538 The American Century: Literature since 1945the currency of the West has, in fact, saved him from moral bankruptcy, helped him
pay his dues to himself and the world. Hugo’s poetic stance has hardly shifted over
the years. By contrast, Shapiro and Simpson began (as we have seen) as poets of
public event, and only gradually changed their interests and allegiances. As the
personal element in their poetry grew, so its shape and tone altered too. “Sabotage
the stylistic approach,” Shapiro commanded in “Lower the standard: that’s my
motto,” “... Get off the Culture Wagon. Learn how to walk the way you want.”
Attacking the “the un-American-activity of the sonnet,” writing pieces with titles
like “Anti-Poem,” he adopted a long, flowing line somewhere between free verse and
prose poetry. With this, he has explored himself and his surroundings (in volumes
like Poems of a Jew (1958)) with sometimes embarrassing frankness: “When I say the
Hail Mary I get an erection,” he admits in “Priests and Freudians will understand,”
adding wryly, “Doesn’t that prove the existence of God?” The alteration in Simpson’s
work (as a collection like At the End of the Open Road: Poems (1963) indicates) has
been less radical: his verse, while becoming freer, has retained an iambic base. But he,
too, wants to know what it is like to be him at this moment in history, “an American
muse / installed amid the kitchen ware.” Like Whitman, he is concerned with the
representative status of his self, his Americanness; unlike Whitman, his landscapes
are often suburban. “Where are you Walt?” Simpson asks in “Walt Whitman at Bear
Mountain,” observing sardonically, “ / The Open Road goes to the used-car lot”: that
observation measures the distance, as well as the kinship, between its author and the
person addressed, the first, finest poet of national identity.
Of the four poets just mentioned who insert their own histories directly into their
narratives, John Logan (whose several collections include The Bridge of Change:
Poems 1974–9 (1980)) is the most apparently casual. His poems seem simple,
informal: “Three moves in six months,” begins one, “and I remain the same.” But, in
fact, they are carefully organized to allow for a subtle orchestration of theme and
tone. In the poem just quoted, for instance, “Three Moves,” he graduates from
startling colloquialism (“You’re all fucked up”) to moments of lyricism and grace:
“These foolish ducks lack a sense of guilt / and so all their multi-thousand-mile
range / is too short for the hope of change.” And although, as these lines imply,
Logan himself suffers from “a sense of guilt” from which the animal kingdom is
blessedly free, he can occasionally participate in the vitality, the innocence of
the natural world around him. “There is a freshness / nothing can destroy in us –,”
he says in “Spring of the Thief ”; “Perhaps that / Freshness is the changed name of
God.” The voice of W. D. Snodgrass, and his stance toward nature, is at once more
controlled and intense. His finest work is “Heart’s Needle” (1959), a series of poems
which have as their subject his daughter and his loss of her through marital
breakdown. “Child of my winter,” begins the first poem: “born / When the new fallen
soldiers froze / In Asia’s steep ravines and fouled the snows ...” Cynthia, the poet’s
child, was born during the Korean War and she is, he gently suggests, the fruit of his
own cold war: the static, frozen winter campaign that is getting nowhere is also
Snodgrass’s marriage. The allusions to the war, and descriptions of the season, are
there, not because of any intrinsic interest they may possess, historical, geographical,GGray_c05.indd 538ray_c 05 .indd 538 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM