542 The American Century: Literature since 1945that “I” is, Schwartz finds it necessary to deal with the accumulated debts of his past.
“The past is inevitable,” he insists, and what the “ghost in the mirror” – that is, the
image of our past – tells us is that guilt is inseparable from the fact of living. “Guilt
is nameless,” Schwartz says, “ / Because its name is death”; we are all burdened by
“the guilt of time” and so “the child must carry / His father on his back.” There are
many things to be said about this poetry, but perhaps the most important thing is
that it is, above all, a poetry of agony and transformation: in “Someone is Harshly
Coughing as Before,” for instance, a man heard coughing in an upstairs apartment
is transformed, in quick succession, into Christ (who has “caught cold again”),
“poor Keats,” and the archetypal vision of the victim, “Longing for Eden, afraid of
the coming war.” The formal and emotional dangers of this kind of verse are perhaps
obvious: the transformations could easily become chaotic and unconvincing, while
the sense of agony could degenerate into a maudlin, occasionally generalized self-
pity. In his early work, though, Schwartz usually manages to skirt such dangers
thanks to his adept handling of traditional forms; “the subject of poetry,” he said, “is
experience not truth,” and he turns his own obsessive truths into imaginative
experience with the help of inherited meters and conventional structures. In “O City,
City,” for example, he uses the framework of the sonnet to focus a contrast between
the quiet desperation of “six million souls” in New York (established in the octave)
and his own longing for a world of purity and passion, where “in the white bed all
things are made” (described in the sestet). It is a simple device, but it works
beautifully. Unfortunately, in his later work, Schwartz adopts a long, rambling line,
attempting to assimilate prose rather than speech rhythms. At best, the verse that
results is like higher conversation (“An adolescent girl holds a bouquet of flowers /
As if she gazed and sought her unknown, hoped-for, dreaded destiny”). At its worst,
and this is more frequent, it is slack and banal.
As American poets gravitated during this period toward more flexible verse forms,
they also, many of them, went in search of a more idiomatic vocabulary. “When you
make a poem,” William Stafford wrote in 1966, “you merely speak or write the
language of every day.” “Rather than giving poets the undeserved honor of telling us
how ... special poetry is,” he went on, “everyone should realize his own fair share of
the joint risk and opportunity present in language.” This is a theme that recurs in the
remarks of many postwar American poets. “I’m sick of wit and eloquence in neat
form,” Alan Dugan announced; while David Ignatow has insisted that he is
“antipoetic” – “nothing,” he has said, “should be taken for more than it says to you
on the surface.” The ideal, in effect, seems to be a virtual transparency of idiom.
For John Ciardi, for instance, there is nothing worse than what he has termed
“the signatory way of writing”; that is, language that is foregrounded, calling
attention to the distinctive “signature” or style of its inventor. What he dreams of,
Ciardi has said, is “an act of language so entirely responsive to the poetic experience”
that his “habituated way of speaking” would be “shattered and leave only the essential
language called into being by the aesthetic experience itself.” The perfect poem
would then be one that, as Ciardi puts it, “seem[s] to declare not ‘X spoke these
words in his unique way’ but rather ‘man spoke these words of himself.’ ” This is not,GGray_c05.indd 542ray_c 05 .indd 542 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM