The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar

Essays on Poets and Poetry

Helen Vendler

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780674425743
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

A Times Higher Education Book of the WeekOne of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades' worth of Helen Vendler's essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume."It's one of [Vendler's] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn't a fresh insight about a poet or poetry."
—Charles Simic, New York Review of Books "Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say 'create'—our understanding of poetry in English."
—Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review "Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made…A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit."
—John Greening, Times Literary Supplement

1

The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar

How the Arts Help Us to Live

When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name “The Humanities,” it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping, and that other forms of learning—the study of languages, literatures, religion, and the arts—would be relegated to subordinate positions. Philosophy, conceived of as embodying truth, and history, conceived of as a factual record of the past, were proposed as the principal embodiments of Western culture, and given pride of place in general education programs.

But this confidence in a reliable factual record, not to speak of faith in a reliable philosophical synthesis, has undergone considerable erosion. Historical and philosophical assertions issue, it seems, from particular vantage points, and are no less contestable than the assertions of other disciplines. The day of limiting cultural education to Western culture alone is over. There are losses here, of course—losses in depth of learning, losses in coherence—but these very changes have thrown open the question of how the humanities should now be conceived, and how the study of the humanities should, in this moment, be encouraged.

I want to propose that the humanities should take, as their central objects of study, not the texts of historians or philosophers, but the products of aesthetic endeavor: art, dance, music, literature, theater, architecture, and so on. After all, it is by their arts that cultures are principally remembered. For every person who has read a Platonic dialogue, there are probably ten who have seen a Greek marble in a museum; or if not a Greek marble, at least a Roman copy; or if not a Roman copy, at least a photograph. Around the arts there exist, in orbit, the commentaries on art produced by scholars: musicology and music criticism, art history and art criticism, literary and linguistic studies. At the periphery we might set the other humanistic disciplines—philosophy, history, the study of religion. The arts would justify a broad philosophical interest in ontology, phenomenology, and ethics; they would bring in their train a richer history than one which, in its treatment of mass phenomena, can lose sight of individual human uniqueness—the quality most prized in artists, and most salient, and most valued, in the arts.

What would be the advantage of centering humanistic study on the arts? The arts present the whole uncensored human person—in emotional, physical, and intellectual being, and in single and collective form—as no other branch of human accomplishment does. In the arts we see both the nature of human predicaments—in Job, in Lear, in Isabel Archer—and the evolution of representation over long spans of time (as the taste for the Gothic replaces the taste for the Romanesque, as the composition of opera replaces the composition of plain-chant). The arts bring into play historical and philosophical questions without implying the prevalence of a single system or of universal solutions. Artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history and is suppressed in philosophy by the desire for impersonal assertion. The arts are true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived—as singular persons swept by drives and affections, not as collective entities or sociological paradigms. The case histories developed within the arts are in part idiosyncratic, but in part they are applicable by analogy to a class larger than the individual entities they depict. Hamlet is a very specific figure—a Danish prince who has been to school in Germany—but when Prufrock says, “I am not Prince Hamlet,” he is in a way testifying to the fact that Hamlet means something to everyone who knows about the play.

If the arts are so satisfactory an embodiment of human experience, why do we need studies commenting on them? Why not merely take our young people to museums, to concerts, to libraries? There is certainly no substitute for hearing Mozart, reading Dickinson, or looking at the boxes of Joseph Cornell. Why should we support a brokering of the arts? Why not rely on their direct impact? The simplest answer is that reminders of art’s presence are constantly necessary. As art goes in and out of fashion, some scholar is always necessarily reviving Melville, or editing Monteverdi, or recommending Jane Austen. Critics and scholars are evangelists, plucking the public by the sleeve, saying, “Look at this,” or “Listen to this,” or “See how this works.” It may seem hard to believe, but there was a time when almost no one valued Gothic art or, to come closer to our own time, Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.

