Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods: Poetry in the Shadow of the Past

“Ignorance of a poem's inner history amounts to willful neglect,” writes William Logan in introducing Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods to its readers. A poem, or for that matter, any work of art, he rightly says, is also “a historical artifact” (2). But traditional criticism (e.g., R. V. Young's “The Old New Criticism and Its Critics,” August 1993, www.firstthings.com/article/1993/08/the-old-new-criticism-and-its-critics) “[has] often ignored the practical aspects of the poem—call them material culture, local bearings, or the unseemly logic of argument” (Logan 4).To demonstrate how knowledge of such practical aspects of a poem—for example, biographical details, historical circumstances, the meanings and associations of its diction in its time—can add unexpected dimensions to our appreciation, Logan has collected eight previously published essays that dig into the essentials of fifteen poems in their time and place.Taking on the role of literary archaeologist, he unearths some surprisingly informative details—mundane ones, as well—about poems with which many readers of this book will be well familiar. This in itself would have been enough. But with the exception of Shakespeare's Sonnet 2, each essay also pairs two poems. Why? Though a few pairings feel as though they have been shoehorned (in the opinion of this reader), Logan's professed aim is “to show how poems sometimes speak to each other” (5).Several of the poems on which he expends his scholarly efforts are by any measure eclectic: Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Ozymandias,” and Horace Smith (1779–1849), “On a Stupendous Leg of Granite, Discovered Standing by Itself in the Deserts of Egypt, with the Inscription Inserted Below”Robert Frost, “The Draft Horse” and Richard Wilbur, “The Ride”Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour” and Seamus Heaney, “The Skunk”Longfellow, “Hiawatha” and Lewis Carroll, “Hiawatha's Photographing”John Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” and Donald Justice, “Henry James by the Pacific”William Shakespeare, Sonnet 2 (“When fortie Winters shall besiege thy brow”)Ezra Pound, “In a Station of the Metro” and William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow”Emily Dickinson, “After Great Pain, a Formal Feeling Comes” and Robert Frost, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening[.]” Logan is a master of close analysis in the tradition of the old New Critical school—fusing such analysis with his scouring of the historical, cultural, etymological, and biographical contexts of each poem, he gives us micro- and macroscopic lenses for reading the poems that he has selected.For instance, on Frost's “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” Logan examines the poem's original punctuation: Are the woods “lovely, dark and deep,” as Frost's original punctuation had it? Or are they “lovely, dark, and deep,” as his posthumous editor, Edward Connery Lathem, revised the line in The Poetry of Robert Frost (1969), long the standard edition…. Perhaps the poet was insensitive to the difference or entertained by the ambiguity, but his choice must have been deliberate…. The scrupulous Library of America edition of Frost's poems (1995) removed Lathem's comma after “dark.” It failed to restore the period after “deep,” however, which ended the line in all early printings. (285; emphasis added) On Shelley's and Smith's related poems: Logan speculates on the sources that so “inflamed” their imaginations. He first corrects Richard Holmes, one of Shelley's biographers, who wrote that both poets had seen the bust of Rameses II at the British Museum. Logan's gumshoe work found that was not so because the sculpture was not exhibited there until 1820 (23). While propounding other potential sources in numbers of pages that follow, Logan concludes that “the statue and Shelley's sources is complicated by occasional confusion about the various statues in the area” (26). “There is evidence that Shelley may have seen illustrations of Memnon in Richard Pococke's A Description of the East and Other Countries…. Shelley may have also read the description of the Osymandyas statue by Dominique Vivant” (27; emphasis added).One more example: on William Carlos Williams's “The Red Wheelbarrow”—English literature's most famous wheelbarrow—Logan's indefatigable sleuthing led him to identify Thaddeus Marshall, “an old Negro” Williams referred to in an article for Holiday magazine in 1954 (214). Beginning with census records, Logan located the house in which Marshall lived; described the neighborhood (“white neighbors, mostly born in New Jersey or New England, though a few were immigrants,” etc. [215–16]); illuminated Marshall's work (“[He] must have had an egg business then, and he might have sold live or dressed chickens as well, including those whose laying was done” [218; emphasis added]); and remarked on the declining fortunes of American farms and farmers (221). There's much more! Some fourteen pages of an essay were originally published in 2015 in the literary journal Parnassus. The coda to this particular story: Logan's discovery led to the installation of a marker at Thaddeus Marshall's grave, which did not have a headstone. According to The New York Times, “a red and white wreath, signifying the red wheelbarrow and white chickens [was to be] laid beside it” (July 6, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/07/07/books/the-secret-of-william-carlos-williamss-the-red-wheelbarrow.html).There is a qualitative difference between the “microscopic” readings of “Stopping by Woods,” which make us reconsider the poem's potential meanings, and the “macroscopic” or historical speculation on Shelley's and Smith's poems, and “The Red Wheelbarrow,” which may give some insight to the poem but mostly fulfills what Richard Feynman called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 1999).Throughout these essays, there are innumerable uses of may have, might have been, perhaps, probably, likely. Consider Logan's anecdote of Keats's sending “On First Looking into Chapman's Homer” to Charles Cowden Clarke after their fevered reading together, and later that night, after having left Clarke's rooms: “Having not yet been to bed, he would likely have been too exhausted to deliver the poem himself and steal back to Southwark…. If Keats wrote [the poem] early on the morning of the Sabbath, that would explain his failure to use the Twopenny Post [which] had six daily deliveries—a letter posted by ten that morning would have reached Clarke with the third delivery, between noon and one or one-thirty p.m…. perhaps he was eager to share his own astonishment at a poem that had arrived like a bolt of lightning”(114; emphasis added).In addition to details on mail delivery in London, Logan takes us through a detailed consideration of the sonnet's diction and images and just where Keats might have encountered them before. For instance, “pure serene”: “Keats might have met it elsewhere in his vagabond reading…. A man in the miasmic warren of Dean Street might well pine for the pure serene” (124). The potential of other well-known phrases that Keats would have come across include “goodly states … wide expanse … his demesne … pure serene … loud and bold … with eagle eyes … wild surmise …” (126–27). Of the phrase “a new planet swims,” Logan surmises, “Keats is probably thinking of the aether. Astronomers would believe until Einstein that the stars and planets moved through the heavens suspended in this substance—Keats would have read in ‘An Explanation of the Principle Terms’ in his copy of Bonnycastle that ‘ether’ was a ‘fine subtile fluid’” (128–29). How convincing all this is, the reader will have to judge. Meanwhile, Logan's detailed and deep forays into Keats's time gives us a physical feel for his physically penning the sonnet itself and just what that might have taken: “The morning may have been cold—Keats might have hurried home, or left slightly earlier than dayspring. Still, considering all the small impedimental (warming his fingers; sharpening a quill, common use of steel nibs being a few years in the future; addressing as sheet; folding up the poem; sealing it with wax, which require a candle flame; taking the walk down Tooley) and at least some time thinking over his words, the timing is difficult.” (113) The essay on Keats's sonnet could well have stood alone, though Logan has paired it with Donald Justice's sonnet, “Henry James by the Pacific.” The somewhat-tenuous reason for doing so: “The poems each concern discovery of a land often rumored but never visited…. Each poet has used a great literary figure as the medium of self-discovery—these are poems in part about the rewards of reading.” Well, maybe. Perhaps Logan was paying personal homage to Justice. In an essay twenty years before—“The Present Bought on the Terms of the Past” (All the Rage [Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998], 30–35)—he writes of Justice as “one of our acute imaginative voices” (30). Logan had thought of the connection between the two poems years earlier, and he writes here of once asking Justice “whether he had recognized the odd, subterranean links between ‘Chapman's Homer’ and ‘Henry James by the Pacific.’ [Justice] seemed surprised, then gratified. After thinking for a moment, he said, ‘Not at all’” (148).One of the sometimes-pleasures in reading these dense essays is Logan's speculative riffing and the aforementioned byways onto which they take him. For instance, Seamus Heaney's “The Skunk” opens with these lines: “Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasuble / At a funeral mass, the skunk's tail / Paraded the skunk” (67). On “damasked,” Logan writes: The metaphor confers on the skunk a certain Crusader antiquity (the original damasks were woven in Damascus) as well as richness: in Epicoene, Ben Jonson mentions a damask tablecloth that cost eighteen pounds. At about that date, by one source, ten thousand bricks cost just under seven shillings. You could have bought more than half-a-million bricks with eighteen pounds, enough for a wall two miles long and six feet high.” (68) Two appending endnotes quote from Ben Jonson's Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman and another longer one begins by quoting a 1644 contract from M. W. Barley, English Farmhouse and Cottage (325). That the digging is deep and deeper is evident in the book's nearly 840 endnotes.I write “sometimes-pleasures.” While there are discussions that often lead to nuanced illuminations, such as Logan's exploration of the different published versions of Shakespeare's Sonnet 2, those discussions can also feel labored for what we come away with. The nearly thirty pages on Longfellow's “Hiawatha” and Lewis Carroll's parody is an example (again, for this reader). Perhaps early American literary scholars will be excited by a modern critic's even referring to Longfellow's eminently parodistic poem. And yet, in this nearly thirty-page essay, Logan's deep knowledge of literature and modern poetry comes to the fore in his generalizing about parody, which “is always double edged and Janus faced”: It must look sharply to its victim while looking out for itself, for a bad parody is worse than no parody at all. There is parody as comic burlesque and parody cunning in its criticism, parody purgative and parody merely parasitic (or perhaps epiphytic). Parody is the catcall or Bronx cheer to all things that take their seriousness too seriously—it supplies what has been left out or suppressed, offering mockery where there should have been self-mockery. Even Homer was parodied—and if the catalogue of ships in books 2 of the Iliad were not the oldest section of the poem, it would be the earliest and more brilliant parody. (90) In his forays into Pound's “In a Station at the Metro” (“The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.”), Logan imaginatively speculates on where the images, let alone the idea, for the poem itself might have come from. Consider “black bough”: “Perhaps the gloom suggested it. (The thicker the crowd, the fainter the light.) The atmosphere, dark enough already, would have been filled with the smoke of men indulging in pipes or cigarettes” (183). An endnote informs us that “[s]moking was allowed on the Métro until the early 1990s” (346n41). Logan suggests other sources for the images as well, including a specific incident involving the Metró: One evening in 1903, a fire caused by a train's short-circuited motor filled the tunnels and Couronnes station with smoke…. Eighty-four were killed. Pound had visited Paris in 1906, when memory of the fire would still have been fresh. Perhaps he had heard of it. The pale faces crowded along the platform might be an eerie reminder of those who had died underground.” (191) Interesting for a historical perspective? Yes. For a literary perspective? Yes, again. For interpreting or a deeper appreciation of the poem—the reader will have to judge.“Critical tactics often reveal the critic more than the poet,” Logan writes in this same chapter—“and a poem so spare [as ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’] invites overattention” (194). He could have been self-deprecating in referring to himself here. Not so. He is sharply disagreeing with Hugh Kenner and Charles Altieri on their separate discussions of the etymology of “depends” (in “So much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow….) (194).Readers familiar with Logan's scores of reviews of contemporary poetry and his academic literary criticism—The Undiscovered Country (Columbia UP, 2005), one of six books that collect his literary essays and reviews, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism—will be familiar with the breadth and tone of his writing. His deep knowledge sometimes leads him to make authoritative-sounding pronouncements that one could easily take issue with—“Henry James by the Pacific” is “a sonnet as sad and knowing as any in American literature” (131); “After Pound, there was not a poet who could requisition the power of such images until Geoffrey Hill” (182). Williams's “‘This is Just to Say’ may be the most passive-aggressive poem in English, yet few poems have portrayed so nakedly the quiet battle between husband and wife” (224). A literary call to arms!In sum, readers of Dickinson's Nerves, Frost's Woods who teach classes in poetry will certainly come away with a deeper appreciation than they are likely to have had for how poems that have seemingly transcended their time (so far) are also so much of the time of their authors. Logan has marked out a path that could guide students to immerse themselves beyond the aesthetics of poems, a path that offers a deeper appreciation of their composition.