William Bronk and His New England Cast of Mind
Two areas of concern that deeply shaped Bronk’s poetry were his sexuality and his religious training, the second of which powerfully inflected the first. Lyman Gilmore’s biography traces the centrality of Bronk’s sexual orientation to his work, citing Bronk’s lengthy analysis of his conflicted feelings about that orientation, which he concluded is the subject of “[e]verything I write . . . about.”[1] Although that orientation may be easily recognized by anyone who shares it, it is rarely a surface concern in the work and has passed unseen, or unremarked, by many critics. Bronk did much of his work at a time when homosexuality was considered a disease and a crime, at best a distasteful aberration, and to be publically “queer” was to be an outcast.[2] His religious and spiritual concerns are another matter. They are the very surface and the depth of many of his greatest poems, and one might think a reader blind to overlook them. And yet, oddly, they, too, have passed unnoticed, and Bronk has been discussed as if he were a secular humanist or an agnostic. He was neither. If we examine the religious issues in the poetry we find that his religious and spiritual concerns are not unrelated to his sexuality and in turn to the very nature of his poetry.
Bronk himself is responsible for the perception of his work as not essentially religious, at least in a conventionally doctrinal way. Writing to George Oppen, for instance, he remarked flatly, “I concede that I am not a Christian and don’t often write on Christian themes […].” (Gilmore 219) Strictly speaking the first may be true, but not the second, at least depending on how one defines “often.” Much of his work is permeated with Christian themes, commonly treated from the perspective of the doubter, the Doubting Thomas, if you will. Bronk would not be considered a Christian by rights of either baptism or conversion, yet his work reaches conclusions that are notably Augustinian and Calvinistic. A cursory look at his religious background may tell us why.
In an interview with Mark Katzman, Bronk said that when he was young he went to the Episcopal Church as that was his mother’s church but was not baptized. He also said that, at least at the time of the interview, he did not go to church,[3] but that is not what I observed, and others have confirmed that he did indeed attend church, if not regularly. He told me that the opening verses of the Gospel According to St. John, which he had recently heard read in church, had the power to move him so deeply as to bring him to tears.
Bronk’s father went to the Methodist Church but had been brought up in the Dutch Reformed Church. This, to say the least, is quite a mixture of theological traditions, for the Arminian Methodists, believers in free will, were traditionally theological foes of the Dutch Reformed. The Dutch Reformed Church was Calvinistic, deterministic. This is a critical distinction in early American culture, particularly in the North in the nineteenth century when the Methodist church gradually became the largest Protestant denomination in the country while the formerly dominant Calvinistic sects lost members to them.[4]
I do not know if the Episcopal or Anglo-Catholic church that Bronk attended as a child was liberal or evangelical or what its professed theological strain was, but I would guess from his poetry that it was not Calvinistic and that he received a strong dose of it. A close reading of his work, however, also suggests a strong Calvinistic sensibility together with a fairly sophisticated knowledge of Anglo-Catholic doctrine. As for the rather more cheerful prospect of Arminian theology, I find little or nothing.
Elsewhere I have argued that Bronk shares with Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau a profound concern with particulars that may seem at first to be the very embodiment of fact but that prove to be only illusive shadows of what is taken to be truth.[5] This is the very essence of what culminated in what is called the New England theology, rooted in part in Scottish common sense philosophy and in Francis Bacon’s focus on things from which inductive reasoning permits conclusions that on closer examination prove to be, in Jonathan Edwards words, only “shadows” or “images” of “divine things.”[6] A famous instance of this, in which the Calvinistic strain otherwise plays no part, is Thoreau’s belief that in a sandbank defrosting in the spring, he discovered “that Nature is ‘in full blast’ within.” Here Calvinistic readings of nature had been cut free of their theological origins.
This trope, repeated endlessly throughout the literature of New England from Edwards to Dickinson to Robert Frost to Bronk, involves attention to what is commonly accepted as fact only to have it shift, like light from a turning prism, to reveal, or appear to be, something quite different. Objects or things, likewise, show themselves to be other what they had at first been assumed to be; they are not in themselves final nor are they vessels for that which is. At the furthest extreme, they may appear to be ineffable or to have nothing at all of the content that they were initially assumed to possess. Things, in any case, are not ultimate; they are at most signs or trajectories. As Bronk said, correcting Williams, “There are no ideas in things.”
I take this point of view as a pervasive conclusion in what may be called a New England sensibility, which, as has been endlessly documented, planted its seeds through upper New York State and the so-called “burned over district” -- the area in which Bronk lived — in its march to the Ohio and then across the continent.[7] It tends, to this day, to be pragmatic, realistic, dry. It has little use for fancy or for pleasure for its own sake. It is skeptical, dispassionate, reasoned and is forever questioning the masks that objects, in the theological tradition being discussed, are thought to wear. It is, one might say, a condition of mind as much as it is a mold for doctrinal beliefs.
