The New England Poet and “the Reality that Surrounds Us”
Sometimes, I could go in anywhere, not
to see the stars, not to be as we
are always, not only under them
but in them. The outer spaces push against
us, all their vastness apart, they crowd
us. They become our world. I could go hide
like Adam in his garden. How
would it matter? No, we are in the stars. Not
for us ever any familiar and definite world.
—William Bronk, “The Outer Becoming Inner”
I. Immanence
Robert Creeley told the poet Tom Clark in an interview that as a child playing in the woods, he recognized “a kind of immanence,” “a feeling of place almost conscious.” By his own testimony, Creeley, who was raised in a small town near Boston, remains not only essentially a New Englander but (his term) “a Puritan” with the associated need to know the fact of something rather than the fictions we would create to make it please us more; as a child, he “distrusted fiction, feeling the term ‘something made-up’ argued an intentional distortion of the ‘truth.’”
To one unacquainted with Creeley’s work, these might seem curious admissions for a writer conventionally thought to be preeminently postmodern, a word that identifies “truth” as relative to its temporal occasion. In fact Creeley’s notions of the world and its “truths” with which it is constituted are grounded in personal conviction: “We believe a world,” he says, “or have none.”
It is not uncommon to find American poets asserting on the one hand that “truth” is to be chosen above “fiction” while simultaneously believing that the “truth” is, after all, only what is believed to be true. It is a paradox perhaps resolved only in practice and within the individual. To understand American writing does require a bifurcated mind, committed to fact yet aware that fact is known only because it is believed.
A “proof” for fact is, in its spiritual dimension, what Creeley calls “a kind of immanence,” “a feeling of place almost conscious” — and this in turn implies something more powerful than the individual who believes, indeed something beyond or other than the individual who belief determines the world. Correspondingly, perception of it involves a powerful sense of the present moment so that spiritual awareness has nothing to do with the rituals and traditions with which it would be qualified or framed in other culture.
II. Threat
There are historical reasons for this kind of spiritual experience, reasons beyond the nature of the Protestant personality or Kantian idealism or Romanticism. Early New England Puritans dealt with a hostile and isolated environment in settling their wilderness. The land was all but impossible to cultivate; even when the virgin forests had cut down and the rock-strewn meadows had been cleared, the land was capable of supporting only the hardiest crops. And there were the Indians. Writing now in western Massachusetts, I am sorrounded by landscapes that 250 or 300 years ago were repeatedly the site of Indian massacres, one of the most famous of which occurred a few miles from here on 18 September 1675 when 700 Pocumtuc warriors attacked a contingent of eighty colonial soldiers. Seven or eight fled, and seven others survived, but the remaining sixty-four were killed. The battle took place beside a stream known since that time as Bloody Brook; settlers downstream first knew of the attack when the stream flowing past their homes ran red. It was an event long remembered; like the harsh winters, it was a reminder that one always had to be attentive to the present fact.
The early history of New England, however sentimentalized in tourist brochures, was an grisly, hazardous world of hazards, and through it flowed the severe New England conscience, that ongoing Puritan pressure, which said in effect, nothing you do will ever be good enough; you must always work harder. Life for the Puritan was a most serious business, and that seriousness, and respect for it, never left New England. In his journals, Thoreau, although himself of French descent, belittles the French for having, unlike the English Puritans, “no busy-ness” in New England. They came, he scornfully adds, “to hunt and fish, not to work.”
III. Fact
Conditions of life in New England required attention to fact and the immediate hardly less than attention to spiritual matters, and the effect was felt for many generations. It should be no surprise to learn that the early history of science in America is linked to New England: to the geologist Edward Hitchcock and botanist Edward Tuckerman at Amherst, to the geologist Benjamin Silliman and his son the chemist Benjamin Silliman at Yale, and to the zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard. These New England scientists shared the belief that their observations of nature revealed a divine process in the creation of the world; in other words, attention to fact implied attention to divine immanence. Nature was a kind of scripture; divinity was manifest in matter.
This process has been well studied. The mingling of observation, fact, and spiritual awareness is axiomatic to writers from New England. To cite an early famous example, It is found in Jonathan Edwards’ “Of Insects,” in which he wrote that he had
... several times seen, in a very calm and serene day [in August] ... , standing behind some opaque body that shall just hide the
disk of the sun and keep off his dazzling rays from my eye, multitudes of little shining webs and glistening strings of a great
length, and at such a height as (that one would think they were tacked to the sky by one end, were it not that they were moving
and floating. And there often appears at the end of these webs a spider floating and sailing in the air with them, which I have
plainly discerned in those webs that were nearer to my eye.
Edwards then noted that he had seen
a very large spider, to my surprise, swimming in the air in this manner, and others have assured me that they often have seen
spiders fly. The appearance is truly very pretty and pleasing, and it was so pleasing, as well as surprising, to me, that I
resolved to endeavor to satisfy my curiosity about it, by finding out the way and of their doing it.
The intertwined observations and feelings [”very pretty and pleasing, and . . . surprising”] lead Edwards not to insights about nature as ends in themselves but to an understanding of “the wisdom of the Creator.” The assumption that the externality reveals and/or manifests another, higher reality is central to many cultures, but in New England it is virtually axiomatic.
IV. Function
A hundred years after Edwards wrote his essay on the “pleasing” spider, a now largely forgotten poet named Manoah Bodman (1765-1850), revealed in his work, although in a very different way, a similar mixture of fact and belief. Bodman was well known in his western Massachusetts town of Williamsburg (the town immediately to the west of Northampton, where Edwards had lived) and the surrounding region for his orations on religious and patriotic subjects. When he was fifty-two, Bodman published his only book, the Oration on Death (1817), in which he included several talks and poems together with a narrative of his struggle with Satan.
Satan, according to the narrative, could disguise himself as an angel in order to lead the unwary Bodman astray. Here in an obscure hilltown village, the powers of evil tried to dominate his soul, telling him “not that there was to be any new revelation . . . ; but a new and wonderful administration of the former.” Heaven and earth were to be joined and “the celestial hosts would actually come down to earth” and communicate with people. Bodman’s task was “to write these things, and publish them to the world.” The obscure village and orator was to takes its place in the center of a cosmic drama, and Bodman, however else these revelations may have affected him, does not seem to have thought them outlandish.
Elsewhere in his works, he makes it clear that in divine matters what happened in his town was as important as anything that happened in London or Paris. The town of Williamsburg could as easily be the center of God’s intentions and presence as any place on earth, and Bodman himself can be at the center of that drama. His works are imbued with a sense of the local and the particular; he is not transported, like Swedenborg, to heaven, but is shown visions as he walks along the streets of his town and works in the fields. The visions may have been hallucinations arising from what would now be diagnosed as schizophrenia, but what matters is the way in which they merge the personal, the local, and the celestial in a seamless unity.
