, 90, 358–9n7, 359n8, 361n26 McGrath, Frank, 350 McKinley, Pres. William, 197, 204–5, 207–9, 220, 300, 378n6 MacLeish, Archibald, 12, 16, 38, 256–7, 259, 265–81, 283–4, 286–8, 291, 293, 307, 311, 338, 388n9, 388n13, 389nn16–17, 389nn19–20, 390nn23–5, 390nn27–9, 391nn32–3, 391n36, 392n41, 393n45, 393n47, 396–7n17 McLuhan, Marshall, 14, 342, 404n9 McWilliams, John P., 37, 44, 47–8, 50, 55, 355–6n15 Mallarmé, Stephane, 10–11, 83, 89, 349–50, 351–2n6, 352–3n10 manifest destiny, 16, 34, 47, 53, 56–7, 75–6, 154, 188, 205, 213, 286; expansionism, 19, 76, 193,

Index

199, 205–7, 215, 248, 378n5, 388n12 Maritain, Jacques, 242, 317, 384n24 Martin, Alexander, 37 Martin, Meredith, 150–1, 353n11 Marxism, 9, 12, 55, 65, 103, 229, 248–9, 255, 257–9, 261–2, 264–5, 267, 270–2, 274, 283, 288, 290, 300, 306–7, 311, 315, 319, 321, 324, 326–7, 331, 335, 337, 386n35, 388n9, 389n14, 391n34, 392–3n43, 396–7n17, 397n19, 398n4, 403n1; Red Scare, 302 Mason, Daniel Gregory, 198, 210, 378n3 Masters, Edgar Lee, 256–7, 315–16, 357n31, 379–80n13, 398n5 May, Caroline, 166–8, 298 Melville, Herman, 5, 55, 94, 113, 233, 308, 311, 313, 327–8, 345, 356n23 Mencken, H.L., 230–1, 365n8 Menken, Adah Isaacs, 169, 373n7 Michelet, Jules, 141–2 Mill, John Stuart, 352n8, 358n6, 394n51 Millay, Edna St Vincent, 8–9, 256, 258, 292–8, 299, 301, 352–3n10, 394nn1–4, 395nn8–11 Millennium myth, 26, 31–2, 40, 43, 49, 57, 74–5, 173, 180, 190, 207–8, 323, 334, 336, 355–6n15; Apocalypse, 29, 39, 43, 87, 248, 308, 331, 333, 347; Atlantis, 52–3, 56–7, 155, 314; Eden, 24, 87, 190, 324; Futurafrique, 53, 314, 322–3, 334; Heaven (Heavenly City), 172, 194–5, 217–18, 344; New Jerusalem, 16, 21, 29, 54, 310; Revelation, 30–2, 195; Utopia, 45,

451

53, 111, 325–6, 337; Zion, 40, 188, 310–11, 338, 401n23 Miller, Nina, 299, 301, 395–6n13 Miller, Stuart Creighton, 379–80n13 Milton, John, 31, 50, 55, 66, 132, 148, 197–8, 217–18, 237, 250, 259, 337, 342–3, 348, 381nn22–3 Mims, Edward, 147, 151, 162–3, 231 Minton, Theophilus J., 181 Momaday, N. Scott, 94–5, 363nn44–5 Monroe, Harriet, 187–91, 193, 255–6, 376n26, 388n7 Monroe, Pres. James (Monroe Doctrine), 205, 211 Moody, Harriet, 199, 210–11 Moody, William Vaughn, 3–4, 6–9, 14, 173, 196–224, 257, 377n1, 378nn3–5, 379–80n13, 380nn18–19, 381nn23–5 Morrison, Alastair, 290, 382n2 Morton, Sarah Wentworth, 170 Mossell, N.F., 176, 178, 182, 374nn15–16 Mussolini, Benito, 259, 283, 388n10 NAACP, 301, 309, 318

Nancy, Jean-Luc, 85, 99 Napoleon Bonaparte, 174–5, 335, 374n12 Native Americans, 5, 21–5, 39, 46, 52, 67, 124–5, 171, 178, 181, 190–3, 214, 268, 318, 320, 351n, 354n6, 366n21; Aboriginals, 45, 169, 267, 327–8; Indians, 17, 27, 29, 33, 56, 189, 206, 209, 360n22, 376–7n32, 380–1n20, 398n27; Aztecs, 267; Cherokee, 171, 375n19; Eskimo (Inuit), 191, 193, 377n33; Hopi, 193; Inca, 23–4,

452

Index

45–6; Kwakiutl, 193; Powhatan, 193; Sioux, 192, 350 Nelson, Cary, 6, 12, 100, 121–2, 223, 255–8, 299, 318–9, 388n8, 391n32, 400n20 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 224 Noah (sons of Noah), 22, 23, 187, 329, 402n35 Nullification Crisis, 125–6, 127–8, 174 Oakes-Smith, Elizabeth, 169–70 O’Hara, Frank, 9, 227, 339, 344, 350, 404n6 oligarchy, 111, 251, 276–8, 282, 342; aristocracy, 132, 134, 139, 141, 234, 251, 276, 369n28, 387–8n6, 391n33, plutocracy, 251; meritocracy, 333 Osgood, Frances Sargent, 169 Ostriker, Alicia, 381n, 394n2 Owsley, Frank, 241, 384n21 pacifism, 205–6, 373–4, 280, 310, 380n17 Paine, Thomas, 19, 48, 274, 276, 356n18, 391n33 Parrington, Vernon, 19, 102–5 party politics, 75, 123–4, 179, 204, 206, 254–5, 265–6, 280, 368–9n23, 390n28; Communist, 264–5, 268, 272, 280, 283, 299–301, 309–10, 341, 389n14, 389n23, 396n15, 398n2, 398n4; Democratic, 28, 120, 206; Federalist Party, 19, 28; Know-Nothing Party, 120, 366n25; Populist Party, 205; Republican, 15, 103–4, 112, 120, 204–6, 210–11, 364n3, 365n12, 366n25, 368n14,

368–9n23, 378n6, 386n33; Whig, 16, 19, 36–7, 40, 151 Pater, Walter, 11, 82, 220, 226, 352n8, 362n35, 394n51 patriotism, 7, 36–7, 41, 56–7, 67, 72–3, 101–2, 106, 108–13, 119, 128, 169–70, 188, 201, 211, 215–16, 254, 257, 259, 271, 277, 280, 291, 306, 309, 326, 335, 350, 366n21; nationalism, 4, 11, 17, 38–9, 46, 53, 61, 94, 101, 105–9, 124, 126, 129–30, 151, 180, 183, 186–7, 249, 271, 291, 326; nativism, 65, 75, 102, 120, 256, 268, 262, 366n25; jingoism, 207; internationalism, 65, 105, 120, 124, 230, 249, 268, 386; transnationalism, 106, 111, 131; globalism, 13–14, 47, 49, 51, 111, 120, 179, 258, 323 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 44–5, 47–8, 51, 59, 105 Perloff, Marjorie, 338, 342 Philippine War, 195, 196–24, 261, 378n6, 379n11, 380n16, 380n18; Platt Amendment, 379n12, 380n18 Phillips, Christopher, 45–6, 48–9, 356n13, 373n5 Pindar (Pindaric, pseudopindaric), 5, 7–8, 48, 59, 63, 70, 80, 90, 169–70, 174, 188, 212, 227, 320, 323, 350, 351n4, 403n42 Pinsky, Robert, 355n6 Plato, 19, 55, 63, 68, 75, 88, 175, 229, 251, 342 Pocahontas, 52, 171 Poe, Edgar Allan, 5, 10, 59–65, 83, 86, 77–93, 94, 99, 105–6, 124, 127, 142–3, 149–9, 160, 173, 225–7,

Index

232, 257, 261, 265, 344, 352n8, 358n2, 358nn4–5, 358–9n7, 359n8, 361nn26–8, 361n33, 362n36, 362n39, 370–1n40 Polk, Pres. James K., 70, 76 Pound, Ezra, 9, 11, 38, 93, 124, 187, 229, 256, 259, 267, 275, 282, 291, 317, 321–2, 353n13, 368n13, 388n7, 388n10, 389n16, 389n19, 389n29, 400n19, 400n21 Prins, Yopie, 170, 298, 373n8, 395n8 progress poem, 4–5, 8, 10–14, 19, 21, 34–57, 63, 129, 154–5, 161, 168, 184, 188, 267, 269–70, 274, 279, 284, 305, 307, 323–4, 338, 342, 351n3, 353n3, 354n2, 371n43, 376n26, 400n20 prophet, 4–5, 7, 20–1, 31, 36, 39, 47, 49, 60, 66, 93, 114, 129, 131, 134, 154, 163, 179, 185, 187, 211, 217, 221, 254, 261–2, 286–7, 295–6, 310, 312, 323, 334, 336, 337–8, 341–2, 353n4, 371n43, 375–6n23, 393–4n49, 400n22; Amos, 21; Ezekiel, 238, 310; Isaiah, 21, 31, 152, 310; Jeremiah, 21, 118, 323; Joel, 310–11; Micah, 188–9, 210 Quinn, Justin, 53, 337–8, 345, 358n2 Rain-in-the-Face, 191–3, 195 Ransom, John Crowe, 160, 163–5, 230, 256, 258, 293, 372n49, 390n27, 394n2 Ray, H. Cordelia, 176, 195 Reconstruction, 106, 121, 134–6, 161, 163, 179, 185, 204, 209, 241, 252, 368n15 Revolutionary War, 17, 26, 37–8, 40, 126, 129, 155, 171, 174, 284–5,

