Of course Allen Curnow and
Gary Snyder are not precisely generational equivalents. Snyder’s first
publication, in the Reed College student publication Janus, doesn’t occur until 1950, a point at which Curnow has already
brought out at least three books. But one of the things the comparison does is
to highlight that discrepancy. The reality is that there were few innovative
American poets of significance who emerged during the 1940s.
The largest exception is Robert
Duncan, who in fact first started publishing at the end of the 1930s
(precocious teenager that he was). The two other major movers of literary form
who were born during that decade between 1910 and 20 – Charles Olson and the
novelist William Burroughs – were both late bloomers. Glancing over Hayden
Carruth’s The Voice That is Great Within Us, a surprisingly decent anthology of the first
60 years of the 20th century that organizes its poets by birth date
– now there’s a narrative! – you can’t help but notice that between the first
poet born in that decade (Olson) and the last (May Swenson), the poets who
predominate in that period – Schwartz, Berryman, Jarrell, Kees,
Stafford, Weiss and Lowell – represent the core of what was the academic
tradition of American poetry. The more innovative poets of that decade,
Antoninus/Everson,
Patchen, Merton, McGrath, were all pronounced loners as writers.
Two were monks, no less.
Certainly, the Second World
War created a great schism in American writing, by cutting off the expatriates and the
international influences that had been so very important to the high
modernists. One might also blame the war, at least in part, for the failure of
the Objectivists to move beyond their first youthful burst
of publishing in the 1930s. For a talented young poet during the war years, the
conservative tradition of American letters – that version of history that sees U.S. poetry as a tributary of British letters – was very
close to the only game in town.
Five poets who are interesting
to look at in this regard are David Ignatow and Harvey Shapiro on the one hand
– Shapiro is slightly younger, having been born in 1924 – and, on the other,
Swenson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Muriel Rukeyser.
The first two have often
been paired, and I admit to reading them as though they were examples of what
the Williams influence would have led to had Objectivism not shown its
potential for greater breadth, depth and evolution. When the New Americans came
along, Ignatow and Shapiro could easily have recognized the shared sympathies
for Williams, but seem instead to have been isolated by the sudden appearance
of all this new writing. Except for Shapiro’s first book The Eye, published by Alan Swallow (as far from the New York publishing world as one could get in the 1950s), the
two did not begin bringing out books until the 1960s. The trajectory of their
isolation was to lead both into becoming profound conservatives, as is evident
from Shapiro’s work at the New York Times
Book Review and Ignatow’s comments at the “What is a Poet?” symposium at
the University of Alabama in 1984. (See Hank Lazer’s What is a Poet?)
The three women poets have
often been claimed by the conservative literary tradition and to some degree at
least they must have needed to relate to that world simply to get their work
into print, not unlike Williams. But it is worth noting how all three can
easily be read quite differently: Swenson (who worked at New Directions) as
another Williams-influenced writer of innovative forms, Bishop for her visible
influence on some of the New York School poets, Rukeyser’s political work aligning her with a tradition that
would bridge McGrath and, say, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. One can only imagine
what might have happened to American poetry had the three worked together to
create a woman-centered poetic tendency decades before Judy Grahn, Pat Parker,
Susan Griffin and Adrienne Rich came along.