This manner of experiencing the world is somewhat different from that suggested in the 14th-century mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing that Bronk said, in effect, he could have written himself.[8] The approach followed there, the via negativa, is radically different from the one I am describing. I am not dismissive of Bronk’s identification with this Thomist text but prefer to see it as a means through which conclusions were reached similar to those found elsewhere in his work. The principal focus in the poems follows lines laid down by the skeptical, rational New England sensibility or condition of mind.
This sensibility or condition of mind can be seen, for example, in “Stations,” a meditation on the Stations of the Cross, in which doctrinal notions Bronk could have acquired from his Episcopal training are put on trial.[9] The poem argues that the “metaphor of the cross” is conveyed through the Stations and, however briefly, may lead one to share God’s “pain.” But Bronk will not accept the “redemption” that the Stations also promise. At issue is “substitutionary atonement” — that is, whether Christ’s death atoned for the sins of a “limited” few or for everyone. According to Calvinistic doctrine, the crucifixion atoned for the sins of a select few. For the rest, prospects remain, to say the least, rather dim, and it is among those that Bronk in his poetry commonly identifies himself. “Stations” places him not as an unbeliever but among unbelievers who are untouched by the atonement, and, therefore among those to whom God will be known through “torment and compulsion.” (BOL 46) The poem illustrates a tension between established doctrine and questioning, specifically between what one may wish and what one is compelled to accept. He concludes, “I will have no other God” than He who compels.
Edwards, it will be recalled, argued that “free will” was possible only when one’s will was in accord with God’s. Otherwise, one is compelled, whether the compulsion be natural or moral. Bronk’s use of the word “compulsion” is critical, implying an alliance with the deterministic theology of Calvinism as opposed to the somewhat more optimistic reach of Anglo-Catholicism. Within the latter, “good works,” for instance, can be a means through which one might achieve, or move toward, salvation. In the Calvinistic tradition, drawing on Augustine and St. Paul, only faith matters, but in itself it cannot assure anything that God has not willed.
Thus I would read Bronk in “Stations” as working with doctrines, understood in this context as metaphors, drawn from the Anglo-Catholic tradition of his childhood but arguing from a position in which what matters is not what one does but what is done to one. Correspondingly, poetry to Bronk is not the result of one’s will but rather the result of what has been willed for one. Illustrating this, Bronk explained in an interview,
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. But the initial rejection of what the poem is saying because it seems to me
something that I don’t particularly want to mean, a meaning that makes me uncomfortable or embarrasses or contradicts
something else I’ve said or whatever. Having to accept that when I’ve lived with it for a little while. . . . Admitting, yes, yes, I guess
that is what I mean. (Foster 19)
The tension between compulsion and a desire for choice, I believe, drives much of Bronk’s work. “Fostering,” for example, rejects both language as such and its presumed subjects as sources for poetry, which depends neither “on what is said or [on] the language saying.” Poems, rather, are “acts of love.” (BOL 65) Love in Bronk’s poems is no more a matter of choice than anything else. He makes this point in “Your Way Too,” which says that much as Odette in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way was “not even his [Swann’s] type,” so, too, do “each of us, love, / in spite of natural inclinations.” Love, in fact, is but another form of compulsion that denies true choice or free will. (BOL 21)
Where, then, does Bronk understand love as he personally experienced it in the context of his overarching religious concerns? David Hilliard, among others, has argued that Anglo-Catholicism, especially in England, was more accepting of, or at least less condemning of, homosexuality than were the “puritan” — i.e. Calvinistic — denominations. A similar situation seems to have been characteristic of the American Episcopal church, at least among its urban or more sophisticated congregations, or so one may gather from accounts such as Douglass Shand-Tucci’s Boston Bohemia.[10] But whether this was the case in Bronk’s religious training is, at least to me, unknown. We would need to know what was taught at the Zion Episcopal Church in Hudson Falls during Bronk’s childhood, and I don’t know whether at this point that could be retrieved, though it may be a fair guess that in the provincial upstate village of Hudson Falls in the 1920s, the position was imbued with guilt and rejection and was no more liberal or forgiving than one might have expected from Calvinistic denominations.
Consider now the following from The Cloud of Unknowing: “Before ere man sinned was the Sensuality so obedient unto the Will, unto the which it is as it were servant, that it ministered never unto it any unordained liking or grumbling in any bodily creature. . . .” But, continues the author, now after the fall, after original sin, “unless it be ruled by grace in the Will . . . [one is left to] wretchedly and wantonly welter, as a swine in the mire, in the wealths of this world and the foul flesh so much that all our living shall be more beastly and fleshly, than either manly or ghostly.”[11]
Strong words, but are they appropriate to Bronk, who felt personally allied to The Cloud of Unknowing? Would he have accepted these words as if he had written them himself? Not surely “wretchedly and wantonly welter,” but in its general attitude toward sexuality, perhaps he might. I cite in support the poem “Lucifer,” which I take as expressing Bronk’s own position:
Shun me. Adam’s fall was trivial
to mine. I am too proud to contend His power,
will not be less and, as less, be least as known
beloved. Secret love is my desire. (BOL 30)
For Bronk’s generation, “Secret Love” meant the song that won the Academy Award for best song for 1953, sung by Doris Day in Calamity Jane, in which she roiled about unmistakably gussied up as a butch dyke to femme Gale Robbins, with whom she shared her house. The “secret love” in the plot was actually Wild Bill Hickock, but this was as it had to be in the 1950s, yet Doris and Gale made such a charming couple that it is not surprising that the song became an anthem of sorts in a world where, for some, only “secret love” was permitted.
Even were the song not Bronk’s reference, this point is clear: Lucifer would be the lover, but of a particular sort, in secret, for there is to be found his particular kind of love.
To summarize: when Bronk told Oppen that he was not a Christian or Katzman that he was not a “card-carrying Christian,” he was technically correct. He was neither baptized nor, insofar as I know, did he experience conversion. But he was being somewhat disingenuous when he said that he did not “often write on Christian themes,” for he certainly did as any attentive reader must recognize. But his “secret love,” if you will, set him immediately and irreconcilably at odds with his doctrinal background. Beyond that lay the harsh expectations of a cast of mind that defined his world.
In “Old Testament,” he writes, “The gist of human finds any way to hurt / itself; pleasures aren’t exempt, they lead to miseries.” (BOL 79) This profoundly spiritual realization is sufficiently bleak and deterministic to satisfy a Calvinist and is, like poetry, not the fulfillment of personal desire but an identification of necessity and obedience. “Talk to me poem,” Bronk says in “Invocation,”
As if we were all alone,
you are the one I listen for and to
I don’t need to speak. You speak for me. (BOL 166)
As Bronk clearly knew, one is given neither theology nor poems in order to be comfortable with them.
[1] Lyman Gilmore, The Force of Desire: A Life of William Bronk (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, Publishers, 2009), xxviii.
[2] Bronk preferred the term “queer” to “gay” as it seemed closer to the truth, at least socially. (conversation with the author) However, he also wrote, “It is not queer to be queer (that horrible word) but a sort of extra sense which gives us perceptions which pertain not just to us but to everybody.” (Gilmore, xxvii)
[3] Mark Katzman, “At Home in the Unknown: An Interview with William Bronk,
http://www.artzar.com/content/bronk/page2.html. Retrieved 4 April 2012.
[4] This is not determinism in a merely mechanical or impersonal sense. Individual responsibility is recognized but in a special way. Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo summarize thus, for example, Jonathan Edwards’ conclusions in Freedom on the Will: “When God decrees an act . . . that act becomes necessary. But acts can become necessary in one of two ways: God can physically compel someone, even while the person really wants to do something else. Or an act becomes necessary when a person has already a psychological inclination toward that act, and the more intense a person’s inclination, the more likely it is that it will be acted on in a predictable fashion. Edwards called the necessity that involves force natural necessity. No one under the force of natural necessity can be held morally accountable for what he or she does. But the necessity that arises from people’s own inclinations is moral necessity. . . . In practical terms, this meant that people could not excuse themselves from the call to repentance and conversion on the grounds of inability.” (Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo, “Introduction,” The New England Theology, ed. Sweeney and Guelzo [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006], 15-16] Calvinism also denies that an individual can determine the nature of his/her moral being. “Free will,” Jonathan Edwards argued, would be possible only in the individual whose will is wholly in accord with God’s.
[5] This essay began as a paper that was read 29 June 2012 at the National Poetry Foundation conference at the University of Maine and, in revised form, appeared in Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 42 (2013). The essay concerns the instant of gnosis when a set of words — which, as poetry, is as yet nothing in itself — becomes the trajectory that is the poem. The essay argues that there is a disconnect between American poetry and American thought in general that can be traced back to the nineteenth century (and earlier, but it is in the nineteenth century that the divergence begins to take clear shape in America). Both rest, initially, on (1) interpretations of the Bible as literally true and (2) Francis Bacon’s notion of inductive reasoning. Interpretations of God’s presence and purpose were grounded in the then universally accepted “two books theory,” i.e., God revealed his intentions in (a) scripture and (b) the natural world. In both cases, one looked for “signs” to interpret. Science, as understood then, was essentially theology: one studied the natural world in order to map its “truths” much as one read the Bible. As the famous geologist Edward Hitchcock wrote, “[S]cience is only a history of the divine operations in matter and mind.” (“Scientific Truth, Rightly Applied, Is Religious Truth,” in Edward Hitchcock, The Geology of Religion and Its Connected Sciences [Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1854]). It was assumed that what one found in one book confirmed or expanded one’s understanding of what was found in the other. The world, like the Bible, was seen, therefore, as a text to be read and interpreted, and that notion in turn is, whether secularized or not, fundamental to Thoreau, Dickinson, and on, I believe, to the present. It can be seen it in the works of Robert Creeley as much as in the works of Jonathan Edwards. The theological justification has been obscured, but the underlying approach or procedure remains. The desired goal remains final knowledge achieved through a reading of the natural world.
The relationship of nature to the Bible would have been shared by a Calvinist like Jonathan Edwards and an Arminian like John Wesley. The difference is that the former believed that everything had been determined from the beginning of time, while the latter believed that individuals were allotted a portion of free will. The latter notion became hugely popular in antebellum America and, “secularized,” remains so. The disconnect between American poetry and American thought can be seen in the division between the Calvinistic and Arminian positions regarding “free will.” Secular cultures like our own are, of course, themselves belief systems, and what passes for “truth” in them may prove to be rooted in “truth” that survives from earlier, specifically religious systems.
American poetry of the sort I am discussing here continues to depend on a Calvinistic strain, recast through notions of secularity. To identify how the Calvinistic strain has survived, it may be useful to recognize that Ezra Pound, for example, was trained as a Presbyterian, that Creeley was trained as a Congregationalist, that Jack Spicer was trained as a Baptist, and so forth. By various avenues (and those avenues now, I would argue, are almost always felt to be secular, their roots long forgotten), the Calvinistic tradition has repeatedly entered into American poetry. My point in this talk was that poetry within this tradition involves a form of gnosis, but not the Emersonian variety that Harold Bloom identified (which was actually closer in its origins to Arminianism). In order to move from the perception and record of the world as a text to the poem itself, a key, a secret knowing, is required. Sometimes that key has been provided by “pseudo-science” or “science” (for example, theories from Norman O. Brown), but this is not true “gnosis.” In the poetry with which I was concerned the key is not so easily identified. In fact, it maybe understood by the poet simply as the product of a compulsion (“the poetry of dictation,” for instance). In any case, it involves an initial poetic obsession with the world as experienced inductively rather than as imagined or as it might fit into the common apprehensions rooted in the secularity that drives American life generally. There is then an alchemical moment when language becomes more than itself, and the poem occurs.
[6] Mark A. Noll summarizes, “Christian apologetics grounded in common sense rapidly developed into a flourishing of what T. D. Bozeman has helpfully described as Baconian theology. In divinity, a rigorous empiricism resting on facts of consciousness and facts from the Bible became the standard for justifying belief in God, revelation, and the Trinity.” (Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002], 235.) Noll quotes Archibald Alexander, Princeton theologian (1772-1852): “To prove that our faculties are not so constituted as to misguide us, some have had recourse to the goodness and truth of God, our creator, but this argument is unnecessary. We are as certain of these intuitive truths as we can be . . . . Besides we must be sure that we exist, and that the world exists, before we can be certain that there is a God, for it is from these data that we prove his existence.” (Noll, America’s God, 236)
[7] The foundational study is Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1950).
[8] Edward Foster, “Conversations with William Bronk,” Postmodern Poetry (Hoboken, NJ: Talisman House, Publishers, 1994), 16: “[…] when I did out of curiosity read it [The Cloud of Unknowing], I said, yes, this guy’s been stealing from me.”
[9] The “Stations” are not part of the theology of the Dutch Reformed or any Calvinist church.
[10] David Hilliard: “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality“: Victorian Studies, 25/2 (Winter 1982), 181–210. (The essay begins, “Despite the traditional teaching of the Christian Church that homosexual behaviour is always sinful, there are grounds for believing that Anglo-Catholic religion within the Church of England has offered emotional and aesthetic satisfactions that have been particularly attractive to members of a stigmatised sexual minority.”) Douglass Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia (Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1995).
[11] Anonymous, A Book of Contemplation the Which Is Called The Cloud of Unknowing in Which a Soul Is One with God, ed. Evelyn Underhill (London: John M. Watkins, 1922), 283-4.
Two areas of concern that deeply shaped Bronk’s poetry were his sexuality and his religious training, the second of which powerfully inflected the first. Lyman Gilmore’s biography traces the centrality of Bronk’s sexual orientation to his work, citing Bronk’s lengthy analysis of his conflicted feelings about that orientation, which he concluded is the subject of “[e]verything I write . . . about.”[1] Although that orientation may be easily recognized by anyone who shares it, it is rarely a surface concern in the work and has passed unseen, or unremarked, by many critics. Bronk did much of his work at a time when homosexuality was considered a disease and a crime, at best a distasteful aberration, and to be publically “queer” was to be an outcast.[2] His religious and spiritual concerns are another matter. They are the very surface and the depth of many of his greatest poems, and one might think a reader blind to overlook them. And yet, oddly, they, too, have passed unnoticed, and Bronk has been discussed as if he were a secular humanist or an agnostic. He was neither. If we examine the religious issues in the poetry we find that his religious and spiritual concerns are not unrelated to his sexuality and in turn to the very nature of his poetry.
Bronk himself is responsible for the perception of his work as not essentially religious, at least in a conventionally doctrinal way. Writing to George Oppen, for instance, he remarked flatly, “I concede that I am not a Christian and don’t often write on Christian themes […].” (Gilmore 219) Strictly speaking the first may be true, but not the second, at least depending on how one defines “often.” Much of his work is permeated with Christian themes, commonly treated from the perspective of the doubter, the Doubting Thomas, if you will. Bronk would not be considered a Christian by rights of either baptism or conversion, yet his work reaches conclusions that are notably Augustinian and Calvinistic. A cursory look at his religious background may tell us why.
In an interview with Mark Katzman, Bronk said that when he was young he went to the Episcopal Church as that was his mother’s church but was not baptized. He also said that, at least at the time of the interview, he did not go to church,[3] but that is not what I observed, and others have confirmed that he did indeed attend church, if not regularly. He told me that the opening verses of the Gospel According to St. John, which he had recently heard read in church, had the power to move him so deeply as to bring him to tears.
Bronk’s father went to the Methodist Church but had been brought up in the Dutch Reformed Church. This, to say the least, is quite a mixture of theological traditions, for the Arminian Methodists, believers in free will, were traditionally theological foes of the Dutch Reformed. The Dutch Reformed Church was Calvinistic, deterministic. This is a critical distinction in early American culture, particularly in the North in the nineteenth century when the Methodist church gradually became the largest Protestant denomination in the country while the formerly dominant Calvinistic sects lost members to them.[4]
I do not know if the Episcopal or Anglo-Catholic church that Bronk attended as a child was liberal or evangelical or what its professed theological strain was, but I would guess from his poetry that it was not Calvinistic and that he received a strong dose of it. A close reading of his work, however, also suggests a strong Calvinistic sensibility together with a fairly sophisticated knowledge of Anglo-Catholic doctrine. As for the rather more cheerful prospect of Arminian theology, I find little or nothing.
Elsewhere I have argued that Bronk shares with Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau a profound concern with particulars that may seem at first to be the very embodiment of fact but that prove to be only illusive shadows of what is taken to be truth.[5] This is the very essence of what culminated in what is called the New England theology, rooted in part in Scottish common sense philosophy and in Francis Bacon’s focus on things from which inductive reasoning permits conclusions that on closer examination prove to be, in Jonathan Edwards words, only “shadows” or “images” of “divine things.”[6] A famous instance of this, in which the Calvinistic strain otherwise plays no part, is Thoreau’s belief that in a sandbank defrosting in the spring, he discovered “that Nature is ‘in full blast’ within.” Here Calvinistic readings of nature had been cut free of their theological origins.
This trope, repeated endlessly throughout the literature of New England from Edwards to Dickinson to Robert Frost to Bronk, involves attention to what is commonly accepted as fact only to have it shift, like light from a turning prism, to reveal, or appear to be, something quite different. Objects or things, likewise, show themselves to be other what they had at first been assumed to be; they are not in themselves final nor are they vessels for that which is. At the furthest extreme, they may appear to be ineffable or to have nothing at all of the content that they were initially assumed to possess. Things, in any case, are not ultimate; they are at most signs or trajectories. As Bronk said, correcting Williams, “There are no ideas in things.”
I take this point of view as a pervasive conclusion in what may be called a New England sensibility, which, as has been endlessly documented, planted its seeds through upper New York State and the so-called “burned over district” -- the area in which Bronk lived — in its march to the Ohio and then across the continent.[7] It tends, to this day, to be pragmatic, realistic, dry. It has little use for fancy or for pleasure for its own sake. It is skeptical, dispassionate, reasoned and is forever questioning the masks that objects, in the theological tradition being discussed, are thought to wear. It is, one might say, a condition of mind as much as it is a mold for doctrinal beliefs.
