Overview of Main Poets to be Read This Semester

EUGENIO MONTALE

Background

-generally influenced by Dante, Leopardi (19th c Romantic poet) and D’Annunzio (though D. was more hedonistic; also later by Eliot and Pound

-throughout his poetry a sense of enclosures--physically by images walls, rooms; or more generally political or social movements; and even metaphysically and ethically various issues about how to define the self; a general sense of an enclosed life, a life lived in a sort of limbo-- the poetry being a means to try to find windows or doors out of these enclosures

-born in Genoa, he spent a lot of time on the Cinque terre, a rocky, cliff coastline south of Genoa, fairly cut off from the land and facing the sea-- the images from this place dominate his earlier poetry but also persist through THE STORM

-ambiguity, uncertainty, the tenuousness of life, of knowledge, of solutions: many of the poems end without a neat closure

CUTTLEFISH BONES (1925)

“I obeyed a need for musical expression....It seemed to me that i lived under a glass bell, and yet I felt myself close to something essential..... Absolute expression would have been the breaking of that bell.” (by “musical expression” he meant a harmony with the world around him)

He was attempting to name the world of the Cinque terre with as much accuracy as possible; though influenced by Dante La Vita Nuova his sense of the world here is more immanent rather than transcendent. By naming he felt he might escape, yet he felt all knowledge was highly provisional, and so many poems end with objects, images and not conclusions. At the same time there is a desire to find an identity in discovering others and the reality of objects. He sees himself in a kind of wasteland that he tries to pass through, and his style here is diaristic and fragmentary.

Structure:

In Limine: an overture of main themes

Movements: early poems, shorter, focus on things: epiphanies vs discord

Cuttlefish Bones: poems of relics and remainders, awareness of limits leading to wry acceptance-- poems explore potential escape from enclosures-- potential wardings off of evil, scattered, singular effects

Mediterranean: suite of 9 poems--the sea’s lesson as vastness, openness, power--questions of whether the self is worthy to receive this power--one way is to merge by drowning-- ends with resigned memory of sea and a return to walls

Noons and Shadows: continues, in larger poems the same struggle (“House by the Sea” with its resignation vs “the more positive “Riviera”-- some dramatic monologues are attempts to explore the self by escaping the self-- attempts in these longer poems to be less scattered--

(See “Meriggiare “Palladio....” in “Cuttlefish Bones” section)

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OCCASIONS (1939)

-Portraits (influence of Browning, Pound); more metaphysical poems in this volume, movement away from the object per se-- the poems are more personal, admit more autobiography as the book progresses--

-Preoccupation with individual’s attempt to maintain psychic balance in a world veering out of control mid 30’s-- a sort of Dantesque movement through vision, conversion and epiphany-- the poems move from one to another in a more thematically tied way than the previous book

-The poems often trail away, hinting at some evasive presence, some knowledge through what is not said--according to Montale “it eliminated some of the impurities and made an assault on that barrier between the external and internal....a product that would contain its sources without revealing them, or better, without stating them flat out....”in Cuttlefish Bones everything was attracted and absorbed by the fermenting sea; later I saw that the sea was everywhere, for me, and that the classic architecture of the Tuscan hills was also in itself movement and flight.”

-The voice is harsher and richer, more ironic; the attempt is to express the inexpressible-- what early critics called “hermetic”

Structure:

The Balcony-- overture: dark room of the mind, possible renewal through love

Occasions- poems based on particular memories

Mottetti-love poems to the distant lady-- a kind of Hell where he struggles to decipher signs of her through “screen images”-- moves from anguished separation to resigned acceptance of separation-- ends with poet among his souvenirs-- this section heavily influenced by Petrarch

Part III “Times at Bellosguardo” -- a vantage point above Florence-- a sense of a larger vista and hope for more inclusive vision to escape enclosures

Part IV Increasingly apocalyptic, ends with poem from Mont Amiata, another vantage point, but far more pessimistic than “Times at Bellosguardo”

The woman, Clizia (name comes from Ovid’s Metamorphosis 4.234-70, daughter of ocean transformed by love of Apollo into flower--note flower images throughout)-- influence of Dante’s donna putters and Petrarch’s Laura-- unattainable women who serve as an ideal-- she is like an angel-- she stands as a visionary image of freedom and escape from the political turmoil and despair of the 30’s

A good example to start with is “Vecchi Versi”

THE STORM AND OTHER THINGS (1956,1957)

-More allegorical than the two previous books, Clizia now dominates the book with most poems being love poems at heart-- she is elusive, uncontainable, constantly receding before the poet’s grasp, yet always present to the imagination, a sign of a covenant, a rainbow linking earth and heaven, a redeemer and muse

