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This longish paper traces a process of career development common to a number of modernist poets, and attempts in a rough way to theorize the common elements of from inception to growth to full flowering. In the process, it theorizes the difference between a “major” and a “minor” poet, at least in the modernist era, assesses the crucial activity of the long poem, and offers other clues to evaluation and canonization – issues that have become decidedly unpopular these days. It is unpublished, but I stand by it as a rule of thumb and general guide. I value the description of one reader, who told me that my thesis has holes big enough to drive a truck through, but it is still a useful index of consideration. My fascination with the long poem is the beginning of my concern for the minimizing, in fact the trivializing of poetry as a genre through the process now called “lyricization,” a major theme of my book The Patriot Poets. Young poets might give more thought in advance to the notion of “career development,” in addition to the pursuit of readership and recognition that normally preoccupies them.
This paper on Williams’ masterpiece Spring and All – the original text of prose interspersed with poems published in 192x and not again until 197x – was an offspring the ideas in my Careers paper. It remained unpublished because I discuss Williams’ great work as an “initiation poem” – a concept that makes no sense apart from the previous paper, or else a great deal of explanation. I have discovered since that the genre of prose and poetry first exemplified in Dante’s La Vita Nuova has a name: it is a _________________.
I became exasperated while studying Eliot’s Four Quartets (to me the most profound poem of the twentieth century) with references to Eliot’s “sestina” in “The Dry Salvages.” The work is clearly not a sestina, and its background is considerably more interesting.
I still think Frost’s “The Black Cottage” is possible the richest work intellectually in his oeuvre. The contrast between Frost’s response to Emerson and Eliot’s led me to group a number of poems together under Hayden White’s term “metahistory”: these two poems, plus Pound’s “Near Perigord,” Williams’ “History,” and Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” This essay, which I wrote quickly in the midst of lecturing, was an odd one out in my work, but I now see in it the seeds of my book The Patriot Poets.
Like many readers, I was led to Henry Roth’s masterpiece of narration by the unusual backstory of its publication. Having taught the book with great satisfaction in my undergraduate course, and struck by the paucity of criticism, I determined to write my only published essay on prose fiction. Roth was still alive at the time, and I am glad to say that he and his wife were greatly pleased by my approach through soundscape.
My only contribution to the extensive scholarship on the poet who led me to a career in literature.
This article is now the first chapter of The Patriot Poets, and since it is available on line anyway, I include it here.