V. Pain
Emily Dickinson, attentive always to the immediate (“Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency”), was drawn in her personal life to issues and ideas that her contemporaries generally felt were more properly concerns of formal religion. Susan Howe has argued that Dickinson took material from her reading and transformed it in ways to make her poetry distinctive, but she was also a person working in a specific place and specific culture that set seeing above books. Howe wrote that she “really was concerned to show that [Dickinson] ... . read to write,” and then demonstrates that complexly behind Dickinson’ work lie her readings in Browning, Dickens, Shakespeare, the Bible, and much more.
If Dickinson’s poems were strictly this kind of textual exercise, they would be ‘something made-up,’ constructions in language. Howe suggests that the Master letters are in fact exactly that; they are not letters to a person so much as a collage of literary echoes.
Howe wants Dickinson to be a latter-day antinomian. Her Emily Dickinson built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, a ‘sheltered’ woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation.
Howe’s arguments are effective, but they only tell part of the story. Dickinson may have been an antinomian from one perspective, but she was, as much as Edwards, in search of “higher laws.” In fact, she was in fear of a world in which there are no laws; she wanted to locate that which could be thought transcendentally true, things than can be proven by experience. Thus, she says with characteristic precision, “I like a look of agony / Because I know it’s true.” What drives her is the need to find that which can be affirmed, and in this, faith is the enemy (“‘Faith’ is a fine invention / When Gentlemen can see —”), because its answers are too easily won.
Dickinson’s poems are forever in search of certainty and law, and there are few things in the world which satisfy that pursuit. Pain is one of those few, and “The hallowing of pain,” she says, is “Like hallowing of Heaven.” Pain is hallowed because it is does not serving other ends; it is nothing but itself. Dickinson is driven by a very strict conscience, and in her own way, she is absolutely the daughter of the Puritans. She is never satisfied with other people’s words unless their truth can be confirmed through her own experience.
Howe would see Dickinson’s decision to publish little of her work as a “gesture of infinite patience” and “a covenant of grace,” but it may be rather the result of her profound perfectionism, her refusal to let what could be just another set of mistaken observations make their way into the world as if they were truth. Dickinson stood far outside from the religious conventions of her time, but that may have been because these claimed already to have answers. How could one know the answers were correct until they had been found through personal experience as well? Dickinson, whom critics would have us read as a proto-Modernist or, in Howe’s case, as a proto-Postmodernist, was in fact very much a product of New England’s past.
VI. Region
In the nineteenth century, New England was rapidly losing political authority to Washington and economic authority to New York, but among New Englanders themselves, there was no perceived diminution of intellectual or literary authority. Dickinson, Edwards, and Bodman, who lived within a few miles of each other, belonged to different generations and sharply differed from each other in religious and cultural assumptions, but they are linked in a shared certainty about their respective positions in the universe and their ability to know that which is irrefutably true.
At the root of this assumption a state of mind, a way of thinking that defines a literature and ultimately throws into doubt the notion of the “postmodern” (a word invented by another New Englander, Charles Olson) as a category to enclose, comprehensively, innovative American writing of the past two or three generations.
To suggest the breadth of the problem, we can turn to the work of two nineteenth-century New England writers, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, and one of their intellectual descendants who, like Olson, has been seen as preeminently postmodern, William Bronk.
VII. Isolation and law
Within the American canon, Tuckerman is less known than Thoreau, but he was a better poet, if not a greater writer, and provides an important contrast to him. Unlike most New England writers of his time, he was neither a Calvinist nor a Unitarian, an apostate nor a transcendentalist. He was an Anglican and a devout one at that, and so, as in many other ways, he seems outside the New England tradition. And yet that is where he belongs — as intensely independent as any. To read his work is to discover, in the words of the poet Witter Bynner, a man “isolated in an intense integrity toward nature, toward his own mind, and toward the unknown God.”
Tuckerman lived in the same area as Dickinson, Edwards, and Bodman. Dickinson knew his brother and conceivably knew, or knew of, him, but they were both reclusive, and Tuckerman’s affirmation of Anglican beliefs would not have pleased her, nor, we can assume, would her positions have satisfied him. Tuckerman published, at his own expense, a selection from his work in 1860 and sent copies to a number of distinguished critics and writers, including Tennyson (whom he had met during a trip to England five years earlier), Hawthorne, and Emerson. The responses ranged from tepid to warm, but none was as enthusiastic as Emerson’s famous reply to Whitman upon receipt of Leaves of Grass (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”).
Tuckerman did have the support of Tennyson and James T. Fields, the foremost literary publisher at that time in the United States. Possibly through Tennyson’s efforts, Tuckerman’s poems were published in England in 1863, and the following year they were issued by Ticknor & Fields. A reprinting of that edition followed in 1869, but thereafter no book of Tuckerman’s work appeared until 1931, when Bynner’s edition of The Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was published, including three sonnet sequences that had remained in manuscript until then. Tuckerman’s “The Cricket,” which is now thought by some to be among his generation’s most significant literary achievements, was not in print until 1950. The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited by N. Scott Momaday, appeared in 1965, but there are important misgivings about editorial choices made in preparing this edition, and a revised “complete poems” is needed.
Tuckerman did not stop writing because his work failed to find a vocal sponsor. Like Dickinson, he simply withdrew and left most of work in manuscript at his death. Like her, he came from a wealthy family and did not need to support himself or his family with his writing. His father, a Boston merchant, provided him with enough income and inheritance that he was able to indulge his interests — astronomy, botany, and poetry. His siblings were successful in their respective fields; one brother, Edward, was the botanist mentioned earlier, and another, Samuel Parkman, was a distinguished organist and composer. Their sister, Sophia May Tuckerman Eckley, who lived in Florence, was a published poet and friend of the Brownings.
Tuckerman had the resources, both social and financial, for a prominent public or professional life, but he chose rather to live quietly in a rural town, Greenfield, Massachusetts, to which he moved in 1847. His house was located diagonally across the street from the Episcopal Church, of which he was a member, and which, together with his books, his family, and the surrounding landscapes, provided the outer boundaries to his life. Although he was asked to write poems for the dedication of the town’s Civil War monument and its new cemetery, he himself played almost no role in the affairs of the town, and when he died in 1873, the local newspaper reported that he had “lived a retired and secluded life among us.”
