The Long Walk Out of Suburbia

In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forged manacles I hear
– Blake

To fall into a habit is to begin to cease to be.
– Unamuno


I’ve been thinking lately about what it means as a poet to have grown up in suburbia. What foundation was set for my sensibility in that first landscape? It is more specific than that since I grew up in the suburb of a very small city. I didn’t grow up on the outskirts of New York or Chicago. I grew up in Pennside, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Reading, itself only just meeting the definition of a city in terms of its population when I was young. But a suburb nonetheless that must have impressed in me its tailored landscapes, those manmade terrains that are different from either the parks of a city or the untamed edge of the truly rural.

The word itself, “suburbs” is from the Latin “sub” meaning “under” and “urbs” meaning “city.” It comes from Roman times when the poor lived at the foot of the city hill outside the wall. But in modern times that “under” means something else and has a weighty significance, at least, as I reflect on it. For all its scenic advantages, the suburban sensibility feels inferior to its urban brother, feels less savvy, less witty, less cultivated. It lives in the shadow of the urban and it may contribute to why, when I was young, I preferred the eccentric to the accepted. I had rather sit alone and think than talk with my peers. It’s why I felt a kinship with a thin tree at the crest of one of the surrounding mountains. It stuck out crookedly, a bald patch on its right side, but even from miles away it was beautifully distinguishable from the monotony of the level ridge of maples.

That need for distinction has long impaired my poetic voice, loaded it with a self-conscious groping that I still labor to overcome every time I write. Any poet worth his salt is beyond the need to impress and is instead driven by the need to realize his vision. But finding that vision requires confronting life right on the spot, at its dirtiest. This is not something the suburban sensibility is trained to do. If suburbia is anything, it’s a place to learn how to evade, to dodge the shadows in the corner, to avoid ever saying what is really meant. Stating the unequivocal truth could disturb the clean-cut image of life among the trimmed lawns and hedges, the neat streets and manmade lake. In suburbia, even rage and neurosis are ordered and pretty.

That clean order — even nature itself tamed — might be what led me to first desire order in art, which is not the same as clarity. Beauty ruled all themes; the music of a poem exempted it from making sense. I could not then have conceived of aspiring to Lowell’s prayer, “Pray for the grace of accuracy/Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination,” at least not semantically. The pulse of a genuine moment was something too real for me to dare touch, not that I wasn’t aware of it. But the suburb is an adult version of a childproofed environment, all the edges are sanded down or cushioned, all the hazards are locked away. Like a child, you know the forbidden is in the locked drawer; you just come to accept the rules of the house because you don’t know any other world. These are the dark distances between people in suburbia, distances astutely explored by the poet Carl Dennis.

Within me that distance has been the long stretch between the artificial voice of my expected self and the authentic voice of my real life. All my effort since starting to write has been to bridge that distance, to close the gap between them. The best poetry I’ve written in recent years has been about how to dodge expectations, not only of others but also and perhaps especially those of oneself. Henry Miller said that for the writer attempting something new, nothing is worse than his friends. In struggling to realize an authentic voice for my poetry, no friend has been a greater enemy than that one in my head who keeps telling me how I should sound, who I should be, what I should say.

How Freudian this comes off is not lost on me. But my concerns are aesthetic and philosophical, not psychological. I refuse to call that friend my superego, though he has helped me be a better person, that is, to not say everything on my mind since that isn’t always helpful. He is the master diplomat, but this makes him a poor poet, since the poetic voice is not really about right and wrong or even kindness, but rather it’s about clarity, insight, articulation of the fully realized moment. But the fully realized moment cannot be abridged, even if it is edited. That is to say, it must be complete even if it has only one, true articulation, the way Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in the best order.” So I must use every means to stifle that unpoetic diplomat, to arrive at the truly poetic moment and simply write. This has not been easy.

Between Keats’s idea that poems should come as leaves on a tree and the truism that the real art in a poem is hiding the art, there is the suburb. The suburb is the artificial wearing the natural as lingerie. It wraps itself in green and decorates its hair with flowers. It’s a seduction and a siren’s song because it is a nowhere, an in-between world that’s neither wild nor tame, neither urban nor rural. It cannot disrobe and show itself in naked honesty because its beauty, indeed, its very substance is in its apparel. It may be why, as a young poet, I was obsessed with form but was equally nagged by the dread that I didn’t have the mind to be a poet. I always felt that one day I would be found out, that, like the suburb, I was actually all appearance.

