The
death of the poet W.S. Merwin last week caused me to think about matters that I
haven't recalled in a long time. I felt bad, of course, that an important voice
in a form of human expression I love has gone quiet, just as if a star blinked
out in the firmament. Yes, there are other stars... but, still.
My first response to news of his
death -- and the full page, beautifully researched and written obituary the New
York Times published last Saturday, March 16 -- was regret that I had failed to
find my way to his poetry in recent years. And that, in fact, I would have to
go back a long way back in the storehouse of memory to summon recollections of encounters with someone so widely acknowledged as a force in American
poetry.
But this was not my only slight.
That storehouse librarian of the past, unreliable as he no doubt is, also
revealed empty shelves where the books of other important poets should be. And certainly
could be.
We are losing their witness. The
poets who saw the last World War, and the years of recovery from it, are dying off. We know that American WWII veterans -- my father among them -- are now largely gone, so this expanding
vacuum should not be news to anyone (even me).
But when I read about the poets that
Merwin knew personally, studied under, or otherwise encountered, I came across much of the roster of the American and English poets whose works I read in the late
sixties and seventies. Back when I began quietly, mostly privately,
auditioning for the role of poet.
To start with, Merwin (as I read in
www.poets.org) was born in 1927, which means he was only 18 when World War II
ended. He was not of an age of those called upon to serve in the military for
that war, but those whose adolescence fell under its shadow. (My father, for
comparison, was 21 when he enlisted in 1942.)
According to poets.org, Merwin was
part of a poetry hot spot at Princeton University, where he arrived
just at the war's end and studied under the influential critic R.P. Blackmur,
one of the major lights in the school of thought known as New Criticism. That was
still the fashion in my college years and was explained to me as restricting
criticism's role to a "close reading" of poetic texts while avoiding
biography or other other concerns -- perhaps, it occurs to me now, as a way to avoid the ideological struggles of the earlier decades of the 20th century, when Marxism,
social realism, and reactions such as McCarthyism, were the lenses through which
literature was often regarded.
In view of the return to the ideological approach of "critical studies" criticism in recent decades, a destructive academic fashion in my view, maybe
the 'new critics' were on to something.
I discovered in the same source that
Blackmur's teaching assistant at Princeton was John Berryman. There's a name I can recall with enthusiasm. I loved Berryman's "Dream Songs," some of them new
published when I read them. I was fascinated by the device of filtering the poet's own thoughts and experiences through an invented poor schmuck of a character
("Henry") to achieve the detachment perhaps necessary to write lines
such as:
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
so heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more; & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Third-person
indirect is a common technique in writing fiction, but using it in verse seemed
to me to deliver an extra power, abetted of course by Berryman's powerful, funky
voice (as in "in all them time").
Young, impossibly talented, tragically destined: we read her
cries and whispers and asked how can we live in a world where nobody stepped in
to save Sylvia Plath?
I could not wait to try this out on my own, though I don't remember
if I did. Frankly just reading these lines, and the following two to end the
stanza -- "Starts again always in Henry’s ears/ the little cough
somewhere, an odour, a chime." -- makes me want to go there again.
Merwin's career then crosses other
intriguing paths. At Princeton he was a classmate of Galway Kinnell, another
highly regarded poet in that 'just-after' world war generation, whose Selected
Poems (1980) won both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Kinnell, who died
in 1984, is another poet on my guilt list; I've never read him except
for accidental crossings in a publication.
Some time after graduating from
college, publishing his first book, and winning a major prize, Merwin was
awarded a fellowship that brought him to Cambridge, Mass. Living in Boston, the
source tells us, "he entered the circle of writers that surrounded Robert Lowell
and decided to concentrate on poetry."
When it comes to postwar American
poets, Lowell has always been the leader in the clubhouse. He's the only poet
of this generation whose work I came across in an "American Studies" course.
Poems from "Life Studies" and "For the Union Dead"
provided my first experience of a contemporary voice on contemporary issues, including
the poet's own 'problems.'
World War II is both subject and
experience for this poet, who became a conscientious objector because of the
war and spent time in jail for draft refusal. Lowell's first 'major poem' was an elegy
for the death of his cousin, who enlisted and drowned in the North Atlantic
after his ship was targeted and sunk by the enemy. "The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket" draws on the tradition of 'elegy' in English
poetry, but then expands it by alluding not to classical elegies (as Milton and Shelley did) but to
classic American texts.
Poet Robert Haas (in "A Little Book on Form") points out that Lowell echoed
lines and imagery from Thoreau's book "Cape Cod." Thoreau was
describing his search for remains and personal effects from the wreck of a
ship from Galway, Ireland, carrying many immigrants and some Americans (including Margaret Fuller):
"I
saw many marble feet and matted heads as the clothes were raised, and one
livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl..."
Lowell wrote: "Flushed from his
matted head and marble feet..."
Merwin and his first wife left
then Boston for Europe and lived in London where they encountered --
who else but Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes? Plath, born in 1932 and still a child
in Depression America when the world war began, was already dead when late sixties
young people discovered her work. In my experience, she was the only
poet read by non-English majors. She was on the top of my list for
'contemporary' poets in those days because of the linguistic intensity of her confrontations with her own experience; that sense of shouting in the dark that we all sometimes feel, perhaps particularly when young.
Young, impossibly talented, tragically destined -- we read the poet's cries and whispers and asked how can we live in a world where no one stepped in to save Sylvia Plath.
Hughes, born in 1930, was a highly
regarded postwar poet in England. Though I tried to admire the poems in his
book "Crow," Hughes never really moved the needle for me. I have read
recently that in postwar England only three poets mattered: Phillip Larkin,
Hughes, and Thom Gunn. My attempts at reading Gunn, born in 1939 and apparently
regarded as an 'anti-establishment' working class voice, left me wondering what
the fuss was about. Possibly, his 'outsider' stance paled in comparison to the
vitality of the American protest and social criticism poetry of Ginsberg and
the other Beats, that fed other voices of the Sixties.
Phillip Larkin, in contrast, is
exactly the other kind of poet, so rigorous and exacting that his poems appear
at times to hover right on the edge between brilliant and precious. Yet Larkin
is famous in the macro-culture for a single Sixties-sounding line: "They
fuck you up, your mum and dad.."
I'll
get out the way here and allow two of Merwin's poems ("Thanks," and
"Yesterday") to speak for themselves:
Thanks
Listen
with
the night falling we are saying thank you
we
are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we
are running out of the glass rooms
with
our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and
say thank you
we
are standing by the water thanking it
standing
by the windows looking out
in
our directions
back
from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after
funerals we are saying thank you
after
the news of the dead
whether
or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over
telephones we are saying thank you
in
doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering
wars and the police at the door
and
the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in
the banks we are saying thank you
in
the faces of the officials and the rich
and
of all who will never change
we
go on saying thank you thank you
with
the animals dying around us
our
lost feelings we are saying thank you
with
the forests falling faster than the minutes
of
our lives we are saying thank you
with
the words going out like cells of a brain
with
the cities growing over us
we
are saying thank you faster and faster
with
nobody listening we are saying thank you
we
are saying thank you and waving
dark
though it is
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand I say yes I understand
he says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I know
even when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yes
he says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my father
he says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give me
oh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father’s hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with me
oh yes I say
but if you are busy he said
I don't want you to feel that you
have to
just because I'm here
I say nothing
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don’t want to keep you
I look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you know
though there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to do
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