powers that add up to a talent in themselves. A critical scope that can trace the intensity uniting different artistic fields is not unprecedented
in America, but she is an unusually well-equipped exponent of it. Making a solid attempt to pin down the sliding meanings of Wallace Stevens’s little poem ‘Disillusionment at Ten
O’Clock’, she brings in exactly the right comparison: a piano piece by Satie. She compares the poem’s ‘red weather’ with a Gaugin seascape: right again. These
comparisons help to define the post-Impressionist impulse from which all the verbal music of Stevens’s Blue Guitar emerged, while incidentally reminding us that Paglia, before she made this
bid on behalf of poetry, did the same for painting, and with the same treasury of knowledge to back up her endeavour. But above all, her range of allusion helps to show what was in Stevens’s
head: the concentration of multiple sensitivities that propelled his seeming facility. ‘Under enchantment by imagination, space and time expand, melt, and cease to exist.’ Nobody has a
right to a creative mind like his. It’s a gift.
Students expecting a poem by Maya Angelou will find that this book is less inclusive than the average line-up for Inauguration Day. But there is a poem by Langston Hughes; and, even better,
there is ‘Georgia Dusk’, by Jean Toomer. A featured player in the Harlem Renaissance of the early 1920s, Toomer transmuted the heritage of southern slavery into music. So did the blues,
but Toomer’s music was all verbal. He was a meticulous technician, which is probably the main reason why his name has faded. Paglia does a lot to bring it back, but she might have done even
more. She concedes too much by saying his ‘flowery, courtly diction’ was more Victorian than modernist. The same might have been said of John Crowe Ransom, and with equal inaccuracy.
Toomer sounds to me like a bridge through time from Elinor Wylie, whom Paglia doesn’t mention, to Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, neither of whom she mentions either.
If she has a deaf spot, it lies on that wing. Favouring, with good reason, the American vernacular, she tends to set it up as something that supersedes European formality, as if it were possible
for a poem to be over-constructed. But it can’t. It can only be underpowered. If she had paid the same pin-point attention to the complex interplay within Toomer’s four-square quatrains
as she pays to William Carlos Williams’s free verse in ‘The Wheelbarrow’, she would have been able to show how a superficially mechanical form can intensify conversational rhythms
by the tightness with which it contains them. It would have been a useful generosity. Anthony Hecht’s reputation was injured when Helen Vendler found his forms limiting. On the contrary, they
were limitless. As for Wilbur, his fastidiously carpentered post-war poems were part of the American liberation of Europe. Whether that liberation was a new stage in American cultural
imperialism’s road to conquest remains a nice question. One would like to have heard her answer. Such a discussion would lie well within her scope. But our disappointment that she stops short
is a sign of her achievement. It we want a book to do more than what it does, that’s a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that’s an endorsement.
Occasionally there is cause for worry that her young students might listen too well. Three short poems by Theodore Roethke are praised without any warning that most of his longer poems, if the
reader goes in search of them, will prove to be helpless echoes of bigger names. Ambition undid him, as it has undone many another American poet infected by the national delusion that the arts can
have a Major League. The short poem by Frank O’Hara should have been marked with a caveat: anything longer by the same poet will be found to have a lot less in it, because the urge to find a
verbal equivalent for the
in America, but she is an unusually well-equipped exponent of it. Making a solid attempt to pin down the sliding meanings of Wallace Stevens’s little poem ‘Disillusionment at Ten
O’Clock’, she brings in exactly the right comparison: a piano piece by Satie. She compares the poem’s ‘red weather’ with a Gaugin seascape: right again. These
comparisons help to define the post-Impressionist impulse from which all the verbal music of Stevens’s Blue Guitar emerged, while incidentally reminding us that Paglia, before she made this
bid on behalf of poetry, did the same for painting, and with the same treasury of knowledge to back up her endeavour. But above all, her range of allusion helps to show what was in Stevens’s
head: the concentration of multiple sensitivities that propelled his seeming facility. ‘Under enchantment by imagination, space and time expand, melt, and cease to exist.’ Nobody has a
right to a creative mind like his. It’s a gift.
Students expecting a poem by Maya Angelou will find that this book is less inclusive than the average line-up for Inauguration Day. But there is a poem by Langston Hughes; and, even better,
there is ‘Georgia Dusk’, by Jean Toomer. A featured player in the Harlem Renaissance of the early 1920s, Toomer transmuted the heritage of southern slavery into music. So did the blues,
but Toomer’s music was all verbal. He was a meticulous technician, which is probably the main reason why his name has faded. Paglia does a lot to bring it back, but she might have done even
more. She concedes too much by saying his ‘flowery, courtly diction’ was more Victorian than modernist. The same might have been said of John Crowe Ransom, and with equal inaccuracy.
Toomer sounds to me like a bridge through time from Elinor Wylie, whom Paglia doesn’t mention, to Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht, neither of whom she mentions either.
If she has a deaf spot, it lies on that wing. Favouring, with good reason, the American vernacular, she tends to set it up as something that supersedes European formality, as if it were possible
for a poem to be over-constructed. But it can’t. It can only be underpowered. If she had paid the same pin-point attention to the complex interplay within Toomer’s four-square quatrains
as she pays to William Carlos Williams’s free verse in ‘The Wheelbarrow’, she would have been able to show how a superficially mechanical form can intensify conversational rhythms
by the tightness with which it contains them. It would have been a useful generosity. Anthony Hecht’s reputation was injured when Helen Vendler found his forms limiting. On the contrary, they
were limitless. As for Wilbur, his fastidiously carpentered post-war poems were part of the American liberation of Europe. Whether that liberation was a new stage in American cultural
imperialism’s road to conquest remains a nice question. One would like to have heard her answer. Such a discussion would lie well within her scope. But our disappointment that she stops short
is a sign of her achievement. It we want a book to do more than what it does, that’s a condemnation. If we want it to do more of what it does, that’s an endorsement.
Occasionally there is cause for worry that her young students might listen too well. Three short poems by Theodore Roethke are praised without any warning that most of his longer poems, if the
reader goes in search of them, will prove to be helpless echoes of bigger names. Ambition undid him, as it has undone many another American poet infected by the national delusion that the arts can
have a Major League. The short poem by Frank O’Hara should have been marked with a caveat: anything longer by the same poet will be found to have a lot less in it, because the urge to find a
verbal equivalent for the
Similar Books