453

307, 360n22; Boston Massacre, 22, 29; Lexington, 171, 285 Reynolds, David, 308–10, 339, 357n26, 360n18, 364n4, 367n9, 367n11, 385n27, 404n4 Rich, Adrienne, 266, 275, 293, 304, 313, 350, 397n24 Richards, I.A., 225, 235, 394 Ridge, Lola, 13, 258 Rimbaud, Arthur, 332, 402n38 Rivera, Diego, 268–70, 272, 390nn21–2 Robinson, Edwin Arlington, 8–9, 212, 227, 256, 380n19, 381n25 Rockefeller, John D., 267–70, 390n22 Roosevelt, Pres. Franklin Delano (FDR), 12, 244, 259, 267, 274, 279–81, 283, 288, 291, 300, 302–3, 311, 335, 386n36, 391–2n37, 398n3 Roosevelt, Pres. Theodore, 196, 204–5, 209, 214, 220, 222, 380–1n20, 381n25 Rosenthal, M.L., 305, 312, 397n19 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 122 Rubin, Louis D., 129, 134, 139, 144, 231–2, 234–5, 243, 250, 383n13, 385n26 Rudy, Jason R., 142, 151, 159, 370n33, 371nn43–4, 372n45 Rukeyser, Muriel, 13, 38, 51, 53, 255, 257–8, 293, 299, 305–13, 381n21, 395n9, 396–7n17, 397nn18–19, 397nn21–2, 397n24, 398nn26–7 Sacco, Nicola, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, 293, 306 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus, 200–3, 212, 215, 379

454

Sandburg, Carl, 13, 68, 256–8, 272–3, 316, 349, 359–60n16, 388n9, 390n25, 395n11, 398n5 Sappho, 169–71, 351n4, 373n8 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 87–8 Savage, Kirk, 201, 374n13 Schaar, John H., 112–13, 366n21 Schafer, R. Murray, 84, 86 Schiller, Friedrich, 135, 361n26, 394n51 Schirmer, Daniel B., 222 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 82–3 Schurz, Carl, 209, 379–80n13 Schwartz, Delmore, 264, 388n13 Scott, Walter, 65, 140, 198, 221, 369n26 Scottsboro Case, 241, 309 secession, 17, 108, 124–5, 128–9, 174, 245, 247, 367n7, 367n9 Segall, Jeffrey, 273, 388n13, 390n26 Shakespeare, William, 106, 228; Coriolanus, 244, 330; Henry V, 216; Macbeth, 115 Shapiro, Karl, 278, 317–8, 399n10 Shaw, Robert Gould, 108, 115, 168, 200–4, 209–10, 212–13, 215–16, 219–21, 224, 366n26, 378n6, 378–9n7, 379n8 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 36–7, 132, 145, 237, 307, 354n4, 361–2n34 Sigourney, Lydia, 168–70, 174–5, 349, 373n5, 373–4n11 Silverman, Kenneth, 18, 31, 34, 37–8, 52, 89–90, 353n3, 355n6, 358n4 Simms, William Gilmore, 124–7, 128, 130, 132, 134, 194, 367nn4–5, 367nn9–10, 373–4n11 Singal, Daniel, 228, 231, 235, 243, 248, 392–3n43

