I. Introduction and Methodology - Duke University · "Scaffolding to Something Else: Mythmaking and...

"Scaffolding to Something Else: Mythmaking and Celebration in an Early Durham Poetry Collection" Jack Bradford

Duke University Dec. 2015

I. Introduction and Methodology

1926 is the year Duke University Press published The Archive Anthology, a collection of

poems originally published in the university's literary magazine, the Archive. Although many of

the poems were written by students and professors who were not born in Durham and did not

live there, about a dozen poems were written by Durhamites. Though small and just a subset of

the poems found in the whole anthology, these poems form the first published collection of

poetry written in Durham by its citizens.1

With some poems in hand at last, I set out again to distill any essence of municipal

identity that could be found in them – any direct or indirect references to places in Durham,

political or economic strife, and the like. As before, the project was a combination of literary and

historical study. It did not take long to see, however, that the poems are less characterizations of

the city during the 1920s than verbal escapes from it. They are poems of praise for a natural

world that is both a conservative remnant of a pre-modern, pre-industrial North Carolina (a

conservatism exhibited by the traditional sonnet and lyric forms of the poems themselves) and

the literal fuel for the burgeoning lumber, tobacco, and textile industries that usher in the state's

modern, capitalist age. In other words, these poems are anti-historical; they trade in the vague

language and spaces of myth, not the geometric patterns of urban development that I had

imagined. This required inverting the critical dialogue with which I engaged: indeed, I found that

1 The anthology, unlike early editions of the Archive itself, includes short biographies of the poets. These are essential, considering that one could not be sure that poems in the Archive were written by Duke students from

Jack Bradford December 11, 2015

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I had argued against poststructuralist theories of authorship in such a way that I had come out the

other side with ideas that applied just as well to readership and criticism.

The centripetal force that made this inversion possible is myth. This is a word that is so

taxing to define that, ironically, though it may be the one term the poststructuralist theorists all

agree to use, they all define and use it disparately. I argue that the term is better defined

demonstrably than concretely, especially considering that the poems themselves are

demonstrations, rather than definitions, of myth. Nonetheless, the phrase I find most useful to

keep in mind as a cryptic, working definition of the term is "the unspoken force behind

intuition." Anything further I leave to the games I play with the critical theorists and the poems

to demonstrate.

What began as a historical study, then, has become theoretical. If I win a match here and

there with the critics, perhaps I have still lost the tournament: they drew me in, and, in the

reading, forced me away from historicism and to the more foundational study of what it means to

read and what it means to observe. Myths ensure that there is no text-in-itself: the reader and the

critic both participate in the creative process left unfinished by the artist. "All circumstances are

the Frame / In which His face is set," writes Emily Dickinson,

All Latitudes exist for His Sufficient continent. The light His Action and the dark The Leisure of His Will (450).

To study the light, then, is to study the historical: in the promise of new knowledge, expose what

is hidden in the shadows of language. I would rather play in the dark – reading and rewriting

these poems in my own mythology, even as I usher them out into the light.

To explain what is meant by "the dark" and Dickinson's "Leisure of His Will," I must

first examine the idea of criticism as a search for positive meaning – "the light." In other words, I


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set out on a course of contrast that forms the narrative structure of this study: criticism as

didacticism versus criticism as mirror; the real versus the mythic; industrial Durham versus the

university; the poems versus their analyses. Uniting them all, finally, is a theory of how art

comes to be made – even by a process ostensibly as receptive as reading. Darkness – the

rejection of ultimate meaning as based in the formal detail of a poem – is, after all, just another

measurement of light.

II. A Critical Mythology

"[H]ymns to the gods and praises of famous men are the only poetry which ought to be

admitted to our State," Plato's Socrates concludes in the Republic. "For if you go beyond this and

allow the honeyed Muse to enter, either in epic or lyric verse, not law and the reason of

mankind...but pleasure and pain will be the rulers in our State" (28). So begins the study of

poetry and the city in the Western tradition: lyric poems contain "cop[ied] images of virtue...but

have no contact with the truth" (24) and are therefore useless in the moral and spiritual education

of the citizenry. Poetry, then, should tap the vein of godly and virtuous experience, should very

nearly be written in ichor; if the poet does not have an experience to teach the reader, there is no

reason for his or her poems to be read.

Compare this to Michel Foucault's less didactic approach to authorship in the 1969 essay,

"What is an Author?" "[T]he author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with

infinite wealth and generosity, and inexhaustible world of significations....as soon as he speaks,

meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely" (988). For Plato's Socrates, meaning

cannot, should not, proliferate: the reader can only take from the poem a clearer image of his or


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her ideal self. Foucault acknowledges, however, that what we say an author does is not what the

presence of "an author" does to the reader: "...he is a certain functional principle by which, in our

culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation,

the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction" (988).

