[In the following extended review of The Columbia History of American Poetry, Spiegelman weighs the volume's weaknesses against its strengths and concludes that it contains disparate perspectives and inconsistencies which detract from the work as a whole.]

David Perkins is the most recent in a long, scholarly line to pose the question, as the title of his elegant 1992 book puts it, Is Literary History Possible?, and to answer with the ambivalent response that, on the one hand, it is not, but that, on the other, we had better keep doing it. The Columbia History of American Poetry conforms to a relatively new model for literary history (which includes three previous volumes from Columbia), neither a narrative, nor an encyclopedia, but a medley. And its very presence on the scene forces us to inquire anew: What does literary history do? What does it explain? For whom is it written?

There is good news and bad news to report, and I’ll get the latter out of the way first, beginning at the level of minutiae. This book has more solecisms, grammatical errors, and misspellings (Who was proofreading? Who was copyediting?) than it ought, and it is disheartening, at the very least, to find mentions in it of Edgar Allen Poe, Edward Arlington Robinson and William Cullent Bryant. As a reference work (which this really is not) the book fails to maintain any consistency of annotation, inexcusable even if one acknowledges the different styles of its thirty contributors. Each essay ends with a list of suggestions for further reading, but these random, arbitrary items exclude a great deal, most troubling those unspecified works by critics referred to by name within the body of the essay. (For example, M. H. Abrams, Clara Claiborne Park, Marge Piercy, and Alan Wilde appear in different chapters, but a reader interested in their works will search the bibliographies in vain.)

To move up the ladder of complaints: someone who wants to hear more than the merest nugatory word of faint praise about Conrad Aiken, e. e. cummings, Vachel Lindsay, Edgar Lee Masters, James Whitcomb Riley, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Trumbull Stickney, May Swenson, Jones Very, or Richard Wilbur will come away disappointed and unenlightened. These omissions are a trifle scandalous. As an omnium-gatherum, John Hollander’s recent two-volume anthology of nineteenth-century American poetry¹ achieves both greater breadth and more significant depth than this critical history. Those mid-nineteenth-century popular poets, against whom Hollander’s anthology allows us to take the genuine measure of Dickinson and Whitman, play no part in Parini’s volume. Sidney Lanier and Frederick Goddard Tuckerman get no mention whatsoever, nor do such representative popular poets as Francis Scott Key, Emma Lazarus, and Ernest Lawrence Thayer. On the other hand, there are two separate essays that treat Marianne Moore at considerable length. In his introduction, Parini calls Bryant “our first national poet” (xiii), but only two other contributors even bother to mention him, and neither can be said to discuss or analyze him. It appears that our first national poet is of little consequence.

Matters of inclusion and exclusion inevitably coincide with problems of point of view. The book is so heavily biased toward the modern (six hundred of eight hundred pages deal with this century) that it might be retitled “The History of Twentieth-Century Poetry with Some Attention to Its Precursors.” One obvious strength of a multi-authored anthology is the opportunity it affords its readers to witness multiple takes on a single issue, or squarings off, or an implicit teaching-of-the-controversies that Gerald Graff has persuasively recommended that we make a part of our pedagogic agendas. One is perplexed, however, to hear Francis Murphy, in his essay on Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, call Michael Wigglesworth’s 1662 poem The Day of Doom “the most popular poem ever written in America” (10), and then to search (again in vain) for anything else pertaining to him and it until, hundreds of pages later, in an essay on Pound’s Imagist aesthetics J. C. Barbarese refers to it en passant as “Wigglesworth’s absurd The Day of Doom [which] seems owned by Paradise Lost” (305). This discrepancy qualifies as more than a mere difference of opinion, and it opens up the whole issue of factuality (What accounted for this poem’s popularity? Who read it? How many copies? How many editions?) and of literary taste as well. Whether it was popular, or merely absurd, might the curious reader be given some excerpts of it to chew on?

Discord among the critics is inevitable, healthy, and speaks for the strengths of this volume as well as for its weaknesses. So does the apparent multiplicity of authorial techniques. As I have mentioned, this volume neither tells a story, hewing to the older narrative model for literary history, nor offers itself as an encyclopedia, chockablock with facts, dates, and other useful information. It is not a reference book. (As I write this, I look nostalgically at my shelves: Baugh, Brooke, Chew, Malone, and Sherburn’s A Literary History of England [1948], which got me through graduate school and which mentions everything and everyone in sensible chronological order, pausing occasionally to make a pithy critical epigram or evaluation, stands beside The Oxford Classical Dictionary, which moves alphabetically from Abacus to Zosimus and provides thumb-nail sketches of the monuments and forgotten scribes and data of antiquity.) One does not go to the Columbia History to “look things up.” It won’t help.

