DANCING AS IF FREE:
READING, IMITATION AND INFLUENCE
Richard Jackson
UT-Chattanooga
He ate and drank the precious Words --
His Spirit grew robust--
-Emily Dickinson, # 1587
"Bad poets imitate; good poets steal."
-T.S. Eliot
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
-Ezra Pound, on Whitman
In a letter from 1928, the great Italian poet, Cesare Pavese, writes:"You have to
create a world of books for yourself, a world of poetry written by people who have
lived their lives in much the same way as we do our own, people who we remember because
they possessed the power to leave behind them books of immeasurable value. We need to
love their spirit, talk about their idea, dream their dreams, and so create our own
spirit on the poetic foundations they have already laid for us, making our own ideas
by discussing theirs, hoping our own dreams, our desires, will be finally worthy of theirs"
(my translation). Indeed, his letters are filled with discussions of books, sometimes
lists of what he's been reading. In October of 1926, for example, he mentions the Italian medieval writers Berni and Boiardo, also Hugo, Goethe, Carlisle, Leviticus,
Herder, a vocabulary book, Othello, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Horace, the medieval
Ossian and The Decameron. He is always asking friends for new books to consume
in these letters, particularly a few years later when the Fascists put him under house
arrest.
I think I first understood the power of reading when I sat, in the Fall of 1966, in
the Andover Public library, discovering the poems of Randall Jarrell, especially
"The Girl in The Library," only to look up and see the kind of vision he saw sitting
a few tables over. What power, I thought, words have, and I was hooked. Despite later failings.
For after that episode followed my imitations of Dylan Thomas, worse than one could
ever imagine, horrific word and syllable splitting that would have shamed even the e.e. Cummings I stole that method from, rantings to make Corso blush, folksy pastorals
that would have sent Frost into a rage, and later, by the time I was a senior in
college, images so deep no mind could ever retrieve them, not even the Merwin I
stole that idea from. Seeing no luck in that, after a while I turned to reading only short
stories and trying to duplicate the sentence flow of writers like Faulkner and Welty.
But even through it all, I knew somehow, that each failing was also a good lesson,
because I did after all learn the passion in Thomas, the attention to detail in Cummings,
the rhetorical skills of Corso, the structures of Frost and Jarrell, the evocative
power of Merwin's The Lice.
And that allowed me, later, to appreciate a poet like James Wright who I still believe
to be a the major influence and love of my reading and writing life.
When I escaped college the first poet who looked at my work was Miller Williams who
suggested that perhaps Merwin had been too strong and influence and that I might
try reading a poet who put some other words between the images--Wilfred Owen being
a prime example, and William Meredith, who became an early and important mentor and himself
introduced me to the work of Berryman and Bishop and a host of other writers. In
a way all my early mentors were walking libraries that helped me create the kind
of world Pavese describes. My only poetry workshop was with Robert Pack in a class where we
spent most of the time talking about "real" poems we should try to measure up to
rather than our own quite limited visions. It's a method and an attitude that has
influenced me ever since. Pack kept pushing Stevens, Williams and Shakespeare, and my love at
that time, Keats.
Keats was certainly a poet who found friends in books, especially as he suggests in
his "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer"-
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep browed Homer ruled in his demesne;
yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagles eyes
He stared at the Pacific -- and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise --
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
What an amazing poem! Look at how it moves from a sort of vague myth set in "realms
of gold" the poets have created in their pastoral poems, through the poetry of Homer
he read translated by Chapman and into history, reality. It is a poem about reading,
how it leads us back to the real world, to ourselves, and allows in that historical
world a new discovery, a new vision, a kind of oxymoronic wild surmise that is the
poem itself. The sonnet in moving from pastoral to literary to historical worlds
encompasses indeed as much as the epic does, transforms the epic vision into a lyrical one.
Reading the classics, of course, can be not only an entire pleasure in itself, but
an important influence. Unfortunately, most of the reading that students do today
is of poems from the past 10 or 20 years. I can't count how many times I have visited
a writing program where the students don't know who Wyatt is, or Sydney, even Pope, or
if they have heard of them, can't really say anuything about them. How few can describe
Milton's pentameter, especially as it melts so often back into an Old English-based
four beat line. And how few realize that the Miltonic line is the basis for their own
poetry whether they write formal or free verse, for today's poetry wortks within
or against that masterful presence. Or take the influence of Horace:one can trace
the odes through Pope's "Moral Essays" (Horatian poems that make use of a sense of order in
nature) through Hardy's poems (which see nature as a disorder) down through james
Wright's last three books. On the other hand, if we start with the satire's we can
see them reemerge in Pope's satiric poems, Byron's "Beppo" and "Don Juan" and into a contemporary
like William Matthews. Not to understand this lineage is not only to fail to really
understand the poetry of Wright and Matthews, but more, to fail to see what possibilities we ourselves might make out of a lineage of our own making. Matthews and Wright
saw possibilities in Horace, or rather they made their own Horace, and their are
certainly other Horace's to be made. So I think I want to emphasize these older poets
here, and, true to my belief, quote a lot of opinions of others that I have taken to
heart over the years as both teacher and poet.