A second reason to encourage scholarly studies of the arts is that such studies establish in human beings a sense of cultural patrimony. We in the United States are the heirs of several cultural patrimonies: a world patrimony (of which we are becoming increasingly conscious); a Western patrimony (from which we derive our institutions, civic and aesthetic); and a specifically American patrimony (which, though great and influential, has, bafflingly, yet to be established securely in our schools). In Europe, although the specifically national patrimony was likely to be urged as preeminent—Italian pupils studied Dante, French pupils studied Racine—most nations felt obliged to give their students an idea of the Western inheritance extending beyond native production. As time passed, colonized nations, although instructed in the culture of the colonizer, found great energy in creating a national literature and culture of their own with and against the colonial model. (We can see this, for instance, in the example of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland.) For a long time, American schooling paid homage, culturally speaking, to Europe and to England; but increasingly we began to cast off European and English influence in arts and letters without, unfortunately, filling the consequent cultural gap in the schools with our own worthy creations in art and literature. Our students leave high school knowing almost nothing about American art, music, architecture, and sculpture, and having only a superficial acquaintance with a few American writers.

We will ultimately want to teach, with justifiable pride, our national patrimony in arts and letters—by which, if by anything, we will be remembered—and we hope, of course, to foster young readers and writers, artists and museumgoers, composers and music enthusiasts. But these patriotic and cultural aims alone are not enough to justify putting the arts and the studies of the arts at the center of our humanistic and educational enterprise. What, then, might lead us to recommend the arts and their commentaries as the center of the humanities? Art, said Wallace Stevens, helps us to live our lives. I’m not sure we are greatly helped to live our lives by history (since, whether or not we remember it, we seem doomed to repeat it) or by philosophy (the consolations of philosophy have never been very widely received). Stevens’s assertion is a large one, and we have a right to ask how he would defend it. How do the arts, and the scholarly studies attendant on them, help us to live our lives?

Stevens was a democratic author, and he expected his experience, and his reflections on it, to apply widely. For him, as for any other artist, “to live our lives” means to live in the body as well as in the mind, on the sensual Earth as well as in the celestial clouds. The arts exist to relocate us in the body by means of the work of the mind in aesthetic creation; they situate us on the Earth, paradoxically, by means of a mental paradigm of experience embodied, with symbolic concision, in a physical medium. It distressed Stevens that most of the human beings he saw walked about blankly, scarcely seeing the Earth on which they lived, filtering it out from their pragmatic urban consciousness. Even when he was only in his twenties, Stevens was perplexed by the narrowness of the way in which people inhabit the Earth:

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.¹

The arts and their attendant disciplines restore human awareness by releasing it into the ambience of the felt world, giving a habitation to the tongue in newly coined language, to the eyes and ears in remarkable re-creations of the physical world, to the animal body in the kinesthetic flex and resistance of the artistic medium. Without an alert sense of such things, one is only half alive. Stevens reflected on this function of the arts—and on the results of its absence—in three poems that I will take up as proof-texts for what follows. Although Stevens speaks in particular about poetry, he extends the concept to poesis—the Greek term for making, widely applicable to all creative effort.

Like geography and history, the arts confer a patina on the natural world. A vacant stretch of grass becomes humanly important when one reads the sign “Gettysburg.” Over the grass hangs an extended canopy of meaning—struggle, corpses, tears, glory—shadowed by a canopy of American words and works, from the Gettysburg Address to the Shaw Memorial. The vacant plain of the sea becomes human when it is populated by the ghosts of Ahab and Moby-Dick. An unremarkable town becomes “Winesburg, Ohio”; a rustic bridge becomes “the rude bridge that arched the flood,” where Minutemen fired “the shot heard round the world.” One after the other, cultural images suspend themselves, invisibly, in the American air, as—when we extend our glance—the Elgin marbles, wherever they may be housed, hover over the Parthenon, once their home; as Michelangelo’s Adam has become, to the Western eye, the Adam of Genesis. The patina of culture has been laid down over centuries, so that in an English field one can find a Roman coin, in an Asian excavation an emperor’s stone army, in our Western desert the signs of the mound builders. Over Stevens’s giant earth, with its tumultuous motions, there floats every myth, every text, every picture, every system, that creators—artistic, religious, philosophical—have conferred upon it. The Delphic oracle hovers there next to Sappho, Luther’s theses hang next to the Grünewald altar, China’s Cold Mountain neighbors Sinai, Bach’s Mass in B Minor shares space with Rabelais.

