The American Poets

What riches American Poetry affords us Bishop, Berryman, Hart Crane, Dickinson, Eliot, Frost, Longfellow, Lowell, Millay, Moore, Plath, Pound, Poe, Wallace Stevens, Carlos Williams, Whitman.

And that ‘s just the dead poets to whom we give voice. 

Since this is a qualification I find that live poets, however eminent, are wholly relaxed about non-inclusion.

“We have everything in common with America, except language.” Clever Oscar, so generous, so amusing, and so right, is, on this occasion, not quite right. For “The English language befriends the grand American expression, it is brawny enough and limber and full enough.” Walt Whitman. It is a unifying force. 

Poetry is a trinity of sound, sense, and sensibility, and “the sound of sense” Robert Frost’s phrase, and the sense of sound, is lost unless we hear it, language caught alive.

Few poets ever caught life in language with as much defiant passion as did WALT WHITMAN  in ‘Leaves of Grass’, of which Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “It tumbled the world upside down for me, blew into space a thousand cobwebs of genteel and ethical illusion, and having thus shaken my tabernacle of lies, set me back again on a strong foundation.” This was not the initial response. “It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote ‘Leaves of Grass’ only that he did not burn it afterwards.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Its egotism ‘I celebrate myself’, ‘One’s self I sing.’ Its exultation of the body, particularly sexually, as equal to the soul, ‘I Sing The Body Electric’, horrified many. Indeed, he was sacked by his shocked employer. However, Walt Whitman persevered, and over 33 years added 400 poems to the original 12 first published in 1885 (and, though poor, at his own expense) in response to Emerson’s famous challenge to America to produce its own new, unique, voice. Though Emerson praised the work – in a private letter, which Walt, without permission, published – sales were for many years abysmal. Whitman, however, believed his work ‘unkillable’. And he was right, the last line of the incandescent ‘Song of Myself’ – from which we have taken an excerpt – is sublimely confident, ‘I stop somewhere waiting for you’. Indeed he does. We follow with the only poem anthologised in his life time ‘O Captain! My Captain!’, mourning the death of Lincoln, who had steered his ship of state in stormy waters.

To ‘Song of Myself’, ‘O Captain, My Captain’…

In March, 1959, a dinner was held in New York to honour, on his 85th birthday, ROBERT FROST, winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, a record which has never been equalled. Lionel Trilling rose to speak “I have to say that my Frost is not the Frost I seem to perceive in the minds of so many of his admirers. Frost’s best poems represent the terrible actualities of life. In sum, he is a terrifying poet.”

The audience was disconcerted, as was Frost. But, Trilling was right. Frost’s poem ‘Out, Out’ is a tragic masterpiece about an accident in a saw mill, when the saw ‘leaped out at the boy’s hand, neither refused the meeting’, the last line amongst the most brutal in literature. Frost’s first collection was published in his 40s, in England where he’d come to farm in Buckinghamshire. Within a year he’d produced ‘North of Boston’, returned to America, after which there was no stopping him. He spoke at President Kennedy‘s inauguration; the President ended many of his speeches with lines from ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’. Indeed, Kennedy asked Frost to visit Kruschev in Moscow to plead against the building of the Berlin Wall. With considerable cunning, Frost recited ‘Mending Walls’ at a dinner – ‘The question about walls is what are you walling in, and what are you walling out’.

‘Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be The Same’ is a haunting love poem. On his death bed he would say “Love is all. Romantic love I tremble with it”. He’d trembled as a young man with an obsessive love for the woman he pursued to the point almost of insanity, his wife, Elinor White. They suffered much tragedy, illness robbed them of three children, and a fourth, Carl, committed suicide. “I feel as though I am  laid out upon a cross”. That a man who had suffered so much asked to have on his gravestone, ‘I had A Lover’s Quarrel with the world’ testifies to character and grace. 

