Europeans have often seen Americans as optimists and themselves as “realists.” It is true that in the United States, the sense of exceptionalism — a term revived in the recent presidential campaign — seems to have driven hyperbole to new heights. In the academic sphere, grade inflation has been increasing since the late 1960s (at elite institutions more than elsewhere). Studentevaluation forms have as many as eight categories, the highest indicating “top 5 percent” and “top 1 percent” (also called “truly exceptional”). Certainly, no one gets into graduate school with “satisfactory,” which, by the logic of inflation, has long been understood to mean “poor.” (In fact, when the College Board “recentered” SAT scores in 1995, resulting in an average score increase of about 100 points, “poor” became “good,” and “good” became “excellent.”) And consider the American military, in which virtually every soldier is evaluated as “outstanding.”
Perhaps, in a culture of hyperbole, a certain value fatigue sets in, and one longs for deflation as a correction. For my part, over the past few years of editing a large reference work on American poetry, I’ve found an unexpected pleasure in the merely satisfactory. Of the hundreds of entries my associate editors and I received from scholars of American poetry of all periods, some of the most satisfying discussed pre-20th-century poets and included characterizations like the following:
Nathaniel Evans (18th century) is “noted by most historians as a ‘fledgling versifier’ whose occasional verses were wholly ‘unremarkable.’” Elizabeth Akers Allen (19th century) “was considered a minor Victorian poet even by her contemporaries.” Her sentiments were “expressed competently, but with no attempt at innovation in style or content.” William Byrd’s (18th-century) “contribution to poetry is not at all significant.” Indeed, “he published merely a few short, uninteresting poems.”
In our present-day culture of inflation, such humble assessments are appealing. Faint praise is sometimes appropriate. Charles Henry Phelps’s “Love-Song” (1892), a political overture to Canada, makes a poor bid for immortality:
Why should we longer thus be vexed? Consent, coy one, to be annexed.
But even William Cullen Bryant, surely a bright star of 19th-century poetry — the prodigy who, at 17, wrote “Thanatopsis” — is treated with disdain: “By the end of the 20th century, most critics pronounced him ‘minor’ when they took note of him at all.”
My own favorite entry, on Gertrude Bloede (19th century), sums up a poet’s bad dream of posterity: “Interest in her work, always limited, declined after her death.”
Curiously, it is almost impossible to find such modest assessments when one turns to contemporary poetry. Indeed, the problem of neglect or insignificance evaporates in a situation in which, in spite of the vast numbers writing (800 to 1,000 books of poetry are published in the United States per year; thousands of other poets publish in journals and quarterlies), we have no minor poets. Everyone today, like those above-average children of Lake Wobegon, is brilliant and sui generis.
William Bronk’s poetry, for example, “holds a unique place in the history of American letters.” Kay Ryan “is one of the most original voices in contemporary American poetry.” Who would dare to call the work of any of our thousands of confessional poets “overly sentimental and unevenly crafted,” as was said of poor Lucy Larcom (1824-93), who published some 20 books and who, as regards technique, was pretty crafty by today’s standards?
Most poets today are magnificently oppressed, lashing out fearlessly against the “mainstream,” which consists of everyone except the poet in question. Their biographies make them seem to jockey for the best of both worlds: Gerald Locklin (1941-), for example, is “an outlaw, underground poet, and college professor who has published more than 100 books of poetry and prose.” How underground can he be?
Indeed, marginalization is hard to sustain in a milieu of instant absorption. Everyone is or would like to be outside the system: “Throughout his career, Bill Knott (1940-) has maintained outsider status in American poetry. This is largely due to the fact that no literary camp can adequately house ... his body of work.” Michael Burkard’s writing “does not fit comfortably within either of these categories [i.e., confessional and Deep Image poetry].” And Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s works “defy easy categorization.” The assumption is that the rest of the poets are easily categorized — far from true, especially if one asks them.
Most of the hyperbole of our time concerns not so much craft or language as identity, an issue seldom invoked in poetry discussions before the 20th century. For Miguel Algarín, “to be a Nuyorican ... is to negotiate a hybrid identity.” Jessica Hagedorn “writes from a postcolonial, diasporic aesthetic.” “Chrystos is a Menominee poet whose commitment to both North American and queer identities has produced a distinctive and compelling body of poetry.” “Minnie Bruce Pratt’s identity as a Southern queer poet is at the forefront of her works and their significance. She speaks the often unspeakable.” “Outspoken, politicized, and prolific, Eileen Myles ... offers an energetic, anarchic, and inventive lesbian voice that has helped free many gay women writers to gain access to details of their lives.” Naomi Shihab Nye’s poems reflect “both her ethnicity and ethnicity in general” and “are windows into other worlds that invite empathy and healing comparisons.”
There are far fewer language-related assessments among the many encyclopedia entries, though there are some. Lyn Hejinian’s texts “focus on the discursive construction of knowledge and subjectivity.” But even here, modes of discourse are seen as inextricable from questions of identity. Thus, Carla Harryman’s work “is concerned specifically with challenging and undermining hierarchies of gender and genre.”
In short, where everyone yesterday seemed dispensable, today no one is. Is the matter of proportion a function of retrospect? Does looking back necessarily diminish?
Canon critics have argued the reverse, holding that the objects in your rearview mirror are not as large as they appear, that forces of canonicity and history are responsible for exalting them beyond any intrinsic merits assigned to them. Perhaps the two views are not in conflict when we consider that we select very few writers of the past, especially the distant past, for canonical distinction, i.e., for the class syllabus. Decades pass, and what seemed earthshaking or groundbreaking no longer seems so; thus contemporary poets’ reputations are exaggerated while earlier reputations are somewhat diminished.
Sheer volume has a lot to do with it. Consider that the poetic contribution of John Josselyn (1608-1700) consists of three short poems published in his two travel narratives. But in our own time, Gerald Locklin has published 100 books, while Robert Kelly has published “well over 50 books of poetry, four collections of short fiction, and a novel.”
The historical reasons for the obvious disparity in output include the demands of living in pre-20th-century America, in times when almost no one was a “professional” poet; the absence of any sense, before Matthew Arnold, that poetry mattered at all to ordinary working people; the complete absence of any institutional support, like that which has proliferated in the United States in the past half-century — i.e., grants, residencies, teaching positions, workshops, and the like; the general absence of any publishing opportunities besides a few popular magazines; and, of course, much shorter lives.
Perhaps, most of all, it is hard to imagine being “lonely like that,” as Adrienne Rich wrote in the early 1960s (in “Face to Face”) of earlier times in this country; hard to imagine, for most of us, “all that lawlessness,” each person living
with his God-given secret, spelled out through months of snow and silence, burning under the bleached scalp
This humble, sequestered idea of poetry is no longer with us, in spite of voices like that of the poet and critic Richard Howard, who has said that “we must restore poetry to that status of seclusion and even secrecy that characterizes our authentic pleasures.” Or, more recently, the critic James Longenbach’s observation that the large audience for poetry “has by and large been purchased at the cost of poetry’s inwardness ... its strangeness.”
In spite of the tenor of book titles like The Marginalization of Poetry and After the Death of Poetry, and in spite of the almost complete removal of the study of poetry from the higher reaches of literary theoretical studies — postcolonialism, poststructuralism, and the New Historicism — the writing of poetry has never been more feverish. There are 300,000 poetry Web sites. Six years ago, an heir to the Lilly fortune — herself an aspiring poet — gave $100-million to Poetry magazine, though her own submissions were all rejected by the editor. Poets continue to graduate in ever-larger numbers from those much-maligned M.F.A. programs.
It is easy to argue that poetry would benefit by returning to its magical desert spaces, but few poets, living or dead, have wished for obscurity. And fewer still would hand back a grant from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation or the National Endowment for the Arts, preferring to work in poverty and loneliness. Though it might be the best rebirth of all, no one can persuade poets to write less.
We may have to wait till the next world economic collapse, or the next ice age, to have a poetry that is not magnificent. Satisfactory, when the time comes, will be good enough.
Jeffrey H. Gray is a professor of English at Seton Hall University, author of Mastery’s End: Travel and Postwar American Poetry (University of Georgia Press, 2005), and editor of The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Poets and Poetry (Greenwood Press, 2006).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 25, Page B14