For the very reason that so many irrational and unattainable things exist in the universe, modern poetry exists; modern poets like Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Yeats, Williams, Eliot, and Pound, each contributed to the modernist era by trying to make sense of the irrational, trying to find light in the darkness, order in the chaos. I believe their poetry comes closest to Stevens’ idea that poetry is a drama of a single mind. Modern poetry seems to be, more than anything, an exploration and celebration of the imagination; the modernist poets use imagination to find meaning and to find a place/home for themselves amidst the darkness and chaos. Jorie Graham effectively describes the nature of modern poetry in her attempt to define it: each poet’s single mind “attempts to render aspects of experience that occur outside the provinces of logic and reason, outside the realm of narrative realism.” Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens-the two poets discussed in this essay-are among those who seem to have managed, at least sufficiently enough for themselves, to capture the “incredible power” of poetry as Graham describes in the “Introduction” of The Best American Poetry 1990.
In her definition of modern poetry, Graham speaks of an art form whose audience is slowly dying due to it being abstract, seemingly elite (which alienates those who cannot understand it), and largely incomprehensible by the average mind. Graham says that the modernist poets used the methods most incomprehensible to humans in order to force language to find and explore that which the poets themselves found to be inaccessible. Graham gives examples like “The ways in which dreams proceed, or magic, or mystical vision, or memory, are often models for poet’s methods.” Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are both excellent examples of modern poets who used methods that are difficult for many average people to understand; Pound tries to reach into dark history to make deceased beings speak into the 20th Century while Eliot tries to physically put himself into the voices of other people to speak out through the poem-both Pound and Eliot try to access something that they couldn’t otherwise access by normal language or by a single voice. Attempts like those of Pound and Eliot often lead to or are drawn out of a modernist’s search for spiritual fulfillments. The “incredible power” of poetry, as Graham describes it, could be the influential force that led many modernist poets like Dickinson and Stevens to search for varying degrees of spiritual fulfillment.
Finally, Graham emphasizes in her definition of modern poetry that many average readers quickly become intimidated by the difficult language used in modern poetry. The modernist poets use language and syntax that doesn’t necessarily make logical sense upon first reading, but that requires exploration and imagination in order to understand it, rather than relying on language that spoon-feeds absolute knowledge to the reader. In other words, Graham says “[In modern poetry] the genius of syntax consists in its permitting paradoxical, “unsolvable” problems to be explored, not merely nailed down, stored and owned; in its permitting the soul-forging pleasures of thinking to prevail over the acquisition of information called knowing.” The intimidation felt by many who try to read and understand modern poetry leads to the very fear that the modernist poets attempted to defeat through their language and difficult syntax: a “fear that one is missing the point or, worse, that one is stupid, blind” (Graham). The poets feared that they would “miss the point” of whatever irrational idea they were trying to grasp if they did not try to capture it with difficult language in poetry; meanwhile, readers fear that they will “miss the point” of the modernist poetry because of the difficult language used.
Two particular poets-Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens-easily fall under the modernist poetry category and both have poetry that supports the three major points from Graham’s definition of modern poetry. First is that modern poetry is an exploration and celebration of the imagination using complicated language such that the poet tries to find a place for him/herself amidst the darkness, chaos, or the uncertain. Second is the “incredible power” of poetry that causes modernist poets to search for spiritual fulfillments. Third is the fear that one (the reader and/or the poet) is missing something important and that poetry is an attempt to grasp something that seems inaccessible. (Note: Though Emily Dickinson’s poetry came before the 20th Century that is considered the era of modern poetry, her poems served as groundbreakers for the key developments within modern poetry (Ramazani xxxvii).) The poems this essay uses to uncover the three points mentioned above include Dickinson’s poems 280, 632, 1129, and Stevens’ poems “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “The Snow Man” (Ramazani 34, 38, 40-41, 244-246, 247).