This manner of experiencing the world is somewhat different from that suggested in the 14th-century mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing that Bronk said, in effect, he could have written himself.[8] The approach followed there, the via negativa, is radically different from the one I am describing. I am not dismissive of Bronk’s identification with this Thomist text but prefer to see it as a means through which conclusions were reached similar to those found elsewhere in his work. The principal focus in the poems follows lines laid down by the skeptical, rational New England sensibility or condition of mind.
This sensibility or condition of mind can be seen, for example, in “Stations,” a meditation on the Stations of the Cross, in which doctrinal notions Bronk could have acquired from his Episcopal training are put on trial.[9] The poem argues that the “metaphor of the cross” is conveyed through the Stations and, however briefly, may lead one to share God’s “pain.” But Bronk will not accept the “redemption” that the Stations also promise. At issue is “substitutionary atonement” — that is, whether Christ’s death atoned for the sins of a “limited” few or for everyone. According to Calvinistic doctrine, the crucifixion atoned for the sins of a select few. For the rest, prospects remain, to say the least, rather dim, and it is among those that Bronk in his poetry commonly identifies himself. “Stations” places him not as an unbeliever but among unbelievers who are untouched by the atonement, and, therefore among those to whom God will be known through “torment and compulsion.” (BOL 46) The poem illustrates a tension between established doctrine and questioning, specifically between what one may wish and what one is compelled to accept. He concludes, “I will have no other God” than He who compels.
Edwards, it will be recalled, argued that “free will” was possible only when one’s will was in accord with God’s. Otherwise, one is compelled, whether the compulsion be natural or moral. Bronk’s use of the word “compulsion” is critical, implying an alliance with the deterministic theology of Calvinism as opposed to the somewhat more optimistic reach of Anglo-Catholicism. Within the latter, “good works,” for instance, can be a means through which one might achieve, or move toward, salvation. In the Calvinistic tradition, drawing on Augustine and St. Paul, only faith matters, but in itself it cannot assure anything that God has not willed.
Thus I would read Bronk in “Stations” as working with doctrines, understood in this context as metaphors, drawn from the Anglo-Catholic tradition of his childhood but arguing from a position in which what matters is not what one does but what is done to one. Correspondingly, poetry to Bronk is not the result of one’s will but rather the result of what has been willed for one. Illustrating this, Bronk explained in an interview,
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. But the initial rejection of what the poem is saying because it seems to me
something that I don’t particularly want to mean, a meaning that makes me uncomfortable or embarrasses or contradicts
something else I’ve said or whatever. Having to accept that when I’ve lived with it for a little while. . . . Admitting, yes, yes, I guess
that is what I mean. (Foster 19)
The tension between compulsion and a desire for choice, I believe, drives much of Bronk’s work. “Fostering,” for example, rejects both language as such and its presumed subjects as sources for poetry, which depends neither “on what is said or [on] the language saying.” Poems, rather, are “acts of love.” (BOL 65) Love in Bronk’s poems is no more a matter of choice than anything else. He makes this point in “Your Way Too,” which says that much as Odette in Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way was “not even his [Swann’s] type,” so, too, do “each of us, love, / in spite of natural inclinations.” Love, in fact, is but another form of compulsion that denies true choice or free will. (BOL 21)
Where, then, does Bronk understand love as he personally experienced it in the context of his overarching religious concerns? David Hilliard, among others, has argued that Anglo-Catholicism, especially in England, was more accepting of, or at least less condemning of, homosexuality than were the “puritan” — i.e. Calvinistic — denominations. A similar situation seems to have been characteristic of the American Episcopal church, at least among its urban or more sophisticated congregations, or so one may gather from accounts such as Douglass Shand-Tucci’s Boston Bohemia.[10] But whether this was the case in Bronk’s religious training is, at least to me, unknown. We would need to know what was taught at the Zion Episcopal Church in Hudson Falls during Bronk’s childhood, and I don’t know whether at this point that could be retrieved, though it may be a fair guess that in the provincial upstate village of Hudson Falls in the 1920s, the position was imbued with guilt and rejection and was no more liberal or forgiving than one might have expected from Calvinistic denominations.
