The term is somewhat deceptive, for to be a minor poet is a major achievement. How few there are, among poets, who create something sufficiently memorable to be read through several generations, or to demonstrate a thing or two of what one might do with a line, a voice, a given form. I take such accomplishments as these to be among the great works of a minor figure.
Perhaps the most conspicuous achievement of the major poet is to create a new way of writing, one sufficiently strong to influence strong poets for generations if not centuries to come, and to influence in multiple ways, for there will be those who imitate as well as those who react against the strong force–think of Donne and Wordsworth, both undeniably major poets. Think then of Richard Crashaw and Leigh Hunt, both of them fine poets, but of a relatively minor kind (though even here Crashaw stands out, for he goes many more places with his metaphysical influence than Hunt manages to travel with his Romantic inheritance; nevertheless, many of us still read Hunt, as well we should).
One minor poet of relatively recent memory, one who carried the old Romantic echo perhaps about as far as it could go in the twentieth century, is Richard Eberhart, whose Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1988) includes 444 pages of lines, many of which are quite slack and abstract. Who reads Eberhart now?
If he is remembered at all, it must be primarily for only two poems one of which is “The Groundhog,” which begins:
In June, amid the golden fields,
I saw a groundhog lying dead.
Dead lay he; my senses shook,
And mind outshot our naked frailty.
There lowly in the vigorous summer
His form began its senseless change,
And made my senses waver dim
Seeing nature ferocious in him.
These lines work well enough; they have their own sort of vigor. Eberhart wrote this poem in 1932, when he was 28. Even at that date, I suspect that the inversion “Dead lay he” must have sounded a little creaky. Nevertheless, I have heard it said that this was the first of a whole raft of dead animal poems. Thus, another function of the minor poet may be to provide such influences as lead to the proliferation of a given type of poem or theme, as opposed to an entire style or school of writing.
As “The Groundhog” continues, the speaker visits the carcass many times, witnessing the stages of its decay until it disappears altogether. The poem then ends by recalling a fit of meditation:
I stood there in the whirling summer,
My hand capped a withered heart,
And thought of China and of Greece,
Of Alexander in his tent;
Of Montaigne in his tower,
Of Saint Theresa in her wild lament.
When I heard Eberhart read this poem almost two decades ago, he explained that the closing lines express his philosophy of life. Thus, Alexander occupies the level of least importance in the tripartite scheme of the poem, for while he was a vigorous force in history, his whole life was taken up with killing. Montaigne was a great thinker and writer, but he remains closed up in his tower; thus, he occupies the second level. Saint Theresa then represents the first level, that of the mystic or the saint.
Eberhart remained a devotee of a Romantic kind of inspiration. Once when we were sitting in his office conversing, he said to me that poetry is a spiritual essence that enters into the heart of the poet, and which the poet translates into human language. When he said this, there was no irony within the miles of the place. Eberhart was a dear, dear man, and I could not get enough of talking with him. He told stories of having dinner with Yeats, of his friendship with Stevens (who sat in a big red chair when he visited the Eberharts’ house), of his encounters with Frost.
He told a story about his yearly visits, when Eberhart was a young man, with an elderly man who grew up in Massachusetts. They spoke of Emily Dickinson. One year, Eberhart’s aging friend began speaking of Dickinson in a personal way, and Eberhart feared that his friend was becoming addled until he realized that when this man was a little boy he met Dickinson and shook her hand. He recalled her as always wearing white, of being quite pretty, and of making good doughnuts. Eberhart told this story at a public reading and invited anyone who wanted, to come forward at the end of the event and shake the hand that shook the hand that shook the hand of Emily Dickinson. This would be, he explained, a real example of the tradition of the laying on of hands. It seemed in some ways a sappy gesture. I was sure to shake his hand many times.
The Muse did not always treat Eberhart well. Here is a sampling of lines from the Collected Poems, chosen more or less at random: “We sing together our ancient song / Over man living short or long, / Beyond his breath, beyond his will, / It is strange kinship still…” (“The Parker River”; “All of his thinking had vanished, / He thought, with vanishing decades, / What was left of his thought?” (“Question Mark”); “In memory I see a youth / And a girl looking into each other’s eyes, / In the surge and height of their life principle, / Which they do not understand.” (“The Haystack”).
But enough. I shall end with a brief consideration of Eberhart’s other memorable poem, and one of the memorable anti-war poems to come out of World War II. Eberhart spent the war training young men for battle. It was a striking and emotional moment when he began noticing the names of the young men he had trained on lists of those killed in battle. Here is the final quatrain of “The Fury of Aerial Bombardment”:
Of Van Wettering I speak, and Averill,
Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.
Even if he did very little to change or advance the language of poetry, Eberhart spent his life paying tribute to the strong tradition that gave him life as a poet. He also made sure that Van Wettering and Averill are names not just on a list, but also names in our literature. If nothing else, the minor poet makes sure that memory of the tradition goes on, even if the minor poet does not give the tradition new life by exerting an altering influence upon it. The work of keeping the memory of tradition alive may be after all a kind of ritual like the laying on of hands. I cannot help but believe that there is something sacred in such work.