I suppose that's why in every undergraduate workshop I teach there is a reading list
that varies from semester to semester. One time we focused on forms; another on the
way the careers of Montale, Pavese and Wright developed; another time on classic
poems. In that last class, for example, we looked at the poems of Pindar, Sappho and Kallimachus
to see how the ode, the lyric and the satiric epigram developed, and then followed
that up with poems by Horace to see how all three modes merged, and then the self
conscious irony in Ovid, the savage satire in Juvenal and martial, the complex and
contradictory visions of Propertius and Catullus, and finally glanced at how Dante
and Petrarch revisited some of these issues in their shorter poems. In another workshop
we looked at poems by the epic writers Homer, Virgil, Lucian, Dante, Ovid, then Milton
and Chaucer in order to see different ways narrative might be constructed. In every
one of these cases we spent more time talking about these poems we were reading than
the poems we were writing. Of course there were imitations galore, some better and some
worse than the ones I had done in college, but then their own poems also grew in
resonance, maturity. They tried on a number of voices and their own voices grew with
each attempt, borrowing a technique here, an idea there, then transforming it into their
own. The more they read the deeper and richer their poems became, and over the past
20 years now, every one of them that has chosen to go on to graduate study has received at least one major fellowship, and this has led to several books and a couple of
dozen chap books.
And of course I was doing the same thing, being particularly enthralled by the discontinuous
and surreal elements in Ovid's Metamorphoses
and the sudden leaps in Petrarch's Rime, a study that lead to a book of poems based
on Petrarch, Half Lives.
John Ashbery describes a similar situation in Other Traditions
:"In addition to the poets one has at times been influenced by, there is also a much
smaller group whom one reads habitually in order to get started; a poetic jump start
for times when the batteries run down." He goes on the mention the major poets Holderlin, Auden, Moore, Stein, Bishop, Stevens, Williams, Pasternak and Mandelstam, but
chooses to write about five lesser known writers, his "other tradition" of writers
who have helped him at one time or another:Clare, Beddoes, Roussel, Wheelwright,
Riding and David Schubert. The group is decidedly, as he says, a "mixed bag" and all the better--
a kind of cross fertilization takes place in such circumstances. "Without contraries
is no progression," wrote Blake. As Charles Simic says in A Fly In The Soup:"I liked so many different kinds of poetry. One month I was a disciple of Hart Crane; the
next month only Walt Whitman existed for me." Simic goes on to say:"I am only mildly
exaggerating when I say that I couldn't take a piss without a book in my hand. I
read to fall asleep and to wake up. I read everything from Plato to Mickey Spillane. Even
in my open coffin, some day, I should be holding a book. The Tibetan Book of the
Dead would be most appropriate, but I'd prefer a sex manual or the poems of Emily
Dickinson." One only has to look at the poems of Yugoslav poet Vasko Popa to see the profound
and lasting influence that he has had on Simic himself whose object and mythic poems
rely on but also transform the work of Popa.
I remember William Matthews looking at a review of his work that described him as
urbane and witty and ironic, and how "purely" original all this seemed to the reviewer,
an appraisal which made Matthews lament that the reviewer simply had not read Horace.
And of course Horace has been a major influence on a lot of poets. Indeed the late
William Matthews has an entire essay, "Horatian Hecht," devoted to showing how the
spirit of Horace is re-created in a new fashion in Anthony Hecht's poems. James Wright,
probably the major American poet in the last half of the 20th century, in his "Prayer
to the Good Poet" calls Horace his good secret, contrasting and comparing him to
his own father, to his neighborhood friends-- in other words absorbing Horace and
his vision into his own life. At the end of the poem he can exclaim:
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, my good father,
You were just the beginning, you quick and lonely
Metrical crystals of February.
Of course, all these poets we might read, steal from, adopt, translate, or imitate
in one way or another, are "just the beginning." In the end, as Roethke said, all
that matters is if it is that a good poem results.
A more conscious form of influence that I have been suggesting here is "imitation."
Theodore Roethke writes in "How To Write Like Somebody Else:"Imitation, conscious
imitation, is one of the great methods, perhaps the method of learning to write.
The ancients, the Elizabethans, knew this, profited by it, and were not disturbed. As a son
of Ben [Jonson], Herrick more than once rewrote Jonson, who, in turn, drew heavily
on the classics. And so on. The poems are not less good for this:the final triumph
is what the language does, not what the poet can do, or display." Indeed, poets through the
ages have learned to write by imitation, from Catullus adaptations of Kallimachus,
Virgil's imitation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in the two halves of his Aeneid,
Horace's borrowings from Lucilius, Petrarch's use of Dante and Cino di Pistoia, Wyatt and
Surrey's use of Petrarch, and so on. Pope in fact said he turned to imitation to
tighten his own verse and to find a voice to say things he was not ready to speak
in his own voice. Petrarch, an early champion of learning from the past, writes in a letter
to his friend Boccaccio:"An imitator must see to it that what he writes is similar,
but not the very same; and the similarity, moreover, should not be like that of a
painting or statue to the person represented, but rather like that of a son to a father,
where there is often great difference in the features and members, yet after all
there is a shadowy something-- akin to what the painters call one's air--hovering
about the face, and especially the eyes, out of which there grows a likeness.... [W]e writers,
too, must see to it that along with the similarity there is a large measure of dissimilarity;
and furthermore such likeness as there is must be elusive, something that it is impossible to seize except by a sort of still-hunt, a quality to be felt rather
than defined.... It may all be summed up by saying with Seneca, and with Flaccus
[Horace] before him, that we must write just as the bees make honey, not keeping
the flowers but turning them into a sweetness of our own, blending many different flavors into
one, which shall be unlike them all, and better." Imitation, in other words, is creation:just
taking a glance at what Samuel Johnson does to Juvenal in his "Vanity of Human Wishes" or what Frost does with Virgil's Georgics in his North of Boston the
Greek Anthology in A Witness Tree
ought to show us how one can learn from the past and still be original. Curiously,
Frost gave a January 1916 lecture called "The discipline of the Classics and the
Writing of English" which extolled imitation. One can see how James Wright's middle
poems were influenced by his reading of Lorca, Jiminez, Neruda and various imagistic
poems from China and Japan. In fact, a glance at W.S. Merwin's poems in The Lice
and the translations he was doing at that time show an incredible similarity of the
type Petrarch describes. Of course, sometimes imitation is very close to the original:in
fact, one translation of Merwin's , "The Creation of the Moon" derived from a South American Indian tale is almost rendered step by step in in The Lice
but with a different ostensible subject.
Even more loosely, we can see a number of influences:Kunitz, Horace and Robinson
on James Wright; Greek and Roman epigrams on Linda Gregg and Jack Gilbert; Vallejo,
Rimbaud and the beats on Tomaz Salamun. Longinus, the Roman critic wrote:"Emulation
will bring those great characters before our eyes, and like guiding stars they will lead
our thoughts to the ideal standard of perfection." Perhaps one of the greatest examples
is the way Petrarch borrows the idea of creating an evolving self in a sequence of
poems from Horace's Odes and his sense of how to address the reader from Cicero's letters.
Ultimately the point here is that poets learn to advance their craft by reading other
poets from other ages and other cultures, adapting impulses, lines, forms and ideas to their own times. Not to read, not to "emulate," is to isolate one's art, to
leave it static.
So how exactly do we allow influences, even consciously imitate, without becoming
slavish? Ezra Pound's early essay (he later naively supported Mussolini and the gang
that terrorized Pavese), "How To Head," describes three aspects of the language
of poetry:melopoeia, its music; phanopoeia, the imagistic quality; and logopoeia, "the dance
of the intellect among words." The first two are surface readings. As Theodore Roethke
notes in "How To Write Like Someone Else," imitation is not of the surface:for some young poets, he says, "any alliteration, any compounding, any enthusiasm before nature
equals Hopkins; any concern with man in society or the use of two 'definite' articles
in a row is 'Audenesque'; any associational shifting or developing a theme alternately, as in music, is Eliot; sexual imagery or dense language structure, Thomas; and
so on." What Roethle would have us do is "take what you will with authority and see
that you give it another, or even better life, in the new context." Similarly, what
Octavio Paz says about translation holds just as well for imitation and influence by
reading:"After all, poetry is not merely the text. The text produces the poem:a sense
of sensations and meanings....With different means, but playing a similar role, you
can produce similar results. I say similar, but not identical:translation is an art of
analogy, the art of finding correspondences. An art of shadows and echoes....of producing,
with a different text, a poem similar to the original." Thus as he says, "poetry is what gets transformed." What Paz is talking about is transforming the unsayable,
as Rilke calls it in his 9th elegy, or what Pound called "logopoeia," into one's
own vision.
Earlier, Ben Jonson had defined imitation in his Timber as merely a poem loosely
based on another poem. Dryden in his "Preface" to his translation of Ovid, then
defined three kinds of relationship a poet could have to a prior text. "Metaphrase"
for Dryden was a slavish, "word by word" account. "Paraphrase" was a "translation with latitude"
that kept the original meaning but often with "amplification." "Imitation, " on the
other hand, meant, for Dryden, a process where the "translator (if now he has not
lost that name) assumes the liberty, not only to vary words and sense, but to forsake
them both as he sees occasion; and taking only some general hints from the original,
to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases." This is precisely the sort of
thing Robert Lowell does in his Imitations from various poets, and what Pound does in
his "Homage to Sextus Propertius,' a sequence of loosely translated lines rearranged
into a sequence of totally new poems. And it is related to what Stephen Berg does
in gathering images, tones and lines from Anna Akhmatova in his With Akhmatova at the Gate
. Dana Gioia has written an essay describing how Donald Justice makes use of various
lines, poems and forms of previous poets in over a fourth of his own poems.
