The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse 9780231520294

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Poetics of Everyday Time
1. The Middle Living of Robert Frost
2. The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens
3. The Everyday Elegies of Elizabeth Bishop
4. The Cosmic Dawnings of James Merrill
Conclusion: Everyday Pasts and Everyday Futures
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Siobhan Phillips

The Poetics of the Everyday Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse

Columbia University Press

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex

C o p y r i g h t © 2010 C o l u m b i a U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s All right s reserved

L i b r a ry o f C o n g r e s s C ata l o g i n g - i n - P u b l i c at i o n D ata ph i l l i p s, s i o b h a n, 1 9 78 – t h e p o e t i c s o f t h e e v e ry day : c r e at i v e r e p e t i t i o n i n m o d e r n A m e r i c a n verse / siobhan phillips. p. c m . includes biblio gr aphical references and index. i s b n 9 7 8 - 0 - 2 3 1 - 1 4 9 3 0 - 3 ( c l o t h : a l k . pa p e r ) — i s b n 9 7 8 - 0 - 2 3 1 - 5 2 0 2 9 - 4 (e-book) 1. american poetry—20th century—history and criticism. 2 . r e p e t i t i o n i n l i t e r at u r e . 3 . r e p e t i t i o n ( r h e t o r i c ) 4 . f r o s t, r o b e r t , 1 8 74 – 1 9 6 3 — t e c h n i q u e . 5 . s t e v e n s , wa l l a c e , 1 8 7 9 – 1 9 5 5 — t e c h n i q u e . 6 . b i s h o p, e l i z a b e t h , 1 9 1 1 – 1 9 7 9 — T e c h n i q u e . 7 . m e r r i l l , james ingram—Technique. I. title. ps310.R45p55 2010 811'.009—dc22

2009023398

Columbia University Press bo oks are printed o n p e r m a n e n t a n d d u r a b l e a c i d - f r e e pa p e r . T h i s b o o k i s p r i n t e d o n pa p e r w i t h r e c y c l e d c o n t e n t. P r i n t e d i n t h e U n i t e d S tat e s o f A m e r i c a

c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

R e f e r e n c e s t o I n t e r n e t W e b s i t e s ( U R L s ) w e r e a c c u r at e at t h e t i m e o f w r i t i n g. N e i t h e r t h e aut h o r n o r C o lu m b i a U n i v e r s i ty P r e s s i s r e s p o n s i b l e f o r U R L s t h at m ay h av e e x p i r e d o r c h a n g e d s i n c e t h e m a n u s c r i p t w a s p r e p a r e d.

for Brian

content s

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: The Poetics of Everyday Time 1 1. The Middle Living of Robert Frost

31

2. The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens 71 3. The Everyday Elegies of Elizabeth Bishop 113 4. The Cosmic Dawnings of James Merrill 155 Conclusion: Everyday Pasts and Everyday Futures 199 Notes 223 Bibliography 275 Index 299

ac kno w led g m en t s

i would not h ave b e gu n t h i s b o ok , m uch l e ss f i n i sh e d i t, without the help of many people. David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer provided insightful, detailed advice in readings and conversations from the beginning of my thoughts to the end of my revisions. Pericles Lewis has been an equally generous source of good thoughts and counsel. Others who read drafts, discussed ideas, and helped with practicalities include Leslie Brisman, Stephen Burt, Jill Campbell, Wes Davis, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Wai Chee Dimock, Paul Fry, Christopher R. Miller, Lloyd Pratt, and John Rogers. I owe much to the gracious assistance of these scholars and others. I am grateful to all my family members for their understanding during the long span of research and composition as well as for many specific instances of help: Sheila Peiffer and Steven Peiffer read portions of the text, Christopher Peiffer provided vital advice at a crucial juncture, Caleb Peiffer was always ready with useful wisdom about the writing process. Prudence Peiffer’s insights and editing saved me from errors while leading me to better analysis. Throughout work on this book, the friendship of Matthew Mutter, Patrick Redding, and Kathryn Reklis both sharpened my ideas and refreshed my enthusiasms. I thank Emily Setina for her considerate reading as well as for our many enriching talks about poetry, biography, and twentiethcentury literature. To Robert McGill—clear-eyed and empathetic about literary scholarship as well as so much else—I am steadily grateful.

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acknowledgments

I have been very lucky in my scholarly homes during the past several years. Thanks to all at the Yale Department of English, especially Diane Jowdy, Ruben Roman, and Erica Sayers. Members of the TwentiethCentury Colloquium and the Biography Working Group at Yale heard and improved portions of this material in early forms. I am grateful to Diana Morse at the Harvard Society of Fellows for her many instances of help and support, and to all those in Cambridge who offered good questions and welcome encouragement in the late stages of writing and editing. Portions of chapter 2 appeared in PMLA and are reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, The Modern Language Association of America. I thank Patricia Yaeger, Eric Wirth, the editorial board, and two readers for their suggestions. Portions of chapter 3 appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature and appear here by permission of that journal; thanks to Lee Zimmerman and the journal’s two readers for their comments. I am grateful to everyone at Columbia University Press who has made the process of book publication smoother, more helpful, and more interesting than I would previously have thought possible; thanks in particu lar to Philip Leventhal, Michael Haskell, and the two anonymous readers whose wonderfully attentive comments improved the entire manuscript. Funds from the John F. Enders Fund, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the William F. Milton Fund supported the research, writing, and publication of this book. I am deeply thankful to these institutions. I am grateful as well as to the authors, executors, libraries, and publishers who provided permission to quote the following material: Excerpts from “In the Home Stretch” and “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1969, by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright 1942, 1944 by Robert Frost, copyright 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Excerpts from “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” “The World as Meditation,” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Unpublished letters of Wallace Stevens copyright © the estate of Wallace Stevens, used by permission of the estate and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s xi

Excerpts from “Anaphora,” “Crusoe in England,” “Five Flights Up,” “North Haven,” “One Art,” “The Prodigal,” “Roosters,” “Sestina,” and “The Shampoo” from The Complete Poems, 1927–1979, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from unpublished notebooks and unpublished letters written by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2007 Alice Helen Methfessel. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate and by permission of Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. Excerpts from “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker,” “For Proust,” “A Tenancy,” “The Thousand and Second Night,” “The Broken Home,” “Clearing the Title,” and “To the Reader,” from Collected Poems, by James Merrill, edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, copyright © 2001 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Unpublished material from the letters and papers of James Merrill, copyright © the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University, used by permission of the estate, Amherst College Library and Special Collections, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Excerpts from “More Feedback” from Where Shall I Wander, by John Ashbery, copyright © 2005 by John Ashbery, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpts from “Episode” by John Ashbery, copyright © 2008 by John Ashbery. Originally published in The New York Review of Books (November 20, 2008). Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author. Excerpts from “Measure” from Field Guide, by Robert Hass, copyright © 1973 by Robert Hass, reprinted by permission of Yale University Press. Excerpts from “L’Abandon Ou Les Deux Amies” from Strangely Marked Metal, by Kay Ryan, copyright © 1985 by Kay Ryan, reprinted by permission of Copper Beech Press. Excerpts from “Half a Loaf ” from Flamingo Watching, by Kay Ryan, copyright © 1994 by Kay Ryan, reprinted by permission of Copper Beech Press. Excerpts from “If the Moon Happened Once” from Elephant Rocks, by Kay Ryan, copyright © 1996 by Kay Ryan, used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Excerpts from “Waste” from Say Uncle, by Kay Ryan, copyright © 2000 by Kay Ryan, used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Excerpt from “Repetition” by Kay Ryan,

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originally published in Poetry ( January 2008), copyright © 2008 by Kay Ryan, used by permission of Kay Ryan. Excerpts from “Like Lightning Across an Open Field,” “Little O,” and “If See No End In Is” from Watching the Spring Festival, by Frank Bidart. Copyright © 2008 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Librarians and staff at many libraries and archives made my research easier and more fruitful, helping me to fi nd and use the materials I needed: thanks especially to Patricia Willis, Nancy Kuhl, Sara S. Hodson, Dean Rogers, and John Hodge. At Vassar, the gracious hospitality of Silke von der Emde, Bert Wachsmuth, Leah Wachsmuth, and Louise Wachsmuth was instrumental. Peter Hanchak allowed me to discover more about Stevens; J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser provided generous scholarly and practical help; Kay Ryan kindly supported my efforts; and Jim Harrison offered me a rare, rich archival opportunity. Finally, I wish to thank Brian Phillips, who read, discussed, and debated everything related to this book. His intellect is a constant resource, his support an even more valuable solace; my sense of the creative good in everyday life draws from every day of our life together.

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Introduction The Poetics of Everyday Time

in an ear ly p oe m, W al lac e S t e ve n s c a l ls i t a “ m a la dy, ” a numbing quotidian “routine” of recurrent days. In a late poem, however, Stevens calls it a “health,” a rejuvenating “over and over” of renewed mornings (Collected, 81, 449). This book focuses on the concept of daily time that links Stevens’s two phrases; I wish to investigate how and why a poet may transform the frustration of the fi rst description into the fulfi llment of the second. To do so, I look at four writers who pay consistent attention to the potential of everyday patterns: like Stevens, Robert Frost strives to make “over and over” a chance as well as a chore (Collected Poems, 66); Elizabeth Bishop wonders how to turn recurrent mornings into a “ceremony” rather than a sentence (Complete Poems, 52); James Merrill tries to perceive ordinary living as less like a cyclic degeneration and more like a spiral of ever“truer” tomorrows (Collected Poems, 616). Through particu lar but related means, each of these poets works to convert the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. Through par ticular but related developments, each of these poets fi nds that daily life can be a vital form as well as a central subject. In their work, ordinary experience both shapes creative practices and directs thematic preoccupations. This book aims to describe their everyday project. In so doing, I also hope to demonstrate why this poetics may matter not only to an understanding of four writers but also to descriptions of their

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The Poetics of Everyday Time

era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the philosophical issues that literature reflects and illuminates. The topic of common living may seem too slight to bear this freight; can it matter so much, one might well ask, how or even if one gets up in the morning? The poetics of everyday time resists such indifference by presenting ordinary life as significant drama: in this writing, quotidian existence cannot be ignored or underestimated. These poems constantly brook the risks in diurnal patterns, and the effacing threat of “sink[ing] under” what is ordinary, as Frost writes, or the accusatory pain of morning’s “horrible insistence,” as Bishop records, shadows all four writers of this study (Frost, Collected Poems, 242; Bishop, Complete Poems 35). These poets confront such dangers, however, not to dismiss or even to overcome what is ordinary but rather to realize its full promise: the illumination of what Merrill describes as “days brilliantly recurring,” what Stevens calls “an inner miracle and sun-sacrament,” what Bishop names in one title as a “miracle for breakfast” (Merrill, Collected Poems, 673; Stevens, Collected, 236; Bishop, Complete Poems, 18). In their work, admitting the burden of quotidian banality is one way of discovering the gifts in given conditions. Their poems thus articulate a common good that is neither ignorant nor cynical; they replace the consoling but impossible sanctity of religious faith with the sober but available “sanction,” to adapt Stevens’s word, of everyday regimen.1 To use Bishop’s phrases, this verse would look on the “untidy activity” of existence and perceive it as “awful but cheerful” (Complete Poems, 61). So much is evident in Bishop’s “Anaphora,” for example, which begins with “each day” and adopts as its subject just that ordinary pattern (Bishop, Complete Poems, 52). The poem’s focus is representative, since the writers of everyday time often use the moment of waking as a crucial test of quotidian recurrence. In “Anaphora,” a speaker begins in wonder at morning before realizing, by the end of the first stanza, that its pure energy will degenerate into the immanence of “mortal / mortal fatigue.” Bishop’s poem does not conclude with the repetitions of deathly exhaustion, though; rather, the mirroring shape of a second stanza follows the progression of day to the onset of evening, including the preparations for another sunrise. To accept the debilitations of dailiness is also to claim its regular, even ceremonial renewal: the “fiery event,” as Bishop calls it, “of every day in endless / endless assent.” This diction insists on the power inherent in the simple fact of one more sun, an energy transfiguring in its fi re and elevating in its rise.

The Poetics of Everyday Time 3

Bishop’s “assent” also shows the exertion behind this quotidian power, presenting matinal beginning as both a singular happening and an assumed pattern. If dawns are necessarily endless, that order makes each one no less of an “event.” The “stupendous studies” of each day take up such eventfulness as their special, recurrent charge, transforming inevitable fatigue into an equally inevitable rejuvenation. This, in Bishop’s poem, is the heroism implicit in a repetitive life, and it is also, and just as importantly, the heroism implicit in a repetitive poetry. From the title, which compares natural and verbal patterns, to the various returns of words that describe and transform daily recurrence, Bishop’s work shows how rhetorical craft mimics and supports an existential effort. Like all the work of an everyday poetics, “Anaphora” perceives ordinary practice as an artistic task. What, exactly, are the interests and investments of the task? “Anaphora” and other works define the stakes of a quotidian poesis by showing a specific dilemma to be emphasized in ordinary experience: the link between a creative self and the world it inhabits. The question of that connection is central to all postromantic aesthetics, certainly, and vital to all post-Kantian philosophy, but it becomes newly central in the postmetaphysical context of the modernist period—in the era’s accelerating uncertainties about the integrity of the subjective person as well as the coherence of the objective environment. A postmodern culture, with its increased emphasis on contingency and indeterminacy, accentuates the pervasive twentieth-century problem; poststructuralist doubts about ontologies of subject and object seem to have complicated rather than obviated concerns about the rights and relations of any discrete identity. Moreover, the skeptical divide between self and world may be particularly difficult for an American writer of the modernist or postmodernist period, since the literary-philosophical heritage of an American tradition, with its mixture of romanticism and pragmatism, charges aesthetics with the potentially contradictory goals of transcendent selfhood and practical efficacy.2 In such a context, the poets of this study show, common life can be newly critical, for its patterns repeatedly enact the association of a single mind and a general environment. Daily experience places the personal rounds of habit and routine within the natural returns of sunrise and sunset; it compares the contemplative shuttle of memory and expectation with the calendric cycle of yesterday and tomorrow; it sets an individual’s decision to get up in the morning and face one more day next to the world’s tendency to turn over in the morning

4

The Poetics of Everyday Time

and provide one more dawn. The writers of my analysis exploit such congruence as they discern how ordinary behavior might stage a viable, secular, and democratic response to a dualistic split. In their work, daily practice can maintain effective subjective freedom within an objective necessity, as everyday living mediates the constantly remade relation of two terms rather than demanding the uncertain choice of one or the other. Daily practice can do so because of the pattern that distinguishes both human schedules and worldly cycles, a pattern of temporal repetition. Structurally and thematically, recurrence pervades the poems that I consider as well as the poetics that I wish more generally to describe. This ordinary rhythm avoids the common temporal extremes of stasis and change: the poetry of this study does not seek the eternity of T.  S. Eliot’s “still point,” that is, or the novelty of Emerson’s “original relation,” or the “now” of Benjamin’s “Jetztzeit”—but it does not accept the fluidity of Bergson’s evolutionary stream, either, or the flux of experience in William James’s later philosophy, or the storm of annihilating progress in Benjamin’s historicism (Eliot, Complete, 119; Emerson, Collected Works, 1:7; Benjamin, Illuminations, 261, 257– 58). Rather, everyday poetics articulates a timeliness in which each morning offers a fresh start and a familiar emphasis, an established precedent and a novel development. Ordinary experience moves by the recursive advance of three tenses, with each present comparing to a similar but different past and predicting a similar but different future. Such difference-in-sameness defi nes any instance of discernible repetition, whether it be symbolic or situational.3 In its daily instantiation, however, the pattern grants ordinary writers a vital possibility. Old-but-new mornings allow the innovation necessary for free will or creative individualism: the sense, always, of something original emerging into being. At the same time, old-but-new mornings provide the consistency necessary for that authority to fi nd purchase: the conviction, always, of how a new conception will take shape. Daily time therefore allows the independent mind an empirically warranted place in the world’s process. One might claim as one’s own the dawn that actually comes, as in Frost’s work, or desire as one’s own the day that is actually realized, as in Stevens’s; one might see in an impersonal tomorrow the remaking of a personal yesterday, as in Bishop’s poetry, or read in the rounds of the calendar the progressive enhancement of the self, as in Merrill’s. The iterations of everyday life, in these writers’

The Poetics of Everyday Time 5

verse, provide recurrent chances for agency as well as recurrent assurances of its relation or effects. This is the dynamic, for example, of “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside,” Stevens’s work of “always beginning” quoted above; the poem presents a human construction and an earthly morning as comparable instances of re-creative consistency (Collected, 448–49). Each is “like a new account of everything old,” Stevens writes, and both allow the poem’s joyful combination of acquiescence and independence. Just as distinct “becoming” can flourish within an order of “natural light and day,” so the artist of dailiness can practice an individual craft sustained by its amenability to the world’s process. In fact, an agreement to daylight echoes across the poetics of everyday time: not just in the “ember yes” of Stevens’s “St. Armorer’s Church” or the punning “assent” of Bishop’s “Anaphora” but also in the “answer from within” that allows Frost’s hero to push toward dawn in “Snow,” or even the “yes” of nature and poetry that ends the fi nal third of Merrill’s daily epic, The Changing Light at Sandover (Frost, Collected Poems, 141; Merrill, Sandover, 489, 492). This agreement also echoes in everyday verse beyond the work of these four—in the final words of a poem by Randall Jarrell, for example, whose critical understanding of Frost, Stevens, and Bishop colors his own regard for the ordinary: “May this day / Be the same day,” he writes, “the day of my life” (Complete, 353). This speaker’s secular “amen” to daily sameness entitles him to claim the morning as his own, “my life,” and quotidian speakers in Stevens, Frost, Bishop, and Merrill, as they variously constitute their identities through ordinary activities, endorse that fi nal possessive fi rst-person. All exemplify, perhaps, a crucial phrase of William James’s Psychology, which holds that “the amount which we accord of it” is “the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world” (Principles, 2:579). James’s paradox— indispensable for any phi losopher committed to both freedom of the will and reality of the world— allows one to prove autonomy through the very consent to necessity. The poetry of this study shows how James’s original accord can be an ordinary cadence, as this verse makes a required, tedious sequence into a meaningful chain of affi rmation. Such a “yes” does not necessarily produce any change in the content of one’s daily rounds. Rather, quotidian poetics requires an alteration in how one perceives, performs, or adopts the same old thing. The writers of this

6

The Poetics of Everyday Time

study are therefore unusually respectful of the commonplace habits in their own and others’ lives; they share an admiring attention to what could seem dull or uninteresting— evident in Stevens’s insistence on the regimen of his office job, for example, or Frost’s preference for an ordinary “middle way” or Bishop’s admiration of “routine” or Merrill’s appreciation of Bishop’s own “talent for life” (Frost, Interviews, 48; Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 647; Merrill, Collected Prose, 121). Such predilections, an everyday poetics makes clear, are not in contrast but in concert with artistic goals, since life and art are to these four poets necessarily interdependent. That interdependence, moreover, is of a particular kind: life and art interrelate less as subject matter and treatment than as commonly ordered procedures of familiar discovery. When Merrill entitles a poem “Morning Exercise,” for instance, he describes not just its material, which tells of a routine trip to the gym, but also its composition, which arranges stanzas on the page with the dutiful regularity of aesthetic training (Collected Poems, 602). The two exercises, both yielding results that are expected and transformative at once, prove the benefits of aesthetic convention as well as the good of experiential habituation: the gym excursion yields a reconciliatory new start just as the poetic workout turns into an original work. One can see a similar process in Stevens’s “On the Way to the Bus,” where an initially gloomy morning commute encounters a “refreshment of cold air” that inspires a new language (Collected, 472). Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill work for such renovations as they link the composition of one’s daily existence to the composition of one’s poetic lines. Both of these endeavors use the paradox of a changing sameness in the development of a creative self. The par adox an d t h e d e ve lop me n t s h o w t h e ba si c i m p o rt a nc e of what seems least important, an insight that unites the prevalent considerations of the everyday in recent humanities work.4 Much of this scholarship extends seminal cultural-studies analyses of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau across a wide range of disciplines, and much of it agrees on the importance of the quotidian to twentieth-century culture5 while also agreeing on the difficulty of fi xing the topic.6 As Liesl Olson summarizes, discussion of everyday life invites “the paradox of representing the unrepresented” (L. Olson, Modernism, 11).7 I join many in the belief that such a paradox can strengthen rather than obviate criticism,8 that any “quest of the ordinary,” to adopt the title and some of the spirit of Stanley

The Poetics of Everyday Time 7

Cavell’s book, must emphasize the difficulty of articulating what is commonly assumed (Quest, 9). I also follow many, however, by seeking to particularize everyday indefi nition—in my case, by concentrating on recurrent time.9 The very implications of repetition, I hope, will serve to counter a threat of limitation in this choice; a focus on timeliness takes up an aspect of daily life that is at once transcultural, less various than the quotidian’s many possible contents, and tangible, less vague than the quotidian’s many possible meanings. Through describing the effects of this structure and the related effects of repetition in both philosophy and poetic form, I hope to show how a particu lar temporality enables a self-fashioning that may well be an enduring interest of ordinary existence.10 The result, I hope, can complement and ramify other interests of everyday life in twentieth-century writing, many of which have recently gained important critical exposition.11 It may also complement work on other twentieth-century American poets who treat everyday themes but whom I do not treat at length: poets like Jarrell, with his several meditations on “the dailiness of life” (Complete, 235– 7, 300); or Robert Lowell, whose late work so often seeks a “good morning” and whose last book is called Day by Day (Collected, 692, 709–838); or A. R. Ammons, whose continuous, daily Tape for the Turn of the Year strives to record “these / days / the way life gave them” (Tape, 203); or Robert Creeley, who writes that “the way / it was yesterday, will / be also today / and tomorrow” (Creeley, Collected Poems, 213). In par ticu lar, several of the poets associated with the so-called New York School promote ordinary stuff as a poetic subject: James Schuyler’s verse praises a “daily life” that is “comfortable, like old jeans” (Collected, 82); Frank O’Hara’s “I do this I do that” poems make art from untransformed quotidian detail (Collected, 341); John Ashbery’s writing defamiliarizes the familiar to fi nd that “there is something to be said for these shiftless days” (Mooring, 350); Ted Berrigan jots down “Today’s News” and fi lls verse lines with “10 Things I Do Every Day” (Collected, 371–72, 164); Bernadette Mayer composes poems that wish to “pass / as a journal entry” (Mayer, Another, 19). All of these artists and others illuminate literary uses of quotidian experience, and all merit further analysis along these lines. These poets, however, do not focus on everyday time— on everyday recurrence—with the attention of Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill. The verse of these four, it seems to me, dramatizes problems and benefits of a  changing sameness more fully than other twentieth-century writing:

8

The Poetics of Everyday Time

more than the alternatives of present-tense flow and singular moments in a poetry like Ammons’s, for example. In addition, the work of these four poets considers repetition as an aesthetic pattern more explicitly than other twentieth-century writing: more than the free-verse spontaneity in work like O’Hara’s or Berrigan’s, for example. Finally, the four writers I analyze treat time as a personal and ecological series of unremarkable days rather than as a cultural or political itinerary of marked dates: they are relatively uninterested, for example, in Lowell’s turn from a Notebook to a History. Such common and commonly central ideas about recurrence lead to a number of overlapping concerns— among them, memory and mourning, guilt and atonement, submission and assertion. These link Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill in an illustrative grouping. Indeed the latter two poets show some awareness of this association; if Stevens famously distrusted Frost’s focus on “things” and Frost replied with his suspicion of Stevens’s “bric-a-brac,”12 Bishop looked back to Stevens’s example and recognized Merrill’s sympathy, while Merrill even more consciously took Stevens and Bishop as models.13 An everyday poetics therefore helps to explain and describe some important affi nities among American twentieth-century poets, whether these sympathies are proclaimed by writers or perceived by readers or both. That being said, I hope that implications of my discussion extend to work that is left out of this study: analysis of everyday poetics may suggest how other poets’ more singular uses of daily recurrence bear on questions of subjectivity and form. This analysis can accentuate, for example, the fact that Schuyler considers his own version of dualistic interrelation—“the what / of which you are part”—in a “Vermont Diary” that sees “in repetition, change” (Collected, 105), or the fact that Lowell’s persistent efforts to redeem the pattern of “day to day to day” use the pattern of sonnet sequences (Lowell, Collected, 681). In work that refuses daily repetition, an everyday poetics helps to describe this choice as necessarily related to both a concept of person and a choice of prosody. A notable example of such refusal is William Carlos Williams, whose ordinary poetry— antisubjective and free verse—records quotidian instants rather than diurnal repetitions. Since “this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested,” as he writes in Spring and All, Williams’s verse seeks a spring or morning of pure, unrecurrent present tense; this immediacy, he believes, can strip away the “constant barrier” between mind and world as it dissolves consciousness

The Poetics of Everyday Time 9

in immersive attention (Williams, Collected, 1:178, 177).14 So much is evident in Williams’s many descriptions of everyday scenes, where the intensity of observation paradoxically diminishes the sense of an observer; Spring and All, for example, suppresses any register of a figure “by the road to the contagious hospital” through its scrupulous, “one by one” rendering of the objects in this “new world” (Collected, 183). Williams’s verse form, too, seems to work toward a state of momentary selflessness, fracturing continuity into discrete phrases isolated by unexpected breaks across a poetic line. His ideal poem is a “field” rather than a rhythm, and an assemblage of independent fragments rather than a cadence of fulfilled expectations (Williams, Selected Essays, 280–81).15 The legacy of Williams’s views in later “objectivist” and “projectivist” poets furthers the self-effacement that his timeliness supports: Charles Olson, for example, in essays on “projective verse,” charges poets both to “get the content instant” and to “[get] rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego” (Collected Prose, 205, 247). In the everyday work of Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill, by contrast, poets strive to keep that individuality intact—and strive to do so through the recurrence that Olson banishes. Their daily repetitions show that a subjectivist-objectivist dichotomy might be a needlessly stark reaction to modernist problems. That demonstration helps to clarify their contribution to modernist writing more broadly. Everyday verse opposes a twentieth-century truism that would contrast artistic craft and quotidian reality: through its concern with avant-garde nonconformity and its record of a crisis in realistic mimesis, modern art often seems to identify the aesthetic by its rejection of convention.16 In par ticu lar, modern art often seems to reject conventional temporality; if modernism is fundamentally a “culture of time,” as a range of critics rightly imply, and if modernity can be defi ned as that era in which “time imposes itself as a problem” (Osborne, The Politics of Time, x),17 many modernist artists see the solution in a destruction of sequence. They would defy the Baudelairean ennui that oppresses common citizens with sameness and overcome the “homogenous, empty time” that Benjamin takes to accompany any idea of “historical progress” (Benjamin, Illuminations, 261).18 This type of modernism is about making it new—to use a Poundian dictum that Williams, among other Imagist writers, takes up—and its characteristic gesture is the shock of a break, irruption, revolution, or even revelation. Yet when modernist writers do not, like Williams, use such shocks to promote a self-erasing realism, they often resist time for the

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opposite effect: they seek, in the atemporal instant, the all-encompassing idealism of an all-powerful self. Many of modernism’s influential critics underline this aspiration, making it characteristic of an era: subjective power is the promise of the “sense of the present” that Stephen Kern emphasizes in his sweeping study of modernist culture when he describes a newly personal perception that could be “expanded spatially” (Culture of Time and Space, 314) and is one result of the “spatial form” that Joseph Frank cites as the aspiration of twentieth-century literature (The Widening Gyre, 8, 57).19 Self-consciousness also motivates the “timeless and transcendent symbol” or “node of pure linguistic energy” that in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s judgment characterizes modern art’s resistance to “history” or “sequence” as well as its attention to “the subjective mind” (Modernism, 50).20 The effect is a Paterian “single moment” or a Joycean epiphany or a Yeatsian image: a state that would press a symbolist focus on perception toward an association of art with eternity and subjectivity with transcendence (Pater, The Renaissance, 151.).21 The writers I consider complicate both the enduring link of modernism and timelessness and the related, equally enduring connection of timelessness and subjectivity. Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill could never be unproblematically entered under the heading “modernist”; even Frost and Stevens, whose writing falls within a generally accepted range of the movement’s dates, distanced themselves from its figures and precepts (in their careful reactions to Eliot, for example). Each of these four poets, however, considered the relation of his or her project to a modernist strain, and their poetry can together be seen as a meditation on modernist possibilities. In their work, twentieth-century writing does not “br[eak] out of the old mechanistic routine,” as Edmund Wilson describes in his famous 1931 account of “imaginative literature” (Axel’s Castle, 298), but instead affirms “the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living,” as John Dewey recommends in his 1934 account of Art as Experience (10). In these poets’ work, moreover, twentieth-century writing can affi rm this connection without ceding the “importance of the individual” that Wilson’s conception would support but that Dewey’s would minimize (Axel’s Castle, 297).22 That is, these four writers aspire to neither the potential solipsism of a private time nor the potential self-effacement of an external order. Their example may therefore support an emergent attention to the everyday strain as a revision of critical assumptions in modernist studies: Rita

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Felski recommends such focus in both of her influential articles, and Bryony Randall and Liesl Olson exemplify its possibilities with recent studies analyzing, in Olson’s words, “the endurance of the ordinary . . . as an essential feature of modernist literature” (L. Olson, Modernism, 32).23 Through a focus on the form and theme of repetition, I hope to show how this feature addresses the dualistic split that remains a central problem of modernist aesthetics,24 as well as to relate the possibilities of recurrence to the forms and history of verse in particular.25 In a poetics of diurnal returns, the quotidian themes of twentieth-century writing address the persistent dilemma of the self.26 This verse defines the ordinary realm as valuable in part for its provision of a common, viable, modernist individualism.27 The defi nition might usefully bear on readings of American literature, too, especially those currently prevailing analyses that emphasize a pragmatist tradition. In their respect for immanent experience and adoption of common practice, poets of everyday time demonstrate this lineage— even Merrill, an unlikely heir, espouses a Jamesian philosophy when he admires Stevens’s poetry as a “body of work that is man-sized” (Collected Prose, 53). The daily artistry of these writers, however, is more closely akin to James’s Psychology than to his Radical Empiricism, and more focused on personal development than on social or political value. Their writing values human experience because it allows the meaningful realization of human will. It is just this realization that challenges many pragmatist descriptions of literature, since the antiessentialism of these accounts can imply an abandonment or surrender of identity. Richard Poirier, for example, in his essays on literary Emersonianism, articulates a practice of “writing off the self ” and a “desire for self-obliteration” (Renewal, 182–83, 195); Elisa New, in her study of a consensual national tradition, defi nes an “intimate and reciprocal relation to American resources” that “only the self delivered from the continent of individuality can discern” (The Line’s Eye, 9); Jonathan Levin, in his study of transitional American forms, finds “pragmatist imagination” to be “tantalizingly oxymoronic” (The Poetics of Transition, 195). If Levin, New, and Poirier all rightly maintain the accuracy of that oxymoron, an everyday poetics helps to show how it can be achieved: ordinary repetitions enact the self-defi ning self-abandonment that Poirier identifies, as well as the interplay of “subject” and “phenomenon” that New describes and the integration of “mind and world” that Levin explains.28 A literature of over-and-over rhythm refuses the supposed timelessness of American

12

The Poetics of Everyday Time

transcendentalism while also refining the timely movements that are stressed in American pragmatism;29 this poetics allows an empirical subjectivity that seems especially significant to the philosophical genealogy of American writing and thought. In that allowance, the poetry of this study could exemplify certain insights of Stanley Cavell, whose analysis agrees with aspects of pragmatism and yet criticizes pragmatic readings of Emerson precisely for their tendency to minimize his self-perfectionist drive. Cavell’s own work, by contrast, describes an ordinary philosophy that virtually excludes James and Dewey, placing Emerson and Thoreau next to romantic poets and post-skeptical thinkers instead. The repositioning is apt: Emerson’s “true romance” of “Experience,” seeking to reconcile individual “genius” and “practical power,” may be as fundamentally romantic as it is proleptically pragmatist, and all four writers of my study echo Wordsworth’s “common day” and Keats’s waking dream as they revise Emerson’s “embrace” of “the common” and Thoreau’s “awakening hour.”30 Just as acute is the motivation for Cavell’s connection, for he sees a pursuit of the ordinary as a general response to skepticism, primarily, rather than an American respect for experience.31 Faced with unsolvable uncertainty, Cavell explains, one must replace the vain attempt to know what is real with the viable effort to acknowledge what is familiar; in Cavell’s view, this “attainment of the everyday” requires the “willing repetition of days” that makes up an ordinary life (This New, 77, Quest, 178; see also Quest, 4, 8– 9, 27; This New, 47). Cavell’s philosophical focus on epistemology is not altogether congruent with the aims of an everyday poetics, since Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill are concerned less with accurate perception of the world than with creative participation in its processes. Yet Cavell’s analysis of the everyday as a problem helps to explain the theoretical range of the poetry I describe32— even as the specifics of that poetry’s rhetoric and content demonstrate how, exactly, a Cavellian philosophy might conflate the “return of what we accept as the world” with the “recovery of the self ” (Quest, 166, 26).33 Cavell’s work helps to show why ordinary life can be the crucible of troublesome concepts that range from the doubts of Descartes to the deconstructions of Derrida. Among these concepts are many from Kierkegaard’s thought, and though Cavell treats his philosophy only sparingly, Kierkegaard’s insights

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are a particularly useful resource for analysis of an everyday poetics. A nineteenth-century Danish phi losopher obsessed with efforts to become Christian may seem an unlikely guide to twentieth-century poetry by four relatively unreligious Americans. Kierkegaard’s writing, however, was prevalent and increasingly influential in Anglophone literary culture from the years just after World War I to the post–World War II heyday of existentialism.34 More important, his work helps to describe the terms of ordinary verse whether or not his writing had direct influence on the poets of this study. Kierkegaard places repetition at the center of his theological and theoretical ambitions, and his study Repetition illuminates the paradoxical dynamic that everyday artists would exploit in their writing and living: “that which is repeated has been,” he writes; “—otherwise it could not be repeated—but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition into something new” (Fear, 149). Kierkegaard fi nds this possibility to be “actuality and the earnestness of existence” as well as “the interest of metaphysics”; the very form of Repetition, a combination of commentary and letters from two different pseudonymous figures, stresses the experiential character of his philosophical category (Fear, 133, 149). In part because of this focus, Kierkegaard’s work can articulate the meaning of repetition for a single psyche in the alien world; repetition, he explains, occurs when “ideality and reality . . . collide” in “consciousness” (Fear, 275). The goal of repetition is therefore no less than “saving one’s personality,” and the possibility of repetition, no less than “freedom’s concerned passion.” Repetition prevents an individual from “los[ing] himself in events” without forcing him or her to retreat into “contemplation’s aristocratic indolence” (Fear, 315). Such engaged, accepting independence is in sympathy with the aims of the poems I analyze here; like the poets of ordinary time, this phi losopher of ordinary faith sees recurrence as basic, troublesome, complicated, but potentially beneficial. To under stan d t h e t rou b l e s an d b e n e f i t s o f re pet i t i on, however, requires a return to Kierkegaard by way of a more proximate intellectual history of the theme. In the modernist era, concepts of self and world seemed to be newly dependent on temporality, and often on recurrent temporality in par ticu lar. Turn-of-the-century attempts to defi ne the subject, for example, rely on return; James’s psychology, which fi nds that

14

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the “sense of sameness is the very keel and backbone of our thinking,” locates that sense above all in “consciousness of personal identity” (Principles, 1:459). His textbook describes how repetition can create a consistent fi rstperson, as the regular comparison of present and past states recognizes an “I” that both perseveres and changes over time. “Who owns the last self owns the self before the last,” James explains, and so on for each iteration before that (Psychology, 182). Identity requires no “transcendent principle of Unity,” therefore; instead, the simple, empirical repetitions of one’s experience can constitute the elusive, idealistic conviction of one’s subjectivity (183).35 Self is no more or less than one’s past experiences, in James’s view, and the sameness in one’s “identity” no more or less than their perceived return. Return is not always psychologically beneficial, though, since the insistence of the past can be self-defeating as well as self-defi ning. While James’s work does not include this aspect, Freud’s presses the point: one of the crucial, originating ideas of psychoanalysis is the fact that repressed memories can return to detrimental effect.36 The explication of repetition in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, written more than twenty years after he expressed his concerns about repetition to Fliess, only proves Freud’s ceaseless attention to dangerous recurrence. In that work, he describes a universal tendency toward malevolent psychic patterns, as this compulsion attempts to defend against past pain through ceaseless reenactment of its trauma. The tendency marks the id’s perverse longing for death, a state of conservative torpor in which exact duplication dissolves into timeless passivity.37 Freud’s work therefore suggests how the everyday longing for consistency and habituation, as well as the everyday suspicion of routine and monotony, could manifest the basic, twinned attraction and threat of mortality. Freud’s theories emphasize, however, that escape from one’s fatal drive does not depend on evasion of repetition altogether, an effect as undesirable as it is impossible. Rather, psychoanalysis would replace compulsive replication with creative recollections.38 This results in a more effortful version of James’s self-appropriative memories, perhaps, one described in Freud’s important paper on therapeutic technique, “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through”; this essay explains how the retelling, restaging, and remaking of prior events can translate an inalterable past into a novel future. Such returns convert deathly id into vital ego, providing

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the self with continuing life and power through its continuing distinction from static somatism. Freud’s famous psychoanalytic dictum—“Where id was, there ego shall be”—thus describes a temporalizing process; if the id shows “no recognition of the passage of time,” power over the unconscious depends on constructing just that passage (“New,” 80, 74). A healthy ego means an ongoing sense of sequential repetition in one’s changing but coherent experience.39 Freud describes this health primarily in the context of analytic therapy, but several post-Freudian psychologists make it a general endeavor, charging every psyche with a continual duty of self-defi nition by re-creation.40 The poets of this study describe it as an aesthetic task, too; if the comparison of psychoanalysis and art is so common as to be truistic, analysis of these writers shows the centrality of recurrence to both activities. Creative repetition overcomes the constrictive recurrence of “that same old story” that Merrill writes in “The Broken Home,” for example, with the poem’s healing use of formal patterns (Collected Poems, 198). And it combats the compulsions of a deathly repetition, in Frost’s “Home Burial,” with the confident recitation of the past in his “In the Home Stretch” (Collected Poems, 55– 58, 113). This is true for those poets who underwent psychoanalysis, like Bishop and Merrill, as well as those for who did not, like Frost and Stevens: the oncoming sunrise of Frost’s poem and the oncoming sunset of Merrill’s show that a therapeutic process can be endemic to everyday experience. Modernist psychology thus deepens the importance of ordinary repetitions, and ordinary repetitions suggest their importance for modernist psychology: Frost’s self-fashioning, Stevens’s dreamwork, Bishop’s reparations, and Merrill’s self-analyses all rely on and transform a quotidian context. For these writers, to neglect one’s daily existence is to cede one’s individual self. Daily time is not just a psychological possibility, however, in the modern period. It is also a physical reality. As Bonnie Costello demonstrates in her recent and important study of landscape poetics, the physical world in the twentieth century seemed increasingly, fundamentally temporal. Building on Costello’s reading of natural “frame and flux,” analysis of daily patterns can show some important uses of worldly process and can further critical understanding of the ecological attention that all four poets in this study share (Costello, Shifting, 52).41 In their work, natural cycles provide the mind with an empirical source of objective veracity. Certainty may be

16

The Poetics of Everyday Time

no more than precedent in their skeptical era—truth may mean only the “tendency to take habits,” to use Charles Peirce’s pragmatist definition (Collected Papers, 224)—but the world’s regular returns continue to offer an important instance of that substantiating tendency.42 It is a minimal verification; “ ’tis only probable,” as Hume’s skepticism long before acknowledged, that “the sun will rise tomorrow,” and a believer of Hume’s era might well take such probability as debilitating (Hume, A Treatise, 124). A citizen of the disenchanted twentieth-century universe, however, could fi nd the probability of sunrise to be a sufficient conviction as well as the single possible one. The contingent but empirical patterns of a physical earth might serve to replace the eternal but unbelievable truths of a metaphysical concept.43 Thus the “faithfulness of reality,” as Stevens describes “morning and evening,” can seem for these poets something like a religious faithfulness— as it does in the sunrise chapel of “St. Armorer’s Church” (Stevens, Collected, 403), for example, or the sunrise “baptism” of Merrill’s “Verse for Urania” (Collected Poems, 389– 91), the humble breadline Eucharist that is Bishop’s “Miracle for Breakfast” (Complete Poems, 18–19), or the equally Eucharistic and equally everyday supper of Frost’s “In the Home Stretch” (Collected Poems, 108–14). The language of these works and others shows that the concept of “ordinary time” in twentieth-century poetry retains some of the label’s ecclesiastical significance: quotidian patterns can manifest the eternal, worldly rhythms that have long provided a form for religious beliefs and “generic plots” (Frye, Anatomy, 162).44 The writers of this study, though, divest these patterns of any transcendent meaning, doctrinal or mythic; their unsupernatural naturalism takes its justification from the plain, ordinary fact of recurrence itself. Their daily practices are no more naïve than they are nihilistic, and their twentieth-century wisdom literature is drawn from common sense— even as they find its lessons to be consistently uncommon. Their work is also careful to articulate the difficulty of achieving a postmetaphysical replacement for spiritual grace. The felt need for such grace, inherent in one’s divisive self-consciousness, can last beyond any religious belief: one reason that dailiness can seem religious, in fact, is that religion also addresses the dualistic problem that I have suggested to be posed and solved in recurrent time. Ritual provides a way for one’s individual, mortal subjectivity to belong to a larger, enduring reality or for one’s particular,

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human actions to acquire general, inhuman sanction. To forgo sacred office for quotidian rhythms, therefore, could be to strive for a secular beatitude or an everyday paradise, and Dewey even suggests this possibility in Art as Experience when he describes how creative activity can reach the “stability” that comes when “an organism shares in the ordered relations of its environment” (15). This conception dissolves duality into harmony, rewriting the Freudian yearning for death as an organicist yearning for eternity;45 in this view, perfect repetition would allow one perpetual life rather than threaten one with absolute erasure. Angus Fletcher labels a similar state as “immanent transcendence”: in his account of an American “environment-poem,” such material sublimity is possible when verse aspires to be a natural setting rather than an individual utterance (A New Theory, 5, 103).46 The writers of everyday modernism, however, fi nd that a merging of human and worldly patterns is not as simply beneficent as Dewey’s “integration” or Fletcher’s “grounding strategy” suggest (Dewey, Art, 15; Fletcher, A New Theory, 24). Poems cannot so easily become worlds, nor can the cycles of aesthetic creation so easily become the cycles of material process. Though twentieth-century philosophy may conceive of both terms in the dichotomy as timely entities—as Bergson writes in Matter and Memory, “questions relating to subject and object” may now be “put in terms of time”— the temporal terms of the question still differ: simply put, matter lacks memory (Bergson, Matter, 77). Every human morning relates present to past, but no sunrise remembers the previous. “The present clock-stroke,” as James’s psychology specifies, is not “aware of the past ones” (Principles, 1:649). When the timely thinking of human retrospect confronts the timely being of worldly prospect, therefore, the divide of self-consciousness remains manifest, and with it persists the deathly threat of an end to consciousness altogether: the comparison of current and previous mornings registers the accumulation of a person’s fi nite days. One’s singular, conscious life remains distinct from the endless renewals of life in general. Dewey minimizes this fatal difference with his conviction that past can be “absorbed into the present” (Art 19), Fletcher with his assertion that “diurnal knowledge places us in a perpetual present moment” (A New Theory, 81), but the poets in this study admit a perpetual previous moment as well— a recurring sense of the “memory” and “mortal[ity]” that Bishop connects in

18

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“Anaphora.” Even Stevens, who aims most often for the eradication of yesterday, acknowledges in many poems that a humanity “apart from any past” may well be impossible (Stevens, Collected, 217). These writers thus strive to make recollection useful as well as restrictive, to fi nd in the need to look back a chance to look forward. They show daily time to be the most promising setting for this endeavor: there, an idea of the past can provide a fact of the future, and the thought of yesterday might be the actuality of tomorrow. Ordinary repetition can in this way join personal historicity to impersonal futurity, and allow one to see in a fresh reality the inscription of an established conception. One might rise every morning, like Keats’s Adam, in imaginative anticipation of the world’s truth.47 The suspense of that truth will be real, in each differing and contingent iteration of dawn; so much is clear in the “almost impossible” lifting that Bishop’s morning requires (Complete Poems, 181) or the strenuous “master[y]” that Stevens’s rounds entail (Collected, 350). But the significance of that truth will be real as well; Stevens’s mastery is as triumphant as it is humdrum, and Bishop’s lifting as revelatory as it is onerous. Each daily return defi nes a newly distinct, newly powerful sense of one’s self and world as it constructs a fresh connection between the two. The “book of reconciliation” for dualistic opposites may therefore be comparable to “the experience of sun // And moon,” as Stevens writes in “Description Without Place”; in this everyday time, as he writes in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” one’s paradoxical “fluctuations of certainty” can make for an ordinary state of “accessible bliss” (Collected, 301, 342). Familiar, night-and-day “nonsense” can “pierce[] us with strange relation” (Collected, 331). The strange poignancy of this relation aligns daily poetics with the work of certain postmetaphysical phi losophers. Nietzsche’s formulation of an eternal return, for instance, fi nds the culmination of his untimely project to be the difficult, necessary acceptance of an infi nite “again,” 48 and Heidegger’s conception of authenticity fi nds existence to be a cyclical, resolute “handing down” in which a being’s “coming-towards-itself ” is also a “coming-back to one’s ownmost Self ” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 435, 388).49 These theories support the importance of ordinary time in the modernist era as they develop the importance of recurrence for the modern subject; Heidegger, for example, writes that existence “understands itself in terms of its daily work” (Being and Time, 465).50 Cavell develops such suggestions

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when he analyzes Heidegger and Nietzsche in the light of an Emersonian quest of the ordinary,51 and so does Alexander Nehamas, in his description of a related “art of living” that takes Nietzsche as a model.52 Despite these rich applications, however, neither Nietzsche’s nor Heidegger’s philosophy seems to match the full aims of the diurnal poetics in this study because neither offers a sense of repetition as the everyday task of a developing, unique person. Rather, Nietzsche’s willed repetition seems to overcome will altogether, ultimately submerging individual life in material process,53 and Heidegger’s authentic return may equally imply the elision of subjective identity in phenomenological immanence. Heidegger’s difficulties with “everydayness,” in fact—his uncertainties about the existential utility of this condition— seem inherent in his difficulties with the particularization of Dasein and the relation of a discrete birth-to-death lifetime to general existence (Being and Time, 422–25).54 The repetitions of an everyday poetics, by contrast, would realize a method that confirms each human being’s distinction even as it accepts the common condition of being. This is why Kierkegaard’s thinking seems helpful to the analysis of this poetry: his writing focuses precisely on the temporal effort of the “subjective thinker.”55 Such work requires one “to understand himself in existence,” in Kierkegaard’s view, as well as to “becom[e] an individual existing human being”; repetition provides the essential means of this experiential self-realization.56 Like many modern psychologists, Kierkegaard believes that “inwardness” means “recollection,” and like many modern phi losophers, he believes that this historical identity manifests a guilty personal alienation (Concluding, 550). He would make that source of anxiety, however, into a measure of assurance, and he would do so through a particular— and difficult—recurrence: not a duplication of the past, in Kierkegaard’s view, but an identification with the future. In this method, one learns what has been through resolutely willing what will be, and one renews an authentic, familiar interiority through risking it to a larger, unknown alterity. The process effects an acceptance that is not resignation and a subjectivity that is neither suppressed nor sponsorless. Moreover, repetition can do so through the simple fact of an individual’s temporal posture: Kierkegaard’s future is a religious eternity and his authenticity, a religious faith, but his formulation of expectancy does not depend on Christianity. It presupposes only those modern uncertainties that religion could once assuage. In an age when people have “forgotten to exist and what inwardness is,” as

20

The Poetics of Everyday Time

he writes, his repetition can provide a “self ” beyond despair as it provides a “truth” beyond doubt; it might allow a person, in Kierkegaard’s paradoxical description, to “become what he is” (Concluding, 263, 489). Nietzsche and Heidegger take up versions of such becoming, certainly, and Kierkegaard himself predicts that “modern philosophy will teach that all life is a repetition” (Fear, 131).57 Kierkegaard’s formulation of this modernist aim, however, differs from Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s in its individualist valence. His solution to skeptical dualism does not aim for an existential monism.58 It differs, too, in its potential for common life: whereas Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s repetitions yield a suprahistorical superman or a more-or-less undifferentiated Dasein, Kierkegaard’s describe the habits of an ordinary person, living ordinarily. He therefore shares with the poets of this study a respect for the deep potential in everyday placement, echoing Frost’s and Merrill’s regard for a resolute patience, for example, or Stevens’s and Bishop’s desire for an everyday contentment—as well as Bishop’s and Stevens’s awareness of quotidian guilt, or Frost’s and Stevens’s fear of an ordinary exhaustion. One particularly interesting aspect of this affi nity is the centrality of marriage; just as Kierkegaard’s philosophy returns persistently to the topic—in the disquisition of Either/Or, in the letters of Repetition, in the repeated comparisons of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, in the self-examination of Stages on Life’s Way— so does the poetry of this study. Frost dramatizes the power of a paired life, for example; Stevens invokes Penelope’s faithful expectation as an artistic model; Bishop uses Crusoe’s relationship with his temporal-figural “Friday;” and Merrill reports on a couple’s séances as the creation of a mutual poem. These writers’ attention to daily repetition motivates their regard for a seemingly commonplace institution; matrimony presents an arrangement in which one’s loyalty to the work of changing sameness combines the assurance or aggravation of consistency with the risk— or rewards— of novelty. Like Kierkegaard, these poets use marriage to test the general endeavor of quotidian existence. In its defamiliarization of convention, that experiment and others reflect another aspect of the everyday philosophy these writers share, and share with Kierkegaard: the jointly personal and communal nature of their project. To be truly ordinary, for these poets, is also to be both authentic and exceptional. While they are rarely overtly political, then, their respect

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for everyday living constitutes a subtle social message; it specifies a sense of democracy that can be present in even esoteric or egoistical passages of their work. These poets wish to use and elevate the structures of living that all people share. Poirier notes Frost’s “capacity to make people feel that in writing a poem he was being more like them rather than less” (Frost, 24), and analysis of everyday poetics demonstrates the truth of Poirier’s assessment for all four writers I consider. Their poetry would realize the full sense of that “common” in “common life.” Its status AS poetry— the very thing that might seem to div i d e it from everyday living—is essential to this realization of commonality. Ordinary verse emphasizes a fact so basic as to be easily overlooked: poetry is defi ned and constituted by its use of repetition.59 This is true for the full range of poetic writing, from the strictest of stanzas to the loosest of free verse, since lines exist through the expectation and possible fulfi llment of a serial, returning order. Rather than a sentence, with its complete thought, or a paragraph, with its even more complete argument, poetry presents its readers with a series of particularized, one-after-the-other parts that refuse the necessity of conclusion and the logic of completion. As Heather McHugh writes, this means that “nothing is foregone, for poetry; instead, everything is gone, again and again: at the end of each line another nothing” (Broken English, 4). And at the start of each line, one might add, another something: this “again and again” could be taken as the most fundamental logic of writing and reading verse. Facets traditionally associated with verse form, including rhythmic, metrical, and figurative rubrics, often serve to mark this more basic fact of recurrent continuity. The poets of this study use that structure to uncover and report the resources of quotidian time: in Frost’s metrical rounds, Bishop’s villanelle and sestinas, Stevens’s assonant patterns, and Merrill’s stanzaic enactment of earthly rotations. Through these means and others, these writers compare the lyric uses of repetition to the ordinary uses of diurnal return. Their searching formalism might therefore show why and how a specifically poetic literature can realize the possibility of commonplace life.60 Just as important, perhaps, their formalism might also prompt a salutary revision of generic definitions—definitions that often equate poetry and timelessness. Sharon Cameron’s influential analysis, for example, uses Emily Dickinson’s

22

The Poetics of Everyday Time

poetry to describe the lyric as a “space where the temporal apparatus of daily life has been as if disconnected”; poems, she argues, manifest a human aspiration to eternality (Lyric Time, 169). In this view, lyric writing is paradigmatically present-tense, and the quintessential lyric seeks a “way out of time” or “simultaneity” that undoes ordinary progress (57, 196.).61 Cameron explains, moreover, that this aim constitutes the difference between poetry and stories, which are “time- and space-bound phenomena” telling of the past or of time’s passage (56). Many narratological studies seem to agree with this estimation: for example, György Lukács’s study of the novel, Ian Watt’s description of English fiction, and Paul Ricoeur’s meditation on Time and Narrative all support a distinction between narrative and poetry based on the record of time.62 These defi nitions, in turn, bolster the common assumption that the novel provides the best form for relating ordinary lives: perhaps, even, that the novel fi nds its justification in this relating.63 Such beliefs about genre, moreover, show little signs of weakening: in a 2008 article, for example, Jonathan Culler calls the present tense “that special temporality of lyric” and endorses Alice Fulton’s contention that “if narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now.” 64 Culler would use time to maintain the difference between poetry and narrative as well as the importance of lyric itself. The writers of this study, however, trouble an atemporal defi nition or defense of their chosen genre. Connections of verse and time are not new, certainly: in Augustine’s Confessions, his famous consideration of temporality uses the anticipation, recitation, and recollection of poetic lines to analyze the transition of past into present and then future (277– 78). In her recent analysis of lyric function, Susan Stewart invokes Augustine to support a general claim that verse can further “models of sequential and chronological time” (Poetry and the Fate, 205– 6, 198), and Christopher R. Miller argues in his recent study that temporal features often attributed to narrative “can be equally ascribed to the Romantic lyric” (The Invention, 7). A poetics of the everyday helps to specify the genre’s potential in this regard: stories may best report a progress of “beginnings, middles, and ends,” as Cameron writes, but poems may best report a progress of recurrent iterations (Lyric Time, 56). Poetic time dramatizes the repeated manifestation of an ongoing rhythm rather than the steady advance of an oncoming climax; verse can register, that is, an everyday experience that seems more like “going

T h e P o e t i c s o f E v e r y d a y T i m e 23

round,” often, than pressing forward (Stevens, Collected, 350). Verse can even help to articulate the discrete properties of this dailiness—nonnarrative yet temporal, unplotted yet contextual. Whereas the lyric of Cameron’s analysis would defi ne the “deathless world of no time” that “we lose by merely waking up” (260), an ordinary poetics would define a realm of precisely that rising; this work conflates a waking, living world and a poetic, imaginative sphere. Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill describe a verse historicity as they analyze a quotidian creativity. Consideration of their efforts may therefore complement a “new lyric studies” that aims to revise some common defi nitions of postromantic verse. Virginia Jackson’s already influential book on Dickinson objects to what she terms “lyric reading,” a phenomenon of critical and textual practice that equates all poetry with lyric poetry, severs that lyricism from its context, and then celebrates the paradox of an estranged, private, and yet culturally relevant voice (Dickinson’s Misery, 10; also see 6–15). Poetry thus becomes a genre of “personal and cultural abstraction,” Jackson writes, a form “independent of social contingency,” with a speaker “suspended, lyrically, in place and time”; Jackson wishes to replace this “alienated lyric image of the human” with the actuality— or absence— of humans themselves (74, 7, 90, 117). She therefore wishes to replace the single “hypostatized lyric” with a collection of “songs, riddles, epigrams, sonnets, epitaphs, blasons, lieder, elegies, marches, dialogues, conceits, ballads, epistles, hymns, odes, eclogues, and monodramas”: such variety, in Jackson’s view, can restore readers’ consciousness of each poem’s situated purpose (Dickinson’s Misery, 41–42; “Who Reads Poetry?” 183). Yet while Jackson’s insights are invaluable in their exposure of assumptions, her focus on poetry’s cultural role could recommend a practice of increasing particularization that neglects some transcultural possibilities of verse writing. These possibilities need not be so summarily abandoned: the flawed descriptions of a postromantic pedagogy do not prove description to be necessarily distorting. Current readers may be able to renew the study of lyric not only by dividing this label into the subclassifications of Jackson’s list, and thereby considering the historical applications of many different works in verse, but also by expanding this label into the larger classification of poetry and thereby considering the rhetorical possibilities of verse itself.65 This analysis might begin with each poem’s technical means—rather than all poetry’s

24

The Poetics of Everyday Time

theoretical aspiration, as in Cameron’s work, or a particu lar kind of poetry’s contextual stipulations, as in Jackson’s. It might examine a poem’s negotiation of formal choices as a singular instance of general work. This analysis of form might draw critical focus to the basic formal fact of recurrence and build a critical consideration of versified time from a more detailed consideration of poetic craft. The result may well be partial; I do not wish to assert that the pattern of lines, words, rhymes, rhythms, or stanzas is the primary concern for all poetic making or the rightful preoccupation for all poetry analysis. It seems worthwhile, however, to suggest what could follow from a focus on poetry’s repetitions: among other things, this analysis can describe an agency outside Jackson’s insightful description of poetic voice. Her work opposes the abstracted speaker produced by lyric reading, on the one hand, and the specific writer recovered by a better practice, on the other, but verse recurrence helps to articulate a third sort of consciousness: this poetic speaker is historicized, managing the temporal necessity of return, and yet unhistorical, not bound by a single time and place. This poetic agency is a singular creativity working through the common, defi nite—but undated— stipulations of its setting. The resulting figuration could again further Stewart’s insights; her study, pointedly “transcultural,” holds “poetic making” to be a fundamentally “anthropomorphic project” (Poetry and the Fate, 41–42, 2). But Stewart’s work concentrates on the social subversion in this endeavor, the way in which lyric troubles authority with its fi rst-person experience, and Stewart’s account thus fl irts with that critical pathos that Jackson rightly suspects.66 A focus on recurrent anthropomorphism, by contrast, may articulate a version of poetry’s subjectivizing task that is less political than psychological, less socially resistant than personally remedial, and less oppositional than opportunistic.67 An everyday poetics shows that when poets treat some common, formal problems of lyric, they also help to describe some common, temporal problems of living. Critics of prose narrative could object that fiction does this, too, using the same basis of recurrent timeliness. Peter Brooks, for example, uses Freud’s repetition compulsion to analyze the plots of nineteenth-century novels.68 Yet while a novel can expertly show the returns of elements over the course of a story, it can less easily demonstrate how these relate to a general recurrence, that is, how the ticks of an individual time span relate to the

T h e P o e t i c s o f E v e r y d a y T i m e 25

rounds of a common time. Verse repetitions, by contrast, thrive on this very interaction of particular and standard patterning as they reveal how a specific phrase can fit its stanzaic form, how an unexpected word may fulfill an expected meter, or how a new line ending can enact a required rhyme.69 Verse repetitions show, in addition, that such requirements can seem chosen as well as imposed, a chance as much as a duty. Poetic form can demonstrate the same paradoxical assent to necessity that the poets of this book fi nd in everyday practice. Finally, verse repetitions may use this assent to resist conclusion; the recurrence of poetry, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith rightly notes, is “fundamentally a force for continuation,” whereas the novelistic recurrence that Brooks describes is fundamentally a drive toward mortality (Smith, Poetic Closure, 56).70 If the rising-and-falling action of plot must logically taper to nothing, the over-and-over action of lineation can logically iterate forever: the “masterplot” of poetic time, one might venture, is not Brooks’s compulsive, Freudian “struggle toward the end” but a conscious, Freudian effort without end (Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 107–8).71 Poetic writing, therefore, seems better able to dramatize the positive uses of one’s repetitive experience, in addition to its negative implications. This is demonstrable through two different readings of Scheherazade’s paradigmatic repetitions: Brooks perceives this “story of stories” to manage the desire for a “terminus,” whereas Merrill fi nds in this Arabian legend the promise of a “Thousand and Second Night” (Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 111, 61; Merrill, Collected Poems, 176–85). An everyday poetics helps to explain how verse affi rms what Stewart calls “ongoingness.”72 An everyday poetics does so, moreover, while resisting some dubious judgments about formalism: the assumption, for example, that form demands the suppression of individuality, whether that suppression is rendered as an admirable impersonality or a suspicious inhibition. This “technological determinism,” to adapt Vernon Shetley’s term (After the Death, 136), takes any choice about rhyme and meter to necessitate or be necessitated by a choice about self-expression, and narratives of so-called confessionalism, in par ticu lar, often trace a progress from formalist reticence to a liberated and honestly autobiographical free verse.73 A daily poetry counters this view by enacting the pragmatic use of a supposed constraint; in this work, the self becomes individual as well as powerful through its continued per for mance of an imposed task. My analysis here, then, joins

26

The Poetics of Everyday Time

several recent critical discussions reconsidering the relation of form and identity: Simon Jarvis, in his several discussions of prosody, uses Hegelian aesthetics to argue for form as a means of self-apprehension (“Musical Thinking,” 57– 64); Stewart notes that “the poet discovers his or her identity as a consequence of form making” (Poetry and the Fate, 12); and Deborah Forbes argues that “the self may be something that only comes into being through cultural forms” (Sincerity’s Shadow, 49). An ordinary poetics helps to show the individuating challenge of standard patterns. At the same time, this verse resists any displaced religion of form, since comparison of daily and poetic practice need not imbue rhetorical structure with unwarranted authorization. Mutlu Konuk Blasing has rightly and usefully argued against this naturalizing tendency with her reminder that “both open and closed forms are neutral conventions” (Politics and Form, 19).74 A poetics of the ordinary suggests the possibilities offered by just such neutrality when it dramatizes what is gained or lost in encounters with convention—however constructed the conventional order may be. The norm of iambic-pentameter feet need not have an intrinsic significance, any more than the order of nights and days need indicate a universal intelligence, for rhetorical or daily formalism to be meaningful. Even an arbitrary pattern, perhaps especially an arbitrary pattern, can manifest distinction and suggest consequence. The poets of this study show that this fact may be as relevant to everyday living, in the potentially purposeless world of the twentieth century, as it is to poetic writing. Thes e poet s f i n d s uc h r e l e van c e t h ro ug h t h e cre at i v i ty o f their conventionalism; the writers’ poetic cadences, like their ordinary continuities, manage a more-or-less ironic or self-conscious exertion in fulfi lling prescribed functions. Such a dynamic is often present in the verse I consider here: in Frost’s work, for example, when the modulated echoes of his conversations show how a two-party exchange can manipulate the rhythm of blank-verse lines; in Stevens’s, when recurrence presses sound patterns all the way into a new word; or in Bishop’s, when she faces a necessary repetition with the steely self-direction to “Write it!” (Complete Poems, 178). A seriously playful formalism is also evident in “To the Reader,” a poem of everyday time in Merrill’s last book that makes explicit the comparison of quotidian repetition and literary production (Collected Poems, 616). A punning opening sets out the conflation:

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Each day, hot off the press from Moon & Son, ‘Knowing of your continued interest,’ Here’s a new book—well, actually, the updated Edition of their one all-time best seller— To fi nd last night’s place in, and forge ahead. Like the compelling “press” of this poem’s first line, the moon and sun of ordinary life present the poet “each day” with a new work— or rather, the same work as yesterday, slightly revised. The jacket copy promises “ ‘a blazingly / Original voice,’ ” as “To the Reader” amusedly notes, that “O” rising up after a line break like a blazing new sun, but the book is as generic as human lives: “done before, to death,” writes Merrill, “in earlier chapters, under different names.” Dissatisfied with this meaningless monotony—and its conclusion in mortality—the reader searches for some sort of transcendent significance to the plot, “a kind of Joycean squirrel run,” perhaps, “returning us all neatly to page 1.” The complete return of a monistic “run/1” in this wish fittingly undoes time with the only full rhyme in the poem. But this impossibly perfect structure, and the eternality it promises, is not to be found among the “inconsistencies of plot and style” that mark a “Moon & Son” production— or that mark the day-by-day changing sameness of a life. “The reader,” then, can only resolve to make his or her own existence into a better production; he or she can only vow, in the final lines of the poem, “a more exemplary life begun / Tomorrow, truer, harder to get right.” This pointedly comparative striving aspires toward a structure of significance— even toward the pure truth of an exact repetition, perhaps—while suggesting that the speaker will never reach such completion. This poem relishes a daily situation of ongoing, recursive progress, a work that “updates” with each tomorrow, with new beginnings as continual and effortful as the lineation of “begun / Tomorrow” suggests. The project will distinguish a reader’s individual life from the “one all-time best seller” of undifferentiated existence even as it proves his place in that common dailiness; the reader will have “continued interest” in a larger cycle of renewals while he “forge[s] ahead” on his own. Merrill’s poem demonstrates the mingled exertion and acceptance that makes from daily time a distinctive aesthetic form and from quotidian progress an individual art. It demonstrates, that is, the aims of the poetics I isolate. Details of “To the Reader” acknowledge its place in that tradition: its initial “each day” echoes

28

The Poetics of Everyday Time

the dawn opening of Bishop’s “Anaphora,” for example, and the “press” of “Moon & Son” echoes the daily “press” of Stevens’s “The Man on the Dump” as well as the “total book” of sunrise and sunset in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (Stevens, Collected, 184, 414). The poem’s final evening pledge, moreover, echoes in a wider context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century American verse. It could be compared to the final cry of Marianne Moore’s “The Pangolin,” for example, in her 1936 collection; this “armored animal,” with his “machine-like / form and frictionless creep,” also shows how the individual will can find its distinct but consensual way in the world (Complete, 117–20). Moore’s poem describes this practice as a model for “man, the self, the being we call human,” as he “slaves” beneath “sun and moon,” and she defi nes the proper method by her animal’s acceptance of a solarand-lunar rhythm. The poem’s conclusion tells how the pangolin says to the alternating blaze, ‘Again the sun! anew each day; and new and new and new, that comes into and steadies my soul.’ Repetitions thwart the pangolin’s advance with a requirement of repeated novelty; like Merrill’s reader, Moore’s animal knows that its ceaseless work, always “partly done,” starts over with each morning. The pattern, however, will steady and renew as well; the pangolin’s acceptance of his fearful diurnal assignment, as the sun literally “comes into” armored self-defenses, allows the ordinary “grace” that Moore’s poem would fi nd also in humanity’s “postures.” This animal’s assenting “again” exemplifies a common hope as well as a common chore. So does the daily burden of another, more wary poem about quotidian time, written more than seventy years later, John Ashbery’s “Opposition to a Memorial” (Worldly, 6). This work ends with the question of ordinary daylight, along with all of its “shallows of content,” asking if the present moment could be “the time to tackle a major oeuvre”: when one hears a companion curse and pick up the load again, coming out into temporary sunshine and the past has waxed benign, one more time? Is this launch defi nitive?

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For Ashbery, each sun or sunrise is “temporary,” each past contingent in its amelioration— and yet he suspects that benignity will be repeated just as surely as the “load” of everyday schedules will demand to be lifted again. If the “launch” of morning can never be “definitive,” and if everyday time never presents the right moment for “a major oeuvre,” the very insignificance of quotidian work can enact the crucial “opposition” of Ashbery’s title; ordinary existence resists the stagnation and sorrow of a “memorial” through its banal, benign, “one more time” pattern. This poem respects the perplexity in everyday living while finding a progress as persistently erratic, or as gracefully accepting, as the pangolin’s “unpugnacious” advance. I shall return to Ashbery’s work in my conclusion; I cite his recent poem here, with Moore’s, merely to suggest the still-rippling implications of the diurnal poetics that I aim to describe. If Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill exemplify this strain, if their work demonstrates its methods and meanings, their fi ndings prove relevant to many poems written by contemporaries and followers. The fi ndings are different, certainly, in each writer: Frost’s ordinary poetics, focused on the recovery of the past, considers the possibilities of talk, marriage, and habit; Stevens’s, focused on the future, seeks the recovery of innocence and the power of dreams; Bishop’s, beset by the insistence of retribution, describes a vitality of mourning and atonement; Merrill’s, avidly accumulative, concentrates on the spiritual aestheticization of worldly time. In the chapters that follow, I hope to show how these preoccupations describe more precisely the distinct shape of each poet’s achievement. I also hope to clarify their common sense of ordinary artistry—a sense of works and days as related and repetitive craft.

Chapter One The Middle Living of Robert Frost

An Ordinary Cadence in 18 92 the law r e n c e, Mas s ac h u s ett s, hi g h sch o o l b e sto w e d valedictory honors on two students, and both spoke at commencement. Elinor White first delivered an address on “Conversation as a Force in Life,” extolling the benefits of talk with someone who might “look into our eyes and give answer to our meanings rather than our words” (Thompson, Frost, 1:129–31). Robert Frost then spoke on “After-Thought,” exhorting his fellow graduates to that “questioning and answering” that comes after “toil” (Collected Poems, 636). Later that summer, these two scholars promised themselves to each other in a private exchange of rings. The virtue of conversation, the prudence of afterthought, the security of long marriage to one’s high-school sweetheart: Frost’s graduation seems to provide a fitting beginning for a traditional, ordinary life. It might be an equally fitting start for a traditional, ordinary poetry. When the pair’s commencement subjects come together, in the conversant marital afterthoughts of Frost’s “In the Home Stretch,” the poem seems content to describe a familiar domesticity. So do many other Frost poems, and by design: Frost states in one interview that he took his inspiration from “the clean and wholesome life of the ordinary man” (Interviews, 47). A “clean and wholesome” persona was the first and most famous image of Frost the poet—the chronicler of smalltown voices and old-fashioned scenes, the literate farmer growing apples

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The Middle Living of Robert Frost

in New England, the wise but accessible rhymer whose maxims grace cards and calendars. By now, however, the image seems both outdated and demeaning. Frost’s ordinary affect defi ned itself, and was defi ned by others, in explicit opposition to modernist aesthetics,1 and the rise in his critical reputation has therefore come with the decline of his accessible image, from Lionel Trilling’s insistence on Frost’s “terrifying” implications in 1958 to Christopher Benfey’s emphasis on Frost’s “vivifying” pessimism nearly fi fty years later (Trilling, “A Speech,” 156; Benfey, “Dark Darker Darkest,” 28). Readings have passed from the poet’s reassuring familiarity—his “affi rmation of old values, simplicities, pieties,” in Trilling’s words—to his alienating challenge (“A Speech,” 155). The Frost a twenty-fi rst-century reader inherits is no longer an “ordinary man” and a reactionary exception to modern or American literary history, but a complicated phi losopher and a writer vital to both traditions. A full understanding of Frost’s importance, however, may require attention to rather than dismissal of his ordinariness, since Frost’s “middle way,” as he once described it, helps to reconcile the enduring oppositions that his poetry suggests. These oppositions support confl icting reasons for Frost’s significance: is his work centrally modernist, for example, because of its concern with a threatened individualism or because of its engagement with communal, even political questions? Frank Lentricchia suggests the fi rst, arguing that the “primordial ground” of Frost’s work is “the poet’s subjectivity” (Lentricchia, Frost, 4), while Walter Jost counters with his description of Frost as a “creature[] of circumstance” (Rhetorical Investigations, 35). Is Frost a vital American writer, moreover, because he continues a poetics of transcendental individualism or because he furthers a tradition of consent? Roy Harvey Pearce asserts that Frost’s “community of one” extends the national antinomian strain, whereas Elisa New argues that Frost’s verse manifests an American adaptation to worldly practice (Pearce, Continuity, 277; New, The Line’s Eye, 24– 25). Frost criticism often moves between and among such alternatives; recent accounts, including Jost’s and New’s, tend to deemphasize what Jost calls a “neoromantic, lyric preoccupation with Self ” for descriptions of what New calls “adhesive attachment and connectedness.”2 Yet subjectivity and its situation were never, for Frost, mutually exclusive regards; his work abandons neither side of the “melancholy dualism” that his own reading of Emerson takes to be “the only soundness” (Collected Poems, 860).3 Frost’s greatest interest for literary

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history may be his facility within this dualism, as his work shows how a seeming self-compromise can be a subtle self-assertion. Frost’s best critics have articulated versions of this skill, often with reference to the Jamesian pragmatism that Frost admired: Frost cited James’s writing as his “greatest inspiration, when [he] was a student,” and several analyses have shown how the poet’s “middle way” maps a version of the philosopher’s via media (Thompson, Frost, 1:536).4 Lentricchia draws on James, for example, when he distinguishes Frost’s tendencies from solipsism by describing a self-definition “vis-à-vis the real world” (Self, 18), and New draws on James when she distinguishes Frost’s tendencies from fatalism by identifying a will that “proves itself in the bending or . . . the seizing . . . of what options should present themselves” (The Line’s Eye, 25).5 In an illuminating recent study, Mark Richardson makes such proof central by showing how a worldly context creates rather than opposes Frost’s individualism.6 Further criticism might build on such insights, however, through greater attention to a specific means and medium of Frost’s creation—to everyday time. This analysis can show the continued importance of Frost’s familiar affect as it describes the basic stipulations of his contextual awareness. Frost’s respect for the common, that is, may be as significant for its use of conventional temporality as it is for its adoption of conventional values, and his worldly subjectivity not only exploits his political and cultural situation but also mines the transcultural and apolitical power of diurnal life.7 If James’s pragmatism shows how the flux of experience can provide that very sense of self and store of truths that historicism seems to deny, Frost’s poetry extends this vital suggestion;8 from the confident declarations of “The Road Not Taken,” foreseeing an identity through its later retelling, to the quieter acknowledg ments of “Carpe Diem,” finding in retrospection a way to live, to the didactic dialogue of “Build Soil,” recommending a repeated “turning under” of ideas, to the private narrative of “The Valley’s Singing Day,” rewriting dawn as a couple’s creation, Frost links worldly and human rounds to make ordinary experience the test and proof of consciousness. When the final lines of “Storm Fear” ask “whether ’tis in us to arise with day / And save ourselves unaided,” they pose a vital assignment of Frostian mornings, in which one must rise both independently “unaided” and dependently “with” the world’s progress (Collected Poems, 19). This human rising is not easy, however simple a sunrise may seem, and the difficulty details Frost’s import. If the benefits of a middle way were as

34

The Middle Living of Robert Frost

effortless as mere conformity, Frost’s ordinary poems would remain as intellectually inconsequential as Trilling suspected them to be. Frost counters this charge with his attention to the risks of daily existence; in fact, daily life presents some of the most quietly terrifying situations in Frost’s poetry. Everyday time can seem more like the lulling cycles of a Freudian death wish than the lively recursions of an independent will—from the “loneliness” and “house fear” of “The Hill Wife” to the drudgery of a despairing “Servant to Servants” to the seemingly futile “Investment” of a couple who hope to “get some color and music out of life” (Collected Poems, 122– 23, 242). In these works and others, routine threatens with a mortal submission that is all the more devastating for its mundane source. One might so easily succumb to ordinary rounds, as “The Investment” suggests, giving up a desire for the piano’s creative “vigor” as one yields a desire for anything invigorating. From its very title, therefore, “The Investment” not only wonders if quotidian living submerges one further and further in a colorless, musicless banality. It also suggests that this process steadily relinquishes “living” itself: to the poem’s protagonist, counting meager winter meals in “unearthed potatoes,” diurnal endurance seems to pull one into a cold ground. “Home Burial” extends a similar threat of entombment when it presents a wife’s horror at the very fact of existence. As the lure of everyday erasure attends Frost’s many accounts of everyday living, it demonstrates the existential effects of regular efforts. One must work so hard to “rise with day” because it would be so easy to “sink under” dailiness. Dangerous possibilities are not the only ones, though, and Frost shows that ordinary living can overcome its innate menace. In his work, the real power of common habits can counter the real peril of ordinary hazards. These habits may be no more exalted than the exchange of conversation, the recollection of afterthought, or the consistent difference of married life; “In the Home Stretch,” in fact, summarizes and dramatizes Frost’s best quotidian living when it combines just such practices. In the pages that follow, I use this poem to show more specifically how Frost would resist the perils and use the benefits that other works adumbrate. The poem’s reception might itself mark the subtlety of Frost’s demonstration: “In the Home Stretch” has drawn little commentary and could well appear unremarkable in form and content;9 its blank verse merely tells of a husband and wife’s fi rst night in a new home. Yet as the work uncovers the complexity of a

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humble context, it can respond directly even to so challenging a philosophical statement as Emerson’s “Experience”: Emerson begins his essay with the question, “Where do we fi nd ourselves?” (Emerson, Collected Works, 3:27), and the wife of “In the Home Stretch” concludes her poem with the assurance that “it would take me forever to recite / All that’s not new in where we find ourselves” (Frost, Collected Poems, 108–14). Whereas Emerson laments the “preparation,” “routine,” and “retrospect” of ordinary life, whereas he regrets those moments when “we dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives” (3:28, 49), Frost presents a couple discussing their household and garden as they eat their dinner. His characters prepare for a future of routine retrospection in the hopes that they can reconcile the individual genius and worldly practicality that Emerson’s essay wishes to conflate. Bolstered with this hope, moreover, the pair can answer the closing question of “Storm Fear” as well as the opening question of “Experience,” since “In the Home Stretch” ends with plans for “first thing in the morning”: the householder of the fi rst poem doubts his ability to rise the next day against the power outside, but the household of the second foresees a steady dailiness in harmony with the world beyond. “In the Home Stretch” emphasizes that harmony through the poem’s focus on accustomed pattern, blurring the very border that an anxious “Storm Fear” would shore up. At the start, for example, when a wife looks out the window at “weeds the water from the sink made tall,” her fi rst glimpse of a new kitchen notes how the iterative, humdrum tasks of past occupants have joined and changed the outside world. The poem’s final lines reinforce the same interdependence, bringing a worldly force indoors: “When there was no more lantern in the kitchen,” Frost writes here, the “fire got out through crannies in the stove / And danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling, / As much at home as if they’d always danced there.” The fi re is wild and homely, free and contained, elemental and domesticated; when its energetic flames replace a couple’s lantern or even a poet’s lamp, they predict a continuing, peaceful cohabitation of the given and the made. Their “dance” does so by a habituation as longstanding as the chores evoked at the poem’s beginning. Through the daily washing of dishes or the nightly lighting of fires, one can both accommodate and appropriate a natural world—and thereby feel “at home” in familiar strangeness.

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If this is a general truth, in Frost’s work, Joe and his wife must learn it afresh as they learn how to begin again in a new location. This pair have just given up city lights for “country darkness,” and their home could easily seem “haunted or exposed” to that alterity. They must remind themselves that the “strangeness soon wears off.” They must gradually remind themselves, therefore, that this happens through the interactive “wear” of daily life: “the round,” as the wife calls it, when she tells her husband of “years / To come as here I stand and go the round / Of many plates with towels many times.” Her description in these lines seems to dread a routine future, as the resigned repetition of “many” indicates, but by the time Joe echoes his wife’s phrase at the end of the poem, the two have realized a different possibility: they plan to “go the round of apple, cherry, peach / Pine, alder, pasture, mowing, well, and brook.” A prospective walk affi rms the couple’s holdings as it inscribes the fertile cycle of a farm year; the rhythm of the lines’ sounds and stresses savors a playful variety in regular, advancing feet. The couple’s repetitive future is less like a submission to necessity than an assertion of title and a participation in natural creativity; the spouses of “In the Home Stretch” will move forward by cycles that prove their justified place in the larger world. This transformation of “rounds” might be called the plot of the poem. It is not much of a plot in the usual sense, however, and that difference suggests how Frost’s quotidian work capitalizes on facets of poetic form: “In the Home Stretch” charts a steadily deepening situation rather than a rising and falling chain of events, and it unfolds a continual, consistent order rather than a bounded, beginning-to-end incident. The poem is defi nitively temporal, that is, without aspiring to the temporality of a story. Like much of Frost’s so-called narrative verse, it thereby marks the distinction of poetry from narrative: though Vereen M. Bell argues that Frost’s focus on “the passing of time” makes him “philosophically a narrative poet,” his work might instead clarify the repetitive time of verse (“Frost” 70–71). Frost’s poems might show, moreover, that a poetic cadence models the best practice of ordinary rhythms; while the morning doubts of “Storm Fear” seem to manifest the uncertainty of its jaggedly irregular lineation, the morning assurance of “In the Home Stretch” seems to realize the promise of the poem’s two-hundred-odd iambic blank-verse lines. Frost’s prosody would demonstrate how “irregularity of accent” can emerge through “the regular

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beat of the metre,” as he puts it (Collected Poems, 665), just as his poetry would demonstrate how individual will can emerge through the regular iteration of days. Seemingly ordinary subjects, as well as seemingly traditional lines, support this distinctly modernist philosophic insight.

Steps and Circles What sort of ordinary time, though, do Frost’s poems and people take up? Joe and his wife reflect on the question as they decide what their “home stretch” will mean, answering fi nally with a future of “all that’s not new”: they mark a progressive consistency that consists neither of sheer advance nor of sheer return. Only after considering both those extremes, however, do the pair settle on their Frostian way. Unmitigated sequence presents the fi rst threat, shadowing the very title of “In the Home Stretch” with thoughts of the last, mortal “home” that steadily approaches, and the wife voices this fear when she looks out the window to a “little stretch” of “mowing-field” and notes how it runs into “woods / That end all.” Such a future is “scarce enough to call / A view,” as she admits; because the “years” she sees in this field are “latter years— / Different from early years,” neither Joe nor she, in their seeming middle age, could want to know their “number.” They must, rather, fear the years’ conclusion: in this conception of time, a constantly different progression measures a fi nite existence that will one day fall to a deathly mower. Those woods, as Joe later puts it, are always “waiting to steal a step on us whenever / We drop our eyes or turn to other things.” His account displays something like that “terror of the flux” that elsewhere in Frost’s poetry “showed itself in dendrophobia” (Collected Poems, 161). Joe and his wife fear a temporal flow carrying them toward the doom of a Frostian forest.10 As the adversarial tone of Joe’s “game” implies, this view prompts or even requires one’s vigilant opposition to time’s progress. That duty echoes in other Frost poems, too: in “Reluctance,” for example, the speaker argues that to “accept the end / Of a love or a season” is to commit “treason” against humanity’s most deeply held wishes (Collected Poems, 38). Frost’s early work often endorses this classically poetic opinion through its reluctance to allow a “drift” toward mortal finality that he figures in the fall of the year.

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“A Prayer in Spring,” for example, asks its vaguely figured divinity not to make the poet “think so far away / As the uncertain harvest,” but rather to keep the speaker “here” in the springtime, watching a bird that “stands still” by a blossom; “Rose Pogonias” raises its “simple prayer” in hopes that a flower-rich meadow could be “forgot” when the “general mowing” comes (Collected Poems, 21, 22–23). As Poirier notes, however, these works acknowledge their prayers to be ineffectual—as futile as Joe’s challenge to the forest, perhaps (Poirier, Frost, 200). The poet must always “bow and accept” time’s passage, as he puts it in “Reluctance.” In “October,” another early prayer, Frost entreats time only to be “slow, slow!”: his almost helpless wistfulness suggests that stopping time altogether is impossible (Collected Poems, 35). Frost fi nds another way to resist the temporal flow toward termination, however, with the second of the contrasting conceptions of time in “In the Home Stretch”: this view sees not steps toward an end but cycles of return. The supposed diminishment of one autumn or evening might precede and guarantee another morning or spring; as Frost reminds himself in “In Hardwood Groves,” a regular seasonal order means that leaves “must go down past things coming up. / They must go down into the dark decayed” (Collected Poems, 34). To accept an end is to enable another beginning. If the strenuous, self-admonishing “must” of “In Hardwood Groves” registers some dissatisfaction with this conception, and if the speaker believes his cyclic earth to be fallen from the heavenly timelessness of “some other world,” he nonetheless admits recurrence as a genuine comfort. This same sort of pattern assures the couple of “In the Home Stretch” even more fully; when Joe urges his wife away from the morbid prospect of field and woods to a “livelier view,” she celebrates the life available in the paradigmatic cyclicity of a new moon. Its silvery wire seems “as new as we / To everything,” she exults. The comparison would see a couple’s future as a fresh beginning rather than a further stretch: their “latter years” can renew the promise of earlier time rather than continue forebodingly to advance. In this comparison, Joe and his wife need not resist a natural adversary who steals steps; they need only join a natural order that starts again. Yet the absolute sameness of pure cycle, Frost’s poetry shows, can be as inhuman as the absolute difference of pure sequence—and equally governed by the danger of annihilation. So much is suggested in Frost’s most famous example of a threatening forest, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” when the final two lines lapse into the peaceful chant of an exact

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repetition. The poem seems a paradigmatic example of Freud’s compulsive death drive, as several critics have noted;11 the continued movement of Frost’s gerundive “stopping,” his conclusion implies, will only reinforce the stasis of the word’s semantic meaning (Collected Poems, 207). If this popu lar poem exemplifies Frost’s supposed accessibility, it also shows the deathly temptation that he uncovers at the heart of common feelings. The same risk inheres in conventional forms; when Frost’s prosodic fi nal stanza presses an AABA rhyme scheme into the exactitude of DDDD as well as the lulling recurrence of the last couplet, the conscious pleasures of assonance yield to the atavistic pull of identity. Such radical indifference could describe the static recurrence of matter as well as the instinctive repetitions of id—the consistency that “In Hardwood Groves” notes when it exclaims, in its opening line, “The same leaves over and over again!” Submission to this insensible, worldly “over and over” would fi nd freedom from mortality only through relinquishment of consciousness. Frost could not countenance this sort of “bow and accept,” either, however temptingly “lovely” the “dark and deep” may seem. Rather, he looks to an alternative also inscribed in the prosody of “Stopping by Woods,” evident in the fi rst three stanzas’ interlocking rhyme scheme. As James Wright notes, their pattern combines a forward-looking terza rima, each sound expecting fulfi llment to come, with a backward-glancing Rubáiyát quatrain, each sound corresponding with what has been.12 Frost’s form thus emphasizes the different consistency inherent in stanzaic repetition, which animates its advance through both echoes and anticipation: this is neither the pure present of endless difference nor the pure present of endless sameness but a progress of past predicting future and future fulfi lling past. A movement by “promises,” one might say—the very “promises to keep” that could, in the last stanza of “Stopping by Woods,” resist deathly stasis and drive the speaker onward.13 No less than Nietzsche, if somewhat less explicitly, Frost believes that the capacity for such promises is the true mark of distinction from nature, manifesting a specifically human temporal awareness.14 Yet if Nietzsche would erase this awareness, along with the memory and expectation that pledges require, Frost would reinforce it: he would fi nd in temporal promise an extension of life that is also a sustenance of individualism. Frost’s effort relies on the deliberate craft enacted in the stanzas of “Stopping by Woods.” It is just as important in the stanzas of “The Onset”;

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this poem appears just a few pages further in Frost’s New Hampshire and presents another deathly wintry forest, where on a “fated night” a speaker caught in a blizzard “almost stumble[s]” (Collected Poems, 209). That is, he almost lets death “overtake” him; the hint of Dantean despair that Frost includes, when he writes of giving up an earthly “errand,” seems to mark a suicidal submission as sure as that of “Stopping by Woods.” In fact, the danger of “The Onset” seems greater than a simple termination of life since the yielding in this poem would undo existence altogether: to dissolve individual consciousness into the fate of a general darkness, Frost writes, would be “more than if life had never been begun.” The poem resists this evacuation, however, with a crucial stanza break and a crucial “yet,” both of which invoke a kept promise: the speaker wields the memory of past winters to assert that “all the precedent is on my side.” This fund of past experience teaches him that “winter death has never tried / The earth but it has failed”; armed with this, he predicts a future when he will see the dangerous snow melt away. The result renders continuing natural time and continuing human life conditional on the speaker’s own assertion— as well as the verse enacting it. Moreover, it bases this power on a use of repetition: the poet must remember past springs, and the poem remake its fi rst stanza, in order to foresee a viable future. Individual power and creative success come through willful endorsement of worldly orders.15 These orders, it is important to note, are not guaranteed: to make endorsement significant or will effective, one must acknowledge the contingency in cycles that could well seem inevitable. Frost’s “precedent” is careful, therefore, to bank on probable verification rather than resting on eternal truth, as a lack of once-and-for-all conviction distinguishes his patterns from deathly exactitude while assigning his poetic speaker a continual project.16 The result also enables a human “game” with nature that is something more than the adversarial contest described in “In the Home Stretch”; talk of “side” and “failure” and “triumph” in “The Onset” shows that victory can mean agreement rather than opposition and that concession can mean achievement rather than submission. With this, the poem’s conquest may foreshadow that of “A Leaf Treader,” whose last line also guards against the allure of death with the memory of previous seasonal cycles: “Now up my knee to keep on top of another year of snow” (Collected Poems, 271). Frost may echo, too, Emerson’s final exertion in “Experience”: “up again, old heart!” Emerson writes (Collected Works, 3:49). Frost’s various versions of “up

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again” strive to show that temporal experience might not be a “treasonous” betrayal of “the heart of man,” as he writes in “Reluctance”—that it might, rather, be a journey “Into My Own,” in which each “I” grows “only more sure of all I thought was true” (Collected Poems, 15). A repetitive poesis can use the truth that has been to think for oneself the truth that must be.

Forwards and Backwards This realization of coming truth describes what the recitation of “In the Home Stretch” can do as well: in this, both this poem and “The Onset” show how Frost’s descriptions of time specify Jamesian precepts. Frost might be describing his poems’ insights, for example, when he writes in his notebook about a “monism of active idea” (Notebooks, 109), suggesting a processual unity in which experience and thought can be interdependent through their mutual vitality. The entirety of Frost’s notebook page, in fact, discusses a reconciliation of dualism that Frost found possible in ongoing process: “Reality is a relationship,” he writes; then, “Old knowledges know the new fact”; then, “Monism of active idea”; “Know backwards: live forwards”; and last, “Tendency; pointing.” These phrases do not summarize Frost’s own views, however, but his gleanings from James. In Pragmatism, James defi nes truth as a temporal “leading,” describes this verification as “both lean[ing] on old truth and grasp[ing] new fact,” and even quotes Kierkegaard’s contention that “we live forwards . . . but we understand backwards.”17 Frost’s generally sympathetic reading of James’s book seizes particularly on the forwards and backwards living that his poems would manage through a pragmatic reliance on returns. James himself demonstrates this reliance since his writing describes how a balance of truth and freedom depends on experiential precedents. His philosophy would replace Kantian precision with an expanded version of Humean probability:18 in a world lacking timeless verities, only the patterns of previous events allow one to predict which opinion will lead to future verification. James therefore explains in Pragmatism that “our experience . . . is all shot through with regularities” and that each man must obey this “order” if he wishes to avoid “frustration” (99, 101). James is equally careful to emphasize, however, that this “pressure of objective control” does not overcome the power of subjective will. Just as Frost’s speaker in

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“The Onset” brings about a fresh iteration of the precedent he invokes, James’s ideal “knower” “helps to create” the truth he declares (Pragmatism, 112; Essays in Philosophy, 21). While “truth is made largely out of previous truths,” and while “men’s beliefs at any time are so much experience funded,” those very beliefs are “parts of the sum total of the world’s experience, and become matter, therefore, for the next day’s funding operations” (Pragmatism, 107). Like Frost’s, James’s diurnal order describes an ordinary spiral of changing consistency in which regular effort maintains real freedom. A late passage in Pragmatism could be recounting the contrast between “Stopping by Woods” and “The Onset” when it notes those “moments of discouragement” in which one wishes to be “absorbed into the absolute life”— and then urges readers to continue “striving” in the “round of adventures of which the world of sense consists” (Pragmatism, 140). In Frost’s work as in James’s, the most important result of one’s ordinary adventures is a sense of one’s own self; as my introduction noted, James’s Psychology describes subjectivity as the most basic certainty that “rounds” provide. Selfhood, in fact, seems to be a particularly daily certainty for James, and all the better for it: “Each of us when he awakens says, Here’s the same old Me again,” James’s textbook explains, “just as he says, Here’s the same old bed, the same old room, the same old world” (Psychology, 182). This theory again amplifies Hume, who fi nds the returns of “memory alone” to be one’s “source of personal identity” (Hume, A Treatise, 261); James sees this source as powerfully resilient rather than regrettably meager. In this, James’s humble mastery agrees with Frost’s: in a late interview, for example, the poet notes with pleasure “how regularly I am supposed to make up my bed fresh every day,” adding, “Just so my mind” (quoted in Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor, 21). Frost recalls a similar duty in a related notebook entry, which describes the “beginning of yourself ” when “you wake from sleep” and “[pick] up the subject” from where it was left (Notebooks, 213). In Frost’s and James’s dailiness, one knows one’s identity by such active re-collections, performed at each new-old start of another morning. The stakes of this self-constitution are evident in the repetition of “The Road Not Taken,” a paradigmatic moment of Jamesian agency that opens Frost’s third volume (Collected Poems, 103). Criticism has rightly explained how a lack of distinguishing details between the two paths means that the nature of the speaker’s decision is less important than the sheer fact of

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making a decision— or perhaps the sheer fact of telling about it— and criticism has rightly related this suggestion of Frost’s poem to James’s general affi rmation of the will.19 It is worthy of notice, however, that the import of choosing or telling in “The Road Not Taken” depends on recurrence: Frost’s poem predicts the significance of a remembered selection, foretelling the reclamation of his past by a future subjectivity.20 Tense begets the triumph of the fi nal stanza; while the fi rst three occur in simple past, as if a neutral authorial voice were recounting a bounded episode, the last dramatizes a particu lar speaker imagining himself “telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged . . .” This prediction echoes the poem’s opening phrase; it thereby foresees how recollection will link the current “I” and the future “I” to confi rm the continuity of a person’s agency while asserting the difference such agency has made. Or rather, this prediction foresees how recollection might do so, since the fi nal two lines emerge from what seems a stuttering hesitation: “I— / I took the one less traveled by.” Frost’s conclusive confidence depends on the connection of these repeating, successive, but different fi rst persons across the temporal gap that he dramatizes with both a dash and a line break.21 The break is as crucial, it seems, as that between stanzas in “The Onset”; it enacts the suspense that makes repetition meaningful as well as difficult. When it does, the space also helps to distinguish Frost’s ordinary poetics from James’s ordinary philosophy. James would elide any divide between successive “I”s; his easy morning habit of “saying,” for example, suggests none of the imaginative activity in Frost’s effortful morning habit of “making up.” Nor does James’s general description of habit, which seeks to “make automatic . . . as many useful actions as we can,” thereby abdicating the very agency that his psychology would elsewhere support (Psychology, 134). While such relinquishment may have been personally welcome to James, a proponent of will painfully conscious of his own indecision, it nonetheless points to a larger tension in his thought, which presents one’s self and one’s experience as both recurrently successive and seamlessly transitive. James can maintain both conceptions successfully in his early work, where recursive “I”s blend into the liquidity of consciousness and comparative percepts dissolve into indivisible understanding,22 but his later philosophy tends to stress the unjointed continuity of his famous “stream of consciousness” over the repetitive pulsation of its specious present

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tenses. As Richard M. Gale explains, this development undermines James’s endorsement of subjective power:23 his flow of “pure experience” seems closer to the course of Bergson’s “creative evolution,” where individual intention subsides into a collective élan vital.24 Frost can approach this Bergsonian flux in later work: “Accidentally on Purpose,” for example, evinces almost smug trust in the beneficent progress of the universe, and “Something for Hope” recommends that one simply leave “some things to take their course” (Collected Poems, 438, 340). But in “The Road Not Taken,” as in many of his best poems, he rejects this complacency in order to maintain the doubtful efforts of self-consciousness.25 In this, Frost’s repetitive psychology may be less pragmatist than Proustian, however incongruous the comparison could seem; Merrill might even have made the connection as a college student if he thought about his senior thesis on À la recherche du temps perdu while listening to Frost read at Amherst. Proust’s long consideration of retrospection and identity takes its method and theme from a rhythmic quotidian and maintains a Frostian sense of genuine risk as it does so. Proust’s narrator also wonders how one should awaken, every morning, as the “being one was the day before.” He also fi nds an answer in recollection, as a familiar room rouses “memories to which other, older, memories cling” (Guermantes, 110–11). This simple morning retrospection models Proust’s entire work, in fact, which Georges Poulet describes as “the continued creation . . . of the being one is by the being one has been” (Studies, 304);26 the description could as easily account for Frost’s poetic project. In both his work and Proust’s, the recurrent break and unity of night and dawn constitutes a life that always “parts to meet itself a stranger— surprised” (Frost, Notebooks, 193). The uncertain gift of Frost’s risky returns, this surprise proves the change one perceives through the sameness in daily rounds. Or in literary rounds, especially metaphoric rounds; whereas James distrusted the disjunctions of figurative language,27 Frost emphasizes and celebrates them. An “education by poetry,” as he suggests in a talk of that title (Collected Poems, 719– 25), is for him in large part an education by metaphor, and metaphor in large part an education by time. The free-verse exercise that Frost includes in a 1925 letter, for example, turns the onward rush of a train journey into a “wheel” of recurrent progress when remembrance of “point A” at “point B” allows “comparison / And metaphor / From

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the presence in the mind / Of two images at the same instant practically” (Collected Poems, 536; also in Selected Letters, 306). Frostian figuration means the mental effort of comparison across the experiential divide separating any two similar moments. It agrees with Merrill’s description, when the later poet notes moving trucks in Greece “blazoned with META PHOROS” and adds his supposition that a “measurable interval gives the transaction what energy it has” (Merrill, Collected Prose, 15). Frost not only relishes such energy but also admits that it thrives on imperfection: any metaphor that closes the circle of return into perfect identity erases the animation provided by a transacted distance. Frost’s poetry acknowledges, therefore, the “practically” in his A and B comparison, just as his prose points out that metaphors are forever “break[ing] down” (Frost, Collected Poems, 721– 22); he perceives, in the words of Paul de Man’s classic criticism of romantic figuration, the “authentically temporal predicament” of the metaphor-seeking self (de Man, “Rhetoric,” 208). Whereas de Man analyzes a romantic desire to evade this temporal predicament through poetry, Frost demonstrates a modernist determination to use the same situation in his verse. The best use would be an “investment” other than the futile sinking that Frost continues to fear: it would be “circles” or cycles “plowed under,” to cite the explanation of “Build Soil—a Political Pastoral” (Collected Poems, 289– 97). This poem begins, in fact, by recalling the “unearthed potatoes” so disheartening in “The Investment”; “Build Soil” goes on to suggest that the best “living”—aesthetically and practically beneficial as well as economically viable—may nevertheless come through one’s trust in earthly returns. Such pragmatic faith is endemic both to writing and to farming, Frost implies; an etymological link between the lines of a poem and the furrows of a field evokes a versus that is equally natural and human, agricultural and aesthetic. The resulting “pastoral” existence may be generally applicable even in Tityrus’s seeming evasion of a political function.28 In this poem, it seems neither possible nor advisable to substitute the “particular” details of a historical situation for the rhythmic “alternations” that are poetry’s age-old theme. Rather, one may effect a “one-man revolution” with an individualism of turning and returning: “The thought I have, and my first impulse is / To take to market, I will turn it under,” Tityrus declares; “the thought from that thought—I will turn it under / And so on to the

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limit of my nature.” This Frostian philosopher believes that “the mind is round,” the “universe is round,” and “all reasoning” is “in a circle”; in the words of Frost’s notebooks, he relishes the fact that life is “forever returning on itself,” learning “A . . . to learn B by which to learn C by which to learn D by which to learn A again and so on round and round” (Notebooks, 380). He holds that form is a perpetual “rounding off ” and that we are always “getting back to something we have lived before” (Notebooks, 281, 297).29 Tityrus also believes, though, that “circulation among the facts” is not the futile sameness that “reason[ing] in circles” could so easily seem; whether experiential, mental, or rhetorical, Frost’s rounds inscribe a spiral of recursive re-enrichment. He adopts and revises the Emersonian injunction to “draw a new circle” (Collected Works, 2:190) by urging his readers to reinscribe the old, thereby capitalizing on the wisdom of each iteration; his building soil would “turn the farm in upon itself / Until it can contain itself no more.” This consistency can ignore the goal of a market price or political prize. And while the process will end, inevitably, in that “limit” to one’s “nature” that mortality presents, Frost’s phrasing renders even that conclusion less fearful than culminating. The time that carries one toward death is the same that steadily enhances one’s thoughts and poems and self. Frost could not “give all to Time,” then, as another poem admits; he will always retain “what I myself have held” (Collected Poems, 304– 5). This work distrusts Emerson’s parallel recommendation to “give all to love,” which comes with a concomitant assurance of transcendental compensation; in Frost’s poem, such giving would relinquish the very subjectivity that marks one’s distinction from objective timeliness.30 His assertion that “I am There” refuses to concede this built soil of identity. Nor could Frost simply “seize the day”; “Carpe Diem,” directly following “I Could Give All to Time,” also contradicts its title with its content (Collected Poems, 305). Frost’s life “lives less in the present” than in the future and past: the present, he writes, is “too present to imagine.” Imagination requires the forwardand-backward glances that measure and make a changing sameness. Indeed, if life “lives” through this poesis, a temporal imagination continues the very possibility of one’s existence.31 To seize the day in Frost’s poetry is therefore to seize yesterday, to turn it under—it is to seize the fact of daily return. Even the lovers in Frost’s poem walk “loving by at twilight,” with their day already over; any carpe diem means a look to the past.32

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Only Middles Seizing the past is equally important for the couple at twilight in “In the Home Stretch,” whose life also seems to depend on reimagining what has already occurred. The spouses’ fi nal defi nition of a “home stretch” recognizes this dependence when they reject the sheer sequence of the mowing field and the sheer cycles of the new moon for the kind of recurrent advance that “Build Soil” describes. Fittingly, the pair begin their defi nition when the wife shifts her attention from the moon to more down-to-earth illumination: “We’ve got to have the stove,” she tells Joe, “whatever else we want for. And a light.” Neither new nor old, the battered but relit stove and lantern model a repetitive vitality that the couple come to articulate by the light of both—when their conversation extends a consideration of practical arrangements into a description of one’s general condition: ‘What is this?’ ‘This life? Our sitting here by lantern-light together Amid the wreckage of a former home? You won’t deny the lantern isn’t new. The stove is not, and you are not to me, Nor I to you.’ ‘Perhaps you never were?’ ‘It would take me forever to recite All that’s not new in where we fi nd ourselves.’ The couple’s new home is the “wreckage of a former,” their new life a reconstitution of the old; their supposedly fresh start only resituates what they already know. Home moving, then, is more arrival than departure, as a possible allusion to The Odyssey also suggests;33 Frost’s couple fi nd that going forward means going back. They seem to welcome this timeliness, though, when the wife triumphantly predicts the repetitive work to come: as they “fi nd [them]selves” in novel familiarity, a future built of the past will be an experience they may claim as their own. Even as their own

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poem, perhaps, since the implications of “recitation” suggest how everyday progress in recurrent time compares to artistic progress of metrical verse. If a good poem is “a run of lucky recalls,” as Frost’s notebooks state (48), his poem suggests the same in a good life. Like many Frost heroes, the wife of “In the Home Stretch” perceives the uncertain luck in those recollections; in fact, Joe reminds her of contingency a few lines earlier in “In the Home Stretch” when he fi rst fetches the all-important lantern. His action follows directly, it seems, from his wife’s assertion that “strangeness soon wears off,” and relighting a “dingy” piece of their past may well be their fi rst step in a cyclic wearing away of inhuman darkness. Joe’s accompanying remark—“There’s that we didn’t lose!”— could therefore seem as affi rmative as the declaration of “keeping” in “I Could Give All to Time.” But Joe recognizes that this keeping is never guaranteed and that the “precedent” on one’s side is no more than probability. When he asserts that “the meals we’ve had no one can take from us,” he continues with I wish that everything on earth were just As certain as the meals we’ve had. I wish The meals we haven’t had were, anyway. However accustomed, continuing rounds are matters of chance, and each day’s bread demands one’s efforts rather than deserving one’s assumption. Joe puts this insight into practice when he tells his wife to “fi nd your loaf ” as he “light[s] the fire,” the couple mutually managing one more iteration of quotidian patterns. Their “day’s work” of settling into a new home thereby models the work essential to every ordinary day— each one as potentially important as this beginning. In Frost’s poem, incessant recitation of the “not-new” predicts an existence less like a rote memorization than a vital craft. That craft, moreover, can make one’s home while extending one’s stretch, since “In the Home Stretch” suggests that the fact of past time counters the deathly threat of time’s passing. In the wife’s notion of recitation, a greater accretion of yesterdays to repeat means a greater number of tomorrows in which they will return; only a not-new future, that is, can logically extend “forever.” The wife thus articulates her “forever” future after Joe’s crucial suggestion of a “forever” past, when he wonders if the two of them “never

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were” new to each other. If one’s former life— or at least, one’s shared sense of a former life— extends unceasingly backward, one’s prospective life can be just as endless. Believing this, the pair can dismiss even the idea of novelty: “New is a word for fools in town who think / Style upon style in dress and thought at last / Must get somewhere,” the wife tells her husband. To presume that life must get somewhere is to admit that life could fi nish, whereas to presume that life must get back to somewhere, over and over, is to deny the existential task any logical conclusion. With this implication, Frost’s answer to “where we fi nd ourselves” takes up Emerson’s answer to the same question in “Experience”: “in a series, of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none,” Emerson writes. It is a setting in which we “wake and fi nd ourselves on a stair,” knowing that “there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight” (Collected Works, 3:27). It is a repetitive sequence that exemplifies the situation of everyday life. Its sequentiality, however, is precisely what Frost turns into an opportunity: the lack of extremity in what Emerson calls the “mid-world” (3:37) means to Frost a salutary refusal of origins and conclusions through the returns of what is never started or fi nished. “Ends and beginnings—there are no such things. / There are only middles,” the wife affirms in “In the Home Stretch.”34 The poem clarifies the subtlety of Frost’s seemingly folksy fondness for the “middle way” and the “ordinary man” (Interviews, 47–48) as the couple learn how the serial mediacy of Frost’s ordinary existence not only continually manifests one’s will but also continually resists the termination of its work. Frost himself seemed to believe as much, and his life displays a thorough resistance to ends: he refused on principle to keep deadlines (Interviews, 80), counseled young poets to “take advantage of their natural laziness” (M. Anderson, Frost and John Bartlett, 4), and cherished an “ambition-less, purposeless” farm life where one “just put everything off ” (Interviews, 157). Deadlines invite conclusion, and Frost prized the “procrastinity” that kept finality forever indefinite (Interviews, 157); as he writes in his notebooks, “The only deadline that doesnt throw me off entirely is the indefinitely far off deadline of my own death” (Notebooks, 315).35 This philosophy is no doubt biographically motivated. The relatively long wait before Frost’s fi rst book may have required that he and Elinor repel thoughts of ambitions and outcomes, and Frost appreciated “the time [Elinor] patiently gave me” (Grade,

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The Middle Living of Robert Frost

Family Letters, 210). But self-protection would have supported the poet’s general preference for patience over impatience and grief over grievance—to use the terms of his introduction to “King Jasper.” Grievance and impatience mistakenly look forward to that day when a wrong will be finally redressed, when “two or three more good national elections” will “do the business,” when one may even “end the need of patience” (Collected Poems, 743). If Frost’s refusal to indulge these hopes could seem a reactionary aversion to progress, “In the Home Stretch” suggests that it may instead be a refusal ever to call progress fi nished: “I may sound like a man who never changes his mind,” Frost explains elsewhere, but he is rather “one who never makes it up” (Mertins, Frost: Life and Talks, 378). In the words of “A Lone Striker,” there is always a thought that wants “further thinking” or a love that wants “re-renewing” (Collected Poems, 250). Through such endless extensions, such infi nite repetitions of renewals, one can not only resist the oppression of a clocked mill day, the spools of which wind Fate’s threads on the mechanical bobbins of industrial schedules. One can also resist the “end” of fate itself. Frost’s refusal to see his mind as fi nally “made up” means that his diurnal mind making need never fi nish. Frost supports the same middling possibility by distrusting beginnings; as Charles Berger astutely notes, this modernist poet sees little need “to create myths or fictions of origin” (“Echoing Eden,” 147). Frost preferred “the old way to be new,” as he writes in an introduction (Collected Prose, 116), and his estimation of loyalty distrusts the “transformation” of conversion: “Let’s leave it to St. Paul,” he tells one audience (Poetry and Prose, 421). His verse, too, celebrates the behind-hand or derivative, those whose selfconscious unoriginality marks them as disciples of the mid-world. The oven bird, for example, a “mid-summer and a mid-wood” singer who merely “makes the solid tree trunks sound again,” creates his unique art precisely by asking “what to make” of such belatedness (Collected Poems, 116; emphasis added). With this ambition, the bird compares to the couple in the nearby poem “Putting in the Seed,” which is rightly celebrated as a love lyric of human and seasonal beginnings but which situates its new life in a Frostian middle:36 just as a “petal-fall is past” in “The Oven Bird,” there are “soft petals fallen” in the later poem (Collected Poems, 120). Like Tityrus, the husband “burying” these petals proves his mid-world wisdom by humbly turning under; he knows that growth to come must draw from growth that has been. Even the seemingly quintessential lyric instant of Frost’s

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“A Boundless Moment” celebrates not originality or timelessness but yet another mediacy: an extended past— a “young beech clinging to its last year’s leaves”—that looks like the future, the flower “Paradise-in-bloom” (Collected Poems, 215–16). The couple in “In the Home Stretch” find a middle Eden as well: “Dumped down in paradise we are and happy,” the wife summarizes. In their rural resettling, they perceive that a Frostian garden must be eternally belated rather than eternally new, and like the poet’s mid-wood singers, these two can relish a conscious use of such mediacy. Like Frost’s resolutely aimless heroes, even, they can savor their conscious refusal of defi nite purpose. They learn as much through their invocation of “paradise,” which draws Joe’s wondering comments: ‘It’s all so much what I have always wanted, I can’t believe it’s what you wanted, too.’ ‘Shouldn’t you like to know?’ ‘I’d like to know If it is what you wanted, then how much You wanted it for me.’ ‘A troubled conscience! You don’t want me to tell if I don’t know.’ ‘I don’t want to fi nd out what can’t be known. But who fi rst said the word to come?’ ‘My dear, It’s who fi rst thought the thought. You’re searching, Joe, for things that don’t exist; I mean beginnings. Ends and beginnings—there are no such things.’ Joe responds to a Genesis allusion with the search for an absolute and innocent origin but quickly encounters the futility of such a quest. The mutuality of intention in any marital choice describes an ordinary realm where beginnings “can’t be known.” If this seems detrimental, however,

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The Middle Living of Robert Frost

Joe can perceive the benefit of uncertainty through his wife’s almost Shakespearean awareness of what “ends” mean: purpose, or beginning, implies fulfi llment, or fi nish. To shun defi nite aims—to make ends “none of our own,” in the phrase from Hamlet—is therefore to extend living beyond foreseen conclusions. Such a possibility makes the wife’s evasions of “wanting” less obstructive than invigorating. Moreover, it makes her frustration of a “troubled conscience” less cruel than necessary: a new start might imply a guilty past, which might in turn yearn for atonement, but complete atonement would be defeatingly fi nal. Only a continually troubled conscience allows revisions to go on and on. In the light of this, it seems only fitting that Frost loved Richard Edwardes’s “Amantium Irae,” as he recalls in an interview, since that poem’s refrain states again and again that “the falling out of faithful friends renewing is of love” (Frost, Collected Poems, 879; Edwardes, in Quiller-Couch, Oxford Book, 72–73). When “In the Home Stretch” describes the same faithful renewal, it shows how the refusal of forgiveness can be a life-giving act. Such life may be measured, perhaps, against the self-defeat of Frost’s “A Servant to Servants,” a monologue of diurnal returns that is only too ready to assign definite guilt. “I waited till Len said the word,” the servant remembers of her own resettling; “I didn’t want the blame if things went wrong” (Collected Poems, 65– 69). Following this refusal, her move “wore out like a prescription”; avoiding fault prevents the servant from repeating or extending her “change.” She cannot remake her past, either, and thereby present her life as her own: in contrast to the self-affi rming speaker of “The Road Not Taken,” this servant can only suppose that she’s “got to go the road I’m going,” explaining that “other folks have to, and why shouldn’t I?” When her husband “says the best way out is always through,” she imagines no alternative for herself. Submission to “through,” however, accepts unidirectional sequence, and prediction of “out” invites conclusion. Here is none of the evolutionary recurrence or expansive middle suggested by “In the Home Stretch.” Instead, the servant’s stretch seems like the lake outside the window, a span of defi nite beginning and ending “cut short off at both ends”; neither the servant nor Len extends that “old running river,” or that old stream of consciousness, through remaking the not-new. When the servant states that “behind’s behind,” she seems to refuse the creative possibilities of belatedness. Her feeling of “behind,” in fact, seems to bolster the allure of a more complete “way out” and her resigned belief that

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“I sha’n’t catch up in this world, anyway,” once again links the enervating rounds of dailiness with the compulsive drives of a death wish. Here, though, Frost also suggests the deathly power of blame; the servant’s bitter afterthought to “through,” in which she vaguely foresees that “they’ll be convinced” when she is gone, reinforces a connection between assignment of guilt and acceptance of mortality.37 Fault-fi nding traps one in the submissive regimen of “A Servant to Servants,” lamenting what one will not change and “doing / Things over and over that just won’t stay done.” These “rounds” show what could easily become of the “over and over” in “In the Home Stretch”: without the deliberate decision to rend each day’s bread or recite each evening’s not-new song, without the self-aware agreement to refuse ends and intentions, everyday repetitions can seem no more than the senseless anticipation of complete insentience.

Common Laws The servant’s blame perverts not only quotidian time, however, but also married time. In her desire to leave home for the safety or insanity of “the asylum,” a place where “you aren’t darkening other people’s lives,” she would avoid the intermingled existence that could make up a better home stretch. Frost’s creative repetitions often manifest human will through the blended wills of human matrimony: Joe and his wife develop salutary afterthought through their questions about “you . . . to me” and “I to you,” for example, and the servant forbids the same possibility through her refusal to question Len about anything. Marriage seems to be of general importance to Frost, since his work focuses throughout on married couples and since he seems to have been equally conscious of the meaning of matrimony in his life;38 if his poems and letters and comments emphasize the institution’s costs more often than its rewards,39 the devastation that marriage can cause seems only to deepen its significance. That significance, however, might be further specified through its relation to time, as the best accounts of Frostian marriage suggest: Poirier, for example, explains how Frost’s comparison of human sexuality, artistic creativity, and material fecundity renders poetry a biological process (Poirier, Frost, 177), and New reads his matrimony as part of a Jamesian “willed belief ” that would fi nd a “practicable arrangement” to “communicate with, if not fi rst causes, then

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The Middle Living of Robert Frost

at least the structures staying our confusion about such causes” (New, The Line’s Eye, 288). Whether as cyclic generation or pragmatic faith, Frostian marriage provides a way of being in a world of temporal experience. This view of marriage’s function is fundamentally Protestant,40 and may fi nd its best philosophical formulation in Kierkegaard’s essay “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage,” where he asserts that “marital love has its struggle in time, its victory in time, its benediction in time” (Either/Or, 141–42). This makes marriage “divine by virtue of being commonplace,” Kierkegaard explains, the institution sanctifying an earthly setting as it proves its own heavenly nature (Either/Or, 140). Frost’s poetry recognizes the same divine ordinariness. So does the poetry of Paradise Lost, and if Frost is the greatest “poet of marriage” since Milton, as Poirier rightly notes (Frost, 22), it is in large part because he shares the earlier poet’s concern with the demands and possibilities of timeliness.41 Comparison of the two poets can therefore clarify some philosophical implications of Frost’s couples: like Frost, Milton is a poet of liberal individualism whose works often worry about the management of mortal limits and the necessity of patience,42 and like Frost, Milton eventually answers this anxiety through his imagination of a pointedly matrimonial Paradise. Milton’s Eden is the place where a human pair exercise free will in harmony with nature; Frost’s version, even more worldly and timely than his predecessor’s, endorses a Miltonic materialism that requires nuptial accord. Frost prefers marital affection to platonic love, for example, because the platonic is philosophically idealist as well as asexual, and because Platonists hold that the “woman you have is an imperfect copy of some woman in heaven,” as Frost disapprovingly notes in one letter (Collected Poems, 774).43 He sees such a creed as fit only for bachelors—for those who eschew the matrimonial efforts essential to life on earth. Marriage is not only timely, however, in Frost’s conception; it is also, specifically, repetitive. Like Kierkegaard, Frost takes the institution to prove the true “meaning of repetition” (Either/Or, 140; see also 141–44). Stanley Cavell expands this connection in Pursuits of Happiness, which defi nes the “comedy of remarriage” as a significant genre of American fi lm; in movies of this type, he argues, a healthy couple must remake their union in order to demonstrate genuine matrimony.44 “In the Home Stretch” dramatizes the duty as a daily task: when they prove the matrimonial combination of “recollection” and “hope” that Kierkegaard describes (Either/Or,

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142–43), Joe and his wife show how the “way back to . . . marriage,” in Cavell’s words, can continue to be “the way forward” (Pursuits, 257).45 So do other happy Frost households, all of which prize a sense of mutual history: in “West-Running Brook,” for example, a young husband’s suggestion that he and his wife are “young or new” requires correction, and in “The Generations of Men,” young lovers delight in shared genealogy as they meet at another “wreckage of a former home,” an “old cellar hole in a by-road” (Collected Poems, 236– 38, 74–81). A well-married couple is never really “new,” in Frost’s description; well-married spouses can always draw on a sense of long, “old” history. They must always draw on this sense, in fact, if they wish to continue. The pair in “West-Running Brook” show as much when they end with prediction of future anniversaries, and the lovers of “The Generations of Men” prove the same when they imagine a “new cottage on the ancient spot” before agreeing to “meet again” at the same place tomorrow. This “again” may authorize as well as continue their relationship, as Cavell’s analysis makes clear; by defi nition— or, more accurately, by its lack thereof—marriage may assign a recurrent responsibility rather than ratify a fi xed state (Pursuits, 141–42). In Kierkegaard’s words, its essence comes both “once and for all” and also “continually” (Either/Or, 139). Frost agrees, as he puts it in a talk, that marriage is “a making thing, an unfolding thing” (Collected Prose, 275).46 “In the Home Stretch” articulates this aspect of the institution when the wife wonders if “evidence of having been called lady / More than so many times make me a lady / In common law”; her flippant allusion to legal convention recognizes how private, casual recurrence can go so far as to establish a public, binding legality. The comment therefore “informs” the whole poem, as Richard Wakefield notes, the constitutive returns of Frostian matrimony exemplifying the vital practice of ordinary existence in general (“Frost’s ‘In the Home Stretch,’ ” 52), and Cavell’s work supports the connection; he cites remarriage, in In Quest of the Ordinary, as the model for a “willing repetition of days” (178) Coupled living manages the everyday “acknowledg ment,” perhaps, that renders the commonplace strange (8– 9). In a later preface, Frost provides his own version of such acknowledg ment when he describes the “daily” duty of a “wordshift” that lets one see one’s “closest friend . . . with the freshness of a stranger” (Collected Poems, 803). To make the familiar novel is for Frost the quotidian task of married life.

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The Middle Living of Robert Frost

The shifting is “mostly back and forth in the same place,” Frost describes, and its efforts are something like “the jumping of a grasshopper whose day’s work gets him nowhere” (Collected Poems, 803–4). Marriage’s repetitions exemplify the Kantian paradox of purposiveness without purpose or intention without teleology.47 The implication is just as clear when the couple of “In the Home Stretch” refuse to countenance “get[ting] somewhere”; marriage proves that one can live a meaningful, timely existence without believing in advance or degradation. Its rhythms therefore exemplify, perhaps, Frost’s belief that “it will always be about equally hard to save your soul”: the poet includes this statement in his “Letter to ‘The Amherst Student’ ” in order to argue against Wordsworth’s and Matthew Arnold’s judgment that each generation or era is worse than the last (Collected Poems, 739). Arnold’s “Dover Beach” demonstrates that mistaken opinion when its speaker hears the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of the “Sea of Faith” and posits marriage as a refuge from such ebbing (Arnold, Poems, 242). Frost’s “Devotion” dramatizes the opposite when it remembers that any withdrawing wave will return to the shore again and again; rather than assuaging the world’s failing, human love can mimic its more enduring recurrence (Collected Poems, 226). Like “shore to the ocean,” Frost’s poem posits, the heart may remain in “one position” as it continues an “endless repetition.” 48 No less faithful than Arnold, Frost uses marriage to describe a different sort of loyalty— one believing in time rather than against it, professing an unknown future rather than attempting a static preservation. His work suggests how a marriage promise “domesticates the infi nite,” in Adam Phillips’s phrase (Monogamy, 52), as it infi nitizes the domestic; matrimonial vows claim future contingency as one’s own intention while they also make one’s own intention chancily contingent.49 This risk helps to explain why Frost’s endorsement of the institution could be less like a conservative submission to custom than a bold trust in oneself and others. In his view, husbands and wives live in the sustained uncertainty of their own plighted responsibility. For Frost, this does not vitiate the concomitant certainty that whatever comes, however unforeseen, will be what a couple “have always wanted”; the spouses in “In the Home Stretch” can rightly mock the helpful “planning” of a neighbor. They can contrast the “company” such neighbors would provide with the better company of their own domestic fi re, knowing that its “at home” dance

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registers the right, unplanned, kind of ordinary going. In this progress of changing regularity, one can forgo rigid preparations in order to be “the happy discoverer of your ends”: Frost uses this phrase in an interview to describe writing poetry, but it might equally describe his views of the best married life (Collected Poems, 857), since marriage is something that “knows its end,” as he says in another talk, “without being able to tell its end” (Collected Prose, 275). The notion of happy discovery, moreover, could also describe Frost’s view of the best daily life, and indeed Frost’s favorite metaphor for the effect was a new morning: in the same interview, he describes it as “the feeling of dawn—the freshness of dawn” (Collected Poems, 858). He offers the same comparison in “The Constant Symbol,” where he defi nes a poem as “the emotion of having a thought while the reader waits a little anxiously for the success of dawn” (Collected Poems, 788). The suspense of this account, in which one waits for an expected success without quite knowing how it will come, evokes the conditional consistency Frost found in the daily repetitions of marriage or the formal recurrence of a poem as well as the ordinary returns of the sun. The local, human activities of marriage and poetry might therefore proceed in harmonious accord with that larger, earthly, order of diurnal returns. The connection explains why the conclusion of “In the Home Stretch,” the prediction of an outdoor walk which could seem non sequitur, emerges as a proper extension of the wife’s recitation. She concludes with “No, this is no beginning,” Joe quickly responds, “Then an end?” and their conversation continues with: ‘End is a gloomy word.’ ‘Is it too late To drag you out for just a good-night call On the old peach trees by the knoll to grope By starlight in the grass for a last peach The neighbors may not have taken as their right When the house wasn’t lived in? I’ve been looking: I doubt if they have left us many grapes. Before we set ourselves to right the house, The fi rst thing in the morning, out we go To go the round of apple, cherry, peach.’

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The Middle Living of Robert Frost

Joe’s plans for a morning excursion reinforce the poem’s steadily emerging wisdom as he continues its steadily persisting rhythms; this husband resists the momentary gloom in his wife’s “end” by reminding her of the inconclusion in their own belated not-newness as well as in the world’s nights and mornings.50 There is always another “day’s work” of remarriage or resettling, that is, because there is always another day. In these lines, the human living that is so different from a mown stretch or a cyclic moon fi nds its true worldly affi nity to be a harmony with quotidian returns, and such rounds let a couple happily discover each morning as a marriage’s— or a poem’s— own ends.

What Has Been If the prospective dawn in “In the Home Stretch” therefore compares to the prospective spring in “The Onset,” given that both resist conclusion through the assertion of natural cycles, it also relates to the prospective sunrise of “Snow,” which links the other two poems by connecting the danger of submission to a blizzard with the example of a bad marriage (Collected Poems, 137–49). “Snow” suggests a solution to both problems to lie in the movement toward morning—undertaken, in this poem, by a minister named Meserve who pauses to rest in a neighboring couple’s home at midnight while a winter storm rages outside. The middleness of this household, Meserve fi nds, is not the creative recurrence of Joe and his wife but the passive suspension of Mr. and Mrs. Cole; their union, like a page in one of their books that Meserve observes, seems unable to turn either forward or backward.51 Meserve resists this inertia through his faith that one’s “very life depends on everything’s / Recurring till we answer from within.” His own internal answer, like that of all ordinary Frost heroes, uses the precedent of diurnal repetition to fi nd an original, me-serving answer in new day. The morning of “Snow,” however, proposes a distinction that the day of “In the Home Stretch” leaves implicit. Meserve takes particular inspiration from birds, those lyric answerers who “tomorrow . . . will come budding boughs from tree to tree / Flirting their wings and saying Chickadee”; as he asks the Coles, “Shall I be counted less than they are?” His question

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alludes to Matthew 6:26, which tells readers to “behold the fowls of the air . . . they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they?” Yet while the biblical passage counsels believers to “take therefore no thought for the morrow,” Frost’s poem seems to reverse that advice, since Meserve demonstrates precisely such thinking. Meserve demonstrates the “heroism,” even, that is described in Frost’s graduation address, where the young poet warns his audience that “he who thinks to rest will rest as in a winter storm, to die” (Collected Poems, 637). To move forward into morning, in Frost’s speech as in “Snow,” requires an active human assertion rather than a passive animalistic faith. Unlike chickadees, people cannot simply assume that tomorrow will come. The difference separates human progress from nature’s, in Frost’s work, and pinpoints a reason in the “after” of his “after-thought”: the distinction comes with human consciousness of the past. If chickadees have no such memory—if they will emerge tomorrow, as Meserve explains, “not knowing what you meant by the word storm”—people will always be “dwelling on what has been” (Collected Poems, 223). This last phrase comes from “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things,” a later poem about poetic and avian renewal that develops the contrast of “Snow”; here, Frost further explains the difference by further explaining the loss inherent in humanity’s backward glances. There is “really nothing sad” for the phoebes of “Country Things,” but for people, it seems, there is always something mournful. As “The Hill Wife” describes in an earlier poem, humans “have to care” when the cyclically recurring seasons come and go even if complacently migrating birds do not (Collected Poems, 122). Frost knew this even as an eighteen-year-old high-school senior; the moment of afterthought, he tells his graduating classmates in his commencement address, is a moment of “keen regret” (Collected Poems, 637). This awareness of regret clarifies the importance of mourning not just to Frost’s quotidian poems but also to a wider strain of everyday poetics. The effort of return seems endemic to the effort of grief, as Freud’s description of sorrow implies: mourning counters the compulsive, defensive repetitions of melancholia with a conscious, reconciling recollection of what is gone.52 As Peter Sacks notes, a Freudian sense of recurrent grief therefore helps to explain the rhetorical patterns characteristic of the elegy—

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the paradigmatic “yet once more” of “Lycidas,” for example (The English Elegy, 23– 26). A Freudian sense of recurrent grief may also help to describe a wide importance for elegiac habits, comparing the repetitions of good mourning in particu lar to the repetitions of good living in general. Mourning may be something like that recursive “working-through” so necessary to the Freudian subject, a practice of sanity that deliberately remakes what is gone. Several psychoanalysts after Freud articulate this suggestion, arguing that “lives [are] about achieving loss,” as Adam Phillips writes, and that art may often be about the “work of mourning” (On Flirtation, 81). In the ordinary poetics of Frost and others, this task is as unending as it is everyday; if Emerson’s quotidian despair in “Experience” is famously born of a futile attempt to grieve, Frost’s belief in quotidian experience may attest to his more successful effort at unceasing sorrow.53 Success or failure lies in one’s ability to rewrite lost past as possible future—thereby linking a human sense of “what has been” with a worldly sense of what will be and turning the pain of mourning into the promise of morning.54 With its sunset situation, “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” poses the question of such promise as it links natural regeneration to the birds’ lack of retrospection. “For them the lilac renewed its leaf,” Frost writes of the phoebes, but will there be any renewal for sorrowful humans? The poem’s implied division at fi rst suggests that only an eradication of grief would allow new beginnings; its conclusion, however, effectively if tentatively suggests something else; when Frost entertains the possibility that the “phoebes wept,” he posits the chance of a regeneration through loss.55 This kind of new beginning would retain the elegiac associations of Frost’s Whitmanian lilacs; it would make from the “keen regret” of afterthought, in the words of Frost’s graduation speech, “the forethought of the next” (Collected Poems, 637). It would make the progress of “country things” agree with the progress of “West-Running Brook,” whose stream contains a “backward motion” “as if regret were in it and were sacred.” The couple of that poem, like the couple of “In the Home Stretch,” perhaps, provide a model of Frost’s beneficially mournful living when they see their own marriage in backward-moving advance. The good of this living may be most clear through a contrasting example, however, because the most anguished instance of daily existence in Frost’s poetry, and the worst marriage, is also the greatest failure of mourn-

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ing. “Home Burial” narrates an interment in grief as inert as the Coles’ in snow (Collected Poems, 55– 58). Like “Snow,” moreover, “Home Burial” wonders how— or even whether— one can move forward in ordinary time: the poem centers on the question of “three foggy mornings and one rainy day,” as the wife quotes from her husband’s words, and presents in its two spouses two possible answers. The first is burdened with the backward motion of an overwhelming regret; from the opening lines, when she “und[oes]” an already “doubtful” step while “looking back over her shoulder,” Amy resists the quotidian advance that to her seems like an unfeeling abandonment of her dead child. Her husband, by contrast, would consent to that timeliness, a natural fluency that will inevitably “rot the best birch fence a man can build” as well as bury the best child or home a man can create. Amy believes grief to be perpetual, that is, a traumatic, insurmountable defense that will not let her move “back to life” from the “grave,” while her husband believes grief to be finite, an activity that should be finished and “satisfied” before one yields to a general moving on. Neither spouse, however, questions the faulty assumption that grieving and living, looking back and going forward, are separate things.56 Neither, therefore, can imagine a satisfactory mutual existence, a life that would acknowledge both progress and loss by reconciling the world’s impersonal advance with a couple’s intimate remembrance. In the words of Amy’s pivotal question, neither can connect the natural fact of “how long it takes a birch to rot” with the human fact of “what was in the darkened parlor.” To do so would make mourning ordinary, its rounds more like the changing preservation of a wife’s not-new recitations than the static iterations of Amy’s “I won’t, I won’t.” Not until the work of Elizabeth Bishop, perhaps, does ordinary poetry present a full realization of this elegiac everyday practice, but Frost’s verse narratives of “Home” suggest the possibility in their opposing examples. It seems fitting, then, that biographers have linked both “Home Burial” and “In the Home Stretch” to the death of the Frosts’ fi rst son and to Robert and Elinor’s subsequent move to a farm in Derry, New Hampshire (Thompson, Frost, 1:597– 98; Newdick, Season, 71– 72). Frost’s two poems may imagine contrasting responses to his loss, and to loss in general, through two different practices of quotidian living: the first thwarted by what has been and the second enabled by remembrance, the first trapped in time and the second remarrying and resettling, the first at odds with dailiness and the second making a life within it.

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How to Talk This making is manifest through speech, and a contrast of “In the Home Stretch” and “Home Burial” clarifies the importance of talking as well as grieving to Frost’s ordinary time. By the conclusion of the later poem, for example, partners unsure as to “who fi rst said the word to come” can say with certainty the words of where they would go, as the husband’s resolve to “drag” his wife out at dawn meets her own intention to “put you in your bed.” These complementary declarations establish the coming night and day, enacting the going “by contraries” that “West-Running Brook” describes as the best version of matrimony. In that work, a pair predicts that each future return will be “the day of what we both said,”57 and the poetry of “In the Home Stretch” demonstrates a similarly constitutive saying. It does so by showing how speech can creatively fulfi ll poetic as well as everyday conventions: the wife’s “I know this much,” for instance, completes a line that her husband begins as she answers his plans for morning with her own for evening, and her husband’s “is it too late,” to take another example, refuses a suggestion of “end” by fulfi lling the pentameter his wife leaves unfi nished while extending another forward-looking enjambment. In such exchanges, a couple’s back-and-forth manifests forwardmoving freedom through adherence to the recursive starts and stops of regular lineation or regular dailiness. Each spouse’s responses to the other work to satisfy and further a given rhythm.58 “Home Burial,” by contrast, demonstrates sayings that go nowhere: at the conclusion of this poem, when Amy exclaims, “How can I make you—,” her husband’s rejoins, “I’ll follow and bring you back by force. I will!—” Their opposed talk locks them in a constrictive self-defeat that seems utterly different from the mutual day and night that ends “In the Home Stretch.” Rather than contraries conversing, “Home Burial” shows marital contraries that neither offer nor expect reply; the husband doesn’t “know how to ask,” as Amy tells him, and can’t say anything without “offense.”59 By the middle of the poem, these two no longer even attempt any asking and answering, and Amy’s wonder at the birch fence can be posed without a question mark. As this ignorance of “how to speak” to each other proves an even deeper ignorance of how to live together, the poem shows the failure with blank-verse lines that are often frustrated into an end-stop halt rather

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than continued by enjambed, inviting inconclusiveness. With the fi nal, mute stasis of the couple’s two blank dashes, Amy’s “make” and her husband’s “force” present the opposite of Joe’s “drag” and his wife’s “put”; only the latter seem anything like the “force in life” that Elinor Frost described with her commencement speech on conversation. Together, therefore, “In the Home Stretch” and “Home Burial” justify Elinor’s title as they show how words allow or deny vitality itself. Amy’s mention of “three foggy mornings” manifests the same connection when she scorns “talk like that at such a time”: to Frost, the question of talk implies a question of timing. This link may detail his well-known emphasis on “spoken language” as well as his well-known focus on common themes. Frost believes that “we’ve got to come down to this speech of everyday,” as he puts it in a lecture, but he also believes that we must do something particu lar with that speech: we must perform a metaphoric “fetching” that “takes a word or phrase from where it lies and moves it to another place” (Collected Poems, 694– 95). In Frost’s view, that is, one must not only adopt but also actively transform familiar locutions. Less a source of authenticity than a chance for process, his everyday talk allows the same-but-different revelation of a remade familiarity. Poetry only deepens this ordinary effect, Frost believes, because verse writing at its best constitutes a “renewal of words” that can “mak[e] . . . words mean again what they meant” (Complete Prose, 326). Variations of this ambition, among ordinary writing, extend from the demotic sayings of Frost’s narrators to the defamiliarized idioms of Bishop’s or the inverted clichés of Merrill’s; they detail a generally shared comparison between the strangeness one might fi nd in common language and the novelties one might uncover in commonplace living. Twentieth-century philosophy endorses the connection, since Cavell’s work derives its quest of ordinary existence from the ordinary-language philosophy of Austin and Wittgenstein.60 Frost’s verse helps to show why the link is persuasive by demonstrating how, exactly, common speech can become revelatory: in particu lar, how conversant words can renew one another. In a poem like “In the Home Stretch,” the return and revision of what has just been spoken not only move an ordinary scene forward but also reveal the unexpected in such ordinariness. So much is evident in the progress of a line like

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‘Shouldn’t you like to know?’ ‘I’d like to know,’ or the rhythm of an exchange like ‘There are only middles.’ ‘What is this?’ ‘This life?’ or the development of phrases like ‘. . . and you are not to me Nor I to you.’ ‘Perhaps you never were?’ Amy in “Home Burial” can only “repeat the very words you were saying,” as she accusingly tells her husband, in a disbelieving or despairing echo, but the repetitions of husband and wife in “In the Home Stretch” show the word-shift of Frost’s most fetching rhetoric. Even the poem’s seemingly defi nitive statements appropriate and revise something already said: the wife’s “dumped down in paradise,” for example, follows Joe’s description of “dump[ing] down” their goods in a new location, and her rejection of novelty, fittingly enough, restates her husband’s wisdom. “I’ve heard you say as much,” she fi nishes by telling him. The couple’s hearing and saying suggest that their prospective recitation will be good, word-renewing poetry— alive to that sense of “repartee” that Frost takes as a criterion of the best verse (Notebooks, 47–48). This promise also proves the prospective reciters to be a good couple: marital intimacy, in Frost’s work, is the best and most important context for conversation.61 This is clear not just in the happy exchanges of “WestRunning Brook” and “In the Home Stretch” but also in the unhealthy monologue of “A Servant to Servants,” where a wife describes a bad marriage by rehearsing her husband’s “sayings” as rotely as Amy does in

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“Home Burial,” or the uncanny narrative of “The Hill Wife,” where a wife dissolves marital ties by refusing to answer her husband. One might contrast the last with the playful call and response Frost describes in his characteristically conversational love poem called “The Telephone.” Frost links language and matrimony in “Snow,” too, since Meserve’s gift for “words, or is it tongues,” as well as his word-shifting habit of “seeing likeness,” seems both mystifying and challenging to the badly married Coles. The connection is also evident in “The Generations of Men,” where two partners together try to “set the voices speaking,” and where dialogue demonstrates the same revisionary repartee found in “In the Home Stretch” in lines like ‘And what do you see?’ ‘Yes, what do I see? or in the recurrent, interweaving questions that conclude the poem. The husband of “Home Burial” states Frost’s implied defi nition nearly outright when he considers whether he and Amy “could have some arrangement” of not speaking, then admits that “I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love / Two that don’t love can’t live together without them. / But two that do can’t live together with them.” The proposed agreement would indeed negate Frostian marriage; in this poet’s work, love is always a sharing of words.62 The connection deepens Frost’s Miltonic affi nities, since Milton argues in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce that matrimony consists of “a meet and happy conversation” and then describes in Paradise Lost how Adam requests a consort specifically “by conversation with his like to help, / Or solace his defects” (“Doctrine,” 246; Paradise, 451).63 This solace echoes its poet’s desire for an “answerable style” in his own verse; like Frost, Milton links the responsive patterns of good marriage with the responsive patterns of good writing (Paradise, 468). Like Frost, too, Milton suggests that the exchange of either may transform recurrent temporality. “With thee conversing I forget all time,” Eve tells Adam in Paradise, before going on to remember all time in a doubled description of pleasing seasonal changes (Paradise, 258– 59). Her lyric suggests, in a very Frostian paradox, that this just-created pair already have a long experience of cyclicity; Adam and

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Eve, perhaps, were “never new” to each other or their world.64 Eve’s lyric also mimics the recurrence it describes, enacting a “forgetting” that seems less like removal from natural patterns than adoption of and consent to their movement. Moreover, that consent emerges through matrimonial speech; Milton’s Adam and Eve, like Frost’s Joe and his wife, may live best by the continual recitation of mutual returns. The poetry of everyday life, in these poems, is no more or less than the conversation of an everyday couple.

Believing In As much as the recitation of “In the Home Stretch,” therefore, Eve’s Edenic hymn could go on “forever”; her song of time is an inset lyric that resists lyric bounds by concentrating the temporal cycles of a domestic epic. Several of Frost’s shorter lyrics, similarly, exemplify in miniature the insights of longer everyday poems like “In the Home Stretch” by realizing through related means the promise of quotidian repetition. “The Valley’s Singing Day,” for example, a poem as generally underrated as “In the Home Stretch” or “Snow,” describes one couple’s retrospective account of an ordinary morning’s birdsong, as the speaker tells his wife— or perhaps her husband, since the bond is intimate but unspecified—how she earlier “awakened under the morning star / The fi rst song-bird that awakened all the rest” (Collected Poems, 217–18).65 She thus anticipated or even replaced sunrise, the speaker explains, beginning the valley’s “day”; like the spring of “The Onset” or the morning of “In the Home Stretch,” this worldly return seems dependent on active human prediction. If day would have come anyway, as the speaker acknowledges when he describes a “determined dawn” beginning to work, this does not in his view diminish her agency. “You had begun it,” he insists, with lineated stress on “you” augmenting his emphasis. Or perhaps overemphasis, given that mention of “proof ” suggests that this narrative is both crucial and dubious and given that the speaker even admits that he “was asleep still” during the events he reports. Accurate observation at the time, however, matters less than defi nitive affi rmation in a later account, when the speaker will be “willing to say and help you say” that “you” began morning. As in “The Road Not Taken,” this poem’s

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forward looking foresees constitutive backward glances; mornings will recur through retelling what has already happened. In “The Valley’s Singing Day,” though, this is not just a spoken but a matrimonial recurrence, possible through mutual exchange in which each spouse “confi rm[s]” the other’s “story.” To use again the words of “West-Running Brook,” this will have been the singing day of what they both said. Here, then, the determined but chancy “success” of dawn is also the inconclusive accomplishment of the pair’s mutually written poem: in this work, Frost shows the possibility of the afterthought, conversation, and marriage that can make up a creative practice of ordinary time. He does so again in an even greater poem about a woman’s effect on  birdsong, one beginning: “He would declare and could himself believe . . .” (Collected Poems, 308). In the sonnet “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” the titular statement both is and is not the substance of “his” declaration; this speaker tells how the birds there in all the garden round From having heard the daylong voice of Eve Had added to their own an oversound, Her tone of meaning but without the words. Admittedly an eloquence so soft Could only have had an influence on birds When call or laughter carried it aloft. Be that as may be, she was in their song. Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed Had now persisted in the woods so long That probably it never would be lost. With “In the Home Stretch,” this work presents Frost’s best example of a recurrent, ordinary existence, and like that longer poem, it describes a diurnal Eden of marital retrospection: with the implicit contraries in the phrase “daylong voice of Eve,” Frost suggests how a wife can recite the natural time of what will come by remembering the natural time of what has been. Her song registers the chance as well as the consistency in worldly and human repetitions, and the “would” in “he would declare” seems akin to the possibly provisional, possibly foreknowing “should” of “The Valley’s Singing Day.” The husband’s speech, and thus the poem itself, could be

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habitually repeated or merely possible or both.66 It is like the voicings of Eve that it describes, a “persist[ence]” that “never would be lost” even as “admittedly” and “probably” concede that it may not be absolute. If the returns of everyday life here—the declarations of poetic self-repartee, telling and convincing itself, no less than the “call or laughter” of Eve in conversation with her spouse— can remake nature and domesticate an alien world, they will do so through rounds both dependably repetitive and contingently unguaranteed.67 These rounds will also, in their developing recursion, refuse ends and beginnings. Critics have located a Fall in this poem through the switch from garden to woods, or with the “now” of line 11,68 but the poem’s own lack of clear distinction seems vital. Frost would have noted that Paradise Lost describes a long-ago Eden that is just as temporally ordered as the current, familiar, fallen earth. He would also have appreciated the fact that in Milton’s epic, the ordinary habits of prelapsarian living are precisely what will redeem postlapsarian time, as working, talking, and loving move toward atoning redemption. Frost agrees that a belated situation can recover real paradise; in “In the Home Stretch,” the “infernal” faces are those moving men who tempt Joe and his wife to doubt a derivative garden, while the spouses trust in a setting of knowing innocence. With a similar trust, the speaker of “Never Again” presents a seamless movement from then to now as the quotidian repetitions of woman and nature persist over and through any possible temporal divide. Frost’s poem replaces bifurcations of theological history with continuities of natural growth; the gardento-woods transition that could mark a Genesis exile can describe, more basically, the ordinary progress of botanical ecosystems. The transition can also describe the progress of human life since woods in Frost’s verse often symbolize mortality. In this poem, an undetectable shift to their “dark and deep” threat perceives no termination because Eve’s continual presence appropriates a space and time of even deathly necessity. “Never again would birds’ song be the same,” the fi nal couplet of this poem states, returning to its title’s assertion through the very repetition it has described: “And to do that to birds was why she came.” This recurring continuity is an art of keeping rather than what Bishop will later call an “art of losing” (Complete Poems, 178); while the undeniable import of this “never again” perpetuity supports critical readings of the sonnet as an elegy for Elinor Frost, the mourner of “Never Again” can nonetheless repeat

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presence rather than absence.69 If to make birds’ song never again the same is Eve’s purpose, Eve’s task remains as perpetually unfi nished as the elegiac affi rmation of it. Never, the speaker of this poem suggests, is a long time. Eve must exist, again and again, as long as there are birds and woods that continue and change. A practice of repetition in life and art thus allows Frost to flout death without refuting mortal existence; humanity persists, distinct but inextricable, in the recurrent, evolving persistence of the world itself. Or rather, it does so in one man’s “declar[ing]” what he “could himself believe”: the reassuring statement in the poem’s fi nal two lines could just as easily be the wishful utterance of the first line’s “he” as it could be the positive dictate of an authorial voice beyond him. It could even be both, perhaps, as a spouse beginning with tentative faith develops the confidence of a poetic maker through his habitual telling. In “Education by Poetry,” Frost argues that verse’s greatest teaching is in such confidence, a “foreknowledge” that must “believe itself into fulfi llment, into acceptance”; this faith, he writes, distinguishes not only the writing of a poem but also the “self-belief ” of a “young man” and “the belief in someone else, a relationship of two” (Collected Poems, 726). This was the education that the young man Robert Frost may have begun in 1892, imagining a marriage of conversation and after-thought, and that Joe and his wife begin together as they resettle “In the Home Stretch.” It has no better demonstration than “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same,” a poem of individual, marital, and artistic authorization that shows the stakes and rewards of a temporal craft. One lives by repetition to know what may prove to have been foretold, to fi nd eventually what will have been always true, through the returning progress of an everyday faith. The belief is capacious in its humility: the fi nal future that Frost would “believe . . . in,” in “Education by Poetry,” is “the hereafter,” and the infi nitude of his sonnet’s “never again” could bespeak the same desire—just as the “forever” of the wife’s proposed recitation in “In the Home Stretch” might extend into a heavenly eternality (Collected Poems, 728). Frost’s infi nity enlarges rather than abandons ordinary time, repeating returns so far forward and backward that humans cannot see the end of them. It compares to Keats’s “here after” where “what we called happiness on Earth” is “repeated in a fi ner tone and so repeated” (Keats, Letters, 37). This “spiritual repetition” of “human Life” is one more example of “Adam’s dream,” writes Keats, a convic-

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tion that reality returns what the imagination creates; in Keats’s version of Milton, Adam “awoke and found it truth.” In Frost’s remaking of Milton’s and Keats’s—and Emerson’s and James’s—risings, we might “wake and fi nd ourselves” each day in a world of both imaginative will and empirical discovery; one can live and write an art of everyday returns in an earthly “home” forever both new and “former” at once. When the “stretch” reaches at last into an otherworldly resettling, the light of ordinary practice might be just “as much at home” there.

Chapter Two The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens

Early Risers per haps no poet att e n d e d mor e to r e curre n t ro ut i n e t h a n did Wallace Stevens. From a 1927 letter outlining his daily schedule to a 1944 message in which he is “happier” to be “doing exactly the same thing day after day” to a 1955 note that describes “trying to pick up old habits” despite his illness, Stevens steadily proves his appreciation for ordinary regimen.1 Biography and oral history offer the details: a morning walk to the office, a day’s work in the Hartford claims department, a quiet evening with the paper at home. Throughout his life, Stevens accepted and even emphasized the consistency that his position as insurance lawyer encouraged.2 He professed to be “enjoying the routine” of nine-to-five work, as he writes in another letter, and stressed the “specific ease” that comes from “going to bed and getting up early” (Letters, 767, 826). At times, he seems even to have valued this “most regular” of lives above a strictly poetic existence; when he objects in a late letter to a “very active period for me as a poet,” he looks forward “to resuming my routine.”3 Readers are left with the puzzle, therefore, of how a great American writer could spend most of his life following the schedule of an undistinguished Hartford executive. Readers are left with the conviction, moreover, that this question is not just biographical curiosity, since diurnal repetitions pervade Stevens’s poems even more certainly than they governed his experience. From the

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“exchequering” quotidian of “The Comedian as the Letter C” to the repeated solar “yes” of “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” to the recurrent daily syllables of “The World as Meditation,” everyday recurrence constitutes a central, vexing, ultimately vital theme of his verse (Stevens, Collected, 34, 224, 442).4 This writer’s business schedule seems thus to be a part of his poetics rather than a prevention of his poetry, the fi xed habits of  his professional life taking up a project that his verse analyzes more subtly. In both, Stevens would make everyday repetition as beneficial as it is basic.5 Why should this task seem so significant to Stevens; why should it matter if the recurrent patterns of a poet’s life and work follow the recurrent patterns of the earth’s days and nights? Most fundamentally, perhaps, because this question rewrites another: the relation between self and world, imagination and reality.6 A dualistic dyad governs many of Stevens’s poems and essays as well as many analyses of his work, from early accounts of critics like Joseph N. Riddel and Harold Bloom, who see Stevens’s work as proof of the mind’s power, to more recent studies by Alan Filreis and James Longenbach, who stress by contrast the importance of Stevens’s contexts. In his daily poetry, Stevens confronts and ultimately refuses the choice between two terms: he describes how the diurnal interdependence of human and natural time can manifest a recurrent interplay of creativity and empiricism. Everyday repetition can be a “Song of Fixed Accord,” to use the title of a lovely and neglected late poem that could well evince the lessons of a lifetime’s routines. In this work, a dove on a roof at dawn fi nds the “ordinariness” of “the sun of five, the sun of six” to be “a fi xed heaven” (Collected, 441), and this paradisiacal consistency allows her expectant “hail-bow” to the coming light, a reverent lyric “pip[ing]” that equates acknowledg ment of external event with affi rmation of internal conception. Her music could assuage the misery of another Stevensian bird, therefore, “The Dove in Spring” whose “bubbling before the sun” keeps “seeking out his identity // In that which is and is established” (Collected, 461). If Stevens perceives the discontent in this seeking, his dawn “Song” shows that he also perceives a solution. The accord of Stevens’s dailiness lets an “established” world return one’s own self-defi nition. Such reconciliation compares to Frost’s middle way, and Longenbach aptly describes the Stevensian “commonplace” as “a middle ground that [is] not a compromise between extremes” (Stevens: The Plain Sense, viii).7

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Like Frost, Stevens discovers this possibility through repetition, the fi xed dailiness that allows a dove’s new morning to be both expected and novel at once. Stevens’s “middle ground” constitutes a rotating globe rather than a static location and a quotidian routine rather than a philosophic statement. Analysis of repetition might therefore further the critical emphasis on Stevens’s ordinary themes: the recurrence endemic to everyday time, in its philosophical and rhetorical possibilities, clarifies the antidualistic function of the poet’s attention to the commonplace.8 Such analysis can resist an opposition of the ordinary and the imaginative in Stevens’s work since the repetitions in this poet’s daily life support continual creative expectation.9 Moreover, such analysis can resist a conflation of Stevens’s patent interest in the everyday with his possible interest in politics since this poet’s commonplace time is not a historical narrative but a daily or seasonal pattern.10 Indeed, Stevens’s commonplace poetry would replace attention to headline news with awareness of earthly cycles. He would like the papers to issue “daily dispatches” describing “the dazzle over the Florida keys,” as he says in one letter, or perhaps to hail the “Master Soleil” that he greets like a visiting dignitary in one poem (Letters, 721; Collected, 208). He once clipped and sent to a friend his local newspaper’s report of spring’s fi rst redwing blackbird.11 These preferences indicate a pervasive attention: throughout his life, Stevens’s interest in the natural world was particularly attuned to its temporality, and a focus on diurnal patterns might therefore complement the recent environmental focus in Stevens criticism.12 Yet Stevens’s use of ordinary timeliness, it is important to specify, is not just a species of organicism or an effort at ecological harmony; Stevens uses worldly patterns to direct and prove his independent agency.13 In Stevens’s everyday writing, a poet need not settle on a Deweyan integration or a Kantian abstraction; nor need he move between the real and the ideal with that random vacillation that some critics describe in Stevens’s development.14 Instead, the imagined and the actual might alternate in a pattern as ordered and ordinary as night and day. This pattern is not always easy, as Stevens’s daily poetry amply reports. It is not always desirable, either, and there are times when his work fi nds a sunrise “hail-bow” to be insufficient. To affi rm both the self and its situation, Stevens’s poetry suggests, could be less a reconciliation of the two than a reduction of both, limiting either the restive scope of the imagination or

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the salubrious gifts of reality. Stevens therefore recognizes the lure of a timeless state as well as the benefits of a repetitive process; like the viewer of “A Fish-Scale Sunrise,” he sometimes longs for a perfection when “today is today,” and like the “latest freed man,” he sometimes stands among the “ joliesses banales” of morning hoping to preserve the “moment’s sun” in a “moment on rising” (Collected, 130, 187). This expanded instant would put “himself / At the centre of reality,” Stevens writes, erasing a divide between mind and world rather than trying to relate the two as distinct entities. Such erasure remains persuasive to Stevens even when it seems dubiously possible. From the idealism of “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” to the abstraction of “Solitaire Under the Oaks,” from the realism in “Earthy Anecdote” to the inhumanism in “Of Mere Being,” he writes a poetry of timeless extremes as well as a poetry of daily compromise (Collected, 51, 473, 3, 476– 77). This chapter focuses on the latter strain in Stevens’s work. But my analysis would not in so doing ignore or refute the former; Stevens’s extraordinary aspirations do not negate the importance of his ordinary poetics. On the contrary, Stevens’s ambivalence about everyday time adds to the interest of his diurnal poetry because it allows his verse to register clearly the disadvantages and even the dangers that a daily practice must overcome. Ordinary time can be a “Banal Sojourn,” as Stevens records in one early title, its daily returns reinforcing boredom; in this poem, summer is like “a fat beast, sleepy in mildew” (Collected, 49). Worse, ordinary time can be a “Domination of Black,” as Stevens suggests in another early title, its daily returns approaching termination; in this poem, autumn brings the darkness of “heavy hemlocks” that stride forth through the repetitions of falling leaves with all the doom of Frost’s forests (Collected, 7). Stevens’s adoption of quotidian patterns, therefore, must fi nd some mitigation of mortality as well as monotony: like Frost—if very differently—he would use necessity to ease its threat. This ambition graces a simple dove’s song with significance as it also clarifies the consequence of greater poems in the Stevens canon, among them “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” “The Auroras of Autumn,” and “The World as Meditation.” Articulating the humdrum but high ambitions of Stevens’s everyday aesthetics helps to further a full reading of these works. They exemplify an accord that is never less than crucial even as it is never more than common.

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That very commonness, moreover, may be an important aspect of Stevens’s art, clarifying his aims and affinities. While the poet’s focus on repetition strengthens critical comparisons with Nietzschean or Heideggerian thought, for example, Stevens’s attention to a specifically everyday recurrence distinguishes his poetic philosophy.15 His work seems less concerned with a defi nition of truth or being than with a program of “How to Live” and “What to Do,” as he writes in a title; he believes, as he states in a letter, that a poet should “take his station in the midst of the circumstances in which people actually live” and “endeavor to give them, as well as himself, the poetry that they need in those very circumstances” (Collected, 102; Letters, 711). To take Stevens at his word here is to describe a writer more ethical or therapeutic than speculative or theoretical, as well as to notice an egalitarian, practical empathy in his esoteric, thoughtful art. Such empathy can seem surprisingly Thoreauvian, in fact, though Stevens is not often linked to Thoreau:16 the earlier poet’s humbly ambitious philosophy also held “the highest of arts” to be “affect[ing] the quality of the day” (Walden, 88). The twentieth-century Hartford insurance executive writing poems “on the way to the bus” and casting himself as a daily “journalist” often seems like a literary descendant of the nineteenth-century Concord nonconformist who wrote Walden and described the best poetry as “a good journal,” for if Stevens’s aesthetics would remember how “people actually live,” Thoreau’s would describe how an “actual hero . . . lived from day to day” (Stevens, Collected, 472; Thoreau, Walden, xviii). In both writers, a concern with ordinary circumstance turns a private art and complicated set of beliefs into an effort that any and all people may take up. Stevens and Thoreau also emphasize the same principal tactic in that effort: earliness. This is evident in the predawn waking that Stevens recounts in letters and the “Prologues to What Is Possible” (Collected, 437) that he enacts in poems as much as in the “infi nite expectation of the dawn” that Thoreau aspires to with the living and writing of Walden (88).17 Through Stevens’s continual pursuit of “morning’s prescience” (Collected, 456), he can perpetually recover the sense of prospect that he fi nds to be constitutive of a creative existence; like his dove or Thoreau’s Chanticleer, he would practice an art of predicting oncoming day.18 This proves a basic difference, then, of his ordinary poetry and Frost’s, however similar a “Song of Fixed Accord” may be to “Birds’ Song” or a “Singing Day.” Frost’s

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daily lyrics stress the afterthought rather than the prologues of repetitive practice, and Frost’s birds tend to remake what was once said rather than to create what will be achieved. The difference can specify, in addition, the two poets’ relation to the broadly pragmatist heritage that they share; if Frost’s work echoes William James’s affi rmation of the will and reliance on past precedent, Stevens’s relates more closely to George Santayana’s emphasis on desire and anticipation of future requital.19 Stevens’s focus on this yearning, in fact, renders his daily poems as romantic as they are pragmatic, as ardent as they are assertive, and it is no accident that Stevens develops his everyday verse through revision of romantic predecessors.20 He does so, in particu lar, through the paradigmatically romantic models of a Shelleyan quest, a Wordsworthian marriage, and a Keatsian dream: in Stevens’s verse, these direct the expectancy of his everyday living and writing. They help to cast ordinary life as both a challenge and a comfort, in a progress of poetic days and nights that stretches toward the climactically peaceful rhythms of Stevens’s fi nal collection.

Humped Returns Consideration of the ordinary begins in his fi rst collections, though, and begins with difficulty. In several early poems, Stevens confirms the problem of everyday time and considers two opposed, unsatisfactory solutions. “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad,” confi ned in the “malady of the quotidian,” dramatizes Stevens’s diagnosis of an ordinary debility: as the psychosomatic illness of the title indicates, diurnal regimen here silences individual response to render a potential poet “dumbly . . . pent” (Collected, 81). This is perhaps Stevens’s purest example of the self-doubting defeat that Laura Quinney describes as a “poetics of disappointment,” and it arises from temporal repetition: “indifferent” in at least two senses, the “time of year” is always the same as well as always alien to subjective interests.21 The poem’s own advance enacts this objectivity with its constrictive, deterministic scheme, and the fi nal stanza, returning to the rhyme sounds of the fi rst, even cramps the work as a whole in a single strophic pattern. This quotidian allows no imagination of an otherwise. Its iterations beat out the futility of alternatives: “One might. One might,” the speaker vainly insists in the fi nal line, as his ineffectual “one” indicates a subjectivity

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worn to absence in the grind of the ordinary. Even as the man hopes, then, for a “fi nal slate” when recurrent time will cease and he will sing “new orations,” he believes this fi nal “penetrat[ion]” of the everyday to be impossible: “Time will not relent.” He may suspect, too, that fi nality would not even be advantageous, since the “icy haze” that he imagines seems ambiguously redemptive, perhaps even comparable to the ice-shagged “nothing” of “The Snow Man” (Collected, 8).22 Stevens leaves “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” in a particularly hopeless position: mutely effaced by his temporal routine, he suspects that the benefits of timelessness, as well as the possibility of timelessness, are no more than fantasy. Perhaps, therefore, one should simply reconcile oneself to a quotidian condition. Stevens attempts just this in “The Comedian as the Letter C”: this reverse quest narrates an everyman’s pursuit of unexceptional existence. Crispin’s humdrum ambition recognizes the significance of an everyday malady, and critics are right to emphasize the comedian’s “ordinary world” as an important Stevensian setting—right as well to argue, as Longenbach does, that this realm was where “Stevens wrote all his best poems” (Stevens: The Plain Sense, 93).23 But “The Comedian” might not be Stevens’s attainment of quotidian artistry but his first, failed attempt, since Crispin resolves the dualistic dilemma of “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” with a denial of self, and thus a denial of verse, altogether. The choice of facts over “fl ights” replaces fictive poems with real plums, idealist orations with empiricist recitations; Crispin overcomes dumbness by mouthing syllables of reality as his adopted “doctrine” (Collected, 31, 36). He overcomes pentness, moreover, by accepting the time of reality as his own existence, thereby living a “quotidian composed as his”: Crispin’s efforts at realism require important adjustments of temporality (Collected, 34).24 This helps to explain his genre, perhaps; if the tragic protagonist’s task is a transcendent and often self-defi ning decision, the comic protagonist’s task is an immanent and often self-effacing endurance. Crispin’s quest intends a similar amenability. He accedes to the “veracious page on page” of an ordinary calendar, proclaims that he would “let the rabbit run, the cock declaim,” and allows the continuing “beat” of daily declamation to subsume his own conception of days before or ahead (Collected, 32, 34). Memories and plans, Crispin believes, are part of the romance and the poetry that he would reject; a transition to prose and realism must forgo “souvenirs and prophecies” for an existence of “day by day, now this thing and now that”

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(Collected, 30, 32). Rather than “confect” his “was and is and shall or ought to be,” Crispin takes his “shall or ought to be in is”: rather than conceive of something otherwise, he lives in the deliberately simple Panglossianism of a present-tense verb (Collected, 32– 33). Is this how to live? Is this what to do? Crispin’s fecund southern homestead certainly seems more hospitable than the icy slate that the throatsore man imagines or the snow man beholds. Like the snow man, the comedian seems to be all “see,” in Stevens’s punning exploitation of his titular letter, but Crispin’s unadulterated empiricism yields an intelligence of summer rather than a mind of winter. Crispin’s world, one might say, counters the poverty of “nothing that is not there” with the abundance of everything that is. The poem’s verbal excess, however, seems designed to question the worth of such abundance, as Crispin’s “grand pronunciamento,” “capacious bloom,” and “rapey gouts” court disgust with a realistic as well as a rhetorical bounty (Collected, 35, 34). Thus if critics have long disagreed whether the poem succeeds or fails,25 their debate might indicate Stevens’s successful failure: in this work, the nearly bathetic effect of excessive verbiage implies the insignificance of plenty without want. It could also be the meaninglessness of satisfaction without aspiration, perhaps, of reality without imagination, of a present tense without past or future. Crispin suggests these effects when he looks back at the “discontent” he knew as a “pricking realist”—as a quester, that is, like Spenser’s “pricking” Red Crosse Knight, who in Crispin’s case aims for a not-yet-attained reality (Collected, 32). Crispin’s achieved “round” of everyday contentment may feel “less prickly,” as the poem goes on to pun, but it is also “much more condign”: appropriately, vaguely punitive (Collected, 34). The sole human narrative it unwinds is hardly a narrative at all, only an alliteration of “exchequering” days that clatter out the recurrent hard cs of Crispin’s nature in an unchanging, unchangeable economy of “humped return.” Crispin’s everyday sun is thus a “true fortuner,” as Stevens writes, the content as well as the capital of his future as deterministically “annealed” as one of the poet’s insurance policies, and “denouement” will be “haphazard” rather than fulfi lling. Existence can only fade, “benignly,” to an end without resolution or meaning. In an anticlimactic rewriting of the threads sheared by Fates, the comedian’s “relation” to reality terminates abruptly in the c sound of “clipped” (Collected, 33, 37). A relentless quotidian leads to an indifferent fi nality.

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The comedian may accept such an outcome, but his poet refuses to do so. The next quest-voyage Stevens writes, in “Sailing After Lunch,” reverses the direction of Crispin’s trip; whereas the earlier hero seeks to make ordinary returns his own, the lunchtime sailor hopes to leave behind the daily rounds that have nothing to do with him (Collected, 99–100). If Crispin’s poem can seem oppressively light, therefore, “Sailing After Lunch” can seem weighty in its very delicacy, dramatizing Stevens’s attraction to a timeless, imaginative poetry that would be free of everyday strictures. This is clear from the fi rst stanzas, in which a sing-song rhyme scheme manifests the repetition that its speaker would evade: “My old boat goes round on a crutch,” he explains reluctantly, “And doesn’t get under way. / It’s the time of the year / And the time of the day.” To this “inappropriate” and “unpropitious” man, natural cycles seem as limiting as the “time of year” does to “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad.” Rather than conform himself to his environment, though, and adopt the compliant “see”ing of Crispin’s indicative letter, the speaker of “Sailing After Lunch” manages the reverse: “It is least what one ever sees,” he asserts. “It is only the way one feels, to say / Where my spirit is I am.” This sailor subordinates soil to intelligence, vision to concept: here, imagination creates one’s world. One can simply “say” what one’s world will be; one can give “that slight transcendence to the dirty sail, / By light, the way one feels, sharp white, / And then rush brightly through the summer air.” “Sailing” penetrates to a “fi nal slate” that is glorious summer rather than icy winter, as this conclusion undoes the cramped trimeter jingle of everyday afternoons for an unrhymed pentameter releasing reader and poet into illuminated bliss. The unexpected balance of Stevens’s light/white rhyme, therefore, across the span of “feel[ing],” could serve as a signal contrast to the dogged, clotted alliterations of Crispin’s verse. The sailor’s assonance buoys an independent affect rather than burdens a submissive perception. The sailor’s rhetoric can do so, moreover, through the poetry and romance that Crispin evades: “Sailing After Lunch” defends a conception of the “romantic” that is the “poet’s prayer.” Its speaker hopes to revise the word’s “pejorative” valence,26 replacing Crispin’s forward-and-backward-looking confection with an eternal and fundamental spirit. Such a romantic exists “everywhere,” the poem affirms, and it need never “remain” or “return.” It conquers the “heavy historical” sail of one’s rounds with an immaterial and ahistorical power.

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When Stevens wonders in one letter, then, whether “Sailing” “perhaps . . . means more to me than it should,” one can see why it may, since the poem answers a dualistic “malady of the quotidian” with an idealistic remedy of timelessness (Letters, 277). Yet if this provides a better version than Crispin’s of “how to live,” it may not be completely satisfactory, either; with “perhaps” and “should,” the poet suspects the melioration of “Sailing” even as he admits its meaning. Does the poem’s transcendence come too easily— and go too swiftly? The bright rush could be momentary escape as easily as enduring benefit, aesthetic delusion as easily as real possibility.27 Stevens suspects that a sense of the “romantic” could be a cheapened, sentimental version of the “feel[ing]” he hopes for in “Sailing After Lunch.” His career-long pursuit of the term “romantic,” in fact, traces a concomitant suspicion of its perversion. By the time of the 1948 lecture “Imagination as Value,” he dismisses romantic achievements as “minor wish-fulfi llments” (Collected, 728). By the time of this talk, however, Stevens can imagine a different sort of achievement in a different nonpejorative conception of his central term. This romance would replace timeless transcendence with timebound desire, describing the poet as a suitor of the world rather than a victim or fugitive of his setting. In this creative love affair, the writer is an “amoreux perpétuel” who takes “reality” as his “inamorata” (Collected, 661, 838).28 The result can affirm both the actuality that Crispin would adopt and the feelings that the sailor-poet would privilege, brought together in an individual’s yearning for what will actually be: one’s poetic creativity, in the central words of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” is no more or less than one’s “love of the real.” Written just after the “Imagination as Value,” this poem provides what is perhaps the fullest explication of Stevens’s “inescapable romance” between mind and world, and it emphasizes even from its title how the poet’s mature romantic depends on ordinary mornings and nights (Collected, 399).29 To reflect on this great work in the light of everyday time, then, is to see how Stevens can overcome dualistic malady with the commonplace patterns that once seemed the malady’s ground. My examination here aims to do so in complement to the many astute readings of Stevensian desire and the many studies that have shown the cyclicity of that yearning.30 A consideration of the poet’s specifically ordinary romance shows some important implications, for Stevens, of a routine that has become an accord.

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Going Round Stevens’s ordinary romantic accord depends on the basic conflation of want and subjectivity; for this poet, desire for reality can manifest one’s conscious and creative difference from the actual world.31 In “The Poems of Our Climate,” for example, Stevens uses this possibility to reverse the erasure of “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad.” Here an anonymous “one” affi rms his own yearning, stating that even were “a world of white” to “conceal” the first-person “I,” one would continue to “want more, one would need more” (Collected, 178–79). One would continue, moreover, to speak the “flawed words and stubborn sounds” of those titular “poems,” since art evinces one’s self-constitutive desire for an imagined object. A similarly desirous speech returns in many other poems: in “A Primitive Like an Orb,” for example, which also describes “words . . . chosen out of . . . desire,” as well as in the “few words” that constitute “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”—always spoken, as Stevens writes, in a desiring “emptiness that would be filled” (Collected, 378). That “would be” is crucial for all of Stevens’s poetic language, as its conflation of optative and future modes affirms the dependence of creative want on its temporal setting.32 Like Frost’s willed comparisons, Stevens’s wishful conceptions recognize the temporal axis of post-Enlightenment poetics. Every mental creation, he persistently suggests, inscribes a space between present and future, what is and what could be.33 Stevens’s imagination, as he writes in “Description Without Place,” consists of a conflated “expectation” and “desire”: his account adopts and rewrites the “effort, and expectation, and desire, / And something evermore about to be” that Wordsworth perceives in poetic creativity (Stevens, Collected, 300; Wordsworth, Selected, 268). Stevens would therefore preserve the gap between present and future just as much as Frost would preserve the space between present and past; as he writes in one letter, Stevens relishes a continued “idea of something ahead” (Letters, 333).34 Deferral extends poetic opportunity as it extends life, rendering the Stevensian imagination, in Levin’s astute phrase, “an implicitly unfi nished process” (The Poetics of Transition, 177). In this process, anticipation empowers the stubborn, delighting sounds of a “never-resting mind” in “The Poems of Our Climate” or the sustaining, believing speech of an unsatisfied mind in “The Well Dressed Man with a Beard” (Collected,

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224); these poems prize what Crispin would call discontent as the ongoing substance of artistic self-consciousness.35 Yet poetic unrest need not be a forever-unrequited love of the world or an endlessly unrealized—even endlessly deluded—imagination of it. Time is not a single long prelude but a cyclically recurrent progress that inscribes multiple ends and beginnings for human desire. These cycles of “realism and romance,” as Levin explains, constitute “the rhythms of Stevens’s poetry,” and the interplay between the two terms is often governed and enabled by a particularly ordinary round (Levin, The Poetics of Transition, 192). Through the progress of days and nights, in which each emerging future repeats a returning past, wishes might yearn for what actually comes and invent what will actually be: the “yes” of each sun, to use the words of “The Well Dressed Man,” can render one’s wish a “thing affirmed.” As Stevens writes in “Evening Without Angels,” “desire for day” can be “accomplished in the immensely flashing East”; “descriptions of new day,” as he puts it in “Description Without Place,” can be a “just anticipation” (Collected, 111, 301). A world of ordinary time can make “visible / The motions of the mind” with the proof of conception offered by each sunrise (Collected, 111). The best account of this process comes in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” which describes how the repetitions of reality plight a repeated troth to the imagination. “Morning and evening,” Stevens writes, “are like promises kept.” Each “approaching sun and its arrival,” therefore, and Its evening feast and the following festival, This faithfulness of reality, this mode, This tendance and venerable holding-in Make gay the hallucinations in surfaces. (Collected, 403) Mental “hallucinations” and actual “surfaces” are rendered joyfully inseparable in the “faithfulness” of an everyday “mode”; as the next stanza specifies, this “tendance” means that each nocturnal “phrase” of the “spirit” can turn to a sunlit “fact” just as surely as each night turns to day. When one’s “making in the mind” is also a “propounding” of natural cycles, the canto suggests, such making can be genuinely “veracious”: subjective creation, that is, can be objective truth (Collected, 403–4).36

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“An Ordinary Evening” therefore emphasizes the recurrence endemic to its titular setting— a round of “blue day” and “branchings after day,” a calendric cycle of “feasts and the habits of saints,” a fluent alternation in which “sun is half the world” and dark “is the other half ” (Collected, 400, 402, 411). The poem is governed, as Christopher R. Miller notes, by Stevens’s “figure like Ecclesiast” (The Invention, 200) whose chant fi nds a “sense in the changing sense // Of things” (Collected, 409), and the work focuses throughout on the same-but-different pattern endemic to existence under the sun.37 With its “permanence composed of impermanence,” such an order can manage the vital relation this poem seeks: between vision and desire, world and self, “that which is” and “that which is apprehended” (Collected, 399). It can reconcile confl icting readings of the poem, too, suggesting why “An Ordinary Evening” might seem like an epistemological experiment and an empirical report.38 Indeed, repetition explains why Stevens’s careerlong attention to the demands of both mind and world demands a nearly lifelong attention to the demands of ordinary time. As “An Ordinary Evening” shows, temporal rounds not only extend a poet’s work, in repeated “coming back and coming back” to a reality that always “continues to begin,” they also render that work meaningful, turning the “commonplace” into the “miraculous” and the “physical town” into a “metaphysical” conception (Collected, 402, 400, 401, 403). Under this “pattern of the heavens,” one need not decide between mind and world, art and truth, as the ultimate arbiter; one need not choose whether, in the words of “Desire and the Object,” “the sun shines / Because I desire it to shine or . . . I desire it to shine because it shines” (Collected, 402, 594). The ordinary poet of “An Ordinary Evening” can rely on such diurnal indecision. His poem resists skepticism, therefore, with a trust much like Santayana’s “animal faith”: this force “posits existence where existence is” and thereby proves “a prophetic preadaptation” to the “environment” (Scepticism, 104). Santayana’s positings and prophecies oppose a “chastity of the intellect” that is too easily satisfied with the separation of thought and experience, replacing this philosophical fastidiousness with desire for reality, and Stevens’s prophecies forgo the same purity when they enact the same ardor (Scepticism, 69). This is demonstrable in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” for example, Stevens’s most explicitly antiskeptical poem, as well as “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: when this earlier work begins in the realization that “we live in a place / That is not our own and, much

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more, not ourselves,” it perceives a mitigation of such inappropriateness in  the “blazoned days” of worldly experience (Collected, 332). The desired change of “Notes” describes an interdependence of “man . . . [o]n a woman, day on night, the imagined // On the real”; the desired abstraction arises from a cyclic “calendar hymn” of “desire” that renews itself each dawn. And when the poet asserts that “the freshness of a world” may fi nally be “the freshness of ourselves,” he adds of his “suitable amours” that “time will write them down” (Collected, 399, 330, 344). Only the time that the poem describes can record its love song. The function of everyday temporality helps not only to explain why “An Ordinary Evening” can be a metaphysical meditation but also to show why “Notes” toward supremacy can be a consideration of the ordinary. The “pleasure” of “Notes,” in fact, the fi nal attribute of a supreme fiction, arises through the humble practice of “going round” (Collected, 350). The accord of this regimen comes in the penultimate canto of the poem’s last section— and fittingly, takes its inspiration from the routine lyric of another amorous bird: “Whistle, forced bugler,” the poet tells a bird who is singing for his mate, but “stop” in “preludes, practicing / Mere repetitions.” Recurrent anticipation provides an “occupation” and “work” that is “fi nal in itself,” since it takes part in the vast repetitions that are the world’s own “fi nal good.” The “men” who mimic the robin’s harmonious preludes fi nd an almost sacramental fulfi llment in their “constant spin.” Such routine joy suggests why “the man-hero is not the exceptional monster,” as this canto concludes, “but he that of repetition is most master”: as Longenbach has shown so well, the poem stipulates the unassuming heroism of an everyday schedule.39 These pleasures, though, may not be the “self-defeat of poetry” that Longenbach perceives in the poem, given that Stevens’s everyday returns show how the quotidian can include a continuing provocation of imaginative desire (Stevens: The Plain Sense, 265). With this, Stevens’s unmonstrous mastery of repetition in “Notes” can transform the “grotesque apprenticeship to chance event” in “The Comedian” (Stevens, Collected, 32). The ninth canto itself demonstrates the creativity possible within repetitive pattern; with its quietly transformative recursions, a fi nal sentence’s movement from “measure” to “monster” to “most master” proves the unexceptional authority that its statement would recommend.

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That agency depends on the specific kind of recurrence asserted here, and the rounds of “Notes” are not Crispin’s “annealed” regularity but a manhero’s “eccentric measure.” Just so, the metric of “An Ordinary Evening” is only ever a “promise,” its patterns explicitly replacing the exactitude of lunar cycles with the contingency of earthly habitation.40 Stevens knows that “nature is not mechanical,” as he writes in a lecture, that the world’s “reproduction is not an assembly line but an incessant creation,” and that repeated novelty forbids guarantees (Collected, 687).41 Yet he knows, too, that this riskiness fosters imagination, permitting independent artistry rather than requiring fatalistic consent. Since the “fi rst idea” is not a single “immaculate beginning,” as “Notes” fi nds; since “original earliness” is, rather, “a daily sense,” as Stevens affi rms in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” one can use that sense every day to “recreat[e]” what is “possible” (Collected, 330, 410–11). Each sunrise provides the originality that American writers have sought since Emerson, allowing “conceptions of new mornings of new worlds, // . . . As that which was incredible becomes / In misted contours, credible day again” (Collected, 401). Such novelty does not forgo the “again” so vital to every day’s ordinary miracle: Stevens relishes an order in which “old stars are planets of morning,” as he writes in “Description Without Place,” and in which one can learn from the known past what the unknown future will unfold (Collected, 301). The world’s constant inconstancy, though, grants a mental freedom as well as an empirical education. “An Ordinary Evening” inhabits a pattern in which a “recent imagining of reality” seems as “up-springing and inevitable” as another dawn (Collected, 397). This pattern also allows a recent verbalization of reality to seem the “vulgate of experience”: Steven’s unskeptical quotidian aspires to a commonly poetic language as well as an accurately poetic creation.42 As “Notes” puts it, he would compound “the imagination’s Latin” with the “lingua franca” of reality, the phrasing of this ambition exemplifying his conflation by putting the vernacular in Italian and the imagination in English (Collected, 343). Throughout, therefore, Stevens’s rhetorical repetitions work to tease odd, Latinate suggestions from common, English words: through the ramifications of “proper” names and “appropriate” places, for example, or the import of the labor in “elaborations,” or the etymology of “evocations” and even “fame.” The results estrange familiarity as surely as

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does Frost’s demotic, and Stevens’s linguistic play may compare equally well to the ordinary-language philosophy that prompts Cavell’s “quest of the ordinary.” 43 Stevens would have found contemporary philosophic confi rmation, in fact, for this same linguistic quest because Jean Paulhan’s 1941 book The Flowers of Tarbes also recommends a conscious trust in rhetoric to overcome the modernist “terror” of skepticism. Paulhan points out the “rediscovery” inherent in this practice, moreover, explaining that deliberate use of familiar words must recurrently reenact “the original joy of that fi rst commitment” when “our spirit accepted having a body” (93). If Stevens read Paulhan’s book when it fi rst appeared, he may have thought of this joy when composing “Notes.” 44 He certainly would have when composing “An Ordinary Evening,” since he quoted The Flowers of Tarbes in “Imagination as Value” just six months before. In that lecture, he cites Paulhan with regard to the “problems of the normal,” calling these the “chief problems of any artist, as of any man”; Paulhan’s solution may have bolstered Stevens’s own sense of linguistic felicity (Collected, 738–39). It may have furthered his sense of romance as well: Paulhan compares the commitment of rhetoric to the commitment of matrimony (Flowers, 93). This pledge is as recurrent, in Paulhan’s view, as Cavell’s “remarriage” or Frost’s resettling, and Stevens emphasizes the same repetitions in the consummation of the third part of “Notes,” when the poet fi nally meets and names his beloved world. The “going round” of canto 9 seems to allow canto 10’s fi rst-person speaker to address reality with an adoring possessive pronoun: “Fat girl, terrestrial, my summer, my night,” his blazon begins (Collected, 351). The “going round,” in fact, may continue through the fi nal canto, where this lover has not reached a defi nitive conclusion. He merely anticipates the time when he will “call” the world “by name.” Moreover, he sees that deferred goal as less an arrest than a perpetual fluency: “You will have stopped revolving except in crystal,” he concludes. Reality will continue to turn even when set in the supposed eternality of aesthetic form,45 and the poet’s own descriptions will continue to follow the earth’s “moving contour” rather than naming it “flatly” or fi nally. Stevens’s love song expands the wisdom of his “Adult Epigram,” which describes the “romance of the precise” as “the ever-never-changing same” (Collected, 308). His mature consummation ends only in the “appearance of Again.” 46 Stevens’s ordinary romance not only relates to a philosophic conception of remarriage, therefore, but also revises a poetic conception of marriage:

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the “spousal verse” that in Wordsworth’s work describes a “great consummation” between “individual Mind” and “external World.” Wordsworth’s vision will come as a “simple produce of the common day,” he writes, but it nonetheless forbids any further dailiness, since Wordsworth predicts summative accomplishment rather than further anticipation (Wordsworth, Poetical, 4– 5).47 In some poems, Stevens can imagine a culmination just as eternal: the “green apogee” of “Credences of Summer,” for example, provides a pinnacle of “mostly marriage-hymns” at which the sun “rests” (Collected, 323).48 Stevens may even imagine something like this in “Notes,” where an “hour / Filled with expressible bliss” (Collected, 349) recalls the “blissful hour” that Wordsworthian matrimony would achieve (Poetical, 4).49 Yet brief “majesty” turns to Cinderella’s rags, in Stevens’s work, the chime of midnight undoing imaginative heights when it begins the reality of a new day. To assert a resting apogee is to court disillusionment—or divorce—by a reality that continues to change. Even the repose of “Credences of Summer” moves from the extremity of a static sun to the clarion call of another sunrise and the anticipation of another Stevensian bird. When Stevens concludes on such anticipation, in “Notes,” he accepts repetitive “preludes” as a mere but final good for his own poetry. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” accepts this wisdom from the beginning, since the later poem starts where the prediction of “Notes” ends: at dusk in an academic town, with a poet who walks through twilit streets to regard and name a world. The writer of “An Ordinary Evening” perceives the full function of the fluent “mundo” that “Notes” would name; like Professor Eucalyptus, he lives in a “gay tournamonde” in “which he is and as and is are one” (Collected, 406). Seeming can become being, on a turning earth, as smoothly as the shifting vowels of this beautiful line, and Stevens’s letters, which describe how his neologism “tournamonde” should “move properly,” explain that “a world in which things revolve” is “appropriate in the collocation of is and as.”50 One’s physical “location,” that is, can enact a linguistic “collocation”; as “An Ordinary Evening” states, reality can be that “total double-thing” that constantly turns from dark to light, as to is, desire to fact (Collected, 402).51 Stevens’s poem may therefore realize the “poem of the earth” that he had just described in “Imagination as Value”: the “true work of art,” he explains in that lecture, is “time and . . . place, as these perfect themselves” (Collected, 730, 728). To set one’s own poesis in this larger process of infi nite perfecting is not only to offer one’s verse a

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natural sanction but also to make one’s routines a poetic and natural method. Daily life can be an evolving work of art.52

Choosing to Play This living art can be common as well as commonplace— even, perhaps, communal. Stevens’s most avowedly ordinary work was composed for a public reading, the 1949 meeting of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, and while it seems unlikely that Stevens modified “An Ordinary Evening” for that occasion, the fact of the commission nonetheless helps to articulate the social implications of his everyday poetics. These are adumbrated even in the fi nal two sections of “Notes,” during which the speaker immerses himself in an ordinary “we” before emerging with the confident “I” and “my” of a fi nal apostrophe. The “man-hero” who addresses the earth in canto 10, it seems, could be any of the “men” from canto 9, and his exceptionality could be inextricable from his ordinary status. Everyday sociality may be better exemplified, however, in an even earlier fi rst-person plural, the fi nal canto of “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” This 1937 poem provides one of the fi rst instances in Stevens’s work of a conclusion in recurrent continuity, and comes to this “round” in answer to a public need.53 Its speaker addresses a “generation,” the same generation that tells him in canto 5 not to “speak to us of the greatness of poetry”; he thus shows them, instead, the commonness of poetry as well as the poetry of their own commonness (Collected, 136). The fi nal canto confronts the malady and reveals the pleasure in their ordinary rounds, describing a “generation’s dream, aviled / In the mud, in Monday’s dirty light”: That’s it, the only dream they knew, Time in its fi nal block, not time To come, a wrangling of two dreams. Here is the bread of time to come, Here is its actual stone. The bread Will be our bread, the stone will be

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Our bed and we shall sleep by night. We shall forget by day, except The moments when we choose to play The imagined pine, the imagined jay. (Collected, 150– 51) The difference between a quotidian of avilement and a quotidian of contentment is the distinction between two different dreams. The fi rst is singular, imagining only an absolute “time in its fi nal block” and thus lamenting the “dirty light” of Mondays, but the second is an interaction that seems to inhabit the pattern of an everyday workweek. The wrangling “two dreams” of this second sort may therefore rewrite the two dreams of “Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion,” which names them as “night and day,” and the “stone” of its practice may revise an earlier section of “The Man with the Blue Guitar” in which “the earth is not earth but a stone”: Stevens presents an ordinary rhythm of slumber and waking that takes its cadence from earthly repetitions (Collected, 71, 142). If one accepts this dailiness, the poet assures his fellow men, the muddy light of actuality will not “avile” the illusions of darkness. Rather, reality will repeat one’s dreams; one can choose, that is, to see daytime facts as one’s own nighttime creations. This would achieve the transformation that “The Blue Guitar” seeks throughout, a “dream no longer a dream, a thing, / Of things as they are” (Collected, 143). It is another description of Stevens’s vital accord between imagination and reality, here using the traditional equation of poetry and dreams. Stevens’s work often invokes this comparison; when Crispin denies himself imagination, for instance, he expunges “dreams,” and when “Owl’s Clover” would deny imagination, the poem must “redesign” night (Collected, 32, 170).54 Stevens’s quotidian poetics, however, goes on to use this metaphor more specifically, emphasizing how imaginative creation can be a recurrent, common activity. He thereby rewrites another romantic precedent, the dreaming of Keats, who compares sleep and poetry almost as frequently as Stevens does and whose moon-governed “Endymion” was a particular favorite of the later poet.55 Like that work, Stevens’s early poems and journal entries distrust an “affection for moonlight nights” as they worry over the difference between the illusions of darkness and

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the reality of day; one must decide between these two realms, it seems, because one should not be “half dream” and “half deed” (Letters, 46, 34). Stevens later learns, however, that the choice is false: if “Endymion” concludes that a poet’s moonlit fantasy is also his real, sunlit beloved, Stevens’s poetry affi rms a similar night-and-day congruence in its quotidian pattern. By the time of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens can tell of a “dream” becoming a “thing” just “as daylight comes . . . [r]ising upward from a sea of ex” (Collected, 143). He remakes Keats’s description of “Adam’s dream” as well as Keats’s account of Endymion’s drama (Keats, Letters, 37);56 he casts the imagination-to-truth transformation not as fairy-tale ending, a religious miracle, or an aesthetic revelation but rather as a simple case of darkness turning to dawn. One need not be a believer or an artist, Stevens suggest, to know creative power. One need only be an ordinary human being who lives in and by a rhythm of sleep and rising—the very rhythm that concludes “The Blue Guitar.”57 Faith in this diurnal order, moreover, may replace the consolations of religious belief as they provide the benefits of imaginative craft, since Stevens’s daily dream responds to Freud’s postreligious dream theory as well as Keats’s post-Miltonic aesthetics. The Interpretation of Dreams compares in many ways to Stevens’s own interpretation of human creativity: Freud also fi nds the nightly habit of wishful illusion to be natural and necessary to the psyche, rendering all men poets through such fi nding.58 Stevens may even have known the affi nity; in a 1934 survey, for example, he states that he had “not read Freud except the Interpretation,” thus confirming his acquaintance with the central text of psychoanalysis as he explicitly rejects psychoanalytic influence (Collected, 771).59 In 1947, moreover, Stevens copied into his commonplace book an extensive quotation from Lionel Trilling stating in part that “of all mental systems, the Freudian psychology is the one which makes poetry indigenous to the very constitution of the mind” (Sur, 89). Stevens, though, was ultimately more concerned with distinguishing his everyday artistry from Freud’s than with showing his sympathies with the psychologist: Stevens’s dreams are not the Cinderella-like self-satisfaction that Freud describes but the creation of what will actually be. Whereas Freud must guard against a tendency to delusive wish fulfi llments, a propensity manifest for him in religious belief, Stevens can ultimately celebrate a tendency to justified wish fulfillments, a propensity manifest for him in everyday existence. The abandonment of

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religion, Stevens explains in “Imagination as Value,” need not be the surrender of all dreams that Freud advocates in The Future of an Illusion. Rather, it might allow a new “science of illusions,” in which “deliberate fictions” create or desire a real situation, and in which one can choose to dream or imagine what waking life will bring (Collected, 728).60 “An Ordinary Evening” again dramatizes the lecture’s insight by showing how the “search for god” yields to a “search / For reality” that is also the “daily” search of a recurrent quotidian (Collected, 410).61 “The Man with the Blue Guitar” performs a similar demonstration, twelve years earlier: the generational audience of the poem’s fi fth canto also wants something to “take the place / Of empty heaven and its hymns” (Collected, 137). Stevens’s concluding dailiness provides it, replacing Sunday’s eternal sacrament with Monday’s daily bread, the mark of a Christian covenant with the “actual stone” of the earth;62 above all, replacing the single end of a static eternity—“time in its fi nal block”—with the continuing wrangle of a routine “time to come.” This would give fellow citizens the power to dream, an ability that their distrust of religious illusion has otherwise forbidden: they live on a “flat and bare” earth, they explain in canto 5, where “night is sleep” and their sun is shadowless (Collected, 136). Like the “plain men in plain towns” from “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” these men have “fought / Against illusion”—have read Freud’s Future of an Illusion, perhaps— and fall asleep at night merely “snuffed out” (Collected, 399). The citizens of “An Ordinary Evening” fi nd a needed “appeasement” for this state in the “savage and subtle and simple harmony” of their indigenous situation, a “matching and mating of surprised accords” that is manifest in temporal cycles, and the men of “Blue Guitar” fi nd succor in a similarly indigenous music, as the guitar plays another “nuptial song” of mated harmony (Collected, 148). Stevens’s instrument takes up an earthly rhythm of “by day” and “by night,” supplants the hymns of heaven with the song of “things as they are,” and turns a future of aviled illusions into a future of everyday dreaming. This everyday creativity may prove socially relevant, however, by replacing political belief as much as or more than it replaces religious faith. An allusion to Keats, a response to Freud, Stevens’s daily dreams are also a quarrel with socialism. Indeed, communism seems, at times, to be even more important than Christianity as a rival for Stevens’s art: in “Imagination as Value,” for example, Stevens states that “the diff usion of communism

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exhibits imagination on its most momentous scale” and that communism “promises a practicable earthly paradise” (Collected, 730– 31). If the challenge of this imaginative paradise was therefore present to Stevens as he began “An Ordinary Evening,” it was perhaps even more present at the time of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” when he had just written a long response to socialist theory in the poem “Owl’s Clover.” Critics disagree about the relation between this work and “The Blue Guitar”; some see the latter as a welcome assertion of the imagination after the ambivalent political conscience in “Owl’s Clover,” while some assert the continuity and value of “Owl’s Clover” as well as the continuing topicality of “The Man with the Blue Guitar.” 63 Yet the transition from one work to the other may not signal Stevens’s retreat or lack of retreat from political to aesthetic allegiances so much as show his deeper allegiance to ordinary time. Socialism’s engagement with time, in fact, seems to have spurred Stevens’s engagement with socialism; the poet regarded this potentially “great force in politics and in life” with an unexpected respect in large part because Marxism’s emphasis on futurity agreed with the expectation central to his own work (Letters, 486). Communism offers a “new romanticism,” in Stevens’s words (Letters, 351), by manifesting the anticipatory desire vital to Stevens’s prologues. When the second part of “Owl’s Clover,” mouthing a socialist position, asserts that “everything is dead / Except the future” (Collected, 154), it could be speaking a central claim of Stevens’s verse.64 This endless dream of tomorrow, however, could mean endless discontent for today. Like the heaven of religious belief, the utopia of socialist thought could make ordinary life into a long “avilement” during which one waits for something better. Stevens’s political thinking recognizes the danger: he strenuously recommends, for example, a 1945 journal article by D. S. Savage, “Socialism in Extremis,” that explains how socialism’s “forwardlooking or ‘progressive’ character” focuses too exclusively on an “end . . . in the future” rather than the “significance of the present.”65 Stevens’s political writing also registers the problem: “Owl’s Clover,” for example, concludes with the significance of the present, describing the “earthly paradise” possible when expectation yields to satisfaction and the ideal is no longer a “thing imagined” but a thing attained (Collected, 170). This means a time “without past / And without future, a present time,” as Stevens

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writes. Yet this means a state “without imagination,” too, lacking those Stevensian conceptions of what might be that constitute creativity as well as engender dissatisfaction. Thus when Stevens wonders whether a paradisiacal existence is really the “passion, indifferent to the poets’ hum, / That we conceal,” the question seems genuine. Does humankind’s dream simply long for an end to dreaming, he asks his generation? And an end to poetry? “The Man with the Blue Guitar” replies in the negative; far from “indifferent,” the people here seek and need the poet’s music. The passion of its hum, though, must be very different from the desire for socialist utopia— for that “Statue at the World’s End,” to use a phrase from “Owl’s Clover,” that “Blue Guitar” describes as “time in its fi nal block.”66 Whereas the singularity of political dreaming can manage only temporal frustration or unimaginative atemporality, the duality of everyday “wrangling” can combine desires and achievements in the pattern of ordinary life. Stevens turns from the marble of “Owl’s Clover” to the music of “Blue Guitar,” from the static block of sculpture to the rhythmic cadence of sound—to an art not only accommodating of but also dependent on timely process. The desire it plays is not “fi nal” but continual, and the dream it dreams not “only” but recurrent; it envisions not “what ought to be,” in the words of “Owl’s Clover,” but “things as they were, things as they are, // Things as they will be by and by” (Collected, 154, 146). It replaces a paradise “without past / And without future” with a world of repeated pasts and futures, an everyday over-and-over of “by day” and “by night.” “Here,” Stevens’s lineation emphasizes in the concluding canto, here is the better life that political desire would realize, here in the earthly pattern that people already inhabit. The final stanzas demonstrate the satisfaction that the order makes possible, through the pivotal breaks of “time // To come,” “will be // Our bed,” and “except // The moments.” A slightly unsure pause, before a comforting turn, shows the desire and fulfi llment recurrently manifest within everyday measure. So does, perhaps, the recurrence of “An Ordinary Evening,” manifest in the returning and assuring “so” of both canto 4 and canto 10, for example, which are joined by their attention to natural rounds. As much as the “Blue Guitar,” this later poem may speak to a “generation,” its solitary walk genuinely intending what its opening canto calls a “larger poem for a

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larger audience” (Collected, 397). Even to acknowledge this possibility helps to counter quick judgments of Stevens’s social positions: when he writes in a 1940 letter, for example, that socialist aims are possible “within the present frame-work,” this opinion may not just show the conservatism of a middle-class executive but also bespeak a precise trust in what Stevens takes the framework to be (Letters, 351). His faith can nonetheless appear hollow, certainly, and the choice to “play” reality as one’s own dream can seem like a willed self-delusion—the pretense that Stevens recommends in a late letter when he admits that while things “never go well . . . you have to pretend that they do” (Letters, 866). Yet he adds in this letter that “good fortune can be worth it,” a statement suggesting the rewards as well as the rigor of the process. If one can see the solar “fortuner” of Crispin’s quotidian as one’s own imagined “good fortune,” one can achieve a happiness more resilient than any promised by politics. One can fi nd a “peace, a security, a sense of good fortune and of things that change only slowly,” as Stevens writes in another correspondence, “so much more certain than a whole era of Communism could ever give” (Letters, 609–10). Stevens ultimately has “no sympathy with communism, instead of expectation,” as he writes in a letter, because communism forbids the best sort of expectation (Letters, 350). In place of the unreliable teleology of political systems, as well as the illusory teleology of religious creeds, he offers his generation the certain futurity that is available in common life.

The Simplest Word The futurity that Stevens offers is nowhere more certain, however, than in its promise of mortality. To replace a hope for utopian timelessness with a desire for ordinary time is to forgo the promise of eternal life for the sentence of eventual death. In “An Ordinary Evening,” this fact is more pressing than any social implications; Stevens ends the public, abridged version with canto 29, in which “countrymen” can redescribe the land around them as their own, but he ends the full, published version with two sections of “barrenness” in which the “last leaf that is going to fall has fallen” (Collected, 415–17). The poem’s somber inconclusion, therefore, seems far from the joyful continuity that completes “Notes,” the “gildered” evening of the earlier contrasting with a twilight “shade” in the later. If “Notes”

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can make Stevens’s ordinary poetics seem a steady triumph, “An Ordinary Evening” goes beyond his earlier work by revealing the more complex and less comforting function of an everyday aesthetic (Collected, 351, 417). The development evinces Stevens’s movement from Transport to Summer and “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” to The Auroras of Autumn and “An Ordinary Evening,” along with the title poem. As the seasonal progress of the volumes suggests, and as numerous readers have noted, the latter book confronts the threat of age and death inherent in earthly change. In “Notes,” such changes seem to promise an earthly eternality, but “The Auroras of Autumn” doubts the earlier poem’s conviction of enduring renewal: “Shall we be found hanging in the trees next spring?” the poem asks in its pivotal ninth canto (Collected, 362). The world’s “freshness” may not exactly be “our own,” as “Notes” would have it. “The Auroras” acknowledges that while the world’s repetitions never grow older and can always expect another sunrise or spring, humans grow older with each return and must ultimately expect a fi nal evening or autumn. The “bare limbs” of human life do not presage a vernal rebirth when one shall be “hanging in the trees” with new fruit; rather, “bare trees” show the “imminence” of a mortality that other connotations of “hanging” evoke. Advancing caducity presages what “An Ordinary Evening” calls a “total leaflessness” (Collected, 407). Stevens acknowledges this threat even in earlier work. In “Anglais Mort à Florence,” for instance, a doomed protagonist fi nds that a “little less returned for him each spring” (Collected, 119). “Notes” tentatively suggests the danger, too, in its own description of spring; why, Stevens asks here, “should there be a question of returning or / Of death in memory’s dream?” (Collected, 338) His invocation of “memory” proves significant, as does the fact that the “Anglais” demonstrates his doom with a “self returning mostly memory”: in these poems and others, Stevens joins Frost in the knowledge that recollection manifests a mortal divide from nature. Yet if Frost would overcome this fact by making nature as retrospective as human mentality, Stevens would rather make human mentality as purely prospective as nature. Why should one be exiled from ceaseless refreshment, Stevens’s question in “Notes” wonders? Why not expunge the recollection that promises death? “An Ordinary Evening” inscribes this wish in canto 24, a desire for an “escape from repetition” in which someone “knowing that something certain had been proposed” could nevertheless

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expect the proposed, certain tomorrow to be genuinely “new” (Collected, 412). Why not exist, Stevens’s poetry asks, in pure and endless novelty? Perhaps because memory allows the “dream” as well as the death, the imagination as well as the fatality endemic to consciousness. Only recollection of past days allows the justified prediction of days to come, and as Stevens writes in “Notes,” it is “later reason” that lets us “make of what we see, what we see clearly / And have seen, a place dependent on ourselves” (Collected, 346). In “An Ordinary Evening,” the “area between is and was” provides the space for both the “presence of thought” and the “the words of the world”; a past tense, that is, seems to engender consciousness, language, and even poetry (Collected, 404). At some points, certainly, Stevens strives to maintain these goods without retrospection:67 in a lecture that he gave a year after “Notes,” for example, he mentions “the question of the relationship of the imagination and memory, which we avoid” (Collected, 681).68 But Stevens could not avoid this question long, and “Esthétique du Mal,” composed just a few years later, explicitly considers the interrelation of one’s power to imagine, one’s sense of the past, and one’s fear of death. “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” extends the meditation by acknowledging the division on which it depends: while the world’s “oldest-newest day is the newest alone,” Stevens states in this poem, a human day hears “old age” in the evening wind (Collected, 406–7). Human beings discern the “dilapidation of dilapidations” lurking within each present tense—the “hibernal dark” that, while it never threatens the spring being of “Notes,” shadows every “primavera” of “An Ordinary Evening.” The poem admits such twilight, however, while refusing absolute darkness. If one can no longer “continue[] to begin,” like Stevens’s “Alpha” figure of reality and prospect, one may, like his “Omega” of imagination and memory, be “refreshed at every end” (Collected, 400).69 This possibility requires one to regard human death and birth as but a single cycle within some larger night-and-day reality—thus turning a “serious reflection,” as Stevens writes, into something “composed / Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace” (Collected, 408). One may consider the gravity of a human condition, that is, to be neither the “clipped” relation of the “Comedian” nor the tragic doom of the “Anglais”; rather, one’s life may be simply a part of the world’s ordinary pattern. Stevens shows the mental effort of such commonplace “reflection” in “The Auroras of Autumn,” canto 9, when the speaker follows the barrenness of bare trees and evening wind with the

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belief that whatever is imminent, however disastrous, “may come tomorrow in the simplest word, / Almost as part of innocence, almost, / Almost as the tenderest and the truest part” (Collected, 362). Here, the round of mornings and evenings includes the morning and evening of an entire life. This crucial “tomorrow” enlarges Stevens’s everyday mode beyond the limits of individual existence to deny that individual death is a meaningful termination. This “tomorrow,” though, must enlarge Stevens’s everyday habits as well—and to potentially fearful proportions. In order to submerge personal life in the larger rounds of an impersonal earth, one’s desire for tomorrow and willing of what is to come must accord with what “An Ordinary Evening” calls the “will of necessity, the will of wills”: one must expect and accept one’s own elimination (Collected, 410). Freud provides a version of this very yearning in the death wish, and Stevens describes something similar at several points—the “monotonous babbling in our dreams” that Crispin fears, for instance, or the id-like “subman” of “Owl’s Clover,” or even the “cozening and coaxing sound” of sleep in “An Ordinary Evening” (Collected, 32, 167, 411). But Stevens is not content with compulsive wish fulfi llment, as he suggests with his reference to “terrible incantations of defeats” in “Men Made Out of Words” (Collected, 310). Rather, he would make defeat into victory, unwitting incantation into active anticipation; he would consciously yearn for the end of consciousness. He would join the unending repetitions of the nonhuman less in capitulation than in conquest. He would acknowledge, moreover, the high cost of that conquest: an evacuation of memory. With this, the “tomorrow” of “The Auroras” includes a difficulty that is less pressing in the springs and mornings of “Notes”; the speaker of the later poem must eradicate the sense of having been that manifests a division from the world’s “new-come bee” (Collected, 338). “Farewell” to that sense, the work begins; farewell to the past; farewell to all reminders of “something else, last year / Or before” (Collected, 356). The repeated goodbyes of “The Auroras” render yesterday no more than “an idea.” They elegize elegy, one might say, using the genre’s characteristic repetitions to erase rather than to preserve.70 Stevens had long suggested that “practice” for death, in “a world without heaven to follow,” must be the “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu” that an earlier poem describes, and he repeats in “Notes” the importance of constantly “throw[ing] off ” what one has (Collected, 104, 330). “I think only too often,” Stevens writes in

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a letter of the same period, “that what we constantly need is a fresh start—a fresh start every day, like a clean shirt” (Letters, 454). By the time of “The Auroras,” however, Stevens’s adieus are both more difficult and more consequent, and Stevens now writes in a letter that he would like to “throw away everything I have, each autumn” (Letters, 659). The speaker of the poem would go at least as far, casting off not just a possession or event but an entire personhood: the very idea, self-constitutive and self-confi rming, of an individual history. However much one hopes otherwise, this identity cannot be preserved; neither a mother’s adulation nor a father’s authority will survive the changes of fate. One must abandon these narcissistic props, forgo this singular yesterday, and give up the assumption that life is a scripted story designed by parental solicitude. The only true theater is the indifferent, impersonal flux of the northern lights themselves, and this earthly transience will destroy the “scholar of one candle”: the distinct self, holding his own light, who sees the fi res of necessity “flaring on the frame / Of everything he is” (Collected, 359). “And he feels afraid,” Stevens adds; “The Auroras” presents the greatest risk in his poetry. Yet it presents the greatest reward as well. When he bids farewell to the idea of a “single man” and his single life story, Stevens fi nds a new identity and a new past. If one no longer seeks to retain a specific history, the poem shows, a changeful fate no longer seems like vituperative opposition but appears, rather, to be the object of one’s quest. Free of human parentage, free of a particu lar childhood, the poet can take necessity itself as both birthright and heritage, thereby discovering the security that he had thought sacrificed. He might inhabit the “transparen[t] . . . peace” of a childhood union and meet the reassuring beneficence of a “mother’s face” (Collected, 356).71 These are the very “purpose of the poem,” “The Auroras” suggests, and their “vivid transparence” and “peace” provide a purpose for “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” too, since the earlier poem anticipates the same in the crystalline harmony of its conclusion (Collected, 329). In canto 8 of “The Auroras,” one may finally “partake thereof,” lying down as if “awake, we lay in the quiet of sleep,” listening as an “innocent mother” sings a lullaby that “create[s] the time and place in which we breathed” (Collected, 361). The scene offers a childhood paradise remade; Eden is no longer a faraway garden from which one has been exiled but the innocence of one’s present setting—as well as of any possible “imminence.”

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This conception realizes the project of as early a poem as “Sunday Morning,” where Stevens fi rst states that one sees in death, an inevitable “fulfi llment to our dreams / And our desires,” our “earthly mothers.” And the conception takes up the effort of as late a poem as “Esthétique du Mal,” in which nostalgia must eschew the “Maman” that was for a “reality” that “is as she was” and is as she will be (Collected, 55, 283). Stevens believed from a young age that inhuman matter can provide human meaning and that the “fateful mother” of an earthly necessity, as he writes in “World Without Peculiarity,” could provide the assurance of maternal presence (Collected, 388).72 “It is the earth itself that is humanity,” he states in that poem. The conscious abandonment of human peculiarity in “The Auroras” shows how this can be so— and how the result is neither vague panpsychism nor blunt materialism but a durable posttheological basis for identity. In “The Auroras,” Stevens’s accession to impersonal fate provides a personal history, his accord with the future enables a restoration of the past, and his acceptance of transience yields the confi rmation of a return. The penultimate canto of “The Auroras” thus helps to explain the penultimate canto of “An Ordinary Evening,” which presents another version of peaceful transparence in its serene “clearness” (Collected, 416). This state arrives when “remembrances” have been eradicated, and its “coming on” and “coming forth” constitute something “returned.” It also follows old age and death with a future emergence that appears as a “restored” past.73 Here the “inamorata” of the earth may come close at last, in a relationship that is both “humane repose” and loving espousal: the conclusion of “An Ordinary Evening” seems as profound as the ardent naming of “Notes” and as consequent as the sleeping innocence of “The Auroras” (Collected, 413). It may depend, moreover, on choices as conscious as a poet’s “mastery” in “Notes” and “sense against calamity” in “The Auroras,” since the earthly intimacy of “Ordinary Evening” follows the speaker’s response to a personified “Life” in canto 25 (Collected, 361, 412–13). The guitar-playing interlocutor, perhaps strumming the night-and-day song heard earlier from the blue guitar, sits beside the poet and “watche[s] him, always, for unfaithful thought”: life’s continual “hatching” continues to demand “an answering look.” After “Auroras,” Stevens knows that look to be genuinely demanding, and in his late work, he takes the ordinary “faithfulness of reality” to be as much challenge as promise.

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Innocent Sleep This faithfulness may even be a Kierkegaardian challenge and a Kierkegaardian promise: the phi losopher’s concept of repetition relates especially closely to Stevens’s ordinary poetics.74 Like Stevens, Kierkegaard fi nds repetition to be possible only after one abandons a self-serving allegiance to the past; “genuine repetition is recollected forward,” Kierkegaard writes (Fear, 131). Like Stevens, Kierkegaard fi nds that the resignation of individuating retrospection can paradoxically provide a new sense of identity and conception of history. Kierkegaard’s invocation of Job as an example even suggests Stevens’s own affi rmation of a specifically natural alterity: Job’s God, after all, answers the plaints of human justice with the power of the physical world.75 To be sure, one could never confuse Stevens’s relationship to that power and Kierkegaard’s relationship to a Christian deity; yet in “The Auroras,” the poet’s strenuous affi rmation of the “predicate” of existence—his trust in whatever tomorrow will unfold from the bare verb of “it is, it is” (Collected, 361)— only deepens the anticipation that for Kierkegaard defi nes religious belief.76 Stevens’s forward-looking acceptance provides him with a very Kierkegaardian result, reversing the normal economy of memory and expectation to grant a better instance of the identity as well as the innocence that these can provide. Stevens’s practice in “The Auroras” is Nietzschean, too, and several scholars have shown specific similarities.77 Nietzsche affi rms earthly innocence, for example, through a love of fate akin to Stevens’s love for reality, and Nietzsche would also fi nd a material immortality through an endlessly repetitive existence (Zarathustra, 178–87). Stevens seems to present a version of this “eternal return” in the fi nal canto of “The Auroras,” where a “never-failing genius” can know the “full of fortune and the full of fate” (Collected, 363). Yet Stevens himself admitted the break between this section and the previous canto, which concludes in his innocent “tomorrow”: as Eleanor Cook describes, the two are “in effect, two endings” to “The Auroras of Autumn” (A Reader’s Guide, 242). To distinguish the first, more Kierkegaardian, ending from the second may help to show Stevens’s differences from as well as affi nities with the commonly invoked paradigm of Nietzschean modernism. The distinction may help, in turn, to affirm the individualism of Stevens’s work: Zarathustra’s selflessness, proclaiming that

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“I will be a nothing,” cedes personal will in order to be “entangled” in the earth’s eternality (Zarathustra, 178), but Kierkegaard’s self-consciousness continually realizes its identity in the refreshing evolutions of time. Stevens’s poems, especially his late poems, often seem closer in aim to the second practice, seeking a reconciliation with earthly process that maintains distinct subjectivity. “What self . . . did he contain that had not yet been loosed?” he asks in “Prologues to What Is Possible,” for example, comparing an imminent personality to the “flick” of new light (Collected, 438). Nietzschean critics of Stevens tend to slight this incessant self-discovery, describing the poet’s recurrence as what Steven Shaviro calls “inhuman affirmation,” and critics who use the related context of Heideggerian philosophy can be similarly distrustful of the “humanistic” tradition or the “ ‘proper self.’ ”78 To read Stevens in comparison to Kierkegaard helps one to see Stevensian repetitions as something other than the erasure of humanity. His repetitions might rather be the affi rmation of ordinary human action: of an existence in which, as Kierkegaard writes, one may “calmly g[o] his way, happy in repetition” (Kierkegaard, Fear, 132). Such happiness also seems germane to Stevens’s late work, in which the extremity of “The Auroras of Autumn” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” begets the calm of “A Quiet Normal Life.” Many letters emphasize the “round and round and round” of that existence, the “whole mechanism of every day life”; Stevens tells one correspondent, for example, that he is “well by day and by night.”79 After “An Ordinary Evening,” he pursues even more steadily the “jewel” of “the normal” that had been his goal since at least the revolving crystal of “Notes” (Letters, 521). He pursues as well the repetition that normality requires: “the habitual, customary, has become, at my age, such a pleasure in itself,” he writes in 1953 (Letters, 767). He relishes letters about ordinary routines in France or correspondence about everyday life in Cuba or the day-by-day pages of the Almanach de Paris of 1950, a book that “restores one’s spirits and the pleasure of living,” as he describes (Letters, 653).80 He appreciated especially the almanac’s inclusion of brief, daily entries by Colette and notes how this writer, “as she tells her beads day by day, is very much in the right spot.” To Stevens, the simple marking of ordinary time can be as beneficial as the rosary. He implies the same in his appreciation of Gide’s journal, which he sees as a refutation of nihilism and compares to one’s “thinking about the nature of our relation to what one

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sees out of the window”; a diurnal record, in Stevens’s view, can assess the divide between world and self without yielding to a nihilistic response (Letters, 602). Stevens’s own daily routine and daily poetics may serve as the same sort of “thinking,” opposing the power of skepticism even as he acknowledges the problems of consciousness. His rounds manifest that “personal absurdity” that he describes in a letter to a friend when he explains how an individual “regimen” can provide “Seelensfriede” and allow one to enjoy “the mere act of being alive” (Letters, 615). The apostle of such absurdity, a poet who walked to work at the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company every morning, seems less like a Nietzschean prophet or superman than a Kierkegaardian knight of faith. He may also be something like that “Ruler of Reality” in “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” canto 27, where the work’s fi nal persona “lies at his ease beside the sea” (Collected, 414). He rests confidently, perhaps, beside the ocean of mortality from “The Auroras,” for his rule is an even more masterful use of daily repetition. This man-hero fi nds that his thoughts are consort to the “Queen of Fact” and that the two alternate in an espousal as cyclic as quotidian time. “Sunrise is his garment’s hem, sunset is hers,” Stevens’s “scholar” writes, describing the result; the Ruler is “the theorist of life, not death, / The total excellence of its total book.” Here the largest, “total” existence is an undying whole, including any seeming termination in its sunrise-and-sunset wheel of imagination and actuality. One can not only be sure, therefore, that even a fatal “Ordinary Evening” yields to another “Aurora”: that even the outlandish, in the words of “The Auroras of Autumn,” comes as “another day // Of the week” (Collected, 361– 62). One can also trust that these days will confi rm one’s own past theories: “He has thought it out, he thinks it out,” Stevens writes in “An Ordinary Evening,” “as he has been and is.” The periodic syntax of this canto—its recurrent “again,” its repeated phrases, its parallel clauses and rhythms—manifests the quietly gorgeous propriety that Stevens fi nds in a life of returns. Here, any fact to which one wakes is a reality one’s own fictions have helped to create. The “total book” of this conception may compare to the volume evoked by another late letter in which Stevens describes composing poetry as imagining “a page of a large book”; “what one ought to fi nd,” he adds, “is . . . every-day reality” (Letters, 642–43). “The Auroras of Au-

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tumn,” moreover, suggests the same with its complementary description of life’s “total excellence,” an innocence “like a book at evening beautiful but untrue, / Like a book on rising beautiful and true” (Collected, 361). The beautiful truth of Keatsian imagination becomes one more everyday dream of reality, rising to its own verification. Indeed, cantos 8 and 9 of “The Auroras” cast one’s entire life as such a dream, an existence in which human beings, “sticky with sleep,” imagine the imminent tomorrow of return to dust.81 This is not the “guilty dream” of death as punishment, the poem specifies, but the innocent conviction of death as return, a mortal wish fulfi llment rather than a mortal anxiety. Keats himself suggests something similar in his description of “human Life and its spiritual repetition”: heaven, he implies, will simply repeat one’s earthly desires (Letters, 37). Stevens even endorses that implication specifically when his late elegy “The Owl in the Sarcophagus” renders death as a “day” of waking fulfi lling the dreamy night of earthly imaginings (Collected, 372).82 In “The Auroras” and “An Ordinary Evening,” however, Stevens again stresses the commonplace implications of a Keatsian recurrence, fi nding the recompense of here-and-hereafter in the repetitions of here-and-now. The paradisiacal song of an “innocent mother” in “The Auroras” describes nothing more or less than an earthly “time and place,” perhaps the same “poem of the earth” that Stevens proposes in “Imagination as Value” and writes in “An Ordinary Evening,” and its heavenly restoration may therefore inhere in the most ordinary rhythms. Stevens agrees in a late letter when he writes that daily rounds are a “profound grace” as well as a “destiny” (Letters, 843). Or in another, he explains that “a walk to the office restores one’s innocence.”83 “And almost the best innocence of the U.S.A.,” he adds: Stevens’s knowing trust in a mortal tomorrow may deepen the importance of his dreamridden social vision.84 “The Auroras of Autumn” shows this when the poem moves from a belief in earthly necessity to a community of “halehearted landsmen,” testing the speaker’s faith through its capacity for fellowship; the poem recovers, after the break between sections 8 and 9, with, “And of each other thought” (Collected, 360). If singular alienation is overcome by a collective setting, an idea of innocence is inextricable from a conception of community. “We were as Danes in Demark all day long,” Stevens can therefore write in the crucial ninth canto, and “knew each

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other well,” sure that thinking “alike” makes “brothers of us in a home / In which we fed on being brothers, fed / And fattened as on a decorous honeycomb” (Collected, 361). “The Auroras” suggests that to take one’s time and place as inheritance and dwelling is to describe all humanity as equally indigenous and innocent. One might compare Thoreau’s conviction, speaking of the “forgive[ness]” of “a pleasant spring morning,” that “through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors” (Walden, 303). In another instance of one of Stevens’s favorite puns, his guiltless earthly citizenship is a honeycomb—“decorous” in its beauty as well as its appropriateness—that both feeds and manifests human being. This citizenship is also a language and a love affair: “The Auroras” affi rms not only the sense of community but also the use of words and conception of relationship that Stevens’s ordinary poetics has developed. The landsmen of “The Auroras” can think alike and of each other because they do so in “the idiom of an innocent earth,” taking their words from a mutually native vernacular. Stevens’s line may remember Paulhan’s comparison of language and honey, “which bees make apparently without thinking about it,” and he would have appreciated that the English “commonplace,” like the lieu commun that Paulhan praises, equates custom and location (Paulhan, Flowers, 8).85 The “idiom” in “The Auroras,” however, not only conflates the earth’s maternal song with humanity’s daily hum, it also makes human commonplaces potentially poetic: any man can be a poet, as Keats argues at the opening of “The Fall of Hyperion,” for any man can tell his dreams; he need only have “lov’d / And been well nurtured in his mother tongue” (Complete Poems, 361). When Stevens specifies that tongue as the song of a “time and place” and describes that love as desire for an earthly mother, he widens Keats’s romantic poesis to include any ordinary day or evening. Stevens’s dreaming includes the entire “drama that we live”— as everyday existence, in its steady imagination of innocence, overcomes one’s guilty conviction of a certain end.

Patient Syllables The Rock, Stevens’s last collection, describes that lifelong dream— beginning with “An Old Man Asleep” and concluding with an old man just

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waking up.86 It manifests, too, the “vivid sleep” in the title poem, which again recalls the “by day” and “by night” rhythms of an earthly rock as well as the common idiom of “The Auroras of Autumn” (Collected, 447). Stevens’s fi nal poems repeatedly enact the quotidian mode of “The Blue Guitar” or “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” and inscribe the quotidian renewal of “The Auroras of Autumn” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”: here morning is not just the “always beginning” that Stevens describes in “St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside” but also the “innocence approaching” that he describes in “The Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda” (Collected, 449, 456). Each original sunrise brings a new world that is also a new life— a “second sel[f ],” as he writes in the latter poem, that “appears when things are changed.” In this way, Stevens’s last works perceive the existential sleep of “The Auroras” in every night-and-day iteration, presenting birth as a novelty recurring as often as morning and the “effort to be born,” in the words of “A Discovery of Thought,” as a habit “surviving being born” (Collected, 459). An elderly poet fi nds refreshment to be a daily or seasonal fact, as the light of “fi rst sun,” bringing winter’s “new life and ours,” provides a being “worthy of birth” to an old man now “a child again.” “Long and Sluggish Lines,” for example, begins with a seventy-year-old wanderer enervated by memory and then suggests that this state is a “pre-history” of renewal, that the aging hero is “not born yet . . . in this wakefulness inside a sleep” (Collected, 442–43). A similar rebirth seems to await the “Old Phi losopher in Rome,” as he appears in Stevens’s late, proleptic elegy for Santayana; this figure, “dozing in the depths of wakefulness,” perceives that death is less a termination of his time in the ancient city than a repetition providing passage to a “more merciful Rome / Beyond” (Collected, 432– 34). In a new version of the “scholar” from “The Auroras of Autumn,” he who stands fearfully at the door with his lone candle to watch fi re destroy the “frame” of his identity, the “Old Phi losopher” of “book and candle” stands on the “threshold” of everything that is to come, awaiting the time when “the design of all his words takes form / And frame from thinking and is realized.” Faithful anticipation of new life again forbids terror at a death that will only manifest one’s own conceptions. That “realized” is crucial, however, and in its multiple meanings emphasizes how Stevens’s late rounds continue to depend on active mastery.87

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Only by “A Discovery of Thought,” as Stevens’s title specifies, can each dawn reveal the “desire for speech and meaning gallantly fulfi lled.” Stevens’s last poems are at once his most peacefully trusting and his most arduously expectant, their rebirths less assumed than achieved. The “new known” of “On the Way to the Bus,” for example, a “climate of morning” on a routine walk, emerges through a “way of pronouncing the word inside of one’s tongue” (Collected, 472), and in “The Rock,” an “illusion so desired” animates the cyclic progress through which “the year is known” by maintaining this poem’s recurrent, A-to-B hymn. As in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” the ordinary heroes in Stevens’s late poems must name and rename the reality around them; in “Nuns Painting Water-Lilies,” for instance, holy sisters nominate new feast days by “mumbl[ing] the words // Of saints not heard of until now, unnamed” (Collected, 457). As this poem suggests, only the freshenings of imagination prove one’s place in the renewals of reality—in what “An Ordinary Evening” calls its “neverending meditation” (Collected, 397). These rejuvenations may prove one’s place in that “World as Meditation” that Stevens describes with the title of a late poem, a process that ceases “neither by night nor by day” (Collected, 441–42). The poem suggests as much with its name and epigraph; here, Stevens quotes George Enesco’s judgment that “meditation,” the “essential exercise of the composer,” is never “suspended,” and compares the daily pattern of its “permanent dream” with the wider reverie of that titular “world.” Even in this opening juxtaposition, then, “The World as Meditation” invokes almost the full spectrum of meaning that Stevens finds in everyday timeliness: the doubled dreams from “The Man with the Blue Guitar” and the recurrent “exercise” of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” as well as the imaginative sleep of “The Auroras of Autumn” and the “total excellence” of “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” The verse that follows deepens all these senses of the ordinary, describing quotidian practice as the creative life of both one’s world and one’s self, as it casts Penelope’s expectant desire for Ulysses as the repeated anticipation of the sun: Is it Ulysses that approaches from the east, The interminable adventurer? The trees are mended. That winter is washed away. Someone is moving

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On the horizon and lifting himself up above it. A form of fi re approaches the cretonnes of Penelope, Whose mere savage presence awakens the world in which she dwells. She has composed, so long, a self with which to welcome him, Companion to his self for her, which she imagined, Two in a deep-founded sheltering, friend and dear friend. The trees had been mended, as an essential exercise In an inhuman meditation, larger than her own. No winds like dogs watched over her at night. Penelope’s expectation of Ulysses’ arrival matches the earth’s preparations for morning and spring, the parallel meditations thereby harmonizing individual life and a world “larger than her own”—the aesthetic form of “the cretonnes of Penelope,” for example, and the savage being of a “form of fire.”88 In Stevens’s poem, the world’s composition does not obviate the task of “composing a self ”; nor does it vitiate the creative power that both constitutes identity and conceives of the reality it would espouse. Rather, the earth provides a “deep-founded sheltering” for Penelope’s occupation and exercise. It shows “a planet’s encouragement,” as the poem later states, of human work.89 The earth also provides the recurrent order of that human work; Penelope’s expectation recurs as regularly as the morning, as the tree’s springtime “mend[ing],” or as her own needlework. The details of her artistry, moreover, a tapestry constantly unwoven as well as woven, emphasize Stevens’s own accounts of quotidian practice, a repeated adieu or “throwing off ” in which one undoes each night what each day has accomplished.90 Only another unraveling allows another original sunrise—the “beginning,” as the poem “The Beginning” describes, that is possible when that “carefulest, commodious weave // Inwoven by a weaver to twelve bells” is “lying, castoff, on the floor” (Collected, 368). Penelope is thus a Stevensian Cinderella who welcomes twelve-o’clock disintegration, as well as an artist and spouse who can confidently expect each new dawn since whatever fresh reality approaches will realize her desires and finish her self-composition. Penelope

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turns the terrified farewells of “The Auroras of Autumn” into the peaceful routine of “An Ordinary Evening.” Her serenity refuses even the barrenness of that latter poem’s autumn, perhaps, as she makes the generative poverty of Stevens’s expectation—his characteristic position of not-yet-spring, notyet-morning, or not-yet born—into its own source of plenty. Penelope’s expectation, in fact, overcomes the elegiac even more explicitly than the prospective fi nal positions of “The Auroras” or “An Ordinary Evening,” given that Penelope nightly deconstructs a burial shroud. To reach an end to unraveling, as Homer’s poem specifies, would be to invite that “deadly fate that lays us out at last” (Odyssey, 96).91 To reach an end would also be to allow Penelope’s marriage to one of her suitors, and “The World as Meditation” therefore extends Stevens’s general description of desire by showing how human yearning could be at once a death wish and a romantic dream. With this, the poem extends his preferred deferral of any consummation, whether it be sinister or benign;92 “The World as Meditation” ends with a Wordsworthian spouse still awaited, a Keatsian dream still sustained, and a Shelleyan sea voyager still far from his destination. It maintains a romance terminally incomplete, or rather one recurrently complete and incomplete: espousal, dream, and quest are achieved each day even as they await a further fulfi llment in days to come. The second half of the poem describes this quotidian process: She wanted nothing he could not bring her by coming alone. She wanted no fetchings. His arms would be her necklace And her belt, the fi nal fortune of their desire. But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart. The two kept beating together. It was only day. It was Ulysses and it was not. Yet they had met, Friend and dear friend and a planet’s encouragement. The barbarous strength within her would never fail. She would talk a little to herself as she combed her hair, Repeating his name with its patient syllables, Never forgetting him that kept coming constantly so near.

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The “warmth of the sun” is both Ulysses and not Ulysses, both the “final fortune” that Penelope expects and another deferral of fi nality. Penelope’s dailiness, in its refusal to distinguish entirely between an actual sunrise and a metaphoric arrival, can see each new morning as the achievement of her longing as well as its life-giving extension. If the poem concludes, then, with its heroine still looking forward to the homecoming anticipated in an opening question, it also concludes with her conviction that culmination has happened: that she has known her “dear friend,” that the “barbarous strength” of his “savage presence” is now “within her”—and above all, in the last line, that she can remember the lover she expects.93 This “never forgetting” mines the tantalizing uncertainty of “yet they had met,” a phrase as suggestive as any in Stevens’s work, since it proposes that recollection is less the grounds of expectation than its product. In another Kierkegaardian paradox, faith’s unending prospect may provide a retrospective precedent. With its mirrored extensions of looking back and ahead, the fi nal line implies that the constancy of something always approaching may enable the constancy of something “never forgetting.” The fact of one’s lack may provide one’s greatest assurance. Penelope’s forbearance may extend infi nitely, then, without yielding to disappointment, and one might recall here that Kierkegaard describes patience rather than desire as the opposite of despair (Eighteen, 187). Stevens’s fi nal sense of romance may compare to this insight in its conflation of waiting and yearning. Stevens’s is an “active” and forward-looking patience, however, a Kierkegaardian “patience in expectancy” as recurrent as worldly time: “It does not cease,” Kierkegaard writes, “any more than do day and night, seedtime and harvest, summer and winter, and will not cease as long as time separates and divides mortal life” (Eighteen, 187, 205). Stevens’s heroine lives by the same rhythm, a “thought” that keeps “beating in her like her heart,” an iterative anticipation that throbs with the very pulse of her life and love. The rhythm revises the “beat” and “batter” of time in “The Pure Good of Theory” (Collected, 289); Penelope’s consciousness, unlike that in the earlier poem, cannot be “destroyed” by time. Rather, her identity is continued and constituted by its cadence. “When the sun fi lled my room at half-past six this morning,” Stevens writes in a late letter, “it made me happy to be alive—happy again to be alive still”: the interplay between that “again” and “still” compares to the daily sustenance of Penelope’s ordinary life (Letters, 709).

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It models, as well, the recurrent sustenance of her poetry. Penelope’s modest “talk . . . to herself,” repeating the name of what is to come, presents yet another instance of the proper nominations possible through iterative practice. Her speech is one more revision of Crispin’s realistic “syllables,” perhaps, and one more idiom or song or hum of the earth’s innocence. Like the best blazons in Stevens’s work, which anticipate a supremacy as repetitive as the process towards it, Penelope’s nominations expect something as “patient” as she.94 The poem, then, fi nds a denouement that refuses conclusion without trailing off into inconclusiveness; the steady acceptance of real time is the steady deepening of imaginative triumph. That triumph inheres, moreover, in routines one already performs, routines as “mere” as combing one’s hair. Any everyday process can be the heroic mastery of repetition that Stevens describes in “Notes” or the sovereign rule of reality that he describes in “An Ordinary Evening.” 95 More simply and accurately, any everyday process can be that “confidence in the world” that Stevens notes in a late lecture, citing Paulhan once again: to “stop to consider what a happy phrase that is,” Stevens writes, is to “wonder whether we shall have the courage to repeat it, until we understand that there is no alternative” (Collected, 864– 65). Penelope’s daily meditation, courageously repeating what is necessary, demonstrates this ordinary understanding. So may the very organi zation of Stevens’s Collected Poems. He chooses to end with expectation; like Thoreau in Walden, Stevens finishes his quotidian record only by looking to a further sunrise.96 In “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself,” set at his favorite moment of earliest light, he fi nds in another ordinary glare another chance for a song of fi xed accord. The cry of a bird, a “chorister whose c preceded the choir,” hails and bows to a world that includes imaginative precedence (Collected, 451– 52). As Crispin’s “C” returns in a sound that both originates and joins his environment’s tones, it allows his poet to foresee a “new knowledge of reality” in the returning sun. The poem remains, certainly, in the “snow” and “wind” of winter and old age, when any cry sounds “scrawny,” when the dreamwork of sleep is “faded papier-mâché,” and when even the sun’s “panache” can seem “battered.” Yet Stevens lets these impoverishments foreshadow the “colossal” light to come. To him, diminishment brings one closer to the novelty in an ordinary round, to a fresh perception of one’s consistent world. The poem’s insistence registers that perception as it demonstrates

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the effort it demands, making Stevens’s fi nal work the fresh inscription of an endless duty. “Poetry,” as Stevens writes in his Adagia, “is a response to the daily necessity of getting the world right” (Collected, 913). To understand the power of the daily is to know better the power of Stevens’s response.

Chapter Three The Everyday Elegies of Elizabeth Bishop

The Revision of Remorse elizabeth bis hop als o e n d s h e r last b o o k w i t h f i rst l i g h t : the fi nal work of Geography III, like the fi nal work of Stevens’s Collected Poems, begins with a “still dark” moment just before dawn (Complete Poems, 181). It seems an equally appropriate fi nish, though a very different one. The uncertainty of Bishop’s “gray light” concludes a career pervaded by doubts about sunrise. Bishop’s poems return often to the pivotal position of daybreak, from the “earliest morning” of “Love Lies Sleeping” to the “thin gray mist” of “Twelfth Morning” and from the “four o’clock” of “Roosters” or “Little Exercise” to the four o’clock of “Sunday, 4 A.M”; her poems often wait there with an anxious expectation.1 The anticipation of “Five Flights Up” itself rewrites the ending of Bishop’s first book, where “Anaphora” also describes a poet watching and listening to the chancy emergence of light (Complete Poems, 52). In the awe of that earlier work no less than the trepidation of the later, Bishop makes reliability eventful; like Frost and Stevens, she presents regular dawns as risky happenings. Like Frost and Stevens, moreover, Bishop recognizes her own role in the happening, and “Five Flights Up” even concludes with such responsibility: “—Yesterday brought to today so lightly!” the speaker observes, before adding, “(A yesterday I fi nd almost impossible to lift.).” The casual difficulty of this parenthetical conclusion, however, as

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it subtly emphasizes a near-impossible task, signals the distinction of Bishop’s ordinary poetics. Her daily work seems more arduous than the operation of Stevens’s desire or Frost’s will, and her poems often shrink from the morning that both Frost and Stevens seize as their own. They often falter, too, at the subjective distinction that such mornings could manifest. When a fi rst-person pronoun makes its single, tentative, appearance in the fi nal line of “Five Flights Up,” “I” seems less like a welcome power of prediction than an onerous charge of remembrance. Bishop’s daily repetitions are not Stevens’s promises, with their Santayana-like faith in an accurate prophecy, and they are not even Frost’s precedents, with their Jamesian confidence in a reliable assertion. They demonstrate instead a more Freudian conception of determinative and potentially debilitating patterns. For Bishop, quotidian living means repeated confrontation with one’s own unavoidable past. That statement could seem merely to reinforce common judgments, since criticism has often read Bishop’s poetic development as the progressively greater revelation of personal history.2 The poet’s reputation and influence have risen with such readings; Langdon Hammer notes as early as 1994 that Bishop’s preeminence seems indivisible from the assumption that lyric poetry should aspire to self-disclosure (“New,” 140). To place her life writing in the context of a daily poetics, however, is to correct the possible reductiveness of this paradigm.3 As “Five Flights Up” shows, Bishop’s autobiography is less a way to express the past than a way to create the present and future. Bishop’s speakers, that is, would not look back to yesterdays but “lift” them into today. Just as each new morning must repeat a previous sunrise, her poetry fi nds that each step forward must remake an old fact: in its necessary creation of a familiar novelty, her life writing is less confessional than quotidian. The life it would tell, moreover, is less a story than a stanza, not a plotted narrative of what has occurred so much as a recursive pattern of what will continue to happen. To read Bishop’s autobiography as an everyday project is therefore to understand why it must be poetically realized, using and creating the developing returns endemic to verse.4 Bishop’s lifelong admiration of villanelles and sestinas, and her subtle exploitation of stanza, anaphora, alliteration, and rhyme, support and enact her attention to diurnal repetition. So does her lifelong attention to poetic genre, in particular her attempts to elegize; her work would use the recurrence of sorrow, in

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its aesthetic as well as its psychological instantiation, to retain and transform what is gone. As the title of a late draft indicates, this makes Bishop’s ordinary effort a continual “Aubade and Elegy” (Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe, 149), one that would welcome today by commemorating yesterday. Her poetics casts the best life, and the best writing, as an ordinary mourning for the past. Criticism has begun to describe this conception: Herbert Marks’s wonderful recent essay, in particu lar, analyzes Bishop’s memorial practice as a way of continuing to live and to write.5 It is useful, however, to note the commonplace setting of such efforts, a pattern of sunrise after sunrise and season after season. Bishop’s revisionary life and art would not only preserve her past and continue her present but also set her existence in some meaningful relation with a natural order. As much as Frost’s everyday recollection or Stevens’s everyday expectation, therefore, Bishop’s everyday autobiography faces a dualistic dilemma posed and resolved in ordinary time.6 “Five Flights Up” shows that the moment of dawn is the moment of such division, separating a person who can barely move yesterday into today and a world that makes the same transition as lightly as sunshine. In her poems about such mornings, Bishop would use individual consciousness to overcome that individuating gap, aiming for something like the reconciliation of earlier ordinary poetry—when Frost’s speakers agree to “go the round” of their farm, for example, or Stevens’s celebrate a “going round” of earthly rotation. Bishop could even be presenting a version of such rounds, perhaps, when “Five Flights Up” describes the morning habits of a “little dog next door” who “rushes in circles in the fallen leaves.” These leaves could recall the spinning leaf of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” or the late-autumn setting of “In the Home Stretch,” and the “cheerful” circles of the dog could recall the ordinary pleasure that Frost and Stevens describe in their best versions of quotidian practice. But the dog’s rushing is not quite comparable, in Bishop’s poem; a dog’s mastery of repetition, Bishop shows, may be no mastery at all. It manifests an instinctual immersion in natural continuity rather than a deliberate choice of future progress. Such immersion is denied the potential man-hero of “Five Flights Up,” moreover; unlike the dog’s questions, Bishop suggests, a person’s doubts will not be “answered directly, simply, / by day itself.” As the poem goes on to specify, this denial evinces not just a general division of animality and human consciousness

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but also a particular “sense of shame” inextricable from the latter: the dog’s joyful morning depends on an innocence that is unavailable to the poet. The same shame shadows many of Bishop’s dawns, amplifying the “guilty conscience” of Frost’s work and the “guilty dream” of Stevens’s to stress the collusion of a sense of history, a sense of self, and a sense of fault.7 With this emphasis, Bishop’s seemingly matter-of-fact poetics joins a long tradition in religion and philosophy as well as verse. Her feeling of division, for example, relates to Nietzsche’s distinction between a human consciousness of time and an animalistic unawareness, and her sense of shame compares to Kierkegaard’s feeling of anxiety.8 The latter may even have been a conscious influence, given that Bishop knew and valued Kierkegaard’s work.9 Her postmodern and post-Freudian consideration of anxiety, however, makes its own secular way to a Kierkegaardian reconciliation, as well as the repetition that such serenity requires, as Bishop seeks self-forgiveness in the practice of everyday life. Analysis of this search shows how much is required for Bishop to lift the weight of each yesterday toward the light of dawn—how much is entailed in her longing for a “solid routine,” for example, or how much is meant in her admiration for Stevens’s “orderly, polished, clean, self-contained kind of existence” (Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 647, 660), or how much it took to manage her own “life-long impersonations of an ordinary woman,” in the words of Merrill’s admiring description (Collected Prose, 231). This everyday pretense was less the occlusion of Bishop’s aesthetic ambitions than their profound realization. To Bishop, being conventionally ordinary was a complicated art.

Faithful Suns Bishop sought this complicated quotidian in others’ examples even as she strove for it in her own life; her everyday poesis helps to explain how her antipathy to confessionalism coexisted with a desire “to know about the lives of the writers I read,” as she states in a letter.10 A disproportionate number of the books that Bishop enjoyed are journals, biographies, memoirs, and collections of letters,11 and she relished the chance they provided to meet authors as personal companions. She writes in one letter, for instance, that she fi nds Hopkins and Herbert to be “the two most attractive personalities in English poetry” (VC 32.1). As Bishop clarifies in another

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correspondence, it is Herbert’s “innate balance, normalcy” that seems so appealing; this quality “really has its attractiveness no matter what they say at present,” she adds (Summers, “George Herbert,” 54). The comment seems indicative of Bishop’s general interest in biography, which would eschew the popu lar details of exceptional geniuses to cherish her favorite artists’ skill at conventional life. Or even their call to conventional life—it seems no accident that Bishop’s two most attractive artistic personalities are also two Christian priests. She envied the fact that religious vocation provides a pattern for everyday living: when she admires Hopkins’s motto, for example, which was “esse quam videri” or “to be rather than to seem,” she adds in her notebook that “being a Jesuit gave him the proper VIDERI already; he just had to fi ll the shelf ” (VC 72A.3). Bishop’s ordinary poetics seeks an equally proper ordination, a way of being as justified as religious practice. She yearns, perhaps, for those “flourishing days of the religious order” that she mentions in “In Prison” (Collected Prose, 191). Thus Bishop’s earliest considerations of daily and poetic repetition are often explicitly Christian, a connection evident in the sestina of morning returns that is “A Miracle for Breakfast” or the tercets of a sunrise gospel story that make up “Roosters” or the diurnal incarnation that constitutes “Anaphora.” These works fi nd spiritual import in a secular schedule, suggesting how Bishop would reverse the familiar sun/Son comparison of metaphysical poetry to make morning a sacramental transfiguration as common as coffee and roll.12 She wonders if the writing and living of daily routines could provide the ritual assurance of a daily Eucharist.13 The question is not idle; Bishop feels acutely the need for such assurance. The feeling animates her lifelong interest in religious literature: not only the Bible, which she knew well, and religious verse, which she thought “about as far as poetry can go,” but also the prose of spiritual writers from Thomas à Kempis to Jonathan Edwards to Simone Weil (VC 72A.3). Scholars have generally passed over this focus,14 and it might well seem mere aberration for a poet who could state plainly “I don’t believe in God” (Summers, “George Herbert,” 57). But Bishop could state just as plainly her belief in the “insoluble and endless and nagging problems of man’s relationship to God,” as she writes in a letter about Herbert’s poetry, adding emphatically that the subject is “real.—It was real and it has kept on being and it always will be.” She could recognize, also, the necessary alleviation of these problems:

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the “simple fact,” as she writes, that “someone who happened to be a genius was moved enough by man’s condition here below” (“George Herbert,” 54). Bishop’s unbelief acknowledges a yearning for atonement that Christian theology could codify, a sense of standing “eternally in the wrong,” as Kierkegaard puts it, that constitutes one’s “relation” to merciful divinity (Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 346– 54). In later letters, when Bishop admitted even more starkly her conviction that she was “born guilty” or was “one of those born-guilty people,” she describes as an ordinary birthright what Herbert or Hopkins would call original sin (VC 27.3; VC 27.5). Some of the most powerful poetry of Bishop’s fi rst volume focuses on just that sense of sin. Timely recurrence reinforces the “nagging” problems, rather than the ritually reconciling solutions, of humanity’s condition here below. Bishop’s most metaphysical poem, for example, describes a repetitive pattern of self-infl icted wrong: in “The Weed,” the titular plant grows “but to divide your heart again” (Complete Poems, 20– 21). Modeled on Herbert’s “Love Unknown,” the poem seems equally indebted to his “Affliction (IV)”; just as Bishop’s heart-dividing weed could be watered with a stream of “my own thoughts,” Herbert’s “thoughts” in “Affliction” are “wounding my heart . . . [a]s watring pots give flowers their lives.” 15 Herbert’s despair can call on the strength of God, however, a power that will make his thinking “day by day / Labour thy praise, and my relief.” Bishop’s daily growth, by contrast, foresees no heavenly comfort, and “again,” the final word of “The Weed,” seems to predict only endless, unrelieving labor. In the poem’s cool self-assessment, this process is concomitant with life, offering the only alternative to a permanent sleep in which “a year, a minute, an hour” are equally meaningless terms and the speaker lies as “unchanged” as the “final thought” of her “cold heart”: no less than the “indivisible” block of “The Imaginary Iceberg,” this frigid state would mean “the end of travel” (Complete Poems, 4). To refuse ends and finality—to wake, change, move, flow—is therefore to admit a necessary and debilitating recurrence; “The Weed” revises the trope of agricultural renewal to point out that cyclic continuity could be far from regenerative. Yet the poem suggests that one will be “prodd[ed]” to life each morning by an uncontrollable drive to reenact self-defeat. The same prodding begins “Roosters,” a more explicitly religious poem comparing the ordinary cockcrow of a Key West morning with the biblical

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cockcrow confi rming Peter’s denial of Christ. The pathos of that New Testament passage, in which the apostle strenuously rejects the idea that he will err and yet seems helpless not to do so, relates to the pathos of “The Weed,” since both diagnose inevitability as a particularly devastating aspect of guilty conviction. The worst shame seems to arise by necessity and to unfold by one’s own agency: a predictable external sunrise, in “Roosters,” brings an equally predictable internal sin. Far from the “hail-bow” or “pearly-pearly” marking Stevens’s or Frost’s mornings, then, Bishop’s birdsong begins her day with a cry of “horrible insistence,” and the “wet match” of the sound, a grating that could as easily start a fuse as a stove, wakes the speaker to “unwanted love, conceit and war.” These aggressions are both sentence and accusation, the roosters’ “projecting” implies, infl icting the inhuman torment of one’s own choice. “Roosters” contrasts with “The Weed,” however, by imagining that “again” could bring comfort as well as indictment, reconciliation as well as remorse. Bishop describes how “old holy sculpture” recasts dawn as a “pivot” of “inescapable hope,” showing that those cock-a-doodles yet might bless his dreadful rooster come to mean forgiveness, a new weathervane on basilica and barn, and that outside the Lateran there would always be a bronze cock on a porphyry pillar so the people and the Pope might see that even the Prince of the Apostles long since had been forgiven, and to convince all the assembly that “Deny deny deny” is not all the roosters cry.

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If Herbert knows forgiveness through prayer, these lines suggest, Bishop perceives it through art. Sculpture counters the recurrence of natural cockcrows with the eternality of crafted roosters. Yet Bishop’s art may not be as transcendent as such summary suggests; her metallic cocks do not seem to provide that timeless place “out of nature” occupied most strikingly by Yeats’s golden bird (Yeats, Collected Poems, 194). Bishop’s birds can only, possibly, redescribe time’s passage, using the past perfect of Peter’s “long since” pardon to meet the challenge of dawns yet to come. The conditional wariness of Bishop’s “yet might bless” or “come to mean” pervades the consolation offered, as Peter “still cannot guess,” the Pope only “might see,” the assembly remains to be convinced. Despite the weathervane’s “always” and the “all together” of “past and future” that art or religion represent, “Roosters” implies that a real time continues to unfold each morning. So does a real rooster’s call of “deny deny deny,” which ends this reconciliatory passage on the poem’s most strident reminder of sin. The call suggests that if indictment is “not all the roosters cry,” “Roosters” cannot yet offer an alternative. Or can it? Bishop’s verse form, a progressive spiral of rhyming threeline stanzas, may itself revise the cocks’ triplicate accusation. Her tercets demonstrate an art different from fi xed statuary, assuming instead the form of natural recurrence—and casting that pattern as a developing consistency rather than a horrible insistence. The poem’s fi nal five stanzas demonstrate the results as they move from a description of Peter’s fault back to a Key West morning. The “wet match” becomes a floating, “low light . . . gilding // from underneath / the broccoli, leaf by leaf,” gilding as well “the tiny / floating swallow’s belly,” and turning the sky into “wandering lines in marble.” The progress of Bishop’s poem and the progress of the morning it describes remake the barnyard of the first section into a living version of the  sculpture in the second. One might thus fi nd in an everyday dawnscape the hope that believers draw from a cathedral column, and indeed the cocks’ awful “deny” is “almost inaudible” by the fi nal stanza, when the sun “climbs in” the speaker’s window “ ‘to see the end,’ / faithful as enemy, or friend.” The allusion is to Matthew 26:58, in which Peter follows the just-arrested Christ “and sat with the servants, to see the end”: Bishop concludes at a moment before another betrayal to suggest that the scene could repeat with a different outcome. Diurnal returns may revise rather than simply recopy a shameful pattern.

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This suggestion is no more than tentative, since Bishop’s last “or” avoids any choice between animosity and alliance. If morning is not necessarily recriminatory, it is not necessarily reconciling either, and daily “faithful[ness]” remains a scrupulously indifferent meteorological phenomenon. The inconclusive conclusion of this poem seems like the imposition of responsibility rather than the provision of hope or despair: one must decide, each morning, whether the day is friendly or hostile. Or rather, one must make the difference, each morning, by crafting a new end for the day’s returning story.16 Such an effort would defy the insistence of the roosters, who tell the poet “how to live,” and would refuse their egoistic “project[ions],” which tell the poet who to be. It would fulfi ll the better possibilities of a morning beyond their calls. “Roosters,” however, seems unable to manage this self-defi nition; even among Bishop’s poems, never forthcoming about their investments of affect, this work seems unusually hesitant. The firstperson-plural speaker of the fi rst section, for example, fi rmly located in a room at daybreak, recedes in the second for an impersonal narration eschewing the active voice and remains entirely absent in the last. Such withdrawal, moreover, only compounds an ambiguous identification with both biblical parable and natural scene. Defensively resisting roosters in the fi rst part, then sympathizing with “poor Peter” in the second, the poet seems to end the third in the position of that savior whom the apostle will betray.17 How is one to discern the meaning of these returning roles, to determine which part this quotidian drama assigns— or to play all of them? Can an ordinary poet be Christ as well as Peter, self-atoning as well as self-victimizing? “Roosters” seems not quite able to imagine, in its description of an ordinary sunrise, the “simple fact” of that Christological solution. Bishop fi nds secular redemption only in a later poem, when she replaces an insistent denial with an endless affi rmation and the “flame-feather” of the roosters’ fall with a fiery descent that can rise again. The Key West morning of “Anaphora” answers the Key West morning of “Roosters” by perceiving Bishop’s Christian “genius” in the “ineffable creature” of each day’s light.18 Daily time becomes a ritual incarnation as this figure appears and takes his earthly nature instantly, instantly falls victim of long intrigue,

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assuming memory and mortal mortal fatigue. More slowly falling into sight and showering into stippled faces, darkening, condensing all his light; in spite of all the dreaming squandered upon him with that look, suffers our uses and abuses, sinks through the drift of bodies, sinks through the drift of classes to evening to the beggar in the park who, weary, without lamp or book prepares stupendous studies: the fiery event of every day in endless endless assent. The “assent” at the end of the second stanza mirrors the descent at the end of the fi rst, just as the closing “every day” echoes an opening “each day”: Bishop’s double sonnet realizes as well as reports an ordinary cycle.19 Moreover, it fi nds in such “ceremony” a miracle more assured than that of Bishop’s breakfast sestina, with its “wrong balcony,” since the solar light giver of this later poem is not a fickle sovereign but a willing savior—a Chaplinesque “beggar in the park” who embodies Bishop’s up-to-date version of a suffering servant.20 This repeated “victim” chooses every day to take on mankind’s “uses and abuses” when he chooses to instantiate himself every day in the “faces” of humanity. As such sacrifice relieves those faces of the “memory” and “mortal[ity]” that is their “fatigue,” suggesting that each “weary,” darkening evening will yield to the “white-gold skies” and “brilliant walls” of another morning, Bishop’s poem endorses a secular version of a Christian tenet by suggesting that the acceptance of “earthly nature” can relieve the burden of mortal incarnation. Repetitive practice, in this poem, may lighten a temporal weight. Repetitive poetry, moreover, may do the same, as Bishop’s anaphoras present a naturalized religious possibility even more fully than do the tercets of “Roosters,” showing how

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changing returns of sound, meter, and rhyme mimic the consistent transfiguration of mornings and evenings.21 The most Stevensian poem that Bishop ever wrote, “Anaphora” recommends a poetic trust, replacing religious faith, in the promise of the ordinary. Bishop’s version of Stevens’s unexceptional heroism, however, is more perceptive than participatory. She observes the daily rounds of light rather than “going round” herself. “Anaphora” solves the problem of uncertain identification in “Roosters,” it seems, with a self-effacing attendance, and the problem of personal guilt with a self-subsuming generality. If the politically aggregate “we” of “A Miracle for Breakfast” seems to coexist uneasily with the poem’s private wish for “my crumb” and “my mansion,” the drift of bodies and classes in “Anaphora” may elide unsatisfactorily the requirement of a private sacrament. This may explain why “Anaphora,” for all its beauty and power, was not Bishop’s fi nal statement of quotidian practice. It may also explain what her further statements must do; when David Kalstone’s peerless analysis of “Anaphora” describes a relation “between personal history and guilt, on the one hand, and the purity and relentlessness of the natural world, on the other,” he also provides an account of Bishop’s subsequent project (Becoming, 97). As she gradually moves from the assent of an ineffable creature to the lift of a first-person speaker, her quotidian poetics confronts a nagging “relationship” specific to herself.

Dreams They Remembered This requires confrontation with a specific history: as the fatiguing “memory” of “Anaphora” already suggests, Bishop’s sense of punishment is ineradicably linked to her sense of the past. It is also linked to her sense of dreams, because for Bishop, night is a time when the weight of personal fault pulls one backward from the light of common day. The related contrasts of dark and light, guilt and innocence, pervade her life as well as her poems; when she writes in a late letter to Robert Lowell, for instance, of “irreparable and awful actions on our consciences,” she explains that she tries to live “without blaming myself for them . . . every day . . . the nights take care of guilt sufficiently” (Words in Air, 753). Early work shows that her nightly guilt could already seem as heavy a load as the man-moth’s shadow,

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“dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him” (Complete Poems, 14–15). Indeed, if North and South contains a counter-statement to the southern, sunlit, assurance of “Anaphora,” a poem recording humanity’s trust in each day’s light, it comes in the northern, moonlit, fear of “The Man-Moth,” a poem describing the paranoid doubt of a nocturnal outsider. This creature suspects the “protection” of the sky, climbs only to fall, travels in subways “facing the wrong way,” and dreams “recurrent dreams.” “Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie / his rushing brain,” Bishop writes. This passively endured recurrence, moreover, predicts his death, since the man-moth regards the “third rail, the unbroken draught of poison” as a “disease / he has inherited the susceptibility to.” Bishop’s lines compare this night work with a backward glance of retrospection, a compulsive need to repeat, and a terrifying pull toward suicide; the mortal punishment for original sin becomes an individual judgment infl icted by one’s unconscious.22 The poem therefore illustrates the Freudian death wish of one confi ned in past pain, and throughout North and South, a psychoanalytic version of mental patterns coexists with a spiritual description of ceremonial order. “The Weed,” for example, describes a dream space where an uncontrollably recurrent nature figures an uncontrollably recurrent mind, thus combining a dread of Darwinian determinism with a fear of Freudian compulsion as well as with the anguish of religious despair. Bishop read psychoanalytic theory throughout her life and tried analysis herself; her use of Freudian insight may therefore have been as conscious as her use of Christian trope.23 With these two interests, moreover, she may have sought the same thing: when Bishop writes to Marianne Moore that she “should like to read The Psychology of the Christian Personality very much,” her next sentence recommends Karen Horney’s The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, and she adds that “I had infi nitely rather approach such things from the Christian viewpoint myself—but the trouble is I’ve never been able to fi nd the books, except Herbert” (One Art, 108). In Bishop’s view, interest in Horney and interest in Herbert may equally address the dilemma of personality—the problem of that modern, secular soul that her grimy man-moth seems to figure. Her work strives for a solution through Freudian as well as Christian means: if her early dawn poems wonder how morning could be atoning rather than accusing, her early dream poems wonder how night could be

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therapeutic rather than threatening. In “Sleeping Standing Up,” for instance, where “the armored car” of dreams tries to follow a backward route that “clever children” use to remember the path home, Bishop seems to question whether the unconscious could reveal a route to familiar security (Complete Poems, 30). The possibility recalls “The Farmer’s Children,” a short story that Bishop published in 1948, in which two boys mark an equally Hansel and Gretel–like trail (Collected Prose, 193– 203). Yet the narrator of “Sleeping Standing Up” “never found out where the cottage was,” and the “The Farmer’s Children” freeze to death rather than make their way home. A malevolent stepmother at “home,” moreover, suggests that reaching the supposed safety of one’s past could be as poisonous as yielding to the man-moth’s inheritance. It could be as dangerous as eating the nocturnal fruit in “Some Dreams They Forgot,” where dreamers who rise to “dark drops” that may well be fatal strive to recall past wakings (Complete Poems, 146). “Had they thought poison / and left?” Bishop writes; “or— remember—eaten them from the loaded trees?” That answer, like the cottage of “Sleeping Standing Up,” remains hidden because “dreams are all inscrutable by eight or nine”; if “dead birds fell,” no one in this poem “had seen them fly, / or could guess from where.” No one can discern the potentially life-or-death lessons of recurrent psychic nightwork. Nor can the speaker of “Paris, 7 A.M.,” a work that rewrites the dead birds of “Some Dreams They Forgot” in its description of a winter sky like a “a dead wing with damp feathers,” as well as recalls the threatening drops of the earlier poem in its description of snowballs with “star-splintered hearts of ice” (Complete Poems, 26– 27). Here a waking dreamer wishes to know when such ominous stars will fall, sensing that “introspection,” “retrospection,” or “recollection” could help her to tell. She suspects that today’s dangerous snowballs grew from long-ago snow forts of childhood, whose fortifications did not “dissolve and die” but hardened into the stone houses that she watches from her window. The poet cannot use backward vision to predict imminent attack, however, and “Paris, 7 A.M.” ends in confused apprehension: “Can the clocks say; is it there below, / about to tumble in snow?” The clocks seem unlikely to help, since their “ignorant faces” chart “overlapping” hours as inscrutably determined as the extensions of a snow-forted past. The anaphora of this free-verse work, searching for patterns that cannot be clarified, manifests the resulting frustration, as an inability to look back with understanding means an inability to

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move forward with confidence through a poem or a day. This “7 A.M.” will spin through dizzying rounds or fracture into fearful multiplicity rather than move toward a safe future. Can one dissolve snowballs and snow forts to find a more secure morning? Bishop considers the chance, it seems, in the dawn poem “Love Lies Sleeping,” where a speaker wants “earliest morning” to reverse the backward pull of railroad ties. Sunrise in this poem, as it “switch[es] all the tracks / that cross the sky from cinder star to star,” might “draw us into daylight” and “clear away what presses on the brain” (Complete Poems, 16– 17). “Hang-over moons, wane! wane!” the speaker exhorts, perhaps hoping to “put out” such tormenting shapes and avoid the fate of a man whose head is literally hanging “over the edge of his bed”; Bishop told one critic that this figure may be dead (Kalstone, Becoming, 19). The speaker resists such permanent sleep through “day-springs of the morning,” a phrase comparing the creaky sounds of rising with a Christological “dayspring from on high”; she also imagines the childhood ammunition of “Paris, 7 A.M.” as a municipal “boom” and presents the histrionic clocks as “alarms for the expected” that ring for “all persons getting up.” “Love Lies Sleeping” seems therefore to prepare for the communal dawn of “Anaphora” by considering if the general habits of waking could erase the personal dangers of dreams. Yet “Love Lies Sleeping” seems finally ambivalent about the possible erasure: when the man-moth’s shadow returns here, it becomes the “unique love” that each person “drag[s] in the streets,” and the poem concludes with the possible revelation that is granted the upside-down man. To undo the hang-overs of individual nights could surrender an insight that only darkness allows. Surrender may be impossible anyway, since Bishop writes that morning will “always” come to “one, or several” like that final figure. Perhaps the awakening city of “Love Lies Sleeping,” as much as the Paris of “7 A.M.,” must always appear through what the man-moth calls the “entire night” of one’s individual “eye.” Perhaps the common and current morning should emerge only through an individual and distorting yesterday. If so, poets must fi nd some way to render a present as crossed as the star tracks of “Love Lies Sleeping” or as splintered as the star-like clock of “Paris, 7 A. M,” and Bishop’s earliest literary criticism urges precisely this effort. When she was still an undergraduate at Vassar, composing “Some Dreams They Forgot” and prompting the vividness of her own subcon-

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scious with nighttime snacks of Roquefort cheese, she proposed a new sort of narrative that could represent the mind’s endless reconsiderations of the past (Millier, Bishop: Life, 43). “Dimensions for a Novel,” the essay defi ning this “experience-time,” even takes as its epigraph the same Stevens line from “Stars at Tallapoosa” that Bishop recalls in the opening of “Love Lies Sleeping”: “The lines are straight and swift between the stars” (Stevens, Collected, 57). Stevens compares these lines to recollections, those “nimblest motions, / Making recoveries of young nakedness / And the lost vehemence the midnights hold”; in her essay, Bishop wants writing to be true to such midnight recoveries. She would replace the continuous curve of traditional plotting with a crosshatch thicket of straight, swift lines, a diagram showing how events in a life do not advance by a simple vector of rising and falling action but rather appear through a “constant readjustment among the members of any sequence” (“Dimensions,” 97). Bishop’s essay anticipates the overlapping divergence of “Paris, 7 A.M.” to wonder how it could be made manifest in a narrative art.24 As that poem and others suggest, manifestation would require more than simple duplication, more than the repetition advocated in Gertrude Stein’s essays and novels, for example. Stein seems to have provided Bishop with a related and ultimately rejected version of recurrence in literature. As if to emphasize the contrast between them, Bishop drew her crosshatched diagram of “experience-time” in the margin of her notes when she attended Stein’s lecture “Portraits I Have Written and What I Think of Repetition, Whether It Exists or No” (VC 75.1). Stein sees her work as distinct from memory, operating as a “continuous succession,” whereas Bishop finds such operation impossible: when Stein describes how she “made portraits of rooms and food and everything because there I could avoid this difficulty of suggesting remembering,” Bishop’s notes ask, “How did that obviate remembering?” And when Stein explains that her “portraits” combine listening, talking, and looking, Bishop’s notes wonder, “What does she think happens in her reader’s mind?” (Stein, Lectures, 176, 188, 191; VC 75.1) To Bishop, minds operate not by Stein’s constant forward advance, always different and always unconfused, but according to the “time pattern in which realities reach us,” often recurrent and always mixed. “Belated emotion,” as it “points back . . . to whatever caused it,” renders everything “experienced in two different ways” (“Time’s Andromedas,” 119; “Dimensions,”

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100–101). To ignore this retrospection is to erase identity itself, and Stein’s recurrence therefore enforces on her characters a numbing universality, Bishop writes, as if “the generation of persons is being created over and over in the minute, and not the essence of the individual” (“Time’s Andromedas,” 116). Yet if Bishop’s essays would stress a remembering individuality, her poems demonstrate how painful it can be. The star-tracks in “Love Lies Sleeping” bring none of the “pleasure” of Stevens’s “lines” in “Stars at Tallapoosa,” and the introversion of a “gray avenue between the eyes,” in Bishop’s poem, has none of the self-possessed simplicity of Stevens’s “eye that studies its black lid.” Bishop’s recoveries manifest not the “nakedness” and “vehemence” of Stevens’s arrows but the shame and confusion of the manmoth’s tracks. When Bishop in a later notebook describes something like her early essay’s temporal thicket, she is remembering the state of being “extremely unhappy— almost hysterically unhappy”: “. . . the past & the present seemed confused,” she writes, “or contradicting each other violently and constantly, & the past wouldn’t ‘lie down.’ ” She adds that the “same thing happens” when one is “drunk,” suggesting that “experience-time” may compare best to a hungover moon of temporal confusion (Millier, Bishop: Life, 223–24). To move from the swift lines of Bishop’s collegiate criticism to the subway ties, dead birds, and dark drops of North and South is to understand better how the essay writer who disparages an “hour after hour, day after day” temporality (“Time’s Andromedas,” 119) is the same poet who could seek the “every day” pattern of “Anaphora.” Such regularity provides needed alleviation. Indeed, the chance for such alleviation may have been part of Bishop’s criticism, since she ends “Dimensions for a Novel” by recommending “a feeling for rhythm” that would effect what Bishop, quoting Richard Bolislavsky, describes as the “orderly, measurable changes of all the different elements comprised” (103). This measured cadence seems as different from Bishop’s crosshatched confusion as it does from Stein’s “enormous wheel,” less a passive notation of the “time pattern in which realities reach us” than an active reaching for patterns of time (“Time’s Andromedas,” 116). Such order would better the stupid steering of dreams, perhaps, and control the dangerous recurrence of memory, as it strives for the analytic assurance of Freudian counsel as well as the ritual assurance of Christian faith.

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To Go Home “The Prodigal” begins to suggest how the order may be achieved; this poem from Bishop’s second book includes both the dawns and the dreams of North and South. Another double sonnet of diurnal habits, its stanzas narrate the routine of a modern-day biblical hero in which sometimes mornings after drinking bouts (he hid the pints behind a two-by-four), the sunrise glazed the barnyard mud with red; the burning puddles seemed to reassure. And then he thought he almost might endure his exile yet another year or more. (Complete Poems, 71) The sunrise reassurance could be compared to the dawn beneficence in “Anaphora” or the friendly sun in “Roosters,” its light concealing if not forgiving the shameful activities of night. Yet the implications of “seemed,” “thought,” “almost” and “might” render this red glaze much less certain than the gold and fire of “Anaphora” or even the gilt and marble of “Roosters.” The second, nightly half of “The Prodigal” confirms the doubt as it details an anxiety-ridden darkness that “Anaphora” elides and that “Roosters” only suggests; at night, The lantern—like the sun, going away— laid on the mud a pacing aureole. Carrying a bucket along a slimy board, he felt the bats’ uncertain staggering fl ight, his shuddering insights, beyond his control, touching him. But it took him a long time fi nally to make his mind up to go home. In the time after a holy “aureole” of light departs, the prodigal is excluded from a barn that is “safe and companionable” as “the Ark”: he is divided, like the speaker of “Five Flights Up,” from animalistic innocence and security.25 He is left to his own “shuddering insights,” the threatening

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brush of an unconscious “beyond his control” and the drunken torment of a past that won’t lie down. Such nightmares mean that the hero pathetically hiding his pints cannot trust hungover moons to “wane” in the returns of sunrise and cannot presume that forgiveness will come through his sheer endurance of exile. Forgiveness may require, rather, the more difficult choice “to go home”: to effect a conscious return, perhaps, to his beginnings. Bishop does not describe this biblical ending, and she ventures it in the weakest rhyme of her poem,26 yet the closing suggestion of “The Prodigal” nonetheless seems to amplify the closing of “Anaphora.” An agreement to go on now implies a decision to go back. In the period surrounding her second volume, Bishop’s own writing may reflect this development with several works based directly on events of her earliest history. “In the Village,” for example, a short story published in 1953, tells of the painful time during her fifth year when her mentally ill mother was institutionalized for good. Bishop had just settled in Brazil when she wrote this piece, and it is easy to see that move as a geograph ical analogue for her writing’s autobiographical turn— a “driving to the interior,” to use the irresistibly applicable phrase from “Arrival at Santos” (Complete Poems, 90).27 Such a description, however, risks slighting the continuity as well as the form of Bishop’s work during this period; her writing may not show a new, prosaic tendency toward revelation so much as a continued, poetic concern with repetition. Bishop’s going home, that is, specifies an anaphora that she had long taken to be her thematic and rhetorical goal. To describe the formal and psychological effects of this repetition, as such progress during Bishop’s career, can help to clarify the purpose and results of the poet’s self-revelation. “Visits to St. Elizabeths” belongs to such description: the most repetitive poem that Bishop ever wrote, it also refers to the difficult period before her move to Brazil (Complete Poems, 133– 35). Though published in 1957, the poem is labeled 1950, the same year in which Bishop was fi nishing “The Prodigal” and the same in which she paid regular trips to the incarcerated, possibly treasonous, and potentially insane Ezra Pound in the Washington, D.C., mental hospital that her title names. The poem describes these visits through the pattern of a childhood nursery rhyme: sturdy return to “the house that Jack built” becomes regular attendance at “the house of Bedlam.” The rubric charts an evolving recurrence in which each forward step must reiterate everything that has been. There is little

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sense of amelioration in this poem’s inexorable advance, though, and what minimal change is possible seems futile; if Bishop’s adjectives for the “man” she visits alter with each stanza, “tedious” seems no more or less applicable than the earlier “honored” or the later “wretched.” As Bishop’s poem accretes extensions of its arbitrary order, it tells a time as potentially senseless as a childhood singsong and as potentially maddening as the ticks of her subject’s watch. This work questions the significance of change as well as the possibility of progress with every new stanza’s reduction to the same three words. Those words, moreover, are particularly damning, given that “house of Bedlam” marks insanity as the recurrent origin of all that follows. Biographical facts support the significance of this suggestion for Bishop; just as the poem’s wary stance toward Pound could indicate a defense borne of identification, the title “St. Elizabeths” could link madness to Bishop’s own name, making her plural visits to a mental hospital examinations of possible “Elizabeths.”28 The consistent address of “Bedlam” would thereby be as personally painful as the consistent address of the sanatorium in “In the Village,” a label written in “purple indelible pencil” that the child protagonist knows “will never come off ” (Collected Prose, 272). The child comes by such knowledge, in fact, through a chore as dutiful and cyclic as later “Visits”: she must mail a weekly package from her “faithful” grandmother to her institutionalized mother (273). Like her poem, Bishop’s story poses the question of whether such routines can be something other than obligatory, sorrowful, or meaningless, and the narrative ends with the child poised on a bridge during her walk to the post office, parcel in hand, as if wondering how to bear the recurrent burden of her individual inheritance. This burden is, more specifically, the shame in that inheritance: if the prodigal’s return requires an admission of sin, Bishop’s own trips back confront the same guilty conscience. Such sense of fault seems to evince something more than the social stigma of mental illness and incarceration, an embarrassment that prompts the child of “In the Village” to hide “the address of the sanatorium with my arm and my other hand” (Collected Prose, 273). It seems to bespeak something more, even, than Bishop’s fear of a disease she may have inherited the susceptibility to, though anxiety about her own sanity may have prompted her embarrassment about a brief institutionalization in 1948 as well as her insistence in later letters that she

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is not mad.29 These worries join a deeper one, which Bishop recounts in a late correspondence describing “guilt feelings . . . about my mother”: “somehow children get the idea it’s their fault— or I did,” she writes. “And I could do nothing about that, and she lived on for twenty years more and it has been a nightmare to me always” (quoted in Harrison, Bishop’s Poetics, 131). In this explanation, the “always” pattern of Bishop’s retrospective nightmares insists on her own responsibility for her mother’s insanity and absence, enforcing a guilty sorrow that she can perceive but not change.30 Psychoanalysis suggests some reasons for these connections: that is, some reasons why grief should be guilt and guilt should be debilitatingly repetitive. Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” links self-recrimination— the disproportionate activity of what religion calls conscience and psychology names the superego—with a neurotic sense of sorrow. The melancholic responds to loss, Freud writes, by withdrawing investment back into the psyche and beginning the endless “self-reproaches” that are really “reproaches against a loved object” (248). Freud extends these fi ndings in “The Ego and the Id” by connecting such guilt with the “pure culture of the death instinct” and explaining how a melancholic’s superego can infl ict the same self-defeat that otherwise marks the id’s repetitive tendencies (53). Freud ventures, moreover, that the process is “common and . . . typical,” less a singular response to loss than “an essential contribution towards building up” one’s “ ‘character’ ” (28). If a healthy ego must overcome the excesses of melancholia, it nonetheless cannot avoid shame entirely; to Freud, one becomes a self in part through managing self-blame. Later psychological work extends this suggestion of shameful individuation, most particularly in the affect theories of Silvan Tomkins.31 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose influential reading of Tomkins helps to apply his work to literature, describes in her criticism a specifically “queer performativity” that may render guilt both aesthetically and politically productive (Touching, 61; see 35– 65). Such theories are germane to Bishop, a lesbian attentive to embarrassment in all of its manifestations. Yet as her comments as well as her poems suggest, Bishop’s “born guilty” sense feels the stigma of her family history more closely than the stigma of her sexuality.32 Her poetics of shame may relate not only to Tomkins’s theories of affect, then, but also to Melanie Klein’s theories of child psychology, which Sedgwick has more recently taken as an inspiration for queer critique. Klein rewrites Freud’s melancholic “self-reproaches” as a fundamental stage

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of early development, a “depressive position” caused when anxiety at the absence of a mother’s breast devolves into guilt over one’s own responsibility for its destruction (Selected, 147–48). In Klein’s theory, this sense of fault prompts one to “repeat fundamental experiences over and over again”; her child psychology, like Freud’s adult analysis, suggests the extremity of the death wish to be an exaggeration of common shame (Selected, 210). This shame may well seem more acute if the loss to be mourned is not the usual deprivation of the mother’s breast but the singular absence of the mother herself, and Bishop’s keen interest in Kleinian thought may have recognized that her “nightmare” of childhood guilt could be described as an accentuation of Klein’s depressive position.33 Klein’s work not only helps to explain the particularly repetitive and retrospective nature of Bishop’s shame, however, but also the necessarily repetitive and retrospective nature of its alleviation. If the opposite of melancholia, in Freud’s view, is a healthy mourning, the resolution of Klein’s “depressive position” is a related process— one that would reconstitute the power of a lost childhood in different forms (Klein, Selected, 173–74).34 As Joanne Feit Diehl explains, Bishop’s poetry demonstrates this reparative search for a new past: it often seems, in her work, like a homesickness for a place one never inhabited and a desire to return to an alien but familiar beginning.35 It often emphasizes, moreover, the endless extension of these feelings; Bishop’s recovery is as recurrent as the sorrow or shame it would heal.36 So much is suggested, for example, in “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance,” another poem from the difficult, prodigal period of the late 1940s and another combining sacred atonement with psychological reparation. The homesick speaker of this work hopes to fi nd an “old Nativity” that is at once the scene of incarnation and the picture of “a family with pets” (Complete Poems, 57–59). The long travel narrative of “Over 2,000 Illustrations” has not provided her with such a vision, and only when she opens a “heavy book” of biblical apparatus, acknowledging the possibly shameful “gilt” that rubs off on her fi ngers, does she glimpse its possibility. If she had seen it, Bishop writes, she could have “looked and looked our infant sight away”: she could have replaced childhood vision with a new vision of childhood.37 Yet this vision would not have come with a single glance or an achieved destination but with a repeated reference; the phrase “and looked and looked” seeks to reimagine an origin rather than fi x it in

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place. The developing “and” and “and” of such looking could better the paratactic “ ‘and’ and ‘and’ ” of the poem’s journeys— or of later “Visits to St. Elizabeths”—by providing an alternative to meaningless process other than impossible fi nality. The concluding but ongoing gaze at a holy birth, moreover, could replace the anticlimactic end of the speaker’s tourism, which discovered no more than a “holy grave, not looking particularly holy.” Bishop’s poem would fi nd religious revelation as well as psychological maturity in the literal re-vision that this poem describes. It seems no wonder, then, that Bishop initially wished to call her second volume Concordance and to place “Over 2,000 Illustrations” fi rst (One Art, 222). It seems important to note, however, that the reparative looks of her poem are mere possibility; like the “old holy sculpture” of “Roosters,” which must be tested against the real morning barnyard, the “old Nativity” engraving of the concordance requires the confi rmation of experience. Lacking such truth, one could be in the madness of psychosis as easily as the fictions of art: one could be in a Bedlam, like “St. Elizabeths,” where poets “lie.”38 When Bishop revisits the question of “Elizabeth,” therefore, in the late poem “In the Waiting Room,” she ballasts the uncertainties of interior consciousness with a reminder of exterior setting, carefully citing the “night and slush and cold” outside on that “fifth / of February, 1918” (Complete Poems, 161). When Bishop’s poetry moves forward from the uncertain travels and “Visits” of 1950, she turns to the world’s times for a similar security.39 Bishop’s fi nal title for her second book is not the verbal cata log of a Concordance but the natural progress of A Cold Spring, and she placed “A Cold Spring” fi rst in the volume instead.

Planting Tears “A Cold Spring” uses naturalism to replace rather than endorse one’s reparations; as it describes the Maryland farm that provided a haven for Bishop during her Washington tenure, it fi nds equal refuge from the psychological trials of the period. This alleviation comes through a smooth progress of “one day,” “the next day,” “then one day,” “now, in the evening,” “now,” “later on”: effortless phrases that observe a transition from past to present to future (Complete Poems, 55– 56). External and ameliorative, this progress opens in the wary and even violent start of spring but closes in the easy

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and even celebratory beginning of another season, its witness certain that “fi refl ies” will rise “every evening now throughout the summer.” The “ascending flight” of these “glowing tributes” evokes the “endless assent” of fi re in “Anaphora” as well as the “release” of “While Someone Telephones,” where fi refl ies’ light seems to promise liberation from a “crystallized” suspension among “wasted minutes” (Complete Poems, 78). But “A Cold Spring” diminishes the possible force of the flames in “Anaphora” and avoids the human drama of the glow in “While Someone Telephones”: whereas that poem imagines insects as the “green gay eyes” of some “relaxed uncondescending stranger,” “A Cold Spring” forgoes an awaited incarnation. Its nativity is not the “prompt” appearance of an “ineffable creature” from “Anaphora” but the birth of a calf which “got up promptly / and seemed inclined to feel gay.” 40 Such differences could serve to indicate some of the work’s aims. “A Cold Spring” does not seek the transformation of memory or mortality, it seems, so much as their absence, and it would replace recurrent or selfregarding “Visits” with a free-verse acceptance of flux. Here there is no origin to rewrite but simply a progress to observe, no past to repeat but simply a present to inhabit. The poem’s serenity imagines the peace of living by natural temporality. It indulges the fantasy of “Quai d’Orléans,” perhaps, in which a speaker yearns to lose her “wake” of memories as effortlessly as ripples “extinguish themselves / against the walls” and to relinquish her star-tracks of retrospection “as softly as falling stars come to their ends / at a point in the sky” (Complete Poems, 28).41 “A Cold Spring” evokes this desirable state, however, through suppressing the first-person speaker whose scrupulous observations constitute the poem. As “Quai d’Orléans” admits and as many other Bishop poems show, subjectivity cannot be rid of its memorial “fossils.” Bishop notes something similar in a notebook near the time of A Cold Spring when she writes that “the expression ‘It seems like yesterday that’ is extremely accurate although it used to sound so foolish to me” (VC 75.3a). Consciousness perceives a continual return of the past rather than a continuous stream of the present. A flowing present may be “bearable to no mortal,” therefore, to use the words of “At the Fish houses” (Complete Poems, 64– 66). Or it may burn mortals, rather, “as if the water were a transmutation of fire.” This phrase recalls the “total immersion” of the poem’s oceanic baptism, as well as the innocence of its Baptist seal, by suggesting a transfigurative absolution for

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one’s shameful sense of history. Bishop’s writing elsewhere connects guilt and atonement with water and flame: the unpublished poem “A Drunkard,” for example, links early memories of the seashore after a fi re with a “reprimand” from Bishop’s mother that marked the beginning of a prodigal’s “abnormal thirst,” and the early story “The Sea and Its Shore” describes a drunken protagonist who seeks Keatsian, priestly “ablution” by nightly burning accumulated papers (Edgar Allan Poe 150– 51; Collected Prose, 171–80). In these works, Bishop’s fi res may compare to the all-consuming flames of Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn,” a shore poem that would achieve worldly innocence through destroying a human past. The desperate futility of “The Sea and Its Shore,” however, so unlike the strenuous courage of “The Auroras,” suggests that immolation was not Bishop’s solution. Her poetics seeks a different reconciliation of guilty remembering and innocent continuing. She fi nds one through a poetic and experiential anaphora: not the flow of “A Cold Spring” or the “flowing” and “flown” of a cold ocean but an order that returns in daily and seasonal patterns. In this temporality, one might connect the revisions of memory to the recurrence of observation; one might achieve a psychological reparation with the authority of real experience. Something like this begins even at the conclusion of “In the Village,” as the child stands poised with her shameful burden while looking down into flowing water (Collected Prose, 274). She fi rst considers whether her mother’s scream, a signal of insanity, “has gone away, forever,” but several lines later she asks a different question: “All those other things— clothes, crumbling postcards, broken china; things damaged and lost, sickened or destroyed; even the frail almost-lost scream— are they too frail for us to hear their voices long, too mortal?” The child fears that the past, even the guilty or anguished past, will be forgotten in earthly process. She turns with this worry to the blacksmith’s clang, a “beautiful pure sound” that can encapsulate all of nature: “It is the elements speaking: earth, air, fi re, water,” Bishop writes. A plea for its return—“Oh, beautiful sound, strike again!”—recognizes a possible replacement for her mother’s scream that would preserve and transform the memory. The story imagines a revision of human history in a craft of elemental authority. “Sestina,” published three years after “In the Village,” presents an instance of such art (Complete Poems, 123– 24). Like “Anaphora,” this poem

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emphasizes from its very title the self-conscious adoption of a pattern that strikes again and again; like that earlier poem, this work sees in such order the alleviation of pain. The speaker of “Sestina,” however, does not wait for a theological light giver like the atoning “creature” of “Anaphora.” Nor does this speaker seek a beatified origin like the illuminated nativity scene of “Over 2,000 Illustrations.” Rather, the writer of “Sestina” trusts a recollection of “failing light” and looks repeatedly at a dim kitchen holding a broken family group. The repetition of one’s personal, flawed memories, in this poem, may be an aesthetic and lived way forward as potentially beneficent as religious reconciliation. The fi rst stanza begins the progress when it goes home to a scene of childhood domesticity: September rain falls on the house. In the failing light, the old grandmother sits in the kitchen with the child beside the Little Marvel Stove, reading the jokes from the almanac, laughing and talking to hide her tears. “House,” “grandmother,” “child,” “stove,” “almanac,” and “tears”: as the sestina’s formal structure makes the poem that follows from these six words, it enacts a recurrent vitality through which what has been provides the substance of what will be. The movement could seem compulsory, with a refrain as determinative as the “house of Bedlam” or a structure as constrictive as the “rigid house” that the child draws in stanza five. It could describe a consciousness as fatalistic as the words spoken by stove and almanac in that stanza; “It was to be” and “I know what I know” indicate an inalterable past and future with symmetrical, then tautological phrases. Yet Bishop’s progress in this “Sestina,” as each verse resituates its necessary end words, shows instead the revision enabled simply by recalling the same thing in a new context. The process suggests the action of metaphor, which fi nds same-but-different transport in what could seem like mere recurrence, and “Sestina” indeed demonstrates the inherently poetic quality of memory or mourning, its grief permitting a life of creative making rather than requiring a life of melancholic routine.42 The word most figuratively changeable, in fact, is the word most obviously grief-stricken, as

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“tears” become raindrops, steam, tea, buttons—and, fi nally, phases of the moon. This last comparison articulates what “Sestina” as a whole suggests: one’s pain is the cyclic stuff of ordinary time. It may be, moreover, a natural stuff. Bishop’s mournful continuing is rhetorical, and her revision of the title from “Early Sorrow” to “Sestina” emphasizes how progressive grief depends on aesthetic form, but the seemingly meaningful changes within this poem’s order are not the seemingly arbitrary changes of the pattern in “Visits to St. Elizabeths.” The alterations of “Sestina” are something more than artistic self-delusion or psychoanalytic self-authoring. “Equinoctial” tears, like “the rain that beats on the roof of the house,” are “foretold by the almanac”: because one’s specific sorrow dwells in a sorrowful reality, it comes as preordained as the world’s rhythms. The conflation endorses the natural course of the penultimate stanza, when the poem’s recursions lead inevitably to a time when tears are “plant[ed]”: But secretly, while the grandmother busies herself about the stove, the little moons fall down like tears from between the pages of the almanac into the flower bed the child has carefully placed in front of the house. This hint of growth after grief recalls elegy’s traditional alliance with the pastoral and even suggests a traditional comfort of that alliance. One can trust the passing of sorrow, perhaps, just as surely as one trusts a turn from seeds to flowers.43 There are no flowers in Bishop’s poem, though, and no passing of sorrow: at the end, the child is drawing “another inscrutable house.” The planting of tears, it seems, will grow only another sestina of grief-stricken end words, and a weedlike harvest may be the sum of worldly renewal. Moreover, Bishop’s poem seems to qualify the natural authority of even this limited amelioration, since the “flower bed” into which these tears fall is not real soil but a plot that the child’s drawing has “carefully placed,” and the “tears” that descend are not the grandmother’s weeping or the rain outside but pictures “from between the pages of the almanac.” “Plant[ing]” here is no more than the transaction of two different symbols. One might

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add that the comparisons of tears and rain earlier are carefully attributed first to the grandmother and then to the child, as if belief in nature’s sympathy could be a delusion of grieving minds. Yet for all that, the poem’s pathos suggests something more than pathetic fallacies; the moons fall “secretly,” after all, beyond the notice of the grandmother and perhaps even the child, and certainly beyond their immediate control. If both tears and soil are human design, their changes seem to emerge from the secrets of design rather than the intention of humans. This is the operation of an objective method rather than the fulfi llment of a subjective wish. Bishop’s poem implies an external mandate without endorsing the fantasy that its authorization is attributable to anything more than human ordonnance. The sestina form itself offers a similarly subtle confidence, providing a temporal order that relieves the anxiety of agency in self-revisions; one can watch what the returning past becomes rather than futilely try to make it be something different. Bishop’s authorial consciousness in this poem— aloof and intimate, omnipotent and unnecessary— shows the conviction possible through such a practice.44 The worldly and poetic rhythms of her impersonal autobiography preclude anguish at what could happen next or bewilderment at what has happened before, and the poem can achieve those “orderly, measurable changes” of one’s history that Bishop’s account of “experience-time” sought. This means that the house of “Sestina” can remain “inscrutable” without presenting the frustrating “inscrutab[ility]” of dreams in “Some Dreams They Forgot,” just as the “[b]irdlike” almanac of the later poem lacks the threat of “dead birds” in the earlier and the moon tears of “Sestina” fall without the unknown portent of “dark drops.” The speaker of “Some Dreams They Forgot” strives in vain to learn the enigmatic lessons of her own subconscious, but the child of “Sestina” draws houses mysterious to herself in implicit confidence that they will reveal or develop, over time, their full significance. The almanac tells when it is “time to plant tears,” and it will tell when to harvest their meanings. One can trust one’s living to a supraindividual rubric without erasing the distinction of an individual history. Thus a poet-speaker who watched the destructive repetitions of her “Weed” or tested the defi ning repetitions of her “Visits” can now write an “again” that is self-estranging without being self-destructive. This poem might demonstrate, in fact, a secular self-atonement: “Sestina” combines both the child’s grieving wishes and the grandmother’s forgiving wisdom

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when it divides its point of view between forward-looking youth and backward-looking age.45 Since the foretelling of rain and weeping is “only known to a grandmother,” since it is she who “hangs up the clever almanac” that scatters tears, since it is her crying that transfigures a crayoned picture of home, the poem suggests that one’s human past can predict one’s natural future— as well as the reconciliation of past sorrow that the future will bring.46 Bishop describes this chance again in a later letter about “re-creating a sort of de luxe Nova Scotia all over again” in Brazil, where she adds that “now I’m my own grandmother” (Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 676). She dramatizes self-grandmothering further, moreover, with the late poem “The Moose,” in which an evening bus trip west carries a long conversation of “Grandparents’ voices” that is both a remembered scene, “just as on all those nights,” and a future perspective—a glimpse from “Eternity” where things are “cleared up finally” (Complete Poems, 169– 73).47 The advancing elegy of this poem allows its speaker to fall asleep peacefully, sure that whatever she travels toward is safely preordained if not yet fully known. When she is jolted awake by an unexpected instance of domestic and spiritual assurance, a female moose both “high as a church” and “homely as a house,” such sublimely “otherworldly” homecoming only furthers the fi ndings of Bishop’s ordinary poetics—in which one’s existence is more mysterious as it is more reconciling, and in which the return of one’s desires comes with the forgoing of one’s control.

Love in Action Both these aspects of Bishop’s poetics contribute to her singular, subtle tone of observant introspection. Through her resistance to self-absorption, in fact, Bishop’s verse could serve to demonstrate the psychological connection between melancholia and narcissism.48 The connection, in turn, helps to explain why Bishop links everyday living to coupled life; in her work, the temporal facility of companionship is opposed to the temporal constrictions of egoism. Such constrictions are often indicated in the retention of tears: the poem “Chemin de Fer,” for example, describes the “little pond // where the dirty hermit lives” as “an old tear / holding onto its injuries / lucidly year after year” (Complete Poems, 8). Whether resentful or remorseful, steady “holding” seems to prevent any conversion of injuries,

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just as Peter’s heartsick weeping in “Roosters,” to take another example, “encrust[s]” a sculpture “thick / as a medieval relic” and seems to keep the apostle in an unforgiven state. There may be a similarly destructive, similarly retentive weeping in the stream of “The Weed,” the drops of which suggest Bishop’s notebook entry describing rain as a tearful eye,49 or even in the precious tear of “The Man-Moth,” which seems his “only possession.” If that heartsick figure and others conflate the maintenance of grief and the preservation of identity, Bishop’s poems suggest the comparison to be no more than a futile and even neurotic distrust of change. Consider the contrast between the fretful cata log of “Questions of Travel” and the joyful hymn of “Song for the Rainy Season”: the fi rst worries over “milelong, shiny, tearstains” that will become “waterfalls . . . in a quick age or so,” but the second celebrates the “rainbows or rain” in those same waterfalls, commanding a household to “rejoice!” in the present precisely because “a later / era will differ” (Complete Poems, 93– 94, 101– 2). Like the tearful rain of “Sestina,” the rainbow of this “Song” manifests an agreement with worldly time that discards melancholic anxiety— and effects, with this, the symbol of a reconciling covenant.50 “The house we live in” admits a “forgiving air” by remaining “open . . . to the white dew,” as Bishop writes, “and the milk-white sunrise.” Both the “house” and the “we” of this work are particu lar, since Bishop labels her poem with the address in Petrópolis where she lived with Lota de Macedo Soares for more than a decade. Here, she found a partnership that her verse already suggests would allow the timely rejoicing of her “Song.”51 Even in “Chemin de Fer,” the hermit suspects that “year after year” resentments would be cured by companionship: when he screams that “love should be put into action,” however, the echo that “trie[s] and trie[s] to confi rm” his plea seems as powerless as Echo herself to undo Narcissus-like traits.52 Better confi rmation requires someone to whom the hermit, like the man-moth, could hand over his tear. In “Rain Towards Morning,” for example, the “unexpected kiss” of another seems to free a cage of “frightening birds” and bring the “brightening” downpour that makes dawn a liberation (Complete Poems, 77). An unfi nished draft from Bishop’s notebooks imagines a similar freedom when it suggests that “the faint nausea before sunrise / when . . . defi nitions go on & on” will cease if the speaker can “see you at their conclusions” (VC 75.3a). Bishop demonstrates the same sort of trust, too, in the unpublished poem beginning

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“It is marvellous to wake up together” and chronicling a dawn thunderstorm. “Without surprise,” the speaker tells her partner, “the world might change to something quite different, / As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking, / Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking” (Edgar Allan Poe, 44). Here, a couple’s shifting love is part of the earth’s daily weather: both are particular to the pair yet beyond their conscious “thinking.” A faith in the unsurprising marvel of one supports confidence in the unsurprising marvel of the other. This is the judgment, as well, of “The Shampoo,” the poem that concludes A Cold Spring and the last of the volume to be written (Complete Poems, 84). This work describes the human, natural routine of washing someone’s hair outdoors and provides Bishop’s fullest suggestion of the power in companionate dailiness. Like Frost’s “In the Home Stretch,” it argues that couples can trust in quotidian time. However much she disliked Frost’s poetry, in fact, Bishop may have been aware of her Frostian affi nities here: in a 1953 letter to Randall Jarrell, she describes Frost’s work as a “lichen-covered stone” (One Art, 283),53 and “The Shampoo” begins by describing “lichens” that grow like “still explosions on the rocks.” Their rings will one day “meet the rings around the moon,” Bishop explains, “although / within our memories they have not changed”: if concentric fungi chart time’s cyclic progress and predict a future meeting with heavenly fate, the speaker can acknowledge the evolution while asserting that lichens are unaltered. Or rather, she asserts that they are unaltered “within our memories,” a word that suggests both the span of a life and the preservative power of recollection. One’s own perception may determine the pace of change, because “Time” is “nothing if not amenable,” as Bishop writes at the end of the second stanza. Her capital letter emphasizes her idealistic point: meaningless except as a mental construct, time must be subject to thought to be anything at all. But Bishop’s poem would not assert authority so much as strengthen an association between human and inhuman timeliness; the second stanza begins: “And since the heavens will attend / as long on us.” The reference of “as long” seems deliberately ambiguous. Is this as long as the moon waits for the lichens’ growth, perhaps, or as long as the speaker and her partner perceive no change in that growth, or simply as long as these spouses have memories at all? All possibilities imply an interdependence of desire and

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inevitability, and all perceive a steady agreement between human and heavenly practice without deciding on cause or effect. Indeed, the tone of “amenable” forbids any logic of control, suggesting that temporal progress is as off-handedly gracious as the persuasive drift of this poem. The modesty of “attend,” too, evokes notice and ser vice; the word implies that the fatal gaze of destiny is also the subordinate executor of one’s plans— maybe, even, of one’s delay, since “attendance,” especially to one of Bishop’s fluency in French, could indicate waiting. The companionate speaker of this poem thus seems to correct the isolated poet of “Quai d’Orléans,” who wishes that “what we see” could “forget us.” Here, a poet celebrates the fact that the world will remember her and her partner just as she and her partner remember the natural world. Earthly patterns both mimic and model an ordinary patience. When Bishop chides her friend for being “precipitate and pragmatical,” therefore, she recommends precisely this patience, cautioning against the unseemly speed or unnecessary action that would quicken the mortality of “shooting stars in your black hair.”54 Bishop’s daily poetics resists the vector of these star tracks, rejecting as much as Frost does the effort to “get somewhere.” Like Frost, moreover, Bishop suggests that this rejection can slow or reverse the effects of aging; she writes to a friend, for example, that she “stopped getting gray” soon after moving to Brazil and is even “much less gray than I was a year ago!” (VC 32.2) “The Shampoo” seeks the same result for her partner, through a marital round as longstanding as heavenly attention: “Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,” the poem concludes, “battered and shiny like the moon.” As this worn, familiar tool models the amenability of the cosmos, the tin and suds of its routine baptism predict the “forgiving air” of rock and water from Bishop’s “Song for the Rainy Season” while amplifying the harmony in that song’s fi rst-person plural.55 Together, both poems imply, “we” can make time our own. Bishop implies the same by contrastive example in “Crusoe in England,” since this poem combines absence of a partner with Bishop’s most significant example of a horrific everyday (Complete Poems, 162– 66). Throughout his pointedly unformal, free-verse monologue, Crusoe can speak only of that time before and after Friday— and mostly of that unbearable span before this companion arrived, a period of undifferentiated accumulation where to “have given years, or taken a few” amounts to the

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same thing. Here, diurnal returns mean unending sameness rather than revision or development, and Crusoe’s anaphora is a pointless reiteration by which “the sun set in the sea; the same odd sun / rose from the sea.”56 The Christian hero of Defoe’s novel maintains his “Reckoning of Time” (Defoe, Robinson, 64);57 as William Empson describes in a study that Bishop admired, the original Crusoe keeps his “sanity and his accounts” (Empson, Some Versions, 204).58 But Bishop’s secular everyman forgoes that reckoning, yielding to the insanity of the unaccountable. He lives in a deranged dreamworld where “nightmares” present “infi nities / of islands” that he must inhabit. The horror of this infi nity lies in its lack of distinction, the same that compares “fifty-two / miserable, small volcanoes I could climb”: these turn weekly progress into a field of futile alternatives.59 Bishop’s Crusoe does not resist this insignificance with everyday poesis; when he takes “time enough to play with names,” even linguistic craft becomes one more alteration without consequence. Crusoe knows the life and art that he wants instead, since he yearns for “something a little different.” But perception of difference depends on the operations of memory: the faculty comparing each day with yesterday and thereby allowing the creative perception of differing consistency as well as the artistic construction of metaphoric movement. Crusoe on his island cannot manage this specifically human account. His drunken dance “among the goats,” for instance, a bacchanal that reverses the prodigal’s drunken exclusion from the barn, could signal a perverse disavowal of the recollection that benefits as well as burdens consciousness. Crusoe would ignore its responsibility, “go[ing] home” in melancholic resignation rather than mournful authority. Crusoe’s bitter acceptance of a “home-made” status, in fact, bespeaks that narcissistic choice; when he asks, “What’s wrong about self-pity?” he assures himself that “ ‘pity should begin at home.’ ” This means that “the more / pity I felt, the more I felt at home,” and if both Freud’s and Klein’s theories link a sense of persecution to a melancholic despair, “Crusoe in England” demonstrates the debilitating result.60 This hero’s endurance of exile might become a reparative domestication only if his adopted “home” could be a site of revision: to reverse his own words, his island must be “rediscovered” and “renamable.” Yet it cannot be either as long as Crusoe is unable to correct mistaken books with his own selfconstitutive rhetoric.

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Crusoe will be unable to do so, it seems, as long as he is alone: when he tries to remember what he knows, and fi nds his own account books “full of blanks,” his truncated recitation of Wordsworth stops at “that inward eye, / which is the bliss . . .” (Wordsworth, Selected, 191). To Wordsworth, memory arises from solitude, but Crusoe’s precise elision shows that his retrospective happiness comes with company. Like Frost’s wife in “In the Home Stretch,” he can “recit[e]” his poetic recollections only when speaking to someone else— only when speaking to Friday, perhaps, for this friend provides Crusoe with a solution to undifferentiated infi nity. “Just when I thought I couldn’t stand it / another minute longer, Friday came,” he reports. Through its evocation of weekend relief, Friday’s name links the benefits of a calendar and a companion, suggesting that the presence of another enables a quotidian consistency combining change and distinction. With its evocation of a human anniversary, moreover, Friday’s presence indicates that the “inward eye” of recollection requires the same companionship: “I call’d him so for the Memory of the Time,” writes Defoe’s hero of his choice (Defoe, Robinson, 206). Friday maintains the retrospective development of Bishop’s desired anaphora, a “day” as recurrently significant as the one ordering marriage in Frost’s “West-Running Brook.” Friday marks the possibility of meaningful existence among meaningless repetition. It is precisely that existence, then, that the solitary Crusoe must elide in this poem; if “accounts of that have everything all wrong,” as he asserts of his relationship, he can no more correct them than he can “re-name” his island. Instead, his account of Friday is as repetitively dull as an island wave. “Friday was nice. / Friday was nice, and we were friends,” he states. As the fi nal lines of the poem reveal, Friday is gone:61 in the absence of this quotidian figure, Crusoe can no more elegize his friend than he can practice the everyday living that his friend exemplified.62 When the rediscoveries of memory depend on another, this poem asks, how does one remember that person? How does one live in time without Friday? Alone “in England,” Crusoe endures a posthumous existence that denies his past any present meaning: “My eyes rest on it and pass on,” he says of one former tool. Here, a poetry animated by “looked and looked” forsakes the task of re-vision. The possibility of real mourning, and the possibility of real living, seem both to be gone with the loss of a loving companion.

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At a Loss Perhaps even such loss, however, is a means of continuing. “One Art,” published five years later, seems to test this possibility when its villanelle catalogue of absence culminates at the inclusion of “you” (Complete Poems, 178). Bishop tried to write villanelles throughout her life, particularly during periods of guilt or uncertainty, and the form’s exactingly repetitive template seems as pertinent to her everyday formalism as the pattern of a sestina.63 Yet “One Art,” the single villanelle that Bishop published and a poem written at a particularly anguished time,64 does not endorse the lesson of “Sestina” by finding succor in a progress of changing returns. Rather, the poem presses repetition into its opposite, making an enduring pattern out of the fact that nothing will endure. Like Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn,” therefore, Bishop’s work uses its farewells to achieve a mastery of repetition composed of skill at surrender. Like the poet of “The Auroras,” moreover, the poet of “One Art” can overcome guilt through this aim, since to “accept” disaster and believe in the “intent” of things to be lost is to refuse any culpability in their passing. In “One Art,” reparation is needless, and a speaker can recurrently try to relinquish rather than recurrently strive to revise. That effort could effect the end of aesthetic craft in a fatalism as indifferent as Crusoe’s free-verse drift. “One Art,” however, suggests the opposite; in a consistency of flux, transience can be an authoritative “practice.” Thus as Bishop balances varying, growing “disaster[s]” with a consistent claim of artistry proven true— or made “evident”—by each repetition of her thesis, her returns cast passive depredation as an active execution. The “I” of this poem uses her formalist power to achieve the selfcontrol of self-denial rather than self-discovery. The only crack in that control, moreover, yields to a parenthetical auto-admonishment to “write it!”: this exclamation, a shaming of one’s own shame, performs a ruthless self-estrangement that forces a poet to submit even her greatest fear to rhetorical form. Only such rigor allows Bishop to state that she “shan’t have lied,” as she writes in the last stanza, where a future perfect verb looks back on the pain to come. The victim who can cast loss as a chosen pattern becomes the poet who claims for her art what loss lies ahead. The progress of Bishop’s drafts dramatizes this transition, showing how a passage that made a lover’s absence “one exception,” for example, yields in

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later versions to a stanza in which accession to the villanelle’s repetitions refuses any sorrow’s exceptionalism (Millier, Bishop: Life, 506–13; Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe, 223–40). The refusal, however, admits the pathos in its stringency—in the penultimate line’s replacement of “isn’t hard” with “not too hard,” for instance, or in the exhortation to write. In fact, this pathos seems to be the point of Bishop’s bitter and even self-mocking tone. However tempting it is to see this much-anthologized poem as a formalist triumph,65 its extremity questions the worth of the craft it demonstrates. “I’ll try to keep on living, at least,” Bishop writes to Anny Baumann soon after completing “One Art,” and her poem tests the limits of that “least,” its pattern extending further and further on less and less (VC 23.8). It seems difficult, ultimately, to imagine how such prospect could be enough— even Stevens’s farewells, after all, seek the confi rming return of “tomorrow”—and Bishop herself may have found it equally hard, given that she continues to strive for a remembering, repeating tomorrow in her later work. This is evident in her decision to end Geography III with “Five Flights Up,” for example, despite the fact that “One Art” was the last poem of the collection to be written. Bishop would rather lift than lose her yesterday. This is evident as well in some of the unfi nished poems that she was composing as she assembled Geography III. “Aubade and Elegy,” for example, which Bishop began after Soares’s death, suggests the connection of elegiac and everyday poetry that could make one’s past a way forward and one’s progress a look back (Edgar Allan Poe, 149). It demonstrates, moreover, Bishop’s continued awareness of the formalism this possibility requires; the poem would turn personal experience into impersonal pattern by fitting its deaths and dawns into two poetic genres. Bishop’s drafts, however, show the continued difficulty of achieving ordinary anaphora, as the recurrence of her unfinished work remains trapped in the horrible insistence of an untransfigured grief: “Not there! & not there!” one line cries. The poem’s description of sunrise routines asserts the impossibility of the one rising the speaker desires; “no coffee can wake you no coffee can wake you no coffee,” a draft page begins.66 Another beginning seems even more compulsively reiterative, suggesting the speaker’s deathly wish to join her subject: “Perhaps for the tenth time the tenth time today,” Bishop writes, “and still early morning I wake it’s like waking / wake and go under the wave” (Edgar Allan Poe, 220). Burdened with self-blame, the poet cannot

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evade what one line calls “regret and guilt, the nighttime horro[r]s”; she cannot escape the nocturnal melancholia that keeps her from an atoning morning (Edgar Allan Poe, 219).67 If the repetitions of “Sestina” show the peaceful progress of reconciliation, the repetitions of “Aubade and Elegy” chant a destructive rhythm of remorse. One reason for this remorse, it seems, is the poem’s failure to affi rm what “Sestina” could: a conflation of tears and rain that allows personal sorrow the impersonal transformation of natural process. Bishop includes such sympathy in “Aubade and Elegy” through loosely translated lines from Miguel Hernández’s “Elegía”; “I want the mint to be weeping / of the land you occupy,” she writes (Edgar Allan Poe, 221).68 The very need for another’s words, however, may indicate her own doubt in the world’s grief, and a similar distrust pervades drafts of “Florida Revisited,” a late, unfi nished poem of seemingly equal futility. Bishop revisits a landscape where nothing has changed, where the sunsets and dews of night and morning are no different, and she fi nds this daily consistency to be as frustrating as Crusoe’s. A Florida that “goes on and on, more or less the same” is a world that flouts the irrefutable “deaths” and lost love in human experience (Edgar Allan Poe, 177–78). One therefore “hates the Florida one knows,” Bishop concludes, and “the Florida one knew”; one hates, that is, the lack of difference between those two states. Their consistency dooms the incipient elegy of this draft as surely as exact repetition dooms the incipient elegy of Bishop’s poem for Soares, confi ning the speaker in what may again be shame. “Florida Revisited” remembers the reprimand of Bishop’s “A Drunkard” as well as the anxiety of Bishop’s dream poems when its speaker picks up a charred object on the beach that she takes to be a “dead, black bird.” Yet if these drafts prove the enduring challenge of an ordinary, worldly, and conventional mourning, their unfi nished status is not the fi nal verdict on Bishop’s aims. She goes on to fi nish a different elegy, and a different meditation on place, that defi nes her revisionary everyday poetics as much as does “Anaphora” or “Sestina.”69 Published after Bishop’s fi nal collection, in memory of her friend and fellow poet Lowell, “North Haven” replaces a hateful Florida seascape with the beloved Maine island where Bishop spent her summers from 1974 through 1979. There, she found the best example of the ordinary routines and “natural pace” that she had so long sought (Complete Poems, 188–89; One Art, 76). Bishop even kept a regular diary during

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these summers, a record of time that demonstrates sustained confidence in its movements. It focuses in particu lar on ordinary movements, reserving its most scornful passage for the idea of “ ‘witnessing history’ ” in televised Watergate hearings: Bishop would rather be witnessing sunsets, sunrises, rain flowers, meals, birds, walks, and outings (quoted in Costello, Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 209). In such unhistorical dailiness, she could wake at dawn singing a morning hymn; she could rediscover faith in the ineffable creature of sunrise; she could imagine, like Stevens, that the deepest happiness may be to have “only the same moods that the weather has.” 70 She could inhabit a human existence agreeing to natural change. The nature of that change allows Bishop’s serenity in North Haven and “North Haven,” since it compares to the constitutive pattern of “Sestina” rather than the changing flux of “Quai d’Orléans” or the irrevocable absence of “One Art.” In fact, North Haven proves the misapprehension of Bishop’s villanelle; while she initially thought that her Maine summers belonged in its cata logue of renunciation, she later found that she could after all return to her “beautiful island.”71 Such unexpected restitution suggests an art of claiming as well as losing, and she writes in her diary that she “want[s] now . . . to learn the name of everything” (quoted in Costello, Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 210). In the same sentence, though, Bishop also fears that she may be “too late” for learning, that she has lost her chance: if the time of “North Haven” is not eternal change, it is not eternal sameness, either. Bishop’s careful specificity with labels seems so contrary to Crusoe’s “play with names” because she believes that no sunrise is a “same odd sun” and admits that the revisited North Haven will never be “immutab[le].” The fourth stanza of Bishop’s poem emphasizes as much, describing how The Goldfi nches are back, or others like them, and the White-throated Sparrow’s five-note song, pleading and pleading, brings tears to the eyes. Nature repeats herself, or almost does: repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise. Nature enacts not cyclic duplication but changing rhythm, with each same-but-different recurrence acknowledging what has been lost in its “almost” consistency— admitting, that is, that last year’s goldfi nches may

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be gone.72 Even human death seems to take a place in this general pattern, since the difference between leaving one summer and leaving “for good,” in the fi nal stanza, could be as simple as the difference between two seasons described here. While the poet of “Florida Revisited,” then, hates the world’s hostile endurance, the poet of “North Haven” welcomes the world’s sympathetic continuity, a difference-in-sameness that will bear and be “bearable” to any mortal.73 Indeed, one’s regret at mortality can paradoxically be part of one’s welcome, just as the sparrow’s “pleading and pleading” can lament the recursions that its music perpetuates. When the weeping of this poem enters almost tangentially, coming after nothing more somber than descriptions of summer, the subtlety demonstrates that a seasonal or diurnal world is already a sorrowful one. Every ordinary day is made of previous days; every accustomed August must remember other summers; every genuine aubade must be inherently elegiac. Every pastoral landscape, moreover, must be part of a pastoral elegy, and “North Haven” replaces Crusoe’s melancholic England with an island that can mourn.74 Once again, Bishop’s beneficent everyday living fulfi lls poetic convention by imitating environmental process; the hexameter concluding each verse of “North Haven” adapts the Spenserian stanzaic structure of Shelley’s pastoral elegy even as it takes its shape from the “long, carded horse’s-tail” of a passing cloud.75 The conflation extends Bishop’s mastery of everyday forms by fi nding worldly loss to be a template for human creation— a “scheme of schemes,” in Cook’s words, implicit in “Repeat, repeat, repeat; revise, revise, revise” (Against Coercion, 43). Here are the syllables of an assenting anaphora, the beats of a pastoral alexandrine, and the end words of a reparative “Sestina”: this six-part rhythm provides the order of future poems as well as the progress of future summers. Like the writer of “Sestina,” therefore, the writer of “North Haven” need not— must not— seek an end to its grieving, and the poem describes a life and a craft that would not be consoled. Rather, it seems to console its subject, passed from the tears and pleading of earthly existence. In this, Bishop revises the generic tradition she repeats, since pastoral elegies often describe a better, otherworldly place for the dead. In Spenser’s “November” eclogue, for instance, Colin Clout ends his song with the promise of a pastoral heaven (Spenser, Shorter Poems, 143–44), and in Shelley’s “Adonais,” Keats’s spirit is fortunately free from mortal “decay” (Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 401). An earthly “day by

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day,” to Shelley, means only the “fear and grief ” that death can lift. But Bishop’s “day by day” means sustaining revision, not declining rot, and her pastures are not the flawed model for Spenser’s “Elisian fieldes” or Shelley’s eternal abode but themselves the only haven or north star possible.76 When Bishop’s subject has “left / for good,” therefore, she does not consider the possible “good” of literary immortality or spiritual eternality. Instead, she reminds Lowell in her fi nal lines that he “can’t derange, or re-arrange” his “poems again.” “Sad friend,” she concludes, “you cannot change”: in Bishop’s elegy, it is the elegiac subject who is “sad.” Her mourning pities the dead who can no longer mourn. This conclusion thereby conceals “an unnerving hint of triumph,” as Marks notes (“Bishop’s Art,” 202), and banishes the guilt that attends Bishop’s more tormented grief.77 Choice of subject undoubtedly contributes to this confidence, since Lowell was not someone whom Bishop ever felt she needed to “save.” He was rather someone, perhaps, whom she felt she needed to overcome.78 Her poem counters a debilitating sense of responsibility with this enlivening sense of rivalry; like Shelley and Milton and perhaps even Spenser before her, Bishop uses an elegy for another shepherd to empower her own song. Lowell provides particularly fit subject for this purpose, moreover, because his art is as revisionary as Bishop’s own: as the fi nal lines of “North Haven” recognize, and as Lowell himself professed, he is a poet who “rewrote” rather than wrote (Lowell, Collected Poems, 532). Lowell’s changes, though, are not Bishop’s, and in fact the term marks a point of discord between them; after reading Lowell’s draft manuscript of The Dolphin, which includes and alters private correspondence from his second wife, Bishop wrote to him in protest, “You have changed her letters” (One Art, 562). Her horror at Lowell’s alterations seems to compound her distaste for his exposure, demonstrating her belief that unauthorized changes abandon the very truth that could endorse a real transformation.79 Whereas Lowell saw revision as the redoing of once-fi nished work, perhaps, Bishop saw revision as the recognition of achieved form. Her changes would not come from presenting a different version of events but from allowing the implicit development of one event’s difference.80 Bishop’s changes, moreover, would take that development from natural fact, thereby forbidding the unjustified and even insane modifications that she had feared since “Visits to St. Elizabeths.” Her scrupulous reportage in “North Haven” thus guards against what she perceives as a Lowell-like

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“derangement” in her own revisionary poetics, and if Lowell’s re-creations of his life aspire to be a volume of History, Bishop’s would try to learn the lessons of Geography III.81 The observant opening stanza of “North Haven” proves this geographical focus at once, establishing authority while remaining simple enough to be an entry in Bishop’s diary: “I can make out the rigg ing of a schooner / a mile off,” Bishop begins; “I can count / the new cones on the spruce.” The first-person poet asserts her power in the very deference of a farsighted gaze. Such vision still allows poetic imagination, and in the second stanza, when Bishop admits that “the islands haven’t shifted since last summer, / even if I like to pretend they have,” she amplifies rather than suppresses her pretense—going on to suppose that the islands are “drifting . . . and that they’re free within the blue frontiers of bay.” Yet her license seems less to alter the world than to admit the world’s own power to alter; here, it is the islands that are free. When Bishop names “North Haven” for the first time in the poem’s final stanza, she honors just that freedom, writing that the island is “anchored in its rock, / afloat in mystic blue.” Consistent but changing, tethered to substance and yet hovering in ethereality, Bishop’s actual world is capable of anything a poet can conceive. Or of anything a fellow poet can conceive: Bishop writes in a letter to Frank Bidart that “ ‘mystic blue’ is I think a steal from Cal, isn’t it?” (One Art, 625) Cal was Lowell’s nickname. Bishop’s poem, then, does not just pity or defeat its subject but also welcomes him to the elegiac project—by invoking the “sea-haze of gauze blue / distance” from Lowell’s sequence “Long Summer,” for example, as well as recalling that work’s report of “a cata logue / of ships” (Lowell, Notebook, 10, 9).82 The tone of “North Haven” furthers this sense of inclusion with a fi rst-person plural as companionably ordinary as that of “The Shampoo.” North Haven is “our favorite” island in the second stanza, and the list of flowers and birds in that verse implies a mutual notice, as if Bishop were taking up a routine task that Lowell can no longer perform but that nevertheless belongs to both of them. Allusion to the “incandescent stars” from Moore’s “Marriage” (Complete Poems, 63), as well as quotation of the marriage song in Love’s Labour’s Lost, also supports the idea that coupled living may be part of the island’s repetitions.83 That idea, moreover, defers again to Lowell’s poetic record: while Lowell and Bishop avoided marriage in different Maine locations years before,84 Maine was to him a place of love’s labor, as Bishop’s fi fth stanza reports:

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Years ago, you told me it was here (in 1932?) you fi rst “discovered girls” and learned to sail, and learned to kiss. You had “such fun,” you said, that classic summer. (“Fun”—it always seemed to leave you at a loss . . . ) In “Long Summer,” Lowell looks back on just such a 1930s season; thus Bishop’s retrospective notice of Lowell’s retrospective work includes her friend’s poetry in the vital recollection that her own verse would enact. “Long Summer,” in fact, may present Lowell’s work at its most Bishoplike. Extensively revised—parts appearing differently in the two editions of Notebook before they are reworked in History and Selected Poems—the work in its original uses schemes of worldly cyclicity to consider times of human life.85 Lowell’s poetry did not end with that inquiry, however. He moves from the quotidian seasons of Notebook to the impersonal dates of History before concluding, fi nally, with the uncertain moments of Day by Day. This fi nal volume all but abandons the temporal patterns in his earlier sonnets, instead recording the “expiring chill” of that brief time a poet has left: “Who knows if the live season / will add tomorrow to today?” Lowell asks in one poem, and wonders in another “where is our pastoral adolescence?” (Collected Poems, 747, 775, 772).86 He responds to this doubt and loss, moreover, with an art that would accurately capture “passing facts” (838); this conservation seems the mere but possible ambition left to his writing. Bishop’s “North Haven” suggests her difference from such an aesthetic, doubting a summer that is seen to be “classic” rather than allowed to be continual. In her description, the preserving fi xity of Lowell’s memory can only leave him “at a loss.”87 Her phrase casts him as a potential elegist even as it convicts him of an inability to put absence into words; it suggests, therefore, that “North Haven” may seek to write for its subject what its subject regrettably could not. The poem would replace his single, paradigmatic season with a pattern of repeated and changing time, or his confusion about fun and loss with an acceptance of their connection. Bishop would demonstrate a memory allowing the continued evolution of the very world it preserves. In “North Haven,” this comes in a poetry modeled on the sparrow’s song: a fi nal parentheses suggests their lyric to be nature’s revisionary alternative to deranged rewriting.

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The meaning of such song could apply not only to Lowell “years ago” but to Lowell now, since twin ellipses suggest that Lowell’s bewildered distance from a 1932 North Haven may compare to his fi nal, mortal, distance from the island. Bishop’s amenable approach to leave-taking, that is, may extend even to one’s ultimate departure from earthly fun. Indeed Bishop’s elegiac practice seems to promise some mitigation of leaving “for good”: the bird’s pleading, after all, continues to “change again” as these sparrows “or others like them” return summer after summer. When poetic creation joins this ongoing worldly elegy, a poet’s revisionary progress might extend its designs beyond individual vision and control—just as that “mystic blue” continues to float in other views and verses.88 Bishop cannot entirely share Frost’s belief that earthly music perpetuates a human “oversound,” or Stevens’s belief that it forever heralds renewal. Yet as she takes the conviction of her poems and days from the repetitions of mournful sparrows, as she takes the assurance of her lines and living from the anaphora of atoning suns, she trusts an “abidance,” as she writes in “Poem,” that is wider than her own measures (Complete Poems, 176–77). She crafts in her everyday rhythms an “assent” that might well be endless.

Chapter Four The Cosmic Dawnings of James Merrill

Teller of Time “alone, one can but toy with imagery,” James Merrill w ri t e s in the early poem “Hourglass,” and many readers have found the line all too characteristic (Collected Poems, 16). Dismissals of Merrill as a toying aesthete extend from initial reviews to posthumous assessments: “frigid and dry as diagrams,” Louise Bogan writes of his poems in 1951 (“Verse,” 110); “too beautiful to be great,” Adam Kirsch agrees half a century later (“All That Glitters,” 44). A recent review suspects that Merrill’s “refinement” and “intricacy of design,” as well as his “mannered” and “rococo” style, may “insist[] too often on being clever” (Kleinzahler, “Changing”). Merrill’s development counters this judgment in at least two ways: through autobiographical honesty, as references to his life imbue accomplished poems with emotional importance, and through spiritual curiosity, as details of his séances provide aesthetic style with a life-and-death significance. Some readers would choose between these two strains of his work, separating the writer of lyrics about “LOV E & LOSS” (Sandover, 176) from the writer of three long poems about the Ouija board.1 But most readers seek, rightly, to relate them. David Lehman, for example, describes a career-long craftsmanship in which the trilogy demonstrates Merrill’s fi nding and breaking of forms; David Kalstone reads a project of self-fashioning in which Merrill’s “strange sci-fi world” provides an “autobiographical

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theater”; Timothy Materer traces a theoretical investigation in which séances conclude Merrill’s fascination with apocalypse.2 My analysis hopes to further such efforts at a unified, adequate reading of Merrill’s poetry by showing how the poet’s concern with rhetorical form, retrospective themes, and reincarnation theories also manifests his attention to a significant pattern. This pattern is evident not only in the design of Merrill’s “Hourglass,” with its recurrent turnings; it is also manifest, more broadly, in the design of Merrill’s hours. It is the day-after-day order of repetitive time. An everyday existence was Merrill’s “real specialty,” as his nephew remembers, “the art of living” (Magowan, Memoirs, 110). It pervades his poetry from fi rst to last: from “Three Chores” to “Morning Exercise,” in the early composition “From Morning Into Morning” and the posthumously published “Days of 1994,” in a volume of Nights and Days and a volume of Late Settings.3 The details of ordinary living also fi ll Merrill’s many letters, which often served as poetic rough drafts.4 Merrill’s quotidian existence, though, is an essential structure as well as subject; he relishes the rounds of “Morning” and “Days” and Settings as much or more than their content. Trust in the ordinary thus bolsters his trust in both the extraordinary and the artful, as the pattern of recurrent time links a poet who toys with sand turned over, an autobiographer who writes an “over and over” life (Collected Poems, 139), and a medium who contemplates a universe named “Sandover.” Repetition shows that Merrill’s rhetorical fi nish may be less a dandyish detachment than a willful heightening of ordinary rhythms and that Merrill’s reincarnation theory may be less an esoteric occultism than a deliberate extension of ordinary risings. In his formalism and in his philosophy, Merrill codifies the promise of daily recurrence. An analysis of this recurrence might therefore complement Nick Halpern’s recent contrast of “everyday” and “prophetic” voices in Merrill’s work by showing how the poet’s focus on everyday practice grounds and prompts his prophetic ambitions.5 An analysis of recurrence may also complement other assessments of Merrill’s unity. It can suggest how the creation and decreation that Lehman describes may be part of a larger cycle governing Merrill’s thought, for example, or how the autobiographical forms that Kalstone explicates may relate to the ecological system in Merrill’s spiritualism or how the apocalyptic vision that Materer perceives may underestimate Merrill’s belief in temporal continuity.6 This last is particularly important because Materer describes a significant aspect of this poet’s philosophy;

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Merrill as much as Stevens describes the lure of timelessness beside the benefits of time. Merrill does so, moreover, for Stevensian reasons, countering a dread of destruction that Materer rightly identifies: diurnal cycles advance as well as return, and Merrill lives a “calm flowing,” in the words of “Hourglass,” as much as a recurrent order. Over time, consistent grinding of sand on glass will quicken each repetition and draw one closer to annihilation. In Merrill’s words, minutes will fi lter “swifterly through the waste all will.” His temporal poetics steadily acknowledges this fearful “waste,” and in the later parts of Sandover, in par ticu lar, it leads him to distrust a debilitating temporal fluency. Yet he assuages this fear not only with the dream of a static eternity, a fi xity that is perhaps impossible, but also with the possibility of recurrent vitality, a pattern that is reassuringly quotidian. As in Stevens’s work, again, these ordinary rounds in Merrill’s verse predict the iterations of life and afterlife by proving the interrelation of body and soul or matter and mind. This link is suggested even in “Hourglass,” since the emblem symbolizes “the soul’s crystal and the body’s dust,” as Merrill writes. The hourglass shows that the wear of time means the gradual intermingling of flesh and spirit. Everyday repetition thus provides a form for the dualism that Stephen Yenser emphasizes in the best book-length study of Merrill, as well as a model for the metaphoricity that Yenser and J. D. McClatchy rightly place at the center of Merrill’s poetry.7 Moreover, everyday time proves the stakes of dualistic or metaphoristic transformations. Merrill’s everyday world is not only a paradise of Keatsian dreaming, in which one repeatedly perceives the truth of one’s fictions, but also a vale of Keatsian soul making, in which one recurrently accretes the stuff of one’s immortality.8 Merrill’s version of happiness draws from a Keatsian— or Proustian—“here after” of continued return.9 “Hourglass” does not achieve this quotidian bliss. But it does suggest what will help Merrill to do so: “Love only is replenishment of halves,” this work concludes. As much as the routine kiss of “To the Reader,” the regular gathering of “Hourglass” depends on a specific “you,” and throughout, Merrill’s ordinary poetry may be second only to Frost’s in its pervasive focus on couples. With Frost, he compares the recurrences of time with the recurrences of companionship; with Frost, too, he suggests that the promise of such time depends on the health of such partnership. Merrill’s trilogy, for instance, learns the wisdom of reincarnation in a

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paired routine that models heavenly revisions.10 Merrill’s focus differs from Frost’s, certainly; perhaps most obviously, his relationships are homosexual and therefore less concerned with “common law.”11 More important, his partnerships are reparative and therefore more concerned with common guilt. Merrill’s sense of companionate living shows an affinity with Bishop’s going home as well as with Frost’s “home stretch,” since Merrill would repair the “Broken Home” (Collected Poems, 197) effected by his parents’ divorce when he was nine: as McClatchy and Yenser explain, this central split may prompt Merrill’s habit of “seeing double.”12 Merrill uses daily returns to repair a dualistic division that is also a family drama. If humans have “broken faith with Nature,” as Merrill notes in an interview (Collected Prose, 114), he would right his father’s wrong by tuning his art and life to an earthly cadence.13 Merrill’s spousal verse thus seems to evoke Stevens’s romance with the revolving inamorata in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” and when Merrill titles his Ouija-board epic The Changing Light at Sandover, he rewrites the “living changingness” of light in which Stevens will meet his beloved “mundo” (Stevens, Collected, 329; Merrill, Sandover, 92). Merrill adapts that meeting more fully at the end of “Clearing the Title,” in which Stevens’s globe revolving in crystal becomes a globe “spun by a gold key-chain round and round” (Collected Poems, 410). Here, as in Stevens, a returning world assures the poet of ongoing renewal for his own life and lines. Indeed, “Clearing the Title” suggests the full range of Merrill’s quotidian rounds, since this spinning globe concludes a poem of remarriage and reconciliation as well as revolving. Like Frost’s “In the Home Stretch,” Merrill’s poem narrates the resettling of late-middle-aged spouses who are threatened by possible ends; like Bishop’s “Anaphora,” Merrill’s poem sees the assent of a Key West sunset as the transfiguration of memory. It seems fitting that the cleared “Title” is not just a deed of ownership to an unbroken home but also a name for Merrill’s trilogy—thereby pointing out the quotidian essence of Sandover as it relates that long poem to an equally quotidian collection of shorter lyrics. Daily existence extends Merrill’s earliest projects.14 With this, it furthers older and wider projects as well, including a romantic, pragmatic, everyday poetics that this book has traced through twentieth-century American verse. Merrill’s dislike for Wordsworth and seeming ignorance of William James or Emerson mean that he can seem

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out of place in an American or romanticist strain. Merrill’s deep debts to Stevens and Bishop, however, as well as his less obvious but important debt to Frost,15 confi rm a sensibility that would join these writers in addressing the problems of self-consciousness with an art of ordinary existence. Like these forebears, Merrill suggests that his project is a legacy of nineteenth-century verse; when the fi nal stanza of “Clearing the Title” joins the reddened “bars” of a departing day with the “stars / Or periods” of an oncoming night, Merrill’s sunset echoes the “bloom” of “barred clouds” in “To Autumn” and the heavenly “star” in “Adonais” as well as the ordinary evenings of American predecessors (Keats, Complete Poems, 361; Shelley, Poetry and Prose, 406). As much as Frost, Stevens, and Bishop, Merrill strives to marry a Keatsian poetry of the earth with a Shelleyan poetry of eternity. When his effort struggles against the enervating “over and over” that threatens Frost’s ordinary couples or the constricting “sense of shame” that shadow’s Bishop’s quotidian speakers, when it struggles—above all— against the annihilating “disaster” that menaces Stevens’s unexceptional man-heroes, Merrill agrees with these poets that the gravest perils are concomitant with a commonplace situation. Yet he agrees with them, too, that a time-bound condition might overcome the hazards it engenders; in the drama of every day, repetition may turn the debilitations of progress into the confi rmation of perpetuity. If Merrill learned of this drama from other poets, though, he might have learned it best from Proust; Merrill himself, and almost all of his critics, cite this novelist as his “greatest influence” (Collected Prose, 119). Proust’s twentieth-century version of the Arabian Nights uses daily, developing return as the model for a modernist artistic practice, and Proust’s narrator writes and lives “in the anxiety of not knowing whether the master of my destiny might not prove less indulgent than the Sultan Shahriyar, whether in the morning, when I broke off my story, he would consent to a further reprieve and permit me to resume my narrative the following evening” (Time Regained, 524). Merrill’s view of Proust links him to the aesthetic of the ordinary that this study would analyze: Merrill posits, for instance, that Proust was the anachronistic ghostwriter of Thoreau’s Walden as well as the declared author of À la recherche du temps perdu, explaining that both books reveal a “reclusive temperament given to worldly images” and comprise “set pieces wherein nature is seen revolving through seasonal prisms” (Collected Prose, 601). In this surprisingly apt comparison, Merrill describes

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some of his own central aims as he reveals part of what he found so valuable in his favorite writer: an aestheticist realism that takes its form from earthly cyclicity.16 When Merrill begins to write something similar, his daily poems pay tribute to Proust’s nightly narrative.

Same Old Story Merrill’s tribute is explicit in “For Proust.” This poem appears in Water Street, a volume that marks Merrill’s turn to his own history,17 and his homage proves the importance of repetition to this project:18 here, the return of the past is itself a continually posed assignment. “Over and over,” the fi rst stanza explains, something would remain Unbalanced in the painful sum of things. Past midnight you arose, rang for your things. You had to go into the world again. (Collected Poems, 139–40) The stanzas that follow tell how an artist-hero sets forth to find a former lover and learn what happened on a particular day in their shared memory before he returns home to write until dawn. The result would presumably right the poem’s “balance,” the identical rhyme in each second and third line demonstrating a larger recollective aim. Verbal recurrence, however, is never exactly restorative: “something” does not equal a subsequent “sum of things,” just as the pairing of “palms” and “palms” or “leaves” and “leaves” insists on distinctions between homophones. As these differences reinforce the ineradicable divide of yesterday and today, they show the change-in-sameness that constitutes memorial repetition as well as creative re-presentation.19 The endlessly unfinished work of retrospection, therefore, constitutes the seemingly infinite work of art, and each not quite balanced stanza, each not quite completed sum, foresees another “go[ing].” Like Proust’s night-by-night composition or Frost’s “turning under” of previous thoughts, Merrill’s “again” thus envisions a future of rebuilding the past: the “over and over” of “For Proust,” with its habitual, Frostian “would,” allows the poem’s smooth movement into a present and then a

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future-perfect tense.20 It also allows the poem’s smooth dilation from a writer’s story to the world’s, as the last stanza narrates: Feverish in time, if you suspend the task, An old, old woman shuffl ing in to draw Curtains, will read a line or two, withdraw. The world will have put on a thin gold mask. Casting creativity as a recurrent, retrospective practice allows one to see everyday time as an aesthetic process: the “thin gold mask” of a dawning world compares the return of morning to the repetition of experience as art.21 Merrill describes something similar at the conclusion of an earlier, unpublished poem, “Morning in the Grand Style,” which tells how sunrise fits “the visage of chaos with a mask of gold”; dailiness, in his work, proves the naturally aesthetic form in what could seem unordered facts.22 In “For Proust,” the impersonal cycles of this formalism may even extend an artist’s personal rounds. The “old, old woman” who lets in sunrise, ageless and earthy as Françoise in Proust’s novel, may “read a line or two” of the speaker’s composition during her morning chores. The lesson repeats that of Bishop’s “Sestina,” which also describes memory as a recursive, creative evolution comparable to worldly cyclicity. Merrill’s work shows a pervasive connection between the autobiographical insights of Proust and of Bishop, and Merrill even begins “For Proust” in the villanelle form that Bishop tried so long to write.23 As this effort suggests, Bishop’s example supported Merrill’s conviction that artistic structures like the villanelle are essential to autobiography, and both writers resist the confessionalist assumption that rhyme or meter prevents fi rstperson honesty. Merrill’s work implies the opposite, in fact; during the opening poem of Water Street, an explicit turn to “self-knowledge” tightens his verse to rhyming quatrains (Collected Poems, 128). Critics respond differently to this formalism: Materer, for example, holds that Merrill’s life writing remains confessional in aim, while Blasing argues that Merrill’s poems intend rhetorical subversion rather than psychological revelation.24 “For Proust” and other works suggest, though, that Merrill’s conventional autobiography may signify not just a memoirist’s idiosyncrasy or a postmodernist’s challenge but also a desire to relate one’s individual story to a more general and ultimately more natural order.