The border of a suburb is not wild. This is not because there are no untamed animals, no skunks or deer ducking behind nearby pines. It’s because between nature and such communities there are enough artificial hurtles that one is free to romanticize nature. So from my street to the nearest woods, the transitions — the community pool, the football field and tennis courts, the creek and surrounding road — were obstacles to any entrance into both the wild and the creative. I sometimes think it may be why I’ve struggled with transitions in my poetry. By contrast, the urban sensibility doesn’t feel the need to connect the dots or supply bridges. From stanza to stanza, either you’re smart enough to keep up or this poem isn’t for you. And it’s important to realize this isn’t snobbery but simply apprehending the world on your own terms, being oneself without apologies. But I’ve always been afraid of losing people along the way, and so tediously laid the groundwork for every step. The problem with such carefulness is that it crowds out the reader’s imagination. A reader should find a home for his imagination within a poem; it should be a place for him to breathe deeply and settle down, even if it’s into the mystery of what it’s all about. This means the total picture includes untamed elements, some invasion of the dark and disordered into the context of the ordered creation. Without it, there is no perspective or context and thus no true insight or cause for wonder.

For the urban sensibility, the edge of the city is not the edge of order, but the edge of civilization. This differs from the suburban sensibility in that it is not mere landscape, but an expression of our humanity. Civilization lies within us. So, for the urban dweller, the edge of the city is the edge and end of humanity. But for the suburban sensibility, the neat, clean order of the landscape is not an indwelling reality. It is, rather, imposed on both the outward and inward landscapes. The edge of suburbia becomes the edge of the safe world. It is not that humanity ends there, but that understanding ends there. Beyond is the incomprehensible, the unpredictable. So my poems have always had a laborious, plodding need to be understood, to be safe. The problem with this is that the best poems of the day are born in liminal spaces, in the outskirts, beyond the longstanding definitions. They risk being misunderstood even by the majority. It is Blake being called mad at the end of his life and his work waiting until the 20th century to be given its just admiration.

I left suburbia for New York City nearly twenty years ago. But suburbia stayed in me. It limited my art, my growth as a poet. I could never escape the logic of its layout. It infected my lines and stanzas, ordering them into a beautiful, sanitary banality. Then I read George Oppen’s poetry. He was dense, difficult and passionately struggling toward clarity. I had never before been enthralled by any objectivist poet. But he was someone who took me in thoroughly. In that rapture, I read prose about him and interviews and came across his idea of a poem as a certain “sequence of disclosure.” This idea was new to me since I had always measured a poem’s movement not by its semantic unfolding but by its phonetic modulation. I lived by Joseph Brodsky’s dictum that “for the poet, phonetics is semantics.” But this dictum had been too native to me to help me grow. I had to abandon it in favor of a “sequence of disclosure,” a modulation of meaning that was itself the music and movement of a poem.

At the same time, I had been reading a number of other poets and had recently read Horace’s 13th Ode from the second book. It was a poem that startled me by its seamless progression. It starts simply with Horace contemplating contemptuously a tree on his property and ends among the shades in Hades. I remember the shock at the end of the poem, of realizing where I was and how Horace had taken me there without jarring my senses. I had been transported from the simple earthly reality of his yard to the netherworld of shades and no charm was invoked or Sybil consulted. There were no hurtles as in suburbia. I found in this poem an example of that sequence of disclosure, something I found I then had to master, because it was a way of escape, not away from reality, but into reality.

A few other poets, modern poets, helped me cut the key to that door: Gerald Stern, Carl Dennis, Stephen Dunn, Stephen Dobyns and Derek Walcott. These were the major stars in that guiding constellation. What was interesting was that, as I wrote the first poem of escape ten years ago, the realization of this new aesthetic, this new philosophy, occurred to me in geometric terms.

The idea that a poem should come full circle was not only axiomatic because of its long tradition but inevitable to my suburban sensibility. Although everyone in suburbia works elsewhere, life there is self-contained. Work is merely what you do to support life in suburbia. But life in suburbia is suburbia and all roads there lead back to its center. This was a form of circling the wagons. A poem then was always about redemption. However, now my desire, my driving need, was for something parabolic, something arcing out and away and ending as far from where I started as possible and arriving there with an inevitability that should not resemble logic. Logic is only one kind of meaning, but all meanings and, in fact, most meanings are not logical. And the most meaningful material is at the edge of what we know and just beyond. It is only here that poems matter, have an almost life or death significance, because it is only from here that one can look back on where you came from, and have the perspective to see the immense battle for identity involved in each moment taken for granted. From here it is possible to reenter the streets of suburbia and not be governed by them.