-the images are constantly shifting, and the division between the physical and metaphysical, body and soul, matter and spirit, is constantly shifting--the images constantly radiate out into clusters of images-- and the style mixes a high resonant style with a colloquial and conversational style--

-There is a quality of "iridesence" about the images and themes, about the presence of Clizia, and the poet projects a more “transcendental I”

-Finally, though, he refuses the Hegelian idea that opposites can be resolved and unified on this higher level-- the world of WWI and the disappointing rise of materialism and commercialism after it shows to the poet a world fully out of balance

-“La Bufera e Altro”-- altro is really untranslatable for it can mean others, more, other things, a kind of metaphysical otherness

Structure:

Finnisterre (1943 chapbook) seen as appendix to Occasions at first-- the woman as a possible solution, hope vs the fascists--after this section the book gets more and more personal almost as if trying to build a private counter world to the horrors he sees around him

Afterward- disappointed at loss of balance and vision

Intermezzo- a waking dream state vs actuality-- a false escape

Flashes and Dedications (flashes of camera-- momentary illuminations)-- attempts by the poet to become pure song, to be identified with the poems themselves, beyond the world

Silvae--in Italian tradition these are poems that originate in extemporaneous methods, then are worked on to be more polished but maintain the extemporaneous mode-- ie-- more “artful” than previous “flashes”

Private Madrigals- the woman as Vixen-- very personal and coded poems that are constantly shifting moods

Provisional Conclusions-- deal with a real world that is also a general existential condition-- for example, The prisoner is political but also ethical-- “provisional” is as close as Montale allows himself in the way of any conclusion

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Later (1970), he will write a book called Satura in which he gives up on any attempts at metaphysical solutions and becomes more casual, humorous, and sometimes satiric-- it perhaps signals a loss of ideals, and a more public posture than the end of The Storm. We will look at a few xeroxed poems from this book near the end of the semester.

JAMES WRIGHT, Above the River

Early Poems:

The Green Wall(1957) and St Judas (1959): poems in forms, stanzas, mostly descriptive narratives-- poems about the downtrodden-- influence of Hardy, Frost, Robinson, and Dickens (subject of his PhD)--the poems were unusual at thed time mostly for their content and only hint at the great poems of the last period for they are bound here by a very conservative and plain style, though one that starts to suggest complex relationships of perspective that later will open up into the more free wheeling poems--

Middle Period:

The Branch Will Not Break (1963) and Shall We Gather At The River (1968) and New Poems (1971) show the influence of translations from Neruda, from Chinese poetry, eastern European poetry-- poems of what was called the “deep image” movement-- forms are shorter, more evocative, focus on the resonance of everyday events-- see “A Blessing”-- the poems here are intense and focused, usually on a stilled, snapshot like scene with a gesture towards the transcendent

Later Period:

Two Citizens (1973), Prose poems from European journeys, To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977) and This Journey (1982) show influence of Horace and the more meditative Frost and Wordsworth, but also the sort of luminous sense of the image narrative one finds in Pavese and poets like Trakl-- these poems are blends of political and personal, cosmic and private, and there is a more irony than in any of the previous poems; the poems are more open in form, more conversational, more meditative, and probably show the influence also of Rilke, especially the Duino Elegies in their sense of a vision made of ordinary experiences-- see “The Journey”

RILKE, Selected Poems

One of the greatest poets of the 20th century, perhaps of all time, Rilke was the quintessential poet, a poet who seemed to breathe poetry. His novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, are a portrait of the poet as one who tries to sense and feel everything as if he saw it for the first and last time, a life almosty too intense to live-- like the poet narrator of his poems, like himself-- some of these ideas are sketched out in his Letters to a Young Poet and his numerous other letters and essays. His poems in French are more obeject oriented, like Montale’s early poems, and not at all metaphysical.

Images (Pictures), New Poems, religious sequences: these poems explore in a detailed and particular way the relationship between the seer and the world that is seen, perspectives-- often with ironic turns—

Duino Elegies: these 10 poems begin with the poet metaphysically lost on a cliffside castle wall wondering if there is any Being that will listen to him, to mankind, in the cosmos, then goes on to define his position in that cosmos and fianlly man’s position in relation to God but a sort of secular or philosophic God-- for Rilke we are all poets in that we create visions of the world to live by--the question is how much of the world that we see to we create, and what part do we perceive and then create from? a question Wordsworth first asked in poetry.