In short, our fictive tradition is bound Platonically; but whereas Socrates says that the lived

experience of the author places the author's work on one side of the true-false dichotomy,

Foucault asserts that although our scope has been expanded beyond merely truth and falsehood,

readers continue to limit texts' "proliferation of meaning" to the outer range of the authors'

biographies. Reproducing the questions Foucault imagines interpreters ask of an "authored" text

and "unauthored" text may be the pithiest way to explain his argument:

"What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects?"....And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: "What difference does it make who is speaking?" (988)

Two of these questions – "Where has it been used, how can it circulate..." – are essential to my

study, in that they suggest an approach to poetry beyond formalism. The places in which poetry

is "used" are the places in which poetry has the most meaning as a felt work of art. It is able to

"circulate" precisely because it stokes the passions of the reader while simultaneously providing

the language with which the reader can make sense of the world around her. This is not to say,

however, that it makes no difference who is speaking. In fact, it makes all the difference.

Consider the following poets and the time periods in which they wrote. Langston Hughes,

1951:

I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem. I went to school there, then Durham, then here to this college on the hill above Harlem (409).


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Wallace Stevens, 1923:

And thus he tossed Between a Carolina of old time, A little juvenile, an ancient whim, And the visible, circumspect presentment drawn From what he saw across his vessel's prow. [...] He inhaled the rancid rosin, burly smells of dampened lumber, emanations blown From warehouse doors, the gustiness of ropes, Decays of sacks, and all the arrant stinks That helped him round his rude aesthetic out (35-36).

Walt Whitman, 1860:

In lower latitudes in warmer air in the Carolinas the large black buzzard floating slowly high beyond the tree tops (318).

As one reads reverse-chronologically through the mainstream American poetic tradition, from

the time the name of the city of Durham first appears in verse by a major poet (Hughes in the

middle of the twentieth century) to the year before the Civil War and nine years before Durham

was incorporated (Whitman), North Carolinian cities and townships drop from the map. Though

Winston-Salem and Harlem are given full lines in "Theme for English B," Hughes assigns

Durham the middle item in his list, two words enclosed by commas – a point of passage between

his inception and the present.

At about the time Hughes' twenty-two-year-old English student would have been born,

Wallace Stevens' "The Comedian as the Letter C" is published. Stevens' speaker, voyaging to

"Carolina," finds it far different in appearance than he expected – not wild and imaginary but

"visible, circumspect," all too real and rank. He smells factory lumber and old burlap and,

incredibly, loves them. As real as this land seems to the speaker, it is entirely sensory, nearly

without substance. Carolina as the mixture of reality and imagination is further complicated by


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Whitman's invocation of the states (as with Stevens, the distinction between North and South is

unclear) in "Our Old Feuillage." The speaker is on the ground (seeing the buzzard "high beyond

the tree tops") and divides the land into "latitudes" but cannot be looking at the bird to see the

land as it lies on a map – he must be looking with the bird's eye. For Stevens and Whitman, these

states are wilderness, only to be understood in generalizations, from a boat or from the sky.

Hughes' speaker bounds from North Carolina to Harlem, crossing the state and leaving it – and

the past twenty-two years – in less than a full couplet.

From what history and which signs has Hughes distilled his flyover proper nouns? One

may just as well ask Whitman from whence his buzzard came, or Stevens why the factory stench

was foremost in his speaker's sense – because Hughes leaves them in the memory as he quits

North Carolina. Residual images from these poems congeal into an ecological myth: North

Carolina is wilderness to be tamed. Whitman celebrates the same foliage that Stevens smells

being turned into lumber – an odor glorified, ironically, because it cannot be romanticized. Of

course, in its very rudeness Stevens' aesthetic laments the passing of the natural (naturally being

less rude). Wild or rude, Hughes rejects both: implicit in his migration to Harlem is the

conviction that there is nothing for a man who is "twenty-two, colored" in North Carolina. By

rejecting the place, however, he only reinforces the myth. Harlem is settled ground in more ways

than one. The commerce of city life replaces the cyclical struggle with the land demonstrated in

the works of lumber and agricultural firms, while the blackness of Harlem constitutes a securer

space for Hughes than the American South of the early twentieth century.

In juxtaposition these lines of Whitman, Stevens, and Hughes form a brief narrative of

place. More lines, taken at random, may produce similar effects. Take, for example, these three

lines:


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Diverge, fine spokes of light, from the shape of my head, or any one’s head, in the sunlit water; A bright bowl of brass is beautiful to the Lord; Ghost and god blends work in this land.

Which line would you guess is the work of which poet? Walt Whitman is the first; then

Langston Hughes; then a lyric from "22nd Century," a song written by Bahamian musician Tony

McKay (pseudonymously Exuma) in 1971 and later recorded by Nina Simone.2 With the

knowledge of who has written which line in hand, the lines may be read differently; some new

detail may emerge that was unlooked-for in the first reading. Does it matter that the title of

Whitman's poem is "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" or that Hughes' is "Brass Spittoons"? Is the initial

scan any less valid?

Yes, it is.

During the first reading, the three poets hover above the lines, unattached. The reader

may notice in one line or another the echo of a familiar rhythm, image, or syntactic structure, or

a nebulous resonance with a theme that the reader identifies with one of the three poets. (It may

be more than a coincidence that my substitute for Stevens mentions "[g]hosts and gods.") These

are the myths we create around poets; for each poet a myth and for each reader of each poet a

myth. John S. Gentile argues that "even though mythemes (essential kernels of myth) may be

carried by images...myth itself presupposes and requires narrative" (85). Even so, "[m]yth is

notoriously difficult to define" (85). Gentile culls together a sample of definitions, some of

which refer to creation stories and others to the unspoken force behind intuition that I refer to

here. Pertinent examples of the latter include:

2 Citations, given here so as not to spoil the game: "Diverge, fine spokes of light..." (Whitman 309); "A bright bowl of brass..." (Hughes 86); "Ghost and god..." (Simone/McKay).


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Myth is an energy-charged image, or idea, that has the power to move and direct the soul (James Hollis, qtd. in Gentile 86). Myth is a form of poetry which transcends poetry in that it proclaims a truth; a form of reasoning which transcends reasoning in that it wants to bring about the truth it proclaims; a form of action, of ritual behavior, which does not find its fulfillment in the act but must proclaim and elaborate a poetic form of truth (Henri and Mrs. H. A. Frankfort, qtd. in Gentile 86). Myth is a culturally (or symbolically, or semiologically, or ritually) creative act through which human beings articulate and constitute the distinction between human being and the world for human being (Elizabeth M. Baeten, qtd. in Gentile 87). Myth is the distilled essence of human experience expressed in metaphor (Peter O'Connor, qtd. in Gentile 88). Myth is a type of speech (Roland Barthes, qtd. in Gentile 86).

Far from being an accumulation of psychic residue, then, myth is itself a product that has been

carefully orchestrated. The trouble – and this may account for the plurality of definitions – is that

mythmaking is a "creative act" housed in the receptive acts of seeing, reading, and hearing.

Receptivity: in a text, the presence of signifiers is all that may be agreed upon (and even

that, as any student of a well-published text will know, is contingent upon which printing of a

text is being studied). Creativity: the problem of what is being signified cannot be resolved.

Jacques Derrida calls this freeplay, "a field of infinite substitutions in a finite ensemble. This

field permits these infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because...instead

of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and founds the

freeplay of substitutions" (9-10). "Substitution," however, is a term derived from mathematics

and which does not do justice to the imaginative work of the act of creating meaning from what

we read, see, and hear. To substitute is to replace a value with something that equals that value,

implying that one meaning can only differ from another as long as they both fulfill the same


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function. But texts encompass and encourage contrary readings, as long as they are validated by

evidence and argument.

I propose that, rather than Derrida's central architectural metaphor of "structure," a text is

the surface of a mirror. Happily for Foucault, one does not also need to have one's parents (our

"authors") standing before the mirror to stare at oneself, though, like a text, one must be the work

of someone rather than someone else. The mirror is a medium for creation or change – to arrange

one's hair, to adjust one's clothing – that is not itself changed by those processes. One can walk

away from the mirror and another can walk up to it and change his or her appearance in an

entirely different way. Criticism is the hand skeining the hair, changing the received image to

conform to what one would like oneself to look like, in accordance (or perhaps not) with one's

idea of beauty in oneself. Homer's epics have been studied for millennia and will be studied in

the future. Pisistratus and each new translator aside, the texts change less with their readership

than readers change, and change the text. Does a mirror exist if there is no one to peer into it? Of

course; one may imagine any number of mirrors lying around untouched and unseen even in the

attics and archives of Durham, North Carolina. But they have no purpose without an audience,

bearing an image, standing before them.

This study is not merely Foucault's brand of criticism, the endless search for meaning in

words; this is closer to mythological criticism, a study of the way language is used to create a

method of seeing a certain world. I ask, "Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who

can appropriate it for himself?" (Foucault 988), and also "Where did 'it' come from? Which came

first, the poem or the myth – the way of reading the poem?" In "From Work to Text," Roland

Barthes distinguishes "works" from "texts": "The work is caught up in a process of filiation. Are

postulated: a determination of the work by the world (by race, by History), a consecution of


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works amongst themselves, and a conformity of the work to the author" (1008). A "text," on the

other hand, is a way of reading that is so authoritative that the author's "life is no longer the

origin of his fictions [in the case of a novelist] but a fiction contributing to his work" (1009).

Barthes cites Holy Scripture, the works of Aristotle, and the works of Freud and Marx as "texts."

Conspicuously, none of these texts originated in Durham, North Carolina. The poetry

published in Durham during the 1920s, even at Duke University, are not texts in the way that

Barthes defines them, but they are certainly works. An author's biography may become a text

that helps to interpret his or her work; so too with other local texts – less Barthes' capital-H

"History" and more of the city, the university, and perhaps the larger text of American

Romanticism. How these smaller texts interact and intersect (for example, the myth of the

"University in the Woods" forming to combat increasing urban development and industrialism)

sheds light on the work-ness, the interpretability of them as works in their own larger Texts

(Durham as a City, Duke as a University – Schoolhouse, perhaps, in its broadest form – and

these poems as Literature). The poststructuralists would be apt to dismiss these poems as poor, or

their meanings as having already been encompassed by better texts; where there have been so

few studies done of both the poems and the place in which they were written, however, it will be

informative to examine these works as they relate to one another, to trace and rediscover, for

example, the myth of the "University in the Woods" – Duke University as an alternative to the

modern labor system, both by virtue of its location away from Durham's factories and as a means

of passage for the citizen from laborer to academic, intellectual, or artist. The function of this

myth is to cast the university in the lights of the social and economic conditions of its setting – as

being a glorified oasis among them – rather than as an institution standing on its own merits.3

3 An institution still under construction (same as it ever was), an institution reluctantly allowing women into what was the "men's college," an institution for the wealthy or lucky....


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This, too, is the model for my analysis of the poems: I will analyze them formally with

the intention of drawing them out into the setting of Durham, North Carolina, in 1926. I will

organize them so as to present a narrative of the birth of the university and, necessarily, that

which is born in sudden succession after a university: literary art as criticism. The point of all

this is not to remove the poems from the myth but rather to entrench them in it. In so doing, I aim

to demonstrate the beginning of a creative act of criticism – an analysis that, unlike conventional

formal criticism, is not bent on explaining to the reader what the poems "mean" or treating them

as perforce didactic merely by virtue of being literary. Didacticism, after all, is where we began:

Plato argued that literature should only be a tool for learning. This analysis, however, is

organized as a call-and-response between the poems and my readings. This is not the making of

something new out of the bones of the old poems; those works, presented whole before each

analysis, remain unchanged. This is what I mean by "dark" and "light": I offer these poems to the

reader without a pretense to the knowledge of their ultimate meaning, a pretense that for me mars

most formal criticism. Criticism, I argue, is a series of beginnings without end: every critic,

finally, is a reader moved suddenly to thought by a passage or word, and then by another, again

and again.


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III. Analysis; or, a Poetic Mythology

a. R.P. Harriss

My analysis begins with R. P. Harriss' "Sonnet from a Forester's Notebook":

All day I waited by the great oak tree And took no heed of time, save when the sun Sunk down at last, and wood folk one by one Crept forth to play, nor took they heed of me. And uninspired to guess life's mystery I mused upon the quest I had begun And pondered this and that, and having done With watching left, unnoticed, quietly. Here in my cabin on the highest hill, Heir to the stars, encradled by the night, I lay me down, remembering with what will I shall arise again when the new light Rolls down the topmost ridge, and streams and trees Awake once more to the old cadences. (Harriss 56)

Despite the poem's title, the content is in no way scientific, or what one would expect from an

analytically-inclined profession that requires the speaker to spend nearly all of his time in the

forest. Indeed, from the opening clause, the speaker makes clear that the reprieve given to him by

the woods is not a reprieve of place so much as of time: "All day I waited by the great oak tree /

And took no heed of time" (56.1-2). Immediately, however, "the sun / Sunk down at last, and

wood folk one by one / Crept forth to play" (56.3-4) – it is only when the passage of time makes


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itself known in the setting of the sun, then, that the forester is joined by the "wood folk." Even

so, the forester is "uninspired to guess life's mystery" by the presence of the woodland creatures

and "muse[s] upon the quest [he] had begun" (56.5-6). These phrases are made all the more

cryptic by the admission of having "waited" the day out in the first line; "waited," one must

wonder, for what?

The sudden population of the forest with "wood folk" alters the space inhabited by the

speaker to coincide with the sun setting. These creatures, "[creeping] forth to play," disturb what,

at the beginning of the poem, goes unmentioned: the sound of a landscape that goes unshared by

anyone except the speaker and the "streams and trees" (56.13). The phrase "wood folk"

simultaneously personifies the woodland creatures and masses them together: though a forester,

the speaker is uninterested in identifying the specific qualitative details of what he sees. He

leaves "unnoticed, quietly" (56.8), with the implication that the nocturnal spectacle before him is

neither unnoticeable nor quiet. In the poem's final lines, he explains that he "shall arise again

when the new light / Rolls down the topmost ridge, and streams and trees awake once more to

the old cadences" (56.12-14). When the animals come out to play, then, the trees and streams go

to sleep, and it is as if sound is unmentionable; only at the very end of the poem does sound

arrive in "the old cadences."

"Sonnet from a Forester's Notebook" is not only a celebration of solitude in nature but a

celebration of the sensory reception that enables one to experience that solitude. Only after

having established the forest as a negation of society and a negation of noise is the speaker able

to remind us of "the old cadences," those positive, primordial rhythms. In other words, "Sonnet

from a Forester's Notebook" is not a Wallace Stevens poem: the busy play of the wood folk is a

clutter imposed over the inherently ordered sounds of the earth, a kind of platonic reality of


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which the sound of the wood folk is a mere imitation. Reality, the forester believes, is the haven

of the senses: an enlightenment, a new understanding brought on by one's environment. The

forest is itself a kind of classroom, an experience streamlined by the American academe – instead

of waiting all day, you walk into a classroom and walk out an hour or so later, remade.