Thoughts on Refusing Heaven, Poems by Jack Gilbert

Although not a perfect collection, this collection is worth a permanent place on everyone’s bookshelf. Winner of both the LA Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, it is deserving of these awards for the sheer life-affirming quality of the poems. These are a wondrous celebration of life not only in spite of its brevity and flaws but precisely because of its brevity and flaws. What, in the mind of others are failures, within this collection, are transformed into the substance of happiness and beauty. Memory becomes the storehouse of a future life and lazy days doing nothing, the substance of the most joyful times.

Gilbert has assimilated much of Eastern thinking more intimately, more personally, than many other poets. They are not mere stylistic tactics or adopted stances, but insights reaped by living through them, seeing how life affirms the mysticism of Taoism and Buddhism. Thus they are coherently westernized. This is so because Gilbert doesn’t always open with simply accepting their terms. Some of the poems are the struggle toward realization told from the point of view of a western mind.

However, on the whole, his poems are not parabolic, moving from point to point to a final destination, and they are not circular in reaching a resolution or redemption. They are more like a tetherball circling closer and closer to a central point. The iterations the poems cycle through may, at times, lack the peremptory quality that is typically valued in poetry, but they make up for it with their exuberance and joy, in finally transforming the daily and pedestrian into gold, in observing the overlaps of places and identity through time, in noticing the interpenetration of histories within a single life. So his poems may resist memorization because they lack inevitability, but his poems are, in spite of it, memorable.

Not a poet of great music, but a wonderful poet of insight, of the turn of thought that startles or delights. This is the music of reflection, not the right note but the well-articulated idea. If he were a painter, he would be Magritte. Because of this remove, that he is an idea poet and not a musical poet, he is fond of simile. His use of simile does not always please, but it does often provoke. And this is the point. If his similes produce a pause in reading, this does not stall the poem since it causes a consideration of the insight that constitutes the poem. That is, Gilbert does not employ simile as a mere lyrical comparison but as a way to inspire us to think and notice. But thinking means considering, pausing, lingering, which a poem called “Burning (Andante non troppo)” is all about. This is a collection worth lingering over, worth allowing yourself to enjoy. It may actually help you to enjoy life more. Few collections can claim such a triumph.

Skating with Heather Grace -- Poems by Thomas Lynch

Skating with Heather Grace
Poems by Thomas Lynch

This book has been on my shelf for a number of years. It was a collection I occasionally pulled down in passing, read a poem or two, and then returned to its ledge among the other titles in my library. Recently I took it down and carried it with me for several days, reading it from cover to cover a few times. It is something I should have done long ago.

Published in Knopf’s Poetry Series in 1986, this is Thomas Lynch’s first book. As such, the biographical information doesn’t say anything about his poetic career but highlights the fact that he makes his living as an undertaker. Although heavy-handed in pointing this out, it clearly informs every poem.

Robert Frost’s cool philosophical understanding of poetry as a momentary stay against confusion is here heightened to a pitch to hold off despair in the face of death and loss. Lynch has an almost desperate desire for cohesion.

sing the same song over and over
because the sound it makes keeps me intact.
(“Noon on Saturday”)

This is the ars poetica of these poems. But it’s not an existential cry, as Matthew Arnold saying, “I am fragments.” It is not his psyche he fears will disintegrate, but his actual body.

I’m frightened witless at the prospect of
some bomb or cancer out there with my name on it.
(“Damage”)

What underlies these poems is an acute feral vulnerability, a profound awareness of how tenuous our hold on life really is.

you and your song rise in the leafy air
chancy as bass spawn in a mallard’s underwings.
(“A Clearing in the Woods”)

All of this plays into his adroit manipulation of rhyme, assonance and repetition. There may be the occasional and slight drift away from thematic elements in favor of a phonetic choice, but never enough to spoil the tone and eventual progress into these meditations that are rooted in earth and blood. Considering the tack taken in his poem “A Note on the Rapture to His True Love,” the identities that comprise its rhyme scheme work in conjunction with the idea that the rapture will bring a second life to those taken, a kind of repetition that the poem subtly rebuffs with the final identity being broken where “leaves” is not repeated but transformed into “left,” the final word. It plays on the double-entendre of “left” allowing those who are not taken up in the rapture to find their own salvation in moments of transcendence, which, in the end, like everything else, are finite.

