Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

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2 Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry

3 Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the intersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the poetic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Topics that are bibliographic, pedagogic, that concern the social field of poetry, and reflect on the history of poetry studies are valued as well. This series focuses both on individual poets and texts and on larger movements, poetic institutions, and questions about poetic authority, social identifications, and aesthetics. Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman, Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson The American Cratylus Carla Billitteri Modernism and Poetic Inspiration The Shadow Mouth Jed Rasula The Social Life of Poetry Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism Chris Green Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian David W. Huntsperger Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse H.D., Loy, and Toomer Lara Vetter Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in New American Poetry Andrew Mossin The Poetry of Susan Howe History, Theology, Authority Will Montgomery Ronald Johnson s Modernist Collage Poetry Ross Hair Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry Ann Marie Mikkelsen

4 Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry Ann Marie Mikkelsen

5 PASTORAL, PRAGMATISM, AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY Copyright Ann Marie Mikkelsen, All rights reserved. Excerpts from poems and unpublished material by John Ashbery reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt., Inc., on behalf of the author, and Houghton Library, Harvard University. Excerpts from unpublished material by William Carlos Williams Copyright 2010, by the Estates of Paul H. Williams and William Eric Williams. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. Portions of Chapter 4 appeared previously as Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! : Wallace Stevens Figurations of Masculinity, Journal of Modern Literature 27.1/2 (Fall 2003): Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission from the publisher. Portions of Chapter 3 appeared previously as The Truth About Us : Pastoral, Pragmatism, and William Carlos Williams s Paterson, American Literature 75.3 (September 2003): Copyright Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN in the United States a division of St. Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mikkelsen, Ann Marie. Pastoral, pragmatism, and twentieth-century American poetry / Ann Marie Mikkelsen. p. cm. (Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics) ISBN (hardback) 1. Pastoral poetry, American History and criticism 2. American poetry 20th century History and criticism 3. Pragmatism in literature. I. Title. PS309.P37M dc A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: February Printed in the United States of America.

6 For Dan, Saul, and Abe.

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8 Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 Pastoral Ideology and the Pragmatic Response 21 2 Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan: Robert Frost s Pastoral of Class Mobility 39 3 The Truth About Us : Pastoral, Pragmatism, and William Carlos Williams s Paterson 67 4 Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! : Wallace Stevens s Figurations of Masculinity 93 5 The Mooring of Starting Out : John Ashbery s Pastoral Origins 123 Conclusion: Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral: Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson, and the Continuity of a Mode 151 Notes 175 Bibliography 209 Index 229

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10 Acknowledgments This project on pastoral has had many shepherds. When this book was no more than a vague idea, several people at the University of California, Irvine, helped me turn it into something more substantial. Laura O Connor has been an insightful reader, adviser, and friend, always ready to offer advice from the front lines of the profession. Ever attentive to nuance, J. Hillis Miller always took the time to read and listen, even in retirement. Chris Beach, Brook Thomas, and Michael P. Clark were extremely liberal with their time and encouragement. I continue to be thankful to Cathy Jurca and Cindy Weinstein for inviting me to join their seminar on Place in American Literature at the Huntington Library, and especially for Cathy s continued enthusiasm for my work. From the moment I heard her glorious readings of Joyce in seminar, I have considered myself lucky to count Margot Norris as a mentor. Her steady confidence and quiet determination have emboldened me and countless others. I also deeply appreciate the support of a Faculty Fellowship and a Regents Fellowship from University of California, Irvine, as well as a W. M. Keck Foundation Fellowship from the Huntington Library. As a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, I was privileged to spend many enjoyable hours in the company of Joseph Entin, Andrew Jewett, Page Fortna, Jay Grossman, David Greenberg, Eric Bettinger, Rob Chodat, Jona Hansen, Matthew Lindsey, Eileen Babbitt, Crystal Feimster, Adam Webb, and Jim Carroll. I am grateful to the Academy for hosting me for two years, and to Leslie Berlowitz, who inaugurated the Visiting Scholars program. I was especially privileged to meet Leo Marx as well as Bonnie Costello during my years in Cambridge, both of whom offer inspiring models of scholarship and generosity. At Harvard s History and Literature program, I could not have asked for a better director than Steve Biel. I am especially grateful for the intellectual challenge and

11 x Acknowledgments wonderful collegiality provided by my friends and fellow lecturers Raphael Allison, Michele Martinez, Kim Reilly, Amy Kittelstrom, and Lisa Szefel. My co-teachers John O Keefe and Andy Muldoon deserve special thanks for their patience and good humor. Marit MacArthur, Liesl Olsen, Beth Roberts, Maria Farland, and Tim Gray offered much appreciated support over the years as fellow readers of poetry. During my years at Florida State University, I was fortunate to have exceptionally welcoming and intellectually engaged colleagues. I especially miss the good company of Robin Goodman, Barry Faulk, Andrew Epstein, Leigh Edwards, Meegan Kennedy, Nancy Warren, and Hunt Hawkins. This manuscript would have been even longer in the making without a First Year Assistant Professor Grant from Florida State during the spring of I am thankful for Jay Clayton s hospitality and that of the Vanderbilt English department. Alistair Newbern provided an array of advice, legal and otherwise, here in Nashville, and you couldn t ask for a better fiddler. Ed Rubin at Vanderbilt Law School kindly facilitated my work here in Nashville. At Palgrave Macmillan, an anonymous reader as well as Michael Thurston offered bracing and beneficial advice, helping me give the manuscript its final form. Many thanks to Rachel Blau DuPlessis for including me in her exciting new series. Sarah Burley, Ajitha Reddy, and Rachel Cohen have been there since the beginning. Sarah Bilston, Crystal Feimster, Jane Rosenzweig, and Kim Reilly have provided the best of companionship as well as models of scholarship. Helen Oestherheld, Melissa Sanchez, Chris Diffee, Jennifer Williams, and Erika Nanes gave me friendship and intellectual fellowship. Over all the years, my sister Erika Mikkelsen Halford was always only a phone call away. My parents, Curtis and Mary Mikkelsen, have been extremely supportive of my work and unstinting in their praise. I will always be grateful beyond words for their generosity and love. Iris Mikkelsen always believed in me and is still missed. Saul and Abe Sharfstein have transformed my life completely and always for the better. Daniel Sharfstein has made everything possible: best friend, attentive editor, fellow writer, kindred spirit, and husband. I never thought I would be so lucky.

12 Introduction Among Robert Frost s earliest works is a poem entitled Pan Desponds, a verse the poet would soon rechristen Pan with Us (1902). It is one of several pastoral poems in Frost s early volumes, many of which nod to this ancient literary mode by depicting fields, gardens, shepherding, farming, and singing, while subtly emphasizing the tension between simple country folk and the sophisticated poetic voice that represents them. Although at first glance a relatively traditional verse, this lyric is also marked by certain incongruities that are particular to works by Frost and other poets who adapt pastoral themes to twentieth- century American realities. The speaker begins by describing how a god appeared in a deserted pasture: Pan came out of the woods one day His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray, The gray of the moss of walls were they And stood in the sun and looked his fill At wooded valley and wooded hill. 1 Pan s appearance is unusual for a classical god, his coloring especially disconcerting. Although his gray is ostensibly linked to the moss, it is more suggestive of complexions associated with age, disease, death, or industrial pollution than the merry, mischievous body commonly associated with the god of ancient Arcady. He is set apart from human society and appears to have little to do other than wander in the woods at the edges of farmland designated by walls. In fact, he sounds less like a divinity, even in disguise, than what contemporaries would have called a tramp. During the economic depressions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, tramps were increasingly commonplace in rural New England, the setting of much of Frost s work, and Frost wrote a significant number of poems

13 2 Pastoral, Pragmatism, American Poetry in which tramps figure prominently. The figure of the tramp in American poetry also had an important antecedent in Walt Whitman s portrayal of himself as a tramp- like loafer. Both contexts are significant for Frost s poem. Like Whitman s tramp, Frost s Pan appears untroubled, even proprietary in his attitude toward his surroundings. Despite his odd pallor and state of dispossession, he is not sad, aloof, or despairing; this Pan is a classically enigmatic and playful figure. After surveying with satisfaction the deserted countryside, Pan makes a grand gesture of resigning his role as a pastoral poet, relinquishing his duties to nature itself. Acknowledging that times were changed from what they were: / Such pipes kept less of power to stir, Pan apparently finds no place for pipes of pagan mirth in a world measured by new terms of worth. The poems ends, however, on a decidedly ambiguous note: He laid him down on the sunburned earth / And raveled a flower and looked away. / Play? Play? What should he play? Only superficially carefree, Pan s behavior throughout the poem suggests less social irresponsibility than a calculated bid for cultural relevance. Despite his ostensible delight in finding himself alone, Pan s actions suggests that he historically a social god is very much in need of an audience. The poet as observer and performer, Pan personifies the multiple roles of the modern artist. Although it seems a casual act, even Pan s idle gesture of ravel[ing] is far from unstudied; a term that denotes processes of clarification and confusion at once, ravel suggests Pan s functions as cultural critic and artistic innovator. Frost was not alone in identifying this obscure, itinerant figure with such cultural potency. The philosopher and psychologist William James identified similar qualities in the Whitmanian tramp, identifying him as a paradigmatically pragmatic individual, an ideally dispassionate observer of a world in need of a rejuvenating moral and critical spirit. 2 Deeming Whitman s tramp persona a worthless and unproductive being whose disregard for social convention will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye, James offers observations that are applicable to Frost s tramplike Pan, whose odd ravel[ing] evokes similar feelings of challenge and unease in readers. Frost and James s parallel invocations of the poet as tramp are telling and significant, indicating modern manifestations of the pastoral mode at the dawn of a new American century. In retrospect, the twentieth century seems to have been anything but pastoral. In the wake of the frontier s end, cities grew and rural populations thinned. Yet even as the Anglo- Saxon farmer and his family became less central to the nation s understanding of itself, pastoral imagery and narratives retained a hold over the cultural imagination. To the extent that

14 Introduction 3 pastoral was and always has been about conceptions of the ideal self and citizen (traditionally white, middle- class, and male in the United States) and that self s relation to the community or body politic as a whole, pastoral could and did adapt to new realities. Over the course of this book, I argue that Pan and twentieth- century American pastoral figures like him embody the modern poet as representative man, and that this modern pastoral poet closely resembled the figure of the poet as described by pragmatist philosophers William James and John Dewey. For James and Dewey both, the poet was a creative force who embodied the very essence of pragmatic thought, and each explicitly associated the poet s perspective with their visions of re- imagining of the ideal American self and community. Drawing upon explicitly pastoral rhetoric in their philosophical approaches to modern ethics, James and Dewey s pastoral pragmatism influenced and developed in tandem with what I term the pragmatic pastorals of their literary counterparts. Frost s lyric, for example, suggests an array of readings that invoke pragmatic principles. Never a fixed entity, Frost s Pan constantly calls attention to his shaping by and his concurrent shaping of turn- of- the- century American culture, the flow and flux of subject/object relations. After all, Pan s disturbing grayness could be read both as an indication of his integration into his New England environment, complete with entrenched fieldstone walls, and as a reminder to readers that the environment itself was being altered as the result of industrialization in cities such as Lawrence, Massachusetts, where Frost spent much of his youth. Far from spontaneous, Pan s music is derived from his experience in the world, experience that Dewey characterized as crucial to creating local and everyday life and art. Similarly, his piqued refusal to play, far from genuine, functions as a kind of manipulative withholding, his threatened withdrawal enabling him to test pragmatically the value of his art. Pan repeatedly gestures toward the artist s inevitable integration into the modern marketplace and public sphere rather than any sort of imagined removal. Far from an antique remnant of a bygone pastoral age, Frost s Pan is clearly with us and a part of our world, if we will have him. Indeed, the crucial question the poem concludes with and refuses to answer implies the presence or absence of an audience capable of assimilating Pan s art. The unanswered questions as to whether or not Pan should play, and if so what should he play, suggest that no one may wish to or even be capable of hearing his music or, to the extent that Pan is a version of the poet himself, Frost s poems. Complicating this scenario, it is a separate lyric speaker apart from Pan who actually speaks this poem. With his careful rhymes, neat stanzas, and decorous references to sylvan

15 4 Pastoral, Pragmatism, American Poetry signs, among other markers of gentility, the omniscient speaker of the poem (written in a form of free, indirect discourse) poses an intriguing contrast to the unruly Pan, who appears to be characterized by a more colloquial diction (he declares a bird s song music enough for him, for one ) and overly dramatic posturing. The poem s speaker and Pan both vie for the reader s attention and affiliation, each claiming the mantel of the modern poet. The tension between these lyric subjects speaks to real questions poets were beginning to ask themselves at the beginning of the twentieth century as the United States population became more literate and cosmopolitan in its tastes. Which voice best speaks to or for the modern public? What kinds of voices do modern audiences expect to hear in modern poems: voices like those of the people, or those more educated and refined? Who are the American people, anyway? Where do they reside, and what voices matter to them? The implied singing contest between the two voices (also typical of traditional pastoral) calls for some process of judgment while holding any final resolutions at bay. Declining to take sides, provoking questions rather than providing answers, Frost s poetic and social subject position seems to hover somewhere between the two voices implied in this poem. These voices in turn should be understood as constituted by a complex web of tensions between high and low, elite and mass culture, the masculine and the feminine, all of which collectively encode the wider social system that modern pastoral poetry continually addresses. The poet s articulation of identity with regard to low and often potentially transgressive individuals such as the tramp, his contingent relation to an increasingly stratified public sphere and marketplace, the nature of the poem itself as a work of art with varying values all the concerns suggested by Pan with Us are echoed by a range of American poets. Invoking a modern, experimental approach to aesthetics and truth, a diverse array of early- to mid- twentieth- century poets including Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Gertrude Stein were able to reimagine relationships between the sophisticated poet and the relatively voiceless, less privileged other. The result is a poetics that interrogates the nature of the ethical individual and good society. Significantly, some of these texts are dialogic or dialogues of some kind, calling attention to the presence of multiple, at times competing, voices within a single text, as well as their role within a poetic discourse explicitly engaged in issues of national definition. Although previous accounts of American pastoral have pegged the mode s obsolescence to the end of the frontier and a predominantly rural society by the 1890s, relegating modern pastorals to nostalgic posturing

