Assignment

Periodization and Difference
Author(s): Micah Mattix

Source: New Literary History, Vol. 35, No. 4, Forms and/of Decadence (Autumn, 2004), pp.
685-697
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20057866
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Periodization and Difference
Micah Mattix
Periodization in literary history, as it is currently employed, is a

fairly recent phenomenon. While the past has been "cut up" since
the time of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (440 BCE), secular
periods, such as "ancient" and "modern," were first used by Petrarch to
compare himself with the past, and increased in prominence with
philosophers and literary historians such as Voltaire (1694-1778), J. G.
Herder (1744-1803), Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), and Friedrich
Schlegel (1772-1829).1 The term "romantic" was first used by Thomas
Warton (1729-1790) to distinguish between poetry that embraced the
medieval romances as opposed to "classical" poetry, and, in the late
1800s, began to be applied to describe English poets such as William
Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) .2
In 1888, Heinrich W?lfflin was one of the first critics to apply the art term
"baroque" to poetry, and, since the late 1960s, the term "postmodernism"
has been frequently applied to both English and American literature.3
The application of such terms to categorize and analyze past texts,
however, has been increasingly critiqued as their use has grown. In 1902,
for example, Benedetto Croce argued that such generalizations do little
to advance our understanding of works of art as each work is, according
to Croce, unique.4 In 1966, Michel Foucault argued that the periodization
of literary history has no inherent historical validity as a division of
human culture, being, at best, an arbitrary imposition on an otherwise
dynamic system and, at worst, a means of creating and controlling
knowledge and, therefore, of consolidating power. And, more recently,
Robert Rehder has shown how the use of period terms is, in many ways,
ahistorical, as authors who do not exhibit the stylistic elements of the
supposed period in which they live are treated as somehow living outside
their own time.5
In response to such critiques, while it is almost universally recognized
that the periodization of the past can be reductive, it is argued that
periods are nevertheless necessary in understanding past texts because
they make difference apparent. In a recent special issue on periodization,
Marshall Brown summarizes what has become the standard defense of
their usage. While, he claims, period terms are "relative" and fictitious,
New Literary History, 2005, 35: 685-697
686 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
they are nevertheless "necessary" for understanding the "complex

accomplishments" of individual authors.6 While Brown admits that
period terms can be reductive and even engender misunderstanding if
they are understood as definitive divisions of human culture, he claims
that we must use some form of periodization because without it "there
can be no thought and no transcendence beyond mere fact toward
understanding" (312). In relation to the literary work, Brown argues,
period terms not only help to establish the context of a text but also
provide a fictional homogeneous period style against which contrasting
styles can be compared (312, 316). In other words, periods, Brown
claims, clarify the literary accomplishment of an individual author. They
help to make difference?the measure by which literary works are
evaluated?apparent.
This theoretical defense, however, does not match the use of period
terms in practice. Far from helping to delineate how a particular author
is different, period terms obscure it by superimposing a predetermined
schema that is reductive.7 In this sense, they obscure what they purport
to describe. While period terms might be a convenient way of dividing
up literary history for undergraduate and graduate programs at the
university, or for certain anthologies written primarily for students, the
argument that period terms assist the scholar in determining the
uniqueness of a particular author or work is, quite simply, false. The
opposite, in fact, is frequently the case. A brief analysis of the poetry of
Frank O'Hara (1926-66) in several recent works of literary history will
show the extent to which period terms have such a leveling effect. In the
process of showing this, I will also mention briefly some insufficiencies
and incoherencies regarding the definition and time span of some of
the period terms currently employed in works of literary history, after
which an alternative to period terms will be proposed.
In his History of Modern Poetry (1976), David Perkins examines over
fifty poets in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland from
1890 to the present, providing insightful and original analysis on
authors as varied as Sir William Watson (1858-1935) and Allen Ginsberg
(1926-2001).8 His treatment of Frank O'Hara, while short, provides,
among other things, an excellent analysis of the effect and purpose of
O'Hara's use of direct and informal language in poems such as
"Personal Poem" (1959) and "Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and
Jean-Paul" (1959), as well as some very insightful remarks concerning
O'Hara's treatment of politics in poems such as "Poem (Khrushchev is
coming on the right day!)" (1959).9 Despite these excellent pieces of
criticism, however, Perkins is ultimately unable to explain in any
consistent way how O'Hara is different from and similar to other past
and contemporary poets?and, therefore, to clearly evaluate his poetic
PERIODIZATION AND DIFFERENCE 687
accomplishment?because of his use of period terms. That O'Hara is