To ‘Mending Walls’…

EMILY DICKINSON wrote short poems. Short does not mean sweet. When she died in 1886, aged 56, she did not have a single book of poetry to her name. She is now regarded as one the greatest poets in the American canon. Bloom considers her as individual a thinker as Dante. How did this happen? Well after Emily’s death her sister Lavinia opened her bureau and found, neatly copied and sewn together in groups, over 900 poems. Lyndall Gordon’s brilliant biography traces her remarkable story. Remember Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who advised Whitman to burn his work? Well, he declined to publish Miss Dickinson. Twice. The poems, though he recognised their brilliance, were, he said, ‘extreme’. They were indeed extreme works of an ecstatic genius. Death obsessed, ‘My Life had stood a loaded Gun’, ‘Because I could not stop for death’, ‘I heard a fly buzz when I died‘, (titles were always the opening line) ‘Well Death is the distinguished thing’ Henry James. Dickinson lived through the civil war, her house overlooked a graveyard, and she was often ill. After Wentworth’s second rejection she wrote him one of the most elegant exits in literary history, ‘I smile when you suggest that I delay to publish. If fame belonged to me I could not escape her, my barefoot rank is better.You think me uncontrolled? I have no tribunal. The sailor cannot see the north but knows the needle can’. Brilliant! She withdrew to her genius ‘This  Nun of Amhearst’. Bloom believes hers is a drama of erotic loss, rather than of religious obsession. Perhaps, in Hughes’s haunting phrase Emily Dickinson knew “her unusual endowment of love was not going to be asked for”.

To ‘My Life had stood a loaded gun’…

ELIZABETH BISHOP, she came, she saw, she changed the view. If, as C.K. Stead wrote, Eliot followed his nerves in ‘Prufrock’ in Bishop’s case the nerve is optic. What Bishop saw was not what we see, nor how we see it – her declared intention in her ‘ice writing’ was to combine the natural with the unnatural, and to give us poetry ‘as normal as sight, as artificial as a glass eye…’. It took time to adjust. Five major publishers turned her down. She went on to win the Pulitzer, and the National book award. James Merrill commented on Bishop’s instinctive, modest life long impersonation of an ordinary woman “Perhaps she needed the disguise. Her beginnings were traumatic.” ‘Although, I think I have a prize unhappy childhood, please don’t think I dote on it’. She didn’t. Her father died in the year of her birth. When she was five her mentally fragile mother was admitted to a state institution. Bishop never saw her again. Much was lost, and far too early. ‘The Art of Losing isn’t hard to master.’ Her obsessive travelling, her many simultaneous lesbian love affairs, her alcoholism, all seem rooted in that early up-rootedness. Her masterpiece of existential terror ‘In the Waiting Room’ in which in the voice of  seven year old, she catches the almost surreal world of childhood, was written in her 60s, as though she’d returned to the source. ‘Songs for a Coloured Singer’ – the first poem of hers to be noted by anyone – shows her gift for character, voices. The ironic note is gentle, less so what she requested for her gravestone which was

‘AWFUL, but cheerful ‘

To ‘In The Waiting Room’, and the last poem, ‘One Art’…

“There is a direct line which can be traced from Virgil to Dante, from Dante to Milton, from Milton to Eliot, the greatest poet for three hundred years.” Ted Hughes. Right again.

“His poetry cuts into our consciousness with the sharpness of a diamond.” The Nobel Academy. It is one of literature’s more daunting truths that T.S.ELIOT was only twenty-two/ three when he wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. It was written in fragments, and according to the poet Conrad Aiken, Eliot was heartlessly indifferent to its fate. Aiken and Ezra Pound fought to have it published, It took four years. Why? Prufrock was an unfamiliar zone of consciousness – an exemplar of Eliot’s theory of the auditory imagination – the feeling for sound and rhythm which exists far below the levels of conscious thought. One must surrender.

A vignette. Virginia Woolf to T.S. Eliot “We’re not as good as Keats”. T.S. Eliot to Virginia Woolf “Oh, yes, we are, we’re trying something harder.” He certainly was. In the history of Poetry there is before and after ‘The Waste Land’. The original title was ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’ – Betty Higden’s line in Dickens’ ‘Our Mutual Friend’. Eliot ‘do’ the ‘The Waste Land’ in different voices – a multiplicity of sound, lines from Dante mingle with Sanskrit, jazz rhythms with Elizabethan language. Part II opens in the room heavy with her strange synthetic perfumes. Suddenly, the voice of the hysterical woman, believed to be that of his tragic first wife, Vivienne Haigh Wood, who declared this terrifying dialogue to be “wonderful, wonderful”. Then, we are transported to a cockney pub, to listen to the tale of poor Albert, out on leave, who wants a good time and Lil ‘who ought to be ashamed, she looks so antique’. The poem then fades on an echo, Ophelia’s line – ‘Good night sweet ladies‘. ‘The Waste Land’ is one of the great triumphs of Literature and Life.

To ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’…

© Copyright 2025 The Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation. A charity registered in England and Wales number 1145062.