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Planetary Motions
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Spoor of Desire: Selected Poems
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Wednesday, November 1, 2017

The Archaeology of Gray’s “The Progress of Poetry”


     One thinks casually of eighteenth-century Augustan literature as highly formal and conventional, its values derived from that age of Roman antiquity which was already belatedly looking backward toward the Greek. The learned classical references that ornament the poetry of the period may seem to be decorative only, signs of allegiance to the lofty standards of the ancient masters, a sort of pretty upper-class language that operated almost like slang, to indicate in shorthand fashion a background and values shared by many European intellectuals. Though Gray’s “The Progress of Poetry” contains numerous references that could be described in this way, there is a deeper, more archaic layer of mythology in his account. Embodying many traits of the nascent Romantic movement and familiar (as very few in earlier eras had been) with the oral poetries of traditional societies, Gray uses mythology in a passionate, intuitive, and personal way at the same time that he observes the usage accepted, even required, from poets in his day. While the conventional allusions support the straightforward burden of the poem as an account of poetry’s history from Classical times through the Middle Ages up to his own day, indeed to himself, this deeper personal level of mythology suggests an altogether different theme.
     Gray was an excellent Classical scholar, spending much of his life as a fellow at Cambridge. His familiarity with both Greek and Latin literature was far beyond that required to make the gestures toward antiquity that were de rigeur in his day. Such references as those in the opening stanza of “The Progress of Poetry” to the Aeolian lyre and to Helicon are as graceful and informative, if as lacking in originality, as the many similar allusions in other authors. The first of these images has a specific meaning significant in Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” but here it is largely conventional, signifying little more than poetry in general. Using such terms at the outset of a poem establishes the writer’s bona fides as a scholar qualified to compose poetry.
     Yet Gray is clearly, with Thomson, Collins, and Cowper, a precursor of Romanticism. The very fact of his imitating Pindar, rather than, like Samuel Johnson, Horace, is evidence for the revaluation taking place. Pindar’s poems are more open in form and associative in logic, spraying mythological names with abandon and daring the reader to keep up. His awareness, imperfect as it may have been, of the pre-Christian oral poetry Celtic, Norwegian, and Welsh, as well as from Lapland and America distinguishes him from earlier critics who would have felt such “primitive” poetry to be necessarily inferior. Further, his sympathetic ear equates with poetry the sounds of awakening nature, the “thousand rills,” the “laughing flowers,” the whole “rich stream of music,” he can hear “rebellow to the roar.” Thus the whole generative engine of nature is incorporated into his own verses.
     Somewhat optimistically Gray notes the power of art to make life livable, banishing “sullen Cares.” In a clear expression of the Romantic politics of radical dissent, he claims that poetry is associated with “Freedom’s holy flame,” ignoring the centuries-long association of art with the ruling class.
     In spite of such sympathetic approaches to Romantic ideals, Gray was criticized by Wordsworth in the seminal statement of Romantic poetic theory, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, for his inauthentic “curiously elaborate” language distant from that of ordinary prose in his “Sonnet” on the death of Richard West, surely one of Gray’s most strongly-felt compositions. While there is little doubt that Gray’s emotion was genuine and profound, the poem’s use of Apollo is as wholly conventional.
     The same vaguely unfocused generative powers of nature that fail to console the grieving poet underlie his excited joy at the beginning of “The Progress of Poetry,” where the transference of energy in the poem is originally felt in the flow of poetry itself, which is likened to the fructifying streams. In later stanzas the same redemptive force is attributed to Aphrodite by (stanza I.3), then to the Muse (II, 2), and finally to the figure of Fancy (III, 3). The successive appearance of these representations of the divine female support the concluding image of the poet as Pindar in the form of a “Theban Eagle,” soaring to the empyrean.
     Classed as one of the “graveyard poets,” Gray’s outlook was indeed melancholy. Apart from the loss of innocence of which he complains in his Eton College ode, “The Progress of Poetry” contains a catalogue of causes of suffering “Labour, and Penury, the racks of Pain” culminating in “Death” and conquerable only by the Muse which is able to banish “Night, and all her sickly dews.”
     Gray used the conventional images of Classical learning, invoking the goddess as an ally against these universal threats to mankind, but in his mind the goddess also assumed a very individual meaning. His muse was a lover but also a maternal figure protecting him from meanness and vice. Though she is associated with nature’s reverdie, she also protects against the uncontrolled passions. In his "Hymn to Ignorance" he appeals to the goddess of not-knowing, feeling he would be far happier with less insight and regretting that he “forsook” her “fond embrace.”
     In his “Ode to Spring” Venus’ powers are inadequate to do more than provide a temporary respite from cares; in the end the poet feels himself to be “a solitary fly.” Most pointedly, in the “Ode to Adversity” he praises adversity, particularized as “Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty,” as a “rigid nurse” who teaches “Virtue” and cultivates philosophy by teaching the poet “to love and to forgive.” Though “wit” had been the byword of Pope’s generation, according to the “Hymn to Ignorance” he feels “filial reverence” for the protective value of lack of knowledge, looking with nostalgia on earlier eras when the whole world was ruled by ignorance, undeceived by “Wit’s delusive ray” which may tempt people into transgression. In “The Progress of Poetry,” art is a firewall against “frantic Passions.” For Gray the divine female, though associated with fertility and love, is paradoxically an aid in self-control. While he is attracted to the Romantic values of imagination and emotion, he is cautious and seeks to moderate these potentially explosive forces. In Gray’s greatest poems, this mythology is highly ambivalent.
     At the end of “The Progress of Poetry” the persona takes flight like an eagle, an image familiar from Pindar, imitated by Bacchylides and Horace, and thus wholly acceptable as a routine ornament. The image of the high-flying poet is, of course, far more archaic than those writers. The notion of a poet/seer flying into the air to attain wisdom is one of the most common shamanistic tropes. Gray may have been wholly unaware of these archaic usages, but he reenacts them for the eighteenth century in his odes.
     Thus he sprinkles Classical allusion over the surface of his verse like a baker adding roses of icing to a cake, but, at the same time, at a subterranean level, he expresses his moral and existential anxieties and his hope for the liberation of poetic flight into the sublime. As psychological facts these tensions imply his own mental distress and internal division, while intellectually, they suggest the conflicts associated with his writing just on the brink of Romanticism. Perhaps such ambivalence is a factor in his extraordinarily small oeuvre which amounted during his lifetime to only thirteen poems, less than a thousand lines in total. If so, the poems he did write may be all the more dense and significant, precise and beautiful, for the ambiguity they suggest, more worthy perhaps than a few thousand lines of a lesser writer’s wholly conventional verse. Though Gray turned down the position of Poet Laureate, he had in his own day and has today far more readers than Colley Cibber who held the honor for decades or William Whitehead who succeeded him.

Burns' and Lovick's Vietnam

     PBS has cut me off. After I watched three episodes of the Vietnam documentary Ken Burns made with Lynn Novick, the online site of this “non-commercial” institution demanded payment to see another. It was one of the rare times, less often I think than once a year, that I am prevented from seeing something by lacking television through broadcast, cable, or satellite. I saw, nonetheless, enough to make a few observations.
     This production is significant because Mr. Burns’ reputation guarantees that this version will be definitive for a generation. Youth to whom the experience of the war is remote will shape their ideas through this single retelling. And the Burns production machine does not disappoint its fans. The film, long as it is, is immensely watchable. Research assistants have combed the archives for apposite pictures and films so that even events that could not have been photographed are illustrated in what seem to be relevant images. Talking heads give the viewer what passes a reasonable facsimile of all perspectives, though I would have preferred to have seen a larger number of people interviewed and fewer repetitions of the same personalities. The editing is brisk and smooth, and the product is easily digestible, too easily for my taste.
     One of the axioms of the sixties movement was that objectivity was an illusion, that all works inevitably have a point of view, just as their makers do, and that the story-teller who adopts a pose of impartiality is deceiving either self or consumers. A responsible documentary maker will do better to acknowledge rather than deny bias, so that watchers may allow for it. Those who claim to show both sides equally inevitably have a hidden agenda, virtually always in defense of the status quo.
     In the years since the war opinion has shifted to such an extent that no one now defends the failed American involvement as justifiable. Anti-war protestors are now acknowledged to have been correct in their analysis of the uprising as a nationalist struggle while the USA played the unattractive and ultimately untenable role of attempting to prolong colonial rule. An apologist for the war effort today to have even a semblance of credibility must substitute indirect and emotional arguments for historical facts.
     It is only by ignoring America’s imperialist motives that the filmmakers can claim that the war was “begun in good faith” and “went wrong” in some mysterious way for which no one can be blamed. The documentary is careful to claim atrocities by popular revolutionary forces in order to give the illusion of balancing the clearly tyrannical rule of the Vietnamese collaborators like Thieu and Ky. Though it can pass for even-handedness to the casual observer, this treatment in fact obscures the very real difference between the patriots who fought to rid their country of foreign invaders and the front men for neo-colonialism.
     It is precisely Burns’ and Lovick’s skill at capturing the audience by presenting engaging little narratives that allows them to ignore the larger facts of the conflict. The sound track features folk-style popular music from the era to illustrate the soldiers as well as the protestors, providing a general liberal-seeming wash over the entire picture. The popular country and Motown tunes of the day are absent, and one would never guess how marginal the position of dissenters remained until 1969 or 1970.
     Through the first three episodes the series follows a single exemplary soldier, clearly one destined to be killed in combat, a certain “Mogy” Crockett whose family is so atypical that he has not only a cute and comic nickname – his ever-so-well-put-together mother tells us she inspired his patriotism by reading him Shakespeare’s Henry V as a bedtime story. “Mogy” is a highly motivated Cold Warrior, educated and gung-ho about killing Communists. Would it not have been preferable to have focused on some more typical draftee, indifferent about the war but accepting of the draft? The narrative of the documentary as it stands implies that the war was fought by sincere but mistaken enthusiasts. Even a Special Forces veteran to whom I spoke recently said that a week in country was enough to convince him the war effort was profoundly misguided and headed for defeat.
     Similarly, the politicians are generally depicted as reluctant prosecutors of war policy, always feeling forced to widen and apologize for the war while at the same time keeping many aspects of it secret from the public. Of course it is necessary to understand the motives of the ruling class during this period, but the film’s account would suggest that American leaders were victims of circumstance, blundering perhaps, but trying to do the right thing, when they were in fact mercilessly seeking to impose American control over a small and distant land.
     Further, the filmmakers portray Ho as the steady and benevolent “uncle” of his own mythology while blaming Le Duan for the harsher Stalinist aspects of North Vietnamese policy as though history relies in the end on personalities.
     Burns and Lovick shrink from calling Vietnam an imperialist war which is the only accurate term. It was fought to maintain American control over what had been a French colony. The government’s own deceit is evident in clips of John Kennedy’s usually smooth rhetorical flow turning bumbling and unsure as he tries to claim that we are not simply replacing one colonial system with another. But that was precisely the plan. The USA became committed to defeating the Vietnamese shortly after killing Lumumba and overthrowing Arbenz and Mossadegh; it then supported right-wing dictatorships around the world which suppressed all civil protest, leading to the rise of armed insurrectionary movements on every continent.
     Perhaps seeing the remaining seven episodes would alter my view of the series. I doubt it. An honestly engagĂ© account of the war would have far more integrity than this sentimental picture in which everyone seems to be morally equivalent, all doing their best as violence and untold suffering unaccountably mounts as though Americans and Vietnamese alike were stalked by some mysterious and pernicious Nemesis. That view may even in the twenty-first century be more acceptable to Americans than the reality of leaders set on American hegemony over a smaller, weaker nation and an army of dupes, forced into harm’s way by Congressmen whose own sons had better things to do than slog through Southeast Asian jungles.

Bukka White’s Limpid Lyric Clarity



Bukka White recorded many of his songs in several versions, particularly in the later phase of his career. The lyrics differ but usually only in details insignificant for my thesis. I am not including the texts of the songs to which I refer as they are readily available.