quite different from Charles Olson (1910-60), Robert Lowell (1917
77), and Allen Ginsberg, and that he shares some similarities with
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and William Carlos Williams (1883-1963),
are rarely mentioned, and certainly never explored in any detail,
because the premise that style develops in periods does not allow for
such comparisons.
Perkins begins by arguing that style in poetry develops in periods. "In
every age," Perkins claims, "only a small number of the techniques and
conventions that are possible in poetry are actually used. The others are
not adopted because they would be inconsistent with those which are, or
because they involve moral or metaphysical assumptions the poet does
not share, or because (in ages that prize originality) they would remind
readers of some past style or other poet and are thus suited only for
allusion or parody" (333). Because of this, Perkins claims, "poems by
poets who lived in the same age and place are likely to resemble one
another in style and content" (335). There are, however, two problems
with this initial statement. First, Perkins assumes that there are such
things as "ages" in human culture, and implies that they possess an
objective definition. This, however, is false. Not only are ages, as
Foucault notes, the historian's arbitrary imposition on an otherwise
dynamic system, but there is little agreement among literary historians
as to the arbitrary definition and time span of many of the supposed
literary ages.
The meaning and time span of terms such as "romanticism" and
"modernism" have been the subject of much debate over the past fifty
years, and no other term is currently more highly debated than the term
"postmodernism," which has been variously defined as "incredulity
toward metanarratives" (Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard), the dissolution of the
distinction between high and low culture (Fredric Jameson), a
"Kunstwollen" (Umberto Eco), or as merely an aspect of "modernism"
(J?rgen Habermas), and is said to have begun anywhere from the mid
19408 to the mid-1960s.10 Because of this, the term "postmodernism" has
been applied to almost every cultural phenomenon in the past thirty
years and engenders a whole gamut of philosophical and aesthetic ideas
that make it nearly impossible to use the term in a coherent and
applicable way. Terms based on political dynasties, such as "Elizabethan"
or "Victorian," or those based on cultural changes, such as "the
Renaissance" or "the Enlightenment," have not fared much better, as
many scholars have noted, due primarily to the awkwardness of employ
ing a time period used to identify political or social changes, which may
or may not have affected what or how people write.11 Therefore, to
assume, or even to state uncritically, that there are such things as ages
and that they possess some agreed-upon definition and time span is to
ignore one of the principle problems in using them to categorize and
analyze past texts.
The second problem with Perkins's claim that "poems by poets who
lived in the same age and place are likely to resemble one another in
style and content," and the principal reason for rejecting it, is the simple
fact that poems written at the same time and place do not necessarily
resemble each other in style and content. O'Hara's poetry is a case in
point. O'Hara published A City Winter, his first book of poems, in 1952,
followed by Meditations in an Emergency in 1957, Second Avenue in 1960,
and Lunch Poems in 1964. During this same period, Allen Ginsberg
published Howl (1956), Kaddish (1961), and Reality Sandwiches (1963);
Robert Lowell published Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and Life Studies
(1959); and Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (1960). While these
poets share some similarities in style, there are also many differences,
and it is simply incorrect to claim that O'Hara's style, for example,
somehow resembles Olson's, Lowell's, or Ginsberg's more than it does
William Carlos Williams's, or that Olson's style resembles Ginsberg's and
O'Hara's more than it does Ezra Pound's, or that Lowell has the same
style as Olson, Ginsberg, and O'Hara, but a different one from T. S. Eliot
(1888-1965) or Allen T?te (1899-1979).
In O'Hara's poetry, for example, as is the case in Williams's, decisions
regarding commas, periods, section breaks, and line length are made
primarily in order to give the poem a certain visual look on the page,
whereas in the poetry of Lowell and Ginsberg, they seem to be made
primarily to give the poem a certain sound. O'Hara uses commas to
separate images, while Lowell and Ginsberg use them to separate a
certain number of syllables and to add stress and tension to the words of
the poem as it is read aloud. The lightness of O'Hara's verse, further
more, has more parallels, in many ways, with the poetry of Williams, the
early work of Stevens in Harmonium (1923), and, in some instances,
Byron's (1788-1824) Occasional Poems than it does with either Lowell's
Lord Weary's Castle or Olson's The Maximus Poems. The idealism in Olson
is absent in both Lowell's and O'Hara's poetry, and the political
controversies surrounding the civil rights movement and the cold war
that preoccupied Ginsberg hardly enter O'Hara's work at all.
Poems by poets living at the same time and same place do not
necessarily resemble each other in style and content, and in treating
poets such as Ginsberg and O'Hara as part of the same period, Perkins
is at pains to explain the obvious differences in their respective styles. At
the beginning of his section on Ginsberg and O'Hara, Perkins immedi
ately gives the following qualification, where he oscillates between
attempting to be sensitive to their obvious differences while still claim

ing that they shared a period style:
As a matter of moral and aesthetic faith, they composed with rapid spontaneity.
They were Dadaist and Surrealist, though much more so in New York than in
San Francisco. And they shocked traditional readers by their dissolution of form,
their subject matter, and their moral and philosophical attitudes, which could
seem frivolously nihilistic. But despite these and other resemblances, the two
styles were not closely similar; they were both versions of the general period style
of the United States in the 1960s, which I described in Chapter 14, but they had
no greater similarities with each other than they did with other types of poetry in
the period, and I place them together in this chapter for convenience.12
Perkins's description of the similarities between Ginsberg's and O'Hara's

styles borders on jargon. He uses broad terms, such as "Dadaist" and
"Surrealist," to claim that they shared a writing style only then to hedge
such generalizations by claiming that "despite these and other resem
blances, the two styles were not closely similar" (528).
Further on in the same section, Perkins remarks that much that
preoccupied poets such as Ginsberg and Olson "seemed not to concern"
O'Hara and other poets living and writing in New York at the time
(530). "Political and social themes," Perkins writes, "?the controversy of
their generation with the United States?rarely eritered their poetry
even during the war in Vietnam" (530). "The tones of political-moral
philosophy," Perkins continues, "in Ginsberg, Lowell, Duncan, Olson,
Bly, Levertov and so many others were not included on their register"
(530). Despite these clear differences, however, Perkins nevertheless
feels that these poets can still be grouped under the same "general
period style" and focuses in the rest of the section on the principle of
similarity in their work?the "personal" and "spontaneous" elements in
their poems. While Perkins is a sensitive enough critic to notice that the
styles of Ginsberg's and O'Hara's poetry, as well as those of Olson's and
Lowell's, are, in fact, quite different, he is ultimately unable to examine
these differences in any detail because of a previous commitment to the
notion of a period style.
O'Hara himself recognized that his poetry was quite different from
much of the poetry being written at the time, and refused to locate his
style on some supposed spectrum of contemporary styles. When asked in
an interview with Edward Lucie-Smith in 1965 what his relation was
"between the academic and Black Mountain, or between Lowell and
Olson," O'Hara responded: "Actually I don't really see what my relation
is to them one way or the other except that we all live at the same time."13
In his 1966 obituary essay for O'Hara, John Ashbery (b. 192V) also
points out that his poetry was quite different from his contemporaries:
"O'Hara's poetry has no program and therefore cannot be joined. It
does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of modern
society; it does not speak out against the war in Viet Nam or in favor of
civil rights; it does not paint gothic vignettes of the post-Atomic Age: in
a word, it does not attack the establishment. It merely ignores its right to
exist, and is thus a source of annoyance for partisans of every stripe."14
What Ashbery highlights (which, it might be added, is also true of his
own poetry) is that O'Hara's work is as different from Ginsberg's verses on
the war in Vietnam as it is from the so-called established verse of T. S. Eliot.
O'Hara was not interested in poetic "movements" or "schools." He was
not interested in working out some philosophical or political ideal in his
poetry, or about writing poetry for any reason other than poetry itself. In
his "Statement for The New American Poetry" (1959), he writes: "I don't
care about clarifying experiences for anyone or bettering (other than
accidentally) anyone's state or social relation, nor am I for any particular
technical development in the American language simply because I find
it necessary."15 His "formal 'stance,'" he continues, is to see his poetry as
a means of expressing "where what I know and can't get meets what is
left of what I know and can bear without hatred" (500). He views his
poetry, in other words, simply as the product of his individual conscious
ness. This is a view he shares with Wordsworth, and, in many ways,
Stevens, Williams, Pound, and many others. The notion of a "period
