The American Century: Literature since 1945 549selves” can somehow be “separated by desire.” It represents a peculiarly intense,
mentally energetic kind of formalism, whereas the reverence for form that
characterizes, say, the work of Howard Nemerov (1920–1991) (as his Collected Poems
(1977) indicates) is calmer, more reflective, expressive of Nemerov’s belief that a
poem should mean as well as be: even great poems, he suggests, unlike the things of
nature “tell ... rather than exemplify / What they believe themselves to be about.”
Nemerov’s “Gulls” is characteristic in this respect. Carefully structured, written in a
slightly formal, even abstract language, the poem nevertheless accommodates some
powerful visual effects (“they glide / Mysterious upon a morning sea / Ghostly with
mist”). It begins with an unsentimental vision of the birds – “I know them at their
worst,” the poet tells us – and gradually emblematizes them, teases out moral infer-
ences from their activities: “Courage is always brutal,” Nemerov insists, “for it is /
The bitter truth fastens the soul to God.” “Bless the song that sings / Of mortal
courage,” he concludes, “bless it with your form / Compassed in calm amid the
cloud-white storm.” What Nemerov wants, evidently, is a poetry that has the poise
and assurance, and the bravery before the facts of life, possessed by the gulls; and in
poems like this one, or “Storm Window” and “Death and the Maiden,” he manages
to achieve that aim.
Still other varieties of formalism, different in turn from those of Wilbur, Kunitz,
and Nemerov, are illustrated by the idiomatic, often bizarre wittiness of Reed
Whittemore (1919–2004) (“I wish I might somehow / Bring into light the eloquence,
say, of a doorknob” (The Past, the Future, The Present; Poems Selected and New
(1990)), the incisive, sardonic tones of Weldon Kees (1914–1955) (“Sleep is too
short a death” (Poems 1947–1954 (1954)), and the patent concern with getting it
right, trying to put things properly, that characterizes the work of Donald Justice
(1925–2004) (“I do not think the ending can be right” (Collected Poems (2004)).
At one extreme, perhaps, is the dispassionate, distanced reflectiveness of Edgar
Bowers (1924–2000) (“The enormous sundry platitude of death / Is for these bones,
bees, trees, and leaves the same” (Collected Poems (1997)) or the equally dispassionate
elegance of X. J. Kennedy (1929–) (“She sifts in sunlight down the stairs / With
nothing on. Nor on her mind” (Nude Descending a Staircase (1961)). At the other is
the poetry of Anthony Hecht (1923–2004), whose measured, sometimes ironic voice
(learned, in part, from his former teacher, John Crowe Ransom) becomes a medium
for passionate explorations of autobiography and history, the fear and darkness at
the heart of things (as the Collected Earlier Poems (1990) illustrates). “We move now
to outside a German wood. / Three men are there commanded to dig a hole,” the
reader is told in Hecht’s “More Light! More Light!”; “In which two Jews are ordered
to lie down / And be buried alive by a third, who is a Pole.” In recent time, however,
perhaps the most memorable lesson in the uses of formalism has been given by
Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), whose Complete Poems were published in 1969,
followed by Geography III (1976). Of her good friend, Marianne Moore, Bishop once
said, “The exact way in which anything was done, or made, was poetry to her.”
Precisely the same could be said of Bishop herself: “all her poems,” Randall Jarrell
once suggested, “have written underneath, I have seen it.” Bishop’s aim is to attendGGray_c05.indd 549ray_c 05 .indd 549 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM