[Book Review] Young Suck Rhee Abstract: A book review Key words: Stevens, Yeats, Romanticism, Modernism, rhetorics Author: Young Suck Rhee is Distinguished Research Professor of Poetry in the Department of English, Hanyang University, Seoul, 133-791, Korea. He divides his time between teaching, writing poetry, and painting. E-mail: ysrhee@hanyang.ac.kr / ranjongrhee@hotmail.com : : 20 : :,,,, :.,,. T hough it is rather late to do a review of a book published almost a decade ago, it seems to me to be timely to do it now, for it is still valid and timely to read this book with care and to learn from it, and secondly the author is to deal with another major poet who was not discussed in this book, as he was not an American but an Irish poet, W. B. Yeats. And the author Professor Charles Altieri s keynote speech title is Yeatsian Poetics and the
284 Young Suck Rhee Resources Grammar Provides, (he is attending the international conference to be held at Hanyang University, Seoul on September 12 to 13, 2015 on the occasion of the 150 th anniversary of the birth of W. B. Yeats) and I presume the grammar here may mean the rhetoric he is brilliantly re-interpreting in the Modernist way in all of his four chapters in this book. And the book is: Charles Altieri s The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry: Modernism and After and it is, despite the title, not a book of theory. It is a book that reads individual poems by individual poets. So, each of the chapters, except for the first and last chapter, which are Introduction and Conclusion, discusses two or three poets in each chapter. And this is why I like this book. The main theme, in each chapter: the new realism in Modernist poetry by Pound and Williams; impersonality and war on rhetoric in Eliot, Loy, and Moore; efforts at renewal of Modernist poetics in Williams, Oppen, and Hughes; return to rhetoric in Modernist poetry in Stevens and Auden. The value of this book remains constant, despite of the passage of time, as it provides how to read a poem by the poet in question. It is difficult for the reader to counter Altieri s way of reading a particular poem by a particular poet. The first reason that it is rather difficult for us to disagree with him is that the principle of his reading is the principle of time or age. We are in the age of Modernism (and Post-Modernism) and after. If we as critics are as capable as Altieri is this makes the difference, we are sure to produce great results, as this book does. But the fact is, it depends on what focus the critic has; this said, there is still a difference in approaches: such as Marjorie Perloff s 21 st Century Modernism: The New Poetics (which includes discussions on T. S. Eliot s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and Gertrude Stein s Tender Buttons) and Christopher MacGowan s Twentieth-Century American
285 Poetry (which discusses forty-eight poetic careers ) (Altieri 1). The principle of reading is, that is to say, to differentiate Romantic poetry and Modernist poetry, and the starting point for the critic is rhetoric; what rhetoric (which is not indexed) means is not clear, but it seems to mean persuasion, but its broadest reading is grammar or American idioms or the poetic diction used or created by American poets. I would like to let you enjoy tasting new wine in old bags, except that I touch briefly on one little instance of Altieri reading part of Stevens. It seems that, compared with Romantic poets, Stevens differs in how he writes a poem: as Altieri points it out, [r]ather than use rhetoric to persuade, they [Modernist poets] would use rhetoric to establish identifications with what it feels like to construct possibilities for changes of heart (128). I would like to quote an essential definition made by Altieri of Modernists (Stevens, in particular) making poetry differently from Romantics (Shelley, for example): Ultimately the poet of Harmonium cared less about what was real than about how an author might render investments in one s own states of mind: one does not describe the self but one enacts it, or carefully observes how it enacts itself. This commitment put him at odds with what he saw as the romantic spirit hungry for belief and eager to celebrate abstractions about the power of mind. Where claims to lyric wisdom had been, Stevens offered only the playful philosophical music played by a harmonium or hand-held organ. (129) Then, Altieri offers The Snow Man, which illustrates most of Stevens intellectual commitments at this time (129). The poem is one sentence stretched out to cover five stanzas and numerous dependent clauses, and that sentence, according to Altieri, virtually becomes a character in a drama where the turns and twists are based on syntactic surprises. There is irony aplenty as the speaking presence seems not to express fixed opinions but to try out possibilities as thoughts unfold (130).
286 Young Suck Rhee At this point, let me take the liberty of applying Altieri s sophisticated reading of The Snow Man to a poem of W. B. Yeats, as it just occurs to me that Yeats s The Cap and Bells s poetics is not that different from Stevens ; it is a drama, in which a speaker, a jester, appears in the poem, but the whole progress of the jester s mind toward the queen and the conclusion of the poem sounds identical to the syntactical surprises in The Snow Man unfolding toward a conclusion. Yeats s language is unique and distinguished, as Helen Vendler has spent so much time reading much of Yeats s poetry; it certainly looks traditional; yet the more it is studied, the farther it is different from Romantics in general. One common characteristic is that it aims not to express fixed opinions but to try out possibilities as thoughts unfold, which is also exemplified in much of Yeats s poetry. What many of Modernist poems, including Yeats s, not to mention Stevens The Snow Man, have done is what Stevens s own poem Of Modern Poetry is saying: The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has not always had To find: the scene was set; it repeated what Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed To something else. Its past was a souvenir, It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time................................. It must Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.
287 The Art of Twentieth-Century American Poetry provides great pleasure for the reader who wants to read Altieri s superb reading of some of the most important American poets of the Modernist period. Edited by: Ilhwan Yoon