Paul Mariani - A Usable Past: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetry
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A Usable Past: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetry
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A Usable Past : Essays On Modern & Contemporary Poetry
author
:
Mariani, Paul L.
publisher
:
University of Massachusetts Press
isbn10 | asin
:
0870234455
print isbn13
:
9780870234453
ebook isbn13
:
9780585186757
language
:
English
subject
American poetry--20th century--History and criticism, Williams, William Carlos,--1883-1963--Criticism and interpretation, Hopkins, Gerard Manley,--1844-1889--Criticism and interpretation, English poetry--20th century--History and criticism.
publication date
:
1984
lcc
:
PS323.5.M37 1984eb
ddc
:
811/.52/09
subject
:
American poetry--20th century--History and criticism, Williams, William Carlos,--1883-1963--Criticism and interpretation, Hopkins, Gerard Manley,--1844-1889--Criticism and interpretation, English poetry--20th century--History and criticism.
Page iii
A Usable Past
Essays on Modern & Contemporary
Poetry by Paul Mariani
The University of Massachusetts Press Amherst, 1984
Page iv
Copyright 1984 by The University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 84-2613 ISBN 0-87023-445-5 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.
Page v
Let us now praise famous men: for all the brothers & Laymen at Manhattan College, both those who still walk the earth & those who sleep now in His care, first among the dedicated men who taught me how to see, Brother Abdon &Brother Luke, Brother Stephen & Brother Paul, as well as Frank Davies and Harry Blair, Paul Cortissoz & John Fandel, and those whose names I have forgotten, I offer up this book.
Page vii
CONTENTS
Introduction
1
William Carlos Williams
Reassembling the Dust: Notes on the Art of the Biographer
17
The Poem as Field of Action: Paterson
37
The Eighth Day of Creation: Rethinking Paterson
59
The Hard Core of Beauty
74
Williams and Stevens: Storming the Edifice
95
Gerard Manley Hopkins
The New Aestheticism: A Reading of "Andromeda"
107
The Cry at the Heart of "The Wreck"
123
A Poetics of Unselfconsciousness
133
The Sound of Oneself Breathing
142
Page viii
Post-World War II Poets
Robert Penn Warren
153
Charles Tomlinson
171
Robert Creeley
184
John Montague
203
John Berryman
214
Robert Pack
226
Thomas Merton
245
Notes
253
Acknowledgments
267
Page 1
INTRODUCTION
In retrospect, there is an unforced symmetry to this collection which I would not have expected when I consider the varied conditions under which these essays and essay-reviews were first written. A 100-page section on Williams, then a section half as long on Hopkins, followed by another 100-page section on some of the poets who came into their own after the Second World War, several of them, it will be noticed, influenced either by Williams or by Hopkins.
Simply put, Hopkins was my first love, alpha, a figure I needed very much for my own spiritual and intellectual survival as a young man. I was in my last semester at Manhattan College and it was the spring of '62. Kennedy was president, there was the bimonthly stir of American space shots being covered on the black-and-white television in the lobby outside Plato's Cave at the Student Union Center, and Paul Cortissoz had assigned meby lottery in essenceto give a class talk on Yeats. But there were enough ardent Irishmen on campus (not a few of them full-fledged supporters of the old Irish Republican Army) andthough it was a Catholic college, there was little enough interest in a dead
Page 2
Jesuit, and an Englishman at that. In any event I traded my assignment with someone else (it may have been my fraternity brother with the marvelous appellation of Jim Blake) and began scouring the library and the cramped, worried-looking bookstores in the area for anything I could find about the poet who had written "The Wreck of the Deutschland" and those extraordinary sonnets whose contrapuntal effects and Anglo-Saxon percussive rhythms kept ringing in my ears. Thus began a love affair with a poet which has only deepened with the years.
I think now that I decided to stay with Englishafter desultory beginnings in philosophy and psychologylargely because of these marvelous poems that incorporated a quarter-century-long dialogue with no less an antagonist/lover than God himself. And though I had to leave Hopkins behind in order to prepare myself for a teaching "career," which meant devouring pythonlike the various texts that make up what we used to callin our prepluralistic innocencethe Great Tradition, I came back to Hopkins when, in early 1967, it was time at last to write a dissertation. Not that Hopkins had been my first choice for a dissertation topic. I would never in all my Jansenistic upbringing have attempted to pursue something I actually loved. Preparing to be a college teacher should be work, hard work, with occasional moments of grace to light the stormy way. Instead, I was set on doing my doctoral work on Carlyle, who had already managed to infect my own naturally asyntactical and crabbed style in ways that would surely have created a hermetically sealed, albeit enthusiastic system of signs even the most charitable of my teachers would have been hard put to understand.
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