The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse

By Siobhan Phillips

Wallace Stevens once described the "malady of the quotidian," lamenting the dull weight of everyday regimen. Yet he would later hail "that which is always beginning, over and over"& mdash;recognizing, if not celebrating, the possibility of fresh invention.

Focusing on the poems of Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merrill, Siobhan Phillips positions everyday time as a vital category in modernist aesthetics, American literature, and poetic theory. She eloquently reveals how, through particular but related means, each of these poets converts the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. In Stevens, Phillips analyzes the implications of cyclic dualism. In Frost, she explains the theoretical depth of a habitual "middle way." In Bishop's work, she identifies the attempt to turn recurrent mornings into a "ceremony" rather than a sentence, and in Merrill, she shows how cosmic theories rely on daily habits.

Phillips ultimately demonstrates that a poetics of everyday time contributes not only to a richer understanding of these four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the issues that literature reflects and illuminates.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9780231520294

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THE POETICS OF THE EVERYDAY

Siobhan Phillips

THE POETICS OF THE EVERYDAY

Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse

Columbia University Press New York

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-52029-4

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

PHILLIPS, SIOBHAN, 1978 –

THE POETICS OF THE EVERYDAY: CREATIVE REPETITION IN MODERN AMERICAN VERSE / SIOBHAN PHILLIPS.

      P. CM.

INCLUDES BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES AND INDEX.

ISBN 978-0-231-14930-3 (CLOTH : ALK. PAPER)—ISBN 978-0-231-52029-4 (E-BOOK)

1. AMERICAN POETRY — 20TH CENTURY — HISTORY AND CRITICISM. 2. REPETITION IN LITERATURE. 3. REPETITION (RHETORIC) 4. FROST, ROBERT, 1874–1963—TECHNIQUE. 5. STEVENS, WALLACE, 1879–1955—TECHNIQUE. 6. BISHOP, ELIZABETH, 1911–1979—TECHNIQUE. 7. MERRILL, JAMES INGRAM—TECHNIQUE. 1. TITLE.

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Poetics of Everyday Time

1.  The Middle Living of Robert Frost

2.  The Faithful Mode of Wallace Stevens

3.  The Everyday Elegies of Elizabeth Bishop

4.  The Cosmic Dawnings of James Merrill

Conclusion: Everyday Pasts and Everyday Futures

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I WOULD NOT HAVE BEGUN THIS BOOK, MUCH LESS FINISHED IT, without the help of many people. David Bromwich and Langdon Hammer provided insightful, detailed advice in readings and conversations from the beginning of my thoughts to the end of my revisions. Pericles Lewis has been an equally generous source of good thoughts and counsel. Others who read drafts, discussed ideas, and helped with practicalities include Leslie Brisman, Stephen Burt, Jill Campbell, Wes Davis, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Wai Chee Dimock, Paul Fry, Christopher R. Miller, Lloyd Pratt, and John Rogers. I owe much to the gracious assistance of these scholars and others.

I am grateful to all my family members for their understanding during the long span of research and composition as well as for many specific instances of help: Sheila Peiffer and Steven Peiffer read portions of the text, Christopher Peiffer provided vital advice at a crucial juncture, Caleb Peiffer was always ready with useful wisdom about the writing process. Prudence Peiffer’s insights and editing saved me from errors while leading me to better analysis.

Throughout work on this book, the friendship of Matthew Mutter, Patrick Redding, and Kathryn Reklis both sharpened my ideas and refreshed my enthusiasms. I thank Emily Setina for her considerate reading as well as for our many enriching talks about poetry, biography, and twentieth-century literature. To Robert McGill—clear-eyed and empathetic about literary scholarship as well as so much else—I am steadily grateful.

I have been very lucky in my scholarly homes during the past several years. Thanks to all at the Yale Department of English, especially Diane Jowdy, Ruben Roman, and Erica Sayers. Members of the Twentieth-Century Colloquium and the Biography Working Group at Yale heard and improved portions of this material in early forms. I am grateful to Diana Morse at the Harvard Society of Fellows for her many instances of help and support, and to all those in Cambridge who offered good questions and welcome encouragement in the late stages of writing and editing.