16 Introduction 5 or stances of environmental activism, I argue that a socially conscious pastoral poetry was in fact reinvigorated by turn- of- the- century cultural, economic, and political shifts and the increasingly nuanced distinctions among individuals and social groups that they engendered. 3 As American society grew more hierarchical and complex, it became all the more important to distinguish oneself from the crowd, to mark off the poet from the people, even as such individuals also registered desires to identify for reasons ideological, aesthetic, and practical with less privileged groups increasingly defined by class, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality. 4 White male poets adaptations of the pastoral mode enabled them to gesture toward their former centrality to American culture while negotiating the terms of their continued engagement with an increasingly diverse public sphere. 5 Over the course of this book, I examine instances of the pastoral mode from the turn of the twentieth century until a couple of decades from its end, arguing that pastoral has been uniquely suited to articulate the relatively elite poet s perspective on the development of a modern political economy as well as the new modes of democracy that this phenomenon entailed. Since Virgil s Eclogues, pastoral has foregrounded the economic and ethical situation of the poet and artist, questioning his ability to comprehend and sing of situations other than his own. In Eclogue I, the Roman Civil Wars recently have ended as the poet Tityrus and shepherd Melibeous converse, only to discover that Tityrus has been allowed to keep his lands and has successfully petitioned for his freedom from vassalage. In contrast, his fellow shepherd declares of himself and his less fortunate neighbors that We are leaving the borders of our country and its sweet fields while you, Tityrus, relaxed in the shade, teach the woods to echo the name of fair Amaryllis. As Annabel Patterson has pointed out, this eclogue begins with a tension between the privileged you of the poet Tityrus and the we of the community and common communicative ground from which he is already estranged. The ethical challenge of these lines is one to which Tityrus is questionably responsive as he fails to address or acknowledge the plight of his countrymen in the ensuing conversation. At issue in the Eclogues as they unfold is whether poetry has a social function, and if so what it is. 6 Fellow critics of pastoral such as Raymond Williams and, to a lesser extent, Paul Alpers have also stressed this ethical dimension of pastoral, its concerns with class and social inequity as well as representative anecdotes of the human condition. 7 Addressing several major twentieth- century American poets rather than the classical, Renaissance, or European authors who form the crux of Patterson, Williams, or Alpers s arguments, 8 I argue that despite discrepancies among their poetic practices, politics, and regional affiliations,

17 6 Pastoral, Pragmatism, American Poetry these poets resorted to the pastoral mode in order to question their roles in a democratic, yet still unequal, society. The Elision of American Pastoral Twentieth- century American pastoral as a literary, social, and cultural phenomenon has gone virtually unread for several decades. While in recent years critics have devoted attention to American nativism, regionalism, and environmental concerns under the rubrics of the new historicism, 9 feminist and gender studies, 10 and ecocriticism, 11 the related topic of modern American pastoral has attracted little attention and the term frequently has been misused. 12 Fortunately, commentaries on the pastoral mode by prominent early- and mid- century literary and cultural theorists convey clearly what many contemporaneous poets understood the mode to do. In excavating and juxtaposing writings by John Dewey, William Empson, and John Crowe Ransom, I lay the groundwork for reexamining Leo Marx s dominant account of pastoral, situating it in relation to a new perspective on the mode. Distinguished by the poet s self- conscious, metaphorical use of the mode in order to comment upon the ideal life, the good society, the artist, and the ethical self, the scope of these pastoral poetic texts extends beyond the evocation of native, rural, or natural scenes to constantly interrogate the origin and purpose of poetry. Over the course of the next several chapters, I argue that the pastoral mode of these American poets is best described as a pragmatic pastoral. Typical of a rising middle class that attempted to answer questions regarding truth and value through the scientific method as devised and promulgated by an intellectual elite led by James and Dewey, these poets deployed their writing as a kind of ethical barometer during a century of intense strain and transition within American society. For much of the twentieth century, poets, like philosophers, social scientists, and literary critics, were part of a growing middle- class academic establishment whose claim to specialized professional powers formed the crux of their authority. 13 It is not coincidental that many of the poets I examine were professionals as well as poets: Williams was a doctor, Stevens was a lawyer and insurance executive, Frost established the university- sponsored position of poet in residence, and Ashbery was an art critic and translator. Their status served to affirm their places within a rapidly changing social environment, their roles as educated men unquestioned. Yet during the early years of the century especially, many questioned how to value white collar work, its function in relation to traditional blue collar work or physical labor, as well as the ways in which such work shaped the personality, ethics, and tastes of this emerging

18 Introduction 7 and increasingly dominant class. The kinds of questions about class and status that pastoral traditionally raises (is the farmer a better man for his labor in the land? what is the right relationship between the poet and the landscape?) have gone unasked for several decades, however, as analyses marked by Marxist or socialist concerns went out of favor after the 1930s, not to be readdressed for several decades. Yet these kinds of questions about status, difference, and privilege with regard to class as well as gender, race, and sexual orientation were essential to the kind of work these poets were doing as they interrogated the nature of the modern American self and society. It is helpful, therefore, to return to the early decades of the twentieth century in order to reinscribe the outlines of this modernist, pragmatic, pastoral perspective as it was coalescing, itself the result of professional, critical inquiry into the nature of pastoral tropes in art and literature. Key texts by John Dewey, William Empson, and John Crowe Ransom offer context for the mode as it emerged during this period and provide intellectual background that explains its lack of reception during much of the twentieth century and into the twenty- first. Establishing how pastoral should be defined in art and literature and explaining the ideological implications of the mode, these commentators implicitly and explicitly identify pastoral as a mode of cultural critique. In Art As Experience (published in 1934; delivered as lectures at Harvard in 1931), Dewey offers a devastating reading of a banal pastoral artwork: 14 The city man who lived in the country when he was a boy is given to purchasing pictures of green meadows with grazing cattle or purling brooks especially if there is also a swimming hole. He obtains from such pictures a revival of certain values of his childhood minus attendant backbreaking experiences, plus, indeed, an added emotional value because of contrast with a present well- to- do estate. In all such cases the picture is not seen. The painting is used as a spring board for arriving at sentiments that are, because of extraneous subject- matter, agreeable. The subject- matter of experiences of childhood and youth is nevertheless a subconscious background of much great art. But to be the substance of art, it must be made into a new object by means of the medium employed, not merely suggested in a reminiscent way. (Dewey 1934, ) For Dewey true art and by implication, a better kind of pastoral art requires activity in which the viewer s emotions, intellect, and physical sensations collectively interact with each other and the aesthetic object. Rather than personal and private, good pastoral art is public and responsive. The ideal artist and audience for such art is aware of its public and

19 8 Pastoral, Pragmatism, American Poetry communal imperative, its function in helping to make sense of relationships among human beings. Even if their economic situations were similar to the city man... given to purchasing pictures of green meadows, the ideal artist and audience would have a more sophisticated perspective on art s function. Dewey s critique of this collector is in large part a sociological summary of how historical and economic conditions shape personal taste. Dewey was among the first to acknowledge that the complex webs of social organization could be embodied in an individual s reactions to a work of art. Forty years later, this situation would be examined by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, whose similar conclusion in Distinction (1979) is now a critical commonplace: every person is subject to and comprehends his own experiences through classifications and a resulting taste by which he intellectually internalizes and physically embodies his class and social status. 15 Indeed, Dewey s own aesthetic judgment is most tellingly rhetorically encoded in the passages laced with his intellectual contempt, even disgust, for the simpleminded collector. His reading of the painting and its owner thus implies the possibility of an alternative and preferred pastoralism as well as the extent to which even that pastoral will be limited by one s life experiences. Not coincidentally, the first major modern critical text on pastoral William Empson s Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), published soon after Dewey s Art As Experience pays close attention to precisely such issues. A child of relative wealth who matriculated to Cambridge in the mid- 1920s, Empson was a moderately liberal young man whose politics were sharpened by career crises (precipitated by a sex scandal) and his experiences living in the increasingly fascist Japan of the 1930s, where left- leaning teachers and students were persecuted for their beliefs. 16 Some Versions of Pastoral focuses mainly on seventeenth- through nineteenth- century British texts, but it begins with a timely discussion of American and British proletarian literature, a few instances of which Empson deems covert pastoral. According to Empson, a text remained proletarian so long as the narrators or speakers presented themselves as working class, but a text became an instance of covert pastoral whenever the author, protagonists, or speakers were not themselves working class but depicted the lives of their social inferiors. 17 Pastoral is only pastoral when written from a perspective of privilege, although in Empson s schema the rights of the privileged tend to breed responsibility. In keeping with his identification with privileged leftists, Empson characterizes the ideal pastoral protagonist as a kind of maverick hero, the poet as social critic and outcast. 18 Complementing this relatively revolutionary assessment of the mode, Empson also makes the claim that

20 Introduction 9 pastoral traditionally aspired to imply a beautiful relation between rich and poor, high and low (Empson 1935, 11). As he famously or infamously put it, pastoral involves a double attitude of the artist to the worker, of the complex man to the simple one ( I am in one way better, in another not so good ) (Empson 1935, 14). While Empson s theories of pastoral may have been easily adaptable to the pastoral poetics of his contemporaries, he eschewed any direct mention of their work. At least one reader was curious about this omission, although the reader was not one of Empson s liberal British friends. Instead, he was at the center of a generation of American critics whose far more limited conception of pastoral would shape its reception in the United States for decades to come. In the essay Mr. Empson s Muddles, New Critic John Crowe Ransom, like Empson a poet as well as a critic, downplays the political dimensions of Empson s book but nonetheless, and somewhat surprisingly, addresses its claims sympathetically. Ransom begins his review predictably by bemoaning what he terms the extravagances of Empson s criticism, drawing attention to Empson s tendency to offer multiple meanings of a poem rather than deciding on a single logic or unity that would explain the text in its entirety. 19 According to Ransom, this psychological rather than logical approach to criticism is typical of the manner in which Mr. Empson likes to show a poet clinging to both his alternatives, although without a clear decision, in Ransom s view, the poem simply does not advance to the stage of logic and truth ( Muddles, 338). To the extent that pragmatists and liberal fellow thinkers were revising the very nature of concepts such as logic and truth in order to reveal their historical and social contingency, Ransom identifies his deep objection to Empson correctly. Even as he despairs of the open- endedness of Empson s psychological readings, however, he approves of the ways in which they increase immensely the range of the experience of reading the poem, even if they eventually stray beyond what he believes the poem can logically bear ( Muddles, 324). Moreover, Ransom is equally disdainful of the critic who would reduce poems to fit his own cozy little apartment. This line of critique culminates in Ransom s pertinent observation that Empson s approach was in fact extremely well suited to modern poetry perhaps, implicitly, more so than his own formalism. Why didn t Empson read more modern poetry by Yeats, Auden, Spender, and Lewis, Ransom wonders, especially given that these poems would lend themselves to Empson s proclivity for teasing out multiple readings ( Muddles, 334)? Less doctrinaire than most readers might expect, Ransom accurately identifies the open- ended, psychological, pragmatically inquiring nature of Empson s readings, while anticipating how modern literature could be read in such a light. 20 Despite the subtlety

21 10 Pastoral, Pragmatism, American Poetry of Ransom s response in this instance, however, other of his writings especially those privileging an ironic high modernism 21 came to characterize his legacy as well as the work of his disciples, whose cultural dominance in the United States has delayed the reception of pastoral s ideological complexity in the American context. Such New Critical readings were so pervasive that they appear even in the work of critics ideologically opposed to the formalist project. In Leo Marx s seminal study of American pastoral, he defines the mode in terms of its contrast between a naïve or simple pastoralism and a privileged, more ironic or complex pastoralism. 22 According to The Machine in the Garden (1964), while complex pastoralism involves invoking the image of a green landscape... as a symbolic repository of meaning and value, it soon acknowledge[s] the power of a counterforce, a machine or some other symbol of the forces which have stripped the old ideal of most, if not all, of its meaning (Marx, 362-3). The authors Marx examines tend to react to such changes with thinly veiled despair or an embittered acquiescence that echoes the ironic stance toward literature and life admired by Ransom and others, even as Marx s approach allows room for a degree of social commentary. In general, however, this narrative of national and generic progression makes any kind of pastoral that does not conform to the complex and ironic model difficult to read, as it by default appears to be utopian or politically naïve and therefore culturally backward. In effect, Marx s keenly perceptive and highly influential characterization of American pastoral nonetheless elides a significant, persistent, and alternative pastoral tradition in American literature of the twentieth century. The disjunction between Empson s and Marx s accounts of pastoral and their emphasis upon the ideological dimensions of the mode prefigure the directions that pastoral criticism took in the American and British academies. Reinserting Empson s text and its reception into the American scene helps to clarify what was at stake in Ransom s ambivalent review as well as how his response was typical of an era that initially acknowledged but later suppressed politicized readings of poetry. 23 As part of an extended push back against such academic formalism in recent decades, critics of modernism have sought to dispel New Critical chestnuts concerning the integrity of the literary text as a precious object or urn above the vicissitudes of social, economic, and political forces. As Lawrence Rainey, Thomas Strychacz, and Mark McGurl, among others, have noted, 24 the notion of a great divide between modernism and mass culture as well as modernism and postmodernism, particularly as articulated and debated by Andreas Huyssen and Fredric Jameson, is marked less by antagonism than mutuality, the higher necessarily defining itself in terms of the lower, for example by adopting

22 Introduction 11 strategies of the marketplace and advertising, mass media and popular culture. 25 Yet returning to Empson s work of the 1930s also crystallizes how and why pastoral poetry of the period itself must be understood historically: the pragmatic pastoral as I understand it was constituted by American poets who, like their British counterparts, were part of a society with increasingly complex social dynamics. These poets were highly self- conscious of the fact that theirs was a world in which poets and critics alike defined their labor, values, and aesthetic tastes in terms of the labor, value, and aesthetic tastes of the working classes as well as women and others whose lives were systematically devalued by virtue of their race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. Pastoral poetry of the twentieth century should be understood as not only historically embedded in this fashion but also a conscious production of poets and figures of privilege who, like Empson and Dewey, had political and personal convictions that led to the depiction of social inequality and injustice. This book will offer a newly historicized and politicized reading of American pastoral, informed in part by Empson s earlier work as well as Raymond Williams s readings of British pastoral poetry, while extending the scope beyond concerns of class. My reading of pragmatism therefore differs significantly from those of the most prominent American commentators on pragmatism and poetry. Richard Poirier and Jonathan Levin, for example, present cases for reading modern poetry in a predominantly apolitical Jamesian light while tending to ignore the politically progressive aspects of those texts. 26 In another prominent case, philosopher Richard Rorty champions Dewey s philosophical approach, but he mischaracterizes Dewey s heirs as the liberal ironists of the present, rather than those who emulate the politically committed life that Dewey himself embraced. 27 Such perspectives are typical of a neo- pragmatism that has inherited many of the assumptions of the New Criticism, indebted to a textual formalism that dissuades critics from openly political speculations. In contrast, critics such as Cornel West, Ross Posnock, Frank Lentricchia, Steven Mailloux, Giles Gunn, and David Kadlec have accounted for an ideologically complex and socially relevant version of pragmatism in American literature and culture that informs this book. 28 Perhaps most influential to my understanding of pragmatism, however, has been the work of historians such as James Kloppenberg, Robert Westbrook, and James Livingston, who continue to provide engaging analysis of the historical and intellectual contexts in which Dewey and James wrote and lived. 29 Similarly, criticism by Cary Nelson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Alan Filreis, Michael Davidson, and Michael Thurston has demonstrated how twentieth- century American poetry must be read in terms of its cultural

23 12 Pastoral, Pragmatism, American Poetry and political context. 30 This diverse range of scholarship helped to limn the outlines of this project throughout, offering models and examples as well as inspiration. Empson s Legacy: The Muddles of Modern Pastoral The pragmatic pastoral mode that I excavate in the following pages is marked by its investment in the social and the human in all of its forms. The twentieth- century pastoral in the United States insists upon, even revels in, its depictions of the low in relation to the high, the bodies and minds of ordinary people necessary to the depiction of democratic life. Yet even as they invigorated the poet as pragmatic creator and proved necessary sources of authentic material, portraits of individuals at the bottom of American society emerged as potentially destabilizing to the poet as professional artist. Empson s frequently cited characterization of the modern pastoral poet as simultaneously better than and not so good as the working man he depicts reverberates throughout these texts. Over the course of this book, I try to give some theoretical and historical context to this fraught, ambivalent relationship that Empson could not, while fleshing out the ways in which these two entities, the poet and the people, often melded together in the pastoral imagination. The result is a pastoralism that allows more than ever for the disorder that shapes order, the dirt and filth that defines the pure and clean. Modern poets attitudes toward low figures are fluid, contradictory, and difficult to classify. Poets drawn toward pastoral often found themselves balancing desires to solidify their own social status with a pragmatic commitment to denaturalize the economic and social constraints of others. Not coincidentally, the terms that Ransom used to describe the troubling pluralistic tendencies of Empson s critical writings muddles and extravagances parallel a common tendency of modern pastoral texts to allude to sites, persons, and situations that represent disruptive forms of excess and provoke sensations of discomfort. In a characteristically pragmatic turn, these texts are not uniformly critical of such presences but just as often employ what Linda Hutcheon terms a transideological irony in relation to them, indicating disgust or contempt at the same time as they suggest sympathy or empathy. 31 Complicating the scene further, elements of the low or disgusting frequently are depicted as aspects of the poet s own self, rendering the self the object of the poet or speaker s own alternately appalled and accepting gaze. For example, Frost advocated a potentially destabilizing extravagance in farming, personal finances, and poetry composition that is linked to the bodies

24 Introduction 13 of tramps. In Stevens s poetry, the figure of a fat man and later fat girl emerges as a simultaneously desired and reviled excess that is both constitutive of and threatening to the poet. For Williams, a literal excrement is linked to descriptions of his beloved beautiful thing, who in turn is an essential counterpart to the poet s alter ego of Dr. Paterson. John Ashbery depicts potential perverts and hints at a suppressed homosexuality in his early pastoral poems, and Gertrude Stein similarly alludes to lesbian sexuality in terms of country life ( cows ). What links these terms is the ways in which they are deployed as metaphors for the poet s self or part of that self, whether as a kind of psychological trait or behavior, physical trait, polluting association, or epithet that renders that person socially suspect or marginal. What is perhaps most striking about these pastorals is that class is far from the only form of social privilege addressed. While class is the concern uppermost for Frost; gender, race, and sexuality as well as class figure prominently in the pastorals of Williams; variations on white masculinity give rise to Stevens s pastoral; and sexual orientation is the primary form of disruptive otherness addressed by Ashbery and Stein. What unites these pastoral texts is their collective focus upon the high/ low, self/other distinctions of pastoral and the ethical provocations these juxtapositions create. Their shared emphasis upon excess and the taint of pollution that it suggests is not incidental but integral to the articulation of a pragmatic pastoral mode. Pragmatism emerged during a period in American history when industrialization, waste, and overconsumption began to alter the physical landscape as well as the constitution of the self and community. Recent critical work on filth, waste, and disgust in nineteenth- century European contexts provides a fruitful parallel for this claim. Drawing upon the anthropological and psychoanalytic work of Mary Douglas, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, and Mikhail Bakhtin, recent historicist work by critics such as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, William Cohen and Ryan Johnson, Dominque LaPorte, David Trotter, and William Ian Miller have created a precedent for understanding a rhetoric of waste and excess in the context of the emergence of the bourgeois subject and democratic society in eighteenth- and nineteenth- century Britain and France. 32 According to Stallybrass and White, during the eighteenth century bourgeois democracy encoded in its manners, morals and imaginative writings, in its body, bearing and taste, a subliminal elitism which was constitutive of its historical being and that defined this being in relation to real and figurative waste. 33 In a similar vein, Miller, a legal scholar, claims that disgust, coined in English in the seventeenth century, is distinctly antidemocratic in its assertion of absolute purity and impurity, unlike the related feeling of

