AMERICAN

TRADITIONALISM
Traditional writers include acknowledged
masters of established forms and diction
who wrote with a readily recognizable craft,
often using rhyme or a set metrical pattern. Often
they were from the U.S. eastern seaboard or the
southern part of the country, and taught in colleges
and universities. Richard Eberhart and
Richard Wilbur; the older Fugitive poets John
Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn
Warren; such accomplished younger poets as
John Hollander and Richard Howard; and the early
Robert Lowell are examples. In the years after
World War II, they became established and were
frequently anthologized.
The previous chapter discussed the refinement,
respect for nature, and profoundly conservative
values of the Fugitives. These qualities
grace much poetry oriented to traditional modes.
Traditionalist poets were generally precise, realistic,
and witty; many, like Richard Wilbur (1921- ),
were influenced by British metaphysical poets
brought to favor by T.S. Eliot. Wilbur’s most
famous poem, “A World Without Objects Is a
Sensible Emptiness” (1950), takes its title from
Thomas Traherne, a 17th-century English metaphysical
poet. Its vivid opening illustrates the clarity
some poets found within rhyme and formal
regularity:
The tall camels of the spirit
Steer for their deserts, passing the last
groves loud
With the sawmill shrill of the locust, to the
whole honey of the arid
Sun. They are slow, proud...
Traditional poets, unlike many experimentalists
who distrusted “too poetic” diction, welcomed
resounding poetic lines. Robert Penn Warren
(1905-1989) ended one poem with the words: “To
love so well the world that we may believe, in the
end, in God.” Allen Tate (1899-1979) ended a
poem: “Sentinel of the grave who counts us all!”
Traditional poets also at times used a somewhat
rhetorical diction of obsolete or odd words, using
many adjectives (for example, “sepulchral owl”)
and inversions, in which the natural, spoken word
order of English is altered unnaturally. Sometimes
the effect is noble, as in the line by Warren; other
times, the poetry seems stilted and out of touch
with real emotions, as in Tate’s line: “Fatuously
touched the hems of the hierophants.”
Occasionally, as in Hollander, Howard, and
James Merrill (1926-1995), self-conscious diction
combines with wit, puns, and literary allusions.
Merrill, who was innovative in his urban themes,
unrhymed lines, personal subjects, and light conversational
tone, shares a witty habit with the traditionalists
in “The Broken Heart” (1966), writing
about 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 by
some poets, including Merrill and John
Ashbery, made them successful in traditional
terms, although they redefined poetry in
radically innovative ways. Stylistic gracefulness
made some poets seem more traditional than
they were, as in the case of Randall Jarrell (1914-
1965) and A.R. Ammons (1926-2001). Ammons created
intense dialogues between humanity and
nature; Jarrell stepped into the trapped consciousness
of the dispossessed — women, children,
doomed soldiers, as in “The Death of the
Ball 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 dream
of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare
fighters.
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