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It may be questioned whether Pound saw himself as an American poet, but Williams, Zukofsky, and Olson certainly did, and their concept of the American was not cultural, social, or political in the materialist sense, however much they may have touched on these matters. American literary identity had been defined for them by Emerson, Whitman, Thoreau, and Melville—authors these poets (again, with the arguable exception of Pound) demonstrably loved. While no critic can know exactly why Olson defined his enterprise as he did in “Projective Verse,” we do know that he saw his work in terms of Melville and then Pound. The literary heritage stands as archaeological evidence of these artists’ inner life. By gathering this evidence and taking a “subjective” approach, I will do two things in this book: explain the spiritual precepts that guided the creation of avant-garde poetic styles, and describe these poets’ attempt to counterbalance the solipsism inherent in Emersonian idealism by evoking a society along distinctly empirical-liberal lines.
The Dissociation of the Poet: A Brief History
When I say that poetry often arises out of a practice that the poet regards as spiritual, I include most Anglophone poetry, from fourteenth-century narrative verse to Renaissance blank verse to Romanticism and beyond. Along with Perry Meisel and other critics who regard Modernism as a fairly lightweight distinction, I do not take Modernism, in spite of its quasi-scientific and formalist bent, to be free of this spiritual concern. There is a fair amount of poetry I would leave out of the mystical tradition—for instance, that of Lord Rochester, Pope, Sylvia Plath, and Frank O’Hara, which is poetry firmly lodged in the concerns of the everyday world. There is a distinction, also, between poetry that concerns itself with spiritual matters and that written by one who regards him/herself as a mystic of sorts. It is this latter type—exemplified by Rimbaud, Blake, and the modern American avant-garde—which seeks to “escape” from the personal presence in the poem. It is partly the difficulty of this poetry and the difference between this type and more prosaic styles, such as confessional verse, that make the range of postwar poetry so hard to sort out.