Portions of chapter 2 appeared in PMLA and are reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, The Modern Language Association of America. I thank Patricia Yaeger, Eric Wirth, the editorial board, and two readers for their suggestions. Portions of chapter 3 appeared in Twentieth-Century Literature and appear here by permission of that journal; thanks to Lee Zimmerman and the journal’s two readers for their comments. I am grateful to everyone at Columbia University Press who has made the process of book publication smoother, more helpful, and more interesting than I would previously have thought possible; thanks in particular to Philip Leventhal, Michael Haskell, and the two anonymous readers whose wonderfully attentive comments improved the entire manuscript.

Funds from the John F. Enders Fund, the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation, and the William F. Milton Fund supported the research, writing, and publication of this book. I am deeply thankful to these institutions. I am grateful as well as to the authors, executors, libraries, and publishers who provided permission to quote the following material:

Excerpts from In the Home Stretch and Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1969, by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright 1942, 1944 by Robert Frost, copyright 1970 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Excerpts from The Man with the Blue Guitar, The World as Meditation, and An Ordinary Evening in New Haven, from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, by Wallace Stevens, copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens and renewed 1982 by Holly Stevens. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Unpublished letters of Wallace Stevens copyright © the estate of Wallace Stevens, used by permission of the estate and the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Excerpts from Anaphora, Crusoe in England, Five Flights Up, North Haven, One Art, The Prodigal, Roosters, Sestina, and The Shampoo from The Complete Poems, 1927–1979, by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Excerpts from unpublished notebooks and unpublished letters written by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 2007 Alice Helen Methfessel. Printed by permission of Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, LLC on behalf of the Elizabeth Bishop Estate and by permission of Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries.

Excerpts from Self-Portrait in Tyvek™ Windbreaker, For Proust, A Tenancy, The Thousand and Second Night, The Broken Home, Clearing the Title, and To the Reader, from Collected Poems, by James Merrill, edited by J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser, copyright © 2001 by the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. Unpublished material from the letters and papers of James Merrill, copyright © the Literary Estate of James Merrill at Washington University, used by permission of the estate, Amherst College Library and Special Collections, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Excerpts from More Feedback from Where Shall I Wander, by John Ashbery, copyright © 2005 by John Ashbery, reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Excerpts from Episode by John Ashbery, copyright © 2008 by John Ashbery. Originally published in The New York Review of Books (November 20, 2008). Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.

Excerpts from Measure from Field Guide, by Robert Hass, copyright © 1973 by Robert Hass, reprinted by permission of Yale University Press.

Excerpts from L’Abandon Ou Les Deux Amies from Strangely Marked Metal, by Kay Ryan, copyright © 1985 by Kay Ryan, reprinted by permission of Copper Beech Press. Excerpts from Half a Loaf from Flamingo Watching, by Kay Ryan, copyright © 1994 by Kay Ryan, reprinted by permission of Copper Beech Press. Excerpts from If the Moon Happened Once from Elephant Rocks, by Kay Ryan, copyright © 1996 by Kay Ryan, used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Excerpts from Waste from Say Uncle, by Kay Ryan, copyright © 2000 by Kay Ryan, used by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Excerpt from Repetition by Kay Ryan, originally published in Poetry (January 2008), copyright © 2008 by Kay Ryan, used by permission of Kay Ryan.

Excerpts from Like Lightning Across an Open Field, "Little O, and If See No End In Is" from Watching the Spring Festival, by Frank Bidart. Copyright © 2008 by Frank Bidart. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Librarians and staff at many libraries and archives made my research easier and more fruitful, helping me to find and use the materials I needed: thanks especially to Patricia Willis, Nancy Kuhl, Sara S. Hodson, Dean Rogers, and John Hodge. At Vassar, the gracious hospitality of Silke von der Emde, Bert Wachsmuth, Leah Wachsmuth, and Louise Wachsmuth was instrumental. Peter Hanchak allowed me to discover more about Stevens; J. D. McClatchy and Stephen Yenser provided generous scholarly and practical help; Kay Ryan kindly supported my efforts; and Jim Harrison offered me a rare, rich archival opportunity.

Finally, I wish to thank Brian Phillips, who read, discussed, and debated everything related to this book. His intellect is a constant resource, his support an even more valuable solace; my sense of the creative good in everyday life draws from every day of our life together.

Introduction

The Poetics of Everyday Time

IN AN EARLY POEM, WALLACE STEVENS CALLS IT A MALADY, A numbing quotidian routine of recurrent days. In a late poem, however, Stevens calls it a health, a rejuvenating over and over of renewed mornings (Collected, 81, 449). This book focuses on the concept of daily time that links Stevens’s two phrases; I wish to investigate how and why a poet may transform the frustration of the first description into the fulfillment of the second. To do so, I look at four writers who pay consistent attention to the potential of everyday patterns: like Stevens, Robert Frost strives to make over and over a chance as well as a chore (Collected Poems, 66); Elizabeth Bishop wonders how to turn recurrent mornings into a ceremony rather than a sentence (Complete Poems, 52); James Merrill tries to perceive ordinary living as less like a cyclic degeneration and more like a spiral of ever-truer tomorrows (Collected Poems, 616). Through particular but related means, each of these poets works to convert the necessity of quotidian experience into an aesthetic and experiential opportunity. Through particular but related developments, each of these poets finds that daily life can be a vital form as well as a central subject. In their work, ordinary experience both shapes creative practices and directs thematic preoccupations. This book aims to describe their everyday project.

In so doing, I also hope to demonstrate why this poetics may matter not only to an understanding of four writers but also to descriptions of their era, estimations of their genre, and ongoing reconfigurations of the philosophical issues that literature reflects and illuminates. The topic of common living may seem too slight to bear this freight; can it matter so much, one might well ask, how or even if one gets up in the morning? The poetics of everyday time resists such indifference by presenting ordinary life as significant drama: in this writing, quotidian existence cannot be ignored or underestimated. These poems constantly brook the risks in diurnal patterns, and the effacing threat of sink[ing] under what is ordinary, as Frost writes, or the accusatory pain of morning’s horrible insistence, as Bishop records, shadows all four writers of this study (Frost, Collected Poems, 242; Bishop, Complete Poems 35). These poets confront such dangers, however, not to dismiss or even to overcome what is ordinary but rather to realize its full promise: the illumination of what Merrill describes as days brilliantly recurring, what Stevens calls an inner miracle and sun-sacrament, what Bishop names in one title as a miracle for breakfast (Merrill, Collected Poems, 673; Stevens, Collected, 236; Bishop, Complete Poems, 18). In their work, admitting the burden of quotidian banality is one way of discovering the gifts in given conditions. Their poems thus articulate a common good that is neither ignorant nor cynical; they replace the consoling but impossible sanctity of religious faith with the sober but available sanction, to adapt Stevens’s word, of everyday regimen.¹ To use Bishop’s phrases, this verse would look on the untidy activity of existence and perceive it as awful but cheerful (Complete Poems, 61).

So much is evident in Bishop’s Anaphora, for example, which begins with each day and adopts as its subject just that ordinary pattern (Bishop, Complete Poems, 52). The poem’s focus is representative, since the writers of everyday time often use the moment of waking as a crucial test of quotidian recurrence. In Anaphora, a speaker begins in wonder at morning before realizing, by the end of the first stanza, that its pure energy will degenerate into the immanence of mortal / mortal fatigue. Bishop’s poem does not conclude with the repetitions of deathly exhaustion, though; rather, the mirroring shape of a second stanza follows the progression of day to the onset of evening, including the preparations for another sunrise. To accept the debilitations of dailiness is also to claim its regular, even ceremonial renewal: the fiery event, as Bishop calls it, of every day in endless / endless assent. This diction insists on the power inherent in the simple fact of one more sun, an energy transfiguring in its fire and elevating in its rise. Bishop’s assent also shows the exertion behind this quotidian power, presenting matinal beginning as both a singular happening and an assumed pattern. If dawns are necessarily endless, that order makes each one no less of an event. The stupendous studies of each day take up such eventfulness as their special, recurrent charge, transforming inevitable fatigue into an equally inevitable rejuvenation. This, in Bishop’s poem, is the heroism implicit in a repetitive life, and it is also, and just as importantly, the heroism implicit in a repetitive poetry. From the title, which compares natural and verbal patterns, to the various returns of words that describe and transform daily recurrence, Bishop’s work shows how rhetorical craft mimics and supports an existential effort. Like all the work of an everyday poetics, Anaphora perceives ordinary practice as an artistic task.