In some ways the poem enacts what T.S. Eliot meant by balancing tradition and the
individual talent in his essay by that title. And Eliot's Essay "What Dante Means
to Me" provides an excellent description of the depth of vision that is transmitted
from one author to another:"the greatest debts are not always the most evident; at least,
there are different kinds of debt. The kind of debt I owe to Dante is the kind which
goes on accumulating...." He cites for example, "width of emotional range," and "that
the poet should be the servant of his language, not the master of it." He finds in
Dante "a constant reminder to the poet, of the obligation to explore, to find words
for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel,
because they have no words for them; and at the same time, a reminder that the explorer beyond
the frontiers of ordinary consciousness will only be able to return and report to
his fellow citizens, if he has all the time a firm grasp upon the realities with
which they are acquainted." One could add Robert Lowell's essay on Dante's influence,
in increasing degrees, on Pound, Eliot and Browning and the Romantics. The practical
view of this is given by Robert Pack in the introduction to Touchstones, an immensely valuable anthology of contemporary poets writing on poems that have influenced them,
notes "how poets necessarily feed on earlier poets, and how they inevitably attempt
to redefine the tradition to make room for the poems of the kind they would like
to write." Of course, a critic like Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence
has fully schematized such a process where the stronger poet "swerves" away from
his or her master until it seems the master is but the imitator of the later poet!
But isn't this the point? Here's Roethke on how he imitated Leonie Adams:"I was too
clumsy and stupid to articulate my own emotions:she helped me to say something about the
external world, helped me convince myself that maybe, if I kept at it, eventually
I might write a poem of my own, with the accent of my own speech." And who now reads
more Adams than Roethke:indeed, it almost seems as if Roethke was her influence!
There are numerous examples to cite here-- and I am of course self consciously putting
this piece together as a patchwork of quotes that I myself have found influential
about influence. For example, Joseph Brodsky writes in his essay "In the Shadow of
Dante" that "ghosts of the great are especially visible in poetry, since their words
are less mutable than the concepts they represent. A significant part, therefore,
of every poet's endeavor involves polemics with these shadows whose hot or cold breath
he senses on his neck." The essay is actually on the great poet Eugenio Montale and how
that great and original poet "created his own poetic idiom" out of the dolce stile
nuovo of Dante, Petrarch and the Italian Renaissance as it in turn was transmitted
through poets like Leopardi. In talking about his Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, one
of the most original poems in English, John Berryman writes how he came upon the
form: "The eight-line stanza I invented here after a lifetime's study, especially
of Yeats's, and in particular the one he adopted from Abraham Cowley for his elegy 'In Memory
of Major Robert Gregory.' Mine breaks not at midpoint but after the short third line;
a strange four-beat line leads to the balancing heroic couplet of lines five and
six, after which seven is again short (three feet, like line three) and then the stanza
widens into an alexandrine rhyming all the way back to one. I wanted something at
once more flexible and grave, intense and quiet, able to deal with matter both high
and low"
(Freedom of the Poet). Other examples abound:Robert Pack has invented a form called
the sonatelle, and Carol Frost an eleven line and eleven syllable per line poem that
plays off the epigram and sonnet, Ginsburg and CK Williams have reinvented the line
in our age,-- the list could go on forever as they say. In the end we want what one anonymous
critic wrote of Pope's versions of Horace and Homer, that they were "bound hand and
foot and yet dancing as if free."
In the end, it's the dancing free that is so important. I remember after my first
book I was chagrined to hear a new friend at that time, David Wojahn, tell me he
could see I had been reading a lot of Stafford. Of course, I was, but I had hoped
it didn't show. So nearly ten years later I was never delighted beside myself when my friend
Bill Matthews said in the early nineties that I was doing something no one else was
doing. Marvin Bell once said that you should try to write a poem that doesn't sound
like a poem, which means we have to cast off our influences, to read not to imitate or to
copy, but to transform, to make new. Just think of what he has done to Williams,
such a powerful and important influence on his own work, how he has transformed Williams
vision of the line especially in his "Dead Man" poems. I suppose the point of reading
is a sort of intellectual osmosis where the mind absorbs the past only enough to
forget it as it was and so to create something new. We don't grow by watching the
marks and numbers our parents draw on the door frame; we grow by growing where we have to
grow.
And I am not advocating reading only poetry. Petrarch was enthralled with Cicero's
letters, Simic has an excellent essay on reading philosophy, Mark Jarman has transformed
Ecclesiates into a major contemporary book of poetry, Albert Goldbarth seems to have read everything especially science and history, Miller Williams makes use of his
science background as Dante did. William Matthews would always describe how he thought
young writers should read eclectically-- about "jazz, science, cooking, detective
stories, history, geography, odd facts, devour it all." And of course one might think
too about the poor "imatatee" as Petrarch ironically did in a letter--he borrowed
the form from Cicero-- to Homer, telling Homer he should not be distressed at all
the imitators (he mentions just about every major poet until his time)--"You grieve because
you have been so greatly mangled by your imitators. But you do not see that it could
not possibly have been different? How could anyone deal fully and fairly with so
great a genius?" How indeed.
Well, if I had my way, I'd have every poetry student be aware of the poems from the
following list of poets from "the tradition." I myself like to look at topographic
maps to imagine what it must be like to live in various places, and try to visit
as many as I can since I have an almost photographic memory for such things. And I regularly
look at Natural Science, National Geographic, Sporting News, Civil War, Archeology, Astronomy
Magazine
, The Bible, art books. As a kid I loved to read cereal boxes-- again and again.
Charles Simic got me hooked on Schopenhauer, I've read most of Derrida and Heidegger,
some Lacan and Kristeva, and the philosophers who influenced them from Plato to Freud. Right now as I read this I am reading Unamuno's Tragic Sense of Life.
But I would also suggest the following philosophical and criticial pieces:
Bachelard's The Poetics of Spac
e
Heidegger's Poetry Language Thought
Hirshfield's The Nine Gates
Most books in the Michigan Poets on Poetry series, but especially the ones by Simic,
Matthews, Meredith, Tate, Bell.
Auden's Lectures on Shakespeare
Rukeyser's essays
Letters of Rilke, Keats
Wordsworth, "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads"
In a class once someone proposed naming our favorite poems, limiting one per author
in each of the several categories, and so here are the ones I chose. The only rule
was that the poets had to be mostly from before our own age, that they could be considered classics, or that we felt had a 150% chance of becoming classics. We also limited
ourselves to poems in English. These are all poems that should be so familair that
one should be able to talk about at length without having the text in front of him
or her. They are what Matthew Arnold called "touchstones."
TWENTY-FIVE SHORT POEMS ( good to memorize)
Wyatt, "The Flee from Me"
- a poem with an incredible number of tonal twists and turns, zooming in and out
Jonson, "On His First Son"
-an epigram in the tradition of Catullus that derives its power by speaking so tersely
Shakespeare, Sonnet 94 "Those that have the power to hurt..."
-a poem that thinks aloud, changing its whole image structure after the 8th line;
perfects the sonnet as a poem of process rather than reportage
Wordsworth, "She Dwelt..."
-look at the way the meter forces you to say the word "difference" in the last line,
which is the point of the poem in the first place-- redefines the ballad as a lyric
Dickinson, "After Great Pain"
-for its mastery of syntax balanced against meter , phrase and line, and its last
line that so accurately imitates its idea, and its playing off of psalter meter
Whitman, "When I heard the Learned Astronomer"
-a typical poem by him that keeps expanding frames of reference ideologically and
rhetorically
Blake, "London"
-for it incredibly powerful meter, its controlled outrage-- based upon song rhythms
Keats, "To Autumn"
-for the way the images redefine time as circular and renewable as opposed to linear
time; it redefines the ode linking it from then on with the elegy as a poem that
defeats time and death
Millay, "If I Should learn..."
-such a cold, calculated poem, yet such hurt must have been hidden behind it-- what
a twist on the Petrarchan love poem!
Frost, "Stopping By Woods"
-this famous poem haunts by its repeated last line--because the second time we hear
it something else is meant, --it redefines pastoral
Thomas, "Refusal To Mourn the Death by Fire..."
-for its incredible rush and build up of passion and rhetoric, and its sudden heartbreaking
turn at the end
Stevens, "The Snow Man"
-with such simple phrasing Stevens manages to produce a paradox at the end where all
and none become one, a poem as philosophical as the Romantics
Wiliams, "This is just to say"
-redefines speech:here the couple are defined by the sweetness and coldness of the
fruit, a poem finally that is a dramatic lyric advancing on many of Wordswoth's
short poems
Yeats, "Lake Isle of Innisfree"
-in language that is uncharacteristically simple Yeats alludes to the pastoral tradition
yet its perfect use of sound to move the poem forward is perhaps unmatched in
English
Hardy, "Neutral Tones"
-one of the prime process poems where the images in the first stanza are redefined
in the last-- Wordsworth with an edge
O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died"
-a poem whose rush of movement reminds one of Swift's city poems, so immediate and
diverse, and with its sudden stop at the end
Sydney, "Loving In Truth"
-the first in his "Astrophil and Stella" it is a sonnet against imitating others,
yet of course it does, Petrarch, Wyatt and others, which is why it is here
Tennyson, "Crossing the Bar"
-like Yeats "Lake Isle" it is a musical, simple poem about finding a resting place,
here beyond death, but with a yearning that seems to realize it won't happen
Pound, "A Station in the Metro"
-the paradigmatic imagist poem
Meredith (William), "The Illiterate"
-perhaps the most powerful Petrarchan sonnet in our age
William Matthews, "Landscape with Onlooker"
-a poem that derives from both Yeats and Tennyson's poems mentioned above, but seeing
that pastoral world as doubled, ironic, both earthly and heavenly
Charles Simic, "Jackstraws"
-a complex poem that flirts with the surrealism of Breton and Prevert but ends up
being a sort of complex anti-parable
Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"
-one of the most masterful villanelles around, see also those by Roethke and Thomas
WS Merwin, "When you Go Away"
-this is here because it was the first poem I memorized outside of school and is one
of the best examples of a deep image poem around
Jack Gilbert. "Adulterated"
- a wild card entry, epigrammatic but in a way Catullus never imagined, for its use
of images of enclosure and sound that metamorphose into its stunning last lines
TWENTY-FIVE MEDIUM LENGTH POEMS
Donne, "The Cannonization"
-for its irony, its sly turning of Christian terms into sexual ones
Marvel, "To His Coy Mistress"
-for its ironic use of syllogism
Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey"
-for its redefining a healing time and space as continuing towards the future, one
of the very great poems in English, it moves from plaintive to prayerful by constantly
meditating on itself, turning in on itself
Coleridge, "Frost at Midnight"
-a companion to "Tintern Abbey" where Coleridge tries to link heaven and earth through
the frost image, the poem is almost a prayer in in soft, pleading tones
Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale"
-THE great meditation on reality and dream in English, keats's music lulls us as much
as it did his speaker
Bishop, "In The waiting Room"
-THE poem about growing up, finding an identity
Tennyson, "Ulysses"
-one of the great monologues filled with lines quoted by Bobby Kennedy, it builds
rhetorically in a masterful way
Browning, "My Last Duchess"
-THE monologue of monologues, but look especially at how the listener in the poem
is defined as if on stage by what the speaker says and does with his verbal gesturing
Eliot, "Journey of the Magi"
-one of the great poems of doubt, also a monologue, yet with a tight-lipped, epigrammatic
resolve
Stevens, "Connoisseur of Chaos"
-a poem that covers an enormous distance, from a sense of chaos and disorder to a
transcendental vision in the end
Frost, "Directive"
-like so many of the Romantic poems, this poem moves us back in time to move us forward,
into myth to see reality, in speech that is as everydayish as it is formal
WC Williams, "The Yellow Flower"
-a paradigmatic meditation poem; look at is parentage in Wordsworth and Coleridge's
conversation poems and its heritage in a poem like Robert Hass great "Meditation
at Lagunitas"
Auden, "In Memory of WB Yeats"
-if you want to know how changes in rhythm can change tone this and Blake's "Mad Song"
are your choices
Hardy, "Darkling Thrush"
-this poem takes Keats rather worry in "Ode to a Nightingale" and makes of it a profound
despair
Arnold, "Dover Beach"
-okay, Hecht has rightly written a masterful parody, but still the poem is unmatched
for its quite beauty, its way of seeing the particular in a larger context, love
in the face of doom
Wright, "The Journey"
-one of his last poems, a sort of self elegy where the idea of dust goes through several
permutations until it becomes almost salvific, in a language that moves from
occasional to necessary-- one of our great poems
Dickinson, "The Soul Has Bandaged Moments"
-almost surreal, yet formally structured with its rhetoric, incredibly haunting and
filled with several turns and twists that move the reader towards an overwhelming
fear
Jarrell, "Woman At the Washington Zoo"
-a monolgue whose tension builds gradually until the release of the last line
Yeats, "Wild Swans at Coole"
-a poem of incredible yearning:in an earlier draft the poem had stanza three as the
final stanza with a more optimistic turn
Gray, "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"
-perhaps the paradigmatic elegy after "Lycidas"
Levine, "The Mercy"
-the name of the ship in this poem becomes the central conceit that governs the poem
in Levine's typically emotional and yet tough minded style
Hecht, "The Hill"
-the two hills in this poem finally merge as the poem itself, a simile vision become
a metaphoric vision
Levis, "The Smell of the Sea"
-this haunting poem intertwines several poems, alludes to King Lear, and redefines
the possibilities for narrative in our time
Matthews, "A Happy Childhood"
-Matthews' gift was to use the everyday images we look beyond to reveal the most important
aspects of our inner lives
Ashbery, "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror"
-for me this overshadows Auden's great poem on a painting, for he takes the inner
impulses of the artist's vision and transforms them into a rich tapestry of verse
Stern, "Soap"
-this poem with all its anaphora and changes in tone, its synecdoche and other figures
is the most powerful holocaust poem ever written
Plumly, "The Boy on the Step"
-Plumly's rewrites Keats for our age in every poem, and yet he is a real original,
and this meditation goes through time in order to save the narrator, and us
Tate, "Constant Defender"
-lest anyone think Tate is simply a poet of verbal hi jinx, look at the loneliness
and pathos of the last lines of this poem and how they force us to reread the poem
as an elaborate attempt to hold off despair
TWELVE LONGISH POEMS
Milton, "Lycidas"
-our most famous elegy, defines the elegy not as a lament but as a poem that creates
optimism from despair
Pope, "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot"
-in over 450 lines he moves from shutting off the world to embracing it, from cold
distance to earned sentimentality
Stevens, "The Man With The Blue Guitar"
-a sort of surreal meditation based on Picasso's work, it tries to look at all the
facets of the reality we half see and half create (Wordsworth's terms), and how
they depend upon each other WC Williams, "Asphodel"
-Auden called this the most beautiful love poem in English, and he may be right--
Williams' use of his variable foot is at its height here
Frost, "Home Burial"
-a dark psychological study written as a dramatic poem, with masterful use of blank
verse
Eliot, "Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock"
- a great dramatic monologue, a great narrative, a great surreal description of the
mind's fears, perhaps the most famous poem in the last century, masterful free
verse
Wordsworth, "1797 Prelude"
-I think this is the best, most powerful autobiographical poem-- it really examins
the growth of the poet's mind more succinctly than later, longer versions
Whitman, "Crosing Brooklyn Ferry"
-a great meditation that defines time as something the American spirit can create
as much as he himself creates American poetry
Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"
-the greatest aphoristic poem we have
Chaucer, "General Prologue"
-for its characterization
Levine, A Walk With Tom Jefferson"
-a meditation that gradually gathers a history around itself
Simic, "White"
-a surreal narrative with no characters or plot, except that the words and images
act like characters in a drama that includes us unawares
TEN LONG/EPIC POEMS/SEQUENCES
Shakespeare, Sonnets
-because he's THE master of the form
Pope, Essay on Criticism
-also filled with good advice for poets
Milton, Paradise Lost
-besides the line, look especially at the way his epic similes undercut the plot,
how he sets the reader up to sympathize with the wrong characters and so fall
with them-- the ultimate poems that involves the readers in its action only to
show themwhat they read wrong; a poem that teaches us how to read it as we go along
Berryman, The Dream Songs
-look at the variety of voices, rhythms and startegies-- and compare to his "Homage
to Mistress Bradstreet" which is a more overtly structured narrative
Millay, "Sonnets from the Ungrafted Tree"
-anti-love poems that constantly play in tension with the form
Roethke, "North American Sequence"
-an incredibly powerful free verse sequence that re-writes Whitman and moves from
the physical to the metaphysical in breathtaking leaps
Whitman, Song of Myself
-a poem that redifines the self in American poetry as something beyond a simple autobiographical
and confessional "I", redefines the line, tthe language, he possibilities of poetry
itself
Sydney, Astrophil and Stella
-
the earliest story--novel-- in verse, based upon Dante's La Vita Nuova
Bell, The Book of the Dead Man
-redefines the line as a sentence, and the rhetorical and imagistic weavings are unique
and powerful
Levis, Elegy
-
these poems redefine elegy, and create a sense of narrative that is at once fragmentary
and coherent
I suppose that's as good a set of lists as any to form a sound basis in the tradition
of the art we practice. But, I am thinking greedily here, it leaves a lot out. What
else do I have my own students read-- that is, in a way, what other poems have formed
that world that Pavese described for me and which I hope to pass on not as a world
but as a stepping stone. How could one not include classics like the following?
-Homer, especially The Odyssey,
for the use of narrative
-Sappho, for her uses of image, the leaps in thought
-Horace, (a couple of odes and epistles[esp. The Art of Poetry], satires, epodes)
for his balance, and his later influence on contemporary poets like William Matthews
and James Wright
-Catullus, a couple of epigrams
-Martial, epigrams, trans. William Matthews
-Lucan, Civil Wars, bleak expose of a country tearing itself apart; plain style epic
-Propertius, Love Poems, great sudden shifts in tone; see also Pound's sequence "Homage
To Sextus Propertius"
-Persius, satires, see the superb translation by W.S. Merwin
-Lucretius, On The nature of Things, an epic with many scientific and historical similes,
whose hero is ultimately a philosophy of life
-Juvenal, satires, pretty harsh about Roman life
-Ovid, Amores, The Art of Love
or a couple of stories from Metamorphosis,
Heroides(dramatic monologues where shafted women from various epics get to speak)
-Petrarch, for the beginnings of the sonnet (Petrarchan conceit), see Musa's translations
-Dante, La Vita Nouva
(poetry sequence with prose self interrogations and explanations on what he is doing--
a must!!)
