Efflorescences of Female Poets

This sketchy essay aims at little beyond description. Perhaps other readers will be intrigued with these poets, or the phenomenon of their appearing when they did. Further, these authors provide data for testing whether women’s writing differs in general from men’s.


     Upon being told of a female Quaker preacher, Dr. Johnson reacted, "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." His attitude was, like most of Johnson’s opinions, as reactionary as it was witty, but his asperity was doubtless due in part to the fact that in his own time that the issue of female speakers, writers, and intellectuals became contested. By the eighteenth century not only did female preachers appear; women writers were proliferating. Women made up a good percentage of both the authors and consumers of fiction, and they were just making their way into the list of the period’s poets.
     Yet, surveying the globe through all the centuries of literacy, in the written records of our species the voices of half the species are all but absent. Were there no other evidence of human culture, the record of literature would itself be sufficient to trace the patriarchal bias of civilization since the Bronze Age. Apart from the sporadic appearance of extraordinary individuals, there have been as well as some fascinating efflorescences of groups of female poets, blossoming out of societies that seem otherwise as male chauvinist as their geographical and chronological neighbors.
     In the Western tradition, doubtless the most celebrated female poet is Sappho whose reputation, though not much of her poetry, has survived the centuries. A towering figure very close to the beginning of European literature, she was called “the poetess” just as Homer was “the poet” (or, in more modern times, “the bard” means Shakespeare“). She was celebrated with statues and coins and called by at least three ancient poets “the tenth muse.” One of her most celebrated poems describes the physical manifestations of passion.
     

The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --

listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.

My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.

Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,

without you . .

     Her once substantial collected works have dwindled over time to a few scattered fragments with one single whole poem, standing almost miraculous amid the ruins. Indeed, the greater part of ancient Greek lyrical poetry as a whole has been lost, but nonetheless, Sappho was hardly a unique figure in her own day. Other female poets from the time are known, though some by little more than name and a few hints of reputation.
     Kleobulina (6th century BCE) is associated in legend with philosophers. She enjoyed sufficient celebrity that two comedies, one by Kratinos and one by Alexis, featured choruses of “Kleobulinas.” All that survives of her work are portions of three riddles. She seems to have specialized in these gnomic formulations which lie at the foundation of metaphor and poetry as a whole. Whether hers were profound or trivial or simply mysterious must be judged by a few examples. The solution to “a dead ass boxed my ear with his horned shin-bone” is a Phrygian flute. More ambitious and universal , though perhaps little more profound is a version of the year riddle, familiar from many sources including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata: “There is one father and twelve children; of these each Has twice thirty daughters of different appearance: Some are white to look at and the others black in turn; They are immortal and yet they all fade away.” [1]
     Even in D. L. Page’s prose translation the reader hears an eloquent and natural voice in Erinna’s sixth century “Distaff,” written in memory of her childhood friend Baucis.

These traces of you, dear maid, lie still glowing in my heart : all that we once enjoyed, is embers now. We clung to our dolls in our chambers when we were girls, playing Young Wives, without a care. And towards dawn your Mother, who allotted wool to her attendant workwomen, came and called you to help with the salted meat. Oh, what a trembling the Bogy brought us then, when we were little ones! - On its head were huge ears, and it walked on all fours, and changed from one face to another!

      Among the others female poets who flourished in archaic and early Classical Greek times were Korinna, who according to Aelian and Suidas defeated Pindar five times in competitions. Her choral lyrics were performed by troupes of girls in partheneia; Megalostrata from the 7th century BCE, whom Alkman called a "golden-haired maiden enjoying the gift of the Muses", and Myrtis of the 6th century, first of a line of female Boeotian poets.
     These writers flourished and were not only accepted but celebrated by coinage and statuary as well as by critics. Though their culture was highly patriarchal, goddess-worship provided some occasion for female poetic agency. Thus Sappho’s lines are in a ritual as well as a psychological sense an offering to Aphrodite. Yet it would be a millennium and a half before Europe would see another such flowering of female poets.
     Among the written records of the remarkably luxuriant poetic growth of the south of France in the later Middle Ages are the names of twenty female troubadours or trobairitz. [2] The development of fin’ amors -- what came to be called courtly love in English – doubtless was influenced by Arabic poetry [3], Mariolatry, and the absence of men during the Crusades. Eventually romantic and artistic skills came to be included among the accomplishments required of a courtier.
     Five poems are extant attributed to the Comtessa de Dia, four cansos and a tenson. For one canso, “A chantar m’er de so qu’eu no volria,” music has survived as well. The poem is a complaint of an unsatisfied lover who feels that her beloved behaves toward her in a “proud,” standoffish manner (“orguoill”) while being “open-hearted“ (“franc”) with everyone else. Still, she remains steadfast in her own dedicated love, preserving her nobility and virtue while he betrays his own “great worth” (“rics pretz”) by failing to return her affection.

I must sing of that which I would rather not:
I am so aggrieved by him of whom I am the friend.
For I love him more than anything that be,
But pity and courtliness do not avail me with him,
Nor my beauty, nor my worth, nor my wits:
For I am thus tricked and betrayed
As I should be if I were ugly.

     The canso by Bieiris de Romans "Na Maria, pretz e fina valors" provides a dramatic example of the complex hermeneutic challenges these texts can present. The poem, clearly attributed to Bieiris de Romans, contains a suite of recognizable courtly love conventions, yet is addressed to a woman named Maria. Her peerless excellences, the poet says, elicit true love and a “pure heart” (“cor truan”). She begs for some sign that her love-service will be accepted. In the beloved the poet finds “gaiety and happiness” (“gajess’ e alegranssa”). [4] Scholars, puzzling over what to make of this poem, have sometimes attributed it to a male author or at any rate to a male persona. Some regard the poem as a straightforward expression of lesbianism, while others prefer to view it as an expression of intense but non-sexual friendship. Inevitably, the beloved has also been identified with the Virgin Mary. [5] To some the words of the poem seem a sincere heart’s overflowing, while to others they are ironic or a purely aesthetic game with little relation to lived experience.
     In Heian Japan (794-1185) two of the greatest writers were women. Murasaki Shikibu wrote the lyric-filled Tale of Genji of which Kenneth Rexroth says “most people who have read it agree that it is probably the world’s greatest novel.” [6] This masterful work combines the most intensely self-conscious aestheticism with a highly wrought eroticism and a mystical Buddhism, all from an almost painfully sensitive point of view, as refined as any page of Proust. The lovers, indeed most of the characters, exchange subtly significant verses, often heavily allusive; indeed, the entire book, long as it is, has a lyric sensibility.

Murasaki:
The troubled waters
are frozen fast.
Under clear heaven
moonlight and shadow
ebb and flow.

Answered by Prince Genji:
The memories of long love
gather like drifting snow,
poignant as the mandarin ducks
who float side by side in sleep. [7]

     Genji was so successful that it became itself the source of countless later references and works of visual art. Murasaki (the name is both the author’s pseudonym and the name of the heroine in the novel) also wrote a journal and a book of waka.
     In her diary, Murasaki says waspishly of one of her contemporaries: "Sei Shonagon is very arrogant. She thinks herself so clever and litters her writings with Chinese characters, but when you look at them carefully you will find many errors. Those who want to behave as if they were superior to others will lower their reputation. Will their future be brighter?" [8]
     Though Shonagon’s lyrics are included in contemporary anthologies, her Pillow Book, a sort of informal journal belonging to the Japanese genre zuhitsu, is her most well-known work. Her super-cultivated sensibility and the extraordinary refinement of the Heian court, are evident on every page. She compiles lists of “things that should be large” “Nothing annoys me so much,” she says as “someone who arrives at a ceremony in a shabby, poorly decorated carriage.” After including “rice starch that has become mixed with water” in a list of “things without merit,” she apologizes at length for mentioning such a vulgar item, saying “I never thought these notes would be read by anyone else.”
     Though she also wrote waka, the prose of the Pillow Book is highly poetic. The books opens with this passage.

