366 Making It New: 1900–1945
spent most of her life in rural surroundings, in the region of the lakes in Wisconsin.
Like him, however, the sense of place has clearly and indelibly imprinted itself on her
poetry. Her work, gathered together in My Life by Water – Collected Poems 1936–68
(1970), communicates the vastness of American geography, the simple fact of wide,
open spaces and the feelings of loneliness and exile that fact can instill. Faced with
that vastness, though, Niedecker herself looks back at it without flinching – with a
steady, determined optimism issuing from the recognition that loneliness is not to be
feared and is, in any case, never total. There is room for human intimacy, the pleasures
and affections of family life, as the characteristically titled – and characteristically
terse and idiomatic – “You are my friend” illustrates.
If the work of Niedecker marks out one extreme to which the impulses expressed
in Imagism could move, that of John Gould Fletcher (1886–1950) and Conrad Aiken
(1889–1973) marks out another. One function of the image might be to plumb the
depths and register the vagaries of the unconscious through the agency of figurative
language. Fletcher clearly believed this. An associate of Pound and Lowell, he used
an impressionistic free verse in his early years, in collections such as his best-known,
Irradiations: Sand and Spray (1915), blending intoxicating colors with a prodigality
of imagery in an attempt to capture the wanderings of his sensibility. In his later
years, in volumes like South Star (1941), he turned back to being a regionalist and to
more traditional forms. But this was not before, along with Lowell, he invented “pol-
yphonic prose” as an even more capacious medium than free verse, designed, like
the stream-of-consciousness fiction of the time, to accommodate all the haphazard
movements of the subconscious. Aiken, similarly, was convinced that poetry could
and should be, as he put it, “the vanguard of man’s consciousness.” Profoundly
influenced by Freud – who, he said, had reformulated “that perennially fascinating
problem of personal identity” for his time – he committed himself to what he termed
a “quest for the knowable.” “Know thyself,” Aiken argued, had always been “the
theme of all significant intellectual activity.” Now Freud had revealed how images,
“magic words,” could supply access to that knowledge, opening up a road for “the
only religion that was any longer tenable or viable, a poetic compression of man’s
position in the universe, and of his potentialities ... through self-knowledge and
love.” Pursuing these aims, Aiken devised a poetic form that has reflected his deep
love of music, in which lines, words, and images come together and separate with a
gentle fluidity, like a stream following the poet’s consciousness. The Preludes,
published in two books (1931), represent one step in this direction. Another is
represented by his most ambitious work, The Divine Pilgrim, which was not
published until 1949 although its constituent poems were written between 1915 and
- In The Divine Pilgrim, as in his other poems, Aiken conducts no systematic
quest, only a circuitously conducted inquiry – an inquiry that is not so much stated
as demonstrated, alluded to in numerous, indirect ways. As in a tone-poem by
Richard Strauss or Arnold Schoenberg, themes are offered that conflict, resolve
themselves into harmony or disharmony. And, as in so many American poems, there
is no ultimate conclusion. Our first duty, Aiken intimates, is to ask the question
“Who am I?” and that is our last duty as well.
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