American Culture and the Voice of Poetry

ROBERT PINSKY

The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Delivered at

Princeton University
April 4, 5, and 6, 2001
Robert Pinsky is a poet and professor of English at Boston Univer-
sity. He was educated at Rutgers and at Stanford, where he received his
Ph.D. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is the recipient of nu-
merous awards, including the Shelley Memorial Award, the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize in Poetry, and the Lenore Marshall Prize. He was the
thirty-ninth Poet Laureate of the United States (1997–2000) and in
that capacity undertook the Favorite Poem Project, a video archive of
American citizens discussing and reading their favorite poems. He co-
edited, with Maggie Dietz, the resulting anthology Americans’ Favorite
Poems. His volumes of criticism include The Sounds of Poetry (1998);
Poetry and the World (1988), which was nominated for the National Book
Critics Circle Award in Criticism; and The Situation of Poetry: Contempo-
rary Poetry and Its Traditions (1978). He is the author of numerous col-
lections of poetry, including An Explanation of America (1980), which
won the Saxifrage Prize; The History of My Heart (1984), which won the
William Carlos Williams Prize; The Want Bone (1990); The Figured
Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966–1996 (1996), which was nomi-
nated for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and was awarded the Am-
bassador Book Award in Poetry; and Jersey Rain (2000).
 I

I hope to respond to the large-minded rubric of the Tanner Lectures on

Human Values, and at the same time to avoid becoming drunk on the
term “Human Values,” or intimidated by it. My goal will be to look at
great things through the aperture of my metier. So while “American
Culture” is an immense term, by “the voice of poetry” I mean something
quite literal and practical: the voice of a person saying a poem. My ex-
amples will be speciŠc, drawn from the Favorite Poem Project, a kind of
accidental, oblique experiment—or something less scientiŠc, a ven-
ture—in American culture.
I’ll begin with some general formulations.
The term “culture” with its old agricultural and biological connota-
tions has taken a new, surprisingly central place in recent thought. Even
we unsystematic readers of magazines and newspapers notice that in
economics, in American electoral politics, in the geo-political analysis
of different peoples and their national systems, culture has become a
kind of ulterior cause of causes. It has been proposed that culture deter-
mines the power of a nation to achieve economic development, and that
cultural differences underlay the recent contest between George Bush
and Al Gore. Even the directions and conceptions of science have been
seen in cultural terms.
In its former, rather frumpy state, the term “culture” (as in the anti-
quated phrase “a person of culture”) had no aura of dread (despite Marx-
ist or Freudian analysis of the mere social fear that one might seem
“uncultured”). In its contemporary form, however, the notion of culture
evokes anxiety of two contradictory, indeed more or less opposite, kinds.
There is the nightmare of undifferentiation, a loss of cultural diver-
sity comparable to the loss of bio-diversity. Hundreds of languages have
died in the last century, with their alphabets and epics and delicate
structures. In the terrible closing pages of Tristes Tropiques, Claude Lévi-
Straus indicates how the mere breath, the very glance, of the observer
rapidly destroys differences that evolved for centuries, homogenizing
and sterilizing the former abundance. This vision of destruction by a
dominant culture reminds us of the etymological link between “culture”
and “colon,” the one who cultivates or scratches the soil, the colonialist.

[153]
154 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

But the other, obverse dread is of a vicious, tribalized factionalism,

the coming apart of civic fabrics through fragmentation, ranging from
the paranoid brutality of ethnic cleansing to the division of mass culture
into niches. Religious difference, racial difference, linguistic difference,
even generational difference can seem compounded and hypertrophied
by information-age forces: the fanatical obsession with difference and its
exploitation by tyranny have been multiplied and accelerated by mod-
ern technology. The swiftness and pervasiveness of contemporary broad-
cast propaganda parallel the heightened efŠciency of contemporary
killing squads. In this disturbing vision, the etymological ghost is cul-
ture’s relation to “cult,” a word denoting arcane forms of worship: the
sinister difference of strangers.
On one hand, we are afraid of becoming so much like one another that
we will lose something vital in our human nature—and on the other
hand, we are also afraid of becoming so different, so much divided into
alien and murderously competitive fragments, that we cannot survive.
In what ways do these opposed, even contradictory cultural anxieties
share a single root?
For an American poet, the fear of lost differentiation and the fear of
excessive differentiation do indeed embody a single, in fact familiar anx-
iety: the fear of being cut off from memory. It is memory that tempers
the imagined extremes of culture, the polarities of explosion and undif-
ferentiation. Memory resists uniformity because it registers Šne grada-
tions; memory resists the factional because it registers the impure,
recombining, šuent nature of culture. The mother of the muses is mem-
ory, and the traditional Greco-Roman crown of the poet is made of
leaves that when picked remain green.
The most profound observers of the United States have seen in our
manners, and in the cultural correlatives of our democracy, a version of
fragmentation, the dread that we become too unlike one another. Alexis
de Tocqueville, in the locus classicus for this viewpoint, associates the sep-
aration of individuals into fragments or atoms horizontally, from their
peers, with the separation of individuals vertically, from their past and
future. Tocqueville writes:

Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors,
but it hides his descendants and separates his contemporaries from
him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone and threatens in
the end to conŠne him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.
(Democracy in America, Henry Reeve text rev. by Francis Bowen, ed.
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 155

Phillips Bradley [New York: A. A. Knopf, 1945], vol. 2, chapter 2,

p. 99)
This passage recalls the great classical tag, found in Gulliver’s Travels as
well as in King Lear, which notes that the human animal is a puny crea-
ture: its patchy fur and šimsy hide give inadequate protection; its claws
and little teeth are poor weapons. It is a mediocre climber and swimmer,
and even its best specimens cannot run as fast as the young or aged of
many other species.
This commonplace trope is deployed to emphasize certain redeem-
ing human qualities, such as the capacity for reason or memory. Toc-
queville, in comparing democracy with aristocratic culture, directs us
toward memory, and a particular aspect of memory: the processes of cul-
ture. The creature is not only clever, not only capax rationis: it has devel-
oped ways to extend memory beyond its lifetime. Its unlikely survival
has depended upon its devising means of communication not only hori-
zontally, with its contemporary peers, to co-operate in gaining food or
shelter, but also vertically, with its predecessors and successors, so that
the experience of past lifetimes can be used.
For this purpose of communal memory and transmission, the animal
has devised the binary code of digital media, and printed marks before
that, and incised or written marks before that—and before those tech-
nologies of marks, the creature made a technology of its own body, with
a highly reŠned system of grunts, emitted through its feeding oriŠce.
Like the griots in Alex Haley’s Roots, who call up across the centuries in-
formation about dynasties, family relations, property rights, the human
animal through the amazing grunt-code of speech can retain subtle
shades of information: which food is available at what time of year, what
customs for mating or burial will best serve the community, informa-
tion as precise or subtle as “bring me a pound of galvanized ten-penny
nails” or “I love you but not that way.” Patterns like rhythm artfully
render the grunt-information more memorable, and more memorizable.
I have come to realize that it is this process that I mean by “culture”:
the process of shared memory that Tocqueville sees as transformed, even
threatened, by the conditions of American democracy. The concept of
culture, Stephen Greenblatt has pointed out, “gestures toward what
appear to be opposite things: constraint and mobility” (Critical Terms for
Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin [Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995])—terms roughly parallel to the
uniformities of the colonialist and the divergences of the cultist. The
156 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

process of culture, a form of memory, controls us and also enables us. In

their extremes those actions of control and liberty manifest the envi-
sioned dystopias of global homogenization on one side and fragmenta-
tion on the other. More precisely, culture is a process of both memory
and resistance to memory, curatorship and transformation.
Consider poetry, an art that in European languages has roots in aris-
tocratic courts with their širtations and imperial visions, or in folk
sources like the ballad and the hymn. That is, practically speaking, the
art of poetry has been preserved in many cultures either by a social class
that considers itself the hereditary caretaker or by a cottage life, passed
along through the generations along with the jokes, recipes, dances and
songs of the grandparents. In other words, poetry in such societies has
either snob value or the values of a unifying folk culture: two sources of
continuity that the USA, relatively speaking, does not have.
Some Americans used to sentimentalize the Soviet-era poetry read-
ings held in athletic stadiums and attended by thousands. But those
events depended upon the exploitation of ancient tastes and attitudes:
speciŠcally, they joined the power of totalitarian government with the
cachet of poetry in a country where an angry driver will shout at an-
other: “You have no culture!” This is not an American insult. We must
strain our imaginations to conceive of countries where the politicians
must at least pretend to love the great national poet, and perhaps mem-
orize a line or two.
Relatively speaking, in the United States the high bourgeoisie has
not preened itself on curatorship of poetry. Nor do we have a single,
unifying folk culture. The Italian-American grandmother, the Cuban-
American grandmother, the Yankee grandmother, the African-
American grandmother, insofar as they pass on the jokes and recipes and
rhymes, will have different ones.
In place of the aristocratic or folk idea, we have, quite characteristi-
cally, improvised and patched together a place for the art of poetry, in
various ways—journalistic, middle-class-domestic, professionalized,
academic, self-conscious—many of them well represented in John Hol-
lander’s two-volume anthology of nineteenth-century American verse.
The American invention of “Creative Writing” is another example of
that improvisation.
I don’t mean to deprecate American culture on these grounds, nor to
elevate it chauvinistically. We are not Persians or Bengalis. (Though I
suppose that some of us are indeed Persian-Americans or Bengali-
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 157

Americans.) That in those highly uniŠed cultures most people quote,

recite and compose poetry as part of a life is attractive, and in each case
rešects a certain culture. Certain forms of memory, relatively speaking,
are settled and available. But the eccentricities of Emily Dickinson and
Walt Whitman explore the soul’s dependence on memory, and its resis-
tance to memory, with strangely improvised instruments. Her skewed
hymns and his breakaway arias both rešect a culture where imported,
inherited and invented elements jangle or coalesce; where the provinces
are in no more clear a relation to any capital than the present is to the
past; where the wrestling of curatorship with transformation is palpably
strenuous. Underlying that contest, and inspiring invention, is the pos-
sibility of a vacuum, of failed memory.
That threatening vacuum is in keeping with Tocqueville’s most ex-
plicit pronouncement about American poetry—a pronouncement that,
out of context, can seem comically harsh:

Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded with paltry

interests—in one word, so anti-poetic—as the life of a man in the
United States. (DIA, p. 74)
But in fact Tocqueville, after observing that the principle of equality
“has dried up most of the old springs of poetry,” proceeds to ask “what
new ones it may disclose.” Legends of heroes and gods or angels and
demons, old traditions and rituals, all viable material for the poet in
aristocratic societies, he says, will not serve poetry in America. He has
an interesting notion about the Šrst thing poets in the new world would
turn to:

When skepticism had depopulated heaven, and the progress of

equality had reduced each individual to smaller and better-known
proportions, the poets, not yet aware of what they could substitute
for the great themes that were departing together with the aristoc-
racy, turned their eyes to inanimate nature. As they lost sight of gods
and heroes, they set themselves to describe streams and moun-
tains.…Some have thought that this embellished delineation of all
the physical and inanimate objects which cover the earth was the
kind of poetry peculiar to democratic ages. But I believe this to be an
error, and that it belongs only to a period of transition.
I am persuaded that in the end democracy diverts the imagination
from all that is external to man and Šxes it on man alone. Democra-
tic nations may amuse themselves for a while with considering the
productions of nature, but they are excited in reality only by a survey
158 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

of themselves. Here, and here alone, the true sources of poetry

among such nations are to be found.…
Among a democratic people poetry will not be fed with legends or
the memorials of old traditions.…All these resources fail him; but
Man remains, and the poet needs no more. The destinies of mankind,
man himself taken aloof from his country and his age and standing in
the presence of Nature and of God, with his passions, his doubts, his
rare prosperities and inconceivable wretchednesses, will become the
chief, if not the sole, theme of poetry among these nations. (DIA, pp.
75–76)

And in a rather ringing Šnal paragraph to his chapter, Tocqueville con-

cludes:

Such are the poems of democracy. The principle of equality does not,
then, destroy all the subjects of poetry: it renders them less numer-
ous, but more vast.
From these provocative ideas, rich in implications to develop or refute,
suggesting an abundance of examples and suggestions, I would like for
now to extract only one main notion of Tocqueville’s chapter, as it is ger-
mane to the Favorite Poem Project: the relation between the ancient art
of poetry and democratic culture. I mean the ideas that take him from
the characterization “petty,…insipid…antipoetic” to the ringing con-
clusion about “the destinies of mankind” and materials “less numerous,
but more vast.”
Those formulations suggest useful insights into American litera-
ture. For instance, how does the poetry of Whitman or Dickinson con-
Šrm or refute Tocqueville’s expectation that American poetry would
reach for profundity not through historical Šgures, heroes and legends,
and not through gods or demons and angels, but by concentration on
the individual soul? Can it be that this young Frenchman in effect actu-
ally predicted Whitman and Dickinson? And what about Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow’s conscious effort to create American legends
and heroes? Or Herman Melville’s? But my subject for the moment is
poetry less in relation to American poets than to American readers and
reading.
The response to the Favorite Poem Project has surprised me, in its
scale and its intensity. With very little publicity, the invitation to name
a poem one would be willing to read aloud for an audio and video archive,
and to say a few sentences about the poem’s personal signiŠcance, pro-
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 159

duced more than eighteen thousand written responses. (These letters

and e-mails themselves are an interesting archive.) In fact, my co-work-
ers on the project and I closed the invitation at that point, before the Šrst
CNN television piece about the project, because too many letters would
have overwhelmed our selection process, which rested on a few graduate
student screeners.
My Šrst names for the undertaking were along the lines of “The Say
a Poem Project” and various ideas incorporating the phrase “giving
voice.” These titles all seemed cumbersome or corny, and it was my co-
editor Maggie Dietz and Sam Miller of the New England Foundation
for the Arts, our Šrst sponsor, who came up with “Favorite Poem,” a
title that emphasizes the second of the two principles, vocality and au-
tonomy, guiding the project.
As editor, my goals included maintaining a certain level of literary
quality, without merely imposing my own tastes; also, representing a
range of ages, regions, ethnicities, economic classes, kinds of education.
Additionally, Maggie Dietz and I decided that although certain writers
and kinds of writing should be represented (for example, African-Amer-
ican poets, Dickinson and Whitman, Shakespeare) the poems should
not all be American. Indeed, to rešect American readers and culture—
people devoted to Rainer Maria Rilke or Pablo Neruda in translation,
for example, and people with native tongues other than English—it
would be necessary to include poems written in many different lan-
guages. That decision was consistent with the terms of our National
Endowment for the Arts grant: to create a portrait of the United States,
in the year 2000, through the lens of poetry.
Another question I hoped the project would explore is the place of
poetry in relation to a tremendously powerful, often brilliant and cer-
tainly elaborate mass culture. In one way or another, every American
poet and reader must respond to that amazing constellation of genius
and vulgarity, vitality and turpitude, of which the greatest products,
perhaps, are jazz and the American feature Šlm.
I Šnd some insight into that question in letters sent to the project, as
quoted in the anthology along with the poems, and in the statements of
people we recorded reading poems. John Doherty, in his initial corre-
spondence, wrote the sentence “I guess a ditchdigger who reads Shake-
speare is still just a ditchdigger.” And indeed, in the video segment, we
see him digging a ditch, wearing his hard hat, as part of his work as a con-
struction worker for the Boston Gas Company. After talking briešy
160 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