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“For Proust” may also show, more basically, that poetic forms are necessary to tell one’s story accurately because only their recurrence can chart a pattern endemic to human biography. Like Bishop’s, Merrill’s craft recognizes the psychic returns that both James and Freud take to be constitutive.25 As early as 1955, for example, he depicts such determinism with recurring characters in his play The Immortal Husband, and as late as 1993, he confi rms in an interview that he is “always coming face-to-face with what I’ve known all my life” (Collected Prose, 178). Even the artist of “For Proust,” with his rueful admission that “the loved one always leaves,” suggests that the willful, conscious re-creation of one’s past mimics the unavoidable, unconscious repetition of one’s experience.26 One’s life story is “always that same old story,” as Merrill writes in “The Broken Home” (Collected Poems, 198),27 and his own home returns as reliably as the Bedlam in Bishop’s “Visits,” providing not just a central symbol for his sonnetsequence poem but also a pervasive motif for the sequence of his collected work.28 Merrill in Water Street states that he must make “some kind of house” (Collected Poems, 129) out of his past, and the coda of Sandover, more than twenty years later, still fi nds “the heart of structure” in “the old ballroom of the Broken Home” (Sandover, 557).29 Bishop emphasizes the constriction of such “structures,” and Merrill acknowledges the same danger: in a late, unpublished draft that begins with an address to Bishop, the speaker despairs at “patterns / Half a century old,” and in “Family Week at Oracle Ranch,” a poem describing a recovery program, the speaker wonders warily “if the old patterns” will “recur” (WU IV.1a; Collected Poems, 660). Merrill’s work, however, sees repetition more often as self-defi nition than as self-defeat. Without forms like the broken home, Merrill writes in his memoir, “the self is featureless” (Collected Prose, 587). “What other way is there to do things, but one’s own?” he asks in a journal after considering “the ‘pattern’ of my life” (WU II.1.8, Journal 10).30 This confidence means that Merrill’s Freud is not a theorizer of debilitating psychic determinism but a spirit counselor who tells the poet and his partner, in The Book of Ephraim, “BI T T E N I E / Z U AU FGEBEN T H E K E Y / TO Y R OW N NAT U R E S” (Sandover, 30). One should remember and reinforce one’s proclivities, in Merrill’s view; one should strive for an ever more exact fulfi llment of one’s particular stanza.31 Temporal cycles are less like compulsive repetition than affirming realization.32

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Merrill thus appreciated Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death, which argues that Freud’s “death wish” mistakenly misreads a “Nirvana-principle”; in this view, perfect recurrence would be eternal vitality rather than atemporal insentience.33 Brown’s book describes history as an advance toward such nirvana, when a painfully unbalanced “over and over” yields to a peacefully infi nite “again,” and the trajectory could provide an aim for Merrill’s own life and life writing. In the words of “To the Reader,” each tomorrow might be proven more “right” by being more “exemplary”— more like an exemplum. The truest individual life may be the one closest to a universal form.34 Merrill’s respect for such individual conventionalism explains his attention to manners, which he calls an “artifice in the very bloodstream” (Collected Prose, 58), and helps to explain why he can further self-knowledge through a card game: “Last Mornings in California,” for example, links the speaker’s experience to a tarot deck, while other works compare living to a game of patience (Collected Poems, 447–48, 192– 94; Sandover, 67– 68). Perhaps most important, Merrill’s respect for formal autobiography helps to explain why he wants to tell his story through “conventional stock figures,” as he writes at the start of The Book of Ephraim (Sandover, 4). When McClatchy rightly notes that the child of Water Street often has “a typological rather than an autobiographical emphasis,” one might add that Merrill would often elide the difference (“On Water Street,” 88). Even a draft of “The Broken Home” is labeled “Notes for a Myth” (WU IV.1.a). This myth is a metrical legend, poetic and temporal; as “Verse for Urania” notes, “the first myth was Measure” (Collected Poems, 385– 91). “Rhyme and meter” not only manifest the patterns of “fable[s],” they also inscribe the “conjunctions and epicycles” behind those prototypes, the natural cycles that make “the world go round” as they make human stories repeat. Thus the order of everyday recurrence governs almost every biographical pattern already mentioned: the returning figures in The Immortal Husband emerge through Tithonus’s marriage to the dawn; the “coming and going” predicted by tarot cards in “Last Mornings in California” echo the “coming, going” of sunrise; and the “same old story” of “The Broken Home” opens and closes with a sunset as it marks the center of a volume that opens with “Nightgown” and closes with “Days of 1964.” 35 When Merrill read Hamlet’s Mill, a study of mythology and astronomy that explains how the structures of traditional tales show the “variety, eternity,

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and recurrence” of sidereal temporality, and when he learned that these “transmutations” must “include us, ruled by Time, framed in the eternal forms,” the book would have only confi rmed his own insight.36 As he states in “Verse for Urania,” dawnings are “half sheer / Lyric convention, half genetic glow.” Ending on just that glow, “Urania” dramatizes a diurnal consummation comparable not only to Brown’s “nirvana” but also, as McClatchy suggests, to the “measured design” of Nietzsche’s eternal return (“Lost Paradises,” 319).37

Gilt Leaves Merrill’s version of that measure, however, evinces the struggles of his ordinary poetics in the fifteen-odd years between “For Proust” and “Urania,” most pointedly his struggles with regard to recollection: whereas the muse of the first poem seems to be memory, the second calls on “Forgetfulness.” Nirvana, that is, may arrive only when one erases the imbalance separating yesterday and today, moving from the imperfect recursions of mental re-creation to the pure returns of natural renewal. The transition is necessary, perhaps, because of the related threats of guilt and mortality in Merrill’s retrospection. Though he believes, with Bishop, that a memorial progress may be psychologically apt, and though he trusts, with Frost, that turnings-under extend one’s life and creativity, he also admits, with Stevens, that recollective rounds foretell the punishing end of existence. The task is “feverish in time,” as Merrill writes in “For Proust,” and “time is running out.” As much as Stevens’s imminent “tomorrow,” Merrill’s imminent day must overcome this fi nitude as he moves forward from his Proustian morning to other ordinary, autobiographical dawns. “Scenes of Childhood,” placed just after “For Proust,” even alludes to “The Auroras of Autumn” when its speaker watches his past go up in smoke (Collected Poems, 141–44).38 Merrill’s flames seem less dire than Stevens’s, to be sure, given that “Scenes of Childhood” describes an evening of home movies in which the fi lm catches fi re in the projector. The weight of this homely incident, however, demonstrates a signal feature of Merrill’s quotidian poetry, which uses common words and commonplace situations to manifest a self-reflection

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that avoids self-seriousness. Earnest in its very wordplay, playful at its most profound, Merrill’s work would resist egotism as well as aestheticism by an ironic estrangement that can discover depths in what seems everyday or superficial. “Scenes of Childhood” is a case in point: as much as Stevens’s, the poem suggests, Merrill’s flames could eradicate a “guilty dream” of the past for the innocent lullaby of an earthly parent. Merrill’s movies show the shameful image of a four-year-old James attacking his mother,39 and only after their burning does Merrill’s mother wish him “pleasant dreams.” Only after the burning, moreover, does the poet replace the metaphoric “crickets and gnats” of the fi lm reel’s “racket” with morning sounds of insects in a real field, where the poet might breathe “in and out the sun / And air I am.” But Merrill registers the stakes of this substitution not with a Stevensian stringency but rather with his own characteristic wit: the “son and heir,” he adds. The pivotal pun wonders if he can replace the “projections” of personal lineage with a future of natural time—a time in which he would be “new-hatched / Each day, all summer.” And Merrill’s poem cannot quite affirm this Stevensian possibility: while the Earth sheds its past with each nightly rotation, Merrill writes in his drafts, people “turn also, but shed nothing / That we have seen” (WU IV.1.a). Rather than rising fresh “each day,” human beings “wake to what we were” and learn that “lived life is never / Lightly undone.” Stevensian freedom from “name / Or origin” seems fi nally an illusion, “floating / Off.” The sounds of Merrill’s darkness are not an innocent song but a serpentlike “hiss / And slither” of breath from his mother’s bedroom. As the poet stands outside her door, in a homely but weighty scene, the guilt inherent in human history may still exclude him from the timelessness of a maternal Eden. He reconsiders this exclusion, therefore, in what may be his central early work of everyday time: “The Broken Home” remembers a comparable transgression in the middle sonnet of its seven-sonnet sequence (Collected Poems, 197– 200). “One afternoon,” Merrill explains, red, satyr-thighed Michael, the Irish setter, head Passionately lowered, led The child I was to a shut door. Inside,

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Blinds beat sun from the bed. The green-gold room throbbed like a bruise. Under a sheet, clad in taboos Lay whom we sought, her hair undone, outspread. This forbidden look, Merrill’s poem implies, causes the endlessly recurring rift of his life and work, as if his parents’ divorce serves to punish his own desire.40 The notes for his personal myth thus describe the story of a general fall: like Stevens and Bishop, Merrill imagines a secular, ordinary version of guilty self-consciousness.41 Like Stevens and Bishop, moreover, Merrill describes the punishment as temporal, since the end of his innocence is the split between a “Father Time” who “made history” and a “Mother Earth” “giving birth, / Tending the house, mending the socks.” An allegory of outdated gender differences registers a troublesome distinction between advancing and returning, sequence and cycle, the past tense of historical dates and the repetitive gerund of earthly life.42 When Merrill pledges to unite these contrasting pairs in his fi lial marriage-vow to “honor[] and obey[]” both parents, he vows to reconcile progress and return by overcoming the shame that divides them.43 In “The Auroras,” Stevens manages this reconciliation by eradicating the human retrospection that “Notes” shuns. Merrill, however, proposes the human love of “Notes” as its own solution to memorial guilt. Rather than destroy the “Scenes of Childhood” that his father fi lmed, he would take his father’s place as “Mother Earth’s” paramour, turning the taboo romance of a repressed childhood into the legitimate consummation of a reparative maturity. The fi nal sunset of “The Broken Home” describes the result when it imagines watching “a red setter stretch and sink in cloud”: this falling sun rewrites not only Merrill’s earlier description of a “red setter,” a dog who “slumped to the floor” in death or shame, but also his earlier description of his father’s remarriage, a descent from “cloud banks” to meet a “green bride.” Merrill perceives the same beloved in the “greengold” room of his childhood, or the avocado with “gilt leaves” that grow “fleshy and green,” or even the poem’s opening tableau of “parents and the child . . . gleaming like fruit / With evening’s mild gold leaf.” He seeks the same beloved, moreover, by accepting the role of Time-ly consort: when he lights a candle at the poem’s opening, a lowering historical wick of “what’s left of my life,” its fi re looks forward to the flame-red color of the

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childhood pet— a pet who belonged, a later poem makes clear, to his father (Collected Poems, 627– 28). The fi nal sonnet rewrites these lights when it turns a setter that oversaw shameful peeping into a sun that crowns the “unstiflement” of guilt, in a scene remarrying the fire of temporality and the earth of endurance. Their unity is manifest in a simple sunset: Merrill’s poem suggests that dailiness could make the personal, painful patterning of one’s “same old story” into the natural restitution of a balanced “over and over.” As Reena Sastri rightly argues of Merrill’s work in general, “The Broken Home” thus rejects an atemporal innocence for one relying on change.44 Atonement in this poem, however, could be as displaced as the observation of Bishop’s “Anaphora” and as deferred as the inconclusion of Stevens’s “Notes,” since Merrill writes only that “someone at last” may be allowed to watch the reparative sunset. “The Broken Home” looks ahead to The Changing Light at Sandover, where repair of division comes through the cosmic risings and settings of reincarnation, as well as to “Verse for Urania,” where sacred-secular illumination holds a similar promise. At the same time, “The Broken Home” predicts that these dawnings will require an expansion of Frost’s mutual mornings and Bishop’s “amenable” times as well as Stevens’s innocent “tomorrow”: in his drive for specifically marital reconciliation, Merrill must master the everyday rounds of life with a partner.

Higher Levels This partnership is evident in “Days of 1964,” the most blissful description of quotidian existence in Merrill’s work, and a poem addressed to the companion who makes his happiness possible. Here, love is a daily attendant of Merrill’s couple, a servant “cleaning and watering”: the “tending” mother in “The Broken Home” or the chore-burdened woman in “For Proust” now appears as a goddess who is equally earthly and erotic (Collected Poems, 220– 22). Love for another may prove her care and favor, in this poem, and a fi nal passage of ecstatically intermingled nights and days may evince the poet’s status as Venus’s son and the earth’s child. It is a specific sort of love, though, that allows this state—love for a person who embodies ordinary sensualism. Merrill states as much in The Book

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of Ephraim, section O, when he remembers the companion of his ’64 “Days”: “However seldom in my line to feel,” Merrill explains, “I must love those for whom the world is real” (Sandover, 51). The “must” recalls a 1946 letter in which Merrill remembers copying the fi nal sentences of Tonio Kröger into his diary at age sixteen. That passage describes the hero of Thomas Mann’s novella writing to a female friend about his love for “blue-eyed,” commonplace people, and Merrill’s letter speaks of his own yearning for “the inconceivable joys of ‘the blond and blue-eyed,’ the bliss of the commonplace which is so violently uncommon.” 45 Like Kröger, Merrill believes, he can attain the “comfortably normal” only by loving those who embody it. Merrill perceives this ardor, moreover, to be as vital to his artistic goals as it is to his erotic life; a subsequent letter of 1946 explains that the creation of a “commonplace” describes “what I must do with my poem and with all poems.”46 At twenty, Merrill articulates both the everyday aim of his poetry and the everyday relationship that it requires. When his project reaches The Book of Ephraim, therefore, the fi rst volume of The Changing Light at Sandover, Merrill maintains the fi rst-person plural of two mediums as their nightly wisdom moves toward another concluding union with the “woman of the world.” The “familiar spirit” of Ephraim seems to be the familiar bond between Merrill and David Jackson as much as a spirit guide from beyond, since the couple’s “FORT U NAT E CON J U NCT ION,” Ephraim tells them, allows otherworldly wisdom to “GET T H RU” (Sandover, 15).47 Jackson seems one of the natural “blue-eyed,” moreover; “the warm, eager tone of his living,” as Merrill describes in his memoir, compares to the “panting and warm” nature of his ’64 lover as Merrill describes it in Ephraim section O (Collected Prose, 522; Sandover, 51). DJ is the sensual “hand” of the couple’s séances, the figure for “Nature” in the trilogy, and life with him could repair dualistic divorce: “I think we’re meant,” Merrill writes in Sandover, to “be the kids who stay / Together for their parents’ sake” (229). Like Strato in “Days of 1964,” Jackson in Sandover can offer an uncommon commonplace that conflates mature romance and childhood innocence. Yet Merrill’s relationship with Jackson differs from his relationship with Strato, and the elemental “DE VOT ION” that provides the “M A I N I M PET US” of Ephraim’s nights is not the breathtaking “love” that generously pays for 1964’s “Days” (Sandover, 59). Merrill and Jackson’s partnership is a

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lifelong commitment, not a seasonal romance: a sometimes bitter and doubted but fi nally enduring and valued allegiance.48 The difference is evident in section O, where “consuming passions” are replaced by “refi n[ing]” fi res. As they accept the warmth of their domestic hearth, the pair of Ephraim also accept their union as habitual and accustomed rather than passionate and overwhelming. What could seem compromise, though, provides the endurance that Merrill’s romances would achieve; while the lover of “1964,” with his desire for “illusion” to “last long,” seems already to fear the time when ardor will become “A BED / . . . OF A SH E S,” the poet of Ephraim section O believes that his fi re can “M ER R I LY / GLOW ON.” 49 Merrill develops this knowledge in the earlier “The Thousand and Second Night,” perhaps his fullest poetic preparation for the Ouija-board trilogy (Collected Poems, 176– 85). This work begins Nights and Days by describing Merrill’s par tic u lar sort of nights and days: a remembering, companionate recurrence whose cycles resist the ends of lives as well as loves. Addressed to Irma Brandeis, the poem takes up Merrill’s earlier ambition to create a commonplace by presenting his version of Kröger’s letter to Lizaveta, and indeed the central section of “The Thousand and Second Night” may remember the self who copied Mann’s ending. “I have kept somewhere a page,” Merrill writes, “Written at sixteen to myself at twice that age / Whom I accuse of having become the vain // Flippant unfeeling monster I now am.” This memory indicts the fi rstperson speaker who begins “The Thousand and Second Night,” a Krögerlike aesthete who must rededicate himself to sensuality. When he does, he fi nds a cure for the mortality seemingly attendant on his decision: the poem’s movement from mind to body to soul, a progress made explicit in its penultimate section, rejects an atemporal eternity for an infi nity of everyday life. The alternative seems no life at all, and Merrill uses the “Rigor Vitae” of his fi rst section, in which half of his face has been stricken immobile, to criticize his affect as a “death-in-life” comparable to that of “Yeats’ / Byzantium.” Yeats celebrates such timelessness, describing an “artifice of eternity” in which one perceives “what is past, or passing, or to come,” but Merrill rejects it, describing a dilettantish languor in which one considers “what I have been, am, and care to be” (Yeats, Collected Poems, 193– 94; see also 248–49). To “uncramp” his inhuman “style,” Merrill seeks the same

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motherly earth goddess who graces his rapturous “Days,” appearing here with an earthlike wen on his Proustian grandmother’s wrist. To achieve earthly favor, moreover, he seeks another “blue-eyed” partner, who arrives when a section titled “The Cure” presents an “Ikon of appetite” with “electric blue” eyes. Merrill then accepts his own appetites, in a section of fleshly sensualism aptly titled “Carnivals”: a dinner party beneath “heads of animals” leads to an onanistic night over pornographic postcards that in turn brings the rapturous six-line stanzas that end the section. Here Merrill seems to discover the feeling he desires. “Love. Warmth,” he exclaims. “Fist of sunlight at last / Pounding emphatic on the gulf.” Both in form and in content, these stanzas emulate Valéry’s “Le Cimetière marin,” with its exhortation to “live!”: a recommendation that Merrill earlier opposes to Yeatsian lifelessness (Valéry, Poems, 220). In his poem, Valéry’s exclamation follows a rejection of Zeno’s arrow that “never moves”; Valéry, that is, accepts the passage of time that Yeats would transcend. Yet Merrill’s invocation of Valéry is not content merely to affi rm such passage. Merrill knows that temporality invites the dangers as well as the benefits of sensualism: a moving arrow could chart a one-way vector into stillness. Carnivals are “farewells / To flesh,” as Merrill’s line-break emphasizes, and his blue-eyed friend proves his humanity in a “headlong emigration[] out of life.” Merrill’s wordplay, again wittily revealing a common threat, connects this death with his own erotic sea voyage into “life” as well as with the voyage of his immobilized flesh toward a “fi xed shore.” Valéryan acceptance of appetite yields to an end no less unfeeling than Yeatsian detachment. Merrill’s poem cannot “overlook” this mortal insensitivity, as a “thin, black dawn” approaches with a pall as dark as the “fi lm” earlier left on one’s desk by a “thousand and one nights” of love. Both his disgust at “grotesque” sensuality and his fear of encroaching death question the significance of a carnal existence that will come in the end to nothing—in which the wick of time or love may simply burn out. How can one resist that extinguishing? Merrill implies an answer with the fi nal section of his poem, the most explicit allusion to its titular legend. Here, Sultan and Scheherazade part after the “long adventure” of their nights has “reached its end.” A Sultan “grown old” then wakes to his own mortal dawn, a “blinding sun” in which he is “too late to question what the tale had meant.” As Yenser points out, this conclusion draws readers back to the work’s title and opening, suggesting that one can begin only

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after fi nishing and thus that the poem will never really conclude (The Consuming Myth, 136). Such a return is but an instance of a larger repetitive pattern in Merrill’s poem, opposing eternality not with a one-way arrow of “days that will / Not come again” but with a recurrent spiral of days coming again and again. Reading means rereading, carnival farewells are a yearly ritual, and each thousand-and-fi rst night is but the prelude to a thousand-and-second. Each carnal death, even, may presage a carnal rebirth: the humorous “resurrection” of the masturbation scene comes when Merrill “rekindl[es]” the erotic fi res of a relative now in this “tomb.” Such repetitions, however, seem to depend on the recollective “question[ing]” that the Sultan misses and that Merrill’s readers are prompted to perform; a new beginning, that is, comes through turning back. When he faces the conclusion of his own “long adventure,” in “Carnivals,” Merrill demonstrates the retrospective-prospective exertion. “Let that wait,” he writes. I’m tired, it’s late at night. Tomorrow, if it is given me to conquer An old distrust of imaginary scenes, Scenes not lived through yet, the few fi nal lines Will lie on the page and the whole ride at anchor. I’m home, of course. It’s winter. Real Snow fi lls the road. On the unmade Brass bed lies my adored Scheherazade, Eight-ninths asleep, tail twitching to the steel Band of the steam heat’s dissonant calypso. The wind has died. Where else would I be If not here? There’s so little left to see! Lost friends, my long ago Voyages, I bless you for sore Limbs and mouth kissed, face bronzed and lined, An earth held up, a text not wholly undermined By fluent passages of metaphor.

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Merrill breaks off his six-line Valéryan stanzas, as if to resist the conclusion implicit in forward progress, and resumes with an ABBA rhyme scheme that recalls “For Proust,” as if to fi nd the continuance implicit in their recurrent habits. Like Proust or Scheherazade, that is, Merrill uses a retrospective dailiness to resist the termination of his tales. “Tomorrow” will arrive, and with it the potentially fatal imminence of a scene “not lived through yet.” But apparently “fi nal lines” may be merely the end of a particu lar journey, yielding an afterlife as ordinary as this scene at home—in which a poet can look back on “lost friends” and “long ago / Voyages.” His sunburnt face, here, seems a winter memory of summer’s eroticism, its features neither the chalk mask of a deathly carnality nor the hammered gold of an eternal sculpture but the enduring substance of an “earth held up,” and the remembering rotation of this globe may continue to transform days that have once been into days that will come once more. With its equal suggestions of matter and mind, moreover, this globe may also continue to repair the fact-and-fiction dualism of the SultanScheherazade partnership; its “passages of metaphor” form a mundo as fluent as Stevens’s tournamonde between reality and imagination.50 “The Thousand and Second Night” takes such passage even further by suggesting that those movements might also turn body into soul. As the professor of Merrill’s penultimate section makes clear, “soul” and “memory” are interchangeable terms for the poem: “soul,” an earlier prose interpolation states, might be a body one no longer had. Spiritual existence is the memorial transformation of material life, thus the simple product of recursively advancing time, and the transition from mortality into immortality might be as natural as a movement from day to day.51 The insight expands Proust’s description of the retrospective “resurrection at our awakening,” which suggests that “the resurrection of the soul after death is to be conceived as a phenomenon of memory” (Guermantes, 111). Merrill’s reincarnation envisions a diurnal pattern moving through the progressively higher risings of Ephraim’s stages (Sandover, 9–10). To take again the words of Merrill’s professor in “The Thousand and Second Night,” dailiness is thus a “form” that “affi rms”; the transition between those two words, as much as Stevens’s shift from “as” to “is,” enacts the possibility it would describe. Indeed, when Merrill rewrites “The Thousand and Second Night” in “Flying From Byzantium,” he uses such vowel shifts to believe in lives and worlds “born again” (Collected Poems, 251– 53). And when

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Auden in Sandover resists the “forward motion” of unchecked time, the quest for “A F F I R M AT ION” comes from an “OLD ST ICK LER FOR FOR M” (Sandover, 331). Immortal life, in Merrill’s view, will only enlarge an aesthetic and everyday structure. Merrill’s choice to begin “The Thousand and Second Night” with place and date signals his trust in that pattern: “think of it as basically journal form,” he tells an audience at one reading of this poem.52 Yet Merrill’s choice to end the poem with a marriage does the same because his dailiness is specifically marital, or remarital. Just as divorce abandons the Sultan to an unquestioning dawn, the poet of “Carnivals” faces his retrospective tomorrow only with an “adored Scheherazade” nearby. This pet does not offer the sensual heat of “Days” and its daily pittance but the domestic flame of Ephraim and its nightly refi nement: with her tail “twitching to the steel // Band of the steam heat’s dissonant calypso,” she practices Merrill’s recurrent poetics by recalling sensuality in a snowbound room. So does Jackson in Ephraim section O, when his complaint about a broken furnace insists in mistaken Greek that “our summer doesn’t work” (Sandover, 53). The rekindlings of both “natural” partners help to form an unbroken home that acknowledges both the history of Father Time and the endurance of Mother Earth; Kyria Kleo, the motherly housekeeper from “Days,” even returns in Ephraim section O as Clio, muse of history. With similar implications, the “bronzed and lined” globe in “The Thousand and Second Night” returns in the fi nal section of Sandover at an anniversary for DJ and JM’s union, where Merrill offers his companion “these lines the years / Together write upon my face and yours.” Accumulation of a partnership’s commemorative cycles ensures continued “E X PECTA NC Y” for the partners themselves (353). Merrill suspects this truth as early as 1950, when he writes to his mother about her engagement: noting that “there is more than one occasion” when one is “ready for marriage,” he adds that “all the stages of life, from childhood to second childhood” show “the movements of growth, maturity and decay which are usually recognized only in the curve of an entire life.”53 A new espousal could mark a new existence, then, in a natural pattern that Merrill’s poem “Upon a Second Marriage” compares to the “concentric rings” of a tree (Collected Poems, 72). Merrill’s mother fi nds such renewal through remarriage to William Plummer, perhaps, and Merrill’s father by remarrying “each thirteenth year”; Merrill may do so with fresh

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commitments to Jackson: the “level[s]” of life after life in Ephraim section F echo the “level[s]” of his marriage’s refinement in section O (Collected Poems, 197; Sandover, 19, 50). It is among the rekindlings of that section that Merrill makes explicit the matter-into-spirit transfiguration he intimates in “The Thousand and Second Night.” Here, the “word ‘animal’ ” is “a skin,” he writes, “through which its old sense glimmers, of the soul” (Sandover, 53). It is in his fi rst poem dedicated to Jackson, moreover, that Merrill fi rst suggests such transformations. “A Tenancy” ends Water Street with a retrospective expectancy conflating the renewals of homes and souls (Collected Poems, 168– 70). The poet sits in a house where he and Jackson have just settled and looks back to an older lease from “the source of light”; that tenancy has now “expire[d],” he notes, with gently ominous implications of a Faustian bargain. The scene beyond expiration, however, is not the end of adventures but “this new room,” a fresh habitation into which Merrill’s “things and thoughts” have been translated.54 The “source of light” seems less a timed deadline than the cyclic order of Changing Light, and this poem even predicts the epic’s conclusion in “The Ballroom at Sandover” when it describes how a “changing light is deepening, is changing / To a gilt ballroom chair a chair / Bound to break under someone before long.” Merrill can accept such gilt or guilty alterations, sure that any break means only another existence. He suspects that it may even be a better one because the body of previous years might now be “called a soul”: It knows, at any rate, That when the light dies and the bell rings Its leaner veteran will rise to face Partners not recognized Until drunk young again and gowned in changing Flushes; and strains will rise, The bone-tipped baton beating, rapid, faint, From the street below, from my depressions— From the doorbell which rings. If the two bells— one a heavenly entrance and one the fi rst ring at a new address— compare the remaking of a household and the reincarnation of a life, the transfigurations of Sandover trust in that suggestion. As Merrill

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writes in a late letter, “DJ and JM have become not just mates but soulmates by the poem’s end.”55

Set in One’s Ways This unification would make The Book of Ephraim the “Thousand and Second Night” of Merrill’s and Jackson’s relationship, as Merrill suggests when he sets out in the opening A section to write the “Book of a Thousand and One Evenings Spent / With David Jackson at the Ouija Board” (Sandover, 4). Merrill must tell this story, he explains, because “Time” cannot do so: “whether because it was running out like water / Or because January draws this bright / Line down the new page.” When Merrill’s speaker fi lls in for this Father,56 he is a Sultan both remaritally coupled and retrospectively questioning; his telling would replace a hot, running-out sequence and a bright, unremembering novelty with a story that returns as well as progresses and remembers as well as renews. The subsequent poem proves his success in its overall form: like “The Thousand and Second Night,” it can only be reread, since the fi nal scene of Ephraim and the spiraling terza rima of the trilogy as a whole return readers to this opening January moment.57 As Sacks writes, the iterations of “refi ned and augmented meaning” thereby implied mimic the pattern of upward soul mobility that Sandover would teach (“Divine,” 185). If Merrill’s theme is the “incarnation and withdrawal of / A god,” as he explains by noting that his “phrase is Northrop Frye’s,” Merrill’s trilogy manifests Frye’s subsequent explanation of this divine movement: “usually identified” with “cyclical processes of nature,” Frye writes, it allows “the continuum of identity” to be “extended from death to rebirth” (Anatomy, 158– 59). Merrill’s daily reincarnation draws on more, however, than the remarriage from “The Thousand and Second Night.” A trust in rebirth also depends on the earlier poem’s affi rming form, as is evident in the admission that opens and closes Sandover: “Admittedly I err by undertaking / This in its present form.” The Dantean allusion confesses to writing verse rather than fiction, a choice that pervades Ephraim, during which Merrill recalls an abandoned novel about the Ouija board while repeatedly acquitting himself of giving up prose for poetry. His punning enjambment of “bright / Line” in this opening section, for example, seems to stress his

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decisive choice of the brilliance in verse lineation. The implications of this decision warrant greater critical attention than they have received;58 if Merrill believed since “For Proust” that verse patterns model daily experience, Ephraim deepens that insight by using the returns of poetic lines to describe and continue the returns of personal lives. Ephraim could serve as correction, therefore, of those distinctions that call fiction temporal and poetry timeless, as Merrill makes plain in a contemporaneous interview when he demurs from questions about whether “the present is still the lyric tense” and whether poetry “aims at an ecstatic, timeless, state” (Collected Prose, 82).59 Worldly and recurrent rather than ecstatic and timeless, Merrill’s diurnal verse rejects fictional temporality without confi ning itself to a present-tense realm. It fi nds a timeliness specifically poetic, the result endorsing the significance of quotidian life as well as the relevance of aesthetic form. The defenses of poetry in Ephraim chart Merrill’s deepening faith in an ordinary reincarnation; like Byron, in a quotation that he copied into his drafts of Ephraim, Merrill fi nds that “Poetry” means “the feeling of a Former world and a Future.” 60 Poetry feels a future world through a former, Merrill’s work shows, because the patterned advance of rhyme and meter knows what will come through knowing what has been. Merrill emphasizes this connection in “The Will,” a poem telling how he lost his Ouija-board novel manuscript, along with a stone ibis intended as a wedding gift, during a trip to see both a marriage and his mother (Collected Poems, 392– 98). The “funerary chic” of the bird, bought with “a check my father wrote before his death,” imbues both statue and novel with the terminal suggestions of Father Time, and their loss lands Merrill in the posthumous existence of a “white-lipped survivor hacked / Out of his own will.” Characteristically, Merrill’s poem refutes that conclusion with a quotidian and remarital renewal; he imagines a rising “one fi ne day” and describes a fi nal scene where “rings exchanged for life” trust the “little suns” of lemon trees as a couple’s fruitful tomorrows. This ordinary resurrection, however, comes only when Merrill abandons prose for poetry: Merrill’s vision of rebirth remakes a verse draft through one sonnet embedded in another, and discovers a turn to new suns at the turn of octave to sestet. Diurnal renewal comes through a revisionary intensification of poetic rounds that can realize a Byronic potential of past-become-future.

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The bird “present,” by contrast, a gift decorated with paintings of a river, accentuates a novel’s potential submission to present-tense flux. The Book of Ephraim describes the danger of this stream in part through the figure of Sergei, an alter ego for Merrill and the novelist manqué of Merrill’s lost novel. Like the speaker of section A, Sergei must take up the narratorial duties of a telling Time— as his own reflection reminds him in section T (Sandover, 69– 71). His time, however, is “running out”; his “mowing,” flowing, mirror image makes each sunrise one more “hangfi re talk” by which “current events” might lead to the terminal sunrise of a “far / Flushed mountain.” Each morning could be “breakfast on death row” as easily as “the next fumbling détente” with mortality. The threat may bespeak Sergei’s mistaken ambitions, given that his hungover reckoning comes after a frustrated night of playing “Patience, having lost / [His] own, three-quarters through the novel”: if this irritation manifests his alienation from the novel’s Mother Earth figure, whose picture he would “rip . . . from her frame,” it also suggests a related generic choice. Sergei’s writing and living embodies a drive toward ending required in his narrative art (67, 47, 68). A different aesthetic method might avoid the “not quite settled matter” of mortality; in the related words of “The Kimono,” Merrill’s rewriting of Bishop’s “The Shampoo,” Sergei might create a “pattern of a stream” (Collected Poems, 361). He might admit that he has “designs” on that “backwardly emerging / Notion rich in dream-deposits” that could describe memory, and he might assert those “orderings of experience” that come with poetic form. Merrill’s own verse provides a model, its “stanza-boxes” tending natural-aesthetic cycles by which perennial characters can recur, “old self in a new form” (Sandover, 68). Sergei, however, can only murmur, “Designs?” with “a shamefaced look.” He seems to shun the supposed “aesthetic overkill” of Merrill’s formalist verse even if it would resist a more actual sort of fatality. Instead, he ends his morning soliloquy resolved to “go behind the falls,” passing through flux to a cave where, in the words of “McKane’s Falls,” one might enlarge “moments of truth” to eternal habitation (Collected Poems, 370). Sergei suspects that the quest could be suicidal as well as transcendent, the cavern a space to “catch one’s death” as well as a place to avoid it. In either case, though, the location is detached from time, and Sergei is desperate to “move beyond its range.” He would evade,

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perhaps, both the psychological knowledge and the aesthetic responsibility of his mortal status. Merrill himself, by contrast, uses his art to fi nd a better way of managing time. His own trip to the falls concludes in the quietly witty “urge / . . . to make water,” perhaps symbolizing the shameful historicity implicit to human urges in general; his “stream / Sails out into the updraft” and “stops at nothing.” That stop, however, does not seem to signal a punishing annihilation so much as mark the end of Merrill’s unfi nished novel— and the start of Merrill’s unending verse, where every “nothing” presages another something. The promise is clear in section X, where Merrill discards the pseudonym “Time” altogether, passing beyond his novelization of the Ouija board as well as his thousand-and-one nights of Ephraim; he and DJ, he writes, have “reached a / Stage through him that he will never reach” (Sandover, 85). The god therefore sinks “underground,” a “recurrent figure” who will “lend his young beauty to a living grave / In order that Earth bloom another season.” Merrill’s move past narrative, that is, discovers how a one-way current can nourish cyclic recurrence. These earthly rounds require a specifically versified form, and the “guiding force” that Merrill’s telling both “mirrors” and “embodies” seems now to be “the world’s poem” or “the poem’s world”: the section concludes with a “net of loose talk tightening to verse, // And verse once more revolving between poles.” Here, Merrill’s reassertion of rhyme and meter prompts the “reawakening” and “recirculation” of natural turns. In another instance of Merrill’s quotidian-cosmic wit, the concomitant rebirth of one foot “gone to sleep” signals a corporeal and metrical resuscitation with otherworldly possibilities—perhaps even the rising of souls that Merrill fi rst describes in “A Tenancy,” which also ends with the return of poetic form and the revival of a sleepy foot. As that poem predicts the changing light of Sandover, it also predicts how Ephraim will use the demands of its artistic medium to show the implications of its everyday patterns. Merrill can use that medium, even, to combat the mortal enervation that everyday rounds suggest. Section L, for example, presents Merrill’s most explicit consideration of a quotidian malady or a home burial; like the scene of Sergei’s breakfast, it considers the worst aspects of Merrill’s dailiness. Here, the pattern seems a monotonous routine grinding toward inevitable halt: “Life like the periodical not yet / Defunct kept hitting the

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stands,” the section opens (Sandover, 40–43). The blank verse that follows moves in rapid, weary boredom through a periodical existence in which days and years return, degrade, and depress; as a “ton of magazines” accumulates, spouses who once “renewed the flame upon the mildewed wall” avoid the fact that “the whole house needs repairs.” Remarriage and rekindling seem useless if one’s life will one day be “throw[n] out.” Yet after the poem’s gradually debilitated resignation concludes with a “death’s-head to be faced,” Merrill’s speaker breaks in with a poetic protest: No, no! Set in our ways As in a garden’s, glittered A whole small globe— our life, our life, our life: Rinsed with mercury Throughout to this bespattered Fruit of reflection, rife With Art Nouveau distortion. In these rhymed stanzas, the repetitions of “life” are not a perishable, periodical magazine but an enduring, recurrent anaphora—a pattern made reflective and fruitful in the mirror ball of “art.” This existence is at once one more natural and more aesthetic than the life just described, its rotations enacted by the curving sphere of a global stanza. This “world’s poem” grants everyday experience a continuity beyond any couple’s mortal, dated ways. Merrill can therefore see “another life” at the end of section L: the “death’s-head” that does in fact come is Merrill’s dream recollection of a previous incarnation’s last moments. The “fatigue” of mortality, this ending suggests, and the “disbelief ” of skepticism, may after all yield to such strenuous, sensate proof of other lives and worlds. Merrill’s vision turns imminent mortality into a remembered experience. As it does so, Merrill’s vision would cast any conclusive evening as but one iteration of a sunriseand-sunset pattern that the couple themselves have created. Merrill presents a similar possibility, more confidently, when his poem reaches the “sunset years” of W, a section that narrates a dinner with JM’s nephew Wendell and ends with another defense of verse. Merrill would “hardly propose,” he writes,

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Mending my ways, breaking myself of rhyme To speak to multitudes and make it matter. Late here could mean, moreover, In Good Time Elsewhere; for near turns far, and former latter —Syntax reversing her binoculars— Now early light sweeps under a pink scatter Rug of cloud the solemn, diehard stars. (Sandover, 82) Merrill again forgoes the supposedly accessible medium of fiction to accept again the “ways” of section L: a habitual pattern, that is, of both daily and poetic rounds. Prose may “reach / The widest public in the shortest time,” as section A admits, but Merrill would report a temporality not short or long but always “In Good Time,” always in the goodness of time’s daily recurrence. The cyclic spiraling of section W’s terza rima, as it crafts the Dantean “circles” that Sergei eschews, thus finds them less like aesthetic overkill than they are like real life. The “circles” are genuinely vital, too, showing the infi nity implicit in diurnal orders: the section ends by turning late into early, night into another morning. The “syntax” of the quotidian, like the “syntax” of rhyme and meter, can make the fearful belatedness of age into optimistic anticipation. “Measures,” in the words of section A, may thus be precisely what “emergency require[s]”; they resist temporal “deadlines” with the liveliness of poetic or earthly lineation (Sandover, 4). This lineation suggests a genealogical as well as a geological continuity: in section W, a pattern “evolving Likeness back to the fi rst man” and “forth to betided lineaments one knows / Or once did.” It would therefore satisfy DJ and JM’s attempt, earlier in Ephraim, to effect a more explicit reproduction: they try to use their séance powers to inseminate particu lar souls, and their “folie à deux” fi nds success only with the placement of Wendell (Sandover, 30). When Merrill forgets Wendell’s special status at the end of section W, he abandons the repetitions of flesh-and-blood inheritance for the returns of daily art, implying that the fruit of Merrill’s and Jackson’s partnership, or the “fruit of reflection” in their mirrored telling, is the creation of a diurnal poem. Indeed, section L’s mirror globe follows section K’s abandonment of genetic projects, and Merrill notes in a

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later letter that the couple’s true— and wise—“folie à deux” is the one that “brings the poem into being.” 61 This nightly aesthetic work, moreover, can achieve the very goal of DJ and JM’s genetic “meddling,” “some kind of workable relation // Between the two worlds” (Sandover, 20): though the couple at fi rst rely on propagation for a “give-and-take,” poetry’s union of “meter” and “matter” provides them with a better version of the interplay between reality and fiction, earth and heaven, life and afterlife.62 The back and forth suggests a synthesis much like ordinary life, in which JM and DJ rotate between a nightly realm that “unseen powers rule” and a daily one they “call the real.” Poetry can describe that Keatsian or Stevensian quotidian in which truths and fictions endlessly interdepend. The conclusion of section W thus revises the conclusion of section M— as the two opening letters upend each other, perhaps—as well as the ambitions of section F (Sandover, 45–46). In this earlier passage, Merrill and Jackson learn that dreams can be a “Show and Tell” of ethereal realms, and they greet this information with a bewildered “Where were we?” “On unsteady ground,” Merrill answers, as the dualities of “Earth, Heaven; / Reality, Projection” do “the Chicken-and-the-Egg till dawn”: would these pairs “never come / Together”? Unable to answer, Merrill can only “rise and shine” through “spectacles put on to focus / The one surface to be truly scratched— / A new day’s quota of shortsighted prose.” But when the verse “binoculars” of section W better these narrative spectacles of section M, Merrill need not choose whether chicken or egg is former or latter, near or far. He perceives the marriage of opposites to be a regular rhythm rather than an unrealized synthesis. To take up this cadence by replacing prose with verse is to reject the “shortsighted” vision of section M as well as the “shortest time” of section A—through a focus more like the “metrical lens” that follows in section X. That earthly metrics, revolving between poles, grounds the daily life of sections Y and Z, in which a fi nal possible rekindling of JM and DJ’s home leads to a final vision of “the ancient, ageless woman of the world” (Sandover, 92). The couple can answer her “injured, musical / ‘Why do you no longer come to me?’ ” with a simple admission of renewed and continued tenancy: “For here we are.” Their location banishes the “unsteady ground” of M, with its confused dualisms and limited quotas, for a steadily grounded duality and an unlimited quotidian; this “world’s poem” and “poem’s world” abandon the distinction between the two as its authors live the

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affi rming form of dailiness. “The 2 worlds lay before us—which to choose,” Merrill writes in a notebook of Ephraim drafts, then adds in a different pencil, “Being who we were, we chose the 3rd,” that is, “Art” (YCAL). The Book of Ephraim rewrites Milton’s epic conclusion in exiled freedom as well as Stevens’s epic conclusion in a fluent mundo, and its everyday poetics aspires to the enduring creativity of Mother Earth herself.

Punctuation But does this creativity banish Father Time altogether—along with his deathly, historical, and possibly narrative threat? Merrill’s faith in couples and couplets may well seem too easy, in this reading, and the daily patterns of “The Thousand and Second Night” or The Book of Ephraim could seem to assuage too smoothly the guilty consciousness of “Scenes of Childhood” or “The Broken Home.” If everyday living blends progress and return, this does not erase the record of progress altogether. What happens to the matter “elided” when a turn of the world in section X buries an underground stream of “loves no longer called up”? This waste leaves “black holes” of loss, punctual periods or dark wicks of previous loves, and it suggests the change in the world’s changing sameness to be a chart of iterated diminishment. It suggests that even reincarnate cycles may move toward extinction. If the threat is inherent in all everyday rounds, Merrill’s work is particularly insistent in refuting it, charting the development rather than the decline of spiraling recursion. A buried stream waters new seeds; lost passion fuels new loves; to Merrill, the turning-under of Frost’s “Build Soil” should find no “limit” to the enhancement of one’s nature. As “Lost in Translation” states explicitly, Merrill would see “nothing[] lost” in the progress of time (Collected Poems, 367). With “patience,” the patience Merrill endorses through allusion to Valéry’s “Palme,” the supposed “waste” of experience may be translated into new leaves and fruit (Merrill, Collected Poems, 472–74). McClatchy and Yenser aptly summarize the effects of this philosophy when they state that Merrill “never stopped growing and he never left anything behind” (introduction, xi), and Merrill describes the same in a letter when he writes that his life keeps “growing and changing” with “next to nothing . . . wasted.”63 Each of his poems or days uses and improves the

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previous. One can never honestly say, therefore, that any “dawn” is “worse”; when “the sacred sun rises,” Merrill explains in an interview, things always “look up” (Collected Prose, 118). This belief clarifies Merrill’s conceptions of revision and elegy. The first is as important to him as to Bishop, and as implicit in ordinary time: in an early dawn poem beginning “at sunrise no devotions,” for example, he asks, “What / Is vision without continual / Revision?” (WU IV.1.a) But Merrill’s revisions are not Bishop’s call to sorrow at what has been lost so much as a reminder of pleasure at what has been gained. To him, a poet’s remaking records ongoing enrichment. This is true, also, of the cosmic revision that is reincarnation: Ephraim, section R, for instance, describes Maya Deren’s death, rebirth, and subsequent ascent through a spiral that will “COU N T & R ECOU N T” previous selves (Sandover, 64). Mourning in Merrill seems therefore both fundamental and almost meaningless, and divergent critical readings that describe him as profoundly unelegiac or manifestly elegiac may bespeak a consolation so automatic as to seem no consolation at all.64 Whereas Milton’s “Lycidas” struggles toward its belief that the “day-star” sinks to rise “anon,” for example, Merrill’s Sandover hears nightly proof of such rising (Milton, Complete Shorter, 255). Loss means only “gains to the work,” as he writes, and “matter elided” is not black-hole burn-out but astral illumination (Sandover, 376). These are the stars, perhaps, that wind the fi nal vision of the world in Ephraim with a Dantean “fi ligree” (92). Merrill, however, is too self-conscious a poet not to register more infernal implications of time: the fever in “For Proust,” the pall of candle grease in “The Thousand and Second Night,” or the solar eclipse of vision in “The Broken Home.” The couple at the end of Ephraim are not just watching a stellified earth but “waiting yet again” for someone to “fi x the furnace,” and fearing “the failure long foreseen / As total, of our period machine” (Sandover, 90– 91). Their periodical life of section L—as well as their rekindled home and marriage—might yet become absolutely defunct.65 Such breakdown, moreover, might prefigure the fate of a larger mechanism; the revisions of section R, for example, themselves consider whether or how to revise section P, in which DJ and JM hear of a general fire that could destroy heaven and earth (55–57). In the shadow of this Götterdämmerung, even reincarnations plot what section R calls a “hellbent azimuth,” and the “silver lining” of a mirror globe might mottle into fi nal blackness (65, 42). As early

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as his poem “Mirror,” Merrill worries that his art will flake, “leaf by life,” into “a faceless will” (Collected Poems, 84), and Ephraim, it seems, cannot entirely banish the fear of “absolute annihilation.” 66 This terror mostly lies beyond Ephraim, however, because it belongs to a different book:67 in section P, Merrill meets the “M EN B4 M A N K I N D” who will speak to him throughout Mirabell’s Books of Number (Sandover, 56). These batlike fallen angels tell of black holes and apocalyptic conflagration; they have experienced the fiery end of a world and know the dangers that time can effect. They distrust the regressions of temporality, therefore, as well as the regressions of human feeling that time enables, and they eschew the familiar eros of Ephraim for an existence beyond remarriage and return altogether. This is the existence to which the trilogy’s second book aspires: thus when DJ wonders in Mirabell if the Ouija board is “shutting us off from the living,” asking if it will ever “readmit / Us to the world,” his question seems apt (217–18). In Mirabell, the “blind bright spot of where we are” stands far above the earthly “here we are” in Ephraim (148). That earth now seems a “GR AV E T I M EK EEPER ,” and the powers of Mirabell would lift DJ and JM into a heaven beyond the gravely mortal “A N I M A L T R A I T ” of time consciousness (164, 146). Merrill must abandon the daily alterations of matter and spirit, animality and mentality, for an otherworldly sustenance of purer anima. The end of his “U N I V ERSA LL W H EEL” is a transformation of natural cyclicity into supernatural infi nity (113). Mirabell thus details the extremity hinted in “Verse for Urania,” a Nietzschean totality of eternal return in which “way out there space and time glitter” (Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 186). When Mirabell describes a similar material infi nity in the “spiral molecule” of “everything that was the case,” its “sparklings outmaneuver time, space, us” (Merrill, Sandover, 274). This Wittgensteinian, Nietzschean molecule seems to replace nature with biology, just as “POEM S OF SCI ENCE” in Mirabell seem to replace the poem of the earth in Ephraim: abstractions of life science, perhaps, here supplant the embodiments of ordinary life (Sandover, 113). The latter seem to be too vulnerable to the deathly waste of passing time, since Nature’s “ways” include a “black dust . . . between the rings,” as the poet explains in a phone call to his mother that is also a hymn to Mother Earth (232– 33). The “weddings and weather” that either woman “still calls news” might well “sweep . . . away” one’s existence. Even Mirabell himself, the spirit whose

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name remembers The Way of the World, must withdraw before the fi nal vision of Mirabell—which is not the “ancient, ageless woman of the world” but the “A NCI ENT A ND I M MORTA L INTELLIGENCE” of a masculine solar power (276). Merrill’s goal in this poem may ostensibly be a romantic wedding of “M Y N D A N D NAT U R E,” but Mirabell nonetheless seems to describe a “MALE WORLD” in which Nature is more “slave” to “Sultan Biology” than equal consort (113, 254, 231).68 Indeed, Mirabell’s vision of union is less like the remarriage recommended by parts of Frost’s or Merrill’s other work than it is like the “mystic marriage” proposed by parts of Stevens’s and, before him, Wordsworth’s poetry.69 If The Book of Ephraim is Merrill’s version of “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” in which espousal means continued revolution, Mirabell seems more like his version of “A Primitive Like an Orb” or “Credences of Summer,” in which consummation brings immortal repose. Mirabell occurs almost entirely in summer, in fact, in contrast to the wintry Ephraim, and concludes in the same “bright excellence” that crowns Stevens’s “Orb” (Stevens, Collected, 379). Stevens in that poem considers a supremacy toward which everyday “notes” might tend, and Merrill in Mirabell may describe something like the same culmination: “SU NC YCLE S” of ordinary time could lead to the book’s fi nal sun, or the cyclical January conclusion of Ephraim point “ST EP BY ST EP I N TO / SE A SON LE SS & CH A R ACT ER LE SS STAGE S” of the “CH I M E S SH A PED A S O O O O O” (Sandover, 275, 211). Mirabell begins with and fi nally returns to that O; like Stevens’s central poem, it seeks a “roundness that pulls tight the fi nal ring” (Collected, 379). Merrill’s work imagines a return so complete as to erase return altogether. This completeness requires a poetry of sheer measure: while the alphabet of The Book of Ephraim admits the imperfect representation of verbal equivalence, the Number of Mirabell’s Books seeks the perfect restitution of mathematical equation. This completeness forbids, moreover, a poetry of any revision: if Ephraim could celebrate repetition through the very progress of its rewriting, Mirabell must describe eternity through the direct transmission of its wisdom. Merrill wrote Ephraim over the course of twenty years and Mirabell in less than two. The poet chafes against a resulting lack of individuation, since he believes that only revision makes verse one’s own; “the words that come first are anybody’s,” he explains in an earlier interview, “. . . like the first words from a medium’s mouth” (Collected Prose, 61). Mirabell

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presents a medium-poet setting down precisely those “words” and complaining predictably that “it’s all by someone else” (Sandover, 261). Yet Mirabell requires this selflessness as well; its “Os” are “CH A R ACT ER LE SS” as well as “SE A SON LE SS.” Infi nity seems to entail a dissolution of “SELF” in “GR E AT GI V ENS” (262). As those givens approach the lack of both “past” and “personality” that Merrill outlines in the opening of Ephraim, Mirabell presses a Freudian psychology of conscious historicity and revisionary patterns toward a Jungian psychology of unconscious eternity and typological orders (4).70 Merrill already imagines this selfless state at moments near the conclusion of Ephraim, along with its attendant “failure of recall” (Sandover, 74). With his focus on the condition in Mirabell, he suggests more of its benefits: to erase one’s “real self ” may also erase one’s self-conscious shame (89). A “self-effacing balance” rights that daily over-and-over imbalance that never quite achieves the “sum of things”; as the fi nal section of Mirabell describes, infi nity’s perfect return may render exactly “what we owe” (275). This reverses one’s guilty fall into time, perhaps, and wipes away the debt that individual repetitions might never be able to pay: the end of Mirabell therefore recalls again the script of Merrill’s parents’ divorce when the solar angel Michael seems to present another “red setter” who can lead Merrill toward the reconciliation of shameful division. Michael’s illumination makes the “Hell” of Father Time, or Merrill’s own father’s “Go to Hell,” into the timeless “world of light” from Merrill’s allusion to Vaughan. Mirabell would remedy the sinful heritage of timely mortals with an innocent being of infi nite mind (274– 75). Yet questions remain. This infi nite existence might seem too extreme to be possible or too pure to be believed: can the material universe really offer such timeless illumination? Scripts for the Pageant takes up this doubt and tests Merrill’s conception of Nietzschean eternity through the figure of a different angel, Gabriel— and through his reassertion of the “forbidden,” “forgotten theme” of “T I M E” (Sandover, 438). This is no “animal delusion now,” as Merrill explains; it is not a regressive trait to be suppressed in ascension to angelism (440). Rather, time is considered as a fact of the inhuman universe, a “jet plume rising from the Shy One’s brow.” Gabriel tells of the “BL ACK BE YON D BL ACK ,” the darkness “beyond ourselves” in the mirror, the death and punishment that self-effacement cannot overcome (249). There is a “secret backward flow,” it seems, even in the workings of

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biological abstraction, a mortal timeliness even in totality, and the sparkling spiral from Mirabell may prove no more than the hourglass “EM P T Y OF SA N D” in Scripts (438). This vision of a universal Sandover draws from a Cold War context of nuclear terror,71 but Merrill’s poem uses the national fear of “ATOM IC WA ST E” to endorse his personal anxiety of a wasted and wasting historicity:72 when Gabriel draws his version of Merrill’s pervasive temporal symbol, he begins with an X that suggests the “character of man” before moving “F ROM X TO M A N TO HOU RGL A SS / A N D T I M E I TSELF” (475). Humans must live, Merrill once more fears, in a fevered running-out. Yet as Merrill asks earlier, “can’t Time renew / As well?” (Sandover, 440). Gabriel’s drawing charts two hourglasses, one ascending toward heavenly radiance and the other descending into a dark “R E SERVOI R OF SPEN T T I M E.” Scripts poses the alternatives with its organi zation into “Yes” and “No,” the difference between these two “M I N DS OF M AT T E R” summarizing the life-or-death alternative of the trilogy. In this fi nal book, however, the choice will emerge from matter itself: Nature will make up its own mind rather than being made up, as in Mirabell perhaps, by immortal intelligence. Like Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn,” therefore, Merrill’s hourglass-drawing scene would overcome terror with maternal, natural comfort; the poet turns from the fi re of necessity with a plea to “MOT H ER” against the nursery room’s “DA R K .” And like Stevens’s innocence, the answering figure is pivotal, fittingly entering in the middle of the poem’s middle section. This modestly commanding “chatelaine of Sandover” no longer seems to be a slave to Biology or obedient Mrs. to Science (407). She is no longer, certainly, a “BA D TA P / DA NCER ON A M AT EU R N IGH T,” as the powers of Mirabell scoffi ngly describe the globe of Ephraim (231). Both angels and humans now depend on the “turns” of the earth’s daily rotations or music-hall performance; Scripts even enacts something like those theatricals in its own Pageant, which move through a series of daily meetings often concluding in a couplet rhyme for “day.”73 Through this quotidian curriculum, moreover, each lesson accreting “greater / Power and light,” the course can lead eventually to a blessing from the “Queen Mum” herself— as if to affi rm that the two hourglasses of Gabriel’s chart do indeed meet on a “R I SI NG DU N E” rather than an indifferent plane (Sandover, 353– 54). The earth’s rounded form, or what Stevens might call her “moving contour,” can “HOLD BACK” waste and darkness,

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and Nature’s last word to humans in Scripts is “Y E S” (475, 489). The resulting possibility of “H E AV EN ON E A RT H” revises the aspirations of Mirabell by proposing the transfiguration rather than the transcendence of worldly existence (492); as Materer argues, this realm of infi nite security might well be the goal of Sandover as a whole (Merrill’s Apocalypse, 123– 24). With its vision of immortal men and promise that “T I M E W I LL STOP,” the prospect acknowledges Merrill’s real and increasing desire for eternity as well as his real and increasing fear of annihilation (Sandover, 512). Merrill’s poem suggests, however, that Eden is neither given nor guaranteed, since its far-off paradise is merely “MOST LIK ELY” (492). In addition, Merrill focuses not on an untimely time to come, with its lack of any “R E SIS TA NCE” and happier but “DULLER” residents,74 but on a timely, everyday living in view of its possibility. As Auden tells DJ and JM, future “Yeses” for humanity depend on the current actions of humanity itself; as the God of Scripts affirms, “U PR IGHT M A N / F ULL OF TI M E” must “CR EATE . . . A PA R A DISE” (492, 494). Humanity can do so, it seems, only by taking up that hourglass position “HERE WHERE WE ARE”—in repetitive ordinary time (475). The progress of Scripts—as well as the progress of Sandover itself—leads from the heaven of Mirabell back to the earth of Ephraim with a greater investment in the significance of its temporal patterns. This return to earthly time is evident in Merrill’s late poetry, with its deepened interest in diurnal recurrence.75 It may be evident even in Scripts itself: the center of this poem, bracketing the crucial ampersand section, are two lyrics of natural cycles and ordinary existence (Sandover, 369– 70, 430–34). “Samos,” for example, enacts through its elaborately repetitive canzone form the transmutation of natural elements; end words of “light,” “land,” “water,” “fire,” and “sense” return, change, and develop before ending in further expectation— even if DJ and JM will be “dust of quite another land / Before the seeds here planted come to light.” “The House in Athens” describes a similarly optimistic awakening for Merrill and Jackson’s home, imagining that time when “a fi rst kiss” from the furnace roused it to the erotic vitality; the heat of this poem, linking the period machine of Ephraim to the loving Cupid of “Days of 1964,” burns with innocent desire as it suggests that DJ and JM may continue to rekindle and refi ne. The fi nale of Scripts draws from this promise when it follows the description of far-off paradise with a ceremony in which DJ and JM pledge themselves anew to

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“E A RT H WOR K LI F E” (513). This ceremony marks a birthday for DJ, personification of “Nature” in the trilogy, as well as a kind of remarriage, and it fi nds hopeful anticipation in both celebrations. When two mediums end their lessons by breaking a mirror into flowing water, the rite symbolizes not only the “indestructible union” of their own relationship but also the faithful mixture of earth and time, worldly poem and temporal flux.76

Entitlements Subsequent poems return the couple’s hope to the Nights and Days from which it came. If the cosmic rounds and risings of Merrill’s trilogy can seem far from the routines and sunrises of ordinary life, Merrill’s late work shows how everyday living can offer the same consolation as ethereal wisdom and responds to doubts about everyday time that Sandover articulates. Both aims are evident, for example, in “Clearing the Title,” the fi rst long poem of Late Settings, which narrates Merrill and Jackson’s resettling in Key West as it decides on a name for the Ouija-board trilogy (Collected Poems, 406–10). Like “The Thousand and Second Night,” “Clearing” is a work of possible conclusions: this new home might mean a fi nal chapter in which Merrill and Jackson wait “companionably for kingdom come.” Like “The Thousand and Second Night,” “Clearing the Title” answers its anxiety with daily repetition: when a scene of motley characters watching a sunset rewrites a carnival pier’s “farewells / To flesh,” the later poem remembers that evening’s seeming “oblivion” is part of a repetitive order. The promise of that order, though, now includes the reincarnate possibilities of The Book of Ephraim: (Think of the dead here, sleeping above ground —Simpler than to hack a tomb from coral— In whitewashed hope chests under the palm fronds. Or think of waking, whether to the quarrel Of white cat and black crow, those unchanged friends, Or to a dazzle from below: Earth visible through floor-cracks, miles— or inches— down, And spun by a gold key-chain round and round . . . )

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As the stanza’s movement from mortal sleep to everyday waking compares a new dawn and a new life, the round-and-round movements of Merrill’s ancient and ageless mother mitigate fear of his own aging fate. It seems that he need not fear the record of age, either, when the “superfluous matter” of dots and ellipses and black holes returns in the less ominous “balloons” of a Key West sunset celebration. These “stars / Or periods,” Merrill writes, “—although tonight we trust no real / Conclusions will be reached—float higher yet / Juggled slowly by the changing light.” The interjected phrase repeats the “most likely” affi rmation of Scripts for the Pageant—but just as Scripts defers in optimistic expectation, “no real / Conclusions” refuses to choose while weighing against the “periods” that would indicate termination. Balloons continue to “float higher yet.” Moreover, the figure of a god who juggles “fi rebrands” in earlier stanzas yields to the face of a “clown” who manages their ascent. The dead, then, may continue to wake in the unending optimism of graves turned “hope chests,” and as the diurnal “changing light” of a new home recalls the diurnal “changing light” of “A Tenancy” two decades earlier, a poet can welcome the rounds of an existential lease. Yet Merrill’s progress toward the light of “Clearing” is not purely optimistic; it enacts new questions about the “spent time” that galvanized Mirabell and Scripts— or about the memory that divided “For Proust” and “Verse for Urania.” If one can overcome the dangers of accretion, as both the trilogy and “Clearing” imply, by trusting the flow of a cosmic hourglass, that reliance still seems to discount one’s distinct history. Thus while the poet householder of “A Tenancy” can transplant old “things and thoughts” to a new place, the new beginning in “Clearing the Title” seems to “cast / Three decades’ friendships and possessions out.” Jackson’s “floods of casual patter” naturally trust such movement, but Merrill’s own preference for retrospection leaves him reluctant; “what about houses elsewhere, rooms already packed / With memories?” he asks. Must one “shut[] doors onto the past” to join that “deepening stream / Along with others who’ve a date / With sunset”? The fi nality of “date” and generality of “others” suggest how Merrill takes revisionary patterns to be the perpetuation of identity: submission to an undifferentiated flow, however continuous, may achieve an endurance that is self-erasing. Is this inevitable, Merrill wonders; as a draft of “Clearing” asks, must “we just shut doors on the total past // Which when destroyed ‘felt nothing’ (Stevens said)”? (WU IV.1.a)

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In “Esthétique du Mal,” Stevens considers his question in the shadow of Vesuvius, and Merrill does so near a different volcano: “Santorini: Stopping the Leak,” the last long work of Late Settings, complements the homecoming of “Clearing the Title” with the home-leaving of Merrill’s departure from Greece (Collected Poems, 479–85). In “Santorini,” the poet seems to accept the loss that transplantation requires; when he burns away a plantar wart from his foot, the extermination imitates Santorini’s geological fire as it symbolizes the poet’s relinquishment of “Greece itself.” He willingly “parch[es]” his memories with “killing rays,” recalling again the conflagration of Stevens’s “The Auroras of Autumn” or his own “Scenes of Childhood” as he aims again for the natural harmony that those other works would achieve. The result, however, is horrifying, a vision of fluent, “ravenous images” each evolving to a “table / Set for one” before surrendering “ego” to an ongoing flood, and Merrill turns from the sight to plead with Nature, “those revels’ Queen.” If he must “ fall / Back out of mind, yours, anyone’s to this / Upstreaming human thaw,” he prays, “O that the shattered star, / The music-maker, broadcast limb from limb, / Be made whole, Lady— hear and remember him!” Merrill desperately wants to believe that a universal flux can still recall particu lar “ facets and symmetries.” He receives his precisely punning answer in the next stanza: when Merrill’s wart returns, its “faint, familiar pulse” sure as the “pulsars” of an awakening foot in Ephraim, it renews his supposedly “drained self ” as it symbolizes worldly renewal. Nature is not a streaming “ghost-leak,” then, but a turning order, a recycling in which even volcanic annihilation predicts an island to come. To “fall back” into earthly progress is to be remembered in earthly patterns. “Clearing the Title” uses the same insight to move from a doubtful to a satisfied resettling: Merrill fi nds that late light streaming toward sunset oblivion is actually “better-late- / Than-never light” recurring with sunrise. Invoking the “late,” like Frost, to resist the “never,” Merrill’s speaker gradually trusts the returns of a not-new past in fresh mornings. Just as the dead wake then to “unchanged friends,” for example, the poet discovers familiar friends in the new life of Key West; “in fact I recognize / Old ones everywhere I turn my eyes,” he admits. The implications of such recognition suggest a subtly Kierkegaardian or Stevensian assurance, promising that any self-effacing tomorrow will include a self-constitutive yesterday, but Merrill’s register and tone once again manifest his difference from Stevens’s more demanding restitution in “The Auroras.” Merrill seems to

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argue through the very lightness of his address, in fact, since his reconciliation emerges less through decisive agreement to fate than through evolving accommodation of friendship. With its conversational progress, “Clearing the Title” lets its speaker expose and reform an initial narcissism by defi ning and accepting an evolving compromise. The result is a modified allusion to Stevens, in the fi nal draft, that doubts if “shutting doors onto the past // Could damage it.” This speaker need no longer burn “everything he is,” perhaps; he can simply close his door or shut his “hope chest” with confidence in future refi nement. This refi nement can preserve past poems as well as past selves:77 Merrill in “Santorini,” it is important to note, asks Nature to recall the “musicmaker” Orpheus, whose dismembered, “broadcast” body and silenced song might be reassembled further down the Hebric stream. In one more instance of a particularly Merrillian pun, Nature’s affi rmative answer therefore enlivens a metrical foot as well as a real one, the pulse supporting the form and continuance of poetry. Such endorsement is crucial in “Clearing the Title,” where Merrill’s reluctance to forgo “three decades” bespeaks his unwillingness to abandon the trilogy composed through those thirty years. He resists a sunset that means “day’s flush of pleasure, knowing its poem done.” The conflation of poem and day, however, suggests that a poet’s art may be as continual as the earth’s days, and Merrill builds from that insight his description of work that “grew From life together, grain by coral grain. Building on it, we let the life cloud over . . . Time to break through those clouds, for heaven’s sake, And look round. Any place will do (Remember, later at the discothèque) And what at fi rst appall precisely are the changes That everybody is entitled to. When Merrill relinquishes writing and “break[s] through” into living, he emerges into a very poetic existence: if the “art” of his trilogy was built of a “life” accumulated like coral, he and DJ begin that art/life again when they settle on the “tough white coral skeleton” of Key West. The transition from aesthetics to reality, poem to world, seems as seamless as sunlight’s recurrent breakthroughs. Indeed the light’s changing is itself an artistic

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show, as the crowd’s applause at the landing stage makes clear, and Merrill’s own verse is a natural power, as he suggests with the half-poetic, half-architectural “lines” of his sixth stanza. Merrill’s fi rst-person plural at the start of this thirteenth stanza, therefore, remembers a duality implicit in quotidian poetics as it overcomes his commitment to an individual past. “Our poem now,” he asserts. Jackson’s naturalism and his own aestheticism unite in the poesis of ordinary time, and the fi nal stanzas of “Clearing the Title” can begin its art over as they start an existence beyond it. This work will be serenely general: the “title” to one’s art now comes in “changes / That everybody is entitled to.” It will also be serenely revisionary: particu lar changes are now part of the larger world’s “constant process of self-revision.”78 This last phrase is Merrill’s description of “truth” in Sandover, an evolving verity symbolized by “changing light”: sure of its alterations, Merrill’s late lyrics can overcome possible worries over his own preference for rewriting.79 As the poet considers “cuts and changes” in “From the Cutting-Room Floor,” for instance, the “Lord of Light” cites his own example, a sun “FOR EV ER” getting at a “bONE OF M EA N ING,” concluding with “R EV ISE, R ISE, SH IN E! GOOD A H M Y CH ILDR EN N IGHT!” (Collected Poems, 466– 67) The appellation of “good children” here, moreover, indicates a third aspect of Merrill’s late conception of poetic work: as it manifests generality, as it embraces revision, his daily verse also enacts a continually achieved innocence.80 The sunset of “Clearing the Title” can thus rewrite the sunset of “The Broken Home” without striving for a defi nitive “unstiflement,” and the steel “bars” of “Clearing” recall the bars of an “I M MORTA L CELL” in Scripts—a biological confinement that turns “iron to sunlight”—while emphasizing the “A S Y ET” of such safety (Sandover, 496). Nature’s “happy endings” are happy by never ending, their immortality rewritten with each day. Such immortality, therefore, demands the environmental and formal attention of Merrill’s late poems, however incongruous that combination may at fi rst appear. His last works press a long-held material spiritualism into a more and more dedicated ecology; while “life” once meant “saving your soul,” he explains in 1988, it now means rescuing “forests,” “poisoned seas,” and “atmosphere.”81 Poems like “The Ring Cycle,” another rewriting of “The Broken Home,” affi rm this suggestion by equating “the world’s life” with the poet’s while fearing the environmental “plunder” threatening both (Collected Poems, 611–13). Yet Merrill’s remedy is more poetic than

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political, as his title suggests, since both a sun and a “son till now undreamed of ” require attention to Wagnerian motifs. As this artistry demonstrates the last, earthly-aesthetic version of Merrill’s “form that affi rms,” it specifies the requirements of affi rmation: formalism is not just the “story” of “The Broken Home,” now, a personal pattern that aspires to natural benefits; not just the “world’s poem” of Ephraim, a personal pattern that demonstrates natural benefits; and not just the “myth” of “Verse for Urania” or Scripts, a personal pattern included in natural benefits. Formalism is also a curatorial responsibility by which one’s own commonplace life and conventional art maintain and develop what is natural. Merrill articulates the charge in a passage from his 1991 memoir addressed to his mother: “In nature the type is everything,” he explains, and you and I are tolerated only to the degree that we’re true to it. If in the process we refine it, better yet. The first and hardest step is getting into nature’s good books. One reason my behavior was “unnatural” a hundred years ago was that nature found on her shelves so few texts proving otherwise. But in our day she’s had to build a whole new bookcase! Wonderful, isn’t it, how she keeps working to improve her mind? Just like you. (Collected Prose, 651) A homosexual artist potentially divided from blue-eyed commonplaces or maternal favors defends his life and art as both standard and revisionary: he would prove his naturalness by redefi ning the very description. Merrill’s everyday autobiography has become social and environmental work. The resulting practice is evident in “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker,” the last major poem of diurnal return in Merrill’s canon (Collected Poems, 669–73). Here, Merrill’s exemplary, environmental life story is fittingly realized in a “Self-Portrait” as “Everyman” dressed in a “a world map,” and Merrill’s drafts of this poem even include a version of his memoir passage about typological naturalism.82 The poet now fears, though, that worldliness invests him in “swells of fashion cresting to collapse / In breaker upon breaker on the beach”; he conflates the sickness of “mother Earth” and his own aging to doubt the possibility or the good of continued waves and further “sacred pageant[s].” Because human irresponsibility seems to blame for both, one’s preference for aesthetic substitutes like the jacket may betray

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a “guilty knowledge” of the real world’s fate, as people seek to “shrug off ” “accountability” by donning fabrications of innocence. Yet the dream of this childlike escapism, Merrill suggests, could also be the beginning of mature responsibility: when he puts on a Walkman with his jacket, hoping that its “musical sunscreen” will protect the “wilderness” of his thoughts, he evokes a desire that human artistry can similarly guard the “mind of matter.” He suggests how so, moreover, with the particulars of the Roberto Murolo songs that he chooses to hear. “Back before animal species began to become / Extinct,” Merrill explains, when Mussolini forbade street singers in Naples, Murolo memorized their music “and hid.” He then emerged after the war with “songs of the land,” his recollection a rebirth for “the land” itself as well as a resurrection of human life, since Murolo’s Orphic lyrics have “a perfect naturalness that thawed the numb // Survivors and reinspired the Underground.” Murolo claims natural power by remembering earthly rhythms; his art preserves and sustains vitality as it makes this worldliness perfect: he plays a “change so strummed into the life of things / That Nature’s lamps burn brighter when he sings . . . Snow on a flower, the moon, the season’s round.” In Merrill’s description, the rounds of art can renew the rounds of the world. That music, then, transfigures the meaning of Merrill’s jacket: less like a juvenile, civic fairy tale than an ancient, cosmic fable, his windbreaker fi nally appears “in black, with starry longitudes, Archer, Goat / Clothing an earphoned archangel of Space.” As Merrill directs Murolo to “sing our fi nal air,” his starry refusal of fi nality concludes that: if you or I’ve exceeded our [?] * * * more than time was needed To fit a text airless and * * as Tyvek With breathing spaces and between the lines Days brilliantly recurring, as once we did, To keep the blue wave dancing in its prison. Musical airs unstifle the guilty suffocation of the jacket’s story, turning the regressive wish for a forgiving, healthy planet into a self-conscious re-creation of a forbearing, developing world.83 The breathing spaces of Murolo’s— or Merrill’s—lyric might allow room for “days brilliantly

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recurring”: a recurrence possible, earlier, in the “lucite coffi n” of an artificial wave machine rather than the “irradiated lucite” of the world’s polluted skies. The dancing prison of this stanza thus recalls the “i m morta l cell” of Sandover or aerating bars of “Clearing the Title” while asserting a poet’s own creation of both. Merrill imagines a natural poem of “higher yet” tendencies that will circle the globe with stars rather than periods and make heaven on earth more and more likely; his asterisked typography, in this stanza, shows the process in action. Thus if the angelic changing he describes seems to extend beyond any one singer’s life, beyond any days when “we” might recur as well, it nonetheless imbues one’s created rounds with a sense of significance and continuance. When Roberto and JM have “ex- / ceeded” their time, as Merrill’s excessive lineation demonstrates, their living, breathing “text” may persist and progress. “An Upward Look,” which follows “Self-Portrait” to end Merrill’s last volume, exemplifies that consolation, as a lover worried that his heart’s “green acre” has been fatally poisoned instead “fi nds the world turning // toys triumphs toxins into / this vast facility” (Collected Poems, 674). The poem’s shape presents one fi nal, rising hourglass in Merrill’s poetry: a discouraged fi rst half of two-line stanzas progresses to a three-line fulcrum before continuing into an optimistic second portion of two-line stanzas again. Each of the poem’s bifurcated lines, moreover, mimics the rotations of the world it describes, a “bright alternation” of “morning star” and “evening star” that lies “within the thinking of each and every / mortal creature”; the poem joins the repetitions of verse to that diurnal repetition one can both live and imagine. Free of punctuation, “An Upward Look” therefore refuses conclusion while trusting the confidence of its title: even a “grave,” here, will “dissolv[e] into dawn.” That is so, too, in the fi nal poems that Merrill writes, their valedictory peace drawing from and deepening a trust in recurrence. The speaker of “Christmas Tree,” for example, accepts that his salts will soon be “plowed back into the Earth for lives to come” (Collected Poems, 866). The dog of “Koi” falls into a pool of sunsettinted fish that murmur “Carpe diem” amid worlds “drop[ping] away” (867). And the poet of Merrill’s last “Days,” “Days of 1994,” greets the morning in an “underground” room where the fresh light of sunrise nevertheless “seeks” him (868– 69). “To wake, to wake,” Merrill writes in this work, “Among the flaming dowels of a tomb / Below the world, the thousand

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things / Here risen to if not above / Before day ends.” The crimson bars of this fi nal earthly prison look ahead to stars both ordinary and eternal; rising from a tomb and rising from sleep are each as glorious and as ordinary as any day’s return. Merrill need never “rise above” everyday life, therefore. He fi nds in its measured pattern a poetics of measureless promise.

Conclusion Everyday Pasts and Everyday Futures

“almost all th e gr ave st top i c s ou r er a h a s p ro d uce d ca n be found in Merrill,” Stephen Burt writes in a 2001 review of the Collected Poems: “nuclear apocalypse; terrorism; Third World development and underdevelopment; the gradual forgetting of the past; existential meaninglessness; solipsism; aging and death. He challenged himself to show not how dreadful or scary these prospects can be, but instead how we do, in fact, live with them all” (“Becoming Literature,” 36). Burt’s summary mingles political, philosophical, and personal themes to end on the different and broader question of living: he argues against a common charge of remove not by emphasizing the poet’s inclusion of current events but by identifying Merrill’s concern with common existence. In this, Burt’s sentence exemplifies how the ordinary poetics that this book has tried to defi ne could address the familiar contrast of art against politics or poetry against history. All four writers of this study have been attacked or defended on these grounds, and various critical efforts have striven to prove that Frost, Stevens, Bishop, or Merrill is more topically relevant than his or her poems might at first suggest. Yet often, indictments and exculpations of this type seem to miss the more central aims of these poets’ work. I hope in my analyses to have suggested why, as well as to have suggested a modification of the opposition behind these efforts. Implicit in my discussions here is a belief that the contrast of timelessness and history can limit the range of literary meaning and the use of critical description. There

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exists a realm of experience other than subjective withdrawal and objective reference; there exists a historicity that is not necessarily historical as well as a sociality that is not necessarily political. One can describe this realm, in part, through everyday time—through its common, consistent, changing over-and-over. A focus on daily rhythm could help to supplement some possibly unwinnable or irrelevant arguments about poetry and politics with a recognition of versified temporality. In a poetics of the quotidian, aesthetic timeliness does not depend on an event or condition that a poem’s content may cite but on an ordinary pattern that a poem’s recursions may inscribe. Moreover, aesthetic relevance does not depend on a specific context that a poet may address but on a common instantiation that a craft must manage. The resulting analysis shifts focus from subject matter to form, and from the stipulations of a particu lar audience to the requirements of a given structure, without necessarily inviting the aestheticism or academicism that can condemn these concerns. The analysis may resist such charges, in fact, with its particular conception of form or structure, since ordinary poetry takes art to be a directed, contingent process rather than a bounded, fi nished object. To write or read this work is to consider the uses and meanings of ongoing cadence. This consideration may help to further understanding of the four poets in this study. It may also add to descriptions of that literary-historical span that runs from Frost’s 1913 debut to Merrill’s 1995 death. The period could seem to evince the triumph of an idealist aesthetics, as the increasingly difficult literature of modernism and its aftermath withdrew from the province of common experience. An everyday poetics complements this account—and counters the criticisms of its discontents—with instances of experiential lyricism; in this work, poets articulate the dangers and powers of ordinary experience to fi nd new significance for its characteristically recurrent efforts. Their attention, therefore, falls outside many of the highlow dichotomies identified in modernist art, which set a fascination with mass culture against an obsession with elite traditions. Artists could also view common experience as an aesthetic practice, casting quotidian life as a conscious project of choices and makings. They could fi nd daily tasks to be as baffl ing, as challenging, and as potentially thrilling as artistic work. This verse would not examine the ordinary stuff that a given society contains so much as imagine the ordinary life that a given individual creates.

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Ashbery, for example, exemplifies a version of the creation when he states in his most recent volume that “the wraparound flux we intuit // as time” comes with “claims on our inventiveness” (Worldly, 70). His attention to wraparound flux shows everyday poetry’s enduring and evolving relevance. There may be many such instances, certainly, and the preceding chapters are not intended to defi ne canons or provide criteria so much as to identity certain aims, means, and effects of American verse from the twentieth century to the present. Ashbery’s career, however, seems to offer a particularly relevant demonstration of how such attributes can develop. Ashbery began writing at the tail end of modernism and continues to write through an era when postmodernism is past-tense; he read Frost and Stevens in fi rst editions, sent a fan letter to Elizabeth Bishop, and knew Merrill as a contemporary. His poems manifest this heritage in part through their consideration of dailiness,1 from the “beginning again” of “White Roses,” in The Tennis Court Oath (Mooring, 91); the waking that ends “Defi nition of Blue,” in The Double Dream of Spring (Mooring, 266– 67); the “Collective Dawns”—the sun “coming up with the same idiot solution under another guise”—in Houseboat Days (Houseboat, 6); to the desired conflation of “thinking / and daily living” that concludes “Baked Alaska” in Hotel Lautréamont (Hotel, 57); and the “daily horoscope” that fi nishes “Are You Ticklish?” in A Worldly Country (Worldly, 70). By “repeating the same things over and over,” as Ashbery writes in “Late Echo,” he suggests how something can “continue and be gradually different”; as the “color of the day” is “put in / Hundreds of times,” his work also rewrites and revises his American forebears (As We Know, 88). Ashbery’s daily horoscopes are less consistent than Stevens’s or Merrill’s, less guilt-ridden than Bishop’s, and less effortful than Frost’s: his accord with time is more often a “careless / Preparing,” as he phrases it in “Soonest Mended,” than a willful affi rmation or conscious creation (Mooring, 233). Ashbery also seems less interested than these other poets in the formal returns of verse and less invested in the experiential returns of days. He is more apt to seek an original way of doing things: “You can’t say it that way any more,” he states flatly at the beginning of his ars poetica “And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” (Houseboat, 45). Especially in his earlier work, Ashbery often resists a life of “repeating the same stupid phrase / Over and over” and wonders if one can “outsmart the sense of continuity” that unconsciously guides him (Mooring, 192, 281). Yet he also fi nds that

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“one is doomed, / repeating oneself, never to repeat oneself ” (Flow Chart, 7), and he perceives that continuity can produce novelty as well as monotony: “Some departure from the norm / Will occur as time grows more open about it,” he writes in another poem (Houseboat, 29). The new can emerge from a gradually changed “consensus”; originality may be part of one’s temporal progress rather than a transcendence or arrest of the flux.2 As one lives a normal life, therefore, there is “no need to wait to be transformed: you are already” (Mooring, 322). This realization allows Ashbery a “strange kind of happiness within the limitations”; he can be “content to make the rounds” (Mooring, 324, 327). He can even assert, as he writes in “The System,” that “what did matter now was getting . . . back to the business of day-to-day living,” aware that each new problem is “actually . . . the same old surprise that you have always lived with” (Mooring, 363). Each is part of “the ambiguous situation one had come to know and even to tolerate, if not to love,” as he writes in “The Recital” (Mooring, 382). Ashbery’s respect for that business of day-to-day living and regard for that ambiguity help to explain how his work can be at once more obscure and more popu lar than most of his contemporaries’. Just as his wide range of references arises in part from his commitment to the variety of ordinary life, his focused attention on everyday experience helps even his most incomprehensible content to seem weirdly common. Ashbery uses his familiar strangeness to address some of the same themes that other poets of daily living take up. He recognizes the power, for example, of an unhistorical historicity; the 2005 poem “More Feedback,” to take one instance of this, revises the anguished mythic cycles of Yeats’s “Second Coming” through its amenably common temporality (Where Shall I Wander, 46). Yeats states that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,” and Ashbery begins by noting that “the passionate are immobilized” as the “case-harden undulate over walls / of the library”; at stake in both poems, then, is the possibility of action during a time of supposed crisis. Ashbery’s work, however, set at “the equinox again,” replaces the cosmic gyres of Yeats’s philosophy with the feedback loops and reversals inscribed by lunar and seasonal schedules. If “the pure joy of daily living” has become “impacted / with the blood of fate and battles,” such patterns might counter apocalyptic certainty with vital hesitation, and when the “gangplank” manager claims that “there’s no turning back,” Ashbery’s speaker points out that “in the past / we could

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always wait a little.” The poet’s expectancy risks “political quietism,” a charge that has threatened Ashbery since his recommendation of “fencesitting” in “Soonest Mended” (Shoptaw, On the Outside, 106). Yet that earlier poem, with its conclusion in perpetual “coming back,” might rather promote the same trust in continuity that girds “More Feedback.” Both works wish to change the terms of the argument rather than retreat into easy apathy. Ashbery’s equinoctial poise, warily hoping that the facts of “what happens” will go on happening, ends the latter work with a suggestion that is political for its very refusal of political rhetoric. The speaker’s position contributes to the suggestion, as “More Feedback” replaces Yeats’s oracular “I” with a less prophetic fi rst person. Ashbery’s version of daily time in general supports his version of an immanent, contingent, but nonetheless coherent subjectivity. As the analysis in previous chapters suggests, ordinary poems can enact this psychology; the work of Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill describes the self as an evolving practice rather than an essential point. Moreover, this work shows how individuality can be maintained by alteration—by its own efforts at self-revision. Such commonplace subjectivity, reconciling pragmatist empiricism and romantic interiority, agrees with several accounts in American literary criticism: most recently, perhaps, Andrew Epstein’s excellent description of “experimental individualism,” which includes Ashbery in its assessment of late-twentieth-century American poetry and concludes that “self ” might be “less an entity than an ongoing process” (Beautiful Enemies, 8, 68).3 In everyday time, the process can be an ongoing pattern, too, not so much abandoning the past as returning continually to a fresh version of it. This daily sort of self can therefore look back with judicious revisions and forward with justified expectations. Ashbery’s work demonstrates the power of such developing consistency—in which one is “always cresting into one’s present,” as he writes in his poetic “SelfPortrait,” and in which the present is a state that one is “always escaping from / And falling back into, as the waterwheel of days / Pursues its uneventful, even serene course” (Self-Portrait, 78). As he writes in the Stevensian “Clouds,” human beings are always “the effortless discoverers of our career,” with “each day digging the grave of tomorrow and at the same time / Preparing its own redemption, constantly living and dying” (Mooring, 281). Ashbery’s most Kierkegaardian formulation of quotidian selfhood, the poem “Clepsydra,” explains how a “distant / Image of you . . .

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Returns the full echo of what you meant”; the result is a “single and twin existence” that can be appreciated “while morning is still and before the body / Is changed by the faces of evening” (Mooring, 193). Like other poets of daily time, Ashbery writes an ordinary and impersonal autobiography, a life story less like a plotted “story” than a repetitive poem. Ashbery’s work also develops a particu lar implication of this lyrical life. It is evident in his pronouns; as many critics have described, Ashbery’s speaker or speakers often wander among a modest “I,” a generically impersonal “you,” and a vaguely constituted “we.” His sense of subjectivity allows such shifts, as a conditional, commonplace first person fi nds that it can join other conditional, commonplace existences without seeming to impose an unwanted standard or to assume an unjustified empathy. The aim, as Ashbery explains in one interview, is “a general, all-purpose experience—like those stretch socks that fit all sizes” (Poulin, “The Experience,” 250– 51). Such experience preserves self-consciousness while avoiding both the “autobiographical” and “confessional” labels that Ashbery rejects in the same talk, and though John Shoptaw compares Ashberyan generality to “political . . . representation” (On the Outside, 1), his poetry may resist that label as well,4 since his affi liations seem prior to any civics and wider than any citizenship. He writes a polity of the ordinary, perhaps. Indeed everyday time may constitute the all-purpose existence that Ashbery desires, and a later poem, “And the Stars Were Shining,” suggests as much with its similarly metaphoric stretch sock: “It was day, after all,” Ashbery writes here; “one of those things like a length of sleep / like a woman’s stocking, that you lay flat / and it becomes a unit of your life and—this is where it / gets complicated— of so many others’ lives as well” (Stars, 76). To measure one’s living by daily “units” is to make one’s living anyone’s, Ashbery shows. To defi ne oneself through everyday time is to grant oneself typicality.5 Stevens’s “The Auroras” implies something similar with its fraternal sleep, as does Merrill’s “To the Reader” with an exemplary publication and Bishop’s “Sestina” with an almanac autobiography. Ashbery however, focuses more steadily on this function of quotidian aesthetics, and exemplifies more often the tone that can result: diffident and respectful yet intimate and inclusive. His conversational poems make their way only by joining with others in a collective sense of improvisatory decisiveness.

