The New Compass: A Critical Review
Letter from
Helen Pinkerton
Trimpi
A letter is the heart’s good-will in brief.
So wrote J. V.
Cunningham in the first line of an early poem, “A Letter,” written while he was
living in
It may be an invitation to visit, as in Thomas Wyatt’s
first letter to John Poyntz, where, after giving his moral reasons for not
living at court, he writes: “But here I am in Kent and Christendom, / Among the
Muses where I read and rime.” And, “Where if thou list, my Poyntz, for to come,
/ Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.” Or it may be an invitation, as
in Jonson’s admirable “Inviting a Friend to Supper.” Donne forthrightly claims
to Sir Henry Wotton: “Sir, more then kisses, letters mingle Soules: / For, thus
friends absent speake.” And, in another to Wotton, “It is my deed of gift of
mee to thee.” Similarly, Milton takes up the tone of gracious affection in his
verse epistle to Edward Lawrence, inviting his friend to a dinner “Of Attick
taste,” with wine and music of “the lute well toucht, or artfull voice.” Pope’s
great “Letter to Dr. Arbuthnot” consummately exploits the letter’s capacity for
self-justification, even to the point of irritable exaggeration, and suggests
that should it fail to be composed from the “heart’s good-will,” the letter
might turn out to be one of those that Timothy Steele describes in “Old
Letters,” that:
[…] speak
of
Now
jettisoned ambitions
And
insecurities which passed for love,
[…] And as
one reads, one may, between the lines,
Construct
the features of a former self
Too
given to the self and its designs.
The letter, while
self-revelatory, ought not to be narcissistically self-obsessed, for that would
leave out the other half of the dialogue, the presence of the friend.
Whatever his reason, Cunningham apparently felt that his
verse letter was a failure, for he republished it only in a truncated form in
1937 and did not include it in his Collected
Poems and Epigrams of 1971 (it is included in Timothy Steele’s edition, The Poems of J.V. Cunningham, 1997).
However, at about the same date, living in Palo Alto, he wrote a splendid
example of the verse letter, “To a Friend, on Her Examination for the Doctorate
in English.” Addressed to a fellow woman graduate student at Stanford, it
epitomizes the true literary scholar’s concerns and costs (not quite our
contemporary “theorist’s” idea of graduate study), expressing his “heart’s
good-will in brief”:
[…] A learned grace
And lines of knowledge on the face,
A
spirit weary but composed
A
soft voice and historic phrase
Sounding
the speech of Tudor days,
What
ignorance cannot assail
Or
daily novelty amaze,
Knowledge
enforced by firm detail.
On the other hand,
Cunningham’s friend, Yvor Winters, for all his later love of literary
tradition, published no verse letter in the manner of Wyatt, Jonson, and Donne.
Ever the experimentalist, he published an early free verse poem, “The
Schoolmaster Writes to a Poet,” (R. L. Barth, ed., The Uncollected Poems of Yvor Winters: 1919-1928), in which, almost
accidentally, the form emerges, barely suggesting some of its usual intentions.
Written from Santa Fe in the early 1920s to a friend (possibly Glenway
Wescott), it gives news, of a sort: “Again the summer, / Santa Fe, / And a few
people— / A moment when one speaks / Beneath low trees […]” It is somewhat
self-revelatory, alluding to what the poet had earlier written, quoting
himself: “The villages / Are pressed flowers / Laid away.” He concludes by
conveying some of his heart’s goodwill, noting that he continues to send
letters, “From old habit,” but his mood is intensely melancholy:
The summer ages.
The
people come and go.
And
I shall go—
For
my gray fence is old,
My
letters quiet,
And
these lines forgotten.
It is a minimalist verse
letter. The possibilities of the classical plain style, which he came later to
love so well, are barely hinted at here.
A verse letter of Janet Lewis, rare in her work, “Forsan
et haec,” was written in nearby Los Altos in the 1980s. Addressed to her old
friend and fellow poet, Donald Stanford, it shows the letter’s freedom to touch
on matters of mutual personal interest—in this instance, a shared sense of
place during a summer long ago in Upper Michigan.
In that quiet place there was always
The sound of the wind in leaves, the lapping
Of water, and the voices of the freighters
Coming
upstream […]
A shared sense of time, in
details referring to Stanford’s youth and her father’s age, sharpens the
personal force available to the letter form. She quotes the well-known line
from Virgil’s Aeneid, which her
father had inscribed in a copy of the Latin poem that he gave young Stanford
one summer long ago:
Look back on this with me now. To no one else,
After these fifty-seven years, can I say:
Forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit.
Remembering these three poets, reading them in relation
to the powerful background of the traditional verse letter, has been for me
this spring a dipping into the well of time. All three lived in Palo Alto
during the 1930s. Cunningham was living here again, just returned from teaching
math to army students in Santa Ana, when I came to Palo Alto, the summer of
1944. I remember, the next spring, his intense, lean figure walking swiftly
down tree-lined Emerson Street, where he was renting a house with his small
daughter, Margie, and I rode past him on my bicycle. I knew him from the class
at Stanford in Freshman composition, entitled “Narration,” which I was taking
and where I was introduced to the prose of Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon,
and James Joyce, and the poems of Louise Bogan, the model for his own austere
lyrics. I had already taken the required class in Freshman comp from Winters
and had been recommended to Cunningham’s advanced class. He left for Hawaii the
end of the school year, and I did not see him again until the summer of 1952,
when he taught a long humid term at Harvard Summer School and became a friend.
His satirical bent by then had taken the briefer, more concentrated form of
epigram and epitaph.
Happily, however, the
satirical capacity of the verse letter has reemerged recently in the work of
Kenneth Fields, who lives now in Palo Alto. In his “Several Voices Out of a
Cloud: Letter to the Poet in Exile” (August
Delights, R. L. Barth Press, 2001), he realizes some of the powerful
possibilities of social criticism that the Latin satirists, Wyatt, Donne,
Jonson, and Pope, so well demonstrate. His observations on the contemporary
world are not about Court or aristocracy, but about the corruptions of American
academia. He uses, as the letter writer may, a historical persona, although
this variation of the form should rightfully be treated as what used to be
called the heroical epistle. Writing in the persona of Horace, he sends a
report to Ovid, who is in exile. It is a marvelous device for his purposes.
Beginning with a pose of
having “nothing left to satirize / Dull-eyed and neutral, dozing in the
corner,” he proceeds to anatomize the hypocrisy, vanity, silliness, and
ignorance of a contemporary English Department, meeting to discuss (what else?)
curriculum and promotions. He moves in and out of the persona of Horace,
revealing personal details and obsessions, even while he etches, through quoted
talk, his colleagues’ attitudes toward literature—the supposed responsibility
of their profession. He concludes, echoing a line of Ovid:
The stiffened herm in the garden’s
shivering,
The
sky that touches everything’s growing solid,
Somewhere a boat is
trailing vines in its wake,
Hot breath of panthers
unseasonably close by . . .
My Anacreon seminar’s
getting harder by the day.
Alluding to the beauty
of the great Western traditions of poetry, Horace-Fields conveys his current
malaise to a sympathetic correspondent. To evoke the tough, rough lines of
Donne’s great verse letters and the severe but amiable self-characterization of
Jonson’s is not easy to do. If Palo Alto has a literary tradition, Fields is in
it.
Among
my recent memories of Palo Alto is the Stanford Humanities Center Centenary
Symposium honoring Winters’s life and work, November 16-18, 2000. In his
participation and in conversation at parties afterward in Palo Alto, a welcome
presence was British-born Dick Davis, author of Wisdom and Wilderness: The Achievement of Yvor Winters (1983).
Included in Davis’ A Kind of Love:
Selected and New Poems (1991) is another superb example of the verse
letter, one that realizes beautifully the self-revelatory—easily
autobiographical—capacity of the form and shows its enduring power as a poetic
form. Like Fields, Davis uses an historical persona, but only for the
recipient. In his “A Letter to Omar,” November, 1982, he addresses a personal
letter, in English translator Edward FitzGerald’s stanza, to Omar Khayyam, the
great Persian poet. Intimate in self-revelation, reminiscent in
autobiographical detail, filled with the poet’s “heart’s good-will,” Davis’
poem is exemplary of the capacity of the form for the kind of detail that is
usually today the province of prose narrative. He relates his discovery, as a
child, of FitzGerald’s masterly translation of Omar’s Rubaiyat, his pursuit of “what your Englished verses meant” to
Tehran, Persia, his choice of teaching as a career, his marriage, learning the
language—in sum, the direction of his entire life as influenced by a passion to
understand the Persian poet’s meaning. He concludes:
And if I reveled in your melancholy […]
It was the passion of your doubt I loved,
Your castigation of the bigot’s folly.
Moreover, through the letter form,
“reporting” to Omar, he recreates its potential for political satire. In Iran:
The warring creeds still rage—each knows it’s
wholly right
And welcomes ways to wage
the martyrs’ holy fight;
You
might not know the names of some new sects
But,
as of old, the nation is bled slowly white.
Listen: “Death to the Yanks, out with their
dollars!”
What
revolution cares for poet-scholars?
What
price evasive, private doubt beside
The
public certainties of Ayatollahs?
And
every faction would find you a traitor:
The
country of the Rubaiyat’s creator
Was
fired like stubble as we packed our bags
And
sought the province of its mild translator.
Themes, observations, allegiances in
both Davis and Fields, restore in new contexts, the great subjects of the
traditional verse letters of Wyatt, Donne, Jonson, Pope, and others. What
better form for our contemporary literary and political malaise?
Pinkerton Trimpi, Helen. “Letter
from Palo Alto.” The New Compass: A Critical Review 3 (June 2004)
<http://www.thenewcompass.ca/jun2004/pinkerton.html>