Sonnets to Orpheus: these poems continue the Duino Elegies in their quest to find the individual’s place in the cosmos, but here more rambling-- that is, they range over a wider territory as a whole, though each individual poem explores different aspects of our relation to the world-- they are sonnets to the poet, to death, to time-- and their ultimate aim is to find some way to transcend time, transcend the physical world--

CESARE PAVESE

After Hard Labor, with its intricate poems that combine and integrate the physical and the spiritual, the personal; and the public, Pavese spent the forties writing more sparse and despairing poems, and novels about characters who could never find themselves or who are radically detached from some society. We will look at some selected translations by xerox copies as the semester goes on, perhaps one a week. Pavese is important for his ironically beautiful poems about despairing subjects, and for his notion of the “image narrative” which is a major contribution to the way we think of poems as the product of a crafted language. Not concerned with metaphysical or cosmic themes, his work can best be described through example:

The structure of the images, as a sort of undercurrent, provide by their metamorphoses and blendings one into the other, a story in its own right, and for the poet, the main story of the poem rather than the ostensible subject. It all comes back to language and style. In his poem "Summer," for instance, an entire poetic world is gradually constructed out of and parallel to the real world -- which is in a sense Pavese's way of solving young Werther's problem of the way reality destroys our visions, but tragically Pavese too committed suicide in Turin a few decades ago. Here is the poem:

A garden between low walls, bright,

made of dry grass and a light that slowly bakes

the ground below. The light smells of sea.

You breathe that grass. You touch your hair

and shake out the memory of grass.

I have seen ripe

fruit dropping thickly on remembered grass with a soft

thudding. So too the pulsing of the blood

surprises even you. You move your head

as though a miracle of air had happened around you,

and the miracle is you. Your eyes have a savor

like the heat of memory.

You listen.

You listen to the words, but they barely graze you.

Your face has a radiance of thought that shines

around your shoulders, like light from the sea. The silence

in your face touches the heart with a soft

thud, exuding drop by drop,

like fruit that fell here years ago,

an old pain, still.

The images of brightness and light become associated with smells -- "The light smells of sea" he says at one early point-- and then the smell is associated with memory, with the woman and her hair, with grass that moves like a sea, with the thud of apples of the grass, which in turn leads to the pulse of the blood. Then for a moment the poet circles back to the air that is filled with light and smell, sees it circling the woman whose eyes -- we are back with the image of light now--"have a savor / like the heat of memory," savor bringing us back to taste and smell. Everything is quiet, the words become like the fruit-- "they barely graze you." The woman's face reflects the sea that was the dominant smell of the opening, and now the silent heart becomes the thud, and the thud drops like the fruit of years ago, like memory. In the end, to say any one image is to evoke the others, so integrated is the poem. In the original the last line is even more intensely ironic and emphasizes the blending of images more: "an old pain / like the sweetness of fruit that fell back then."

NOTE WHAT HE HAS DONE HERE; GIVEN TOPICS A, B AND C HE USES THE LANGUAGE OF ONE TO TALK ABOUT THE OTHER. SO IF HE TALKS ABOUT A, SAY, APPLES, HE WRITES ABOUT THEM IN TERMS OF WORDS WE USUALLY USE FOR ORANGES, B, AND THEN WHEN HE GETS TO ORANGES AS A SUBJECT, HE USES THE LANGUAGE OF APPLES, A AND CUCUMBERS, C TO DESCRIBE ORANGES-- THAT WAY THE LANGUAGES-- LANGUAGES-- OF EACH BEGIN TO REDEFINE WHAT EACH IS-- THERE WE HAVE METAMORPHOSIS AND TRANSPORT-- WE ARE TAKEN TO NEW WAYS OF SEEING AND FEELING-- THIS IS SOMETHING YOU CAN DO VERY EASILY IN YOUR OWN POEMS JUST BY A FEW WORD SUBSTITUTIONS AND CROSSOVERS.

What the image story creates is similar to what painters like Caravaggio and Tintoretto for whom the main subject is not the surface, editorial subject, but the artistic putting together of the language and gestures of the poem. For Pavese a poem would never be about abuse, or a death or lost love or whatever, but about he language and images that structure the experience: in a poem, the language and art come first. Think even of Dante who in his La Vita Nuova describes his spiritual love for Beatrice. Most of the time when those poems are presented they are taken out of the book whose prose memoirs of the poems that are interspersed between each poem describe the artistry, usually the structure of each piece: we miss Dante's emphasis not on the love, the subject, but on the art, the technique. This is something most novice poets, in their drive to say the really important and sensitive things they think must be said, seem nearly always to miss.