In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them.
In summer the nights. Not only when the moon shines, but on the dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is. [9]

     In an example of a curious dialectic potential within sexist custom, women were not considered appropriate for the study of Chinese and the composition of prestigious Chinese poetry or kanshi, (though some acquired Chinese anyway). One result was that women writers concentrated on waka, in Japanese, and were thus likely to write more apparently natural and sincere verses than the practitioners of a learned and artificial tradition.  The breadth of participation  by women in the literary life of the time may be suggested by the title of Akazome Emon’s volume Thirty-Six Female Poetic Sages. Among the many other poets writing during the Heian era were Lady Ise who became concubine to Emperor Uda, the Princess Shikisi, and Izumi Shikibu considered by many the greatest poet of the time. [10]
     Though I claim no professional expertise in any of the three cultures in which these poets lived, I will nonetheless venture a few suggestions toward an explanation of their popularity. Ancient Greek, Heian Japan, and the Languedoc during the high Renaissance were all societies which placed an unusual value on the aesthetic. The refined cultivation of the pursuit of beauty is evident in such phenomena as the well-organized program of pleasures at ancient Greek symposia, the courts of love under Eleanor of Acquitaine, the Countess of Champagne, and others during the High Middle Ages, and the moon-viewing and poetry parties that originated in Heian era. These practices all imply a certain space for hedonism, though all include intellectual or artistic as well as corporeal pleasures.
     Undeniably each culture also has individual characteristics that may have been influential in making space for female poets: tolerance for homosexuality in archaic Greece, Buddhist aesthetics in Japan, Mariolatry and chivalry in the Western European Middle Ages. Critics have argued is whether certain of these texts represent authentic women’s voices or merely women who have gained acceptance by learning to compose patriarchal poetry. What cannot be disputed is that, in spite of their comparative silence through much of history, women have figured conspicuously in certain great eras of poetry. The phenomenon of these efflorescences of female poets and their individual works themselves deserve greater attention.




1. Both may be found on p. 165 Greek Elegy and Iambus I, J. M. Edmonds (Loeb Library).

2. The accessible text is Meg Bogin’s The Women Troubadours (W. W. Norton: New York and London, 1980). I acknowledge the substantial service she provided in assembling this volume, though I find her unreliable both as to facts and interpretations. She relied for texts on Oscar Schultz’s Die Provenzalischer Dichterinnen (Leipzig : G. Fock, 1888).

3. See Alois Nykl ‘s convincing Hispano-Arabic Poetry And Its Relations With The Old Provencal Troubadours.

4. The Consistori del Gay Saber "Consistory of the Gay Science") was a poetic institution founded at Toulouse in 1323 to foster the revival of Old Occitan verse.

5. Proponents of male authorship include François Zufferey, Oskar Schultz-Gora, Gianfranco Folena, Jean-Baptiste de Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye and Elizabeth W. Poe. Those who consider the work lesbian include Pierre Bec, Magda Bogin, Renat Nelli, and John Boswell, which an advocate of affection is Angelica Rieger.

6. “Tale of Genji” in Classics Revisited.

7. Kenneth Rexroth, Translations from the Japanese.

8. The Diary of Lady Murasaki, translated by Richard Bowring, 1996, Penguin, p. 54.

9. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated by Ivan Morris (Penguin), p. 201, 159, and 21.

10. Asian poetry was highly influential for European and American Imagism in the early twentieth century. Amy Lowell introduced a collection titled Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, translated by Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi, with an introduction by Amy Lowell. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920.

Edouardo

     There were two great advantages to my job as a textbook editor. Though we kept some strict deadlines, I was always able to complete my work in a small fraction of the expected time, allowing me a good many hours to employ as I wished. It was there that I first read Beowulf in Old English, there that I translated Leonidas of Tarentum, there that I idled away a good many hours reading the Berkeley Barb and the L. A. Free Press, to both of which the corporate library subscribed, thanks to its director, a gay astrologer.
     That librarian was an example of what I found the other significant advantage of the workplace, which allowed me, despite my restlessness with conformity and big business, to linger there long enough to accumulate a nest egg for traveling. The fact is that, although it looked very much like an ordinary office, an insurance company for example, it was not quite the same. My own semi-alienated presence was not unique. Because the industry was publishing there were a number of literary types, artists, and other individualists lurking in the institutional halls who made the place considerably more bearable to each other.
     The company had its own one-man art department where in-house publications, catalogues, and advertisements were put together. The art director, liberated I presume because of that title, had an office in the executive wing despite his gnomish whimsy, drooping moustaches, and unlikely clothing. His home was a pleasure palace with layers of classy antique oriental rugs underfoot and dozens of varieties of small bright tropical fish darting about several salt-water tanks. He was generally inaccessible because he would wear earphones for music and could not hear his telephone or doorbell. Another of my colleagues had just decamped from Lama Commune after the community had defeated his proposal that all residents should be mandated to enact daily psychodramas based on their dreams. There was as well a latter-day Mark Twain, a Keokuk boy who liked to write and tell stories, playing up his country exoticism, and an independent Celtic scholar who later formed a commune with one of my co-workers, a poet who was later to walk the streets of Berkeley with sandwich boards of glad poetry. We made fraternal contacts as well among the few youthful pot-smokers in low level positions.
     But it seemed as though even the straight people often displayed a high weirdness quotient. Another editor on my own project was always poring over catalogues of spying merchandise. (He was one of the few who would not accept an anti-war armband Patricia had made to distribute for a Moratorium day.) We mythologized some who caught our attention. There was a tall blond man given the sobriquet “the farmer’s lout,” with what I have to admit was very little justification, while the officious little fellow who worked downstairs in supply was the “malicious dwarf,” after Quilp in The Old Curiosity Shop.
     In those days I worked also with Edouardo. He was a generation older and one of his eyes looked off in an irrelevant direction, which lent him an aspect at first slightly distracting, but which I came to view as an appropriate analogue for his antic temperament. He was always impeccably and rather formally dressed, a form of semantic magic that served him well. It was, I think, his clothes and his semi-British accent that had got him his editorial job.
     Edouardo told us that he had grown up in Argentina, though his parents had come from Lebanon. (It is, as the reader will shortly realize, very difficult to discern whether any of the available facts about Edouardo in fact represent reality.) According to him, he had been sent to a British “public” boarding school where, during his teenage years, he was expelled for some combination of insubordination and moral turpitude. This much was not difficult to believe.
     Undeterred, upon his return to Buenos Aires, he purchased an Oxford tie and somehow parlayed this prop into membership in the club of Oxbridge graduates in the Argentine, an organization with many influential members. He was always rather vague about his professional activities during this stage of his life, preferring to focus on the café society in “the Paris of South America” and the endless hours he once spent discussing art, books, and politics while lingering over a few drinks and perhaps plotting a love affair or two.
     By his account he had known some seriously engaged left-wingers (and he was Jewish besides, enough to draw suspicion under the fascist military regime) and found himself jailed without charge. When he was just as suddenly released after six months, he decided to emigrate. Doubtless on the basis of his sharp appearance, he got a job selling neckties at Marshall Fields, but lost the spot after a few weeks when he advised a customer whom he felt had insulted him that a certain tie would match the man’s “bilious” complexion.
     At this professional crisis Edouardo decided to employ his chief skill, his art form, in fact, his recreation and delight: fabulation. He managed to score an interview with the publisher and proceeded to dazzle all he met with his polished language and conservative suits. He may have been exaggerating his persuasive skills, but he told us, his car pool comrades, that he had claimed to have earned a master’s degree in literature from the University of Beirut which at that moment was unfortunately aflame in civil war, making inquiries impossible. His undergraduate degree was from Heidelberg, but the names of Jewish graduates, he mentioned, had unfortunately been purged under the Nazis. Everyone wanted to believe him. He did, after all, sound so convincing with that accent. (On our drives to and from work, we heard the BBC accent deployed in scurrilous schoolboy songs, some with obscene Latin jokes. He was the first person I heard who used “fuck-all” to mean nothing.)
     Not only was he popular at work, he gained a reputation as a universal genius. In those days before the internet, if our library could not provide a bit of information necessary to write a footnote, one would have to travel to a bigger university or research library. Editors soon found that, if they asked Edouardo, he provided an immediate answer in every case. The subject did not matter – it could be a phrase in medieval Persian or a detail from the periodic chart, Edouardo seemed always to know every answer. I asked him if he were not apprehensive that, at some point, the books would be published and teachers who knew the real answers would write critical letters, but that eventuality seemed so remote to him it was as though it did not exist. Doubtless he was rightfully secure in his powers of bluff.
     Edouardo’s flights of fancy were not restricted to his professional life. We understood that despite his marriage, he pursued numerous liaisons, sometimes even leaving work for a rendezvous at a lunchless lunchtime. He was utterly charming to everyone, but particularly to women. I have no idea what he told the women he met; my only hint came once when I overheard him at a party explaining the challenges of his psychiatric practice to a lady he had been eying.
     I do not doubt that he was a recurrent trial to his wife. I even expressed reservations about his behavior to a common friend. When he heard of my comment, he was unperturbed. “That’s just what you should think. You are twenty-three. When you are fifty-three, your attitude will be different.” It is a simple fact that, to my callow perspective, he was a kind of mentor, not as a lover, but as a consciousness effervescing with brio, a character all the more intriguing for his errant eye and bald head, one who, whatever his faults, loved life and sought to live to the fullest, even when his field of operations was centered in a publishing company in the suburban Midwest.

Celebrities of Performance Poetry

This essay is a fragment, a chapter, perhaps, of Winged Words, a considerably longer work on orality in poetry.


     John Masefield, a rather popular poet himself and a long-term Poet Laureate, said, “Since the printing press came into being, poetry has ceased to be the delight of the whole community of man; it has become the amusement and delight of the few.” [1] He is certainly correct that poetry spoke to the hearts of all in the traditional village, in the theater at Epidauros and in the Globe. Nonetheless, a description of the public career of several poets of the last century and half will indicate that, well after the spread of literacy, indeed, even after the growth of mass media, the appetite for oral poetry persisted among general American audiences. However their appeal seems based on that particular sort of stylized individuality called celebrity rather than poetry alone. Just as certain movie stars play more or less the same role again and again [2] (an option unavailable to stage actors), the marketplace taught poets that, to be popular in an age of mass media, they had to construct a consistent and appealing public personality and generate color and drama as well as reading poetry.
     This generalization is supported by a review of the most popular readers of poetry in recent times. Each of the cases below conjures an image of the poet stretching to bridge the increasing gap between high art and common showmanship. In the first case, audiences saw a cultivated individual impersonate simple country folk. In each of the others, the contrast is reversed: the supposedly refined poetic sensibility is represented by a hobo, bohemian, or drunk. Either way the contrast provided piquant and popular entertainment. The poets’ poetry, while it might sell books, was not in itself enough to attract a mass audience to a reading. Ticket buyers were motivated by the wish to see a celebrity or at any rate a colorful personality. The successful performing poet, it seems, must be exhibited as a curiosity or at any rate a novelty.

