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Modern Poetry after Modernism
College Literature, Fall 1998 by Thurston, Michael
Longenbach, James R. 1997. Modern poetry after modernism. New York: Oxford University Press. $45.00 hc. $18.95 sc. ix + 209 pp.
MICHAEL THURSTON YALE UNIVERSITY
Longenbach's is a dangerous book. Cogently argued, filled with close readings that are impressive for their logic and lucidity, clearly composed out of a passionately sympathetic engagement with the poetry that is its object, and eloquently, sometimes beautifully written, Modern Poetry After Modernism is a powerful treatment of what Longenbach calls second- and third-wave poets of the twentieth-century, poets writing in the wake of Pound and Eliot and Williams and Stevens and Moore. The book elaborates its arguments with force and grace. Moreover, its central argument rings true and will prove quite useful for readers of postmodernist poetry. And yet the book bothers me very much.
The history of modern poetry after modernism, Longenbach argues, has generally been narrated as a "breakthrough." From closed forms to open forms, from apolitical verse to political poetry, from impersonality to obsessive exploration of the self, our literary history tells over and over again how this poetry broke out of the modernist enclosure, broke through the crusted walls of traditional metrics and stanzaic structures and rhyme schemes, broke down divisions between poetry and history, between self and society. And this history, Longenbach tells us, is wrong, wrong, wrong. Postmodernist poetry (that which came after the flourishing of poetic modernism in the first half of this century) could not break through because it never needed to break through; all that it supposedly broke through to-openness, politics, history, the selfoperated already in the modernism from which it supposedly broke away. Our "breakthrough" accounts depend upon a narrow and impoverished reading of modernism, and they impose a false division and a false coherence on the various poetries that have come into being since the late 1930s, when Elizabeth Bishop (a central figure for Longenbach) undertook her poetic career.
In chapters on Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Richard Wilbur, Richard Howard, Robert Pinsky, Amy Clampitt, John Ashbery, and Jorie Graham, Longenbach shows how quite various poets mined a much wider and more variegated vein of modernism than our reductive histories recall. They develop trends and possibilities already inherent in, say, Hart Crane's uncanonical reading of T.S. Eliot, which emphasized passion and renewal and which found in "Death by Water" "an augury of imminent rebirth and redemption. . . [a] kind of metamorphosis or quickening" (16). Longenbach's readings are especially revealing when he addresses the political dimensions of poems by such supposedly apolitical formalists as Bishop, Wilbur, and Clampitt. While all of his poets deeply suspect any instrumental political poetics, any model that sees poetry as able to act directly in the political world, almost all of them develop oblique social critiques in their work. Longenbach shows how Bishop turns her stringently skeptical eye upon colonialist assumptions about Brazil and Brazilians, for example, and how Clampitt explores associative links between the Russian steppes and the American midwest to interrogate the prairie's "fearful grid of settlement" (qtd in Longenbach, 118) and midwestern culture's "intolerance of difference" (118). His discussions of Howard and Graham illuminate the multifarious ambitions of modernist explorations of the self in ways that situate Howard's dramatic monologues and Graham's philosophical meditations quite productively.
But even if we put the book's strong readings to the side, the wonderful utility of Longenbach's thesis should already be obvious to anyone who reads and writes about contemporary poetry. We might finally announce a truce and cease those interminable battles between formalist poets and free-verse practitioners. No longer will Brad Leithauser have to duke it out with the likes of Robert Bly on conference stages or journal pages. We can declare a moratorium on overly simple contrasts between raw poetry-gooey and dripping with unironical selfhood and political sentiment (or sentimentalized politics), and cooked poetry-hardened to a crackly crunch on the twin burners of formal rigor and ironic distance. And we can stop trying to force careers that do not fit it onto the Procrustean bed of the "breakthrough narrative," attending instead to the more subtle and illuminating contours of poetic change and development that Longenbach points out. No longer must we begin our conversations about contemporary poetry by dealing once more with the supposedly essential association of formal and ideological freedom (open form = liberatory politics) or of formal and ideological closure (traditional verse form = reactionary politics). These are very, very good things. And there's more. Longenbach's convincing readings trace the richness and self-difference of the poets he writes about to modernism, providing along the way a useful corrective to impoverished versions of modernist poetry generally and of specific modernists, especially T.S. Eliot. By sending us back to modernism with a sense of its own internal variety, Longenbach does a secondary service to his readers.
