5/11/10 Stevens: reading, certainly, but reading what? Then: contemporary nature-readers.

Questions about map? Paper?

Will have office hours tomorrow 10:30 - 11:30 and 4 -5.

Should have microessays back by tomorrow. You will be able to revise for a higher grade. Will be no comments on revision; as pressed for time as I will be, I might even skip the grading form and give you a number. Cannot promise that this opportunity will hold for the paper, though I'll try.

Where we are in our thread: we've come full circle. We started with Frost and his observation that people read things into nature that aren't necessarily there. We moved back to Taylor to show that the whole pattern of reading the book of nature starts with the very beginnings of American poetry (actually it's older than that--depending on how you define the terms, you could probably trace this back thousands of years). We moved to the 19th century, where we saw Bryant borrowing from English traditions of nature poetry, and then to Emerson, who pushes English Romanticism one step further into American transcendentalism. Whitman, we saw, takes these transcendentalist ideas of nature and runs with them. Dickinson, on the other hand, is more cautious. Although she is capable of moments of Emersonian communion with nature, she also has some doubts about the very act of perception.

One way to look at the arc of these different ideas is this: our question is, "what can we read in the book of nature?" And for almost 200 years, with the possible exception of Bryant, we have a lot of people who have different versions of the same answer with respect to nature: God, or at least some kind of moral order. Their conceptions of God are very different, but it's more or less the same answer. In Dickinson, for the first time, we have a streak of doubt about the READING part. Whether you think she doubts that there is a moral order in nature depends on how literally you read her lines about saints and angels; but in her more skeptical moments she has lots of doubt about the human capacity to perceive what is really there.

And so we come full circle: it is a very short step from "Perception of an Object costs" to the skepticism of Frost's "Design" or "The Need of Being Versed in Country Things." What we saw in "The Most of It," however, is a suggestion that Frost doesn't completely give up the idea of seeing God in nature, or some kind of higher order in nature, either.

It seemed to me that there was a fair amount of confusion on this point at the end of last class--most of it, I think, arising from the fact that Frost is so ambiguous about things--so let me try to make this point again, not least because it's a good transition to Stevens. On the very first day of this thread, I read quote from Frost's letter to The Amherst Student: "the background in hugeness and confusion shading away from where we stand into black and utter chaos; and against the background any small man-made figure of order and concentration." This appears to be expressing a kind of proto-existentialist view: the universe, or at least that which is not human in the universe, is merely "hugeness and confusion shading away...into black and utter chaos." There is no order in the world except for the order that humans make of it. So it would appear, again, that Frost is the first person in our thread who is an atheist--who doesn't see God in the book of nature.

In fact, though, this isn't quite what we see in his poetry. The speaker of "Design" misperceives the design in nature, but there is an order that he doesn't see. A person who is "versed in country things" won't believe that the universe is ordered so that birds weep when sad things happen to human beings, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a different kind of order in nature.

"The Most of It," I would argue, goes even farther. The answer to the speaker's question, "is there anything or anyone in nature who will love human beings back?" is ambiguous: a buck comes crashing through the undergrowth, and that is all. Make the most of it. Is that counter-love, or just coincidence? But the title has two meanings: make the most of it, but also make "The Most of It." By implication, we make the most of it--that is, find order in the hugeness and confusion of the world--by making "The Most of It," that is, by creating a "figure of order and concentration" such as a poem. Note that this is still ambiguous: does creating order just console us for a lack of order in the world, or does it actually suggest that there is order in the world?

Frost's essays, though, give more of answer. In "The Figure a Poem Makes," he writes that there are "suggestions of form," he writes, "in the rolling clouds of nature . . . through us nature reaches its height of form and through us exceeds itself." In these terms, a buck crossing the lake and crashing through the undergrowth--or for that matter a spider and moth on a flower--is a "suggestion of form" in nature. And writing a poem is the creation of form, indeed the "height of form." And--here's the clincher--since we are part of nature, then in poetry itself "through us nature reaches its height of form and through us exceed itself." Form in us is form in nature.

Another way to put this: for all that Frost shared the skepticism of his age about whether or not the order that humans see in the world really matches up with the order of nature, he nevertheless has faith that the human ability to create order is a part of the natural order, and thus a sign that some kind of order, whether we understand it, does exist. And I use that word "faith" carefully--it is, fundamentally, a religious view.

Today, we're taking our thread a step or two beyond our starting point. We'll start with Stevens, who we've met before as our representative modernist. I'll start with a hypothesis: Like Frost, Stevens questions the gap between human ideas of order and the order of nature. The difference is that he is unequivocably atheistic.

