In Pursuit of the Pearl in James Merrill’s First Poems

Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes.

  

     Readers who are neither professors nor poets are likely to stress the communication function of literature at the expense of its essential aesthetic role.  At its most vulgar this tendency appears when a schoolteacher asks a class “What is the poet trying to say?”  Scholars, too, are accustomed to tease out meaning – political, psychological, spiritual – from artistic texts as though these are subjects about which the writer may educate the reader.  While such inquiries are not altogether groundless, the fact is, of course, that the only field in which artists are expert is likely to be art.  In essence, art is self-justifying play.  All arts rise from people entertaining themselves and others by performing recreational symbolic manipulation.  Among the chief pleasures of this universal human activity is the experience of beauty in formally structured patterns, patterns of sound, of meaning, of color and movement, patterns satisfying for their own sake, regardless of reference to anything in lived experience. 

     The role of formal beauty in art is evident in forms like dance, music, and abstract painting but it is never absent from literature as well.  One advantage of critical discussion of theme is that the issues can often be more or less demonstrable, whereas perception of beauty is ultimately subjective.  One may prove that a given work has been considered beautiful by the best authorities for centuries, one may document one’s own motives for applauding a poem’s form, yet it remains impossible to force another to experience pleasure in consuming it. 

     This does not mean, however, that critics do not present judgements of value.  The primary role of a journalistic book reviewer is evaluative, and more scholarly commentators do not shrink from gauging aesthetic quality.  Indeed, their opinions are often spirited.  In appraising the work of James Merrill, many critics express an odd ambivalence.  He is generally acknowledged to be one of the finest American poets of the latter half of the twentieth century, yet virtually all discussion of his work includes descriptive adjectives that foreground the poet’s mastery of what Pound called melopoeia while treating this skill as a weakness.  Readers’ sensibilities are doubtless shaped by the fact that sound is the most neglected aspect of poetry today.

     In the years since Merrill’s First Poems, poetry has proceeded ever further on the path toward prosiness and the colloquial, and sound has been neglected to the point that it is imperceptible to many readers.  Like Roethke and Lowell the fashions of the time led Merrill to loosen his practice of prosody, yet from the start many readers found his work precious and over-refined.  Even in an era when academic poetry governed most critics’ standards, these poems struck readers as insufficiently vulnerable.  Merrill attracted curiously qualified praise in which his expertise was cause for applause but also for suspicion. 

     This oddly ambiguous rhetorical pattern describing Merrill emerges clearly from a perusal of New York Times reviews of his books.   The review of First Poems in the New York Times heralded the book and called attention to the poet’s “superb elegance” heralding “the rise of a new American formalism.”  Yet the critic’s reservations, though muted, were clear in the review’s title “Mannered World,” and his later reference to the poet’s “highly-mannered style.”  The Times’ next reviewer felt it necessary to mount a defense, asserting that “The verbal elegance, and the Jamesian or Proustian world he draws his people and images from, are neither frivolous nor precious.”  The third Times critic to treat Merrill’s poetry constructed a miniature imaginative flight on the now familiar theme.  “One could imagine him (or the persona of his poems) aging into a perfectly dapper Henry James villain: a Gilbert Osmond, to whom life consists of figurines to be manipulated. Brilliant, technically flawless, terribly aloof, involved in their own artifice.” He finds, however, in Water Street, an increased “humility,” as though the Christian virtues had aesthetic currency.  The reviewer of Nights and Days balances Merrill’s “suavity and technical polish” against a newfound “complexity of feeling,” noting in sum the same bipolar opposition: “This poetry fascinates and exercises the intelligence as much as it liberates the emotions.”  The commentator on The Fire Screen repeats the pattern.  In an article titled “Traveler With a Trunk of Poetic Devices,” he describes Merrill’s work as “elegant and cosmopolitan . . .  decorative, sumptuous, tinged with world-weariness . . .rarified” and regards the most successful poem as that least assertive of form, thus “freeing” the subject and  “compelling it to speak for itself” unlike a poem in a more demanding form which would hold “its subject still by enclosing it in a complex frame.”  Well after Merrill’s death the theme continued, with the Times writer noting his poetry’s “high, almost lacquered finish” and its “refinement, intricacy of design and formal containment,” while regretting his being “in thrall to a certain kind of poetic decorum.”  He is “a hopeless voluptuary when it comes to language” whose “hyper-refined style” recalls the Decadents.”  In short, he is “recherché” due to the unfortunate tendency for his “gifts with language” to “become his vice.” [1]

     A procession of reviewers continued with the same theme since, suggesting again and again that virtuoso technique, while worthy of praise, yet was likely to signal some sort of emotional emptiness.  A few further examples of this all-but-universal judgement will suffice. 

     Secondary codes developed to imply this sort of ambivalent assessment of Merrill’s achievement include references to Wallace Stevens and to Mozart.  Helen Vendler, a partisan of Merrill’s oeuvre, after stating the opposition in her title “Ardor and Artifice,” ensures its understanding by the subtitle “The Mozartian touch of a master poet,” and proceeds to build her essay on it.  She notes opponents of Merrill’s receiving the 1973 Bollingen Prize had objected to his poetry, “a hermetic cultivation of one's sensibility and a fastidious manipulation of received forms."  Observing that the poet was consistently accused of “snobbery, affectation, preciousness, artifice, perversity, and elitism,” she enlists the author himself to concede that his early poems were a "melodic, empty-headed fin de siècle sort of thing." [2] 

     One sympathetic reader says that Merrill was a poet who preferred “wit over emotion,” who “embroidered his effects, unable to let loose in a soulful voice.” [3]  Another critic has felt it necessary to rehabilitate First Poems though her appreciation is limited by calling the poems “borrowed,” “an imitation” with “a cold, transparent medium intervening between the self and the world,” “all dressed up without much of a place to go,” and lacking “the animating spark of individual experience.”  She even accuses the elegant Merrill of “awkwardness.” [4]             

     As Vendler’s quotation of the poet’s own self-denigrating characterization of his work suggests, Merrill had heard this opinion commonly enough that he adopted it in part.  In an untitled poem from 1972 (which he chose to highlight with italics to indicate its significance in 1982) Merrill characterizes his early work in a warm but somewhat condescending tone, rich in aristocratic indulgence, using the most unassuming terms. 

  

-- Not after all a work so vile

That portions even now aren’t guaranteed

To make the simplehearted read

And who know better, smile.                [5]

 

 The most that can be said of these poems then is that they “blaze tinily,” and the awkward, slightly unusual adverb reinforces the author’s humble pose.  Of course this is in effect nothing but an unusually gracefully performed modesty topos, demonstrating rather than apologizing for literary sophistication.

     There can be doubt that Merrill is a highly self-conscious practitioner who makes considerable use of both pure sound as well as of montages of ideas and images.  The care with which he builds his lines is evident to the analyst.  Merrill’s mid-twentieth century reaction to the danger of meter and rhyme sounding child-like, mechanical, insincere, or off-putting is not to abandon traditional forms but to loosen them comfortably. 

         One need only open First Poems and glance at “The Black Swan” (also the title of the poet’s first chapbook, privately printed) to note the poet’s concern with form.  The poem’s five stanzas are visually similar, looking much like rhyme royal, an intriguing invitation to the reader much as the entrance to a meticulously tended French-style garden beckons toward the stroller.  The number of feet per line varies  5-3-5-5-5-3-4 (pentameter, trimeter, pentameter, pentameter, pentameter, trimeter, tetrameter) and the feet are basically iambic.  Merrill said of the iamb in general that “no other meter will do,” calling the foot “our virtual birthright,” [6] but this basic backbeat is subject to considerable variation.  The rhyme scheme is always AABCABC, but the rhymes are virtually always partial. 

     An appended chart provides the data, but simply reading the text reveals his approach at once.  Merrill has composed an elaborate stanza of his own invention which is yet similar enough to earlier forms to seem natural, yet it is clearly “modern” due to the considerable irregularity of the metrical and rhyme patterns.  A courtly dance is in progress, but it is not one of absolutely predictable patterns.  Merrill’s form is sufficiently complex that the arrival of rhymes and the length of lines are often something of a surprise in spite of the overall regularity.

     The sound structure of the poem has an appeal of its own, accessible even to a non-English speaker, yet the melody, as always, is functional and expressive in support of meaning.  As the present concern is not hermeneutic, a few examples must suffice. 

     The poem begins not with an iamb but with an arresting downbeat like the “Hwaet!” that opens Beowulf.  The last line of that stanza is hypercatalectic, i. e. adding a syllable, indicating in the pace the excitement of the poet’s suspended “wonder.”  The fourth line of the second stanza includes an extra syllable in the second foot corresponding to the “thing in itself,” an object then described in regular feet.  In the last seven lines of the final stanza a regular pentameter is followed by a regular tetrameter and then four lines more disordered in meter as the speaker accepts his relationship to the extraordinary swan.

     Meanwhile, the rhyme words squirm and turn, differing with each other as much as they agree.  Thus “lawns” and “swans” are all but harmonious, while the word “draw,” with its increased difference, indicates the problem poised by the “private chaos” that accompanies the fine bird.  The effect is increased by the comparative extent to which “splendor” and “wonder” and “wake” and “lake” consort well together.

     The expressive potential of Merrill’s sound effects is secondary, though, to the altogether formal pleasure of observing theme and variations, expectations satisfied or turned in the serial experience of the reader or listener following the poem as it unfolds.  With line lengths and rhymes in flux, yet under the governance of an overall pattern, the poem is at once formally elegant and unpredictable.  Merrill resembles in form the highly conventionalized yet ever-fresh structures of a Bach fugue. 

     Those critics who find Merrill too skillful a poet link this characteristic with a lack of affect, a deficiency in emotion, yet “The Black Swan” ends, having passed through “wonder,” “pain,” and “grief,” with a declaration both direct and passionate: “I love the black swan.”  One need not venture far into biographical details (he called his professor Kimon Friar “the black swan”) to see how in fact he foregrounds feeling not only in his first book’s first poem, but throughout his career and, incidentally, his life. 

     The theme is elaborated in “Variations: the Air is Thickest that a Thistle Guards.”  A tour de force with in six sections in varying forms, each of them a sort of cabaret song detailing one variety of love-longing, united by the opening and closing mentions of “sweet air,” suggesting the goodness of life in spite of doubts, pains, regrets, and frozen feet. 

      Two eleven-syllable lines conclude section one after six with ten syllables each, as the “hungering waves are both ornamented and limited by the thistle’s pain.  The rhymes are tightly but irregularly wrapped with an ABCBCADD pattern though a, b, and c all share the vowel-r sound.  The d rhymes state the poem’s central tension, the linkage of pain and pleasure, with the “pearl-eaters” a distant ideal of satisfied desire.  

     The second section not only builds a shapely self-contained verbal structure; it also plays against the first.  Instead of the insistent if off-base rhyme scheme of the first section there seem to be no end-rhymes at all (only the pleasant internal echo of “rambler”/”brambles” in the first stanza) until the ninth line when “blows”/”grows” comes as a surprise, only to be capped by the tenth line which resounds rhyming fully with the fifth.  Lines five and ten are also each eleven rather than ten syllables in length though in these stanzas twelve syllable lines appear as well. 

     The third section switches to shorter lines suggesting children’s verse.  Doubtless to balance the expectation of heavily stressed meters and full rhymes associated with the nursery.  The syllable count varies randomly from five to seven while rhymes are etiolated almost out of recognition, with the first two being the ironic pair of “nursery”/”mercenary” and the sinister one of “witches”/”matches.”  The light expectation associated with children’s poetry is belied by the haunting third stanza in which people, like flowers, either “fall helter-skelter” or, turning “wry like thistles,” like Keats’ bees in the Autumn Ode, deceive themselves into believing that “each latest/ Is safest, is sweetest.”

     Four architectural octets, recalling the septets of “The Black Swan” form the fourth section which shifts abruptly from the nursery to the drawing room and the enactment of an ambiguous love relationship in languorous lines recalling “Prufrock.”  Here the half-rhymes again are regular in their appearance ABABCDDC.  The shapely form of then stanzas is defined by the line lengths, basically pentameter with lines one, two, three, five, six, and eight approximating pentameters (though varying between ten and fourteen syllables) and lines four and seven trimeters (between five and seven syllables).

     The poet disorients his readers once more with the fifth section, an unlikely representation of the pains of love in a vignette of Henry IV seeking absolution in Canossa for what was essentially a political struggle with Pope Gregory VII in five-line stanzas with partial rhymes ABBAA.  In an example of Merrill’s meticulous attention, the penultimate line “Whatever I tasted, wherever I strayed” stands out with eleven syllables slowing and spreading the implications of the magical moment at which everything the poet encounters becomes “at once of pure pearl made.”   He here resumes the pearl imagery which had been running underground since section one and which is also informed by earlier texts from the parable of the “pearl of great price” in Matthew through the fourteenth century Pearl and beyond.  Taking readers by surprise with a sort of verbal shell game, just when Merrill seemed to have wandered from his theme, he lands suddenly in what looks like its ecstatic culmination.

     In section six, the final lyric of the variations, iambic pentameter dominates, though the syllable count ranges from ten to thirteen and even partial rhymes are so dispersed as to vanish.  Yet this conclusion is a ringing call, as the poet affirms the quest for love, however imperfect, reaching a total acceptance of the flip side of the erotic coin in what he calls the “sweet air” of the final words, which then reader realizes had been implicit from the start, but which has been justified by the series of lyrics.      

     What is most important about the form of both “The Black Swan” and “Variations: the Air is Thickest that a Thistle Guards” is not the specific forms the poet employs or the alterations that enrich the poems meanings, but rather the fact that any reader or listener will perceive structures in the sound.  Whether consciously or not, the poem’s consumers react to the patterning.  Merrill might be compared to the masters of bebop whose wild polyrhythms and changes on melody could only be heard if traces of enough regularity to create expectations persisted.  Careful analysis of Chaucer or Shakespeare reveals considerable variation even in these canonical poets, but Merrill’s choice of rough cut rhymes and cadences that stumble or skip as often as they march distinguishes his work. 

     If the poet is showing off, it would be a shame were the reader not to enjoy the display.  Merrill’s pyrotechnics may not be to the taste of all, but they are masterfully constructed in a way impressive to anyone sensitive the sound value of words.  It is as theoretically absurd to suggest that too great a skill in managing the sound of a poem can entail a lack of strong feeling as to suggest that excessive brilliance in imagery or in narrative might imply some other faults.  In fact there is no reason to regard artistic technique and passion as in some way opposed when in fact the former is so often in service to the latter.

     Critics are simply wrong when they suggest that technical virtuosity is anything but a strength.  The error arises due to the fact that many readers, both lay and professional, retain Romantic assumptions.  The recreational manipulation of symbols called literature may cultivate the illusion of passionate self-expression.  Yet the author also may strive for a variety of effects.  A writer may, for instance, construct a description of a place or a personality.  Another may be more tendentious, stressing theme over other elements.  Story-telling may dominate some novels or poems.  The creation of beauty is a universal artistic goal; little wonder that in some works this foundational element is foregrounded.

     Most works include an array of these aesthetic ends, though they are not mixed in equal portions.  None is inherently superior to another.  A description, a didactic theme, a good story, a verbal object of startling beauty, each must be judged to fail or succeed on its own terms.  The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and the fictions of Ronald Firbank are certainly not to everyone’s taste, but they have consistently found admiring readers.  Should Merrill’s fate be similar, he will be in good company. 

 

  

 

1.  Anthony Harrigan, “Mannered World,” New York Times, July 8, 1951; William Meredith, “Images and Reality,“ May 3, 1959; X. J. Kennedy, “Four Fashions of Contemporary Verse,” New York Times, November 25, 1962; Gene Baro, “New In Poetry,” New York Times, June 26, 1966; Daniel Hoffman, “Traveler With a Trunk of Poetic Devices,” New York Times, August 2, 1970; August Kleinzahler, “Changing Light,” New York Times, November 7, 2008.

 

2.  The New Yorker, March 4, 2001.

 

3.  David Mason, “Merrill’s Intimations,” The Hudson Review Summer 2015.

 

4.  Rachel Hadas, “James Merrill's Early Work: A Revaluation,” The Kenyon Review New Series, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Spring, 1998), available at https://www.jstor.org/stable/4337717. 

 

5.  Merrill, James, From the First Nine: Poems 1946–1976 (1982).

 

6.  Both phrases are quoted in Bill Pahlka, “James Merrill's Secret Scansions,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 59, No. 4 (winter 2017). 

Notes on Buddhism and Poetry

 

Can poetry be Buddhist?

     The existence of any Buddhist aesthetics may be questioned.  The tension between the enjoyment of art and the ideal of the Great Renunciation is evident in many East Asian poems.  For one scholar of religion [1], Buddhism is wholly aesthetic in its apprehension of the world.  “The goal of life for Buddhists is aesthetic.  It is the enjoyment of life itself as intrinsic value.”   Contemplative withdrawal is in fact that focus on intrinsic enjoyment.  “Nirvana is the complete willingness to accept this world as it is as the best of all actual worlds.”  “Nirvana is the aesthetic enjoyment of what is as it is.”  However, this apparent total embrace of beauty is accompanied by a lack of interest in privileging any specific object as better, more meaningful, or more pleasing than another.  Since Buddhist meditation consists of the pure “enjoyment of self” (presumably recognizing at the same time the non-existence of ego), any experience of a work of art will introduce a “distinction between subject and object” which is “not only irrelevant but even a hindrance to its enjoyment.”

