Identity and Society in American Poetry: The Romantic Tradition B ...

Stephen Fredman’s The Grounding of American Poetry rightly sees in modernist objectivist styles and epic poets’ concern with history a striving against a pervasive sense of groundlessness. It is an extension of the classic idea of America’s “Edenic” emptiness, established in Tony Tanner’s The Reign of Wonder or R.W.B. Lewis’ The American Adam, among others. According to Fredman, poets’ concerns result from a sense of cultural rootlessness, which they combat by seeking grounding in history, in the body, or in the present moment. The perception is a good one, but it lacks a sense of psychological realism. Poets such as Williams and Olson, who saw themselves creating an American literature and identity, seem concerned with sidestepping factitious verbal definitions in order to uncover a heretofore-unknown form of knowledge. Their project was much bigger than a search for cultural definition. “No ideas but in things,” Williams’ oft-repeated motto, is a statement of a search for a metaphysical truth through poetry. What drove him to build Paterson around this credo? Was it a sense that America lacked and in any case did not want a connection to the old world? Olson’s insistence on spontaneous, associative writing would seem to be poorly conceived as a search for cultural grounding. Is this to be achieved by exploiting the subconscious like a Jungian analyst with himself as a patient? These poets hoped to establish America as the leader of a grand project—like an epistemological space—which would ground human experience. Fredman’s study is incisive, but fails to account for these poets’ metaphysical leanings, glaring though they are.

Critics are certainly aware that poets, out to express something ineffable, are defying the rules of ordinary communicative acts. Critics often refer to these spiritual tendencies euphemistically, as a species of stylistic eccentricity. Modernist poetics are, therefore, characterized by “indeterminacy” (from Marjorie Perloff’s classic study); or by a tension between idea and thing (Cristina Giorcelli); a Zen-like preoccupation with silence (Susan Schulz); or a century-long commitment to “disjunctive” poetics (Peter Quartermain). All of these descriptions are appropriate to a literary tradition that is striking for its indirectness, avoidance of meaning, and confused relationship between writer and audience.