     Though poetry and art in general have a unique capacity to express the irrational processes that underlie human consciousness and thus excel in representing ambiguity and the mysterious, some works appeal to the reader very simply and directly. Such simplicity is often associated with honesty which has been praised as a desirable literary quality since Classical times. To Plato “Beauty of style and harmony and grace and good rhythm depend on simplicity” [1] When Sir Philip Sidney reported his Muse’s mandate “look in thy heart and write" he was employing a rhetorical pose, but one which gains its power from the claim that it presents a subjective truth unornamented. Sincerity became a far more widely recognized literary value with Rousseau’s Confessions and the Romantic movement. By later Victorian times this standard had become sufficiently accepted that to Matthew Arnold “an essential condition” of great poetry is “the high seriousness which comes from absolute sincerity.” [1]
     In the blues songs of Bukka White the listener encounters few surprising or original metaphors and little in the way either of ambivalence or complexity. For instance, “Good Gin Blues” barely goes beyond declarations like “I wants me a drink of gin” and “I love my good old gin.” To some the celebration of alcohol may seem an insubstantial theme, but White approaches love with a similar lyric clarity. For instance the first verse of “Bukka’s Jitterbug Swing” is a simple statement of desire in which the primary rhetorical device is repetition.


Hey-eee, come on you women
Let's a do the the jitterbug swing
Hey-eee, come on you women
Let's a do the the jitterbug swing
When ya do the jitterbug swing
Then you know you will be doin' the thang


     The song closes with the same outcry reaching beyond language with which it opened.


Hey-eee, please ma'm don't say, 'Uh-uh'


     In his version of “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” a song originally recorded by Big Joe Williams as a prisoner’s lament, each of the fifteen stanzas opens with a poignant line, repeated three times. The song’s long life as a rhythm and blues and rock and roll standard [3] is surely a reflection of the understated power of such lines as that of the title (which itself occupies four stanzas), “turn your lamp down low,” and “I b’lieve your man done come.” White’s song of love longing associated with incarceration, “Poor Boy Long Way from Home” is similarly minimal with the fact of separation bearing the emotional burden, progressing only from the title phrase through the plaintive cry “Baby, I wanna come back home to you” to the final poignant stanza in which the singer says he cannot even make contact by telephone.
     White complains of depression in the most concrete manner, in “Sleepy Man Blues” declaring “when a man gets trouble in his mind/ he wanna sleep all the time.” His struggle to “stay in the sun shine” and “keep from weakin’ down” is all the broader in implication for his lack of further specification. Similarly, his complaint on his mother’s death “Strange Place Blues” laments the alienation the singer experiences at his mother’s death not through explicit lamentation but by calling himself a stranger in a strange place. In the same way he sings of the hardship of prison not by protesting brutality but with the question “When Can I Change my Clothes,” repeating the question through six stanzas with little variation but with incremental intensity. Similarly, the immensely moving “Parchman Farm Blues” simply says “I sho’ wanna go back home.”
     White’s gospel turn “I am in a Heavenly Way,” perhaps one of his most minimalist songs, repeats the word joy as a kind of single syllable mantra fifty-seven times through fifteen stanzas if my count is accurate. Here poetry functions less as delivery of information than as a magic charm.
     The primary signification of works like these by White cannot be doubted. The critic may note subtle sound effects and allusions to other songs, but the fundamental impact of these songs is on the surface. This analysis implies no value judgment. Every reader of Hemingway’s fiction is aware that simple statement, even understatement, can be as powerful as indirect, complex, or conflicted formulations especially when dealing with the most powerful and fundamental of human passions. Lack of rhetorical figures is in itself a figure, and Bukka White was a master of the cri de coeur.


1. This is Jowett’s version of the Republic III 400d-400e.

2. Matthew Arnold “The Study of Poetry.” The slippery impressionism of the standard is well-illustrated by the fact that Arnold asserts without thinking he need present any evidence that Burns and Chaucer are lacking in this regard. In Burns he finds “something which makes us feel that we have not the man speaking to us with his real voice; something, therefore, poetically unsound.” One looks in vain for further specification.

3. Versions were recorded by the doo-wop group the Orioles and by Muddy Waters before the rock versions by Them, Van Morrison, AC/DC and others.


This site includes a good many other essays treating blues songs as poetry. To see the others open the Index under the current month in the archive and consult section 5D “songs.”