All of these poems are full of the longing for the ethereal, a life beyond the earthbound and what birds, and gulls in particular, in the collection come to symbolize:

out where the gulls glide on the edge of weather
songs in praise of rootlessness and wayfare
(“Learning Gravity”)

And in another poem there is the desire to

join them in the air beyond the land
and make my life with them diving between islands.
(“A Dream of Death in the First-Person”)

But this cannot be. We are all bound by

laws
whereby things rise and fall, arrive and take
their leave according to their gravity.
(“Learning Gravity”)

Those birds and what they represent and everything beyond them are finally

a new life form light-years removed from me.
(“I Felt Myself Turning”)

Or as Lynch puts it in the penultimate poem of the collection

we, none of us survives
our awful will to live or will to die.
(“Damage”)

It’s said that every elegy is really written about the writer’s own fear of death. This may be the case, but for Lynch, an undertaker by trade, he sees death as random and omnipresent, an ever looming threat against everyone. When, in the poem “Damages,” he invokes the collective pronoun, it’s not to summon an authority he doesn’t have, the way a bad poet might. Instead, it’s to truly touch on something affecting us all. It’s why what is so attractive in these poems is their deep compassion. They are heartbreakingly compassionate. And in this context, other elements, the moments within life, those transcendent but doomed moments, are prized in their fragile brilliance, such as where he tries to remember the naked body of a friend he once slept with years ago, or he watches his young daughter skate and realizes he will gradually need to let her go as she gets older. These are the moments of meaning, of history, of personal significance that are given such deep poignancy against the relentless and inevitable triumph of the meaningless. It saddens them but increases the attention given to them.

Skating with Heather Grace is one of those collections where the poet faces our common abyss and it is a more honest collection than you will typically find because it is not angry but worried, concerned in the way one is when you know such terrible things happen daily, when you see that everyone around you is standing at the edge of the same inescapable end. Here, the resigned faith that “life goes on,” is a poetic principle, it is an amor fati that demands we sing and sing loudly. To paraphrase Roethke, who is invoked in the longest poem, it is the kind of shaking that keeps us steady. It is the precarious balance between two polarized dreams. It is where we live and where these poems take place. This is not only a collection worth reading, it a collection worth rereading.

Tomorrow’s Living Room -- A Review

Tomorrow’s Living Room
Poems by Jason Whitmarsh


This is Jason Whitmarsh’s first book. It is winner of the 2009 May Swenson Poetry Award. And it is a deserving collection. One that may at first mislead you with its wit and simplicity. His deft casualness makes it possible to breeze through these poems without thinking of the odd statements being made. Indeed, in his citation, Billy Collins, who chose the book for the award, points out the “pleasurable disorientation” of the language, its “mixture of directness and imaginative surprise.” And the back of the dust jacket describes them as “alternately wry and dark.” These are all accurate observations of the surface textures, but to some extent, miss the point, miss why these poems are such a surprising tonal blend.

The opening poem is called “Forecasts” and is a grouping of four quatrains, all involving some sort of evasion, distance or submerged emotion controlling the actual moment. For instance, the second quatrain goes,

The rock fell from a great and far-off height
and plummeted silently through the roof
into bed, where it replaced your heart.
That’s what I think. It’s why you’re so aloof.

This distance, heightened by the internal monologue, foretells the rest of the collection. Indeed, that insistent, “That’s what I think” is at the core of Whitmarsh’s linguistic landscape. The poems are often pivoting on people so involved in what they think, they fail to make any real connection with others. Another poem, early in the book, is “One Art.” It is a satire of the famous Bishop villanelle, brilliantly using the exact same rhymes in the sequence of Bishop’s original. But in this version, the speaker is talking about wishing to be Bruce Lee when he was young so he could hit his “way out of disaster.” The poem concludes,

It’s evident
why I wanted to be a kung fu master,
as though desire alone could prevent disaster.

This desire is at the heart of the original Bishop poem, a speaker who is aching to convince themselves of something they don’t truly believe. This resonates to the key struck by the rest of Whitmarsh’s collection, which, on the whole, addresses the disasters that come from entertaining our fantasies too much, the emotional traumas of too much indulgent daydreaming. It’s why the tone is such a peculiar blend of humor and loneliness.

The title of another poem is “He Said These Things, Not Even I Could Forgive Him.” The first line of this poem goes

I’m kind of reluctant to mention the superhero powers
I’ve acquired since last we talked.

This is an opening line that leaves one expecting to laugh the rest of the way through. But the poem ends with the speaker saying,

In my dream
I grabbed an electric fence and when I woke I said
how strange to be in pain in a dream and you said
I was lucky it wasn’t worse, those fences are dangerous.

Oddly, it seems, dream and reality are beginning to blend by the conclusion of the poem. The person spoken to is almost accepting the terms of the “superhero” who is speaking. However, we can’t forget the title. The person spoken to resents the speaker. Why? Perhaps for no other reason than that the superhero is talking about what should remain unspoken.

If Whitmarsh’s poems are about the dramas that result when our unspoken fantasy lives break in and distance us from our real lives, these unspoken fantasies are also the source of what drives us to need each other or what makes us interesting or even who we are. One poem says it’s

Better, maybe, to let the guilt metastasize
than to cancel by good intent
any chance to surprise.

A couplet says,

Everything weak in us survives. It’s meant to.
If not, not a day would go by where I’d want you.

This couplet is from a poem titled “Three Curses.” The implication is that this is a curse, that our weakness is what drives us to want others, to desire. It is also what creates our fantasies and the distances between us. Or as Whitmarsh says in another poem, “One begins ever after and ends upon a time.”

It is a wonderful debut collection, inventive in its forms, from villanelles, triolets, and ghazels to prose poems and all handled with a casual fluency. He writes with compressed intensity; only a handful of his poems are longer than half a page. But all glitter like well-cut gems.

Rereading Walter Pater

Rereading Walter Pater’s The Renaissance I’m struck how the sheer pleasure of reading the book breaks hard against the abundance of thought it provokes. It makes it difficult to decide if I should rhapsodize about the beauty of his prose or delight in the many connections his work has to other writers and thinkers both before and after him. Perhaps a little of both.

His aesthetic, as he describes it at the beginning of his essay on Giorgione, accounts for how he allowed himself the luxury of such a poetic style. For Pater, the all important element in a work of art is its impression. When he says, “in its primary aspect, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall” he frees himself to enter a painting or poem or the life of an artist and permit his own reactions to form the meaning. He can suggest the sound of poured water mixing with played pipes in Fête Champêter or the smile of the Mona Lisa “defining itself on the fabric of [Leonardo’s] dreams” and I take these in without any hesitation that they are not good scholarship since that is not the intention. Pater is not trying to get at some objective message or meaning, but at what it means to him to inhabit a certain space.

Pater argues that it’s neither the senses nor the intellect that art addresses, but the “imaginative reason.” I immediately understand this to correspond to what I call the sensibility. It is an odd organ of perception. But it is Pater’s effort to describe how this vague organ registers aesthetic reality that makes his descriptions so beautiful and why it is not accurate to understand him as simply a critic or hedonist. In fact, so many of his attitudes and ideas seem to foreshadow much in modernism and existentialism.

As I read him, I have strong but undefined feelings that he stands on the narrowest and subtlest bridge dividing what is Romantic from what is modern. Or that he breathes the air of both atmospheres without fully inhabiting either. Certainly, much of what is in the major existentialists and major modernists can be seen as the evolution of the Romantic stances, their natural consequence and end. When Blake asserts that the imagination is the Holy Spirit, there is no significant progress made when Stevens proclaims “God and the imagination are one.” When Keats said negative capability is “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason,” he defined exclusively for artists what Camus would define as the absurd man. So when Pater describes Fra Angelico’s Coronation of the Virgin, it registers as more than an aesthetic disagreement, but a metaphysical one. That’s because Pater had already made a step toward that fragmented landscape of modern life. But he doesn’t seem to step fully into it or, if he does, he’s wearing some kind of protective armor, something that keeps his mind intact where later minds are in pieces. What Pater says of Goethe could be said of himself, “he defines, in clearest outline, the eternal problem of culture — balance, unity with one’s self.”

