552 The American Century: Literature since 1945revelation. “Everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!” the poet exclaims and, in
that moment of illumination, “victory filled up / the little rented boat.” Such insights
are as bright, particular, and as fleeting as a mingling of oil, water, and light: objects,
as Bishop shows them, brim with meaning that is vividly but only temporarily
disclosed. In one of her most famous poems, “At the Fishhouses,” Bishop uses
another image to convey the shock and the ephemerality of the revelatory experiences:
not a rainbow this time, but the drinking of “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear
water” – so cold, in fact, that it seems to “burn your tongue.” “It is like what we
imagine knowledge to be,” she declares of such a draught: “dark, salt, clear, moving,
utterly free, / drawn from the cold hard mouth / of the world ... / ... and since / our
knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.” It is exactly this kind of knowledge that
Bishop realizes in her own work, where truth slips in through the cold peculiarities
of fact and then quietly slips away again.
Another poet who at least began as a formalist of sorts was Theodore Roethke
(1908–1963). His first volume of poetry, Open House (1941), used traditional verse
structures and depended on the then fashionable mode of tough intellectualism.
The opening lines of the first, and title, poem show that this was no ordinary
formalist, however. “My secrets cry aloud,” Roethke declared. “I have no need for
tongue. / My heart keeps open house, / My doors are widely swung.” Here, in a
language that is stripped and bare, and rhythms that are driving and insistent,
Roethke announced his intention of using himself as the material of his art. His
major preoccupation was to be with the evolution and identity of the self, and these
tight, epigrammatic verses cry that aloud. “I’m naked to the bone,” Roethke declares
later in this poem, “Myself is what I wear:” that is almost, but not quite, true. He is
still, after all, dressed in the uniform of an inherited poetics. But beginning with his
second volume, The Lost Sea and Other Poems (1948), this too was to be discarded in
the search for the subrational, prehistorical roots of being. “Cuttings (later)” bears
witness to the change: “I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing, / In my
veins, in my bones I feel it, –” Roethke confesses here. “The small waters seeping
upward, / The tight grains parting at last.”
Much of his verse after the first volume, Roethke explained, “begins in the mire,
as if man is [sic] no more than a shape writhing from the rock”: a being, the birth
and growth of whose consciousness can be fruitfully compared to the birth and
growth of plants, trees, and all organic matter. There is a new rooting of poetry in
sensuous experience here, the “greenhouse” world or natural landscape of the poet’s
childhood (Roethke’s father was a florist, joint owner of over 25 acres of greenhouses).
Along with this, there is a new search for some dynamic concept of correspondence
between the human and vegetable worlds. Roethke felt that he had to begin at the
beginning, with primitive things; to journey into the interior of the natural order,
and into himself as part of that order. This required, in turn, a more primitive voice.
“If we concern ourselves with more primitive effects in poetry,” Roethke argued,
“we come inevitably to the consideration ... of verse that is closer to prose.... The
writer must keep his eye on the object, and his rhythm must move as his mind
moves.” So, in the poem just quoted, Roethke uses the free verse line, long, elaboratelyGGray_c05.indd 552ray_c 05 .indd 552 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM