[Continued from: “American Sonnets (Part XVIII: From the French for…)”]
Rimbaud’s addition to the lineage of both disguised form a la Auden and the “American” sonnet is more than speculative; if anyone would have been tuned in to the formal underpinnings belied by Rimbaud’s enfant terrible content and biography, it would have been Auden. Auden’s 1938 poem titled “Rimbaud” is a sonnet – and one of the last poems he wrote before making his big move across the Atlantic to America in 1939 (“But in that child the rhetorician’s lie / burst like a pipe”). And in his long poem “New Year Letter” of 1940, Auden includes Rimbaud on the short list of poets he must confront; he writes of Rimbaud that he “strangled an old rhetoric.”
While I keep returning to the sonnet in particular, I’m always writing out of a broader interest in form, particularly innovative, complicated, subverted form – and the stories we tell ourselves about “American” form. In the back of my head, as I consider all the diverse influences that go into American poetry, I keep returning to Harryette Mullen’s comments on the “mongrelness” of American poetry – referring back to Mullen speaking of American culture as the “product of a mixing and mingling,” reminding us: “Mongrel comes from ‘among.” Among others. We are among; we are not alone. We are all mongrels.”
“The pure products of America / go crazy,” begins William Carlos Williams’s poem “To Elsie” (originally published untitled as poem XVIII in Spring and All in 1923). I’ve always thought this could be a one-sentence summary of Ginsberg’s quintessentially American “Howl,” and was delighted to discover that Ginsberg noted this poem as one of the first that really “opened Williams up” to him, as well as admitting a “slight parallel” between these opening lines and “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Ginsberg’s poetic lineage is also quintessentially American – Williams, Whitman – or so goes the American story. This is one story, and one strand of lineage, it’s true, but Ginsberg, like all of us, is more complicated than that.
Aidan Wasley begins his book “The Age of Auden: Postwar Poetry and the American Scene” (Princeton University Press, 2011) by quoting a positive 1946 review of For the Time Being, the second book Auden had published since his arrival in America in 1939. The reviewer writes:
Auden’s poetry has always aroused much interest, the more so because Auden’s personality and technique and opinions have been so flexible. He has been consistently evolving toward disciplined, responsible utterance, and away from slipshod emotional crisis, overconscious penitence, tender despondency and nostalgia . . . A definitive review of For the Time Being is impossible; it is the kind of book that reviews the reviewer: it is too intelligent in thought and perfected in technique to allow immediate formal judgement.
Wasley waits a few pages to reveal the author of this review: “Its author? A nineteen-year-old Columbia undergraduate named Allen Ginsberg.” He continues:
Reading the young Ginsberg in praise of the American Auden’s “disciplined, responsible utterance” and rejection of “slipshod emotional crisis” provides a startling – and amusing – clash of literary stereotypes . . . But such disruptions of settled narratives of literary history, in which presumptively oppositional poles of American poetic culture are seen in surprising alliance, far from being quirks of individual poets . . . are in fact characteristic – if not definitional – of Auden’s role in postwar American poetry . . . It also illustrates how many of the critical narratives of postwar American poetry – which customarily frame the period in terms of competing camps of formalism versus experiment, establishment versus avant-garde, feminist or gay versus masculinist, West Coast versus East – are complicated by Auden’s appearance and influence across all these regional, cultural, stylistic, and gender divides.
While Ginsberg opens “Howl” with echoes of Williams, and his anaphoric long lines obviously channel Whitman, one might argue (as Wasley does), that the actual structure of “Howl” is modeled not after either of these poets, but after Auden’s “New Year Letter”:
Observing Auden’s characteristic mode of using the individual-focused insights of psychoanalysis to make broader generalizations of cultural malaise, Ginsberg offers his own effort at a clinical “coherent explanation” for the “ruin” of his age, taking particular note of Auden’s first American long poem, “New Year Letter,” whose mode of epic, epistolary self-analysis and questing after an ideal community would find an American heir in Ginsberg’s own “Howl” a decade later.
Of this young Ginsberg, Wasley reminds us:
This is the Ginsberg who is introduced in Kerouac’s first novel, The Town and the City (1950) as the poet “Leon Levinsky,” whose radicalism and sophistication are signaled to his audience by ostentatious display of talismanic texts: “He carried two slim volumes under his arm, the works of Rimbaud and W. H. Auden.”
The symbolic significance of the young Ginsberg’s iconic copies of Auden and Rimbaud may seem hard to parse from the perspective of the familiar narratives . . . A more unlikely pairing of influential poets might seem hard to imagine. Rimbaud, the raging, despairing iconoclastic youth who embarked on his systematic derangement of the senses and repudiated poetry by the age of 21, is seen as the patron of a line of literary art defined by its aggressive experimentalism, non-linearity, and resistance to formal and societal convention . . . Auden is often seen as a conservative emblem of Anglicizing formalism, an “insular Englishman” for whom there was a “brief vogue . . . among Americans who came of age in the 1950s [but whose influence] waned rapidly,” in Helen Vendler’s words, as younger poets went looking for more adventurous poetic models.
While Wasley’s particular focus is on Auden, his whole book is making a larger point:
[The] distinctions critics are used to making about competing traditions in American poetry – with often an implied or explicit claim of the superiority of one over another – don’t always add up quite so neatly . . .
In the service of this argument, it’s worth pointing out that, for Auden’s part, he didn’t see himself and Rimbaud in such oppositional terms. Despite Auden’s notorious and somewhat theatrical distaste for all things French, Rimbaud was in fact a precursor of iconic significance.
Auden’s sonnet about Rimbaud is not an “American sonnet” in a formal sense or a national sense, but it is worth noting the ways in which Rimbaud hovers over Auden’s own move to America, and the ways in which poets like Rimbaud and Auden reveal themselves as shapers of what we may see as our own poetic Americanness.
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[Continued in “American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin”]