The Poet & the Tyrant

Osip Mandelstam: A Biography

By Ralph Dutli (Translated from German by Ben Fowkes)

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had predicted, in Stalin’s Gulag. His books had been removed from libraries and bookshops. Only braver readers kept them, sometimes hidden in saucepans at their dachas. From 1958, supported by the CIA, émigré scholars collected what they could from Russian publications of the writings of banned Russian authors; the works were so in demand that students like myself copied them out by hand. Impressionable readers were stunned by the hypnotic musicality of Mandelstam’s early poems, by the penetrating appreciation of the disaster that unfolded – the ‘ship of time going to the bottom’ – during the First World War and the Russian Revolution, by the fine love poems and by the use of biology to elucidate his times.

For a student of Russian literature, Mandelstam is a godsend. Every poem has memorable lines that could be quoted in many imaginable situations. Some are frivolous – ‘Eternal is the taste of fresh whipped cream,/As is the smell of orange peel’ – and others gnomic: ‘Everything has been. Everything will be repeated/And only the moment of recognition is sweet.’ Mandelstam absorbed into his poetics a whole century of Russian lyrical poetry, including Pushkin, Lermontov and Tyutchev, as well as Derzhavin, Batyushkov and Baratynsky, so that his poetry seems to be a conversation with the dead. The influence of classical Greek and Latin poets, German Romantics and French symbolists can be discerned too. Yet you also feel the presence of an acutely nervous, highly reactive personality, steeling itself to face forces that threaten him with destruction.

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The Perils of Fame: Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney

David Mason

They are killing her again.
—Frieda Hughes

 “Don’t you see—fame will ruin everything.”
—Ted Hughes, quoting Sylvia Plath

 So this is what an afterlife can come to?
—Seamus Heaney

 
One of our most powerful stories is that of the misread person, judged and condemned by everyone, ultimately unseen. We make the narrative worse with our ridiculous social media, the lack of circumspection as persons and reputations go crashing down in the flames of righteousness and vindictive gossip. How little justice really results from our cries for justice, our certitude, our raging egos, our “likes,” how much could in a better world remain open to nuance, ambiguity and doubt. How little mercy we show each other, how little forgiveness. But social media only amplify human tendencies that have always been with us, wherever two or more are gathered in the name of anything. Consider the problem of fame, one of the most universal human desires and one of the most disastrous, how it underlies literary ambition, the “fair guerdon” praised by Milton. Consider also the paradox that literature requires solitude, not only for its composition, but for access to the deeper waters of inspiration, beyond ego and its siren calls. Writers thrash in the arms of this paradox, wanting to say something that will speak to future generations, wanting the opportunities that fame affords without being destroyed by the judgments that follow it. The position is impossible.

One could argue that Sylvia Plath was destroyed by fame even before she became famous, though her most enduring fame was achieved after she committed suicide on February 11, 1963. She became famous not for herself, not even for the fierce, exacting beauty of her best poems, but as a figure easily misread by what she had called “The peanut-crunching crowd”—a martyr, an icon for feminists, a cautionary tale, a bitch-goddess. None of these judgments has touched the reality of her person or the reasons her poetry stands out in comparison to the writing of others.

Plath was not a poet of suicide any more than Homer was a poet of sailing. She was smart, ambitious, hugely talented, disciplined, complicated. She suffered from depression, but depression did not define every day of her life. Finally, she was every bit as much a mystery as you and I, untouchable by the facts of her life, no matter who mines and exhibits them. Anne Stevenson’s 1989 biography, Bitter Fame, excelled because it was written by a poet of Plath’s stature and generation, but it was probably compromised by Plath’s sister-in-law, Olwyn Hughes, who did not know her well and wanted to defend the reputation of her brother, Ted. The massive new biography by Heather Clark, Red Comet, represents a fuller picture, more thorough research and freedom to quote from papers unavailable to earlier writers, but does it get any closer to the “truth” about Sylvia Plath?[1] I doubt it. Clark’s laudable program is to rescue Plath from the critical residue of the past 60 years—the misrepresentations, judgments, opinions, assumptions, misreadings. On the whole, she succeeds in making us care, if we had not already cared, about Plath’s brilliance and its place in the world. But one must still be cautious when reading the poems in this biographical light. Like all the best poetry, like life itself, Plath’s poems cannot be fully or conveniently explained as phenomena.

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The Durable Art of Elizabeth Bishop

By David Mason

The knife there on the shelf—
it reeked of meaning, like a crucifix.
It lived. How many years did I
beg it, implore it, not to break?
—“Crusoe in England”

Few recent American poets have found readers outside a coterie of like-minded devotees. The good ones attract readers from multiple camps, readers who can’t deny a quality of experience richer than mere identity, better than mere technique or fashion. Perhaps this explains why Elizabeth Bishop’s poems appear to be so enduring, so admirable across a spectrum of readerships. Perhaps it is her containment, her solitude that we admire. Midway through Thomas Travisano’s authoritative biography of Bishop, we find this telling passage about the poet’s visits to New York:

When in the city, Bishop made her own definite impression. Partisan Review editor Clement Greenberg explained that Bishop was noticeable because she did not fit the standard literary pattern of the time. “I remember Elizabeth because she stood out. Elizabeth wasn’t a yacking literary type all the time. She wasn’t Delmore Schwartz.” He added, “You felt with Elizabeth life came first.” She was not concerned with presenting a marketable persona. In Greenberg’s words, “She wasn’t a celebrity figure, one whom journalism could catch hold of. Her poetry did it.” He added, “She wouldn’t have fitted in with the Partisan Review crowd.” Perhaps most important, according to Greenberg, “I never felt Elizabeth belonged in any crowd.”

Paradoxically, Bishop’s popularity, as far as poetry can be popular, derives from her isolation, her individuality, her lack of self-importance. We can read into her. The poems of Robert Lowell can seem all burnished ego, brilliance giving way to exegesis, while Bishop’s appear happy to remain partly hidden. They trust the reader like a secret friend.

To be fair, Lowell was often a real friend to Bishop, a companion in the art who saw her strengths clearly and would remark that “her large, controlled, and elaborate common sense is always or almost always absorbed in its subjects, and that she is one of the best craftsmen alive.” If I seem to disparage technique in the paragraph above, it’s not because I don’t believe it is the true test of a poet’s sincerity, but because it is insufficient to explain the power of the best poetry. Lowell leaves a lot of technique on view, while Bishop folds it into the visible world or what Lowell called “her marvelous command of shifting speech tones,” a comparison to Robert Frost. Suffice it to say that in Bishop we have acute artistry that has managed the most difficult trick of all—to attract a wide audience on its own merits.

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The house that a poet’s passion built

BY LAWRENCE CHRISTON

Robinson Jeffers was among the most ruggedly Promethean of 20th century poets, but every dawdling personal pleasure he denied himself in his flinty gaze at “boiling stars,” soaring hawks and insufferable mankind seemed to find its way into Tor House and Hawk Tower, the Carmel family compound he finished in 1924 after five years of hauling granite boulders out of the sea — first as a stonemason’s apprentice, then alone with block and tackle.

Wrestling with 300-pound rocks distracted Jeffers from chafing self-doubt over a small body of poems that was competent but undistinguished and guilt over staying home with his wife and two young boys while his generation went off to fight in World War I. The house became the answer to his anguish.

Outwardly, Tor House — and its nearby Hawk Tower — appears the rough extension of Jeffers, with its stubborn, thickly cobbled walls of Santa Lucian rock on a seaside bluff. The poet saw himself not just at the continent’s edge but also at the brooding, turbulent edge of history and human limit. When he gazed at the Pacific, he didn’t see anything on the other side except oblivion.

But the spell the house and tower exert on visitors is completely unexpected. Jeffers had one great love in his life, his wife Una — a smart and spirited beauty in whom he met his match. For whatever these structures of stone answer about him, they are his ardent, monumental tribute to their life together.

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Open Canon: Amy Lowell

E.R. Zarevich

Amy Lowell (1874–1925), Time magazine cover,
2 March 1925. Source: Public Domain.

Posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1926, Amy Lowell was a self-educated poet who favored Imagism and rejected “safe” choices.

You are ice and fire,

The touch of you burns my hands like snow.