What, exactly, are the interests and investments of the task? Anaphora and other works define the stakes of a quotidian poesis by showing a specific dilemma to be emphasized in ordinary experience: the link between a creative self and the world it inhabits. The question of that connection is central to all postromantic aesthetics, certainly, and vital to all post-Kantian philosophy, but it becomes newly central in the postmetaphysical context of the modernist period—in the era’s accelerating uncertainties about the integrity of the subjective person as well as the coherence of the objective environment. A postmodern culture, with its increased emphasis on contingency and indeterminacy, accentuates the pervasive twentieth-century problem; poststructuralist doubts about ontologies of subject and object seem to have complicated rather than obviated concerns about the rights and relations of any discrete identity. Moreover, the skeptical divide between self and world may be particularly difficult for an American writer of the modernist or postmodernist period, since the literary-philosophical heritage of an American tradition, with its mixture of romanticism and pragmatism, charges aesthetics with the potentially contradictory goals of transcendent selfhood and practical efficacy.² In such a context, the poets of this study show, common life can be newly critical, for its patterns repeatedly enact the association of a single mind and a general environment. Daily experience places the personal rounds of habit and routine within the natural returns of sunrise and sunset; it compares the contemplative shuttle of memory and expectation with the calendric cycle of yesterday and tomorrow; it sets an individual’s decision to get up in the morning and face one more day next to the world’s tendency to turn over in the morning and provide one more dawn. The writers of my analysis exploit such congruence as they discern how ordinary behavior might stage a viable, secular, and democratic response to a dualistic split. In their work, daily practice can maintain effective subjective freedom within an objective necessity, as everyday living mediates the constantly remade relation of two terms rather than demanding the uncertain choice of one or the other.

Daily practice can do so because of the pattern that distinguishes both human schedules and worldly cycles, a pattern of temporal repetition. Structurally and thematically, recurrence pervades the poems that I consider as well as the poetics that I wish more generally to describe. This ordinary rhythm avoids the common temporal extremes of stasis and change: the poetry of this study does not seek the eternity of T. S. Eliot’s still point, that is, or the novelty of Emerson’s original relation, or the now of Benjamin’s "Jetztzeit"—but it does not accept the fluidity of Bergson’s evolutionary stream, either, or the flux of experience in William James’s later philosophy, or the storm of annihilating progress in Benjamin’s historicism (Eliot, Complete, 119; Emerson, Collected Works, 1:7; Benjamin, Illuminations, 261, 257–58). Rather, everyday poetics articulates a timeliness in which each morning offers a fresh start and a familiar emphasis, an established precedent and a novel development. Ordinary experience moves by the recursive advance of three tenses, with each present comparing to a similar but different past and predicting a similar but different future. Such difference-in-sameness defines any instance of discernible repetition, whether it be symbolic or situational.³ In its daily instantiation, however, the pattern grants ordinary writers a vital possibility. Old-but-new mornings allow the innovation necessary for free will or creative individualism: the sense, always, of something original emerging into being. At the same time, old-but-new mornings provide the consistency necessary for that authority to find purchase: the conviction, always, of how a new conception will take shape. Daily time therefore allows the independent mind an empirically warranted place in the world’s process. One might claim as one’s own the dawn that actually comes, as in Frost’s work, or desire as one’s own the day that is actually realized, as in Stevens’s; one might see in an impersonal tomorrow the remaking of a personal yesterday, as in Bishop’s poetry, or read in the rounds of the calendar the progressive enhancement of the self, as in Merrill’s. The iterations of everyday life, in these writers’ verse, provide recurrent chances for agency as well as recurrent assurances of its relation or effects.

