|
Every
thirty or forty years a significant shift occurs in poetic
sensibility. The change usually takes the form of a generational
revolt as young poets reject the dominant style of their elders.
Twentieth century American poetry has seen at least three
upheavals. The first came shortly before World War I when
early Modernists like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens,
and H.D. renounced the softness and sentimentality of late
Victorian verse. The second seismic shift came just after
mid-century when the Beat and Confessional poets abandoned
the decorous impersonality and stylistic formalism of the
New Critical aesthetic. The third upheaval is happening right
now as various camps of populist poetry attack an increasingly
tired and fragmented academic subculture.
Peter
Davison's new study, The Fading Smile, provides a candid,
firsthand account of the mid-century poetic revolution. As
his lengthy subtitle (Poets in Boston, from Robert Frost
to Robert Lowell to Sylvia Plath, 1955-1960) indicates,
he views the broader events from one specific time and place.
"I chanced, in 1955, into one of the most vital milieux for
poetry in the history of the country," his narrative begins.
Focusing on the remarkable concentration of poetry talent
in Boston during the next half-decade, Davison examines a
dozen influential poets–including Richard Wilbur, Anne
Sexton, Adrienne Rich, Donald Hall, and W.S. Merwin. To this
notable cast, he adds himself, sometimes as observer, sometimes
as participant.
No
other event in contemporary American poetry–perhaps no
other event in our recent literature–has been so exhaustively
chronicled as the shift from academic formalism to free verse
and the rise of Confessional poetry. The subject has not only
been the intellectual focus of innumerable critical books
and articles; its human side has been flamboyantly recounted
in celebrated biographies of its major figures like Lowell,
Plath, and Sexton. When so much documentation already exists–including
the private details of the poets' sexual, psychological, and
medical histories–an informed reader has the right to
ask whether Davison's book adds anything new to this potentially
tired topic.
Davison's
approach, however, is both novel and illuminating. Although
he presents his authors individually in successive chapters,
he studies them as a group, carefully tracing their relations
to one another. While most of his biographical information
is available elsewhere (though not so expertly collated and
condensed), no one has ever attempted so knowing and evocative
a description of this literary milieu. The Fading Smile
is nothing quite as simple as a memoir. Davison's book is
in equal parts literary history, criticism, anthology, and
autobiography. The author provides a short biography of each
writer he discusses, quotes representative poems, and then
overlays his personal reminiscences with a keen eye for significant
detail.
In
the late 1950's the Boston poetry scene seemed notably academic,
especially in comparison to Beat San Francisco. Viewed from
today's professionalized creative writing world, however,
Davison's crowd appears positively bohemian. Although octogenarian
Frost was Boston's senior poetic eminence, the cerebral and
competitive Lowell dominated local literati. His brilliant
monologues, manic sexual infatuations, and annual hospitalizations
set the feverish tempo of this hard-drinking, jagged-nerved
milieu. Aspiring poets craved his approval. At one especially
drunken party the young Merwin repeatedly asked Lowell's opinion
of his work. "I think you're a very very good second-rate
poet," Lowell finally retorted. Boston may have been a stimulating
environment for poets, but it was not always a nurturing one.
No
young poets were more competitive than the women. Pushed to
the margins of literary life, they were aggressively concerned
with their critical status. Plath was obsessed with her "rivals,"
especially Rich, whom she regarded with resentful envy. Rich
in turn was jealous of Sexton. If the suddenly successful
Sexton "was going to take up space," Rich suspected at the
time, "I was not going to have that space." Beautiful, needy,
and self-dramatizing, Sexton focused her attention mostly
on the men. Half the leading poets in Boston eventually became
her lovers, mentors, confidantes, or advisers.
The
diverse achievements of Lowell-era Boston suggest that American
poetry prospers in those rare moments when academic, bourgeois,
and bohemian cultures promiscuously intermingle. Less than
half of Davison's subjects taught during the period he examines.
Rich, Sexton, and Kumin were mothers determined that their
domestic responsibilities would not cripple their artistic
developments. L.E. Sissman worked in advertising. Merwin was
a translator and playwright. In general, these poets spent
more time on the psychoanalyst's couch than in front of a
classroom. The central institution of The Fading Smile
is not so much Harvard or Boston University but the Poets'
Theatre. This small Cambridge group dedicated to reviving
verse drama displayed extraordinary energy by producing new
plays mostly from young and unestablished poets, including
John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Edward Gorey, Paul Goodman, as
well as Merwin, Hall, and Sexton. Most notably, the Poets'
Theatre premiered The Misanthrope, the first of Wilbur's
now famous translations from Moliere.
Davison
is uniquely qualified to chronicle the complex story of The
Fading Smile. He is the ultimate literary Boston insider–not
only the long-time poetry editor for The Atlantic Monthly
but successively a key editor at three of the city's major
publishing houses. The author of nine volumes of poetry, Davison
knew all the major characters of his narrative personally.
Frost was an old family friend. He met Hall as a fellow Harvard
undergraduate. He played the lead in the premiere of Wilbur's
The Misanthrope. Davison and Plath were briefly lovers.
The
well-connected Davison, however, brings another qualification
to his "group portrait"; the poets themselves generally treated
him as an outsider. "During most of my writing life I have
felt slightly estranged from my fellow poets," Davison has
commented elsewhere. "Most poets seem to look at me sideways,
preferring me, I imagine in the role of editor." In Davison's
account, one can occasionally feel the psychological sting
of that estrangement, but he has used that distance profitably
to gain a more disinterested perspective on his own milieu.
Poets
tend to write memoirs for one (or both) of two reasons: to
claim a place in literary history or to settle old scores.
Although The Fading Smile fires a few parting shots
at old battlefields, Davison's account is admirably free of
vindictive self-justification. Not that the author is self-effacing
or blandly uncritical. The Fading Smile often takes
a skeptical perspective on its subjects, and Davison seldom
stays off-stage for long. The book, however, takes great care
to present a balanced view of its material, and Davison treats
his own younger self as critically as its other characters.
While insisting on his place among the poets of his generation,
he makes no exaggerated claims of self-importance. Whatever
grudges he may nurse in private, Davison understands that
writing well is the best revenge. . .
|