     As the end of Buddhism is enlightenment, one might conclude that the twentieth-century American philosopher is correct that any distraction is an obstacle, yet traditions of Buddhist practice contradict his conclusion.  The fact is that Buddhist art has flourished from the earliest periods, from the reliquaries in which the Buddha’s remains, we are told, were distributed to groups of devotees to be placed in stupas. [2]  Since that time Buddhist arts has proliferated in all the countries where the religion was practiced, in architecture, painting, carving, literature, and dance. [3]

     These works were by no means made as part of a secular milieu, but rather as a form of spiritual practice.  The makers of Buddhist devotional objects clearly intended for their works to serve as meditative aids in individuals’ progress toward enlightenment.  Just as chanting the poetry of the sutras was a form of worship, so might shaping original poetic images or graphic forms direct the consciousness toward its liberation.  Representation of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas is meant to awaken the sufferer to the possibility of nirvana.  The koans of Zen are obstinately concrete and specific as are the lyrics of Wang Wei and Han Shan.  The destruction of the sand mandalas in Tibet, while intended to underline the evanescence of phenomena, is as well an aesthetic signifier as modern artists such as Banksy have realized [4].  all are meant as upaya, “skillful means,” with the ultimate goal of guiding spiritual development.

     Finally, of course, the Buddha recommended a Middle Way in the very opening words of the discourse regarded as his first after enlightenment, the Dhammacakkappavattana Sutta, avoiding both sensual indulgence and asceticism.  Anyone possessing a body will tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain and to feel lust, hunger, and anger.  Even the bhikkhu remains human and must taste and welcome food, however frugal the meal.  Therefore, a blanket condemnation of aesthetic experience seems out of character compared to a measured use of art which may even embrace the accomplishment of religious ends. [5] 

     I can scarcely deny the often expressed ambivalence, though, of Buddhist practitioners, of which this passage from Bai Juyi is representative.

 

Since earnestly studying the Buddhist doctrine of emptiness,

I’ve learned to still all the common states of mind.

Only the devil of poetry I have yet to conquer—

let me come on a bit of scenery and I start my idle droning. [6]

                                                                             

 

The appearance of the dharma in American literature

     Though it competed with Hinduism, particularly Vedanta, for American devotees, Buddhism has been an influence in American literature for as long as the Asian texts have been available.  At certain periods Buddhism shaped the broad mainstream of American poetry, while isolated points of contact from individual writers occurred at all periods.

     The Transcendentalists introduced Buddhism to American readers.  In 1844 the Buddha was ushered into the drawing room of American thought when the Dial, at the time edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and George Ripley, printed a translation of The Lotus Sutra which had only that year appeared in a French version, the first access Europeans had to this seminal text.  [7]  The old East-West mythologies persisted in part (as they do yet today), and this new knowledge of authentic Buddhist thought was fragmentary, leading Emerson to refer to the “Bhagvat Geeta” as “the much renowned book of Buddhism,” [7] and to note vaguely that “all tends to the mysterious East.” [8]

     Still, respectful mentions of Buddhism became widespread.  Thoreau referred to “their Christ” in contrast to “my Buddha” in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers [9] and Melville wrote a poem addressed to Buddha asking for nirvana. [10]  Far from the Transcendentalist Northeast, Lafcadio Hearn converted to Buddhism and translated Japanese poems and stories.  Buddhism is thereafter never absent from the stream of American literature.  During the second half of the nineteenth century its most prominent contribution to American literature was to create an enlarged space for mysticism during a time when the Theosophical Society (whose Col. Alcott was a Buddhist), Spiritualism, and eventually the appearance of Swami Vivekananda at the 1893 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago were among the popular manifestations of a similar interest.

    In the early twentieth century, during the time of High Modernism, Buddhist poetry shaped the Imagist movement through Pound and Buddhist convert Ernest Fenollosa’s The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry.  [11]  Among those later influenced by these were William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists,  Zukofsky, Reznikoff, Oppen and Rakosi.  Meanwhile, T. S. Eliot studied Sanskrit and Pali, took a course in Japanese Buddhist philosophy, and concluded that Indian philosophers make European thinkers “look like schoolboys.” [12]  Though there had been converts for decades, genuine Buddhist institutions receptive to non-Asians such as Christmas Humphrey’s Buddhist Society of America (established 1931) were appearing.  The main effect of this era’s Buddhist influence was, however, reflected in Williams’ slogan “no ideas but in things.”

     The writing of the Beat coterie in the fifties is surely the most prominent example of Buddhist influence.  With several prominent poets with Buddhist gurus (such as Allen Ginsberg), some who were actual monks (Philip Whalen), and a great many other practitioners (Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder), the appearance of Black Buddhists such as Bob Kaufman and, today, the fiction writer Charles R. Johnson, as well as a great many more who took a sympathetic interest, this group brought Buddhist ideas and texts to millions. 

 

 

Allen Ginsberg on Buddhism and poetry

     As the most influential and prominent Buddhist American poet of the last century as well as a founder of the Buddhist Naropa University with its Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics,  Allen Ginsberg is a case of particular significance.  Since Ginsberg is a scholarly man, familiar with a great deal of poetic and religious texts, as well as being a serious follower of Buddhist practice, his delineation of the intersections of poetry and Buddhism are uniquely revealing. 