In another Harriss poem, "September Transient," this idea is integrated into human

society:

There is a mellow pleasantness about The negro village near the Southern town On Autumn days. The talk flows in and out, From house to house... "Sis Viney's man is down Wi' chills en fever" ...Dulcey's boys "has cotch Th'ee han'some 'possums"...Wesley's "up in cote"... He got six months for it. (He stole a watch)... Rennie is "cookin' out"...Dan's bought a shoat... The talk goes on. The children play and sing As white youths do, only more quietly; A sleeping hound, notched-eared and nondescript, Sprawls on the sidewalk; every living thing, Loving the sun, comes out-of-doors to see Where laughing Autumn's feet have lightly tript. (Harriss 47)

"There is a mellow pleasantness about / The negro village near the Southern town / On Autumn

days" (47.1-3), he writes, before attempting to capture southeastern African-American dialect:

"'Sis Viney's man is down / Wi' chills en fever'" (47.4-5); "Wesley's 'up in cote'... / He got six

months for it. (He stole a watch)" (47.6-7). Once again, Harriss uses negation – this time,

negating the white "Southern town" – to illustrate a scene more "pleasant" than others. It is worth

noting, however, that Harriss' speaker is compelled to insert qualifications and explanations of

the dialect; he is speaking to a white audience. If the scene is so natural, why not include the

dialect unemended? One wonders what Langston Hughes would make of the white poet who

longs for a village like the one the speaker leaves in "Theme for English B." "September

Transient" is the intersection of Southern mythology and relations between blacks and whites in


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North Carolina during the early 20th century; the poem predates The Jazz Singer by a year, and

the blackface famously used in that film is applied here verbally, fantasizing the "mellow

pleasantness" of black experience – a pleasantness that seems, in the poem, to be based on being

outside "the Southern town." Hughes' quiet flight to Harlem says more in a phrase than Harriss

says in a sonnet; black undergraduates did not matriculate at Duke University until 1963, nearly

40 years after the publication of Harriss' poem.

b. Newman Ivey White

Newman Ivey White is unique among the poets included in this study in that he is not

only an alumnus of Duke University, but he also wrote poems while teaching English there

(Archive Anthology 69). The poem "Radio" can be read as an elucidation of Harriss' forester's

"old cadences":

"Go and catch a falling star"4

Still stand uncaptured these, and rightly these: Spring's timid tread among first-blooming trees; The smell of salt where greening marshes stand; The cold, clean starlight dropped on quiet land; The rich, brown gleam of damp earth freshly turned; The acridness of crisp leaves newly burned; The million-mirrored flashes of bright sun On wind-touched lakes that birch trees look upon; The wet caress of gently driven snow; The ruby red of ashen logs aglow; The somnolent, sad wind's impassive rune Heard from a bed of pine straw deeply strewn: These still remain inviolate as when

4 Taken from the first line of John Donne's "Song."


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They stirred strange cravings in fierce tribal men; As though kind nature, planning ample dowers, For other breeds of men, unkin to ours, Had smiled upon us in our valiant play And passed, unaltered, her deviant way. (White 66)

"[N]ature" (66.15) is portrayed here as being at once inside and outside time: "Radio" is a

procession of the seasons that concludes with a paradoxical assertion of nature's "unaltered" and

"deviant" (66.18) modes of being. She always changes, then, but in the same ways "as when /

[she] stirred strange cravings in fierce tribal men" (66.14) – a phrase that drips colonialism. It is

not out of place, however, in a collection with Harriss' "September Transient," in which a

dialectical war is being waged between the explanatory white verse and what seem to be

"specimens" of African-American dialect. White, who co-edited An Anthology of Verse by

American Negroes (Archive Anthology 69), romanticizes those "other breeds of men" (White

66.16) as evidence of nature's integrity through time. As with "September Transient," I am drawn

to "Radio"'s exhibition of an "other" figure precisely because the speaker apotheosizes that

otherness without empathizing with it; in other words, this racial mythology is a kind of

mythmaking that, in turning man into a symbol, removes man's humanity.

c. W. Freeman Twaddell, "An Unsatisfactory Lover's Complaint"

If you should grant what I pretend to seek, How merrily would run this passion's dirge! And then, not too long after, would emerge The sorry clearer vision of next week; And I should be somewhat abashed and meek Recalling divers words. For this disease The cure is full attainment and – but these Are matters whereof wisdom does not speak. Although the tide comes in and out, the sea For all its change wins very little ground; And one should learn some caution, verily.


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But new decoys to ecstasy abound – Tintagel here, then yonder Brittany Where some Iseult is always to be found (Twaddell 59).

