5/20/10 Meanwhile, back home: William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore.

questions on paper? due Saturday by midnight.

sample oral interp: "Design" (788)

• Don't have to mention not pausing at the end of enjambed lines--we would assume that. The only time you might mention enjambment or end-stopping is if there's something about the poem that you think needs to be read in a different way--pausing on an enjambed line or rushing over an end-stopped one. In your interpretation, focus on the MEANINGS of the poem that require you to read the poem in certain ways.
• I see this poem as one in which the speaker misunderstands things that Frost expects us to understand. The speaker is looking at something that he considers strange--a white spider and a white moth on a white flower that would usually be blue. This is striking for the speaker not only because it seems like a strange coincidence, but because in Western culture the color white is usually associated with purity and innocence, as in wedding dresses and christening clothes, whereas the main event in this scenario is death.
• Because he thinks the scene is so unusual, he can't help but try to read some larger meaning into the scene, as if it were some kind of omen or sign from above. But if it's a sign from any supernatural being, it would have to be Satan rather than God, given that the scene associates the color of purity with a scene of destruction--it would have to be a "design of darkness to appall" the human onlooker. On some level, though, the speaker can't quite believe that such an evil design is really there, or maybe on some level he knows he's reading an awful lot into a simple scene, so at the end he pulls away from such speculation and dismisses the whole things as something too "small" to have a cosmic evil design reflected in it
• We as readers, however, are supposed to see through the speaker's mistake. The spider and the moth are on the flower for perfectly natural reasons: they're both trying to hide, the spider so he can better catch prey and the moth so he can better avoid a predator. If there is a design involved, it is simply the natural order--which may or may not be divinely ordered, but which either way has an order which is different from human orderings like associating white with babies and weddings. In this way, the poem is pointing out that humans tend to read things into nature that aren't there--the poem is more about that mistake than it is about whether or not there is order in the world.
• The challenge in reading this poem aloud, then, is trying to figure out the character of the speaker. He gets the scene wrong, so he can't be too all-knowing. On the other hand, he's smart enough and observant enough to notice a scene like this and to play out its implications in his mind. I see him as one of those people who is a little too smart for his own good--always observing things, always pushing things just a little too far, the kind of person who drives you crazy by noticing that you have changed your hair style and speculating on whether or not you've fallen in love with somebody, but doing it in this kind of joky way such that you can't tell him to go shove it without being accused of not having a sense of humor. So on one level this scene with the spider is just an intellectual joke to him, and he's just playing with the idea. At the same time, because he hasn't really thought all this out very carefully, it does kind of bother him.
• So I have decided to read it as follows. In the octet, the first eight lines, the speaker's tone is joky--he's just playing with the images and trying to squeeze as much spookiness out of it as he can. But in the next five lines, he has scared himself into questioning the scene seriously: his tone becomes somber, and he really wants to know the answer to the question of what's going on here. In the last line, however, he goes back to his old joky self, not because he has figured it out but because he can't figure it out and he wants to console himself and go back to his normal self. He has missed the point in part because he has this superficially smart way of being in the world and he can't let go of it to look deeper.

We're coming full circle today, returning to materials that we looked at on our very first day. Where we are in our thread:

1. We started with some American poets (Barlow, and in previous threads Freneau and Bryant) who struggled to write a distinctively American poetry but whose conception of poetry was so caught up with European poetry that they could not be said to have succeeded in that attempt.
2. We moved to a few 19th C poets who did write something distinctive. Poe does so, not by trying to do something distinctively American, but simply by pushing European poetry in a direction it had never gone before. Emerson tries to write something distinctive, and even gestures towards something like free verse, but his real contribution is his theoretical work on what American poetry would look like. Whitman takes Emerson's ideas and makes them work, inventing a truly distinctive, distinctly American work. We could, by the way, make the same argument about Dickinson.
3. We then look at three expatriate poets (Pound, H.D. and Eliot)--poets who make no effort at all to created something American, but rather to one degree or another repudiate American poetry in favor of a poetry that is thoroughly cosmopolitan.