     In the most general way, Ginsberg identifies poetry as a whole with meditation, saying “breath spirit is the vehicle for poetry and song as well as the air horse/ The mind rides during meditation practice.”  Thus, “fine art and other meditation practices are brother-and-sister-related activities.” Great poetry is “a probe into the nature of reality and the nature of the mind.”  The goal of such “probes of consciousness” is the “purification of mind and body” [13]  

     Yet he specifies certain of his own practices, in particular “spontaneous mind, on-the-spot improvisation,” poetry as the “art of spontaneity in the void” [14].  For Ginsberg, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche’s formula “first thought, best thought,” or, in slightly elaborated form, “the first thought you had on your mind, the first thought you thought before you thought you should have a formal thought,” defines poetry’s proper subject. [15]  For readers who fear the loss of the pleasures of meticulous craftsmanship, this method would substitute “the total delight in chance.”  [16]

     Drawing on several generations of translations of Chinese poetry including versions by Pound, Waley, and Rexroth, Ginsberg also emphasizes a focus on concrete objective imagery.  He quotes Trungpa: “Things are symbols of themselves,” and advocates “direct treatment of the ‘thing’” [17] 

     Thematically, both “first thought, best thought” and the deep focus on the object of meditation arise from the Buddhist conviction of the ephemeral and ultimately misleading experience of reality.  According to Ginsberg, the “transcendental wisdom” of the insight that life is “both real and dream, both once at the same time,” the realization of “dream as the suchness of the universe,” is the central theme of “the ‘Golden Ash’ school, as Kerouac qualified existence.”  [18]  The phantasmagoria of poetry is explicitly “daydreams,” [19]  but consciously recognized as such and thus pointing the way to an accurate assessment of all perception and leading the reader toward enlightenment.  Every poetic detail of a Buddhist poem signifies “the eternal gateless gate which if it has ‘form’ has an undescribable [sic] one – images of which are however innumerable.” [20]

     While Ginsberg’s Buddhism inspired a body of great poetry, his theoretical writing was always polemic, uninterested in the claims of other world-views and compositional techniques.  Like other partisans, he maintains the universality of his approach, saying that “’Form is no different from Emptiness, Emptiness no different from Form’.  That formulation is one that Keats and all subtle poets might appreciate.” [21]  He maintains that “beauty itself is the realization of simultaneous ‘emptiness and form’” [22] as though there were at bottom but one variety of beauty.   

 

 

final thoughts

     In that overgeneralization lies the difficulty with Buddhist poetics.  Not surprisingly, it is similar to the limitation of Christian or Marxist poetics, each of which may couch in comely terms a certain world-vision but which has difficulty accommodating any other.  The dialectic of form and emptiness in the dance of eye and object may constitute beauty indeed, though not necessarily any more than the contemplation of form alone, whether one’s beloved’s thigh or the cadences of meter. Impermanence has its own aesthetics as well, reflected in Bernadette Mayer’s stream-of-consciousness or John Cage’s verbal compositions.  With a sufficient metaphorical imagination a non-Christian reader can appreciate the value of a Christian poem, so likewise a non-Buddhist may delight in Wang Wei, or a bhikkhu might relish Milton.  Poetry is the record of moments of consciousness which, even for an advanced spiritual practitioner, does not reside always at the highest of altitudes. 

     The thematic contributions of Buddhism, the conceptual space for describing meditative revelation and the ambiguity of perceived reality, remain significant and lasting.  The study of East Asian poetry, one of the oldest and most sophisticated poetic traditions in the world, immeasurably enriched American poetry, particularly by encouraging a disciplined focus on imagery.  As for Truth, I dare say Gerard Manley Hopkins might bring a reader an illuminated moment just as surely as Han Shan might.  Furthermore, many poems are careless of theme and impress rather with ingenuity or sensuous sound beauty or powerful passion. 

     We are only just beginning to assimilate (and transform) the artistic and philosophic achievements of Asia.  Priceless though they be, they cannot govern American poetic practice in the twenty-first century while they certainly will contribute to it.  In fact Buddhist poetry from a dozen countries of the East has already both broadened and deepened American writing in both form and content.

 

 

 

1.  See Archie J. Bahm, “Buddhist Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Dec., 1957).

2.  See the Mahāparinibbāṇa Sutta.

3.  A suggestion of iconoclastic fundamentalism is apparent in the reluctance for several centuries to represent Buddha himself.  Now, of course, images of the seated Buddha are the most common and recognizable theme of Buddhist art. 

4.  Banksy’s self-destroying work Girl with Balloon was more notorious than original.  Gustav Metzger had been making such works since the late 1940s.  See his article "Machine, Auto-Creative and Auto-Destructive Art," Ark, summer 1962.  In 1962 Jean Tinguely presented Homage to New York in the Museum of Modern Art’s Sculpture Garden, an assemblage composed primarily of objects collected in garbage dumps and wired to explode and burn immediately after its unveiling. 

5.  Even Augustine, who had been so ashamed of his fondness for the theater, came to feel that there was a place in Christianity for art which encouraged the soul toward God. 

6.  Translated by Burton Watson (who uses the form Po Chü-I) in cThe Selected Poems of Po Chü-I. 

7.  The French was by Eugène Burnouf; he had written it in 1839, but did not publish it until he had completed an introduction in 1844.  The English translation from French, once attributed to Thoreau, is anonymous in the text but by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.  The sutra appears in the Dial immediately preceding a translation of a Hermetic text.  For a full account, see Arthur Christy, The Orient in American Transcendentalism.   

7.  Emerson to Elizabeth Hoar, June 17 1845, Letters III, edited by Ralph L. Rusk, 290. 

8.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols, eds. William H. Gilman, et al. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960-1982), 1: 12.

9.  “I know that some will have hard thoughts of me, when they hear their Christ named beside my Buddha, yet I am sure that I am willing they should love their Christ more than my Buddha, for the love is the main thing.”

