(Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics) Ann Marie Mikkelsen (Auth.) - Pastoral, Pragmatism, And Twentieth-Century American Poetry-Palgrave Macmillan US (2011)

Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century
American Poetry
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics
Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics promotes and pursues topics in the
burgeoning field of 20th and 21st century poetics. Critical and scholarly work on
poetry and poetics of interest to the series includes social location in its relationships
to subjectivity, to the construction of authorship, to oeuvres, and to careers; poetic
reception and dissemination (groups, movements, formations, institutions); the in-
tersection of poetry and theory; questions about language, poetic authority, and the
goals of writing; claims in poetics, impacts of social life, and the dynamics of the po-
etic career as these are staged and debated by poets and inside poems. Topics that are
bibliographic, pedagogic, that concern the social field of poetry, and reflect on the
history of poetry studies are valued as well. This series focuses both on individual
poets and texts and on larger movements, poetic institutions, and questions about
poetic authority, social identifications, and aesthetics.
Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman,

Laura (Riding) Jackson, and Charles Olson
The American Cratylus
Carla Billitteri
Modernism and Poetic Inspiration
The Shadow Mouth
Jed Rasula
The Social Life of Poetry
Appalachia, Race, and Radical Modernism
Chris Green
Procedural Form in Postmodern American Poetry
Berrigan, Antin, Silliman, and Hejinian
David W. Huntsperger
Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse
H.D., Loy, and Toomer
Lara Vetter
Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in “New American” Poetry
Andrew Mossin
The Poetry of Susan Howe
History, Theology, Authority
Will Montgomery
Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry
Ross Hair
Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century American Poetry
Ann Marie Mikkelsen
Pastoral, Pragmatism, and
Twentieth-Century American
Poetry
Ann Marie Mikkelsen

PASTORAL, PRAGMATISM, AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN POETRY
Copyright © Ann Marie Mikkelsen, 2011.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2011
All rights reserved.
Excerpts from poems and unpublished material by John Ashbery reprinted
by permission of Georges Borchardt., Inc., on behalf of the author, and
Houghton Library, Harvard University.
Excerpts from unpublished material by William Carlos Williams Copyright ©
2010, by the Estates of Paul H. Williams and William Eric Williams. Used by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
Portions of Chapter 4 appeared previously as “ ‘Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!’: Wallace
Stevens Figurations of Masculinity,” Journal of Modern Literature 27.1/2 (Fall
2003): 105–121. © Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission
from the publisher.
Portions of Chapter 3 appeared previously as “ ‘The Truth About Us’ ”:
Pastoral, Pragmatism, and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson,” American
Literature 75.3 (September 2003): 601–627. Copyright © 2003. Reprinted
by permission of the publisher, Duke University Press.
First published in 2011 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
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this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
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ISBN 978-1-349-29008-6 ISBN 978-0-230-11715-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-0-230-11715-0
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mikkelsen, Ann Marie.
Pastoral, pragmatism, and twentieth-century American poetry / Ann
Marie Mikkelsen.
p. cm.—(Modern and contemporary poetry and poetics)
1. Pastoral poetry, American—History and criticism 2. American
poetry—20th century—History and criticism 3. Pragmatism in
literature. I. Title.
PS309.P37M55 2011
811⬘.509358209734—dc22 2010028253
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: February 2011
For Dan, Saul, and Abe.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Pastoral Ideology and the Pragmatic Response 21
2 Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan:
Robert Frost’s Pastoral of Class Mobility 39
3 “The Truth About Us”: Pastoral, Pragmatism,
and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson 67
4 “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!”: Wallace Stevens’s Figurations
of Masculinity 93
5 “The Mooring of Starting Out”: John Ashbery’s
Pastoral Origins 123
Conclusion: Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral: Gertrude Stein,
Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson, and the Continuity of a Mode 151
Notes 175
Bibliography 209
Index 229
Acknowledgments
T
his project on pastoral has had many shepherds. When this book
was no more than a vague idea, several people at the University of
California, Irvine, helped me turn it into something more substan-
tial. Laura O’Connor has been an insightful reader, adviser, and friend,
always ready to offer advice from the front lines of the profession. Ever atten-
tive to nuance, J. Hillis Miller always took the time to read and listen, even
in retirement. Chris Beach, Brook Thomas, and Michael P. Clark were ex-
tremely liberal with their time and encouragement. I continue to be thank-
ful to Cathy Jurca and Cindy Weinstein for inviting me to join their seminar
on Place in American Literature at the Huntington Library, and especially
for Cathy’s continued enthusiasm for my work. From the moment I heard
her glorious readings of Joyce in seminar, I have considered myself lucky to
count Margot Norris as a mentor. Her steady confidence and quiet determi-
nation have emboldened me and countless others.
I also deeply appreciate the support of a Faculty Fellowship and a Regents
Fellowship from University of California, Irvine, as well as a W. M. Keck
Foundation Fellowship from the Huntington Library.
As a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
I was privileged to spend many enjoyable hours in the company of Joseph
Entin, Andrew Jewett, Page Fortna, Jay Grossman, David Greenberg, Eric
Bettinger, Rob Chodat, Jona Hansen, Matthew Lindsey, Eileen Babbitt,
Crystal Feimster, Adam Webb, and Jim Carroll. I am grateful to the
Academy for hosting me for two years, and to Leslie Berlowitz, who inau-
gurated the Visiting Scholars program. I was especially privileged to meet
Leo Marx as well as Bonnie Costello during my years in Cambridge, both
of whom offer inspiring models of scholarship and generosity. At Harvard’s
History and Literature program, I could not have asked for a better director
than Steve Biel. I am especially grateful for the intellectual challenge and
x ● Acknowledgments
wonderful collegiality provided by my friends and fellow lecturers Raphael

Allison, Michele Martinez, Kim Reilly, Amy Kittelstrom, and Lisa Szefel.
My co-teachers John O’Keefe and Andy Muldoon deserve special thanks
for their patience and good humor. Marit MacArthur, Liesl Olsen, Beth
Roberts, Maria Farland, and Tim Gray offered much appreciated support
over the years as fellow readers of poetry.
During my years at Florida State University, I was fortunate to have ex-
ceptionally welcoming and intellectually engaged colleagues. I especially
miss the good company of Robin Goodman, Barry Faulk, Andrew Epstein,
Leigh Edwards, Meegan Kennedy, Nancy Warren, and Hunt Hawkins. This
manuscript would have been even longer in the making without a First Year
Assistant Professor Grant from Florida State during the spring of 2006. I
am thankful for Jay Clayton’s hospitality and that of the Vanderbilt English
department. Alistair Newbern provided an array of advice, legal and other-
wise, here in Nashville, and you couldn’t ask for a better fiddler. Ed Rubin at
Vanderbilt Law School kindly facilitated my work here in Nashville.
At Palgrave Macmillan, an anonymous reader as well as Michael Thurston
offered bracing and beneficial advice, helping me give the manuscript its
final form. Many thanks to Rachel Blau DuPlessis for including me in her
exciting new series.
Sarah Burley, Ajitha Reddy, and Rachel Cohen have been there since
the beginning. Sarah Bilston, Crystal Feimster, Jane Rosenzweig, and Kim
Reilly have provided the best of companionship as well as models of scholar-
ship. Helen Oestherheld, Melissa Sanchez, Chris Diffee, Jennifer Williams,
and Erika Nanes gave me friendship and intellectual fellowship. Over all
the years, my sister Erika Mikkelsen Halford was always only a phone call
away. My parents, Curtis and Mary Mikkelsen, have been extremely sup-
portive of my work and unstinting in their praise. I will always be grateful
beyond words for their generosity and love. Iris Mikkelsen always believed
in me and is still missed. Saul and Abe Sharfstein have transformed my life
completely and always for the better. Daniel Sharfstein has made everything
possible: best friend, attentive editor, fellow writer, kindred spirit, and hus-
band. I never thought I would be so lucky.
Introduction
A
mong Robert Frost’s earliest works is a poem entitled “Pan
Desponds,” a verse the poet would soon rechristen “Pan with Us”
(1902). It is one of several pastoral poems in Frost’s early volumes,
many of which nod to this ancient literary mode by depicting fields, gar-
dens, shepherding, farming, and singing, while subtly emphasizing the ten-
sion between simple country folk and the sophisticated poetic voice that
represents them. Although at first glance a relatively traditional verse, this
lyric is also marked by certain incongruities that are particular to works
by Frost and other poets who adapt pastoral themes to twentieth-century
American realities. The speaker begins by describing how a god appeared in
a deserted pasture:
Pan came out of the woods one day—

His skin and his hair and his eyes were gray,
The gray of the moss of walls were they—
And stood in the sun and looked his fill
At wooded valley and wooded hill.1
Pan’s appearance is unusual for a classical god, his coloring especially dis-
concerting. Although his “gray” is ostensibly linked to the “moss,” it is more
suggestive of complexions associated with age, disease, death, or industrial
pollution than the merry, mischievous body commonly associated with the
god of ancient Arcady. He is set apart from human society and appears to
have little to do other than wander in the woods at the edges of farmland
designated by “walls.” In fact, he sounds less like a divinity, even in dis-
guise, than what contemporaries would have called a “tramp.” During the
economic depressions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
tramps were increasingly commonplace in rural New England, the setting
of much of Frost’s work, and Frost wrote a significant number of poems
2 ● Pastoral, Pragmatism, American Poetry
in which tramps figure prominently. The figure of the tramp in American

poetry also had an important antecedent in Walt Whitman’s portrayal of
himself as a tramp-like “loafer.” Both contexts are significant for Frost’s
poem.
Like Whitman’s tramp, Frost’s Pan appears untroubled, even proprietary
in his attitude toward his surroundings. Despite his odd pallor and state
of dispossession, he is not sad, aloof, or despairing; this Pan is a classically
enigmatic and playful figure. After surveying with satisfaction the deserted
countryside, Pan makes a grand gesture of resigning his role as a pastoral
poet, relinquishing his duties to nature itself. Acknowledging that “times
were changed from what they were: / Such pipes kept less of power to stir,”
Pan apparently finds no place for “pipes of pagan mirth” in a world measured
by “new terms of worth.” The poems ends, however, on a decidedly ambigu-
ous note: “He laid him down on the sunburned earth / And raveled a flower
and looked away. / Play? Play?—What should he play?” Only superficially
carefree, Pan’s behavior throughout the poem suggests less social irrespon-
sibility than a calculated bid for cultural relevance. Despite his ostensible
delight in finding himself alone, Pan’s actions suggests that he—historically
a social god—is very much in need of an audience.
The poet as observer and performer, Pan personifies the multiple roles
of the modern artist. Although it seems a casual act, even Pan’s idle gesture
of “ravel[ing]” is far from unstudied; a term that denotes processes of clari-
fication and confusion at once, “ravel” suggests Pan’s functions as cultural
critic and artistic innovator. Frost was not alone in identifying this obscure,
itinerant figure with such cultural potency. The philosopher and psycholo-
gist William James identified similar qualities in the Whitmanian tramp,
identifying him as a paradigmatically pragmatic individual, an ideally dis-
passionate observer of a world in need of a rejuvenating moral and critical
spirit.2 Deeming Whitman’s tramp persona a “worthless and unproductive
being” whose disregard for social convention “will change the usual stan-
dards of human value in the twinkling of an eye,” James offers observations
that are applicable to Frost’s tramplike Pan, whose odd “ravel[ing]” evokes
similar feelings of challenge and unease in readers. Frost and James’s paral-
lel invocations of the poet as tramp are telling and significant, indicating
modern manifestations of the pastoral mode at the dawn of a new American
century.
In retrospect, the twentieth century seems to have been anything but
pastoral. In the wake of the frontier’s “end,” cities grew and rural popula-
tions thinned. Yet even as the Anglo-Saxon farmer and his family became
less central to the nation’s understanding of itself, pastoral imagery and nar-
ratives retained a hold over the cultural imagination. To the extent that
Introduction ● 3
pastoral was and always has been about conceptions of the ideal self and
citizen (traditionally white, middle-class, and male in the United States)
and that self’s relation to the community or body politic as a whole, pas-
toral could and did adapt to new realities. Over the course of this book, I
argue that Pan and twentieth-century American pastoral figures like him
embody the modern poet as “representative man,” and that this modern
pastoral poet closely resembled the figure of the poet as described by prag-
matist philosophers William James and John Dewey. For James and Dewey
both, the poet was a creative force who embodied the very essence of prag-
matic thought, and each explicitly associated the poet’s perspective with
their visions of re-imagining of the ideal American self and community.
Drawing upon explicitly pastoral rhetoric in their philosophical approaches
to modern ethics, James and Dewey’s pastoral pragmatism influenced and
developed in tandem with what I term the “pragmatic pastorals” of their
literary counterparts.
Frost’s lyric, for example, suggests an array of readings that invoke prag-
matic principles. Never a fixed entity, Frost’s Pan constantly calls atten-
tion to his shaping by and his concurrent shaping of turn-of-the-century
American culture, the flow and flux of subject/object relations. After all,
Pan’s disturbing grayness could be read both as an indication of his integra-
tion into his New England environment, complete with entrenched field-
stone walls, and as a reminder to readers that the environment itself was
being altered as the result of industrialization in cities such as Lawrence,
Massachusetts, where Frost spent much of his youth. Far from spontane-
ous, Pan’s music is derived from his experience in the world, experience that
Dewey characterized as crucial to creating local and everyday life and art.
Similarly, his piqued refusal to “play,” far from genuine, functions as a kind
of manipulative withholding, his threatened withdrawal enabling him to
test pragmatically the “value” of his art. Pan repeatedly gestures toward the
artist’s inevitable integration into the modern marketplace and public sphere
rather than any sort of imagined removal. Far from an antique remnant of a
bygone pastoral age, Frost’s Pan is clearly “with us” and a part of our world,
if we will have him.
Indeed, the crucial question the poem concludes with and refuses to
answer implies the presence or absence of an audience capable of assimilat-
ing Pan’s art. The unanswered questions as to whether or not Pan should
“play,” and if so “what should he play,” suggest that no one may wish to
or even be capable of hearing his music—or, to the extent that Pan is a
version of the poet himself, Frost’s poems. Complicating this scenario, it is
a separate lyric speaker apart from Pan who actually “speaks” this poem.
With his careful rhymes, neat stanzas, and decorous references to “sylvan
signs,” among other markers of gentility, the omniscient speaker of the

poem (written in a form of free, indirect discourse) poses an intriguing
contrast to the unruly Pan, who appears to be characterized by a more
colloquial diction (he declares a bird’s song “music enough for him, for
one”) and overly dramatic posturing. The poem’s speaker and Pan both
vie for the reader’s attention and affiliation, each claiming the mantel of
the modern poet. The tension between these lyric subjects speaks to real
questions poets were beginning to ask themselves at the beginning of the
twentieth century as the United States population became more literate
and cosmopolitan in its tastes. Which voice best speaks to or for the mod-
ern public? What kinds of voices do modern audiences expect to hear in
modern poems: voices like those of the people, or those more educated and
refined? Who are the American people, anyway? Where do they reside,
and what voices matter to them? The implied singing contest between
the two voices (also typical of traditional pastoral) calls for some process
of judgment while holding any final resolutions at bay. Declining to take
sides, provoking questions rather than providing answers, Frost’s poetic
and social subject position seems to hover somewhere between the two
voices implied in this poem. These voices in turn should be understood as
constituted by a complex web of tensions between high and low, elite and
mass culture, the masculine and the feminine, all of which collectively
encode the wider social system that modern pastoral poetry continually
addresses.
The poet’s articulation of identity with regard to “low” and often poten-
tially transgressive individuals such as the tramp, his contingent relation to
an increasingly stratified public sphere and marketplace, the nature of the
poem itself as a work of art with varying “values”—all the concerns sug-
gested by “Pan with Us” are echoed by a range of American poets. Invoking
a modern, experimental approach to aesthetics and truth, a diverse array
of early- to mid-twentieth-century poets—including Frost, William Carlos
Williams, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery, and Gertrude Stein—were able
to reimagine relationships between the sophisticated poet and the relatively
voiceless, less privileged other. The result is a poetics that interrogates the
nature of the ethical individual and good society. Significantly, some of
these texts are dialogic or dialogues of some kind, calling attention to the
presence of multiple, at times competing, voices within a single text, as well
as their role within a poetic discourse explicitly engaged in issues of national
definition.
Although previous accounts of American pastoral have pegged the
mode’s obsolescence to the end of the frontier and a predominantly rural
society by the 1890s, relegating modern pastorals to nostalgic posturing
Introduction ● 5
or stances of environmental activism, I argue that a socially conscious

pastoral poetry was in fact reinvigorated by turn-of-the-century cultural,
economic, and political shifts and the increasingly nuanced distinctions
among individuals and social groups that they engendered.3 As American
society grew more hierarchical and complex, it became all the more impor-
tant to distinguish oneself from the crowd, to mark off the poet from the
people, even as such individuals also registered desires to identify—for
reasons ideological, aesthetic, and practical—with less privileged groups
increasingly defined by class, ethnicity, race, gender, and sexuality.4 White
male poets’ adaptations of the pastoral mode enabled them to gesture
toward their former centrality to American culture while negotiating the
terms of their continued engagement with an increasingly diverse public
sphere.5 Over the course of this book, I examine instances of the pastoral
mode from the turn of the twentieth century until a couple of decades
from its end, arguing that pastoral has been uniquely suited to articu-
late the relatively elite poet’s perspective on the development of a modern
political economy as well as the new modes of democracy that this phe-
nomenon entailed.
Since Virgil’s Eclogues, pastoral has foregrounded the economic and ethi-
cal situation of the poet and artist, questioning his ability to comprehend and
sing of situations other than his own. In “Eclogue I,” the Roman Civil Wars
recently have ended as the poet Tityrus and shepherd Melibeous converse,
only to discover that Tityrus has been allowed to keep his lands and has suc-
cessfully petitioned for his freedom from vassalage. In contrast, his fellow
shepherd declares of himself and his less fortunate neighbors that “We are
leaving the borders of our country and its sweet fields” while “you, Tityrus,
relaxed in the shade, teach the woods to echo the name of fair Amaryllis.”
As Annabel Patterson has pointed out, this eclogue begins with a tension
between the privileged “you” of the poet Tityrus and the “we” of the com-
munity and “common communicative ground” from which he is already
estranged. The ethical challenge of these lines is one to which Tityrus is
questionably responsive as he fails to address or acknowledge the plight of
his countrymen in the ensuing conversation. At issue in the Eclogues as they
unfold is “whether poetry has a social function,” and if so what it is.6 Fellow
critics of pastoral such as Raymond Williams and, to a lesser extent, Paul
Alpers have also stressed this ethical dimension of pastoral, its concerns with
class and social inequity as well as “representative anecdotes” of the human
condition.7 Addressing several major twentieth-century American poets
rather than the classical, Renaissance, or European authors who form the
crux of Patterson, Williams, or Alpers’s arguments,8 I argue that despite dis-
crepancies among their poetic practices, politics, and regional affiliations,
these poets resorted to the pastoral mode in order to question their roles in
a democratic, yet still unequal, society.
The Elision of American Pastoral

Twentieth-century American pastoral as a literary, social, and cultural phe-
nomenon has gone virtually unread for several decades. While in recent
years critics have devoted attention to American nativism, regionalism, and
environmental concerns under the rubrics of the new historicism,9 femi-
nist and gender studies,10 and ecocriticism,11 the related topic of modern
American pastoral has attracted little attention and the term frequently has
been misused.12 Fortunately, commentaries on the pastoral mode by promi-
nent early- and mid-century literary and cultural theorists convey clearly
what many contemporaneous poets understood the mode to do. In excavat-
ing and juxtaposing writings by John Dewey, William Empson, and John
Crowe Ransom, I lay the groundwork for reexamining Leo Marx’s domi-
nant account of pastoral, situating it in relation to a new perspective on the
mode. Distinguished by the poet’s self-conscious, metaphorical use of the
mode in order to comment upon the ideal life, the good society, the artist,
and the ethical self, the scope of these pastoral poetic texts extends beyond
the evocation of “native,” rural, or “natural” scenes to constantly interrogate
the origin and purpose of poetry.
Over the course of the next several chapters, I argue that the pastoral
mode of these American poets is best described as a “pragmatic pastoral.”
Typical of a rising middle class that attempted to answer questions regarding
“truth” and “value” through the “scientific method” as devised and promul-
gated by an intellectual elite led by James and Dewey, these poets deployed
their writing as a kind of ethical barometer during a century of intense
strain and transition within American society. For much of the twentieth
century, poets, like philosophers, social scientists, and literary critics, were
part of a growing middle-class academic establishment whose claim to spe-
cialized professional powers formed the crux of their authority.13 It is not
coincidental that many of the poets I examine were professionals as well as
poets: Williams was a doctor, Stevens was a lawyer and insurance executive,
Frost established the university-sponsored position of “poet in residence,”
and Ashbery was an art critic and translator. Their status served to affirm
their places within a rapidly changing social environment, their roles as edu-
cated men unquestioned. Yet during the early years of the century especially,
many questioned how to value “white collar” work, its function in relation
to traditional “blue collar” work or physical labor, as well as the ways in
which such work shaped the personality, ethics, and tastes of this emerging
Introduction ● 7
and increasingly dominant class. The kinds of questions about class and sta-
tus that pastoral traditionally raises (is the farmer a better man for his labor
in the land? what is the right relationship between the poet and the land-
scape?) have gone unasked for several decades, however, as analyses marked
by Marxist or socialist concerns went out of favor after the 1930s, not to be
readdressed for several decades. Yet these kinds of questions about status,
difference, and privilege with regard to class as well as gender, race, and
sexual orientation were essential to the kind of work these poets were doing
as they interrogated the nature of the modern American self and society. It
is helpful, therefore, to return to the early decades of the twentieth century
in order to reinscribe the outlines of this modernist, pragmatic, pastoral per-
spective as it was coalescing, itself the result of professional, critical inquiry
into the nature of pastoral tropes in art and literature.
Key texts by John Dewey, William Empson, and John Crowe Ransom
offer context for the mode as it emerged during this period and provide
intellectual background that explains its lack of reception during much of
the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Establishing how pastoral
should be defined in art and literature and explaining the ideological impli-
cations of the mode, these commentators implicitly and explicitly identify
pastoral as a mode of cultural critique. In Art As Experience (published in
1934; delivered as lectures at Harvard in 1931), Dewey offers a devastating
reading of a banal pastoral artwork:14
The city man who lived in the country when he was a boy is given to
purchasing pictures of green meadows with grazing cattle or purling
brooks—especially if there is also a swimming hole. He obtains from
such pictures a revival of certain values of his childhood minus atten-
dant backbreaking experiences, plus, indeed, an added emotional value
because of contrast with a present well-to-do estate. In all such cases the
picture is not seen. The painting is used as a spring board for arriving at
sentiments that are, because of extraneous subject-matter, agreeable. The
subject-matter of experiences of childhood and youth is nevertheless a
subconscious background of much great art. But to be the substance of
art, it must be made into a new object by means of the medium employed,
not merely suggested in a reminiscent way. (Dewey 1934, 113–114)
For Dewey true art—and by implication, a better kind of pastoral art—

requires “activity” in which the viewer’s emotions, intellect, and physical
sensations collectively interact with each other and the aesthetic object.
Rather than personal and private, “good” pastoral art is public and respon-
sive. The ideal artist and audience for such art is aware of its public and
communal imperative, its function in helping to make sense of relation-

ships among human beings. Even if their economic situations were similar
to the “city man . . . given to purchasing pictures of green meadows,” the
ideal artist and audience would have a more sophisticated perspective on
art’s function.
Dewey’s critique of this collector is in large part a sociological summary
of how historical and economic conditions shape personal taste. Dewey
was among the first to acknowledge that the complex webs of social orga-
nization could be embodied in an individual’s reactions to a work of art.
Forty years later, this situation would be examined by French sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu, whose similar conclusion in Distinction (1979) is now a
critical commonplace: every person is subject to and comprehends his own
experiences through “classifications” and a resulting “taste” by which he
intellectually internalizes and physically embodies his class and social sta-
tus.15 Indeed, Dewey’s own aesthetic judgment is most tellingly rhetorically
encoded in the passages laced with his intellectual contempt, even disgust,
for the simpleminded collector. His reading of the painting and its owner
thus implies the possibility of an alternative and preferred pastoralism as
well as the extent to which even that pastoral will be limited by one’s life
experiences.
Not coincidentally, the first major modern critical text on pastoral—
William Empson’s Some Versions of Pastoral (1935), published soon after
Dewey’s Art As Experience—pays close attention to precisely such issues. A
child of relative wealth who matriculated to Cambridge in the mid-1920s,
Empson was a moderately liberal young man whose politics were sharpened
by career crises (precipitated by a sex scandal) and his experiences living
in the increasingly fascist Japan of the 1930s, where left-leaning teachers
and students were persecuted for their beliefs.16 Some Versions of Pastoral
focuses mainly on seventeenth- through nineteenth-century British texts,
but it begins with a timely discussion of American and British proletar-
ian literature, a few instances of which Empson deems “covert pastoral.”
According to Empson, a text remained “proletarian” so long as the narrators
or speakers presented themselves as working class, but a text became an
instance of “covert pastoral” whenever the author, protagonists, or speak-
ers were not themselves working class but depicted the lives of their social
inferiors.17 Pastoral is only pastoral when written from a perspective of privi-
lege, although in Empson’s schema the rights of the privileged tend to breed
responsibility. In keeping with his identification with privileged leftists,
Empson characterizes the ideal pastoral protagonist as a kind of maverick
hero, the poet as social critic and outcast.18 Complementing this relatively
revolutionary assessment of the mode, Empson also makes the claim that
Introduction ● 9
pastoral traditionally aspired to “imply a beautiful relation between rich and

poor,” high and low (Empson 1935, 11). As he famously—or infamously—
put it, pastoral involves a “double attitude of the artist to the worker, of the
complex man to the simple one (‘I am in one way better, in another not
so good’)” (Empson 1935, 14). While Empson’s theories of pastoral may
have been easily adaptable to the pastoral poetics of his contemporaries, he
eschewed any direct mention of their work.
At least one reader was curious about this omission, although the reader
was not one of Empson’s liberal British friends. Instead, he was at the center
of a generation of American critics whose far more limited conception of
pastoral would shape its reception in the United States for decades to come.
In the essay “Mr. Empson’s Muddles,” New Critic John Crowe Ransom,
like Empson a poet as well as a critic, downplays the political dimensions
of Empson’s book but nonetheless, and somewhat surprisingly, addresses its
claims sympathetically. Ransom begins his review predictably by bemoan-
ing what he terms the “extravagances” of Empson’s criticism, drawing atten-
tion to Empson’s tendency to offer “multiple meanings” of a poem rather
than deciding on a single “logic” or “unity” that would explain the text in
its entirety.19 According to Ransom, this “psychological” rather than “logi-
cal” approach to criticism is typical of the manner in which “Mr. Empson
likes to show a poet clinging to both his alternatives,” although without a
clear decision, in Ransom’s view, the “poem simply does not advance to the
stage of logic and truth” (“Muddles,” 338). To the extent that pragmatists
and liberal fellow thinkers were revising the very nature of concepts such
as “logic” and “truth” in order to reveal their historical and social contin-
gency, Ransom identifies his deep objection to Empson correctly. Even as
he despairs of the open-endedness of Empson’s “psychological” readings,
however, he approves of the ways in which they “increase immensely the
range of the experience” of reading the poem, even if they eventually stray
beyond what he believes the poem can logically bear (“Muddles,” 324).
Moreover, Ransom is equally disdainful of the critic who would reduce
poems to fit “his own cozy little apartment.” This line of critique culmi-
nates in Ransom’s pertinent observation that Empson’s approach was in
fact extremely well suited to modern poetry—perhaps, implicitly, more so
than his own formalism. Why didn’t Empson read more modern poetry
by “Yeats, Auden, Spender, and Lewis,” Ransom wonders, especially given
that these poems would lend themselves to Empson’s proclivity for teasing
out multiple readings (“Muddles,” 334)? Less doctrinaire than most readers
might expect, Ransom accurately identifies the open-ended, psychological,
pragmatically inquiring nature of Empson’s readings, while anticipating
how modern literature could be read in such a light.20 Despite the subtlety
of Ransom’s response in this instance, however, other of his writings—espe-

cially those privileging an “ironic” high modernism 21—came to character-
ize his legacy as well as the work of his disciples, whose cultural dominance
in the United States has delayed the reception of pastoral’s ideological com-
plexity in the American context.
Such New Critical readings were so pervasive that they appear even in
the work of critics ideologically opposed to the formalist project. In Leo
Marx’s seminal study of American pastoral, he defines the mode in terms
of its contrast between a naïve or “simple pastoralism” and a privileged,
more ironic or “complex pastoralism.”22 According to The Machine in the
Garden (1964), while “complex pastoralism” involves invoking “the image of
a green landscape . . . as a symbolic repository of meaning and value,” it soon
“acknowledge[s] the power of a counterforce, a machine or some other sym-
bol of the forces which have stripped the old ideal of most, if not all, of its
meaning” (Marx, 362-3). The authors Marx examines tend to react to such
changes with thinly veiled despair or an embittered acquiescence that echoes
the “ironic” stance toward literature and life admired by Ransom and oth-
ers, even as Marx’s approach allows room for a degree of social commentary.
In general, however, this narrative of national and generic progression makes
any kind of pastoral that does not conform to the complex and ironic model
difficult to read, as it by default appears to be utopian or politically naïve
and therefore culturally backward. In effect, Marx’s keenly perceptive and
highly influential characterization of American pastoral nonetheless elides a
significant, persistent, and alternative pastoral tradition in American litera-
ture of the twentieth century.
The disjunction between Empson’s and Marx’s accounts of pastoral and
their emphasis upon the ideological dimensions of the mode prefigure the
directions that pastoral criticism took in the American and British acad-
emies. Reinserting Empson’s text and its reception into the American scene
helps to clarify what was at stake in Ransom’s ambivalent review as well as
how his response was typical of an era that initially acknowledged but later
suppressed politicized readings of poetry.23 As part of an extended push back
against such academic formalism in recent decades, critics of “modernism”
have sought to dispel New Critical chestnuts concerning the integrity of
the literary text as a precious object or “urn” above the vicissitudes of social,
economic, and political forces. As Lawrence Rainey, Thomas Strychacz, and
Mark McGurl, among others, have noted,24 the notion of a “great divide”
between modernism and mass culture as well as modernism and postmod-
ernism, particularly as articulated and debated by Andreas Huyssen and
Fredric Jameson, is marked less by antagonism than mutuality, the higher
necessarily defining itself in terms of the lower, for example by adopting
Introduction ● 11
strategies of the marketplace and advertising, mass media and popular cul-
ture.25 Yet returning to Empson’s work of the 1930s also crystallizes how
and why pastoral poetry of the period itself must be understood historically:
the pragmatic pastoral as I understand it was constituted by American poets
who, like their British counterparts, were part of a society with increasingly
complex social dynamics. These poets were highly self-conscious of the fact
that theirs was a world in which poets and critics alike defined their labor,
values, and aesthetic tastes in terms of the labor, value, and aesthetic tastes
of the working classes as well as women and others whose lives were sys-
tematically devalued by virtue of their race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation.
Pastoral poetry of the twentieth century should be understood as not only
historically embedded in this fashion but also a conscious production of
poets and figures of privilege who, like Empson and Dewey, had political
and personal convictions that led to the depiction of social inequality and
injustice.
This book will offer a newly historicized and politicized reading of
American pastoral, informed in part by Empson’s earlier work as well as
Raymond Williams’s readings of British pastoral poetry, while extending
the scope beyond concerns of class. My reading of pragmatism therefore
differs significantly from those of the most prominent American commen-
tators on pragmatism and poetry. Richard Poirier and Jonathan Levin,
for example, present cases for reading modern poetry in a predominantly
apolitical Jamesian light while tending to ignore the politically progres-
sive aspects of those texts.26 In another prominent case, philosopher
Richard Rorty champions Dewey’s philosophical approach, but he mis-
characterizes Dewey’s heirs as the “liberal ironists” of the present, rather
than those who emulate the politically committed life that Dewey himself
embraced.27 Such perspectives are typical of a neo-pragmatism that has
inherited many of the assumptions of the New Criticism, indebted to a
textual formalism that dissuades critics from openly political speculations.
In contrast, critics such as Cornel West, Ross Posnock, Frank Lentricchia,
Steven Mailloux, Giles Gunn, and David Kadlec have accounted for
an ideologically complex and socially relevant version of pragmatism in
American literature and culture that informs this book.28 Perhaps most
influential to my understanding of pragmatism, however, has been the
work of historians such as James Kloppenberg, Robert Westbrook, and
James Livingston, who continue to provide engaging analysis of the his-
torical and intellectual contexts in which Dewey and James wrote and
lived.29 Similarly, criticism by Cary Nelson, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Alan
Filreis, Michael Davidson, and Michael Thurston has demonstrated how
twentieth-century American poetry must be read in terms of its cultural
and political context.30 This diverse range of scholarship helped to limn

the outlines of this project throughout, offering models and examples as
well as inspiration.
Empson’s Legacy: The “Muddles” of Modern Pastoral

The pragmatic pastoral mode that I excavate in the following pages is
marked by its investment in the social and the human in all of its forms.
The twentieth-century pastoral in the United States insists upon, even revels
in, its depictions of the “low” in relation to the “high,” the bodies and minds
of ordinary people necessary to the depiction of democratic life. Yet even as
they invigorated the poet as pragmatic creator and proved necessary sources
of “authentic” material, portraits of individuals at the bottom of American
society emerged as potentially destabilizing to the poet as professional art-
ist. Empson’s frequently cited characterization of the modern pastoral poet
as simultaneously “better” than and “not so good as” the working man he
depicts reverberates throughout these texts. Over the course of this book, I
try to give some theoretical and historical context to this fraught, ambiva-
lent relationship that Empson could not, while fleshing out the ways in
which these two entities, the poet and the people, often melded together in
the pastoral imagination. The result is a pastoralism that allows more than
ever for the disorder that shapes order, the “dirt” and “filth” that defines the
pure and clean.
Modern poets’ attitudes toward “low” figures are fluid, contradictory,
and difficult to classify. Poets drawn toward pastoral often found them-
selves balancing desires to solidify their own social status with a prag-
matic commitment to denaturalize the economic and social constraints
of others. Not coincidentally, the terms that Ransom used to describe the
troubling pluralistic tendencies of Empson’s critical writings—“muddles”
and “extravagances”—parallel a common tendency of modern pastoral
texts to allude to sites, persons, and situations that represent disruptive
forms of excess and provoke sensations of discomfort. In a character-
istically pragmatic turn, these texts are not uniformly critical of such
presences but just as often employ what Linda Hutcheon terms a “tran-
sideological irony” in relation to them, indicating disgust or contempt at
the same time as they suggest sympathy or empathy.31 Complicating the
scene further, elements of the low or disgusting frequently are depicted
as aspects of the poet’s own self, rendering the self the object of the poet
or speaker’s own alternately appalled and accepting gaze. For example,
Frost advocated a potentially destabilizing “extravagance” in farming,
personal finances, and poetry composition that is linked to the bodies
Introduction ● 13
of “tramps.” In Stevens’s poetry, the figure of a “fat” man and later “fat
girl” emerges as a simultaneously desired and reviled excess that is both
constitutive of and threatening to the poet. For Williams, a literal “excre-
ment” is linked to descriptions of his beloved “beautiful thing,” who in
turn is an essential counterpart to the poet’s alter ego of “Dr. Paterson.”
John Ashbery depicts potential “perverts” and hints at a suppressed
homosexuality in his early pastoral poems, and Gertrude Stein similarly
alludes to lesbian sexuality in terms of country life (“cows”). What links
these terms is the ways in which they are deployed as metaphors for the
poet’s self or part of that self, whether as a kind of psychological trait
or behavior, physical trait, polluting association, or epithet that renders
that person socially suspect or marginal. What is perhaps most striking
about these pastorals is that class is far from the only form of social privi-
lege addressed. While class is the concern uppermost for Frost; gender,
race, and sexuality as well as class figure prominently in the pastorals
of Williams; variations on white masculinity give rise to Stevens’s pas-
toral; and sexual orientation is the primary form of disruptive otherness
addressed by Ashbery and Stein.
What unites these pastoral texts is their collective focus upon the high/
low, self/other distinctions of pastoral and the ethical provocations these
juxtapositions create. Their shared emphasis upon excess and the taint of
pollution that it suggests is not incidental but integral to the articulation of a
pragmatic pastoral mode. Pragmatism emerged during a period in American
history when industrialization, waste, and overconsumption began to alter
the physical landscape as well as the constitution of the self and commu-
nity. Recent critical work on filth, waste, and disgust in nineteenth-century
European contexts provides a fruitful parallel for this claim. Drawing
upon the anthropological and psychoanalytic work of Mary Douglas, Julia
Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, and Mikhail Bakhtin, recent historicist work by
critics such as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, William Cohen and Ryan
Johnson, Dominque LaPorte, David Trotter, and William Ian Miller have
created a precedent for understanding a rhetoric of waste and excess in the
context of the emergence of the bourgeois subject and democratic society
in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and France.32 According to
Stallybrass and White, during the eighteenth century “bourgeois democ-
racy” “encoded in its manners, morals and imaginative writings, in its body,
bearing and taste, a subliminal elitism which was constitutive of its his-
torical being” and that defined this being in relation to real and figura-
tive waste.33 In a similar vein, Miller, a legal scholar, claims that “disgust,”
coined in English in the seventeenth century, is distinctly antidemocratic
in its assertion of absolute purity and impurity, unlike the related feeling of
“contempt,” which in democracy alone can emanate from lower as well as

higher social orders.34
The American situation several decades later contains clear parallels,
as the American political economy went through transitions seen nearly
a century earlier on the continent while coming to terms with a chang-
ing population that challenged traditional conceptions of the productive
citizen.35 High rates of immigration, urbanization, and industrialization,
the transition to corporate capitalism, as well as the movement of women
and people of color into the workforce and public sphere radically destabi-
lized eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of American citizen-
ship, subjectivity, and society in ways that can be considered analogous in
some form to the earlier European situation.36 These shifts were especially
ominous to white middle-class men, for whom such individuals and groups
represented threats to “masculinity” and traditional concepts of virtuous
citizenship as characterized by the farmer or pioneer. At the purely mate-
rial level, waste and garbage became a ubiquitous sight on city streets, as
increased consumption led to mass disposal of outdated commodities.37
The connection between the material and the social has long been visible
to poets and social critics alike. As David Trotter notes, “mess theory” has
something to do with “democracy, which would be hard to imagine without
litter, or without the historically specific form of disgust aroused by (and in)
the spectacle of widespread social mobility.”38
The pragmatic and scientific dimension of waste identification is also per-
tinent. As Tim Armstrong has observed, a general fascination with waste and
waste products was concurrent with the rise of “scientific” modes of thought
in early twentieth-century American society. Modernist texts, according to
Armstrong, educate readers to identify and categorize scientifically their own
body’s behavior as well as those of others, understanding all bodies operating
beyond the purview of “science”—often those coded as feminine or racially
or sexually other—as wastefully productive, generating materials that may
overwhelm rather than fuel the social economy.39 However, subject to reeval-
uation as positive elements (aspects of the self, a beloved, or respected entity),
these presences in pragmatic pastorals emerge as more similar to “mess,”
which Trotter discusses as a more contingent, less disturbing form of waste
that can be recodified as useful matter and even part of the self.40 Arising in
response to the artificial and often unethical nature of older social and cul-
tural divisions, pragmatism at its most progressive could find the “waste” of
society to be regenerative rather than polluting. The product of a pragmatic
perspective on experience that emphasizes the need to “reevaluate” values
both negative and positive, the transitive, fluctuating manifestations of waste
as various kinds of “mess” are crucial to the modern incarnation of pastoral.
Introduction ● 15
Mapping the Pragmatic Pastoral

Even as the pragmatic pastoral mode can and must be defined in relation to
previously defined contemporary cultural phenomena, it is also an ancient,
recognizable mode with continuities stretching back to the work of Virgil
and Theocritus. My book begins with a chapter describing an abbrevi-
ated history of American pastoral, its roots in classical models as translated
into distinctly American concepts of citizenship and subjectivity, and the
transformation of this nexus of culture and ideology in the early years of
the twentieth century. I discuss the pragmatic and progressive response to
the so-called end of the frontier, a response that resulted in not only the
redefinition of American society but also the need to theorize new con-
cepts of personality and democratic community that could account for these
changes. This postfrontier pragmatic methodology, I argue, is integral to
the development of modern pastoral poetics. The chapters that follow trace
the pragmatic pastoral sensibility of major American poets, revealing the
persistent pastoral mode that emerged at the turn of the twentieth century
and continued at least into its latest decades.
While the aim of my project is to situate these chapters within this over-
all historical context, at the same time I do not pretend to undertake the
same kind of deeply historicized projects as have Alan Filreis or Michael
Thurston. While I admire their work immensely, my aim is to present a
more panoramic understanding of pastoral’s persistence over time and over
the course of widely divergent poetic careers. While some chapters men-
tion specific events that influenced the perspective of a particular poet—the
Lawrence and Paterson textile mill strikes for example—more often I discuss
the emergence of pastoral in relation to notable and documented historical
trends to which the poet is expressly responding, such as the increased vis-
ibility of women in the literary marketplace or the pathologizing and crimi-
nalization of homosexual men and women. I am most interested in the ways
in which a pastoral sensibility first forms and then coalesces over the course
of a poet’s career, often intensifying at specific points in a lifetime, as it does
for Frost in the early 1900s, for Williams and Stevens during World War II,
for Ashbery during the cold war of the 1950s through the early 1970s, for
Stein just before World War I and in the 1920s and 1930s.
Along these same lines, this book seeks neither to produce an exhaus-
tive assessment of the “pragmatic” characteristic of each poet’s work nor
to prove that each poet was, technically, a pragmatist. The avoidance of
blow-by-blow assessments of how each particular poem or pronouncement
can be read in terms of James or Dewey’s writings is intentional. None of
these poets was a philosopher, and their direct engagements with James and
Dewey, when they can be identified, were usually brief. Like most of their
contemporaries, they experienced pragmatism in large part as a philosophy
that suffused contemporary reassessments of the ideal self and community.
Instead, my purpose is to document whenever possible the specific instances
in which poets read or were influenced by James or Dewey’s writings, and
just as importantly to use these moments of intellectual contact to depict
the extent to which these poets’ worldview or perspective corresponds to or
even anticipates James and Dewey’s pragmatic conclusions. These readings
then set the stage for examining individual pastoral poetics more broadly
in the context of a pragmatism that I understand to be a constitutive aspect
of early- and mid-twentieth century approaches to subjectivity, experience,
aesthetics, and democracy.
Chapter 2 exemplifies both of these approaches as, working roughly
chronologically, I turn first to the career of Robert Frost, characterizing his
pastoralism as a variant of a late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
“tramp poetics.” Reproducing the concerns of a wave of tramp literature in
which homeless, working-class men were depicted as both criminals and
victims, barely human industrial “waste” and quasi “prophets” of a new
era in labor relations, Frost’s early poetry of the 1890s through the 1910s
repeatedly depicts the lives of tramps from the perspective of both property-
owners and the homeless themselves, bringing into question the ethical
parameters of the human community as well as the nature of the modern
“extravagant” self, stripped of his traditional role as “producer” and virtu-
ous citizen. Reading Frost’s tramp poetics in the context of William James’s
occasional writings on tramps and their relation to his pragmatic method,
I argue that some of Frost’s tramp pastorals can be taken as critiques of
James’s own occlusion of class in his philosophy and thus as anticipating
aspects of Dewey’s more politicized pragmatism, while other poems remain
politically ambiguous.
Chapter 3 discusses pastoral’s role in the career of William Carlos
Williams, with special attention to his epic poem Paterson. Engaged with
Dewey’s thought during his lifetime, in particular by the essay “Americanism
and Localism,” Williams deployed the “local” first in several early “pasto-
ral” poems from the 1920s but most profoundly in Paterson, the product of
over thirty years of work but not written and published until during and
after World War II. In Paterson localism is expressed in the form of a city
and its environs, the long and complex history of which has culminated in
crowded urban landscapes populated by immigrants, workers, and other
individuals—such as working women and wealthy homosexuals—that
Williams’s contemporaries associated with various forms of “dirt.” Rather
than dismissing such characters, however, Williams—who as an artist often
Introduction ● 17
felt himself to be similarly culturally marginalized—urges his readers to