Unlike the poems of Harriss and White, Twaddell's "An Unsatisfactory Lover's Complaint" is

steeped in explicit allusion through and through. The title is a play on the Shakespeare poem "A

Lover's Complaint"; Tintagel and Brittany are coastal cities in England and France, respectively;

those cities are the primary settings in the English legend of Tristan and Iseult – the latter lover is

even named in the poem's final line. Twaddell's poem differs from the other poems in the

collection because it is not concerned overly concerned with the natural world, much less any

specific place in the United States. Consequently, I am less interested in the form of the poem

than in the way Twaddell's allusiveness fulfills the promise of the earlier poems by Harriss and

White: Twaddell, being a student at Duke University, experiences for himself the repose of the

forester and the "old cadences" – in this case, the literal rhythms of poems by Shakespeare,

Milton5, and the English verse legends.

Compare Twaddell's written-into-the-poem allusions to the epigraph that White attaches

to the beginning of "Radio": there is an exuberance and humor in the former's instinct to

transform canonical texts into a lament for bad sex that is lacking in the latter's rather mechanical

(recall the rhymed couplets and iambic meter) ode to nature. To chart the thematic movements in

this sequence of poets is to move from the poet's environment (literally) to the lived experience

of one person interacting with another, just as Harriss' forester is only able to find the language

with which to describe himself outside the city. Similarly, "An Unsatisfactory Lover's

Complaint" is a kind of precursor to the version of criticism that I advocate in this paper:

producing art is the natural outcome of seeing art. The poem also plays on the ideas of intuitive

myth that I touched on in my theoretical analysis – in this case, to comic effect: the gravity that 5 Less evident here than in "Concerning Cain" (see appendix).


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the invocations of Shakespeare and the Tristan legend bring to one's first perusal of the poem is

dispelled by the melodrama of the verse and (perhaps) the familiarity that makes the empathetic

reader chuckle.

Speaking of empathy, I dwell on this poem in particular because, in the narrative that I

have created by framing it with the Harriss and White poems, it describes the current moment in

my collegiate life (that is, this paper) quite well. Kid goes to college, reads a few books, takes

pieces out of them and twists them around to talk about himself – essentially, the set-up for a

joke. The only trouble is that the punch line is about twenty pages long.


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IV. Conclusion; or, the Pure Good of Disc Jockeying

So yeah, I sampled your voice, you was using it wrong You made it a hot line, I made it a hot song – Jay-Z (2001)

In this paper, I have used two methods of organization to critique two different sets of

poems. The poems by Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and Langston Hughes analyzed in

section II were done so chronologically, and I attempted to map the Carolinian march into

modernity by way of the literary techniques and imageries of the poets. In effect, I read into each

text in order to read more broadly the history of something entirely peripheral to the poems.

Against formal criticism and against Derrida's concept of "structure," I used the poems as a

means to an end, without detracting from the meanings of the poems in themselves – mirroring

the way Whitman can borrow the image of a buzzard from its scientific, anatomical, and

ecological contexts and suspend it in the warm air, free from everything but the poet's gaze, if

that is how one chooses to read it. For another reader, the vagueness of "buzzard" is an attempt to

unite the anatomical and ecological contradictions between Old World and New World buzzards.

Neither reading is demonstrably wrong; yet one can argue that neither is significant to the

meaning of "Our Old Feuillage."


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This theoretical stalemate invites us to analyze something less vague. In section III, I

organize a set of poems written in the same place and published in the same year so as to fulfill

and react to the mytho-poetic timeline established in section II. If Whitman, Stevens, and Hughes

are representative of both literary and historical trends toward modernism, then Harriss, White,

and Twaddell are representative of a location and moment being remade by these trends. These

poems are regional and occasional, and they have been out of print for 90 years: if I am drawn to

reading them as part of the trends established in Section II – trends which, one might argue, are

entirely peripheral to the meanings and qualities of the poems themselves – it is because I am not

interested in merely reading the poems, calling them "poor," and having done with them, as

Jacques Derrida might. For those who have agreed that the works of Whitman and the other

major poets are sacred and not to be read except formally, reading "outside" the poems or using

them as means to one's own creative ends is surely critical blasphemy. And yet it is safer and

more comprehensible for one to do the same with the works of lesser poets because the poems

are not considered as valuable – but what is the value of a dead text, one that is not allowed, as

Foucault puts it, to "proliferate indefinitely" (988)?

This is not a novel idea in literary criticism. Formal criticism, which I denounce here as

the sole way to read and yet make use of in my own analyses in sections II and III, requires the

creative organization of excerpts and details shaped by the structure of an argument. The same

idea is illustrated by my invented problem of Whitman's buzzard above: the resonances of even a

single word can differ from reader to reader, going as far as to embrace contradictions; and for

other readers the word has little resonance and is just part of the litany of words scanned by the

eyes. This kind of criticism, which takes less liberties with a given text than I do, is still a

creative act (restrained, usually, to the scope of the text being read).


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To make something entirely new out of a classic text is to bring criticism into the 21st

century. Again, the idea is not new – in Dante's Purgatorio, the lyrics sung by a band of angels is

a direct Latin quotation from Virgil's Aeneid; for that matter, the oral tradition with which

Western poetry began was a process of gathering phrases from other bards' renditions of a poem

into one's own – but is one that has become more immediately relevant in the age of electronic

media and file-sharing. Copyright law is the newest testament in the church of poetic sanctity,

and audio sampling is doing for music what criticism should be doing for literature. One of the

most well-known records made entirely from audio samples is DJ Shadow's 1996

Endtroducing.... Each track, structured as a hip-hop beat with a drum loop and overlaid melodies,

borrows from surprisingly disparate recordings – bringing together, for example, the sounds of

Richard Strauss' Also sprach Zarathustra, Metallica, Organized Konfusion, and clips from the

television series Twin Peaks. The samples on Endtroducing... and other pieces of pop music

since the 1980s, like Dante's sample of the Aeneid, do not damage the originals but rather enrich

them by association, as well as producing music that may be of an entirely different quality or

genre.

What, then, is the point of a paper like this, that works primarily under formal constraints

and yet hints at the existence of something beyond them – a realm beyond, heralding creative

writing rather than deeper criticism? The first point is the same as it ever was: to share a few of

the poems I have found and to introduce them to my readers with some preliminary analysis; this

has been done. But the path of this study ran simultaneously with those of other courses, in

which I read poems and novels and wrote papers responding to them formally. These papers

became perfunctory because, as I read, I was already picking out details and shaping them into

an argument, all the while dimming the felt radiance of reading that has attached me to fiction


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and literature from the beginning. Reading became part of an exchange: if I hand in this narrative

I have shaped from this text, it will be returned to me with such-and-such a grade. This project

became my scaffolding to something else: a kind of writing and analysis that is not merely

restrained to the ins-and-outs of a text but also embraces the excitement and wonder that reading

brings to the reader.

If criticism is not didactic – having a pretense of final knowledge – it must be

celebratory. In "The Pure Good of Theory," Wallace Stevens envisions the fictive element of

literature as a "beast of light" (333) entering the very page of the flimsy book that we are reading

at this very moment, a page

Touched suddenly by the universal flare For a moment, a moment in which we read and repeat The eloquence of light's faculties (333).

If a theory does not inspire in us the same flare as the text that leads us to form it, that theory is

not worth writing. There is nothing left to do, then, but to return the eloquence of light with a

darkness of our own.


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Appendix

1. Ethel M. Davis, "Being Inland"

The lore of lakes is haunting, The mountain's mystery Remains alone for wanting Of souls to set it free, And rock-cliffs bear upon their breasts The sea's biography, But how shall we find wisdom Who walk a sandy floor, Who know not lakes nor hills nor cliffs Nor any windless shore?

2. Ethel M. Davis, "Contemplation"

In the green twilight of the trees There are no grim anxieties, Only a scent and murmurings Of quiet, brooding, crooning wings To stir the spirit's wonderment.

3. R.P. (Robert Preston) Harriss, "September Transient"

There is a mellow pleasantness about The negro village near the Southern town On Autumn days. The talk flows in and out, From house to house... "Sis Viney's man is down Wi' chills en fever" ...Dulcey's boys "has cotch


23

Th'ee han'some 'possums"...Wesley's "up in cote"... He got six months for it. (He stole a watch)... Rennie is "cookin' out"...Dan's bought a shoat... The talk goes on. The children play and sing As white youths do, only more quietly; A sleeping hound, notched-eared and nondescript, Sprawls on the sidewalk; every living thing, Loving the sun, comes out-of-doors to see Where laughing Autumn's feet have lightly tript.

4. R.P. (Robert Preston) Harriss, "Sonnet from a Forester's Notebook"

All day I waited by the great oak tree And took no heed of time, save when the sun Sunk down at last, and wood folk one by one Crept forth to play, nor took they heed of me. And uninspired to guess life's mystery I mused upon the quest I had begun And pondered this and that, and having done With watching left, unnoticed, quietly. Here in my cabin on the highest hill, Heir to the stars, encradled by the night, I lay me down, remembering with what will I shall arise again when the new light Rolls down the topmost ridge, and streams and trees Awake once more to the old cadences.

5. R.P. (Robert Preston) Harriss, "Sounds"

I have three sober loves and they are these: The sound of Autumn rain on acorn trees, The chuck-will's-widow by dusk-haunted brakes, And that bright quirk a half-grown partridge makes.

6. W. Freeman Twaddell, "Concerning Cain"

It was an accident that we Were trapped by Satan and the tree. The chance that overthrew us then Has passed, and will not come again. And Cain, at least, will never hear Of sin and death and shame and fear. We sinned and fell, and we have seen The flaming brand, and learned to shun The sight of God; but this, our son,


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Can never do what we have done Or be what we have been.