Consider now the following from The Cloud of Unknowing: “Before ere man sinned was the Sensuality so obedient unto the Will, unto the which it is as it were servant, that it ministered never unto it any unordained liking or grumbling in any bodily creature. . . .” But, continues the author, now after the fall, after original sin, “unless it be ruled by grace in the Will . . . [one is left to] wretchedly and wantonly welter, as a swine in the mire, in the wealths of this world and the foul flesh so much that all our living shall be more beastly and fleshly, than either manly or ghostly.”[11]
Strong words, but are they appropriate to Bronk, who felt personally allied to The Cloud of Unknowing? Would he have accepted these words as if he had written them himself? Not surely “wretchedly and wantonly welter,” but in its general attitude toward sexuality, perhaps he might. I cite in support the poem “Lucifer,” which I take as expressing Bronk’s own position:
Shun me. Adam’s fall was trivial
to mine. I am too proud to contend His power,
will not be less and, as less, be least as known
beloved. Secret love is my desire. (BOL 30)
For Bronk’s generation, “Secret Love” meant the song that won the Academy Award for best song for 1953, sung by Doris Day in Calamity Jane, in which she roiled about unmistakably gussied up as a butch dyke to femme Gale Robbins, with whom she shared her house. The “secret love” in the plot was actually Wild Bill Hickock, but this was as it had to be in the 1950s, yet Doris and Gale made such a charming couple that it is not surprising that the song became an anthem of sorts in a world where, for some, only “secret love” was permitted.
Even were the song not Bronk’s reference, this point is clear: Lucifer would be the lover, but of a particular sort, in secret, for there is to be found his particular kind of love.
To summarize: when Bronk told Oppen that he was not a Christian or Katzman that he was not a “card-carrying Christian,” he was technically correct. He was neither baptized nor, insofar as I know, did he experience conversion. But he was being somewhat disingenuous when he said that he did not “often write on Christian themes,” for he certainly did as any attentive reader must recognize. But his “secret love,” if you will, set him immediately and irreconcilably at odds with his doctrinal background. Beyond that lay the harsh expectations of a cast of mind that defined his world.
In “Old Testament,” he writes, “The gist of human finds any way to hurt / itself; pleasures aren’t exempt, they lead to miseries.” (BOL 79) This profoundly spiritual realization is sufficiently bleak and deterministic to satisfy a Calvinist and is, like poetry, not the fulfillment of personal desire but an identification of necessity and obedience. “Talk to me poem,” Bronk says in “Invocation,”
As if we were all alone,
you are the one I listen for and to
I don’t need to speak. You speak for me. (BOL 166)
As Bronk clearly knew, one is given neither theology nor poems in order to be comfortable with them.
[1] Lyman Gilmore, The Force of Desire: A Life of William Bronk (Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House, Publishers, 2009), xxviii.
[2] Bronk preferred the term “queer” to “gay” as it seemed closer to the truth, at least socially. (conversation with the author) However, he also wrote, “It is not queer to be queer (that horrible word) but a sort of extra sense which gives us perceptions which pertain not just to us but to everybody.” (Gilmore, xxvii)
[3] Mark Katzman, “At Home in the Unknown: An Interview with William Bronk,
http://www.artzar.com/content/bronk/page2.html. Retrieved 4 April 2012.
[4] This is not determinism in a merely mechanical or impersonal sense. Individual responsibility is recognized but in a special way. Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo summarize thus, for example, Jonathan Edwards’ conclusions in Freedom on the Will: “When God decrees an act . . . that act becomes necessary. But acts can become necessary in one of two ways: God can physically compel someone, even while the person really wants to do something else. Or an act becomes necessary when a person has already a psychological inclination toward that act, and the more intense a person’s inclination, the more likely it is that it will be acted on in a predictable fashion. Edwards called the necessity that involves force natural necessity. No one under the force of natural necessity can be held morally accountable for what he or she does. But the necessity that arises from people’s own inclinations is moral necessity. . . . In practical terms, this meant that people could not excuse themselves from the call to repentance and conversion on the grounds of inability.” (Douglas A. Sweeney and Allen C. Guelzo, “Introduction,” The New England Theology, ed. Sweeney and Guelzo [Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2006], 15-16] Calvinism also denies that an individual can determine the nature of his/her moral being. “Free will,” Jonathan Edwards argued, would be possible only in the individual whose will is wholly in accord with God’s.