Tuckerman was in some ways indifferent to potential readers. The poetry includes references — e.g., Quonecktacut, “[t]he Shay’s man,” “Whately woods,” “the Common” — that must puzzle those who do not know the geography and history of his region. He also employs botanical terms — “stramony,” “barberry,” “home tree, ople tree, and sycamine” — that reflect his interest in the plant life of New England but that, especially in his day, would have had little resonance in the rest of the world. Above all, he draws on his private life and its central tragedy — the death of his young wife — as if his readers were as intimately concerned with, and knowledgeable about, it as he.
Using the traditional trope of the poet as a swan, Tuckerman asks in his first sonnet, “What avail / Is the swan’s voice if all the hearers fail?” but then answers himself by saying s that the poem does not need to be heard, for if that were so, “God were not God, whom knowledge cannot know.” Attributing, that is, to poetry the highest knowing, Tuckerman gives him and his work what some in his day might have thought an outrageously exalted role. As much as the somewhat less sophisticated Bodman, Tuckerman set himself at the center of the cosmos, able to penetrate nature to see and in his language represent things otherwise hidden. One of the foremost examples of this is the tenth sonnet in the first sequence:
An upper chamber in a darkened house,
Where, ere his footsteps reached ripe manhood's brink,
Terror and anguish were his cup to drink,
I cannot rid the thought, nor hold it close;
But dimly dream upon that man alone:
Now though the autumn clouds most softly pass;
The cricket chides beneath the doorstep stone,
And greener than the season grows the grass.
Nor can I drop my lids, nor shade my brows,
But there he stands beside the lifted sash;
And with a swooning of the heart, I think
Where the black shingles slope to meet the boughs,
And, shattered on the roof like smallest snows,
The tiny petals of the mountain-ash.
Tuckerman tells us that he “dream[s] upon that man alone,” and then envisions the image that constitutes the last three lines of the poem, which in turn tells us more about the man than if we were told what his “terror and anguish” had been. In short, Tuckerman ascribes to himself the ability to see and represent what is not literally in front of his eyes. He perceives the inner meaning of the event of the person where others see only the shell.
Tuckerman is a visionary but not a mystic like Bodman. Rather he observes fact, a “look of agony” much as that seen by Dickinson and then penetrates it to see its hidden workings. Like Dickinson, he examines carefully the particulars of the world and find them, at times, sufficient: “And in the rainy midnight I have heard / The ground sparrow’s long twitter from the pine, / And the catbird’s silver song . . . .” But the greatest moments in Tuckerman occur when the particulars and his spiritual awareness fuse in ways he describes in the seventh sonnet from his second series:
His heart was in his garden; but his brain
Wandered at will among the fiery stars.
Bards, heroes, prophets, Homers, Hamilcars,
With many angels, stood, his eye to gain;
The devils, too, were his familiars:
And yet the cunning florist held his eyes
Close to the ground, a tulip bulb his prize,
And talked of tan and bonedust, cutworms, grubs,
As though all Nature held no higher strain;
Or, if he spoke of Art, he made the theme
Flow through boxborders, turf, and flower tubs;
Or, like a garden engine's, steered the stream,
Now spouted rainbows to the silent skies;
Now kept it flat, and raked the walks and shrubs.
Eugene England argued in Beyond Romanticism that Tuckerman’s religious beliefs and his interest in the natural world as such precluded his becoming one of Emerson’s disciples. But he is a transcendentalist of his own kind: tenaciously focusing on his immediate world insofar as it empowers him to understand things of larger or ultimate significance. No less than Emerson, for whom nature became the means through which to obtain what he understood as full participantion in the currents of universal being, Tuckerman clearly felt himself to be within reach of the absolute, “his brain / Wander[ing] at will among the fiery stars”
The Anglican tradition, England pointed out, saw the universe as essentially rational, organized according to real and decipherable laws. Science in Tuckerman’s day was equally rationalistic; fundamentally concerned with observation and categorization and seeing nature as essentially static. Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in 1859 while Tuckerman was working on his first sonnet series. Whether or not he read the book, he would, one feels, have resisted it, preferring Louis Agassiz’s notion that God had created each species as a unique and fixed element in nature. This gave the world an orderliness that would accord with Tuckerman’s religious beliefs.
VIII. Solitude and Change
Emerson, by contrast, viewed nature as perpetual change and was therefore disposed toward a Darwinian view. In moral and cultural as well as scientific matters, Emerson had no use for the static or fixed: “With consistency,” he wrote in “Self-Reliance,” “a great soul has simply nothing to do.” And, in “Experience,” he wrote, “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.” Further, in “Circles,” he wrote, “There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.”
In effect Thoreau saw things in the same way, but, like Tuckerman and unlike Emerson, he characteristically confined his observations to the particulars of the observable world. Emerson was free to speculate in his study about the mutability of all things and his belief that, despite this, there was an underlying coherence — change itself — to give mutability coherence. But Thoreau needed to find his conclusions in physical fact. The most famous expression of mutability as fundamental coherence and order occurs in Walden in the chapter entitled “Spring,” where he studies a railroad embankment beginning to thaw in the spring warmth and finds that it “illustrate[s] the principle of all the operations of Nature”:
This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is “in full blast” within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.
Tuckerman and Thoreau concentrate on the material world but understand it in entirely different ways, Tuckerman finding in it immutable laws and Thoreau finding perpetual generation. Not surprisingly, Tuckerman worked best in the established order of the sonnet while Walden is, except in the most general ways, unlike any other literary work. As different as Tuckerman and Thoreau were, they were, like the others discussed here, in important ways very much alike. Concord is today a suburb of Boston, but in Thoreau’s youth the city was four hours away by carriage, and even after the railroad was completed, it was still an hour’s ride. Concord was not as isolated as Tuckerman’s Greenfield or Dickinson’s Amherst, but it was primarily a region of farmers rather than bankers and merchants.
Within Thoreau’s secluded world, he could identify “higher laws” and understand his local world as the type of the moral universe. The highest aspirations could be realized in solitude — a solitude intensified by the fact that Walden, as he said, is outside history “I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy,” he says; "Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed."
“God himself culminates in the present moment,” he concluded, “and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.” In turn, this transcendent recognition is rooted in the specifics of the physical world: “we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.”