about his work, he reads some well-chosen selections from Whitman’s

“Song of Myself.” “Poetry,” he says in his remarks, “was deŠnitely intim-
idating at Šrst. It just looked like a lot of words that were out of order and
out of place, that did not belong together.” He adds, “It takes a lot of
reading and re-reading to grasp it.”
I believe that in many countries social constraints of one kind or an-
other might suppress or temper this candor, requiring more respect or
less discovery. This freedom to judge the art of poetry itself as a con-
sumer, intimidated by the art’s difŠculty but not by its social prestige or
authority, feels American to me, for good or ill. It is echoed by a number
of the participants, including Seph Rodney, who early in his unforget-
table discussion of Sylvia Plath’s “Nick and the Candlestick” remarks
that he had always thought of poetry as merely “grandiose” and “for
want of a better term, a high-falutin’…not very real way of using lan-
guage.” Like Doherty on Whitman, Rodney on Plath presents his at-
tachment to her work as a kind of conversion experience to poetry itself.
Poetry’s place in the world and in a particular life seems more self-
evident and authoritative for some of the participants who came here
from other places, such as Lyn Aye, the Burmese-American anesthesiol-
ogist in San Jose, who reads a poem by Zawgee in Burmese and in Eng-
lish translation, or Jayashree Chatterjee, the New Jersey librarian who
reads Rabindranath Tagore in Bengali and in English.
What is striking in all four of these instances is a note of personal
conviction in both the delivery of the poem selected and the statements
about the poem. The slightly accented Burmese and Indian voices both
speak about exile or loss of place, and in what I consider another charac-
teristic American gesture they select poems that simultaneously sharpen
and soothe those feelings of immigrant dislocation.
In short, the intimacy and introspection of these readers, in their ap-
proach to the poems they read, correspond to Tocqueville’s proposition
about poetry in a democracy. The subject of each poem as they describe
it begins with the condition of a soul: material, to borrow Tocqueville’s
terms, more “vast” for each reader than it is various or “numerous.”
(Though an overall variety characterizes the undertaking as a whole.)
Concentration on the individual human soul is audible in the con-
struction worker’s remarkable reading of Whitman’s closing passage.
The poem’s familiar, bizarre mixture of grandiloquence and comedy,
egotism and generosity, takes on new overtones as the young man in the
video, sitting on an earth-mover, reads the Šrst-person lines:
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 161

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me…he complains of my

gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed.…I too am untranslatable,

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,

It šings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadowed
wilds.
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air.…I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,

I effuse my šesh in eddies and drift it in lacy jags.

Whitman’s vision of his death and his endurance are insightfully read
by Doherty as an address to the reader, on a quite practical level. “You
will hardly know who I am or what I mean,” he reads, and “Failing to
fetch me at Šrst keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search an-
other, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.” This advice was written, and
in this instance was read, in a particular spirit of direct address, an im-
mediacy that means to redeŠne poetry itself, and views the personal oc-
casion as transcendent.
The mass medium of video, perhaps paradoxically, thus dramatizes
something I consider crucial about the medium of poetry: a poem takes
for its medium the reader’s breath and hearing. That is, even in silent
reading, the reader imagines the sounds of the words and sentences.
When I read a poem, aloud or not, I am aware of it as something to say,
or that could be said. The vehicle for that awareness is in my bodily
senses—the vehicle also for memory, as when I chant the phone number
or the grocery list, some evolutionary link between vocal rhythm and re-
called information.
The reader is not merely the performer of the poem, but an actual,
living medium for the poem. In relation to mass media, this distinction
seems to me crucial: if the medium is any one reader’s voice, or any one
reader’s ears, then the art is by its nature, inherently, on an individual
and personal scale. In that intimacy and human presence reading a poem
resembles a live performance, as distinct from a mass-produced image
such as a movie. But insofar as its text is Šxed, the poem is distinctly less
ephemeral than the live performance. Poetry’s dual qualities of human
scale and permanence are roughly parallel to the dread of homogenizing
162 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

uniformity on one side and the fragmented life of the Cyclopes on the
other side. That is why poetry’s voice—its literal, actual voice—takes
on a heightened poignancy, and a heightened value, in a culture rich in
dazzling performative art that is produced, duplicated and marketed on
a mass scale. In the setting of mass culture, the voice of poetry, in ways
show business cannot, embodies something crucial: an essential respect
for individuals.
To put this another way, I have been surprised to Šnd from this proj-
ect that in a perhaps unique sense one can see a person read a poem. That
is, I can watch your face while you listen to music, watch a movie or look
at visual art—but I am not witnessing your experience of that work.
The same goes for watching a reader deep in a novel. To watch someone
saying a poem aloud can be to witness that person’s experience of the
poem. The readers in the videos, though they know that they are being
Šlmed, make visible the intimate and individual nature of the art. Their
“performances” of the poems are not actorly presentations of the poem’s
emotions and ideas—though those are surely present—but something
subtly and crucially different from that: presentations of what it is like
to read a particular poem.
Tocqueville’s speculations about equality, on one hand, and on the
other contemporary mass culture with its emphasis on performance, on
lavish spectacle and reproduction, combine to make me hear with spe-
cial urgency the particular reader’s voice: its regional accent, its sense of
an individual life, and its respect for the words, as it utters:

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,

But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And Šlter and Šber your blood.

The poem, which is neither its performance nor its characters on a page,
is what takes place as a reader literally or Šguratively gives voice to the
lines, rendering the cadences and the unique currents and energies of
the syntax, apprehending the movement of the meanings.
When the Favorite Poem Project has been described approvingly
as “populist” I have felt uncomfortable, because I know that our ap-
proach was in essential ways elitist. There is a generation that loves
the writing of Robert Service, and some of them wrote to us, and some
of their grandchildren wrote to us about Shel Silverstein. Some from
the generations between those two wrote to us about Rod McKuen, or
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 163

the lyrics of Bob Dylan—all part of the larger archive of letters and e-
mails, but not represented in the book or the recordings, by Šat of us
editors.
On the other hand, we were guided by respect for the ways nonpro-
fessional readers read and the ways they describe their reading. This ele-
ment of the project has excited some negative judgment. Pov Chin, a
teenager from California who is represented both in the anthology and
in the videos, wrote:

My interpretation of this poem written by Langston Hughes may

not be the same as his. But a poem is what I choose to make of it and
this one is a description of me. It explains how I feel about life.
A reviewer of the book took this statement as his leading example of a
defect he found in it. After quoting these sentences, he writes:

This theme—this is a description of me—occurs again and again.…

Rather than letting poems draw us out of ourselves, making us
larger and broader, we are encouraged to make the poems smaller so
that we can take them inside us and, in a literal sense, comprehend
them.…Pinsky and Dietz may simply have assumed that the only
way to sell poetry to Americans is to appeal to their inherent narcis-
sism. (Troy Jollimore, Boston Book Review [March 2000])

In its way, this makes a certain sense. (The reviewer, incidentally, quotes
de Tocqueville about American pettiness and self-centeredness, but not
about the more vast subjects for poetry.) The terms of the Favorite Poem
invitation did invite the volunteers to say something about their partic-
ular, personal reasons for selecting the poem. Indeed, the explicit crite-
rion we developed for selection was the intensity and interest of what
the person had to say about the poem. It could be argued that this edi-
torial inclination vulgarized the project, or at least distorted it toward
the personal or introspective, and away from the poem as a means of dis-
covery about the world, or as a highly developed work of art.
But the cliche of American narcissism does not adequately describe
what these people actually say. Let me return to the example of Pov
Chin, who says of a poem that it is “a description of me.” Her voice and
accent in the video are those of a California teenager, and this prefatory
statement of hers (a statement I think of difŠdence) can sound glib or
self-centered. The poem is an extremely short one by Langston Hughes,
far from his most impressive work:
164 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

Minstrel Man

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long?

Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter,
You do not hear
My inner cry?
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die?
The little paradigm of this poem, as plain as a folk song, takes on rich
overtones and vibrations in relation to the American minstrel tradition
of blackface—makeup that was sometimes worn by black, as well as
white, performers. The grinning minstrel-show performer, bursting
with joy, represents a terrible and complicated process of cultural appro-
priation and distortion, all sorts of sublimated guilts and envies and
myths, comforting and disturbing.
Of all that, the high school student Pov Chin appears to be unaware.
When she found the poem and copied it out, she tells us, she had not
heard of Langston Hughes. It is not clear if she knew at the time that he
was African-American, or what the information signiŠes to her, partic-
ularly since she was born in Laos of Cambodian parents. Yet what she
says about the poem is germane, and perhaps increases one’s respect for
the poem. In the book, she writes:

…I am not free. I am a female Cambodian growing up in America

but I am raised in the old-fashioned Cambodian ways. Asian tradi-
tion for daughters is very strict. It is so hard for me to see my friends
having a sleep-over and the only person missing is me. I walk around
school with a big smile on my face but inside I am a caged bird just
waiting to be free. Life has never been easy for me especially with my
parents’ problems. Their problems started during the Khmer Rouge
genocide in the early ’70s. Two of their sons passed away in front of
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 165

their faces, killed by the Khmer Rouge. They still had the courage to
get out of Cambodia and Šnd refuge for us in America.
This is not literary criticism, nor does it pretend to be. But the word for
it is not “narcissism,” either, and as an explanation of why the writer val-
ues “Minstrel Man” by Langston Hughes, it is forceful and appropriate.
The association of freedom and cultural restraint with performance and
the equation of “big smile” with being caged represent an insightful
tribute to Hughes’s poem. To the extent that Pov Chin didn’t know
much about the author, it is remarkably intuitive. Even the exclusion
from the American high school custom of sleep-overs and the delicate
euphemism “passed away” for the murdered children testify to a rich
and respectful relation to the poem.
The distinction between the narcissistic and the personal, abun-
dantly clear in this letter quoted in the anthology, is even more clear in
the video segment artfully Šlmed by Emiko Omori. In the opening shot
Pov Chin begins speaking in the foreground; in the background, behind
her, we see a suburban-looking interior and Šrst a television set playing
something with Asian faces and then, as the camera pans upward, the
seated Šgure of a woman. This watchful Šgure, present throughout the
shot, is Pov Chin’s mother, silently following the interview as though
she is not about to let this, one of her remaining children, out of her
sight. We see a shrine, and some incense being lit and some family pho-
tographs: of children posing in front of a very modest house; of an un-
smiling elderly woman.
A notable aspect of Pov Chin’s narration comes with her explanation
that during the family ordeal and the murder of the little boys she was
not yet born; the mother was pregnant. “It was not only us,” she says, “it
was my granny, too, and they killed my granny.” The Šrst person plural
of “only us” is striking to me: “they rounded us up,” she says at another
point. This unself-conscious Šrst person plural, like the watching ma-
ternal Šgure, embodies the powerful familial and social component of
the sentences quoted in the anthology and echoes similar questions of
the generic and the individual, inside and outside, cultural cage and
cultural sustenance, in Hughes’s poem. “I am not free” is related to
“they rounded us up”; both sentences acknowledge the great conun-
drum of each person’s connection to others. Whatever one understands
that “we” to represent, it is not narcissism.
I have quoted a somewhat negative response to the project (and the
review I’ve quoted from is in fact only partly negative) less to argue with
166 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

it or to score points against it than to suggest the range of cultural and

literary responses that this undertaking has called up, partly by acci-
dent. A scrap about an anthology, or about what is narcissistic, what is
personal, is one eddying current in a great šood of ambiguities and agi-
tations. My proposition is that the reviewer’s gesture against a leveling
uniformity and the Favorite Poem Project’s gesture toward a unifying
cultural ground, though they seem like opposite actions, both express a
defense of shared memory.
A successful, inventive mass culture, together with Tocqueville’s
“principle of equality” from which the mass culture partly grows, cre-
ates a certain need to deŠne, and perhaps construct, the social place of an
ancient art. This pressure should not be seen as merely negative: it, too,
is enabling as well as controlling. The mass culture itself struggles to
adjust memory and change, and like the poets sometimes it succeeds
and sometimes it collapses into pretension or banality. In the absence of
the settled aristocratic idea, and in the absence of the unifying folk-cul-
ture, Americans have been pressed to supply new forms of memory. Re-
sponding to this pressure, Whitman became somewhat broken-hearted
by his inability to create (and Šll) the role of national bard. That sadness
was reenforced for me by my own surprise at how journalists responded
to President Clinton’s gift of Leaves of Grass to Monica Lewinsky: they
thought of Whitman not as the quintessential American poet, but as
the author of a rather hot book.
Nonetheless, the vacuum or pressure that created and frustrated
Whitman’s ambitions also inspired his poetry. And the unsettled place
of poetry has continued to inspire great works as well as blather and de-
spair: the poetry of both William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens,
for example, can be seen as growing more or less explicitly out of the
question of poetry’s place in national manners. “The spirit and space,”
writes Stevens in his poem “The American Sublime”: “The empty
spirit / In vacant space. / What wine does one drink? / What bread does
one eat?” To take a less sublime example, improvising the Šgurative
bread, the wine, the place, Americans have invented Creative Writing,
with all of its still-evolving virtues and defects. The audio recordings,
videos and anthology of the Favorite Poem Project are one more gesture
of this kind of improvisation, and in some measure give an account of it,
as well.
I’m afraid that to make my point I may have exaggerated the
uniqueness of the United States. All culture, after all, like any living
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 167

person’s memory, perpetually adds and rearranges, drops and inšects its
material: it is a process of change, not a static entity or a list of works.
The more I knew about Iran and India, the more, I am sure, I would
have to modify my assumptions about Persian and Bengali poetry, the
more šux and ambiguity I would perceive.
Still, American culture as I have experienced it seems so much in
process, so brilliantly and brutally in motion, that standard models for it
fail to apply. The Mandarin notion of a privileged elite preserving cul-
tural goods on an old-world model is swamped by the demotic genius of
characteristic makers like Whitman, Duke Ellington, Buster Keaton.
The Arnoldian model of cultural missionaries bringing along the masses
wilts not only for the same reason but because modern political history
has discredited the notion that intellectual or artistic Šgures can auto-
matically serve as moral leaders. The Mandarin’s complementary oppo-
site, the Philistine model, would accept the marketplace entirely: what-
ever is consumed, is good. This idea collapses before the omnivorous,
strangely vaunting aspiration of actual Americans—with the Favorite
Poem Project one current example. Another model, the idea of mass cul-
ture as our only real culture, cannot do because culture is a process of
memory, and as mass cultural products speed by, the popular culture of
each decade is winnowed to be preserved in the care of universities, li-
braries, foundations. A serious task of criticism is to assist in that win-
nowing process. In the archives of curatorship, classic jazz and silent
comedy and blues await any of the best of our sitcoms or rap performers
that deserve remembering. And the model of American culture as a
mere confederation of ethnic or regional or religious or gender-based
cultures cannot sufŠce because all of our greatest achievements—a poem
by Dickinson or a chorus by Charlie Parker—are as mixed, syncretic and
eclectic as our inventions in food or clothing. In that polyglot, heuristic
and erratic šux, each of the nonprofessional readers of this poetry pro-
ject, anchored by the vocal attachment to a poem, offers a still point.
In my second lecture, I will try to trace certain ways that American
poets of the past century have brought social materials, and even a kind
of social comedy, into the introspective lyric poem: expanding, and per-
haps breaking through, the prescient terms of Alexis de Tocqueville.
But I hope it will be appropriate, in relation to what I have said, to end
with a personal response to a poem. The project asks for “a” favorite, not
one single favorite. I will say a little about my own attachment to one of
perhaps a hundred poems I might have chosen.
168 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