“embrace the foulness” of modern life and to reconsider the ideological
assumptions behind epistemological categories such as “dirt” or “excrement”
that he links to objects of desire such as the “beautiful thing” as well as the
city’s immigrant population. Although Williams’s poetics frequently betray
the poet’s ambivalence concerning his relation to the residents of his city,
the cumulative effect is to expand the reader’s sense of how poetry and com-
munity formation are linked.
Chapter 4 turns to the work of Wallace Stevens, exploring his refer-
ences to the body and the physical life in his poetics, linking his relatively
undiscussed earthiness with his understanding of the pastoral mode. What
emerges is a surprising resistance on Stevens’s part to popular, muscular
models of representative masculinity, and consequent interest in what the
poet terms “the normal,” resulting in a strain of pastoralism that first took
form in the 1920s and coalesced in the late 1930s and early 1940s in the
midst of World War II. Reading Stevens’s 1943 essay “The Figure of the
Youth as Virile Poet” in the context of William James’s anxieties concerning
American masculinity and morality in “The Moral Equivalent of War,” as
well as John Dewey’s later defense of pragmatism’s moral complexity and
political commitment, I argue that Stevens absorbed a pragmatic perspective
on physical experience of the world. The essence of this sentiment is mani-
fested by “fat” in the form of “everyday” people, variations on the poet’s own
alter ego such as “fat Jocundus,” and ultimately his own daughter—that “fat
girl” as “green” and “fluent mundo”—in “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
(1942). Although Stevens’s racialized depictions of “fat” betray its limited
locality in the form of “native” white Americans, it can also be seen as a
fruitful way to depict a “hopeful waste” in the world. Implicitly rejecting
the “anorexic” poetics of other modernists such as Eliot and Pound, who
referred with disgust to what they regarded as an overly chaotic, feminized,
consumerist environment, Stevens offers instead a creative if at times ambiv-
alent approach to such social and aesthetic realities.
Chapter 5 examines the work of John Ashbery, whose poetics and poli-
tics, like those of Stevens, have traditionally been understood as highly
urbane and essentially inscrutable. Born in 1927, Ashbery confronted not
the pressures of urbanization and industrialization, but a cold war ideology
that invoked the rhetoric of the “frontier” in order to facilitate social homog-
enization and repress the kind of liberal political dissent formerly associ-
ated with pragmatism. Ashbery’s frequent recourse to the pastoral mode in
poems from the late 1940s and early 1950s such as “Eclogue,” “A Pastoral,”
and “The Mythological Poet” entails a surrealistic, campy poetics that dra-
matizes and inverts the invasive, punitive measures society takes against
“perverted” voices and bodies that would subvert the masculine, heterosex-
ist mainstream. Alluding to the logic of masochism, Ashbery’s early pastoral
poetics suggests the dangers to selfhood, ethics, and love inherent in cold
war culture for gay men. Later pastorals from the 1960s and 1970s such as
“Spring Day” and “Soonest Mended,” written after the death of his father
and a 10-year sojourn in Paris, suggest grounds for a more hopeful, equitable
social vision in which danger and violence may be thwarted by gestures
toward intellectual and sexual intimacy. Fueled by the postwar collapse of
barriers between the public and private realms, these later works foreground
traditional pastoral themes newly politicized in their link to homosexual
identity: paeans to love and friendship, the erotic life and conversation.
The sixth and concluding chapter links Gertrude Stein’s pre–World War
II erotic pastoral mode and theory of “landscape” to the pastoral poetics of
postwar female poets Lyn Hejinian and Lisa Robertson. Rather than under-
mine my argument concerning how male poets employed the pastoral mode,
this conclusion begins by tracing the ways in which Stein invoked pastoral in
order to create a masculine mask for her desires and to articulate poetics that
were proof of her necessarily male “genius.” This chapter is meant to under-
score the gendered authorship of pastoral poetry through the first half of the
twentieth century while observing at least one new direction for pragmatic
pastoral in the last few decades. Although poets such as Marianne Moore
occasionally referenced tropes associated with the American landscape
and nature, and H.D. immersed herself in nature imagery linked to Greek
themes, only Stein explicitly made American and European aspects of the
mode central to her work over the course of her career. Directly influenced
by William James and indirectly by John Dewey, Stein formulates a prag-
matic pastoral in texts such as “Melanctha” and Lucy Church Amiably that is
linked to her unique sense of consciousness and sexuality, covertly embody-
ing while effacing an early articulation of lesbian subjectivity and incipient
feminism. Citing Stein’s example, Hejinian and Robertson perpetuate and
complicate her work in poems like “The Green” and XEclogue, explicitly
linking Stein to the relatively recent emergence of feminist American pasto-
ral modes as well as a cosmopolitan pastoralism.
In bringing together such diverse poets as Frost, Williams, Stevens,
Ashbery, Stein, Hejinian, and Robertson, I hope to emphasize the extent to
which a pragmatically and especially a Deweyan pastoral mode has proved
a plausible means of forging a new discursive model for the modern poetic
speaker and citizen. The appeal of a pragmatic philosophical and political
perspective to such varied poetic temperaments reflects the degree to which
pragmatism saturated American intellectual life throughout the early- and
mid-twentieth century and, despite its limitations, offered a comprehensive
Introduction ● 19
model for understanding the modern experience well into the century’s later
decades. In a literary environment committed to “making it new,” prag-
matism’s creative, generative perspective upon the self and society was an
easily assimilated methodology. After World War II, when pragmatism
as such seemed to lose ground, its persistent if tacit appeal to artists and
thinkers and eventual resurgence in the 1980s speak to the need for such an
American mode of cultural and social critique. My hope is that this account
of a pragmatic pastoral tradition assists in reconstructing an alternative
poetic tradition in which politics and economics were felt to be integral
to discussions of culture and aesthetics. While the direct consequences of
this historical embeddedness have not always been politically liberating for
poets or those marginalized voices they have depicted, these new versions of
American pastoral did function in the service of a belief that poetry should
speak to power, and that it might even be heard.
CHAPTER 1
Pastoral Ideology and the

Pragmatic Response
P
ragmatic pastorals offer a poetic response to William James’s inno-
vative perspective on subject/object relations and John Dewey’s
efforts to connect the potential for democracy directly to issues of
aesthetics and discourse. Their pragmatic template for twentieth- century
thought is not only essential to the methodology of modern pastoral
poetry but also crucial to the development of modern intellectual life in
the United States. Early in the century, James and Dewey were already
developing comprehensive models of inquiry that problematized the dis-
junction between the individuals who constituted the nation and those
who wielded power. Dewey’s writings provoke and propagate the idea of a
public sphere in which expanding political and social rights make visible
and debatable issues that had formerly been considered intimate, domes-
tic, or private.1 In the throes of the Progressive Era and after its peak,
Dewey developed a new form of pragmatism that directly engaged with
the national sense of crisis and continued to resonate long after his death
in 1952 in the work of C. Wright Mills and Sidney Hook, among others,
until its reemergence in the varied neopragmatisms of today. Insofar as
it invokes and seeks to transform a tradition of imagining the American
self and community that can be traced back to the eighteenth century,
Dewey’s—and to an extent William James’s—pragmatism seeks to figure
itself as the modern equivalent of the civic humanism implied in ear-
lier versions of American pastoral ideology. It is within this context that
Dewey and James came to influence modern poets as diverse as Frost,
Williams, Stevens, Ashbery, and Stein.
This chapter sets out the historical context in which pragmatism emerged,
the postfrontier economic, political, and cultural conditions to which James
and Dewey directly responded, and the reception of these philosophers’
radical ideas and distinctively pastoral rhetoric by their peers and students.
The next section maps out the central tenets of pragmatism, focusing first
on James’s approach to subject/object relations, truth and experience, as well
as his more occluded perspective on social relations. Then I turn to Dewey’s
theory of experience and nature, his emphasis upon ideal forms of demo-
cratic community and the role of the arts in shaping and critiquing society,
as well as his doubts concerning the potential for “communication” in all of
its forms to eradicate inequality. Outlining the major principles of this phi-
losophy as well as its roots in reshaping American pastoral ideology, I pro-
vide the historical and intellectual framework for the chapters that follow.
In those chapters, I claim that the pragmatism of pragmatic pastoral
poetry emerges in at least three ways. First, it pursues an ethical mode of
inquiry into the problem of inequality, as in Frost’s depiction of “Pan” or the
poet himself as a tramp, although it may not come to any definite conclu-
sion or political judgment. Second, it reevaluates traditional lyric forms and
voices, especially in ways that question the privileges habitually ascribed
to male lyric subjectivity, as in Stevens’s “Bantams in Pine Woods.” Third,
pragmatism functions in the strategic, experimental deployment of diction
and syntax that force the reader in turn to conduct her own active inquiry
into how meanings and values (and thus the self) are culturally constructed
and might be remade through discourse. While these pragmatic elements
are proper to many texts one might consider modern or postmodern, what
marks these texts as pragmatically pastoral is their direct invocation of
the pastoral mode as a signal of their conscious intervention into national
debates as to the nature of the new ideal self and good society, as well as the
indebtedness—direct and indirect—of most of these poets to the work of
Dewey and James. While there is a significant degree of continuity among
these poets’ work, equally satisfying and surprising is the range of approaches
to pastoral as each reimagines multiple possible American scenes and new
fields of experience.
Pastoral and Pragmatism Historicized

The pastoral mode has long been a uniquely powerful means of commenting
upon and re-imagining American society. Influential accounts of American
history and culture have repeatedly invoked the concept of the “garden,”
“virgin land,” or “nature’s nation” in order to describe the “American incar-
nation” of the pastoral ethos.2 More recently, pastoral has again become
Pastoral Ideology, Pragmatic Response ● 23
central to debates in American studies classrooms by virtue of a revived

interest in environmental studies as well as in the concept of the “frontier,”
a central feature of the American pastoral mode.3 The physical embodiment
of the ground where self and other, culture and nature meet, blur, and blend,
the “frontier” recently has been replaced by “borderlands,” a term more sug-
gestive of the nuances of identity and geography that typify such regions. For
late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians working in the wake
of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 address and essay, “The Significance of
the Frontier in American History,” a frontier pastoralism essentially defined
the American self and community. Turner’s essay affirmed earlier accounts
that saw the frontier as the distinctly American pastoral space to which indi-
viduals came as pioneers and settled to create agricultural communities, as is
imagined in William Cullen Bryant’s 1832 poem “The Prairies”:
I listen long
To [the bee’s] domestic hum, and think I hear
The sound of that advancing multitude
Which soon shall fill these deserts. From the ground
Comes up the laugh of children, the soft voice
Of maidens, and the sweet and solemn hymn
Of Sabbath worshippers. The low of herds
Blends with the rustling of the heavy grain
Over the dark-brown furrows.4
As Bryant’s poet listens, visualizes, and sings of the landscape’s transforma-

tion, he makes possible what was widely felt to be a natural and inevitable
process. His presence is crucial, in fact, to this social progression. But by the
late nineteenth century, Turner’s pronouncement of the frontier’s end had
become a new cultural and historiographical truism that encoded a range of
concerns regarding how the United States would define itself upon becom-
ing a fully colonized land mass.5 Given the nation’s growing imperial inter-
ests and implicit extension of its “frontiers” beyond the North American
continent, the loss of a literal frontier would have seemed to make the con-
cept irrelevant. The reverse, however, has been the case.
Even as the physical frontier disappeared, the concept of the “frontier”
remained potent for twentieth-century intellectuals, including historians as
well as poets, philosophers, and sociologists. Their use of “frontier” rhetoric
can be understood, to an extent, both to complicate and reflect a wider
popular usage of the term. In a 1994 article, Patricia Limerick points out
that while in recent years the “f-word” has come under attack in academia
for its “ethnocentrism and vagueness” as well as its masking of imperialism’s
violence, it has maintained a central place in popular culture. Examining 100

years of advertisements and journalism, she concludes that “the American
public has genuinely and completely accepted, ratified, and bought the
notion that the American frontiering spirit, sometime in the last century,
picked itself up and made a definitive relocation—from territorial expan-
sion to technological and commercial expansion.”6 Building on Limerick’s
claim, I suggest that a parallel appropriation of a pastoral frontier rhetoric
occurred in the social sciences as well as in popular and elite literary and
cultural spheres through much of the twentieth century, with repercussions
that can still be felt today.
Both the social sciences and major strains of modernist literature were
the product of a liberal ideological movement that coalesced precisely as the
physical frontier was ending. Pragmatism, the most prominent and lasting
intellectual means of reevaluating establishment mores, was explicitly con-
sidered by its founders to be a “pioneering” philosophy. James and Dewey
each understood himself to be forging new models of the self and com-
munity that would recapture the lost qualities of virtue and ethics associ-
ated with precapitalist yeoman farmer and republican citizen. Intentionally
employing frontier rhetoric, they replaced images of individuals clearing and
laboring upon the land with visions of subjects experiencing and experi-
menting within the vagaries of a pluralistic society, integrated into rather
than authoritatively shaping their environment. This new vision of the ideal
American self armed not only pragmatists but also poets and artists with
powerful cultural tropes reoriented toward the ethical and communitarian
rather than the material and individualistic.
The rhetoric and methodology of pragmatism were framed in terms
of and in reaction to what came to be called the nation’s “pastoral ideol-
ogy,” a concept that encompasses the general tendency in American politi-
cal and cultural life to ascribe to the pioneer and farmer (closely aligned
in eighteenth-century America) moral virtue and, later, economic integ-
rity. Since the eighteenth century, pastoralism in American culture has
been linked to the republican ideal of the virtuous citizen and society, also
known as a form of “civic humanism.” During this period writers and phi-
losophers such as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and Thomas Jefferson
felt confident in characterizing Americans’ relationship with nature as eco-
nomically stable and morally sanctioned, based on legal and spiritual terms.
Crevecoeur writes of how
the instant I enter on my own land, the bright idea of property, of exclu-
sive right, of independence, exalt my mind. . . . What should we American
farmers be without the distinct possession of that soil? . . . This formerly
rude soil has been converted by my father into a pleasant farm, and in
return, it has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our
freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as inhabitants of such a
district.7
Jefferson’s emphasis is more religious in tone as he observes that “[t]hose who

labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen
people, whose breasts he had made his peculiar deposit for substantial and
genuine virtue.”8 It is these people who are “the most virtuous and indepen-
dent citizens” (Jefferson, 181). These early articulations of American repub-
licanism attempt to account for the moral dimension of citizenship, a kind
of virtue that is at once private and public.
This virtue, whether granted through possession of or labor in (another
form of possession) the land, distinguishes such ideal citizens from those
we now associate with the far less morally inflected concept of “possessive
individualism.”9 As C.B. Macpherson has argued, “possessive individu-
alism,” his term for the liberal-democratic theory of individualism, sees
the individual as “neither . . . a moral whole, nor as part of a larger social
whole, but as an owner of himself ” (Macpherson, 3). This model for the
self, developed from the British empirical tradition of Locke, Hume, and
Bentham, but subsuming the ethical imperative to an economic one,
became predominant by the mid-nineteenth century as the individu-
alist and pioneer (differentiated, to an extent, from the farmer) became
models for the national subject. As the nation transformed itself from a
former colony into an international presence in its own right, questions
of ethics came to be considered “domestic” issues, relegated to the home
front rather than integrated into public and economic life.10 This disrup-
tion of the humanist pastoral tradition was a phenomenon that American
philosophy and literature both embraced and attempted to keep at a dis-
tance. According to Michael Gilmore, American transcendentalists such
as Ralph Waldo Emerson tended to mystify the relationship between man
and nature, thereby implicitly justifying individualist ambitions, while at
the same time protesting specific instances of moral depravity on the part
of business interests or the nation as a whole.11 A society whose prerogative
in the world was rooted partly in a sense of moral superiority derived from
its democratic principles and partly in its economic prowess, the United
States struggled to maintain a vision of the virtuous citizen that was at once
loyal to its idealized pastoral experience of community and at the same time
compliant with its more mercenary practices.
By the early twentieth century, as the traditional political economy based
on property ownership gave way to corporate capitalism and a consumer
society, new models for the self and society supplanted earlier assumptions
concerning the relation of land and labor to virtue. The historical narra-
tive is well known. As industrialization and urbanization pushed workers
to the cities, these forces spawned a class of middle-managers, men who,
rather than owning their own businesses, worked for larger corporations.
Displaced from the land itself as well as alienated from the actual products
they were helping to create, such individuals have been the source of per-
petual anxiety from the nineteenth century to the present. Whether in the
form of the “97 pound weakling” of 1920s advertisements or C. Wright
Mills’s “cheerful robot” of the 1950s, such men have been regarded as eco-
nomic and ethical eunuchs, stripped of their muscular and moral power.
As historians such as Anthony Rotundo, Michael Kimmel, Gail Bederman,
and John Kasson have shown, the cults of manhood and masculinity that
developed at the turn of the century and continue to hold sway today (in
the form of poet Robert Bly’s Iron John movement or fight clubs, among
others) have been responses to a widespread sense that the model male self
and citizen formerly represented by the yeoman farmer and pioneer was in
crisis.12 Yet while the resulting lack of a model male self—for the represen-
tative citizen was usually presumed to be male—appeared to many proof of
a social nadir, to others this period of social flux presented an opportunity
to revisit and redefine gender, class, racial, and sexual categories. By the
turn of the century, philosophers, poets, and commentators of all kinds
began a dialogue in which the nature of the new ideal, representative self
and the community of which it would be a part was debated and its param-
eters reformed.
For Dewey, as for many artists and intellectuals of the period, the mod-
ern “frontier is moral, not physical.”13 With the end of the geographical
frontier, the need for new models for self and community was brought into
relief and became an energizing rationale for the rise of the new culture
of “science.” Pragmatism was developed as a response to early twentieth-
century social, economic, and cultural shifts and attempted (and continues
to attempt) to create room for both public and private virtue in the newly
representative and ethical citizen and community. As James Livingston con-
ceptualizes it, pragmatism emphasizes a discursive mode of subjectivity or
social self in which “the distinction between knower and known, self and
other, subject and object—or the relation between personality and property,
freedom and necessity, consumption and production—must be re-created
and embodied in time and in social forms, not assumed to be fixed, or
given by the past.”14 Pragmatists and progressives emphasized relationships
beyond those that were economic and proprietary in nature, with strictly
vertical lines of responsibility and ownership, instead emphasizing a more
flexible, horizontal sense of social and financial obligation. As members of

a democracy increasingly defined by intangible and mutually entangled
expressions of ownership, American citizens were simultaneously urged to
feel as never before an enlarged sense of responsibility toward all members
of the community. However, while offering a useful and compelling descrip-
tion of pragmatic principles, Livingston’s account neglects to consider how
many citizens felt overwhelmed by the prospect of contending with the
proverbial masses and terrified by the potential consequences of protesting
the status quo. Narrowly individualist models of society and subjectivity
persisted, resisting the kinds of social mobility and political transformation
implicitly promised by new modes of thought. The transition between old
and new ways of thinking was hesitant and gradual precisely because the
shift was so profound.
In Dewey’s view, the entrepreneurial pioneer and his perceived heir—
the capitalist who lacked a moral and aesthetic sense (the two were always
entwined)—were the object of extreme emotions. Such individuals’ anti-
quated strain of “idealism” was nothing less than “noisy and nauseating.”
Although Dewey acknowledged the presence of a “genuine idealism of faith
in the future, in experiment directed by intelligence, in the communication
of knowledge, in the rights of the common man to a common share in the
fruits of the spirit,” he nonetheless acknowledged that this true pragmatic
impulse was often “paralyzed.” Lacking the capacity of “discrimination”
that pragmatism teaches, the American people, Dewey predicted, “shall
oscillate between wholesale revulsion and the sloppy idealism of popular
emotion.”15 Dewey’s choice of words is intriguing, revealing the extent to
which he experienced a literal nausea at the mechanical workings of capi-
talism and a popular culture that substituted “sloppy” thinking for the
true, pragmatic “discrimination” necessary to recognize and internalize
new truths. James, Dewey, and their contemporaries rejected this abject-
ing mode of existence and the mess it had made of American society by
appropriating the rhetoric of the frontier existence in order to sell, in effect,
their new ethical, scientific approach. Cashing in on the popular taste
for frontier rhetoric and imagery, pragmatists appropriated the remnants
of a powerful American pastoral ideology despite the fact that—or pre-
cisely because—it represented elements of American society that they were
attempting to eradicate.16
Dewey’s Individualism Old and New (1930), written later in his career for
a broad public audience, provides his most explicit characterization of prag-
matism in terms of “frontier” rhetoric. Directly stating the need to replace
the old “rugged—or is it ragged—individualism” with a new version of the
self, he cites the need for a “new individualism,” “a new psychological and
moral type.”17 Dewey describes the contemporary sense of crisis in a series

of revealing terms:
The wilderness exists in the movie and the novel, and the children of
pioneers, who live in the midst of surroundings artificially made over
by the machine, enjoy pioneer life idly in the vicarious film. I see lit-
tle social unrest which is the straining of energy for outlet in action; I
find rather the protest against the weakening of vigor and a sapping of
energy that emanate from the absence of constructive opportunity; and
I see a confusion that is an expression of the inability to find a secure
and morally rewarding place in a troubled and tangled economic scene.
(Individualism, 40)
Lacking the “constructive opportunity” equated with the frontier, the mod-
ern individual has lost manly “vigor” as well as the capacity to build a life
that is “morally rewarding.” Although his problems are due to the “eco-
nomic scene,” the modern man presumably hopes to live a more ethically
as well as a more materially satisfying life. Whereas the “pioneer” or old
individualism was twisted “to conform to the practices of a pecuniary cul-
ture,” Dewey hopes for something better in a modern, pragmatic, moral self
and community (Individualism, 9). Rather than a “physical wilderness,” he
avers, “our problems grow out of social conditions. . . . The adventure of the
individual . . . is an unsubdued social frontier” (Individualism, 45 –46). Only
by embracing scientific method and pragmatic philosophy, he concludes,
can modern Americans hope to replace the pioneer with a new ideal citizen,
who in turn might shape a better national community. Even as he expresses
hope for the future, though, Dewey is not wholly optimistic. All too often,
he finds the older individual is idealized rather than discarded as the cul-
tural remnant (or “rag”) that it is; people tend to be suspicious of science or
use it for private and financial rather than publicly minded and ethically
driven purposes.
More generally, throughout his work Dewey adopts rhetoric with similarly
pastoral tensions between the known and the unknown, self and other, past
and future. In terms that evoke the distinction between what the Puritans
referred to as the “howling wilderness” and the “city on the hill,” Dewey
describes the world as “a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable, uncannily
unstable,” a theater in which language and art are crucial to negotiating the
boundary between the seemingly “formal and recurrent” and the “contin-
gent and ongoing.”18 James, too, emphasizes the intrepid exploration of the
“possible” at the frontiers or margins of a universe that is “unfinished, grow-
ing in all sorts of places, especially in the places where thinking beings are at
work.”19 Quintessentially, American pastoral conceptions of the ethical self

laboring in nature are unmistakably alluded to in these characterizations of
philosophical inquiry as the work of an intrepid explorer.
Pragmatism was also received as a new mode of the frontier myth by
younger generations of critics who understood Dewey and James’s desire to
rearticulate the ideal American self and community. “Young Americans”
such as Randolph Bourne began their careers deeply influenced by Dewey.
Bourne sought to established a “Beloved Community” characterized by
“small-scale communities knit together by shared cultural traditions,
mutual aid, and a sense of the common good” (Blake, 7, 3). “Ours is the
first generation of Americans consciously engaged in spiritual pioneering,”
Waldo Frank mused in Our America (1919), while Van Wyck Brooks urged
in 1917 that the nation adopt “a program for the conservation of our spiri-
tual resources,” implying that stewardship rather than exploitation of nature
should be the appropriate metaphor for human relations.20 Similarly, Lewis
Mumford, influenced by British freethinker Patrick Geddes, aspired to
construct a “green politics.” “Infused with the spirit of science,” Mumford
encourages readers of The Story of Utopias (1922) to be members of “euto-
pias,” which he offered as a more European model of community: “the
aim of the real eutopian is the culture of his environment, most distinctly
not the culture, and above all not the exploitation, of some other person’s
environment.”21 And although his tone in Utopias is nostalgic and even anti-
modern in its reverence for a medieval European past, Mumford’s cultural
critique becomes—despite his disavowals of Dewey—even more pragmatic
in The Culture of Cities (1938), as he addresses the complexities of the mod-
ern city and technology while explaining the benefits of what Dewey called
“the local,” the direct, everyday human interactions that nourish democratic
society. Taken collectively, the Young Americans can be understood as typi-
cal of a moment that was shaped initially by their intellectual mentors and
subsequently propagated by a wide array of writers.
While Dewey retained his belief in pragmatism as the best response to
an ethically unmoored society, former pupils such as Bourne, Mumford,
as well as the poet and cultural critic John Crowe Ransom disparaged the
pragmatic frontier discourse and its model for the modern citizen and soci-
ety. Collapsing pragmatism with utilitarian and market driven “sciences,”
these attacks suggested that pragmatism had acquiesced to the hegemony of
capital it was meant to work against. By 1917 Bourne declared that Dewey’s
belated response to the atrocities of World War I left the impression of one
“grappling, like the pioneer who challenges the arid plains, with a power
too big for it.”22 In The Golden Day (1926), Mumford idealizes the antebel-
lum period of American letters as a time of great creativity and promise,
now belied by the industrialist mentality that had adopted the mantle of
the pioneer. “Pioneer society, having no past, and no continuity, could have
no future either,” he declares, adding skeptically that one could “recover
great tracts of pioneer and industrial America from the pragmatists, the
pioneer especially in James, the industrialist in his great pupil, Dewey.”23
While Dewey is too concerned with “preparation for something else,” James
is characterized as “digging and dogging at the universe” (Mumford, 258,
95 –96). John Crowe Ransom sums up this line of thought with his observa-
tion that such intellectuals are “pioneering on principle,” without any end
in sight.24
Yet even these prominent reactions against pragmatism, in conflating
it with an amoral version of the pioneering, pastoral spirit of American
culture, speak to the extent to which pragmatism had become integral to
modern discussions of American pastoral ideology—that is, who the rep-
resentative, ethical American should be and what kind of society he should
work to create. The disdain for pragmatic methods in most cases reflects a
distrust of a philosophy that either worked too hard or simply failed, in the
opinion of these younger thinkers, to reveal the links between public and
private practices, present actions and future consequences. These reactions
also imply, to varying degrees, the resilience of an older model of American
citizenship that calls for personal intellectual cultivation, a mode of develop-
ment that would preserve space for private, though not necessarily public,
virtue. Taken as a group, such reactions have long been held as emblematic
of a modernist tradition that eschews politics or has covertly reactionary
leanings. As the extent of their immersion in pragmatism reveals, however,
even such apparently determined rejections offer proof of the extent to
which they shared James’s and Dewey’s deep investment in theorizing the
mutual relationship of art, personality, and society, as well as their mutual
understanding that such discussions could not be divorced from the frontier
rhetoric of the American pastoral.
James, Dewey, and the Advent of Radical Thought

The pragmatic method as developed by William James and John Dewey was
crucial to the formation of the modern pastoral poetic mode insofar as it
was the primary theorization of the progressive sensibility that informed the
literature and politics of the early- and mid-twentieth century—a sensibility
that many prominent artists and intellectuals felt themselves to share. In their
attempt to delineate the distinctions and bridge the gap between the pioneer
and pragmatist, materialist and ethicist, James and Dewey responded to a
national sense of crisis concerning the nature of the modern self and modern
experience—a crisis that was felt acutely by poets who hoped to find a surer
footing in the American cultural scene. While Dewey’s appropriation of
frontier rhetoric is more obvious, before him William James’s explications of
the very nature of pragmatism helped to establish images and associations
that would make Dewey’s more obvious conflations of the two discourses
self-evident.
Drawing upon his psychological studies and the work of Charles Peirce, 25
James’s theory of “radical empiricism” as articulated in Pragmatism (1907)
refers to experience as a meandering country “stream” that is “multitudinous
beyond imagination, tangled, muddy, painful, and perplexed.”26 The self
and the world are both subject to this state of flux and continuous indeter-
minacy, which James repeatedly couches in metaphors of the natural world.
As he turns to the nature of knowledge and truth, his rhetoric becomes
more abstract, but retains an emphasis upon the individual’s exploration of
uncharted intellectual territory. Truth itself is not fixed but instrumental,
James warns: “the true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the
way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons”; “truth happens
to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events” (James, 37, 92). What we
end up determining to be the truth is a form of “meliorism,” for these truths
will embody our beliefs about what will improve the world. While James
assumes that pragmatism entails a faith that is pluralistic, he also affirms
that such is not necessarily the case (James, 71). On the one hand, he argues
that pragmatism always accedes to the fact of its incomplete knowledge of
the world, leading us to believe that “all our theories are instrumental, are
mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic
answers to some divinely instituted world-enigma” (James, 87). Even so,
James himself cannot suppress his own disbelief that “our human experience
is the highest form of experience extant in the universe” (James, 133). James’s
desire to believe in a higher power despite his belief in the goods offered by
pluralistic thinking illustrates his ultimate conviction that competing goods
will always exist and pose potential conflicts for the individual. According
to James, a moral being must continually make difficult, even impossible
choices, a stance that has led historians such as James Kloppenberg to dub
him an “ironic” pragmatist.27
In light of this position, James was far less sanguine about the possibility
of avoiding conflict or violence than his younger colleague, John Dewey,
a situation James again expressed in terms of human beings’ relationship
to the natural environment. As James notes in his 1910 essay, “The Moral
Equivalent of War,” while war itself could not be avoided, those energies
could be more productively turned toward war against “Nature,” specifically
the joining of upper-class youth with their working-class counterparts in the
ranks of those manning “coal and iron mines,” “freight trains,” “ and “fish-
ing fleets.”28 Not coincidentally, such service would be not only morally
beneficial, revealing in essence how the “other half” lives, but also it would
toughen up an elite, white, Anglo-Saxon upper class increasingly perceived
as weak and soft, their luxuries coming at the price of workers’ exploitation.
Dewey’s response to James’s essay is perhaps one of the most telling indica-
tors of the difference in their temperaments and the general import of each
one’s philosophy. In a 1915 letter, Dewey described James’s essay as a mere
“remedy for neurasthenics,” adding,
his thing on war seemed to me to show that even his sympathies [were]
limited by his experience; the idea that most people need any substitute
for fighting for life, or that they have to have life made artificially hard
for them in order to keep up their battling nerve could have come only
from a man who was brought up an aristocrat and who had lived a shel-
tered existence. I think that he had no real intimation that the “labor
problem” has always been for the great mass of people a much harder
fight than any war.29
Dewey found James’s proposition elitist, opining instead that society’s many
peacetime injustices and inequalities took precedence over reorienting the
passions of the upper classes. While James himself was committed to demo-
cratic tenets, Dewey’s philosophy was more consistently predicated upon
a commitment to universal democracy that clearly embodied his concern
for those left out of the traditional political economy. Building on James’s
thought, Dewey presented a pragmatic vision of “experimental empiricism”
that is similar to his mentor’s while reflective of his own biases concerning
what form “meliorism” should take. It was Dewey’s conceptions of experi-
ence, the self, and society that were the most widely promulgated through-
out the first half of the twentieth century and so serve as the touchstone of
many of my arguments concerning pragmatism, although James’s writings
and concepts provide necessary cultural background and sources of intel-
lectual influence as well.
Like James, Dewey posits a postdualist vision of experience in which
the self is immersed in his environment—much like the farmer or pioneer
in relation to his land—in such a way that the self cannot be abstracted
or understood beyond his embedded experience. In Experience and Nature
(1929), Dewey explains that all experience is “double-barreled,” “it recog-
nizes in its primary integrity no division between act and material, subject
and object, but contains them both in an unanalyzed totality.”30 Like James,
Dewey perceives the world to be “a scene of risk; it is uncertain, unstable,
uncannily unstable” in which immediate experience is consistently alter-

ing the very nature of our selves (Experience, 41). Unlike James, however,
Dewey’s ethical vision involves an essentially optimistic perspective upon
“nature.” “Nature” for him implies a world of experience that contains an
inherent order, a world, therefore, in which there are no conflicts between
competing goods that cannot ultimately be resolved. Dewey’s developing
vision of the modern self thus echoes both the relatively fixed republican
ethos of the early years of the nation while allowing for the frontiersman’s
progression toward a natural democratic ideal.
According to Dewey, experience “carries principles of connection and
organization within itself,” forms that ultimately lead man to the devel-
opment of “creative democracy.”31 Only in this ideal form of social order
are all citizens enabled to fulfill their full personal and political potential.
Interested in “an opening and enlarging of the ways of nature in man,”
Dewey urges us to “discover in thoughtful observation and experiment the
method of administering the unfinished processes of existence so that frail
goods shall be substantiated, secure goods be extended, and the precari-
ous promises of good that haunt experienced things be more liberally ful-
filled” (Experience, 76). And while Dewey admits that “the process of state
formation [is] thus an ongoing, experimental process,” certain aspects of
this ideal state suggest his investment in specific kinds of core social enti-
ties (Experience, 301). In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey would make
more explicit his conviction that the stable small town remained the ideal
community within which true discourse and relationships could be nur-
tured: “Democracy must begin at home,” he proclaimed, “and its home is
the neighborly community.”32 Unlike James, the urban ironist, the more
optimistic Dewey’s loyalties lay with smaller, local communities, rural and
urban alike, that would form the basic levels of organization in his radically
democratic “Great Community.”33 In his focus upon the local, Dewey also
anticipates the body of cultural geography and similar work that reinforce
his assumption concerning the relationship between place and space and
distinctive forms of subjectivity and community.34
Unlike so many of his fellow social scientists, however, Dewey’s vision
of the good society entails knowledge not only of philosophy, economics,
and political science, but also of the literary arts, poetry in particular. In
Experience and Nature, Dewey outlines how language functions with regard
to the individual. He insists that the concept of “subjectivity” must be revised
with the recognition that “this world of inner experience is dependent upon
an extension of language which is a social product and operation.” Failure
to acknowledge this fact would lead to “the subjectivistic, solipsistic and
egoistic strain in modern thought” (Experience, 173). The self is the product
of language and society and all of the historical contingencies that shape
each. Discourse, man’s means of shaping as well as being shaped by the
world, is “both instrumental and consummatory,” something that leads to
other modes of experience and something that is potentially fulfilling in and
of itself (Experience, 183). Arts such as poetry enable the “solvent union of
the generic, recurrent, ordered, established phase of nature with the phase
that is incomplete, going on, and hence still uncertain, contingent, novel,
particular” (Experience, 359). In so doing they give both immediate pleasure
and “continuously renewed delight” as a consummatory experience that is
“indefinitely instrumental to new satisfying events” (Experience, 283). Poetry
is the key to human beings’ continued development toward pragmatic social
and ethical ideals.
It is in Art as Experience (1932) that Dewey articulates a specifically
pragmatic aesthetics. In this crucial volume he explains that his task is “to
restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience
that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are
universally recognized to constitute experience.”35 Drawing on a pragmatic
vision of the subject’s relation to her environment, Dewey articulates an
elaborate theory of a world in which natural “rhythms” and “impulsions”
culminate in aesthetic experiences that manifest “what actual experience
actually becomes when its possibilities are fully expressed” (Art, 280). The
imaginative vision of art addresses social life by eliciting “the possibilities
that are interwoven with the texture of the actual,” enabling the viewer or
reader to see the full potential of experience present and future, and to act
to develop her own potential accordingly (Art, 345). As such, art promotes
the formation of creative democracy, a state that harmonizes “the develop-
ment of each individual with the maintenance of a social state in which the
activities of one will contribute to the good of all the others.”36 Poetry and
literature are especially potent forms of aesthetic experience, insofar as “the
expressions that constitute art are communication in its pure and undefiled
form,” and literature is presented in a “medium” “already formed by com-
munication,” or language (Art, 244). Even the critic is granted a role in this
process, for in interpreting “the moral function of art” he furthers art’s role
in “remov[ing] prejudice,” and “tear[ing] away the veils due to wont and
custom” (Art, 324).
Dewey’s connection between art and democracy proved significant and
inspiring, as it provided an opportunity for a diverse range of individuals
to establish themselves as citizens by virtue of their aesthetic activity. In
his emphasis upon knowledge and creativity as the basis for ethical and
political legitimacy, Dewey sought to extend the promise of full citizenship
beyond the proprietary upper and upper-middle classes through education.
But he was careful to note that art and democracy are not necessarily secure
in the world as it stands. Wary of the harmful effects of industrialized labor
while not entirely damning of it, he warns that art will be endangered until
“the mass of men and women who do the useful work of the world have the
opportunity to be free in conducting the processes of production and are
richly endowed in capacity for enjoying the fruits of collective work” (Art,
344). Throughout his career Dewey sought to establish an uneasy truce
with the economic and historical forces that made pragmatism possible yet
threatened to eclipse its activist, democratic potential with their own brand
of social determinism. As a result, Dewey’s philosophy, while primarily
associated with a liberal, progressive agenda, contains certain transideo-
logical valences that speak to the complications of forming a universally
“meliorist” vision for humanity.37
Dewey’s most troubled musings on modern society emerge in The
Public and Its Problems (1927), written in response to Walter Lippmann’s
The Phantom Public (1925). While Lippmann discusses the impending
irrelevance of representative democracy, Dewey’s rebuttal stresses that due
to the forces of industrialization, the state, developed to meet the needs of
a republican, agrarian society, is unable to meet the needs of the new and
multiple “publics” that have arisen. If the public is to survive at all, he sug-
gests, immediate action must be taken. Artists and local environments are
each essential to the development of the publics and communities of which
Dewey’s “Great Community” will be comprised, but, as Robert Westbrook
notes, Dewey is unable to formulate precisely how either can function to
produce the kinds of publics that will recognize their needs clearly enough to
have a real effect upon the state. In the end, Dewey’s conclusions are hardly
optimistic, as the state appears too entrenched and the publics too large and
unwieldy to be transformed in the service of real democracy.38 What emerges
is a general desire for clear discourse to function within multiple publics as
a means of creating social consciousness and forcing political action: “The
essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and con-
ditions of debate, discussion, persuasion” (Public, 208). How this discourse
and consciousness are arrived at is left unresolved, but Dewey does conclude,
in words suggestive of William Carlos Williams’s later dictum regarding art
and news: “Artists have always been the real purveyors of news, for it is not
the outward happening itself which is new, but the kindling by it of emotion,
perception, appreciation” (Public, 182–184).39 Similarly, in Art as Experience
he cites Shelley’s description of the poet as the world’s “unacknowledged
legislator”; for Dewey “the first intimations of wide and large redirections
of desire and purpose are of necessity imaginative” (Art, 349). Even as he
looked to poets for political inspiration, however, Dewey reiterated his fear
that the imaginative and artistic impulses of the working class would be sup-
pressed, “the processes of production” imposing upon the masses a latter-day
caste system.
In Dewey’s ideal world artists and their audiences would form a new
basis for the representative citizen, forging among themselves a moral and
aesthetic authority that they could use to influence society as a whole.40
The positive aspects of this scenario are clear: the model subject and self
is educated, intellectual, creative, and possesses an intuitive ethical sensi-
bility. Membership in such communities is flexible and voluntary. To an
extent, the model is even practical, as over the course of the twentieth cen-
tury the economic sector has called for an increasingly educated workforce
to meet the needs of a consumer-driven economy. Problems do hover on
the horizon of this democratic vista, however. Dewey presumes a natural
(indeed, predetermined) emergence of consensus concerning social goods,
but is unclear as to how publics themselves should be formed. Dewey also
appears to assume a linguistic clarity and faith in “communication” that
anticipates Jürgen Habermas’s later formulation of the “formal pragmatics
of communicative action.”41 Recent pragmatic philosophers and literary crit-
ics Cornel West, Frank Lentricchia, and Ross Posnock, as well as histori-
ans James Kloppenberg and Robert Westbrook, appear to have inherited
Dewey’s assumption, all finding in pragmatism means to produce demo-
cratically constructive dialogue,42 while others, such as Richard Rorty, echo
the early Habermas in their formulation of an “ironic” pragmatism that
merely offers intellectual satisfaction to the educated elite and falls short of
effectively advocating truly democratic principles.43 The poets I examine in
the chapters that follow come to their own conclusions regarding poetry’s
ultimate democratic potential, most implying a powerful link between poli-
tics and aesthetics while noting the limitations of the union.
The pragmatists’ own invocation of pastoral frontier rhetoric provides
a strong example of how culturally familiar tropes and genres may be used
to attract and communicate with audiences who might otherwise be wary
of innovative ideas. Yet James and Dewey’s appropriation of an antiquated
discourse reveals both the possibilities and pitfalls of such a gesture: while
educated and careful readers would quickly comprehend the distinctions
between old and new ways of thinking, less insightful readers might fail to
grasp the intellectual leaps, the ways in which literal terms become figura-
tive. A “pioneer,” once an immigrant leading his wagon over the Continental
Divide, becomes a scientist behind the wheel of his Ford, researching rural
poverty. The “frontier,” rather than a porous borderland where Federal pow-
ers ended and Native American communities began, becomes the intellectual
space where knowledge is endlessly produced and reassessed, truths emerging
in place of ignorance, ethics complicating expedience. Poetry, necessarily

metaphorical, proves an ideal genre in which to engineer such slippages,
its linguistic felicities permitting juxtapositions of images and ideas that in
turn provoke thought and emotion. Even so, vexing issues remain: how to
get people in proximity to poetry, how to make poetry for and of them?
Gently but insistently posing such questions, pragmatic pastorals gesture
toward the utopian ideals of modern public sphere theory while acknowl-
edging the limitations of public discourse, their voices echoing across fields
both literal and figurative.
CHAPTER 2
Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan:

Robert Frost’s Pastoral of Class
Mobility
I
n the fall of 1894 after a spat with his future wife, Elinor White, Robert
Frost bought a one-way train ticket and set off on an ostensibly suicidal
trip to the Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border. By
the time he decided against throwing himself into the murky waters, he
found he didn’t have enough funds to make his way back home to Lawrence,
Massachusetts. Assessing his situation, Frost embarked on a series of adven-
tures that read, in retrospect, as if purloined from turn-of-the-century head-
lines and popular fiction about the menace of tramps, the unemployed and
homeless men who haunted urban and rural America in the wake of the
major depressions of the late nineteenth century. “Nearly out of money,”
biographer Lawrence Thompson narrates, “Frost decided to try his luck at
leaving Elizabeth City [N. C.] hobo-fashion, by stealing a ride in a freight
car.”1 Sleeping for a while, Frost awakened to find himself at a lumber camp,
where he hopped another train to Washington, D.C. There Frost “spent
that evening in a hobo jungle just outside the capital, studying the grizzled
and shabby veterans who crouched or sat around a little fire made of sticks
and branches.” As Thompson relates the scene, “there was poetry of a sort
for Frost to hear that evening, ballads and songs, one of which he learned
by heart” (Thompson, 185–186). Frost’s initial encounter with tramps was
marked by offers of advice, male camaraderie, and the communal recitation
of songs and poetry that evidently made a deep impression on the lonely
young man.
Frost’s attempt to blend in with these exotic strangers, however, was

quickly stymied. Soon, the tramps began to inquire about the quality of
Frost’s traveling gear and clothing, as well as the whereabouts of any money
he might have on him. “No longer interested in suicide,” a disquieted Frost
fled the encampment, asking the nearest policeman if he might be locked
up in jail, at the time a common form of overnight lodging for tramps.
“Years later he liked to boast that he had spent his first night in Washington
behind bars in a jail,” (Thompson, 187) the story becoming a humorous
tale of the poet’s youthful indiscretion. Exhilarating and frightening, Frost’s
experiences with tramps reflected a fluctuating public consensus that ren-
dered tramps both sympathetic and threatening characters. Time and again,
in poems written over the course of his long career, Frost would return to
the subject of tramps, retaining a complex and evolving perspective on the
migrant poor.
Far from anomalous, Frost’s story of his own tramping experience as
well as his early efforts at what was known as “tramp poetry” were typi-
cal of an elite literary culture entranced by the phenomenon of the unem-
ployed. Within these romanticized narratives, tramps tend to be depicted
as residual frontiersman whose rejection of industrial and corporate culture
is evidence of an inherently independent American ethos linked to cultural
production.2 In texts such as Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey’s Songs
of Vagabondia (1894), for example, vagabonds or tramps are pastoral fig-
ures who reject hard work for a life of ease and pleasure, declaring them-
selves “Free as the whim / Of a spook on a spree,” not “mere commodities”
“[r]anged upon shelves,” “[w]e are not labeled, / We are ourselves.”3 Calling
themselves “Black Richard or Bliss,” these “vagabonds” are implicitly
racially marked, emphasizing a dual rejection of the traditional role of white
producer as well as the modern plight of the mechanized worker. Tramp
poetry first gained ground in the 1890s and continued to hold appeal for
a mass audience well into the 1930s, and Frost worked within and against
its conventions throughout much of his career, beginning with his earli-
est publications. Carman himself praised Frost’s first published poem, “My
Butterfly,” which appeared in The Independent, a well-known liberal New
York newspaper whose editor, Susan Ward, showed the poem to the older
poet (Thompson, 166).4 In Frost’s own first attempt at a Carmanesque lyric,
“Pan with Us” (1902),5 Pan is neither black nor white but “gray,” his strange
skin color beginning to suggest the racialized difference of Carman and
Hovey’s vagabonds while indicating that Frost’s own work would shy away
from the nostalgic, implausible, racialized realm of “vagabondia.”
Instead, Frost’s early pastoral tramp poetics invoke classical pastoral fig-
ures and tropes in order to reimagine a new, postfrontier American reality,
Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan ● 41
addressing the experience of social marginalization attendant upon tramp

life as epitomized by the white tramps he encountered in the Washington
D.C. “hobo jungle.” Fusing aspects of tramp narratives that appeared in
dime novels and journalistic exposés with popular poetic renditions of the
tramp as a kind of modern “Pan” or idealized pastoral artist, Frost was able
to produce ideologically ambivalent depictions of poverty and the plight of
the modern poet, the latter’s position both collapsed into and juxtaposed
with the social marginality of the tramp.
The connection between the underprivileged and poetic practice is
exemplified early in Frost’s career, in “The Mill City” (1905), a grim son-
net that depicts sympathetically the ranks of mill workers from which so
many tramps of the period came. Describing a “drear city by a stream”
whose “denizens were sad to me,” the speaker reflects upon his blindness
with regard to their condition: “I could not fathom what their life could
be.” Like “drowned men,” these laborers have been overcome by a darker
strain of the “stream of experience” so vaunted by James—represented for
them by the “river” that powers the mill. The concluding sestet suggests the
speaker’s complex situation with regard to these people and their relation to
his poetic practice:
Yet I supposed that they had all one hope

With me (there is but one). I would go out,
When happier ones drew in for fear of doubt,
Breasting their current, resolute to cope
With what thoughts they compelled who thronged the street,
Less to the sound of voices than of feet.6
The first line break suggests either that the speaker himself is their “one
hope,” or that they, like him, have only “one hope.” So constructed, the
poem teeters between the poet’s desire to speak for the “voices” of this crowd
and his sense of his own distance from their fate. He can only “suppose”
what they feel, he is both like and unlike them, better and not so good,
foregrounding the pastoral class tensions Empson later identified. To the
extent that he is not of them, he is “resolute to cope” with the “thoughts”
their very presence “compelled,” acknowledging that they do in fact demand
a response from the speaker and poet—rather than passive, their presence
is active. This activity is reinforced by the poem’s reference to “feet,” which
provoke a response from the speaker that competes with and almost over-
whelms the “voices,” although they are still present. In effect, the speaker
imagines himself transposing the rhythm of the crowd, its physicality of
being, directly into his own poetic labors, his voicing of their experience
implicitly replacing their own voices, ironically “drowned” out by their own
weary shuffling. Whether or not the result is a poetry in which “thoughts”
of social equity or justice justify the “hope” of the city’s “denizens” is left
unresolved, although the verse does suggest that the presence of the working
poor is not blithely co-opted nor its rhythms appropriated without aware-
ness of their economic situation. It is the poet’s own “feet,” however, that
ultimately shape the regular meter of this poem and serve to stress his own
aesthetic awakening even as he laments the workers’ fate.
The poem’s preoccupation with walking anticipates a number of poems
that depict tramp figures, now loosed from the tighter rhythms of the city
crowd and forced to wander in search of food and shelter. In poems writ-
ten from the 1890s through the 1910s, Frost depicted itinerant men as real
rather than romanticized figures, their presence provoking honest questions
regarding the parameters of the national community and the obligations
of the self to others. While his work was occasionally confused with that
of other poets writing in the tramp-style,7 Frost’s work was nevertheless
distinctly more troubling and sophisticated than that of self-styled poet
“tramps” such as Harry Kemp, W.H. Davies, or Vachel Lindsay.8 Instead,
Frost’s tramp poetics dovetailed with depictions of tramps in the work of
William James, while implicitly conducting their own Deweyan pragmatic
critique of James’s romantic depictions of the homeless. Although Frost’s
later poems, with the notable exception of “Two Tramps in Mud Time,”
tend to disavow the complex and conflicted class affiliations of Frost’s early
years, their very existence hinted at a continued grappling with underlying
social issues intensified by the Great Depression.
Tramping in Context
Frost’s early pastoral tramp poetics must be read in the context of late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debates concerning the status of
the homeless and migrant workers. The presence of tramps embodied con-
cerns about the ethics of community and civic responsibility as well as the
gulf that had opened up between the white, middle-class managerial class
and the working class. For Chicago School sociologist Robert Park in his
classic treatise “The Mind of the Hobo” (1925), “the hobo” was character-
ized by a “restlessness” that marks him as “a belated frontiersman, a fron-
tiersman at a time and in a place when the frontier is passing or no longer
exists.”9 But in a nation still recovering from the Civil War and frequent
economic depressions, tramps were far from the American ideal and often
embodied a masculinity “out of place,” a kind of social “disorder.”10 Directly
after the war, public sentiment regarding tramps was surprisingly hostile,
revealing what would become a growing anxiety regarding class divisions

and inequality. As Walt Whitman observed in notes for a (never delivered)
lecture on The Tramp and Strike Questions, “[i]f the United States, like the
countries of the Old World, are also able to grow vast crops of poor, des-
perate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably waged populations. . . . —then our
republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface-successes, is at heart
an unhealthy failure.”11 This perspective was not monolithic or immune
to historical events, however: while tramps were widely maligned in the
1870s as irresponsible men who rejected domestic life, by the 1880s public
opinion had begun to shift in the wake of successive economic depressions
and the problem of “unemployment” was acknowledged for the first time in
American history.12
By the 1890s, aspiring journalists and social observers such as Jack
London as well as Stephen Crane, Walter Wyckoff, and Josiah Flynt donned
rags and took to the rails in order not only to document but also physically
to embody a widening social phenomenon that threatened to destabilize the
modern industrial economy with strikes and protests.13 Often voyeuristic,
the accounts of these middle-class writers tended to co-opt a virile working-
class masculinity in order to shore up middle-class authority, their narra-
tives’ subsuming of “class difference . . . into cultural difference” relegating
tramps to simply another group within a pluralistic society.14 Yet the late
nineteenth-century tramp was hardly a “univocal figure,” and was just as
often depicted as Christ-like or even an inheritor of the ideals of the Union
Army in texts that appealed to working-class audiences.15 The white, male
inheritor of the mantle of the “producer,” for which the Union had fought
and who had been subsequently disenfranchised by the new economic
order, the tramp could be considered malign or pathetic to the degree audi-
ences shared his alienation from corporations and new industrial realities.
Laboring at the “wageworkers’ frontier,” tramp culture in fact constituted a
new era in labor relations that ended only with World War II.16
As Tyler Hoffman and Donald Sheehy have observed, Frost’s ideological
orientation toward the working poor was likely rooted not only in his travels
and reading but also in his experiences as a mill worker and inhabitant of
Lawrence, Massachusetts, a major textile center and site of labor unrest dur-
ing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.17 During his formative
years in the city, Frost developed distinctive, if at times contradictory views
on the working and unemployed poor. Frost’s family, while clinging to a
shabby middle-class gentility through the meager earnings of Frost’s school-
teacher mother and contributions from his paternal grandfather, favored
liberal politics in a manner typical of a period in which the lines between
the lower-middle class and working class often blurred.18 Frost’s mother
was an ardent supporter of socialist Henry George, a family acquaintance

from their years in San Francisco.19 Although better educated, Frost’s family
lived in rented lodgings in close proximity to the city’s working class. While
Frost insisted on referring to himself as a “rebel” rather than a radical, and
ridiculed socialism and other liberal causes favored by friends such as Louis
Untermeyer,20 his experiences with working-class tramp figures and the
immigrant laborers of the Lawrence textile mills (political allies under the
auspices of the International Workers of the World, also known as the IWW
or “wobblies”) from the early 1890s onward led him to depict such figures
with surprising frequency and complexity (Untermeyer, 31). 21
The infamous Lawrence Strike of 1912 crystallized some of these feel-
ings for Frost, the young poet noting with a typical ambivalence that he
“felt almost sorry to be so far from Lawrence when the syndecalist strike
was on” (Letters, 48). Effectively controlled by migratory laborers by 1908,
the IWW’s efforts during the strike emphasized issues that would later
come to dominate Frost’s own poetry, helping to reveal the inadequacies
of a deeply unequal society and making visible the mutable “value” of
an individual’s labor.22 In its drive to return the “surplus” value of his
labor to the working man, wresting it from the control of the corpora-
tion, the IWW’s agenda brought into the foreground conflicting ideas
regarding production, consumption, waste, and subjectivity at the turn
of the century. Generating more income and leisure time for the work-
ing class, labor unions helped breed new habits of consumption that in
turn fueled the development of a consumer society and perceived working-
class “extravagance” antithetical to the proletariat utopia envisioned by the
IWW’s most ardent members.23 While labor unions sought to counteract
the direst poverty and win a living wage for their members, they ended
up literally buying into a consumerist ethos that channeled political into
cultural capital.
Constituting a new economic and ethical challenge to the dominant
order, forcing Americans to literally reevaluate their traditional assumptions
about subjectivity and community, the presence of tramps also registered in
the nation’s newest philosophy, pragmatism. On several occasions, William
James refers to the tramp as a protopragmatist, and Frost’s consistent depic-
tion of the tramp as the counterpart of—and competitor for cultural capital
with—the middle-class poet or philosopher can be convincingly read in the
context of Frost’s enthusiasm for the writings of William James. As several
critics have noted, James’s early volumes Psychology: Briefer Course (1892),
The Will to Believe (1897), and Talks to Teachers and Students on Psychology
(1899) as well as Pragmatism (1907) were important texts for Frost, who
taught Psychology and Talks to Teachers while an instructor at the Plymouth
Normal School in New Hampshire.24 But it is significant for Frost’s early

poetry that James tended to have a “blindness” regarding the plight of the
working poor, fixating instead upon the psychological and spiritual needs
of the middle and upper classes, especially intellectuals. In Psychology, for
example, “the tramp who lives from hour to hour” is enlisted as an exam-
ple of a mental limitation curiously akin to that of the “bohemian whose
engagements are from day to day,” both figures’ aversion to “considerations
of the more remote” consequences of their actions evidence of a lessened
capacity for ethical behavior, especially with regard to sex and responsibility
for family members and other human beings.25 James’s characterization of
the tramp echoes complaints from the 1870s and 1880s that the tramp was
irresponsible, having abandoned rather than been forced from his role as
primary breadwinner for his dependant family.26 Similarly, in the chapter
on “The Consciousness of the Self,” the “material aspects of the self” are
imagined as forms of personal property without which “we are all at once
assimilated to the tramps and poor devils whom we so despise, and at the
same time removed farther than ever away from the happy sons of earth who
lord it over land and sea and men in the full-blown lustihood that wealth
and power can give[.]”27 Here, the tramp is associated with an abject state of
poverty and lack of property, his very self made vulnerable by his lack of pos-
sessions, modern subjectivity implicitly aligned, in contrast, with a “lusti-
hood” and manliness equated with wealth. In their rejection of the tramp as
irresponsible and unmanned, James’s early writings reflect a contemporary
reluctance to accept the reality of unemployment and its devastating effects
upon the working-class.
In texts such as “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” (from Talks
to Teachers, based on lectures given in 1892) and Pragmatism, James presents
a more conciliatory, at times romanticized, view of tramps as Whitmanian
loafers and ultimately archetypes for the pragmatist himself. Reflective of a
general softening of public attitudes toward tramps by the 1890s and early
1900s, James’s references to tramps were also influenced by his development
of a more socially conscious philosophy. “On a Certain Blindness” dwells at
length upon Robert Louis Stevenson’s tramplike figures of “The Lantern-
Bearers,” young boys who carry lanterns under their cloaks on the way to
evening escapades, the lamps functioning in James’s narrative as a metaphor
for the secret inner light of all human beings.28 Continuing a few passages
later, he asserts: “Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp
or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will
change the usual standards of human values in the twinkling of an eye, giv-
ing to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the
distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to
build up” (OCB, 851). The tramp emerges here as the protopragmatist, the
individual capable of revealing the elusive, transitory nature of “value” and
in the process enabling the creation of a “new centre and a new perspective”
upon human existence. Significantly for Frost, the tramp is immediately con-
flated with the poet in James’s work, who is epitomized for James by Walt
Whitman himself. The good gray poet is deemed a “contemporary prophet,”
one who “abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventional-
isms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes
save those elementary ones common to all members of the race. For this he
becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and,
considered either practically or academically, a worthless and unproductive
being” (OCB, 851). Characterized as aloof from the crowds that he observes
and is inspired by, the poet is depicted in terms reminiscent of Baudelaire’s
flâneur, the urban spectator whose “special purpose” was described by Walter
Benjamin as “endow[ing] [the] crowd with a soul.”29 Unlike his European
counterpart, however, James’s Whitman only sees in the crowd an affirming
vision of the civic body, never an alienating vision of modernity.
James’s portrait of the tramp as democratic seer anticipates later writ-
ings in which the tramp poet and dreamer is similarly idealized rather than
scorned, his former irresponsibility transformed into an intense receptiv-
ity to others that is distinctly ethical. While his homelessness and lack
of social ties supposedly free him to see into the lives of others, however,
little account is made of his physical needs or financial demands. The
tramp is imagined as wanting nothing, content to roam and see at will, an
unreal indigent who subsists upon “gleams” and “light” rather than bread
and milk. In “abolishing . . . distinctions” among men, he denies his own
claims upon society, even as his supposedly “worthless and unproductive”
character becomes crucial to the emotional and spiritual reproduction of
American society. Ultimately, James’s tramp has more than a little in com-
mon with the tramps impersonated by contemporaries such as London,
Flynt, and Wyckoff, in that his supposed repository of insight has been
co-opted for the middle classes by a professional observer who labors in the
name of science and truth. His mental labor accrues value in proportion to
the tramp’s refusal to acknowledge traditional concepts of material value,
thus precluding the possibility of economic compensation for the latter’s
work, his civic participation limited to a “sympathetic” contribution of per-
spective that is willingly appropriated by a spiritually impoverished and
implicitly more deserving middle class. Like Frost’s plodding mill workers
and their unemployed brethren, such figures are in danger of losing their
“voices” and “feet” both to the poet’s art, their cultural contributions and
ethical challenge wholly submerged in the text.
Pragmatic Critique and the Origins of a Tramp Poetics

To the extent that Frost’s tramp characters evolved from their roots in
the same kind of late nineteenth-century tramp literature that so inspired
James, they elicit the nascent democratic impulses of James’s writings while
developing them in ways that came to anticipate and coincide more closely
with the pragmatic approach of John Dewey.30 Frost’s tramp poetry does
not simply celebrate the dissolution of traditional standards of value but also
presents the anxieties and cultural difficulties involved in translating such
philosophical (and implicitly economic) transvaluations into new visions of
the ethical individual—especially the artist—in society. The similarities
in their perspectives are indicated in part by Dewey’s own assessment of
Whitman, whom he deemed the “seer” of “democracy,” his life “a life of
free and enriching communion.” Like all great artists, Whitman for Dewey
was one of the “real purveyors of news,” able to “kindl[e]” through his work
the “emotion, perception, and appreciation” necessary for transforming the
essence of a reader’s or viewer’s experience in the world. “If the Great Society
is to become a Great Community,” and a true “Public” come into being,
Dewey warned, such Whitmanian figures were essential: “a subtle-delicate,
vivid and responsive art of communication must take possession of the phys-
ical machinery of transmission and circulation and breathe life into it.” Only
when “the machine age has thus perfected its machinery it will be a means
of life and not its despotic master,” he concluded.31 In many respects, Frost’s
tramp poetics address precisely the tension between industrial society and
democracy, the machine and human life and ethics, that Dewey saw as the
target of pragmatic inquiry and action.
Frost’s poetics specifically anticipate Dewey’s perspective on the function
of harsh physical labor in the modern age as well as the philosopher’s concep-
tion of the “rhythms” of everyday and aesthetic experience. As Dewey later
observed, “changes in industrial conditions” too often led artists to develop
eccentric and “isolated means of ‘self-expression,’ ” rather than art that is
fully integrated into its environment.32 The problem with modern indus-
trial society is that “[t]he psychological conditions resulting from private
control of the labor of other men for the sake of private gain . . . are the forces
that suppress and limit esthetic quality in the experience that accompanies
processes of production” (Art, 343–344). The philosopher stressed the need
for poets to be free to experience an “environing world that makes pos-
sible the existence of artistic form” through its natural “rhythm” (Art, 147),
going so far as to imagine poetic meter itself as arising naturally from “the
participation of man in nature’s rhythms” which “induced him to impose
rhythm on changes where they did not appear” (Art, 148). Frost, too, felt
the interplay of natural and poetic rhythms to be the underlying principle

behind all poetry, and his poetry expresses similar reservations about the
effects of industrialized society upon poetry. However, while Frost’s early
poetry repeatedly suggests that the working poor deserve compassion and
charity, he just as often invokes such presences in order to characterize the
“natural” rhythmic origins of his own poetics, as in “The Mill City.”
A similar dynamic enlivens “The Self Seeker” (1913), a poem inspired
by the experiences of Frost’s friend Carl Burrell, also an aspiring poet and
autodidact whose itinerant work habits in some ways resembled those of
a tramp and whose disabling accident marred Frost’s honeymoon visit to
Burrell’s hometown. The poem chronicles the conversation leading up to
and including the visit of a company lawyer to a disabled mill worker’s
bedside in order to make a small settlement. Sardonically declaring that
“I’m going to sell my soul, or, rather, feet,” the disabled worker (known as
the “Broken One”) provokes the indignation of his friend Will (based on
Frost himself), who protests: “With you the feet have nearly been the soul”
(Collected, 93). Once again, temporary factory workers are imagined as hav-
ing “feet” that are expressive of a spiritual and implicitly poetic element, the
perfect iambs of the line stressing the coherence of person and vocation. The
point is brought home by a discussion of the “Broken One”s favorite hobby,
the seeking and gathering of wild orchids—what Frost elsewhere refers to
as Burrell’s “poesies” and clearly a version of “poesy” itself.33 Casting the
hopeful botanist and metaphorical poet in the role of the factory worker
and recreational tramp, and casting himself as the friend whose anger at the
company’s meager compensation anticipates the anger of striking workers
over industrial accidents and low pay, Frost reveals how closely intertwined
are the fates of the middle-class poet and the working classes. Carl’s fate was
not, Frost knew, so removed from his own; the two had been schoolmates in
Lawrence and Frost was saved from such penury only by a generous inheri-
tance from his grandfather. The “Broken One”s loss of his feet, however,
suggests a grim fate for the poet were he, too, forced to labor in a factory
and not free to literally “Will” his work into being, even if the latter were to
mean that he, like “some stockholders in Boston,” would profit from others’
pain (Collected, 100).
Feet and the sound of feet were equated for Frost both with poetic meter
and with the kind of physical and ethical restlessness that animated his
work. The very act of tramping, both in the form of the long walks that
Frost enjoyed throughout his lifetime and in the more ominous incarna-
tion this habit took in his journey to the Dismal Swamp and back, rein-
forced Frost’s sense that poetry was directly linked to physical experience
in a social universe, poetry’s rhythms developing from the poet’s immersion
in a “stream” of life that was no mere metaphor. Just as Virgil’s Tityrus is

forced to look on as his fellow shepherd Melibeous is condemned to walk
into exile, Frost’s “Will” observes the “Broken One,” and his speaker listens
to the “denizens” of the mill city, provoking the reader’s judgment as to how
the poet can or should respond to inequality and dispossession. Yet poetry
speaks, for Frost, through feet whose rhythms smooth or disjointed, easy
cadences or abrupt interjections, bespeak the impossibility of finding voices
that fully express the experiences of others. As Frost once wrote in his jour-
nal: “Poetry is measure in two senses. It is measured tread [,] but it is also a
carefully measured amount of all you have to say. I should have to say [,] any
economies in verse to keep from falsity of thoroughness.”34 Stressing that
“what you with[hold] is as effective as what you throw in” (an echo in turn
of Pan’s strategy of reservation), Frost allows his lines to contain the tread
of the rural and working poor who populate so many of his best poems,
while omitting what might interfere with his own voice. The true poet, Frost
wrote to John Barlett, “must learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the
sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of
the metre.”35 In effect, poetic feet represent and distort real feet, cadences or
“treads” just as the “machine” has hobbled “the Broken One,” who in turn
seems unable to break away from the machine, erotically drawn to “embrace
the shaft” and ride it out to its perverse climax. The result is the “music” of
the mills, which one “ought as a good villager to like,” the grotesque sound
of the modern political economy—and modern poetry—turning experience
into art (Collected, 93, 94).
In its depiction of industrial life and its attendant migrant or tramp labor,
both of which are in turn linked to the “feet” undergirding the poet’s work,
Frost’s poetics ironically embodies Dewey’s conviction that art should not
be removed from but acknowledged as necessarily integrated into modern
society. For both Frost and Dewey, the artist’s task in a democracy “is to
restore continuity between the refined and intensified forms of experience
that are works of art and the everyday events, doings, and sufferings that
are universally recognized to constitute experience” (Art, 3). However, in
a complication of Dewey’s distrust of industry, Frost depicts the mills and
their environs as inevitable, their music, along with the tread of tramps,
contributing to rather than suppressing art, albeit with ethically unsettling
consequences. Rather than merely passive figures, ready for appropriation
by a middle-class audience, Frost’s impoverished characters and voices pro-
voke unresolved discomfort in Frost’s speakers and readers. Their “voices”
and “feet” work with and against the poet’s “voice” and “feet” to create a
poetry of the new industrial order that belies the soothing, depoliticized
“happy-go-lucky” strain of pragmatic “anarchism” James perceived as well
as picturesque turn-of-the-century depictions of tramps as carefree spirits.

It is thus that Frost’s poetics creates “new experiences” that give voice to
those “otherwise dumb, inchoate, restricted, and resisted” through a kind
of work that is neither traditional labor nor escape but a new form of dis-
course that is both necessary and a version of what he later termed “extrava-
gance” (Art, 133).
The Extravagance of the Middle Class

In 1962, Frost gave a talk entitled “On Extravagance,” in which he declared
that, despite his New England upbringing, “I never took any stock in the
doctrine that ‘a penny saved is a penny earned.’ A penny saved is a mean
thing, and a penny spent is a generous thing.”36 While Frost may well have
imagined this stance as wittily heretical in 1962, in the 1890s through the
1910s the term “extravagance” initially was associated with Henry George’s
theorization of the habits of both “tramps” and “millionaires,” marking a
relatively new phase in the American political economy best encapsulated in
Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). In documenting
“conspicuous consumption,” Veblen dwelled on the phenomenon of “con-
spicuous leisure,” noting that “wherever the canon of conspicuous leisure has
a chance undisturbed to work out its tendency, there will therefore emerge a
secondary, and in a sense spurious, leisure class—abjectly poor and living a
precarious life of want and discomfort, but morally unable to stoop to gainful
pursuits.”37 While neither a millionaire nor tramp, Frost’s self-presentation
and poetics suggest a middle-class persona that contained attributes of both,
tacitly reminding readers that such extreme forms of “extravagance” and
“leisure” existed only in relation to—and indeed were the social inversion
of—the concurrent realities of undervalued physical and intellectual labor.
Typical of a new breed of middle-class poet, Frost sought to affirm the value
of his mental labor and aesthetic product in terms suitable to a consumer-
driven economy that made leisure possible while constantly negotiating its
kinship and obligations to working-class labor and the bodies to which it
was attached.
Hardly a millionaire, Frost nonetheless feigned a shabby gentility in his
interactions with neighbors and friends.38 Soon after Frost’s first books of
poetry appeared in the United States, he reinforced his newly middle-class
status by taking the casual if studied stance of the gentleman poet during
at least one of his initial interviews with American papers. Finding Frost at
home at his farm in Franconia in February 1917, a reporter from The Boston
Post was more than delighted to play along, quoting Frost to the effect that
“I suppose I’m just a bit lazy . . . so I’ve had a lazy, scrape-along life, and
enjoyed it.” Noting how his family “smouldered” by way of existence, Frost
is depicted describing himself as “not really poor or lacking anything, but
constantly on the verge of having something.”39 Whether or not Frost actu-
ally described himself as “lazy” (additional correspondence suggests that the
reporter himself supplied the word), the word coheres with Frost’s reluctance
to be seen as a common laborer or producer and so have his poems perceived
as ordinary objects, even as he describes himself as not unlike those poor
who merely “scraped along.” His “smouldering” suggests a precarious state
of existence, evoking a constant using up or spending linked to “extrava-
gance” or consumption while also suggesting a “lack” of “something” the
family does not quite have and perhaps even a certain resentment regarding
their relative poverty.
This telling self-characterization recalls and complicates readings of the
“slow smokeless burning of decay” of “The Wood-Pile” (1914; likely begun
1906–1910), now one of Frost’s best known poems.40 In the poem, the
speaker sets out on a long, aimless walk only to encounter an abandoned pile
of wood in the middle of the forest. A mystery revolves around who “could
so forget his handiwork on which / He spent himself, the labor of his ax,” as
to forgo compensation for his own toil (Collected, 101). On the one hand, if
taken as a figure for the potentially neglected poem, the woodpile symbol-
izes Frost’s disdain for a literary marketplace that undervalued his contri-
butions and thus his preference for a self-imposed wastefulness (foregoing
publication).41 On the other hand, the use of wood chopping and woodpiles
as metaphors for labor and value also serve to emphasize the nature of physi-
cal labor sought by and demanded of the migrant poor, illuminating the
ways in which Frost’s anxieties concerning intellectual labor and class status
were linked to his depictions of work, the refusal to work, and the inability
to work. As Frost likely knew from his reading and personal experience,
middle-class reformers often turned to wood chopping and similar tasks as
“work tests” for tramps seeking shelter in the 1870s and 1880s.42 Such work
tests were part of what Wai-Chee Dimock has termed a late-nineteenth-
century “economy of pain” in which charity work is circumscribed by a
logic of “limited liability” dictated by capitalism.43 In “The Wood-Pile,”
the “work test” or image of wood consumption is crucial to situating Frost’s
own middling and mediating role in an economy of charitable obligations
and limitations, suggesting both the ways in which he identified with the
labor (or lack thereof) of the transient worker and the ways in which his art
had to be distinguished from the threat such endeavors posed to his sense of
self and class position. On one level, the discovery of the rotting woodpile
echoes the speaker’s own waste of time as embodied in the long walk that
has taken him to this remote location. The poet appears to have emerged
from this “tramp” as effortlessly as the stacked wood, the value of each act
denied a simple monetary equivalent. The speaker tips his hand, however,
in his commentary upon the only visible presence in the poem, a bird who
hovers around the pile behaving “like one who takes / Everything said as
personal to himself” (Collected, 100–101). The bird’s tizzy of “fear” upon
the intrusion of the speaker, comically made visible in the form of its “white
feather,” the universal token of cowardice, enables the speaker conveniently
to recognize, displace, and dismiss any and all “fears” onto this fragile, elu-
sive body whose song traditionally represents that of the poet. The result is
a poem that ensures a safe and satirical distance from the “pain” and “fears”
of others while reassuring the speaker that such fears were never “personal
to himself” to begin with.
In a similar manner, several early poems depicting tramps also hint at
and attempt to dispel such “fear” as it threatens to disrupt the poems’ econ-
omies of meter, form, and affect as well as the integrity of the poet himself.
The resulting poems depict the Frostian persona as aligned with the “pains”
both of those giving and receiving charity. In many cases, the poems tend
to blur and destabilize the boundary between the two figures, giver and
recipient, revealing a complex social reality of rural New England that
exposes the fragility of the social order and attributions of value underlying
that order. In the spirit of an irony “that doesn’t iron out anything,” Frost’s
early tramp poetics tend to delay the articulation of any ethical imperative
while implying that a society without any such network of social obliga-
tions would be in constant threat of ethical as well as economic impoverish-
ment (Untermeyer, 378).
Although Frost himself was an ardent walker accustomed to lonely ram-
bles, he was extremely vigilant regarding the menace that others’ trampings
might prove to himself and his family. Just before moving to his first farm in
Derry, New Hampshire, “anticipating tramps and prowlers, he . . . purchased
a revolver in Lawrence” (Thompson, 278). Yet it was also during his years
at Derry that Frost had yet another, not entirely negative, experience with
tramps, an experience that was to influence poems written over the course
of his career. According to a story Frost related to Thompson late in his life,
one evening a tramp stopped “at his farmhouse and asked if he could sleep
in the barn overnight”:
It was late in the fall, the night was cold, and the tramp looked as thought
he might set fire to the barn, after dark, if the answer was no. With
mixed feelings of fear and pity, Frost had let this tramp sleep on a bed of
rugs and blankets in the kitchen beside the stove. He gave the man food
that night, and breakfast in the morning. After the stranger was gone,
Frost puzzled over his own inner turmoil: All men are created equally
free to seek their own rights in their own way, but how does one draw
the line between the rights of the property owner and the rights of the
tramp to make a claim on the sympathy (or fear) of the property owner?
(Thompson, 377)
Although this story was told at the end of Frost’s career and undoubtedly
the interpretation he offers to Thompson is influenced by his later views
on property rights, the essence of the anecdote rings true. Despite Frost’s
gloss on the incident, it appears that his initial reaction was fairly gener-
ous, despite the Frost family’s own meager means during this period, and
the “line” that he would draw between one’s set of rights and the claims of
another was by no means clear-cut.
“Love and a Question,” a poem directly influenced by the Derry tramp,
begins to address precisely such questions of obligation. A deceptively
traditional-looking ballad chronicling the trespass of a mysterious “Stranger”
into the honeymoon of a young couple, it depicts an old man who “bore a
green-white stick in his hand, / And, for all burden, care” (Collected, 17–18).
He brings his case before the young bridegroom, unwilling to directly beg,
“He asked with the eyes more than the lips / For a shelter for the night.”
The poem appears to set the stage for the man’s intrusion into the domestic
space in an act not unlike and perhaps in replacement of the sexual exchange
that was to occur that evening. Instead of immediately letting the man in,
though, the bridegroom hesitates, stepping outside to consider the “ques-
tion” of the title. The encounter is characterized, ostensibly, not by fear but
by the pangs of guilt and longing, the “woes” of another balancing against
the “love” of the pair. The poem’s energy is derived from the central ques-
tion of what is owed the tramp or beggar figure and where he fits into not
only the domestic economy but the “bridal house” itself insofar as it stands
for the traditional family and larger community and culture. The tramp is a
figure to whom one should give, according to the tenets of Christian charity,
“a dole of bread, a purse,” and on whose behalf certain acts of performa-
tive discourse can be enacted (“a heartfelt prayer,” “a curse”), but the poem
allows that it is questionable if he should be admitted into the primal scene
of the tribe.
At a certain point, ethical fastidiousness appears to give way to closely
held feelings regarding “love’s” relationship to “woe,” the limits of charity
and community reached at the moment misfortune threatens to overwhelm
the community with the “burden” of their “care[s].” Indeed, the abjecting
presence of the tramp is figured as potentially forestalling sexuality, procre-
ation, and the reproduction of traditional “values.” As the groom deliberates,
the immense “value” of the wedding night is figured as his desire to have
the bride’s “heart in a case of gold / And pinned with a silver pin,” her worth
signified by her encapsulation within and penetration by precious met-
als. Within the economy of the community, her “value” is confirmed and
redeemed precisely by her sexual penetration, which has become equivalent
to her aestheticized representation by the groom. The presence of the tramp
threatens to disrupt this ritual with his impoverishment, his lack of worth
and “cares” literally devaluing the evening as well as deforming the poem
itself, which lacks any clear resolution. The question of whether to admit
him is never answered, although his presence implies that former assump-
tions about “values” must be reevaluated upon encounters with the home-
less. Traditional genderings of worth as attached to the private and domestic
sphere come under increasing pressure and scrutiny in such poems, in which
the “homeless” nature of the modern industrial world intrudes upon the
fairy-tale-like scenario suggested by the poem’s antiquated form. The poem
encodes a pervasive sense of collapsing spheres and the lack of a coherent
discourse within which to frame answers to the ethical questions posed by
the characters. The poem’s lack of closure speaks to the extent to which such
dilemmas remained unresolved for Frost throughout his career.
The poem “Death of the Hired Man” (pub. 1915; written 1905) restages
this situation with a number of variations, this time setting a wife’s sense of
ethics against her husband’s (Collected, 40–45). Although Frost’s initial dif-
ficulties publishing this poem suggest that some read it as a commonplace
tale of tramping, it bears far more careful consideration than sentimental
tramp ballads. More of a traditional pastoral eclogue, the poem depicts in
blank verse a conversation between a farming couple regarding a migrant
worker, Silas, who has long assisted in their harvest. Near the end of his life,
he has come home to die at their farm, despite the fact that he has a brother
who is a “director in the bank” somewhere. The wife, Mary, insists that they
allow him to stay, noting that “ ‘[w]orthless though he is, / He won’t be made
ashamed to please his brother.’ ” “ ‘Be kind,’ ” she insists, when her husband
protests that Silas is useless around the farm. Warren, the husband, recalls
instead how “off he goes always when I need him most. / He thinks he ought
to earn a little pay, / Enough at least to buy tobacco with” even if he has
done little or no work. He represents Silas as an unfaithful and unreliable
worker, whose ethos is essentially that of the hobo or tramp, eschewing the
role of male producer to live in the moment, exercising the unethical lack of
foresight William James once so deplored. Easily bought off by a few extra
pennies “in haying time,” he is eager to return in winter, when it is cold
but there is little work. Upon returning this year, Silas has insisted to Mary
that he has really come to “ditch the meadow,” although she immediately
understands that this promise of labor is a fictive gesture designed to mask

their personal sense of obligation to him with an economic one. Respecting
his need for “self-respect,” Mary recounts how she patiently listens to his
plans, although “he jumbled everything. I stopped to look / Two or three
times—he made me feel so queer—/ To see if he was talking in his sleep.”
Pained by his condition, Mary sees their obligation to him not as necessary
payment for past contractual relationships, but as a humanitarian compen-
sation for a subjective incoherence and disorientation that is just as much the
product of modern labor as impending death. Aside from his “one accom-
plishment,” “build[ing] a load of hay,” Silas has “nothing to look forward to
with pride, / And nothing to look forward to with hope, / So now and never
any different,” Mary observes. His sole talent an increasingly antiquated,
physical method of creating form, Silas has become a victim of the abstrac-
tion of labor, his practical “value” as an employee receding by the day.
The crux of the situation revolves around whether or not to let Silas stay,
and whether or not Warren and Mary’s farm, as a microcosm of the com-
munity and nation, can be considered his home. Silas’s “hope” is that he
will be able to die in the place in which he feels most comfortable, part of
a community to which he once, apparently, belonged, becoming in effect
the extended family of an apparently childless couple. When Mary explains
that “he has come home to die,” Warren “mocked gently” the word “home,”
observing that “he’s nothing to us, any more / Than was the hound that
came a stranger to us / Out of the woods, worn out upon the trail.” “Home
is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in,” he
offers ironically. “I should have called it / Something you somehow haven’t
to deserve,” Mary counters indignantly. This well-known exchange reflects
a universe in which homelessness makes more visible the increasingly pre-
carious status of home itself, its fragility demonstrated by the couple’s own
lack of accord on its definition. Describing Silas as “broken,” an appellation
he shares with the “Broken One” of “The Self-Seeker,” Mary insists that
Warren go welcome him. When Mary calls to him a short while after he has
left the room, “dead was all he answered.”
In contrast to her husband’s (which many read as Frost’s) irony, Mary’s
instinctive generosity forms the ethical focal point of the poem. The mature,
creative counterpart to the passive, voiceless bride of “Love and a Question,”
Mary’s arguments take the form of a story or narration of Silas’s condition,
through which she hopes to elicit her husband’s compassion. The fact that
she has already let Silas into the home and made him comfortable, how-
ever, also imply that the husband’s consent is a formality—unlike the new
bride and even Warren, Mary is an agent of charity whose emotional pains
upon encountering Silas justify her actions to herself. Frost abruptly ends
the poem with Silas’s death, however, thus precluding any further obliga-
tion on the part of the couple. This relatively easy conclusion to the tale
prevents continued disruption of Mary and Warren’s domestic life, but
it does not resolve the differences his presence has provoked. Later in his
career, Frost suggested that this poem could be understood as presenting
the “Republican” stance of the husband and the “Democratic” stance of the
wife, noting that few have noticed the “Democratic” aspect to his work.44
Given Frost’s ambivalent responses to New Deal policies, such a reading
augments the reader’s sense that the poem contains no simple resolution.45
Warren has the last word, and it is unclear whether Silas’s death has moved
him, although his gestures toward his wife (he “slipped to her side, caught
up her hand and waited”) suggest that he comprehends her pain at the event.
The poem ends with an abjecting specter of death hanging over the two, the
wife’s question regarding Silas’s state ostensibly “answered” (the last word of
the poem) but the larger issues left hanging. The poem ends with the sugges-
tion of Silas’s cooling corpse within the domestic space, its presence taking
the place of the filial order the childless Mary might have hoped to create.
In “The Fear” (1913), the representative nature of the tramp, poet, and
rural family itself are all brought into question as a means of signaling the
extent to which the nation can offer a secure model for the self or inclu-
sive standard of community and valuation. Like “Love and a Question,” this
poem was based on an incident that occurred around the turn of the century
to a neighbor of friends with whom the Frosts vacationed in the summers of
1906 and 1907.46 This eclogue in iambic pentameter describes a man and
wife returning home late at night only to feel a profound sense of unease, as
if they were being watched from the darkness. The wife is certain she senses
someone about, while her husband attempts to dismiss her fears. Undeterred,
she suggests that someone in particular may be threatening them: “Let
him get off and he’ll be everywhere / Around us, looking out of trees and
bushes / Till I shan’t dare to set a foot outdoors” (Collected, 89–92). The
watching figure is ascribed a power of surveillance that is terrifying and spe-
cific, designed to turn this woman’s home into a virtual prison. The woman’s
suggestion that she alone address him, that she has intimate knowledge of
his psychology and that this is “[her] business,” leads the reader to suspect
that he is a former husband or lover possibly come to take revenge (as is the
case in the story that supposedly inspired the poem). The wife’s resistance to
such intimidation real or imagined speaks to her refusal to be the object of
another’s monitoring. But upon calling into the night “What do you want?”
she receives a surprising response: “Nothing.” “The voice” turns out to be a
man with his child, who justifies their presence with the explanation: “Every
child should have the memory / Of at least one long-after-bedtime walk.” He
attempts to show her the child, but realizes that she can’t “see” this proof of
his innocence, that he is not a “robber.” Somewhat comforted, the wife calls
toward her husband, only to drop the lantern that she had been carrying. The
poem ends with a pair of disturbing lines: “The swinging lantern lengthened
to the ground, / It touched, it clattered and went out.”
Robert Frost, who frequently signed his letters “Rob’t,” short for both his
first name and “robbed” (a point he makes explicit), here situates himself as
a middle-class vacationer who has intruded upon the remote rural life of a
couple and disturbed their peace of mind (Untermeyer 71). The character
here assumes at first that it is he who has been deprived of a certain “worth,”
mistaken for a “tramp” or robber who might be covetous of the couple’s
space or valuables. In fact, however, his whimsical “tramping” or nighttime
stroll does reveal a kind of devaluation that might be construed as a robbery
of the traditional American family. The man and wife’s situation is pre-
sented as emblematic rather than exceptional, a typical rural encounter in
which the suggestion of infidelity suggests the farmer’s decreasing sense of
worth.47 Furthermore, it is the middle-class visitor who is capable of repro-
duction, not the apparently childless farmer and wife, and the visitor as well
who has determined that the value of the rural life lies in its capacity to gen-
erate abstract “memories” of “natural,” aesthetic experiences, not an actual
physical product. Within such a world, outsiders can only be feared as those
who will take advantage of dissatisfactions, emotional and physical, and to
steal from the formerly representative self, male or female, the remnants of
its identity. The walker offers in response to the wife’s queries “Nothing,”
precisely because he has already appropriated from the environment every-
thing that he wanted: the experience of being in the world with his child.
Because he is not a real tramp but an ersatz middle-class tramper, he has no
use for any social goods that the rural couple might offer, depriving them in
advance of the opportunity for hospitality, to present, however grudgingly,
food, coins, or a place to rest. Cut off from the community, they can only
be stolen from, their paranoia anticipating the fears of radical impoverish-
ment: indeed, many tramps came from precisely such rural areas and situa-
tions, forced off the land by decreasing crop and land values. In the poem’s
final lines, the couple’s encounter with the walker and child magnifies their
dimming vision, their diminished capacity to be reliable observing subjects
and citizens themselves. The surrounding void of the night air leaves room
for speculation as to how connection between the personal and political, so
irrevocably linked here, might be reformed.
The last early poem to deal extensively with a tramp presence, “The Hill
Wife” (1916), depicts, like “The Fear,” another lonely country wife com-
ing into direct contact with a stranger whose demeanor provokes a sense
of insecurity and danger. The poem consists of five sections, the third of
which, “The Smile,” was originally published separately in 1914 and differs
in form and tone from the rest of the poem. While the first, fourth, and
fifth sections consist of variations on ballad form reminiscent of “Love and a
Question” and the second section is in a more naturalistic iambic tetrameter,
“The Smile” consists of twelve lines of rhyming iambic pentameter more
closely akin to the blank verse of “The Fear” and “The Death of the Hired
Man.” Nearly a sonnet, its tone is nevertheless far less soothing and medita-
tive than “Love and a Question,” instead suggesting an almost paranoid
stream of consciousness regarding a departing tramp. Although the speaker
appears to address the Hill Wife’s husband, the monologue may be purely
internal:
I didn’t like the way he went away.

That smile! It never came of being gay.
Still he smiled—did you see him?—I was sure!
Perhaps because we gave him only bread
And the wretch knew from that that we were poor.
Perhaps because he let us give instead
Of seizing from us as he might have seized.
Perhaps he mocked at us for being wed,
Or being very young (and he was pleased
To have a vision of us old and dead).
I wonder how far down the road he’s got.
He’s watching from the woods as like as not. (Collected, 123)
Like “The Fear,” this poem presents a woman’s perspective on a perceived

danger that is equally physical and social. The Hill Wife’s fear is rooted in
the “smile” of the tramp, offered in exchange for the “bread” the couple had
offered him. Immediately rejecting the possibility that the tramp might ever
be “gay” or carefree—despite popular poetry implying the opposite—the
wife perceives the tramp to be a danger straight out of sensational news
accounts typical of the 1870s and 1880s. A despoiler of the domestic scene,
the tramp is imagined as malevolent and mocking, and a potential rapist
even, a far cry from the gentle, elderly “stranger” of “Love and a Question.”
These conclusions, however, appear dubious to the reader precisely because
the speaker’s perspective is limited by a poverty, like that of the wife in “The
Fear,” that precludes her from the ability to feel pain for others—or perhaps
enables her to feel too much. Nearly as, if not more, socially isolated than
the hobo at her door, the rural wife engages in a perverse kind of projection
that inverts her limited knowledge of the homeless man into his supposedly
intimate knowledge of the couple. His imagined perspective on their poverty

makes explicit the theme suggested in previous poems: that the traditional
rural domestic unit has lost its value and ability to produce and reproduce
itself. As later sections of the poem make clear, the wife herself, on the verge
of leaving her husband, also may be about to become homeless.
Drawing on turn-of-the-century attitudes that blended fear of and com-
passion for the homeless, Frost’s early tramp poems reveal a poet struggling
to come to terms with the realities of a new political economy and its con-
sequences for the homeless and working poor as well as those ostensibly
better off. Revealing the relative and outdated value of traditional truths
concerning the home, Frost’s tramps provoke discussion of charity and suf-
fering on the part of givers and recipients. As the lines between the rural
family, middle-class vacationer, and tramp blur, the poems suggest that the
true “labor” of poetry is precisely this kind of ethical work, which is both
an “extravagance” and of solid social value. The result is a pastoral mode
in which the transition from agricultural to industrial labor provokes resis-
tance and outrage, even as its inhabitants adjust to what “The Self-Seeker”
describes as the new “music” of the village. Straining against while submit-
ting to these rhythms, the modern poet depicts the world as he sees it, rife
with pain and compassion, social flux forcing ethical dilemmas to which he
presents no easy solution.
Late Frost and the Forgotten Man

In 1935, Frost met with an aspiring poet, Oliver Waye. The author of a poem
entitled “The Forgotten Man,” originally published in Today (a previous
incarnation of Newsweek) on December 23, 1933, Waye had met with some
limited success. In what was apparently his best-known poem, Waye depicts
the “forgotten man” as a tramp, maligned as “a thug and a Red,” an “atheist
misbegotten.”48 A politically threatening figure, this character is completely
unlike the “forgotten man” made famous by Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 radio
address, in which the then presidential candidate rallied listeners on behalf of
the hardworking “forgotten man at the bottom of the economic pyramid,”
likely an honorable veteran and farmer no longer able to make his own way
without federal assistance.49 In Waye’s poem this sympathetic personage is
translated from a recognizable man into an abstract symbol or “Specter” of
“Pestilence,” “Famine,” and “Decay.” Whatever ideological affinities he may
once have possessed are subsequently dissolved into vague notions of “Freedom
and Liberty” as well as “Love,” “Fate,” “Passion,” and “Hate.”50 Ideologically
incoherent, the poem appears to have “forgotten” its own “man,” morphing
from a liberal call to arms into a pile of political and poetic clichés.
Whether or not Frost liked this particular poem, he seems to have been
struck by his meeting with the young man, which he described in a letter to
Louis Untermeyer:
The tramp was worthy. He had a very convincing contempt for people
who live in houses and know where the next meal is coming from. Anger
was his motive—anger at imperfection. You might not expect it from
my impassive exterior, but I have always had the same anger. But I refuse
to be driven to suicide or desertion by it. Ridgely Torrence was telling
me how he sat with [Edward Arlington] Robinson not so many years
ago (thirty), and Robinson was weeping face in hands for want of being
read as a poet. My fury is for more important things and is moreover too
tight. All the same no deserter comes near me without my sympathy.
(Untermeyer 266)
While characterizing himself as unlike the “tramp” or social “deserter,”

Frost nonetheless implies an affinity between the young man’s anger and
his own—both directed at a world that is often unjust and “imperfect.” Yet
the world’s imperfections, it quickly emerges, are more cultural than social,
more related to neglect by the literary establishment—or anger at those who
misread him—than economic inequality. Although an “impassive” Frost
protests that he cared for “more important things” than his own fame as a
poet and implies that Waye’s youthful inclination to “desert[]” had merely
his “sympathy,” Waye’s poetry and presence evidently touched a nerve.
Always sensitive to implications regarding his literary celebrity and the
relative value of his verse, Frost by the late 1910s began to downplay social
and political questions in his own tramp poetry. Consequently, Frost’s late
poems and plays—such as “The Lockless Door,” “Trespass” (1939), “The
Literate Farmer and the Plant Venus” (1941, likely written 1932–1936),
“An Unstamped Letter in our Rural Mailbox” (1944), as well as the dra-
mas “A Way Out” and “The Guardeen”—generally depict tramps not as
Rooseveltian “forgotten men” but as poets in disguise, radical Jamesians,
oddly sympathetic criminals, or students on vacation. The tramp is either
linked to the middle-class poet or effaced and replaced by urban, profes-
sional figures whose wanderings at first challenge but ultimately confirm
the values of rural Frostian poet-figures. In each permutation, these charac-
ters serve to eclipse the presence of the actual poor, whether local or itiner-
ant, enabling Frost to avoid the questions of social equity and charity that
had preoccupied so many of his earlier tramp poems. During this period of
his greatest popularity, Frost tends to reinforce what Joan Rubin terms “gen-
teel” values as encoded by the middlebrow culture in which Frost played a
prominent role.51 Considered in their historical context, Frost’s late tramp

poetics reflect the gradual easing of the tramp crisis during the 1920s, the
changing nature of unemployment during the Great Depression (typified by
migrant families rather than single men), and finally the relative disappear-
ance of obvious unemployment during the post–World War II era.
The one prominent exception to such socially disengaged late tramp
poetics, however, is the poem “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (1934) in which
the speaker’s more nuanced reflections upon tramps affirm some continuity
with earlier tramp poems, suggesting that Frost’s engagements with social
issues would never be simple to historicize or categorize. In “Two Tramps in
Mud Time,” the speaker articulates a vision of tramps that contains elements
of Frost’s earlier compassionate stance toward the unemployed, expressed in
tandem with his later articulations of the poet’s rights and values. The result
is a fusion of early- and mid-career attitudes that is as unusual in Frost’s work
as it is indicative of his idiosyncratic personal and poetic development.
The poem begins with a transition from winter to spring, from solid
ground inclined to “frost” to a “mud” that brings “two strangers” (Collected,
251). Seasonal and social instability are linked as the contingent, ethi-
cally disturbing mess of modern life impinges upon the poet’s reverie. The
speaker, a Frost-like figure, is chopping wood in his yard when two tramps
come along, apparently in genuine need of employment and compensation.
The scene is reminiscent of “The Wood-Pile” while delving more explicitly
into how physical and poetic labor mirror each other, the wood in question
now the property of the speaker rather than mysteriously appearing in the
woods. Knowing instinctively that one stranger wishes “to take my job for
pay,” the speaker at first rejects the man’s unspoken but implied request with
a self-serving pronouncement:
The blows that a life of self-control

Spare to strike for the common good,
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.
Perversely, the tramps’ interest in the speaker’s work only increases his desire
to continue with it, as he relishes the sight of his natural surroundings and
his physical presence in the natural world:
The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,

The grip on earth of outspread feet,
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.
As did the “work test” in the late nineteenth century, here chopping wood
becomes a means of evaluating who is “worthy” of another’s time as trans-
lated into the value of money. In order for the poet to prove worthy of the
reader’s time, however, he must at first deny the tramp the opportunity to
“work,” thus foregrounding the relation between consumption and charity.
In a perverse reenactment of scenes in which tramps were forced to cut wood
for food and shelter, however, the speaker-poet transforms the act from a
painful to a pleasurable one, from labor to leisure. The act becomes unmis-
takably erotic, a wasteful, masturbatory performance of “extravagance”
designed to impress and taunt the tramps, themselves probably “not long
since in the lumber camps.” In an imitation of homosocial bonding rituals,
the speaker is sure that the tramps “judged me by their appropriate tool,”
their attention to his work and assessment of his handling of the “ax” rhe-
torically recasting them as consumers of his gratuitous performance rather
than deserving producers or laborers in their own right. As did Roosevelt in
his address to the “forgotten man,” Frost imagines a world in which such
men are enabled to consume, thus stabilizing the nation’s economy and the
well-being of the artist at the same time.
Yet rather than dehumanizing the tramps as “primitive, barely human
creatures,” as Robert Faggen suggests, the speaker’s decision to keep working
is vexed precisely by his recognition of their human presence and “right[s]”
as “forgotten men” in search of work that would enable them to perform
additional acts of material production in addition to cultural consumption.
It is only in the context of acknowledging their “right” to the labor, their
potential to offer “logic” in support of their claim, that the speaker must
press his case. Their presence is both an occasion to express sympathy as well
as an opportunity to articulate the poet’s own cause. As is made explicit in
the beginning of the second half of the poem, the speaker acknowledges that
whatever he might intend to do with his labor and time:
They knew they had but to stay their stay

And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
with what was another man’s work for gain.
It is clear that “theirs was the better right—agreed.” Even so, having submit-
ted to the tramps’ claim to ethical authority, the speaker’s final lines both
postpone the fulfillment of his part in the social contract and articulate an
explicit grounding for the poet’s counter-right to engage in a kind of pro-
ductive leisure or “play” that typifies the middlebrow idealization of genteel
letters as practiced by the poet. It is precisely the ethical tension between
these options that gives the last lines of the poem their ironic power and
that indicates the beginning of a mid- to late-career tendency to extend and
complicate the poet’s earlier sympathies:
But yield who will to their separation,

My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future’s sakes.
These well-known lines have often been read as evidence of Frost’s lack of
interest in what Richard Poirier characterizes as “downward comparisons”
with those individuals associated with dirty, potentially unproductive lives.52
Read from another perspective, however, these lines also can be understood
as emphasizing the need for the poet to articulate his poetics precisely in
relation to the labor of the working poor. In a sense, Frost’s poetry only has
value insofar as it rhetorically, if not materially, provides for the needs of the
poor, an act that concurrently affirms the poet’s own craft.53 Although it
seems clear that the speaker will indeed soon cede his labor to the tramps’
“right,” the speaker’s desire to unite “love” and “need” is real and not with-
out its own ethical overtones. In fact, the speaker’s vision of a world (literally
“united” by “my two eyes”) in which aesthetic and affective fulfillment will
lead to political and social recompense parallels Dewey’s contemporaneous
argument concerning the connection between art and democracy. In the
ideal society, according to Dewey, there is no separation of “ ‘practice’ from
insight, of imagination from executive doing, of significant purpose from
work, of emotion from thought and doing” (Art, 20–21). Instead, the phi-
losopher idealizes the ways in which production and consumption are fused
in the creative act of the middle-class artist in an act that is both aesthetic
and ethical. Read in the context of Dewey’s politicized aesthetics, Frost’s
investment in “mortal stakes” in this poem makes a great deal more sense,
as does its emphasis upon “Heaven and the future’s sakes,” the latter phrase
suggesting Frost’s own version of the “Greater democracy” that Dewey saw
as the end of artistic and intellectual labor. Whether the tramps are as capa-
ble as the poet of taking part in such a world remains in question, however.
Frost’s tendency to invoke tramps in order to articulate both class sympa-
thies and class insecurities make a great deal more sense when understood as
the product of formative, turn-of-the-century discourses about the function
of the poet in society, the nature of work, the limits of charity, and the true
nature of the “forgotten man.” That Frost would continue to address tramp
poetics as late as “A Bed in the Barn” (1944–1947), a brief lyric that returns
to the scenario of “Love and a Question” only to ridicule a tramp’s “rigma-
role / of self respect to shame the soul” suggests that Frost’s own sense of
“self respect” and social status was always less sure than others knew. Ever
aware of the ways in which his university appointments made him vaguely
obligated to rich acquaintances for his endowed positions, Frost remarked
in a 1960 interview with Richard Poirier: “Sounds as if I’d been a beggar,
but I’ve never been consciously a beggar. I’ve been at the mercy of. . . . I’ve
been a beneficiary around colleges and all. And this is one of the advantages
of the American way: I’ve never had to write a word of thanks to anybody I
had a cent from. The colleges came between” (Interviews, 231–232). While
implicitly opposing his position to those “beggars” who were the beneficia-
ries of private contributions on the street or in rural homes as well as those
benefiting from government largesse, such as the WPA and other Roosevelt
programs, Frost’s self-description crystallizes his uneasy sense of himself as a
“beggar” whose productivity that could not readily be assessed and yet was
socially necessary and even ethically defensible. Safely ensconced within a
university system that both underwrote and undermined the middlebrow
gentility he counted on to make his poetry sell and his own stock go up
(both figuratively and literally, as Frost owned stock in Holt, his publisher),
Frost constructed late career tramps or “beggars” that aided him in enact-
ing a “rigmarole / of self respect” before his readers. In contrast, Frost’s
more nuanced consideration of these issues in “Two Tramps in Mud Time”
addresses the inconsistencies of his self-invention in a far more intellectu-
ally honest way, in keeping with the ethical ambiguities of his early tramp
verse.
Focused upon class distinctions within a democracy, Frost’s pastoral
tramp poetics is paralleled by the pastoralism of his contemporary, William
Carlos Williams. Although Williams and Frost seldom saw eye to eye during
their lifetimes—Frost pointedly ignoring his rival while Williams observed
that “the bucolic simplicity of Frost seems to me a halt”—Ezra Pound
anointed them both early in their careers as progenitors of a new American
poetics.54 Despite their personal differences, they had a great deal in com-
mon. Like Frost, Williams grew up in an industrial city, Paterson, New
Jersey, prone to divisive labor politics. As Lawrence did for Frost, Paterson
and its surroundings provided Williams with material crucial to construct-
ing an innovative pastoral mode as well as a “new measure” attuned to the age
and locality. Although formally more radical than Frost, Williams’s cadences
also seek to echo and define the voices of the working poor in relation to the
defining, if erratic, rhythm of the poet’s paces through the city’s streets
and parks. Multiple “Idylls” depict not only the working poor, including
“Pan” himself, but also women, homosexuals, and African-Americans in
ethically troubling ways. “Embracing the foulness” of modern American
life, Williams links his poetics directly to “filth” much as Frost could not
help but return repeatedly to the “mud” of the transients who haunt his
work. Coalescing during the 1920s and again during the 1940s, Williams’s
pastoral also is aligned with a Deweyan pragmatism, tending to maintain
and strengthen the poet’s conviction in a progressive social vision more
obvious than Frost’s. Overlapping and diverging in their pastoral poetics,
both Frost and Williams succeed in revitalizing the mode and making it
pertinent to early and mid twentieth-century questions of individualism
and community.
CHAPTER 3
“The Truth About Us”: Pastoral,

Pragmatism, and William Carlos
Williams’s Paterson
S
et in the depressed New Jersey city where William Carlos Williams
lived and practiced medicine, Paterson opens with a pastoral landscape
scene. The poem’s protagonist, Dr. Paterson, configured in mythic
proportions, lies in the valley below the local falls, stretched alongside the
female “mountain,” who is described as having “[p]earls at her ankles, her
monstrous hair / spangled with apple-blossoms.”1 Interspersed with the lyri-
cal descriptions of these sleeping giants is a prose narrative of a nineteenth-
century shoemaker who, while eating mussels he had collected for food,
discovered “many hard substances” that he initially “threw . . . away”
(Paterson, 9). When he brought these to a jeweler, they were found to be
extremely valuable, and upon gathering more he found “[o]ne pearl of fine
luster [that] was sold to Tiffany for $900 and later to Empress Eugenie for
$2,000 to be known henceforth as the ‘Queen Pearl,’ the finest of its sort in
the world today” (Paterson, 9). Typical of the collagelike form of the poem,
these first pages juxtapose beautiful and grotesque images and stories, link-
ing art and environment, literature and history, treasure and waste. The
mountain scene, seemingly odd piece of historical trivia, and the voices
that follow depict the locality of Paterson and its inhabitants, mythical and
actual, in a radical reincarnation of the pastoral mode.
Pearls initially appear upon the body of the female mountain, Dr.
Paterson’s initial object of love and desire. This first embodiment of the
“Kore” or “beautiful thing,” moreover, is only one of many incarnations.
By Book Three (1949) this central source of value has taken the form of
a working-class African-American woman who is treated by Dr. Paterson
after she has been repeatedly raped in a disputed middle territory claimed
by rival gangs from Paterson and Newark (Paterson, 104–105). Her status
within the book is surprising, potentially offensive, and yet reflective of
Williams’s insistence upon disturbing settled aesthetic and social concepts
of purity, value, and truth. The Kore is granted value by virtue of the poet’s
fascination with and desire for her. Similarly contingent is the value of the
pearl: valued for its structural integrity, its spherical shape, and most often
for its “pure” white color, it is no more than the product of the mussel’s
bodily secretions. Easily deemed excremental if classified by its physical ori-
gin, the pearl is discovered accidentally while eating, its narrow miss of a far
less appetizing fate presenting Williams with the opportunity to underscore
its transformation from pollutant to treasure. The Kore in Book Three, seem-
ingly devalued culturally and socially by virtue of her race, gender, and vio-
lation, is esteemed by the doctor precisely because of these associations with
marginalized aspects of American culture. It is she whom Dr. Paterson calls
upon in a manner both disdainful and worshipful, not only to “[t]ake off
your clothes and purify / yourself” but also to “let me purify myself /—to
look at you, / to look at you” (Paterson, 105). It is the dark, female, vio-
lated body that occupies the position of privilege, however problematically,
within this pastoral poem.2
Although some readers consider Dr. Paterson’s gesture racist and sexist
essentialism, it also exemplifies Williams’s redefinition of the valued self and
his desire to confront readers with the culturally relative nature of social and
aesthetic value. Like Frost, Williams reimagines the American pastoral scene,
its representative subjects and community, in terms of figures marginal to it.
Instead of tramps—or degraded versions of a formally central male American
subject—Williams turns to people traditionally isolated by their gender, race,
or sexual orientation from the narratives of the self that American pastoral
traditionally depicts. Williams’s Kore is emblematic of a radical new use of the
pastoral form that, in its depiction of “local” environments of early- and mid
twentieth-century New York and New Jersey, conveys a purposefully con-
flicted, often indeterminate politics. Although completed in various stages in
the 1940s and early 1950s, Paterson’s roots lay in several attempts by Williams
to depict his hometown in early poems such as “The Wanderer” (1914) and
“Paterson” (1926).3 On the publication of Williams’s first Complete Collected
Poems in 1938, “The Wanderer,” with its germs of Paterson, was placed last in
the volume, forming an explicit poetic bridge between the poet’s early aspira-
tions and the important work to come.
“The Truth About Us” ● 69
Written during and after World War II, the book-length poem is the
result of years of work and a variety of influences dating back to early
in his career—influences that coalesced shortly after the period dur-
ing which Frost was writing some of his early tramp poetry. Although
Paterson’s mid-century timing may seem surprising, Williams told people
that the late 1930s felt much like the tumultuous early years of the twen-
tieth century—in ways both promising and disappointing.4 In a letter of
1938, Williams writes: “The times are too like those of 1913 [the year of
the Paterson Silk Strike] to suit me. At that time it looked as if they were
really building up to a period of major expression. They did not let it occur.
As then there are too many who do not want the artist to speak as only he
can.”5 More openly moved by the local labor unrest of the 1910s than Frost,
Williams felt compelled to depict the event and its cultural repercussions
later in his career. An aesthetic response to a world whose potential for
liberal reform he saw drained away into the effort to keep fascism at bay by
the 1940s, Paterson reimagines how the progressive energies of 1913 might
be recuperated and redeployed as the nation came to rebuild itself during
and in the wake of near universal catastrophe.6 At the same time, the poem
contains evidence of the poet’s despair at the state of the nation as well as
his doubts regarding the basic principles of a democratic aesthetics. Even
so, it is persistent in its evocation of a poetic universe in which the artist
has a crucial social role linked to the lives of the ordinary men and women
about whom he writes.7
The chapter begins by moving from readings of Paterson, Book Four
(1951) that illuminate links between pollution and pastoral in the text, to
discussions of Williams’s links to John Dewey’s theory of the “local” and
the connections between “art” and “experience.” Under Dewey’s influ-
ence, Williams forged a pastoral poetics that emphasizes the diverse nature
of American society while acknowledging the poet’s sense of himself as
both a cultural outsider and an aesthetic and social arbiter of some power.
Returning to early lyrics such as “Pastoral” and “Idyll” as well as Book Four,
I consider how various characters’ perspectives on their polluted pastoral
surroundings challenge a normative model of subjectivity in the modern
United States. The final two sections of the chapter focus on Williams’s
privileging of marginalized voices in the remainder of Book Four and in Book
Two (1948), where his revisionary characterizations of female and homo-
sexual voices, as well as an extended meditation upon the working class,
including participants in the 1913 Silk Strike, result in pastoral interludes
that subtly redefine the parameters of the poetic subject and representative
American self.
Filth, the “Local,” and Pragmatist Aesthetics

In Book Four of Paterson, Williams’s hopeful yet troubled aesthetic is evi-
dent in a series of idylls depicting amorous, often disturbing, and some-
times comic encounters between a middle-aged, gay, wealthy woman; her
younger employee, a nurse; and Dr. Paterson himself. Not coincidentally,
Book Four came under critical attack from readers such as Randall Jarrell,
who had praised Books One (1946) through Three. According to Williams,
Jarrell “couldn’t take the identification of the filthy river with the perversion
of the characters”; later critics echoed Jarrell, seeing its pastoral vision as
a “suicidal nightmare of modern history.” In response, Williams defended
his work by qualifying terms such as “filthy” and “perversion” and, in the
process, clarifying Paterson’s purpose: “If you are going to write realistically
of the conception of filth in the world, it can’t be pretty. What goes on with
people isn’t pretty. . . . What in the world is an artist to do? He is not a mor-
alist. He sees things, reacts to them, must take them into consideration.”8
For Williams, both assumptions about pollution (“the conception of filth”)
and “What goes on with people” are the stuff of an intriguingly open-ended
poetics that resists conventional morality. Instead of understanding his inter-
est in pollution as part of a quest for linguistic purity, a means of identifying
what to exclude from his work, I take rather literally Williams’s call for his
readers to “embrace the foulness” of the world (Paterson, 103).9
Pollution beliefs and the pastoral mode have a natural affinity, as both
are concerned with establishing and evaluating boundaries of civic and ulti-
mately aesthetic bodies. In the case of Paterson, Williams’s pastoral poetics
reveal the extent to which custodians of traditional, patriarchal American
society believe that “dirt is essentially disorder,” and regard dealing with
and potentially eradicating such entities as “a positive effort to organize the
environment.”10 Their concern for a pure civic body can be understood as
an analogue to Mary Douglas’s description of pollution rituals concern-
ing human orifices as the sociological counterpart of “a care to protect the
political and cultural unity of a minority group.”11 Yet, as Williams’s poetry
reveals, the peculiar status of entities associated with “dirt” in society—
such as women, homosexuals, the working poor, and immigrants—entails
that they can be excised only with great difficulty and potential loss to the
greater body that is the nation. Williams’s pastoral poetics is most radical,
perhaps, in its recognition that not all deemed “filth” or “dirt” is necessarily
“polluting,” in part because determinations of “pollutants” are so relative
and ideologically based. The Kore, therefore, is depicted as both part of the
socially disadvantaged community that Dr. Paterson serves, as well as an
embodiment of his aesthetics. The result is a text that is ambiguous in its
determinations of how dirt becomes polluting, and the (at times limited)
conditions under which dirt may be redeemed.
Williams was extremely self-conscious about his subject matter in Paterson
and throughout his career could be both humorous and defensive about his
poetic choices at the levels of form and content. While Williams praised
Marianne Moore in 1923 for “wiping soiled words or cutting them clean
out,” getting rid of their “greasy” former contexts and “aroma,” Williams
himself seemed to be more interested in delving into what was convention-
ally deemed the seamier side of life and language.12 When in 1925 Ezra
Pound asked him for a few poems for publication in England, Williams
replied mischievously that he would try to get together some “safe stuff” for
him, “a sort of Caroliensis Palgraves Golden Treasury—nothing allowed to
enter which isn’t of the purest ray serene, with clean ass, snotless nose and
circumcised.”13 His interest in and allegiance to this dimension of experi-
ence can be attributed at least in part to his sense that critics tended to
classify him with all of the other “undesirables,” like his avant-garde con-
temporaries known as the “Ellis Island” school of art.14 When asked in an
interview about the critical reception he and his American compatriots of
the 1920s encountered as compared to the acclaim that greeted the expatri-
ate T.S. Eliot, Williams remarked mockingly, and perhaps bitterly, “[W]e
were writing poems from the dungheap—the Ashcan school.”15 Whereas
Eliot’s overtly ironic and apocalyptic perspective upon “The Waste Land”
of modern life appealed to many critics, those same readers were at a loss
when it came to Williams’s nuanced representations of daily life in urban
and suburban New Jersey.
Williams’s pastorals comprise a zone that encompasses the potentially pol-
luted, porous borders of the self, community, and poetic narrative, which the
poet discusses in terms of a pragmatic, Deweyan conception of the “local.”16
As Williams explains in a 1921 manifesto (“Yours, O Youth”), he initially
set out to promote “contact” in his poetry, a term that suggests both physical
contact as well as a “taking on of certain colors from the locality by the expe-
rience” of specific places, namely, for Williams, the mid-Atlantic seaboard of
the United States.17 He makes clear years later in a 1944 letter (while compos-
ing Paterson) that the concept of the local was borrowed: “there is no univer-
sal except in the local. I myself took it from Dewey. So it is not new.”18 John
Dewey, the source of this idea and many of Williams’s other perspectives
upon ethics, the self, and society, had a profound and lasting influence upon
Williams, as has been noted by recent criticism by John Beck, David Kadlec,
and Alec Marsh.19 Emphasizing the local, Dewey attempted to forge a vision
of how individuals in communities—rural, suburban, and urban alike—can
function as arbiters of American subjectivity, aesthetics, and ethics.
Dewey’s theory of locality is progressive and proimmigrant, citing the

importance of art in the formation of modern citizens and vice versa. In
“Americanism and Localism” (1920), a text with which Williams was famil-
iar, Dewey notes that while local newspapers are filled with “earnest editori-
als on the importance of Americanization and the wickedness of those who
decline to be either Americanized or to go back to where they came from,”
the objects of this anxiety are themselves more than likely so imbued with
“the pervading spirit of localism”—that is, so absorbed by the routines of
their lives—that they cannot be bothered to deal with the paperwork nec-
essary to become naturalized citizens.20 Dewey goes on to note that such
people “are too busy making the American language to devote much time
to studying the English” (“Americanism,” 538). Dewey’s argument regard-
ing the role of the working class (especially as comprised of newcomers to
American language and culture) and similarly marginalized individuals is
reiterated in Art As Experience. Here he affirms that just as “the mass of men
and women who do the useful work of the world” should have the “capacity
for enjoying the fruits of collective work,” so should art reflect this demo-
cratic ethos: “the material for art should be drawn from all sources whatever
and . . . should be accessible to all” (Art, 344). One of the functions of art
as he envisions it is “to sap the moralistic timidity that causes the mind to
shy away from some materials and refuse to admit them into the clear and
purifying light of perceptive consciousness” (Art, 189).
Over the course of Paterson, Williams echoes Dewey’s open disdain for
those who would enforce arbitrary or habit-formed standards of cultural
purity upon a nation whose culture is constantly being remade. Instead,
Williams’s texts suggest a democratic, pragmatic aesthetics, depicting the
impurities of the poet’s own life as well as the lives of local inhabitants rang-
ing from African-Americans, to working-class women, to affluent lesbians,
to the ethnic working poor. Self-consciously invoking a “conception of
filth” in relation to pastoral, Williams challenges his readers to object to the
poem as a literary travesty, a despoliation of perfection and the poetic itself,
an unwelcome incursion into the cultural, and all that that term signifies in
terms of political, social, and economic orders and privileges. 21 Even before
Paterson, many of Williams’s pastoral lyrics from the 1910s through the
1920s involve the emergence of filth, the unwashed body, and the excremen-
tal. The early poem “Pastoral” (1914) begins with “[t]he old man who goes
about / Gathering dog lime,” and whose humble life is deemed of greater
consequence than that of “the Episcopal minister / Approaching the pulpit /
Of a Sunday.”22 Another early “Idyll” (1914) depicts the speaker snug in
bed, thinking of “[t]wo unfortunates / Cowering in the wind” outside dur-
ing a storm. It is especially when “thinking / Of the freezing poor” that the
speaker “consider[s] [him]self / Happy—” (Collected, 48). A later poem also

entitled “Pastoral” (1917) imagines “little frogs / with puffed- out throats, /
singing in the slime” (Collected, 97) while the haunting “To Elsie” (1923)
exposes the “truth” emerging from her “broken / brain”
as if the earth under our feet

were
an excrement of some sky
and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth
while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in
the stifling heat of September . . . (Collected, 218)
The “truth” that Elsie offers, with her “ungainly hips and flopping breasts”
and her love for “cheap / jewelry,” is a perspective from the bodily and the
subaltern, a view in which dirt and pastoral, “excrement” and “earth,” are
imbricated in ways that are both devastating and revelatory. A “pure prod-
uct[] of America,” Elsie’s radical inversion of national mythology and reality
haunts the speaker and reader alike. It is the crucial tensions she exposes
between body and mind, the private and the public, the self and the com-
munity that Williams hints at throughout his career and illuminates most
decisively with Paterson.
While Dewey’s conception of the local was clearly formative for Williams’s
late poem, Dewey’s pragmatist aesthetics was another likely source as the
poet sought to articulate the relationship between poetry and society, the
word and reality. In the mid-1950s, not long after the five main books of
Paterson were completed, Williams recalled the origin of his interest in pas-
toral poetry in terms that suggest both his sense of his own marginalized
subject position and an essentially pragmatic aesthetics. The passage begins
with an ostensibly modest assessment of his literary bona fides:
Without knowing Greek I had read translations of The Odes of Theocritus

and felt myself very much attracted by the pastoral mode. But my feeling for
the country was not as sophisticated as the pastorals with their picturesque
shepherdesses. I was always a country boy, felt myself a country boy.23
Like Keats, one of his earliest poetic influences, Williams presents himself
as at a remove from the original Greek and all that it represents in terms of
aristocratic education and classical European values. Rather than fret over
the vulgarity of admitting his distance from the original Theocritus, how-
ever, he savors his position as a simple “country boy” who knows the value
of his approach to the natural world. The ethnically mixed Williams (his
mother was from Puerto Rico), may even have imagined himself as one of
those paradoxically “pure products of America,” like “Elsie” an indigenous
racial hybrid living at the margins of society. In this “unsophisticated”
vision of himself as the anti-yeoman-farmer, Williams is the not-quite-native
“country boy” as apparent outsider and secret insider.
The remainder of the passage, however, becomes increasingly abstract
and complex as Williams describes an aesthetic vision that defies dualistic
conceptions of the world in an approach typical of pragmatism.
To me the countryside was a real world but nonetheless a poetic world. I

have always had a feeling of identity with nature, but not assertive; I have
always believed in keeping myself out of the picture. When I spoke of
flowers, I was a flower, with all the prerogatives of flowers, especially the
right to come alive in the Spring. (Poem, 21)
Such poetry, in the words of the 1923 Spring and All, “has to do with the
crystallization of the imagination—the perfection of new forms as additions
to nature” (Collected, 226). Rather than central, the “I” is occluded here,
the poetic and “real” worlds blurred. When the poet “spoke of flowers,”
he enters a new poetic dimension, one that is at once “real” and yet not a
material foundation for a fixed set of subject/object, human/environmental
relationships. Instead, his only “realism” is “of the imagination. It is only
thus that the work escapes plagiarism after nature and becomes a creation”
(Collected, 198). Or as he later wrote in an essay on Marianne Moore: “There
is a special place which poems, as all works of art, must occupy, but it is quite
definitely the same as that where bricks or colored threads are handled.”24
Williams’s work involves the creation of a poetic world in which the speaker
is what he speaks, in which the poet enters into a zone of flowers and filth,
of things that are the word, the human, and yet also potentially something
entirely else. The poet writing poetry produces something manifest in the
world, declaring his right to be and create someone or thing not easily evalu-
ated in conventional dualist terminology.
Similarly, in Art As Experience, Dewey stresses art’s continuity with the
everyday world, art as process rather than product, and the artist as the one
who expresses the natural continuity between nature and culture, the ordi-
nary and the aesthetic, the ugly and the beautiful. Just as Williams under-
stood poetry to be an imaginative dimension linked to the real world, so too
did Dewey see nature’s and the artist’s “forms” as points on a continuum of
experience. Rather than an object separate from the world, art is a kind of
activity, a way of being. As Dewey writes years earlier in terms that recall
Williams’s: “Common things, a flower, a gleam of moonlight, the song of a
bird, not things rare and remote, are means with which the deeper levels of
life are touched so that they spring up as desire and thought.” “This process is
art,” and the artist is the one best able to convey the experience of “kindling
by [such outward happenings] of emotion, perception and appreciation.”25
As Williams suggested in the title of Spring and All, ordinary life is the
means by which art “springs” into being, the artist himself part of a kin-
esthetic process uniting poet and world that Dewey terms “kindling” and
Williams terms a “feeling of identity with nature.” Like Williams, Dewey is
careful to point out that the very activity of true art is revealed in artists’ ten-
dencies to use “that which is usually found ugly to get esthetic effect” (Art,
173). Rather than unnatural, this attention to the ugly is a form of attention
to nature’s own rhythms, enabling the artist to “exhibit dislocations and
dissociations of what is usually connected,” in the process “bringing to defi-
nite perception values that are concealed in ordinary experience because of
habituation. Ordinary prepossession must be broken through if the degree
of energy required for an esthetic experience is to be evoked” (Art, 173).
Both an aesthetic and social process, the depiction of “bricks and threads” as
well as “flowers,” poor Elsies and other unconventionally “beautiful things”
is integral to a Deweyan aesthetics that plays an important role in Williams’s
poetic imaginings.
Corydon, Phyllis, and the Sheep

Extrapolating from and embroidering upon pragmatic politics and aesthet-
ics, Williams’s pastoral vision emphasizes the fluctuating nature of the mod-
ern United States, its capacity to contain and value individuals and artists
alike working at the nation’s social and cultural margins. Rather than nos-
talgic, as readers such as John Beck have recently claimed, Williams’s pasto-
ralism is pragmatic and politically indeterminate, although leaning toward
a progressive worldview.26 His poetics tend to point to and question the
categorization of indeterminate or leftover entities—such as Elsie—instead
of bemoaning their mere presence. Such “dirt” in Paterson inevitably serves
to undermine, invigorate, and destabilize various cultural assumptions con-
cerning the nature of “poetic” content as well as the poet’s own control and
authority.
In the first section of Book Four, for example, a text that has troubled many
of Williams’s critics past and present, “Corydon,” an older, sophisticated,
Europeanized American socialite, attempts somewhat clumsily to seduce

“Phyllis,” the young, relatively uneducated, “rustic” American nurse.27
Despite Williams’s stated aversion to homosexuality, in these women he
seems to have created individuals whose sexuality is one aspect of their
complex lives rather than a simplistic mark of their marginality.28 Yet while
the scene’s pathos and humor suggest Williams’s capacity to depict both
Corydon and Phyllis sympathetically within his narrative, their representa-
tion contains no assurances that Williams is without ambivalence regarding
their sexuality and access to poetic authority. Ultimately, it is the tension
between Williams’s desire to deploy these women as examples of his reevalu-
ative pastoral mode and his desire to foreground his mastery of the same that
makes the scene so emotionally arresting.
Book Four’s introductory “Idyll” begins with a line both affectionate and
disdainful, apparently murmured by Phyllis, but perhaps by Dr. Paterson
or the “poet” himself: “Two silly women!” (Paterson, 149). The following
line, “(Look, Dad, I’m dancing)” appears to comment both wistfully and
ironically upon the situation, in which Phyllis is rubbing the back of the
temporarily crippled Corydon. Confined to her apartment for a few days,
Corydon develops a distinct perspective upon her environment. When her
nurse returns after an absence, she describes the view from a window in
terms that are decidedly comic and self-consciously poetic. Indeed, it soon
becomes clear that Corydon is beginning to read aloud from her own verse:
That is the East River. The sun rises there.

And beyond, is Blackwell’s Island. Welfare Island,
City Island. whatever they call it now,
where the city’s petty criminals, the poor
the superannuated and the insane are housed.
Look at me when I talk to you.
—and then
the three rocks tapering off into the water.
all that’s left of the elemental, the primitive
in this environment. I call them my sheep. (Paterson, 151–152)
Corydon’s description is at once patronizing and pathetic as she commands

and then begs the attention of her small audience. Her tone may be ironic
as she observes the slightly worn New World in the form of the destitute
of Roosevelt Island, yet she appears to find a curious solace in the adja-
cent scene of pastoral serenity: the three rocks, pure and white, uncompli-
cated and “elemental,” the quintessential colonialist narrative of the New
World as an uninhabited Eden. It is difficult to know how exactly the reader
or audience should respond to this odd performance. Not unexpectedly,

Phyllis seems baffled by her employer’s view of the river. The nurse’s only
reply at the moment consists of “[s]heep, huh?” But in the next passage she
has further opportunity to comment skeptically upon her patient’s attempt
at verse. Writing to her father, she describes the apartment, her duties, and
the conversation, exclaiming:
But she’s a nut, of the worst kind. Today she was telling me
about some rocks in the river here she calls her three sheep. If
they’re sheep I’m the Queen of England. They’re white all right
but it’s from the gulls that crap them up all day long. (Paterson, 152)
This bluntly critical, yet not unfunny, observation seems prompted not only
by the remark’s incongruity but also by Phyllis’s discomfort with her employ-
er’s cultural sophistication and cosmopolitan education. There seems to be
a fundamental distinction between the relatively naïve young woman and
her overly informed companion, a distinction that readers as diverse as Paul
Mariani, Joseph Riddel, and Benjamin Sankey have taken to embody not
only the difference between innocence and corruption, but also the implied
(homo)sexual perversion of the Old World and the “normal” heterosexual
nature of the New World.29
Like so many of Williams’s pastoral poems, however, Book Four is more
complex than it appears. Such politically suggestive interludes of Paterson
reveal the extent to which Williams’s ambitions extend beyond linguis-
tic games or familiar clichés of nationhood into new ground, questioning
the cultural bases of assumptions concerning valuation as they have been
encoded into aesthetic modes like the pastoral.30 For it is Phyllis’s remarks,
not Corydon’s, that embody the essence of what many of Williams’s crit-
ics found so disturbing or perverse about this Book. Phyllis is vulgar and
immoral, more than happy to point out “crap” when she sees it, a sullen
debunker of all that is poetic and naïvely pastoral. Corydon, on the other
hand, is the poet in this scene, the one who attempts, however unsuccess-
fully, to locate a fragment of mythic presence in the landscape. For example,
it makes sense that Corydon wishes to see “the three rocks” as innocent
“sheep,” an undifferentiated group of literary symbols not coincidentally
adjacent to that island with its three arbitrary names (“Blackwell’s Island.
Welfare Island, / City Island”), the home of urban criminals, the aged, and
the poor. In juxtaposing these images, Corydon unwittingly (or perhaps
quite consciously) sheds light upon the real nature of whiteness, its function
as a purely symbolic counterpoint to everything that is not racially white
(along with all that that entails) and is therefore associated with dirt.31 The
potential threat that the inhabitants of the island might present to an ideal
community is apparently excised from her pastoral narrative (it becomes
simply “whatever they call it now”), just as Corydon herself—a poet and a
lesbian—knows she might be excluded from a contemporary’s vision of a
“pure” America. Like Williams, she is both insider and outsider, unveiling
the social fictions that contribute to her own disguise, but unsure exactly
how far to take her exposé.
Phyllis’s observation that the rocks are white precisely because they are
covered with seagull “crap” lends yet another layer to the image, reversing the
relationship between purity and filth, exposing the truth that already lies on
the surface of the scene. Pastoral defined in European and American texts
by the supposedly harmonious (though often tense) relationship between
self and other, the poet and society, gives way to pastoral as gritty reality
at the margins of the city, in the land between it and the suburbs them-
selves. It is no longer the Garden of Eden that the New World resembles, but
the garbage-strewn fields of the Meadowlands. Williams does not mourn
this development; instead, he reveals the historical potential of the genre
to encompass the world as it stands. He implicitly rejects understandings
of pastoral as a narrative of utopia or an ironic commentary upon its loss.
Pastoral is invoked only to be exposed as the true domain of the excremental
and extra, the leftover or excess of a scene or narrative. Instead of depicting
a story of origins, pastoral emerges in this “idyll” as a genre of ambivalence,
indeterminacy, and filth.
The extent, however, to which this text successfully models the social
or political inclusion of characters such as Corydon or Phyllis—the homo-
sexual or working poor—remains undecided. Although Dewey emphasizes
the importance of poets speaking for marginal groups and individuals,
indeed stressing the extent to which “artists have always been the purveyors
of real news,” Williams’s text brings into question the extent to which he was
willing to jeopardize his own project in the course of empowering others.32
Ultimately, Paterson is a text about Dr. Paterson’s journey through his local
landscape, and its reevaluation of polluting entities a means of enabling his
progression. It may well be that his locality as it extends to marginal figures
such as Corydon, Phyllis, and the Kore is an amalgamation of characters
whose collective abjection grants the speaker the capacity to “embrace” their
“foulness,” thereby foregrounding his power to “represent” their lives. The
emergence of such voices in their own right, it is suggested, might potentially
silence the speaker and delegitimate his claim to a form of cultural authority.
Indeed, Williams’s defense of Paterson as an exploration of the “conception
of filth” as such can be taken to undermine his attempt to depict individual
characters or address specific instances of exclusion on the basis of sexuality,
class, race, or gender. Despite the obvious limitations of his project, however,
Williams’s attempts to create multidimensional, complex characters with
whom his own persona interacts on a relatively equal social plane suggests
a willingness to take risks few other poets were willing to take. Not easily
dismissed as depraved or unbalanced, the pastoral speakers emerge in these
idylls as voices of conscience, not yet fully realized in the world as such but
present in significant aesthetic iterations.
An American Beauty
In Book Four, Williams produces his most forceful case against cultural cli-
chés of value and purity. The association of nature, beauty, leisure, pollu-
tion, and indeterminacy with the feminine and subaltern, first introduced
in Book One and later with the Kore, are reinforced and complicated in Book
Four, a book whose working theme was “the positive acceptance and use
of knowledge.”33 Early in the Book the curious dynamics of a love triangle
emerge: as Corydon attempts to seduce Phyllis, the young nurse becomes
involved in a vaguely adulterous affair with the poem’s libidinous and liter-
ary protagonist, Dr. Paterson. Yet Phyllis, the shared object of desire, proves
to be an ambiguous figure. She correctly perceives “the elemental, the primi-
tive” for what it is—“crap”—and, as mentioned previously, has been read
as representative of the clear-sighted, primitive, virginal New World. The
point elided in most criticism, however, is that it is precisely her perception,
innocence, and virginity that are continually brought into question in her
exchanges with her pursuers. As a not-quite “pure” country girl who has
come to the city, she embodies a sexual and territorial ambivalence that con-
founds Dr. Paterson and Corydon alike. Despite much interrogation on the
subject from both her would-be lover and her employer, Phyllis is coy and
defensive about her sexual experience (“What’s it to you?”) (Paterson, 170).
While she does not quite embody the previous mysterious Kore or “beauti-
ful thing,” the two figures are not entirely dissimilar. In earlier drafts, both
“beautiful thing” and Phyllis are similarly marked: by scars on their thighs
(Paterson, 126).34 While the Kore is an ambivalent figure of pollution who
forces Paterson to reevaluate his conceptions of “purity,” Phyllis is perhaps
the victim of parental incest (she writes to her father, “only I won’t wrestle
with you all night on the bed any more because you got the D.T.s . . . your
[sic] too strong for me”) and perhaps still a virgin whom Paterson paws but
never penetrates (Paterson, 150). She and the Kore represent elements of dis-
order that both intimidate and liberate the male protagonist.
The disorder of the “Idylls” extends beyond Phyllis’s contradictions to
Corydon as well, a woman who embodies for Williams both sexual and poetic
ambivalence. When writing Section I of Book Four, Williams remarked that

this “old gal” had quite “won [him] over” in spite of himself.35 Reading her
imperious yet plaintive exchanges with Phyllis, it is easy to see her unlikely
charms. When commenting upon her own body, she describes herself self-
deprecatingly as “more horse than woman.” She continues, “Did you ever
see such skin as mine? Speckled like a Guinea hen” or “more like a toad, per-
haps?” (Paterson, 157). Acknowledging the “truth” about her body, Corydon
then playfully suggests that she and her companion exchange roles—“You
be Corydon! And I’ll play Phyllis. Young! Innocent! One can fairly hear the
pelting of apples and the stomp and clatter of Pan’s hoofbeats. Tantamount
to nothing” (Paterson, 158). Corydon is both appalling and appealing, a
woman who cheerfully admits to looking part human and part animal, and
an actress with the capacity to “play” both male and female roles at will. A
woman who is attracted to other women, she is the embodiment of a physi-
cal and sexual indeterminacy that is the epitome of dirt to Williams, yet
undeniably winning to the poet and his readers. Manipulative, yet lonely
and eager to please, Corydon’s rendition of femininity and homosexual-
ity ultimately form one outlet for an aspect of Williams’s personality and
verse.
It is significant to keep in mind that Corydon is first and foremost a
poet, perhaps even a version of Dr. Paterson himself. Both his poem and
hers (in the context of its reception by Phyllis) function in similar modes,
at once pastoral and polluted, critical of the dehumanizing aspects of mod-
ern life while implicitly representative of a pragmatic, humanizing response.
Corydon’s poem is based largely upon an early manuscript that Williams
never published, “A Pastoral,” and only belatedly becomes her own. It begins
as a conversation between the two women, set as verse presumably by the
“poet.”36 But once it emerges as Corydon’s own text, she too emerges as a
fully realized artist, down to such painful details as constant rejection from
her audience and almost incapacitating self-doubt. As she reads the poem,
the comic and uncomfortable responses she evokes from Phyllis anticipate a
general reader’s reactions and help to establish a tentative bond of empathy
among all concerned. The first formal reading of the poem is incomplete,
as the nervous and tipsy Corydon insists upon starting where she left off
“(about the rocks and sheep, begin with the helicopter),” but then is continu-
ally interrupted both by Phyllis and the poetic narrator himself (Paterson,
161). The verse is comprised of apocalyptic images describing the search for
the body of a lost “Hindu princess” in the river, lest the gulls feed on it
and its identity and its sex, as its hopes, and its
despairs and its moles and its marks and
its teeth and its nails be no longer decipherable

and so lost. (Paterson, 153, 161)
Meanwhile, gulls hover around the “three harbor stones” invoked previously
as “sheep”—so far “useless,” “unprofaned” (Paterson, 161). The stones serve
as the locus of purity once again, the site at which identity can perhaps be
anchored while the body itself—here marked as exotic, aristocratic, racially
other, and female—is threatened with digestion and decomposition.
Phyllis’s characteristic reaction to this first section, however, destroys
both the illusion of the purity of the poetic enterprise and its allegory. “It
stinks,” she declares, pointing out once again the offensive nature of the
gulls and rocks as well as expressing her uncensored opinion of the apoca-
lyptic lines. While Corydon’s poem expresses the desire, paradoxically,
to preserve identity in a “forever present,” clinging to the three rocks in
a doomed attempt at closure, Phyllis insists upon opening up the text to
the pollution and disorder that Corydon both invokes and then attempts
to suppress (Paterson, 161). The nurse foregrounds the extent to which the
gratuitous othering of the supposed Princess and her organically transgen-
dered body is a fiction, the gulls themselves a natural means of transforming
her into the excremental layer that covers the three rocks. In the context of
this reception, Corydon’s own sense of otherness is implicitly disrupted as
well, her poetry having excavated the myth of a coherent, American identity
inimical to the presence of a female body whose decomposition grotesquely
refracts Corydon’s sense of her variable sexuality. Although Corydon may
not appreciate the implications of Phyllis’s communication, they have been
decisively and somewhat humorously made clear.
Corydon then restages this scene of aesthetic rejection as she imagines
a more Europeanized pastoral interlude in which Phyllis will succumb to
her wealth and charms, a scene that Phyllis eventually counters with her
own American version of the pastoral narrative. First, persistent in her
attempts to seduce her young employee, Corydon invites Phyllis to “[c]ome
with [her] to Anticosti,” presumably to go fishing (Paterson, 167). The older
woman establishes herself as the Old World poet who would initiate her love
affair in a place she refers to as “paradise,” although her prospective lover
insists that the name sounds more like “pizza” (Paterson, 162). They would
retreat to this place not unlike (and a sly parody of) Yeats’s Innisfree, where
Corydon will preserve Phyllis from harmful gossip and even from her own
desire: “that these spiked rumors may not tear / that sweet flesh” (Paterson,
167). But Corydon cannot help but fall into a series of poetic imitations at
this point, unable to imagine a pastoral or poetic ideal that is not well tram-
pled. On the trip itself, Corydon speaks mostly French instead of her native
language, while Phyllis is somewhat isolated by her uneducated American

vocabulary. This attempt at a classical pastoral scene inevitably—and not
unexpectedly—falls short, the Garden of Eden opening to reveal a complex
and frustrating Tower of Babel more representative of the contemporary
national reality.
The American version of the ideal is similarly reevaluated and compli-
cated when Phyllis attempts a rebuttal to her experiences abroad. Back home
at last, Phyllis announces to Paterson that she wants to “go . . . West next fall”
with her friend, “that tall / dark girl with the long nose” (Paterson, 168). At
this point, it is Phyllis who seems to be establishing her own pastoral narra-
tive, enacting the American cliché of the explorer accompanied by a “native”
guide, while giving it the twist of a new gender and, possibly, sexual orienta-
tion. Whether or not her trip will come to pass, however, is doubtful, for
a few lines later she teases Paterson, telling him to take her out “[a]fter I’m
married,” assuming that she will marry and remain in New Jersey (Paterson,
169). It turns out that Phyllis may be fated to change, to gain a partial new
identity and perhaps undergo some emotional development—but all will
occur within the scope of the local. No escape into a spatial preserve beyond
the state and time itself is possible for either Corydon or her nurse. Through
these snippets of dialogue Williams revises pastoral narratives of both the
Old World and the New, in the process forging a distinctively twentieth-
century pastoral mode.
Instead of rejecting all aspects of modern urban life, Williams offers
pragmatically pastoral accounts of life in the city and suburbs that embrace
the “filth” of society and human nature while they excoriate those forces
that attempt to determine and demean human existence. What remains is
a narrative in which all the characters, as troubled as they are, attempt to
form bonds with each other and the potential reader, in the process resist-
ing factors that would inhibit communication. These “idylls” give Corydon,
Phyllis, and Dr. Paterson a much-needed poetic space in which to experi-
ment emotionally and begin to learn to make mature human connections.
As Corydon’s poem progresses between its initial pastoral phase and its final
pastoral imitations, for example, it lingers in the metropolis, within ear-
shot of newsboys near houses “[u]nfit for human habitation” just before the
tunnel descends under the river. It is at this point that Corydon declares
rather impressively that love is “begrimed, befouled” (Paterson, 164). But it
is unclear what function this rather predictable depiction of city life serves,
and whether love is in as dire straits as the poem says. When the topic of
spoiled love comes up, Corydon interrupts her own lines, musing, “I’d like
to spill the truth, on that one” (Paterson, 165). When asked why she doesn’t,
she growls, “This is a POEM!” as if delimiting the amount of polluted truth
a proper poem or pastoral could decently allow for, as opposed to the news-
papers and general “hubbub” of the city crowds (Paterson, 164). Indeed,
in earlier drafts it is the word “beshitted” that she wishes to include in her
verse, but Williams decided against.37 Corydon somewhat comically acts as
her own censor as she once again calls attention to the ostensible juxtaposi-
tion of genre and reality, the polluted nature of her pastoral realm.
Corydon’s fastidious reaction to modern life as the embodiment of
“filth” associated with the working-class life also adds yet another aspect of
abjected “locality” to the idyll, distracting attention from her own marginal-
ity while further undercutting the possibility of a homogeneous civic body.
Yet her self-consciousness and almost absurd decorum also succeed, ulti-
mately, in undermining the ferocity of the surrounding lines. Grim scenes of
mechanistic fury—“directed missiles” shuddering animal-like in their cages,
human beings degraded to so many indistinguishable “canned fish” at the
factory lunch hour—all seem overly dramatized and unreal. This scene is
the predictably hellish embodiment of “how the money’s made, money’s
made” in the technologically advanced consumer society of mid century,
but such impersonal generalizations inevitably dull in comparison with the
more vivid, human scenes involving the characters of Paterson. Corydon can
barely finish the description, on the verge of tears “for what I know. I feel so
alone” (Paterson, 166). Her tears are patently for herself, however, and not
those of whom she writes; her capacity to encompass the entirety of a local-
ity is limited.
Throughout the poem, descriptions of dehumanization and working- class
desperation are invariably cut short and juxtaposed with scenes that empha-
size the perverse, passionate, and frustrated attempts of Corydon, Phyllis,
and Dr. Paterson to gain physical and spiritual sustenance from each other.
Factory and city tableaus are interspersed with quirky exchanges between
Phyllis and Paterson, including one involving some clumsy fondling and
another in which she contemplates “go[ing] on the stage.” Paterson’s mock-
ing response (“Why don’t you? . . . / though the legs, I’m afraid, would / best
you”) underscores the intimacy these characters have established with one
another and the defensive, at times cruel, humor they use to deflect atten-
tion from their weaknesses (Paterson, 166). The presence of such interludes
draws attention back to the poem’s focus upon the sexual and personal
entanglements of the characters, and the many ways in which their concerns
are universal rather than marginal. At this point in the “idylls” it is clear
that neither Corydon, Phyllis, nor Paterson are individuals who could be
carelessly despised by a reader who has “a developed understanding with
considerable humility of what’s going on,” in Williams’s words.38 Rather, the
dialogue between Corydon and Phyllis and Phyllis and Paterson suggests a
self-knowledge that enlarges their capacity for human “contact” despite their
potentially hostile and at times unpleasant physical environment. The local-
ity of their lives is vindicated as material proper to a new kind of pastoral
that emphasizes the individual rather than her supposed social worth.
Although Book Four has often been read as a commentary upon the harsh
and dirty world of the city, as an embodiment of the poet’s despair at the state
of American society, the human universe evoked in these pages is undeniably
lively and sympathetic. Despite the apocalyptic overtones of “Corydon, A
Pastoral,” the idylls themselves allow for a playfulness, thoughtfulness, and
candor among Corydon, Phyllis, and Paterson even as they fail to achieve
their desires. Their much-touted failures to find love are incomplete failures
at that, for each has established relationships, however tentative, with one
another. I would even argue that it is precisely the characters’ inability to
sever destructive emotional ties (to “divorce”) that keeps them from pro-
gressing, as in the case of Phyllis and her drunken, abusive father. All three
live in a world in which such patriarchal figures have become untenable, and
societal norms for all are shifting. The characters are understandably anx-
ious and expecting the worst. Yet, instead of allowing them merely to escape
their lives, their pastoral interludes at the edges of the city permit them to
encounter each other, their desires and fears, within a fragile narrative struc-
ture that allows for their excesses and uncertainties to have free play. While
hardly the stories of carefree shepherds and their loves, these pastorals do
suggest human beings struggling to discover what Williams once termed
“the truth about us,” although the truths are seldom beautiful (“To Elsie,”
Collected, 218). In the end, it is precisely this reorienting of “truth” with
regard to conventional standards of “beauty” that marks Paterson’s continu-
ity with and revision of the pastorals of old, and the coalescence of a new
pastoral mode in twentieth-century American literature.
Vulgarity and the ‘Aristocratic’ New Measure

Williams’s interrogation of the relationships between beauty and ugliness,
value and pollution, pastoral and urban life continues throughout the whole
of Paterson, emerging clearly in section I of Book Two before section I of Book
Four. Like Book Four, Book Two explicitly invokes the pastoral mode; it was
originally conceived of as a modern “Saturnalia” based upon Catullus’s love
poetry and as a modern version of Theocritus, according to Williams’s early
notes.39 However, the poem also undoubtedly has its source in a slightly later
Latin poet, Virgil, insofar as it focuses upon class differences and Paterson’s
specific and most discouraging historical experience with class struggle: the
Paterson Silk Strike of 1913.40 The Strike, a seminal event of the Progressive
Era that received national coverage (like the Lawrence Strike), ended after
several months with few concessions from the mill owners and a sense of
defeat on a large scale for the striking unions (including the I.W.W.) and
their liberal sympathizers. Drafts of Book Two indicate that its original title
or theme was “the strike” and that in an early draft Paterson’s initial mus-
ings concerned this issue; several lines from the poem are actually lifted in
full from the “Strike” section of Williams’s 1914 poem, “The Wanderer.”41
This traumatic historical event, combined with the Book’s “Sunday in the
Park” setting and themes of love and lovers, strongly suggests that the poet
is attempting to delineate forms of “contact” similar to those that we find
among Corydon, Phyllis, and Paterson later in the poem. As in Book Four,
Williams struggles to imagine a relationship between the self and other that
moves beyond mere exploitation and appropriation.
While Book Four tends to eschew issues of class, Book Two directly
addresses this issue so integral to pastoral and much of Williams’s work:
the relationship between the complex poet and supposedly simple working
man. As he phrased it in a 1947 letter, Book Two was intended to address the
Paterson strike directly, including “the economic distresses occasioned by
human greed and blindness.” Yet in its depictions of “the social unrest that
occasions all strikes” he confesses, “the aesthetic shock occasioned by the rise
of the masses upon the artist receives top notice.”42 In large part, Williams’s
interest in the striking masses and especially their effect upon the poet echo
the concerns of Robert Frost, whose hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts,
was the site of the other major strike of the 1910s. As in Frost’s early poetry
about tramps and mill workers, Williams’s troubled efforts to imagine ethi-
cal relationships among human beings serve as the focal point of the poem.
Despite optimistic rhetoric of the 1910s that celebrated the possibilities of
a new “social self” relatively uninhibited by economic realities, Williams is
reluctant in the post–World War II era to embrace this perspective, choosing
instead to illuminate the complexities of inequality. Crucial to the pastoral
dynamics of section I, Book Two, are tensions between the poet’s socially mar-
ginal source of energy and his desire to create from the scene of their appar-
ent “waste” a poetry of ethical and aesthetic force. Ultimately, Williams’s
transformative consideration of these often foreign-born, working-class
individuals and their relation to a new poetic technique forces the reader to
confront social and economic inequities perhaps critical to the production of
poetry in the modern world.
Book Two begins with reference to a conjunction of time (“Sunday”)
and place (“in the Park”) that suggests both leisure time and the initiation
of the pastoral mode. It is a time and place at which the laboring masses
of the city can leave behind their jobs, strictly defined social roles, and
culturally predetermined concepts of value, waste, and production. It is

the proverbial “day off ” that is in essence a “wasted day” from the perspec-
tive of industry, the day on which “nothing” is produced except perhaps a
sense of “otium” or well-being—a sense of pleasure in individual existence
that cannot be commodified as such. It is a “flower of a day” that the
people will both enjoy and potentially ruin in their use of it (Paterson, 44).
Section I begins not with the masses, however, but with Dr. Paterson, who
is intent upon going “outside / outside myself,” into a world that is both
not of him and yet born of his words and imagination as he “instructs his
thoughts / (concretely)” upon the “body” of the female “Park” (Paterson,
43). The reader is induced into the realm of the imagination and the pas-
toral at once, the latter serving as a metaphor for Williams’s own subaltern
or “polluted” poetics as centered in this femininized, working-class space.
Paterson embarks upon his walk by following a group of young picnickers
up a hill, observing “the ugly legs of the young girls, / pistons too powerful
for delicacy! / the men’s arms, red, used to heat and cold, / to toss quar-
tered beeves” (Paterson, 44). In these lines taken from “The Wanderer,”
the mechanized bodies of the workers, while hardly suggestive of people
accustomed to leisure, become reminiscent of the goatherds and farmers
of Virgil or Theocritus’s poetry as they take a few hours to relax before
returning to their work. Their period of leisure marks the time for poetry,
music, and dance—and is therefore the appropriate moment for the poet
to enter into the scene.
As the poet approaches and hovers near the picnickers, however, he does
not seem to be in a state of physical or emotional well-being. Despite his
traditional role as the promulgator of pleasure and wisdom, his capacity to
evoke memories and music, and his supposed integration into the commu-
nity, he, too, seems stuck within the physicality of his body and its mecha-
nized movements. He describes “Walking” as a fixed series of gestures of
the foot, thigh and arm to be accompanied by a complete diagram “(6B)”
(Paterson, 45). This sense of alienation from his own body, not unlike that
which he detects in the workers at rest, is followed by a passage of prose, a
portion of a letter from a woman with whom Paterson has recently cut off a
correspondence. She writes to him that as a result of his rejection of her, she
has felt a “complete damming up of all my creative capacities in a particu-
larly disastrous manner.” She continues,
For a great many weeks now (whenever I’ve tried to write poetry) every
thought I’ve had, even every feeling, has been struck off some surface
crust of myself which began gathering when I first sensed that you were
ignoring the real contents of my last letters to you, and which finally
congealed into some impenetrable substance when you asked me to quit

corresponding with you altogether without even an explanation.
That kind of blockage, exiling one’s self from one’s self—have you ever
experienced it? (Paterson, 45)
Just as he enters the world of imagination and pastoral—as he enters a

world both of himself and not of himself—Paterson begins to consider the
potentially disorienting effects of language and poetry. Just as these can
enable one to realize oneself in the imagination, so do they have the capacity
to dismantle one’s conception of selfhood as codified in the “real” world.
Whereas he is first struck by his physicality and his ability to break it down
into a series of machinelike movements, he is then struck by the thought of
a woman and poet whose inability to write causes her to feel an alienation
from the self, even that it is vulnerable to being “struck” away in pieces like
a “crust.” In each case the smooth integration of the body and spirit is under-
cut by an experience of the self as other, an unraveling of the pure experience
of subjectivity into a set of disjointed physical or intellectual sensations. The
poet’s disintegration as he enters into the pastoral realm of the poem speaks
to a more general sense of fragmenting identity as the interlude proceeds.
Incorporating yet countering the myth of the decline of the American
republic, Paterson proceeds to offer a vision of a population that turns out to
be less a group of stable, mechanized producers than ambivalent and incon-
tinent consumers. Most at home in the processes of relaxing, wasting time,
eating, making love, and excreting, they are a version of pure humanity that
is constantly in flux, caught up in a web of desires and bodily functions that
disperse the subjective self and its fleshly body over time and space. They
are the citizens of the future and the poet’s audience, but the poet’s atti-
tude toward them is as much marked by frustration as hope. It is such men
and women who, despite their “minds beaten thin / by waste,” (Paterson,
51) must form the basis for the beginning of a new age with its new mea-
sure. Invoking the need for “invention” and “change,” the poet sings of how
“unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new / line.” For, “without
invention the line / will never again take on its ancient / divisions when the
word, a supple word, / lived in it, crumbled now to chalk” (Paterson, 50).
The “supple” voices and bodies that help him to create this “new line” are
precisely those of the “wasted” individuals whom he observes making love
under the trees, vulgar yet earnest, “[n]ot undignified” despite their “piti-
ful” aspects (Paterson, 52). The poet cannot pick and choose his era or his
subject—instead, he must work with the world as it appears to him in all
its ordinariness and chaos. As a result, his relationship to the working-class
picnickers is marked by a flexible, accepting sense of irony regarding the
true nature of what has been deemed “waste” in society. This perspective
is implicitly opposed to “scholarship,” which in an earlier draft Williams
noted: “passes them by and can’t / say one clear word to the purpose con-
cerning [these people], / except irony. Scholarship prying among / the words
the needed words.”43 Unlike the ostensibly apoliticized poetry admired by
his scholarly contemporaries, the New Critics, Williams’s distinctive ironic
approach allows for aesthetics that can have a political effect.
The politics of Williams’s embrace of the mill workers is complicated,
however, by the poet’s disquietude about his own subject position and its
relationship to his poetic authority. After all, it is what he describes as the
“contrast between the vulgarity of the lovers in the park and the fineness, the
aristocracy of the metrical arrangement of the verse” that contributes to the
scene’s unmistakably pastoral tensions between the refined and uncouth—
tensions that are immensely fruitful if of indeterminable “value.”44 The
poet’s relationship to these working-class frolickers is one that serves mainly
to bolster his implicit claim that as a poet he produces something of worth. It
is the workers who historically have had a more direct, unmediated relation-
ship to the products of their work and the land, a relationship that is highly
suggestive of moral authority as well. It is they who are literal producers of a
community, those who at one time could have claimed to have a direct social
“value” by virtue of their labor. At the same time, however, the poet’s use
of a lower-class dialect is not necessarily an appropriation that will reinforce
his claim to any authoritative cultural identity. The voices that he adapts are
“foreign” to mainstream America, the workers laboring in factories that only
alienate them from their own products and bodies. In the end, the workers
are depicted as more like the poet in their state of incoherence than unlike,
his appropriation of their voices seeming less an artistic poaching than an
empathetic gesture of quasi-solidarity. Read from either angle, the result is
a text whose multiple ironies suggest its concurrent desires to express liberal
social sentiments while affirming a bourgeois conception of the artist.
Despite the intermittently vexed relationship of poet and worker, how-
ever, a more hopeful and assured perspective emerges as Paterson contin-
ues on his path through the park. As he moves on from his earlier, bleaker
observations of the crowd and individual lovers, he offers more positive,
sexualized images of physical and bodily congruence. He is caressing the
“park” herself with his footsteps; when he crosses an old meadow, he notes
the phallic observation tower in “its pubic grove” (Paterson, 53). Several lines
later, he turns to two anecdotes concerning dogs, anecdotes that once again
demonstrate the liberating potential of pollution or the bodily force itself
in reaction to the reifying forces of social determination. The first dog is a
collie whose owner combs her hair carefully “until it lies, as he designs, like
ripples in white sand giving of its clean-dog odor” (Paterson, 53). They stand
on a stone bench that Williams may have meant to stand for a temple of
Venus, and the dog’s beauty and passivity have often been taken to represent
a version of the aesthetic ideal for which the poet searches. However, any
such reading of the scene is complicated by the anecdote that follows a few
lines later, a comic letter written by one woman to another, apologizing that
she has allowed the reader’s dog, “Musty,” to become impregnated while she
was in her care (Paterson, 54). These two female dogs, one pristinely kept by
her male owner, the other momentarily neglected by her female keeper, pro-
vide a humorous and telling comparison within the narrative. Once again
the ideal is contrasted with what is debased in Williams’s scheme, but in this
instance it is immediately apparent that the “polluting” force, in this case of
“musty” female sexuality, also serves as a source of liberating laughter. The
extreme, yet hilarious earnestness of Musty’s keeper serves as a counterpoint
to the collie’s obsessive groomer as the poet comments upon the necessary
and procreative incursion of disorder. A clean, effete model of “Beauty” is
made to stand aside and share the stage with humor and physicality as mani-
fested in disorderly and sensory “pleasure,” as Williams again shifts the place
of the “good” in his metaphysical equation.
These copulating dogs return later in the poem as the symbols of the
“pleasure” that the “Park” simultaneously must allow for but in theory pro-
hibits: “NO DOGS ALLOWED AT LARGE IN THIS PARK” (Paterson,
61). It is “pleasure” itself that emerges as the crucial element in the poem,
the human element always evoked by pastoral resurfacing to remind the
reader what the real purpose of aesthetics, “culture,” and ultimately even real
justice must be. The poet is heavily indebted to his indifferent and reluctant
audience for this revelation of “joy,” leaving the poem open to be read in part
as a notice of gratitude. Williams’s simultaneously essentializing yet highly
detailed descriptions of these weekend scenes allow him to account meticu-
lously for a community that functions most productively when open to the
very elements that it legislates against. His “new measure” contains room for
the old rules to be reevaluated and rewritten, although as a matter of course
no rules could ever fully regulate the eruptions of pleasure in this text.
In turning the lives, language, and lifestyle of these rough lovers into the
stuff of poems, Williams defiantly reidentifies poetry with joy and leisure
time, the multiple lives of individuals to whom poetry itself may be for-
eign but who embody nonetheless the nation’s future cultural potential. He
mocks those who would find “the center of movement, the core of gaiety”
in an aesthetic realm so far removed from the real world that its language
is false and incomplete (Paterson, 56). Instead, he ironizes the possibility of
finding such a center: his “Pan” is “dead pan,” a young man playing guitar
while his friends enjoy their food and wine. The scene is classical yet modern
at once, a hybrid nexus of irregular syntax (“Come on! Wassa ma’? You got
/ broken leg?”) and vivacious dancers (an old woman “lifts one arm holding
the cymbals of her thoughts”) (Paterson, 57). It is the “air of the Midi / and
the old cultures” yet it is the “present” all at once (Paterson, 57). Time has
not stood still but instead moves forward to expose the undercurrents of
change in the midst of seeming peace and prosperity. A woman, impatient
with her countrymen’s refusal to dance, cries out “Excrementi” (Paterson,
57). Her brusque disapproval, however, is aimed at their reluctance to enact
their pleasure in the ancient “measures,” stepping along to the music of the
New and Old Worlds. They are too tired, too “wasted” by their day to
engage in any but the smallest of efforts. But the final view of these lolling
youth is not unkind, leaving them “on the rocks celebrating / the varied
Sundays of their loves with / its declining light—“ (Paterson, 58). Although
the moment is as fading and elusive as a “lost / Eisenstein film,” it becomes
simultaneously indelible as encoded in the poet’s verse (Paterson, 58).
As he walks on from this scene, Paterson again passes a pair of doz-
ing lovers. Despite a “useless voice,” they too, it appears, have begun to
sense “a music that is whole, unequivocal” even if it is “in [a] sleep” from
which they do not awaken (Paterson, 60). The latent music and poetry of
section I, Book Two exist in the cry of “Pleasure! Pleasure!” that is not so
much the poet’s but the crowd’s “own” as the poet renders it back to them
(Paterson, 60). They are both emotionally “relieved” and moved to physi-
cally “relieve” themselves at this realization in yet another one of Williams’s
obscene puns. Directed up toward the “conveniences,” the picnickers must
stumble over the worn rocks and denuded trees in order once again to pol-
lute and despoil the environment (Paterson, 60). Williams does not linger
over the destruction, however, but instead points out that even “deformity”
is “to be deciphered (a horn, a trumpet!)” through “an elucidation by multi-
plicity” (Paterson, 61). This process, not constructive in a conventional way,
may entail “a corrosion, a parasitic curd,” but will also serve as “a clarion
/ for belief, to be good dogs” (Paterson, 61). Yet the last element of this
recipe for poetry seems to suggest that the poet is once again playing with
his readers’ expectations of poetic and pastoral order, for he knows all too
well that even “good dogs” forget their training more often than not. The
poet, instead of leading us towards a post-Edenic land of milk and honey,
instead produces a text that is the by-product of its age, a sour “curd” that
in turn becomes the basis for a new sensory experience. It seems that no
single method of composition, of systematic rule following, can accomplish
what “natural” processes of decomposition and recombination will allow
for: the continuous rejuvenation of the community and the poet. It is the
poet, perhaps, who should really be guarded against, for it is he who is “at
large” in the park, in his mind, and in his own poetic world, and it is his
travels beyond prepragmatic constructs of the “self ” that make this vision
of the community possible.
Williams’s Paterson provides no definitive answers to social or aesthetic
problems—it only offers alternatives and a zone of the imagination in which
to implement them. Although issues of class, race, and gender occupy him
throughout the poem, the sections that specifically invoke pastoral serve as
the best means of viewing the connection between his poetic project and a
national one. In the realm of the imagination, continuous with the “real”
world, the poet is able to become whoever and whatever he wants, be it a
“flower” or a worker on holiday. Although the tensions of the “real” world
trail the poet into his text, even these can be put to work, class dynamics
employed to expose the possibilities and limitations of reimagining the self.
He seeks in “contact” with his fellow man the kind of communal ties that
pastoral ideology used to provide but can no longer account for with its hal-
lowed mystique of yeomanry, property, and “soil.” In desiring the “bloody
loam” where his friend Pound would have the “finished product,” Williams
exposes his willingness to engage with the “filth” of the nation, both physi-
cally and intellectually (Paterson, 37). Ultimately, Paterson’s project appears
to be open in form but inevitably restricted by time, as it moves toward
at least an initial ending in a large, gaseous “blast.” Appropriately enough,
however, this vaguely obscene “eternal close” serves only as a precursor to
yet another beginning, as the next Book builds upon the “curd” and “turds”
of the previous one. The aesthetic energy created by pollution, by a dog on
the loose, in the best case reverberates beyond its pastoral incarnation out
toward the world of the “real,” spreading chaos and pleasure wherever it
runs. Leaving the park and idylls behind, the poet rushes out to build their
equivalent in his community of readers.
Having created a flow of words where there had been blockage, even if
the mass were to be deemed excremental, Williams succeeds in Paterson in
letting loose a new vision of poetic language upon American letters. Not all
were ready to receive the torrent, but many were. Among Williams’s many
readers and acquaintances was Wallace Stevens, with whom Williams had
a relatively direct and competitive relationship. Tellingly, one of their more
tense literary exchanges involved the pastoral depiction of American locali-
ties and individuals. In the fall of 1945, Allen Tate’s Sewanee Review pub-
lished Stevens’s “Description without Place,” originally delivered as the Phi
Beta Kappa poem for Harvard’s 1945 commencement. Musing upon tropes
such as a “queen” whose “green mind made the world around her green,”
the poem references Marvell’s pastoral “green thought in a green shade”
to reflect upon the nature of “seeming,” the inevitable difference between

“desire” and “reality” in poetic descriptions.
A veritable “theory of description,” the poem was immediately read and
loathed by Williams, who took its reference to the “Spaniard” who “lives
in the mountainous character of his speech” to be a slur upon himself,
ultimately reading the poem as proof of Stevens’s reluctance to join with
him in inventing a grounded, local, post–World War II American poet-
ics.45 In response, Williams composed his own poem, “A Place (Any Place)
to Transcend All Places,” which was published by John Crowe Ransom’s
Kenyon Review in 1946. A paean to the mélange that is New York, the poem
celebrates the “hodge-podge” created by the “draining places” from which
its inhabitants came, a polluted pastoral site of “weeds and grass.” Calling
attention to what is “obscene and abstract as excrement—,” it is what “no
one wants to own / except the coolie / with a garden of which / the lettuce
particularly / depends on it—if you / like lettuce, but / very, very specially,
heaped / about the roots for nourishment.”46
A pointed rebuke to Stevens’s apparently otherworldly poem, Williams’s
verse reads as almost a literal attempt to rub his fellow poet’s nose in the
reality of contemporary life. Upon closer examination of Stevens’s text, how-
ever, it can be argued that, like so many other poets and critics, Williams
simply misread Stevens’s complex relationship to “place” and the nature of
waste and excess in the modern world. Rather than a rejection of the world,
“Description without Place” can also be read as a celebration of all that is
associated with summer, greenery, and a “queen” or “queens” who evoke an
atmosphere of “anticipation,” “revelation,” and “reconciliation” not dissimi-
lar to the poetic future Williams hoped to bring about. Although Williams
had difficulty discerning the similarities between their work, closer exami-
nation of each poet elicits a common desire to renegotiate the relationship
between the everyday and the aesthetic, the lowly and the high, the people
and the poet.
CHAPTER 4
“Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!”: Wallace Stevens’s

Figurations of Masculinity
I
n a 1935 letter to Ronald Lane Latimer, Wallace Stevens makes a rare
direct mention of pastoral. Although Stevens wrote several early poems
with titles such as “Eclogue” (1909), “The Silver Plough Boy” (1915),
and “Ploughing on Sunday” (1923), and referred pointedly to poets as
“shepherds” in early correspondence, nowhere does he address the topic at
any length.1 In the Latimer letter, Stevens reflects upon whether or not one’s
everyday life and poetry might be of a piece, and by way of example cites
a study by an art historian that attributes the linearity of Dutch painting
to the flat Dutch countryside. Stevens then appears to dismiss the topic,
observing: “You know, the truth is that I had hardly interested myself in
this (perhaps as another version of pastoral) when I came across some such
phrase as this: ‘man’s passionate disorder’, and I have since been very much
interested in disorder.”2 While the “this” that is the “version of pastoral” has
a slightly indeterminate referent, it seems to refer to the very idea of order,
that is, the direct correspondences between life and art, the world and the
imagination, the poet as man and the poet as creator of a linguistic universe,
that intrigued Stevens throughout his career. Despite Stevens’s avowal of
disinterest in the topic, it would emerge repeatedly in his poetics as a crucial
counterpoint to the very “disorder” he imagined to have displaced it.3
Even the rather precise example of pastoral “order” that Stevens uses to
make his point resonates on several different levels in terms of Stevens’s
own biography and its possible links to his poetics. The example of a Dutch
painting, coupled with references to Stevens’s own compulsive orderliness in
the same letter, bring to mind the poet’s youthful fascination with his Dutch
and Germanic background, which he first teasingly celebrated in a 1909

letter to his future wife, Elsie Kachel: “I said I was German to the utter-
most. . . . Peasants are glorious. Think. Who inhabited Arcady?” (Letters,
120).4 This stolid peasant figure was often an attractive one for Stevens, and
sufficiently “pastoral” insofar as it evoked hearty shepherds in the country-
side. However, the image of boisterous men in the fields seems at odds with
Stevens’s concurrent sense of himself—noted in his journal in 1902—as a
relatively refined poet, distinguished from the urban riffraff, for whom “an
Arcadian flute is better after all than a metropolitan corn-cob” (Letters, 58).
Stevens would later describe this opposition as a contrast between the older
“outsider” returning to the land of his youth and the “native” or “insider”
who never left.5 Both of these model, “pastoral” selves, however, were a far
cry from the “Crack-A-Jack” lawyer and successful businessman that his
father admonished him to become, just as neither quite fit the “strenuous”
type of man Stevens attempted to embrace on long weekend walks through-
out rural Pennsylvania and New Jersey during the early 1900s and 1910s,
when he would “cover[] about twenty miles or more” in an effort to escape
the effects of too much “tobacco + food” (Letters, 20, 69). Stevens’s letters
and poetry from the turn of the century through the 1940s reveal a poet
concerned with stressing his “manhood” and affiliation with “virile” “man-
poets,” yet confronted with a bewildering variety of modern masculine iden-
tities to emulate. The notion that pastoral suggests a certain natural “order,”
after all, in which a man could easily locate his proper role and place in soci-
ety, is contradicted by the context of the reference: the “pastoral” mentioned
in the letter evokes not only poetic order but the orderly landscape painting
as observed by a male art critic—surely not the most “manly” of occupations
in a nation terrified that its elite males were becoming increasingly effete
and unfit to save their society from genetic “degeneration.”6
The many models of masculinity encoded in Stevens’s direct and oblique
references to “pastoral” reflect his desire to reconcile within himself many
versions of the modern man and to figure himself as a model, representative
American male, speaker, and citizen. The most frequent form that this self-
imagination took in Stevens’s famously abstract prose and poetry is, perhaps
surprisingly, the body. While at times conforming to the ideal male bod-
ies most in vogue from the 1890s through the 1940s, the imagined, often
vague poetic bodies of his texts also suggest the physical manifestation of
alternative, at times racialized and feminine, orders and creative disruption.
Among the most intriguing, and disorderly, of self-images for Stevens are
those of the “Large Man,” “Jumbo,” or the “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!” body of
“Bantams in Pine-Woods,” all of which recall a personal physicality that
both embarrassed him (“That monster, the body!”) and was an anomalous
“Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!” ● 95
point of pride and affection (“that monster” was easily sated by “capon and
fresh peach pie”) (Letters, 176). Even as Stevens worried over the implica-
tions of his large build in terms of looking the part of the poet—who was
traditionally associated with leaner, smaller, more traditionally aristocratic
frames—he also saw his height and girth as evidence of an appetite for a
real world that could be touched, smelled, and ultimately, tasted and feasted
upon in both affirming and ominous ways.
Within the context of Stevens’s poetry, suggestions of overly large
male bodies manifest the poet’s faith in tangible experience of the phe-
nomenal world that pragmatists held to be the basis for all thought, phi-
losophy, and, of course, poetry. “Fat” emerges as a trope that for Stevens
evokes a panoply of experiences suggestive of both order and disorder, the
masculine and feminine, the poet and the people he would represent. A
response to overly “masculine” bodies, the “fat” body is a pastoral sign of
the common man, albeit in a limited sense: Stevens implicitly considers
the common man to be kin to his own country cousins, white “natives”
in their proper, rural environments. Although Stevens’s invocations of
racialized large bodies are largely caricatures, Stevens’s ultimate accep-
tance of a “fat girl” as a possible poetic heir signals an acceptance of a
selfhood and poetic vocation that could be open to the “feminine” and
all that it represents. The result is a pastoralism that embraces aspects
of the self that other modernists considered polluting and disorderly,
a healthy-minded—if still racially limited—approach to life and what
Stevens termed “hopeful waste.”
In the following pages, I begin with a reading of “Bantams in Pine-
Woods,” using the poem as a lens to illuminate changing conceptions
of masculinity and fat in the cultural context of early-twentieth-century
American society. Stevens’s multiple perspectives on the poetic self, I sug-
gest, entails the articulation of a poetics of “fat” that reflects his ambivalent
experiences of his own expanding body. I then discuss Stevens’s unconven-
tional poetics within the context of his reaction to World War II, which
triggered the poet to frame his poetics not only in terms of (and often in
opposition to) earlier masculine ideals but also with regard to the pragmatic
philosophy of William James. In the third and final section, I examine the
poet’s characteristic deflation of more “muscular” male figures in favor of
“fat” ones in poems dating from the mid 1930s through the early 1950s and
appearing in volumes ranging from Harmonium to The Auroras of Autumn.
Products of a specific season of plenitude and incipient change and associ-
ated with Stevens’s own roots in rural Reading, Pennsylvania, these “fat”
bodies emerge as alternatives to fixed, unproductive versions of the mascu-
line “hero.”
Boxing, Fat Men, and the “Rogue Elephant in Porcelain”

While a great deal of ink has been spilled over Stevens’s investment in con-
ceptual figures such as the “dandy,” “man number one,” the “hero,” the
“major man,” “medium man,” the “subman,” and the “giant,” little attention
has been paid to the physical aspects of these figures or the rare but revealing
images of male bodies in Stevens’s work.7 The specific nature of the mascu-
line ideal has gone unquestioned in the bulk of Stevens criticism: it is taken
for granted that a real man must be muscular and physically masterful, and
that Stevens himself must have admired such a physique exclusively. Yet from
the publication of Harmonium on, criticism at times assigned Stevens a more
ambiguous gender identity, emphasizing his dandyish, implicitly feminine
“grace and ceremony.”8 Stevens and his interest in men “virile” and other-
wise, therefore, must be understood as the product of an American society in
which masculinity was an extremely fraught and contested cultural site.9 By
the late nineteenth century, what had been a firm, character-driven “manli-
ness” had become a more amorphous, anxiety-laden “masculinity” that was
dependent upon its opposition to women and those racial and ethnic “oth-
ers” perceived to be cultural, social, and political threats.10
Prominent Americans such as Theodore Roosevelt began to advocate
the “strenuous life” for men as an alternative to the sedentary lifestyles of
the growing middle class. This group included many salaried breadwin-
ners, men such as Stevens, a lawyer for an insurance company. Whereas
in previous decades the ideal bodies of both men and women were both
slighter and larger—the delicate body associated with a higher social class
and intellectual capacity while larger girth was linked to social stability and
respectability—by the early twentieth century a distinctly muscular “bulk”
had come into fashion and would remain so for the next several decades. Just
as the expanding, “brain-trained” middle class had previously aspired to be
like their slender betters in the mid-1800s, by 1920 they feared becoming
the “ninety-seven pound weakling” of the ubiquitous Charles Atlas adver-
tisements (Green, 252).
“Bantams in Pine-Woods,” first published in 1922, suggests a vision of
masculine rivalry and aggression that is both a spoof of contemporary stan-
dards of “manliness” and a curious reenactment of the same. The poem’s
unexpected energies and celebration of “fat” as a trope for those energies
situate it as a precursor of a range of mid-century poems in which similar
eruptions occur. Traditionally, the poem has been read rather literally, as a
lighthearted, parodic approach to the young Wallace Stevens’s anxiety as an
apprentice poet (a “virile” “inchling” and small “bantam” bird) confronting a
larger “cock” and “ten-foot poet.” Eleanor Cook has emphasized the “phallic
subtext” in Stevens’s play upon the word “cock,” and Rachel Blau DuPlessis
makes a compelling argument for reading the poem as Stevens’s response to
the threat of Vachel Lindsay’s potentially emasculating “colored” power.11
These readings all maintain the fiction that the bantam birds or “cocks” in
question represent Stevens and some other individual. In contrast, I argue
that the “cocks” in question are not only pragmatic variations upon the male
poet’s possible physiques and experiences, but that the protagonists quickly
become indistinguishable, their aggressive posing belied by the persistence
of a “fat” body that undermines the contemporary masculine ideal in sur-
prising ways. In order to dispel what would become the “hero” and “virile
poet’s” “masterful” body, however, Stevens first playfully invokes it by refer-
encing a very specific kind of physical, “manly art”: the highly popular sport
of boxing and prizefighting.
As boxing emerged as a middle-class activity and entertainment dur-
ing the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the term “bantam”
came to be used to describe the lightweight class of fighter. At a cultural
level, boxing allowed for the popular adulation of the “Heroic Artisan,” a
working-class, often ethnic figure, while allowing middle- and upper-class
men the opportunity to prove their mettle and reassert the “virility” of the
Anglo-Saxon.12 Within the context of boxing, “Bantams in Pine-Woods”
can be understood as a kind of public challenge or even the kind of “trash-
talk” common among practitioners of the original “manly art” (as well, at
times, among writers: witness Stevens’s unfortunate provocation of a fist-
fight with Hemingway in Key West in 1936).13 The speaker inaugurates his
address with a series of taunts:
Chieftain Iffucan of Azcan in caftan

Of tan with henna hackles, halt!
Damned universal cock, as if the sun
Was blackamoor to bear your blazing tail.14
The mocking diction and tone ostensibly serve to differentiate two “ban-
tams” that the poem’s title, curiously enough, indicates are indistinguishable
(in an equally vague if somewhat pastoral “pine-woods”). As readers we are
encouraged to imagine a dialectical, pastoral, and distinctly masculine ten-
sion between large and small, simple and complex, strong and quick-witted
characters, although other features of the poem belie this narrative cliché.
According to this fiction as suggested in the opening lines, the speaker’s
bravado is addressed to a figure in a “caftan,” an allusion to the somewhat
exotic and even feminine dressing robe adopted by boxers. The figure’s
absurd moniker, however, designates him as the “Chieftain” of an unreal,
highly rhetorical world. The odd chiasmus of phonemes in the first line (the
“tain”/”tan” and “can”/”can” “Chieftain” and “Iffucan” mirrored by “Azcan”
and “caftan”) accentuate his hypothetical, conditional properties (“if you
can,” “as [I] can”) as well as his status as a self-reflective, self-regarding fig-
ure whose power and masculinity are as stylized as the “can-can” of French
dancing girls or the costumed Native American “chieftains” whose iconic
photographs gained cultural currency even as their bodies were quickly dis-
appearing from the continent. Riffing upon the “Ashcan” school of painters
such as George Bellows (who often painted boxers), the reference to “Azcan”
also recalls grandiose and glamorized scenes of working-class triumph—
even if those triumphs were often small compensation for the grimmer reali-
ties of political and social losses.
That Stevens begins the poem with such an elaborate invocation suggests
his investment in exposing the illusory features of such contests of strength,
while concurrently exploring the ways in which masculinity was itself a “fig-
ure” with varyingly “real” correlates. For example, in the next stanza this
“[d]amned universal cock,” as arrogant “as if the sun / Was blackamoor to
bear your blazing tail” may seem “universal” and apparently “representa-
tive,” but his world is clearly not the real world, with its fanciful slave or
antique “blackamoor” and impressive “blazing tail” (a “tall tale” of sorts?).
Here, the rhetoric of medieval chivalry, closely aligned with the cultural and
racial anxieties that spawned the rise of boxing, is invoked to depict a pauper
turned prince, the working-class body elevated as a knightly, masculine,
specularized— and thus implicitly femininized—cultural ideal. All of this
talk climaxes with an attempt to deflate the proposed antagonist in favor of
the speaker’s own brand of masculinity, which he attempts to assert in the
next stanza. “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat! I am the personal. / Your world is you. I am
my world,” the “bantam-weight” snarls in a fit of inarticulate indignation.
Once again the contrast between Jack and the Giant, small and large, quick
and dull is suggested, but the antipathy never seems to materialize convinc-
ingly, in part because the speaker’s diction here is stilted and abrupt, his
formerly rich vocabulary impoverished as it approaches the true nature of
the “bantams.” In fact, the patent illogic of the poem overtakes its diction in
the magical third stanza: both figures are in their own “world[s]” in a chi-
asmus that has each mirror the other (“Your world is you. I am my world.”).
In effect, each is a version or reflection of the other, just as the Chieftain
originally appeared to be a comical doubling or exaggeration of himself.
The now abjectly “fat” “other” emerges as a version of the “bantam’s” own
self: a monstrous “ten-foot poet among inchlings.” The image was undoubt-
edly an extremely personal one for Stevens, a man whom Carl Van Vechten
described in 1914 as a “rogue elephant in porcelain.”15 At this point in the
poem, it is the “fat” male body that must now be dealt with in place of the
formerly (it was implied) muscular fighter and performer.
Over the next two stanzas, it becomes clear that the presence of “fat” is
curiously and often humorously productive for the poet. In his attempt to
exorcize this possible physical self and nemesis, the speaker appears to suc-
ceed only in reasserting its presence, the “fat,” an archaic term for a large
jar or vat, remaining its “portly” self much as its namesake in Tennessee
(“Anecdote of the Jar”):
You ten-foot poet among inchlings. Fat!

Begone! An inchling bristles in these pines,
Bristles, and points their Appalachian tangs,
And fears not portly Azcan nor his hoos.
Indeed, the “bristling,” newly bearded bantam has a rural, Appalachian

tongue or “tang” that can take shape only around the figure of this “cock,”
the Pennsylvania Dutch poet apparently given voice when presented with
something appropriately masculine and substantial to address in himself.
The other “bantam” or “bantams” seem inconsequential in contrast with
this figure, not to mention textually indeterminate in number (why “their
Appalachian tangs”?), as the speaker collapses with his putative subject. This
ambiguity regarding the speaking self and his elusive fellow “cocks” rein-
forces the implication that these displays of masculinity are themselves a
charade, an elaborate “cock-fight” with rhetoric, rituals, and regalia that are
borrowed and anachronistic. Absent these distractions, it is the “fat” male
body that continues to resonate as the focal point of concerns as to the true
substance of “masculinity” (is it “muscle” or “fat”?) and Stevens’s ability to
work creatively with such cultural tropes.
The fat body itself was newly perceived to be a “disfigured” body by the
turn of the century, a disruptive presence whose overactive orifices and lack
of self-control suggested a larger kind of social disorder—yet it also was (and
is) alarmingly ordinary.16 At one level, it is precisely this disruptive ordinari-
ness, this capacity to assert reality and bodily experience over theoretical
norms, which makes the trope of the fat man an attractive one for Stevens. A
fat man is a man who understands the simple pleasures of life, a poet who in
1940, just prior to World War II, admires “a photograph of a lot of fat men
and women in the woods, drinking beer and singing Hi-li Hi-lo,” an image
that convinces him “that there is a normal that I ought to try to achieve”
(Letters, 352). Yet the “portly” body also suggests a port, or place of shelter
and civility, in a more disturbing sense: in a world where the rules of sport
must compensate for a lack of rules in the marketplace, the powerful fat
man oversees the continuance of traditions intended to regulate and control

his fellow men. Even as the fat man with his mysteriously breathy, joyful, or
jeering “hoos” may inspire affection or a respectful “fear,” it is unclear that
he is a vision of the masculine self that Stevens truly intended to exorcise
(“Begone!”). Rather, the puffed up “bantams” in their rural “pine-woods”
can be understood as reflecting the poet’s insights into the illusory nature
of masculinity and the uneasy peace that he continually made with a world
whose physical, ethical, and aesthetic standards were ever-shifting and often
not in accord with his own experience.
What “Bantams in Pine-Woods” most aptly illustrates is the ultimately
unsatisfactory nature of the “hero” or ideally masculine body, which Stevens
constantly invokes and then deflates in his poetry in favor of the “large” or
“fat” man. At the other end of the spectrum from both the weakling and
strongman, the fat man is the man whose bulk is decidedly not muscle, his
size alone inspiring both respect and ridicule. While the “large” man may
at first seem a version of the “masculine” “hero” so many Stevens critics
have invoked, his cultural history is quite different from that of his more
studied, self-absorbed, and later vaguely fascist, cousin.17 It is significant
that the very term “fat” began to take on negative connotations during the
early decades of the twentieth century, and additional epithets were coined
rapidly, among them “dumpy,” “tubby,” “porky,” and “jumbo” (from the
Gullah for elephant) (Schwartz, 89). The young Wallace Stevens, upon see-
ing the notoriously large President Taft in a 1910 New York City parade,
had a characteristically ambivalent reaction: “His Excellency looked stupid
to me. His eyes are very small—his hair is white with a yellow tinge. He
is very heavy but not in a flabby way, specially. I say he looked stupid; but
at the same time, we all know him to be a man of much wisdom, patience
and courtesy” (Letters, 167). While an individual such as Taft would for-
merly have attracted no censure for his size in the nineteenth century, the
President became a touchstone for national jokes concerning weight by the
end of his administration, his bulk contrasted with the younger and more
fit Theodore Roosevelt. “Fat implied not the assertion of power but its false
promise,” a point brought home by the athletic former Rough Rider’s cru-
sades against corrupt trusts and the large monopolists who controlled them
(Schwartz, 90).
By the 1920s, attitudes toward overweight bodies stressed their ineffi-
ciency, their deviancy from “Yankee” frugality in a period of wartime con-
servation, and their overall irregularity in an era of mass production and
postwar ideological conformity. Insurance companies, such as the one
for which Stevens himself worked, promulgated weight charts to be used
to assess the health of potential clients. Americans began to diet in large
numbers by the 1920s, closely following new fads as they attempted to stem a
tide of consumption, constipation, and heart disease: “Reducing has become
a national pastime . . . a craze, a national fanaticism, a frenzy,” a journalist
observed in 1925 (Schwartz, 173). Stevens, too, was caught up in the phe-
nomenon, writing to Louis Untermeyer in 1926, “At the present time all my
attention is devoted to reducing” (Letters, 247). While the six-foot poet was
told to lose about 20 of his 229 pounds at a young age, by the mid-1930s he
weighed 234 and acquaintances estimated his weight at 250 and even 300
pounds by the late 1930s and early 1940s (when he wore a size 48 jacket).18
Stevens was denied a life insurance policy on the basis of his weight, and
struggled to maintain a strict regimen within the household.19 Yet even as
Stevens was extremely self-conscious about his size—at one point refusing to
do a reading due to “the mingled problems of obesity and minstrelsy,” recall-
ing in 1948 that he “felt more like an elephant at every step” while walking
down the aisle to the lectern at a previous engagement (Letters, 583)—he
also loved to indulge in favorite foods. Stevens’s early journals and letters are
filled with detailed descriptions of meals, and his youthful enthusiasm for
gourmet treats evidently continued throughout his life. When a French bak-
ery opened in Hartford in 1947, Stevens observed with delight and chagrin
that “to start the day so full of these [brioches] that every time one breathes
one whistles does not help to get things done”(Letters, 561). Other letters
regale his correspondents with the delights of corn–on–the cob, blueber-
ries, fruit, Turkish figs, Spanish melons, oysters, Parmesan cheese with soft-
boiled eggs, wines, and other foods both rare and commonplace.
Fat was a trope with a special resonance for Stevens, who associated his
own girth with his Pennsylvania Dutch ancestry and what it suggested of the
“normal” life of “fat men and women in the woods” that he aspired to cap-
ture in his poetry, even as it simultaneously recalled the consumer goods in
which the relatively wealthy insurance executive could indulge.20 Despite the
traditional association of “fat” with monstrosity—Stevens already referred
to his body as “that monster” quite early in his career—and gluttony, as well
as with mid-twentieth-century consumerism and overproduction, Stevens
seems to have dispensed with such cultural tropes and substituted a curi-
ously positive valence for the “fat” or “large” man (Schwartz, 18). While, on
the one hand, Stevens’s conflicting attitudes toward “fat” begin to suggest
its association with a “grotesque otherness” or lowness that Peter Stallybrass
and Allon White discuss as crucial to defining “bourgeois sensibility,” at
the same time “fat,” in its shifting alignments with both wealth and pov-
erty, epitomizes a modernity in which life has become, as David Trotter
puts it, “messy,” the self “contingent” and subject to changing norms that
denaturalize the very essence of “waste.” The result is that Stevens’s poetry
avoids a more predictable “disgust”—with all of its antiegalitarian connota-

tions—instead exuding a circumscribed tolerance of “otherness” tempered
by a nostalgic “desire.”21 Comprising a pragmatic response to the “virile
poet” he would ostensibly champion during World War II, Stevens’s poetics
of “fat” constantly functions to destabilize bodies whose “mastery” of self
and others he deems incipiently fascistic or antidemocratic. In sharp con-
trast to what has been termed the “anorexic” aesthetic of colleagues such as
Eliot and Pound (whose work he disliked),22 and more like William Carlos
Williams, Stevens produces a representative poetic self that, pragmatically
rooted in his personal experience, suggests a more expansive although still
limited approach to the numerous and supposedly “irregular” bodies of the
national population, especially those of women and the rural “native” white
population associated with his childhood.23 The intellectual origins of this
pragmatic approach to the body and experience infused Stevens’s work from
the beginning and can be located in his encounters with the theories and
texts of philosophers such as William James and John Dewey.
The Virile Poet and the Pragmatic Presence in Wartime

Concurrent with the national interest in sport and physical fitness was the
rise of pragmatism, the basic tenets of which Stevens absorbed from the
writings of James while an undergraduate at Harvard from 1897 to 1900.
Concerned, as were their nutritionist and bodybuilding contemporaries,
with the health of the nation, James and Dewey addressed the intellectual,
political, and cultural dimensions of the good democratic citizen. Like their
more overtly materialist counterparts, James and Dewey believed in the
holistic nature of the body and spirit, stressing the role of the entire human
being (physical and intellectual) in the construction and reconstruction of
social institutions and political ideologies. Exemplifying this approach is
James’s 1910 essay, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in which the philoso-
pher proposed that “instead of military conscription” there be “a conscrip-
tion of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years
a part of the army enlisted against Nature.” By temporarily working side by
side with the lower classes, James argued, upper-class men would learn from
experience not only the need for a better, more democratic society but also
how to become men imbued with “ideals of hardihood and discipline.”24
James’s essay was clearly the product of an era in which the manliness of
the upper and middle classes was in doubt, and his essay was meant both as
a rebuke to warmongers (such as Theodore Roosevelt) with whom he dis-
agreed as well as a confirmation of contemporary fears that American men
were lacking in basic physical and intellectual requirements.
Despite such protests, however, pragmatism was often aligned with

feminine energies, both in James’s own rhetoric and in the context of mid-
century debates concerning pragmatism’s efficacy in the political sphere. As
Patricia Rae has noted, in Pragmatism (1907) James presents his scientific
method as a feminine entity, “tough-minded” yet unmistakably female.25 In
a passage at odds with his later reflections upon the effete men of the upper
classes, James personifies pragmatism as a “she” who “ unstiffens” the tra-
ditional theories produced by men: “She has in fact no prejudices whatever,
no obstructive dogmas, no rigid canons of what shall count as proof.” This
presence is not only feminine but also inherently egalitarian: “Pragmatism is
willing to take anything, to follow either logic or the senses and to count the
humblest and most personal experiences.” Already we can see “how demo-
cratic she is. Her manners are various and flexible, her resources as rich
and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature.” 26
Tellingly conflated with a maternal, nurturing presence in these final sen-
tences, pragmatism emerges as a natural outgrowth of democracy itself, the
“mother,” in turn, of a new, modern generation and intellect.
By the early 1940s, however, opponents of pragmatism or “naturalism,”
as it came to be identified, criticized it for advocating a rootless relativism
linked to pacificism and overintellectualism and thus, implicitly, a lack of
masculine values.27 At the moment the nation needed to present an intellec-
tually and physically imposing response to the Axis powers, pragmatism was
deemed by some influential commentators to be insufficient for the task. In
the infamous 1943 “Failure of Nerve” controversy (published in the Partisan
Review, where Stevens also published on occasion), Sidney Hook and John
Dewey defended pragmatism against attacks by conservative thinkers who
accused James and Dewey’s scientific method of indirectly aiding Nazism
and other repugnant ideologies precisely because they refused to provide a
firm and absolute set of standards through which such enemies could be
systematically opposed. In response, John Dewey linked his critics to forces
that would stifle democracy in the name of their own rigid ideological and
theological agendas: “Democracy cannot obtain either adequate recognition
of its own meaning or coherent practical realization as long as antinatu-
ralism operates to delay and frustrate the use of methods by which alone
understanding of, and consequent ability to guide, social relationships can
be attained.”28 To the mid-century pragmatist, the antinaturalists were
forces that required a dangerous passivity of the populace, while natural-
ism or pragmatism fostered active engagement with the political process.
To pragmatists, the ideal individual was not an orderly and obedient soldier
but an intellectually voracious aesthete. Significantly, Wallace Stevens read
Dewey’s article and described it as “valuable,” likely admiring in it both the
Jamesian philosophy he was first introduced to at Harvard and absorbed

over the years as well as the more explicit Deweyan impulse toward political
engagement that the poet struggled with during the 1930s (Letters, 441).
While this exchange may seem peripheral to Stevens’s own poetics, just
a few months after the publication of this exchange Stevens gave a rare talk
on the nature of the poet and his social responsibilities: “The Figure of the
Youth as Virile Poet.” Early twentieth-century prototypes for both the mus-
cular male and the pragmatist are prominent in Stevens’s discussions of the
ideal man in this crucial essay, delivered at a 1943 Mount Holyoke confer-
ence that included many exiles from the war in Europe.29 Making pointed
reference to James and his concerns regarding turn-of-the-century mascu-
linity, the essay resituates the philosopher within a mid-twentieth-century
discussion of the poet during a time of violence, implicitly suggesting a way
to reintegrate the feminized, experientially based practice of pragmatism into
a wartime poetics. While much has been written on Stevens’s early relation-
ship to James, it is the poet’s later discussion of the philosopher that is one
of his most striking reflections on pragmatism’s weaknesses and strengths.30
Foregrounding conflicting images of the men necessary to shape the ideal
poet’s physicality, the essay can be read as a response not only to James but
also to Dewey and the recent “Failure of Nerve” controversy.
The crystallization of these concerns appears halfway through the essay
as Stevens addresses the title theme. Here he presents at least two forces
involved in the production of an adequately “masculine” figure who can
write the appropriately “heroic poem.”31 First he discusses the ideal poet as
part of a literary lineage in which “the centuries have a way of being male,”
this maleness due in part to the influences of “philosophers and poets” capa-
ble of the “hard” and “rigorous” thinking necessary to birth the true “intel-
ligence” of the period (“Youth,” 52). The result of such men’s intellectual
labor is a poetic truth that “is the truth of credible things,” objects and ideas
that can be assessed and evaluated by “credible people” who attest to their
solvency. The economic rhetoric is Jamesian and pragmatic in its references
to “credit” and “credibility,” affirming, as James notes in Pragmatism, that
“Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system” (Pragmatism,
95). Even as the essay lionizes such individuals, however, equally telling is
Stevens’s praise for the “mundo of the imagination” at the expense of the
“gaunt world of reason,” rhetoric that elevates a healthy “mundo” and all
that evokes a non-Anglo, Southern European (perhaps Spanish or Italian)
sensuality and ethnic vitality above the “gaunt” world of mere thinkers
(“Youth” 57–58). Equating the “morality of the poet’s radiant and produc-
tive atmosphere” with the “morality of the right sensation,” this key section
of the essay firmly links the lofty realms of philosophy and ethics to the
sensuality of physical experience, connecting high and low, intellectual and

physical, imagined and real worlds.
Underscoring his ambivalent attitude toward the pure intellectual, Stevens
posits a caricature of the metaphysician as an unattractive alternative to the
future poet. Citing a letter from William James himself, Stevens emphasizes
how the philosopher perceived his own physical and mental shortcomings as
preventing him from experiences of the world more accessible to “real” men.
Stevens cites James carefully to reiterate this point:
‘Most of them [i.e. metaphysicians] have been invalids. I am one, can’t

sleep, can’t make a decision, can’t buy a horse, can’t do anything that
befits a man; and yet you say from my photograph that I must be a second
General Sherman, only greater and better! All right! I love you for the
fond delusion.’ (“Youth,” 58–59)
While James depicts himself a mere “invalid” as compared to the vigorous

war hero General Sherman, Stevens figures the “youth as virile poet” in
terms that are scholarly yet concurrently evoke the physical and everyday
mental vitality to which James aspired. In the sentences that follow, Stevens
presents the youth as a future hero, “standing in the radiant and productive
atmosphere,” “examining first one detail of that world, one particular, and
then another,” concluding that “poetry is only reality, after all.” A purer and
more masculine pragmatist than his mentor, he is still like the Jamesian
pragmatist insofar as he is a “tough-minded” pluralist capable of compre-
hending multiple points of view (Pragmatism, 10). “In the twinkling of an
eye” and using literally God-like powers, he “invents language,” “crushes
men,” and “rescues all of us from what we have called absolute fact.” Like a
good pragmatist he undermines “absolutes” as well as “facts” that may well
be a matter of perception and alter over time and through experience. Yet
the rhetoric of strongmen abounds: an implicitly physically gifted being,
a virtual superhero-in-training, this individual “exercises” himself in order
to “help to lift” the “heaviness of the world,” which he is able to do thanks
to the “abnormal ranges of his sensibility,” which enable him to “accumu-
late” more and more profound experiences more rapidly than the “normative
type” of poet (“Youth,” 63, 66). His “virility” is characterized precisely by
“that special illumination, special abundance and severity of abundance,
virtue in the midst of indulgence and order in disorder” that make him
not only more imaginative but also, implicitly, a better, more representative
modern man in a century marked by abundance, indulgence, and disorder
(“Youth,” 66). Stevens concludes by affirming the necessity of this model
man and poet on the grounds that even as he exercises imaginative powers
he is more likely to “dwell” outside the imagination and hence retain the
essential “masculine nature that we propose for one that must be the master
of our lives” (“Youth,” 66).
Yet, having dispensed with the pure intellectual and championed the
virile youth’s intellectual heroics, by the end of the essay Stevens alters
course again, reemphasizing the importance of an intellect and physicality
linked not only to male minds and bodies but those of women as well. In
so doing, he echoes James’s femininized conception of pragmatism as well
as an essential tenet of Dewey’s pragmatic aesthetics of the 1930s. The key
moment occurs in the last of three references to the virile youth’s compan-
ion: a “sister of the Minotaur.” Half woman, half monster, she is crucial to
the poet’s work. Initially introduced as an entity “still half-beast and some-
how more than human,” she is subsequently cast off as a “mystic muse” and
“monster” whom the young poet in the process of “purification” no longer
requires (“Youth” 52, 60). The essay concludes, however, by reinvoking her
presence, the virile youth addressing her in order to affirm that not only
is he “part of what is real” and “part of the unreal,” but also the “truth of
that imagination of life in which with unfamiliar motion and manner you
guide me in those exchanges of speech in which your words are mine, mine
yours” (“Youth,” 67). Her reemergence in the essay’s final sentences speaks
to the extent to which the impure, “monstrous” and “feminine” emerge
as crucial forces for the midcareer poet.32 Rather than affirm the “virile”
poet, the essay ends by covertly legitimizing the appeal of the femininized
Jamesian pragmatist who unites experience of the real and unreal, physical
realm and imagination. In his insistence that “the truth of that imagina-
tion of life” can only be shaped by “those exchanges of speech in which
your words are mine, mine yours,” Stevens also recalls Dewey on art: “The
expressions that constitute art are communication in its pure and undefiled
form” (Art, 244). Poetry is present in words exchanged between individu-
als, the poet and the “sister” who is also a part of him. Ultimately, the virile
poet’s unique understanding of the laws and limitations of real and imag-
ined worlds seems to result not from his unadulterated masculinity but
from the pragmatic sensibility he inherited from his effeminate intellectual
fathers.
Stevens’s final thoughts on the connections among poetry, communica-
tion, and ethics in the essay also make greater sense in light of Dewey’s
assertion of art’s ethical dimension. According to Dewey, true experience
and poetry can only result from a world in which the flesh and spirit, intel-
lect and body of the “live creature” enable “a transformation of interaction
into participation and communication.”33 Stevens concludes his reflections
on the relationship between the poet and his community by articulating a
poetics of “morality” that has much in common with Dewey’s more overtly
politicized aesthetics. In several key lines Stevens directly addresses the
“character of the crisis through which we are passing today, the reason why
we live in a leaden time,” citing a note from a book on Gide: “ ‘the main prob-
lem which Gide tries to solve—the crisis of our time—is the reconciliation of the
inalienable rights of the individual to personal development and the necessity for
the diminution of the misery of the masses’ ” (italics Stevens’s). Stevens com-
ments, “When the poet has converted this into his own terms, the figure of
the youth as virile poet and the community growing day by day more colos-
sal, the consciousness of his function, if he is a serious artist, is a measure
of his obligation. And so is the consciousness of his history” (“Youth” 64).
The essential issue is to what extent the poet is “obligat[ed]” to his com-
munity, how his “personal development” is implicated in his recognition
of his social and historical function. For Dewey, similarly, “consciousness
is not a separate realm of being but is that manifest quality of existence
when nature is most free and active.”34 The individual cannot be separated
from “activity” in the world, or the imagination from the real, a situation
echoed by Stevens’s intimation that the “community” is constantly “grow-
ing” more “colossal,” its sheer mass unavoidable, its condition shaping the
poet’s personality.
In the end, Stevens’s depiction of the artist in masculine and feminine
terms is made possible by precisely the kind of environmental “disor-
der” that makes the virile poet’s special capacity for “order” visible in the
first place. As Dewey notes in Art As Experience, it is precisely the ten-
sion between order and disorder, rather than the mastery of the latter, that
is necessary for the “live creature” to have a productive existence: “The
live creature demands order in his living but he also demands novelty.
Confusion is displeasing but so is ennui. The ‘touch of disorder’ that lends
charm to a regular scene is disorderly only from some external standard.
From the standpoint of actual experience it adds emphasis, distinction”
(Art, 167). In tacit accordance with this principle, Stevens evokes in his
poetry and letters a nuanced vision of the male body and intellect that
gives life to this pragmatic perspective upon experience in the world and
modern democracy. Indeed, dissolution and failure rather than coalescence
and ascendancy mark the overly muscular heroes of Stevens’s own poetry
from the late 1930s and early 1940s, their impotence anticipating the erup-
tion of new sources of selfhood that would emerge in its place. The result-
ing pragmatic, alternative male body is disorderly and chaotic, at times
feminine as well as racially other. As such it suggests new parameters—and
some limitations—for the ideal poetic speaker as well as the representative
voice and man.
The Poet as Native Speaker

Stevens’s “fat” characters are generally situated in the “fat” season, sum-
mer, which in turn is associated with fertility, the feminine, and pastoral
comforts.35 Throughout his career Stevens suggests characteristically con-
tradictory attitudes towards this season and its denizens, contrasting them
at times with the autumnal season of the tragic. It is a contrast that is inher-
ently pastoral, juxtaposing the contrasts proper to the mode, simpler times
and men juxtaposed with apparently more complex and difficult counter-
parts. Eventually, the seasons tend to blend and blur in his work: Stevens’s is
ideally a late-summer pastoral, a poetics of seasonal change caught between
“tinsel in August” and the “Sep-tem-ber” “the wind spells out” (Collected,
351, 265). This in-between quality extends to a two-fold state of mind,
recalling terms that Stevens employed in an essay on John Crowe Ransom:
once one has “ceas[ed] to be native[]” of a place, one becomes an “insider[]
and outsider[] at once.” Such a person is “not content merely to acknowl-
edge [the] emotions” that scenes of his hometown arouse, but must “isolate
them in order to understand them.” Likely an “artist,” “while his activity
may appear to be that of the outsider, the insider remains as the base of
his character.”36 Not unlike William Empson’s “complex” individual in his
perspectives on the world, such a man must attempt to understand himself
and his environment both as it was and as it would become. Often, Stevens
implicitly invokes this model when discussing the ideal and “normal” man,
the seasonal metaphors underlining the transience of an aggressive “mascu-
linity” and its dispersal into a mellower, more affirming “fat.”
It is this transience that is foremost in the poem, “Examination of the
Hero in a Time of War” (1942), in which an abstract yet muscular “hero”
gives way to a scene of consumption among local townsfolk, a scene that
in turn evokes a season of surfeit. Not unlike his wartime still lifes, which
Bonnie Costello has described as “thresholds” between “the private ‘climate’
of meditation to the ‘climate’ of the times,” Stevens’s invocation of the pas-
toral, its “summer” respites and holiday disorder, enables him to recall the
rhetoric of soldierly masculinity while interrogating its relation to images
of locality and community.37 The result is a commentary upon the proper
poetic body and site of aesthetic production. The muscular (and decidedly
fleshly) body in question is typical of the bodies of Stevens’s later work,
which, like their earlier counterparts in “Bantams in Pine-Woods,” tend to
give way to more disorderly models. At first, however, the hero “seems”
To stand taller than a person stands, has

A wider brow, large and less human
Eyes and bruted ears: the man-like body

Of a primitive. He walks with a defter
And lither stride. His arms are heavy
And his breast is greatness. All his speeches
Are prodigies in longer phrases.
His thoughts begotten at clear sources,
Apparently in air, fall from him
Like chantering from an abundant
Poet, as if he thought gladly, being
Compelled thereto by an innate music. (Collected, 277)
Uncannily like the “virile poet” he would describe a year later, this figure is
decidedly both “masculine” and a poet, but he is also more a prophet than
a pragmatist, a seer with access to “clear sources”—unlike the empirical
rationalist of the 1943 essay. Indeed, this figure seems a version of the anti-
naturalist fascist Dewey railed against, or a foundationalist and mystic like
the terrifying Captain of the “The Masculine,” whose apocalyptic vision of
male aggression and egotism taken to its illogical conclusion leads to “an
end without rhetoric” in “Life on a Battleship” (1939).38 In “Examination,”
though, the hero’s strict creed is quickly belied by the “profane parade”
Stevens imagines in stanza XI:
But a profane parade, the basso

Preludes a-rub, a-rub-rub, for him that
Led the emperor astray, the tom trumpets
Curling round the steeple and the people,
The elephants of sound, the tigers
In trombones roaring for the children,
Young boys resembling pastry, hip-hip,
Young men as vegetables, hip-hip,
Home and fields give praise, hurrah, hip,
Flesh on the bones. The skeleton throwing
His crust away eats of this meat, drinks
Of this tabernacle, this communion,
Sleeps in the sun no thing recalling. (Collected, 278)
In this scene of chaos, excess, and fertility, the hero’s conditional existence
is simultaneously made flesh and dispelled in a whirlwind of merrymaking:
“the basso / Preludes a-rub, a-rub-rub” and “the elephants of sound, the
tigers / In trombones” are “roaring for the children.” The very “sounds” so
crucial to poetry are characterized as “elephants,” and even the onomatopoeic
terms of the musical instruments suggest flesh pressed against flesh: “a-rub-
rub.” The people of the town are depicted as a nicely prepared meal and a
parody of mechanized overproduction: “Young boys resembling pastry, hip-
hip / Young men as vegetables, hip-hip,” while the very “home and . . . fields
give praise.” It is a time of “Eternal morning” and “Flesh on the bones,” as
even the “skeleton” “eats of this meat, drinks / Of this tabernacle, this com-
munion.” Rather like the “fat men and women in the woods, drinking beer
and singing Hi-li Hi-lo,” these ordinary people are ostensibly on parade to
celebrate the “hero” himself, but the celebration of an idea quickly dissipates
into a scene of revelry and amnesia: “no thing recalling.”
Stevens concludes the poem in stanza XVI by announcing that “Each
false thing ends,” appearing to comment on the inevitable lapse of such
“false” summer scenes into “veritable” autumn (Collected, 280). Yet, after
linking autumn to the “familiar Man” and summer to the “hero,” then
seeming to dispel the latter (both the imagined muscular ideal and the ordi-
nary people who sloppily celebrated his existence), the speaker next ques-
tions the privileging of the newly invoked “familiar” or “veritable Man.”
Are autumn and its man really “true,” or are they merely apparently true,
or “veritable”? A pragmatic perspective insists that the dialectic the poet has
inherited and replicates here be put to an “examination” itself. Not surpris-
ingly, the poem ends with a compulsive return to an image of “Summer,”
this time as a vaguely feminized, perhaps “false” creature: “jangling the
savagest diamonds and / Dressed in its azure-doubled crimsons,” so that
it “May truly bear its heroic fortunes / For the large, the solitary figure”
(Collected, 280–281). Like Chief Iffucan, the season is an enigmatic, almost
preposterous, exotic entity, overly elaborate in dress, a walking spectacle of
the culture of consumption. Yet, also like Iffucan, this exoticized, dandyish,
feminized “it” has a certain gravity and expansiveness—even pathos—as
it merges rhetorically with the other entity of the concluding lines. This
alternative entity is suggested when the speaker refers to “its azure-doubled
crimsons” and “its heroic fortunes,” but no clear, verifiable referent for “it”
emerges from rhetoric. “It” seems to invoke both the feminine “Summer”
and the mysterious “large, solitary figure” that haunts the final lines of the
poem, the fat man eerily incarnate. In the final lines the speaker weighs his
appreciation for what may seem “false” with what has not yet been proven
“true,” assessing actual and “veritable” seasons and men, leaving the reader
with a vague presence, stark against the blankness of the page. Stripped of
any identifying musculature, the individual seems suddenly ordinary, even
“familiar,” himself, a hulking presence in the midst of an abstract revelry
that evokes both the masculine and feminine, summer itself and its stranger,
imagined reflection.
This oddly feminine yet “large” man, haunting yet comforting, can be
traced back through previous poems and into later ones as well. This figure
constantly emerges as the best alternative to superficially ideal or “represen-
tative” men, suggesting the need for a poetic figure whose “manhood” is
only enhanced by its openness to a more fluid, implicitly feminized, world.
In the years previous to his reflections on the wartime “hero,” in the midst
of the Depression, Stevens addressed the topic of the poetic, representative
man in “Owl’s Clover,” the 1936 text in which the poet most directly takes
up the question of the chaotic urban masses and their relation to the poet. In
the first sections of the poem, Stevens offers an almost bewildering variety of
model men. The ideal is now no longer the “buckskin” pioneer, but possibly
the “sculptor” whose work speaks to the masses on “summer Sundays in the
park,” or perhaps the “subman” (OP, 75–101).39 The last section, “Sombre
Figuration,” presents the “subman” as a possible re-creator of a despoiled
world depicted in section two of the poem (“Mr. Burnshaw and the Statue”)
as largely “waste,” albeit both a “hopeless waste of the past” and a “hope-
ful waste to come,” its light revealing “faint, portentous, lustres . . . of what
will once more to rise rose” (Opus, 81).40 The “subman” “dwells below,”
“in less / Than body and in less than mind, ogre, / Inhabitant, in less than
shape, of shapes / That are dissembled in vague memory / Yet still retain
resemblances, remain / Remembrances” (Opus, 97). The “subman,” while
not quite human, is the original “native” of the imagination, but it is unclear
to what extent he is a “native” of the earth itself. For even the true “native,”
“The man . . . for whom / The pheasant in a field was pheasant, field,” now
“[l]ives in a fluid, not on solid rock,” like all men in a pragmatic, mod-
ern age (Opus, 97). Only in a distant, mythic past might the “man and
the man below” have been “reconciled”; presently neither model is quite
adequate for the poetic task to which the speaker would set them. The “sub-
man” dispensed with, the “sculptor” reappears, but his vision is potentially
manifested in a grotesque statue of muscular marble: “a ring of heads and
haunches, torn / From size, backs larger than the eye, not flesh / In marble,
but marble massive as the thrust / Of that which is not seen and cannot be”
(Opus, 100). A parody of classical representations of youthful, virile male
bodies, this statue “scaled to space” would be a monument to an idea that
never should be given a physical form. Set in a “true perspective,” the statue
is proper only to “hum-drum space;” the stone embodiment of the people’s
hero a ghastly failure (Opus, 100).
In place of these would-be artists and creators, a familiar presence
emerges, but he is initially presented in terms that have caused many crit-
ics to question his efficacy. In the final lines of the last stanza of “Sombre
Figuration,” Stevens imagines a figure he terms “Jocundus.” The opposite
of the “black-blooded scholar,” “Jocundus” is a “medium man among other

medium men,” an apparently wasteful creature who lives “for the gau-
dium of being,” “indifferent to the poet’s hum.” He exists in a time that
at first seems dystopic, “Without imagination, without past / And without
future”—yet in this state “Night and the imagination [are] one” (Opus, 101).
The speaker’s tone is a nuanced manifestation of the alternatives presented,
at once speculative and passionate, precise and rhetorically elusive as the
speaker evaluates the attraction of this merry, comedic figure who is both
suggestively ordinary and the namesake of an obscure Roman-era martyr.
Reappearing in “The Glass of Water” (1942), “fat Jocundus” is a central
rather than marginal figure in these texts, but his status with respect to
the poet’s cultural and ideological project is far from agreed upon. While
Milton Bates suggests that Jocundus is the antipoet, wholly “indifferent to
the poet’s hum,” Joseph Riddel describes Jocundus as an antiquated poet, a
“seeker after the center, not the surface” unlike “The Glass of Water’s” more
successful maker of forms, the “lion” of “light” (Bates, 214; Riddel, 155).
What “fat Jocundus” represents most suggestively in the “The Glass of
Water,” however, is the poet as metaphysician, now given shape in a decid-
edly “portly” body rather than a muscular one. He appears in the midst of a
poem about abstraction, a Falstaffian anchor to a discourse upon the nature
of true being:
The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems

Crash in the mind—But, fat Jocundus, worrying
About what stands here in the center, not the glass,
But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,
It is a state, this spring among the politicians
Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,
One would have still to discover. Among the dogs
And dung,
One would continue to contend with one’s ideas. (Collected, 197–198)
While others are interested in forms for their own sake, Jocundus is caught
up in “worrying / About what stands here in the center, not the glass,” that
particular, “plastic” object or state. He seeks ideas about objects rather than
the objects themselves, yet he is also Stevens’s figure for the common man,
the ordinary made manifest. Odder still, within the logic of the sentence,
Jocundus himself is frozen in time, without a verb to mobilize him, or else
turned into an “it,” but modified by the phrase: “It is a state, this spring
among the politicians / Playing cards.” As such, Jocundus is transformed
from what he was into a joker himself, a trickster face card in Stevens’s
rhetorical gaming, an idea as much as a person. He can be understood as

kin to the ambiguous “it” of “Examination of the Hero,” evoking a world of
goods and services. Alternatively, he is suggestive of the portly and untrust-
worthy “politicians,” not unlike Taft, who deal routinely in illusory percep-
tions of the self: for example, passing themselves off as locals or insiders
when they are in fact a privileged elite. In a last sleight of hand, Jocundus
could also be understood as associated with the “village of the indigenes” or
natives, to which the poem abruptly transfers us. A realm associated with the
previous incarnations of the “fat” Jocundus, it is a site of “dogs and dung”
but also where one “would continue to contend with one’s ideas.” Even in
the most “natural” and “original” of locations, the true poet must examine
both the ordinary and the realm beyond, sifting through his experiences
in search of those fragile “truths” and “fictions” that provide temporary
solace. As such, Jocundus is the poet heartily embodied as the elusive and
disorderly “fat” figure, a trope for the comedic, role-playing imaginer and
source of poetic language. This elaboration upon the Jocundus of “Sombre
Figuration” allows the reader to see the connections between a figure for
whom “night and imagination” are “one,” and the poet who seeks a deep, if
domestic order in dreams and “[his] ideas,” whether at home in the “village”
or among “politicians.”
In a series of shorter poems such as “Asides on the Oboe” (1940),
“Jumbo” (1942), and “Large Red Man Reading” (1950), successive ver-
sions of “fat Jocundus” emerge with a certain regularity. Like Jocundus,
these figures absorb and incorporate into themselves elements of the mass
culture and population that surround them, whether in the form of a femi-
nized spectacle or quasiracial caricatures. In “Asides on the Oboe,” the
speaker proposes a man who is at once fiction and the originator of fic-
tions: “the impossible possible philosopher’s man” (Collected, 250). He is
“the man who has had the time to think enough, / The central man, the
human globe, responsive / As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass, /
Who in a million diamonds sums us up” (Collected, 250). He is a being who
reflects the self, is one’s reflection, and is also a “globe” that absorbs and
contains the world, including the self. He is both exceedingly ordinary, and
“impossible,” the imagined “rational man” of the economist, or the ideal
“pragmatist” and citizen who sees, reflects upon, and responds to his world.
Also, like the spectacular, exotic Iffucan, he is the quintessential object of
the subject, a “mirror” and a “million diamonds,” deceptively reportorial
or dazzlingly distortive. In a world of fictions, his artifice is nearly indis-
tinguishable from reality and even an improvement upon it: “in his poems
we find peace.” Even in wartime, he persists in his task, he “suffer[s]” as do
“we,” and in the wake of tragedy “we and the diamond globe at last were
one.” He is a “glass man” not unlike Emerson’s “transparent eyeball,” the

medium by which the world becomes the poem of its possibilities. Not
“impossible” at all, he is the necessary transmitter and mediator of our
“mythologies of self.”
In “Jumbo,” Stevens explicitly invokes a comic, popular term for “fat”
that contrasts with the fragile but enduring “globe” of the “philosopher’s
man.” A relatively recent coinage for “fat,” derived from the Gullah for
“elephant” and evocative of the “hooing” Iffucan as well as the riotous
crowds with their circus animals and “trombones,” “Jumbo” opens up a
world of rhetorical possibilities for the poet. More specifically, in adopt-
ing an implicitly African-American version of the “fat” man, Stevens is
able to appropriate a racialized rhetorical and physical power for himself,
while obscuring the distinctions between self and other that such racialized
caricatures putatively reinforce. The effect of this gesture is to acknowledge
the presence of racial otherness as desirable only insofar as it is coloniz-
able, the speaker denying it any viability or voice beyond his own buf-
foonish impersonation. The first stanza suggests a creature breaking out
of a contained space that seems simultaneously natural and artificial, a
native environment and a cage: “the tree were plucked like iron bars /
And jumbo, the loud general-large / Singsonged and singsonged, wildly
free” (Collected, 269). The tone is gleeful and playful, as Stevens explicitly
links exotic, animalistic “jumbo” to his former poetic self, Crispin, mock
inquiring: “Who was the musician, fatly soft / And wildly free, whose claw-
ing thumb / Clawed on the ear these consonants?” (Collected, 269). The
distinctive “C” sounds—recalling Stevens’s poem “The Comedian as the
Letter ‘C’ ”—hint that the true presence here is Stevens himself, the “trans-
former” himself, “himself transformed,” whose “single being, single form /
Were their resemblances to ours.” Self-reflective and transforming, a capa-
cious mirror for the audience he resembles and reassembles, he is also our
comforting “companion in nothingness.” “Loud, general, large, fat, soft,”
from certain perspectives he might seem unattractive and ordinary, but
this “secondary man” is also denoted “wild and free.” A Picasso-esque “blue
painter,” a Lincoln-esque “hill scholar,” he is the ideal combination of art-
ist, intellectual, and politician. At the same time, he is the “bad-bespoken
lacker, / Ancestor of Narcissus,” one who can’t speak well at times, who
craves his own beauty as reflected in the natural world (Collected, 269). He
senses an internal “lack” that drives him to love these natural mirrors—and
it may be precisely this porous sense of self that is the root of his powers. An
amalgamation of men both black and white, he is the forger of an almost
composite self, and as such is both master of and subject to his fluctuat-
ing environment. Less ominously, he is “prince of the secondary men” and
hence like the “subman,” a sort of collective unconscious for humanity. But
he is also more than that, an “imager” who is resolutely embodied, a crea-
ture of this world as well as the imagination.
As such, Jumbo is not unlike the “Large Red Man Reading,” or, the
“large red man” of “Reading,” Pennsylvania. This presence is evoked in
terms both intellectually abstract and emotionally precise, drawing on the
pragmatic potential of the “human globe” while suggestive of “Jumbo’s”
racialized subjectivity. It is he who “sat there reading, aloud” the “poem
of life” that draws the “ghosts” back to earth, longing for their solid bod-
ies. The speaker recounts: “They were those that would have wept to step
barefoot into reality,” and “cried out to feel it again, have run fingers
over leaves / And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was
ugly / And laughed” (Collected, 423). Listening to the “vatic lines,” “the
literal characters” of “poesis,” they assume the reality of which the large
man reads. “In those thin, those spended hearts” and in “those ears” the
lines “took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are / And
spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked” (Collected,
424). Here the “imager” offers these ghosts what they had “lacked,” now
well-bespoken he grants and gives, creating a fiction of a reality they are
unable to experience directly. In the world of the poem, the “night” and
“imagination” are again “one,” the ghosts gain back their human forms,
and “lack” is replaced by “what will suffice.” The poet proffers sustenance
in the form of bodies, emotions, and implicitly the ability to articulate
desire. His “largeness” and “red” flush, moreover, are not incidental to
these gifts. His expanded human capacity as both the complex “reader”
and the simpler resident of “Reading,” as both the urbanite acquainted
with other colors of men as well as the rural white insider, enables him to
recall these presences, perhaps the ancestors he so carefully inscribed into
his genealogy. The “red” people who his predecessors displaced, however,
are not thus implicitly enfranchised, but serve instead as mystical medi-
ums for their own colonizers. This exclusive gesture, while not terribly
surprising, casts a slight pall as the poet offers a virtual “Thanksgiving”
to his extended family: in place of their “spended” hearts he offers a cor-
nucopia of experience, a feast for his extended—though not the whole
human—family.
These presences return in their most important form in “Credences of
Summer” (1947), a homage to Reading and the poet’s at times ambiva-
lent memories of his childhood there. Read in the context of poems in
which “fat,” “summer,” and bodily experiences are celebrated, it can bet-
ter be understood as a definitive statement upon the significance of the
poet’s “native” land. While some critics have suggested that “Credences”
is a meditation upon the limits of pastoral—and as such inferior to its

counterpart, “The Auroras of Autumn”—such readings neglect the poem’s
pragmatic tendency to reevaluate and reimagine the parameters of the
poet’s creative locus.41 Regarded in the context of poems and letters that
offer similar visions of the poet’s conflicted relation to the physical world,
the various pleasures of the poem are more easily apparent, and Stevens’s
own appreciation for it elucidated.42 This poem in turn illuminates one of
Stevens’s most memorable poems, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” and
the “fat girl” around which it coalesces. The daughter of “fat Jocundus”
and his bride from Reading, both a product of their worldview and her own
person, she remains one of Stevens’s most poignant creations and in some
sense most fully embodies the radical potential of “fat” to recenter and
creatively undermine inherited “orders.”
“Credences” begins with the poet describing a world of “midsummer”
that is at once the very essence of the real and the point from which
imagination springs: “This is the last day of a certain year / Beyond which
there is nothing left of time. It comes to this and the imagination’s life.”
The speaker breathes life into an intimate, loving scene of “father stand-
ing round, / These mothers touching, speaking, being near, / These lov-
ers waiting in the soft dry grass” (Collected, 372). Immersed in the world
he once was “native” to, the speaker forestalls its examination and his
inevitable shift into the position of “outsider”: “Postpone the anatomy of
summer, as / The physical pine, the metaphysical pine” (Collected, 373).
Here the parodic “pine-woods” of Harmonium have turned back into
themselves, the rhetorical figures of “cocks” and “bantams” exchanged
for their simpler, less aggressive forefathers. Such a world has limits, how-
ever; as “the fertile thing that can attain no more,” it may also forestall
the production of poetry itself. Trapped in a world of reminiscence, the
speaker struggles halfheartedly to move from “green’s green apogee” to a
site more suited to the poet’s “clairvoyant eye” (Collected, 373–374). But
here the “secondary sounds” that the “secondary man” might pick up
upon are absent; present only are the “last sounds,” and a hollow “good”
that is accepted simply because it is “what is.” This is a universe in which
a “rock” appears as “truth,” and a “youth, the vital son, the heroic power”
may emerge in tandem with the villagers who unthinkingly believe in
him (Collected, 374).
This world with its healthy, if thoughtless inhabitants at first appears
to be a world stripped of desire: “They sang desiring an object that was
near, / In face of which desire no longer moved” (Collected, 376). In suc-
ceeding lines, however, the fruitfulness of this world is suddenly heralded,
as the tone shifts again and the uses of such sites are affirmed. Trumpets,
those triumphal noisemakers, joyfully proclaim “what is possible,” “the vis-

ible announced.” This trumpet “supposes that / A mind exists, aware of
division,” presumably the complete mind of the poet, “grown venerable in
the unreal” (Collected, 376). The poet is figured as a “cock bright,” which is
exhorted to “[f]ly low . . . and stop on a bean pole” (Collected, 377). Suddenly,
the natural world he hovers over takes on a new vitality as this “soft, civil
bird” witnesses the “decay” of one “complex,” a process that in turn gives
rise to “another complex of emotions, not / So soft, so civil.” The “cock”
then will “make a sound, / Which is not part of the listener’s own sense,”
and perhaps not even a word yet, but it is something new and, like the poem
of the “impossible possible philosopher’s man,” “responsive.” Sharing a key
consonant with “Crispin” and echoing previous Stevensian figures for the
expansive and expanding poet, the “cock” signals the return of the poet to
this landscape as both native son and lofty, if slightly absurd (perched on his
“bean-pole”) observer .
These sounds and creative gestures immediately prefigure the poem’s
conclusion in section X, in which the whole world of “midsummer” has
become an artificial “summer play,” its people “characters / Of an inhu-
man author” (Collected, 377). The world of the ordinary and everyday,
what had seemed a self- enclosed world without room for rhetoric or
desires, has given way to its mirror opposite. Within the economy of the
poem, this seemingly fixed and suffocating realm has become the impe-
tus for poetry after all. In this sense, the poem itself has come to serve as a
container for the real and imagined in one, as the colorful “mottled mood
of summer’s whole” is dreamed up before the reader’s eyes. This emphasis
on sight and passive observance gives way to an even more auspicious
emphasis on “speaking” in the final stanza, as the “characters” take on a
life of their own, artifice suddenly turning back into the real as if both
were part of a plastic, liquid continuum. “[T]he characters speak because
they want / To speak, the fat roseate characters,” but their world is not the
stifled “midsummer” of the early sections of the poem. Rather than bliss-
ful, they are only “free, for a moment, from malice and sudden cry,” the
“complete[ness]” of their scene a temporary state. Although they “speak,”
they give voice to “their parts as in a youthful happiness” [italics mine]:
happiness and youth, it is suggested, are things of the past (Collected,
378). As autumn approaches, loss and desire take the place of surfeit,
but imagination could not have been reborn without its temporary idyll.
Despite the speaker’s ambivalence regarding the world these “fat” “roseate
characters” inhabit, he figures it here as a necessary landscape to which
the poet—as “soft” or “not / so soft civil bird”—may return in the appro-
priate season.
The “Fat Girl” May Yet Sing

Even before “Credences of Summer,” “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”
(1942) permitted Stevens to reorder and reimagine the poet’s relation to
physical and aesthetic worlds, prefiguring the ultimate and necessary emer-
gence of a complementary “disorder”—his truest “angel.” Just as late sum-
mer, with its intimations of autumn, is the site of poetic production, so is
the “fatness” associated with its inhabitants a sign of stasis shifting toward
alteration, the native fading into the outsider, the masculine bleeding into
the feminine. All are subtle variations that provoke the speaker’s pained
exclamations at the world’s beauty, which is a function of precisely such
change. While predating “Credences” as well as “The Figure of the Poet as
Virile Youth,” “Notes” contains Stevens’s most memorable attempt to resolve
his own anxieties about “fat” and its counterpart in the “hero,” both of
whom are imagined as the poet’s heirs. As if anticipating the ambivalence
in his depiction of William James and the virile youth, rather than begin-
ning with the hero and disrupting his presence with a “fat” or “large” pres-
ence, here the speaker initially ends the poem with a wholly feminized “fat.”
The result is a tender meditation on her presence in which he acknowledges
her as both part of yet foreign to his own self. Months afterward, however,
Stevens added an additional last section of the poem in which he turns half-
heartedly to the soldier as his new counterpart and ideal reader. The relative
success and failures of these two endings to the poem ultimately emphasize
the singular importance of “fat” to Stevens’s entire corpus. Once it is gone,
so too are the “fictions” that Stevens had always implicitly acknowledged
to be the realm of the feminine and the night; without their music the only
sound is a stale rattling of sabers.
Before the poem moves towards this climax and anticlimax, Stevens pres-
ents a series of deceptively programmatic descriptions of the poet and the
origins of poetry. He first instructs a young “ephebe” to “become an igno-
rant man again,” to approach the “difficulty of what it is to be” without the
too-bright rhetoric of the “sun” that often obscures rather than illuminating
experience (Collected, 380). Rejecting the all-encompassing light of a singu-
lar, totalizing philosophy, such a youth should approach the world with a
fresh perspective, pragmatically ready to weigh truth in light of his experi-
ence. The speaker celebrates the poet who “refreshes life so that we share,
/ For a moment, the first idea,” the poet who hears the “hoobla-hoobla-
hoobla-how,” of the exotic “Arabian” or the curiously foreign “hoobla-hoo”
of the more common “wood-dove” (Collected, 383). These voices of the
“first idea,” suggestive of pure “otherness” and Romantic attempts to resolve
the self’s relation to the “other” in transcendental “chant[ing],” are part of
same essence as the “howls” and “hoo” of what Stevens termed elsewhere
the “obese machine” of the ocean, its fluidity a reminder of life’s “strange
relation” to art (Poems, 382–383). The interconnection of these elements
is reinforced in the person of “major man” as “MacCullough,” an appar-
ently ordinary individual who, influenced by the movements of the sea, may
absorb its tendency to break down forms, setting “language” itself at “ease”
(Collected, 386–387). The speaker is careful to note that the poet is not a
divine or transcendent figure but a human seeker, who “goes from the poet’s
gibberish to / The gibberish of the vulgate and back again.” “He tried by
peculiar speech to speak / The peculiar potency of the general, / To com-
pound the imagination’s Latin with / The lingua franca et jocundissima”
(Collected, 397). Not surprisingly, in his plays upon language both common
and refined, the poet ends up alluding to “fat Jocundus” and his ilk, shortly
to be embodied in the poem’s culminating image.
The “fat girl” spins into the orbit of the poem as it concludes, constitut-
ing, with the “soldier” of the last section, one of the speaker’s two most
important poetic and possibly real legacies. One of the few definitively
“fat” female entities in Stevens’s poetics, this girl is obviously the child of
her father—“Chief Iffucan,” “fat Jocundus,” the “transformer” himself.43
Stevens, the father of an only girl, could hardly have separated the “feeling”
here from the “fiction that results from feeling,” which is precisely the point
of this section. Like the previous “fat” figures, she is full of promise: “my
summer, my night” (Collected, 406). Yet she is also immature, on the brink
of a distinctly pastoral alteration: found “in difference,” “a change not quite
completed.” The speaker addresses her lovingly, recognizing her as both self
and not self: “you are familiar yet an aberration.” He attempts to remain
merely “civil” in his speech towards her, but at the same time he is anxious
to “name you flatly, waste no words.” The futility of this gesture, however,
is implied in the rush of words that follow, as the speaker begins finally to
recognize the fully realized, feminine, almost foreign nature of this new self.
She is radically real and present. The poet cannot help but dwell upon her
domestic, everyday forms, how she appears when “strong or tired, / Bent
over work, anxious, content, alone.” While obviously fond of her, the poet
is also bemused by her effect upon him: she is “the irrational / Distortion,
however fragrant, however dear” (Collected, 406).
The puzzle of her powers, though, turns out to be the key to his—and
possibly one day her—poetics: “That’s it,” he realizes, “the fiction that results
from feeling” is proof that “the irrational is rational,” the world and imagi-
nation, female and male, are one. He imagines how “we” will one day hear
this at the Sorbonne, father and daughter returning home from the “lec-
ture” at “twilight.” The moment as imagined is tender and surreal. In that
impossible possible moment, the poet and father, “flicked by feeling,” will
“call [her] by name, my green, my fluent mundo.” But in the very moment of
naming, of attempting to immortalize the moment and person in the poem
and in time, the idyll turns cold and unreal. The girl suddenly transmogri-
fies into another realm entirely, perhaps into the workings of a pocket watch,
or into the translucence of a lyric: “You will have stopped revolving except
in crystal,” she is told. The poem ends abruptly on a note of beauty and sup-
pressed anguish, as the poet anticipates not only the loss of his child and his
own body to time, but also the evaporation of an imagined Paris in which
love is unchanging and poetry radically alive.
Written during World War II, the poem both is an elegy for a Europe
Stevens was never to know and for the passing childhood of his daughter.
Shortly after this poem was written, Holly moved out of the direct sphere of
his influence, resisting his requests that she return to college at Vassar and
asserting a selfhood that could not be congruent with Stevens’s own. Leaving
school to commit herself to the work for the war effort and soon marrying
a man Stevens disliked, she exemplified a headstrong femininity her father
both admired and sought to control.44 The experience must have been at
once painful and illuminating for this distant yet generous father. Even as
he anticipates such a loss, however, it is encoded in terms that imply her
underlying, affirming continuance: in a well-known letter, Stevens defines
the “fat girl” as “the earth” or “globe” itself—her passing therefore may be
only rhetorical, a fiction that evolves with the poet’s desires.45 Originally, the
poem ended with these evocative lines.
In the final section, likely added years later, the poet attempts to affirm
his legacy to his spiritual “sons” rather than his daughter, those boys who
were enduring an equally decisive coming of age during this time. Milton
Bates has recently read this section of the poem as Stevens’s affirmation of
the soldier’s likeness to himself in his rejection of “determinist” and “his-
toricist” accounts of history.46 Reading these lines, however, I find the shift
to these exhortations incomplete and unconvincing. The poet tries to trans-
form himself from the Virgilian shepherd “underneath / A tree” into the
Virgil of the Aeneid, chanting of “war.” The speaker tries to affirm that
his “war” “depends on yours,” the violence and ethical demands of the war
infusing his poetry, which in turn helps to form the soldier: “The soldier is
poor without the poet’s lines” (Collected, 407). The speaker tries to imagine
how “simply the fictive hero becomes the real,” transformed by the “proper
words” and “faithful speech” that see him through death or on to the next
battle (Collected, 408). In this context the poet is still a healthful figure,
anxious to share the poetry that has been the stuff of life for him, but equally
aware that “proper words” can lead a soldier on to death. He offers a vision
of the world in which complex and simple, mind and nature, attempt a
fusion, but the result instead is a tension, a sense that the poet and soldier
are not one and may even be antagonistic, their “wars” having very different
ends, the violence of war drowning out even the most “faithful speech” in
its honor. The essential power of Stevens’s poetry can even be said to be less
in evidence in this section, his best “fiction” (or is it?) that of the “fat girl,”
despite his surface reluctance to acknowledge this truer heir.
Despite himself, Stevens consistently affirms a democratic, pluralistic
universe of plenty and abundance, or at least adequate sustenance. While
he doubts the efficacy of the “fat,” feminized world of “midsummer,” he
consistently returns to it as a site in which the “possible” has its roots. “Fat
Jocundus” embodies both the end of desire and its eternal generation, bring-
ing together “night” and the “imagination” in a fluid state of “one[ness]”
that reflects a truer, underlying order that is also a kind of disorder. The
contradiction of Stevens’s fascination with order and “man’s passionate dis-
order” is ultimately this: that they themselves are one, the universe simply
the fluidity of experience itself, subject to shaping and transformation as the
poet speaks. The “gibberish of the poet” and of the “vulgate” are not opposed
but variations on a tune to be piped on the “Arcadian flute” that is also a
“metropolitan corn-pipe.” At an especially difficult time in his country’s
history as well as in his own life and career, Stevens constantly called upon
these “fat” presences, these variations on the self, to belie the potential fas-
cism of the virile youth, tempering his intellect with pragmatic experience in
the world and the companionship of a sister-poet who is both other and part
of him. Disruptive to the end, “fat” progresses from a trope for the comic
self to a metaphor for the self’s limited but fertile origins, to a sign for the
bodies of the self’s physical and aesthetic heirs. Expressing both satisfaction
and dissatisfaction with the self, these tropes for the body also allow Stevens
to protest the predominance of an aggressive and highly performative mas-
culinity that often had little to do with an individual’s intellectual or moral
fiber. A reminder of his ethnic roots and an idealized American society, as
well as an at times clumsy harbinger of a nation that might admit greater
gender equality, Stevens’s fat body served as a metaphor for a sensibility both
traditional and pragmatic. Emblematic of the “hopeful waste” Stevens once
saw in the world, his aesthetic of “fat” serves as a comedic yet wise response
to a world that could be both banal and unbearably tragic.
Questioning mainstream masculinity as a true measure of the ethical
self, Stevens’s wartime poetics prefigured a cold war poetics in which pas-
toral continued to be a useful mode through which to propose alternative
male bodies and subjectivities. Declining to identify with the “soldier” and
his postwar variants, John Ashbery embraced the legacy of Stevens, Frost,
and Williams as he constructed pastorals figuring alternative masculinities

as normative aspects of the self. Coming of age directly after World War II,
Ashbery self-consciously constructs a poetic subject that embraces not only
homosexuality but also aspects of the feminine and mass culture. Far from
discontinuous with Stevens’s “modernism,” Ashbery’s “postmodern” pasto-
ralism of “mixed feelings” echoes and augments Stevens’s uneasy acceptance
of “Jumbo” and the “fat girl,” similarly attuned to the possibilities of selves
and a poetics that defies a narrow “realism” in favor of what Ashbery once
termed Stevens’s “gorgeous aberrations.”47 In a 1964 review of an art show
in Paris, Ashbery once referred to a piece in terms of Stevens’s “Anecdote
of a Jar,” noting: “it organizes its ‘slovenly’ environment, including you the
viewer, emptying it of meaning and at the same time hinting at another
kind of meaning, beyond appearances.”48 This description of such “strange”
“experiment[s]” can also be understood to express a point of confluence
between Ashbery and Stevens, insofar as both produce poetry that osten-
sibly “organizes” what is disordered or “slovenly” in the environment and
audience. In each case, despite highly polished surfaces, the poets allude to
half-hidden means of remaking the self, encouraging the reader to redis-
cover the layered, mirroring realities that constitute experience and connect
it to the imagination.
CHAPTER 5
“The Mooring of Starting Out”: John

Ashbery’s Pastoral Origins
T
he third poem in John Ashbery’s first volume of poetry, Some Trees
(1956), is entitled “Eclogue.” Rather than depicting a pleasing land-
scape or leisurely afternoon as its classical title suggests, however, the
poem consists of a hostile dialogue between “Cuddie” and “Colin,” evidently
father and son. In antiquated diction, “Cuddie” threatens “Colin” with a
kind of community violence: “peons” who “rant in a light fume” as they
gather at the “water’s edge.”1 Colin replies with an equally cryptic rejection
of his father and an appeal that he be planted “far in my mother’s image / To
do cold work of books and stones,” invoking a maternal, avenging angel who
would allow him to “depart unhurt.” The poem then ends abruptly, read-
ing much like notes for an unperformed play. Haunting yet comic, deeply
personal but not without a note of the parodic, “Eclogue” warns readers
away rather than inviting them in to an aesthetic idyll. Like other pastorals
by Ashbery, “Eclogue” has a vexed and not especially nostalgic relationship
to the literary, social, and political past. Consistent with other American
pastorals of the twentieth century, it suggests a conflict over standards of
masculinity as well as potential violence at the margins of a community. Yet
the scene and dialogue are utterly surreal; if meant to be taken as socially or
culturally representative they do not read as such in any conventional way.
Instead, the poem demands to be read on entirely new grounds, as Ashbery
reimagines the pastoral mode in order to forge a new American lyric subject
and convey a postwar American reality.
While in keeping with the pastoral legacy of Frost, Williams, and
Stevens, Ashbery’s cold war pastorals present an increasingly complex social
universe. A world in which the lines between publicity and privacy became
increasingly blurred while myths concerning manhood and national secu-
rity were simultaneously reinforced and cagily revamped, cold war America
embraced a suggestively pastoral rhetoric of “new frontiers” and private “gar-
dens.” In poems such as “Eclogue,” Ashbery’s surreal responses to the exclu-
sive and policing function of these tropes during this period unsettle the
newly coalescing parameters of the ideal male subject and his community,
publicizing the gradual emergence of a marginal male subjectivity whose
compulsion toward order is matched only by his drive toward play, disor-
der, and, ultimately, love. The result is a pastoral poetics that affirms the
genre’s traditional emphasis upon distinguishing the self and other, complex
and simple person, poet and “peon,” while suggesting junctures at which
such roles bleed into each other, ultimately creating fissures in the ideologi-
cal construction of the self and nation. Like the socially deviant, sexually
suggestive, and ambiguously gendered tropes of the “tramp,” the “beautiful
thing” as “excrement,” and the “fat man,” the “pervert” of Ashbery’s poet-
ics is a figure whose desires at once evoke the homosexuality proper to the
social universe of Virgil’s “Eclogues” and expose American pastoral’s con-
tinuing function in calibrating the nature of the ethical self and just society.
Eschewing private shame for a semipublic performance of gay subjectivity,
Ashbery invokes the pastoral mode in order to dismantle and reconstitute
the parameters of the ideal man and representative speaker, in the process
forging a discursive poetics whose very sinuousness erotically belies its con-
current instinct toward order and form.
The chapter begins by examining the cold war ideology that framed
Ashbery’s coming of age as a poet, including the conflicting models of mas-
culinity he encountered as a young man. Ashbery’s resulting turn toward
surrealistic techniques emerges as a means of countering the ideological
emphasis on “realism” during the period, and parallels his encounters with
male intellectual role models—including veterans of World War II—whose
sense of self and sexuality exceeded such “containment narratives.”
Pragmatically Deweyan in its critique of narrow conceptions of subjectiv-
ity, aesthetics, and community, Ashbery’s poetics suggests an alternative
vision of reality and experience in an era in which pragmatism itself was
largely dismissed and ignored. Self-consciously refashioning an “alternative
subjectivity” for the poet, Ashbery’s poems can be understood in terms of a
contemporary discourse of “masochism” and its relation to gay identity as it
coalesced from the 1950s through the 1970s. With this framework in mind,
I turn to Ashbery’s first and fourth volumes—Some Trees (1956) and The
Double Dream of Spring (1970)—in which his investment in pastoral is most
noticeable. Composed as he was initially yet warily establishing himself as a
“The Mooring of Starting Out” ● 125
young poet, the pastorals of Some Trees are evocative of strange yet familiar
rural sites often linked to childhood and threatened by violence. The Double
Dream of Spring, in contrast, is comprised of poems written after Ashbery’s
return to a socially and politically revitalized United States after a 10-year
sojourn in Paris. In this volume, Ashbery posits pastoral idylls as potential
sites of aesthetic, erotic, and personal healing less circumscribed (although
not uninformed) by threats of violence and pain than shot through with
a campy, if at times wistful, playfulness. Collectively, these readings help
to trace a personal and poetic odyssey that, although only marginally vis-
ible to many of Ashbery’s critics, continues the revitalization of a distinctly
American pastoral mode as cultural critique.
Dreams of New Frontiers and the Coldest Warriors

From the 1940s through the 1960s, as John Ashbery came of age, American
culture underwent a period of consensus, limited dissent, and self-censorship
in which the nation’s energies were focused on self-definition and the con-
tinuation (or reinvention) of national myth and tradition. Postwar American
rhetoric was filled with pastoral references to “new frontiers,” a phrase meant
to suggest hope and opportunity as well as the fulfillment of democracy’s
more extravagant promises. But the word “frontiers,” with its nineteenth-
century overtones, also suggests the existence of borders and conflict, the
need for guards and soldiers to maintain and extend the “garden” of a civil
society. As Americans attempted to enact frontier myths of patriarchal
authority, economic independence, and personal virtue within the confines
of the newly prominent and idealized domestic realm (often taking the form
of a suburban “garden” home), their efforts often fell short. Inevitably, as
Elaine Tyler May has discussed, the family itself became an extension of the
larger political culture rather than the site of privacy, individualism, and
retreat.2 The conflict between conceptions of the domestic space as fron-
tier battleground and personal garden foregrounds an analogous and related
debate over the nature of the culture’s heroes or “representative men.” As
Suzanne Clark argues, a mythically pure, “frontier”-oriented masculin-
ity became linked to the production of narratives that would propagate the
official “realism” of cold war ideology.3 The Cold Warrior was a fusion of
John Wayne and Theodore Roosevelt, firm in his resolve against the com-
munist enemy and its allies. Gay men and women were regarded as threats
to national security and the reality of their existence denied and suppressed.
Resistance to such inscriptions of postwar subjectivity was relatively scarce
and covert: the old Left had crumbled, its most ardent spokespeople often
turned into its sharpest critics as they struggled to disavow former affiliations
with radical politics. Artists and intellectuals appeared to turn inward toward
personal, psychoanalytic, religious, and ostensibly apolitical themes, spurn-
ing the naturalist and socially aware narratives of the 1930s and early 1940s.
If the types of dissent associated with radical, pragmatic thinkers such as
John Dewey had not entirely disappeared, they nevertheless took new forms
as the political and cultural landscape shifted.
In this context, the surrealism of a pastoral such as “Eclogue” can be
understood as a pragmatic response to cold war efforts at political, cultural,
and social containment. If, as Alan Nadel notes, such “containment” nar-
ratives entailed the “general acceptance . . . of a relatively small set of narra-
tives by a relatively large portion of the population,” as carefully constructed
“metanarratives” culled “substance” from “waste,” “history” from everyday
events, then Ashbery’s often enigmatic use of pastoral functions to dispel
the hegemony of strictly realist narratives, disrupting the dominance of an
intolerant and contradictory pastoral ideology.4 In order to recuperate what
lay outside of official “realism,” Ashbery turns toward private, uncodified,
“wasted” experiences and moments that supplement and undermine the pri-
vate/public divide, effectively mirroring—and exposing—the ways in which
cold war “frontier” ideology attempted to publicize and scrutinize private
life from the outside in.5 In countering the cold war’s corruption of art into
propaganda, its appropriation of the private sphere for the public, Ashbery
implicitly adopts a pragmatic approach toward his art. According to Dewey,
art’s relation to the ideal democratic community is regenerative rather than
structural: “in the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remak-
ing of the experience of the community” (Art, 81). Undermining the hier-
archical order and fear-induced conformity of cold war America, Ashbery’s
surreal pastorals elude easy categorization, stressing the dynamic ways in
which “the poem, or painting, does not operate in the dimension of correct
descriptive statement but in that of experience itself” (Art, 85). Drawing
upon his own experience while refusing to identify it as such, maintaining
art as a process rather than a destination, Ashbery constructs unlikely idylls
in which “actuality and possibility” are “integrated,” “remaking” American
culture from the perspective of the artist and individual (Art, 297).
Ashbery’s readers immediately recognized—but often misread—the dis-
turbing effect of his antirealist or surrealist technique. In his preface to Some
Trees, W. H. Auden (one of Ashbery’s major early influences) places Ashbery
squarely within a historical, surrealist and implicitly pastoral literary tra-
dition, noting that writers from “Rimbaud down to Mr. Ashbery” seek a
return to a “golden age” of myth and ritual as evoked in the modern world
only by “childhood” and “daydreams.”6 Ashbery’s well-documented interest
in the surrealism of figures such as Joseph Cornell, Giorgio de Chirico, and
Raymond Roussel, however, never suggests that he saw the technique, in the
visual arts or literature, as a means of escape.7 Rather, Ashbery’s perspective
on art and experience more often implies their mutual entanglement. In
a 1967 review of a surrealism show at the Knoedler Gallery in New York,
Ashbery recommends to viewers that one ought to approach the show
not as a collection of lovely antiques from the 1920s, but as the declara-
tion of independence on which our present democracy (“the Republic
of Dreams,” in Louis Aragon’s phrase) is based. The space of dreams—
deep, shallow, open, bent, a point which has no physical dimensions or
a universal breadth—is the space in which we now live. All of the artists
here . . . helped conquer more territory for art. . . . [T]here is no real alter-
native to innovation, and the artist, if he is to survive, cannot leave art
where he found it. Dreamers are insatiable expansionists, and the space
of dreams rapidly becomes overcrowded.8
Rather than distinguish surrealism from politics, Ashbery links the two,
first positing surrealism as the basis for contemporary democracy (in a ges-
ture perhaps as much ironic as patriotic), and then characterizing surrealists
themselves as pioneers, parodying the cold war “expansionists” with their
own “dreams” of world domination. As Ashbery and John Dewey both
understood, the spillover from art and dreams necessarily flows into the
space of the social and political, edging into and eroding fixed conceptions
of reality and order. “The first intimations of wide and large redirections of
desire and purpose are of necessity imaginative,” Dewey writes, stressing the
function of literature especially in eliciting “the possibilities that are inter-
woven with the texture of the actual” (Art, 349, 345).
Like Whitman before him as well as the Confessional poets whose careers
paralleled his own, Ashbery was well aware of the ways in which the distinc-
tive form of lyric had the potential to redefine the parameters of the self as
well as society.9 If, as Auden acknowledges in his introduction to Some Trees,
Ashbery could not help but write knowing that in his age “[m]en really speak
in prose” while only in a past age did “[t]he real man speak[] in poetry,”
then Ashbery’s lyric poetry must also be understood as the manifestation
of an alternative male subjectivity that is at once publicized and private,
aestheticized and politically potent in his work.10 In the wake of a tense rela-
tionship with a father who apparently embodied aspects of the all-American
male, Ashbery turned toward a different series of male role models once he
entered college.11 As a young man in the 1940s and 1950s, Ashbery’s good
friends and Harvard classmates included war veterans Frank O’Hara and
Kenneth Koch, both more literary aesthetes and comedians than models
of stoic virtue and pioneering fortitude. Despite his comfort among such
friends in college and later in New York City, having registered as gay with
the draft board, Ashbery was aware that his sexuality made him a potential
target, recalling that “it was a very dangerous and scary period.”12
Echoing while transforming that sense of fear, the eerie aggressions of
poems such as “Eclogue” invoke “deviant” or “perverse” masculinities that,
according to Kaja Silverman, pose “a tacit challenge not only to conven-
tional male subjectivity, but to the whole of ‘our’ world . . . they call sexual
difference into question, and beyond that, ‘reality’ itself.”13 Silverman’s dis-
cussion of alternative subject formations during the postwar era illuminates
the sexually subversive artistic milieu in which Ashbery found himself in
the late 1940s and early 1950s and whose energies he drew upon to imagine
his pastoral selves.14 In contrast with the overtly masculine, “swashbuck-
ling energy, wide-open spaces and ‘O Pioneers!’ stance of much American
Abstract Expressionism,” which Ashbery found to “ring a trifle hollow,”15
the urban sophisticates who made up Ashbery’s social circle were marked by
their relative acceptance of alternative or experimental sexualities.16 Favoring
friendships both platonic and erotic between men and men as well as men
and women, Frank O’Hara, Jane Freilicher, Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers,
Barbara Guest, John Ashbery, Anne and Fairfield Porter, James Schuyler,
and their acquaintances formed a social and cultural circle around New
York City and its environs that offered an implicitly pragmatic alternative to
restrictive mainstream and art-world assumptions concerning gender, sexu-
ality, and aesthetics.17
Even as they hint at aggression and violence, Ashbery’s pastorals and
early writings are also marked by a strangeness and humor that recall a
“camp” sensibility associated with postwar, gay urban culture. Linking
camp to William Empson’s definition of “urban pastoral,” Susan Sontag
emphasizes how camp juxtaposes “innocence” with urban sophistication,
embracing a “spirit of extravagance” while subtly ridiculing it. Delighting in
consumerism and specularity, as well as artifacts of mass culture considered
vulgar, extreme, overly feminine, and in poor, if sincere, taste, camp is “the
sensibility of failed seriousness, of the theatricalization of experience.” As
such, camp is also the ground where the private (camp sensibility as associ-
ated with gay urban culture) meets the public (in the form of art), Sontag’s
resistance to the political dimensions of camp notwithstanding.18 Ashbery’s
own early attempts at theater are hilarious incarnations of this approach,
drawing on and parodying the gendered clichés of popular film and middle-
brow culture such as westerns and detective thrillers.19 Parading a cast of
Canadian Mounties, scheming Indians, and damsels in distress, parodying
a frontier ethos that was as familiar to his audience as it was ridiculous,
“The Compromise” (1960) ends with the author intruding and addressing
the audience, unable to decide how to make the heroine choose between
two masculine types: “the man of action or the melancholy dreamer.”20 The
tables are turned, however, when the characters decide for themselves to
simply end the play, the heroine standing between the two men who “both
fondle her,” while bidding each other “Auf wiedersehen, and all that sort of
thing” (“Compromise,” 118). In “The Philosopher” (1964) Ashbery mocks
the prototype of the (tacitly gay) intellectual, the kind “who ‘goes too far’
and ultimately sacrifices everything human to his desire for knowledge and
power.”21 Drawing upon Clifton Webb’s urbane “Waldo Lydecker” in the
film Laura, a portrayal heavily marked by Hollywood code for homosexual
characters and later considered a key example of filmic “camp,” Ashbery
presents a dubious Professor Whitney Ambleside squaring off against John,
the conventionally masculine reporter, for the loyalty of the lovely Carol. As
in “The Compromise,” the dilemma is never resolved, this time in favor of
having the characters adjourn for dinner.22
Ashbery himself links “camp” to “irony,” describing the latter as “a kind
of defense against dealing with the problems that life imposes and which are
out of one’s grasp,” and therefore like what “is meant by ‘camp’ in a liter-
ary sense.”23 In both cases, the artist or author takes on a skeptical attitude
toward the world around him, mobilizing taste, intelligence, and sensibility
in order to contain that which threatens him. While engaging with camp’s
pastoral contrasts between the simple and complex, self and other, conven-
tional and “camp” or “gay” forms of masculinity, sexuality, and heroism,
Ashbery develops an attitude toward modern subjectivity that acknowledges
its culturally produced and contingent nature, his pastoral poetics modeling
the representative man and speaker as a figure marked primarily by his alter-
ity rather than his centrality.24
The Pastorals of Some Trees

The historical and personal contexts that shaped Ashbery’s work have
been considered previously, but the distinctly pastoral nature of cold war
American culture and Ashbery’s response to it has gone unnoticed.25 The
link between Ashbery’s poetics and his sexuality has been addressed produc-
tively by John Shoptaw, David Herd, Catherine Imbriglio, and John Vincent,
among others,26 all illuminating the struggles of a poet grappling with social
and aesthetic codes that could be both repressive and covertly liberating.
Yet in his sideways engagement with the predominant tropes of the postwar
United States, Ashbery’s pastorals offer his most pointed rebuke and trans-
formation of a national poetic tradition, evoking a pragmatic, alternative
male subjectivity and camp sensibility, publicly reenacting primal scenes

that are at once individual and national, located in the body and formally—
often pleasurably and at times frustratingly—displayed in the poem. It is
through this strain of poetry that Ashbery most decidedly returns home to
what he terms “the mooring of starting out,” and in doing so evokes land-
scapes such as those surrounding his rural hometown of Sodus in upstate
New York—the place where he, as he wrote to an old friend, “felt much
more exiled . . . than I have ever felt anywhere since.”27 Intent upon reimag-
ining a painful past and reinscribing it as prologue to his future, Ashbery
shapes a poetics in which memory and imagination reveal the limitations
and possibilities of an experience that is as representative as it is personal.
Although Ashbery often denies the autobiographical aspects of his work,
he does write suggestively about the ways in which words and meanings
migrate in his poetry, linking the personal and the aesthetic in his own
words. He notes, “[o]ne thing that I’ve noticed about my own poetry is the
prevalence of indirect movements such as in the words ‘seep’ or ‘leach,’ or, in
other words, where things get from one place to another in an unorthodox
way. This might be part of the impulse that also results in talking about
marginal places.”28 Commenting on his own proclivity for terminology
that suggests liquid or fluid out of place, Ashbery suggests a link between
alternative poetics, alternative subjectivities, and a literary mode he often
employs to evoke his hometown near the Great Lakes. Ashbery’s rhetoric
also suggests a poetic process in which apparent disorder is given a degree
of form and shape by “unorthodox” movements, recalling Eve Sedgwick’s
psychoanalytic account of lyric poetry as a means by which the young poet,
unconsciously mimicking primal scenes of corporal punishment, asserts
a potentially violent rhetorical power over his personal past and literary
inheritance. Containing and mastering some “earlier, plurivocal drama or
struggle: among tones, among dictions, among genres,” this process also
entails a “leakage of involuntarity of meaning” which she links to anal eroti-
cism or a “sexual politics of the ass.”29 Positing that that “the ‘problem’ of
men’s anal eroticism is . . . arguably inextricable from modern Western pro-
cesses of meaning,” homosexuality subverting the hegemony of a heterosex-
ual and patriarchal social and symbolic order (Sedgwick, 129), Sedgwick’s
account dovetails with Silverman’s description of the subversive power of
“deviant” and “masochistic” masculinities, both reinforcing a connection
between poetic form and biography, art and experience. To the extent that
Sedgwick’s account suggests that poetic form specifically lends itself to the
establishment of control (violent childhood discipline displaced by aesthetic
discipline30) while allowing for productive movements among various kinds
of literary languages encoded by “tones,” “diction,” and “genres,” it also
helps to account for Ashbery’s distinctive poetic style, its surrealism as well
as its syntactical slipperiness, his capacity to suggest pastoral convention
even as he mocks, adapts, and transforms it.
Ashbery’s provocative, partly tongue-in-cheek meditations upon the
modern self, sexuality, and the self’s relation to (or status as) the marginal
“other” enable him to recast traditional pastoral themes in early poems such
as “Eclogue,” “The Picture of Little J.A. in a Prospect of Flowers,” and “A
Pastoral.” While “Eclogue” refers to a natural landscape briefly and ellipti-
cally (“this land of whistling goats”), landscape is not a primary preoccu-
pation of Ashbery’s early pastorals.31 Instead, the cryptic, lyric exchanges
of “Eclogue” begin with reference to a “secret” that is “slowly” becoming
known, private knowledge turning public.32 “People and sticks go down to
the water,” Cuddie warns his companion, “How can we be so silent? Only
shivers / Are bred in this land of whistling goats.” The initial tones are of
threat and intimidation with a suggestion of lewdness (those old “goats”),
but the antiquated references and odd epithet (“this land of whistling goats”)
also call the reader’s attention to the lines’ almost comic staginess. Colin’s
response quickly reveals Cuddie to be his “father,” of whom he has “long
dreamed” “to accost me in dull play,” yet even these words continue to sug-
gest the scene may be a farce of familial violence, a “dream” turned “dull
play.” The question that immediately follows is more difficult to parse as
fully satiric, however: “If you in your bush indeed know her / Where shall
my heart’s vagrant tides place her?” Colin inquires. Whether or not the ques-
tion is a genuine one, or merely rhetorical, its studied vagueness is danger-
ously evocative, threatening Cuddie with the unmasking of his own secrets.
The “bush” in question may refer to a natural hiding place or wood, but an
alternative referent to human hair is highly sexually suggestive. Both mean-
ings tie the father to the landscape and a threatening sexuality, while the
son’s “heart” is the site of elusive, liquid, “vagrant tides,” impossible to pin
down and an uneasy medium in which to place the mysterious “her.”
Indeed, Cuddie seems anxious to destroy at least some aspect of his amor-
phous son, subsequently inciting Colin to the site of his possible destruction:
“the water’s edge” where the “peons” are archly described as “rant[ing] in
a light fume.” Near this site where “Madness will gaze at its reflection,”
selves seem to double and multiply, fracturing and displacing any sense of
subjective coherence or integrity. Colin’s reaction is manifested by the “pain
come near me,” which rather than bursting his “heart,” forces it to give
birth to yet another “tiny crippled heart,” “spiked like some cadenza’s head.”
This doubled, armored grotesquerie is both testament to and defense against
the punishment he has unwittingly incurred, and which Cuddie again ges-
tures toward, suggesting a “dip in raw water” that might either cleanse or
obliterate “these few thoughts and fleshy members,” a “refresh[ment]” he

paradoxically links to “evil.” Abruptly, the reappearance of “she”—quickly
revealed to be the mother—changes the dynamics of the scene, raising the
possibility of salvation through an alternative self-identification. But Cuddie
replies to Colin’s request for deliverance with his now typical malevolence,
while Colin is reduced to enigmatic, italicized addresses to an unseen audi-
ence: “She burns the flying peoples. . . . And spears my heart’s two beasts.”
Interspersed with these exclamations are Cuddie’s final invocations of vio-
lence and “old advice,” both of which threaten to “cover with its mauves”
his intended victim. While Colin has the last word, announcing, “And I
depart unhurt,” the poem suggests otherwise, foregrounding a severe dis-
juncture between the performance of the eclogue as a “dull play” and the
emotional realism of the scene as an ambivalent performance of gender roles
and sexuality.
The reality suggested in this masquelike interlude can be understood at
some level as biographical. Ashbery dedicated Some Trees, after all, “to my
parents,” a gesture that invites readers to understand his contentious rela-
tionship with his father, as well as his fond but complicated relationship to
his passive yet loving mother, as underlying histories in this pastoral scene.
Ashbery’s homosexuality is likely the “secret” referred to in the opening lines,
his multiple “heart[s]” turned “beasts” distinguishing him from his parents,
signaling his “flourish” of both sexual difference and aesthetic distinction.
The first of many early pastoral poems by Ashbery, “Eclogue” provides a
key to the drama that each reenacts, at once compulsively and playfully, in
the service of a sexually motivated self-discipline that ultimately enables the
expression of gay love. Confirming Dewey’s assertion that “esthetic emo-
tion is . . . something distinctive and yet not cut off by a chasm from other
and natural emotional experiences” (Art, 78), Ashbery’s haunting pastorals
of Some Trees evoke a surreal childhood marked by its continuity with real
trauma. Yet Ashbery is always careful to maintain a balance between the
public and private, literary and personal. In “The Picture of J.A. in a Prospect
of Flowers,” he mischievously manipulates Marvell’s conventions of hetero-
sexual love poetry, positing lyric universes in which violence, trauma, and a
sexualized self move from the margins to center stage. In doing so, he con-
structs a quasi-masochistic pastoral poetics in which the threat of violence is
problematically linked to an eroticized redemption, which in turn is linked
to the alternative spaces and selves the poet would have us move toward if
not yet settle into.
Like “Eclogue,” this poem slips among a number of aesthetic modes,
moving from pastoral to surrealist, mock-metaphysical, archaic, didac-
tic, and finally what can only be called protoconfessional (predating
Confessionalism’s heyday by about a decade). The overall effect is of an

exercise in shifts of mode, tone, and diction, as well as a meditation upon
human sexuality, the passage of time, and the evolving nature of a very per-
sonal “I.” The title evokes the pastoralism of Marvell, whose “The Picture of
Little T.C. in a Prospect of Flowers” is an ode to the beauty of a young girl
whose impenetrable virtue is both example and threat to nature and man
alike. Rather than a paean to light and virtue, however, Ashbery’s poem
begins with “darkness” and heavily sexual overtones (“darkness falls like a
wet sponge”) (Trees, 27). The poem recounts what may well occur later in
T.C.’s idyll, when virtue is lost, nature takes its course, and she enters into
the perilous world of adult sexual relationships.
In the opening lines of the poem, “Dick” has “clap’d” Genevieve and
later given her a slapstick (if a bit sadistic) “swift punch / In the pajamas,”
discarding her with the Shakespearean imperative: “Aroint thee, witch.”
Sexual pleasure gives way to pain, as the woman is punished for an implicit
transgression, possibly developing the “clap” as well for her trouble. The dic-
tion shifts from the antique to the colloquial and back again as the speaker
navigates his way around a story that is both old and perpetually renewed.
In the next stanza, Genevieve admits to having been appeased with “certain
handsome jewels,” her affiliation with consumerism and sensuality (“Her
tongue from previous ecstasy / Releases thoughts like little hats.”) standing
in stark contrast to the male sensibility evoked in the concluding couplet
of the section. During “summer” there are “monks . . . playing soccer,” their
all-male pastoral removed from Genevieve’s sexual incontinence. Violation,
shame, and confusion are the primary emotions of this initial scene, even as
they are tempered by humor and absurdity. Heterosexuality and the social
exchanges and violence that it engenders upon its supposedly weaker half
appear to be the focus of the speaker’s repulsion, or at least the subjects of
an ironic commentary.
The second section of the poem is by turns a meditation on the rela-
tive nature of “virtue,” and a reinforcement of an anti-woman ethos, warn-
ing of “dirty handmaidens / To some transparent witch” (Trees, 28). Their
“dream[s]” are of a “white hero’s subtle wooing,” whose imagined atten-
tions are somehow linked to a “gift” that will be “force[d]” upon them.
Heterosexual fantasy is revealed to mask sites of implicit sexual coercion, the
“white hero” a harbinger not of the “white world” of “music,” but of some-
thing more sinister. The final couplet again invokes an economy of exchange,
albeit a forestalled one: “That beggar to whom you gave no cent / Striped the
night with his strange descant.” Here again, the final lines appear to offer
an aesthetic alternative, almost as foreign as that of the sporty “monks,” to
a heterosexual, and implicitly tainted, universe. Rather than entangled, here
song and money are juxtaposed, the almost traditional Romantic/Modernist

“beggar” creating his eccentric music outside the confines of mainstream
consumer culture as it is linked to the girls’ facile adolescent dreams.
In contrast, the final section (III) shifts the reader abruptly to a mode
that appears to be protoconfessional, the speaker beginning as if previously
interrupted (“Yet I cannot escape the picture / of my small self in that bank
of flowers”) in a soliloquy upon his childhood. The tone and diction are
intensely personal, and a sharp contrast with the intentionally archaic, elu-
sive, and mannered rhetoric of the two previous sections. The first stanza
begins with an urge to “escape” that is already thwarted; however, the
speaker’s younger self is trapped in a “picture” as surely as the characters of
the previous sections were captured in their gendered social rituals and the
poetic conventions that encode them. The speaker associates himself with a
“fungus” among the “phlox,” one of nature’s less seemly orders (and perhaps
one of those aberrations that Marvell imagined “little T.C.” to correct when
she gave the tulips scent and stripped the roses of their thorns). Unlike his
counterparts in the previous sections, this boy is “accepting / Everything,
taking nothing,” wary of engaging with the all-too-human way in which
things “stink” and become “sick” with the passage of time, “the loveliest
feelings” both “find[ing] words” and being “displaced” by others (Trees, 29).
The speaker insists upon “calling this comic version of myself / The true
one,” distancing himself from yet anchoring himself in the child who refuses
to grow up, while emphasizing the role of language in accessing and inevita-
bly altering this simpler self (which “was wrong” to refuse the world around
him). “Calling” upon himself in an uncanny naming that is also an interpel-
lation of sorts, the speaker discourses upon the true nature of “virtue” and
“change,” deeming them “really stubbornness,” and “horror.”
Unlike “little T.C.,” “little J.A.” has already exceeded the confines of
the lyric—but not into the death that threatens his female counterpart if
she persists in resisting nature’s orders and cycles. Instead, as the object of
his own gaze, he becomes the passive and specularized object of his own
affection, his own best student in the ways of life, love, and poetry. The
final couplet here again seems to posit a possible realm of escape for this
“comic” self, but unlike the pastoral realm of the monks, or the beggar as
solitary modernist singer, the world evoked here appears in lines enjambed
from the previous stanza, a part of rather than a counterpoint to the pho-
tographic reality that precedes them. “And only in the light of lost words /
Can we imagine our rewards,” we are told, “light,” exchange, and language
ending the poem just as “darkness” and violence began it. Even the fact
that such redeeming “words” are already “lost” seems somehow belied by
the presence (and half-rhyme) of “rewards” (also suggestive of “re-words”)
as Ashbery playfully demonstrates how the poem itself can “virtuously”

enact its own fear of “change” by denying its own end and the words that
inevitably are yet to come. The poem’s effort to put “feelings” into “words”
itself betrays any attempt to forestall their multiple implications and future
readerly transactions.
Patterns of words that both delimit and expand the horizons of the speaker
also are foregrounded in “A Pastoral.” A sestina, the poem celebrates and
problematizes its own highly artificial universe, a self-contained, arbitrarily
constructed aesthetic realm whose realism is always already in question.
Insofar as it suggests myths of the “deep south,” the poem begins by invok-
ing a Faulknerian aura of decadence and decay, where “vice” and “license
permeate[]” the land and its waters (Trees, 72). The locus of these excesses is
the “showboat,” with its “simple” “shows,” “handsome / And toy horns,” and
“tried and true melodies.” Clichés and odd syntactical arrangements flow
into each other with a surreal grace as the reader enters into this peculiar
linguistic predicament. Initially, the speaker appears ambivalent about this
floating palace with its shopworn tunes—the poem, after all, begins with
“Perhaps no vice endears me to the showboat”—but the ambiguous con-
struction of the initial line also leaves open the possibility of his complicity
with its peculiar magic, especially by the end of the stanza as his “capers”
and “misdirected” “animals” appear on the scene. Moreover, the speaker
quickly allows himself to be sidelined by more elusive, potentially dangerous
figures, such as the “who” that is “hating and laughing, risen with animals,”
or the “lad” that “intends to file with the green deep south.” Coy and flirta-
tious, this “lad” “stirs the rocks and keeps them handsome,” a gigolo of sorts
in these shallow, shady waters. But his spell proves fragile as a mysterious
“they” and “them” surface to “side with the foreseeing of animals,” censoring
with “melodies” from an ominous “corral” that would teach “which flowers
to press back into the shade.” The initial speaker returns with a vengeance
at this point, yet while aligned with the “shade” that would be tamed, he is
also determined to “mobilize that handsome / Energetic enemy of the deep
south,” perhaps inciting him to engagement and exposure. By the end of the
fourth stanza, a showboat already has “fled” and “worms” have infiltrated
the realm of the animals. By the fifth stanza “the days are guarded” and
only a “miserable showboat” left, “unwatched by animals.” This purposely
enigmatic poem permits both the construction and the dispersal of this
“handsome” scene with its “lad” and “animals,” “vice” and “capers.” Indeed,
the “showboat” takes on many qualities of the sestina itself, “simple, not
yet easy,” a poem as plaything with an old “melody” suggestive of a dance.
Alluring but complicated, the “showboat” is an ever-displaced and floating
site in which conventional sexuality and narrative both are untethered from
the shore. As such, however, it is an easy target for its foes, to the extent
that even the speaker’s allegiances are questionable. As a result, the reader
is never sure how to position herself with regard to this strange apparition,
the poem’s interlocking words and stanzas resisting precisely the kind of
scrutiny, both critical and moral, that they appear to invite.
As if anticipating this readerly impasse, a certain didacticism emerges at
this point, an omniscient speaker appearing to warn readers of the “melodies
/ That cleave to the heart,” which are in league with the “animals / Strangers
are” (Trees, 73). A surface moralism implies that we cannot forgive these
“handsome” emissaries of “terror,” haunting and beckoning us forward with
the “crook’d finger of a disappearing showboat.” The boat itself is anthropo-
morphized, implicitly fused with the mischievous “lad” or one of his “hand-
some” counterparts. Yet the envoy then appears to refute these warnings as
mere hysteria, fusing and recasting all the end words of the poem from the
perspective of a curiously naïve or perfectly debauched “psalmist,” who may
be a humorous substitute for the poet. In his blanket appreciation of the
scene he thinks “the deep south a wonderful showboat” and upon meeting
the “animals” in the “shade” said, “You are my melodies, and you are hand-
some.” The entire scenario is redeemed at this point as the poem ends only
to begin again, the envoy sending us off toward the “shade” and “animals,”
inviting us again to find them attractive and alluring, the very stuff of song
rather than “strangers.”
The campy showboat scenario—immortalized by Edna Ferber’s novel
and its adaptation as a Broadway musical—allows for speculation upon
forbidden love, performativity, and secret identities all within the con-
text of aesthetic spectacle.33 The speaker hints at homosexual liaisons and
social repression, delivering what might have been a sordid tale within the
exceedingly formal and official lines of a courtly poetic form. In essence,
the “deep[ly]” private aspects of what goes on down “south” are paraded
about for the world to see, encoded in an elaborate but ultimately trans-
parent social text. The poem itself has become a form of “showboating,”
the interior life implicitly publicized for those who wish to read of it, its
queenly affectations hardly inscrutable to the right audience. Although the
poem itself never mentions water, the “showboat” enters our consciousness
by floating between the currents of what we think we know and what we
think we should not. An open secret, the “showboat” mimics the riverboat
(formerly so crucial to the economy of the rural South) with its performance
of modern superfluity, flaunting the mobile vantage point from which the
future of such sites must be reimagined.
Ashbery’s poetry permits the reader to linger in its strange spaces while
pointing to their ultimate fragility, their connection to the flux inherent
in human experience. Encouraging what Dewey termed a kind of “sur-

render” to art, Ashbery’s lyrics also create islands of safety, acknowledg-
ing a state that the philosopher described as an “adequate yielding of the
self . . . possible only through a controlled activity that may well be intense”
(Art, 53). Protecting and identifying with his reader’s potential vulnerability
and social isolation, Ashbery implements a situation in which “the artist
embodies in himself the attitude of the perceiver while he works” (Art, 48).
His tone is often intimate and searching, marked by a plural first person or
second person address that draws the reader more closely into his universe.
“The toothless murmuring / Of ancient willows, who kept their trouble /
In a stage of music” permeates “The Mythological Poet,” surrounding “we”
who were on a picnic, absorbing music that “brought us what it seemed /
We had long desired” (Trees, 34). As in previous poems, the possibility of
aesthetic and emotional surfeit is presented, only to be pulled away. The sen-
sual, physical, and feminine threaten this idealized order as the “green sides”
of this world “founder[],” upon contact with “a world of things, that rages
like a virgin / Next to [their] silken thoughts.” The “new / Music, inno-
cent and monstrous,” makes the patriarchal, chivalric, “jousting willows”
“sick” (Trees, 35). But the second section of the poem appears to counteract
this scene, introducing a “mythological poet” who peremptorily “accepts /
Beauty before it arrives.” Unlike the aging willows, however, the poet is
already a dandy, feminized and implicitly homosexual, “Fabulous and fas-
tidious.” For his presumption he is deemed merely an “ornament, a kind
of lewd / Cloud placed on the horizon.” A passive, marginal element, his
interests tend toward “dust, candy, perverts,” elements “[c]lose to the zoo,”
“the panting forest,” and “the great and sullen square.” His locality extends
from the caged and bestial to the erotic (where he is “inserted” in the forest)
and the public (where he is “openly walking”). Despite his implied depravity,
however, he is undeniably charismatic, a flâneur and voyeur whose vitality is
antithetical to the posturing of the “toothless” “ancient willows.”
Compelling even in his apparent dissipation, the poet as “pervert”
has “eloped with all music / And does not care,” citing “a final diversion,
greater / Because it can be given, a gift / Too simple even to be despised.”
Speaking in riddles, this “mythological poet” appears both Delphic oracle
and crook. Speaking of “diversion[s]” and a gift that is “simple,” he suggests
something beyond mere music. What he offers is a vision equally naïve and
decadent, deriving its value from this unlikely pairing. Citing the “roaring
/ Centurion of the lion’s hunger,” the speaker imagines a moment (“oh”) in
which the poet as “pervert” and a mysterious “child” (possibly the reader)
might “join hands, in the instant / Of their interest, in the shadow / Of a
million boats; their hunger / From loss grown merely a gesture?” (Trees, 36)
In this vision, the complex man unites with the child, not in an act of peder-
asty but in gentle token of their shared “hunger from loss,” a joint yearning
for what the zoo and its inhabitants can only hint at. Their elusive attraction
seems linked to the “lion’s hunger” as it takes on its own figurative life as
a “roaring Centurion.” A soldier and man of endurance, masculine, fierce,
and handsome, the “centurion” is everything the child cannot yet be and the
pervert may never become. Yet this entity is far from solid, perhaps a mere
illusion or play of words shaped to stave off desire (“hunger”) itself. Within
the confines of his implied cage, the ravenous lion itself is merely a spectacle
for the pervert and child to gaze upon, astonished that he may echo rather
than embody the object of their own inchoate hunger. In a world of “boats”
and “interests,” exchange and degradation, the “gesture” between the two
acknowledges a deeper, universal need for human contact both emotional
and physical, for bonds more profound than leonine posturing. At this point
the music of the poem rejects the “trouble” of the old willows in favor of the
“innocent and monstrous” together, the perverse “mythological poet” aiding
and abetting the cause of a primordial music that does not merely lament the
past in a park, but moves in a variety of marginal and public spaces alike.
This may be a music of uncertain, misplaced desire and affection, but it is
nevertheless a music that encompasses a range of human experience both
elided and present in the oldest of songs. “The Mythological Poet” offers
up a pastoral scene at once classical and contemporary, hinting at the power
of spontaneous intimacy and readerly, aesthetic interactions as antidotes to
coercion, while reminding us of the unpredictable erotic undercurrents of
violence real and staged.
Unlike the “ancient willows,” the trees of “Some Trees” initially seem
responsive and encouraging of human love, whatever form it might take.
Protective and friendly, “each / Joining a neighbor,” these “amazing” trees
engage from the beginning in a gracious specularity and “performance”
(Trees, 51). The first three lines of the poem are enjambed as if to repli-
cate the effusiveness of their life force, “still” upon the page, but moving
outward over it to remind the reader of their latent energy. Although their
power is conditional (“as though”), their message appears to have been
received. When two potential lovers, at odds with “the world,” attempt
to meet, it is the trees who remind them that “their merely being there
/ Means something; that soon / We may touch, love, explain.” The trees
affirm the very idea of meaning and being itself that “love” in turn mag-
nifies, allowing us to “touch” and “explain” in every human language.
The poem intensifies at the prospect of this moment, and “we are sur-
rounded” by the presence of a “comeliness” that is “silence already filled
with noises,” like “a canvas on which emerges / A chorus of smiles, a winter
morning.” Life in aural and visual forms, chaotic and aestheticized, radi-
ates from this encounter.
The final lines of the poem retract hesitantly from the imagined moment,
however, as if wary of the “puzzling light” that would illuminate this love,
anticipating how in “moving” one might avoid exposure, alluding instead
to the refuge found in “reticence,” “accents” that function as “their own
defense.” In contrast to the “amazing” “speech” as magical, “still perfor-
mance” (almost reminiscent of Noh theater) that the trees initially had
seemed to offer, the speaker implies that a different kind of rhetorical play
may undo the very idea of love and meaning the pastoral glade provided. A
place that had seemed removed from the world merely may have shielded
the lovers temporarily from its gaze. The initial tone of ease and awaken-
ing has been tempered by a sense of imminent siege: “we are surrounded.”
The “silence already filled with noises” is ominous, the “chorus of smiles”
in “winter” may be false and cold. The “puzzling light” and “moving” sug-
gest disorientation, while the final couplet invoking “days” of “reticence”
broken by “accents” that only “seem their own defense” implies that there
may be little to forestall an imminent offensive. Written while Ashbery was
a student at Harvard, the lines suggest two students meeting furtively in the
Yard or by the Charles, alone among the crowds of their peers, barely able
or willing to take a “chance” on each other. The poem suggests grounds for
articulating their possible love, but cannot permanently shelter them in a
wider social landscape. Caught between two worlds, the speaker is tortured
by the possibility of one and the probability of the other. In imagining his
escape he cannot help but inscribe his imprisonment. Whether the exercise
is more pleasurable than painful has yet to be determined. As in so many
of Ashbery’s early pastorals, the speaker’s desire for intimacy—emotional,
sexual, intellectual—is thwarted even as it is proffered, but the dream rever-
berates regardless.
Double Dreaming of America