1.
     James Whitcomb Riley, once one of the most popular of American poets, a man who dined at the White House, whose statue stands in his home town, and whose birthday was made a state holiday, is now remembered for a few pieces relegated to “children’s verse.” Having begun as an entertainer for the Wizard Oil Company before he had attained celebrity as a poet, Riley supported himself after 1875 primarily through public poetry recitations, and by 1889 he was touring most of the year. Known for his rural personae, dialect poetry, [3] and conventional sentiment, the man himself fascinated audiences. He was elegantly dressed and well-spoken, yet able to slip into his folk idiom at will. Often the program consisted of a series of acts, sometimes featuring poetry, lecture, and music during the same evening. Riley appeared sometimes with other practitioners of regional dialect such as Mark Twain or George Cable. [4]

2.
     In the early 20th century Vachel Lindsay was able to support himself primarily through readings while preaching “the gospel of beauty.” He still liked to call himself a “beggar” and a “mendicant,” and the fact is that before he had become well-known he financed lengthy walking tours by reading in boarding houses, restaurants, and saloons in return for food and a bed. Challenging American materialism, he said his poems were “printed expressly as a substitute for money.” His reading style was grand and loud, in the old theatrical manner, featuring gesture and posture and nonverbal exclamations. He reports his audiences for the most part well-satisfied, but also records with wry “hip” amusement the reactions of those who thought him mad or called him a lazy bum. Lindsay was at once a counter-cultural bohemian and a popular entertainer.
     He was far from unique. In a letter, Lindsay describes the state of poetry in his day:


The famous 1912 New Poetry Fire kindled by the good and great Harriet Monroe was burning up the prairie, and anything any poet did was temporarily news, at last. New Books of Poetry were popping like Popcorn. Amy Lowell was telling Massachusetts just where to get off. Ezra Pound had broadcasted imagism from London. In just two months [Edgar Lee Master's] Spoon River [Anthology] was to start in Reedy's Mirror, and to be read to tatters in Chicago and London before it came out in Book Form. Frost was coming out in England and was about to be lionized in Boston, Sandburg was soon to receive his first prize, that for His poem on Chicago, from Harriet Monroe, and all the poets in America for the first time in thirty years were looking one another in the eye.


     One finds no division between high art and popular here. Poetry magazine is “burning up” the Midwest. Books are “popping” out of the poets’ consciousness and, presumably, off bookstore shelves. In order for Miss Lowell to tell Massachusetts as a whole “where to get off,” Massachusetts must have been listening. Spoon River Anthology is to be serialized in a weekly publication that had evolved from a newspaper supplement. It was perhaps the last moment at which it could be said that “all the poets in America" “were looking one another in the eye.”


3.
     Amy Lowell [5] was perhaps unique in the degree of her efforts to market herself and the “new poetry.” She declared poetry to be her trade, and with a twentieth century tradesman’s eye for the role of advertising in a sound bottom line, noted "Publicity first. Poetry will follow." She boasted "I made myself a poet, but the Lord made me a business man." T. S. Eliot dubbed her the "demon saleswoman." In the words of the actress Eleanor Robson Belmont, Lowell "perform[ed] the service of a barker at a circus, as from the lecture platform, in the press, and almost the street corner, she cried aloud, 'Poetry, Poetry, this way to Poetry.'"
     Her readings were multi-media events which featured such effects as a drummer behind a screen, while Lowell herself sang, shouted, whooped, cake-walked, and stomped. She smoked cigars, and as the reading proceeded she donned one after another of a whole series of pince-nez which she brought on stage in a basket. In the words of Van Wyck Brooks, "she whizzed and she whirred, and she rustled and rumbled, and she glistened and sparkled and blazed and blared." Poet John Brooks Wheelwright called her "the Biggest Traveling One-Man Show since Buffalo Bill caught the Midnight Flyer to Contact Mark Twain." To Louis Untermeyer she was "not merely a lecturer, she was an event, a national phenomenon, a freak of nature, a dynamo on the loose."
     Though she cautioned both D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce against explicit eroticism, her work foregrounds a powerful but veiled sexuality exciting to her audience in a way that would today difficult to conceive. [6] Her work was immediately meaningful to readers puzzled by the maneuvers of high modernism in works by Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and Gertrude Stein. She retained popularity in the role of a safe and entertaining bohemian whose outrageous repartee never became frightening. She seems to have cultivated "public rows," beginning with her combative assertion of imagism at the 1915 Poetry Society of America meeting (at the end of which angry literati charged the stage). She noted with satisfaction that, after she had attacked Whitman calling him “primitive,” “wild,” and, more surprisingly, as “a man of little influence” at the celebration of his centenary at Philadelphia’s Contemporary Club (where Whitman himself had been a member), her books sold out in that city.


4.
     Dylan Thomas’ notoriety persists to this day. Thomas provided the image of The Poet [7] to better than a generation of readers of English with his unruly curly hair, his alcoholism (so congenial to a Romantic notion of the artist/hero), the “angelic” melody of his voice, and his imagery, at once surrealist and patently emotional. He was for a time the darling bad boy of the intelligentsia, reading mostly on university campuses yet misbehaving in the most satisfying and “artistic” way. [8] Thomas’ tours were commercially successful, [9] and the poet’s status was evident in his introduction not merely to literary figures, but also to Hollywood celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe.

5.
     Allen Ginsberg was known to millions from Howl’s obscenity trial and photos in Life magazine who never read his poetry. By taking off his clothes repeatedly at social gatherings during the nineteen fifties, he guaranteed name recognition well beyond the literary sphere. By appearing at the Human Be-In in January of 1967 he positioned himself as a father of the youth revolution. His appearances were often spectacles including chanting and music. I do not doubt that Kaddish will continue to find readers in the twenty-second century, but I would guess that a greater number will know his reputation.


     Though universities can still fill halls to simply hear a talented poet read, it appears from the American history, a few points from which are sketched above, for a general audience something further is required. Perhaps this development became inevitable as soon as performance ceased to be the most common way of presenting poetry. Thousands of years after poetry was first recorded in writing, it was still sung or chanted, often with dramatic embellishment, certainly with expressive voice and body language. It may be that, once the universal tradition that bound ancient Greek and medieval English audiences fractured into the varieties of modern sensibility, the delectation of poetry for its own sake became inevitably a minority taste. The poet today who is as little attracted by the “poetry lite” of Billy Collins and Ted Kooser as by the easy sensationalism of much of today’s performance poetry might as well stop lamenting the art’s small audience and either be glad of a coterie of devotees or cultivate an attention-getting mode of performance capable of seducing today’s listeners.




1. This statement from Masefield appears on a hundred quotation sites, but nowhere is it attributed. A few mention his book The Daffodil Fields, but that seems to contain no prose. The source is immaterial to my use here, but its mystery annoys me nonetheless. Surely someone can inform me of the source.

2. John Wayne is an example of the latter, Paul Muni of the former. Cary Grant could do his patented version of suave elegance, but could also do first-rate comedy and a variety of other roles.

3. Riley’s work with dialect was an influence on Paul Lawrence Dunbar.

4. Cable deserves more readers for his portrayal of old New Orleans and for his progressive politics.

5. Much of the information in this paragraph and the next two is derived from Melissa Bradshaw. “Outselling the Modernisms of Men: Amy Lowell and the Art of Self-Commodification.” Victorian Poetry 38.1 (2000) 141-169.

6. To some readers this represented the masking of her own homosexual orientation. See Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men, "Writing Lesbian" (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1981); Judy Grahn, The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1985).

7. As, for the same era, Einstein became the typical intellectual. By the late 1950s Time and Life had found more contemporary sensational poets and, with a few series of photographs set up the Beats in business. (Though this last phrase aspires to irony, these pictures lit the imagination of such suburban youths as myself.)

8. For instance, before reading at Pomona College, he lost his papers and notes. I recall a university professor pointing out the step on a stairway on which Thomas had fallen as a sort of holy relic.

9. Barbara Holdridge and Marianne Roney approached Thomas in New York City in 1952, recorded him, and launched Caedmon Records, the sole recording company specializing in spoken word.