Authors:
Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 1
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February 1988 | Volume 39, Issue 1
In his 1844 essay called “The Poet,” Ralph Waldo Emerson urged American poets to fashion a distinctive art from the facts of American life. “Banks and tariffs,” he wrote, “the newspaper and Caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing away. … Yet America is a poem in our eyes; its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will not wait long for metres.”
“Voices and Visions,” a new weekly television series beginning this month on PBS, shows how right Emerson was. Thirteen of America’s most important poets are given an hour each: Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Hart Crane, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath. I have seen six of the programs, and, if the rest are anywhere near as good, they constitute one of the finest, most imaginative series ever.
Poetry seems, at first, an implausible subject for television. At least in our time, it has become a mostly private art. (I know one poet who actually stopped giving readings because he could not stand to hear the special, self-satisfied tone that inevitably crept into his voice.)
The easy way to have done this series would have been to concentrate on biography—and the facts of each poet’s life are indeed laid out unsparingly—but its central concern remains poetry , not poets. The viewer comes away from each program with a new sense of what it means to struggle with the sound and sense of words, and admiration for the audacity with which the most ambitious among these poets sought to produce what Crane called a “mystical synthesis of America” in a country growing too fast to pay much attention.
Eyewitnesses to their struggles have their say: William Eric Williams, the doctor son of Dr. William Carlos Williams, takes us through the poet’s attic studio, its wall still spotted with brittle, yellowed clippings that intrigued his father; Malcolm Cowley remembers suspecting that his friend Hart Crane was in love with him, while the late Peggy Cowley, with whom Crane surely was in love, recalls the poet’s suicide. Critics speak too: Richard Poirier travels to the places in Old England where Robert Frost’s New England voice was first heard: Richard Sewall suggests the impact upon Emily Dickinson of inhabiting a bedroom that overlooked the cemetery in which five of her girlhood friends were buried in a single year.
But most indelible is the infectious enthusiasm of living practitioners for the work of their forebears: Galway Kinnell lends Whitman’s work a special clarity through the understatement of his reading; Derek Walcott demonstrates the astonishing number of things conveyed by a single six-word line from Crane.
This is challenging, energetic television, adult in the best sense. Very little is