10.  “Buddha” includes an epigraph from one of the more Buddhist passages of the Greek Testament, James 4:14 “Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away.” 

11.  Pound’s preference for the social ideals of Confucianism led him to mock Daoist and Buddhist holy men, yet his poetry is not thereby affected.  Arthur Waley’s translations and critical writings were a major transmission source (including for Pound) as was the work of D. T. Suzuki.

12.  Spender said Eliot “almost became a Buddhist.  See Jeffrey M. Perl and Andrew P. Tuck, “The Hidden Advantage of Tradition: On the Significance of T. S. Eliot's Indic Studies,” Philosophy East and West, vol. 35, no. 2 (Apr., 1985).

13.  These passages are from two pieces, both titled “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose: Selected Essays 1952-1995, 152 and 262.

14.  From Deliberate Prose, “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” 251.  Compare also Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” which recommends “No pause to think of proper word but the infantile pileup of scatological buildup words till satisfaction is gained, which will turn out to be a great appending rhythm to a thought and be in accordance with Great Law of timing.”

15.  Ginsberg, Allen. “First Thought, Best Thought,” Composed on the Tongue (1971), 106–117.

16.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 258 and 272.

17.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 266 and 268.

18.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246 and 247.

19.  “Meditation and Poetics,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 152.

20.  “When the Mode of the Music Changes, the Walls of the City Shake,” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 250.

21.  “Meditation and Poetics” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 265.

21.  “Retrospect of Beat Generation” in Allen Ginsberg, Deliberate Prose, 246.

An Explication of Stevens’ “A Primitive like an Orb”

     Wallace Stevens’ late poem “A Primitive like an Orb,” like Beethoven’s late string quartets, is elegantly wrought and profoundly spiritual, though both the poet and the composer puzzled or put off a portion of their initial audiences. [1] The early work that established Stevens’ reputation was replete with lapidary images, at times tumbling one after another with such speed as to dizzy the reader, but generally sharply defined, solid, and earth-bound. “A Primitive like an Orb,” published when the author was sixty-eight years old, is far more abstract and assertively thematic, even tendentious. The poem, more explicitly than anything in Harmonium, more clearly even than his “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” proffers a spiritual, indeed a mystical, potential in art alone stripped of religion’s conventional clothing in mythology and supernaturalism. In Stevens’ terms god is a “supreme fiction,” known to be illusory but efficacious nonetheless when willfully believed. [2]
     Stevens is hardly alone in defining a non-supernatural route to illumination. In their various ways, Jains, some Stoics and Skeptics, pantheists, most Buddhists and some Hindus have done the same, but Stevens presents a modern sophisticated attempt to recover religion from the ruins left by the “death of God” in the nineteenth century.
     In “A Primitive like an Orb,” Stevens outlines what is at once his aesthetic and spiritual philosophy, with a majestic Olympian confidence beyond that of his often highly qualified and oblique prose musings. Using metaphors of surprising and illuminating originality (called “opulent” in stanza 4) and French-style syllabic alexandrines (for the most part) of such music that their authority is difficult to question, the poet soars above the decorative and ameliorative, seeing the eternal in the ephemeral, the pattern underlying each perception, the macrocosm in every microcosm, with a grand mystery parallel to that promised by mystics and occult savants.
     A linear paraphrase of this ambitious notion as it unfolds through the poem’s ninety-six lines may be useful though the idea is present from the start. I take the word “primitive” in the title in the sense of originary, though it bears traces as well of association with the religious paintings of the “Italian primitives.” The “orb” is the Platonic sphere of which, in the Timaeus, the philosopher says “the shape of a sphere, equidistant in all directions from the center to the extremities, which of all shapes is the most perfect” [4] The “perfect” shape is later the basis for the concept of the divine as “an infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere” [5]
     To seek what is promised in the initial phrase “the essential poem at the centre of things” the poet first notes the necessity of recognizing that every significant perception entails an “apperception.” What one sees is not the discrete object outside but a connection, a relationship, a dyad of viewer and viewed. In this way the “cast-iron of our lives” is “gorged” with “good.” The process is aided by beauty, always a subjective, mind-created quality, in the poem signified by “nymphs” and “genii,” the graces that signify art. (stanza I)
     The possibility of a “supreme fiction” is suggested by the ambiguous veridical status of art. “It Is and is not and, therefore, is.” [3] The beauty of art, “its huge, high harmony,” affirms a validity and a reality distinct from that by which other discourses are tested (“a separate sense”). Once accepted, once it “captives the being,” the truth of art seems to inhere in the nature of things, to have always been there. (stanza II)
     The “captiving” of the senses that occurs with the apprehension of aesthetic vision brings immense and intimate pleasure (“what milk,” “what wheaten bread and oaten cake,” “green guests and table in the woods and songs”) at the same time as it remains powerful, divine, and mysterious. The “secluded thunder” of such revelation allows access to what was otherwise “too heavy for the sense to seize,” a truth manifest yet obscure. (stanza III)
     The rewards for the poem’s reader are not limited to delight, but rather extend without limit, until “last terms, the largest, bulging still with more.” Steven’s emphasis is on apperception. [6] It is neither the vision itself nor the subjective mind that can produce “the fulfillment of fulfillments” but only the connection, the link, the integration of the consciousness with the world. “One poem proves another and the whole.” [7] Only by infusing reality with passion may “the lover, the believer, and the poet” whose “words are chosen out of their desire” shape language to a reflection of themselves. In this way they “celebrate the central poem.” Is this not similar to the Chandogya Uphanishad’s assertion that the individual atman is identical to the cosmic Atman, though with aesthetic language substituted for the mythological? (stanza IV)
     Insistently repeating his theme, Stevens declares that through this process in which the mind and the world inform each other “by sharp informations” (precise imagery) until “the central poem became the world.” (stanza V) with a sensuality recalling erotic love. [8] We make love to creation through language ”each one the mate of the other.” The poet is “the mate of summer,” the refracted image of self “a self of her that speaks, denouncing separate selves” and exploding dualities. The process, like human love, is productive as “the essential poem begets the others.” (stanza VI) In the end “the central poem is the poem of the whole,” in which the cosmos as a whole has a coherence and a meaning like that of a well-crafted work of art. (stanza VII)
     This whole, this cosmos or Atman or god may also be called a vis, a strength or power. It is the broadest generalization of all things, “a principle or, it may be, the meditation of a principle, an “inherent order.” It is positive in influence, “a nature to its natives all beneficence, a repose,” allowing the mind to relax, having purchase at once on itself and on all else. This may be imagined as well as “muscles of a magnet” (invisible order perceived),and the mention of muscles suggests then the figure of “a giant, on the horizon, [i.e. barely visible] glistening [yet grand].” This giant becomes the dominant image of the poem’s conclusion. (stanza VIII)
     This vision is a surpassingly beautiful one “in bright excellence adorned,” “crested with . . . fire,” with “scintillant sizzlings,” “serious folds of majesty,” “trumpeting seraphs,” altogether “a source of pleasant outbursts in the ear.” (stanza IX) In spite of the fact that the mind cannot grasp his totality in any single vision, the “giant” of reality “imposes power by the power of his form.” The grand whole, the vision of the total whole lurks behind imperfect incarnations in the world and people and art though it always appears in truncated forms. (stanza X) Though barely glimpsed, this giant, “an abstraction given head” is divine, the “centre on the horizon,” god as the infinite sphere. (stanza XI)
     What more can be said? By imbuing nature with passion, the individual renders it holy and redemptive, though in the end it be “nothingness,” which is to say nirvana.