25 14 Pastoral, Pragmatism, American Poetry contempt, which in democracy alone can emanate from lower as well as higher social orders. 34 The American situation several decades later contains clear parallels, as the American political economy went through transitions seen nearly a century earlier on the continent while coming to terms with a changing population that challenged traditional conceptions of the productive citizen. 35 High rates of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization, the transition to corporate capitalism, as well as the movement of women and people of color into the workforce and public sphere radically destabilized eighteenth- and nineteenth- century conceptions of American citizenship, subjectivity, and society in ways that can be considered analogous in some form to the earlier European situation. 36 These shifts were especially ominous to white middle- class men, for whom such individuals and groups represented threats to masculinity and traditional concepts of virtuous citizenship as characterized by the farmer or pioneer. At the purely material level, waste and garbage became a ubiquitous sight on city streets, as increased consumption led to mass disposal of outdated commodities. 37 The connection between the material and the social has long been visible to poets and social critics alike. As David Trotter notes, mess theory has something to do with democracy, which would be hard to imagine without litter, or without the historically specific form of disgust aroused by (and in) the spectacle of widespread social mobility. 38 The pragmatic and scientific dimension of waste identification is also pertinent. As Tim Armstrong has observed, a general fascination with waste and waste products was concurrent with the rise of scientific modes of thought in early twentieth- century American society. Modernist texts, according to Armstrong, educate readers to identify and categorize scientifically their own body s behavior as well as those of others, understanding all bodies operating beyond the purview of science often those coded as feminine or racially or sexually other as wastefully productive, generating materials that may overwhelm rather than fuel the social economy. 39 However, subject to reevaluation as positive elements (aspects of the self, a beloved, or respected entity), these presences in pragmatic pastorals emerge as more similar to mess, which Trotter discusses as a more contingent, less disturbing form of waste that can be recodified as useful matter and even part of the self. 40 Arising in response to the artificial and often unethical nature of older social and cultural divisions, pragmatism at its most progressive could find the waste of society to be regenerative rather than polluting. The product of a pragmatic perspective on experience that emphasizes the need to reevaluate values both negative and positive, the transitive, fluctuating manifestations of waste as various kinds of mess are crucial to the modern incarnation of pastoral.

26 Mapping the Pragmatic Pastoral Introduction 15 Even as the pragmatic pastoral mode can and must be defined in relation to previously defined contemporary cultural phenomena, it is also an ancient, recognizable mode with continuities stretching back to the work of Virgil and Theocritus. My book begins with a chapter describing an abbreviated history of American pastoral, its roots in classical models as translated into distinctly American concepts of citizenship and subjectivity, and the transformation of this nexus of culture and ideology in the early years of the twentieth century. I discuss the pragmatic and progressive response to the so- called end of the frontier, a response that resulted in not only the redefinition of American society but also the need to theorize new concepts of personality and democratic community that could account for these changes. This postfrontier pragmatic methodology, I argue, is integral to the development of modern pastoral poetics. The chapters that follow trace the pragmatic pastoral sensibility of major American poets, revealing the persistent pastoral mode that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century and continued at least into its latest decades. While the aim of my project is to situate these chapters within this overall historical context, at the same time I do not pretend to undertake the same kind of deeply historicized projects as have Alan Filreis or Michael Thurston. While I admire their work immensely, my aim is to present a more panoramic understanding of pastoral s persistence over time and over the course of widely divergent poetic careers. While some chapters mention specific events that influenced the perspective of a particular poet the Lawrence and Paterson textile mill strikes for example more often I discuss the emergence of pastoral in relation to notable and documented historical trends to which the poet is expressly responding, such as the increased visibility of women in the literary marketplace or the pathologizing and criminalization of homosexual men and women. I am most interested in the ways in which a pastoral sensibility first forms and then coalesces over the course of a poet s career, often intensifying at specific points in a lifetime, as it does for Frost in the early 1900s, for Williams and Stevens during World War II, for Ashbery during the cold war of the 1950s through the early 1970s, for Stein just before World War I and in the 1920s and 1930s. Along these same lines, this book seeks neither to produce an exhaustive assessment of the pragmatic characteristic of each poet s work nor to prove that each poet was, technically, a pragmatist. The avoidance of blow- by- blow assessments of how each particular poem or pronouncement can be read in terms of James or Dewey s writings is intentional. None of these poets was a philosopher, and their direct engagements with James and