54 Poetry for Students
Romans and to endure to the Renaissance, Milton,
and Tennyson. Virgil, Rome’s most important poet,
wrote so-called “bucolic” poetry in praise of the
country life. But in the Romantic period, and es-
pecially in the poetry of William Wordsworth, Na-
ture became all. Wordsworth saw the poet as the
servant of Nature, and for both Wordsworth and his
close friend and collaborator Samuel Taylor Cole-
ridge, the experience of the “sublime” was the most
powerful sensation a human could have. The sub-
lime, a popular philosophical concept of the eigh-
teenth century, was the sense of the overwhelming,
a feeling of being dwarfed. Experience of the sub-
lime was an experience of awe. For Wordsworth,
only nature could provide an experience of the sub-
lime, for nothing human-created (such as art) could
convey the sense of infinity, power, and divinity
that nature (being a direct creation of God) has.
John Keats, another important poet of the Ro-
mantic era, used these ideas of Wordsworth’s but
changed them slightly. Keats was in awe of nature,
but unlike Wordsworth, Keats counted his experi-
ences of art as the most important and powerful in
his life. Where Wordsworth wrote of rambling in
England’s Lake Country and of climbing Mount
Snowdon, many of Keats’ most famous poems re-
count his experiences with artworks such as a
translation of Homer or a Greek amphora. In “Ode
on a Grecian Urn,” perhaps Keats’ best-known
poem, he describes a scene on a Greek amphora.
He is transfixed not just by the nature portrayed
on the urn, but by the question of representation.
In art, Keats feels, natural beauty cannot fade.
Time and its ravages have no effect on art, and in
this sense Keats feels the sublime gazing upon the
urn. Keats’ reaction is to aestheticize: “‘Beauty is
truth, truth beauty,’” the urn tells him, and he re-
sponds: “that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know.”The Romantics, therefore, questioned the rel-
ative power of art and of nature, and these con-
flicting ideas have influenced every poet who has
written on nature since. A third poet, though, Wal-
lace Stevens, took his questioning even further.
Stevens was concerned, for his entire poetic career,
about whether the outside world really has an ob-
jective existence or whether it is simply a projec-
tion of the mind. He wavered between the two prin-
ciples; in poems like “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”
or “The Snow Man” he seems to feel that the world
is only a projection of the mind, whereas in oth-
ers—“Debris of Life and Mind,” for instance—he
sides strongly with the idea that the world does
have an objective existence. And in “Thirteen Ways
of Looking at a Blackbird,” Stevens adopts a Pi-
casso-like approach and examines this question
from thirteen different angles, coming up with thir-
teen different ideas about the outside world.
Charles Wright has always been a poet deeply
concerned with the outside world and especially
with nature, but at the same time he (like almost
every other American poet of his generation) car-
ries with him the deep influence of Stevens. In
“Black Zodiac,” he addresses questions of the ex-
istence of nature and of how poets can or should
represent nature. In Wright’s early poetry (much of
which is collected in the volume Country Music),
Wright concentrated on the description of nature
and seemed to be taking the middle ground between
Wordsworth and Keats. But as with Keats, the poet
does not call attention to his own place in the per-
ception of nature—he seems to assume that all peo-
ple would perceive and understand nature in the
same way. Vendler, in an earlier essay on Wright,
complains that he claims, “like all poets, a return
to original nature: the refusal to particularize his in-
dividual existence implies his utterance of univer-
sal experience, predicable of everyone.”
In “Black Zodiac,” though, as in much of his
later verse, Wright has gotten beyond his youthful
tendency to generalize his impressions of nature.
In this poem, the motions of the stars provide him
with the raw material for his meditations on “the
masters,” both poetic and religious. The poem be-
gins, as do so many of his, in his yard. The August
heat and humidity hang about him in their palpa-
ble “clear nothingness,” and this invisible om-
nipresence reminds Wright of these “masters,” who
in this first stanza remain unnamed.
But the next stanza begins with a hint of who
these “masters” are: “Those who look for the Lord
will cry out in praise of him.” The stanza begins,Black ZodiacIn this poem, the
motions of the stars provide
him with the raw material
for his meditations on “the
masters,” both poetic and
religious.”