outline_us_lit

TRADITIONALISMTraditional writers include acknowledgedmasters of established forms and dictionwho wrote with a readily recognizable craft,often using rhyme or a set metrical pattern. Oftenthey were from the U.S. eastern seaboard or thesouthern part of the country, and taught in collegesand universities. Richard Eberhart andRichard Wilbur; the older Fugitive poets JohnCrowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert PennWarren; such accomplished younger poets asJohn Hollander and Richard Howard; and the earlyRobert Lowell are examples. In the years afterWorld War II, they became established and werefrequently anthologized.The previous chapter discussed the refinement,respect for nature, and profoundly conservativevalues of the Fugitives. These qualitiesgrace much poetry oriented to traditional modes.Traditionalist poets were generally precise, realistic,and witty; many, like Richard Wilbur (1921- ),were influenced by British metaphysical poetsbrought to favor by T.S. Eliot. Wilbur’s mostfamous poem, “A World Without Objects Is aSensible Emptiness” (1950), takes its title fromThomas Traherne, a 17th-century English metaphysicalpoet. Its vivid opening illustrates the claritysome poets found within rhyme and formalregularity:The tall camels of the spiritSteer for their deserts, passing the lastgroves loudWith the sawmill shrill of the locust, to thewhole honey of the aridSun. They are slow, proud...Traditional poets, unlike many experimentalistswho distrusted “too poetic” diction, welcomedresounding poetic lines. Robert Penn Warren(1905-1989) ended one poem with the words: “Tolove so well the world that we may believe, in theend, in God.” Allen Tate (1899-1979) ended apoem: “Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!”Traditional poets also at times used a somewhatrhetorical diction of obsolete or odd words, usingmany adjectives (for example, “sepulchral owl”)and inversions, in which the natural, spoken wordorder of English is altered unnaturally. Sometimesthe effect is noble, as in the line by Warren; othertimes, the poetry seems stilted and out of touchwith real emotions, as in Tate’s line: “Fatuouslytouched the hems of the hierophants.”Occasionally, as in Hollander, Howard, andJames Merrill (1926-1995), self-conscious dictioncombines with wit, puns, and literary allusions.Merrill, who was innovative in his urban themes,unrhymed lines, personal subjects, and light conversationaltone, shares a witty habit with the traditionalistsin “The Broken Heart” (1966), writingabout a marriage as if it were a cocktail:Always that same old story —Father Time and Mother Earth,A marriage on the rocks.Obvious fluency and verbal pyrotechnics bysome poets, including Merrill and JohnAshbery, made them successful in traditionalterms, although they redefined poetry inradically innovative ways. Stylistic gracefulnessmade some poets seem more traditional thanthey were, as in the case of Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) and A.R. Ammons (1926-2001). Ammons createdintense dialogues between humanity andnature; Jarrell stepped into the trapped consciousnessof the dispossessed — women, children,doomed soldiers, as in “The Death of theBall Turret Gunner” (1945):From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.Six miles from earth, loosed from its dreamof life,I woke to black flak and the nightmarefighters.80