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“And the Stars,” for example, ends by addressing “you,” a figure that seems both specific partner and unspecified reader: “we can handle it together,” Ashbery assures, describing how his audience has “the sky for an awning / for as many days as it pleases it to cover you” (Stars, 99). He echoes the same confidence in a 2008 poem, when he writes again that “we can handle it, hand on / the stick shift headed into a billboard / labeled Tomorrow, the adventures of new music, / melismas shrouding the past and the passing days” (“Episode”). An ordinary lyricism— a melisma of twentyfi rst century dailiness—lets Ashbery’s fi rst-person plural in “Episode” fi nd “calm / under an appearance of turmoil.” As in his revision of Yeats, Ashbery here replaces political activism with quotidian persistence and oracular vision with collective ordeals. In this, Ashbery’s self-defi nition seems genuinely democratic; it assumes a group of individuals united by common time. In this, too, his self-expression seems genuinely egalitarian; it aspires to a general relevance driven by common creativity. Both effects are important consequences of an everyday poetics. So is another: an emphasis on imminence. Throughout Ashbery’s work, the actual dynamics of a faith in tomorrow deepen the metaphorical meanings of a coming day. The same is true, in various ways, for poems by Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill; as Stevens writes in a late letter, to “think about what next” is for these writers “one’s constant, thrilling problem” (“Taking Care,” 61). In its full sense of problematic thrill, such ordinary futurity may prove to be an important aspect of everyday poetics by suggesting contributions to seemingly unrelated fields of contemporary criticism. One such field, for example, is queer theory: though Bishop, Merrill, and Ashbery have all been read in the context of their sexuality,6 their sense of the quotidian may be especially relevant to a queer meditation on time. Lee Edelman sets many of the current terms of this meditation with his influential study No Future; futurity, in Edelman’s view, only props up a heteronormative belief system that would continue traditional society through traditional means. To accept the good of tomorrow is to accept the importance of procreation, the value of “the Child,” and the governance of a repressive “secular theology” that Edelman calls “reproductive futurism” (No Future, 2–4, 10–13). Rather than submit to this totalizing order, Edelman argues, and work for greater inclusion in its institutions, one

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should cherish a fundamental alterity and oppose the order’s very premises. The political, social, and perhaps even the aesthetic value of queerness comes with its ability to “shatter[] . . . narrative temporality” (31).7 Yet poetic temporality, and its nonnarrative expectation of the future, might not require the same shattering destruction. As Edelman indicates with a titular link of “queer theory and the death drive,” his project relies on a Freudian and Lacanian account of repetition; No Future contrasts the fantasy of life-giving progress, a fairy tale that is regressively told by conventional culture, with the reality of deathly compulsion, a fact that is rightly acknowledged by queer critique. However salutary this description may be, it is designedly limiting, and theorists following Edelman are left to wonder if, in Kate Thomas’s words, one must “throw the bathwater of futurity out with the baby” (“Post Sex,” 622). “Do all futurities entail heteronormative forms of continuity or extension?” asks Elizabeth Freeman in her introduction to a recent journal issue on “queer temporality,” adding that the question marks “the spot of our collective critical endeavor” (“Introduction,” 166). Freeman, Thomas, and others have taken up the endeavor in various manifestations, each suggesting, in the words of Michael D. Snediker’s argument for “queer optimism,” that “there are ways of resisting a pernicious logic of ‘reproductive futurism’ besides embodying the death drive” (Queer Optimism, 23).8 An everyday poetics could support the project by countering Edelman’s defi nition of compulsive recurrence with an equally Freudian description of re-creative repetition—the kind of repetition that one might fi nd in common time. This sort of repetition could see ordinary life, the apparent locus of society’s most heteronormative standards, as a place for their review and even their gradual transformation. And it could present an ordinary future, the apparent replication of a standard liberal subject, as a chance to develop the variety within any liberated self. Both possibilities relate to suggestions that are already central in the theorization of sexuality. Judith Butler’s analysis of gender describes a performativity by which repetition of social roles challenges their defi nition, for example, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, more recently, recommends a process of reparative revision in queer criticism that could be applied to living as well as to reading.9 One might also note that Foucault’s History of Sexuality, a foundational text for queer theory, takes sexual behavior to be one of the “arts of existence,” those practices that would “transform . . .

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existence into a kind of permanent exercise.”10 An everyday poetry can dramatize the implications of the exercise when it turns quotidian experience into a self-conscious craft—thereby making the conventional creative and changing what could be assumed into what must be discovered. The results may constitute a queer prospect that is not essentially negative, since a person who lives by estranging the familiar can regard tomorrow with neither the naïve optimism of reproductive futurism nor the nihilistic aggression of resistant morbidity. An everyday poetics could fi nd happiness “interesting,” to quote again from Snediker’s plea for “queer optimism” (Queer Optimism, 3). Though Snediker defi nes this interest as “nonfutural” and “present tense” (23, 16), his analysis of serialism and iterability suggests that a repetitive, quotidian pattern could support something like his desired affect.11 Ashbery’s ordinary poetry shows more clearly how this could be so, perhaps, with works that are as optimistic as they are odd, and Bishop and Merrill, too, provide different but equally interesting visions of ordinary happiness.12 The everyday verse of all three and others, therefore, might not only contribute meaningfully to queer theory but also stress the bearing of this theory on a range of broad questions. The potential delusions of reproductive futurism, it is important to note, threaten also those not defi ned as queer. The potential distortions of marriage do so, too: this institution seems to persist at the exemplary center of any ordinary temporality, and queer theory articulates its persistent problems for subjects of all sorts. The difficulties arise from matrimony’s conservative essence; Edelman’s theories, for example, support the powerful argument that any state legitimization of homosexual couples would erase subversive difference through heterosexist standardization.13 Continuing political battles about the defi nition of matrimony, however, suggest that some imagination of coupled living still seems useful to many in the fashioning of identity and purpose. Marriage articulates a realm between one’s private existence and public role; perhaps uniquely among human relationships, it may help both to distinguish and to unite these different, complementary positions. Marriage might do so, moreover, without imposing the discriminating normativity that critics rightly cite, if commitment could presume or allow something other than strict conformity. Bishop and Merrill suggest this possibility in their poems of partnership, and so does Ashbery in his many poems of dual everyday life: the repetitions of “Late Echo,” for example, perpetuate

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“love” in par ticu lar. These poets do not suppose that loyalty to a companion means submission to convention. Instead, the choice of paired life may exemplify one’s consistent effort to inhabit and renew familiar patterns; conscious allegiance may be a means of enriching one’s necessary setting rather than a way of endorsing one’s social order. This would change matrimonial legitimation from a single state citation to a recurrent mutual project, and would make that project as generally possible as it is intimately varied— evident in the recitation of “In the Home Stretch” or the patience of “The World as Meditation” as well as the amenability of “The Shampoo” or the anniversaries of The Changing Light at Sandover. To make a couple’s authority its ongoing task is also to change the status of procreation, since companions who will together defi ne each samebut-different tomorrow need not predicate expectation on the conception of a child.14 Merrill is most explicit in this choice, perhaps, when he gives up genetic meddling in Sandover to concentrate on nightly Ouija sessions: this habit, and the poem that results, seem to justify and continue his life with Jackson. The decision could seem no more than necessary for a homosexual poet. Yet it may also be no less than principled for an everyday writer; the heterosexual couples of Frost’s poems are equally resistant to the equation of matrimony and reproduction. The true task of companionship, Frost’s “In the Home Stretch” and “Home Burial” suggest, begins only when childbearing ends, when two people imagine a future that is patterned by diurnal continuity rather than guaranteed by generational lineage. Merrill’s spouses and speakers take up this challenge from Frost’s more conventional-seeming husbands and wives. One might see this especially in Merrill’s redefi nition of Christmas, a date clearly dramatizing his culture’s faith in redemptive childbirth. Edelman, in fact, describes the holiday as emblematic of “reproductive futurism” when he analyzes the symbolism of Scrooge and Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (No Future, 45– 54). Perhaps owing in part to such implications, Merrill and Bishop both fi nd Christmas to be a fraught subject;15 their descriptions of the holiday pose a choice between fatal, intransigent necessity and fatuous, impossible normality. Bishop’s poetry dramatizes the fi rst possibility when she notices expectant Christmas trees “associating with their shadows” in “At the Fish houses.” The pines seem to be part of a deathly repetition implicit to that poem’s “over and over” (Complete Poems, 65).16 Merrill’s work presents the second option when he slams the door on caroling chil-

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dren in “Chimes for Yahya”; if “tomorrow’s Christmas,” the poet refuses both a day and a holiday that mark a trust in the future (Collected Poems, 371– 78). Through the course of “Chimes,” however, Merrill fi nds a “tomorrow” that does not rely on the scripts of normative sanctity: he fi rst remembers a homosexual parody of birth that he witnessed in Isfahan, a playacted parturition that mocked the idea of traditional culture as well as its continuance through biological conception; he then uses that memory to affi rm an “animal nature” that continues to live and feel within him despite its discipline from the rounds of a “rolled-up Times.” By the end of the poem, recollection has become renewal, and a poet’s looking back has become his looking ahead. The music of Merrill’s verses “mingle[s]” with the strains of children’s songs, suggesting that the “told tale” of his odd personal story can repeat as surely and expectantly as the children’s standard verses of Christmases past. Similar convictions light “Verse for Urania,” which ends with Merrill listening to Purcell’s song about the Blessed Virgin and her godly child, convinced that temporal cycles promise him a new life as surely as they bring the dawn of his own godchild’s birth. The late poem “Christmas Tree” draws on such reformulations of the holiday when it ventures to speak as the titular symbol. Throughout his poems, Merrill’s exploration of nativity shows how ordinary time might extend queer possibilities. This or dinary t i me mi gh t con t r i but e to ot h e r cri t i ca l projects also, and I wish to suggest two such applications more briefly. The fi rst emerges from the necessarily ecological focus of everyday cycles; Merrill’s Christmas tree, for example, anticipates a new life provided by its willingness to fertilize trees that will come. Quotidian continuity replaces an investment in sacred ritual or sexual reproduction with a more modest dependence on the returns of a physical world. An ordinary poetry articulates, therefore, a par ticu lar literary environmentalism, one that perceives inhuman matter as the grounds of a human psychology, and analysis of this verse may add to environmental criticism by refusing a contrast between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism that has often structured the field.17 In a quotidian ecology, respect for the world’s alterity means an enrichment of the mind’s authority, and vice versa; ordinary poetry registers the consistent strangeness of the earth even as it recognizes humanity’s involvement in that strangeness. In a quotidian ecology, moreover, such recognition

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comes as a mode of being rather than a list of beliefs, and its practice is possible even through seemingly cultured activities or in highly constructed places. Anyone can pattern his or her life and work by diurnal time, whether he or she greets the dawn from Cambridge or Key West, from New York or Nova Scotia, from Paris or Ouro Preto. Ordinary poetics describes a pastoralism of habits rather than habitats. If environmental criticism has, rightly and usefully, often focused its theoretical efforts on a definition of place and space,18 environmental readings continue to demand new ways of describing the interrelations of nature and culture. Time, and daily time in particu lar, might prove a significant category in this effort. A second possible critical application comes through the necessarily formal realization of ordinary tomorrows; in Merrill’s “Chimes,” for example, there are nine parts of the poem as well as nine bells of a souvenir and nine lives of rebirth. Preceding chapters of this study have described how an everyday poetics compares aesthetic and experiential patterns; it seems worth noting, though, that the comparison could help to evade some common and limiting labels for contemporary verse. Vernon Shetley’s tripartite taxonomy is still apt, dividing the field among the “erasure of subjectivity toward which Language poetry often seems to aspire,” the “unexamined belief in the power of subjectivity . . . often seen among the MFA mainstream,” and the “New Formalist faith in the power of traditional poetic forms to give valid shapes to subjectivity” (After the Death, 19– 20). Shetley’s indictment still seems relevant, too; none of these conceptual categories, he notes, includes a conviction of personal agency along with an acknowledg ment of the impersonal structures that shape it.19 A poetry focused on repetition, however, can manage both: sustaining an awareness of literary technology without investing words or form with priority, and preserving a commitment to selfhood without investing identity with essence.20 A poetry focused on ordinary repetition, moreover, could make the combination as relevant as Shetley rightly supposes poetry may be (Shetley, After the Death, 192). Criticism might use the facets of everyday poetics to detail possible instances of a formalist realism; if “the fi rst fact of the world is that it repeats itself,” as Robert Hass writes in an essay on poetic form (Twentieth- Century Pleasures, 56), one can mine the significance of this worldly truth in part through the various fictions it engenders. At the same time, one might realize the complicated significance

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of poetic structure in part through the basic experience it confronts and transfigures. Hass’s own work may be a good candidate for the kind of reading I am suggesting, and another good chance to consider the implications of everyday patterns and themes. His poems avoid the specific schools and styles of Shetley’s divisions; a California native, Hass won the Yale Younger Poets prize with his first book and ranges in his last from Iowa to Inverness to Berlin. His influences, early and late, include Alan Ginsberg, Robinson Jeffers, and Gary Snyder, as well as Thomas Hardy, William Wordsworth, and W. B. Yeats, and his essays take their complementary examples from poems of Creeley, Eliot, Olson, Whitman, and Zukofsky—as well as translations of Basho, Brodsky, Miłosz, Rilke, and Tranströmer. He is neither a neoformalist nor a language poet, and he teaches in a university without an MFA degree. Committed to tradition, he writes most often in free verse; attentive to domestic feeling, he worries explicitly about political failures; focused on nature, he is preoccupied with the functions of linguistic systems. His most famous poem is a monologue that considers the effect of poststructuralist thought on the word “blackberry.” Or considers, perhaps, the effects of that thought on recurrences of the word “blackberry,” since “Meditation at Lagunitas” concludes by repeating the sound three times (Praise, 5). Hass’s work is alert to return, and temporal rhythm, for him, often seems to demonstrate the tricky but inspiriting mix of ecology and aesthetics that his best poetry strives to equal. He begins his essay on form with the human and natural habit of rising to the sun every morning, and he goes on to describe a routine daily walk. He then continues the Frostian, even Emersonian vein of his consideration by analyzing the “foolish happiness on the faces of people” who are sure that “dinner will be served” (Twentieth-Century Pleasures, 56– 57). Such attention to humdrum schedules endorses what could be merely “predictable,” but this does not mean that Hass propounds a simple organicism or a smug conformity (56). A “hypnotically peaceful” rhythm can also be “terrifying,” he writes, since it comes “so near self-abandonment and loss of autonomy” (116). Hass would resist that loss with a self-aware craft, thereby maintaining autonomy as well as assurance; a writer must move between the opposed risks of “claustrophobia” and “vertigo” or the opposed goods of “safety” and “freedom” (117). This balance is “dialectical and generative,”

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in Hass’s words, for both art and life. It is self-defi nitive as well: Hass takes the “fi rst experience of form” to be “our own formation” (57). The formation animates Hass’s speaker in “Santa Lucia II,” a scholar who “get[s] down” to her task at the conclusion of the poem: “You notice rhythms / washing over you,” Hass writes in the fi nal lines, “opening and closing, / they are the world, inside you, and you work” (Human Wishes, 45). Rhythmic self-formation also inspires the speaker of “In Weather,” who strives for “vision” amid the “pearly repetitions of February” and who perceives a mysteriously individuating habituation as “days return / day to me”: “I know that I know myself,” he concludes, “no more than a seed / curled in the dark of a winged pod / knows flourishing” (Field Guide, 59– 64). One can see the same, too, in the protagonist of “Berkeley Eclogue,” to whom “every day was a present / he pretended that he brought. The sun came up. / Nothing to it. I’ll do it again tomorrow, and it did” (Human Wishes, 61). All three of these diurnal form makers would empathize with the Hartford insurance executive who composed poems in his head on his way to the office, and Stevens’s daily desire is an explicit inspiration for Hass in “Songs to Survive the Summer”: “I thought / this morning of Wallace Stevens // walking equably to work,” Hass writes (Praise, 50).21 He shows his most Stevensian individuation, though, in the earlier poem “Measure”: this lyric begins with the word “recurrences” and describes the harmonizing orders of worldly light and writerly work that are evident in an afternoon’s worth of composing poetry (Field Guide, 44). “I almost glimpse / what I was born to,” Hass concludes, “not so much in the sunlight // or the plum tree / as in the pulse / that forms these lines.” The poem describes a paradoxical anticipation of one’s inherited legacy and a paradoxical estrangement of innate knowledge that are possible through the dynamics of ordinary rhythms; in so doing, it supports a generative— and Stevensian— complementarity for one’s works and days. Indeed the title of Hass’s most recent volume, Time and Materials, retranslates Hesiod’s phrase into a new affi rmation of its basic conjunction. Through his reliance on the metrics supporting this connection, Hass suggests his affi nities with Merrill as well as Stevens, and through his delicate analyses of coupled life—“In Weather,” for example, is matrimonial as well as meteorological—Hass’s work also bears comparison to the ordinary poems of Frost. Frost’s sense of daily experience, however, has more in common with that of another Californian writer, and another possible

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example of everyday poetics, Kay Ryan. Her poems evince the wryly perplexed patience that pervades some of Frost’s best domesticity: “There is nothing / to endurance,” she writes in a strange love poem of her fi rst book, for example; “it is not a talent. / You or I will / never understand it” (Strangely Marked, 16–17). Like Frost’s “Devotion,” Ryan’s “L’Abandon Ou Les Deux Amies” uses the “always and always” of ocean waves to consider the “forever / reform[ing]” of human companionship; like “Devotion,” Ryan’s poem fi nds “endless repetition” to be mysteriously natural rather than boringly normal. Ryan’s poem, in fact, seems more mystified about that pattern than “Devotion” is, since the “nothing” that constitutes her endurance stands before its line break with an awed wonder. One’s lack of total agency or understanding seems both an advantage and an anxiety of one’s ordinary continuing. The same ambivalence extends from the “again / and again” of this ocean in her first book to the “again and again” of the ocean in her latest volume (Niagara, 67). “If the moon happened once, / it wouldn’t matter much, / would it?” she asks at one point, but since the moon happens many times, it seems, it matters quite a lot (Elephant, 23). Like Hass, Ryan meditates on such repetition through an oeuvre of misleading modesty and subtle breadth; her work takes inspiration from Blake, Crane, Dickinson, Keats, and Yeats as well as from writings of natural historians, the music of Erik Satie, and the records of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. She also teaches outside of the MFA system and keeps to a designedly simple routine: “I’ve tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy,” she explains (Lund, “Poet”). This philosophy of quiet happiness is evident in her self-aware response to ordinary poets before her. She alludes to Stevens with poems called “The Palm at the End of the Mind” and “Poetry Is a Kind of Money,” for example, and answers Bishop in “Waste” and “Half a Loaf ”: the latter corrects “The Gentleman of Shalott” with advice not to “adjust to half / unless you must,” while the former revises “One Art” when it complains how “the day misspent / the love misplaced, / has inside it / the seed of redemption” (Flamingo, 56– 57, 39; Say Uncle, 20). Ryan’s uncommon use of common expressions, moreover, could align her with Merrill, and her menagerie of rebarbative beasts, led by her modestly hoping “Turtle” (Flamingo, 63), even compares to the Mooreish collection that includes “The Pangolin.” It is Frost’s works, though—works that Ryan has called “the most beautiful American poems of the twentieth century”— that may be most germane to her own writing. Her verse evokes Frost’s

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rustic monologues of early-twentieth-century New England as precedent for some wry meditations in the early-twenty-fi rst-century West (“I Demand,” 421). Ryan’s poems do so by registering the same enervating possibilities that Frost describes in quotidian experience. “Say Uncle,” for example, knows as well as Frost’s “A Servant to Servants” how difficult it is not to succumb to dailiness (Uncle, 1); “Winter Fear” suspects as much as Frost’s “The Onset” that any particular season might not turn into a precedented spring (Uncle, 18); “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” hopes as ardently as “In the Home Stretch” that human habits can leave their mark on the enduring matter of the world (Niagara, 40). Like Frost’s, Ryan’s speakers avoid the potential effacements in daily temporality by willfully persisting in time’s patterns, believing that such diligence can bring the rich “harvests,” hard and brilliant as diamonds, that she describes in a poem called “Patience” (Say Uncle, 12). Ryan’s trust in harvested value, moreover, like Frost’s trust in turned-under wisdom, convinces her to rewrite Eden as a common garden, and Flamingo Watching, a tripartite book bearing the Frostian headings of “Habitat and Range,” “Behavior,” and “Common Names,” details most especially her humdrum paradise. Ryan’s “On the Primacy of Green,” for example, remembers the fall of Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”; her “A Certain Kind of Eden” wonders about the irreversible recursions of a no longer innocent agriculture; “Snake Charm” meditates on the serpentine seductions of a language with “endless pattern” and “generative rhyme” (12–13, 26, 55). The book’s general tone, a suspicious appreciation for what is ordinary, culminates in the poem “Repetition,” which opposes the “consolations” and “poison” of return before combining both effects (35). Together they yield “accretion’s extravagance,” Ryan writes, in a phrase that Frost might have appreciated for its pragmatic braggadocio. When Ryan returns to “Repetition,” in a 2008 work, she suggests a similar sense of exciting thrift: here, “Trying to walk / the same way / to the same store / takes high-wire / balance,” she writes. Ryan’s characteristically clipped lines, refusing expansive flash for self-contained fi nish, enact the poise that they take as their aesthetic and experiential goal. They invest what could be a meaningless duty or a childlike game with a Kierkegaardian seriousness. They do so, however, without relinquishing Ryan’s laconic irony: “Few are / the willing,” her poem ends, “and fewer / the champions.” With

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such willing, with such champions, Ryan’s poems pay tribute to Frost’s heroes—and to all who can turn daily tasks into doughty triumphs. Yet while Ha s s ’s an d R yan ’s wor k s h o w cl e a r a f f i n i t i e s with the everyday poetics I have tried to describe, the terms and fi ndings of that description may be more interestingly applied to a poet who appears to be far less sympathetic to the commonplace. Frank Bidart was a close friend of Bishop and Lowell—it was to Bidart, for example, that Bishop fi rst read “North Haven” over the telephone from Maine— and Bidart admired Merrill’s work as it appeared (Bishop, One Art, 613, 624). Yet his own writing seems pointedly different from Bishop’s, Lowell’s, and Merrill’s, departing from their day-by-day themes in par ticu lar. Bidart’s most famous early poems are spoken by characters as decidedly out of the ordinary as a self-hating sex-abusing child murderer or a schizophrenic classical dancer, and even his most seemingly autobiographical fi rst-person narrators often appear to be fraught and exceptional. Their rhetoric, moreover, with its aggressively disjunctive capitals, italics, fragments, punctuation, and spaces, departs from the natural rhythms of Bishop’s elegiac forms or the metrical progression of Lowell’s sequences. “What reaches him except disaster?” Bidart asks at the conclusion of a sonnet called “SelfPortrait, 1969,” thereby protesting against the desire for continuity that pervades Lowell’s late sonnets and the resistance to disaster that girds Bishop’s late villanelle (In the Western Night, 132). Instead of fi nding peace by accepting a common situation, Bidart’s speakers can drive themselves to insanity or suicide with their desire to escape an ordinary fate. They rage against the malady of the quotidian more strongly than Frost, Stevens, Bishop, or Merrill ever did. Bidart’s speakers often do so, however, because of a sense of guilt that Bishop would have recognized: the two poets share a focus on inescapable shame. They also share a conviction that guilty feelings allow each mind its psychology as they imprison each mind in its punishment; when Bidart’s Nijinsky assures himself that “the insane do not feel guilt,” a sense of sin provides the conviction of coherent subjectivity (In the Western Night, 27). This conflation of shame and individuation means that Bidart’s selfconsciousness can be as tormenting as Bishop’s in “The Weed,” and Bidart rewrites something like that dream sequence in his poem “Another Life.”

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Here an alternate self, labeled “MONSTER,” repeatedly gnaws on his own “mutilated arm” (In the Western Night, 172– 73). Another poem suggests that the self-consuming figure may be as retrospective as Bishop’s plant: in Bidart’s “The Arc,” an amputee who has lost his arm seeks to be free of his memory as well, to “erase” his past and thus perhaps “not to exist / in time at all” (In the Western Night, 92). The line break implies the risk of the speaker’s impossible fantasy as it suggests how liberation from memory can erase one’s existence. Bidart as much as Bishop therefore perceives a remorseful recollection to be the sign and price of self-possession; the various egos and alter egos of his poems often persist through unmaking and then remaking a guilt they never fully eradicate. Increasingly, Bidart’s work emphasizes the repetitive pattern that this process implies. “Music Like Dirt,” for example, alternates iterations of the three-word title phrase with various two-line stanzas about a love affair: “I will not I will not I said but as my body turned in the solitary / bed it said But he loves me which broke my will,” runs the self-divided, compulsively unpunctuated fi rst and last of these verses (Star Dust, 5). Other poems compare such personal patterns to a natural order: the opening work of Desire, for example, less despairing but no less recurrent than “Music Like Dirt,” takes as its two refrains the phrases “as the eye to the sun” and “when we wake to desire” (3). In “The Second Hour of the Night,” too, Bidart describes Myrrha’s forbidden desire for her father “each night” as “narcotic // chastisement” (Desire, 38). With other Bidart protagonists, Myrrha wishes to escape self-inflicted punishment, which dooms her to a loop of “ four steps forward then / one back, then three / back, then four forward.” She knows that “hidden, threaded // within repetition is the moment when each step / backward is a step / downward” (39, 41).22 She therefore strives, like the speaker of “The Arc,” to undo the past that the poem suggests is the source of her sentence: “What she could not transform herself / into,” Bidart explains, “is someone // without memory, or need for memory” (38). Recollection is that “music beneath every other music,” perhaps, the dirty night-and-day hum of a fate that cannot be erased (38). This destiny can only, possibly, be remade, its regressive chastisement turned into progressive reconciliation— and again like Bishop, Bidart suggests a necessary transition from guilty patterns to mournful cycles. Myrrha may not manage the transformation in her “grief for the unlived life,” her “mourning / each morning renewed as Myrrha // woke, was there // and

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not there” (Desire, 38). Bidart himself may not either, in his several attempts to grieve: the concise attempt at elegy that is “Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words,” for example, concludes each verse with an inexorable affi rmation of “your death” (Star Dust, 14). Bidart’s most painful attempt at the task of mourning, a small, beautiful lyric called “The Yoke,” even suggests Bishop’s unfinished “Aubade and Elegy” in its anguished tone; one line, “I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and,” echoes the unpunctuated diurnal repetitions of Bishop’s draft (Desire, 14). Despite the difficulty, however, Bidart maintains his aspiration to “mourn like a mourning dove”—as he writes in the title of another poem; “it is what recurs,” he states here, “that we believe” (16). Mourning would find a music that need neither resist nor succumb to such repetition. Its lyricism would use returns, rather, as aesthetic means. This goal supports, and is supported by, Bidart’s developing insistence on the importance of structure: “we fi ll pre-existing forms and when we fi ll them we change them and are changed,” he explains in “Borges and I” (Desire, 9). In Bidart’s view, such preexisting patterns may be experiential or psychological as well as rhetorical; everything in life, it seems, as well as “everything in art,” is, for Bidart, “a formal question” (11). Yet the question does not press him into what contemporary critics would call formalism since he is not much interested in the status of traditional verse genres. Rather, it prompts him to consider the interplay of choice and prescription that guides any poem’s craft or any person’s condition. In both writing and living, his work suggests, the best way to “approach freedom” may be “to acknowledge necessity,” however difficult or undesirable this acknowledgment may be (In the Western Night, 162). Such an approach keeps poems and lives necessarily fluent, Bidart shows; “Borges and I,” for example, rejects the fiction of a “protected essential self ” to accept an identity always “ceasing to be what its being was” (Desire, 10).23 Such an approach also keeps poems and lives equally artistic, Bidart suggests; he perceives a poesis in “the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal” (Star Dust, 10). His phrases evoke Frost’s letter on “form and the making of form,” which cites the examples of “a basket, a letter, a garden, a room, an idea, a picture, a poem” (Frost, Collected Prose, 740). Like Frost, Bidart proposes literature as but one example of common practice. Bidart’s latest book could extend this unlikely comparison with Frost— and show Bidart’s more evident and deepening affi nities with Bishop and

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Stevens—through its greater attention to the means and meanings of shape making. In the restless, reconciliatory poems of Watching the Spring Festival, creative structure allows one to transform the patterns of an individual past through assent to the patterns of a necessary future. Bidart remains ardently, even violently honest about the difficulty of the project, frank about the compulsions and degradations that may drive one’s existence instead. “Marilyn Monroe,” for example, the opening poem of the volume, describes the “pact beneath ordinary life” as “if you / give me enough money, you can continue to fuck me” (Watching, 3). In “Like Lightning Across an Open Field,” “renewed health and renewed illness” arrive together, bringing the “freedom // or necessity” of a “new life” that is “a new cage”; in a reference to Stevens’s “The Rock,” Bidart concludes that “it is an illusion you were ever free” (10). This poem’s title speaks back to Lowell’s late work “The Day,” which compares morning to “lightning on an open field” and imagines a time when one could live “momently” and “in love with our nature” (Lowell, Collected Poems, 763); doubting Lowell’s “terra firma,” Bidart writes that “there was no // earth where the soul could stand” (Bidart, Watching, 9). Such constrictions bring his speakers to the same state of enervation that begins many of Stevens’s late poems, and just as Stevens describes, for example, how “at so much more / Than seventy, where one looks, one has been there before” (Collected, 442), so Bidart notes in “Little O” how “at sixty-six, // you have done whatever you do // many times before” (Watching, 42). Yet Stevens’s late speakers can find renewal in standard patterns, and Bidart’s poet also goes on to describe how, when the “conventions // the world offers out of which to construct your // mirror fail,” one must “intricately, invisibly reinvent them” (43). The reflection of a fresh selfimage comes only by revising what is given. This method would refuse the repetitions of a purely psychic torture for the repetitions of a more natural, impersonal, and ameliorative process. Bidart therefore declines to believe that “the ground” is ultimately “sealed off from us,” as he writes in “Little O.” He would maintain his access to that earthly “cure” (Watching, 43) that, in Stevens’s “The Rock,” allows decreation to presage creation, illness to yield to health, and winter’s barrenness to predict spring’s leaves (Stevens, Collected, 446). Ongoing returns of the world, that is, might promise the ongoing returns of a poet and describe them as something more than guilty or grieving. The suggestion evinces a new, potentially surprising, and somewhat Stevensian ecology in

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Bidart’s work; the poem that follows “Little O,” for example, and that gives Bidart’s volume its title, seeks “transformation” by smashing the “glass” between the speaker and a “floating / world” (Watching, 44). To crack the  crystal around Stevens’s earth, and to reach the revolving “fat girl” there enclosed, is to know “the source of fury,” Bidart writes—perhaps the source of that belief in poetry that Stevens knows to be “a magnificent fury” (Stevens, Letters, 446). It may make a poet who is “crazy with desire,” as Bidart’s subsequent poem “Hymn” describes, less like a neurotic, alienated exception and more like a creative, naturalized artist (Watching, 45). Bidart’s desiring poet of the earth could even compare to the rationally irrational lover-poet who can name the world in Stevens’s “Notes,” since the speaker of “Hymn” performs a similar apostrophe: “Earth, O fecund thou,” he lovingly calls (45). He calls these words twice, in fact, at the beginning and end of the poem, in a circularity inscribing the renewal that the planet may enable. Elsewhere in Bidart’s volume, too, a recurrently fecund being supports a recurrently formal art. Such art can affi rm its place in abundance without forgoing the distinct personality of the artist; in “Winter Spring Summer Fall,” for example, repetitive stanzas register natural cycles through the observations of a poet’s fi rst-person “eye” (Watching, 24– 25). This poem uses the structure of “Music Like Dirt,” alternating two unvarying lines with a series of couplets, but it changes the meaning of the pattern: the shameful compulsion of a dirty song becomes the self-conscious creation of an earthly lyricism. With this, the psychological sentence of a recurrent fate seems to yield to the physical sustenance of a natural perpetuity. Poetic speech accrues some of the endless vitality in seasonal rounds: “words in / lines,” as Bidart’s speaker suggests, can “make the snake made out of / time pulse without cease electric in space.” Bidart exemplifies the complementary promise of earthly and poetic conventions as he enacts a subjectivity defi ned and sustained by the fulfi llment of form. The result is a human and inhuman harmony comparable to the reconciliation of Bishop’s “Sestina.” “Winter Spring Summer Fall,” however, is not Bidart’s sestina. That comes later in Watching the Spring Festival, after the reverence of “Hymn,” and darkens again the possibilities of Bidart’s repetitive craft. “If See No End In Is” inscribes with its title the six end-words of each stanza that follows; here, though, pattern adumbrates a somatic conclusion rather than

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promising a seasonal continuity (Watching, 46–47). “What none knows is when, not if,” Bidart states plainly at the opening of his poem. Death is as certain as the abstract monosyllables that clip his lines. He repeats that statement, moreover, at the close of the work, as if the circle of this largest, fatal return subsumes the smaller verbal cycles that it binds. In the intervening lines, recurrence describes the “prison” of memory, a retrospection forever modeling future humiliations on the pattern of past shame and anticipating future punishments through the price of past failure. Such a “vast resonating chamber,” Bidart writes, means that “each thing you say or do is // new, but the same,” that each appeased craving for “sex or food” only opens to the prospect of another unappeased yearning, and that the “fi nite you know / you fear is infi nite.” The furious dynamics of a possibly self-destructive desire seem to grind down into the fatal rounds of a possibly self-protective death wish, and mortality seems a necessary cure for memory. Bidart is well aware of what would resist this sentence, if he is less sure of how to effect the remedy: “What none knows is / how to change,” he writes in the second stanza of the poem. Like the speaker of his “Little O,” the speaker of Bidart’s sestina must reinvent the conventional; like Bishop in “North Haven,” he must turn “repeat” into “revise.” Bidart has already accepted the assignment, perhaps, since he opens “Like Lightning Across an Open Field” with “days and nights typing and retyping // revisions half in / relish” (Watching, 9). With “If See No End In Is,” he confronts the uncertainty of this retyping and doubts that the mortal, impersonal repetitions in which one struggles can allow the ongoing, personal revisions by which one creates. He answers this anxiety only in the fi nal poem of Watching the Spring Festival, “Collector”— and appropriately enough, by remaking his own words: a passage from the work’s third section that describes how “the rituals // you love imply that, repeating them, // you store seeds that promise / the end of ritual.” The speaker at fi rst fi nds such “promise” lacking in the record of “a lifetime’s / accumulations”; if one tries to “wipe this // away,” Bidart writes, “tomorrow it is back” (Watching, 54). Real change seems impossible. In a fi nal section, though, Bidart returns to the promise of repetition: “Tell yourself, again,” he writes, with as much insistence as in Bishop’s self-admonishing conclusion to “One Art,” how “the rituals / you love imply that, repeating them, // you store seeds that promise // the end of ritual” (58). Seeds now seem as fertile as the seed-tears

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planted in “Sestina,” and Bidart now fi nds the accumulation of past pain to be a suggestion of prospective help. As the speaker tells himself “again” of the promise he continues to store, he plants his hopes in the fact of return, ending his book with the chance of an ameliorative future. It is no more than a chance, certainly, and the very need to tell and remind oneself suggests how grave are the misgivings that remain. Bidart’s work continues to report the danger as well as the promise in ordinary life and the challenge as well as the power in formal craft; with this, he shows the persistent richness— artistic, emotional, philosophical— of an everyday creativity. That persistence is evident in Bidart’s ongoing poetic project, a series on the “The Hours of the Night,” with each entry describing “an hour we must pass through,” as he explains in an interview, “before the sun can rise again” (Travis, “Interview”). Dawn is both the stated conclusion of the work and its possible realization; Bidart says in the same interview that he doesn’t know “what will make moral and intellectual clarity and coherence rise again.” He adds that, with just three hours written over seventeen years, he will be “lucky” to “write one more.” Yet Bidart likes “the idea that I’m involved in a project that can’t be completed,” as he puts it: “the project corresponds to how things are.” A prospective, unfi nished quest for new day seems the right place to end a study of everyday poetics; it affi rms the unending human endeavor, morning after morning, to prove one’s distinct imagination through its place in a larger world. This effort makes art out of how things are.

notes

Introduction 1. “To me poetry is one of the sanctions of life,” Stevens writes in 1939, “and I write it because it helps me to accept and validate my experience” (Collected, 804). 2. Paul Jay describes how the tension between transcendentalism and pragmatism, which runs “like a fault line” through American criticism and literature, reflects a debate central to modernity (Contingency Blues, 7; see also 6– 7, 9–17). 3. Deleuze uses this paradoxical truism, for example, to articulate a postmetaphysical concept of repetition that undoes the traditional opposition of sameness and difference to describe “a concept of difference without negation” (Difference, xx). J. Miller draws on Deleuze when he distinguishes “Platonic” repetition, which presumes a single origin for subsequent copies and is based on a logic of similarity, and “Nietzschean” repetition, which demonstrates the lack of any origin for subsequent copies and is based on an alogic of difference (Fiction and Repetition, 5– 6). For my purposes, the interrelation of sameness and difference is more important than differentiating between types of recurrence that privilege one or the other, though Deleuze’s masterful study, as well as the Nietzschean thought that it explicates, remain important reminders of how repetition can both reinforce and deconstruct identity. 4. For example, recent issues of Cultural Critique (Fall 2002), New Literary History (Autumn 2002), and Modernist Cultures (Spring 2006) all focus on everyday life. 5. Felski’s works astutely describe the prevalence of everyday life in recent scholarship, the difficulty of the concept, and its importance to modernism (“Introduction,” 607–13; “Invention,” 15–18). Langbauer (“Cultural Studies”),

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Cuthbert (“The Everyday Life”), and Driscoll (“The Moving Ground”) describe everyday life as both a fundamental term in cultural studies and a problematic category. Gardiner (Critiques), Highmore (Everyday Life and Cultural Theory), and Sheringham (Everyday Life) describe strains of cultural-studies or sociolog ical scholarship on twentieth-century everyday life. 6. Lefebvre, for example, writes about the difficulty of the phi losopher who must “confront looming alienations as a critic and an implacable enemy” in order to “rediscover his lost concrete universality” in everyday life; Blanchot describes everyday life as “what is most difficult to discover” (Lefebvre, Critique, 1:98; Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 12). 7. The “biggest problem with working on the everyday,” agrees Sayeau, “is that once you name it . . . it disappears” (“Everyday,” 1). 8. “It is when something appears to be universal, essential, or obvious, that it is particularly in need of exploration,” Randall writes (Modernism, 1– 2). 9. Other useful analyses of ordinary experience include recurrence in broader defi nitions: Felski, for example, particularizes everyday life through the “temporality . . . of repetition,” the “sense of home,” and the “characteristic mode . . . of habit” (Felski, “Invention,” 18); Randall articulates “two strands of dailiness, everyday life, and daily time,” using the first to describe a “mode of attention to content” and the second to describe “temporal structure” (Randall, Modernism, 2); and Olson describes the ordinary as an experience of “inattention or absentmindedness,” a genre of “unheroic events and overlooked things,” and a style of “routine” and “repetition” (L. Olson, Modernism, 6). Olson’s concluding analysis of Proust attends most closely to repetition as a “strategy of organizing the temporality of the everyday” (Modernism, 151). 10. This study therefore does not attend to sociolog ical and cultural-studies work; when such analysis treats repetition, as Lefebvre does, it tends to accept his political ambition of redeeming everyday life in “a cultural revolution” that requires the transcendence of repetition through transformative moments (Modern World, 197; see also Critique, 1:127; 3:166– 71; for Lefebvre on repetition, see Critique, 3:11–12, 128– 35). For a particularly useful account of French everyday-life theory and its relevance for literary criticism, see L. Olson, Modernism, 12–17. Peter Osborne applies Lefebvre’s work in a more philosophical context but also seeks societal “disalienation” through a “refiguration” of the moment, a project that draws from analysis of Benjamin’s Jetztzeit (The Politics of Time, 196; see also 150– 59, 180– 96). 11. Among pertinent studies, Perloff explicates a Wittgensteinian “poetics of everyday life” that exposes the strangeness of ordinary language (Wittgenstein’s Ladder, 22); Halpern describes “the everyday and the prophetic” as symbiotic “speech

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genres” of contemporary verse (Everyday and Prophetic, 3– 6, 30–37); Sayeau analyzes how boredom shapes “modes of novelistic discourse” in modern literature (“Everyday,” 16); Randall shows how dailiness in British modernism reflects historical and sociolog ical change, particularly with regard to “mental labour” and “women’s experience” (Modernism, 12; see also 10–28, 91– 92); and L. Olson emphasizes the “untransformed” nature of everyday experience as a challenge to modernism’s supposed aesthetic goals (Modernism, 32; see also 3–5). 12. See Brazeau, Parts, 160, for a record of this exchange. 13. For Bishop’s interest in Stevens, see One Art, 16, 38, 44– 5, 47, 67, 442, 449, 596. Several of Bishop’s best critics have linked her to Stevens; one particularly good example is Costello, “Narrative.” For a good explanation of Bishop’s guarded interest in Frost, see MacArthur, The American Landscape, 16–17, 137– 40. For Bishop’s friendship with Merrill and admiration of his work, see One Art, 302–4, 444–45, 511–12, 520– 22, 530– 32, 541–44, 566– 67, 575– 76, 584–85, 594– 95, 596– 97, 612–13, 625– 26. For Merrill’s admiration of Stevens and Bishop, see Collected Prose, 53, 58, 64, 93, 120, 147, 216–19, 229– 57, 468– 69; Collected Poems, 353–4, 666– 67; Sandover, 66, 72. 14. Breslin describes Williams’s emphasis on the moment and his resistance to time’s “linear, historical progression” (Williams, 3, 24, 62– 63, 127, 168; see also J. Miller, Poets of Reality, 301– 2, 325– 33). For Williams’s emphasis on overcoming ego, see J. Miller, Poets of Reality, 287–88, 291– 92; Breslin, Williams, 43–44, 55. 15. For the effects of Williams’s verse forms, see J. Miller, Poets of Reality, 345–47; Breslin, Williams, 78–82. Cushman’s study gives a fuller description of Williams’s constant, frustrated efforts to redefi ne “measure.” 16. P. Lewis describes this crisis (Cambridge, xviii). “The one thing that all modernists had indisputably in common,” writes Gay in a recent summary, “was the conviction that the untried is markedly superior to the familiar, the rare to the ordinary, the experimental to the routine” (Modernism, 2). 17. Osborne defi nes modernity through its obsession with time; so, in different ways, do Schleifer (Modernism and Time) and Goodstein (Experience). J. Miller describes concern with time as a feature of modernism (“Time,” 86). See also Jameson’s discussion of the place of space and time in modernist and postmodernist literary-philosophical culture (“The End”). 18. Goodstein, for example, summarizes “aesthetic modernism” as an effort “to turn the transience of lived experience into the permanence of artistic form” (Experience, 8). For modern resistance to everyday life or ordinary time, see also Quinones, Mapping, 38– 39, 86, 88, 256; Nicholls, Modernisms, 7; Felski, “Introduction,” 612–13; Felski, “Invention” 20– 21; P. Lewis, Cambridge Introduction, 164– 66.

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19. Also see Frank, The Widening Gyre, 3– 62. Kern writes that “private time radically interiorized the locus of experience” and adds that a “sense of the present” was “the most distinctively new” element of modernist time (Culture of Time and Space, 314). 20. See also Howe’s description of a modernist focus on subjectivity, which links this to the “breakdown” of a “transcendent perspective” (14, 22). 21. For modernism’s extension of romanticist and symbolist timelessness, see Kermode’s history of the “romantic image,” a “radiant truth out of space and time” (Romantic Image, 4), and Gelpi’s description of the “momentary gestalt” in romantic and modern literature (A Coherent Splendor, 4). In his explanation of “the epiphanic mode,” Langbaum argues that its revelatory stasis is a “dominant modern convention” from romanticism forward (“The Epiphanic Mode,” 34; see also 37–43). 22. Dewey writes that the “uniquely distinguishing feature of esthetic experience is exactly the fact that no . . . distinction of self and object exists in it” (Art, 249). 23. Rosner’s study is also germane to this emphasis; she analyses the influence of everyday spaces in order to describe “a new understanding of what interiority means for modernist writers” (Modernism and the Architecture, 11). 24. L. Olson writes that everyday experience “may be internalized” and may include “negotiations between self and the world,” though she focuses on the effects of “legal institutions, social systems, and the biological necessities of living” rather than the consciousness of identity and the limitations of necessity, and she sets out to oppose the common notion of modernism as “an aesthetic of self-conscious interiority” (Modernism, 4, 9, 3). Randall’s study is more attentive to the use of everyday experience in the formation of subjectivity; her close readings conclude that “attention to dailiness” reveals “the par ticu lar instability of the ideology of the subject during this period” (Modernism, 185–86). Randall’s Marxist and feminist analyses would note how writers’ “critique of everyday life” challenges “dominant ideologies” and shows the “power of manipulating time” (191– 2). 25. When Randall turns to the only poet of her study, H.D., she treats autobiographical narrative (Randall, Modernism, 124). L. Olson situates her analysis among studies of the novel (Modernism, 17– 22), though she includes Stevens and asks, in a concluding analysis of Proust that considers the “incompatibility of the everyday with narrative form,” whether poetry “is arguably a more apt genre to represent the ordinary” (Modernism, 150, 151). Ophir closely ties modernist interest in the everyday to a fictional form; she argues that “modernist fiction continues the novelistic tradition of interest in the undistinguished life” and recommends “considerations of the everyday in modernist fiction” that

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take up “the history of the novel and the distinctive characteristics of the form” (“Modernist Fiction,” 7, 17). 26. Goodstein’s recent analysis of boredom and modernity, which traces a “democratization of skepticism” to prove that the supposed universality of boredom is a historically situated twentieth-century judgment, articulates in a different way how the modernist epistemological crisis was manifest in everyday temporality (Experience, 10, 404– 5, 412–13). 27. In this, I hope to further Felski’s suggestion that “repetition is clearly vital to psychological development” (“Introduction,” 613). Ophir takes up the same project in her analysis of modernist novels (“Modernist Fiction,” 11–12). 28. New, The Line’s Eye, 55; Levin, The Poetics of Transition, 4. See also Epstein’s discussion of “abandonment” as a self-defining practice in American poetry, one by which “selfhood consists of an ongoing evasion of self ” (Beautiful Enemies, 23). 29. For various forms of these movements, see Poirier’s discussion of Emerson’s syntax (Pragmatism, 11, 64– 65), New’s of Jamesian habit (The Line’s Eye, 178– 79), and Levin’s of pragmatic process in the case of Stein, Stevens, and others (The Poetics of Transition, 153– 66, 167– 95). Descriptions of American literary timelessness include Poulet’s emphasis on the moment in Emerson, Thoreau, and Eliot (Studies, 323– 25, 334– 37, 357– 59); Hassan’s argument that American literature has “never really acknowledged Time” (Radical Innocence, 325); and Lynen’s description of a Puritan present tense that is related to a heavenly eternity (The Design of the Present, 35–40, 51– 52). 30. Emerson, Collected Works, 3:49; Wordsworth, Poetical, 4; Keats, Letters, 37; Emerson, Collected Works, 1:67; Thoreau, Walden, 87. For Cavell’s focus on romanticism, see, for example, Quest, 45. 31. Taylor situates this in a broader cultural and intellectual history, describing how a post-Enlightenment recognition of interiority meant increased regard for secular existence as a field of self-development (Sources, 211– 33). 32. Apart from his essay on Stevens, Cavell does not treat the writers I analyze here (“Reflections”). Applications of Cavell’s thought to American twentiethcentury poetry are relatively sparse, though Longenbach uses Cavell’s philosophy in his study of Stevens (Stevens: The Plain Sense, 264– 70), and Jost, Rhetorical Investigations, provides an extended comparison of Frost’s poetics and Cavell’s philosophy through a focus on rhetoric. 33. In an illuminating recent essay, Altieri criticizes Cavell’s “romantic subjectivity” for “an interest in the world that is inseparable from . . . endless selfinterpretation” and argues that Cavell “is less concerned with testing ideas against some independent world than with seeing how far they will carry his affective life”; the poets of this study would correct this flaw not by abandoning romantic

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subjectivity but by including in self-interpretation precisely the “tests” that Altieri advocates, thereby “preserv[ing] a sense of our own limitations and fi nd[ing] cause to celebrate the very conditions that so limit us” (“Cavell’s Imperfect Perfectionism,” 207, 217, 223). 34. See Kaufmann, Existentialism, 100–101. Bishop, for instance, was reading Kierkegaard’s journals in 1943; both Bishop’s and Merrill’s admiration for Auden may have promoted their sympathies with Kierkegaardian thought (Bishop, One Art, 114). Kierkegaard’s influence, though often acknowledged, has garnered little specific study in a literary context: Schilling’s work is the exception (see esp. “Kierkegaard,” 52– 96). Wetzsteon provides a good account of Kierkegaard’s influence on W. H. Auden, which helps to suggest the general prevalence and possible use of Kierkegaardian ideas (Influential, 83–108). 35. “The I,” writes James, is not “an unchanging metaphysical entity like the Soul, or a principle like the pure Ego, viewed as ‘out of time.’ It is a Thought, at each moment different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own” (Principles, 1:400–1). Randall’s astute description notes how habit “confi rms subjectivity,” for James, and how this puts “the defi nition of consciousness itself . . . in terms of . . . those aspects of life associated with the everyday” (Modernism, 44, 49– 50). 36. For a letter describing Freud’s early apprehension of this phenomenon, see Complete Letters to Fliess, 207–15. 37. For Freud’s explanation of the repetition compulsion, see esp. “Beyond,” 21– 23, 32– 33, 36– 39; “New,” 106–8. 38. Loewald and Modell make this contrast explicit: Loewald writes that psychoanalysis is “the endeavor to transform unconscious or automatic repetitions . . . into aware and re-creative action” through which “each of us is on the path to becoming a self ” (Papers, 171–72; see also 37–42, 67– 68), and Modell writes that such repetitive transformations “are the antithesis of an involuntary repetition of the past” (“Transformation,” 137; see also Other, 61– 64). 39. Modell describes Freud’s “deep insight” that “the ego is a structure engaged in the processing and reorganizing of time” (Other, 18; see also 15–19, 77). 40. While Freud notes that the lone ego can behave “like the physician during an analytic treatment,” he does not develop the suggestion in the context of repetition (“Ego,” 56). Loewald describes how “repeating oneself knowingly” is crucial to any effort to “become a self ” (Papers, 96; see also 87–100), and A. Phillips writes that repetition “is an integral and ineluctable process in a life” by which an “individual’s future is made through an ongoing process of returns” (Equals, 152). 41. Costello’s study shows how a modernist American engagement with “dynamic nature” clarifies the “modernist tension between subject and object” (Shifting, 1, 18).

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The dynamic she finds in Frost, where “truth and make-believe unite in making believe what is so,” is a daily possibility for the four poets in this study (52). 42. For the importance of habits to pragmatist truth in general and Peirce in particu lar, see Menand, Metaphysical, 277–80, 365– 66. 43. In his notebooks, Frost writes that Wordsworth’s description of “days bound each to each by natural piety” means “nature piety,” faith in the world, rather than “a religious piety that was natural for us all to feel” (Notebooks, 493). 44. Eliade and Frye describe these general connections (Eliade, Cosmos, esp. 85– 90; Frye, Anatomy, 105, 158– 63). 45. It is important to note that Dewey criticizes an achieved “Nirvana” as having “no traits of suspense and crisis” and therefore no “fulfi llment”; he maintains throughout his philosophy, however, an antidualistic paradise as his aim— criticizing “dualism” as “anti-naturalism,” for example, and recommending instead a “naturalism which perceives that man with his habits, institutions, desires, thoughts, aspirations, ideals and struggles, is within nature” (Art, 17; Later Works, 114; see esp. 111– 23). For Dewey’s indifference to individualism, see Menand, “Real.” 46. Fletcher writes that the “essentially pragmatist American literature” he aims to describe deemphasizes “authorial consciousness and creativity” (A New Theory, 2, 24). 47. Dewey suggests this when he imagines “a fi nished world” where “sleep and waking could not be distinguished” and then contrasts the current world where “moments of fulfi llment punctuate experience with rhythmically enjoyed intervals” (Art, 17); the writers of this study embrace something like that rhythmic fulfi llment. Their repetitions thus never achieve the “pure cyclical narrative” or “cosmic, cyclical and infi nite” existence that Frye and Eliade describe as the end of artistic or ritualized practice (Frye, Anatomy, 105; Eliade, Cosmos, 153). Yet whereas Eliade’s descriptions of human time contrast sheer cycle and sheer historicity, ancient union with nature and modernist alienation from it, the temporality of everyday poetics fi nds a middle ground in which awareness of progress as well as change can fi nd union as well as distinction (Eliade, Cosmos, 154– 58). Frye recognizes a similar pattern as the “central recurrent cycle of sleeping and waking life,” combining “the daily frustration of the ego” and “the nightly awakening of a titanic self ” (Anatomy, 105). 48. For the development of Nietzschean repetition, see Untimely, 60– 67; Gay, 194– 95; Zarathustra, 125– 26, 173– 78, 184– 87. 49. For development of this idea, see Heidegger, Being and Time, 434–44. 50. The several astute and influential applications of postmetaphysical philosophy to literature do not focus on this aspect of dailiness: Bové, for example, counters

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a “metaphysical” description of artistic lineage with the Heideggerian “destruction” of tradition (Destructive Poetics, ix, 53, 84), and Spanos describes a Heideggerian critique of spatialized thinking (Repetitions, 7– 9; Heidegger, 27– 51). 51. For recent examples of Cavell’s connection of Emerson, Thoreau, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, see Philosophy, 120, 215– 35. 52. For Nehamas’s conception, see especially Nietzsche, 188– 98; The Art of Living, 141–46. 53. Nehamas interprets the Nietzschean eternal return as the constant reinterpretation necessary to make oneself into a “perfectly unified character,” but this formulation tempers the extremity of Nietzsche’s fi nally inhuman reality; Zarathustra is not choosing to write his autobiography but deciding to relinquish an individual life story (Nietzsche, 198). Deleuze’s commentary shows how Nietzsche’s eternal return undoes the dualistic economy of comparison and difference that allows “the coherence of a thinking subject” (Difference, 58). 54. Osborne’s critique of Heidegger, which he uses to construct a theory of everydayness, is germane here (The Politics of Time, 172– 95). 55. Mazur usefully relates Kierkegaard’s repetition to modern American poetry generally but compares it to Deleuze’s emphasis on nonidentity (Mazur, Poetry and Repetition, 16–17). It is Kierkegaard’s difference from Deleuze that I fi nd especially relevant, since Deleuze criticizes the Kierkegaardian conception of self that seems to me pertinent (Deleuze, Difference, 95). My reading contrasts also with von der Heydt’s, which uses Kierkegaard to defi ne an American poetics of infi nity and emphasizes how Kierkegaard resists Hegelian historicity (At the Brink, 193– 201). 56. Kierkegaard, Concluding, 351, 355; see also 121, 262– 63, 312; Fear, 133. Carlisle provides an excellent summary of how, in Kierkegaard’s work, “becoming and repetition are the basic elements of the self and must therefore be the categories of a philosophy of existence, of spirituality, of religion” (Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, 121; see also 70–86; Eriksen, Kierkegaard’s Category, 40–41). 57. Nietzsche writes that humans must “become who we are” (Nietzsche, Gay, 189); Heidegger writes that Dasein can “say to itself ‘Become what you are’, and say this with understanding” (Heidegger, Being and Time, 186). 58. As Said notes, “Kierkegaard everywhere insists on the individuality of the aesthetic repeating voice” (Beginnings, 88). Carlisle explains that Nietzsche’s repetition rejects “an inward subject,” instead offering “a monist, expressivist vision of becoming”; and she suggests that Heidegger’s challenge to “the dualistic separation of subject and object” tempers “Kierkegaard’s insistence” on “the internal and the external” as well as Kierkegaard’s “inwardness” (Kierkegaard’s Philosophy, 138, 140–41).

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59. The Princeton Encyclopedia writes that repetition “lies at the core of any defi nition of poetry” (Shapiro, “Repetition,” 1035); Smith notes that “repetition is the fundamental phenomenon of poetic form” (Smith, Poetic Closure, 38). Mazur’s study is one of few to focus on the repetitive modality of verse, emphasizing how returns within a text relate to “repetitions between texts by different authors” and thus how repetitions “question the speaker’s authority”; her deconstructive notion of repetition fi nds the pattern to aid in poetic “self-subversion” (Poetry and Repetition, xv, 24). 60. Thus if New writes that the American literature of “relation” fi nds its “proof . . . especially in the poem,” I hope to suggest how the formal distinctions of poetry contribute to this demonstration (The Line’s Eye, 9). 61. G. Wright’s analysis of poetic verb forms, which stresses the importance of the “simple present” and defi nes a “timeless . . . lyric tense” providing “permanence and eternity” (G. Wright, “The Lyric Present,” 564, 566, 567), supports Cameron’s point that “the lyric endeavor” is “the collapsing of eternity into immortality in the designated space of the present” (Cameron, Lyric Time, 260). 62. Lukács writes that “only in the novel . . . is time posited together with the form”; “in lyric poetry,” by contrast, “only the great moment exists” (The Theory of the Novel, 122, 63). Though Watt is not concerned with a distinction from poetry per se, he describes the novel’s “insistence on the time process” as characteristic (The Rise of the Novel, 24). Ricoeur’s work explicates the assumption that “time becomes human time to the extent that it is orga nized after the manner of a narrative” and that “narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience,” though Ricoeur does use poetry—when he cites Augustine’s recitation of a psalm, for instance (Time and Narrative, 3; 13– 22). Bakhtin’s influential defi nition of the “chronotope,” the “intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature,” also supports the connection of the novel and timeliness; though he writes that “any and every literary image is chronotopic,” he analyzes only novels in this light and emphasizes the chronotope’s provision of the “meaning that shapes narrative” (“Forms of Time,” 84, 251, 250). It is worth noting that Bakhtin disparages repetition and sees “cyclicity” as a “negative feature” that limits the “forward impulse”; elsewhere he describes “commonplace, philistine cyclical everyday time” as “a viscous and sticky time that drags itself slowly through space” (209–10, 248). 63. Watt writes that the novel’s “detailed depiction of the concerns of everyday life . . . depends upon its power over the time dimension” (The Rise of the Novel, 24). Ophir, in a recent article, writes that “the history of everyday life in fiction”

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is “the history of the novel itself ”; the novel tradition “affirms the intrinsic significance of ordinary lives” (“Modernist Fiction,” 8). 64. Culler, “Why Lyric?” 205, 202; see Fulton, Feeling, 7. Fulton writes that “readers of poetry” must “develop a Zen gift for existing in the moment” (6). In a different recent emphasis on the ahistoricity of the lyric, von der Heydt defi nes a poetry of stasis and the moment; see At the Brink, esp. 195– 98, 219n. 12. 65. Culler makes a related suggestion, though with different description of “the idea of the lyric” (“Why Lyric?” 202). 66. See esp. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate, 296– 304. Jackson describes how “lyric reading” tries to “restore lyrics to the social or historical resonance that the circulation of lyrics as such tends to suppress”; since such “interpretation is always a recovery project,” she adds, such criticism “tends toward pathos” (Dickinson’s Misery, 70). 67. This focus bears comparison to Snediker’s account of “lyric personhood,” which refuses to choose between “being an incoherent (psychoanalytic) subject and a coherent one” and articulates an “aesthetic person” conceivable “within the space” of a poem (Queer Optimism, 124, 127). 68. Significantly, most of Brooks’s own examples of the repetition “so basic to our experience of literary texts” are poetic: “rhyme, alliteration, assonance, meter, refrain” (Reading for the Plot, 99). J. Miller’s study Fiction and Repetition also analyzes narrative recurrence and agrees with some of Brooks’s conclusions about Freudian paradigms for plot compulsions, though Miller is more concerned with the ways in which fictional returns trouble the possibility of interpretation, showing how repetition “both grounded and ungrounded at once” vexes the “critic’s conceptual or figurative scheme of interpretation,” leaving a reader only to “thread his way from one element to another, interpreting each as best he can in terms of the others” and suggesting “the failure ever to fi nd an end to the corridors of interpretation” (Fiction and Repetition, 17, 66, 126, 173; for Miller’s use of Freudian repetition, see 69, 135– 38, 169). 69. Stewart explains how poetry “participates both in the generalizations of inherited systems of meaning and in the particularities of expression”; its form therefore “bear[s] witness to individuation and universality at once” (Poetry and the Fate, 327– 28). 70. See also Bahti’s related explanation of how lyrics turn “ends” into “nonend[s]” (Ends of the Lyric, 12–13). 71. In this reading, “we live in order to die”; plot repetitions are a “detour” from this ambition (Brooks, Reading for the Plot, 107). 72. Stewart writes that “the futurity of poetry depends on our sense of the cohesion and ongoingness of persons in general— a cohesion and ongoingness to

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which we adhere even when we cannot know its ground” (Poetry and the Fate, 331). 73. Hammer, Longenbach, and Forbes, in different but related ways, describe and refute this common narrative (Hammer, Hart Crane, 212–14; Longenbach, Modern Poetry, 5– 7; Forbes, Sincerity’s Shadow, 47– 56). 74. Blasing argues against “any naturalization of the code as inherently meaningful” and writes that “claims for the inherent value of any given form must be viewed with suspicion”; she describes how postmodern poets, among them Bishop and Merrill, prove the “distance between [poetry’s] structure . . . and its meaning” (Politics and Form, 19).

1. The Middle Living of Robert Frost 1. Frost’s familiar work seems to “denigrate the work of the critical intellect,” Trilling explained on Frost’s eighty-fi fth birthday; Cowley’s earlier review agrees that Frost is “being praised too often and with too great vehemence by people who don’t like poetry” (Trilling, “A Speech,” 155; Thompson, Frost, 3:266–70; Cowley, “The Case,” 37). Frost in some measure encouraged this view, as his interviews indicate; Trilling notes that Frost often “confounds the characteristically modern practice of poetry by his notable democratic simplicity of utterance” (“A Speech,” 155), and Lentricchia describes how Frost “define[d] and proudly advertise[d] himself as ordinary” in pointed difference from “high modernist company” (Lentricchia, Modernist, 107). Several surveys of modernism emphasize this difference: Perkins lists Frost under a subhead, “Poetry in Rapport with a Public,” that separates him from the “High Modernist Mode” of Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, and Yeats (High, xii, xiv); Gelpi labels Frost a “preModernist” (A Coherent Splendor, 2); and Donoghue, contrasting Frost with Eliot, writes that Frost ignored the “predicament” of modernism (The Old Moderns, 67). 2. Jost, Rhetorical Investigations, 136; New, The Line’s Eye, 243. A recent collection of essays about Frost, for example, divides its focus among “gender, biography and cultural context, the intertext, and rhetorical and cultural poetics” (Wilcox and Barron, Roads Not Taken, 3), and Hoff man’s 2001 book reads Frost’s verse as “a complexly coded articulation of political and cultural identity” (Frost and the Politics, 6). 3. Stanlis’s book argues that “dualism provides the whole basis” of Frost’s “total but unsystematic philosophical view of reality,” explaining how the poet opposed “both the spiritual form of monism, which denies the reality of matter, and the materialistic form, which denies the reality of the spirit” (Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, 1, 283).

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4. Though Frost never studied under James, he read James’s Will to Believe, Talks to Teachers on Psychology, Pragmatism, and Psychology textbook (Thompson, Frost, 1:238–43, 372; Shaw, “The Poetics,” 159– 60). The label of a via media I borrow from Kloppenberg, who describes how pragmatist thought rejects “both mind-body and subject-object dualisms inherited from Descartes” (Uncertain Victory, 3–4). 5. See also Lentricchia, Self, 7–10, 123– 26. 6. M. Richardson’ s entire study aims to rewrite a false opposition of originality and conformity by showing that external discipline “work[s] with, not against, the poet in realizing his desire”; Richardson focuses on Frost’s use of “social obligation”— the “going concerns” of marketplace and politics (The Ordeal, 234, 137). 7. This diurnal order would further the “advance and retreat” pattern that Lentricchia describes (Self, 24– 25) or the “coming to terms” fluency that New posits (New, The Line’s Eye, 30) with something like the blending of “transition” and “return” that Costello analyzes in Frost’s nature poetry (Shifting, 39–42). Costello astutely describes how the “rich temporal dimensions” of Frost’s lyric combine “the solaces of pastoral time” and “the anxieties of evolutionary time” (42); a similar combination, I would add, is inherent in Frost’s conception of everyday life, animating the philosophical possibilities he fi nds there. 8. “Experience as a whole is a process in time,” James states in an essay (Radical Empiricism, 31), and Frost agrees: “The next time I examine a class they will have to . . . tell me what I think the world is,” he writes in a notebook; “the only answer that will be right is Process” (Notebooks, 358). 9. Many major studies of Frost do not consider this poem: Lynen, Lentricchia, Poirier, Oster, M. Richardson, Jost. Brower considers certain lines only (Frost: Constellations, 182); Kemp judges that it “fall[s] short of North of Boston’s best pieces” (Frost and New England, 179); Pritchard writes merely that it is “an exceptionally warm treatment of marriage” (Frost: A Literary Life, 147); Kearns mentions “ominous possibilities” and “sexual ambivalence” (Poetics of Appetite, 94, 153); Faggen’s brief discussion contends that the poem “follows the Protestant paradigm of pilgrimage” (Frost and the Challenge, 192). Baumgaertner, “Frost: The Dilemma,” and Wakefield, “Frost’s ‘In the Home Stretch,’ ” to both of which I am indebted, provide fuller analyses with different emphases: Baumgaertner considers the work in the light of other marriage poems, and Wakefield fi nds it an example of Frost’s regionalism. 10. For the associations of Frost’s woods with danger, psychological and physical, see Lentricchia, Self, 94; Oster, Toward Robert Frost, 148. 11. Warren’s early description of a “suicidal peace” prefigures a Freudian diagnosis (“The Themes,” 123), and Ciardi labels this peace a “death-wish” (“Frost: The

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Way,” 15); see Armstrong, “The ‘Death Wish,’ ” for details. Biographical suggestions support this argument: Bleau reports that the poem recounts an episode in Frost’s life when he was tempted by “despair” (“Frost’s Favorite,” 175–76). 12. Frost’s poem, Wright explains, makes “two undertones of time . . . a single current, and the listener’s yearning back toward the one flows into his yearning forward toward the other” (“Frost: ‘Stopping,’ ” 95– 96). 13. Stewart’s suggestion that “the sound of poetry is heard in the way a promise is heard” is germane here (Poetry and the Fate, 104). 14. “To breed an animal which is able to make promises—is that not precisely the paradoxical task which nature has set herself with regard to humankind?” Nietzsche asks, and adds: “is it not the real problem of humankind?” (Genealogy, 38) 15. As Costello writes in her excellent discussion of this poem, victory “against oblivion” here “marks a poetic more than a natural achievement” (Shifting, 46). 16. See Brower for an excellent discussion of this poem’s preservation of doubt within confidence (Frost: Constellations, 97). 17. See James, Pragmatism 103, 36, 107; Kierkegaard, Journals, 450, 537– 38n. 553. Also see Kierkegaard, Fear, 131– 33. 18. “Hume can be corrected and built out, and his beliefs enriched, by using Humian principles exclusively, and without making any use of the circuitous and ponderous artificialities of Kant,” James writes. “It is indeed a somewhat pathetic matter, as it seems to me, that this is not the course which the actual history of philosophy has followed” (Essays in Philosophy, 138). 19. See, for example, Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life, 127– 28; for relations of this to James, see Shaw, “The Poetics,” 176– 77; Evans, “Guiding Metaphors,” 80. 20. This is to agree with Savoie’s explication of the poem’s “temporal complexity,” which he accurately describes as “exquisitely Jamesian” (“A Poet’s Quarrel,” 20). 21. As Savoie writes, if “the escalation of rhetoric . . . begs for a certain skepticism,” the “self-assurance of this fi nal stanza is precisely, simultaneously, the very triumph of the will to believe” (“A Poet’s Quarrel,” 23). 22. James writes in his psychology textbook, for example, that “a train of successive thinkers is the stream of mental states” (Psychology, 181). 23. See Gale, The Divided Self, 273– 302; Gale’s study charts the division between James’s emphasis on the human will and his desire for a Bergsonian mystical assurance. 24. Bergson’s philosophy in Creative Evolution suggests that the “duration” providing the “very stuff of reality” is less differentiated than unifying; among “dissociated individuals,” he writes, “one life goes on moving,” so that “the whole of humanity” is an “immense army” or a crest of life’s general “wave” (Creative Evolution, 272, 259, 271, 269). James’s essays “Does ‘Consciousness’ Exist?” and “A World of

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Pure Experience” approach the same unity, overcoming the “dualism” of a “neoKantian” mistake for an ever-growing “unity of the world” (Radical Empiricism, 5, 43; see 3–44). Readers of James in political and historical contexts tend to see this as a materialist development into more perfect empiricism; see Kloppenberg’s discussion of James’s increasingly conjunctive reality (Uncertain Victory, 75–76). Readers of James in philosophical and psychological contexts tend to see this as a religious development toward more perfect mysticism; see Gale’s discussion of James’s tendency to “ ‘promiscuize’ change” (The Divided Self, 302). For my discussion, the distinction matters less than the shared sense of how James’s later work suggests a loss of individual distinction and individual will—whether it dissolves into material flux or quasi-divine spirit. 25. Stanlis summarizes the poet’s reaction to Creative Evolution and gradual resistance to a Bergsonian monism (Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, 81–107, esp. 82–83). Stanlis argues that Frost was much closer to the earlier Bergson of Matter and Memory, whose dualism supported Frost’s affi nities with Samuel Butler (47)— as well as, I would add, with the early James. R. B. Hass’s related reading takes Frost’s poetics as an example of Bergsonian vitalism but emphasizes Frost’s focus on the tension between instance and flow, the individual and the general, in Bergson’s philosophy (“Bergson,” 63– 65). 26. Benjamin’s wonderful account describes how in Proust, “awakening is the great exemplar of memory: the occasion on which it is given us to remember what is closest, tritest, most obvious,” though Benjamin seeks to apply this “awakening” to a historical project (Arcades, 388). McCracken’s analysis is germane here; he shows how Proust’s example allows Benjamin to make “the least (the most everyday) and the most grandiose claims for awakening,” suggesting that “it is in everyday experience . . . that the promise of the past is found” (“The Completion,” 157). 27. Evans analyzes James’s fear of discontinuity in relation to his fear of figurative language (“Guiding Metaphors,” 71– 73). 28. In her study of pastoral ideology, Patterson situates “Build Soil” in a long line of poems that use Virgil’s eclogues to demonstrate ambivalence about poets’ “ideological stance as writers in relation to their sociopolitical environment” (Pastoral and Ideology, 194; see 263– 66). Patterson’s analysis usefully relates the work to a classicist heritage that is still too little acknowledged in Frost criticism, and her reading of the poem’s political implications is acute. But her contrast of “social and political issues” with “personal growth and regeneration” (264) may be too stark; in the context of Frost’s everyday poetics, “Build Soil” could present an ordinary realm that seems neither strictly political nor purely personal.

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29. Also see Notebooks, 187, 301, 490, 662. In another entry that begins, “I’ll tell you why all movement is in a circle great or small,” Frost explains how this cyclicity allows a dualism of matter and memory: “It is so every particle” can be “acted on directly across as well as from behind. . . . The action from across is called environment the action from behind is called inheritance” (263). 30. “Heartily know, / When half-gods go, / The gods arrive,” Emerson states at the end of “Give All to Love” (Collected Poems, 73), but Frost writes in one of his notebooks of the “possibility that when half gods go not whole gods [,] but quarter gods [,] arrive” (Prose Jottings, 143). 31. Frost writes in “The Death of the Hired Man” that Silas, who has “nothing to look backward to with pride, / And nothing to look forward to with hope,” is “so now and never any different”: such fi xity might signify immortality for a Christian God—who “is now and ever shall be,” in the words of a common prayer— but it signifies for humans only that immortality that comes with being, like Silas, already dead (Collected Poems, 43). 32. In “Asking for Roses,” an earlier poem explicitly considering the “carpe diem” theme, lovers can gather their flowers only by moonlight, and in the garden of a decaying, abandoned house (Collected Poems, 525– 26). 33. The wife’s fi nal bit of conversation tells her husband that she will “put you in your bed, if fi rst / I have to make you build it”; see Homer, Odyssey, 461– 64. Frost several times professed his admiration of The Odyssey (Collected Poems, 738, 852). 34. Baumgaertner usefully analyzes the “middle” as crucial to Frostian marriage but calls it “suspension,” a less active state, I believe, than the one “In the Home Stretch” describes (“Frost: The Dilemma,” 81, 80–83). 35. Robert Francis writes that he “never saw [Frost] glance at a watch or clock. For him apparently, deadlines did not exist” (Frost: A Time to Talk, 4). In one of his last interviews, Frost commented that “maybe it’s my general lack of worry and ambition that has somehow enhanced my longevity” (Interviews, 294). 36. Poirier notes the poem’s involvement in “different forms of gestation and birth” (Frost, 220). See also Brower, Frost: Constellations, 183–84; Oster, Toward Robert Frost, 210–13. 37. Readings of this poem as a drama of oppression can slight the woman’s own role in her defeat; see especially Kearns, who describes the work as characteristic of Frost’s fear of femininity (Poetics of Appetite, 86–89). However apt that analysis, it seems worth noting that Frost’s ordinary poetics may also be alert to the implications of gender in a different way: he refuses to ignore the fact that socialized categories have made everyday living the par ticu lar problem of women, and therefore made women’s choices about time more important and

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more difficult than men’s; a failed everyday life, in his work, always and unjustly affects women more harshly. 38. Newdick notes the “unusual closeness of union with wife, Elinor” (Season, 165); Sheehy and Parini are especially insightful about his grief-stricken reaction to Elinor’s death (Sheehy, “(Re)Figuring,” 189– 91; Parini, Frost: A Life, 310–15). Letters and accounts describe how Frost “like[d] to look on at” the marriage of his children and was “especially interested” in college students who were married; one of his favorite self-dramatizing stories described his help with the sudden wedding of a young scholar (Selected Letters, 296; Parini, Frost: A Life, 360, 218; Thompson, Frost, 2:216–18). Some of the most judgmental of Frost’s published letters, moreover, address Louis Untermeyer after his divorce and remarriage; the “remedy” for Untermeyer’s mistakes, Frost writes to him, is to “be as ordinary as you can” (Letters to Untermeyer, 191– 92; see 190– 94). 39. “I could have cried out with the romantics that no artist should have a family,” Frost writes to Untermeyer at one point; in another letter he wonders if “decent marriage” is “a provision of the ages for causing the least possible pain between the sexes. The least possible is all I say” (Letters to Untermeyer, 204, 193). Frost’s most personal awareness of marital pain comes in his self-recrimination after Elinor’s death; see Thompson, Frost, 2:493– 512. 40. Taylor explains the Protestant association between the sacralization of ordinary life and the importance of nuptial vocation (Sources, 216–18). 41. Stanlis notes that Frost thought Milton “the perfect example of a Puritan poet who exemplified his conception of creativity,” though Stanlis does not amplify the two poets’ shared focus on time or matrimony (Frost: The Poet as Philosopher, 104). 42. One of Milton’s temporally focused works, “On Time,” was a par ticu lar favorite of Frost’s (Notebooks, 47). Hoxby, “Milton’s Steps,” provides a good discussion of Milton’s temporal anxieties. 43. For the connection of Frost’s anti-Platonism with marriage, see Sheehy, “(Re) Figuring,” 217–19; Parini, Frost: A Life, 316. 44. Cavell notes that Kierkegaard’s Repetition is “a study of the possibility of marriage,” though he does not compare Kierkegaard’s fuller conception of marriage in Either/Or (Pursuits, 241). 45. Kierkegaard writes that a married couple “do not live only in hope; at all times they have hope and recollection together in the present” (Either/Or, 142). See also Cavell’s point that “having grown up together, or anyway having in some way created a childhood past together, remains a law for the happiness of the pair in the universe of remarriage comedies” (Pursuits, 136). It was a law Frost followed in his life as well as his poems: in a letter to Louis Untermeyer, he writes that

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he is a “realist,” and proven so by “how I fell in love,” for “the realist always falls in love with a girl he has grown up and gone to school with, the romanticist with a new girl from ‘off somewhere’ ” (Letters to Untermeyer, 8). 46. Kierkegaard writes that recollection “places a sharp on the note of the moment” and “the further back it goes, the more often the repetition, the more sharps there are”; thus marriage is a “growing progression in which the original is increased” (Either/Or, 142). 47. Cavell’s discussion of marriage invokes this “purposefulness without purpose” (Pursuits, 89). 48. Poirier writes that “geological relations here” seem “a metaphor for human ones” (Frost, 177). 49. In a related point, Kierkegaard writes that “marriage is precisely that immediacy which contains mediacy, that infi nity which contains fi nitude, that eternity which contains temporality” (Either/Or, 94). 50. Wakefield notes that the couple’s “renewal of belief puts them into harmony with nature’s endless renewal” and that Joe thus “declares himself, like Emerson’s American Adam, ready to walk at dawn into his garden” (“Frost’s ‘In the Home Stretch,’ ” 59). 51. Baumgaertner uses this comparison to explain the Cole’s “death-in-marriage” (“Frost: The Dilemma,” 82). 52. Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” suggests this contrast; see esp. 244–45. 53. “In the death of my son, now more than two years ago,” Emerson writes near the beginning of “Experience,” “I seem to have lost a beautiful estate,—no more. I cannot get it nearer to me” (Collected Works, 3:29). 54. In In Quest of the Ordinary, Cavell makes this connection key: mourning and morning, he argues, form a “dominating pun of Walden as a whole,” proposing “human existence as the fi nding of ecstasy in the knowledge of loss” (171). This seems a second-order commentary, however, on what the writing of Walden presumes—that is, a world “gone, forgone”—rather than a description of anything enacted in the text of Walden; indeed, Thoreau seems to oppose mourning, as well as retrospection, in his recommendation that one avoid “atoning for the neglect of past opportunities” (303). Thus while I agree with Cavell that mournful repetition is essential to everyday practice, I fi nd it more fully described in the poets of this study than in the writings of Thoreau or Emerson that he cites. For Cavell’s description of everyday mourning, see also This New, 26, 85; Themes, 53– 54. 55. This is a characteristic consolation of pastoral elegy, as Costello notes; Frost’s “turn toward cyclical renewal,” she explains, makes “nature . . . represent human feeling” (Shifting, 45). In his study of pastoral, Alpers writes that the “poem

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is willing . . . to court the pathetic fallacy it will later profess to deny” and argues that its “strength” is “not that it denies that ‘the phoebes wept,’ but that it can afford to be ready to believe it” (What Is Pastoral? 322). 56. Most critics sympathize with the husband’s insistence on moving on; see Lynen, Pastoral, 114; Pritchard, Frost: A Literary Life, 153; Poirier, Frost, 130. Jost faults the husband for an “itemizing” use of language (Rhetorical Investigations, 270). 57. In “West-Running Brook,” Poirier writes, “speaking or saying is a true measure of time” (Frost, 225). 58. Conversation, Wakefield notes, is in this poem how we “renew our beliefs” (“Frost’s ‘In the Home Stretch,’ ” 48–49). 59. For this poem’s emphasis on language, see Poirier, Frost, 127–29; Oster, Toward Robert Frost, 214–16; Jost, Rhetorical Investigations, 247. Poirier argues that bad conversation relates to a mistaken apprehension of “time and of timing” (Frost, 130). 60. New links Cavell’s suspicion of any “fl ight from the familiar” to Frost’s preference for “local” experience and voices (The Line’s Eye, 204, 225), and Benfey notes that Frost’s poetics “might profitably be compared to what came to be known as ‘ordinary language’ philosophy” (“Dark Darker Darkest,” 26). Jost’s literary analysis takes up these affi nities in his rhetorical reading of Frost’s work, but his focus on Frost’s political and philosophical opposition to transcendence and skepticism slights, in my view, the repetitive pattern of Frost’s living and writing; his theory of Frost’s epidictic moments, for example, neglects the situation of those moments in recurrent patterns (Rhetorical Investigations, 151– 52). New’s more subtle discussion of Frost’s ordinary work more closely compares to my analysis of timing: her contrast of “The Grindstone” and “Two Tramps in Mud Time,” for instance, suggests a distinction between the latter’s easy assumption of heavenly futurity and the former’s acknowledgement of an eroding cyclicity (The Line’s Eye, 277–82). 61. Cavell’s explanation of remarriage notes the importance of conversation to post-Puritan matrimony (Cavell, Pursuits, 86–88), and New explains how Frost’s poems “promote marriage as the institutional expedient best adapted to tutor and promote our redemptive hearing” (The Line’s Eye, 288). 62. Matterson’s analysis of North of Boston sees the book as a symmetrical movement into and away from a center; interestingly, this pairs “The Generations of Men” with “Home Burial” (“ ‘To make it mean me,’ ” 48– 50). In the latter poem, the husband’s specific suggestion of keeping “hands off / Anything special you’re a-mind to name” is one more refusal to mourn his dead child, the most important thing he and his wife might have named together. 63. Miltonic conversation is not words only, but its broader implications confi rm a Frostian sense of language’s importance. For the defi nition and importance of

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Miltonic conversation, see Halkett, Milton, 58– 70; Turner, One Flesh, 203–10, 243–44; Kietzman, “The Fall.” For the relation of Milton’s theories to Puritan thought, see Aers and Hodge, “ ‘Rational Burning.’ ” 64. Turner notes this contradiction (One Flesh, 288). 65. Berger, one of few critics to consider this poem, emphasizes the playful tone of Frost’s profundity, which suggests that “all accounts of beginnings . . . contain their share of arbitrariness or accident” (“Echoing Eden,” 148). 66. See Oster’s analysis of the forward-looking modal “would” in “Never again would” (Toward Robert Frost, 248–49). 67. Berger’s peerless analysis of this poem notes “the idea of an originality available through repetition, repetition seen not as curse but as a form of renewal” (“Echoing Eden,” 159). 68. See Oster, Toward Robert Frost, 248; Kearns, Poetics of Appetite, 220n. 3; Faggen, Frost and the Challenge, 80. Poirier’s more helpful view notes “resemblances” between “the unfallen and the fallen world” (Frost, 170), and Costello notes that Frost leaves out the Fall (Shifting, 33). Milton critics have found a similar lack of distinction in Paradise Lost; M. Bell writes that Milton’s “account of the Fall . . . subtly obscured any sharp division in the drama” (“The Fallacy,” 864). 69. Berger notes that the words “never again” carry a suggestion of loss into a statement conveying the opposite: “what we thought was lost has actually persisted” (“Echoing Eden,” 160).