One sees his method of unity in how he portrays what the mind does to satisfy its need “to feel itself alive.” He said it “must see into the laws, the operation, the intellectual reward of every divided form of culture; but only that it may measure the relation between itself and them. It struggles with those forms till its secret is won from each, and then lets each fall back into its place.” This reaches back to Blake who said,

He who binds to himself a joy
Doth the winged life destroy.
He who kisses the joy as it flies,
Lives in eternity's sunrise.

And it reaches forward to Simone de Beauvoir when she defines freedom as being “able to surpass the given toward an open future.” Between these two metaphysics of freedom, Pater defines his technique to give the intellect the completeness he said it demanded. However, this technique contains the seed of its own dissolution. In the very notion of the “divided form of culture” is everything that gives him his uniting focus and what transformed, for later minds, into a multiplicity that fragmented the psyche itself.

For Pater, there are discrete aesthetic moments offered to the intellect to construct its own unity, forms yielding definitions and boundaries of cultural discourse. But in the 20th century, the existentialists rejected the mere play of such forms. Again Simone de Beauvoir said, “We repudiate all idealisms, mysticism, etcetera which prefer a Form to man himself.” The divided object presented to the mind in the 20th century was not culture, but man himself, his fragmented psyche. As the poet George Oppen put it, “we have chosen the meaning, of being numerous.” The self no longer felt the unity it once did and could no longer contrive it. Walter Pater’s mentor, Matthew Arnold, exemplified this fragmentation quite dramatically. In fact, the teacher stood on the other side of that bridge dividing and distinguishing the Romantic sensibility from the modern one.

Pater was not driven, like his mentor, to proclaim, “I am fragments” because aesthetic appreciation was a uniting principle for him. He was not a hedonist, but an aesthete. In his famous conclusion to The Renaissance, Pater writes, “Not to discriminate every moment some passionate attitude in those about us, and in the very brilliancy of their gifts some tragic dividing of forces on their ways, is, in this short day of frost and sun, to sleep before evening. With this sense of the splendor of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch.” It is staggeringly beautiful and poignant, another of the infinite renderings of carpe diem. But we see here the idealism Beauvoir rejects; we see Pater’s unity in gathering together these moments. He is the central self bringing his singular experiences into the whole of his guiding intelligence. And this divides him from the 20th and 21st centuries; this keeps him from being wholly modern. As close to the doorstep as he comes, he remains outside. But he is so wonderfully there, an almost reassuring figure — if only we could be more like him — the favorite grandfather of many artists and intellectuals, a source of wisdom too remote to follow but close enough to relish quoting.

The Sensible and the Meaningful

To begin June on my blog, I decided to post some current thoughts on poetry. Lately I’ve thought about Wallace Stevens’ remark that, “a poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully.” It seems to me that a poem should actually succeed in this resistance, but only just. The intelligence should fail but be so consistently close to succeeding that it can’t resist renewing the effort to bring it under its dominion. A poem should be the perfect seduction of the intelligence. I think of a poem like Joseph Brodsky’s “Kalamaki” as a perfect example, at least for me. It is a poem I have felt always on the verge of fully comprehending. I could sense the boundaries of its meaning as I neared its end, just as it slipped away. It’s like someone whose hand is big enough to almost palm a basketball, but not quite. Portions of it leap out at me as I go along; I gather a thread here and a thread there. I’m about to tie them in a neat little bow when, right at the end, it unravels. And I never fail to return to the poem at some point and renew the journey because it is so amazing, so deeply meaningful, although inexplicable. And that is the subtle distinction that has brought me to this idea of how a poem should function.

Though a thesaurus will show them as synonyms, there is a difference between what makes sense and what is meaningful. Of course, the sensible has many definitions. What I mean by sensible here is: that which is of sound judgment or good sense, something that is fitting. But what we typically consider sensible is so only according to our given understanding of the world. However, the realm of possible meaning is much larger than this. That is, what is meaningful is larger than what is sensible. So, while everything that makes sense is meaningful, there are a vast number of things that are meaningful which make no sense. This is the realm poetry should explore. It is where such poets as John Ashbery, Marvin Bell, even Mallarme and sometimes Fernando Pessoa make their homes or pitch a tent.

It recalls another thought I’ve frequently had, a definition of a poem that has recurred to me throughout the years: that a poem is the clearest explanation of something. The consequence of this is that the explanation of a poem is both a movement away from clarity and a redundancy. Of course, this doesn’t mean we should abandon literary criticism, only that, the best literary criticism should, in itself, approach the nature of poetry. It’s why writers like Walter Pater and Edward Dalhberg are preferable to simple critics like Harold Bloom or Helen Vendler: as admirable and interesting as they are. It is in this spirit that I continue to write my own thoughts on poetry and poets and look forward to shortly publishing my thoughts on Walter Pater after having recently reread The Renaissance.