style," however, blocks Perkins from examining how O'Hara might be
similar, or indebted, to Wordsworth, Stevens, Williams, or Pound. While
Perkins admits in his chapter on Pound and Stevens that poets such as
O'Hara, Ginsberg, and Olson built on their poetry, as well as on the
poetry of Williams, he does not explore this relationship in any detail,
but simply asks the reader to keep this relationship (whatever it might
be) in mind.16
This is, perhaps, because what poets such as Olson, Lowell, Ginsberg,
and O'Hara share with poets such as Pound, Williams, and Stevens, as
well as with almost every poet since Wordsworth, is precisely the
"personal" and "spontaneous" elements of their poetry that Perkins
finds so different. Wordsworth, for example, wrote famously in his
Preface (1802) to the Lyrical Ballads that poetry is "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings," and attempted (though not always
successfully) to use a much more personal and less elevated diction than
any poet before him.17 Walt Whitman (1819-92) uses free verse in Leaves
of Grass (1891) because of the freedom it allowed him to express his
feelings, and attempts, as he explains in his notes, "to avoid all poetical
similes."18 Both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot would perfect the free verse
form, and in his introductory note to William Carlos Williams's The
Tempers (1913), Pound writes that what he admires in Williams's poetry is

the fact that it is "not overcrowded with false ornament," and the fact
that Williams's "cadence is, to my sense, genuine."19 While it may be
argued that O'Hara's poetry is so spontaneous and so personal that, as
Marjorie Perloff has stated, his poems hardly seem "to qualify as poems at
all," it is important to remember that similar remarks have been used to
describe the poetry of nearly every great poet since Wordsworth.20
Frank O'Hara also shared other aspects of style with poets such as
Williams and Stevens, all of which Perkins leaves unanalyzed. While
O'Hara's relationship to Williams has been noted and explored in
several works, strangely, little has been written of his relationship to
Stevens. Yet, O'Hara clearly admired and was influenced by Stevens's
honesty in his poems and his ability to develop a style of his own that
expressed his sensibility. In notes for a talk at The Club in 1952, O'Hara
writes: "More than any other living poet he has maintained poetry as
high art. Never making concessions to styles or public sentiments he has
remained austere without becoming cold or finicky; his work has grown
steadily in beauty and wisdom while never thickening into mere fuss and
elegance nor hardening into theory. The sensibility his poems reveal is
one which other ages [may] well envy us for possessing."21 Not only does
O'Hara state his admiration for Stevens's poetry here, but he also claims
that what he admires in it is precisely the fact that Stevens has not
followed other "styles or public sentiments." What he admires in
Stevens's work is its difference, and the fact that it cannot be reduced to
the styles of the supposed period in which Stevens lived.
Marjorie Perloff, one of the few critics to write of Stevens's influence
on O'Hara, shows that O'Hara drew from Stevens's poetry in creating
his own style. She writes, for example, that one of O'Hara's early poems,
"A Procession of the Peacocks" (1948), "is an example of a Wallace
Stevens imitation," and that lines 12 and 13 of O'Hara's "Ode to Michael
Goldberg ('s Birth and Other Births)" (1958) recall "Wallace Stevens's
'The World Is Larger in Summer.'"22 While there are, in fact, few
similarities between O'Hara's "Ode to Michael Goldberg" and Stevens's
"The World Is Larger in Summer," Perloff is correct in claiming that "A
Procession of the Peacocks" is a Wallace Stevens imitation. Furthermore,
what she does not mention is the fact that the entire poem is also a
variation on a theme in Stevens's "Domination of Black" (1923), where
O'Hara both enacts and reverses Stevens's image of poetic imagination.
O'Hara's "Les etiquettes jaunes" (1950), furthermore, begins in almost
the same way, as far as subject matter is concerned, as Stevens's "Cye est
pourtaicte Madame Ste. Ursule, et les unze mille vierges" (1923), and
O'Hara's "Early Mondrain" (1950) and "On Looking at La grande jatte,
the Czar Wept Anew" (1951) recall the dramatic, descriptive tone of
Stevens's "The Auroras of Autumn" (1950). While the styles of O'Hara

and Stevens are often quite different, they also share similarities. \et,
both these differences and similarities go undetected when the two
poets are separated by the categories of periods.
Style in poetry does not necessarily develop in periods. Literary
historians, however, sometimes organize literary history in such a way as
to make it look as though this is the case. Perkins, for example, divides
poetry in the United States from 1890 to the present into four distinct
periods in an attempt to accommodate four distinct styles: "The Ameri
can Milieu, 1890-1912"; "Popular Modernism," which spans a mere ten
years, from 1912 to 1922; "High Modernism," which he dates from 1925
to 1950 and then extends it, somewhat confusingly, to include the 1950s
and 1960s with the "resurgence of Pound, Williams and Stevens"; and
"Postmodernism," which Perkins dates as starting in 1954. Almost every
poet included in Perkins's History spans at least two, if not three, of these
periods, and the decision to place Olson, Lowell, Ginsberg, and O'Hara
in the "postmodern" period, and Stevens and Williams in what Perkins
calls "High Modernism" is not based on any historically d?fendable
period style, but rather upon a predetermined period style posited by
the literary historian.
Each great poem and each great poet is different. They each have
particularities that other poems and other poets do not share. These
particularities, however, go unperceived when we use period terms.
Rather than highlighting the poetic accomplishment of a particular
poet, period terms have a leveling effect?highlighting only the ele
ments of style or content that are shared between poets in the same
period, or highlighting those elements that are different from poets in
previous periods. How a poet differs from contemporary poets in the
same period, or how he is similar to poets in previous periods, is rarely, if
ever, mentioned.
While not all literary historians have claimed, as Perkins has, that style
in poetry develops in periods (and even Perkins himself seems to have
restated his position somewhat in his Is Literary History Possible?),23, it is
frequently argued, as Brown does, that periods are nevertheless neces
sary in understanding past texts because they make difference apparent.
This theoretical defense, however, does not match the use of period
terms in practice, as we have seen in Perkins's work. Nor does it seem to
match the use of periods in other more recent works of literary history.
In Emory Elliot's Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), for
example, while Elliot does not use period term labels such as "modern
ism" and "postmodernism" to title his chapters, he nevertheless divides
literature in the United States into five distinct categories, the final two
of which ("1910-1945" and "1945-Present") correspond almost exactly
to the dates Perkins uses to define "High Modernism" and