Index

Sitting Bull, Chief, 191–2 slavery, 4, 8, 25, 33, 75–6, 103–8, 110, 112, 115, 117, 120–1, 123, 127, 132–3, 136, 139–40, 145, 153, 155, 184–5, 219, 238, 240, 252, 310, 312, 319, 326, 387–8n6; abolitionism, 70–3, 75, 102–6, 108, 110, 115, 140, 159, 171, 199–200, 206, 246–7, 307–8, 360–1n24, 364n2, 367n7, 385n30, 401–2n31; Constitution (on slavery), 111–12, 162, 168, 179–80, 204, 366n18; emancipation, 120, 137, 169, 179–80, 184, 186, 217, 372n48, 378–9n7, 401–2n31; Emancipation Proclamation, 107, 129, 156, 168, 176, 186, 317, 364–5n6, 372n47, 374n13; Fugitive Slave Law, 108, 127; pro-slavery, 60, 124–6, 129–31, 244–8, 367n7, 367n11, 367–8n12, 385n30, 402n; wage-slave argument, 131, 134, 147, 152, 246, 309, 318–19 Smeall, J.F.W., 17–19, 27, 353nn1–2, 353n4, 354n7 Smith, William, 37 Solomon, Carl, 53, 342, 345, 349, 404n11 Sorby, Angela, 122 Spanish-American War (San Juan Hill), 8, 66, 196–7, 209, 379n11, 380n18; Teller Amendment, 220, 379nn11–12, 380n18, 381n24 Spanish Civil War, 273, 301, 303, 305 Spengler, Oswald, 231, 235, 243, 248, 357n31, 385n31 Squires, Radcliffe, 242, 281, 287, 384n17, 392n38 Starke, Aubrey Harrison, 135–40,

Index

142, 144, 146–7, 149, 151, 159–63, 368n15, n19, 369n27, 370n38, 372n48 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 59, 94, 101, 166–7, 366n23, 375n22, 381n21 Stephens, Alexander, 129, 245 Stevens, Sen. Thaddeus, 136 Stevens, Wallace, 8, 28, 92–3, 148, 259, 285, 357n31, 359n12, 362n39, 382n4, 388n10 Stewart, John L., 287, 383n12, 393n48 Stoddard, Richard Henry, 101–2, 116–18, 351n4 Suarez, Ernest, 384n16, 384n22 Sumner, Sen. Charles, 137 Supreme Court, 179, 215, 314, 396n15; Brown vs Board of Education, 319, 327, 341; Loving vs Virginia, 187; Pembina Silver Mining vs Pennsylvania, 204; Plessy vs Ferguson, 179, 203–4; Jim Crow, 12, 162, 179, 203–4, 231, 241, 252, 308, 314, 329, 341 Surette, Leon, 230, 385n26 Swedenborg, Emmanuel, 91–2, 362n40, 362–3n41, 363n45 Swinburne, Algernon, 101, 150, 304 Taft, Pres. William Howard, 205, 208 Taggard, Genevieve, 13, 228, 258, 293, 299–304, 387n4, 395n9, 395n12, 395–6n13 Tate, Allen, 3–4, 7–8, 10, 12, 14–15, 49, 53–6, 79, 139, 160–3, 165, 225–52, 254–5, 257–8, 267, 271, 279–91, 293, 299, 306, 316–7, 320–1, 334, 339–40, 342, 352n9,

455

352–3n10, 353n16, 357n31, 357n32, 382nn1–2, 382nn4–8, 382–3n9, 383nn11–14, 383–4n15, 384nn16–20, 384nn22–3, 384–5n24, 385nn26–31, 385–6n32, 385nn35–6, 387n3, 387–8n6, 388n13, 389n20, 390nn26–7, 391n34, 392nn38–40, 392–3n43, 393nn44–5, 393nn47–8, 393–4n49, 394n2, 395n10, 399nn8–11 Taylor, Bayard, 148, 153, 351n4 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 37, 93–4, 127, 141, 289–90, 325–6, 363n52, 372n50, 401n26, 403n43 Thomson, James, 36, 42, 45 Thoreau, Henry David, 43, 76, 86, 259, 308–9, 347, 360–1n24 Timrod, Henry, 14, 124–5, 127–33, 134–6, 160, 164–5, 228, 231, 240, 367nn5–6, 367nn8–9, 367n11, 367–8n12, 370–1n40, 372n50, 373–4n11 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 109, 365n15 Tolson, Melvin B., 39, 51, 53, 148, 241, 314–36, 337, 362n39, 398nn2–5, 398–9n6, 399nn7–13, 399–400n14, 400nn15–17, 400nn19–22, 401n23, 401nn26–30, 401–2n31, 402n34, 402n38, 402–3n40, 403n43 Torrey, Charles Turner, 70–2, 326 Townsend, Eliza, 173–5, 374n12 translatio studii (translatio imperii), 16, 18, 35–7, 40–1, 46–7, 49–50, 154, 213, 267, 275, 284, 354n2 Truman, Pres. Harry S., 288, 290, 341, 389n18, 391n35 Trumbull, John, 18, 30, 34–5, 38–9, 355n6