You are cold and flame.

You are the crimson of amaryllis,

The silver of moon-touched magnolias.

When I am with you,

My heart is a frozen pond

Gleaming with agitated torches.

Amy Lowell (1874-1925) wrote this passionate poem, “Opal,” about the love of her life, actress Ada Dwyer Russell. Lowell wanted to dedicate her collections to her as well, but Dwyer, fearing the public exposure of their love affair, begged her not to. The only book Lowell was allowed to dedicate to her paramour was an analytical biography of the poet John Keats, published in 1925. This was considered a “safe” subject in Dwyer’s eyes, but Lowell, in her own lifetime, rarely showed much interest in anything deemed “safe.” 

What she was interested in was shaking her native America out of its stiff poetic rut, through her allegiance and advancement of Imagism, a movement that was considered shocking to mainstream audiences at the time. The poem above exhibits some of the key elements of Imagism, a branch of literary modernism: simple, straightforward language, unconventional presentation of verse, and meaningful images that the author deconstructs down to their essences. It was a direct opposition to the popular styles of Romantic and Victorian poetry, rejecting their rigid sets of rules surrounding rhyme, rhythm, and acceptable content (which tended to involve long narratives and broad, philosophical ideas). In Lowell’s work, a touch of homoeroticism added the personal flair that distinguished her in this particular subgenre. As she would be exulted as a poet, she herself exulted in women. Like her poetry, lesbianism was something Lowell was able to confidently incorporate into her identity against the oppression of the era she lived in. 

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Robinson Jeffers: Peace Poet

Justin Raimondo

A celebrated American bard, hailed by the critics as the bright shining star of the “California poets,” delivers the manuscript of his long awaited book, and his publisher—a major source of much of the nation’s literary cachet—sends a note chirping merrily that “the whole staff is buzzing with anticipation.” That buzz, however, soon turns to a growl as the author’s antiwar views come under their disapproving scrutiny.

Even as editor reassures author “how meaningful and important every word you wrote has been to me,” he is nonetheless “disturbed and terribly worried” about those “frequent damning references” to the president. The book, the editor sadly concludes, “will feed the prejudices of the wrong people, especially those who have tried so hard and so vindictively to discredit him.”

The poet’s work is subjected to severe editing. Entire poems—10 in all—are excised. When the volume is finally published, it bears an extraordinary editorial note averring, “in all fairness to that constantly interdependent relationship, and in all candor,” the publisher “feels compelled to go on record with its disagreement over some of the political views pronounced by the poet in this volume.” The editor’s note concludes with the smug self-assurance of one who knows his reiteration of the conventional wisdom renders him practically unassailable: “Time alone,” he intones, “is the court of last resort in the case of ideas on trial.”

It’s a tale for our times. The persecution of a liberal artist by conservative philistines and ideologues, the author a victim of the Bush cult, right? No? Well, then, it must be the story of some fellow-traveling Dalton Trumbo-like figure out of the McCarthy era, whose poetry of a slightly pinkish hue got him called on the carpet. Wrong again.

The poet is Robinson Jeffers, poet laureate of the Old Right, whose censored volume of verse, The Double Axe, published in 1946, shocked his longtime editors at Random House, where Bennett Cerf would not countenance reference to “the cripple’s power-need of Roosevelt.” In “The Love and the Hate,” a long narrative poem that did pass the censor’s test, Jeffers conjured a dead soldier who comes back to haunt his parents. Incorporating virtually all the political themes of the pre-war conservative opposition, the boy-corpse mourns the present fate of

The decent and loyal people of America,
Caught by their own loyalty, fouled, gouged and bled
To feed the power-hunger of politicians and make trick fortunes
For swindlers and collaborators.

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James Joyce’s divine comedy

For the Irish, atheism will always be religious

BY TERRY EAGLETON

One of the great literary anniversaries last year was the death of Dante in 1321, while this year marks the centenary of the appearance of James Joyce’s Ulysses. At first glance it would be hard to find two more ill-assorted authors. Dante is the poetic voice of medieval Christendom, exalted and sublime; Joyce is a modern rebel and blasphemer, sordid and salacious, a man described by Virginia Woolf as “a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples”.

Dante speaks of such grand affairs as heaven and hell, church and state, while Joyce loftily dismisses the lot of them. One panic-stricken English critic compared Ulysses to an Irish Republican bombing. A former Provost of Trinity College, Dublin remarked that the novel showed what a blunder it had been to establish University College, Dublin, where Joyce was a student, “for the aborigines of this island, for the corner-boys who spit in the Liffey”.

Yet the two writers have a good deal in common. It’s true that the language of Dante’s Divine Comedy can be a touch too mellifluous for some modern ears, but it can also be the idiom of the street, rough and abrasive, crammed with insult and abuse. Dante chose to write in the vernacular (and thus for the common reader) rather than in Latin, and in doing so played a major role in establishing everyday Italian as the literary language of his people. It was a choice which helped to revolutionise the writing of other European cultures as well.

For his part, Joyce has an uncannily well-tuned ear for the speech of working-class Dubliners, and Ulysses, which is awash with pub talk, gossip, political polemic and satirical invective, is one of the first novels in English to portray what we might now call mass culture. It includes tabloid journalism, scientific jargon, a pastiche of women’s romantic fiction, a mini-Expressionist jargon, the language of the unconscious and a good deal more. There is really no answer to the question “What is Joyce’s style?” even though he could spend days on end sculpting a sentence.

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Robinson Jeffers: Impolitic Poetry and the Hounds of Hell

Steve Kowit

“The passion for truth is the faintest of all human passions.” ― A. E. Housman

If Nietzsche was correct when he observed that the poets lie too much, it is also true that now and again a poet emerges who articulates truths so incendiary and forbidden that the guardians of the public good cannot help but be disconcerted. When it is politic to mouth chauvinistic homilies and genuflect to the tribal gods, those seditious writers and dissidents are ever in danger of being torn apart by the hounds of Hell, the beasts who guard the gates of propriety ― as Euripides, who terrified his Athenian countrymen by showing them the savage face behind the veil of their self-aggrandizing myths, is rumored to have been so torn apart. Osip Mandelstam disappeared forever into the gulag, Anna Akhmatova’s verse was banned, Boris Pasternak was forced to turn down the Nobel Prize because he could not avoid depicting the pathological nightmare of the Soviet state. But they dared not arrest him, he was too famous; instead, they threw his wife into a work camp to teach him the virtues of silence. In Turkey, Nazim Hikmet served decades in prison and was then forced into exile when he refused to fight in the US-sponsored Korean genocide. Richard Wright, Rafael Alberti, Joseph Brodsky, Juan Gelman and Czeslaw Milosz are just a few of the poets of our era who suffered exile. Cesar Pavese, Kim Chi Ha, Juan Ramon Hernandez, Irina Ratushinskaya are among the many poets of our century to be imprisoned. Garcia Lorca was murdered by the Spanish fascists for being a homosexual and a communist. Roque Dalton was murdered, or so it is generally believed, by internecine warfare among his fellow revolutionaries. Today, Forough Farroughzad’s sexually transgressive poetry is banned by the Iranian Islamic Republic.

In the most benign form of punishment, such writers are simply disparaged by critics, and the reading public is discouraged from paying attention to their works. Take, for example, the case of Robinson Jeffers. His refusal to write in the elusive modernist manner of his contemporaries, his lack of patriotic fervor during the Second World War, his grave reservations concerning the nobility of humanity, his insistent condemnation of mankind’s congenital cruelties, his disparagement of man’s primacy in the cosmic order, and the long shadow of misanthropy that fell across the entire body of his work were hardly designed to endear him to the critics and reviewers of his era. Although his screeds against humanity’s cruelty, America’s imperial designs, and the human degradation of the environment do not, these days, seem very wide of the mark, he has not regained the stature he once had and stands notably apart, both philosophically and aesthetically, from the modernist giants of twentieth-century American verse. “No major American poet,” Dana Gioia has commented, “has been treated worse by posterity than Robinson Jeffers. Nonetheless he still has an impressive number of passionate readers and advocates, and the most appealing of his poetry is by no means in danger of being forgotten. But what has remained perhaps least noted in his work is another quality shared by few of his contemporaries — a large-spirited compassion for his fellow beings, a compassion that does not exclude our non-human brethren. It is not impossible that it was precisely this empathy and compassion that account for his poetry’s unwavering focus on the world’s cruelty, man’s savagery, and his nation’s destructive history.