In his essay “Circles,” Emerson provides a metaphor with which such statements can be read: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” One individual in Emerson’s view is as much at the center of the universe as any other. Such a view permits the poet freedom to pursue his work in any manner he may choose. Even the relatively conservative Tuckerman felt free to dissociate himself from the traditional notions of sonnet form and began experimenting with it in ways that disturbed his contemporaries. Dickinson’s first editors, likewise, felt she had made “mistakes” and so imposed conventional metrics and rhymes on her work. And Thoreau was read for decades as basically a nature writer, misunderstood even by those who claimed to honor him most. Bodman was ridiculed by his townsmen, one newspaper editor remarking that the poet in his orations “used good language, and an abundance of it, but whether his reason and appeals were convincing, I never could comprehend, as the flood of words always ecliped the force of his logic.” Even today he is seldom read except by specialists in American literature. As Emerson said, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”
IX. Community and Change
A native of New England like the other writers discussed here, Charles Olson was among those most responsible for transforming an essentially regional aesthetic into one that is one is usually labelled “postmodern,” a term which he in fact invented. Olson’s poetics draw on a great range of materials from Herodotus to modern physics, but what he finds in these is fundamentally support for the notions about literature and its relation to personal experience that one finds in Tuckerman, Dickinson, and Thoreau. Olson, who professed not to like Emerson, led Emerson’s transcendentalism into the present. Emerson’s fundamental recognition is the fact of change, but he insists that this is essentially divine force, which he calls the Oversoul. For Olson, however, there is only change itself, housed in the individual, and as he wrote in “The Kingfishers,” “What does not change / is the will to change.” This “will to change” is not an abstract, impersonal, or Platonic ultimate but, rather, thoroughly human. Time, history, and community, in Olson’s view, all evolve from the human. “Polis is / eyes,” he wrote in The Maximus Poems, thereby reasserting the fundamental presumption shared by his New England predecessors, while stripping it of its spiritual dimension. But at the same time, he shared their insistence that it is the individual not the culture that matters. For him, there are “no such many as mass” but rather “eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of.”
Correspondingly, Creeley wrote, “No man can make poetry without the ground of himself,” adding, “The local is not a place but a place in a given man” — claims that permit the poet enormous latitude. Walden, for example, is then not so much a geographical fact as what, for lack of a better term, one might call a state of mind. Similarly, Olson’s Gloucester is The Maximus Poems is a matter of his own devising and not a commonly experienced geography. Some postmodern theorists and critics would argue that it is false to see “the local” as essentially “a place in a given man” since the individual is “socially constructed.” What is real to them is “many as mass.” There are, it would seem, conflicting “postmoderns” and no way to resolve the differences between them.
X. Conviction
William Bronk’s work follows a “postmodern” trajectory that derives from the New England tradition. Postmodern writing is typically skeptical of claims to absolute truth, particularly claims that depend on faith. Bronk’s work, although in other respects as skeptical as any, refuses to abandon the conviction that an absolute exists while assuming that full awareness of that absolute is impossible.
Bronk’s work is greatly admired by a wide range of avant-garde and traditional poets. Although never a popular writer, he has been as highly respected in the American poetry community as any poet of his generation, earning the approbation of writers as various as Howard Nemerov, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Gustaf Sobin, and Rosmarie Waldrop. “Charles Olson valued him quite probably more than any other of his contemporaries,” Creeley wrote at the time of Bronk’s death;
it was the measure of intelligence he constituted, the address of his means to the given world. Finally, there was no one else quite like him, so large in his singleness, so separate yet enclosing. One will not see his like again.
Bronk was not, strictly speaking, a New Englander, for although he studied at Dartmouth and Harvard, most of his life was spent largely in Hudson Falls, a village in northern New York State. Hudson Falls is within a short drive of New England, however, and has much of the feel and look of villages in that part of the world. More to the point, Bronk read Thoreau early in his career, and Thoreau, as David Clippinger has shown in “Luminosity, Transcendence, and the Certainty of Not Knowing,” was primary to the evolution of Bronk’s work. “Thoreau and Bronk,” Clippinger wrote, “are both inheritors of a Platonic tradition of ethics as well as the conception of the life of the individual as an ongoing quest for spiritual transformation and transcendence.” That transcendence, Clippinger pointed out, is evident notably in “Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World,” one of Bronk’s earliest and greatest poems:
Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
—which what?—something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.
Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.
Although Bronk’s work is marked by a pervasive relativism that sets his work solidly in the context of postmodern writing, there are profoundly visionary moments when he sees beyond relativism to “a purity of space.”
Bronk insists that whatever we see and consider to be the world is purely a construction and not actually “there.” Among his books, for example, is the prose work The New World, which studies the radical differences between contemporary notions of time and space and those formulated by the Mayans and the Incas. But as different as notions of time and space may be from culture to culture, the recognition that there is time and that there is space does not change. In this, Bronk aligns himself with Kantian idealism and American transcendentalists. Beginning with a world of contingent meanings, Bronk ends with certainties, although, returning to a sense of the perceived world as governed by contingencies, he insists that the certainties are not those with which, except in the broadest sense, our lives are lead. “We learn,” he wrote in “The Good Life,” to use / the wrong terms always to deal with our lives: / terms with nothing at all to do with us.”
It is important to note that Bronk believes the poet and the poem can record the fact that these certainties exist. No less than the writings of his New England predecessors, Bronk’s involve personal testimony and conviction. As he said to the present writer:
I have repeatedly had the experience, when the poem gets written down, of saying, oh, God, no, I don’t mean that — but hesitating to change the meaning because it seems to me the way it has to be said — and then only later, maybe the next day, two days later, the next week: yes, I guess that’s what I do mean. . . . Having to accept that when I’ve lived with it for a little while. Admitting, yes, yes, I guess that is what I mean.
XI. Postmodern Realities
The skepticism and relativism that runs as much through Dickinson as through Bronk is quite different from that which one commonly associates with postmodernism, but this in turn suggests only how limited much of the critical thinking of the past two or three generations has been. A wiser approach was suggested by Paul Hoover in the introduction to his anthology Postmodern Poetry, in which he argued, contra Frederick Jameson, “that postmodernism is an extension of romanticism and modernism, both of which still thrive.” Hoover’s anthology, he said, “does not view postmodernism a single style with its departure in Pound's Cantos and its arrival in language poetry; postmodernism is, rather, an ongoing process of resistance to mainstream ideology.”
And in its radical individuality, little could more clearly be called “an ongoing process of resistance to mainstream ideology” than the New England tradition in American writing.
Sometimes, I could go in anywhere, not
to see the stars, not to be as we
are always, not only under them
but in them. The outer spaces push against
us, all their vastness apart, they crowd
us. They become our world. I could go hide
like Adam in his garden. How
would it matter? No, we are in the stars. Not
for us ever any familiar and definite world.
—William Bronk, “The Outer Becoming Inner”
I. Immanence
Robert Creeley told the poet Tom Clark in an interview that as a child playing in the woods, he recognized “a kind of immanence,” “a feeling of place almost conscious.” By his own testimony, Creeley, who was raised in a small town near Boston, remains not only essentially a New Englander but (his term) “a Puritan” with the associated need to know the fact of something rather than the fictions we would create to make it please us more; as a child, he “distrusted fiction, feeling the term ‘something made-up’ argued an intentional distortion of the ‘truth.’”