This is the dynamic, for example, of St. Armorer’s Church from the Outside, Stevens’s work of always beginning quoted above; the poem presents a human construction and an earthly morning as comparable instances of re-creative consistency (Collected, 448–49). Each is like a new account of everything old, Stevens writes, and both allow the poem’s joyful combination of acquiescence and independence. Just as distinct becoming can flourish within an order of natural light and day, so the artist of dailiness can practice an individual craft sustained by its amenability to the world’s process. In fact, an agreement to daylight echoes across the poetics of everyday time: not just in the ember yes of Stevens’s St. Armorer’s Church or the punning assent of Bishop’s Anaphora but also in the answer from within that allows Frost’s hero to push toward dawn in Snow, or even the yes of nature and poetry that ends the final third of Merrill’s daily epic, The Changing Light at Sandover (Frost, Collected Poems, 141; Merrill, Sandover, 489, 492). This agreement also echoes in everyday verse beyond the work of these four—in the final words of a poem by Randall Jarrell, for example, whose critical understanding of Frost, Stevens, and Bishop colors his own regard for the ordinary: May this day / Be the same day, he writes, the day of my life (Complete, 353). This speaker’s secular amen to daily sameness entitles him to claim the morning as his own, "my life," and quotidian speakers in Stevens, Frost, Bishop, and Merrill, as they variously constitute their identities through ordinary activities, endorse that final possessive first-person. All exemplify, perhaps, a crucial phrase of William James’s Psychology, which holds that the amount which we accord of it is the one strictly underived and original contribution which we make to the world (Principles, 2:579). James’s paradox—indispensable for any philosopher committed to both freedom of the will and reality of the world—allows one to prove autonomy through the very consent to necessity. The poetry of this study shows how James’s original accord can be an ordinary cadence, as this verse makes a required, tedious sequence into a meaningful chain of affirmation.

Such a yes does not necessarily produce any change in the content of one’s daily rounds. Rather, quotidian poetics requires an alteration in how one perceives, performs, or adopts the same old thing. The writers of this study are therefore unusually respectful of the commonplace habits in their own and others’ lives; they share an admiring attention to what could seem dull or uninteresting—evident in Stevens’s insistence on the regimen of his office job, for example, or Frost’s preference for an ordinary middle way or Bishop’s admiration of routine or Merrill’s appreciation of Bishop’s own talent for life (Frost, Interviews, 48; Bishop and Lowell, Words in Air, 647; Merrill, Collected Prose, 121). Such predilections, an everyday poetics makes clear, are not in contrast but in concert with artistic goals, since life and art are to these four poets necessarily interdependent. That interdependence, moreover, is of a particular kind: life and art interrelate less as subject matter and treatment than as commonly ordered procedures of familiar discovery. When Merrill entitles a poem Morning Exercise, for instance, he describes not just its material, which tells of a routine trip to the gym, but also its composition, which arranges stanzas on the page with the dutiful regularity of aesthetic training (Collected Poems, 602). The two exercises, both yielding results that are expected and transformative at once, prove the benefits of aesthetic convention as well as the good of experiential habituation: the gym excursion yields a reconciliatory new start just as the poetic workout turns into an original work. One can see a similar process in Stevens’s On the Way to the Bus, where an initially gloomy morning commute encounters a refreshment of cold air that inspires a new language (Collected, 472). Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill work for such renovations as they link the composition of one’s daily existence to the composition of one’s poetic lines. Both of these endeavors use the paradox of a changing sameness in the development of a creative self.