As early as 1923, in “Shine, Perishing Republic,” Jeffers was warning that America was settling “into the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire,” and he was advising his sons to “keep their distance from the thickening center” (“Shine, Perishing Republic” CP 1: 15). During the First World War he had tried unsuccessfully to enlist as a pilot but because he was already in his thirties he was rejected for being too old. But the astronomical toll of death and destruction that the war brought shocked him out of his naïve romanticism and he came to view that catastrophic event — and the very idea of war — with horror. A few years later, in “Love-Children,” one of the shorter poems included in his 1927 collection The Women at Point Sur and Other Poems, he writes without apology: “I’m never sorry to think that here’s a planet / Will go on…perfectly whole and content, after mankind is scummed from the kettle” (CP 1: 213). To have insisted that mankind was a destructive force in the world and to have offered his allegiance to that larger creation, the universe itself, in which homo sapiens is but one of myriad sentient beings — and by no means the most admirable — struck the central note of his subversive philosophy.

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Remembering Gwendolyn MacEwen

By: Emily Zarevich

The Canadian poet was inspired by everything from Ancient Egyptian mythology to folk magic, from Gnosticism to global politics.

“If it is permissible or even possible to apply a single adjective to the aim of Gwendolyn MacEwen’s writing, then the most accurate word would be explorative,” writes J. L. Bartley in his preface to Invocations, a commentary on MacEwen’s poetry and prose. “All of her publications to date have been concerned with a quest for a particular knowledge or vision and, consequently, with the communication of such knowledge to her audience.”

In other words, the Canadian poet and novelist Gwendolyn MacEwen (1941–1987) was a writer who didn’t just write about what she knew but also what she wanted to know. This is reflected in a writing style that was celebrated by fellow Canadian author Margaret Atwood (best known for The Handmaid’s Tale), who knew MacEwen personally.

In the span of MacEwen’s illustrious career as a poet, novelist, and self-disciplined researcher, this extended to anything and everything from Ancient Egyptian mythology to folk magic, from Gnosticism—the study of first-century CE Jewish and Christian practices—to the Arabic language, from global politics to private intensities. Everything.

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R. S. Thomas interview: ‘Waiting for the God to speak’

In this interview, published in the Church Times on 21 July 1995, Martin Wroe spoke to the fierce old Anglican clergyman about his life, poetry, and fragile hold on faith.

R. S. Thomas at the Hay Literature Festival, in 1992

THE door of the whitewashed cottage overlooking the sea creaked open, and the mean, towering countenance of the finest living poet in Wales peered fiercely out. The Revd R. S. Thomas was about to take his afternoon constitutional over the bleak Lleyn peninsula in north Wales.

He was not in a good mood. He had forgotten his appointment with the English-speaking journalist who had travelled several hundred miles to find him — and had spent a year persuading him to agree to it. For most of the year, R. S. Thomas had not spoken English, on principle. Nor had he seen any journalists.

For a few tense seconds the day hung in the balance. Then the priest in the poet won out. The recluse put away reclusion for a couple of hours, and reluctantly admitted the outsider. There is no doubting his poetic genius, but R. S. Thomas can be a bad-tempered old bugger. Maybe there’s a connection.

The most surprising thing about last week’s news that this ancient Welsh Anglican clergyman had been nominated for the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature was that he had let the proposers — a group of literati led by Lord Gowrie of the Arts Council — do it at all.

In fact, he refused to be nominated at first; but when Kevin Thomas of the Welsh Academy agreed that, if he won, he could make his acceptance speech in Welsh, he reluctantly went along with it. He is disdainful of public acclaim or critical praise.

At 83, Thomas rarely gives interviews. In fact, he rarely bothers much with anyone except a few locals, and then only to keep up his Welsh. So he says, anyway. But he still writes — in English — every day, dodging the tricks of failing memory, daring to go for originality even when he can’t exactly remember whether he was original this way before.

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