7. W. Freeman Twaddell, "Exhortation to Virtue"

The summer and the winter are But changed relations to a star. A single orbit serves to bring The summer, winter, autumn, spring. And stellar parallaxes show Through what a space the earth must go To change its flowers into snow. (It is, of course, well understood How nicely divers folk define, And what a sharply cleaving line Marks off the evil from the good.)

8. W. Freeman Twaddell, "An Unsatisfactory Lover's Complaint"

If you should grant what I pretend to seek, How merrily would run this passion's dirge! And then, not too long after, would emerge The sorry clearer vision of next week; And I should be somewhat abashed and meek Recalling divers words. For this disease The cure is full attainment and – but these Are matters whereof wisdom does not speak. Although the tide comes in and out, the sea For all its change wins very little ground; And one should learn some caution, verily. But new decoys to ecstasy abound – Tintagel here, then yonder Brittany Where some Iseult is always to be found.

9. Newman Ivey White, "Clais Returns"

Clais comes home to her dwelling; What shall she have for delight? Cornflowers, blue beyond telling, Roses, sweet for the smelling, Crocuses, rich for the sight. Flowers were never for selling


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Crimson or purple or white Worthy of Clais tonight. Clais comes home to her dwelling; What shall she have for delight? She shall have music, impelling Softly to ease, and excelling Sweetness of mortal or sprite.... Harmony dies in the swelling, Flowers die in the sight: Clais comes home to her dwelling; What shall she have for delight?

10. Newman Ivey White, "For a Birthday" Upon this day let all things quiet be Within my soul, that I may rest a while Upon good fortune, as upon some isle Rest homing birds that fish the unquiet sea. Not that the splendid gods so far from me Have paid my puny service with a smile Of scornful tolerance, knowing it half-vile And worth in this world's goods no special fee, Do I rejoice; but that they once forgot, The indifferent high gods, where merit lay And so endowed my trivial, common lot That glory walks abroad with me each day And high content makes me who merit not Indifferent to earthly care as they.

11. Newman Ivey White, "Radio"

"Go and catch a falling star"6 Still stand uncaptured these, and rightly these: Spring's timid tread among first-blooming trees; The smell of salt where greening marshes stand; The cold, clean starlight dropped on quiet land; The rich, brown gleam of damp earth freshly turned; The acridness of crisp leaves newly burned; The million-mirrored flashes of bright sun On wind-touched lakes that birch trees look upon;

6 John Donne's "Song"


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The wet caress of gently driven snow; The ruby red of ashen logs aglow; The somnolent, sad wind's impassive rune Heard from a bed of pine straw deeply strewn: These still remain inviolate as when They stirred strange cravings in fierce tribal men; As though kind nature, planning ample dowers, For other breeds of men, unkin to ours, Had smiled upon us in our valiant play And passed, unaltered, her deviant way.

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. "From Work to Text." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 1006-1010. Print.

Davis, Ethel M. "Being Inland." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and Well- Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 16. Print.

——— . "Contemplation." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and Well-Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 62. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. "Sign, Structure, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. Print.

Dickinson, Emily. The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. R. W. Franklin. Reading ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1999. Print.

Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and

Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 978-988. Print.

Gentile, John S. “Prologue: Defining Myth: An Introduction to the Special Issue on Storytelling and Myth”. Storytelling, Self, Society 7.2 (2011): 85–90. Web.

Harriss, R.P. "September Transient." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and Well- Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 47. Print.

——— . "Sonnet from a Forester's Notebook." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and Well-Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 56. Print.


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——— . "Sounds." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and Well-Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 34. Print.

Hughes, Langston, and Arnold Rampersad. "Theme for English B." The Collected Poems of

Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1994. Print.

——— . "Brass Spittoons." The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Knopf, 1994. Print.

Jay-Z. "Takeover." 2001. The Blueprint. Perf. Jay-Z. Roc-A-Fella Records, 2001. CD. Plato. "Republic, Book X." The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed.

David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin's, 1989. 21-29. Print.

Simone, Nina. "22nd Century." The Very Best of Nina Simone: Sugar in My Bowl 1967-1972. By Tony McKay (Exuma). Perf. Nina Simone. 1998. CD.

Stevens, Wallace. "The Comedian as the Letter C." The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens.

New York: Knopf, 1954. 27-46. Print.

——— . "The Pure Good of Theory." The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf, 1954. 329-333. Print.

Twaddell, W. Freeman. "Concerning Cain." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and

Well-Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 63. Print.

——— . "Exhortation to Virtue." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and Well- Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 25. Print.

——— . "An Unsatisfactory Lover's Complaint." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little- Known and Well-Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 59. Print.

White, Newman Ivey. "Clais Returns." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and Well-

Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 43. Print. ——— . "For a Birthday." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and

Well-Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 35. Print.

——— . "Radio." The Archive Anthology: Verse by Little-Known and Well-Known Writers. Ed. R.P. Harriss. Duke University Press, 1926. 66. Print.

Whitman, Walt. "Our Old Feuillage." Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996.

318-323. Print.

——— . "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry." Poetry and Prose. New York: Library of America, 1996.


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307-313. Print.

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