The American Century: Literature since 1945 547“the end of the Republic” thanks to an increasingly authoritarian government.
Others show him adopting the mask of some member of that business-dominated,
power-oriented society which brought the war into being (“Counting Small-Boned
Bodies”), or translating the obscene realities of war into a crazy, nightmarish surre-
alism, as in “War and Silence:” “The bombers spread out, temperature steady /
A Negro’s ear sleeping in an automatic tyre / Pieces of timber float by saying noth-
ing.” In all of these pieces, however, Bly relates the contemporary political crisis to a
more general crisis of belief. Like Ginsberg, say, or Robert Duncan, he seeks an
explanation for and answer to public events in terms that are, ultimately, mystical,
erotic, and apocalyptic. The other strategy, adopted by Robert Lowell and a few
other poets – Adrienne Rich, for instance – is subtly different and, arguably, even
more compelling. In poems like “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” published in Near
the Ocean (1967), Lowell links the godless militarism of his society and the bloody,
futile conflict in Southeast Asia to the sense of his own spiritual dereliction: “Pity
the planet, all joy gone / from this sweet volcanic cone; / peace to our children when
they fall / in small war on the heels of small / war /,” Lowell concludes this poem,
“until the end of time / to police the earth, a ghost / orbiting forever lost / in our
monotonous sublime.”
The final lines of “Waking Early Sunday Morning,” with their vision of the earth
as “a ghost / orbiting forever lost,” recall another way in which American poets have
felt compelled to think the unthinkable. After Auschwitz no lyric poetry could be
written, Theodor Adorno insisted. Similarly, many writers have felt that no language
is adequate before the possibility of global annihilation: the mind, perhaps, cannot
encompass the destruction of mind, speech cannot speak of its own extinction.
Still, poems have been written not only after Auschwitz but about it; and poets have
tried to tell about the potential death of the earth. They suffer from the imagination
of disaster and the struggle to give verbal shape to their imaginings in the hope that,
this way, disaster may be forestalled. The quiet voice of William Stafford in “At the
Bomb Testing Site” suggests one possible maneuver, to allow the obscene phenom-
enon to speak for itself. He simply describes a “panting lizard” in the desert near a
testing site that “waited for history, its elbows tense.” Nothing seems to happen in the
poem. It concludes with these lines: “Ready for a change, the elbows waited. / The
hands gripped in the desert.” It is what Stafford called “the sleeping resources in
language” that carry the message here: the sense of doom that occurs in the spaces
between the words. The unknown is presented as just that; the unspeakable becomes
the only partially spoken; under a nuclear cloud, Stafford intimates, all we have is
unnamed, unnamable dread. Galway Kinnell also uses the perspective of a primitive
creature in his “Vapor Trail Reflected in a Frog Pond,” only in his case the frogs’ eyes
that keep “The old watch” create a point of view that eerily resembles the Inhumanist
vision of Robinson Jeffers. These prehistoric creatures, with “their / thick eyes” that
“puff and foreclose by the moon,” make the vapor trail of an aircraft, and the power
it emblematizes, seem not only insane but inane: a passing cloud puffed by a race
who have jettisoned the self-containment of the other animals in favor of self-
absorption and self-destruction.GGray_c05.indd 547ray_c 05 .indd 547 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM