The famous poets were all disreputable in life, and died in obscurity. Let’s say that again: the famous poets were all disreputable in life, and died in obscurity. Sounds hyperbolic, not to mention paradoxical. Yes, there was Pope, and Longfellow – but for every Alexander Pope there were at least two John Clares. And for every Longfellow there were at least three shorter fellows, such as Melville, Dickinson or Sidney Lanier.
And what, really, do we know about Homer, the person? Approximately enough factual data to fit within the orbit of a single atom of helium. And Dante? Dante died in exile, buried quietly in the backwater town of Ravenna. And Shakespeare? Sweet Will, the historical individual, on the 400th anniversary of his passing? (Let’s not even go there.)
The famous poets struggled in life and died in obscurity: let us contemplate, if ever so briefly, this conundrum. But for contrast, let’s begin with a detour.
Picture the poetry section in a bookstore. Any bookstore: a bland outlet in a suburban mall, a university shop in a fancy college town... you’ve been there, as I have, mon semblable, mon frère, ma soeur. There is a particular, peculiar bookstore feeling. It suffuses, ineluctably, every would-be poet – every unknown, unsuccessful, or even half-successful versifier. A toxic blend of melancholy, nausea, vertigo, anxiety, envy, skepticism and self-consciousness (with maybe a dab of paranoia) – catalyzed by the proximity of these cliff-like wooden aisles, packed neatly with clean bright poetry volumes, pinned on the chest with gold-leaf medals, on the rear with probing squeals of approval. These are the immense high fortress walls of official recognition – which you, nondescript interloper, typical nonentity, will neither scale nor penetrate.
Some talented writer could devote an entire essay to this sad etching of darkness at noon, this invisible eclipse.
A few years ago there arose from the swamp of literary journals a good deal of complaint about the poetry “glut”. The avalanche of bad or mediocre poems fomented and sent into circulation was drowning out the good, and this phenomenon marked a decline or morbidity in cultural values and aesthetic taste. But such jeremiads failed to convince. The writerly schools coalesced, instead, in the opposite direction: the U.S. was undergoing a veritable poetry renaissance, an unprecedented, explosive convergence of interest, talent, energy and relevance. It was the dawn of a new, uncharted, and vital era for poetry.
Where does this leave that glum, marginal character loitering by the “Poetry & Criticism” shelves? Don’t pay any mind. She’s a loser.
Yet something uncanny happens there, under the mall’s desolate fluorescent lighting. That abject nobody-poet shares one minor feature – infinitely insubstantial as it may be – with the splendid canonical poets of our glorious tradition: that is, she struggles in life and dies in obscurity.
And in a flash, we recognize a kinship between these rows of gleaming, nauseous, fiberboard bookshelves, and the archaic labyrinth-tombs of Knossos and Thebes. What then is the skeleton key to this riddle? Where is Ariadne’s thread?
The great anthropologist A.M. Hocart, characterizing our prehistoric ancestors, put it in a gnomic nutshell : “the first king was a dead king.” Not for nothing was Eliot’s signature volume of criticism titled The Sacred Wood. This was borrowed from Sir James Frazer’s anthropological classic, The Golden Bough – a study of the roots of cultural mythology in sacrificial kingship. Our so-called canon – the authorized diachronic transmission of literary authority (a particularly Eliotic obsession) – is intertwined with the legacy of prehistoric tribal succession rites.
The king must die. Le Roi est mort – vive le Roi! Anthropology has hovered for generations around the problem of vicarious sacrifice. Its most radical theorist was the late René Girard, who proposed that mob violence and the scapegoat mechanism are actually constitutive of human culture, a subconscious stratum which configures human social experience in toto. The king must die so that we may continue to have abundance of life, blessings of the gods. The death of the scapegoat brings peace to rivalrous tribes, does away with sin and all uncleanness.
In Western culture, our poets must suffer in life and die in obscurity before mounting to the heaven of the pantheon. Art’s aesthetic pleasure is inextricably woven with the remoteness and otherness, the difference, the finish, of its maker’s ends. As Mandelstam, himself an exemplary literary scapegoat, put it (in my rough paraphrase): “the poet’s meaning is fulfilled by his death.” Or, in Wallace Stevens’ terms : “Death is the mother of beauty.”
But are we on the right track here? Is there even a track? Ariadne’s thread seems to be leading us into ghastly, spectral regions, the haunts of a Poe. Can we really credit Girard’s claim about a universal scapegoat reciprocity-mechanism, a version of Original Sin? Must poets die in order to dwell in the canonical Elysium of our hearts?
For the sake of our thread, let’s continue down this trail. Ezra Pound wrote somewhere that “literature is hero worship”. He may have been speaking with reference mostly to himself, but the statement has some relevance to the general phenomenon of poetic filiation, affinity, attraction. We adore what is far-off; we honor what is complete, finished, accomplished, whole. “The achieve of, the mastery of, the thing” (Olson). This tendency works somewhat against the grain of that normative American shibboleth – progress, change, growth (the Future, the Open Road). Rather, Past and Future balance one another; each radiates its distinct values and excellence.
But what of our lonesome traveler, that no-count figure in the bookstore aisles, looked down upon, mocked by the tall cemented guile of prestigious literary marketing? For him, for her, the maze only gets darker, the spiderweb thickens.
Then, unaccountably, she reaches the center... and instead of a Minotaur, she discovers, on the dirt floor, a single copper coin (maybe a penny). She flips it over (it’s a two-faced image). Beauty and Death, Poetry and Life... Wallace Stevens’ wife Elsie, on the Liberty dime...
This place is haunted. Do I wake or sleep?