Pushing the imagination to its extreme limits is an imperative requisite for both the writers and readers of modern poetry; the emphasis on imagination dates back to the Romantic movement as modern poets search for “adequate fictions” (Ramazani xliv). Like Graham says in her definition, Ramazani affirms that “making it difficult” seems to be a given for much of modern poetry (xliii). Only by forcing the imagination to the extreme can writers and readers of modern poetry get beyond the complexity that requires poets to “‘…become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning'” (xliii). The following characteristics of modern poetry also demand the reader to have a great dependency on imagination: “Modern poetry more often shows instead of telling, presents instead of expounding. Its approach is typically oblique, throwing the reader into the middle of an experience instead of working up to it gradually” (Ramazani xlii). Like most modern poets, the works of Dickinson and Stevens all try to grasp difficult concepts or find a place for themselves amidst chaos/darkness by encouraging the use of imagination, whether it is to understand the poem itself or to participate in the particular situation described by the poem.
Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man,” for example, tells the reader to “have a mind of winter” in order to really experience it-in order to truly consider the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” In this poem and in many of his others, Stevens continually speculates on the domain of the imagination and of reality while simultaneously testing the power of imagination (Ramazani 235). Ramazani notes that the “imaginative quest” in modern poetry might be said “to culminate in Stevens’s pursuit of a ‘supreme fiction'” in which “life and art struggle to bring one another under control, and the issue is never settled” (xliv). In other words, “life” is the complexity that Stevens tries to express through “art” (or imagination) through the medium of difficult poetic language, but the “life” and the “art” push equally against one another to the point that the issue of trying to make the inaccessible accessible is never completely solved (only explored). Stevens describes the “supreme fiction” that calls for extreme imagination: “…’what makes the poet the potent figure that he is, or was, or ought to be, is that he creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it and that he gives to life the supreme fictions without which we are unable to conceive of it'” (Ramazani liv).
In the poem ”
Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Blackbird,” Stevens stretches the imagination to consider thirteen ways (an “eccentric number”) and tarries between beholding the physical inflections of the blackbird call and the suggested innuendos just after the blackbird stops whistling (Vendler). In the second stanza of the poem, Stevens describes how he “was of three minds” because there were three blackbirds in the tree that he was regarding. Stevens seems to be saying in that part of the poem that his line of vision is the same as that of the blackbirds, which means that from such a perspective, his imagination or our “extent in space (as well as in time)” extends “only as far as the blackbird goes” (Vendler). To Stevens, “imagination is the liberty of the mind,” which is the “modern dance” played out in his poetry that Graham says the reader can only understand if he knows the vocabulary, texture, and choreography of the dance (Ramazani 236). Stevens uses imagination manifested through poetry as a “human effort to cope with an increasingly violent reality,” to find a place for himself amidst the heavy pressure of reality.
In
Dickinson
‘s poems 280 and 632, she speaks specifically about her mind and the brain as she tries to grasp the vastness of the imagination. “My Mind was going numb” she relates in poem 280 as her Mind is dying. In 632, she gives numerous comparisons to try making the less comprehendible things accessible, like “The Brain – is wider than the Sky – / For – put them side by side – / The one the other will contain.” Both in these poems and in her other works,
Dickinson
is trying to “draw all things into a jagged cohesion” so that she can find a place for herself amidst all the chaos and vastness of the Mind. Her poetry tries to use accessible things like a funeral, the sky, and the sea to grasp at least a foothold on things that are typically inaccessible by the human mind; thus, “she affirms…that infinity may be represented by things infinitely small” (Ramazani xxxviii). In poem 1129, she says “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant – ” because the pure vastness of the Truth (and of imagination) would overwhelm any person if he learned the whole Truth all at once. Dickinson’s poetry is filled with questions, ponderings, and riddles that highlight some of the poet’s mischief in concealing the wildness of her imagination from strict interpretation; the expression “leave it to the imagination” would be an appropriate idiom for the modern poets, but especially for
Dickinson
‘s poetry.
Stevens and Dickinson represent opposite ends of the spectrum of modern poets who were coerced by the “incredible power” of poetry to search for spiritual fulfillment. Just like most people cannot grasp/accept spiritual concepts by every-day rational lines of thought, the “incredible power” of poetry is its “merging of irrational procedures with the rational nature of language”; Graham’s idea is that this factor typically makes modern poetry so difficult to comprehend that the poetry is unintentionally made inaccessible by poets to readers. Stevens and Dickinson each try to wield the “incredible power” of poetry to explore and settle themselves in the cradle of their own spiritual paradises, “outside the realm of narrative realism” (Graham).
Dickinson
seems to search for spiritual fulfillment in her poetry as she speaks through hymn-like quatrains and as she embraces the smallness of her existence in reality amidst the vast infinity. Many of her poems include some sort of spiritual realization where “the speaker is usually in a state of deprivation, but has a vision of the Kingdom that might, by virtue of imaginative energy, be brought into being” (Ramazani 30). Poem 280 is a prime example of
Dickinson
using the “incredible power” of poetry to reach a spiritual fulfillment as the speaker is in a state of deprivation while her Brain is dying. For a Brain to experience a funeral is not a normal occurrence, therefore, Dickinson is relating a past (and simultaneously present) experience of losing her mind (either through unconsciousness or through the degeneration of the mind due to the dark chaos in reality) and her attempt to find and settle in a place of spiritual (and certainly mental) rest. Likewise in poem 632,
Dickinson
consents to not make the Brain more powerful than God, even after she finishes expressing the vastness of the Brain in the first two stanzas.
As opposed to Dickinson, and especially opposed to Eliot’s turn to Christianity during his career, Stevens struggled with God throughout his life and cold-shouldered Christianity until he eventually turned to his own religion instead-a religion in which reality coupled with “supreme fiction” allows for a paradise to be found only in the world (not outside of it). For example, his poem “The Snow Man” illustrates a possible paradise if the reader would simply do as Stevens suggests by submitting to the cold, becoming a part of it, and experiencing such a spiritual revelation that “And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.” Stevens replaced the idea of religion with imaginative literature and thought that a new religion needed to be created that was “closer to physical life and willing to encompass death [encompass reality], as well as life, in its conception of being” (Ramazani liv). Like “The Snow Man,” Stevens seems to desire an emptying out of the self in order to “surrender to reality” and not be among those “blind” people who don’t “realize that they are looking at the world of their own thoughts and the world of their own feelings” (Ramazani 235). In order to fill a spiritual void, Stevens writes each poem to embrace imperfection, both reality and imagination, and to gives the poet the power to create “‘the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it'” (which leans toward escapism poetry). These are all factors in Stevens’ search for a place for himself in the middle of a dark void.
Finally, Dickinson and Stevens join the other modern poets in using the “genius of syntax…[to permit] paradoxical, “unsolvable” problems to be explored“; they use difficult language and syntax to capture a complex concept, for fear that they might otherwise miss the point and be blind to the truth or the paradise that is just inaccessible. Describing the necessity of ‘making it [poetry] difficult,’ Eliot says that “it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results” (Ramazani xliii). Robert Frost also indicates the difficulty of poetic language when he says “Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, ‘Why don’t you say what you mean?’ We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections-whether from diffidence or some other instinct.”
Stevens’ later poetry is typically more abstract as he “continues to affirm and question the power of the imagination” (Ramazani 235). In his poem ”
Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Blackbird,” he tries to capture occurrences that might exist “outside the provinces of logic and reason” as described by Graham in her definition of modern poetry. Certainly in this poem, Stevens creates images through the art of Cubism in order to allow the “soul-forging pleasures of thinking” to contemplate thirteen different illogical perspectives of the same object (a blackbird) that would not typically be found in real life. In this poem, it’s as if Stevens is trying so hard to fight the fear of “missing the point” or of being “blind” that he speculates thirteen different possible views of the same object as he is trying to make the idea of the blackbird more accessible to himself and to the reader. As he tries to fight the fear by creating images for more pondering, he moves from observing a solitary blackbird in a vast snowy land to asserting that a man, a woman, and a blackbird are one. Using language that just barely touches upon his meaning, Stevens postulates the significance of a blackbird’s whistling and innuendos in stanza 5, and then he hints at a fear invoked by the blackbirds themselves in stanza 11. As if Stevens understood the complexity of imagination and feared making the imagination’s ideas further inaccessible through difficult language, Stevens asserted that the abstraction in imagination “must not leave the world behind, but must express an agreement with reality” (Ramazani 236).