Matthew Arnold: Man that is Not

This essay on Matthew Arnold was an attempt to do at least two things. It was first, a consideration of Matthew Arnold’s place within the context of modern literature and the modern psyche as a whole. Second, it was an attempt to develop a more discursive voice for my prose. This second purpose meant handling the material differently than with a simple academic focus, but rather with a kind of poetic rhapsodizing. Thus the essay is a meditation on the fragmentation of the modern psyche using Matthew Arnold as the focal point around which that consideration revolves. Disparate elements play into it, but return to him as a leading representative at the beginning of its manifestation in the world.

-----------------------------------------------
Matthew Arnold: Man that is Not
By Michael T. Young


“You must be something to be able to do something.”
-- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Matthew Arnold was the reluctant modern. “Resolve to be thyself” he pleaded because he was unable to embrace his own spirit. He longed for unity but wrote to his sister, “I am fragments.” These expressions seem excessive to us only because we are its natural descendents. “Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is” said Camus. And George Oppen wrote, “We have chosen the meaning of being numerous.” The multitudinous and fragmented world that daunted Arnold can no longer overwhelm us because we are it. Arnold was among its firstborn, for what Arnold the critic resisted, Arnold the poet embraced. He refused to be wholly himself, and this war with himself made him as modern as any poet writing today.

Arnold was appointed to an inspectorship of schools in 1849. He valued education and knowledge perhaps as highly as we value information. That he turned to the Greeks as models of the best in poetry and thought was all too instinctive. For the Greeks understood ignorance as the enemy of integrity. The Delphic Oracle said, “Know thyself,” to help conduct people to a noble life. But modern man is beyond the Delphic dictum for he has foregone integrity for multiplicity. The modern person in quest of self-knowledge does not seek to know himself; he seeks to “find himself.” And Arnold was such a man because he knew “who finds himself, loses his misery!” Modern man is not ignorant but lost. A labyrinth of constant self-analysis confounds him. He is the Daedalus of his own mind, an inventor of mazes and convolutions of thought for which his conscience imprisons him. It does not let him rest. It drives him to circle his cell, to ever move and never get anywhere, to ever learn and never come to a definite knowledge.

Hither and thither spins
The wind-borne, mirroring soul,
A thousand glimpses wins,
And never sees a whole;
Looks once, and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last employ.
("Empedocles on Etna," 2.82-86)

This same spirit is why Hamlet remains contemporary. He is one of the first modern characters not because he is petrified with inaction but because he must unpack his heart to the air and holds a mirror up to the heart of all around him. He is a mind discovering itself, haunting the world with his brooding confessions, a voice of enchantment echoing inside each of our privately bounded nutshells. This is relevant because Arnold, recognizing Hamlet as a type characteristic of his own age, said, “The dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust.”

Modern man’s identity is a series of momentary stays against confusion. He is perpetually asserting his psyche’s identity to withstand the threat of other identities. Arnold noted that “Hardly have we, for one little hour,/been on our own line, have we been ourselves.” Keats could not have conceived of the numberless selves springing up and dissolving in the modern psyche because negative capability was, to him, a poetic talent or character trait. But to the modern mind it is either its nature or its neurosis. This dualistic psychology gives birth to our multiple warring personalities. Seeing this multitude rising in himself and in the world, Arnold was one of the early thinkers to conceive of “the masses.” He knew man was getting lost in the multitudes both in the world and in himself. “Each half lives a hundred different lives” he said. And none of those halves are in harmony, but moving in a growing discord. Sartre’s remark that “hell is other people” was foretold when Arnold said, “Other existences there are, that clash with ours.” Feeling the perpetual struggle, Arnold looked at nature with envy.