And I left off some favorites from my class lists above:there are other fine poems
by all those poets, and terrific poems everyone should know and which have worked
well in workshops. In England and Ireland there are almost too many too list: Spenser's
"Epithalamium" and "Prothalamion;" Ben Jonson's "Inviting a Friend to Supper;" Marvell's
mower poems and "To His Coy Mistress;" Vaughan's "The World;" Herbert' s "The Pulley
;" Carew's "The Rapture" Milton's "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso;" Swift's city
and Celia poems; Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode," Resolution and Independence, "London
1802," "Peele Castle," and Lucy poems; Coleridge's conversation poems; Keats'
other odes and sonnets; Browning's monologues; Shelley's "Ode to West Wind" and
"Mont Blanc;" Clare; Arnold's "Dover Beach;" Tennyson's "Ulysses;" Hopkins' "The Windhover,"
Hardy's "The Darkling Thrush" "Snow in The Suburbs;" Yeats' "Culchain Comforted,"
and "The Circus Animals' Desertion; " Lawrence's "Love on The Farm; "Owen's Dulce
et decorum Est;" Keyes' "Schiller Dying;" Thomas's "The Hunchback in the Park," "Fern
Hill," "Do No Go Gentle."
And in America an equally formidable list:dozens of poems by Dickinson; Whitman's
"Crossing Brooklyn Ferry;" poems by Melville and Stephen Crane; Pound's Cathay Poems;
HD's 1940's trilogy about the war; Rukeyser; Frost's famous poems but also "An Old
Man's Winter Night," "The Subverted Flower," and "The Draft Horse;" Jarrell's poems
from The Lost World;
Tate and Ransom; Hayden, especially his New York poems; Williams' later poems in the
three step line; Crane's "Chaplinesque" "Voyages" and the "Brooklyn Bridge" sequence;
Mckay, "The Tropics in New York;" Bogan's "Medusa;" Stevens' "Sunday Morning," "The
World as Meditation," "The Idea of Order at key West," "Prologues to What is Possible,"
"The Man on The Dump;" Bishop's "In The Waiting Room" and "Poem;" Lowell's "Skunk
Hour;"Toomer's poems in Cane
.
And then what about foreign poets like Vallejo and Neruda, Parra, Drummond Andrade,
Allegria, Paz, all from South America, or Salamun and Popa, Holub, Herbert, Rozewicz,
Szymborska, and Dimitrova, and Celan from Eastern Europe; Darweesh and Amichai from
Palestine; the Swedish poet, Transtromer, one of the greatest living poets; or Russians
like Akhmatova, Mandelstam, and Tsetaeyeva; Germans like Trakl, Rilke and Eich; Radnoti
the great Hungarian poet; the Romanians Arghezi, Cassian and Blandiana; the great
Turkish poet, Hikmet; the great lyricist Faiz; Italians like Pavese, Montale, Quasimodo
and Compagna; Lorca, Gonzalez, Machado, Aleixandre and Hernandez from Spain; French
poets like Appollainaire, Breton and Prevert; or Greeks such as Seferis, Cavafy
and Ritsos. It occurs to me I have left off Pessoa, and probably dozens of others.
And I haven't begun to consider the Irish poets in addition to Heaney-- Carson and
Boland for starters. The list goes on. I write this surrounded by piles of books,
not sure which to pick up next. here is Milosz' new book, A Treatise on Poetry,
maybe that will help? And here's all our contemporaries-- her's a new book by Dara
Wier, another by Dean Young, one by Mary Reufle, another by Mark Halliday. here's
David Rivard. It never ends. Nor should it. That's the point, isn't it? Simic said
he'd like to be in his casket with one of two books, but I haven't decided mine yet, but
whatever they are, the pages will be dog-eared, and I'll have a pencil in the other
hand
Richard Jackson is the author of 6 books of poems, most recently Heartwall
(U. Mass, Juniper Prize, 2000) and Half Lives
(Invisible Cities, 2002), as well as several chapboooks of translations and adaptations
of Italian poets, two books of criticism (Dismantling Time in Contemporary Poetry
and Acts of Mind,
and two anthologies of Slovene poetry (Double Vision
and The Fire Under the Moon
). His Selected Poems and Translations
is Ashland University Press (2002) and a selected Poems in Slovene was published
in 2001. A Former Fulbright excahange poet to Yugoslavia and receopient of 4 Pushcart
appearances, NEA and NEH fellowships, his poems have been translated into a dozen
languages. He edits PM Publications and teaches at UT-Chattanooga where he directs the
Meacham Writers' Workshop, and also teaches in the Vermont College MFA program, winning
teaching awards from both schools.