THE PARADOX AND THE DEVELOPMENT SHOW THE BASIC IMPORtance of what seems least important, an insight that unites the prevalent considerations of the everyday in recent humanities work.⁴ Much of this scholarship extends seminal cultural-studies analyses of Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau across a wide range of disciplines, and much of it agrees on the importance of the quotidian to twentieth-century culture⁵ while also agreeing on the difficulty of fixing the topic.⁶ As Liesl Olson summarizes, discussion of everyday life invites the paradox of representing the unrepresented (L. Olson, Modernism, 11).⁷ I join many in the belief that such a paradox can strengthen rather than obviate criticism,⁸ that any quest of the ordinary, to adopt the title and some of the spirit of Stanley Cavell’s book, must emphasize the difficulty of articulating what is commonly assumed (Quest, 9). I also follow many, however, by seeking to particularize everyday indefinition—in my case, by concentrating on recurrent time.⁹ The very implications of repetition, I hope, will serve to counter a threat of limitation in this choice; a focus on timeliness takes up an aspect of daily life that is at once transcultural, less various than the quotidian’s many possible contents, and tangible, less vague than the quotidian’s many possible meanings. Through describing the effects of this structure and the related effects of repetition in both philosophy and poetic form, I hope to show how a particular temporality enables a self-fashioning that may well be an enduring interest of ordinary existence.¹⁰

The result, I hope, can complement and ramify other interests of everyday life in twentieth-century writing, many of which have recently gained important critical exposition.¹¹ It may also complement work on other twentieth-century American poets who treat everyday themes but whom I do not treat at length: poets like Jarrell, with his several meditations on the dailiness of life (Complete, 235–7, 300); or Robert Lowell, whose late work so often seeks a good morning and whose last book is called Day by Day (Collected, 692, 709–838); or A. R. Ammons, whose continuous, daily Tape for the Turn of the Year strives to record these / days / the way life gave them (Tape, 203); or Robert Creeley, who writes that the way / it was yesterday, will / be also today / and tomorrow (Creeley, Collected Poems, 213). In particular, several of the poets associated with the so-called New York School promote ordinary stuff as a poetic subject: James Schuyler’s verse praises a daily life that is comfortable, like old jeans (Collected, 82); Frank O’Hara’s I do this I do that poems make art from untransformed quotidian detail (Collected, 341); John Ashbery’s writing defamiliarizes the familiar to find that there is something to be said for these shiftless days (Mooring, 350); Ted Berrigan jots down Today’s News and fills verse lines with 10 Things I Do Every Day (Collected, 371–72, 164); Bernadette Mayer composes poems that wish to pass / as a journal entry (Mayer, Another, 19). All of these artists and others illuminate literary uses of quotidian experience, and all merit further analysis along these lines.

These poets, however, do not focus on everyday time—on everyday recurrence—with the attention of Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill. The verse of these four, it seems to me, dramatizes problems and benefits of a changing sameness more fully than other twentieth-century writing: more than the alternatives of present-tense flow and singular moments in a poetry like Ammons’s, for example. In addition, the work of these four poets considers repetition as an aesthetic pattern more explicitly than other twentieth-century writing: more than the free-verse spontaneity in work like O’Hara’s or Berrigan’s, for example. Finally, the four writers I analyze treat time as a personal and ecological series of unremarkable days rather than as a cultural or political itinerary of marked dates: they are relatively uninterested, for example, in Lowell’s turn from a Notebook to a History. Such common and commonly central ideas about recurrence lead to a number of overlapping concerns—among them, memory and mourning, guilt and atonement, submission and assertion. These link Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill in an illustrative grouping. Indeed the latter two poets show some awareness of this association; if Stevens famously distrusted Frost’s focus on things and Frost replied with his suspicion of Stevens’s bric-a-brac,¹² Bishop looked back to Stevens’s example and recognized Merrill’s sympathy, while Merrill even more consciously took Stevens and Bishop as models.¹³ An everyday poetics therefore helps to explain and describe some important affinities among American twentieth-century poets, whether these sympathies are proclaimed by writers or perceived by readers or both.

That being said, I hope that implications of my discussion extend to work that is left out of this study: analysis of everyday poetics may suggest how other poets’ more singular uses of daily recurrence bear on questions of subjectivity and form. This analysis can accentuate, for example, the fact that Schuyler considers his own version of dualistic interrelation—the what / of which you are part—in a Vermont Diary that sees in repetition, change (Collected, 105), or the fact that Lowell’s persistent efforts to redeem the pattern of day to day to day use the pattern of sonnet sequences (Lowell, Collected, 681). In work that refuses daily repetition, an everyday poetics helps to describe this choice as necessarily related to both a concept of person and a choice of prosody. A notable example of such refusal is William Carlos Williams, whose ordinary poetry—antisubjective and free verse—records quotidian instants rather than diurnal repetitions. Since this moment is the only thing in which I am at all interested, as he writes in Spring and All, Williams’s verse seeks a spring or morning of pure, unrecurrent present tense; this immediacy, he believes, can strip away the constant barrier between mind and world as it dissolves consciousness in immersive attention (Williams, Collected, 1:178, 177).¹⁴ So much is evident in Williams’s many descriptions of everyday scenes, where the intensity of observation paradoxically diminishes the sense of an observer; Spring and All, for example, suppresses any register of a figure by the road to the contagious hospital through its scrupulous, one by one rendering of the objects in this new world (Collected, 183). Williams’s verse form, too, seems to work toward a state of momentary selflessness, fracturing continuity into discrete phrases isolated by unexpected breaks across a poetic line. His ideal poem is a field rather than a rhythm, and an assemblage of independent fragments rather than a cadence of fulfilled expectations (Williams, Selected Essays, 280–81).¹⁵ The legacy of Williams’s views in later objectivist and projectivist poets furthers the self-effacement that his timeliness supports: Charles Olson, for example, in essays on projective verse, charges poets both to get the content instant and to [get] rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego (Collected Prose, 205, 247). In the everyday work of Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill, by contrast, poets strive to keep that individuality intact—and strive to do so through the recurrence that Olson banishes. Their daily repetitions show that a subjectivist-objectivist dichotomy might be a needlessly stark reaction to modernist problems.

That demonstration helps to clarify their contribution to modernist writing more broadly. Everyday verse opposes a twentieth-century truism that would contrast artistic craft and quotidian reality: through its concern with avant-garde nonconformity and its record of a crisis in realistic mimesis, modern art often seems to identify the aesthetic by its rejection of convention.¹⁶ In particular, modern art often seems to reject conventional temporality; if modernism is fundamentally a culture of time, as a range of critics rightly imply, and if modernity can be defined as that era in which time imposes itself as a problem (Osborne, The Politics of Time, x),¹⁷ many modernist artists see the solution in a destruction of sequence. They would defy the Baudelairean ennui that oppresses common citizens with sameness and overcome the homogenous, empty time that Benjamin takes to accompany any idea of historical progress (Benjamin, Illuminations, 261).¹⁸ This type of modernism is about making it new—to use a Poundian dictum that Williams, among other Imagist writers, takes up—and its characteristic gesture is the shock of a break, irruption, revolution, or even revelation. Yet when modernist writers do not, like Williams, use such shocks to promote a self-erasing realism, they often resist time for the opposite effect: they seek, in the atemporal instant, the all-encompassing idealism of an all-powerful self. Many of modernism’s influential critics underline this aspiration, making it characteristic of an era: subjective power is the promise of the sense of the present that Stephen Kern emphasizes in his sweeping study of modernist culture when he describes a newly personal perception that could be expanded spatially (Culture of Time and Space, 314) and is one result of the spatial form that Joseph Frank cites as the aspiration of twentieth-century literature (The Widening Gyre, 8, 57).¹⁹ Self-consciousness also motivates the timeless and transcendent symbol or node of pure linguistic energy that in Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane’s judgment characterizes modern art’s resistance to history or sequence as well as its attention to the subjective mind (Modernism, 50).²⁰ The effect is a Paterian single moment or a Joycean epiphany or a Yeatsian image: a state that would press a symbolist focus on perception toward an association of art with eternity and subjectivity with transcendence (Pater, The Renaissance, 151.).²¹

The writers I consider complicate both the enduring link of modernism and timelessness and the related, equally enduring connection of timelessness and subjectivity. Frost, Stevens, Bishop, and Merrill could never be unproblematically entered under the heading modernist; even Frost and Stevens, whose writing falls within a generally accepted range of the movement’s dates, distanced themselves from its figures and precepts (in their careful reactions to Eliot, for example). Each of these four poets, however, considered the relation of his or her project to a modernist strain, and their poetry can together be seen as a meditation on modernist possibilities. In their work, twentieth-century writing does not br[eak] out of the old mechanistic routine, as Edmund Wilson describes in his famous 1931 account of imaginative literature (Axel’s Castle, 298), but instead affirms the continuity of esthetic experience with normal processes of living, as John Dewey recommends in his 1934 account of Art as Experience (10). In these poets’ work, moreover, twentieth-century writing can affirm this connection without ceding the importance of the individual that Wilson’s conception would support but that Dewey’s would minimize (Axel’s Castle, 297).²² That is, these four writers aspire to neither the potential solipsism of a private time nor the potential self-effacement of an external order. Their example may therefore support an emergent attention to the everyday strain as a revision of critical assumptions in modernist studies: Rita Felski recommends such focus in both of her influential articles, and Bryony Randall and Liesl Olson exemplify its possibilities with recent studies analyzing, in Olson’s words, the endurance of the ordinary … as an essential feature of modernist literature (L. Olson, Modernism, 32).²³ Through a focus on the form and theme of repetition, I hope to show how this feature addresses the dualistic split that remains a central problem of modernist aesthetics,²⁴ as well as to relate the possibilities of recurrence to the forms and history of verse in particular.²⁵ In a poetics of diurnal returns, the quotidian themes of twentieth-century writing address the persistent dilemma of the self.²⁶ This verse defines the ordinary realm as valuable in part for its provision of a common, viable, modernist individualism.²⁷

The definition might usefully bear on readings of American literature, too, especially those currently prevailing analyses that emphasize a pragmatist tradition. In their respect for immanent experience and adoption of common practice, poets of everyday time demonstrate this lineage—even Merrill, an unlikely heir, espouses a Jamesian philosophy when he admires Stevens’s poetry as a body of work that is man-sized (Collected Prose, 53). The daily artistry of these writers, however, is more closely akin to James’s Psychology than to his Radical Empiricism, and more focused on personal development than on social or political value. Their writing values human experience because it allows the meaningful realization of human will. It is just this realization that challenges many pragmatist descriptions of literature, since the antiessentialism of these accounts can imply an abandonment or surrender of identity. Richard Poirier, for example, in his essays on literary Emersonianism, articulates a practice of writing off the self and a desire for self-obliteration (Renewal, 182–83, 195); Elisa New, in her study of a consensual national tradition, defines an intimate and reciprocal relation to American resources that only the self delivered from the continent of individuality can discern (The Line’s Eye, 9); Jonathan Levin, in his study of transitional American forms, finds pragmatist imagination to be tantalizingly oxymoronic (The Poetics of Transition, 195). If Levin, New, and Poirier all rightly maintain the accuracy of that oxymoron, an everyday poetics helps to show how it can be achieved: ordinary repetitions enact the self-defining self-abandonment that Poirier identifies, as well as the interplay of subject and phenomenon that New describes and the integration of mind and world that Levin explains.²⁸ A literature of over-and-over rhythm refuses the supposed timelessness of American transcendentalism while also refining the timely movements that are stressed in American pragmatism;²⁹ this poetics allows an empirical subjectivity that seems especially significant to the philosophical genealogy of American writing and thought.

In that allowance, the poetry of this study could exemplify certain insights of Stanley Cavell, whose analysis agrees with aspects of pragmatism and yet criticizes pragmatic readings of Emerson precisely for their tendency to minimize his self-perfectionist drive. Cavell’s own work, by contrast, describes an ordinary philosophy that virtually excludes James and Dewey, placing Emerson and Thoreau