When I arrived at Rutgers from a town on the New Jersey Shore, the
Šrst person in my family to attend college, I found something lordly and
exhilarating in the assumption that I was entitled to read the greatest
works of art. Though I understood William Butler Yeats’s “Sailing to
Byzantium” only imperfectly, I recognized something of the spiritual
force Yeats attributes to such monuments of magniŠcence. “Once out of
nature,” I read, and that phrase meant immeasurably more to me than
after I die. “Once out of nature I shall never take / My bodily form from
any natural thing, / But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make / From
hammered gold and gold enameling.”
I can echo Pov Chin here, and say that whatever Yeats meant by these
lines, they described me. The alien, elaborate texture of his invented
Byzantium, the remoteness from me of the historical Byzantium and of
Yeats himself, the stylized and perhaps even absurd image of the me-
chanical bird—all the strangenesses I heard in the poem—seemed to
gain force from their very distance. Those golden quanta of artiŠce were
not American, they were not of New Jersey, they were neither Christian
nor Jewish. But the act of putting those strange forms into my actual or
inner voice seemed to recognize something already in me—perhaps the
past, all the history that had been assimilated unconsciously and in a
blur, but in a unique and individuating blur.
The voice of the poem was, precisely, a “bodily form.” Because that
form could embrace my experience with magisterial ferocity, it spoke to
anxieties that perhaps preŠgured this lecture’s notion of cultural anxi-
eties about fragmentation and sameness. Half-comprehended phrases
like “the artiŠce of eternity” suggested that the soul did not have to be
lost in an enveloping mass, nor isolated as a provincial—one was not
necessarily doomed to be a cipher or a galoot. The imagined city of
Byzantium’s differences from what might seem my nature called up
that nature—a particular soul tied to a particular dying animal—in a
way that, say, a work about Jewish lads from New Jersey whose grand-
fathers were barkeepers, might not.
The voice of artiŠce, I secretly half-dared to think, had always been
there. Now, maybe, it was ready to wake up and guide what I hoped
would be a progress of the natural thing I thought I had been as a child
and high school pupil, toward the shimmering world of art, encompass-
ing classical learning and television, a world of hammered phrases and
dying animals, of gold and enamel and neon, a world that included and
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 169

transformed all, where the drowsy emperor of the will might become
alert, where memory endlessly discovered semblances and distinctions:
the world, in a word, of poetry.

II

I want to say something about social reality in American poetry of the

twentieth century. Alexis de Tocqueville formulated American poetry
as introspective, concentrated on the aperture of the individual soul; I
mean to look at ways the poetry of the past century has turned his for-
mulation inside-out. Tocqueville wrote:

The destinies of mankind, man himself taken aloof from his country
and his age and standing in the presence of Nature and of God, with
his passions, his doubts, his rare prosperities and inconceivable
wretchedness, will become the chief, if not the sole, theme of poetry.
(DIA, vol. 1, p. 76)

The story of twentieth-century American poetry could be told as a series

of brilliant inventions for including material not “aloof” from country
or age: not so much departing from Tocqueville’s larger deŠnition as ex-
tending and deepening it to include manners and community.
I’ll begin with some general speculations about social reality and the
nature of poetry.
Dire abandonment, I have read, often makes institutionalized souls,
especially children, croon and rock rhythmically, a heartbroken ritual
music, fearsomely minimal. A medical name for this behavior is auto-
stimulation. The embarrassing hint of masturbation in that term, the
grotesque unease or nervous giggle of that association, perhaps reveals an
eerie recognition. Just outside the membrane enclosing that wounded
isolation, made visible by contrast, is my ordinary consciousness: en-
gaged yet furtive, communicative yet shamed, teeming with a host of
wants and taboos—the word “taboo” embodying the price of our
charmed admission to the world of social stimuli. The regular cadence of
the outcast creates a rudimentary other, an illusion of response, that we
recognize; the covert sexual fantasies of what we call normal life are only
one example of a similar principle at work.
170 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

On what I’ll call a more formal level, the regular, monotonous chant
recalls certain vocalizations of normal, humdrum solitude: little repeti-
tious charms of invocation amid the frustration of some misplaced
object—keys keys keys keys keys; the staccato repetition of a one-syllable
obscenity, like a muttered ceremony of rage or desperation; the happier
spells of celebration recited at good news or some gratifying experience
(yes yes yes yes yes); and—perhaps most interesting of all, and closest to
the cadenced moans of the devastated—the little half-sung noises made
to ease a painful awareness of embarrassment. I confess that remember-
ing a fetid, grade-A faux pas can make me half-whisper a syllable like
“dah” in prestissimo monotone to the rhythm of The Stars and Stripes For-
ever or The Mexican Hat Dance.
These ephemeral proto-poems share an interesting duality with the
auto-stimulation of total distress. The unvarying, solitary rocking or
crooning, with its reduction or stylization, perhaps substitutes mimeti-
cally for its opposite: a varying, attentive social presence, listening as I
lament my lost car keys, curse my mistake or celebrate the letter an-
nouncing good news for me.
The instance of embarrassment is more complex: the tuneless tune I
murmur brings back the social world where I brought shame on myself,
and imitates the all-too-responsive real presence of others, but in a rudi-
mentary, dwindling simulacrum that distracts me from the awfulness of
the actual remembered scene. And this little mimesis, like the cadenced
grunts of loss, has its parallel in poetry.
Nervous muttering resembles a work of art in that it simultaneously
sharpens and dislocates a feeling, calling it up but transforming it,
maybe blunting it a little by incorporation. Insofar as rhythm and repe-
tition accomplish this double action, the little repeated, one-word
proto-poem differs signiŠcantly from anecdote. Anecdote is sociable;
perhaps narrative itself is sociable. Life among others in a novel, even a
novel entirely in dialogue, is in some essential way told-about. The
novel overtly tells us what people say and do, immersing us in social re-
ality with an illusion of presentation. In a play, presentation is actual:
communal reality, in theatrical performance, exists both as though it
were happening and as actually happening.
In a poem, the social realm is invoked with a special intimacy at the
involuntary level of voice itself. Communal life, whether explicitly in-
cluded or not, is present implicitly, in the cadences and syntax of lan-
guage: a somatic ghost. In such a theory, the Industrial-Revolution art
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 171

form, Šction, rešects the conversation or letters of middle-class people

in a town or city—the panicked verbosity of Pamela, the homey enu-
merations of Crusoe, the word-wound, shopper-like roaming of Leopold
Bloom, all create a social scene from the manufactured web of discourse.
The older form of theater is more like a ritual: performance creating ac-
tual presences. Maybe that is why theater so often involves the cloying
yet somehow apt word “magic.” The social world in poetry, according to
this paradigm, is neither told about nor presented: it is, precisely, in-
voked: brought into being by the voice. Incantation, rather than ritual.
Real works blur and explode such distinctions, defying tidy generic
modes of social reality. So too do new forms: Šlm art and opera, both of
them inšuencing and inšuenced by literature, can give presence a virtu-
ally assaultive vividness, as enveloping and šuid as dreams. Technolo-
gies like Šlm and broadcast media dismantle any tidy deŠnition of art
forms from without, as artists do from within. We routinely recognize
qualities in a novel as “poetic” or in a poem as “novelistic” or “dramatic.”
Nevertheless, the kinds of art retain attributes, with characteristic
terrains—and something deep in poetry operates at the borderland of
body and mind, sound and word: region of the subtle knot that John
Donne says makes a man. George Oppen calls up that transitional terri-
tory in the Šfth section of his poem “Of Being Numerous,” with bold
contrasts and overlaps among physical fact, cultural artifact and mind
itself:

The great stone

Above the river

In the pylon of the bridge

‘1875’

Frozen in the moonlight

In the frozen air over the footpath, consciousness

Which has nothing to gain, which awaits nothing,

Which loves itself.