To one unacquainted with Creeley’s work, these might seem curious admissions for a writer conventionally thought to be preeminently postmodern, a word that identifies “truth” as relative to its temporal occasion. In fact Creeley’s notions of the world and its “truths” with which it is constituted are grounded in personal conviction: “We believe a world,” he says, “or have none.”
It is not uncommon to find American poets asserting on the one hand that “truth” is to be chosen above “fiction” while simultaneously believing that the “truth” is, after all, only what is believed to be true. It is a paradox perhaps resolved only in practice and within the individual. To understand American writing does require a bifurcated mind, committed to fact yet aware that fact is known only because it is believed.
A “proof” for fact is, in its spiritual dimension, what Creeley calls “a kind of immanence,” “a feeling of place almost conscious” — and this in turn implies something more powerful than the individual who believes, indeed something beyond or other than the individual who belief determines the world. Correspondingly, perception of it involves a powerful sense of the present moment so that spiritual awareness has nothing to do with the rituals and traditions with which it would be qualified or framed in other culture.
II. Threat
There are historical reasons for this kind of spiritual experience, reasons beyond the nature of the Protestant personality or Kantian idealism or Romanticism. Early New England Puritans dealt with a hostile and isolated environment in settling their wilderness. The land was all but impossible to cultivate; even when the virgin forests had cut down and the rock-strewn meadows had been cleared, the land was capable of supporting only the hardiest crops. And there were the Indians. Writing now in western Massachusetts, I am sorrounded by landscapes that 250 or 300 years ago were repeatedly the site of Indian massacres, one of the most famous of which occurred a few miles from here on 18 September 1675 when 700 Pocumtuc warriors attacked a contingent of eighty colonial soldiers. Seven or eight fled, and seven others survived, but the remaining sixty-four were killed. The battle took place beside a stream known since that time as Bloody Brook; settlers downstream first knew of the attack when the stream flowing past their homes ran red. It was an event long remembered; like the harsh winters, it was a reminder that one always had to be attentive to the present fact.
The early history of New England, however sentimentalized in tourist brochures, was an grisly, hazardous world of hazards, and through it flowed the severe New England conscience, that ongoing Puritan pressure, which said in effect, nothing you do will ever be good enough; you must always work harder. Life for the Puritan was a most serious business, and that seriousness, and respect for it, never left New England. In his journals, Thoreau, although himself of French descent, belittles the French for having, unlike the English Puritans, “no busy-ness” in New England. They came, he scornfully adds, “to hunt and fish, not to work.”
III. Fact
Conditions of life in New England required attention to fact and the immediate hardly less than attention to spiritual matters, and the effect was felt for many generations. It should be no surprise to learn that the early history of science in America is linked to New England: to the geologist Edward Hitchcock and botanist Edward Tuckerman at Amherst, to the geologist Benjamin Silliman and his son the chemist Benjamin Silliman at Yale, and to the zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz at Harvard. These New England scientists shared the belief that their observations of nature revealed a divine process in the creation of the world; in other words, attention to fact implied attention to divine immanence. Nature was a kind of scripture; divinity was manifest in matter.
This process has been well studied. The mingling of observation, fact, and spiritual awareness is axiomatic to writers from New England. To cite an early famous example, It is found in Jonathan Edwards’ “Of Insects,” in which he wrote that he had
... several times seen, in a very calm and serene day [in August] ... , standing behind some opaque body that shall just hide the
disk of the sun and keep off his dazzling rays from my eye, multitudes of little shining webs and glistening strings of a great
length, and at such a height as (that one would think they were tacked to the sky by one end, were it not that they were moving
and floating. And there often appears at the end of these webs a spider floating and sailing in the air with them, which I have
plainly discerned in those webs that were nearer to my eye.
Edwards then noted that he had seen
a very large spider, to my surprise, swimming in the air in this manner, and others have assured me that they often have seen
spiders fly. The appearance is truly very pretty and pleasing, and it was so pleasing, as well as surprising, to me, that I
resolved to endeavor to satisfy my curiosity about it, by finding out the way and of their doing it.
The intertwined observations and feelings [”very pretty and pleasing, and . . . surprising”] lead Edwards not to insights about nature as ends in themselves but to an understanding of “the wisdom of the Creator.” The assumption that the externality reveals and/or manifests another, higher reality is central to many cultures, but in New England it is virtually axiomatic.
IV. Function
A hundred years after Edwards wrote his essay on the “pleasing” spider, a now largely forgotten poet named Manoah Bodman (1765-1850), revealed in his work, although in a very different way, a similar mixture of fact and belief. Bodman was well known in his western Massachusetts town of Williamsburg (the town immediately to the west of Northampton, where Edwards had lived) and the surrounding region for his orations on religious and patriotic subjects. When he was fifty-two, Bodman published his only book, the Oration on Death (1817), in which he included several talks and poems together with a narrative of his struggle with Satan.
Satan, according to the narrative, could disguise himself as an angel in order to lead the unwary Bodman astray. Here in an obscure hilltown village, the powers of evil tried to dominate his soul, telling him “not that there was to be any new revelation . . . ; but a new and wonderful administration of the former.” Heaven and earth were to be joined and “the celestial hosts would actually come down to earth” and communicate with people. Bodman’s task was “to write these things, and publish them to the world.” The obscure village and orator was to takes its place in the center of a cosmic drama, and Bodman, however else these revelations may have affected him, does not seem to have thought them outlandish.
Elsewhere in his works, he makes it clear that in divine matters what happened in his town was as important as anything that happened in London or Paris. The town of Williamsburg could as easily be the center of God’s intentions and presence as any place on earth, and Bodman himself can be at the center of that drama. His works are imbued with a sense of the local and the particular; he is not transported, like Swedenborg, to heaven, but is shown visions as he walks along the streets of his town and works in the fields. The visions may have been hallucinations arising from what would now be diagnosed as schizophrenia, but what matters is the way in which they merge the personal, the local, and the celestial in a seamless unity.
V. Pain
Emily Dickinson, attentive always to the immediate (“Microscopes are prudent / In an Emergency”), was drawn in her personal life to issues and ideas that her contemporaries generally felt were more properly concerns of formal religion. Susan Howe has argued that Dickinson took material from her reading and transformed it in ways to make her poetry distinctive, but she was also a person working in a specific place and specific culture that set seeing above books. Howe wrote that she “really was concerned to show that [Dickinson] ... . read to write,” and then demonstrates that complexly behind Dickinson’ work lie her readings in Browning, Dickens, Shakespeare, the Bible, and much more.