2. The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens 1. Stevens, Collected, 941; Wallace Stevens Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, California, WAS 379 (11 December 1944); Huntington WAS 2515 (28 June 1955). All subsequent references to this collection will be abbreviated Huntington. 2. For Stevens’s routine, see in par ticu lar J. Richardson, Stevens: The Later Years, 87–88, 143–44, 300– 302. Brazeau’s interviews with those who knew Stevens in the insurance business provide invaluable descriptions of the poet’s daily life (Parts, 3– 93). 3. Stevens, Letters, 726; Huntington WAS 338 (15 November 1954). Routine life “keeps us fit and cheerful,” Stevens writes in the fi rst. 4. Many critics notice and analyze Stevens’s poetic cyclicity; see Litz, Introspective Voyager, 180; Bornstein, Transformations, 173; Fletcher, foreword, ix. Mazur provides a detailed analysis of Stevens’s rhetorical repetitions; she argues that Stevens’s poems “both posit and question the status of representation as repetition”

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so that “transformation and plurality replace unity and certitude” (Poetry and Repetition, 79, 89). Stevens “wanted to substitute a quotidian for an exceptional hero,” Bornstein notes (Transformations, 173); Levin’s pragmatist analysis throughout supports the point that for Stevens, “poetry belongs to life in its most ordinary contexts” (The Poetics of Transition, 178). Stevens’s meditations on this dichotomy help to constitute his importance for modernism: as Eeckhout summarizes, epistemological uncertainty about the “knowledge relation between subject and object” reached “a stage of intense crisis” during the modernist era, in which “Stevens stands out . . . because of the consistency, the near-obsessiveness, and the endless originality with which he pursued [this theme] in poem after poem” (“Stevens and Philosophy,” 109). L. Olson agrees that Stevens’s sense of the ordinary is “balanced between two poles that he called imagination and reality”; she later describes this “middle ground” as a response as well to the extremes of a postwar sociopolitical climate in which “ideological endpoints” dominate (Modernism, 116, 125). Important recent accounts of Stevens’s attention to everyday experience include Longenbach, Stevens: The Plain Sense; Filreis, Stevens and the Actual World, Modernism, and “Stevens in the 1930s”; and L. Olson, Modernism. Olson, most specifically, describes Stevens’s “satisfaction with the material rather than the spiritual, the local rather than the exotic, and the constant rather than the unknown”; she sees one value of the ordinary, for Stevens, to lie in its resistance to religious belief (Modernism, 116, 127, 144–45). Longenbach, Filreis, and Olson all note the importance of repetition to Stevens: Longenbach describes how Stevens discerns “heroic potential in a life of dull routine” (Stevens: The Plain Sense, 260); Filreis articulates the paradox of “circular” progress (Stevens and the Actual World, 222– 23); and Olson emphasizes his “roundabout, circular” style (Modernism, 117). I hope to further these suggestions with Stevens’s use of an antiskeptical, ultimately Kierkegaardian recurrence. This suggestion rises in accounts that emphasize Stevens’s idealism as well as those that emphasize his more realistic predilections: Carroll fi nds Stevens’s “pure poetry” of “mystical vision” to be opposed to “the enjoyments of common life” (“Stevens and Romanticism,” 93). L. Olson resists this opposition with her insistence that Stevens’s ordinary aesthetic maintained the imagination as “a requirement of life,” though she also writes that “Stevens valued the dependable routines of ordinary life over the rarer moments of inner clarity or imaginative vision” (Modernism, 125, 115); I hope to clarify how these moments can be for Stevens part of an ordinary routine.

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10. Longenbach’s analyses emphasize Stevens’s “carefully modulated effort to assert the historicity of poetry and the political power of poets” (Stevens: The Plain Sense, 279), and Filreis focuses on the interest in “historical conditions” evident in Stevens’s routine (Stevens and the Actual World, xviii). L. Olson agrees that Stevens’s “theory of the commonplace was deeply mindful of the politics of his times” but later suggests a more useful distinction between the political and the social (Modernism, 117, 119– 20, 130– 31). Stevens’s own writing demonstrates his belief in the difference between everyday life and political engagement; in letters to José Rodríguez Feo, for example, he praised Feo’s mother for eschewing interest in communist politics and attending to “cows, horses and chickens” (Letters, 602). 11. Huntington WAS 3708 (25 February 1949). 12. For recent analyses of Stevens’s naturalism, see, Voros, Notations; Quinn, Gathered; and Costello, Shifting, 53–85. 13. My analysis therefore builds on and aims to further the varied relations of natural and human cyclicity that critics perceive in Stevens’s work: Kermode describes the poet’s seasons as “phases of human life” and the “creative imagination” (Stevens, 34); Doggett notes Stevens’s use of “the cycle of day” in his own “cycle of being” (Stevens’ Poetry, 174); Lensing’s work describes the four seasons in Stevens’s verse as four states of creativity and “personal psychodrama” (“Stevens’ Seasonal Cycles,” 118; see also Doggett, Stevens’ Poetry, 61– 67, 174– 77). In his discussion of Stevens, Sperry describes seasons as “a way of integrating our physical and emotional energies within the larger rhythms of the universe” (“Stevens and the Seasons,” 607), and some ecological criticism repeats this judgment; see, for example, Voros’s description of Stevens’s “poetry of process” (Notations, 66). 14. Pearce writes that Stevens’s poems do “one thing or the other” as they “celebrate mind or celebrate things themselves” (“Stevens: The Last,” 129), and J. Richardson articulates Stevens’s movement “up and down between imagination and reality” (Stevens: The Early Years, 241). 15. For important comparisons of Stevens with Nietzsche, see Bloom’s references throughout Stevens: The Poems; Bates, Stevens: A Mythology, 247– 65; Leonard and Wharton, The Fluent Mundo, esp. 103– 39; and Leggett, Early. For Heideggerian readings, see Bové, Destructive Poetics, 181– 215; Voros, Notations, 88– 97; and Kermode, “Dwelling.” J. Miller does not mention Heidegger but describes a Stevensian “poetry of being” (Poets of Reality, 11; also see 217–84). Hines’s study makes the most direct link, arguing that “the supreme fiction, for Stevens, was the poetry of Being” (The Later Poetry, 141). For Hines’s application of Heideggerian repetition to Stevens, see The Later Poetry, 164–83, 198, 210–12.

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16. An important exception is Costello, whose compares the two writers in her study of environmental poetics (Shifting, 70). 17. In a 1948 letter, Stevens describes how “this morning I was up at five o’clock under the impression that it was six, and did not discover my mistake until I had fi nished my bath and was half dressed, when it was too late to go back to bed” (Letters, 580). 18. A late letter from Stevens praises the “wild doves” who “coo at the earliest light,” and another describes those “early risers,” the “robins and doves,” who can be “connoisseurs of daylight before the actual presence of the sun coarsens it” (Letters, 828, 879). 19. When Santayana compares knowledge to a child’s desire for the moon, he articulates an epistemology that Stevens dramatizes in his “desire for day” (Santayana, Scepticism, 172– 73; Stevens, Collected, 111). Santayana’s work itself suspects that diurnal time allows both the continuation and the fulfi llment of justified wishes, since he describes in a related sonnet how the “desire” of a childlike “dreamer” matures to a love of “sun and moon” (Complete Poems, 99). 20. Both Thoreau and Santayana also seek the Stevensian goal of a “new romantic” (Letters, 277, 279), especially in their revisions of Wordsworth: Santayana’s sonnet on the “sun and moon” seems a revision of the “Immortality” ode, for example, and Thoreau’s aim to “speak . . . like a man in a waking moment, to men in waking moments” (Walden, 315) takes up Wordsworth’s aim of writing as “a man speaking to men” (Wordsworth, Selected, 453). Weisbuch explains Thoreau’s revisions of Wordsworth and English romanticism in general (Atlantic Double- Cross, 133– 50). 21. Quinney defi nes “disappointment,” in her view a central romantic and postromantic theme, as “the state of the self estranged from the hopes of selfhood”; the psyche, “having grossly overestimated its power and significance,” comes to see itself as “a mediocre thing” (Poetics, ix–xi). The resulting abandonment of teleology makes time “an iterative stutter, proceeding rather than progressing” (8). Quinney sees this temporality as a result rather than cause of self-effacement, arguing that “a weakness in the self ’s constitution” makes “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” the “prey of time” (111), but her analysis supports my basic connection of psychic destruction and temporal replication. 22. Stevens’s decision to delete a stanza of summery atemporality from “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad” emphasizes the affi nity; see Collected, 996, for the expurgated stanza. 23. L. Olson also reads this poem as the beginning of Stevens’s use of the normal to answer “the lifelong dilemma of how to live” (Modernism, 121).

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24. Bloom notes that Crispin’s “malady” is a “belatedness,” but sees this as a function of Stevens’s position with regard to poetic predecessors (Stevens: The Poems, 82). 25. Kermode, for instance, sees the poem as an affi rmation of reality’s “riches” (Stevens, 48), while Vendler sees a mistaken attempt to become a “ribald poet” (On Extended Wings, 52). 26. Stevens explains in a related letter that “when people speak of the romantic, they do so in what the French commonly call a pejorative sense” (Letters, 277). 27. Carroll notes that the transcendent is here only “a moment of evanescent sensory clarity” (Stevens’ Supreme Fiction, 68). 28. Among many influences, Stevens might in par ticu lar allude to Whitman’s judgment that “the known universe has one complete lover and that is the greatest poet” (Complete Poetry, 11). 29. L. Olson provides the fullest explication of “An Ordinary Evening” as an example of Stevens’s “investment in the commonplace,” an investment that clarifies the poem’s inconclusive structure, “eschewal of abstraction in favor of the physical earth,” and “desire to see things for what they are” (Modernism, 137). My focus is perhaps closest to Gilbert’s, whose wonderful analysis reads an attempt “to overcome dualism by redefi ning reality so that it includes the incessant motion of both world and mind”; I hope to show how ordinary time allows this (Walks in the World, 89). 30. Doggett explains how Stevens “sees the mind-world relationship as that of the lover and his beloved” (Stevens’ Poetry, 134); Vendler’s second book on Stevens describes a “great poet of the inexhaustible and exhausting cycle of desire and despair” (Stevens: Words, 40); Fletcher’s foreword to Fisher’s study points out that “the larger reason for repetition is love” (x); and Arensberg connects “the centrality of repetition as a poetic dynamic” with Stevens’s “encoded love affair” (“ ‘A Curable Separation,’ ” 28). Mazur notes that Stevens’s repetition can be “a form of desire, and thus directed toward the future, a movement forward” (Poetry and Repetition, 92). 31. Doggett notes that “subjectivity is essentially a kind of incompleteness,” always desiring, in Stevens (Stevens’ Poetry, 131). 32. As Vendler notes in a peerless analysis of Stevensian syntax, Stevens “is a normative or optative poet, forsaking the reportive tenses, present and past, in favor of all the shifting modes of desire” (“Qualified,” 168). 33. Regueiro notes that imagination in Stevens can be “the force compelling the poet to move into past and future”; this observation contributes to her analysis of the limitations of the Stevensian imagination, including its denial of immediacy (Limits, 207; see 147– 218).

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34. In “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery,” Stevens writes that if the “search for a tranquil belief should end,” the “future might stop emerging out of the past,” and in “The Pure Good of Theory,” the “inimical music” of “Time,” however hostile, provides an “enchantered space” for “enchanted preludes” (Collected, 121, 290). Stevens’s romantic poet, as he writes in a 1934 review of Williams, is like “Lessing’s Laocoon,” and his desire for reality occurs always in the temporal situation that Lessing’s analysis emphasizes (Collected, 770). 35. This is to disagree with Quinney, who argues that the “mutability” of thought produces “epistemological disappointment” in Stevens’s late poetry and forces him to abandon his quest for “panoptical perspective” (Poetics, 99); aesthetic authority, I would argue, does not require immutability. 36. Costello notes a similar phenomenon when she describes how Stevens’s “metaphysical inventions . . . learn their changes less from autonomous compositional laws than from physical surroundings” (Shifting, 69). 37. C. Miller notes that “the experience of the repetitive and the cyclical is at the heart of this poem” (The Invention, 200), and L. Olson’s description of the poem’s “central preoccupations” includes “repetition as a way of living and moving forward” (Modernism, 137). 38. Vendler, for example, reads “An Ordinary Evening” as close to a “virtual” poetry (“Stevens: Hypotheses,” 114), while Quinn sees New Haven as realistic, “something graspable” (Gathered, 96). 39. Longenbach uses this “crucial” section of “Notes” to demonstrate Stevens’s regard for the “hard-won pleasures of an ordinary life” (Stevens: The Plain Sense, 269). 40. Gilbert points out that “faithfulness” and “promises” suggest “an element of uncertainty that redeems” morning and evening “from mere repetition” (Walks in the World, 91). 41. My description here draws from Doggett’s analysis of Stevens’s time, “a mingling of repetition and alteration” (Stevens’ Poetry, 62); from Litz’s account of “Notes,” in which the “constant in time is change” (Introspective Voyager, 267); and from Springer’s analysis of Stevens’s repetitions, “slightly different each time they occur” (“Repetition,” 194). I hope in linking this mode with a quotidian refutation of skepticism to extend these excellent descriptions. 42. L. Olson connects Stevens’s trust in the commonplace with his belief in language as a “trustworthy medium” (Modernism, 123). 43. Longenbach links Stevens’s “Notes” to Cavell’s philosophy (Stevens: The Plain Sense, 264– 65, 270), and L. Olson relates Stevens’s use of language to Cavell’s theories (Modernism, 118, 146); Cavell himself argues that Stevens’s poetics defeats skepticism through “faithfulness, as daily as the coming of the sun” (“Reflections,” 75).

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44. It seems probable, however, that Stevens ordered Paulhan’s book in 1947, five years after “Notes,” when he wrote to Barbara Church that “I received some of Paulhan’s books from Miss Vidal and I have written to her since then to procure through some bookseller at Tarbes colored postcards of the place” (Letters, 566– 67). Stevens’s letters throughout show his knowledge of and respect for Paulhan and Paulhan’s work (376, 379, 573, 687, 725– 26, 744, 747–48, 800; also see J. Richardson, Stevens: The Later Years, 180, 272, 384–85). 45. Many critics have described this paradox: see especially Bornstein’s excellent account of how “arresting . . . the fat girl’s motion . . . lapses back into provisionality” (Transformations, 230), or Morrison’s wonderful description of Stevens’s “movement toward an identity paradoxically accomplished in the movement toward, yet still contingent on a future presented as already accomplished” (“The Fat Girl,” 100). 46. As Shaviro writes in his excellent analysis of Stevens’s rounds, “Repetition without identity is the movement that stops at the point of its preludes, a movement whose interminable latency is also its fi nality and its openness to continued alteration” (“ ‘That,’ ” 226). 47. Huston and Bornstein compare Wordsworth’s and Stevens’s marriages (Huston, “ ‘Credences,’ ” 263; Bornstein, Transformations, 187). 48. Riddel describes the Stevensian “summer” as “a time for marriages, for balances” when “self and world reach a crisis of maturity” (The Clairvoyant Eye, 223); Doggett describes the Stevensian sun as “the fulfi llment of the subjectobject relationship”; (Stevens’ Poetry, 171); and Huston writes that Stevens’s summer can unite “heaven and earth in a ‘Now’ that transcends the ordinary limits of time and place” (“ ‘Credences,’ ” 263). 49. In different ways, both Bloom and New take this as Stevens’s goal in “Notes” (Bloom, “Notes,” 91– 95; New, The Regenerate Lyric, 87). 50. Stevens, Letters, 699; Huntington WAS 3305 (27 January 1950). 51. Other readings recognizes a similar if less temporal doubling: Leonard and Wharton defi ne Stevens’s reality as a concept including both actuality and imagination (The Fluent Mundo, 18, 140– 65), and Leggett fi nds Stevens’s “supreme fiction” to be “reality as inhuman imagination” (Late, 14). Levin’s analysis makes a related point when he emphasizes Stevens’s “pragmatist belief that our ordinary conceptions are in fact a subtle and constantly evolving fusion of rational and imaginative elements” (The Poetics of Transition, 169). 52. This helps to explain why Stevens turned down a chair in poetry at Harvard in 1954, explaining that he could not forgo “the routine of the office”: Stevens’s workaday habits may already be a theory of poetics (Letters, 853). J. Richardson reads commitment to this schedule as evidence of psychological uncertainty

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(Stevens: The Later Years, 300– 301), and Grey suggests fi nancial anxiety or masculine insecurity (The Wallace Stevens Case, 48–49), but there may be poetic reasons as well. 53. L. Olson notes that “Stevens’s notion of the commonplace develops in part” from his “attempt to write poems that would address the social issues of his day”; she focuses on Stevens’s “seeking out the commonplaces of others” as his “engagement with the social,” particularly through his correspondence (Modernism, 119– 20, 130– 34). 54. Criticism of Stevens has not often focused on this comparison of night and imagination. C. Miller’s study is an exception, reading Stevens’s work as a romantic “poetics of evening”; Miller writes that Stevensian evenings are part of an “ongoing meditation on perception and the forms of time” (The Invention, 196– 202, 196). 55. For Stevens’s love of “Endymion,” see Letters, 28–29, 147. Comparison of Keats and Stevens is common, though this particular shared meditation on poetry and darkness is less so. Bloom and Carroll provide exceptions, but neither sees Stevens’s dreams as part of an emphasis on ordinary life—indeed, Carroll implies the opposite with his discussion of “mystic vision” (Bloom, Stevens: The Poems, 351; Carroll, “Stevens and Romanticism” 98– 99). Besides Keats, Stevens’s conflation of poetry and night could also draw on Whitman’s nocturnal poetics and perhaps the example of Valéry, whose poems anticipate Freudian insights into the creative power of dreaming: Stevens owned Theodora Bosanquet’s booklength study of this poet, which describes how the virgin of “La Jeune Parque” “abandons her joyless state of divine omniscience to embrace the delights and pains of fulfi lled desire along with all its implications of repetition and decay” (Paul Valéry, 63). 56. Stevens is even more explicit later, in “The Pure Good of Theory,” with its “Adam of beau regard, from fat Elysia” whose “mind made morning, / As he slept” (Collected, 291). 57. Stevens suggests something like the same morning revelation in a later letter: “How often when one has been trying to say something in one’s room during the evening and when one has not even been sure what it was that one wanted to say, things come to mind with all the force of acute concentration as one sits on the edge of the bed” (Letters, 618). He adds, significantly, that this “common enough experience” is not “exceptional, like a blandishment on the part of a fat and happy muse, but . . . an elevation available at will.” 58. Philip Rieff, writing of Freud’s dream theory, notes that “the effort expended, in dreaming, to outwit the forces of culture is the one recurrent intellectual as well as artistic activity most people perform” (Freud, 122).

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59. In a lecture less than two years later, at about the time he was writing “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens was sufficiently knowledgeable and approving of Freud’s work to note that he “has given the irrational a legitimacy that it never had before” (Collected, 783). See J. Richardson for an argument that Freud was more important to Stevens than the poet’s admissions suggest (Stevens: The Later Years, 54– 55). 60. J. Richardson makes a related argument when she claims that The Future of an Illusion provides par ticu lar attributes of Stevens’s “supreme fiction” (Stevens: The Later Years, 58– 62). 61. L. Olson agrees that the “commonplace” of “An Ordinary Evening” is Stevens’s “only powerful substitute for the illusions of religious imagining” (Modernism, 145). 62. For an excellent discussion of Stevens’s covenant imagery, see Cook, Poetry, 149– 51. 63. For the fi rst view, see Riddel, The Clairvoyant Eye, 120– 35; Bloom, Stevens: The Poems, 117–19. For the second, see Filreis, Modernism, 220–47; “Stevens in the 1930s,” 43–47. Cleghorn argues that the “critical extremes” of Riddel and Filreis mistake Stevens’ aims; “Owl’s Clover,” in his view, seeks to undermine the “false division” between “creation and argument” (Stevens’ Poetics, 57). 64. Filreis notes that “the poet’s attraction to communism” was “a form of his attraction to . . . romanticism,” serving “post-Christian longings for a new sense of order” (Modernism, 178). 65. See Stevens, Letters, 486; Savage, “Socialism,” 16–17. To Savage, communism’s futural focus served to “minimize the importance of the individual” and resulted in “an emphasis upon political method (i.e. opportunism) at the expense of morality” (17). Stevens called this article “as extraordinary a piece of thinking and writing as I have seen.” 66. Litz contrasts the “Utopia” of “time in its fi nal block” with the “ ‘wrangling’ of dream and reality which is our life in time” (Introspective Voyager, 257). 67. Stevens manifests a distaste for memory in his own life; in a 1950 letter, for instance, he describes having had “to do a good deal of looking back, which is a poor thing for anyone to do” (Letters, 682). This aspect of Stevens’s thought helps to explain his conception of self: less like Frost’s or James’s identifying “sense of sameness” (Psychology, 211), a maintenance of the past, than like Santayana’s identifying sense of “shock,” an awareness of the new (Scepticism, 146). 68. Many critics follow Stevens’s example; when Riddel, for example, writes that Stevens’s poetic “mind contains all reality (in memory),” he does not clarify the implications of that parenthetical addition (The Clairvoyant Eye, 274). Leighton’s

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excellent discussion is an exception; she analyzes Stevens’s use of “souvenirs” to suggest how poetic form allows “neither memory nor forgetting, but something which might be both” (On Form, 181; see also 192– 95). Bloom’s analysis of Stevens’s belatedness is the most extensive consideration of the problem of retrospection, but Bloom reads this dilemma as an anxiety about cultural predecessors rather than a fear endemic to mortal memory and time (Poetry and Repression, 287– 93). Bloom’s stated aim, to “revivify the ancient identity between rhetoric and psychology” (Stevens: The Poems, 396), is still a viable and necessary project, I would argue, but one that can be seen through the predicament of ordinary repetition as well as the situation of aesthetic lineage: language faces the problem of living before and after other days as well as the problem of living before and after other poets. 69. Ramazani reads this passage as consolatory (Poetry of Mourning, 121– 22). Stevens’s Omega alludes to Keats’s Moneta, in “The Fall of Hyperion,” a “pale Omega” figure who is “Shade of Memory” (Complete Poems, 367– 68). 70. Thus while Vendler describes “Notes” as an “escape from . . . self-pity and its literary forms—nostalgia and elegy,” reading “The Auroras of Autumn” by contrast as an elegy that “falters in its regressive motion toward childhood,” I wish to suggest that the latter poem’s elegy continues the escape that “Notes” begins (On Extended Wings, 205, 249). 71. This opposes Costello’s reading, which links the poem’s “homelessness” to its “engagement with . . . the temporal ‘drama that we live’ ” (Shifting, 75–76); time, I would argue, provides a sort of home for Stevens in this poem. 72. Published in The Auroras of Autumn, “World Without Peculiarity” takes up an old argument: in 1934 Stevens copied Richard Storrs’s judgment that “the phi losopher could not love the indefi nite and impersonal principle of order pervading the universe,” then argued in his commonplace book that “the indefi nite, the impersonal, atmospheres and oceans and, above all, the principle of order are precisely what I love; and I dont see why, for a phi losopher, they should not be the ultimate inamorata” (Sur, 33). Stevens objects to Storrs’s opinion that “the universe is explicable only in terms of humanity”; his later poems show rather how humanity might be explicable in terms of the universe. Critics have read this demonstration more pessimistically than Stevens seems to have taken it; Quinney, for instance, when explaining Stevens’s naturalistic “harmonization of the elements of experience,” writes that “it will easily be perceived how dubious a consolation this is” (Poetics, 135). 73. Cook’s excellent explanation of the poem’s antiapocalyptic mode is germane here (Poetry, 269– 70).

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74. Springer links Stevens’s repetition with Kierkegaard’s, though she does not analyze “The Auroras” (“Repetition,” 195); Mazur invokes Kierkegaard to argue that Stevens’s repetition “makes new rather than recovers” (Poetry and Repetition, 91). 75. See Kierkegaard, Fear, 204–13. Eriksen explains that Kierkegaard’s use of Job shows how “ ‘repeating’ is not simply a matter of doing again, but of receiving as a gift what seemed most obviously to belong to oneself, namely one’s past” (Kierkegaard’s Category, 42; also see 42–46). 76. See Kierkegaard’s discourse on “The Expectancy of Faith,” in which “the future is indeed everything” (Eighteen, 17). 77. Bloom relates Steven’s innocence in “The Auroras” to Nietzsche’s eternal return (Stevens: The Poems, 277), Leonard and Wharton read Stevens’s mastery of repetition as “a Nietzschean ‘amor fati’ ” (The Fluent Mundo, 123), and Leggett analyzes Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” as “the fi rst post-Nietzschean poetry of amor fati” (Early, 96). 78. See Shaviro, “ ‘That,’ ” 231; Bové, Destructive Poetics, x; Spanos, Repetitions, 8. Leggett’s Nietzschean reading similarly describes an “individual . . . submerged in the natural rhythms and cycles of the earth” (Early, 108). New’s analysis is useful and relevant: she isolates a Heideggerian tendency in Stevens that would render “a privacy without person,” then concludes that this yields to a “world of concealment, dualism, of human loneliness relieved by the marriage of opposites” (The Regenerate Lyric, 84, 90). 79. Huntington WAS 372 (18 November 1949); Letters, 613; Huntington WAS 3811 (5 October 1954), Letters, 825. 80. Stevens describes the correspondence of Romain Rolland, for example, as “interesting beyond belief ” because these letters told how “the neighbors seem to have moved the chairs every Thursday and cleaned the windows every Friday, polished the kitchen floor every Saturday, did the laundry on Sunday, dusted on Monday, etc.” (Letters, 657). 81. “How nice it is to drop fi fty years in the wastebasket,” writes Stevens in a 1952 letter: “It is the same thing as writing a poem all night long and then fi nding in the morning that it is so much the best thing that one has ever done” (Letters, 741). The passage seems to enact again the Keatsian, Kierkegaardian pattern of “The Auroras,” in which eradication of the past allows the dawn confi rmation of one’s imaginative desires. 82. “The brilliance of earth is the brilliance of every paradise,” writes Stevens in “Three Academic Pieces,” musing how “ghastly . . . it would be if the world of the dead was actually different from the world of the living” (Collected, 689– 90).

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83. Huntington WAS 3753 (23 April 1951). 84. This again distinguishes Stevens’s love of fate from Nietzsche’s; as Bates explains, Stevens’s interest in the “the common man” is hardly Nietzschean (Stevens: A Mythology, 262). Quinn notes that even while “The Auroras of Autumn” “avoids specific contemporaneous political concerns,” the poem “provides a community with a vision of its place in the world” (Gathered, 64). 85. Paulhan argues later that “we simply need to make commonplace expressions common” (79). See Eleanor Cook’s suggestive reading of the implications of “commonplace” (Poetry, 274). 86. MacCaff rey notes that “The Rock is in some sense an old poet’s dream” (“A Point,” 609). 87. In this I disagree with Quinney, who sees The Rock as an extension and culmination of the “poetics of disappointment” present in Stevens since “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”; Quinney reads Stevens’s fi nal poems as “surrender rather than reconciliation” (Poetics, 100). 88. Leggett argues for the distinction of the two meditations, though it seems just as important to see how Stevens compares them (Late, 60– 62); Fisher’s analysis notes the interplay between “two levels” (Stevens: The Intensest, 14–18). 89. Whiting’s excellent discussion of the poem shows how “through the process of creating a fiction, the mind discovers that it is at home in the ever-changing universe” (The Never-Resting Mind, 187). 90. “To create the new we must fi rst de-create the old,” writes Vendler; thus “Penelope’s web becomes for Stevens the very image of human desire: woven afresh every day, it is unraveled again every evening” (Stevens: Words Chosen, 31). 91. Arensberg points out this implication of the myth (“ ‘A Curable Separation,’ ” 41). 92. This accords with Loren Rusk’s point that in “The World as Meditation,” “love is desiring, and creation is loving action. Thus creation . . . is not attainment but the self-sustaining operation of desire” (15). 93. Griswold relates Stevens’s conception of memory here to Santayana’s, which describes recollection as indistinguishable from imagination and describes how repetition may “prevent[] forgetfulness” (“Santayana on Memory,” 116). 94. In his analysis of Penelope’s work as a theory of waiting, Schweizer astutely notes that “her daily weaving and nightly unweaving . . . parallels the delays and detours of Odysseus’s journey; it resembles the complicated revisionary processes of writing and all that writing implies” (On Waiting, 46). 95. It seems noteworthy that Penelope’s combing recalls the final example in “Of Modern Poetry,” too, which describes its subject as “the finding of a satisfaction”

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possibly like that “of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman / Combing” (Collected, 219); Stevens’s daily poetics in “The World as Meditation” may fulfill his program for modern verse more generally. 96. “There is more day to dawn,” Thoreau writes in the penultimate sentence of Walden (325).

3. The Everyday Elegies of Elizabeth Bishop 1. Bishop, Complete Poems, 16–17, 110–11, 35– 9, 41, 129. “Little Exercise” was originally titled “Little Exercise at 4 A.M.” (MacMahon, Bishop: A Bibliography, 151; I am generally indebted to MacMahon’s bibliography for dates and details of Bishop’s publications). Several critics have described this “prevalence of dawnscapes,” as Travisano puts it (Bishop: Artistic Development, 184); see Schwartz, “One Art,” 147–48; Kalstone, Becoming, 12; Millier, Bishop: Life, 176. Travisano presents Bishop’s dawn as a moment of “decision whether to go on with it all” (184). 2. Schwartz’s and Travisano’s readings of “Five Flights Up” focus on what Schwartz calls the “burden of memory” (Schwartz, “One Art,” 148; Travisano, Bishop: Artistic Development, 183–84). For readings of Bishop’s poetry as the gradual inclusion of what Goldensohn calls the “directly personal,” see Travisano, Bishop: Artistic Development, 3–4; Goldensohn, Bishop: The Biography, ix–x. Hammer describes the common assumption that Bishop’s “career unfolds as the progressive disclosure of the life in the work” ( “New,” 149); Costello describes how Bishop criticism often assumes that “the voice of the poem provides a path back to the life of the writer” (Costello, “Bishop’s Impersonal,” 337). 3. For excellent critiques of biographical readings of Bishop, see Hammer, “New”; Costello, “Bishop’s Impersonal.” 4. This is to agree with Ellis’s argument against biographical readings and his contention that “everything comes back to fi nding the correct form for Bishop,” though his formal focus does not analyze repetition specifically (Art and Memory, 14). 5. “For Bishop,” Marks writes, “. . . revision is the sign of poetic vitality no less than of mental health” (“Bishop’s Art,” 201). 6. In this I hope to expand Kalstone’s key insight that “Bishop repeatedly places her poems at that harsh nexus of human and inhuman” by showing that placement to be often temporal and daily (Becoming, 96). 7. Bromwich and Kalstone both identify this sense of “self-reproach” and “remorse” in Bishop’s work (Bromwich, “Bishop’s Dream-Houses,” 166; Kalstone, Becoming, 84), and Costello notes how “the sense of shame” in “Five Flights Up”

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is “associated with self-consciousness and memory” (Costello, Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 184). 8. See Nietzsche, Untimely, 60– 67; I owe the suggestion of Kierkegaard to David Bromwich. Recent work in animal studies questions the divide between shameful humanity and shameless animality, but these revisionary efforts might also attest to a long philosophic tradition of making the distinction (Kuzniar, Melancholia’s Dog, 67–75). 9. Bishop recommended Kierkegaard’s journals to Marianne Moore in 1943, writing that “there are wonderful things in it” (Bishop, One Art, 114); thirty years later, she writes to Ashbery that his Three Poems “remind me very oddly of Kierkegaard,” whom she has “always been able to read . . . with the greatest pleasure” (quoted in Lehman, Last, 355). Bishop’s library included a marked copy of Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way; see the cata log entry at http://discovery.lib.harvard.edu/?hreciid=|library%2fm%2faleph|000701723. 10. See Elizabeth Bishop Papers, Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries, 25.12. All subsequent references to this archive will be abbreviated VC. In another letter, Bishop advises an aspiring poet to “read ALL of somebody,” then “read his or her life, and letters, and so on” (One Art, 596). For Bishop’s opinion of confessionalism, see Millier, Bishop: Life, 323, 361, 462, 489– 90. 11. Mildred J. Nash remembers that Bishop’s already-culled library in 1978 had “a full shelf and a half from ceiling almost to floor” of biographies (Monteiro, Conversations, 137). For explanation of what letters mean to Bishop and Bishop’s poetry, see Hammer, “Useless Concentration.” 12. Bishop writes in a letter that she would like her friend Margaret Miller to paint at the foot of her bed John Donne’s lines “But as for one which hath a long taske, ’tis good, / With the Sunne to beginne his business” (One Art, 26). 13. Kalstone writes that in “Miracle for Breakfast,” Bishop would interpret miracles “not as apocalyptic but as something which may be as daily as breakfast” (Becoming, 50). 14. Walker’s book is an exception, though she would use Bishop’s religious references more to consider spiritual concepts than to analyze Bishop’s poetics as such (God and Elizabeth Bishop, 40). Costello’s excellent analysis of “the importance of the divine in Bishop’s early reflections” focuses on the contrast of natural and divine power (Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 97– 9). 15. See Herbert, Complete, 87–88; for the relation of “The Weed” and “Love Unknown,” see Monteiro, Conversations, 23. Bishop quotes “Affl iction (IV)” more directly in “Wading at Wellfleet” (Complete Poems, 7). “The Weed” might also recall Hopkins’s sonnet beginning, “My own heart let me have more pity on”; here, the poet wishes to “call off thoughts awhile” (Poems, 102– 3).

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16. Schweik’s excellent analysis takes this process to be a social responsibility, in which “selection of trope becomes . . . a metaphor for all participation in the social order and all making of social change” (A Gulf, 230; see also 227). 17. Several of the poet’s best critics have pointed out similar ambiguities, which Schweik describes as a “staging of potential ethical and imaginative options” (A Gulf, 230). See Bromwich, “Bishop’s Dream-Houses,” 159; Kalstone, Becoming, 84. 18. Kalstone explains that the poem “takes up— but with refi nement—the quarrel which began with ‘Roosters’ ” (Becoming, 98). 19. For good discussions of this poem’s cyclicity, see Goodridge, “Bishop and Stevens,” 143; Stevenson, Five Looks, 91– 92. 20. The figure may allude to Stevens’s common hero in “Notes,” walking “beyond the town” an “old coat” and “slouching pantaloons” (Collected, 336). For echoes of Stevens in this poem, see Kalstone, Becoming, 96; Goodridge, “Bishop and Stevens,” 143–45; Marks, “Bishop’s Art,” 215. Bishop may also allude to Dylan Thomas’s “The Hunchback in the Park” (Poems, 198–200); Bishop felt “instantaneous sympathy and pity” for Thomas when she met him (One Art, 277). 21. For detailed, excellent, and contrasting analyses of the rhetorical repetitions here, see Kalstone, Becoming, 97– 98; Marks, “Bishop’s Art,” 214–15. Marks’s reading fi nds captivity and “benumbing” in the recurrence that I take to be affi rmative (215). 22. Diehl describes how the man-moth exemplifies a “repetition-compulsion that constitutes his origins,” exercising an “all-too-human effort against the selfdestructive urges he otherwise cannot control” (Bishop and Moore, 63). 23. Bishop writes in a 1953 letter that she read “all . . . of Freud” in Brazil; earlier letters and notebooks show that this was in part a rereading (One Art, 283, 101, 351; Millier, Bishop: Life, 118, 126– 27). Travisano notes that Bishop belonged to “the fi rst generation of poets” for whom Freud “had begun to be absorbed into the fabric of Anglo-American culture” (Midcentury Quartet, 78). 24. See Costello’s connection of “Paris, 7 A.M.” with “experience-time” (Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 178–80) and Stevenson’s reading of the poem as a meditation on “time and memory” (Five Looks, 61– 63). 25. Costello’s analysis of this poem describes how “the returning sun is replaced by the departing lantern of the farmer, its ‘aureole’ suggesting God abandoning this earthy world” (“Narrative,” 189). 26. “Home is the one line ending without a true rhyme,” Kalstone observes (Becoming, 128– 29). 27. For critical descriptions of this development, see Mazzaro, “The Poetics of Impediment,” 45; Travisano, Midcentury Quartet, 167–68; Kalstone, Becoming, 196–99;

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Harrison, Bishop’s Poetics, 117–18. Marks’s description of Bishop’s “crossing” from “traumatic” to “narrative” memory, a “new determination to synchronize past and present,” seems most accurate (“Bishop’s Art,” 205, 209). 28. Parker argues that “Bishop’s poem about Pound is partly and surreptitiously also a poem about herself ” (The Unbeliever, 119); Merrill writes that “Visits” describes “aspects of herself that she was curious to face” (Collected Prose, 237). 29. See, for example, Bishop’s insistence in a 1970 letter that “I am sane & I’ve never felt saner” (VC 27.5). During her stay at a psychiatric hospital, she asked a friend not to write “sanitarium” on the envelope of her letters, and she seemed particularly fearful, during her crushing anxieties of 1949 and 1950, about the effects of the institution on her character (Millier, Bishop: Life, 214; Bishop, One Art, 187, 189). 30. Millier notes that “the child of a dysfunctional mother often assumes the burden of responsibility herself ” (Bishop: Life, 505). 31. Tomkins views shame, the central affect of his affect theory, as the sensation closest to “the experienced self ” (Shame and Its Sisters, 136; see 133–45; Sedgwick, Touching, 98, an essay written with Adam Frank). Sedgwick emphasizes the “alchemy of the contingent” in Tomkins, which means that any “emergence of a core self ” presents a possible instance of “discomfiture and surprise” (Touching, 98). 32. By using Henry James’s revisions as a paradigmatic case, Sedgwick’s analysis of queer shame suggests the importance of retrospection, though she does not pursue this implication (Touching, 61). 33. Bishop recommended Klein’s Envy and Gratitude to Lowell soon after it appeared, admired The Psychoanalysis of Children, and advocated Kleinian analysis to a young mother (One Art, 371; Harrison, Bishop’s Poetics, 224– 25; VC 25.10). In Brazil she and Lota de Macedo Soares befriended a psychologist who studied with Klein and who later treated Soares herself (VC 25.10). Bishop might even have come to identify the deficiency of her own Freudian therapy as an inattention to Kleinian insights: in a 1954 letter to Dr. Baumann, Bishop praises Germaine Guex’s La névrose d’abandon, which explains how an “abandonment syndrome” complicates superego formation, and writes, “Although I try not to take such reading ‘personally’ I think it has showed me exactly where Dr. Foster and I went wrong, and has made me feel a good deal better & more enlightened about that par ticu lar fiasco” (VC 23.2). 34. Klein writes in “The Origins of Transference” that “it is only by linking again and again . . . later experiences with earlier ones and vice versa . . . that present and past can come together in the patient’s mind” through a healthy process of “integration” (Selected, 210).

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35. Bishop’s art is meant, Diehl writes, “to create an alternative home” (Bishop and Moore, 109). For Bishop’s homesickness, see Costello, Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 131–32. Bishop tried for many years to write a poem and story about her mother’s homesickness; she worked on drafts as she composed “The Prodigal” (Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe, 86–88, 188– 90, 294– 97). 36. This focus on temporality is meant to further Diehl’s analysis of Bishop’s creativity as a Kleinian reparation and work of mourning, to which I am indebted; see Bishop and Moore, esp. 7–8, 85–86, 95–105, 108–10. 37. Thus the self-injunction of “Over 2,000 Illustrations,” “open the book,” echoes that of “Paris, 7 A.M.,” “look down into the courtyard”: both are moments of “retrospection” and “introspection” that seek a different vision of the past. See also Bromwich’s analysis of this poem, which describes how, in the fi nal lines, “to look our sight away is to gaze our fi ll, but also to look until we see differently— until, in our original terms, we do not see at all” (“Bishop’s Dream-Houses,” 173). 38. For some of Bishop’s many assertions of her poem’s “plain facts,” “straight fact,” or “truth,” see Bishop, One Art, 621, 477; Monteiro, Conversations, 117, 42. One student remembers “her saying more than once, if we would ask her about a poem, ‘That really happened!’ ” (Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering, 210). 39. Diehl describes “attentiveness to the natural world” as an essential element in Bishop’s reparation (Bishop and Moore, 8); the conclusion of “In the Village,” Diehl writes, is a “displacement of craft into the natural world which lends a mutability that changes but does not destroy” (103). Through this, Diehl explains, Bishop can “re-create the power of craft and attest to the salvific mutability of nature in order to redress feelings of abandonment and loss” (104). 40. With this, Bishop’s poem might also revise the work her epigraph invokes: Hopkins’s “Spring” ends with a reference to Christ’s incarnation (Poems, 67). 41. In the case of “Quai d’Orléans,” the past is again connected to Bishop’s sense of fault: in 1937 while visiting France, Bishop, Margaret Miller, and Louise Crane had a car accident that required the amputation of Miller’s hand and forearm, and though Crane was driving, Bishop seems to have felt remorse toward Miller for the rest of her life (Millier, Bishop: Life, 123– 26). “Quai” was written after the accident and later dedicated to Miller. 42. Psychology confi rms this link; Modell argues that “metaphor is an essential element in the transformation of traumatic memories and, further, that the metaphoric process provides the necessary bridge between the past and the present: memory” (“Transformation,” 138). Compare also Cummins’s general discussion of the sestina, which characterizes end words as “signposts” that make one “aware . . . of the passage of time: this word is the ‘same,’ but only in the sense a human being is the same at different ages” (“Calliope Music,” 140).

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43. “To place a lament in the pastoral world,” Lambert explains at the start of her study of pastoral elegy, is “. . . to imply some form of regeneration” (Placing Sorrow, xvii). 44. “Sestina” thus helps to explain why poetic formalism seems to Bishop more natural than free verse; she remarks in a 1960 letter to Lowell, for example, that she believes “un-metrical verse” to be “more ‘literary’ and necessarily selfconscious than metrical” (One Art, 388). 45. Bishop’s short story “Gwendolyn,” written before “In the Village” and “Sestina,” provides a useful contrast: as Marks notes, the work is “both a parable of mnemonic restitution and an allegory of traumatic dissociation in which the child and her grandmother are the divided parts of a missing self ” (“Bishop’s Art,” 207). The grandmother in “Gwendolyn” inflicts the narrator’s self-castigating recrimination for a playmate’s death—“I don’t remember now what awful thing happened to me,” the story concludes (Collected Prose, 226)—whereas the grandmother in “Sestina” enacts the self-forgiveness inherent in mournful transformations. 46. Costello describes how “adult schemata,” in this poem, “bring forward the unschematized awareness of the child in a consciousness freer of guilt, shame, or fear” (Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 199). 47. See Blasing’s analysis of temporality in “The Moose,” which notes that the poem, an “elegy of sorts,” describes how the bus’s “westward journey . . . repeats a historical and continental movement west and away from a source, within cyclical natural time, represented by the setting sun” (Politics and Form, 99–100). 48. Freud writes that melancholia’s “substitution of identification for object-love is an important mechanism in narcissistic affections” (“Mourning,” 249). For later theories linking shame and narcissism, see Nathanson, “A Timetable,” 5– 6; H. Lewis, “Shame,” 93–102. 49. Kalstone writes that “The Weed” is “obviously related to a dreamlike notebook entry . . . in which, on the window coated outside with raindrops and inside with steam, Bishop has a hallucination in one of the drops of a ‘lonely, magnificent human eye, wrapped in its own tear’ ” (Becoming, 18). 50. Costello explains that Bishop’s “association of dew and tears, of personal grief and nature’s processes . . . resists self-absorbing sorrow and suggests a more inclusive vision of loss as natural change” (Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 59). 51. When Bishop was preparing her Complete Poems, she added a dedication to “Anaphora,” “in memory of Marjorie Carr Stevens,” as if to acknowledge that this poem’s affi rmation of quotidian repetition depends on human partnership: Stevens and Bishop lived together in Key West, with interruptions, from 1941 through 1945 (Millier, Bishop: Life, 164–79). The dedication she added to “Quai d’Orléans,” “ for Margaret Miller,” suggests similar awareness; for Bishop’s pos-

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sibly romantic, unrequited attraction to Miller, see Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering, 70. 52. Merrill notes that this echo would be “shun . . . shun . . . shun” (Collected Prose, 249). 53. Bishop disliked “something still unturned about Frost— something slightly unpleasant under that lichen-covered stone.” In another letter to Jarrell, she adds that “the bad side of Frost” is “the silly side, the wisdom-of-the-ages side” (One Art, 432); “The Shampoo” makes the wisdom of the ages into something more than silly. 54. Bishop repeated her suspicion, after Soares’s probably suicidal death, that Soares was “too impatient to live. . . . If you read my poem THE SHAMPOO,” Bishop adds in a letter, “. . . you’ll see that I felt exactly the same thing, oh—14 years ago” (VC 99.1). 55. For Ashley Brown’s memory of Bishop and Soares’s hair-washing “ritual,” see Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering, 142. 56. As Marks describes, this is a “limbo where space and time are interchangeable and the absence of any external standard makes measurement impossible” (“Bishop’s Art,” 216). 57. Bishop recounts in an interview that her dislike of Defoe’s Christianity furthered her desire to “re-see it with all that left out” (Monteiro, Conversations, 88). 58. Bishop read Some Versions of Pastoral in 1936 and wrote to Moore that she thought it “excellent—the parts where I’m familiar with what he’s talking about, that is” (One Art, 39) 59. Curry notes that while the “the specificity of the number allows us to calculate a routine for this Crusoe . . . ‘misery’ . . . points toward its inadequacy as an act of fulfi llment” (“Augury,” 80). 60. See Freud, “Mourning,” 248; Klein, Envy, 36– 38: “persecutory anxiety and defenses,” Klein explains, can help one “escape from the overwhelming burden of guilt and despair” (37). 61. Several critics read “Crusoe in England” as an elegy for Soares; see Goldensohn, Bishop: The Biography, 68; Harrison, Bishop’s Poetics, 193; Millier, Bishop: Life, 449. Though Soares’s death likely became part of the poem’s motivation, reading “Friday” specifically can reduce the work: as Costello’s wonderfully complete analysis of this poem explains, its effect is “a matter less of personal disclosure than generic achievement” (“Bishop’s Impersonal,” 355; see also 344– 63). 62. See Diehl’s description of this poem as a failed mourning and reparation (Bishop and Moore, 104– 5). 63. Bishop’s drafts prove that she “wanted to write a villanelle all my life,” as she told an interviewer in 1978, and show the difficult circumstances and temporal

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themes of her attempts to do so (Monteiro, Conversations, 118). One attempt came in 1937, after the car wreck that required the amputation of Margaret Miller’s hand; a draft begins “I was not quick enough to catch you then; / Time out of mind the sparrow falls again” (Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe, 34– 35, 258– 61). A second attempt during Bishop’s difficult Washington tenure repeats that “the time to watch for is when Time grows green” (Edgar Allan Poe, 186–87). 64. For details of this period, see Millier, Bishop: Life, 513–16. 65. See Harrison, Bishop’s Poetics, 197; Millier, Bishop: Life, 513; and Stevenson, Five Looks, 126, for readings that emphasize this poem’s mastery; McCabe, by contrast, argues that the poem “reveals a struggle for mastery that will never be gained” (Bishop: Poetics of Loss, 27). 66. Harrison notes that while “repetition is a vital element in elegy . . . repetition is not a movement toward consolation here; this is a broken-record repetition” (Bishop’s Poetics, 206). 67. Bishop’s letters prove her sense of responsibility for Soares’s death: “I can’t help thinking I might have saved her somehow,” she writes, adding that she “honestly can’t think of anything I did especially wrong— except that I have done many wrong things all my life” (One Art, 470). Inability to save a mentally ill woman she loved seems to have awakened the “all my life” sense of fault begun with her mother’s institutionalization. 68. Bishop prints next to these lines the opening of Hernández’s poem: “Yo quiero ser, llorando el hortelano / de la tierra que ocupas y estercolas, / compañero del alma, tan temprano.” Timothy Baland translates this as: “Ramón, right now I want to be / the mournful friend who tends the ground / you fertilize and lie in, gave too soon” (Hernández, Selected Poems, 96). 69. At the time of Geography III, Bishop wrote to her publisher that the book might yet include her elegy for Soares and adds that the work “shd. have a geographical title eventually” (VC 60.3). 70. Quoted in Costello, Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 210. “What is there here but weather, what spirit / Have I except it comes from the sun?” writes Stevens in “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu” (Collected, 104); in 1968, Bishop wrote to Moore her appreciation for Stevens’s letters: “He enjoys everything so much . . . and I also like his preoccupation with the weather and climates” (One Art, 499). Bishop writes “Matthew 26:58” in the margin of one diary entry describing a joyful dawn, as if to suggest a revision of the biblical allusion that long ago concluded “Roosters” in uncertainty (VC 73.9). 71. “One of the things I didn’t get into the villanelle . . . is that I don’t think I’ll be able to go back to that beautiful island in Maine any more,” Bishop wrote to Baumann after composing “One Art” (Costello, Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 210).

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72. Thus while Marks compares Bishop’s “goddess of permanence-in-change” to Spenser’s (“Bishop’s Art,” 203), Cook’s account seems more apt when it notes how Bishop’s natural revision corrects earlier accounts of natural permanence (Against Coercion, 40–41). 73. Costello describes how the poem “displaces the simple dichotomy of nature’s presence and the mind’s absence and temporal awareness with a fluctuation of shared and distinguishing features” (Bishop: Questions of Mastery, 212). 74. Alpers’s study of pastoral notes that “from its beginning, the form has been concerned with various human separations and their implications,” and he describes “pastoral conventions as practices that bring ‘shepherds’ together after a separation or loss” (What Is Pastoral? 92, 134). Lambert’s study provides an excellent summary of the tradition on which Bishop draws, especially the Spenserian sense that “changing seasons” help us “place more painful mutations in our own lives”; Spenser, Lambert notes, “builds the association of human cycles and natural ones into the very structure of his pastoral universe” (Placing Sorrow, 126, 127). 75. Marks notes these formal allusions (“Bishop’s Art,” 203). 76. Marks notes Bishop’s lack of interest in “the poetics of stellification” (“Bishop’s Art,” 203). 77. More than Crusoe’s diary, Bishop admired Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year; in “North Haven,” one might say, she takes up its narrator’s enviable position as innocent daily survivor (Bishop, One Art, 105). 78. Like Bishop’s mother and Soares, Lowell was burdened with mental illness, yet he died not in a sanitarium or by suicide but in a New York cab returning to see his second wife; Bishop even mentions Lowell in a late letter as proof that “schizophrenia CAN be cured” (VC 27.5). For Bishop’s complicated sense of competition with Lowell, see Kalstone, Becoming, 211–12; Hammer, “Useless Concentration,” 169– 72; for manifestations of this late in life, see Bidart’s reminiscences as well as Millier’s biographical account (Fountain and Brazeau, Remembering, 339; Millier, Bishop: Life, 473– 74). 79. See Kalstone’s contrast of Lowell’s and Bishop’s views of truth and Marks’s contrast of the two poet’s changes; Kalstone insightfully links the difference to the poets’ senses of shame (Marks, “Bishop’s Art,” 205; Kalstone, Becoming, 246–47). 80. This helps to explain why Bishop, unlike Lowell or Moore, rarely altered her poems after they were deemed fi nished. 81. V. Bell supports this suggestion with his description of Lowell’s relation to the natural world: “implacably autonomous” in Notebook and earlier, “external to the self and consciousness,” nature is “also malevolently animated by the threatened subject’s perception of it” (Robert Lowell, 137). In Day by Day, Bell goes on to argue, the disjunction between human and natural is a possible source of

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consolation, but the fundamental divide remains (Robert Lowell, 224– 26). What Bell calls a “restrained unhumanistic skepticism” makes Lowell’s philosophy seem fundamentally different from Bishop’s trust in a relation of human and natural sorrow (226). 82. For revisions of these lines, see Lowell, Selected Poems, 184, 186; Collected Poems, 504, 434. 83. Marks notes these allusions, focusing on hints of infidelity in Shakespeare’s cuckoos rather than the song’s enactment of romantic recurrence (“Bishop’s Art,” 203–4). 84. In a letter to Bishop, Lowell remembers that he almost proposed to her after their 1948 vacation together in Stonington, Maine; when Bishop and Soares visited Lowell and his wife in Castine, Maine, in 1957, his romantic feelings seem to have resurfaced (One Art, 344–46). 85. Lowell writes to Bishop in a letter that he prefers the original version (Lowell and Bishop, Words in Air, 757). Yenser describes how Notebook focuses on the “transformation of meaningless repetition into meaning through repetition,” ending with a consideration of Nietzsche’s eternal return (Circle, 288; see also 284– 93). V. Bell agrees, though he sees a perhaps more “precarious relationship between the poet and the undirected flux of his experience”: Notebook, in his view, “moves with the years and seasons but also in the most unpredictable and erratic currents of the time stream” (Robert Lowell, 134). 86. I share V. Bell’s view of the essentially pessimistic tone in Day by Day, where any sense of recurrence serves to emphasize mortality and “patterns that consume individual human lifetimes do not relent” (Robert Lowell, 215). 87. A 1941 letter from Lowell makes his view of memorial stasis explicit: memory, he writes, “hold[s] an experience as in a pair of tongs” (Letters, 33). 88. Cook notes how repetition, in this poem, suggests “some form of continuing life, whether in a younger generation or in some continuing tradition” (Against Coercion, 43).

4. The Cosmic Dawnings of James Merrill 1. See Vendler, “James Merrill,” 345, 353. Materer notes the “astonishment of Merrill’s readers when a writer of exquisite, personal lyrics published a visionary long poem” (Merrill’s Apocalypse, 5; see also Polito, “Introduction,” 1– 2). 2. See Lehman, “Elemental,” esp. 25, 38, 43–44; Kalstone, “Persisting,” 135–44.; Materer, Merrill’s Apocalypse, esp. 2–14. 3. Vendler’s criticism is particularly attentive to Merrill’s “moral choice” to locate “value in the human and everyday rather than in the transcendent” (“Divine,”

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217). Labrie notes Merrill’s preference for portraying a “domestic and uneventful life” ( James Merrill, 63), and Adams describes Merrill as “valuing the feelings of ordinary existence above all else” (Merrill’s Poetic Quest, 152). 4. Letters to Frederick Buechner begin “The Thousand and Second Night,” for example, and an account to Robin Magowan begins “Chimes for Yahya” (4 December 1960; 5 March 1966); by 1991, Merrill writes to Peter Moore that his correspondence prepares for “the inevitable Poem” (25 November/6 December 1991). Merrill also starts several works in the margins or entries of journals; as Hammer writes in the case of “16.ix.65,” “the two forms of writing—poem and notebook entry— are not, fi nally, different in kind in his practice” (“Life,” 285). 5. To Halpern, the everyday and the prophetic are “hospitable,” “mutually sustaining,” and distinct voices in Merrill’s work; though Halpern notes Merrill’s “extraordinary respect for the everyday,” he argues that “Merrill is not deeply interested” in choosing between the transcendent and the everyday except “as the making of one choice or other might have a par ticu lar dramatic value” (Everyday and Prophetic, 178, 176, 165). 6. “Merrill’s faith is in the ‘STOP TO T I M E’ represented by the ‘F ICT I V E SPACE’ of his poem,” writes Materer (Merrill’s Apocalypse, 126), but it seems worth nothing that the space of Merrill’s poetry, even in Sandover, can be temporal as his real setting. 7. Yenser’s book argues that Merrill is “an inveterate dualist” who believes both that “any single principle will double” and that “opposing principles must be one” (The Consuming Myth, 4). McClatchy and Yenser’s introduction to Merrill’s Selected Poems explains that “the mercurial and transforming power of metaphor” is at the core of Merrill’s verse (xv). 8. See Keats, Letters, 249– 50; I owe the suggestion of this connection to Langdon Hammer. 9. Kimon Friar, the teacher and lover who fi rst suggested to Merrill the goal of a long poem, provided Merrill’s most intense exposure to Keats (Hammer, Masks, 14–15, 19– 23). 10. Gunn points out in an early reading that Sandover is a poem of “gay marriage” (“A Heroic Enterprise,” 157); Gwiazda’s recent study states that “Merrill’s affi rmation of his same-sex relationship with Jackson . . . is enough to make his trilogy one of the most outspoken documents of homosexual self-avowal in American poetry” (Merrill and Auden, 69). 11. Merrill’s work may in fact argue for the ordinariness of same-sex partnerships through that very unconcern: “Sandover does not make apologies for Merrill and Jackson’s marriage-like relationship,” Gwiazda writes; “rather, it portrays the common life of two men who inhabit a domestic space at a time when

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marital unions outside of the conventional bonds were only beginning to register on public consciousness” (Merrill and Auden, 69). 12. The need to think of “the real and the imagined . . . simultaneously,” McClatchy and Yenser write, “perhaps derives from the poet’s most traumatic youthful experience” (introduction, xii). Elsewhere, McClatchy writes that the divorce prompted Merrill to “harmonize . . . two sides of his life” and to “remain of two minds about all matters” (“Braving” 233; see also “Merrill’s Inner Room,” 5– 6). 13. Yenser’s chapters on Sandover detail how “Nature remains JM’s muse” (The Consuming Myth, 279); Adams calls Merrill “supremely a poet of earth” (Merrill’s Poetic Quest, 152); and McClatchy describes Merrill’s Oedipal fascination with the earth as “muse and model, scold and siren, security and danger and love” (“Merrill’s Inner Room,” 22). 14. When he collected his early books in From the First Nine, Merrill added “Clearing the Title” as the volume’s last poem and only new work. 15. Merrill’s love of Bishop and Stevens is well-documented (Collected Prose, 58, 70, 93, 147, 216–19, 229–42, 352– 56, 468– 69). Merrill took both as models of how to write a “man-sized” poetry, attuned to an “human scale,” rather than an oracular verse (Collected Prose, 53, 163). While Merrill does not state his debt to Frost so overtly, Frost was undoubtedly influential: Reuben Brower, Merrill’s thesis adviser at college and friend afterward, wrote one of the fi rst book-length studies of Frost, and Frost visited the Amherst campus during Merrill’s undergraduate years. In a 1945 letter Merrill writes that the “greatest news yet is that I HAVE MET ROBERT FROST . . . HE HAS READ FIVE OF MY POEMS AND LIKED THEM FAR MORE THAN EVER I DARED HOPE!” (to Thomas Howkins, 2 May 1945) 16. Pervasive repetition in Proust’s work helps to explain why this novelist should be a poet’s greatest influence. Genette analyzes how repetition distinguishes Proust’s novel from others, substituting “for summary, which is the synthetic form of narration in the classical novel . . . a different synthetic form, the iterative” (Narrative, 143). 17. Merrill assents when an interviewer describes “An Urban Convalescence,” the fi rst poem of the book, as “the most personal poem you had yet written”; Merrill calls it “a turning point” (Collected Prose, 68). Critics agree. Kalstone, for example, writes that Water Street marks a turn “toward more overtly autobiographical work” (Five Temperaments, 93); Moffett writes that the volume begins to draw “upon the particulars of the poet’s life” (Merrill: An Introduction, 37). 18. McClatchy notes that “For Proust” could serve as the prelude or dedication of Water Street (“On Water Street,” 62).

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19. Yenser’s analysis of this poem, to which I am indebted overall, describes how “we are led to consider the interplay between the same but different words and between the world and the literature that reflects it” (The Consuming Myth, 79). 20. Yenser notes this change “from continuous past through simple past to present” (The Consuming Myth, 80). 21. Yenser acutely describes the image as “simultaneously a tribute to the imagination’s power to renew and a reminder of time’s passage,” and McClatchy rightly emphasizes that “it is the world, not the artist, that puts on the mask,” though one might add that the world here is an artist of sorts (Yenser, The Consuming Myth, 81; McClatchy, “On Water Street,” 63). 22. James Ingram Merrill Papers, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, IV.1.a, Box 3. All subsequent references to this archive will be designated WU. 23. WU II.1.12, Journal 65. Merrill’s other Proustian homage, “The World and the Child,” is a villanelle; for Bishop’s connection to this poem, see Materer, “Mirrored Lives,” 181. 24. Materer applies the “breakthrough narrative” of confessionalism to Merrill’s development, though Merrill’s transition, in Materer’s view, “is not the dramatic one attributed to Lowell or Plath” (“Confession,” 168– 69); Blasing reads Merrill’s forms as a “staging” that “registers their anachronism and thus divests them of historical authority,” even as form seems to “consume the personal source” (Politics and Form, 167–70). Alternatively, Nickowitz reads Merrill’s poems as ambiguously confessional, seeking to “hide the self and hide sexual identity” (Rhetoric and Sexuality, 2). 25. Forbes notes the confessional equation of autobiography and story; analysis of repetition furthers her point that “autobiographical self-consciousness can be a resource for formal innovation . . . as well as a method for uncovering new stories” (Sincerity’s Shadow, 18; see 17–18). 26. In a late rereading of Proust, Merrill marvels at “how few actual incidents there are,” and notes how “the same single event . . . is used to shed light dozens of times in the course of the same 1000-or-so pages” (to Carolyn Grassi, 7 November 1992). 27. Moffett’s description of the fi nal sunset in “The Broken Home,” an “escape and salvation from what the story tells,” thus seems not quite accurate, since Merrill’s story may recur as often as sunset (Merrill: An Introduction, 55). 28. “Sequence” is not precisely the right word for Merrill’s sonnet-formed poems, precisely because each part seems as distinct and related as the separate works of a collection; as Lehman writes, the form of sonnet “building blocks, linked

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yet separate, retaining their individual integrity yet flowing into a whole larger than the sum of its parts, qualifies as one of Merrill’s most significant and original contributions to the treasure chest of poetic forms” (“Elemental,” 54). 29. Merrill admits in his memoir that his life “has been less a flight from the Broken Home than a cunning scale model of it” (Collected Prose, 587). 30. Compare Bishop’s point, sympathetic with Merrill’s if much more resigned, that “if there is anything one gains from psychiatry at all it’s the simple thing . . . that one must be oneself ” (One Art, 190). 31. Merrill repeats in a 1985 letter his judgment that “people will do things their own way,” a process that yields “genre portraits by Time” (to Stephen Yenser, 12 September 1985). 32. One exception comes in the opening of Mirabell, where Merrill sees “compulsively repetitive / Neuroses” in the Larkin-like “quotidian toads” of his wallpaper (Sandover, 97– 98). 33. Brown, Life, 90– 91. Merrill expresses his appreciation in letters to Frederick Buechner that he copies in his journal around 1960 (WU II.1.5, Journal 54). 34. See Collected Poems, 616. Merrill may see this truth as the achievement of Proust’s or Bishop’s life as well. In Sandover, he quotes Proust’s conflation of “désir de me mettre au travail” with “désir de mener la vie de tout le monde” (61); in a review, Merrill writes that Bishop’s “purified, transparent ‘I,’ which readers may take as their virtual own,” shows “the ‘touch of nature’ which makes the whole world kin” (Collected Prose, 240). 35. Kalstone describes this as a “symbolic autobiography” that makes “apparently ordinary detail transparent to deeper configurations” (Five Temperaments, 111); one might add that these “configurations” are artistic and natural forms as well as personal histories. 36. De Santillana and von Dechend, Hamlet’s Mill, 48, 47. In a letter to Richard Howard, Merrill mentions reading this volume, “perhaps the most difficult book I’ve ever wanted to read,” in order to “fit some half-digested lumps into a poem for Urania” (10 May 1973). 37. Materer explains that Merrill’s conclusion alludes to the forms of Christian prayer in which temporal cycles become the infi nity of “world without end” (Merrill’s Apocalypse, 70). 38. For a full account of this poem’s relation to “The Auroras,” see McClatchy’s excellent explanation, which reaches conclusions more ample and detailed than mine (“On Water Street,” 93– 96). 39. Nickowitz writes that “burned fi lm reinforces the guilt and aggression with which the poet views his past” (Rhetoric and Sexuality, 44).

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40. Merrill’s memory of “peeping” seems to have been the subject of one of his earliest poems; see McClatchy’s explanation in “James Merrill’s Inner Room,” which includes a facsimile of “Looking at Mummy” (12–14). 41. Adams argues that this poem aspires to a “prelapsarian psychic state, before the development of consciousness,” though his Jungian reading follows the implications of this differently (Merrill’s Poetic Quest, 32). 42. Adams’s analysis includes a related contrast of the father’s “linear . . . race with and against time” versus the mother’s “archetypal feminine cycle” (Merrill’s Poetic Quest, 27– 28). 43. In Life Against Death, Brown writes that “full psychoanalytical consciousness would be strong enough to cancel” guilt by “deriving it from infantile fantasy” (292); this unrepressed psyche fi nds something like a Nietzschean, materialist eternity by overcoming the death of the body in a mysticism like “that simple health that animals enjoy” (311). 44. Merrill suggests that “time, normally understood as destroying innocence, might give innocence the opportunity to build anew,” Sastri explains; Merrill’s innocence is therefore “profoundly temporal” (Merrill: Knowing, 2, 105). 45. Mann, Death in Venice, 226–28; to William Burford, 1 August 1946, James Merrill Papers (Box 1, Folder 12), Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. Hammer connects this desire to Merrill’s love for Strato (“Days,” 5). Two decades later, Merrill repeats the confession when another letter asks what happens “to the envy, the love (am I simply paraphrasing Tonio Kröger?) the child’s sense of what is natural” and answers that “one repossesses those qualities in one’s adult love-life” (to Judith Moffett, 26 March 1968). 46. To William S. Burford, 5 August 1946, James Merrill Papers (Box 1, Folder 13), Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College Library. 47. Ephraim was to have been named Eros in Merrill’s unfi nished Ouija-board novel (Sandover, 47). Kalstone writes that Ephraim shows “life shared with DJ” to be the “ground bass of Merrill’s poetry” (Five Temperaments, 124); Moffett calls the book “a sustained love poem” (Merrill: An Introduction, 175). 48. The consistency of this union was crucial, to Merrill, even through other love affairs of both partners: he writes in a letter to Kimon Friar that he would never “threaten that home base” (1 April 1983). In a late letter to Allan Gurganus, Merrill remembers reading about the goose “who mates for life” with “smarting eyes” (20– 21 April 1993). 49. Several critics read The Book of Ephraim as a story of love cooling into companionship, and Selinger traces this movement in Merrill’s love poetry overall (What Is It, 161– 85). But Keller’s description of “continual” erotic “rebirth” is to my mind most accurate (Remaking It, 248). Also see Moffett,

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Merrill: An Introduction, 175– 76; Perkins, Modernism and After, 652; Kalstone, “Evenings,” 48. 50. In a wonderfully acute summary, Kalstone describes the “interpenetration and inseparability of the days of raw experience and the nights of imaginative absorption and recall” in Nights and Days (Five Temperaments, 103). 51. Yenser formulates the insight in “Wildean terms: one can cure the soul by means of the senses and the senses by means of the soul”; here and throughout Merrill’s verse, this can happen through recurrent time (The Consuming Myth, 133). 52. See Merrill’s notes for a reading (WU V.13.e). Earlier, he affi rms “the diaryentry-type unfolding of it” to a correspondent who suggests that he place “Carnivals” fi rst; the life-after-death import of that section, Merrill suggests, can emerge only through quotidian progress (to Robin Magowan, 1 February 1963). 53. To Hellen Ingram Plummer, 29 June 1950. 54. Adams argues that one “cannot help but hear a ‘leash’ being drawn tight” (Merrill’s Poetic Quest, 10), but McClatchy seems more accurate in his explanation of “the Faust legend” here: it emphasizes “not the speaker’s eventual loss, but the poet’s formidable soul-making” (“On Water Street,” 87). 55. To Craig Poile, 24 September 1991. 56. Merrill wrote to Yenser that he wished Ephraim to include a favorite Cavafy quotation: “When we say ‘Time’ we mean ourselves. Most abstractions are simply our pseudonyms. It is superfluous to say ‘Time is scytheless and toothless.’ We know it. We are time” (14 February 1975; Collected Prose, 200). Merrill’s Cavafy-like attention to “Days” supports the same judgment. 57. “Having read the trilogy,” Yenser writes, “we are prepared to read the trilogy” (The Consuming Myth, 318). 58. In a review after Ephraim was published, Vendler notes that “novels were not the solution” for Merrill’s “dailiness” (“Divine,” 211), and Lehman’s essay reads a “complicated dialectic” between “lyric endings and narrative ends” in Sandover to suggest a “tension between narrative ‘forward motion’ and poetic closure” (“Elemental,” 38, 46). McHale, alternatively, analyzes Sandover as a “kind of novel,” akin to “historiographic metafiction,” and suggests that the drive to “replenish the resources of narrative in poetry” serves as one mark of Merrill’s postmodernism (The Obligation, 26, 11, 258). Keniston writes that Merrill’s “nostalgia for lyric” in Sandover shows his desire for a “lyric realm of unmitigated loss that he has apparently forsaken” (Overheard Voices, 54, 55). 59. This is to disagree with von der Heydt, who writes that Merrill’s “lyric approach” requires an “atemporal perspective” (At the Brink, 73– 74).

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60. The Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. All subsequent references to this archive will be abbreviated YCAL. 61. To Craig Poile, 24 September 1991. The substitution of poetry for childbearing occurs elsewhere in Merrill’s work, most pertinently perhaps in the second poem of “Up and Down,” where Merrill’s mother gives him an emerald ring “for when you marry” and Merrill imagines telling her that “the little feet that patter here are metrical”— a response that links propagation to a green maternal world as well as his own mother (Collected Poems, 342). 62. “Extremes? They meet in meter all the time,” Merrill writes in drafts of Ephraim: “Any 2 realms can be made one by rhyme” (YCAL). 63. To Helen Plummer, 21 February 1976. Merrill recommends the same attitude to friends, criticizing David Kalstone, for instance, when Kalstone describes “a wasted year”: “It’s too dreadful to look at things that way,” Merrill writes in a letter. “One must be grateful for the experience, for the priceless wisdom it has brought” (31 December 1969). 64. Bloom, for example, writes that “Merrill is not an elegiac poet” (introduction, 5), whereas Sacks writes that “one among several ways to read [Sandover] is as . . . a multiple elegy of epic proportions” (“Divine,” 159– 60). Von Hallberg’s description of the poet’s gains from losses and Vendler’s point about Merrill’s refutation of the tragic agree with Bloom (von Hallberg, American Poetry, 115; Vendler, “James Merrill,” 351– 52), while McHale argues that Merrill rehearses, restages, and models death in the trilogy so that death “saturates the very fabric of the poem” (The Obligation, 49– 51). Keniston’s insightful analysis, related to my suggestion here, argues that Merrill “offer[s] an alternative to narrative models of loss and consolation often associated with elegy”; in Merrill’s work, she writes, “loss and retrieval alternate” (Overheard Voices, 54; see 57– 60). 65. Yenser explains that the “period machine” is an “alternative description of this poem, as well as of the world it celebrates,” one that “gives time its due”; this expands his crucial observation that for Merrill, “even a Proust can only be partially successful in the end” if “we suppose the criterion for success to be a triumph over time” (The Consuming Myth, 237, 236). See Yenser’s excellent explanation of the period or dot in Sandover as a whole, which describes the allusions that contribute to this recurring figure and show its ambiguous unity of “the positive and the negative” (The Consuming Myth, 299). 66. In a letter about his fi rst Ouija-board experiences, Merrill writes, “I cannot calculate how much I must have suffered in my mind from the fear of absolute annihilation. Now it seems all kinds of exalted utterance, whether scripture or poetry, point to truth” (to Hellen Ingram Plummer, 2 September 1955).

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67. “This topic takes Ephraim out of his depth,” Materer explains. “(In a sense, Merrill is saying that the topic is out of his depth, and that he needs a different poetic voice to address it)” (Merrill’s Apocalypse, 88). 68. Yenser’s detailed, helpful explication of the mind-nature pairing in Mirabell tends to see a more equal partnership, though he writes that “God B”—the biology figure—“seems virtually one with the evolving universe” (The Consuming Myth, 275; see 273–80). Adams argues that the feminine is “actively negated” in Mirabell (Merrill’s Poetic Quest, 149). 69. Yenser explains how “Merrill puts himself squarely in the Romantic tradition as M. H. Abrams defines it” through this “marriage of mind and nature” (Myth 272). 70. Merrill writes in a later letter that “I suppose by its nature (if you grant that the quest leads to archetypes) our experience was felt to be more ‘Jungian’ than ‘Freudian’ ” (to Don Adams, 6 May 1992). The fi nal illumination of Mirabell may allude to a passage from Jung’s autobiography in which Jung describes a ceremony of adoration for “the great god who redeems the world by rising out of the darkness as a radiant light in the heavens” (Memories, 269); Merrill copied this passage into drafts of Ephraim (YCAL). 71. Merrill was deeply concerned with the nuclear threat; for example, he read and recommended Jonathan Schell’s 1982 New Yorker articles, later published as The Fate of the Earth, which describe nuclear proliferation as “the most important reality of our time” (8): Schell’s analyses “make almost unbearable reading,” Merrill writes in a letter, “but must be read” (to Stephen Yenser, 1 March 1982). Materer provides a good summary, in the context of Merrill’s poem, of “the fearful atmosphere of this cold war period,” in which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists steadily moved the minute hand of a “doomsday clock” closer to midnight (Merrill’s Apocalypse, 103– 5). 72. Materer notes that “Merrill’s projection of nuclear anxiety into his personal life is characteristic of his thinking and feeling about political and social issues” (Merrill’s Apocalypse, 3). 73. This structure supports Adams’s point that Sandover seeks to reconcile the “lyricbased epic,” in which the “sublime is found and lost repeatedly,” with the “linear model of progress” seen in Mirabell, “toward a real paradise in the real future” (Merrill’s Poetic Quest, 127). I share Adams’s general sense that Scripts emphasizes the circular time of Ephraim rather than the linear time of Mirabell, as well as his conviction that a marriage of linear and circular represents the union of Time and Earth that Merrill has long wished to achieve (136–39). 74. As Yenser explains, Merrill’s poem must “resist itself in the name of life,” which means that Merrill “turns in the direction of the actual world” (The Consuming Myth, 314).

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75. Materer notes that many of Merrill’s poems after Sandover return to “organic, cyclical time,” though he also observes that Merrill is “still hoping for a miracle” (Merrill’s Apocalypse, 134, 148). 76. See Merrill, Sandover, 278. Yenser explains the relation of the fi nale passage to the broken glass of a Jewish marriage ceremony through analysis of the epigraph of Scripts, concluding that “in the trilogy, the broken glass unites DJ and JM and their friends and also humanity, divinity, and Mother Nature” (The Consuming Myth, 315). 77. Yenser notes that the “trumpet-vine” and “cracked pavement” in “Clearing the Title” recall the Palm Beach setting of “From the Cupola” as well as the poet’s childhood vacations in Florida (The Consuming Myth, 328). 78. Merrill includes this description in written answers to an unpublished interview (WU IV.1.c.ii.[b]). “Truth” in Sandover, Merrill writes in notes for a reading, “while it grows more + more beautiful . . . never allows for the last word to be spoken— as if it were . . . a living organism” (WU V.15.c). 79. In a late letter, for example, Merrill calls “revision . . . the vital and truly stimulating part of my labors” (to Dorothea Tanning, 26 November 1994). 80. Sastri explains how in Merrill’s trilogy, “knowing innocence takes on its character as inventive agency that builds in time” (Merrill: Knowing, 92). 81. Merrill writes this in response to a query from Life magazine on “the meaning of life” (WU IV.1.c.ii.[d]). His ecological vision supports and develops his concern about nuclear proliferation; as Schell’s articles emphasize, the “nuclear peril” could be seen as an “ecological peril” fi rst and foremost (The Fate, 111). 82. “For Type is tops in Nature’s book,” it states, “And ourselves, gladly suffered to the extent / That we embody (or refi ne) it.” Merrill includes this stanza in a letter to Stephen Yenser (16 August 1991). 83. Sastri reads the jacket as a “per for mance of knowing innocence” that “aims for the creation of something new under the conditions of the ‘guilty knowledge’ of mortality and the ‘horrors’ of history” (Merrill: Knowing, 172).

Conclusion: Everyday Pasts and Everyday Futures 1. “Day of course does appear very commonly in my poetry,” Ashbery says in one interview, adding later that “a day might be said to be the basis for a poem” (Packard, The Poet’s Craft, 86–87). 2. Mazur’s analysis of Ashbery’s repetitions focuses on the way in which “repetition . . . is never a return of the same”; rightly and usefully, Mazur relates this to the influence of Stein in Ashbery’s work (Poetry and Repetition, 105; see 105–48).

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3. Also see Beautiful Enemies, 15–16, 23– 25, 65– 68. Epstein’s illuminating reading calls Ashbery a pragmatic poet because of his “belief in the world’s dynamic instability and his emphasis on looking forward to constantly changing, uncertain situations with which one must cope” (131). Ashbery himself notes in an interview that his poetry aims to be “growing”: “It’s moving, growing, developing, I hope; that’s what I want to do anyway and these things take place in the framework of time” (Packard, The Poet’s Craft, 87). 4. Shoptaw’s study provides a good description of Ashbery’s “all-purpose subjectivity,” which is “neither egotistical nor solipsistic” (On the Outside, 3). See also Epstein’s account of Ashbery’s “ ‘vague allegories’ of his own life” (Beautiful Enemies, 147). 5. See Morse, “Typical Ashbery,” for a related analysis of Ashbery’s use of cliché. Ashbery explains in an interview that when writing “The Skaters,” he sought “forms of autobiography rather than special elements that applied to my own life” (Packard, The Poet’s Craft, 89). 6. Shoptaw, for example, reads Ashbery’s all-purpose subjectivity as part of a “homotextual” poetics (On the Outside, 4). 7. Edelman affi rms this stance in “Antagonism” and “Ever After.” 8. See, for example, Freccero’s description of “queer spectrality” (“Queer Times,” 489– 90); Freeman’s discussion of “temporal drag” and of an “erotohistoriography” predicated on the “time consciousness” of “embodied pleasures” (“Packing History,” 728, “Time Binds,” 59); Muñoz’s analysis of a “queer futurity” that is based on “quotidian gestures” and fi nds “the future in the present” (“Cruising” 353, 360); and Thomas’s discussion of a “queer temporality” in the “broken, interrupted teleology” of Michael Field (“ ‘What Time We Kiss,’ ” 327– 30). The 2007 GLQ roundtable on queer temporalities provides an overview (Dinshaw et al., “Theorizing”). 9. See, in particular, Butler, Gender Trouble, 185–90, and Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 123–51. It is important, certainly, to note distinctions, and Butler’s recommendation to use “those practices of repetition that constitute identity” in order to “contest[] them,” differs in at least two important ways from the ordinary sense of recurrence that this study describes: first, she denies the possibility of a subject when she defines identity as repetitively constituted; second, she implies that a conscious, denaturalizing practice of repetition will always be parodic (188, 182–85). 10. Foucault, Use of Plea sure, 11, Care, 49; see also Foucault’s discussion of regimen (Use of Plea sure, 101–8). Nehamas connects Foucault’s attention to sexuality and focus on an “art of living” (The Art of Living, 177). 11. For Snediker’s descriptions of optimistic iteration in the work of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Jack Spicer, see Queer Optimism, 123– 24, 126– 27, 184– 85, 191.

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12. Ashbery says in an interview that “my most pessimistic moments in my big poems are optimistic” (Packard, The Poet’s Craft, 96). Gwiazda describes more fully how Merrill’s poetry resists Edelman’s conclusions (Merrill and Auden, 108– 9). 13. See Warner’s argument against gay marriage (The Trouble with Normal, 81–147). In discussing why “marrying should be considered as an ethical problem” reaching “as far as the legal force and cultural normativity of the institution,” Warner’s analysis extends much further than an assertion of conservatism; he rightly emphasizes, for example, a “constitutive role of state certification” that would make gay marriage a “state-sanctioned program for normalizing gay sexuality” (107, 125, 111). Admittedly, my analysis of marriage as an everyday vocation ignores the real problem of matrimony’s legal privileges; I nevertheless hope that the nonstatist conceptions of marital legitimacy, conceptions that literature helps to describe, are more than what Warner calls “false optimism” about changing “the meaning of marriage” (143). 14. In a recent reference to his own theories of remarriage, Cavell notes that “marriage is justified not by law . . . nor in par ticu lar . . . by the presence of a child, but alone by the will to remarriage” (Philosophy, 87). 15. For Bishop’s aversion to Christmas in her own life, see Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 696; Millier, Bishop: Life, 487. 16. A later draft describes another collection of “forgathered” Christmas trees guarding a graveyard (Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe, 98). 17. Buell describes these often opposed approaches as manifest in “first-wave” and “second-wave” environmental criticism; when he writes that they share “an understanding of personhood” as “defined for better or for worse by environmental entanglement,” he suggests an important insight that everyday poetics could further develop (Future, 23; see also Writing, 6–8; Future, 21–25, 98–108). This would also help to vitiate the accusations of theoretical naiveté that have been leveled against environmental criticism (see, for example, D. Phillips, The Truth, 29–41). 18. For a discussion of this concept as used by environmental critics, see Buell, Future, 62– 63; Writing, 55–83. 19. Blasing also writes about the inadequacies of “New Formalism,” “Language poetry,” and “writing-program-programmed lyric poetry in naturalized free verse”; none can “admit their rhetoric,” she argues, and all show the “persistence . . . of an early-modern figuration of the relationship between form and content” (Politics and Form, 27). 20. Caplan suggests a related reconciliatory function for form in contemporary poetry; he quotes Paul Fussell to argue that writers can avoid “the choice between ‘new schemes’ that ‘transmit’ ‘the intolerable fractures and dislocations of modern history’ and older verse forms that seek merely to ‘recapture’ a more coherent past” (Questions, 4).

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21. For a related discussion of Hass’s and Stevens’s preoccupations with the material world, an analysis more focused on political implications, see L. Olson, “Robert Hass’s Guilt.” 22. See Chiasson’s analysis of how a “refrain of advance and retreat without forward progress runs through this section of the poem, characterizing both the action of the poem and its narrative strategy” (One Kind, 104– 5). Chiasson’s interpretation of Bidart, showing how the poet’s pragmatic rhetorical per formances seek to “historicize confessionalism,” is germane to my reading of how Bidart extends an ordinary poetics (One Kind, 97). 23. In an interview with Mark Halliday, Bidart stresses that a poem “is itself an action,” an idea that has been “largely ignored by twentieth-century aesthetics” (In the Western Night, 227).

