DONALD DAVIE AND TWO WAYS OUT OF WHITMAN Belle Randall

DONALD DAVIE , Two Ways Out of Whitman: American Essays (Carcanet) £14.95

Not at all the miscellaneous scraping of the bottom of the barrel one expects of belated posthumous collections, this assortment of reviews, lectures and poems, some previously published, some not, has been selected and arranged by Doreen Davie, the poet's widow, not always chronologically but in order to display a more comprehensive view of American poetry than we knew Davie afforded. For this we are grateful. Though modest in their individual claims, taken as a whole these pieces offer an eye-opening alternative reading of American poetry and its heritage. Those who would dismiss Donald Davie as reactionary simply have not read him. No critic is more limber in his sympathies, more open to new kinds of poetry, indeed, at times, open to a fault. However much he may have admired poems by Americans who more or less adopted the British tradition (Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Howard Nemerov), such poetry didn't much engage Davie's critical attention. In coming to America, Davie sought poetry that was distinctly American, and he made it his project to trace a vital tradition from Walt Whitman through Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams (the need to bypass T.S. Eliot is presupposed) to the Black Mountains and Ed Dorn. Davie's theories are well-earned; even more admirable is his willingness to discard them, if refuted by the real thing. Of 'Song of Myself' he says,

I found myself reading a great poem, invigorating and liberating. The experience was undeniable and at whatever cost my ideas about poetry and morality will have to be changed to allow for it. (p. 63)

This is an important step in the overarching argument that unifies this collection, for it frees Davie from having to make his appreciation not merely of Whitman, but of Dorn, Berryman and others, jibe with his earlier appreciation of Yvor Winters's stringent moral judgements. As if anticipating this necessity, Davie writes, 'We can admire Whitman, or (to speak for myself) one can justify the admiration one feels for him, only by classing him with a kind of confessional poet who claims, and must be allowed the right, to be irresponsible. More and more Americans of recent years have conceded this right to Whitman and to other poets...' concluding, 'Nothing less is called for if we are to come to terms with what Leslie Fielder has called "the poet of the twenty-first century"' (p.63).

The title, which does much to focus the collection, comes from a book review written in 1968 of books by Williams and Roethke, neither of which, as a way out of Whitman, is found to provide agreeable access. In Williams, Davie detects early a 'lameness' and 'flatulence' which he attributes at first to inadequacies of his British ear. After quoting 'The Gift':

The very devils
    by their flight give praise.
        What is death
beside this?
    Nothing. The wise men
        came with gifts
and bowed down
    to worship
        this perfection.

Davie writes, 'I suspect that no American ear can register this as off-key, simply because so much American literature has been committed to recovering Adam's innocence', yet this American ear (mine) registered it even then, in the year this review was published, sitting, as a Stegner Fellow, in Davie's classroom at Stanford. I recall him asking us what we thought of Williams without tipping his hand, and, like one at the unveiling of the Emperor's New Clothes, I was cowed into silence. Williams has been a sacred cow for something like thirty-five years now, making Davie's criticism extremely refreshing.

Roethke's weaknesses are less influential and, to Davie, less interesting. Whereas in Williams, Whitman has been 'made over and made new; the influence is at a level far below similarities of syntax and metre', Roethke explicitly invokes but does not make new those aspects of Whitman that for Davie are least credible, 'Be with me, Whitman, maker of catalogues'. Roethke intones. From Davie's point of view, 'to proceed by excited cumulative catalogue is almost to admit defeat, spattering the target instead of aiming for the bull' (p. 61).

'One may admire Williams' disciples (I think of Edward Dorn and Robert Creeley) more than one admires Williams,' Davie writes. In order to trace a tradition, he needs to identify its heirs. Some such schematic notion may have driven him to his indulgence of Olson, Dorn and the Blue Mountains (the criticism is indulgent, whatever one thinks of the poetry), and may have driven Doreen Davie to shuffle these pieces so as to make this gesture final, but the lapse of disinterest, a virtue otherwise assiduously maintained throughout these pages, Davie's very eagerness, makes them the least convincing in the book. Here, as nowhere else, the prose seems coy and dated:

I must warn you at once that there is a disappointment in store for you. I have chosen no specimen poems to dissect for your benefit. No, on consideration I have decided against this. For that procedure smacks altogether too strongly of precisely the milieu for poetry that the Beatniks and Black Mountaineers alike want to avoid: the graduate seminar... Dorn and Robert Creeley, are not written for that sort of reading, any more than are the poems of Allen Ginsberg or Walt Whitman. As Olson's treatise makes clear, they are written very insistently for the speaking voice, and for the speaking voice of the poet himself; and they are composed so as to be performed, live, before a live audience by the poet in person. (p. 162)

And so it goes, with Davie, persisting in calling the Beat poets 'Beatniks,' taking the Black Mountains at face value ('They are not interested in making their poems self-suffi- cient'), depicting them as they would wish to be depicted ('They are very learned poets, who write very learned poems') never subjecting such statements to the kind of scrutiny that Winters, surely, the Winters inside him, would require. Don't all poems exist both as written and spoken word, and, more important, don't all poems need to register as sound in the reader's inner ear? Should the professor apologise for the activity and atmosphere of the classroom? Does success in performance exempt poetry from the scrutiny of a close reading? Christopher Ricks has performed elegant academic dissections of lyrics by Bob Dylan, for instance, can't we ask as much of Davie? Davie seems to exercise a kind of favouritism in his quest for an heir. If in Williams he detects a certain 'lameness' and 'flatulence', why can't he hear any in Olson? If Turner Cassity and John Ashbery's poetry is camp ('a thing done to excess, becoming self-parody'), why isn't Gunslinger? Elsewhere, Davie finds in the romantic notion that poetry is 'unconsidered utterance' the seeds of our doom; here he gushes, 'And so the poems have, quite deliberately, the sort of untidiness and hastiness that we associate with lecture-notes and reading-lists.'

Nor do the didactic and prosy passages quoted from Olson do much to convince us that this is poetry redeemable by public performance, as claimed:

            in successive waves basically NW
as in fact the earth's crust once - and mantle or at least
the depth of the asthenosphere broke
apart and went
        itself mid-
                        north north West
150,000,000 years ago to that
definitely now established by
J. Tuzo Wilson as well as other
oceanographers and geographers who have paid
        attention to the
fit of the earth's continental shelves
          on either shore of each
ocean - including runs right down the middle such as when

etc... etc... (Davie quotes twice again as much). Throughout 'The Black Mountain Poets: Charles Olson and Edward Dorn', one feels Davie has gotten too much California sun, is too much impressed by Ed Dorn in buckskin, at the cost of his usual good judgement and common sense. If the poems depend on being read aloud by the poet in person, they can not survive. Nor does this exclusive emphasis on individual 'voice' mesh with what Davie says elsewhere of that overvalued distinction. To the extent that this infatuated praise ushers in the waves of self-dramatisation in which we are now engulfed, a social occasion Davie describes so aptly in one of the final essays here ('The one and only poetic form, for postmodernism, is the diary... and the diary is not just a long poem but interminable'), it would seem that the problem with finding the way out of Whitman may be that what we are looking for is too big to see, a public thoroughfare, indeed, a traffic jam at rush hour, where poetry - Davie's idea of poetry, yours or mine - is in danger of getting lost amid the honking horns.

Zukofsky, Niedecker, the Objectivists, Olson, Dorn - as the essays are arranged here, we find ourselves arriving, by a different route, at conclusions which somewhat anti-climatically coincide with those of the so-called Language poets, whose remappings of tradition were offered a decade ago in several big anthologies. The effect is to place Davie, a critic who does not belong in any camp, squarely in theirs.

When, as my advisor at Stanford, Davie helped me arrange the poems in my first collection, I remember his stating at once his conviction that the chronological order would be best, the most telling, would reveal connections more surprising and valid than any I could contrive. This saved me much posturing before the mirror and turned out to be right. It is a conviction stated again, incidentally, in the present collection, when he remarks of three collections by William Carlos Williams, 'they ought to be read in chronological order, which is not how they are printed' (p. 58). In making Davie's praise of Dorn conclusive, Mrs Davie is clearly following her husband's wishes (in the poem 'The Tortoiseshell', published decades after the Dorn essays, he explicitly addresses Dorn as heir), yet wishful thinking would seem to be the culprit here. One wonders what the results would be if she had followed his advice instead, tracing the real story, the chronological one, admitting what a long strange trip it's been. If arranged chronologically, the essays would show Davie's praise of Dorn superseded by decades of more convincing praise of other poets followed by his ultimate despair of discerning quality amid the quantities of poetry currently produced ('The sheer bulk of what offers itself as American poetry through recent decades defeats any attempt at discrimination') and end with his attempt to rescue Lorine Niedecker from postmodernist clutches ('... so much for postmodernism. For linear is what time unavoidably is, when experienced between cradle and grave' p. 157). Less forced, more judicious and loving, and two decades more recent than his praise for Dorn is his praise of John Berryman, but Berryman and Niedecker are of his own generation, and cannot serve as heirs. Nor can Allen Tate and the Southern poets, who adopt the British tradition ('There are certain of Tate's poems which may, without excessive falsification, be read in a British or Australian, or at any rate a non-American accent'). This path too arrives at a dead-end: 'Tate and Winters stand together in my mind as representing an astringent and sophisticated temper in American poetry which is very rare indeed in American writing of the last twenty-five years' (p. 112). Why has the stream seemingly run dry? An essay describing the climate of contemporary poetry, one of the two essays with which the present collection ends, answers that question: 'How can poetry not be devalued? Everyone has some, can get or make as much as he wants'. Our poetry has not run dry, it has drowned in an ocean of its own fecundity, a sea of little Whitmans, each claiming poetry as his democratic right, releasing the odour of an armpit ('an aroma finer than prayer') as he goes under the wave. A chronological arrangement might have made clear precisely the lack of an heir which a revolution has accomplished, the chaos which the overthrow of hierarchy (a structure Davie defends to the end) presupposes, a mob scene in which the career of Ed Dorn, whatever its ultimate measure, has taken place. Davie's praise of Berryman, significantly more recent than his praise of the Black Mountains and more convincing, might help young poets to find new footing in these difficult times (or, again, might lead us to re-assess Davie's detour of Eliot, and to follow Davie's example by tracing a tradition, but one of our own, a tradition strongly shaped by ballad measure that bypasses Whitman in favour of Dickinson, and passes from Eliot to Berryman to Charles Simic). The more pertinent insight is not Davie's crowning Ed Dorn in pages thirty years old and somewhat dated, but his unmasking Williams, a position he restates with increasing confidence over time. Speaking of 'This Is Just to Say', the poem qua refrigerator note, in 1987 Davie is no longer tentative: 'The word for this, the only word for this, is cute!' A chronological arrangement would show the maturing of Davie's critical voice, well-earned positions in time becoming well seasoned: of Williams: 'His heart was in the right place on his sleeve; where his head was, it is as usual impossible to say'. Yet the gravity of these opinions also deepens, and finally his judgement of Williams contains an element of prophecy: 'A poet who was, or pretended to be, mindless: is this the effigy we are to hang garlands on? If we persist in doing so, the consequences may be far-reaching, and not just for poetry' (p. 70).

Facing 'the troublesome question of how we have come to devalue the notion of greatness in poetry, and perhaps of poetry itself, when the label "great poet" is affixed to Williams,' Davie writes with finality, 'Despite the fervent and frequent and of course embarrassing assertions by Williams about poetry's supreme status, his practice and his belated reputation have debased the dignity of the poet's calling' (p.69). For all his generosity, Davie's criticism is most distinguished by what it withholds. In its condemnation of Williams and of the way out of Whitman chosen by the mainstream, this collection is truly liberating and revolutionary.

This article is taken from PN Review 143, Volume 28 Number 3, January - February 2002.