If Dickinson’s poems were strictly this kind of textual exercise, they would be ‘something made-up,’ constructions in language. Howe suggests that the Master letters are in fact exactly that; they are not letters to a person so much as a collage of literary echoes.
Howe wants Dickinson to be a latter-day antinomian. Her Emily Dickinson built a new poetic form from her fractured sense of being eternally on intellectual borders, where confident masculine voices buzzed an alluring and inaccessible discourse, backward through history into aboriginal anagogy. Pulling pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territory, a ‘sheltered’ woman audaciously invented a new grammar grounded in humility and hesitation.
Howe’s arguments are effective, but they only tell part of the story. Dickinson may have been an antinomian from one perspective, but she was, as much as Edwards, in search of “higher laws.” In fact, she was in fear of a world in which there are no laws; she wanted to locate that which could be thought transcendentally true, things than can be proven by experience. Thus, she says with characteristic precision, “I like a look of agony / Because I know it’s true.” What drives her is the need to find that which can be affirmed, and in this, faith is the enemy (“‘Faith’ is a fine invention / When Gentlemen can see —”), because its answers are too easily won.
Dickinson’s poems are forever in search of certainty and law, and there are few things in the world which satisfy that pursuit. Pain is one of those few, and “The hallowing of pain,” she says, is “Like hallowing of Heaven.” Pain is hallowed because it is does not serving other ends; it is nothing but itself. Dickinson is driven by a very strict conscience, and in her own way, she is absolutely the daughter of the Puritans. She is never satisfied with other people’s words unless their truth can be confirmed through her own experience.
Howe would see Dickinson’s decision to publish little of her work as a “gesture of infinite patience” and “a covenant of grace,” but it may be rather the result of her profound perfectionism, her refusal to let what could be just another set of mistaken observations make their way into the world as if they were truth. Dickinson stood far outside from the religious conventions of her time, but that may have been because these claimed already to have answers. How could one know the answers were correct until they had been found through personal experience as well? Dickinson, whom critics would have us read as a proto-Modernist or, in Howe’s case, as a proto-Postmodernist, was in fact very much a product of New England’s past.
VI. Region
In the nineteenth century, New England was rapidly losing political authority to Washington and economic authority to New York, but among New Englanders themselves, there was no perceived diminution of intellectual or literary authority. Dickinson, Edwards, and Bodman, who lived within a few miles of each other, belonged to different generations and sharply differed from each other in religious and cultural assumptions, but they are linked in a shared certainty about their respective positions in the universe and their ability to know that which is irrefutably true.
At the root of this assumption a state of mind, a way of thinking that defines a literature and ultimately throws into doubt the notion of the “postmodern” (a word invented by another New Englander, Charles Olson) as a category to enclose, comprehensively, innovative American writing of the past two or three generations.
To suggest the breadth of the problem, we can turn to the work of two nineteenth-century New England writers, Henry David Thoreau and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, and one of their intellectual descendants who, like Olson, has been seen as preeminently postmodern, William Bronk.
VII. Isolation and law
Within the American canon, Tuckerman is less known than Thoreau, but he was a better poet, if not a greater writer, and provides an important contrast to him. Unlike most New England writers of his time, he was neither a Calvinist nor a Unitarian, an apostate nor a transcendentalist. He was an Anglican and a devout one at that, and so, as in many other ways, he seems outside the New England tradition. And yet that is where he belongs — as intensely independent as any. To read his work is to discover, in the words of the poet Witter Bynner, a man “isolated in an intense integrity toward nature, toward his own mind, and toward the unknown God.”
Tuckerman lived in the same area as Dickinson, Edwards, and Bodman. Dickinson knew his brother and conceivably knew, or knew of, him, but they were both reclusive, and Tuckerman’s affirmation of Anglican beliefs would not have pleased her, nor, we can assume, would her positions have satisfied him. Tuckerman published, at his own expense, a selection from his work in 1860 and sent copies to a number of distinguished critics and writers, including Tennyson (whom he had met during a trip to England five years earlier), Hawthorne, and Emerson. The responses ranged from tepid to warm, but none was as enthusiastic as Emerson’s famous reply to Whitman upon receipt of Leaves of Grass (“I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”).
Tuckerman did have the support of Tennyson and James T. Fields, the foremost literary publisher at that time in the United States. Possibly through Tennyson’s efforts, Tuckerman’s poems were published in England in 1863, and the following year they were issued by Ticknor & Fields. A reprinting of that edition followed in 1869, but thereafter no book of Tuckerman’s work appeared until 1931, when Bynner’s edition of The Sonnets of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman was published, including three sonnet sequences that had remained in manuscript until then. Tuckerman’s “The Cricket,” which is now thought by some to be among his generation’s most significant literary achievements, was not in print until 1950. The Complete Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, edited by N. Scott Momaday, appeared in 1965, but there are important misgivings about editorial choices made in preparing this edition, and a revised “complete poems” is needed.
Tuckerman did not stop writing because his work failed to find a vocal sponsor. Like Dickinson, he simply withdrew and left most of work in manuscript at his death. Like her, he came from a wealthy family and did not need to support himself or his family with his writing. His father, a Boston merchant, provided him with enough income and inheritance that he was able to indulge his interests — astronomy, botany, and poetry. His siblings were successful in their respective fields; one brother, Edward, was the botanist mentioned earlier, and another, Samuel Parkman, was a distinguished organist and composer. Their sister, Sophia May Tuckerman Eckley, who lived in Florence, was a published poet and friend of the Brownings.
Tuckerman had the resources, both social and financial, for a prominent public or professional life, but he chose rather to live quietly in a rural town, Greenfield, Massachusetts, to which he moved in 1847. His house was located diagonally across the street from the Episcopal Church, of which he was a member, and which, together with his books, his family, and the surrounding landscapes, provided the outer boundaries to his life. Although he was asked to write poems for the dedication of the town’s Civil War monument and its new cemetery, he himself played almost no role in the affairs of the town, and when he died in 1873, the local newspaper reported that he had “lived a retired and secluded life among us.”
Tuckerman was in some ways indifferent to potential readers. The poetry includes references — e.g., Quonecktacut, “[t]he Shay’s man,” “Whately woods,” “the Common” — that must puzzle those who do not know the geography and history of his region. He also employs botanical terms — “stramony,” “barberry,” “home tree, ople tree, and sycamine” — that reflect his interest in the plant life of New England but that, especially in his day, would have had little resonance in the rest of the world. Above all, he draws on his private life and its central tragedy — the death of his young wife — as if his readers were as intimately concerned with, and knowledgeable about, it as he.
Using the traditional trope of the poet as a swan, Tuckerman asks in his first sonnet, “What avail / Is the swan’s voice if all the hearers fail?” but then answers himself by saying s that the poem does not need to be heard, for if that were so, “God were not God, whom knowledge cannot know.” Attributing, that is, to poetry the highest knowing, Tuckerman gives him and his work what some in his day might have thought an outrageously exalted role. As much as the somewhat less sophisticated Bodman, Tuckerman set himself at the center of the cosmos, able to penetrate nature to see and in his language represent things otherwise hidden. One of the foremost examples of this is the tenth sonnet in the first sequence:
An upper chamber in a darkened house,
Where, ere his footsteps reached ripe manhood's brink,
Terror and anguish were his cup to drink,
I cannot rid the thought, nor hold it close;
But dimly dream upon that man alone:
Now though the autumn clouds most softly pass;
The cricket chides beneath the doorstep stone,
And greener than the season grows the grass.
Nor can I drop my lids, nor shade my brows,
But there he stands beside the lifted sash;
And with a swooning of the heart, I think
Where the black shingles slope to meet the boughs,
And, shattered on the roof like smallest snows,
The tiny petals of the mountain-ash.
Tuckerman tells us that he “dream[s] upon that man alone,” and then envisions the image that constitutes the last three lines of the poem, which in turn tells us more about the man than if we were told what his “terror and anguish” had been. In short, Tuckerman ascribes to himself the ability to see and represent what is not literally in front of his eyes. He perceives the inner meaning of the event of the person where others see only the shell.
Tuckerman is a visionary but not a mystic like Bodman. Rather he observes fact, a “look of agony” much as that seen by Dickinson and then penetrates it to see its hidden workings. Like Dickinson, he examines carefully the particulars of the world and find them, at times, sufficient: “And in the rainy midnight I have heard / The ground sparrow’s long twitter from the pine, / And the catbird’s silver song . . . .” But the greatest moments in Tuckerman occur when the particulars and his spiritual awareness fuse in ways he describes in the seventh sonnet from his second series:
His heart was in his garden; but his brain
Wandered at will among the fiery stars.
Bards, heroes, prophets, Homers, Hamilcars,
With many angels, stood, his eye to gain;
The devils, too, were his familiars:
And yet the cunning florist held his eyes
Close to the ground, a tulip bulb his prize,
And talked of tan and bonedust, cutworms, grubs,
As though all Nature held no higher strain;
Or, if he spoke of Art, he made the theme
Flow through boxborders, turf, and flower tubs;
Or, like a garden engine's, steered the stream,
Now spouted rainbows to the silent skies;
Now kept it flat, and raked the walks and shrubs.
Eugene England argued in Beyond Romanticism that Tuckerman’s religious beliefs and his interest in the natural world as such precluded his becoming one of Emerson’s disciples. But he is a transcendentalist of his own kind: tenaciously focusing on his immediate world insofar as it empowers him to understand things of larger or ultimate significance. No less than Emerson, for whom nature became the means through which to obtain what he understood as full participantion in the currents of universal being, Tuckerman clearly felt himself to be within reach of the absolute, “his brain / Wander[ing] at will among the fiery stars”
The Anglican tradition, England pointed out, saw the universe as essentially rational, organized according to real and decipherable laws. Science in Tuckerman’s day was equally rationalistic; fundamentally concerned with observation and categorization and seeing nature as essentially static. Darwin’s Origin of the Species was published in 1859 while Tuckerman was working on his first sonnet series. Whether or not he read the book, he would, one feels, have resisted it, preferring Louis Agassiz’s notion that God had created each species as a unique and fixed element in nature. This gave the world an orderliness that would accord with Tuckerman’s religious beliefs.
VIII. Solitude and Change
Emerson, by contrast, viewed nature as perpetual change and was therefore disposed toward a Darwinian view. In moral and cultural as well as scientific matters, Emerson had no use for the static or fixed: “With consistency,” he wrote in “Self-Reliance,” “a great soul has simply nothing to do.” And, in “Experience,” he wrote, “Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight.” Further, in “Circles,” he wrote, “There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile.”
In effect Thoreau saw things in the same way, but, like Tuckerman and unlike Emerson, he characteristically confined his observations to the particulars of the observable world. Emerson was free to speculate in his study about the mutability of all things and his belief that, despite this, there was an underlying coherence — change itself — to give mutability coherence. But Thoreau needed to find his conclusions in physical fact. The most famous expression of mutability as fundamental coherence and order occurs in Walden in the chapter entitled “Spring,” where he studies a railroad embankment beginning to thaw in the spring warmth and finds that it “illustrate[s] the principle of all the operations of Nature”:
This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring. It precedes the green and flowery spring, as mythology precedes regular poetry. I know of nothing more purgative of winter fumes and indigestions. It convinces me that Earth is still in her swaddling-clothes, and stretches forth baby fingers on every side. Fresh curls spring from the baldest brow. There is nothing inorganic. These foliaceous heaps lie along the bank like the slag of a furnace, showing that Nature is “in full blast” within. The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.
Tuckerman and Thoreau concentrate on the material world but understand it in entirely different ways, Tuckerman finding in it immutable laws and Thoreau finding perpetual generation. Not surprisingly, Tuckerman worked best in the established order of the sonnet while Walden is, except in the most general ways, unlike any other literary work. As different as Tuckerman and Thoreau were, they were, like the others discussed here, in important ways very much alike. Concord is today a suburb of Boston, but in Thoreau’s youth the city was four hours away by carriage, and even after the railroad was completed, it was still an hour’s ride. Concord was not as isolated as Tuckerman’s Greenfield or Dickinson’s Amherst, but it was primarily a region of farmers rather than bankers and merchants.
Within Thoreau’s secluded world, he could identify “higher laws” and understand his local world as the type of the moral universe. The highest aspirations could be realized in solitude — a solitude intensified by the fact that Walden, as he said, is outside history “I am not aware that any man has ever built on the spot which I occupy,” he says; "Deliver me from a city built on the site of a more ancient city, whose materials are ruins, whose gardens cemeteries. The soil is blanched and accursed there, and before that becomes necessary the earth itself will be destroyed."
“God himself culminates in the present moment,” he concluded, “and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.” In turn, this transcendent recognition is rooted in the specifics of the physical world: “we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality that surrounds us.”
In his essay “Circles,” Emerson provides a metaphor with which such statements can be read: “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.” One individual in Emerson’s view is as much at the center of the universe as any other. Such a view permits the poet freedom to pursue his work in any manner he may choose. Even the relatively conservative Tuckerman felt free to dissociate himself from the traditional notions of sonnet form and began experimenting with it in ways that disturbed his contemporaries. Dickinson’s first editors, likewise, felt she had made “mistakes” and so imposed conventional metrics and rhymes on her work. And Thoreau was read for decades as basically a nature writer, misunderstood even by those who claimed to honor him most. Bodman was ridiculed by his townsmen, one newspaper editor remarking that the poet in his orations “used good language, and an abundance of it, but whether his reason and appeals were convincing, I never could comprehend, as the flood of words always ecliped the force of his logic.” Even today he is seldom read except by specialists in American literature. As Emerson said, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”
IX. Community and Change
A native of New England like the other writers discussed here, Charles Olson was among those most responsible for transforming an essentially regional aesthetic into one that is one is usually labelled “postmodern,” a term which he in fact invented. Olson’s poetics draw on a great range of materials from Herodotus to modern physics, but what he finds in these is fundamentally support for the notions about literature and its relation to personal experience that one finds in Tuckerman, Dickinson, and Thoreau. Olson, who professed not to like Emerson, led Emerson’s transcendentalism into the present. Emerson’s fundamental recognition is the fact of change, but he insists that this is essentially divine force, which he calls the Oversoul. For Olson, however, there is only change itself, housed in the individual, and as he wrote in “The Kingfishers,” “What does not change / is the will to change.” This “will to change” is not an abstract, impersonal, or Platonic ultimate but, rather, thoroughly human. Time, history, and community, in Olson’s view, all evolve from the human. “Polis is / eyes,” he wrote in The Maximus Poems, thereby reasserting the fundamental presumption shared by his New England predecessors, while stripping it of its spiritual dimension. But at the same time, he shared their insistence that it is the individual not the culture that matters. For him, there are “no such many as mass” but rather “eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of.”
Correspondingly, Creeley wrote, “No man can make poetry without the ground of himself,” adding, “The local is not a place but a place in a given man” — claims that permit the poet enormous latitude. Walden, for example, is then not so much a geographical fact as what, for lack of a better term, one might call a state of mind. Similarly, Olson’s Gloucester is The Maximus Poems is a matter of his own devising and not a commonly experienced geography. Some postmodern theorists and critics would argue that it is false to see “the local” as essentially “a place in a given man” since the individual is “socially constructed.” What is real to them is “many as mass.” There are, it would seem, conflicting “postmoderns” and no way to resolve the differences between them.
X. Conviction
William Bronk’s work follows a “postmodern” trajectory that derives from the New England tradition. Postmodern writing is typically skeptical of claims to absolute truth, particularly claims that depend on faith. Bronk’s work, although in other respects as skeptical as any, refuses to abandon the conviction that an absolute exists while assuming that full awareness of that absolute is impossible.
Bronk’s work is greatly admired by a wide range of avant-garde and traditional poets. Although never a popular writer, he has been as highly respected in the American poetry community as any poet of his generation, earning the approbation of writers as various as Howard Nemerov, George Oppen, Susan Howe, Gustaf Sobin, and Rosmarie Waldrop. “Charles Olson valued him quite probably more than any other of his contemporaries,” Creeley wrote at the time of Bronk’s death;
it was the measure of intelligence he constituted, the address of his means to the given world. Finally, there was no one else quite like him, so large in his singleness, so separate yet enclosing. One will not see his like again.
Bronk was not, strictly speaking, a New Englander, for although he studied at Dartmouth and Harvard, most of his life was spent largely in Hudson Falls, a village in northern New York State. Hudson Falls is within a short drive of New England, however, and has much of the feel and look of villages in that part of the world. More to the point, Bronk read Thoreau early in his career, and Thoreau, as David Clippinger has shown in “Luminosity, Transcendence, and the Certainty of Not Knowing,” was primary to the evolution of Bronk’s work. “Thoreau and Bronk,” Clippinger wrote, “are both inheritors of a Platonic tradition of ethics as well as the conception of the life of the individual as an ongoing quest for spiritual transformation and transcendence.” That transcendence, Clippinger pointed out, is evident notably in “Metonymy as an Approach to a Real World,” one of Bronk’s earliest and greatest poems:
Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
—which what?—something of what we sense
may be true, may be the world, what it is, what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible, the tolerance
of travelers, eating foreign foods, trying words
that twist the tongue, to feel that time and place,
not thinking that this is the real world.
Conceded, that all the clocks tell local time;
conceded, that "here" is anywhere we bound
and fill a space; conceded, we make a world:
is something caught there, contained there,
something real, something which we can sense?
Once in a city blocked and filled, I saw
the light lie in the deep chasm of a street,
palpable and blue, as though it had drifted in
from say, the sea, a purity of space.
Although Bronk’s work is marked by a pervasive relativism that sets his work solidly in the context of postmodern writing, there are profoundly visionary moments when he sees beyond relativism to “a purity of space.”
Bronk insists that whatever we see and consider to be the world is purely a construction and not actually “there.” Among his books, for example, is the prose work The New World, which studies the radical differences between contemporary notions of time and space and those formulated by the Mayans and the Incas. But as different as notions of time and space may be from culture to culture, the recognition that there is time and that there is space does not change. In this, Bronk aligns himself with Kantian idealism and American transcendentalists. Beginning with a world of contingent meanings, Bronk ends with certainties, although, returning to a sense of the perceived world as governed by contingencies, he insists that the certainties are not those with which, except in the broadest sense, our lives are lead. “We learn,” he wrote in “The Good Life,” to use / the wrong terms always to deal with our lives: / terms with nothing at all to do with us.”
It is important to note that Bronk believes the poet and the poem can record the fact that these certainties exist. No less than the writings of his New England predecessors, Bronk’s involve personal testimony and conviction. As he said to the present writer:
I have repeatedly had the experience, when the poem gets written down, of saying, oh, God, no, I don’t mean that — but hesitating to change the meaning because it seems to me the way it has to be said — and then only later, maybe the next day, two days later, the next week: yes, I guess that’s what I do mean. . . . Having to accept that when I’ve lived with it for a little while. Admitting, yes, yes, I guess that is what I mean.
XI. Postmodern Realities
The skepticism and relativism that runs as much through Dickinson as through Bronk is quite different from that which one commonly associates with postmodernism, but this in turn suggests only how limited much of the critical thinking of the past two or three generations has been. A wiser approach was suggested by Paul Hoover in the introduction to his anthology Postmodern Poetry, in which he argued, contra Frederick Jameson, “that postmodernism is an extension of romanticism and modernism, both of which still thrive.” Hoover’s anthology, he said, “does not view postmodernism a single style with its departure in Pound's Cantos and its arrival in language poetry; postmodernism is, rather, an ongoing process of resistance to mainstream ideology.”
And in its radical individuality, little could more clearly be called “an ongoing process of resistance to mainstream ideology” than the New England tradition in American writing.