In his introduction Parini makes a somewhat exaggerated generalization when he says that our poets have always tried “to lay claim to a voice that reflects the genuineness and separateness of a particular culture” and that American “poems have consistently taken the measure of the culture as a whole” (x). There have been many poets with much more modest aspirations, like the late Howard Nemerov—another poet scanted in these pages—who said sensibly that “poetry is a way of getting something right in language.”² Parini’s own goal, in other words, begins to look grandiose, and more political and cultural than, strictly speaking, poetic. The melting-pot image of America, merging with Emersonian patriotic zeal and Whitman’s expansive proposal that the United States are themselves the greatest poem, has been matched in the pages of this volume with the current fashion for multiculturalism, the rainbow coalition, and intellectual teamwork. Such a composite method has many advantages for an anthology whose editor speaks on behalf of separateness. Just as we constitute a congeries of separate “particular” cultures, so it makes sense to consider those cultures, or topics, poets, and poetic moments from the specific viewpoints of different scholars.

Parini also claims in his introduction that his contributors are “some of our strongest critics” (xi). Finally, the Columbia History comes down to a series of discrete critical essays (some stronger than others) in which, quite often, history takes a back seat to other primary focuses. (Parini’s essay on Frost is, by his own admission, “largely an attempt to characterize the work itself” [xxi]: it could sit comfortably at the beginning of a selection of Frost’s poems.) The editor is to be commended for encouraging a variety of critical views and tastes, and for discouraging obscurity and jargon. The intended audience for the book, one infers, is a general educated reader who is not necessarily checking up on facts or looking for specific information but, instead, interested in learning something about individual authors (via separate essays on the usual suspects: Longfellow, Dickinson, Whitman, Poe, Frost, Pound, Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Hart Crane, and Auden); pairings or groups of authors (Bradstreet and Taylor, the Transcendentalists, several gatherings of women poets, the Fugitives, the Beats, the Confessionals, James Merrill and John Ashbery, Philip Levine and Charles Wright); groups defined racially (early African-American poets, the Harlem Renaissance, Black Arts poets, native American poets); or, in a few instances, topics arranged by formal and thematic considerations (“The Epic in the Nineteenth Century,” “The Twentieth-Century Long Poem,” “Nature’s Refrain in American Poetry”).

Not only do focus and style vary from one essay to the next, but so does method. Some writers follow the older model of listing everything in order, giving everyone a mention. Carolivia Herron’s essay on early African-American poetry (23–32) is of this sort: a catalog that retrieves obscure or formerly lost writers and weaves them all into a list with dates and titles but with little analysis or evaluation. The essay is a bibliographic data base. Lynn Keller on the long poem in the twentieth century (534–63) does pretty much the same thing, but with virtually no poetic excerpts. Although omitting from analysis Benet, Robinson, MacLeish, and Jeffers (who is treated in John Elder’s essay on nature poetry [707–27]), she manages to make a brief mention of practically everyone else. Some essays (such as Elder’s) are primarily thematic; others use biography as the basis for generic and stylistic achievement (Lea Baechler on Berryman, Roethke and the elegy [605–31]; others (Barbarese on Crane [419–51], Helen Vendler on Stevens [370–94] are analytical but not particularly historical. Some awaken us to forgotten gems, as Lawrence Buell does in his piece on the Transcendentalists (97–120), by making a generous use of quotation, especially from the work of Ellen Hooper. John McWilliams’s curious piece on nineteenth-century epic (33–63) daringly blurs generic lines to talk mainly about fiction and history rather than poetry.

The individual essays are all competent, and some are first-rate. Some of them have only a passing interest in matters of poetic form, prosody, and technique. Others (like Parini’s mentioned above) constitute appropriate introductions to individual poets. The very best offer guidance to both novices and advanced readers alike. As usual, Helen Vendler merits praise for the way in which she first puts Wallace Stevens into a historical context and then teaches us how to read a Stevens poem. Her piece, like Parini’s and William Pritchard’s on Eliot (319–42), epitomizes judiciousness and clarity. She gives one page to the poet’s biography, one to his publishing history, several more to his literary antecedents and the traditions into which his best readers have placed him, before settling into her main topic, not Steven’s “themes” but “his exceedingly original voice, conveyed through his many experiments in language” (378). Now we have landed in familiar critical territory, and Vendler leads us with sympathy and assurance through the strange verbal landscape of Stevens’s planet, his titles, his symbols, his riddles, his syntax, and his experiments with both shorter and longer poetic forms. When useful she connects the poetry to Stevens’s life and to the background of national and international events to which it sometimes obliquely alludes, and she moves with a measured pace from the experiments of Harmonium through the final poems, exiting with a glance at his posthumous reputation.