If there did not exist, floating over us, all the symbolic representations that art and music, religion, philosophy, and history, have invented, and all the interpretations and explanations of them that scholarly effort has produced, what sort of people would we be? We would, says Stevens, be sleepwalkers, going about like automata, unconscious of the very life we were living: this is the import of Stevens’s 1943 poem “Somnambulisma.” The poem rests on three images, of which the first is the incessantly variable sea, the vulgar reservoir from which the vulgate—the common discourse of language and art alike—is drawn. The second image is that of a mortal bird, whose motions resemble those of the water but who is ultimately washed away by the ocean. The subsequent generations of the bird, too, are always washed away. The third image is that of a scholar, without whom ocean and bird alike would be incomplete.

On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rolls

Noiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,

That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.

The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.

The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,

The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

The generations of the bird are all

By water washed away. They follow after.

They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

Without this bird that never settles, without

Its generations that follow in their universe,

The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,

Would be a geography of the dead: not of that land

To which they may have gone, but of the place in which

They lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

In which no scholar, separately dwelling,

Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,

Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.²

Without the bird and its generations, the ocean, says the poet, would be “a geography of the dead”—not in the sense of the dead having gone to some other world, but in the sense of their being persons who were emotionally and intellectually sleepwalking, dead while alive, who lacked “a pervasive being.” To lack a pervasive being is to fail to live fully. A pervasive being is one that extends through the brain, the body, the senses, and the will, a being that spreads to every moment, so that one not only feels what Keats called “the poetry of earth” but responds to it with creative motions of one’s own.

Unlike Keats’s nightingale, Stevens’s bird does not sing; its chief functions are to generate generations of birds, to attempt to sprout wings, and to try to leave behind some painstakingly scratched record of its presence. The water restlessly moves, sometimes noiselessly, sometimes in “sounding shallow[s]”; the bird “never settles.” The bird tries to generate wings, but never quite succeeds; it tries to inscribe itself on the shale, but its scratchings are washed away. The ocean is “falling and falling”; the mortal generations are following and following. Time obliterates birds and inscriptions alike.

Imagine being psychically dead during the very life you have lived. That, says Stevens, would be the fate of the generations were it not for the scholar. Stevens does not locate his scholar in the ocean or on the shale, the haunts of the bird; the scholar, says the poet, dwells separately. But he dwells in immense fertility: things...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: How the Arts Help Us to Live
• 2. Fin-de-Siècle Lyric: W. B. Yeats and Jorie Graham
• 3. The Unweary Blues: The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes
• 4. The Nothing That Is: Chickamauga, by Charles Wright
• 5. American X-Rays: Forty Years of Allen Ginsberg’s Poetry
• 6. The Waste Land: Fragments and Montage
• 7. The Snow Poems and Garbage: Episodes in A. R. Ammons’s Poetics
• 8. All Her Nomads: Collected Poems, by Amy Clampitt
• 9. Seamus Heaney and the Oresteia: “Mycenae Lookout” and the Usefulness of Tradition
• 10. Melville: The Lyric of History
• 11. Lowell’s Persistence: The Forms Depression Makes
• 12. Wallace Stevens: Hypotheses and Contradictions, Dedicated to Paul Alpers
• 13. Ardor and Artifice: Merrill’s Mozartian Touch
• 14. The Titles: A. R. Ammons, 1926–2001
• 15. Poetry and the Mediation of Value: Whitman on Lincoln
• 16. “Long Pig”: The Interconnection of the Exotic, the Dead, and the Fantastic in the Poetry of Elizabeth Bishop
• 17. Stevens and Keats’s “To Autumn”: Reworking the Past
• 18. “The Circulation of Small Largenesses”: Mark Ford and John Ashbery
• 19. Wallace Stevens: Memory, Dead and Alive
• 20. Jorie Graham: The Moment of Excess
• 21. Attention, Shoppers: Where Shall I Wander, by John Ashbery
• 22. Seamus Heaney’s “Sweeney Redivivus”: Its Plot and Its Poems
• 23. The Democratic Eye: A Worldly Country, by John Ashbery
• 24. Losing the Marbles: James Merrill on Greece
• 25. Mark Ford: Intriguing, Funny, Prophetic
• 26. Notes from the Trepidarium: Stay, Illusion, by Lucie Brock-Broido
• 27. Pried Open for All the World to See: Berryman the Poet
• Notes
• Credits
• Acknowledgments
• Index