"Postmodernism." Poets such as Wallace Stevens and William Carlos
Williams are placed in the period "1910-1945," while poets such as
Olson, Lowell, Ginsberg, and O'Hara are placed in the one entitled
"1945-Present." Despite attempting to allow for the heterogeneous
nature of much of American poetry, and of literature in general, as
Elliot states in the preface, the poetry of this second group is neverthe
less treated as somehow possessing the same style, which is described in
terms almost identical to Perkins's.24 James Breslin, the author of the
section on poetry in the volume, writes that the poetry in the "postwar
era" was "spontaneous and unpredictable," due to its reaction against
"Modernism."25 While Breslin admits in his short section on O'Hara and
Ashbery that "Williams and Whitman were important to O'Hara, as was
Wallace Stevens to the young Ashbery," and that both O'Hara and
Ashbery wrote "many different kinds of poems and differed markedly
from each other," he nevertheless focuses in practice on what makes
O'Hara's poetry "speedy, literalistic" and "transparent," thus supporting
his thesis that poetry in the "postwar era" is "spontaneous and unpredict
able" (1097-99).
A further example of the leveling affect of period terms can be found
in the recent Cambridge History of American Literature, edited by Sacvan
Bercovitch.26 Despite its claims to have marked "a new beginning in the
study of American literature" and to have "redrawn the boundaries of
the field and redefined the terms of its development," Bercovitch,
nevertheless, divides American poetry into volumes according to the
familiar dates of 1800-1910 (volume 4), 1900-1950 (volume 5), and
1940-1995 (volume 8).27 As was the case in both Perkins's and Elliot's
histories, in The Cambridge History, poets such as Williams and Stevens
find themselves in the volume dated 1900-1950 and Olson, Lowell,
Ginsberg, O'Hara, and Ashbery in the one dated 1940-1995. What is
new with The Cambridge History is not that it has, in fact, "redrawn the
boundaries of the field," but rather that it has added new ones. In the
volume on poetry from 1940 to 1995, for example, not only does Robert
von Hallberg, the author of the section, employ the traditional dialectic
of "modernism" versus "postmodernism," but following, perhaps, Helen
Vendler's proposal that the solution to reductive period terms is more
categorization, further divides "postmodernism" into "Rear Guards" and
"Avant-Gardes," and "Avant-Gardes" into four different "literary avant
garde scenes."28
These further divisions, however, have not corrected the reductive
nature of period terms, but accentuated it. In Hallberg's chapter on the
"Avant-Gardes," for example, while there is a fair amount of discussion
of the definition of the avant-garde in American poetry, which he
admits, ironically, seems not to concern many poets, there is very little
analysis of the actual poetry of Olson, Ginsberg, or O'Hara. In this
particular case, not only have Hallberg's added divisions failed to make
the heterogeneous nature of much of American poetry apparent, but, I
would argue, they have displaced the subject of poetry almost entirely in
favor of discussion of such things as "Black Mountain avant-gardes,"
"New York avant-gardes," "the Black Arts Movement," "continental
avant-gardes," "the postwar avant-garde," "Futurists," and so forth (83
92).
Period terms do not make difference apparent, and, in practice, are
simply used for convenience. In The Norton Anthology of Postmodern
American Poetry, for example, Paul Hoover explains why he has chosen to
use the term "postmodern" in the title of the anthology: "I have chosen
'postmodern' for the title over 'experimental' and 'avant-garde' because
it is the most encompassing term for the variety of experimental practice
since World War II, one that ranges from the oral poetics of Beat and
performance poetries to the more 'writerly' work of the New York
School and language poetry."29 In other words, the term "postmodern"
has the least amount of precise descriptive content, which makes it a
very convenient term to lump together a bunch of otherwise unrelated
authors. It is used precisely because it does not make difference
apparent, and it is this convenience, I would posit, that makes the term
"postmodernism" and other period terms attractive to use in works of
literary history, where a large number of poets need to be treated in a
comparatively few number of pages.
This does not mean that the past should not be "cut up" at all. Robert
Rehder argues, however, that the problems of "dynamics and develop
ment can only be seen if much longer durations are considered than are
included in any period."30 Rather than using period terms, therefore, he
proposes that all historical statements be made "in terms of particular
authors and texts," and that we "talk about poetry from Milton to
Wordsworth or the novel from Waverly (1814) to Ulysses (1922)" (123).
In such a case, Rehder argues, literary history "could then be expressed
in literary terms and subsequently related to the dynamics of other
subjects, and hypotheses formulated that would allow for different rates
of change and for development over periods of time determined by the
object described" (123). Similarly, Ralph Cohen argues that change and
development in literary texts ought to be analyzed in terms of their
genre over a period of time, the duration of which is, in turn,
determined by identifiable changes in the texts belonging to that
particular genre.31 Rather than imposing a superficial time period such
as "modernism" or "postmodernism," in such a case difference and
variation themselves determine the time period needed to study the

change observed.
For example, a work of literary history in this case might examine
American poetry from Walt Whitman to Frank O'Hara without dividing
the poets into periods, which would then allow the author of the history
to compare the styles of each poet included in the history based upon
identifiable differences or similarities located in the poems themselves.
Or, it might examine a particular idea, or stylistic element, over a period
time?the expression of the self in poetry from William Wordsworth to
John Ashbery, or first-person narration in the novel from Pamela (1740)
to Heart of Darkness (1902). While any attempt to organize and synthesize
the past will necessarily lead to certain reductions and regrettable
omissions, in the above example, the criteria by which an author is
included or not in the history, and the change being analyzed, are
clearly stated. This, I would argue, is a marked advantage over period
terms, where the organizing principles are not only frequently unstated
or unclear, but, quite simply, false. As opposed to attempting to show
that Frank O'Hara is a "postmodern" poet, or that Samuel Taylor
Coleridge is a "romantic" one, historians would be free to explore the
complex relationships that exist between poets and between them and
their cultures, cutting up the past into manageable sections without also
establishing monolithic period terms.
While I agree with Brown that we cannot attain to knowledge of the
past without some sort of division of it, Brown and others claim
unnecessarily that such divisions need to be made using period terms. It
is unclear, however, why it is, in fact, logically necessary that an absolute,
homogeneous period be posited in order for difference and variation to
be apparent. Especially given that, in practice, period terms clearly have
the opposite effect. For difference to be apparent, another approach to
dividing literary history is clearly needed, and, perhaps, thinking of the
past in terms of changes within literary genres rather than in terms of
arbitrary and often ideologically weighted period terms might be the
beginning of a fresh approach to literary history that opens up new
discussion of texts and authors hitherto excluded by periodization.
University of Neuch?tel
NOTES
1 Michael Grant, The Ancient Historians (London: Weidenfelf and Nicolson, 1970), 26
30; Robert Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (New Jersey: Barnes and
Noble, 1981), 32; and Ernst Behler, "Problems of Origin in Modern Literary History,"
Harvard English Studies: Theoretical Issues in Literary History 16 (1991): 9-34.
2 Hans Eicher, "Introduction," in "Romantic" and Its Cognates: The European History of a
Word, ed. Hans Eicher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 6; and George
Whalley, "England/Romantic-Romanticism," in "Romantic" and Its Cognates, 159-60.
3 F. J. Warnke, "Baroque Once More: Notes on a Literary Period," New Literary History 1,
no. 2 (Winter 1970): 146.
4 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Douglas
Ainsli (London: Vision Press, 1953), 26.
5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York:
Vintage, 1994), 125-65; and Robert Rehder, "Periodization and the Theory of Literary
History," Colloquium Helveticum 22 (1995): 117-36.
6 Marshall Brown, "Periods and Resistances," Modern Language Quarterly 62, no. 4
(December 2001): 312 (hereafter cited in text).
7 Rehder, "Periodization and the Theory of History," 120-23. I am indebted to Robert
Rehder for this idea and for many of the ideas that follow from it in the rest of the essay.
8 David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1976-87).
9 Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, vol. 2, Modernism and After, 532-33 (hereafter cited
in text).
10 Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff
Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv;
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), 2-3; Umberto Eco, "Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable," trans.
William Weaver, in Modernism/Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (London: Longman,
1992), 225-28; J?rgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," in A Postmodern
Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University Press of New York,
1993), 91-104; and Linda Hutcheon and Joseph Natoli, introduction to A Postmodern
Reader, v-vii.
11 See, for example, Ren? Wellek and Austin Warren's discussion of periodization in
Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), 263-67.
12 Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, 2:528-29.