That’s it.” The lover writes, the believer hears,
The poet mumbles and the painter sees,
Each one, his fated eccentricity,
As a part, but part, but tenacious particle,
Of the skeleton of the ether, the total,
Of letters, prophecies , perceptions, clods,
Of color, the giant of nothingness, each one
And the giant ever-changing, living in change. (stanza 12)


     Various traditions have suggested that the glint of the divine might be discerned in any object at all: Among the more dramatic insights are the Zen assertion that “the Buddha is dried dung” [9] and the gnostic claim that Christ may be found in a split stick or under every rock. [10] Blake saw “a world in a grain of sand” and Huxley under mescaline in a vase of flowers. [11] However, none of these foci of meditation is an intentional work of art. Stevens does not say that any sight at all can lead toward the mystical giant, but rather that illumination may come through a profound gaze not on some appearance in the world but on the artist’s reception of an object. For him the connection between perceiver and perceived defines the link between microcosm and macrocosm the clear view of which has the potential for enlightenment. Stevens is developing to its furthest the late nineteenth century spiritual valorization of art and the Symbolist exploitation of underdetermined images.
     The spiritual validity of Steven’s “supreme fiction” accessible through meditation on poems can only be measured by practitioners. It is certainly true that devotion has many modes to suit the sensibilities of various human consciousnesses: some advance through charity, some must be ravished by devotional rapture, others climb to the sublime on intellectual concepts, while the rituals and formulae of established religions serve the needs of most. Stevens’ poem is elegantly crafted and subtly argued: surely his method deserves a place among the rest.




1. The poem first appeared as one of John Bernard Myers’ Banyan Press series, the Prospero Pamphlets in 1948 with two drawings by Kurt Seligmann. It was republished in Steven’s 1950 volume The Auroras of Autumn. The pamphlet’s notice in the New York Times for June 27, 1948 observes that “the poem, at times, eludes understanding." and makes no mention whatever of the artist or the images.

2. See Gregory Brazeal , “The Supreme Fiction: Fiction or Fact?” for a critic’s view that Stevens failed in his quest to define such a possibility and, indeed, that the very notion arose from a misreading of William James. (Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Fall, 2007), pp. 80-100). One might wonder in what sense a fiction can be fictional.

3. Descending from Hesiod and Aristotle all the way to Derridean deconstruction.

4. Timaeus 33b.

5. In the “Dialogue on Infinity” attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, but identical or very similar formulae appear in Empedocles, Augustine, the Liber XXIV Philosophorum, Alain of Lille, Nicholas of Cusa, Pascal, and Voltaire among others.

6. Cf. Steven’s claim may derive from, though it goes beyond Kant’s notion of transcendental apperception.

7. Cf. Eliot “Tradition and the Individual Talent.”

8. There is, of course, a vast mystical literature in which divine and human love are conflated: Krishna and the gopis, Mechthild von Magdeburg, Rumi, and John of the Cross, and a great many others.

9. In another passage, the Buddha is three pounds of flax. See The Gateless Gate, Cases 21 and 18,

10. Gospel of Thomas 77.

11. Doors of Perception.

A Glimpse of Robert Bly

     In the very early seventies, when the world was younger, I was living in the center of the United States and of one strain at least of American poetry in Iowa City. Robert Bly came to town to read, not at the world-renowned writers’ workshop but off-campus for Lamp in the Spine, a little magazine produced if I remember rightly, by Lew Hyde, who has since gone on to a Harvard professorship, a MacArthur Fellowship, and books at once best-selling and intelligent.
     Bly did not at the time care to read for the university; despite his Harvard degree his anti-academic bias had been pronounced from the start. In the second issue of his journal The Fifties, he quotes Jules Laforgue: “The only remedy is to break everything.” I admired his rebellious stance and his clean, hard-edged images and found his Midwestern identity a salutary contrast to America’s usual bicoastal interests. I appreciated his partisanship against the war in Vietnam and managed to attend his first anti-war reading in Minneapolis. In spite of the regional loyalty that brought him back from New York to live in rural Minnesota, he published important translations of poets whose work had been unknown in the United States, much of the work animated by a sort of well-digested Surrealism.
     Bly having not cared to come to the university, the university came to him. In the audience at Bly’s reading that night the Workshop professors were seated in a group. Bly had only just begun his presentation when he suddenly addressed them.
     “Such greed and waste! It’s ridiculous! How much money do they pay you, Donald.” He pointed to Donald Justice, poetry chair of the Workshop. “Twenty-four thousand maybe? What sense does that make? They could get four poets who could live well on six thousand each. How about you, Marvin? [speaking to Marvin Bell] What do you need that big money for?”
     The professors said nothing, then muttered a bit among themselves, rose, and exited as a body. Bly had purged the hall. I wondered in later years, as his poetry became steadily worse and his popularity grew, as he emerged as a mythological code-breaker and a busy advocate of something called the Men’s Movement, as Iron John lingered for months on the bestseller list and the royalties rolled in, as his literary work was in my view compromised by his fans, whether Bly ever found it necessary to recalibrate his relation to money.

An Appreciation of Theodore Roethke

Poet Will Nixon (author of My Late Mother as a Ruffed Grouse and Love in the City of Grudges) invited me to write a piece for his blog (http://willnixon.com/blog/) explaining my fondness for a poem. I am posting it here as well but suggest that readers have a look at his site which includes plenty of his own writing as well as other guest contributions. 

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, 

When small birds sighed, 

she would sigh back at them; 

Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: 

The shapes a bright container can contain! 

Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, 

Or English poets who grew up on Greek 

(I'd have them sing in a chorus, cheek to cheek). 

 How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin, 

She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and Stand; 

She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin; 

I nibbled meekly from her proferred hand; 

She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake, 

Coming behind her for her pretty sake 

(But what prodigious mowing we did make). 

 Love likes a gander, and adores a goose: 

Her full lips pursed, the errant notes to seize; 

She played it quick, she played it light and loose; 

My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees; 

Her several parts could keep a pure repose, 

Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose 

(She moved in circles, and those circles moved). 

 Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay: 

I'm martyr to a motion not my own; 

What's freedom for? To know eternity. 

I swear she cast a shadow white as stone. 

But who would count eternity in days? 

These old bones live to learn her wanton ways: 

(I measure time by how a body sways). 

     When I first began to read poetry (poetry, that is, other than the lyrics of Walter R. Brooks’ Freddy the Pig, Walt Kelly’s Pogo, and Robert Service), it was the late fifties and, like a great many others of my cohort, I was excited by the Beats. From my suburban home, I studied the Donald Allen anthology and wrote to most of the small presses listed in the back. At the same time, however, I leaped into the ocean of words, trying to read everything: oral and written; ancient, medieval, and modern; American and Chinese and African and Indian. In spite of my particular affection (or weakness) for the hip writers, I was also taken by a number of quite different contemporary American authors, among them Robert Lowell and Theodore Roethke. 

     The two poets were sometimes associated due to their psychiatric diagnoses or their escape from the formal mold of the fifties (which each had practiced so expertly), but to me their appeal was as craftsmen. Roethke’s well-known lyric “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,” is as perfect as a troubadour song or an Elizabethan sonnet. If the poem breaks no new ground for the language, it is nonetheless a rare achievement. Using erotic energy, one of the most traditional poetic dynamos, Roethke manages to devise new locutions to express the oldest and simplest themes. 

     What may seem mannered and exaggerated adoration of the female is nothing more than a realistic portrayal of ardent desire, constrained, in the interests of art and civility, into a dance of meter and rhyme with rhetorical grace-notes and flourishes at every turn. Detailed formal analysis could not, however, demonstrate excellence. In any event, when one catches one’s breath in awe, proof seems beside the point. As with the sonneteers the very polish of the verse takes a seductive role. 

     Yet, the reader notes that the love-object is entirely unspecified. She could be anyone. The praise is a pure display of the poet’s imagination. Loveliness in the bones is not visible, nor is the beloved likely literally to sigh at small birds in passing. These images are for the mind alone and not the eye; they are distinguished by the extravagance of their claims rather than by any descriptive power. The humor toward the first stanza’s end recalls Donne, at once witty and ever so earnest. The “English poets who grew up on Greek” (and fewer they are with every passing year) appear as an afterthought but then spawn the absurd image of the chorus line, more Rockettes than Aeschylus, which nonetheless prepares the way for the playful use of Turn and Counterturn to follow. The mere capitalization of “Touch” assigns it the burning urgency of desire, and the entire stanza is filled with sexual implication without the slightest explicit word. 

     The agricultural metaphors for sexuality are universal indeed – the curious can have a peek into The Golden Bough or a reference book on vulgar slang – but Roethke lightens his version of this archaic figure with the play on “rake” and the casual word “pretty” before presenting his powerful and enthusiastic image of “prodigious mowing.” Highly physical implications continue through the third stanza: whatever it may mean that she could make “one hip quiver with a mobile nose,” it certainly sounds sexy. 

      The final stanza opens with almost Biblical grandeur: “Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay,” followed, with fine alliteration, by the martyr/motion line, and then a classic statement of the love as spiritual training. In what might have been a quite Platonic formula were the beloved male, the poet adores eternity in his lady. The white shadow is an excellent figure for the wonder that is love. Time collapses, and the poet concludes with a fine metaphysical crescendo, though clinging to the physical with the words “wanton” and “sways.” 

     Though Roethke did not feel licensed to wander freely in his backbrain for entire poems at a stretch until perhaps I Am! Says The Lamb (1961) or The Far Field (1964), he had declared as early as his “Open Letter” in 1950 an intention to “fish, patiently, in that dark pond, the unconscious, [to] dive in, with or without pants on, to come up festooned with dead cats, weeds, tin cans, and other fascinating debris.” Roethke not only did that; he proceeded to make objects of surpassing beauty with what he brought to the surface.