And with joy the stars perform their shining,
And the sea its long moon-silver’d roll;
For self-poised they live, nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul.
(“Self-Dependence,” 21-24)

The stars were not only tranquil but joyful in their shining because they were not the victim of a “differing soul.” They remained themselves, always shining, always there, reliable enough to navigate by. Arnold labored to order the flying fragments of the new world, the multitudinous scatterings of industrial society. He pressed images of nature hoping to transform them into symbols of man’s potential ideal. The stars were

A world above man’s head, to let him see
How boundless might his soul’s horizons be,
How vast, yet of what clear transparency!
How it were good to abide there, and breathe free;
How fair a lot to fill
Is left to each man still!
(“A Summer Night, “87-92)

But all the exclamation points belie his passion to believe his own words. Arnold was not an optimist in his taste or his sentiment. He admired the melancholic poetry of Leopardi and ended his own most famous poem by saying of modern man’s condition that,

. . . we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
(“Dover Beach,” 35-37)

Arnold in his social criticism chastised British society for “the anarchical tendency of [their] worship of freedom.” He knew that some authority must exist to which people answer, even if it were only his cherished “right reason.” But Arnold was, as Blake said of all true poets, “of the Devil’s Party without knowing it.” In his prose Arnold knew where poetry was going and why, and in his prose he struggled against it with all his might. But his poetry was authentic as his prose was desperately sincere. His prose demanded guidance from right reason, but his poetry enshrined the boundlessness of man’s soul and the endless struggles it was condemned to engage.

Charge once more, then, and be dumb!
Let the victors, when they come,
When the forts of folly fall,
Find thy body by the wall!
(“The Last Word,” 13-16)

Torn by the force of the indifferent mechanism which modern society has become, he is in fragments. But driven by the rage to assert his integrity or charged by the very power that rips at him, modern man tries to understand himself, hoping enlightenment or knowledge will save him.

But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves. . .
(“The Buried Life,” 45-55)

It’s to “know thyself.” But at some point the quest becomes a red herring. Faust sold his soul for knowledge and for all he knew, it could not save him. Solomon proclaimed, “The fool hath no delight in understanding, but that his heart may discover itself.” He turns and turns in himself to understand his own fragments, to gather them into some organized whole. It was the poetic project of Stevens who was always diving and mining for “Words of the fragrant portals dimly-starred,/And of ourselves and of our origins.”

Modern man does know himself. He is better informed than all before him about psychology, physics, and the numberless scattered trivia that compose his external and internal worlds. His failure is that he “isn’t” himself.

. . .we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ‘tis not true!
(“The Buried Life,” 64-66)

To the problems he saw in the world, Arnold tried to interject solutions, but his poems ring true when he simply records his observation of the discord that he cannot resolve. Even in his prose, when he defines culture “not in resting and being, but in growing and becoming” he has already embraced the spirit of an age he condemned. While he warned against the “unrestrained swing of the individual’s personality,” he hoped to fill a cultural need by “spontaneity of consciousness.” Like us, Arnold had enough self-knowledge to know the faults if his time but not enough inspiration to know the way to resolve them. His ultimate abandonment of poetry was inevitable.

Arnold excluded “Empedocles on Etna” from later collections of his poetry. He said it was because its sufferings had no release in action, that there was no relief from the pain through hope or resistance. And this is partly true because Arnold already understood what Sartre said in the 20th century, that for modern man “there is no reality except in action.” Empedocles’ most assertive self-expression was self-destruction, the most valid action for the man “whose insight has never born fruit in deeds” (“The Scholar-Gipsy,” 174). That is, a violent action becomes the only action for those whose self-knowledge has no expression in their being.

Empedocles leaps into the fires of Mount Etna,

My soul glows to meet you.
Ere it flag, ere the mists
Of despondency and gloom
Rush over it again,
Receive me, save me!
(“Empedocles on Etna,” 2.412-416)

“Empedocles on Etna” is the earliest expression of Amor Fati, the only control left for the non-existent. Death is Empedocles’ salvation.

A character in Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano says, “What is a lost soul? It is one that has turned from its true path and is groping in the darkness of remembered ways.” It is caught in a circuit of habit and recollection, reiterations of yesterday which it mistakes for tomorrow. This is what produced the nostalgic poetries of Leopardi and Hood. In them, it was innocent and young but in Arnold, it was a spirit of self-knowledge and fragmentation. For us, in the 21st century, it is simply the nature of things. As Larkin said, “nothing like something, happens anywhere.” The non-existent has taken place of our being. Arnold was the first poet to register this displacement with something like conscience. His struggle against it became part of the discord which made him one of its primary representatives in the Victorian age. In his poetry he affirmed the fragmentation, the fears and the self-assertions that he denied in his prose, but not because he lacked self-knowledge but because his self-knowledge could not change what he was.