13 Frank O'Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco:
Grey Fox, 1975), 12-13.
14 John Ashbery, "Frank O'Hara's Question," Book Week, September 25, 1966, 6.
15 Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 500.
16 Perkins writes: "The young poets who admired and built on them [Pound, Williams,
and Stevens] are not discussed in the next chapters on Pound, Williams and Stevens, and
minor authors of long Modernist poems. But since the 1950s Allen Ginsberg, Charles
Olson, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and many
others?Robert Lowell in his Life Studies (1959), John Berryman in his Dream Songs from
1964 on, Randall Jarrell in his poems of the 1960s?were responding to Pound, or
Williams, or both, and transforming the context in which they were read, the younger
poets and the transition in taste they express are very much a part of Pound and Williams
and should be kept in mind throughout the following pages" (A History of Modern Poetry,
212).
17 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (London: Longman, 1992),
63.
18 Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier (New
York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:157.
19 Ezra Pound, "Introductory Note," quoted in William Carlos Williams, / Wanted to Write
a Poem, ed. Edith Heal (London: Cape, 1967), 24.
20 Marjorie Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), xiii. In his review of Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814) in the
Edinburgh Review, for example, Francis Jeffrey writes that "the peculiarities of his composi
tion" must be ascribed "not to any transient affection, or accidental caprice of imagination,
but to a settled perversity of taste or understanding" (Francis Jeffery, "Review of The
Excursion," Critics on Wordsworth, ed. Raymond Cowell [London: George Allen and Unwin,
1973], 6). In his article on Whitman in The Literary History of America (1900), Barrett
Wendell describes Whitman's verse as possessing a "decadent eccentricity" that "nobody
else can imitate"; and in an anonymous review of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock" in 1917, we read that "much of what he [Eliot] writes is unrecognizable as poetry
at present" (Barrett Wendell, "Walt Whitman," in Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and
Harold W. Blodgett [New York: Norton, 1973], 818-19; Anonymous, "Shorter Notices," T.
S. Eliot: Critical Assessments, ed. Graham Clarke [London: Christopher Helm, 1990], 11).
21 Frank O'Hara, "The Image in Poetry and Painting," The Club, April 11, 1952,
unpublished manuscript, 467, quoted in Perloff, Frank O'Hara, 61.
22 Perloff, Frank O'Hara, 141.
23 Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
24 Emory Elliot, preface to The Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory
Elliot and others (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xi-xii.
25 James Breslin, "Poetry," in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, 1082-83.
26 Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994-2004).
27 This introductory note is found on the front inside flap of volume 8.
28 Helen Vendler, "Periodizing Modern American Poetry," in The Challenge of Periodization:
Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Lawrence Besserman (New York: Garland, 1996),
233-34; and Robert von Hallberg, "Avant-Gardes," in The Cambridge History of American
Literature, vol. 8, Poetry and Criticism, 1940-1995, v (hereafter cited in text).
29 Paul Hoover, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 1994),
XXV.
30 Robert Rehder, "Periodization and the Theory of Literary History," 123 (hereafter
cited in text).
31 Ralph Cohen, "Genre Theory, Literary History and Historical Change," Harvard
English Studies: Theoretical Issues in Literary History 16 (1991): 92.

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Periodization and Difference

Author(s): Micah Mattix

Periodization in literary history, as it is currently employed, is a

New Literary History, 2005, 35: 685-697

they are nevertheless "necessary" for understanding the "complex

accomplishment?because of his use of period terms. That O'Hara is

attempting to be sensitive to their obvious differences while still claim

Perkins's description of the similarities between Ginsberg's and O'Hara's

Tempers (1913), Pound writes that what he admires in Williams's poetry is

Stevens's "The Auroras of Autumn" (1950). While the styles of O'Hara

to the dates Perkins uses to define "High Modernism" and

variation themselves determine the time period needed to study the

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