The American Century: Literature since 1945 541freer verse forms. Not everyone ceased to be a formalist. Nor did those who changed
their poetic voice necessarily do so as Rich – or, for that matter, Shapiro and Simpson
did – as part of a commitment to a more confessional mode. But, whether interested
in personal confession or not, many poets turned at about the same time Rich did
(that is, in the late 1950s or early 1960s) toward a more open and idiomatic poetry –
in search of what one poet, Alan Dugan, has called “words wrung out of intense
experience and not constructed.”
Among the poets who show this alteration is Donald Hall (1928–) (the range
of whose work is shown in The Alligator Bride: Poems New and Selected (1969) and
Old and New Poems (1990)), who moved from traditional forms, as in “My Son,
My Executioner,” to the more fluent and relaxed measures of poems like “The Town
of Hill” and “Maple Syrup.” More important, there is Robert Bly, who began by
writing short, quiet, carefully constructed portraits of rural life and landscapes in
the West, before graduating to a more sensuous, various, and insinuating music – as
in “Looking into a Face.” “I have risen to a body / Not yet born, / ” Bly declares here,
“Existing like a light around the body / Through which the body moves like a shining
moon.” Bly’s later poetry of the apocalypse, experiences at once mystical and erotic,
in fact gains its impact from his mastery of very free verse forms. The feeling of an
experience that is simultaneously luminous and unknown – present but as yet
undisclosed to the rational sense – is caught, not only in the imagery of light and
incantatory repetition, but in the stealthy yet passionate movement of the verse.
A similar transfiguration of restless life into mobile language is noticeable in the
later work of W. S. Merwin. His earlier poetry – as some lines from “Dictum:
A Masque of Deluge,” quoted earlier, illustrate – is formal and mythological, with
the poet concealed behind the text, paring his fingernails. From this, Merwin moved,
in collections like The Moving Target (1963), The Carrier of Ladders (1970), and
The River Sound (1999), to more contemporary, sometimes personal subjects,
though mostly written in fairly regular iambics (“Pool Room in the Lion’s Club,”
“Grandmother Dying”), and then on, in turn, to the angular, radically disruptive
rhythms of “Morning”: “The first morning / I woke in surprise to your body / for
I had been dreaming it / as I do.” This is certainly not confessional verse, but it does
represent a startling departure from Merwin’s earlier work. “We are words on a jour-
ney,” Merwin insists in one of his later poems, “An Encampment at Morning,” “ / not
the inscriptions of settled people,” and that remark serves to illustrate the change: an
interest in the more obviously permanent forms of human vision and voice has been
replaced by a pursuit of the mobile and temporary – of life as it passes, in all its
rapid, disjunctive rhythms.
The change from formal to freer verse forms has not, however, always been a
happy one. The earlier poems of Delmore Schwartz (1913–1966), collected in
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938), were predominantly iambic, and the
relative strictness of the forms he employed exercised a useful discipline. Some of
these poems represent Schwartz as the engaged observer. Other pieces are more like
an open wound: “Shy, pale, and quite abstracted,” Schwartz is confronted by the
ineluctable, ugly fact of himself. “I am I,” one poem concludes; and to know whoGGray_c05.indd 541ray_c 05 .indd 541 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM