Renaissance England had a particular set of metaphors for the way writers existed in a literary tradition or, more generally, for the way people existed in the wake of the cultural past. These were metaphors of liquidity: influence flowed forth like one great river or like all the waterways in a given land flowing finally together before entering the sea. Edmund Spenser’s allegorical pageant of rivers that gather for the marriage of the Thames and Medway at the conclusion of the fourth book of The Faerie Queene remains one of the great distillations of this idea. We tend, now, to prefer lists to flowing rivers. Not to be outdone in scope by a mere top ten list of any variety, the most recent Atlantic Monthly (December 2006) features “The 100 Most Influential Americans of All Time.” In a list headed by Abraham Lincoln, how well do poets and writers fare?
Walt Whitman rings in at 22 (sandwiched between Harry Truman and the Wright Brothers. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring catapults her to 39 ahead of W.E.B DuBois (43), Frederick Douglass (47), William Faulkner (60), Henry David Thoreau (65), James Fenimoore Cooper (83), John Steinbeck (92), and Herman Melville (100). This categorization neglects, of course, influential thinkers whose writings were important, such as William James (62), Margaret Mead (81), and Jonathan Edwards (90) among others. The problem of calibrating a scale of influence is that influence shifts historically in wide and rapid swings or in minute gradations. That is to say, there’s never any true calibration and we must govern our desire to create ever more elaborate compilations of greatness, grandiloquence, and magnificence. Otherwise, we skip from actual experience to “the best of” experience. Having said that, I was intrigued to find smaller articles citing other influences in fields not necessarily well represented on the top 100 list.
Christian Wiman, the editor of Poetry, offers the five most influential poets, one of whom, Walt Whitman, made the big list. The others include T.S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, and Sylvia Plath. I really appreciated Wiman’s take on the less than beneficial influence of genuinely gifted poets. Wiman cites the “blight of bad poetry” that follows William Carlos Williams penchant for poems “dominated by simple visual description, devoid of rhyme and meter, and suspiciously close to a basic prose paragraph broken into lines.” Of course, the fault may lie with the anthologizers of Williams (can he really be adequately represented by “The Red Wheelbarrow” alone?) He also quite deftly identifies the “narcissistic despair” characteristic of Plath imitators deaf to the “strange and original and troubling” nature of the poetry. My only real complain comes from Wiman’s reading of Stevens, who, though important in Wiman’s eyes, reigns over the retreat of poetry into the academy, a claim familiar to us from Wimam’s colleague John Barr, the head of the egregiously endowed Poetry Foundation who has recently, in the pages of Poetry launched another attack on “the academy.”
As an academic myself–both a professor of Renaissance literature than of creative writing (if more institutionally the former)–I’m never quite sure what such attacks are meant to accomplish. Nor do I ever quite know what “the academy” is supposed to be, since it is composed of so many institutions and has produced so many styles of poetry–some good, many bad. Is that not the way of most art? Is it better to publish books–and award prized to books–that are “recognizable,” as if the composition of a book of poems by a butcher or carpenter or reporter is somehow inherently more real and important (regardless of the quality of the writing) than by anyone who teaches university students. We should stop making fetishes of carpenters and butchers and reporters, just as we should stop validating safe, faux-regionalists whose claims to populism are belied by their actual incomes, occupations, and education. And while we’re launching an attack on the “academy” should we also stop and think about how many creative writers provide cheap labor and get thoroughly shafted by the academy while technically being part of it? Should we worry more about the way the academy is rendered increasingly corporate and utilitarian–will there be a place for creativity (no less creative writing) in the future of the academy currently under assault from all sides?
I love to hate the academy as much as anyone else. It’s an easy target. Yet it is an uncomfortable target in a nation experiencing a wholesale cultural failure of education. The academy is not just one thing:to poets or to anyone else. I wish poets (and lovers of poetry) were more interested in the assault on thinking, imagining, and feeling complex things, which is the ugly underside of many of these attacks. It’s also our great fortune to have a poet like Stevens who asks more of us than we might be inclined to give–more of our minds and of our imaginations than we will ever be asked to give by almost anyone else, unless we are lucky enough to have a friend, a mentor, or a teacher to draw us out of our habitual patterns of thought. That what education is, literally: a leading or drawing out. Once we lose the capacity for thoughtful, imaginative, and emotional language (which takes any form: simple, complex, serious, funny) it will not be returned to us.