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Index

“Abandon Ou Les Deux Amies, L’ ” (Ryan), 213 “Accidentally on Purpose” (Frost), 44 “acknowledgment” (Cavell), 12, 55 Adams, Don, 263n3, 264n13, 267nn41–42, 268n54, 270n68, 270n73 “Adonais” (Shelley), 150–51, 159 “Adult Epigram” (Stevens), 86 “Advice to the Players” (Bidart), 217 Aers, David, 240–41n63 “Affl iction (IV)” (Herbert), 118, 254n15 Alpers, Paul, 239–40n55, 261n74 Altieri, Charles, 227–28n33 “Amantium Irae” (Edwardes), 52 American literary tradition, 11–12, 32, 159, 223n2, 227nn28–29, 228–29n41, 230n55, 231n60 Ammons, A. R., 7–8 “amor fati” (Nietzsche), 100, 251n77, 252n84 “Anaphora” (Bishop), 1, 27–28, 113, 117, 124, 126, 128, 129–30, 135, 148, 158, 167, 255n18, 255n20, 258n51; and Bishop’s conceptions of everyday time, 2–3, 5, 17–18, 121–23, 255n19; and poetic form, 3, 122–23, 136–37, 255n21 “And the Stars Were Shining” (Ashbery), 204–5

“And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name” (Ashbery), 201 “Anglais Mort à Florence” (Stevens), 95, 96 animals and animality, 58–59, 72, 75, 84, 110, 213, 244n18; in Bishop, 115–16, 129, 144, 254n8; in Merrill, 170, 173, 174, 184, 186, 209, 267n43 “Another Life” (Bidart), 215–16 Arabian Nights, The, 25, 159, 170–73, 175. See also “Thousand and Second Night, The” “Arc, The” (Bidart), 216 Arensberg, Mary B., 245n30, 252n91 “Are You Ticklish?” (Ashbery), 201 Armstrong, James, 234–35n11 Arnold, Matthew, 56 “Arrival at Santos” (Bishop), 130 Art as Experience (Dewey), 10, 17, 226n22, 229n47 “Art of the Possible” (Lowell), 153 Ashbery, John, 7, 28–29, 201–5, 207, 254n9, 271–72nn1–5, 273n12 “Asking for Roses” (Frost), 237n32 “As the Eye to the Sun” (Bidart), 216 atemporality. See timelessness or eternity “At sunrise no devotions” (Merrill), 183 “At the Fishhouses” (Bishop), 135–36, 208

300

Index

“Aubade and Elegy” (Bishop), 115, 147–48, 217, 260n66, 260nn68–69 Auden, W. H., 173, 188, 228n34 Augustine, Saint, 22, 231n62 Auroras of Autumn, The (Stevens), 95, 250n72 “Auroras of Autumn, The” (Stevens), 74, 105, 106, 108, 136, 146, 204, 252n84; and Merrill, 164–66, 187, 191–92, 266n38; and Stevens’s conceptions of everyday repetition, 95–104, 250nn70–71, 251n74, 251n77, 251n81 Austin, J. L., 63 autobiography, 114–15, 130, 139, 155–56, 160–63, 194, 204, 230n53, 253nn2–4, 264n17, 265n25, 266n29, 266n35, 272n5. See also confessional poetry

Bahti, Timothy, 232n70 “Baked Alaska” (Ashbery), 201 Bakhtin, M. M., 231n62 “Ballroom at Sandover, The” (Merrill), 162, 174 “Banal Sojourn” (Stevens), 74 Barron, Jonathan N., 233n2 Bates, Milton J., 243n15, 252n84 Baudelaire, Charles, 9 Baumgaertner, Jill P., 234n9, 237n34, 239n51 “Beginning, The” (Stevens), 107 Bell, Millicent, 241n68 Bell, Vereen M., 36, 261–62n81, 262nn85–86 Benfey, Christopher, 32, 240n60 Benjamin, Walter, 4, 9, 224n10, 236n26 Berger, Charles, 50, 241n65, 241n67, 241n69 Bergson, Henri, 4, 17, 44, 235–36nn23–25 “Berkeley Eclogue” (Hass), 212 Berrigan, Ted, 7, 8 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud), 14, 228n37. See also repetition compulsion Bidart, Frank, 152, 215–21, 261n78, 274nn22–23 “Bight, The” (Bishop), 2 biography and memoir, 116–17, 254nn10–11. See also autobiography Bishop, Elizabeth, 10, 12, 199, 201, 205, 207, 208, 213, 228n34, 254nn9–12, 256n29, 272n11,

273n15; and autobiography, 114–15, 130, 139, 161–62, 253nn2–3, 259n61, 266n30; and Bidart, 215–17, 219–21; companionship or partnerships in, 20, 140–46, 152–53, 258n51; dangers or difficulties of everyday time in, 113–16, 118–22, 123–31, 143–45, 253n1, 259n56, 259n59; defi nitions and descriptions of everyday time, 1–3, 5–6, 7–8, 17–18, 20, 29, 114–16, 120–23, 136, 143–45, 148–50, 153–54, 254n13, 261n72; dualism in, 115, 253n6, 254n8, 261n73; and Frost, 61, 63, 68, 113–14, 115, 116, 119, 142–43, 145, 154, 225n13, 259n53; guilt and shame in, 116, 118–21, 123–24, 128–33, 135–36, 139–40, 215–17, 253–54nn7–8, 257n41, 258nn45–46, 260n67, 261nn77–78; and Lowell, 148–54, 261nn78–80; memory and the past in, 17–18, 114–15, 123–33, 144–45, 253n2, 253–54n7, 255n24, 255–56n27, 257n37, 257nn41–42, 258n45; and Merrill, 8, 28, 116, 158–59, 161–62, 164, 166, 167, 177, 183, 225n13, 256n28, 259n52, 264n15, 265n23, 266n30, 266n34; mourning and elegy in, 61, 115, 132–33, 137–38, 144–45, 147–54, 216–17, 257n36, 258n47, 259nn61–62, 260n66; nature in, 115, 134–43, 148–54, 219, 257n39, 258n43, 258n50, 259n58, 260nn68–70, 261nn73–74; poetic form in, 21, 26, 114, 120–23, 125–26, 130, 137–39, 143, 146–48, 150, 233n74, 253n4, 255n21, 258n44, 259–60n63, 260n65; and psychoanalysis, 15, 124–25, 128, 132–33, 255nn22–23, 256n33, 257nn35–36, 258n48, 259n60, 266n30; and religion, 16, 116–23, 124, 128, 129, 133–34, 135, 137, 254nn13–15, 255n25, 259n57, 260n70; revision in, 133–34, 137–38, 144–45, 149, 150–54, 183, 220, 253n5, 261n72, 261nn79–80; and Stevens, 8, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 123, 127–28, 136, 146, 147, 149, 154, 225n13, 255n20, 260n70; subjectivity in, 9, 114–16, 123–24, 126–28, 135, 139, 162, 203, 204, 253–54n7, 255n17, 256n28; and truth, 134, 136, 151, 257n38, 261n79. See also individual works Blanchot, Maurice, 224n6

I n d e x 301 Blasing, Mutlu Konuk, 26, 161, 233n74, 258n47, 265n24, 273n19 Bleau, N. Arthur, 235n11 Bloom, Harold: analysis of Merrill, 269n64; analysis of Stevens, 72, 243n15, 245n24, 247n49, 248n55, 249n63, 250n68, 251n77 Bogan, Louise, 155 Book of Ephraim, The (Merrill): death in, 178–79, 182–84; earth in, 158, 181–82, 187, 188, 194; love in, 167–69, 172–75, 185, 267n47, 267–68n49; poetry and poetic form in, 172–73, 175–82, 194, 268n58, 269n62; reincarnation and soul making in, 172–73, 174–75; revision in, 183, 185; section A, 163, 175, 180; section C, 172; section E, 168; section F, 174, 181; section I, 180; section K, 180; section L, 178–79, 180, 183; section M, 181; section O, 168–69, 173–74; section P, 183–84; section Q, 168, 266n34; section R, 183; section S, 177; section T, 177–78; section W, 179–81; section X, 178, 181, 182; section Y, 181; section Z, 181–82; selfdefi nition and self-effacement in, 162–63, 186, 266n34, 268n56 “Borges and I” (Bidart), 217 Bornstein, George, 241n4, 242n5, 247n45, 247n47 Bosanquet, Theodora, 248n55 “Boundless Moment, A” (Frost), 50–51 Bové, Paul A., 229–30n50, 243n15, 251n78 Bradbury, Malcolm, 10 Brazeau, Peter, 225n12, 241n2 Breslin, James E. B., 225nn14–15 “Bright Star” (Keats), 136 “Broken Home, The” (Merrill), 158, 162–63, 173, 182, 183, 186, 193–94, 265n27, 267nn40–42; and benefits of everyday time, 15, 165–67 Bromwich, David, 253–54nn7–8, 255n17, 257n37 Brooks, Peter, 24–25, 232n68, 232n71 Brower, Reuben A., 234n9, 235n16, 237n36, 264n15 Brown, Norman O., 163–64, 266n33, 267n43

Buell, Lawrence, 273nn17–18 “Build Soil—a Political Pastoral” (Frost), 33, 45–46, 47, 160, 182, 214, 236n28 Burt, Stephen, 199 Butler, Judith, 206, 272n9 Byron, George Gordon, 176 “Byzantium” (Yeats), 169

Cameron, Sharon, 21–24, 231n61 Caplan, David, 273n20 Carlisle, Clare, 230n56, 230n58 “Carpe Diem” (Frost), 33, 46 Carroll, Joseph, 242n9, 245n27, 248n55 Cavell, Stanley, 6–7, 12, 18–19, 227n32, 230n51; and marriage, 54–56, 86, 238–39nn44–45, 239n47, 273n14; and mourning, 239n54; and ordinary-language philosophy, 63, 86, 240nn60–61; and Stevens, 246n43 “Certain Kind of Eden, A” (Ryan), 214 Changing Light at Sandover, The (Merrill), 5, 192, 196, 225n13, 266n32; death and annihilation in, 157, 178–89, 182–84, 186–87, 270n71; earth and nature in, 158, 181–82, 184–85, 187–89; guilt and innocence in, 186, 193, 271n80; love and romantic partnerships in, 167–69, 172–75, 185, 189, 208, 263–64nn10–11, 270nn68–69, 271n76; and Merrill’s conceptions of everyday time, 155–58, 169, 172–75, 189–90, 193–94; poetry and poetic form in, 172–73, 175–82, 194, 268n57; subjectivity or self-defi nition in, 162–63, 186, 266n34; time and timelessness in, 175, 177–78, 182, 184, 186–88, 269n65, 270nn73–74. See also Book of Ephraim, The; Mirabell’s Books of Number; Scripts for the Pageant “Chemin de Fer” (Bishop), 140–41, 259n52 Chiasson, Dan, 274n22 children. See procreation and children “Chimes for Yahya” (Merrill), 208–9, 210, 263n4 Christmas, 208–9, 273nn15–16 “Christmas Tree” (Merrill), 196, 209

302

Index

Ciardi, John, 234–35n11 “Cimetière marin, Le” (Valery), 170 “Circles” (Emerson), 46 “Clearing the Title” (Merrill), 158–59, 189–93, 196, 264n14, 271n77 Cleghorn, Angus J., 249n63 “Clepsydra” (Ashbery), 201, 203–4 “Clouds” (Ashbery), 201, 203 “Coda: The Higher Keys” (Merrill), 162, 174 Cold Spring, A (Bishop), 134, 142 “Cold Spring, A” (Bishop), 134–35, 136, 257n40 Colette, 101 “Collective Dawns” (Ashbery), 201 “Collect of Philosophy, A” (Stevens), 110 “Collector” (Bidart), 220–21 “Comedian as the Letter C, The” (Stevens), 72, 80, 82, 84–85, 89, 94, 96, 97, 110; and Stevens’s conceptions of everyday time, 77–79, 244–45nn23–25 “comedy of remarriage” (Cavell), 54–56, 238nn44–45, 239n47, 240n61, 273n14 communism, 91–94, 243n10, 249nn64–65 Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard), 19–20, 230n56 confessional poetry, 25–26, 114, 116, 161, 204, 233n73, 254n10, 265nn24–25, 274n22 “Constant Symbol, The” (Frost), 57 contemporary poetry, 210–21 contingency and uncertainty, of everyday repetition, 18, 29, 220–21; in Bishop, 113, 120–21, 129; in Frost, 40, 44, 48, 52, 56–57, 67–68, 235n16; in Stevens, 85, 246n40 conversation, 31, 34, 62–66, 240nn57–61, 240–41n63. See also language Cook, Eleanor, 100, 150, 249n62, 250n73, 252n85, 261n72, 262n88 Costello, Bonnie: analysis of Bishop, 225n13, 253nn2–3, 253–54n7, 254n14, 255nn24–25, 257n35, 258n46, 258n50, 259n61, 261n73; analysis of environmental poetics, 15, 228–29n41; analysis of Frost, 234n7, 235n15, 239n55, 241n68; analysis of Stevens, 225n13, 243n12, 244n16, 246n36, 250n71 Cowley, Malcolm, 233n1

Creative Evolution (Bergson), 235–36n24 “Credences of Summer” (Stevens), 87, 185 Creeley, Robert, 7, 211 “Crusoe in England” (Bishop), 20, 143–45, 146, 148, 149, 150, 259n56, 259n59, 259nn61–62 Culler, Jonathan, 22, 232nn64–65 cultural studies, 6, 223–24nn5–6, 224n10 Cummins, James, 257n42 Curry, Renée R., 259n59 Cushman, Stephen, 225n15 Cuthbert, David, 223–24n5

daily time. See everyday time Dante, 40, 175, 180, 183 dawn, as crux for everyday time, 2–3, 18, 28–29, 221, 236n26; in Bishop, 113–16, 118–19, 120–23, 126, 129, 253n1; in Frost, 33, 35, 42, 44, 57–58; in Merrill, 164, 165, 170, 183, 196–97; in Stevens, 97, 105, 110, 248n57, 251n81 “Day” (Lowell), 8 “Day, The” (Lowell), 218 Day by Day (Lowell), 7, 153, 261–62n81, 262n86 “Days of 1994” (Merrill), 156, 196–97 “Days of 1964” (Merrill), 163, 167, 168, 169, 170, 173, 188 death, 118, 126, 159, 194, 237n31, 238nn38–39, 239n51, 239n53, 251n82, 258n45, 259n54, 262n86, 269n66, 271n83; as death drive or repetition compulsion, 14, 25, 34, 38–40, 53, 124–25, 220, 232n71, 234–35n11; and divide between humanity and nature, 17, 61, 74, 94–98, 267n43; as occasion for elegy, 61, 147–49, 150, 154, 241n69, 252n91, 259n61, 260n67, 261n78, 269n64; as occasion for rebirth, 105–6, 170–72, 176–80, 196–97; as threat of passing time, 37, 46, 48, 61, 68–69, 157, 170, 178–79, 182–84, 186–88, 190, 234n10. See also elegy; mourning; repetition compulsion

I n d e x 303 death drive. See death; repetition compulsion “Death of the Hired Man, The” (Frost), 237n31 de Certeau, Michel, 6 “Defi nition of Blue” (Ashbery), 201 Defoe, Daniel, 144, 145, 259n57, 261n77 Deleuze, Gilles, 223n3, 230n53, 230n55 de Man, Paul, 45 “depressive position” (Klein), 133 “Description Without Place” (Stevens), 18, 81, 82, 85 desire, 76, 97, 106–9, 114, 166, 244n19, 245nn30–32, 252n90, 252n92; for reality, 80–84, 104, 216, 245n28, 246n34, 248n55. See also love; marriage and romantic partnerships “Desire and the Object” (Stevens), 83 “Desire to Make Love in a Pagoda, The” (Stevens), 105 “Devotion” (Frost), 56, 213, 239n48 Dewey, John, 10, 12, 17, 73, 226n22, 229n45, 229n47 Dickinson, Emily, 21, 23, 213, 272n11 Diehl, Joanne Feit, 133, 255n22, 257nn35–36, 257n39, 259n62 “Dimensions for a Novel” (Bishop), 127–28 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 272n8 “Discovery of Thought, A” (Stevens), 105, 106 Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, The (Milton), 65 Doggett, Frank, 243n13, 245nn30–31, 246n41, 247n48 Dolphin, The (Lowell), 151 “Domination of Black” (Stevens), 74 Donne, John, 254n12 Donoghue, Denis, 233n1 “Dove in Spring, The” (Stevens), 72 “Dover Beach” (Arnold), 56 dreams and nightmares, 89–93, 103–6, 123–26, 128, 132–33, 244n19, 248nn55–58 “Drunkard, A” (Bishop), 136, 148 drunkenness, 128–29, 136, 144

dualism and duality, 11, 32–33, 41, 226n22, 226n24, 230n53, 230n58, 233–34nn3–4, 234n6, 236n25, 242n6, 263n7, 264n12, 269n62; of humanity and nature or mind and world, 3–5, 17–18, 33, 35, 59, 72–74, 76–80, 81–85, 95–97, 102, 115, 157–58, 172, 181–82, 193, 228–29n41, 229nn45–47, 237n29, 243nn13–14, 245nn29–30, 247n48, 253n6, 261n73, 261–62n81, 270nn68–69; of imagination and reality, 3, 72–73, 85, 89–90, 102, 242n7, 242n9, 243n14, 247n51, 268n50; of soul and body, 157, 172, 174, 181, 268n51. See also repetition: relation of human and natural

earth, 95, 110, 161, 251n82, 264n13; as beloved, 86–88, 104, 158, 165–67, 189, 218–19; and diurnal cyclicity, 87–88, 89, 91, 107, 160, 172–73, 177–78, 181–82, 187–89, 219; as parent, 97–99, 103–4, 165–67, 170, 184, 187, 190, 194–95, 269n61; and “poem of the earth” or poetry of the earth, 87, 103, 159, 178, 181–82, 184. See also nature “Earthy Anecdote” (Stevens), 74 ecological criticism, 209–10, 228–29n41, 243nn12–13, 244n16, 273nn17–18 ecology. See nature Edelman, Lee, 205–6, 207, 208, 272n7, 273n12 Eden. See paradise or Eden “Education by Poetry” (Frost), 44–45, 69 Edwardes, Richard, 52 Eeckhout, Bart, 242n6 Ego and the Id, The (Freud), 132, 228n40 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses (Kierkegaard), 109, 251n76 Either/Or (Kierkegaard), 20, 54–55, 118, 238–39nn44–46, 239n49 “Elegía” (Hernández), 148, 260n68 elegy, 103, 105, 239–40n55, 258n43, 258n47, 259n61, 260n66, 260nn68–69, 269n64; as everyday practice 59–61, 68–69, 114–15, 138, 140, 145, 147–54, 183, 261n74; as tendency to be overcome, 97, 108, 250n70. See also mourning

304

Index

Eliade, Mircea, 229n44, 229n47 Eliot, T. S., 4, 10, 211, 227n29, 233n1 Ellis, Jonathan, 253n4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 4, 11, 12, 19, 158, 211, 227n29, 230n51, 239n53; and Frost, 32, 35, 40, 46, 49, 60, 70, 237n30, 239n50; and Stevens, 85. See also individual works Empson, William, 144, 259n58 “Endymion” (Keats), 89–90, 248n55 “Episode” (Ashbery), 205 Epstein, Andrew, 203, 227n28, 272nn3–4 Eriksen, Niels Nymann, 230n56, 251n75 Essays in Philosophy ( James), 42, 235n18 Essays in Radical Empiricism ( James), 11, 234n8, 236n24 “Esthétique du Mal” (Stevens), 96, 99, 191 “eternal return” (Nietzsche), 18, 100–101, 164, 184, 229n48, 230n53, 251n77, 262n85, 267n43 eternity. See timelessness or eternity Evans, David H., 235n19, 236n27 “Evening Without Angels” (Stevens), 82 everyday-life studies, 6, 224n10 everyday time, defi nitions and descriptions of, 1–8, 17–18, 20, 26–29, 199–200, 201–2, 211–21, 224n9, 236n26; in Bishop, 114–16, 120–23, 136, 143–45, 148–50, 153–54, 254n13, 261n72; in Frost, 33, 37–41, 47–49, 61, 66–70, 234n7, 240n60, 241n67; in Merrill, 156–61, 169, 171, 181–82, 188–90, 194, 196–97, 263n5, 265n27, 266n37, 267n42, 268n52, 270n73, 271n75; in Stevens, 71–73, 80, 82–85, 87–88, 93, 102, 105–11, 242–43nn7–10, 245n30, 246n37, 246n41, 247nn45–46, 251n81 everyday time, negative aspects of, 73–74, 113–14, 266n32; death, 2, 17, 34, 53, 94–98, 159, 178–79, 184–85, 219–20; division from nature, 73–74; enervation and monotony, 1–2, 34, 36, 52–53, 76, 143–45, 259n59; guilt, 116, 118–20, 216, 219–20; self-effacement, 2, 34, 52, 73–74, 76–80, 190–91, 244n21 everyday time, positive aspects of, 89, 94, 150–51, 246n39, 248n57, 254n13, 268n51; extension of life, 48–49, 98–99, 107–10,

142–43, 154, 159, 169, 237n35; harmony with nature or reality, 3–7, 18, 35–36, 61, 72, 80, 82–84, 89, 98–99, 101–4, 107, 115, 138–40, 160, 181–82, 194–96, 218–19, 220–21, 243n13, 252n89, 260n70, 261n73, 267n43; relief of guilt or shame, 100, 103–4, 116, 117, 120–23, 137, 139–40, 261n77, 265n27, 267n44; renewal or reincarnation, 1–2, 5, 103, 105–6, 110–11, 170–75, 178–82, 188–90, 196–97, 266n37, 268n52; self-defi nition, 4–7, 11–12, 15, 36–37, 72, 100–101, 109–10, 114, 136–40, 163, 191–93, 211–12, 218–19, 220–21 expectation and futurity, 81, 92, 241n66, 244nn17–18, 245n32, 246n34; as everyday practice, 18, 19, 47–48, 69–70, 75–76, 94, 97, 100, 105, 109, 110–11, 173, 188, 205–9, 221, 251n76, 253n96; in marriage and romantic partnerships 55–57, 173; and subjectivity, 43, 81, 232–33n72 “Experience” (Emerson), 35, 40, 49, 60, 227n30, 239n53 “experience-time” (Bishop), 127–28, 139, 255n24

Faerie Queene, The (Spenser), 78 Faggen, Robert, 234n9, 241n68 “Fall of Hyperion, The” (Keats), 104, 250n69 “Family Week at Oracle Ranch” (Merrill), 162 “Farmer’s Children, The” (Bishop), 125 Felski, Rita, 10–11, 223n5, 224n9, 225n18, 227n27 “Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet, The” (Stevens), 96 Filreis, Alan, 72, 242n8, 243n10, 249nn63–64 Fisher, Barbara M., 252n88 “Fish-Scale Sunrise, A” (Stevens), 74 “Five Flights Up” (Bishop), 113–15, 129, 147, 253n2, 253–54n7 Flamingo Watching (Ryan), 214 Fletcher, Angus, 17, 229n46, 241n4, 245n30 “Florida Revisited” (Bishop), 148, 150 Flow Chart (Ashbery), 202

I n d e x 305 Flowers of Tarbes, The (Paulhan), 86, 104 “Flying from Byzantium” (Merrill), 172 Forbes, Deborah, 26, 233n73, 265n25 forgiveness and atonement: through daily time, 68, 116, 118–23, 129–30, 135–37, 139–41, 143, 150, 158, 166–67, 195, 216, 218–19, 258n45; in marriage and romantic partnerships, 52, 143; as reparation, 133–34, 136, 146, 150, 158, 166, 257n36, 257n39, 259n62; through timelessness, 186. See also guilt and shame; innocence form and formalism, 155–56, 160–64, 192, 200, 210–12, 217–21, 258n46; poetic, 7, 8–9, 11, 15, 21–26, 36–37, 39, 114, 130, 143, 146–47, 161–62, 231nn59–62, 232n69, 233nn73–74, 249–50n68, 253n4, 260n65, 261n75, 265nn24–25, 273nn19–20; poetic and natural, in relation, 120, 137–39, 150, 161, 172–73, 175–82, 193–94, 218–21, 258n44, 266n35; in types and conventions, 163–64, 271n82. See also poetry and poetic form; types and archetypes “For Proust” (Merrill), 160–62, 164, 167, 172, 176, 183, 190, 264–65nn18–22 Foucault, Michel, 206–7, 272n10 “Four Quartets” (Eliot), 4 Francis, Robert, 237n35 Frank, Joseph, 10 Freccero, Carla, 272n8 Freeman, Elizabeth, 206, 272n8 Freud, Sigmund, 249nn59–60, 270n70; and Bishop, 114, 116, 124–25, 128, 132–33, 144, 255n23, 256n33, 258n48, 259n60; and deathly repetition, 14, 17, 39, 97, 124–25, 206; and dreams, 90–91, 248n55, 248n58; and mourning, 59–60; and self-defi ning repetition, 14–15, 162–63, 186, 228nn38–40; and shame, 132–33, 258n48; and time in prose and poetry, 24–25, 232n68, 232n71. See also individual works; melancholia; mourning; repetition compulsion “From Morning Into Morning” (Merrill), 156 “From the Cupola” (Merrill), 271n77

“From the Cutting-Room Floor” (Merrill), 193 From the First Nine (Merrill), 264n14 Frost, Elinor, 31, 49, 61, 63, 68, 238nn38–39 Frost, Robert, 10, 12, 15, 16, 23, 199, 200, 201, 203, 205, 211, 215, 233n2, 234n8, 236n28, 237n30, 237n33, 237n35, 241n65, 241n68; and afterthought, 31, 34, 53, 59–60, 67, 76; and Bishop, 61, 63, 68, 113–14, 115, 116, 119, 142–43, 145, 154, 225n13, 259n53; conversation and speech in, 31, 34, 62–66, 85, 227n32, 240nn57–63; death and threat of death in, 34, 37, 38–40, 46, 48, 53, 61, 68–69, 74, 234–35n11, 237n31; defi nitions and descriptions of everyday time, 1–2, 4–6, 7–8, 20, 29, 33, 37–41, 47–49, 61, 66–70, 234n7, 240n60, 241n67; dualism in, 32–33, 35, 41, 59, 95, 233n3, 234n6, 236n25, 237n29; and gender, 237–38n37, guilt and blame in, 52–53, 116; and James, 33, 41–44, 53, 70, 234n4, 234n8, 235n17, 235nn19–21; marriage in, 20, 31, 34, 53–58, 62–70, 86, 142–43, 145, 157–58, 167, 185, 208, 238nn38–39, 238n41, 238n43, 238–39n45, 239n51, 240n61; and Merrill, 44–45, 63, 157–58, 159, 160, 164, 167, 182, 185, 191, 264n15; middleness in, 6, 49–51, 237n34; monotony of everyday time in, 33–34, 36, 52–53, 58, 237n37; mourning in, 59–61, 239–40n55, 241n69; nature in, 35–36, 57–58, 59–61, 95, 229n41, 229n43, 234n7, 239–40n55; the past or retrospection in, 47–49, 59–61, 67, 75–76, 95, 114, 160, 164, 237n29; poetic form in, 21, 26, 36–37, 39–40, 217, 235n12; relation to modernist and American literature, 31–33, 233n1; and Ryan, 212–15; and Stevens, 8, 72–73, 74, 76, 81, 85–86, 95, 233n1, 249n67; subjectivity and selfhood in, 9, 32–33, 37, 39, 42–46, 58, 69, 203, 236n24, 249n67. See also individual works Frye, Northrop, 16, 175, 229n44, 229n47 Fulton, Alice, 22, 232n64 Future of an Illusion, The (Freud), 91, 249n60 futurity. See expectation and futurity

306

Index

Gale, Richard M., 44, 235n23, 236n24 Gardiner, Michael E., 224n5 Gay, Peter, 225n16 Gay Science, The (Nietzsche), 229n48, 230n57 Gelpi, Albert, 226n21, 233n1 gender, 237–38n37, 270n68 “Generations of Men, The” (Frost), 55, 65, 240n62 Genette, Gérard, 264n16 “Gentleman of Shalott, The” (Bishop), 213 Geography III (Bishop), 113, 147, 152, 260n69 “Getting Up Ahead of Someone (Sun)” (O’Hara), 7 Gide, André, 101 Gilbert, Roger, 245n29, 246n40 “Give All to Love” (Emerson), 46, 237n30 Goldensohn, Lorrie, 253n2, 259n61 “Golden State” (Bidart), 217 Goodridge, Celeste, 255nn19–20 Goodstein, Elizabeth S., 225nn17–18, 227n26 Grey, Thomas C., 248n52 “Grindstone, The” (Frost), 240n60 Griswold, Jerome, 252n93 Guermantes Way, The (Proust), 44, 172 guilt and shame, 8, 19, 52–53, 118–21, 128, 129, 136, 146, 151, 182, 201, 220, 256nn30–32, 257n41, 258nn45–46, 260n67, 261n79, 266n39, 271n83, 274n21; and dualistic division, 103, 116, 158–59, 164–67, 186, 194–95, 267n43; and melancholia, 132–33, 147–48, 259n60; and subjectivity, 116, 123–24, 130–32, 186, 215, 253–54nn7–8. See also forgiveness and atonement; innocence Gunn, Thom, 263n10 “Gwendolyn” (Bishop), 258n45 Gwiazda, Piotr, 263–64nn10–11, 273n12 habit and routine, 5–6, 34–35, 43, 71–72, 101–2, 116, 142–43, 227n29, 229n42, 241nn2–3, 242n5, 242n8, 246n39, 247–48n52, 251n80, 259n59, 272n10. See also everyday time; repetition

“Half a Loaf ” (Ryan), 213 Halkett, John G., 240–41n63 Halpern, Nick, 156, 224–25n11, 263n5 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 52 Hamlet’s Mill (de Santillana and von Dechend), 163–64, 266n36 Hammer, Langdon: analysis of Bishop, 114, 253nn2–3, 254n11, 261n78; analysis of Merrill, 263n4, 263nn8–9, 267n45; and criticism of confessional poetry, 233n73 Harrison, Victoria, 255–56n27, 259n61, 260nn65–66 Hass, Robert, 210–12, 213, 215, 274n21 Hass, Robert Bernard, 236n25 Hassan, Ihab, 227n29 Heidegger, Martin, 18–20, 75, 101, 229–30nn49–51, 230n54, 230nn57–58, 243n15, 251n78 Herbert, George, 116–17, 118, 120, 124, 254n15 “Herbert White” (Bidart), 215 Hernández, Miguel, 148, 260n68 Highmore, Ben, 224n5 “Hill Wife, The” (Frost), 34, 59, 65 Hines, Thomas J., 243n15 history, difference from everyday time, 8, 45, 73, 149, 166, 199–200, 202–3 History (Lowell), 8, 152, 153 History of Sexuality, The (Foucault), 206–7 Hodge, Bob, 240–41n63 Hoff man, Tyler, 233n2 “Home Burial” (Frost), 15, 34, 61–63, 64, 65, 208, 240n56, 240n59, 240n62 Homer, 108. See also Odyssey, The homosexuality, 132, 158, 194, 205–9, 263–64nn10–11, 272n6, 272n8 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 116–17, 118, 254n15, 257n40 “Hourglass” (Merrill), 155–57, 187, 188, 196 “Hours of the Night, The” (Bidart), 216–17, 221 “House in Athens, The” (Merrill), 188 Howe, Irving, 226n20 “How to Live. What to Do” (Stevens), 75

I n d e x 307 Hoxby, Blair, 238n42 Hume, David, 16, 41, 42, 235n18 Huston, J. Dennis, 247nn47–48 “Hymn” (Bidart), 219 “Hymn from a Watermelon Pavilion” (Stevens), 89

“I Could Give All to Time” (Frost), 46, 48 identity. See subjectivity and selfhood “If I Could Mourn Like a Mourning Dove” (Bidart), 217 “If See No End In Is” (Bidart), 219–20 “If the Moon Happened Once” (Ryan), 213 “Imaginary Iceberg, The” (Bishop), 118 imagination, 11, 18, 43, 46, 69–70, 152, 172, 221, 264n12, 265n21; in Stevens, 72–73, 76–79, 81–82, 84–85, 89–93, 96, 102–4, 106, 110, 242n7, 242n9, 243nn13–14, 245n33, 247n51, 248n54, 248n56, 251n81, 252n93. See also dualism and duality; subjectivity and selfhood “Imagination as Value” (Stevens), 80, 86, 87, 91, 103 Immortal Husband, The (Merrill), 162, 163 immortality. See reincarnation; timelessness or eternity individual and individualism. See subjectivity and selfhood “In earliest morning” (Schuyler), 7 “In Hardwood Groves” (Frost), 38, 39 innocence, 68, 97–100, 103–4, 116, 129, 136, 167, 193, 195, 251n77, 261n77, 267nn43–44, 271n80, 271n83. See also forgiveness and atonement; guilt and shame insanity. See mental illness Interpretation of Dreams, The (Freud), 90, 248n58 “In the Home Stretch” (Frost), 15, 16, 31, 40, 41, 115, 142, 145, 158, 208, 214, 234n9, 237n33; conversation in, 62–66, 240n58; and everyday time, Frost’s conceptions of, 34–38, 47–49, 67, 69–70; guilt in, 51–53; marriage in, 53–58, 64–66; middleness in, 49–51, 237n34; mourning in, 60–61; nature

in, 35–36, 57–58, 239n50; poetic form in, 36, 62–63 “In the Village” (Bishop), 130, 131, 136, 257n39, 258n45 “In the Waiting Room” (Bishop), 134 “Into My Own” (Frost), 41 “Introduction to E. A. Robinson’s ‘King Jasper’ ” (Frost), 50 “Investment, The” (Frost), 2, 34, 45 “In Weather” (Hass), 212 “It is marvellous to wake up together” (Bishop), 141–42

Jackson, David (DJ), 178, 183, 184; as natural or a nature figure, 168, 173, 190, 193; and procreation, 180–81, 208; relationship with Merrill, 168–69, 173–75, 188–90, 192–93, 263–64nn10–11, 267n47 Jackson, Virginia, 23–24, 232n66 James, William, 4, 5, 11, 12, 76, 114, 158, 162, 235n18, 235–36nn22–24; and figurative language, 44, 236n27; and Frost, 33, 41–44, 53, 70, 234n4, 234n8, 235n17, 235nn19–21; and habit, 43, 227n29; and repetition as precedent, 41–42; and repetition as self-defi ning, 13–14, 17, 42–43, 228n35, 249n67 Jameson, Fredric, 225n17 Jarrell, Randall, 5, 7, 142, 259n53 Jarvis, Simon, 26 Jay, Paul, 223n2 “Jeune Parque, La” (Valéry), 248n55 Job, as example of Kierkegaardian repetition, 100, 251n75 Jost, Walter, 32, 227n32, 234n9, 240n56, 240nn59–60 Journal of the Plague Year, A (Defoe), 261n77 Joyce, James, 10, 27 Jung, C. G., 186, 267n41, 270n70 Kalstone, David: analysis of Bishop, 123, 253n1, 253nn6–7, 254n13, 255nn17–18, 255nn20–21, 255–56nn26–27, 258n49, 261nn78–79; analysis of Merrill, 155,

308

Index

Kalstone, David (continued) 156, 262n2, 264n17, 266n35, 267n47, 267–68nn49–50 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 41, 56, 73, 235n18, 236n24 Kaufmann, Walter, 228n34 Kearns, Katherine, 234n9, 237n37, 241n68 Keats, John, 136, 150, 213, 227n30; and dreams or “Adam’s dream,” 12, 18, 69–70, 76, 89–90, 103, 108, 157, 251n81; and Merrill, 157, 159, 181, 263nn8–9; and Stevens, 89–90, 91, 103–4, 108, 248n55, 250n69, 251n81 Keller, Lynn, 267n49 Kemp, John C., 234n9 Keniston, Ann, 268n58, 269n64 Kermode, Frank, 226n21, 243n13, 243n15, 245n25 Kern, Stephen, 10, 226n19 Kierkegaard, SØren, 41, 116, 118, 191, 203, 214, 228n34, 254nn8–9; and Frost, 54–55, 235n17, 238n45; and marriage, 20, 54–55, 238–39nn44–46, 239n49; concept of repetition, 12–13, 19–20, 100–102, 251nn74–75; and Stevens, 100–102, 109, 242n8, 251nn74–76, 251n81; subjectivity in, 13, 19, 101, 230nn55–58, 251n75 Kietzman, Mary Jo, 240–41n63 “Kimono, The” (Merrill), 177 Kirsch, Adam, 155 Klein, Melanie, 132–33, 144, 256nn33–34, 259n60 Kleinzahler, August, 155 Kloppenberg, James T., 234n4, 236n24 “Koi” (Merrill), 196 Kuzniar, Alice A., 254n8 Labrie, Ross, 263n3 Lambert, Ellen Zetzel, 258n43, 261n74 Langbauer, Laurie, 223–24n5 Langbaum, Robert, 226n21 language, 63, 78, 81, 85–86, 87, 104, 110, 240n56, 240n59, 246nn42–43, 252n85. See also conversation “Last Mornings in California” (Merrill), 163

“Late Echo” (Ashbery), 201, 207–8 Late Settings (Merrill), 156, 189, 191 “Latest Freed Man, The” (Stevens), 74 “Leaf Treader, A” (Frost), 40 Lefebvre, Henri, 6, 224n6, 224n10 Leggett, B. J., 243n15, 247n51, 251nn77–78, 252n88 Lehman, David, 155, 156, 262n2, 265–66n28, 268n58 Leighton, Angela, 249–50n68 Lensing, George S., 243n13 Lentricchia, Frank, 32–33, 233n1, 234n5, 234n7, 234nn9–10 Leonard, J S., 243n15, 247n51, 251n77 letters, 101, 116, 156, 248n53, 251n80, 254nn10–11, 260n70, 263n4 “Letter to ‘The Amherst Student’ ” (Frost), 56 Levin, Jonathan, 11, 81, 82, 227n29, 242n5, 247n51 Lewis, Helen Block, 258n48 Lewis, Pericles, 225n18 Life Against Death (Brown), 163, 267n43 “Like Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery” (Stevens), 246n34 “Like Lightning Across an Open Field” (Bidart), 218, 220 “Little Exercise” (Bishop), 113 “Little O” (Bidart), 218–19, 220 Litz, A. Walton, 241n4, 246n41, 249n66 Loewald, Hans W., 228n38, 228n40 “Lone Striker, A” (Frost), 50 “Long and Sluggish Lines” (Stevens), 105, 218 Longenbach, James: analysis of Stevens, 72, 77, 84, 227n32, 242n8, 243n10, 246n39, 246n43; and criticism of confessional poetry, 233n73 “Long Summer” (Lowell), 152–53 “Lost in Translation” (Merrill), 182 love, 244n19, 252n92; of the earth, 166–67, 219, 250n72; in marriage and romantic partnerships, 52, 54, 56, 65, 109, 141–42, 152–53, 157–58, 167–70, 208, 213, 267n45,

I n d e x 309 267–68nn47–49; of reality 80–84, 86, 100, 104, 245n28, 245n30. See also desire; marriage and romantic partnerships “Love Lies Sleeping” (Bishop), 113, 126–27, 128 Love’s Labour’s Lost (Shakespeare), 152 “Love Unknown” (Herbert), 118, 254n15 Lowell, Robert, 7, 8, 123, 148, 151–54, 215, 218, 256n33, 258n44, 261–62nn78–82, 262nn84–87, 265n24 Lukács, György, 22, 231n62 “Lycidas” (Milton), 60, 183 Lynen, John F., 227n29, 234n9, 240n56 lyric, 22–24, 66, 114, 176, 231nn61–62, 232nn64–67, 232n70, 268nn58–59, 270n73. See also poetry and poetic form “lyric reading” ( Jackson), 23–24, 232n66

MacArthur, Marit J., 225n13 MacCaff rey, Isabel G., 252n86 Macedo Soares, Maria Carlota Costellat de (Lota), 141, 147–48, 256n33, 259nn54–55, 259n61, 260n67, 260n69, 261n78, 262n84 MacMahon, Candace W., 253n1 Magowan, Robin, 156, 263n4 “Man Meets a Woman in the Street, A” ( Jarrell), 5 “Man-Moth, The” (Bishop), 123–25, 126, 128, 141, 255n22 Mann, Thomas, 168, 169 “Man on the Dump, The” (Stevens), 28 “Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad, The” (Stevens), 1, 76–77, 79, 81, 244nn21–22, 252n87 “Man with the Blue Guitar, The” (Stevens), 88–93, 99, 105, 106, 249n63, 249n66 “Marilyn Monroe” (Bidart), 218 Marks, Herbert, 115, 151, 253n5, 255nn20–21, 256n27, 258n45, 259n56, 261n72, 261nn75–76, 261n79, 262n83 “Marriage” (Moore), 152 marriage and romantic partnerships, 20, 106–8, 157–58, 166–67, 184–85, 188–89; between human beings, 31, 34, 53–58,

62–70, 140–46, 152–53, 167–75, 179, 193, 207–8, 238nn38–41, 238–39nn43–49, 239n51, 240n61, 258–59n51, 259n55, 262nn83–84, 263–64nn10–11, 267–68nn47–49, 273nn13–14; between humanity and nature, 86–87, 104, 158, 166–67, 168, 185, 245n28, 245n30, 247nn47–49, 250n72, 270nn68–69, 271n76. See also desire; love Materer, Timothy, 156, 157, 161, 188, 262nn1–2, 263n6, 265nn23–24, 266n37, 270n67, 270nn71–72, 271n75 Matter and Memory (Bergson), 17, 236n25 Matterson, Stephen, 240n62 Mayer, Bernadette, 7 Mazur, Krystyna, 230n55, 231n59, 241–42n4, 245n30, 251n74, 271n2 Mazzaro, Jerome, 255n27 McCabe, Susan, 260n65 McClatchy, J. D., 157, 158, 163, 164, 182, 263n7, 264nn12–13, 264n18, 265n21, 266n38, 267n40, 268n54 McCracken, Scott, 236n26 McFarlane, James, 10 McHale, Brian, 268n58, 269n64 McHugh, Heather, 21 “McKane’s Falls” (Merrill), 177 “Measure” (Hass), 212 “Meditation at Lagunitas” (Hass), 211 melancholia, 59, 132–33, 137, 140–41, 144, 148, 150, 258n48 memory and retrospection, 8, 34, 67, 75–76, 109, 114, 153–54, 216–20, 236n26, 239n46, 249–50nn68–70, 252n93, 255n24, 255–56n27, 256n32, 256n34, 257n42, 262n87, 271n77; and divide between humanity and nature, 59–61, 95–100, 115, 135–37, 142–43, 144–45, 147, 164–65, 190–92; as an extension of life, 47–49, 160–61, 171–72, 174; and subjectivity, 14–15, 17–18, 19, 42, 44, 122, 123–28, 132, 249n67, 251n75, 253n2, 253–54n7, 258n45 Menand, Louis, 229n42, 229n45 “Men Made Out of Words” (Stevens), 97 mental illness, 131–32, 151–52, 215, 256n29, 260n67, 261n78

310

Index

Merrill, James, 10, 11, 12, 15, 199, 200, 201, 205, 228n34, 262n1, 262–63nn3–4, 263n9, 264n14, 265n26, 266nn32–33, 266n36, 269n63; and autobiography, 155–56, 160–63, 194, 264n17; and Bishop, 8, 28, 116, 158–59, 161–62, 164, 166, 167, 177, 183, 225n13, 256n28, 259n52, 264n15, 265n23, 266n30, 266n34; dualism in, 157–58, 172, 174, 181–82, 263n7, 264n12, 265n19, 268nn50–51, 269n62, 270nn68–69; earth and nature in, 158–59, 160, 161, 163, 164–67, 170, 172–73, 177–78, 181–82, 184–85, 187–91, 193–96, 209, 264n13, 265n21, 270nn68–69, 270n74, 271n76, 271nn81–82; and everyday time, defi nitions and descriptions of, 1–2, 4–6, 7–8, 20, 26–29, 156–61, 169, 171, 181–82, 188–90, 194, 196–97, 263n5, 265n27, 266n37, 267n42, 268n52, 270n73, 271n75; fear of annihilation or death in, 156–57, 159, 164–66, 170, 176–77, 179, 182–89, 190–92, 194, 269–70nn66–67, 270nn71–72; forms or types in, 155–56, 163–64, 172–73, 186, 193–94, 265n24, 270n70, 271n82; and Frost, 44–45, 63, 157–58, 159, 160, 164, 167, 182, 185, 191, 264n15; guilt and innocence in, 164–67, 182, 186, 193, 194–95, 266–67n39–41, 267n44, 271n80, 271n83; and homosexuality, 205, 207–9, 263–64nn10–11, 265n24; love, marriage, and romantic partnerships in, 20, 157–58, 166–75, 179, 184–85, 188–89, 193, 207–8, 263–64nn10–11, 267n45, 267–68nn47–49, 268n61, 270nn68–69, 271n76; memory in, 160–61, 164–65, 171–72, 190, 271n77; poetry and poetic form in, 21, 23, 25, 156, 161–63, 170, 172–73, 175–82, 185, 188, 192, 193–97, 210, 233n74, 265nn23–24, 265–66n28, 268n57, 268n59, 269nn61–62, 270n73; reincarnation in, 155–56, 171–74, 178, 179–80, 183, 189–90, 268n54; and rejection of prose for poetry, 176–81, 268n58; revision in, 183, 185–86, 190, 193–94, 271nn78–79; and Stevens, 8, 28, 157, 158, 159, 164–67, 172, 181, 182, 185, 187, 190–92, 225n13, 264n15, 266n38; subjectivity in, 9, 160–63, 185–86, 190–92, 203, 204, 266nn31–32,

266nn34–35; timelessness or eternity in, 157, 176, 184–86, 188, 263n6. See also individual works metaphor, 44–45, 63, 137, 144, 157, 172, 236n27, 257n42, 263n7 metaphysical poetry, 117, 118, 254n12 middleness or “middle way,” 32–33, 49–51, 72–73, 237n34, 242n7 Miller, Christopher R., 22, 83, 246n37, 248n54 Miller, J. Hillis, 223n3, 225nn14–15, 225n17, 232n68, 243n15 Millier, Brett C., 253n1, 256n30, 259n61, 260n65 Milton, John, 54, 65–66, 68, 70, 90, 151, 182, 183, 238nn41–42, 240–41n63, 241n68. See also individual works Mirabell’s Books of Number (Merrill), 155, 168, 184–87, 190, 266n32, 270n68, 270n70, 270n73 “Miracle for Breakfast, A” (Bishop), 2, 16, 117, 122–23, 254n13 “Mirror” (Merrill), 184 Modell, Arnold H., 228nn38–39, 257n42 modernism, 3, 6, 15, 18, 32, 37, 45, 50, 86, 100, 159, 200, 201, 223n2, 223n5, 224–25n11, 225–26nn16–21, 226–27nn23–26, 228–29n41, 242n6, 252–53n95; and time, 9–11, 13 Moffett, Judith, 264n17, 265n27, 267n47, 267–68n49 “Montrachet-le-Jardin” (Stevens), 2 “Monument to After-Thought Unveiled, A” (Frost), 31, 59, 60 Moore, Marianne, 28, 29, 152, 213, 233n1, 261n80; correspondence with Bishop, 124, 254n9, 259n58, 260n70 “Moose, The” (Bishop), 140, 258n47 “More Feedback” (Ashbery), 202–3 morning. See dawn, as crux for everyday time “Morning Away from You” (Lowell), 7 “Morning Exercise” (Merrill), 6, 156 “Morning in the Grand Style” (Merrill), 161 Morrison, Paul, 247n45 Morse, Jonathan, 272n5

I n d e x 311 mortality. See death mourning, 8, 59–61, 114–15, 132–33, 137–38, 144–45, 147–54, 183, 216–18, 239n52, 239–40nn54–56, 257n36, 258n43, 258n50, 259n62, 261n74. See also elegy; melancholia “Mourning and Melancholia” (Freud), 59–60, 132–33, 239n52, 258n48, 259n60 Muñoz, José Esteban, 272n8 Murolo, Roberto, 195–96 “Music Like Dirt” (Bidart), 216, 219 “My own heart let me have more pity on” (Hopkins), 254n15

narcissism, 140–41, 192, 258n48 narrative and narratology, 22, 24–25, 36, 114, 130, 159, 176–78, 226n25, 231–32nn62–63, 232n68, 232n71, 264n16, 265n25, 268n58 Nathanson, Donald L., 258n48 nature, 209–10, 211–12, 218–19, 228–29n41, 229n43, 234n7, 239n48, 246n36, 254n14, 257n39, 258n47, 258n50, 260nn68–70, 261n73, 261–62n81, 264n13, 271nn81–82; as deathly, 19, 34, 37–38, 39–40, 46, 61, 68, 76–78, 94–99, 124, 149–50, 182–84, 186–87, 190, 243nn12–13; as flux, 37, 134–36, 190–91; as lover or parent, 87, 99, 158, 168, 187–89, 191, 250n72, 270nn68–69; as repetitive, 15–17, 19, 35–36, 38–41, 57–58, 59–60, 67–68, 73–74, 76–77, 82–86, 95–99, 107, 115, 120–21, 123, 136, 138, 140, 142–43, 144, 148–50, 152, 153–54, 156, 159, 165, 187–89, 191, 193–95, 218–19, 239n50, 261n72, 261n74, 262n85; as truth, 134, 150–51 “Nature” (Emerson), 4, 12, 85 “Need of Being Versed in Country Things, The” (Frost), 59–60, 239–40n55 Nehamas, Alexander, 19, 230nn52–53, 272n10 “Nestus Gurley” ( Jarrell), 7 “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” (Frost), 67–70, 75, 241nn66–69 Newdick, Robert, 61, 238n38 New, Elisa: analysis of Frost, 32–33, 53–54, 234n7, 240nn60–61; analysis of Stevens,

247n49, 251n78; and American literature, 11, 227n29, 231n60 New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Freud), 15, 228n37 “new lyric studies,” 23–24, 232nn64–66 “New Spirit, The” (Ashbery), 202 Nicholls, Peter, 225n18 Nickowitz, Peter, 265n24, 266n39 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 39, 116, 229n48, 230n51, 235n14, 254n8; and Merrill, 164, 184, 186, 267n43; concept of repetition, 18–20, 75, 100, 164, 184, 223n3, 262n85; and Stevens, 75, 100–102, 243n15, 251nn77–78, 252n84; and subjectivity, 19–20, 101–2, 230nn52–53, 230nn57–58 “Nightgown” (Merrill), 163 nightmares. See dreams and nightmares Nights and Days (Merrill), 156, 163, 169, 189, 268n50 No Future (Edelman), 205–6, 208 North and South (Bishop), 124, 128, 129 “North Haven” (Bishop), 148–54, 215, 220, 261nn72–73, 261nn75–77, 262n83, 262n88 Notebook 1967–68 and Notebook (Lowell), 8, 153, 261n81, 262n85 “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” (Stevens), 18, 88, 101, 105, 115, 219, 247n44, 255n20; and dualism, 83–84; language in, 85–86, 106, 246n43; love and marriage in, 86–87, 247n49; memory in, 95–97, 250n70; and Merrill, 158, 166, 167, 182, 185, 187; and Stevens’s conceptions of everyday repetition, 83–85, 95–99, 110, 246n39, 247nn45–46; threat of death in, 94–95, 250n70 “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (Frost), 214 “Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself ” (Stevens), 110–11, 113 novels. See narrative and narratology nuclear power, 187, 270nn71–72, 271n81 “Nuns Painting Water-Lilies” (Stevens), 106

Odyssey, The (Homer), 20, 47, 106–10, 237n33, 252n91, 252n94

312

Index

“Of Hartford in a Purple Light” (Stevens), 73 “Of Mere Being” (Stevens), 74 “Of Modern Poetry” (Stevens), 252–53n95 O’Hara, Frank, 7, 8 “Old Man Asleep, An” (Stevens), 104 Olson, Charles, 9, 211 Olson, Liesl, 274n21; analysis of modernism, 6, 11, 224–25nn9–11, 226nn24–25; analysis of Stevens, 242–43nn7–10, 244n23, 245n29, 246n37, 246nn42–43, 248n53, 249n61 “One Art” (Bishop), 146–47, 149, 213, 220, 259–60n63, 260n65, 260n71 “Onset, The” (Frost), 39–40, 41, 42, 43, 58, 66, 214, 235nn15–16 On the Genealogy of Morality (Nietzsche), 235n14 “On the Primacy of Green” (Ryan), 214 “On the Way to the Bus” (Stevens), 6, 75, 106 “On Time” (Milton), 238n42 Ophir, Ella, 226–27n25, 227n27, 231–32n63 “Opposition to a Memorial” (Ashbery), 28–29 “Ordinary Evening in New Haven, An” (Stevens), 28, 74, 105, 106, 108, 110, 246n38; and desire, 80–81, 84; and dualism, 82–84, 245n29; and language, 86; and politics, 92, 93–94; and religion, 91; and Stevens’s conceptions of everyday repetition, 80, 81–83, 85, 87–88, 93, 99, 101–3, 245n29, 246n37, 246n40, 250n73; and threat of death, 94–97, 250n69 ordinary-language philosophy, 63, 86, 224n11, 246n43. See also conversation; language ordinary time. See everyday time “ordinary time,” religious sense, 16 Osborne, Peter, 9, 224n10, 225n17, 230n54 Oster, Judith, 234nn9–10, 237n36, 240n59, 241n66, 241n68 “Oven Bird, The” (Frost), 50 “Over 2,000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” (Bishop), 133–34, 137, 257n37 “Owl in the Sarcophagus, The” (Stevens), 103

“Owl’s Clover” (Stevens), 89, 92–93, 97, 249n63

“Palm at the End of the Mind, The” (Ryan), 213 “Palme” (Valéry), 182 “Pangolin, The” (Moore), 28, 213 Paradise Lost (Milton), 54, 65–66, 68, 182, 241n68 paradise or Eden, 17, 51–52, 54, 67–68, 92–93, 98, 103, 150–51, 157, 165, 184, 188, 214, 248n56, 249n66, 251n82, 267n43, 270n73. See also timelessness or eternity Parini, Jay, 238n38, 238n43 “Paris, 7 A.M.” (Bishop), 125–27, 255n24, 257n37 Parker, Robert Dale, 256n28 past. See memory and retrospection pastoral, 45, 138, 144, 150–51, 210, 234n7, 236n28, 239–40n55, 258n43, 259n58, 261n74 Pater, Walter, 10 patience, 20, 49–50, 54, 109–10, 143, 163, 177, 182, 208, 213–14, 252n94. See also expectation and futurity “Patience” (Ryan), 214 Patterson, Annabel, 236n28 Paulhan, Jean, 86, 104, 110, 247n44, 252n85 Pearce, Roy Harvey, 32, 243n14 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 16, 229n42 Penelope. See Odyssey, The Perkins, David, 233n1, 267–68n49 Perloff, Marjorie, 224n11 Peter, Saint, 119–21, 141 Phillips, Adam, 56, 60, 228n40 Phillips, Dana, 273n17 “Plan, The” (Creeley), 7 “Poem” (Bishop), 154 “Poems of Our Climate, The” (Stevens), 81 poetry and poetic form, 7, 8–9, 11, 79, 110, 125–26, 130, 143, 146–48, 170, 185, 192, 200, 210, 211–12, 215, 217–21, 225n15, 231nn59–62, 233nn73–74, 235nn12–13, 235n15, 245n32, 249–50n68, 252–53n95, 253n4, 255n26, 257n42, 258n44, 259–60n63, 260nn65–66,

I n d e x 313 261n75, 265nn24–25, 265–66n28, 268n57, 273nn19–20, 274n22; and conversation, 62–64; as a representation of everyday time, 21–23, 27, 36–37, 39–40, 47–48, 93, 102, 114, 120–23, 137–39, 150, 153–54, 155–56, 160–63, 172–73, 175–82, 188, 193–97, 255n21, 261n74, 270n73; versus prose or narrative, 22–25, 36, 114, 176–78, 180, 226n25, 231–32nn62–63, 232n68, 264n16, 265n25, 268n58 “Poetry Is a Kind of Money” (Ryan), 213 Poirier, Richard: and American literature, 11, 227n29; analysis of Frost, 21, 38, 53, 54, 234n9, 237n36, 239n48, 240nn56–57, 240n59, 241n68 political and social implications of everyday poetics, 20–21, 32, 45, 73, 88–94, 103–4, 199–200, 202–5, 224n10, 234n6, 236n28, 240n60, 243n10, 248n53, 249nn63–65, 252n84, 255n16, 273n13 Polito, Robert, 262n1 “Portraits I Have Written and What I Think of Repetition, Whether It Exists or No” (Stein), 127 postmodernism, 3, 116, 161, 201, 225n17, 233n74, 268n58 Poulet, Georges, 44, 227n29 Pound, Ezra, 9, 130–31, 233n1 pragmatism, 3, 11–12, 16, 203, 214, 223n2, 229n46, 272n3, 274n22; and Frost, 32–33, 41–45, 54, 234n4; and Stevens, 76, 242n5, 247n51; and Merrill, 158. See also Dewey, John; James, William Pragmatism ( James), 41–42, 234n4, 235n17 “Prayer in Spring, A” (Frost), 38 “Primitive Like an Orb, A” (Stevens), 81, 185 Pritchard, William H., 234n9, 235n19, 240n56 procreation and children, 180–81, 205–9, 237n36, 240n62, 269n61, 273n14 “Prodigal, The” (Bishop), 129–30, 131, 133, 136, 144, 255nn25–26, 257n35 “projective verse” (Olson), 9

“Prologues to What Is Possible” (Stevens), 75, 101 prosody. See poetry and poetic form Proust, Marcel, 44, 157, 159–61, 170, 172, 224n9, 226n25, 264n16, 265n23, 265n26, 266n34, 269n65. See also “For Proust” (Merrill) psychoanalysis, 14–15, 59–60, 90–91, 124, 128, 132–33, 138, 206, 249n59, 255n23, 256nn33–34. See also Freud; repetition compulsion Psychology and The Principles of Psychology ( James), 5, 11, 13–14, 17, 42–43, 228n35, 234n4, 235n22, 249n67 “Pure Good of Theory, The” (Stevens), 109, 246n34, 248n56 “Putting in the Seed” (Frost), 50, 237n36

“Quai d’Orléans” (Bishop), 135, 143, 149, 257n41, 258–59n51 “queer optimism” (Snediker), 206, 207, 272n11 “queer performativity” (Sedgwick), 132, 256n32 queer theory, 132, 205–9, 256n32, 272nn7–8 “Questions of Travel” (Bishop), 141 “Quiet Normal Life, A” (Stevens), 101 Quinn, Justin, 243n12, 246n38, 252n84 Quinney, Laura, 76, 244n21, 246n35, 250n72, 252n87 Quinones, Ricardo J., 225n18 “Rain Towards Morning” (Bishop), 141 Ramazani, Jahan, 250n69 Randall, Bryony, 11, 224nn8–9, 225n11, 226nn24–25, 228n35 “Randall Jarrell” (Lowell), 151 “Realities” (Lowell), 153 “Recital, The” (Ashbery), 202 Regueiro, Helen, 245n33 reincarnation, 155–56, 171–74, 178, 179–80, 183, 189–90, 268n52 religion and religious faith, 2, 19, 59, 68, 100, 128, 135, 137, 151, 227n29, 229n43,

314

Index

religion and religious faith (continued) 238n41, 241n68, 254nn14–15, 255n25, 257n40, 259n57, 260n70; and everyday poetics, 16–17, 117, 122–23, 238n40, 254n13; everyday time as replacement for, 90–91, 249nn61–62, 249n64; and sense of sin or guilt, 117–23, 124, 129, 133–34 “Reluctance” (Frost), 37–38, 41 remarriage. See marriage and romantic partnerships; “comedy of remarriage” “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” (Freud), 14–15 Renaissance, The (Pater), 10 repetition: as aspect of the everyday, 4, 7–8, 73, 156, 224n9; in Bishop, 1–3, 4, 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 114, 114–15, 118–25, 130, 132–33, 137–39, 144–54, 253n4, 255n19, 255nn21–22, 260n66, 262n88; defi nitions of, 4, 47, 85, 99–100, 136, 149, 171, 175, 223n3, 246n41, 247n46, 261n72, 267n42, 271n2, 272n9; in Frost, 1–2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 33, 35–37, 39–40, 42–49, 52–58, 59–61, 63–70, 234–35n11, 239n50, 240n60, 241n67; in Merrill, 1–2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 27, 156, 158, 160–63, 171–75, 176–83, 188–91, 193–97, 265n27, 266n32, 267n42, 271n75, 271n79; in natural process, 15–17, 19, 35–36, 38–41, 57–58, 59–60, 67–68, 73, 74, 76–77, 82–86, 95–99, 107, 109, 115, 118–19, 121, 122–23, 136, 144–45, 149–50, 153–54, 158, 160, 161, 163–64, 165–67, 189–97, 211–12, 218–19, 243n13, 258n47; in philosophical theories, 12–13, 18–20, 41, 54–55, 63, 75, 86, 100–102, 109, 116, 164, 184, 223n3, 229nn48–49, 230nn51–58, 238n44, 243n15, 251nn74–75, 251n77, 262n85; in poetic form, 7–9, 11, 21–22, 24–26, 27, 36–37, 76, 79, 102, 114, 120, 122–23, 130, 137–39, 146–47, 150, 161–63, 172–73, 175–82, 188, 193–96, 200, 204, 210, 212, 216, 219–21, 231n59, 232n68, 241–42n4, 253n4, 255n21, 257n42, 264n16, 274n22; in psychological theories, 13–15, 17, 25, 39, 41–43, 59–60, 76, 97, 114, 116, 124, 132–33, 136, 162–63, 186, 206, 228nn35–40, 256n34; relation of human and

natural, 2–5, 11, 13, 15, 17–18, 33, 36, 40, 42, 57–58, 59–61, 65–70, 72–73, 80, 82–83, 87–88, 95–99, 102, 106–9, 115, 121–23, 138, 144, 149–50, 153–54, 158, 161, 188–89, 193–97, 210–12, 218–21, 229n47, 239n50, 243n13, 246n36, 261nn73–74, 262n85, 265n27; relation of poetic and natural, 3, 26–27, 36, 40, 45, 57–58, 65–66, 102, 120–23, 138–39, 149–50, 161, 163, 172–73, 176–78, 180–82, 188–89, 193–97, 218–21, 258n44, 265n21; relation of psychological and poetic, 15, 39, 43–45, 128, 130, 137–39, 146–48, 161–63, 220–21, 257n42; and revision, 133–34, 137–38, 149–54, 183, 193–94, 218, 220, 261n72, 271n79; as a spiritual pattern, 16, 69–70, 91, 103, 117, 156–57, 171–75, 178–81, 183, 254n13; in Stevens, 1–2, 4, 7, 9, 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 71–73, 76, 79, 80–89, 93, 95–102, 105–10, 241–42n4, 242n8, 243n13, 243n15, 245n30, 246n37, 246n41, 247nn45–46, 251n74, 251n77. See also everyday time repetition, in human practice: habitual or routine, 5–6, 35–36, 43, 52–53, 71–72, 84, 89, 93, 101–2, 110, 116, 213–15, 242n8; imaginative or creative, 83–85, 87–88, 150, 195–96; psychologically self-defeating, 14, 34, 39, 52–53, 76, 79, 114, 118–20, 124–25, 132–33, 144–48, 216, 234–35n11, 255n22, 266n32; psychologically self-defi ning, 11, 13–15, 19, 20, 24, 26, 36–37, 39–40, 42–44, 46, 47–49, 72, 105–6, 107, 109, 114, 116, 139, 156, 160–63, 204–5, 206, 210, 212, 228n35, 228nn38–40, 230nn55–58, 272n11; related to conversation or language, 63–64, 67–69, 85–86, 87, 106, 110, 246n43; related to marriage and romantic partnerships, 20, 54–58, 66–69, 86–87, 106–10, 152, 157–58, 171–75, 179, 188–89, 207–9, 213, 238n44, 239n46, 245n30, 267–68n49; related to mourning, 59–61, 68–69, 115, 137–38, 145, 149–54, 183, 216–17, 241n69, 260n66; retrospective, 47–49, 124–25, 160–61, 171–72, 252n93, 257n42. See also habit and routine

I n d e x 315 Repetition (Kierkegaard), 13, 19–20, 100, 101, 230nn56–57, 235n17, 238n44, 251n75 “Repetition” (Ryan), 214–15 repetition compulsion, 14, 17, 25, 39, 53, 61, 97, 124, 132–33, 147–48, 162–63, 206, 220, 232n68, 232n71, 234–35n11, 255n22, 260n66, 266n32 “reproductive futurism” (Edelman), 205–7 revision, 256n32, 261n72, 261n80, 262n82, 271n79; in conversation, 64–65; as everyday practice, 137–38, 144–45, 149, 150–54, 183, 193–94, 218, 220, 253n5; as psychological reparation, 133–34, 257n39; and subjectivity, 185–86, 190, 203 Richardson, Joan, 241n2, 243n14, 247–48n52, 249nn59–60 Richardson, Mark, 33, 234n6, 234n9 Ricoeur, Paul, 22, 231n62 Riddel, Joseph N., 72, 247n48, 249n63, 249n68 Rieff, Philip, 248n58 “Ring Cycle, The” (Merrill), 193–94 “Road Not Taken, The” (Frost), 33, 42–43, 44, 52, 66, 235nn19–21 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 20, 144–45, 259n57, 261n77 Rock, The (Stevens), 104–5, 252nn86–87 “Rock, The” (Stevens), 105, 106, 218 “Romantic Chasm, A” (Frost), 55–56 romanticism, 12, 22, 76, 77, 89, 92, 108, 158–59, 227–28n33, 238n39, 238–39n45, 244n20, 245n26, 246n34, 248n54, 249n64, 270n69; and the desire for timelessness, 45, 79–80, 87, 185, 226n21; and love of the world, 80–82, 86–87, 104, 185; and subjectivity, 3, 32, 203, 244n21 “Roosters” (Bishop), 2, 113, 117, 118–21, 122–23, 129, 134, 141, 255nn16–18, 260n70 “Rose Pogonias” (Frost), 38 Rosner, Victoria, 226n23 routine. See everyday time; habit and routine; repetition Rusk, Loren, 252n92 Ryan, Kay, 213–15

Sacks, Peter M., 59, 175, 269n64 Said, Edward W., 230n58 “Sailing After Lunch” (Stevens), 79–80, 245nn26–27 “Sailing to Byzantium” (Yeats), 120, 169, 170 “St. Armorer’s Church From the Outside” (Stevens), 1, 5, 16, 105 “Samos” (Merrill), 188 “Santa Lucia II” (Hass), 212 Santayana, George, 76, 83, 105, 114, 244nn19–20, 249n67, 252n93 “Santorini: Stopping the Leak” (Merrill), 191–92 Sastri, Reena, 167, 267n44, 271n80, 271n83 Savage, D. S., 92, 249n65 Savoie, John, 235nn20–21 Sayeau, Michael Douglas, 224n7, 225n11 “Saying It to Keep It from Happening” (Ashbery), 202 “Say Uncle” (Ryan), 214 “Scenes of Childhood” (Merrill), 164–66, 182, 191, 266nn38–39 Scheherazade. See Arabian Nights, The Schell, Jonathan, 270n71, 271n81 Schilling, Peter A., 228n34 Schleifer, Ronald, 225n17 Schuyler, James, 7, 8 Schwartz, Lloyd, 253nn1–2 Schweik, Susan, 255nn16–17 Schweizer, Harold, 252n94 Scripts for the Pageant (Merrill), 173, 186–89, 190, 193, 194, 196, 270n73, 271n76 “Sea and Its Shore, The” (Bishop), 136 “Second Coming, The” (Yeats), 202–3 “Second Hour of the Night, The” (Bidart), 216–17 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 132, 206, 256nn31–32, 272n9 self and selfhood. See subjectivity and selfhood self-effacement or selflessness, 8–9, 11, 43–44, 123, 185–86, 225n14, 230n53, 235–36nn22–24, 244n21, 252n87; as a result of poetic form,

316

Index

self-effacement or selflessness (continued) 25, 146; and submission to natural process, 19, 39–40, 76–78, 97–98, 100–101, 135, 211, 251n78 “Self-Portrait, 1969” (Bidart), 215 “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (Ashbery), 203 “Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker” (Merrill), 2, 194–96, 271nn82–83 Selinger, Eric Murphy, 267n49 “Servant to Servants, A” (Frost), 1, 34, 52–53, 64, 214, 237–38n37 “Sestina” (Bishop), 136–40, 141, 146, 148–49, 150, 161, 204, 219, 221, 257–58nn42–46 Shakespeare, William, 52, 152 shame. See guilt and shame “Shampoo, The” (Bishop), 142–43, 152, 177, 208, 259nn53–54 Shaviro, Steven, 101, 247n46, 251n78 Shaw, W. David, 234n4, 235n19 Sheehy, Donald G., 238n38, 238n43 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 76, 108, 150–51, 159 “Shepheardes Calendar, The” (Spenser), 150–51 Sheringham, Michael, 224n5 Shetley, Vernon, 25, 210–11 Shoptaw, John, 203, 204, 272n4, 272n6 “16.ix.65” (Merrill), 263n4 “Skaters, The” (Ashbery), 272n5 skepticism, 3, 12, 16, 83, 179, 227n26, 246n43, 261–62n81 “Sleeping Standing Up” (Bishop), 125 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 25, 231n59 “Snake Charm” (Ryan), 214 Snediker, Michael D., 206, 207, 232n67, 272n11 “Snow” (Frost), 5, 58–59, 61, 65, 66, 239n51 “Snow Man, The” (Stevens), 77, 78 Soares, Lota de Macedo. See Macedo Soares, Maria Carlota Costellat de (Lota) social implications of everyday poetics. See political and social implications of everyday poetics socialism, 91–94, 249nn64–65

“Solitaire Under the Oaks” (Stevens), 74 “Some Dreams They Forgot” (Bishop), 125, 126, 139, 148 “Something for Hope” (Frost), 44 Some Versions of Pastoral (Empson), 144, 259n58 “Song for the Rainy Season” (Bishop), 141, 143 “Song of Fixed Accord” (Stevens), 72, 75, 110 “Songs to Survive the Summer” (Hass), 212 “Soonest Mended” (Ashbery), 203 Spanos, William V., 230n50, 251n78 “spatial form” (Frank), 10 Spenser, Edmund, 78, 150–51, 261n72, 261n74 Sperry, Stuart M., 243n13 “Spring” (Hopkins), 257n40 Spring and All (Williams), 8–9 Springer, Mary Doyle, 246n41, 251n74 Stages on Life’s Way (Kierkegaard), 20, 254n9 Stanlis, Peter J., 233n3, 236n25, 238n41 “Stanzas Ending with the Same Two Words” (Bidart), 217 “Stars at Tallapoosa” (Stevens), 127, 128 Stein, Gertrude, 127–28, 227n29, 271n2 Stevens, Wallace, 10, 11, 12, 15, 23, 26, 201, 212, 213, 226n25, 227n29, 227n32, 241–42n4, 244nn22–23, 245n33, 246n35, 248nn53–54, 249n59, 252n87, 252–53n95, 274n21; and Bidart, 215, 218–19; and Bishop, 8, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 123, 127–28, 136, 146, 147, 149, 154, 255n20, 260n70; community in, 88, 93–94, 103–4, 204, 252n84; dangers of everyday time in, 1–2, 73–74, 76–80, 94–98, 157, 244n21, 249–50n68–69; and death, 74, 94–98, 105, 159, 164; and defi nitions and descriptions of everyday time, 1–2, 4–6, 7–8, 17–18, 20, 29, 71–73, 80, 82–85, 87–88, 93, 102, 105–11, 242–43nn7–10, 245n30, 246n37, 246n41, 247nn45–46, 251n81; and desire, 76, 80–84, 97, 104, 106–9, 114, 244n19, 245nn30–32, 252n90; and dreams, 88–93, 103, 248nn55–57; dualism in, 72–74, 76–80, 81–85, 89–90, 95–97, 102, 115, 157, 172, 181, 242nn6–7, 243nn13–14, 245n29, 247n48,

I n d e x 317 247n51, 252nn88–89; and expectation or futurity, 29, 75–76, 81, 92, 94, 97, 100, 105, 109, 110–11, 115, 205, 244nn17–18, 245n32, 246n34; and Frost, 8, 72–73, 74, 76, 81, 85–86, 95, 233n1, 249n67; guilt and innocence in, 97–100, 103–4, 116, 136, 165–66, 187, 251n77; and Kierkegaard, 100–102, 109, 242n8, 251nn74–76, 251n81; language in, 21, 78, 81, 85–86, 87, 104, 110, 246nn42–43; love and marriage in, 20, 86–87, 104, 106–8, 158, 185, 245n28, 245n30, 247nn47–48; memory or the past in, 18, 95–100, 109, 136, 190–92, 245n24, 249–50nn67–70, 252n93; and Merrill, 8, 28, 157, 158, 159, 164–67, 172, 181, 182, 185, 187, 190–92, 264n15, 266n38; nature and the earth in, 73, 85, 86–88, 89, 91, 95, 97–99, 103–4, 107, 110, 218–19, 243nn12–13, 246n36, 250n72, 251n82; and Nietzsche, 75, 100–102, 243n15, 251nn77–78, 252n84; and politics, 73, 91–94, 199, 243n10, 249nn63–65; and religion, 2, 16, 90–91, 242n8, 249nn60– 62; and romance or the romantic, 76, 77, 79–82, 86, 89, 92, 104, 108, 158, 244nn20–21, 245n26, 246n34, 248n54, 249n64; and routine, 6, 20, 71–72, 84, 101–2, 241nn2–3, 242n5, 242n8, 246n39, 247–48n52, 251n80; subjectivity and selfhood in, 9, 76–80, 81, 97–99, 100–101, 107, 109, 203, 245n31, 249n67, 251n78. See also individual works Stevenson, Anne, 255n19, 255n24, 260n65 Stewart, Susan, 22, 24, 25, 26, 232n66, 232n69, 232–33n72, 235n13 “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (Frost), 38–40, 42, 234–35nn11–13 stories. See narrative and narratology “Storm Fear” (Frost), 33, 35, 36 “stream of consciousness” ( James), 43–44, 235n22, 235–36n24 subjectivity and selfhood, 3–7, 8–11, 12, 18–20, 32–33, 39, 58, 72, 79, 97–102, 132, 212, 215–16, 226n20, 226n24, 227n31, 227–28n33, 229nn45–47, 230n53, 230nn55–58, 235–36nn22–25, 249n67, 256n31, 266nn30–31,

266nn34–35, 271n82, 272nn4–6, 273n17; and poetic form, 24–26, 139, 160–63, 217, 219–20, 232nn66–67, 232n69, 232–33nn72–73; as a problem, 114–16, 121–23, 124, 126–28, 131, 159, 215–16, 219–20, 253–54n7, 255n17, 256n28, 258n45; as temporal, 13–15, 37, 42–46, 69, 81, 105, 109, 141, 190–92, 203–5, 210, 217–21, 227nn27–29, 228n35, 228nn38–40, 245n31, 266n31, 272n9. See also autobiography; self-effacement or selflessness soul, 56, 124, 228n35; in Merrill, 157, 169, 172, 174–75, 178, 180, 193, 268n51, 268n54. See also dualism and duality “Sunday Morning” (Stevens), 99, 251n77 “System, The” (Ashbery), 202

talk. See conversation; language Tape for the Turn of the Year (Ammons), 7 Taylor, Charles, 227n31, 238n40 “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon” (Stevens), 74 “Telephone, The” (Frost), 65 “Tenancy, A” (Merrill), 174, 178, 190, 268n54 “10 Things I Do Every Day” (Berrigan), 7 “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (Benjamin), 4 “Things Shouldn’t Be So Hard” (Ryan), 214 “This Golden Summer” (Lowell), 153 Thomas, Dylan, 255n20 Thomas, Kate, 206, 272n8 Thompson, Lawrance, 61, 238n39 Thoreau, Henry D., 12, 159, 227n29, 230n51, 239n54; and Stevens, 75, 104, 110, 244n16, 244n20, 253n96 “Thousand and Second Night, The” (Merrill), 25, 169–74, 175, 182, 183, 189, 263n4, 268nn51–52 “Three Academic Pieces” (Stevens), 85, 251n82 “Three Chores” (Merrill), 156 Thus Spake Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 100–101, 184, 229n48, 230n53. See also “eternal return” (Nietzsche) time, 7–8, 13–16, 33, 53–54, 56, 63, 65, 109, 120, 141–43, 166, 173, 184–89, 205, 210, 228n39,

318

Index

time (continued) 234n8, 238n42, 240n57, 240n59, 245n24, 245n33, 246n34, 249n66, 250n71, 257n36, 259n56, 259–60n63, 266n31, 267n44, 269n65, 271n75, 271n80; in American literature, 11–12; in modernism, 9–10, 13, 17, 225–26nn17–21; as progressive debilitation or decay, 1–2, 37, 76–77, 95–96, 164, 170, 182–83; as progressive enhancement or enrichment, 1–2, 45–46, 47–49, 160–61, 169, 182–83, 235n20; in prose and poetry, 21–25, 36–37, 176–82, 231–32nn59–64, 232n68, 232–33nn70–72, 245n32, 265n20, 268nn58–59; as a pseudonym or role, 166, 175–78, 187, 188, 268n56; types of, 4, 9–10, 37–41, 72–73, 77–80, 91–93, 126–28, 149, 153, 187–88, 191, 199–200, 234n7, 235n12, 240n60, 244n21, 246n41, 255n24, 258n47, 261nn72–73, 262n85, 267n42, 270n73. See also everyday time; repetition; timelessness or eternity Time and Materials (Hass), 212 timelessness or eternity, 17, 37–38, 74, 79–80, 87, 92–93, 95, 151, 156–57, 163, 164, 169, 177–78, 184–86, 188, 225n14, 229n47, 237n31, 244n22, 245n27, 246n35, 247nn48–49, 249n66, 266n37, 267n43; in American literature, 11–12, 227n29; in artistic or literary form, 8–9, 10, 21–23, 120, 176, 231nn61–62, 232n64, 263n6, 268n59; in modernism, 8–10. See also paradise or Eden Time Regained (Proust), 159 “Time’s Andromedas” (Bishop), 128 “To an Old Philosopher in Rome” (Stevens), 105 “To Autumn” (Keats), 159 “Today’s News” (Berrigan), 7 “To the Reader” (Merrill), 1, 26–28, 157, 163, 204 Tomkins, Silvan, 132, 256n31 Tonio Kröger (Mann), 168, 169, 267n45 transcendentalism, 11–12, 32, 46, 223n2, 237n30 Transport to Summer (Stevens), 95

Travisano, Thomas, 253nn1–2, 255n23, 255n27 Trilling, Lionel, 32, 34, 90, 233n1 “Tune” (Ryan), 213 Turner, James Grantham, 240–41nn63–64 “Turtle” (Ryan), 213 “Twelfth Morning; or What You Will” (Bishop), 113 “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (Frost), 240n60 types and archetypes, 163–64, 186, 270n70, 271n82

uncertainty. See contingency and uncertainty of everyday repetition “Unmade Word, The” (Frost), 63 Untimely Meditations (Nietzsche), 229n48, 254n8 “Up and Down” (Merrill), 269n61 “Upon a Second Marriage” (Merrill), 173 “Upward Look, An” (Merrill), 196 “Urban Convalescence, An” (Merrill), 161, 264n17 Valéry, Paul, 170, 172, 182, 248n55 “Valley’s Singing Day, The” (Frost), 33, 66–67, 75, 241n65 Vendler, Helen: analysis of Merrill, 262n1, 262–63n3, 268n58, 269n64; analysis of Stevens, 245n25, 245n30, 245n32, 246n38, 250n70, 252n90 “Vermont Diary, A” (Schuyler), 8 “Verse for Urania” (Merrill), 16, 163, 164, 167, 184, 190, 194, 209, 266nn36–37 “via media” (Kloppenberg), 33 “Visits to St. Elizabeths” (Bishop), 130–31, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 151, 162, 256n28 von der Heydt, James E., 230n55, 232n64, 268n59 von Hallberg, Robert, 269n64 Voros, Gyorgyi, 243nn12–13, 243n15 “Wading at Wellfleet” (Bishop), 254n15 Wakefield, Richard, 55, 234n9, 239n50, 240n58

I n d e x 319 Walden (Thoreau), 75, 104, 110, 159, 227n30, 239n54, 244n20, 253n96 Walker, Cheryl, 254n14 Warner, Michael, 273n13 “War of Vaslav Nijinsky, The” (Bidart), 215 Warren, Robert Penn, 234n11 “Waste” (Ryan), 213 Watching the Spring Festival (Bidart), 218 “Watching the Spring Festival” (Bidart), 219 Water Street (Merrill), 160–62, 264n17 Watt, Ian, 22, 231nn62–63 “Waving Adieu, Adieu, Adieu” (Stevens), 97, 260n70 Way of the World, The (Congreve), 185 “Weed, The” (Bishop), 118–19, 124, 138, 139, 141, 215, 254n15, 258n49 Weisbuch, Robert, 244n20 “Well Dressed Man with a Beard, The” (Stevens), 72, 81, 82 “Well Water” ( Jarrell), 7 “West-Running Brook” (Frost), 55, 60, 62, 64, 67, 145, 240n57 Wetzsteon, Rachel, 228n34 Wharton, C. E., 243n15, 247n51, 251n77 “While Someone Telephones” (Bishop), 135 “White Roses” (Ashbery), 201 Whiting, Anthony, 252n89

Whitman, Walt, 60, 211, 245n28, 248n55 Wilcox, Earl J., 233n2 “Will, The” (Merrill), 176–77 Williams, William Carlos, 8–9, 225nn14–15, 233n1, 246n34 Wilson, Edmund, 10 “Winter Fear” (Ryan), 214 “Winter Spring Summer Fall” (Bidart), 219 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 63, 184, 224n11 Wordsworth, William, 12, 56, 81, 145, 158, 211, 227n30, 229n43, 244n20; and marriage, 76, 87, 108, 185, 247n47 “World and the Child, The” (Merrill), 265n23 “World as Meditation, The” (Stevens), 72, 74, 106–10, 208, 252–53nn88–95 “World Without Peculiarity” (Stevens), 99, 250n72 Wright, George T., 231n61 Wright, James, 39, 235n12

Yeats, William Butler, 10, 120, 169, 170, 202–3, 205, 211, 213, 233n1 Yenser, Stephen: analysis of Lowell, 262n85; analysis of Merrill 157, 158, 170, 182, 263n7, 264nn12–13, 265nn19–21, 268n51, 268n57, 269n65, 270nn68–69, 270n74, 271nn76–77 “Yoke, The” (Bidart), 217