This passage gains in physicality from the abstract—or at least formal

—chiasmic arrangement of vowel-sounds and words in the phrases
“frozen in the moonlight in the frozen air” and “nothing to gain, which
awaits nothing.” Pronouncing such symmetries audibly, or feeling their
172 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

virtual sound, quickens our sense of physical breath stirring into social
speech: the poetic quality that poets writing about their art have associ-
ated with a conversation heard through a door, a drunken song a few
streets away, a distant singer in a foreign tongue. The chiasm of “noth-
ing to gain…awaits nothing” is an artifact like the bridge, recognized
before it is interpreted.
Even a dramatic monologue, or a narrated dialogue like Robert
Frost’s “Home Burial,” makes its voice or voices present to our imagi-
nation partly in the half-conscious way I have attributed to poetry:
somatically, by invocation, by something linked to the rešex of auto-
stimulation or of its diametric twin embarrassment, a mimesis in rhyth-
mical sound of social life. In Frost’s poem, the blank verse becomes more
than a vehicle; it is a physical presence: as corporeal as the infant’s corpse
at the center of the poem’s marital argument, and as conventional as the
social world that surrounds and inŠltrates that same argument. The
play of the social and the intuitive is part of the couple’s contention, and
it is manifest in their voices:

‘God, what a woman! And it’s come to this,

A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead,’

‘You can’t because you don’t know how to speak.

If you had any feelings, you that dug
With your own hand—how could you?—his little grave;
I saw you from that very window there,
Making the gravel leap and leap in air,
Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly
And roll back down the mound beside the hole.
I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.
And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs
To look again, and still your spade kept lifting.
Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice
Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why,
But I went near to see with my own eyes.
You could sit there with the stains on your shoes
Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave
And talk about your everyday concerns.
You had stood the spade up against the wall
Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.’

‘I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed.

I am cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.’
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 173

This passage of fewer than two hundred words—barely room for a prose
narration to clear its throat—establishes forcefully the two contending
people with their agonized grief, and within both of the agonists two el-
ements contending for recognition: physical reality on one side, and
sensitive decorum or ceremony on the other. Both elements are in the
verse. The extreme compression, the more remarkable because the dia-
logue is credible as speech, is enabled by a physical component, by the
artist’s arrangements of vocal noises at the threshold of consciousness.
The occasional end-rhyme is the least of it: “I saw you from that very
window there, / Making the gravel leap and leap in air, / Leap up, like
that, like that, and land so lightly / And roll back down the mound be-
side the hole.” Analysis can trace such steps only clumsily and approxi-
mately: it is not only the syncopation of repeated words, and not only
the vowel in “down the mound” but the contrasting vowel of “hole” that
ends the sentence with a rather thudlike rhyme on “roll.”
In a way the most powerful moment in this conversation is a strange,
apparent irrelevance, just before the closing. She has said that “one is
alone” and “dies more alone,” that “Friends make pretense of following
to the grave, / But before one is in it, their minds are turned.” His speech
in response culminates in the bizarre line, “Amy! There’s someone com-
ing down the road!”
After what she has just said about the underlying frailty, even
hypocrisy, of human attachments—“The world’s evil”—his sudden, ex-
clamatory concern about a passing neighbor or stranger is grotesque,
pathetic, absurd in a way that I think is precisely like life. Embarrass-
ment—a halting consciousness of other people, the sudden barricade of
social awareness, obstructing emotion and threatening to take over the
mind—is in a way the most basic, irreducible manifestation of social re-
ality. For Frost’s characters it is both an obtrusion on their argument and
part of its essence. In this unexpected line, bursting from the character
as he is about to be left, embarrassment and abandonment join.
To some extent, poetry cannot exclude the social realm because po-
etry’s very voice evokes the attentive presence of some other, or its lack.
And in twentieth-century American poetry’s incorporation of explicit
social material, the tension of embarrassment and abandonment recurs.
Perhaps the most widely admired poem named by participants in the
Favorite Poem Project, appealing to readers of very different ages and
levels of sophistication, is “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a poem
174 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

that probes social isolation and social terror with tremendous eloquence.
Many high school students seem to intuit that the poem was written by
a very young man—T. S. Eliot inventing a middle-aged, Šrst-person
protagonist as vehicle for the sexual and social difŠdence of youth.
Eliot’s poem is of course about many other things as well: for exam-
ple, it is about culture as a burden, as oppressively controlling and dis-
couraging as it is enabling, perhaps more so. Prufrock in this sense is
very close to the Šgure of the exhausted aesthete, the wistful dandy. If he
had conŠdence, he might be a dandy. For the dandy, experience is some-
what tainted or corrupted by culture. (Though Oscar Wilde might
reverse that statement.) As embarrassment is akin to abandonment—
feeling excessively distinct from the attentive social world—the aes-
thete’s jadedness is a feeling of sameness. In the terms of Wallace
Stevens’s “The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad”:

Mildew of summer and the deepening snow

Are both alike in the routine I know
This is partly the voice of the nineteenth-century or Romantic life of
sensation, in a state of exhaustion. It is an exaggerated, comic version of
the pre-modern poets—Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ernest Dow-
son?—who were the immediate predecessors of the Modernist genera-
tion. Frost parodies that hyper-sensitive aesthete in himself, writing in
“To Earthward,”

I craved strong sweets, but those

Seemed strong when I was young.
The petal of the rose
It was that stung.

The expressively inverted syntax, “The petal of the rose / It was that
stung,” is like a gently derisive tone of voice.
What is the point of parodying the dandy or aesthete in oneself, for
Stevens or Frost? It is, partly, a way of parodying both poetry itself and
the American culture that has no ready place for poetry. Like embarrass-
ment, like the warning “There’s someone coming down the road!” it ac-
knowledges the presence of others and the tension aroused by that
presence. I hear this serious joke on the voice of poetry in William Car-
los Williams, too. In “These,” a poem partly about pathos and death, he
writes the terrible then momentarily comical lines:
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 175

the people gone that we loved,

the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused—

Hide it away somewhere

out of the mind, let it get roots

and grow, unrelated to jealous

ears and eyes—for itself.

In this mine they come to dig—all.
Is this the counterfoil to sweetest

music? The source of poetry that

seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped

that ticked yesterday so well?

Of course all clocks, before they stop, tick—presumably “well.” The

rhetorical question, repeating the observation, resembles the ancient
wisecrack about even a stopped clock being right twice a day. The poem
evokes the terror of death and loss, and then for a moment questions el-
egy and all other attempts to verbalize loss, as tautological or obvious.
“Stupidity” has been an element in the poem from the rhetorical snap of
its opening sentence:

THESE

are the desolate, dark weeks

when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.

The audacity of this, like the almost-parodic repetition of “the clock has
stopped,” has a virtuoso quality, in its deadpan, downright way almost
as dandiŠed as Stevens’s exotic ambushes of vocabulary. There is even a
note of the exquisite in the rareŠed word “counterfoil,” which sounds
like music or fencing but denotes the stub of a check, where the date and
amount are recorded.
Like one who recalls “The petal of the rose / It was that stung,” and
like the sensibility that Šnds the white of summer mildew and the
176 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

white of snow “alike,” Williams’s voice here momentarily concedes an

embarrassing absurdity in its discourse, and in the roots of its discourse.
The stopped clock once ticked well, then it stopped—poetry sees this
and in effect strikes its brow, speaking its question to marvel at the ob-
vious. It is a moment that places poetry into something a little like a
roomful of people, with Williams simultaneously among them, regard-
ing poetry as quizzically as any, but also presenting its power to them—
as he does with the two lines that follow the relatively comic question:

The source of poetry that

seeing the clocked has stopped, says
The clock has stopped

that ticked yesterday so well?

and hears the sound of lakewater
splashing—that is now stone.

