CHAPTER 26

Many Keys (1957)

On Women’s Poetry

Certain music, a band playing on a village green, with the instruments coming in, each from its own distance, and some of the trumpets really far away on rooftops, was heard by Charles Ives.1 And Emily Dickinson took hymns, making so personal a thread of faith out of the sounds she heard that for a hundred years there would be people to complain that her ear was off. These ways of music, perfectly evident in the poems, in Ives’s music, come flowing in, were taken and used fully, are offered new to us.2

That music joins the influences at work on our lives today.3 Some times there plainly, often transformed; we can take it and implicate it whole; or resist it and leave it out, working against it; or transform it through ourselves into its next art.

Looking at any art we see at once a range of ancestors, ancestors of this liveliness. We can see, too, the influence that becomes history, the experience assimilated and reoffered as part of form.

The forming powers of response can be seen in any art, any part of life. They may be seen with an additional clarity, I think, in poetry by women in America at this time. I do not want to separate out a group for the sake of likenesses, or by date, or—least of all—for a statistical sampling. But if you will look at the books, or the poems in anthologies, by women who may be thought of as artists, you will find an ease in tracing the forming powers of certain forces through their work and their lives. For one thing, the group of actual artists is small, even smaller than the comparable group of men. For another, there are fewer literary influences than you might expect, and some of the same writers emerge almost everywhere. The range is to be found in two kinds of influence; and these have hardly begun to be explored. One is the variety of nonliterary material: observations, images absorbed from dreams or landscapes and with a brilliant integrating gesture given as meaning, and the details of daily life made personal; the other, fascinating and difficult to trace, consists of those influences rejected in the writer’s work. We hardly have the biographical methods, or the critical beginnings, to let us perceive the struggle against influences, and how these reactions may be used, turning rebellion, hostility, the desires begun in hatred and fear into the movements that, reaching art, may surpass these origins.

Another reason to set apart a flight of poets is the concentration of method that will let us ask our questions. What links these wishes? To what forms do they tend? What objects are sacred here? Where are we led by these beliefs?

It is easy enough to find the long tradition. We all, women and men, know it in ourselves. It is that of the woman as listener. Trained to perfect herself in receiving, educated as appreciator, she classically was exalted, set on a mountain as Muse; one of those for whom Pegasus struck open with his hoof the moon-shaped Well of Poetry; one of those who taught the Sphinx the riddle which finally lay in wait for answering Oedipus. That the answer to the riddle was known to such women, and simply confirmed by Oedipus, is not taught either to girls or boys. That the poets who drank from that spring were men, we know very well. In this same tradition, curiously, when one great poet was a woman, she was called the Tenth Muse.4 But the woman-poet draws on her sources, making no more mention of the Muses than do the Japanese. She is glad to be Muse, on occasion, although it is not an easy life; she is glad to be recipient, certainly this can be delightful, although to be exclusively a recipient will guarantee atrophy at least, and all the viciousnesses with it.

But Sappho was here. And before her, the lyrics of the Old Testament: Miriam’s song, and Deborah who sang with Barak of “great searchings of heart.”5 It is David, though, and the writers of the Psalms and the Song of Songs who bring us to this place. As Misch says in his rich sourcebook on autobiography, at the outset of personal poetry the individual experience is there, but given in terms of its results.6 Then Sappho’s songs opened an art of the “secret melody in the soul, creatively echoing its life, so that every stirring of the emotions became a miniature cosmos and formed itself into supreme poetry.” Among the papyri with the fragments of Sappho found in our century is one in which “the audience is, as it were, the writer herself.” This is one of the starting points of self-portrayal.7

To do this, to write as if oneself were the audience and to make communication, means that one has dived deep enough to reach the place where obscurity, that terrible middle depth, is passed, deep enough to be where all is shared again.

Here men and women are open to each other, of course. But the ideas inherent in this go along with the central training of women: oneself as audience, any one life as an expression which may be understood at such a depth that it can be seen as having form. In considering a group of poets who are women, and in going to the influences of their lives, we have a chance to see what the possibilities here are. Do these women have any special relation to any art? Involved in art, may they be able to declare for women who are expressed primarily in their personal lives?

In a group brought up primarily to be audience, there are shared attitudes toward experience and toward art. The role of the listener is felt strongly, and is conceived as having qualities which can evoke further action, further communication. This is the listener who is necessary, as necessary as the listener who heard out the Ancient Mariner, under his compulsion to tell what manner of man he was.8 This is a listener who answers, traditionally, as Muse, evoker; who answers, sometimes, as artist, and breaks that barrier.

For there has been a dialogue of poems, a drama of poems. It expresses dialogues on this earth, at times open and at other times part of the buried life. In Japanese poetry, which does not turn to a muse any more than does the poetry of women in the West, poems are go-betweens in love affairs; women answer. At one time, the men wrote in Chinese, the women doing the work that in Europe we link with Dante, “to express the genius of the time in the native language,” says Donald Keene.9 In Lady Murasaki’s time, the “English” past has only Wulf and Eadwacer to speak for women—unless you count Grendel’s mother.10

Our contemporary American poets who are women speak in their own voices, and there would be screams, from writers and publishers too, if you printed an unsigned book of their chosen poems. You could not sort out literary influences. And what would happen to the controversy about Anne Lindbergh?11 But some things could be sorted out.

You would have such poets as Josephine Miles, Elizabeth Bishop; Marie Welch, Claire McAllister, Isabella Garner; May Swenson, May Sarton, Naomi Replansky; Babette Deutsch, Margaret Walker, Helen Wolfert; Léonie Adams, Louise Bogan; Marya Zaturenska, Marianne Moore. Other names will occur to you at once.12 But in a vocabulary of influences, what could you not say about Blake and Vaughan and Herbert?13 About the openly acknowledged sources of natural history and the records of travel? About the ballads and the persevering French forms, the sonnet and the hieroglyph of wings or the edge of the sea? The syllabic metric of the Mediterranean, the Bible parallels, and the spark leaping between the poles of the shortest Japanese form?

Away from the books in one sense—if you know the lives of these artists, you will find the left-out influences, cadences suppressed, directions in art rejected, groups and fashions renounced in favor of the unfriended integrities that, at one time or another, have to be chosen by every poet.14 And, because they are poets, because they are women, you will find the almost illegible but unmistakable records of the times that they chose commitment to life instead of to art, and were able to move on later to another level of poetry. But I will come to this again.

Away from the books, too, one must make distinctions regarding the traditional work of women, in its relation to these forms. This, also, is influence. Although some of these poets have taught or worked in libraries, it is the other work that enters here: the concern with housework, the quality of life that is in daily cooking and cleaning. The recurrences here, the necessity to start continually from the beginning, the thanklessness that exists in these drudgeries while one is rebelling against them—I think these come into the attitudes of women toward form in writing.

They come into attitudes toward experience of women and of all those who grow up as the artist grows, in almost constant conflict between modes of life and modes of creativity. We all know the hesitation before experience which is one of the most deeply felt truths of the adolescent girl. She goes through a discipline so implacable toward her growing powers, in our civilization, that only the disciplines of art are fair mirrors of it, or the spiritual discipline that brings one consciously to the next level of one’s life. But on the writing of the young who express the images of this hesitation you will often find the teacher’s single word, IMMATURE.

American writing is full of hesitation before the terms of experience of our life. Very often, and conspicuously in novels, you see it camouflaged as a grasping for cruelty and corruption of consciousness. The disguise slips easily, in poems; the movement of the meanings—what is called the music—lets the falseness show at once. It is like the falseness of crude imitation in its effect. But, in the work of women, imitation is seen more often. You can think of many women in whose work can be found the “immaturity” which tries to express conscious denial for the sake of something more alive, significant of more. The expression of this process in terms of form is now taking place in the poetry of women. Partly from a sense of waste—seeing the depression as waste, seeing the wars as waste unless they are fought

. . . till I have conquered in myself what

causes war, but I would not believe it15

—partly from a search for the forms that will express all the subtleties of the central movements of the being, this work is proceeding.

It is not new, and of course it does not belong to women. It can be seen clearly in the use and misuse of the sonnet form, the sonnet seen philosophically, as dialectic resolution of two simultaneous meanings; meanings which could be as opposite, as parallel, as the juxtapositions of the Old Testament. It can be seen in a recent correspondence about Kathleen Raine’s poems, with W. S. Merwin finally saying, against “organic form,” “That is why there are two words for Nature and Art.”16 The wit-writing of men’s poetry—often alien to women when it denies the irrational, and deeply fascinating to women when it includes the marvelous and wise “irrational” element, as Donne does—stands at one end of this range.17 At the other stand the forms which allow for another order of experience. They do not work against rhyme, as has often been assumed; they are likely to call for the return of sound more than once, more than the minimum of rhyme, and not only or mainly at the ends of lines. They allow for recurrences of sound, and for movement through recurrences which are not repetitions because they exist in time, in changed circumstances. They justify Frank Lloyd Wright and Gertrude Stein and everyone behind these who has known that there is no repetition in nature, or in art.18

There is waste in nature, waste in art, and plenty of waste in the lives of women. Waste is an influence, and the making of poetry works against waste. In poetry, as everywhere else, there are swamplands of the fourth-rate, the third-rate, and endless suburbs of the second-rate. What one hopes for is the first-rate, and the lives that will produce it. To the work on the making of forms must be added the work of the individual on himself.19

There are individuals who construct themselves to be artists, and from that time on live according to this commitment. He, she, will act out what he can; and will make experiences and forms which then will act on him, so that he travels a road determined by the exchange between work and a character which, in the beginning, was created by himself. In American poetry, the characters formed by Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson have the highest visibility. It is on these legends that they literally risked their lives, in self-rebirth as a new type. It is this risk which their detractors cannot forgive them. The basic creation, made in this way, is that of a character who could write the poems that they would wish to write. The movement was toward a future requirement.

This movement, which organizes the embryo, is certainly not male or female. But it is part of the instinctual life which, in this society, may not be lost in the growth of women as often, perhaps, as in the growth of men; although certainly the great poets of it have been men. If it comes to be expressed in the art of women—and some of the signs exist in the poets I have named—new resources of the forms must surely appear, and new forms for these resources follow as the buried life of our time is brought to consciousness.

At the point at which the barriers are broken, an energy and daring must be summoned up in order to meet experience. All the influences that reinforce her energy will have to be available now to the woman who enters and continues in an art.20 One crisis is likely to come as her formal education ends, and the support or friction of a ready audience (for her who has often seen herself as audience) is suddenly removed. How many brilliant girls, the astonishers of their schools, end and subside! Another time—apart from the psychic and economic crises of all our lives—comes in the long rearrangement of life that predictably will come to women who write, after the birth of their children. This change of level may take about ten years, and, like the others, can stop the function of the artist or be taken as “influence.”21

These are two crucial times. What ancestors affirm one’s life in these? What is chosen and built-in, what thrown away?

And what kind of poetry emerges from such commitments?

There is another crisis—the most significant one of the artist’s mature development, says Rank, and it comes into being through the conflict between life and art. In a fertile chapter, Rank writes of the victory over the idea of deprivation.22 With the end of doubt in this conflict comes the freeing of the artist from the needs which enter most often into his first turning toward art. This crisis is familiar to all artists. It is met in the life of most women who do any kind of creative work—in fact, of most women who work—not once, but many times. Often, it is one of her recurrences, and the ways in which she meets it determines, each time, her entire future.

Emily Dickinson’s legend is based on her qualities in this encounter. To anyone who imitates her stance or her poetry of these struggles and transcendence, Emily Dickinson is a “bad influence.” But these are the evil translations of recurrence. It is such translation that has made Whitman, or any first-rate poet, or any man or woman who has risked his life, “a bad influence.”

But, if you hear the music in your own way, use it, and offer it new, the image is made, it takes on its new life. Part of this is birth-image—from Anne Bradstreet’s “The Author to Her Book,”

And for thy Mother, she alas is poor,

Which caused her thus to send thee out of door,

but there is the weaning-image, the going out:

I took my Power in my Hand

And went against the World . . .

and the image of being native to oneself:

I will play a part no longer . . .

and the image of consciousness, seen as evil in its corruption, as in Marie Welch’s

The black of magic

Is in not knowing

Oneself

The magician.23

For a man, for a woman, the image goes out into the world. As this happens, the poet has his return to life, and then a gathering-together for the next work, with whatever nourishes his powers. These nourishments, too, are called influences; “the earth,” says Emily Dickinson, “has many keys.”24 The gathering is seen as withdrawal, and—for most women—the withdrawal from daily life is extremely difficult. It can mean extra financial pressure for a man or for a woman; in addition, the receptive and recurrent nature of a woman’s life exists, to prevent her from living “like a beast or a hermit” and to make more inaccessible the conditions under which her art may be followed.25 Then the tortures may come; they do not belong specifically to women or men, you can find them catalogued for the poets of our time in Kenneth Rexroth’s “Thou Shalt Not Kill.”26

To use the possibilities so that life is allowed and nourished; the life also of the forms. To make the forms so that experience is seen to include the world, so that all things of daily life are seen in their essential and full vitality (so that the mysticism of the material will not survive as a deadening force among us); to understand the withdrawals before experience, when they are made in generalization, in the impersonal and anti-sexual, and when they are made for the sake of more life. To move as listeners, until criticism becomes a response to the world with that particular work of art in it. To explore the recurrent, to explore the receptive in its full relationship to all creative aspects of life. To move with the receptive until it finds its forms, so that the buried life finds its poetry, in all its voices, approaching alive and now.

(Unpublished, 1957)