In much of her poetry,
Dickinson
is terrified of the “approach of death,” but she also expresses a fear of being “blind”-like the fear mentioned in Graham’s definition of modern poetry. In poem 1129,
Dickinson
seems to summarize in two lines her view of how poetry works for her: “The Truth must dazzle gradually / Or every man be blind -.” “Truth” is the specific idea in this poem (as well as the representation of inaccessible ideas of other poems) that the poet and the reader are both trying to grasp, though by different means; “Dazzle” may refer to poetic language that does not necessarily follow rational thoughts, and it “must” reveal the Truth in this manner; “gradually” relates to the process of “permitting the soul-forging pleasures of thinking to prevail over the acquisition of information called knowing,” as described by Graham; and “Or every man be blind” correlates with the shared fear among modern poets and readers alike, who fear that they are missing the point and are thus blind. In a lot of her poetry,
Dickinson
also uses many dashes, as if to leave intentional pauses in her thoughts for the reader to fill in what he/she feels is appropriate. This technique might be considered one that makes it difficult for the reader to comprehend the poem’s meaning, but
Dickinson
seems to use the dashes almost as a part of her poetic dance to make inaccessible concepts more accessible. A prime example of this technique is in
Dickinson
‘s poem 280 in the last stanza, in which she has experienced an illogical “death” of her Brain and finishes with “And Finished knowing – then – ” where she seems to leave the poem hanging. The last word “then” seems to indicate that Dickinson has at least sufficiently grasped a complex concept for her own purposes and she is open (“then -” pause) to whatever imagination might open up for her after this experience. In other words, she seems to have succeeded in not “missing the point” in this particular poem in her attempt to fight the fear of “blindness.”
Though much of modern poetry seems rather inaccessible, as Graham’s definition indicates, the three factors discussed in this essay – imagination, a search for spiritual fulfillment, and the poet’s attempt to avoid “missing the point” – are all continually addressed in modern poetry like that of Stevens and Dickinson who merely try to make the inaccessible more accessible through complex ideas and difficult language. The rest is up to the reader to learn how to understand the poetic “dance” performed by each poet, by learning to comprehend the “vocabulary,” “texture,” and “choreography” of each poet’s style.
Works Cited
Graham, Jorie. Introduction.” The Best American Poetry 1990.
New York
: MacMillan, 1990.
Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. Volume 1 Modern Poetry.
New York
: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003.
Vendler, Helen. “On ‘
Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Blackbird’.” Modern American Poetry. 27 November 2005 .
In her definition of modern poetry, Graham speaks of an art form whose audience is slowly dying due to it being abstract, seemingly elite (which alienates those who cannot understand it), and largely incomprehensible by the average mind.Graham says that the modernist poets used the methods most incomprehensible to humans in order to force language to find and explore that which the poets themselves found to be inaccessible.Graham gives examples like “The ways in which dreams proceed, or magic, or mystical vision, or memory, are often models for poet’s methods.”Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot are both excellent examples of modern poets who used methods that are difficult for many average people to understand; Pound tries to reach into dark history to make deceased beings speak into the 20 Century while Eliot tries to physically put himself into the voices of other people to speak out through the poem-both Pound and Eliot try to access something that they couldn’t otherwise access by normal language or by a single voice.Attempts like those of Pound and Eliot often lead to or are drawn out of a modernist’s search for spiritual fulfillments.The “incredible power” of poetry, as Graham describes it, could be the influential force that led many modernist poets like Dickinson and Stevens to search for varying degrees of spiritual fulfillment.
Reference:
- Graham, Jorie. ; “Introduction.” ; The Best American Poetry 1990. ; New York: MacMillan, 1990. Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann, and Robert O’Clair. ; The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. ; Volume 1 Modern Poetry. ; New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. Vendler, Helen. ; “On ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’.” Modern American Poetry. ; 27 November 2005 <www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/ stevens//” >blackbird.htm>;.
