Book Commentary: March 2004 Archives
I am reading A New Theory for American Poetry, by Angus Fletcher, the Renaissance scholar who has dedicated himself to a more universal inquiry than just the 1600s and 1700s. The book is about Whitman. And John Clare. And John Ashbery. It is founded upon environmentalism and poetics. Its chief idea is the "environment-poem." And what Fletcher means by "theory" in the title is precisely this--poetics and the environment that a poem makes and that makes a poem.
He writes a fascinating chapter on "The Whitman Phrase," claiming that it is modeled on the wave in its ceaselessly repetitive nature, its movement-without-destination. He writes equally engaging chapters titled "Clare's Horizon" and "Diurnal Knowledge." He makes a wonderful argument in a sub-section titled "Describing the Nondescript." The environment of which Fletcher writes, that is, is something much grander and far less purposeful or directed than the environments of modern-day "nature poets" or the Romanticism of two centuries ago. It is directing in the sense that environment has created the American poet (or political idea or science or economy); and Whitman was the first to recognize this.
It's sometimes a slog of too-academic discourse: "If then, among central attributes of the descriptive, there is a power to place inventories in motion (if only as the result of adding up a sequence of discoveries), the descriptive implies an ever receding horizon."
Still, the book is extremely well constructed for having been written out of a series of investigations, papers, and readings over a broad expanse of years in the late nineties. Not to mention prepared for via an earlier career in Renaissance literature! There is much to learn here about yourself as a poet and as an American.
End note: I recall a classmate in graduate school at Indiana University, in the middle seventies, attempting to write a term paper on the fugue quality of Whitman's style. (Fletcher makes numerous comparisons to music in the poetry of Whitman as well.) My classmate surely was sensing this wave association in the contrapuntal aspect of the fugue? Alas, he didn't take his argument beyond mere analogy (that is, into theory), and, as I remember it, our professor didn't buy the analogy.