With characteristic speed, restlessly varying idioms and levels, Wil-

liams takes the memorializing gesture from somewhat hapless record-
keeping—the counterfoil noting the stopped clock—to a somber
image, with a kind of classical dignity.
The aesthete, stung by the petal, seeing the mildew and the snow as
alike, is in a way the poet reduced to a social type. In these poems, a
touch of the hyperbolically exquisite allows poetry to acknowledge its
own nature: by some social standards, an art of preposterous, goofball
metonymies and far-fetched resemblances. In a mode that is a mirror-re-
versal of the dandyish, it sees that the clock has stopped and says, “the
clock has stopped,” adding that it ticked quite well yesterday. In each
case, a tiny particle of social comedy infuses a brilliant phrase. The self-
consciously dandyish and its mock-naive reversal both acknowledge po-
etry’s exorbitant, nearly embarrassing qualities and at the same time
make those qualities irresistible and even—because they have a social
meaning—somehow familiar.
Poetry, then, has roots in the moment when a voice makes us alert to
the presence of another or others. It has afŠnities with all the ways a soli-
tary voice, actual or virtual, imitates the presence of others. Yet as a form
of art it is deeply embedded in the single human voice, in the solitary
state that hears the other and sometimes re-creates that other. Poetry is
a vocal imagining, ultimately social but essentially individual and in-
ward.
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 177

Insofar as Tocqueville was prescient about American poetry’s con-

centration on the human soul, “aloof” from society and from ages, there
is perhaps a special drama in our poetry to this play between social and
individual, outward and inward voice.
Elizabeth Bishop delineates that drama explicitly and compactly in
the crucial passage of her poem “In the Waiting Room”:

Suddenly, from inside,

came an oh! of pain
—Aunt Consuelo’s voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

The voice comes “from inside”—inside the dentist’s ofŠce and inside
the child. The possible embarrassment (“I might have been…but
wasn’t”) may be prevented by the strangeness of this moment, which
could be a primal moment for poetry, or for individual consciousness, or
both. As she begins to faint, the child gazes at the undifferentiated land-
scape of “shadowy gray knees, / trousers and skirts and boots / and differ-
ent pairs of hands” and asks, “Why should I be my aunt, / or me, or
anyone? What similarities… / held us all together/ or made us all just
one.” The bizarre, alien assemblage of knees, boots, hands, as a vision of
the social world outside the self, fragmentary and dizzily provisional,
may be peculiarly American.
What makes us all one—and what makes us all different—seems
deeply involved with a voice: a voice that is both imagined and actual;
both inner and social; both mine and someone else’s; that separates me
and includes me. It will not do to sentimentalize this voice; at the cli-
max of Bishop’s poem is the sentence “The War was on.” Each of these
178 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

dualities involves struggle, perhaps even combat. But the voice of po-
etry is uniquely situated as audible yet not necessarily performative.
I have proposed in both of these lectures that the voice of poetry is
intimate, on an individual scale. It penetrates and in a sense originates
where the reader’s mind reaches toward something heard or uttered as
though vocality were one of the senses. This medium is different from
the poet’s intonations and personality shining forth at a poetry reading,
and different from a skilled actor’s gifts. It is inside a reader. It is vocal
and emotive and intellectual.
This intimacy and human scale have special meaning within a mass
culture extraordinarily rich in performance, with show business provid-
ing an industry, an aristocracy, an all-but-universal measure. American
mass culture is a mighty achievement, and its works have included po-
etry and been included in poetry. But American poetry also plays a vital
role as a contrast to mass culture, somewhat resistant precisely because
the poetic medium is essentially individual.
This contrast explains the frequency with which one is asked a cer-
tain question. In its various forms, it is the question that the news media
cannot resist asking any poet. Broadcast or print; highbrow, lowbrow or
middlebrow; national or local—uppermost in the reportorial mind is al-
ways the same inquiry, sometimes presented as the product of original
thought, a conceptual innovation. Like many cliches, the question picks
up the truth by precisely the wrong end, with the grip that cripples or
neuters.
The inevitable Question, however it is presented, amounts to:
shouldn’t poetry be part of show business? Or even, why does it seem
out of step with so much else? And because the query is wrongheaded,
one’s answers are always a bit feeble. It might be, “Have your poems
been set to music?” Well yes, but to paraphrase a great poet, I thought I
was doing that when I wrote them. Or, “What do you think of rap
music?” Don’t know much about it, but my guess is that as with “liter-
ary” poetry most of it is ordinary, a little of it is very good and a little is
contemptible. I have heard Yusef Komunyakaa express distrust of it in-
sofar as it makes a commodity out of rage. “And poetry slams?” Proba-
bly a good thing for poetry, though as part of the entertainment
industry poetry will always be cute and small; as an art it is immense
and fundamental. “How can I learn to read poems aloud?” By reading
poems—for instance, poems by Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley
Hopkins, among others who might not have been hits on the poetry
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 179

reading circuit. “Do you write for the page or for the stage?” I hope that
I compose with my voice, and that I read with my voice. I do own pens,
and word-processing equipment, and I use them.
But the interrogation is hopeless, because it begins with the as-
sumption that poetry’s tremendous strength, in the American context,
is its weakness. Poetry mediates, on a particular and immensely valu-
able level, between the inner consciousness of the individual reader and
the outer world of other people. To take poetry from that profound ter-
rain to a more familiar platform would be to tame it.
And perhaps American poetry, where society so often appears more
as an imagining than as an experience, is untamed in particular ways. It
has been proposed that while the United States is a great nation the
Americans are not—or not yet?—a great people. We are not deŠned by
blood and we are perhaps not yet deŠned by the alternative of shared
memory. The Constitution, the Civil War, the cultural achievements of
Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Duke Ellington, John Ford—are they,
quite, part of a shared memory? Do they supply the place of a mytho-
logical origin as dragon’s teeth or wolf-babies? In this view, even our
racial divisions are only one egregious part of the ongoing project of be-
coming a people.
In another way of looking at it, perhaps it is the spirit of American
culture to resist becoming “a people,” or to continue that project in-
deŠnitely, always morphing or discarding—not resting with, for exam-
ple, Longfellow’s Paul Revere and Hiawatha. In its way, the unlikely,
almost unreadable landscape of Bishop’s waiting room, prosaic yet
delirious, is more like a national myth, closer to Whitman’s barbaric
and unanticipated yawp. In the project of inventing a culture, or of an
ever-prolonged imagining one, the voice of poetry is essential because of
its unique place between silence and speech, between the single soul and
the community, between marketplace and dreamlife, between the past
and the breath of the living.
Culture, in all its forms of memory, can preserve us from excessive
sameness on one side and fanaticism about difference on the other side.
Culture also can be oppressive, even nightmarish: genocides, holocausts,
the destruction of ancient cultures, massacres, imperialisms, police
states and prison states all can be seen as cultural manifestations. Poetry
is not the voice of virtue and right thinking—not the rhyme depart-
ment of any progressive movement; in fact, great poets have espoused
repulsive politics. But the turns of verse, between justiŠed and ragged,
180 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

the regular and the unique, the spoken and the implied, the private and
the social, profoundly embody a quest—perhaps the democratic search,
and endless—for life between a barren isolation and an enveloping mass.
I will quote another poem—one I have written about before, in an
account of my home town on the Jersey Shore. My excuses for writing
about the poem again are aptness to the present subject and the poem’s
magniŠcence. Written near the beginning of the twentieth century by
Edwin Arlington Robinson, “Eros Turannos” epitomizes for me the tidal
forces within lyric poetry that draw it toward the social. The poem’s pe-
culiar, rather spectacular form embodies those forces and their “War,” as
Bishop calls it, with something private and interior.
Robinson’s poem begins with the situation of one person: a woman
who must choose between a love affair that she well knows will be a
calamity or no love affair at all. The extraordinary account of her psy-
chology turns out, partway through the poem, to be spoken by a
town:

EROS TURANNOS

She fears him, and will always ask

What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity

That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost.
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old tress

Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days—
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 181

Till even prejudice delays,

And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates

The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,

The story as it should be,
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We’ll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen,
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they

That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.