At their impressive best, individual essays locate our central or even our peripheral poets within their own time, among their contemporaries, and in regard to their predecessors and descendants. Some of the essays, as I have said, focus on thematic or historical issues to the exclusion of formal ones, whereas others tend to be exercises in close reading or stylistic investigations that have less to say about historical matters. Dana Gioia’s “Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism” (64–96) marches right down the middle of the road, explaining history by explaining poetic form. (Arnold Rampersad makes a comparable march in his piece on the Harlem Renaissance [452–76].) Gioia revisits our most popular poet and investigates the High Modernist standards that permitted his fall from critical grace. Not only was Longfellow internationally successful, but he also achieved his fame by a kind of formal experimentation that has gone either unnoticed or unappreciated by subsequent generations of scholars and poets, even (or especially) those who wear the badge “poet-professor” that he first wore in this country. Gioia sides with the perhaps mythical common reader, the person who has not forgotten Longfellow, who knows by heart individual lines or larger chunks of his verse: “Contemporary taste does not esteem the genres Longfellow favored—the ballad, idyll, pastoral romance, and moral fable—nor does it regard the stylistic strengths his contemporaries praised—clarity, grace, musicality, masterful versification, and memorability” (68–69). Gioia demonstrates clearly and succinctly how changing taste can become a cudgel with which to beat, or viciously to neglect, a former star, and he does so without forcing his argument into the straightjacket of theory or ideology. Instead, he wisely discusses the rise and fall of poetic genres, categories, and forms. His view of Modernism as the villain relies a bit too heavily on an older, Procrustean version of the early twentieth century, which is itself now undergoing considerable revision (as we see from the essays of Margaret Dickie, Lynn Keller, and Arnold Rampersad in this volume). Gioia attributes Longfellow’s decline to the modernist preference for the private voice (What about Pound’s strident didacticism?), for hermetic or autotelic art (What about Williams?), for difficulty of approach (What about Frost?), and for the strenuous Flaubertian removal of the artist from the public sphere (What about Allen Ginsberg?).

But he also suggests another, perhaps more interesting reason for Longfellow’s devaluation. Not just Modernism itself (whatever that might have been) but also a neopuritanical resistance to certain kinds of meter might explain Longfellow’s expulsion from critical favor. Gioia goes beyond Timothy Steele’s recent diatribe against free verse and the revolution wrought by Walt Whitman to consider equally the strong preference of Robert Frost, Yvor Winters, and other formalists, for iambic pentameter in either its strict or loose version.³ Such a formal monopoly, says Gioia, tended to depreciate and therefore to ridicule other kinds of metrical experiment—trochees, various triple rhythms and so on—as suitable only to light verse. The very omission from this volume of so masterful a poet as E. A. Robinson, whom we might call the American Hardy—at least musically—proves Gioia’s point.

Other critics in the volume are less interested than Gioia (himself a practicing poet linked with the so-called New Formalists) in poetic forms. Cynthia Griffin Wolff, in her essay on Dickinson (121–47), ignores much of the formal and rhythmic originality of the poetry (although she manages a couple of paragraphs about the notorious punctuation) in exchange for a focus on imagery, tonality, and the historical questions surrounding a woman’s entry into a predominantly male sphere. Donald Pease is more attuned to Whitman’s presence in his poetry “as indissociable from the United States’s ongoing experiment in democracy” (170) than to his prosodic revolution.

The inevitable question to be posed about a volume such as this is whether its whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Probably the answer is no. Reading this book straight through, we may wonder what a literary history is, or should be, a history of: we might, for example, want to read pieces on “The History of the Sonnet in America,” or “The Use of Free Verse from Whitman to the Present,” or “Race and Meter,” but Parini and his writers have chosen to tell other stories, most of them having to do with major figures or with movements in which all the single players receive equal, and cursory, attention to thematic more than to formal matters. It all comes down to the problem John Ashbery describes at the start of “The New Spirit”:

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave all out would be another, and truer, way.⁴

What to include, what to omit? The Columbia History of American Poetry makes what many might regard as unfortunate omissions, in spite of the general excellence of what it contains. It tells no single story, and it lacks a thread, aside from an accidental one, to connect the several stories that appear within its glittering parts.

Notes

1. John Hollander, ed., American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Library of America, 1993).

2. Howard Nemerov, “Poetry and Meaning,” rpt. in The Howard Nemerov Reader (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1991) 281.

3. Timothy Steele, Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (Fayetteville: U of Arkansas P, 1990).

4. John Ashbery, Three Poems (New York: Viking, 1972) 3.