William Carlos Williams

Where does Williams fit into this picture?

• On the one hand, he knew Pound and H.D. in college, remained friends with both, and was influenced profoundly by them; also, much of his earliest work is directly in the Imagist strain; he published poems in an anthology Pound put together called Des Imagistes .
• On the other hand, he was not at all happy with the direction the poetry of the expatriates was going. Come back to the first principle of Imagism: "direct treatment of the thing whether subjective or objective." What is the nature of the "thing"? Pound not much interested in "things" themselves, if by "thing" we mean some tangible physical object: interested in patterns of cultural energies. H.D. too: she writes about concrete things like forests and flowers, but her interest is in inventing a mythology in which those concrete things suggest principles and ideas.
• Williams WAS interested in physical objects, and his sense of why that's important is very much caught up in his urge to develop a poetry "in the American strain," as he puts it.
• first and third paragraphs of "America and Alfred Steiglitz"
• --> That is to say: allegiance to English and European culture can prevent one from seeing what exists right here in America. It was not at all the case that he rejected European influences. He was partly educated in Europe, and was much influenced by European art.. But he was convinced of the importance of creating an American poetry in an American context, with what he called an "American idiom." "Over and over again it must be repeated: none can afford to ignore, or to forget, or to fail to have seen, the superb wealth of, say, a Morgan collection. . . . But neither can a region afford not to have lived."

What is required to “have lived” and what part does poetry play in it? Excerpts from Spring and All:

• What these excerpts are: Spring and All published in Paris in 1923. Odd book: part literary cricicism, part chapbook of poetry, part philosophy, part essay in praise of imagination. Includes many of his most famous short poems, including "Red Wheelbarrow" and "Spring and All." I've excerpted some of the passages which show most clearly his quarrel with the expatriates--in particular his dislike of their abstractness, their lack of directness.
• 1 and 2: What's the problem and what is the solution to it?
• 4: what does imagination do?.
• 3: who might he have in mind here?
  • “I’ve always wanted to fit poetry into the life around us . . . I abandoned the rare world of H. D. and Ezra Pound. Poetry should be brought into the world where we live and not be so recondite, so removed from people. . . . This seemed to me to be what a poem was for, to speak for us in a language we can understand.”
  • But this doesn’t simply mean that Williams was trying to write “easier” verse. At about the same time, he said to an interviewer: “I acknowledge that the difficulty of a poet’s writing is a barrier to the public. Definitely. But I say he is forced to it in the modern world—to reflect the complexity of his thinking. . . . When I see a poet who’s perfectly clear, I have to laugh. He isn’t SAYING anything.”
  • not condemning difficulty, then, but rather abstraction, lack of directness. CONTACT is a key word for Williams.
• What kind of poetry would follow from this? From Paterson: "no ideas but in things."

[from 1910 until he retired in mid-50’s, practiced medicine in Rutherford, NJ. Famous stories: pulling over in his car on the way to a house call to write a poem on a prescription pad; typewriter in office on a swing-up table that he would bang into position to type poems between patients. One critic says that Williams wrote "prescription-pad sized poems”—not a description of length but a commentary on the relationship between art and life.]

"Spring and All" (2.836)

• Opening lines refer us to The Waste Land. What does Williams have to say
  about that poem?
  • Is the waste land here really dead?
  • As a view of poetry or culture, what's the difference between focusing on the dead things and focusing on new life?
    • Prose in Spring and All begins with evocation of killing everything off and recreating it exactly as it was before.
  • If this is in part a view of what the new poetry should be like, what kind of poetry is he calling for?
  • objects defined: aesthetic implied. Individuality, clarity, definition; dignity of being.
• Why is all this set on the road to the contagious hospital?

"A Sort of a Song" (2.839)

• this too is a poem in part about poetry. What's he calling for here?

BREAK

Another poet of the particular: Marianne Moore

We close out our thread on "American or European" with a poet who on the surface doesn't appear to fit there: she was not particularly concerned either with rejecting or affirming Americanness per se in her poetry. In part, I've chosen her as a transitional figure rather than as a representative or culminating figure (transitional between this thread and the one after next on women's poetry). But in part too she is very much a part of this thread, by virtue of being interested in the kinds of issues that the American/European quarrels were fought over.

Biographical details: at Bryn Mawr when H.D. was there; probably knew Pound, Williams then too. Once she began publishing, widely praised by poets such as Williams, Stevens, and Eliot, among others. Work not widely acknowledged by the public for many years, even after she won the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize and the Bollingen Prize after the publication of Collected Poems in 1951.

Worked at a variety of jobs in NYC: secretary, teacher, librarian (note that these are conventionally female jobs). A certain "librarian's temperament" in her poetry: neatly excised snippets of writings throughout her work (parts in quotation marks); wide range of references from all kinds of materials.

By 1960, although her work was still not widely read in schools, she was a well-known public figure: Life did a spread on her; famous as an "personality": prim, proper, spinsterish; appearing in her tri-cornered hat; fond of baseball, even asked to throw out the opening ball once for the Yankees. Asked by the Ford Motor Company to name their new car, she came up with a variety of peculiar names: the Utopian Turtletop, the Resilient Bullet, Mongoose Civique, Turcotingo. All her suggestions were turned down; eventually named the Edsel.

Serious points to all this:

• We've seen three distinct schools in modernist poetry: a school focused on form and order (Frost and Stevens); a school focused on the fragmentation of modern life and on reclaiming lost heritages (Pound, Eliot, H.D.); and a school focused on the particular and the concrete, on contact with the world (Williams). Moore is a poet of the particular, like Williams, but with a difference:
  • like Williams, values precision, objectivity, hardness and clearness.
    ▪ snakeskin "like rose petals"
    ▪ difficulty: "dislike connectives"
  • allusive, like Pound, H.D. and Eliot, but her allusions are not especially literary; factual information, letters, miscellaneous documents. Again, precision is the value. But not "contact" in a Williams sense; rather, learning from. Strict, even grim, sense of moral values, coupled with dry humor; values often embodied in animals. Fortitude, non-aggressiveness, precision, emotional reserve, the "genuine"
  • syllabic verse--common in French, very rare in English
    • poems for the eye, not the ear; lines impede the utterance. Yet the shape of the lines is certainly part of the point
  • In other words: she is a part of this debate, and yet distant from it; she borrows what she needs and leaves the rest without much explicit comment. One can see her as being more akin to Williams than to Eliot, but not for the same reasons.

"To a Snail" (2.856-857)

• what qualities do we normally associate with snails?
• why compression? (How does a snail move?)
• how is "contractility" analogous to modesty?
• what do we NOT value in style, according to lines 4-8?
• what does "the principle that is hid" mean, and why would we value it?
• the quote is probably from Henry Osborn Taylor's The Mediaeval Mind: A History of the Development of the Thought and Emotion in the Middle Ages. (You heard it here first.) Taylor is talking about the medieval theologian Duns Scotus. Taylor asks if Duns Scotus thinks that theology is a science, and answers, "Duns will not deny it; but thinks it more properlay be called a sapientia, since according to its nature, it is rather a knowledge of principles than a method of conclusions" (2.546). Moore apparently connects BOTH with the snail, and they presumably have something to do with the "principle that is hid"
  • what does the "absence of feet" (and which kind of feet) have to do a "method of conclusions"?
  • what does the "occipital horn" have to do with "a knowledge of principles"?
  • how do the two of them explain "the principle that is hid," if they do?
• What other poetry have we seen that values severe compression? is Moore commenting on Imagism in some way?

"Poetry" (2.855-856)

• What's "genuine"?
  • why do eyes dilate? why does hair raise? Why are these things "useful"? Then--if we're looking for "high-sounding interpretations," what would we THINK is the cause of these events?
  • if poetry is useful in the way that dilating eyes are useful, what is the relationship between poetry and nature, for Moore?
• So she praises the genuine, and presumably condemns what is "so derivative as to become / unintelligible"; what could she be referring to?
  • what does the colon suggest? But notice where it ends up: all these things are important. So what is derivative? And why would she need to insist that these are proper materials for poetry?
• what does it mean to be a "literalist of the imagination" ? What kind of poem would be an "imaginary [garden] with real toads in [it]"?
• Final claim: what is the "raw material of poetry" and what is "the genuine"?

Maps

• grades: sense of how best to grade evolved.
  • Started out putting letter grades next to the different criteria, but abandoned this very quickly--not very productive to get Fs on criteria you haven't attempted to meet because it's too early, and it's hard to make fine distinctions about the quality of work that is unfinished. So just ended up with +, -. +/-.
  • as promised, the numeric grades are holistic assessments of the draft as draft--how well things are coming along for this stage of the project. But by the end I found myself believing more and more that even these grades are fairly meaningless. Some people have very elaborate planning, but almost no detailed interpretations of poems; others have detailed commentary, but don't have a clear plan for the whole; some had to deal with logistical issues like figuring out the program they were using, while others just had to write. It's difficult to compare such work fairly. So I decided on the following. It would have felt like to much of a copout to simply not put grades on at all, so I did. But I would only count those grades as 20% of the total if it helps your overall map grade to do so: otherwise, I'll count your final grade on the map as 100% of the grade.
• overall: impressed by the creativity of the maps and your willingness to dive into such a huge project
• On "giving a sense of the whole": To some extent this means covering a lot of terrain--poems from all different eras, poets from different schools, and so on. But since that part of it is really covered by the "breadth" criterion, what this means even more is having some way to organize and/or characterize the whole so as to show an understanding of it. Where this gets complicated is that this criterion needs to be balanced against the next criterion about showing interconnections. A chronological or geographical ordering gives a good sense of the whole, but neither is very good at showing interconnections. On the other hand, tracing two or three themes through several poems gives a great sense of interconnections, but it doesn't necessarily give a good sense of the whole. Tracing a single theme through all 25 poems will show the interconnections AND give a good sense of the whole, but the danger there is that your approach will appear very narrow. Some ways to balance these:
  • Structure your map in such a way that there is more than one organization working at one time--your threads of ideas AND a chronology, for example.
  • Focus the map around a single theme, but have it be complex enough so that you can justify saying that it really is a central organizing principle of American poetry as a whole. If you do this, you're probably going to need a theme with multiple terms--e.g. a balance or struggle between X and Y.
• On breadth: This does mean numbers of poets, but not JUST numbers of poets: you should have poets from a wide range of time periods. And you should try to give some sense of who you take the most important poets to be. Most people did this pretty well for an early draft, but it's going to be a bigger issue in the final project. Try to make sure you have a good balance.
• On depth and detail and ability to interpret: let me try to say in a different way something I said in an earlier class. Ultimately, you're construcing a map of American poetry, not of American poets. Poets are of course relevant to poetry--so I do encourage you to talk about the poets, literary periods, or anything else that helps us understand American poetry. But a poem is essentially a structure of words that means something, that expresses an idea. So meanings and ideas ought to be of the highest importance in your map. There is of course a balancing act here as well: you don't have time to write twenty papers and organize them into a whole. But you should spend enough time on individual poems to be able to make support claims about meaning or ideas with evidence.
• On original elements: there are basically two ways to do this--and it's probably best to do some of both . The first is simply to include some poems or poets that we have not talked about. You wouldn't want the majority of the poets you write about to be of this type, because you have limited time, but it wouldn't hurt to put in a couple. The second way is to offer an organization of the material that is significantly different from what we've done in this class--e.g. tracing a thread of ideas that we haven't gotten to. I don't expect it ALL to be original--that would be unreasonable. But try to make sure that there is something of your own in your overall view.
  BTW--if you write about poems that are not in our anthology, please make sure that I have copies of them. Ask first.
• On Works Cited: do have one. But save yourself time. Cite both volumes, then cross-reference. E.g. Moore, Marianne. "To a Snail." Baym 2.856-857.