Stevens, "Idea of Order at Key West" (2.823-824)

• 1st stanza: what's the scenario, and what is the relationship between mind and nature here?
  • beyond the genius (here in older sense of "spirit"), water never formed, body wholly body
  • "and yet" - where's the "mimic motion" come from? not ours although we understood. What are "we" doing, in other words?
  • —> question: how did we come to hear something "beyond"?
• 2nd stanza:
  • "not a mask"--mask for what?
  • why does it matter that the song was uttered "word by word"?
• 3rd:
  • "she was the maker"--what is it, then, that humans do, if they don't read something "behind" the book of nature?
  • "Whose spirit?"--why do we sometimes feel as if there were something behind nature?
• 4th
  • "when she sang, the sea became the self that was her song"--is this a contradiction? how do we resolve it, if it is? Is this the pathetic fallacy again, or something different? What does it mean to say that there never was a world for her except the one she sang?
• last 2 stanzas:
  • what is the question to which "blessed rage for order" is the answer? What does that mean? Why is it blessed?
• Robin Gail Schulze, points out that climate and geography are recurring tropes throughout Stevens' poetry: " Stevens equates northern climes and icy states with an absence of imagination, southern locales and warmth with the play of an active fantasy." What climate are we in here, and why?

BREAK

Two Contemporary Nature-Readers

We will finish this thread with two contemporary nature readers: Allen Ginsberg and A.R. Ammons. Ginsberg was a Beat poet; Ammons is not generally thought of as part of a school. As we'll see, though, he is very much indebted to Emerson, Whitman, and Stevens, and is taking up many of the same issues.

"Sunflower Sutra" (handout)

Beats: Jack Keroac, Allen Ginsburg, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti; in prose, Jack Kerouac. At their peak in the 1950's. Three meanings of "Beat":

• beat as in "beaten"--beaten down by American society; implies alienation, dispossession, rejection of mainstream values
• beat as in musical beat, especially jazz--a certain sense of rhythm, "typewriter-jazz," association with hip scene
• beat as in "beatific" or "beatitude"--religious connotations, sense of spiritual questing; direct interest (for Ginsburg especially) in Eastern religions, especially Buddhism.

As in most of the poems that we have read, we have here a speaker looking at some element in nature and talking to or about it. How is this scenario different from, say, Frost's speaker looking at the spider?

• context of despoiled nature, represented ultimately by the locomotive. How is it described? What does locomotive connote?
• how is the sunflower itself described?
  • battered, grimy--suggesting what?
  • "my sunflower O my soul" why does he identify?
  • "I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem." The reference here is to an experience that Ginsberg had in his apartment in Harlem in 1948. He was reading Blake when he had a vision in which Blake came to him in person. He claimed to family and friends afterward that he had found God.

What does Ginsburg mean when he says that the sunflower forgot it was a flower? What is he arguing for?

• to the sunflower
• to the locomotive--why "forget me not"? why described as "once powerful mad American locomotive"?
• What does the last line mean? What would follow from it?

Why is the sexual imagery so ambivalent?

BREAK

A. R. Ammons, "Corsons Inlet" (2.1409-1412).

Ammons: not generally thought of as part of a school. But very much indebted to Emerson, Whitman, Williams, Stevens.

"Corsons Inlet":

• In the two stanzas beginning "the walk liberating," what is the relationship of the speaker's mental state and the natural scene he is witnessing? Is this like or unlike the kinds of relationships between mind and nature that we've seen before?
  • released from what kind of forms?
  • allow myself eddies of meaning in what?
• When the speaker says that "Overall is beyond me," what does he mean? Why is it capitalized?
• "in nature" through "no walls": the first of these stanzas is close observation of nature, the second description of his own work, or his thought processes. Is he imitating nature? learning from nature? part of nature? Is this another instance of the "pathetic fallacy" that Frost and Stevens critique, or is this different?
• In the stanza beginning "the news to my left," who gives the news? What does that imply, again, about mind and world?
• in the same stanza, is the "possibility of rule as the sum of rulelessness" an assertion of order or not?
• next two stanzas: what's the difference between the "smaller view" and the "larger view"?
• "swallows" through "routes" —what "serenity" is he talking about? what "arranged terror" does he avoid, and why would it be terrifying?
• In the last stanza, what is the "easy victory" and why would that not be enough? What else is there?
• why is the predominant unit of punctuation the colon?
  • Lehman, David . "Archie: A Profile of A.R. Ammons". American Poet (2006). Rpt on poets.org, <http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15766>:

    "The colon permits him to stress the linkage between clauses and to postpone closure indefinitely.... When I asked Archie about his use of colons, he said that when he started writing poetry, he couldn't write if he thought 'it was going to be important,' so he wrote 'on the back of used mimeographed paper my wife brought home, and I used small [lowercase] letters and colons, which were democratic, and meant that there would be something before and after [every phrase] and the writing would be a kind of continuous stream.'"

This is the end of our first thread. On Thursday, we'll start on the second thread, "American or European."( The syllabus has a misprint, putting that title after Thursday.)