[5] This essay began as a paper that was read 29 June 2012 at the National Poetry Foundation conference at the University of Maine and, in revised form, appeared in Talisman: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics 42 (2013). The essay concerns the instant of gnosis when a set of words — which, as poetry, is as yet nothing in itself — becomes the trajectory that is the poem. The essay argues that there is a disconnect between American poetry and American thought in general that can be traced back to the nineteenth century (and earlier, but it is in the nineteenth century that the divergence begins to take clear shape in America). Both rest, initially, on (1) interpretations of the Bible as literally true and (2) Francis Bacon’s notion of inductive reasoning. Interpretations of God’s presence and purpose were grounded in the then universally accepted “two books theory,” i.e., God revealed his intentions in (a) scripture and (b) the natural world. In both cases, one looked for “signs” to interpret. Science, as understood then, was essentially theology: one studied the natural world in order to map its “truths” much as one read the Bible. As the famous geologist Edward Hitchcock wrote, “[S]cience is only a history of the divine operations in matter and mind.” (“Scientific Truth, Rightly Applied, Is Religious Truth,” in Edward Hitchcock, The Geology of Religion and Its Connected Sciences [Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company, 1854]). It was assumed that what one found in one book confirmed or expanded one’s understanding of what was found in the other. The world, like the Bible, was seen, therefore, as a text to be read and interpreted, and that notion in turn is, whether secularized or not, fundamental to Thoreau, Dickinson, and on, I believe, to the present. It can be seen it in the works of Robert Creeley as much as in the works of Jonathan Edwards. The theological justification has been obscured, but the underlying approach or procedure remains. The desired goal remains final knowledge achieved through a reading of the natural world.
The relationship of nature to the Bible would have been shared by a Calvinist like Jonathan Edwards and an Arminian like John Wesley. The difference is that the former believed that everything had been determined from the beginning of time, while the latter believed that individuals were allotted a portion of free will. The latter notion became hugely popular in antebellum America and, “secularized,” remains so. The disconnect between American poetry and American thought can be seen in the division between the Calvinistic and Arminian positions regarding “free will.” Secular cultures like our own are, of course, themselves belief systems, and what passes for “truth” in them may prove to be rooted in “truth” that survives from earlier, specifically religious systems.
American poetry of the sort I am discussing here continues to depend on a Calvinistic strain, recast through notions of secularity. To identify how the Calvinistic strain has survived, it may be useful to recognize that Ezra Pound, for example, was trained as a Presbyterian, that Creeley was trained as a Congregationalist, that Jack Spicer was trained as a Baptist, and so forth. By various avenues (and those avenues now, I would argue, are almost always felt to be secular, their roots long forgotten), the Calvinistic tradition has repeatedly entered into American poetry. My point in this talk was that poetry within this tradition involves a form of gnosis, but not the Emersonian variety that Harold Bloom identified (which was actually closer in its origins to Arminianism). In order to move from the perception and record of the world as a text to the poem itself, a key, a secret knowing, is required. Sometimes that key has been provided by “pseudo-science” or “science” (for example, theories from Norman O. Brown), but this is not true “gnosis.” In the poetry with which I was concerned the key is not so easily identified. In fact, it maybe understood by the poet simply as the product of a compulsion (“the poetry of dictation,” for instance). In any case, it involves an initial poetic obsession with the world as experienced inductively rather than as imagined or as it might fit into the common apprehensions rooted in the secularity that drives American life generally. There is then an alchemical moment when language becomes more than itself, and the poem occurs.
[6] Mark A. Noll summarizes, “Christian apologetics grounded in common sense rapidly developed into a flourishing of what T. D. Bozeman has helpfully described as Baconian theology. In divinity, a rigorous empiricism resting on facts of consciousness and facts from the Bible became the standard for justifying belief in God, revelation, and the Trinity.” (Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002], 235.) Noll quotes Archibald Alexander, Princeton theologian (1772-1852): “To prove that our faculties are not so constituted as to misguide us, some have had recourse to the goodness and truth of God, our creator, but this argument is unnecessary. We are as certain of these intuitive truths as we can be . . . . Besides we must be sure that we exist, and that the world exists, before we can be certain that there is a God, for it is from these data that we prove his existence.” (Noll, America’s God, 236)
[7] The foundational study is Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1950).
[8] Edward Foster, “Conversations with William Bronk,” Postmodern Poetry (Hoboken, NJ: Talisman House, Publishers, 1994), 16: “[…] when I did out of curiosity read it [The Cloud of Unknowing], I said, yes, this guy’s been stealing from me.”
[9] The “Stations” are not part of the theology of the Dutch Reformed or any Calvinist church.
[10] David Hilliard: “UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality“: Victorian Studies, 25/2 (Winter 1982), 181–210. (The essay begins, “Despite the traditional teaching of the Christian Church that homosexual behaviour is always sinful, there are grounds for believing that Anglo-Catholic religion within the Church of England has offered emotional and aesthetic satisfactions that have been particularly attractive to members of a stigmatised sexual minority.”) Douglass Shand-Tucci, Boston Bohemia (Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1995).
[11] Anonymous, A Book of Contemplation the Which Is Called The Cloud of Unknowing in Which a Soul Is One with God, ed. Evelyn Underhill (London: John M. Watkins, 1922), 283-4.