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Diversity and Dissipation:
The Post-Modernist Movement in America
by
Michael Dellert
The post-World War II era in American letters has been described as the "Age of Uncertainty." This is hardly surprising. A look at the socio-political psychology of the past 50 years makes Americans as a race look schizophrenic. From McCarthyism and political witchhunts in the 50s to Free Hippie Love, Flower Power, and the anti-Vietnam War sentiment in the 60s to rampant liberal hedonism in the 70s to Reaganesque neo-conservatism and cultural materialism in the 80s, to political correctness and an emphasis on subcultural diversity at the expense of cultural unity in the 90s, the post-war era has been a quagmire of shifting values and philosophies, encouraged by an explosion in technological sophistication and a declining cultural literacy. The cultural fragmentation of America has prevented a unified poetic movement from rising to replace the Modernists of the interbellum period. Instead, there are Beat poets, confessional poets, commercial poets, African-, Asian-, Spanish-, Hispanic-, and Martian-American poets, nature poets, etcetera ad nauseum. In addition, the growing disparity between the socioeconomic classes and the rise of the mass media have contributed to the separation of the individual from the mass culture and his attribution to one or more subcultures, to which sophisticated mass-marketing techniques have artificially assigned certain products, argots and values which the (often unwilling) members of the subcultures must obtain, speak and live by. This schizophrenic multicultural social system has produced a variety of artistic responses, which share a few features but differ markedly in almost all others.
The writings of Allen Ginsberg and W.S. Merwin serve as perfect examples of this Age of Uncertainty and the poetic differentiation which it has spawned. Two styles could not be more radically different, yet each man was born in the twenties (Ginsberg in 1926, Merwin in 1927) and lived through precisely the same historical time period. Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, and raised in Paterson, New Jersey. Merwin was born in New York City, and grew up in Union City, New Jersey and Scranton, Pennsylvania. Ginsberg went to Columbia University, Merwin to Princeton University. Merwin's first book of poetry, A Mask for Janus, appeared in 1952. Ginsberg's first book of poetry, Howl and Other Poems, was published in 1956. Right about there, any similarity between these two poets ends.
Allen Ginsberg's poetry tends to be pseudoapocalyptic, describing the poet's relationship with a world gone mad. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,/ dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,/ angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night..." (Howl, 1-3). The incredibly long breath lines, stream-of-consciousness style, "vulgar" Americanisms, and longing for a lost spirituality are recurrent themes in his poetry. He wrote of drug hallucinations, homosexuality, and rebellion against an oppressive, jingoistic American culture. Ginsberg sought to expand "the area of reality" which poets could include in their poetry, and did so through the use of mind-bending drugs and an undifferentiated self-consciousness. In Ginsberg's poetry, all values are levelled, and all image and meaning subordinated to the relentless drive of his rhythms. "I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look at the sunset over the box house hills and cry" (Sunflower Sutra, 1).
On the other hand, W. S. Merwin’s poetry is much more traditional. Roughly pentameter lines, traditional themes and images, Merwin is what I would call a commercial poet. In fact, his poetry has recently appeared in The New Yorker, as commercial an outlet for literature as you are likely to find. Merwin's poetry, unlike Ginsberg's, does not frighten, startle, or surprise, but "enlightens," the way Ezra Pound's Modernist poetry brought wisdom and understanding through imagery.
"Noah’s Raven
Why should I have returned?
My knowledge would not fit into theirs.
I found untouched the desert of the unknown,
Big enough for my feet. It is my home.
It is always beyond them. The future
Splits the present with the echo of my voice.
Hoarse with fulfillment. I never made promises."
As Noah's Raven demonstrates, Merwin's style is drastically different from Ginsberg's. Imagistically akin to the late Modernists, it has a self-consciousness to it typical of this style of Post-Modernist poetry. It expects a certain education from its readers (a background in the Biblical Flood story), and expects the reader to identify himself with the subject of the poem, rather than for the author to be associated with the narrative voice. Through careful re-reading and subjective projection into the poem, the reader will (hopefully) draw out some kernal of wisdom planted there by the poet, a kernal peculiar and unique to each reader, as their subjective, affective experience of the poem is translated into meaning.
Having had the honor of participating in a poetry workshop led by Merwin several years ago, I can, from personal experience, say that his poetry is intended to be first and foremost, affective. It is written to elicit a particular feeling from its reader, but that particular feeling will be unique to each reader, because his themes tend to be generic and recycled, allowing the individual reader to project his own personal circumstances into those of the poetry. Grandmothers, grandfathers, children, life, death, etc. form the bulk of Merwin's themes, and they participate in the discourse of all the other commercial, mass-market poetry ever written by being somewhat generalized and unfocused in their imagery, the better to slip unobtrusively into the consciousness.
The poetry and prose of the late twentieth century could be described as "eclectic." It is born of turbulent social and economic times, and reflects the widening specialization and differentiation of the American population. That two poets born in the same general geographic area at approximately the same time in history could create such vastly different poetry is a testament to the fragmentation of American culture.