456

Tubman, William, 316, 320, 324, 329, 334 Tucker, Herbert F., 47, 65, 351–2n6, 353n12, 354n2, 355n13, 356n20 Tuckerman, Frederick Goddard, 4, 6, 58–9, 64, 93–9, 363nn43–6, 363n52 Twain, Mark, 139–40, 357n31, 379–80n13 Underwood, Thomas, 162, 228, 230–2, 240, 242–3, 281, 382n5, 382nn7–8, 384nn18–20, 384n23, 384–5n24, 385–6n32, 386n36, 392–3n43 unions, 263, 303, 308, 389n14; CIO, 265; IWW, 309; strikes, 188, 263–4, 302 Valéry, Paul, 10, 83, 237, 383n14 Vietnam War, 13, 109, 222–3, 366n21, 382n26, 391n32 Vikings (Norse), 156, 189 Virgil, 19–20, 27–8, 46, 48, 354n2, 355n7, 356n17 Volney, Comte François de, 355–6n15 Von Cromphout, Gustaaf, 68, 88, 357n11 Waggoner, Hyatt, 62, 67–8, 359n15 Wagner, Richard, 148, 150, 154 Wald, Alan, 12, 264, 299–301 Walker, Cheryl, 169, 293–5, 373n3, 373nn7–8, 374n14, 376n31, 394n2 Walker, Jeffrey, 387n1 Walker, Margaret, 317 Wardrop, Daneen, 77 War of 1812, 173–4

Index

Warren, James Perrin, 50 Warren, Robert Penn, 160, 163, 228, 241, 256, 308, 384n20 Washington, Booker T., 178–9, 193–4, 202–3, 206, 209, 374–5n17, 379n9 Washington, Pres. George, 19, 26–8, 117, 170, 184–5, 308, 373n10 Webster, Sen. Daniel, 72, 75, 360n20, 360–1n24, 387n2 Welch, Richard E., Jr, 222, 380n16 Wells, Ida B., 191, 376n29 Wertheimer, Eric, 18, 22, 25, 27, 29, 353n2, 354n6, 355n14, 357n28 Westover, Jeffrey W., 56, 357n29 Wheatley, Phillis, 181, 184, 375n22 White, Edmund, 344, 404n5 White, Hayden, 68, 229 Whitfield, James Monroe, 155–6, 372n47 Whitfield, Stephen, 200, 202–4, 379n8, 380n17 Whitley, Edward, 4 Whitman, Walt, 3, 5–7, 13, 28, 34, 38, 44, 46–57, 58–9, 62–4, 79, 93, 96, 101, 109, 111, 113, 124, 149–51, 153–4, 157–9, 162, 179, 187–8, 199, 213, 215, 219, 227, 254, 257–64, 269, 275, 286, 306, 313, 316, 319, 321, 325–6, 330, 333, 335, 338–44, 348, 350, 356n18, 356nn20–3, 356–7n25, 357nn26–7, 357n32, 357n34, 364n4, 365n13, 371nn43–4, 387n1, 388n12, 403n2, 404nn4–5 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 70, 100, 122, 154, 219 Wilde, Oscar, 66, 226, 357n31, 378n3 Wilkinson, Lynn R., 91, 362–3n41

Index

Williams, William Carlos, 44, 55–6, 68, 229, 256, 305, 311, 322, 341, 357nn31–2, 382n4, 387n1, 400n16 Wilson, Edmund, 94, 100, 134, 149, 232, 241, 271, 295, 365n8, 368n14, 395n11 Wilson, Pres. Woodrow, 206, 368n17 Winters, Yvor, 54–5, 78, 93–5, 363n42, 381n21 Wolosky, Shira, 167, 183–4, 367n5, 373nn2–3, 395n9 Woodward, C. Vann, 194, 372n48

457

Wordsworth, William, 11, 58, 63, 66, 80–2, 84, 86, 89, 94–5, 125, 127, 144, 352n8, 358n6, 358–9n7, 361n33 World War, First, 8, 195, 206, 284, 302 World War, Second, 8, 195, 266, 279, 284, 290, 293, 310, 312, 340 York, Jake Adam, 54, 380n18 Zabel, Morton Dauwen, 254–8, 260, 262, 271, 278, 289, 387n5

458

Index