The poem’s astoundingly deployed rhymes make it a kind of hyper-

ballad: a ballad to the ballad power, as though the woman’s isolation and
shame call up some longing for a folk-tradition that her country does
not have. The Šrst-person plural impersonates the communal, but also
heightens the poem’s loneliness and lack. I take that sense of lack partly
from what I know of Robinson’s career. For the long Šrst part of it, he
was indigent, lonely, spurned by magazine editors, embittered with his
provincial town in Maine and with the New York where he also found
the going hard.
But on the other hand, the town does notice the woman’s fate, and
notices it with awe. On this subject, let me quote the letter about this
poem printed in Americans’ Favorite Poems—the only letter in the an-
thology that we print anonymously:
182 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

I discovered the poem many years ago as a newly married girl living
in a small town, which in fact possesses a harborside. My husband
had an intractable (it seemed then) drug and alcohol problem and
was away a lot for his job. I didn’t have a job at the time, knew no
one, and spent many days in solitude riding my bike, reading, and
rešecting on what my life had become since my decision to marry. I
did not then comprehend what the line “for they that with a god
have striven” meant. I just recognized completely the state of wish-
ing to be united with a man because of what I knew or thought I
knew about the onward years. I lived then and now in an ancient
house left me by my father, whose father left it to him, whose father
left it to him. It is one mile from the ocean, surrounded by old trees.
These facts made up no small part of my husband’s decision to marry
me. I copied that poem into the journal I kept then and it sits before
me on the table as I write. I have always felt the woman was as I was.
The knowledge that I’ve gained about “the god” has lent a retro-
spective dignity to events experienced as utter failure. The discovery
of the poem, with its eerily large number of coincidences with my
own situation, was like a gift, or maybe a clue in a giant game of cha-
rades, from “the god” himself, who saw he had perhaps misjudged
his opponent.

This personal account of the poem is as remarkable as the coincidences

it notes. Its viewpoint is perhaps more psychological and social than lit-
erary. The writer, for all her power and eloquence, does not choose to
consider the ways that the poem’s story may be Robinson’s story, a trans-
formed account of his own frustration, loneliness, dignity and rage. But
this insightful, anonymous letter also suggests something like the clas-
sical relation of tragic hero and community, or touches on that idea with
the words “a retrospective dignity.” In the poem, the community gains
a certain stature from its awareness that in it is one who has wrestled
with a god; the individual gains dignity from the witnessing of that
struggle. The man, who “waits and looks around him,” is in ways less
important than the god or the town. The poem is less about two people
than it is about one person, love as a ruling force, and a social setting.
The form of poetry in the poem, the chiming and symmetrically
swirling rhymes, creates the voice of a great solitude, a desolation that
communicates itself to the very landscape. “A sense of ocean and old
trees” is vague partly as a mocking evocation of the man who looks
around him, lightly comic in ways like those I have noted; but the
phrase also has a speciŠcity that relates it to Robinson’s concluding im-
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 183

age, the “stairway to the sea / where down the blind are driven.” The
nightmare ritual or šight suggested by that image implies a social
world more ancient or more fantastically barbarian than can be known.
The voice of the poem, in our heads and in our breath, brings that world
and the solitude of the protagonist together, with terror and majesty.
“Eros Turannos” was published in the same issue of Poetry magazine
as Carl Sandburg’s group of Chicago Poems, including “Chicago”—the
well-known anthology piece (it is in the Favorite Poem anthology), the
apostrophe that begins “Hog Butcher for the World” and ends “Freight
Handler to the Nation.” “Chicago” is not a bad piece of writing, though
by “anthology piece” I have indicated its limits. In no way does it begin
to equal “Eros Turannos” in emotion, in formal penetration or inven-
tion. But Sandburg’s group was made the leading item in that issue of
Poetry and that year received the magazine’s Levinson Prize, which Yvor
Winters in his book on Robinson says was “the most considerable prize
offered for poetry in the United States at that time” (Edwin Arlington
Robinson, p. 11).
This is very far from the most impressive anecdote about literary
awards and recognitions: it’s a familiar tale that Marcel Proust, Henrik
Ibsen and James Joyce all failed to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The lists of poet laureates include many ciphers. With the arrogance of
the living, we may deceive ourselves that nowadays we know better.
What’s germane here is the way these two poems approach their sub-
jects, and their implied subject of how poetry will situate itself in rela-
tion to American life.
It may be that the judges found Sandburg’s epithets and participles
vital: “Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-
naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher.…” Indeed, they may have
found his poem engaging and engaged precisely in relation to my sub-
ject in these lectures: poetry’s voice in American culture. Where “Eros
Turannos” might have seemed laudable but modest in scope, Sandburg’s
dithyrambic embrace of Chicago as “laughing with white teeth” may
have seemed not only original but avant-garde. (But avant-garde may be
a contradiction in terms in our culture, where the model of mass media
makes being part of some garde too available, and perhaps too prized,
when the crucial issue is, precisely, distinction.)
Comparison of the two poems helps deŠne a place for American
poetry, its profound role of both engaging and resisting the rather
Sandburg-esque giant of a society that is at once dazzling and banal,
184 The Tanner Lectures on Human Values

provincial and global, menacing and hopeful. Poetry’s voice participates

in that society and its culture, but by its nature also resists them: by na-
ture singular where they are plural, memory-driven where they are
heedless, personal where they are impersonal—luxuriously slow where
they are rushed, and thrillingly swift where they are plodding.
I speak as an enthusiast of modern life: I enjoy the possibilities of jet
travel, the DVD and the VCR, am devoted to my computer and my cell
phone, appreciate the marvels of contemporary plumbing, medicine,
dentistry. Like Frank Bidart in his recent poem “For the Twentieth Cen-
tury,” I am grateful for the technologies that make Callas, Laurel &
Hardy, Szigeti available at a touch of the PLAY button, turning their art
into “pattern, form / whose inŠnite / / repeatability within matter /
deŠes matter.” But the voice that appreciates the artists and the “thou-
sand / technologies of ecstasy” that preserve them is also idiosyncratic,
not duplicable, and resistantly inward as well as outward.
What Robinson resisted in 1911 was a provincial vacuum, the
nightmare of us small-town watchers who can gossip and tap our brows
but cannot make tragedies or ballads. A village stinginess haunts his
work and this poem in particular, recalling Tocqueville’s description of
American life: “Nothing conceivable is so petty, so insipid, so crowded
with paltry interests.” There is something heroic in Robinson’s simulta-
neous resistant loathing and meticulous love for the provincial settings
and Šgures he imagined, the lonely grandeur of his hypertrophied bal-
lad stanzas and saturated ironies. Sandburg has considerable merits, but
by comparison his poem’s rebellions are trivial, and its celebrations
coarse.
Robinson, like the hero of his poem, wrestled with something larger
than himself, and his wrestling deserves a grave and delighted commu-
nal awe. His command of speciŠcity and abstraction and his managing
of idiom and lines resist in an anticipatory way any invitation to make
American poetry something that goes down easily: a part of show busi-
ness, or a branch of literary theory, or any other diminished thing. I be-
lieve that there are great poems being written now, by living American
poets. Almost by deŠnition, such poems are grounded partly in resis-
tance. Almost by deŠnition, we may not be giving them laurels. “Eros
Turannos” is arresting and spectacular, in the chamber of spirit and ear
that I have suggested is the place of poetry. Its distinction answers a cul-
tural need as a more eager rhetoric of community cannot. In certain
ways “Eros Turannos” is in itself and in its place in the world a little
[Pinsky] American Culture and the Voice of Poetry 185

aloof, not automatically or easily visible. It is great as a work, negligible

as a commodity. That is the way of the world. Fortunately, art too has its
way: not tamed by expectation, untranslatable by journalism or ped-
antry, outlandish, even barbaric, sounding its yawps somewhere over
our worldly roofs, or beyond them.