Self-imposed exile ended for Ashbery in the summer of 1965, when he
returned to New York City and the United States permanently a few
months after his father’s death the previous December. The Double Dream
of Spring (1970), the book of poems written after that return, chronicles
this homecoming and in doing so makes the most explicit and repeated
use of pastoral since Some Trees. Ashbery’s return to pastoral in this volume
has a great deal to do not only with living in America again but with the
death of his father, and more specifically, the ways in which this death
further allows or enables Ashbery to continue to come into his own as a
poet, man, and representative speaker.34 Writing a friend from his youth
whose own father died, Ashbery later recalled, “I have been through that
and ‘know the feeling,’ an unexpected and very disquieting aspect of which
is suddenly being yanked back into one’s childhood.”35 The effects of such
temporal displacement and geographical reorientation are difficult to trace
precisely, but seem to have been expressed in various ways. In a general
sense, these poems encode Ashbery’s return to his “genius loci,” the “indig-
enous” American landscapes and culture that comprise the “common or
mill run of things” underlying the essence of his art (Art, 8, 10–11). At
home again, Ashbery’s poetics suggest an intense experience of his envi-
ronment that enables what Dewey termed a “transformation of interaction
into participation and communication” (Art, 22). In these poems the tight
control over form appears to subside, as Ashbery at some points moves away
from the shorter lyrics of his youth and toward longer, more discursive
structures. Yet Ashbery does not relinquish his interest in shorter forms, or
in the various modes of poetic control that so often seem disguised as a lack
thereof. The result is a string of pastoral poems that employ descriptions of
rural retreats, childhood, trees, and country life generally as antidotes and
sites of resistance to a crumbling cold war ideology with its oppressive stan-
dards of masculinity and sexuality.36 In poems such as “The Task,” “Spring
Day,” “Soonest Mended,” “Variation, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of
Ella Wheeler Wilcox,” and “Rural Objects,” Ashbery explores variations
on his own themes of discipline, difference, and discourse, creating a mid-
career pastoral mode that is more effusive and hopeful than its previous
incarnations. The work of a poet at home for perhaps the first time in his
native country, these poems reveal a voice more central than marginal to
the American scene, a prodigal voice accepting and transforming his cul-
tural inheritance.
The Double Dream of Spring begins with “The Task,” a title that refers
to William Cowper’s eighteenth-century pastoral poem, which itself begins
as an ode to a sofa before commenting more substantively upon the loss
of rural England—a collapse of the banal and the profound that Ashbery
undoubtedly appreciated. The modern namesake, likewise, begins with a
wary if not slightly mocking tone, observing a “they” who “are preparing
to begin again: / Problems, new pennant up the flagpole / In a predicated
romance.”37 The distancing “they,” however, may only be a disguise for
a “we” or even an “I” who himself is beginning again in his native land,
turning back toward the old but new flag, about to reignite a problematic
“romance” with his native language, landscape, and tribe. The next stanza
picks up on this sense of unease with references to “fugitive lands,” and
an “Everyman” who “must depart / Out there into stranded night, for his
destiny / Is to return unfruitful out of the lightness / That passing time

evokes.” He must recognize “cloud-castles” for what they are, as “the way
is clear / Now for linear acting into that time / In whose corrosive mass he
first discovered how to breathe.” The prodigal son has returned and is deter-
mined to both explore and explode the “mass” of the past, relearning how to
“breathe” if he has to in confronting this scene of rebirth.
The implicit trauma of this approach is reinforced by the speaker’s antici-
pation of parental disapproval and discipline. For in returning to the site
of the self’s origins, one also returns to “the filth you’ve made,” the ways
in which “you” have exceeded, defied, despoiled the very idea of the per-
son others intended you to become, as the parental scolding implies. “Yet if
these are regrets they stir only lightly,” Ashbery affirms, turning instead to
scenes of his rural childhood: “the children playing after supper, / Promise
of the pillow and so much in the night to come.” “I plan to stay here a little
while,” he announces, to collect not only such “moments of insight” as such
memories afford, but also to attain “the reaches,” to dispel a “last level of
anxiety that melts / In becoming, like miles under the pilgrim’s feet.” This
volume, he suggests, will enact such a journey in a quest for grounds upon
which to reimagine himself, often returning to the pastoral locales of youth
in order to explore the parameters of language and memory that enable one
to come into being.
“Spring Day” opens, appropriately enough, with “immense hope” as well
as “forbearance,” “doubts,” and “cold hope” (Dream, 14). “Night” follows
“day” in a vague, perhaps rhetorical “city,” as a “sleeper” fends off “clubs and
knives” in the dark. The speaker suggests both danger and resilience as he
moves from a surreal urban to an epic rural scene. In the next lines, the array
of emotions sweeps the reader along toward the moment when “tears ride
freely, laughs or sobs,” a cathartic outburst that brings the poet to a prophetic
scene reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson: “The giant body
relaxed as though beside a stream.” As in the beginning of Paterson, Book I,
a giant awakens to some mysterious “force,” realizing a “secret sweetness”
that seems to predate even “life.” This original man then speaks himself of
a “they” “long in coming,” possibly soldiers or even gods who both “mat-
tered nothing” yet “were presumed dead, / Their names honorably grafted
on the landscape / To be a memory to men.” A seemingly heroic lineage is
established, whose “shell” has been a shelter of sorts, but now “we break
forth like a river breaking through a dam,” the giant avers, first pausing and
then telling of a “terrible” “progress” that will be as “turning fresh knives
in the wounds / In that gulf of recreation.” Whether that violated gulf is
the site of pleasure or creation or both, however, is ambiguous. The pater-
nal figure continues, chronicling the past and near future, evoking an “us”
who are despoilers and destroyers, who would ruin the “bare canvas” of the
landscape as “gulf” or “frightened plain,” imposing a truly wanton aesthet-
ics. Having done with his pronouncement, the “mountain” then “stopped
shaking,” and eases into a state of almost sexual release: “arched into its own
contradiction, its enjoyment” (Dream, 15).
This epic, terrifying, and suggestively physical scene and pronouncement
then flow into suggestions of a very personal yet universal past involving
childhood and memory. Over the course of the same sentence we move from
the “mountain” to a domestic world where the “lights were put out,” and
“memories of boys and girls / Who walked here before the great change” are
called to mind. The mythic alterations of the previous lines contrast with
the smaller dramas of the following lines, in which “the air mirrored us, /
Taking the opposite shape of our effort” while “casting us further and fur-
ther out.” The careful “comment and corollary” of childish, bookish learning
offers a tempered contrast to the paternal story of violent change, a universal
adolescence briefly offering an alternative to parental destruction. Rather
than tearing into the “canvas” of the world, the children accept the world
as their “mirror.” Even as the very air solidifies by reflecting the parameters
of their selves as well as the limitations of their agency, the children verg-
ing on adulthood recognize this process as the means toward another set of
possibilities.
Ashbery sketchily evokes what those possibilities might be in the final,
lovely yet enigmatic lines. The speaker wittily jolts the reader awake (“Wha—
what happened?”) into a new temporal and spatial dimension, “with / The
orange tree” and its curative “summer produce” that could heal even “his-
tory” if we wished it to. From this vision the poem tumbles forward, into a
“storm[]” and “wind” and then “another dream.” With an energy designed
to carry along the fragile, emerging selves of the previous stanza, “we” “roll”
into “another dream” and end up with a mysterious “you” whom the speaker
addresses with a keen adoration: “Gracious and growing thing, with those
leaves like stars, / We shall soon give all our attention to you.” Its leaves shiny
and aglow, this apostrophized being could be an orange tree, cousin to one
of the sheltering trees of “Some Trees” or “Civilization and Its Discontents,”
a sheltering spirit of love. As it is clearly also of the conscious realm (a “you”),
however, it could also be taken for the youth or poet himself as tree spirit,
now patron of his own idyll. With his “fruit” he, too, could partake in the
rewriting of history, remaking the world in the “leaves” of books that catch
and hold our attention like “stars,” demanding we gaze often, again and
again, into their universal light, or, conversely, the particular and beauti-
ful faces of our past as they are filtered through the cinema of our con-
sciousness. Only by such acts of imagination as situated in a site of pastoral
origins, the poem suggests, can we begin to remake the myths of the past in
the image of the future.
The evocative yet pleasingly absurd juxtapositions of “Spring Day,” in
which history and dreams flow into each other so thoroughly, are succeeded
by an equally curious assemblage of characters and voices in “Soonest
Mended,” one of the best known poems from the volume. After beginning
with a relatively somber reference to “our technological society” and our
need to be rescued from it like passive “heroines,” then shifting impishly
to the hesitant “Angelica” with her “colorful but small monster” from the
“Ingres painting,” the speaker alludes to a cartoonish “Happy Hooligan
in his rusted green automobile” (Dream, 17). Yet in a signature gesture,
“Soonest Mended” quickly turns from such a mix of high- and lowbrow
references back to the more abstract sense of “summer” evident in “Spring
Day,” appealing to the desire “[t]o step free at last . . . to be small and clear and
free,” which is somehow related to “summer’s energy” as it “wanes.” These
sharper pangs of late summer are also kin to, and perhaps echoes of, a more
general, almost Stevensian desire for substances, selfhood, and meaning, all
rhetorically linked by references to fertility and harvest: “underneath the
talk lies / The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose / Meaning,
untidy and simple like a threshing floor” (Dream, 18). The speaker gestures
somewhere “underneath” mere “talk,” as if we could bypass language for
a purer human dialect, and in doing so reminds us of how often human
interactions and communication take place on multiple levels, beyond what
has actually been said. So often “meaning” eludes even the best “talkers,”
our sophistication undone in the face of what is “untidy and simple.” Yet the
speaker also suggests that there are dangers in lingering over these desires,
our status as spectators to our own lives: this idealization of the unsaid
but felt, a “truth” that is the very “being of our sentences,” may become “a
kind of fence-sitting / Raised to the level of an esthetic ideal.” The speaker
questions the value of a sensual but disordered adolescent world in which
“[n]one of us ever graduates from college.” Never the college heroes or “play-
ers,” “we” would be “merely spectators” of life, although “subject” to the
rhythms of its games.
By this point, the poem has become a hypothetical dialogue between
the speaker and a “you” who seem alternately at odds and in agreement over
these matters, the speaker straining to bring their thoughts into accord as
he appears to conclude, somewhat surprisingly, that “probably thinking not
to grow up / Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate”
(Dream, 19). For the time being, such “maturity” seems a necessary coun-
terforce to being simply a “good citizen,” always following the rules, accept-
ing compromise and “the charity of hard moments as they are doled out.”
Instead, the speaker suggests coupling traditional trappings of adulthood

with a methodical “careless[ness],” manifested in sowing seeds but crooked,
remembering only “to forget,” and always returning “[t]o the mooring of
starting out, that day so long ago.” He appears to advocate approaching
life as a process of never-ending beginnings, of returns to origins, even as
they shift and fade like memories of so many hazy school days. Never fixed,
our lives are instead at a “mooring,” floating over the surface of experience,
subject to its currents and never quite where they were when we started
out. Capable of approaching the world from many directions, the subjects
produced over the “course” of such voyages are variable over time, sensi-
tive to alterations in themselves and others. Approaching Dewey’s dictum
that art “serves life rather than prescribing a defined and limited mode of
living” (Art, 135), the imagery suggests a poetics always shifting in rela-
tion to the poets and readers’ experiences and alterations. Ultimately, this
vision of life as a “learning process,” coupled with the poem’s reliance on the
“being of our sentences,” suggests that poetry itself is one of the best means
of “preparing,” serving as both the repository of and antidote to memory.
Celebrating new formations of selfhood and conceptions of “citizenship,”
poetry is a means of addressing a universe of “heroines” rather than heroes,
subjects who sublimate aggression into language, and individuals who value
the emotional and intellectual life over thoughtless action.
Similarly, poems such as “Variations, Calypso and Fugue on a Theme of
Ella Wheeler Wilcox” and “Rural Objects” reiterate and reformulate pas-
toral as a trope not only for the origins of selfhood but of being itself as an
antidote to a violent cold war ideology whose hegemony the counterculture
was beginning to erode. Signaling an incipient “liberation of the human
spirit,” these poems redeploy a pragmatic perspective at the same historical
moment of the late 1960s when Dewey’s own work was beginning to be
reread and reassessed (Art, 339). Rather than employ pragmatism as a cor-
rective to economic inequality, however, younger admirers began to see it as
a native response to the centralization and abuse of political power Dewey
had predicted many years before.38 Trees figure predominantly in the first
poem, as the speaker plays upon an eerily complacent truism gleaned from
Wilcox regarding individual agency, the planting of trees, and the pleasure
such trees afford to armies: “For the pleasures of the many / May be oft-
times traced to one / As the hand that plants an acorn / Shelters armies
from the sun” (Dream, 24). The rather dubious ethics of sheltering armies,
and Wilcox’s naïve juxtaposition of pleasure and violence are implicitly
teased out over the course of the poem, extending a commentary on poetry’s
relation to war and masculinity. First, the speaker, too, luxuriates, albeit
self-consciously, in “the feeling” “of never wanting to leave the tree, / Of
predominantly peace and relaxation.” This is the site of complete fulfill-

ment, where rather than soldiers we have “our brothers all around” even as
“truly, young adulthood was never like this.” A homosocial paradise, the
trees offer a physical and spiritual grace, even if “one must move forward”
from this place and “divest oneself of some tested ideals.” Pragmatically, the
speaker allows for the possibility that “even finding nothing to put in their
place is a good experience.” Where this line of thought takes him, however,
is toward confronting the apocalyptic possibility that even the “trees should
shrivel in 120-degree heats, the acorns / Lie around on the worn earth like
eyeballs, and the lead soldiers shrug and slink off.” What had been an ide-
alized state of “delight,” “consideration” and “affirmation” turns dystopic,
“acorn” seeds turned to dull “eyeballs” with no transcendental, Emersonian
powers, and even the haven for young men proves only to have been an
imaginary one, the “brothers” merely “lead soldiers,” the companions of a
solitary child.
The emptying out of pastoral myths linked to war continues throughout
the poem as the speaker appears to shift but the poem’s emphasis does not.
The next section begins with parodic couplets in which a dandified voice
declares: “So my youth was spent, underneath the trees / I always moved
around with perfect ease.” The arch, fey lines easily convey the speaker’s
fatuity while continuing to betray a certain pastoral wistfulness that exceeds
the conventions of this doggerel and suggest the ideological origins of the
verse’s appeal (Dream, 25). This speaker longs only to return from his grand
yet compulsory European travels, to find “home” in “a hole of truth in
the green earth’s rug” where “Once you find it you are as snug as a bug.”
Although this advice is hardly more reliable than Wilcox’s paean to passivity
and simple acts, it clearly implicates the poet in the fabrication of narratives
of both passivity and agency. In these lines Ashbery parodies both Wilcox’s
facile condoning of a vaguely imagined, epic violence, as well as the kind of
simplistic American nativism that glorifies the United States, duping citi-
zens into believing themselves safe from nuclear horror by digging “holes”
in the earth. The rest of the poem shifts into prose at this point, moving
through scenes of a vaguely urban consciousness, including that of a grown
man returning to the neighborhood where he played “stickball in the vacant
lot across the street” in the poem’s one suggestion of a metropolitan idyll.
His memories of the games are both violent and uneventful (“he’d go home
tired and bleeding” but other times they were “a nice bunch of guys”), sug-
gesting a rather melancholy, even darkly sexual, undercurrent to contem-
porary life that contrasts with the platitudes of the childish esthetes evoked
in the poem’s opening lines. His reflections upon the schoolyard scene end
abruptly as “time farted,” two lines of doggerel intervene, and the poem ends
with one last scene in which a student approaches the paranoid, delusional
professor “Gustavus Hertz” who screams that he will “tell you nothing!” and
to “Go away!” Any transcendental quest for knowledge is again interrupted
as the text degenerates into the kind of campy satire Ashbery employed in
his early plays. In both play and poem, Ashbery mocks the ideology that
links men to violence and land, perpetuating myths of camaraderie and
friendship. Such relations are implicitly rejected in favor of a reader who
shares the speaker’s politics, humor, and literary sophistication; unlike Hertz
and his potential acolyte, the poet does not reject his pursuer, although he
does test and tease him. It is their intimacy, ultimately, that may prove most
pastoral in the poem, proffering the kinds of interpersonal connection that
the other idylls do not. The poem, in sum, exemplifies an urbane sensibility
that works with pastoral tropes in order to defuse and delimit mainstream
ideology in favor of new forms of knowledge and subjectivity.
“Rural Objects” challenges the reader to question the worth of any ideal-
ized narratives of self and being, especially when those narratives are based
on nostalgic references to a past that Ashbery has already dispelled and
reformulated. The speaker begins by inviting “you” to share in his supposed
understanding “About being there in the time as it was then? / A golden
moment, full of life and health? / Why can’t this moment be enough for us
as we have become?” (Dream, 43). This “moment,” however, was predicated
upon its ability to shape “how the future would behave” indefinitely—as
if the frontier rhetoric of the past would somehow ensure the continuity of
American postwar culture. Instead, such ideology is exposed as a fiction and
“we” are left in a world in which our difference rather than our sameness is
what defines us: “And now you are this thing that is outside me / And how I
in token of it am like you is / In place.” Even as “I” and “you,” however, “we”
exist in a strange continuum with each other, still similar, if in some ways
objectified (“this thing” “it”). We are subject to “reassembl[y],” and are the
stuff of “dreams” and their “back yard[s],” contained, suburban spaces that
nonetheless suggest a realm of play and discovery. Rather than sit contented
with the past, we may seek to move “closer,” to exist in a state of anticipation
and expectation, but may also “return to the fork in the road / Doubtless to
take the same path again?” Ultimately, the speaker questions the extent to
which reexamining our assumptions about the past and present may actu-
ally influence us to behave differently, or if habit or inertia will overwhelm
us (a quandary that also preoccupied William James).
Such habits, for example the reversion to pastoral itself, are slyly mani-
fested as the speaker turns to consider the nature of time passing from
another perspective. While resorting to pastoral childhood memories of a
“deserted lake” and “mountain ash,” both recalled “as you are older and in a
dream,” the speaker now asks after purpose: “to whom is all this?” (Dream,
44). He suspects that “we are being called back / For having forgotten these
names / For forgetting our proper names,” guilty of some “crime” that has to
do with having left behind the ghosts of former selves and ways of life. While
patterns of behavior and language can be questioned, the speaker suggests,
such revolts can feel like “crime” even when they are warranted challenges
to the status quo. The poem at this point invokes pastoral imagery in order
to make a point about the mode’s ideological flexibility, as well as the costs
of dislodging it from the dominant narratives that have so monopolized it
during the past decades.
The rhetorical situation of the first half of the poem is itself overthrown,
however, in the next stanza, which begins: “This is how the singer spoke, /
In vague terms, but with an eternity of thirst.” Suddenly the reader is meant
to understand the preceding stanzas as spoken by another, stranger voice,
not a familiar speaker’s at all. The conspiratorial tone associated with these
transgressive refigurings of childhood must now be considered a ruse of
sorts, leading us to wonder if we were somehow exposed or complicit in an
unsanctioned rebellion. The sense of exposure is belied, however, by the fact
that the subsequent lines themselves are part of a strong literary tradition,
almost Stevensian in tone and thematically akin to “The Idea of Order at
Key West.” In the new context, though, the singer merely “spoke,” her song
replaced by mere words that do not satiate even her own “thirst” (the words
“single pink” in these lines imply the singer’s gender, although it is not cer-
tain). Moreover, the singer’s words seem to have no universal, connective
powers: the next stanzas all depict scenes of human disconnection, what is
“sad and real”: the “commercial school,” “accounting,” and “anxiety.” These
culminate in even the speaker accusing “you” of being right to “pillage and
obstruct” before shifting to a “she” who “Stared at her toes.” Silent, obstruc-
tionist herself in her refusal to engage, this unexpected “she” still seems to
provoke the poem’s last parries, the “argument” as to how “it’s just a cheap
way / Of letting you off,” although “it” and how it excuses “you” are both
vague (Dream, 45). The pastoral idealization of the past may be at stake—or
the childhood memories that the speaker cannot help but fall back on—but
neither seems to have successfully aided in avoiding responsibility for an
unspoken task.
Instead, the argument appears averted, temporarily at least, with images
that anticipate Ashbery’s “A Wave”: “blue objects protruded out of the /
Potential, dying and recoiling, returning as you meet them / Touching for-
ever, water lifted out of the sea.” In its suggestion of eternal return, this sea-
scape again takes us back to Stevens and Key West. The diction is full of
productive contrasts: “protrusions” “dying and recoiling” foreground life and
death. They “return” and are “touching forever” until the water itself is “lifted
out of the sea,” an image that suggests the desired and desiring dimensions of
the poem itself. In a sense, the poem can be said to end by refusing to end, by
turning back upon itself and its arguments of difference and disjuncture with
a rhetoric of oceanic expansiveness. The emphasis falls on a holistic reinte-
gration of poet and poem, reader and text, subject and experience, resulting
in a “remaking of impulsion and thought,” a process that perpetually gives
rise to new poems in turn (Art, 349). Rather than finding a neat but banal
resolution to modern anomie and disjuncture, the poem shifts from the land
to the sea, from interrogating fixed ideas to presenting fluid, borrowed, and
revised images of self and time. The self and the song do not function to
grant each other either coherence or order; instead, in Ashbery’s vision the
mysterious background becomes an expansive foreground, the ocean moving
in all directions simultaneously, its various and multiplying currents reflect-
ing a constantly fluctuating experience of language and the world.
Coda: The Vermont Notebook

Although a vaguely pastoral impulse survives in Ashbery’s more recent vol-
umes—perhaps most humorously in Can You Hear, Bird ’s (1995) “Military
Pastoral,” a campy send-up of military discipline complete with “buttocks,”
“thrifty paysannes,” “village streets,” an observant “thrush,” and obligatory
“laurels” that await the beleaguered “Blubberface” and his comrades39 —the
poet rarely returns to such recognizable pastorals in his recent work. Rather,
it is in Ashbery’s early- and mid-career pastoral meditations on the way we
were and continue to be, the ways in which childhood and maturity are
linked, that he demonstrates pastoral’s capacity to express the poet’s search
for the mutable origins and essence of the poetic and public self.
Ashbery’s fascination with pastoral reached a peak by the mid-seventies
and waned after this point. One of his last major pastoral projects is The
Vermont Notebook (1975), an experimental text in which the porous depic-
tion of subjectivity immersed in experience confirms a pragmatic perspective
that Ashbery traces back to Gertrude Stein and William James. As Ashbery
observes, “it’s one of the few things I’ve written that seems to have been
influenced by Gertrude Stein. Although I’ve read her a lot, I’ve never heard
her voice come into my work, except occasionally here and there.”40 In this
pragmatically Steinian, surreal, pastoral experiment, specific rural sites such
as “Vermont” dissolve into lists of objects and people, generic sites, activities,
brand names, colors, games, crimes, cities, newspapers, as well as names of
poets and artists—many Ashbery’s personal friends—and kinds of fabric.
Other series evoke a vague narrative or scene, some in lists and others in
dense prose-poetry that evokes both “jewelers” and the “dump” in a single
passage reminiscent of William Carlos Williams’s excremental “pearl.” The
dump becomes a metaphor for the listing and spillage of words in the text
so far, as Ashbery also revises Wallace Stevens’s iconic “Man on the Dump”:
“As I swear the dump is my sweet inner scape self so do I condone the dump
for having nothing left for me only the will to go on dumping creating it out
of its evacuation. I will go to the dump. I am to be in the dump. I was per-
manently the dump and now the dump is me, but I will be permanently me
when I am no longer the dump air. The dump air lasts.”41 Always playful,
the speaker figures himself as endlessly evolving and devolving into garbage,
accumulating and sloughing off aspects of the self—including multiple
poetic precursors—until he is practically nothing, dispersed into a pungent
residue of “dump air” and language itself.
Collectively, the text appears to be a grab bag of experiences and voices,
tied together by an overarching, quasi-Whitmanian consciousness whose
continuity cannot be confirmed. What unites these memories of presence,
however, is a sense that they are marginal and questionable, their very exis-
tence perhaps imagined and easily discarded. In the “The Fairies’ Song,”
these marginal narratives are linked explicitly to marginal people: “some-
times one of us will get included in the trash” (Vermont, 93). “There are long
rides around doubtful walked-in spaces, / Dreaming of manure piles under
the slop and urge of a March sun,” as well as “limpid pools of quiet” and
“insipid flowering meads / Wastes of acting out daytime courtesies at night.”
The Vermont Notebook can be read as the accumulation of such people and
their “waste[ful]” activities, be they rural or urban, straight or gay, given to
reflection or not, beholden to “acting out” their traditional roles or willing to
shed them at “night.” Although appearing at first glance to be an opaque time
capsule of words, the collage of The Vermont Notebook ultimately illuminates
a way of life and its denizens by refusing to capture them in traditional guises
or forms. Significantly, the pastoralism of The Vermont Notebook crystallizes
the logical extreme to which Ashbery’s early poetics would take him, while
signaling the end of a period in which he made pastoral an obviously impor-
tant aspect of his work. As he came of age as a poet, Ashbery turned to pas-
toral as a means not of escaping from reality but of immersing himself more
fully in a world in which the real and surreal, personal and political, everyday
and aesthetic often cannot be easily distinguished. This postwar world, his
poetics suggests, has all too much in common with the world his modernist
predecessors struggled to apprehend, while also beginning to bend and break
open, impelling the center toward its peripheries.
CONCLUSION
Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral:

Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian,
Lisa Robertson, and the
Continuity of a Mode
F
rom his first semester at Harvard in 1946, Navy veteran and future
poet Frank O’Hara was captivated by the work of Gertrude Stein,
who died that same year. In English A, he wrote an essay on The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which he described to his parents as
“one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read by anyone.”1 In the poem
“Memorial Day 1950,” O’Hara would describe the early stages of his work as
including “several last things / Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for.” 2 Clearly,
O’Hara saw links between his poetics and hers, and one of these links was a
highly eroticized form of pastoral. O’Hara’s “Concert Champêtre,” or “rus-
tic harmony,” for example, is a humorous and amorous poem in which the
speaker encounters a “cow” with curiously human qualities (Poems, 15). A
“grand” “giantess of good,” she dwells among “bees.” It is at her invitation
that the speaker takes a roll in the “clover,” and begins a conversation about
his own cow story, at the prospect of which she responds with a “bit[e]”
and postcoital cuddling (“she crooned / silently and threw a leg / over my
shoulder”). The speaker’s attitude towards her is fond if at times vaguely
hostile; the last words of the poem refer colloquially to his own about-to-be-
recounted tale: “It will kill you.” As he sees it, he will get a laugh, but also
may appall and offend in some devastating way.
Gertrude Stein, the regal queen of modernism, the author of texts such
as the playful “Bee Time Vine” and “As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story,”
and a lesbian whose private life was carefully guarded from public scrutiny,
fits nicely into O’Hara’s poem as a maternal presence who invites the young
poet into the realm of the physical and the lyrical, the sexual and the comic,
affirming identifications beyond the heterosexual. Like his friend and con-
temporary John Ashbery, O’Hara found pastoral to be a necessary mode
in which to express the sensations of love and loathing that accompanied
the postwar gay experience. Writing decades earlier, Stein was far more cir-
cumspect in depicting her own sense of otherness. Her use of pastoral both
resembles and departs from those of her male peers and literary heirs, and
she indeed might have been “killed” by the kind of public acknowledgement
of difference that was so invigorating for O’Hara. Precisely because her sense
of gender and sexuality was so fraught, her pastorals reinscribe the mode
from a site that is both curiously conventional and utterly other. However,
the continued attraction of Stein’s pastoral poetics for later twentieth-
century poets, often women or gay men, suggests that her pastoral mode
was not only fruitful but was an important model for a new series of pastoral
innovations.
Over the course of this book so far, I have posited a modern pastoral
mode in which male poets articulate an ethical individualism strongly influ-
enced by James and Dewey. They employ the mode to imagine new relation-
ships with those marginalized by virtue of their class or economic condition,
gender, sexuality, race, or ethnicity, while confronting their own proximity
to the edges of American society. These pragmatic pastorals are inflected
by a genuine orientation toward not only “public culture,” but also a politi-
cized public sphere,3 their goals at times overlapping with the goals of more
openly political texts such as the proletarian literature of the 1930s, as well
as texts we associate with the avant-garde.4 Responding to a newly troubling
divide between the privileged and underprivileged, center and margin, these
twentieth-century pastorals have sought to reenvision the dynamic between
self and other, the poet and the people. Modern pastorals are marked by
their tendency to explore and even explode these dichotomies, bringing into
question how privilege and power are constructed and maintained.
In this final and concluding chapter, I explore the resurgence of a prag-
matic pastoral mode in American poetry at the end of the past century,
focusing on its early turn-of-the-century origins and later flowering in
avant-garde and postmodern poetry circles in texts by women poets, includ-
ing Stein as well as Lyn Hejinian and Lisa Robertson. Informed by post-
modern conceptions of self that explode the gendered binaries of the past,
these texts are directly and indirectly shaped by pragmatic conceptions of
subjectivity. The resurgence of pragmatism or neo-pragmatism in the 1980s
in the work of philosophers such as Richard Rorty and Cornel West, literary
Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral ● 153
critics such Richard Poirier, Ross Posnock, and Giles Gunn, and historians
such as James Kloppenberg and Robert Westbrook suggests that the con-
cerns both material and intellectual that preoccupied poets at the turn of
the last century continue to drive American academics, poets, and the public
even as we mark the recent millennium.5 The influence of these thinkers in
creating a climate hospitable to pragmatic concerns as well as the continued
relevance of James and Dewey themselves upon contemporary poets solidify
claims for a revitalized pragmatic pastoralism.
The continuity among the work of Stein, Hejinian, and Robertson is the
result, ironically, of the success with which Stein disguised the subversive
nature of her work, aligning her public and poetic personas with ostensi-
bly masculine conceptions of “genius” and sexuality. In pastorals such as
“Melanctha” (1909) and Lucy Church Amiably (1927), Stein employs the
mode in ways not unlike those of her male contemporaries, querying tru-
isms of gender and sexuality while discussing nature, landscape, romance,
identity, history, gender, and economics.6 Due to her own self-censorship as
well as a critical reluctance to address such issues, however, Stein’s radical
critique of traditional, patriarchal pastoral orders was not fully received by
her intellectual heirs until much later in the twentieth century. Drawing
upon Stein’s pastoral poetics, Hejinian and Robertson invoke her example
more frequently and explicitly than either O’Hara or Ashbery. Overtly inter-
ested in pastoral’s potential to destabilize aesthetic and social conventions,
these women poets are confident of their centrality to a North American
tradition of letters while aware of the ideological complexity of their cultural
inheritance.7 A member of the Language school of poets, Hejinian frequently
references pastoral rhetoric in her voluminous writings on poetics as well as
in instances of her own poetry (e.g., “The Green”). Robertson, a Canadian
poet, invokes Stein in the erotic collages of her book-length XEclogue.
Even as their projects complement Ashbery’s in their evocations of sex-
ual difference and complications of a postwar “masculine” perspective on
experience, these pastorals by women suggest a productive new orientation
for the mode. And while their avant-garde, late-twentieth-century feminist
pastorals are most directly influenced by Stein’s example, they are also made
possible by—indeed are the logical fulfillment of—the pastoral visions
articulated by Frost, Williams, and Stevens. Exploring the ways in which
pastoral has been adapted by one early- and two late-twentieth-century
women poets, this book concludes by underlining the mode’s persistent rel-
evance to the American scene. Twentieth-century American pastoral is a
continuing project, implying a political, social, and cultural atmosphere in
which the marginal has become more central, even as tolerance and equality
remain elusive goals.
Gertrude Stein’s Geography of History

Shortly before she was supposed to graduate from medical school at Johns
Hopkins, Gertrude Stein left her studies, having concluded that women
could in fact accomplish little once outside the classroom: the “American
woman confuses ‘her education her cleverness and intelligence for effec-
tive capacity for the work of the world.’ ”8 On the surface, Stein denied the
causes of science and progress linked to early feminism, but her apostasy
was neither complete nor lasting. Over the years, she repeatedly returned to
the progressive tenets of modern “science” in order to formulate responses to
what she once termed “Patriarchal Poetry.” Through her writing, Stein, like
the New Women she professed to scorn, was able to fuse public and private
elements of her life so as to elicit new—although often limited—aesthetic
and ethical possibilities.
To the extent that “genius . . . was . . . synonymous with maleness” for Stein,
it is no surprise that early in her career she often adopted male-identified or
male roles in fictionalized accounts of her life. Q.E.D. (1903–1905), begins
with an epigraph from a scene in Shakespeare’s As You Like It that epito-
mizes her early, self-veiling use of the pastoral mode. In the scene the cross-
dressing Rosalind is stranded in a wood with various mismatched lovers
as well as a shepherd, all comically vowing undying “adoration, duty, and
observance” to one another until an impatient Rosalind likens their voices to
“the howling of Irish wolves against the moon.”9 Stein’s choice of this scene
to preface a private autobiographical drama only published later in life hints
at her identification with Rosalind’s masculine subterfuge as well as her own
early identification with the pastoral mode.
Just as significantly, radical depictions of gender and sexuality as well
as race and nationality intertwine in a text Stein herself believed to be her
first major literary accomplishment, inaugurating her pragmatic use of pas-
toral. Stein dons the persona of Jeff Campbell in Three Lives’s “Melanctha”
(1909),10 a retelling of Stein’s affair with May Bookstaver (the novella’s
subtitle is “Each One As She May”). Jeff and Melanctha are African-
American lovers who struggle and repeatedly fail to make known their
feelings for each other, their affair taking place “in the bright fields” and
around their neighborhood at the city’s margins.11 Their story unfolds, as
do many modern pastorals, at the edges of urban life rather than its white,
middle-class, ideological center. The prose style is melodious and rhythmic,
reminiscent of song, characterized by a revolutionary syntax that is Stein’s
first attempt at what she would term in “Composition as Explanation” a
“prolonged present” that would become a “continuous present.”12 With its
emphasis on “beginning and beginning and beginning,” the narrator lingers
over love’s frustrations much as do the singing shepherds of Virgil’s Idylls,

chronicling the hesitancies, recklessness, and disaster resulting from feelings
that are “less than you are always thinking and much more than you are ever
knowing.”13 Although Jeff and Melanctha eventually find some comfort in
their relationship, their happiness is soon marred by her “wandering,” his
misunderstanding, and Melanctha’s eventual death, the story becoming a
pastoral elegy of sorts for a woman who refuses to conform to turn-of-the-
century racial, sexual, or gender norms.14 In its presentation of the bisexual
Melanctha and her friend Jane Harden as well as its depictions of African-
American lives as representatively American—albeit often in the form of
broad racial caricatures—“Melanctha” decenters some stereotypes even as it
deploys and reinforces others. An experimental chronicle of a failed, youth-
ful love affair, “Melanctha” was a turning point in Stein’s literary career.
When Stein returned to the pastoral mode in the poetic prose of Lucy
Church Amiably (written 1927, published 1930), her approach involved a
new emphasis on what she termed “landscape,” a quality whose desired effect
she declares similar to what she wished to achieve in “Melanctha” with the
“prolonged” or “continuous present.”15 As Stein discussed the phenomenon
in a lecture entitled “Plays” (1935), while the “continuous present” served
to approximate the impassioned yet static nature of Melanctha’s life and
relationships, so did “landscape” suit the story of Bilignin (a town near the
French country house Stein shared with Toklas) and its surroundings, the
site that would constitute the grounds of Lucy Church Amiably. Although
Stein soon turned to writing plays, this overtly pastoral novel or prose poem
was her first attempt at representing what it was about “landscape” that
she found so appealing, and her multiple attempts to theorize this tech-
nique reveal the centrality of a pastoral poetic to her work as a whole. As she
describes the texture of the prose-poem
The landscape has its formation and as after all a play has to have forma-
tion and be in relation one thing to the other and as the story is not the
thing as any one is always telling something then the landscape not mov-
ing but being always in relation, the trees to the hills the hills to the fields
the trees to each other any piece of it to any sky and then any detail to
any other detail, the story is only of importance if you like to tell or like
to hear a story but the relation is there anyway.16
Both the “continuous present” and “landscape” foreground a state of being

or existence, patterns of mutual relations among objects and people (or
people as objects, as the stereotyped and thus virtually immobile plot-wise
characters of Melanctha and Jeff so often seem to be), and the eschewal of
a conventional, linear narrative or “story.” The emphasis is upon the spatial

or relational rather than the temporal, immersion in experience itself rather
than its codification into precoded symbols, meanings, and narratives. Even
so, while ostensibly eschewing the kind of information normally conveyed
in a story in which “any one is always telling something”—“landscape” for
Stein also is strongly linked to the “play” with all of its connotations of per-
formance and publicity, both situated in time and in relation to the kind of
mass audience that Stein craved.
In The Geographical History of America (1936), Stein introduces a related
concept that both clarifies and complicates her references to “landscape.”
She refers to the concept of the “masterpiece” as a work of art that tends to
“always flatten it out, flatten human nature out so that there is no begin-
ning and middle and ending.”17 Similar to a “landscape” insofar as both are
the site of the spatial and a flattening out of time, the “masterpiece” creates
room for what Stein terms “romance.” “Romance” is the realm of “human
mind” rather than “human nature,” the latter being aligned with “history”
and “identity” (Geographical, 183). Stein’s careful attempt to theorize a pas-
toral realm of “human mind” apart from “human nature,” of “romance”
or an idyll apart from “history,” however, is less an honest appraisal of her
own technique than typical of the way in which her self-protective impulses
to deny certain aspects of history often end up subsumed within pastoral
texts such as Lucy Church Amiably that speak of histories, experiences, and
personalities which belie Stein’s abstractly rigid doctrines.18 In a revealing
contrast, in a third theorization of her aesthetic process in that text (in the
lecture “Poetry and Grammar,” part of the same series as “Plays”), Stein
describes Lucy Church Amiably as the site of “real narrative” as distinct
from “newspaper narrative.” The poetry of this text, Stein now claims, is an
attempt to “replace[] the noun by the thing in itself,” so that poetry would
now “have to deal with everything that was not movement in space.” “Lucy
Church Amiably had been an attempt to do it,” she states, implying that this
poetic text would address not only spatial but temporal concerns, forming
a new poetic narrative mode that would nonetheless exceed conventional
means of storytelling.19
Stein’s privileging of a kind of literary space as “landscape” which, as she
also assesses it, ultimately addresses its temporal dimension, makes a great
deal more sense when considered in the context of her own relation to his-
tory, specifically her intellectual grounding in William James’s conceptions
of consciousness and space in Principles of Psychology.20 In terms of her poet-
ics, Stein’s characterization of “landscape” as a set of linguistic objects exist-
ing in space can be understood as not dissimilar to what James described as
the “substantive,” as opposed to the “transitive,” state of mind, the former
of which he describes as mental “resting-places” analogous to the use of a

“period” at the end of a sentence. Suggestively, James describes such “resting
places” as pastoral, quasi idylls, “usually occupied by sensorial imaginations
of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for
an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing.”21 What is most
significant about this state, however, is that it is extremely difficult to rep-
resent, with the result that “sentences with absolutely no meaning may be
uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged”:
Discourses at prayer-meetings, reshuffling the same collection of cant

phrases, and the whole genus of penny-a-line-isms and newspaper-
reporter’s flourishes give illustrations of this. “The birds filled the tree-
tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant,”is
a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises
in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried
reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. (Principles, 168–169)
Culminating with a pastoral scene of birdsong and presumably male athletic

competition, James emphasizes how the expression of such “feelings of rela-
tion” subtly defy conventional newspaper narratives and may even be almost
poetic in effect, much like Stein’s own texts. Tellingly, however, for James
such linguistic felicities are not the same thing as art, which requires form
and forethought: “the artist notoriously selects his items, rejecting all tones,
colors, shapes, which do not harmonize with each other and the main pur-
pose of his work” (Principles, 171). Citing this kind of selection as a positive
effort toward order, James links aesthetics to the realm of the ethical and
thus the historical and public: “an act has no ethical quality whatever unless
it be chosen out of several all equally possible” (Principles, 172). Although
Stein’s idealization of “landscape,” “masterpieces” and new “narratives” con-
sisting of “things” in place of nouns may evoke the sensation of immediate
experience, they too are anything but artless. Moreover, Stein’s and James’s
complementary references to newspapers suggests that such “substantival”
scenes are necessarily entangled with the “transitive” and temporal: media,
sport, religion—the full texture of everyday life in James’s account.
The results are texts that bear out John Dewey’s more explicit commen-
tary upon aesthetics and ethics, revealing a previously unnoticed conflu-
ence of Stein’s and Dewey’s thought that is less unlikely than one might
think. According to Dewey’s Experience and Nature and Art As Experience,
texts written, not coincidentally, under the influence of Albert Barnes, a
friend and correspondent of Stein’s brother and former confidant, the art
collector and theorist Leo Stein, art is both “consummatory”—providing
aesthetic pleasure in a state analogous to the “substantive” stage of con-

sciousness—as well as “instrumental” and “productive,” leading to further,
what James might call “transitive,” states of consciousness. 22 Such consum-
matory moments are far from isolated aesthetic events, moreover, but are
“ends” connected to human “values” (Experience, 396). Most pertinent to
Stein’s aesthetics, Dewey insists that the aesthetic object functions as more
than an “act of expression” on the part of the artist and is not fully realized
until received by the reader or viewer, at which point traditional subject/
object relations break down: “In art as an experience, actuality and possibil-
ity or ideality, the new and the old, objective material and personal response,
the individual and the universal, surface and depth, sense and meaning,
are integrated in an experience in which they are all transfigured from the
significance that belongs to them when isolated in reflection” (Art, 297).
The function of texts is far from private and autonomous, but rather pub-
lic and social. According to Dewey, not only is art meant to be perceived,
but its ability to be received by a reader is integral to its ethical function.
While Stein might not have agreed openly with Dewey’s conclusion that
“the first intimations of wide and large redirections of desire and purpose
are of necessity imaginative,” her literary creations bear out her own desires
and purposes in complex and revealing ways that open her texts to readers
interested in how experience and subjectivity inflect the writing, reading,
and interpretation—by authors, critics, and laypeople alike—of literature
(Art, 349).
A traditionalist in many matters, Stein was somewhat notoriously in
favor of an American “rugged individualism”—it is no surprise that Stein
loved to read genre fiction such as Westerns—and the very term “land-
scape” has immediate associations with a Romantic, frontier-oriented theory
of subjectivity that involves the perceptual and colonizing mastery of an
environment.23 Yet Lucy Church Amiably provides numerous examples of the
ways in which Stein’s attempts to render one “landscape,” perhaps the fields
near Bilignin, end up invoking multiple sites, histories, and states in a man-
ner consistent with other aesthetically and ethically innovative twentieth-
century pastorals. A “vital rediscovery of the pastoral,” according to Donald
Sutherland, the text brings together elements both lyrical and prosaic in
the interest of presenting a radical perspective on everyday life.24 The main
characters, for example, have names such as Lucy Church, John Mary, and
Simon Therese, which, as critics have noted, collapse male and female,
human and nonhuman (the title reference is to an actual, physical church
in the town of Lucy).25 Stein feigns identifying these characters in terms of
their families and affairs, but no clear narrative lines emerge. Instead, the
reader is left with characters whose gender, sexuality, and social standing
are difficult to pin down, although they all seem wealthy and idle. There
is an aura of the “amiable” about the book as a whole, derived in part from
its references to “romantic nature” abstracted from the destructive forces of
temporality. Personal, contingent, and distinctly Steinian anxieties surface
quickly though: “A genius says that when he is not successful he is treated
with consideration like a genius but when he is successful and has been as
rich as successful he is treated like anybody by his family.”26 Written as
Stein’s reputation was growing and about to be cemented with the publica-
tion of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in 1933, Lucy Church Amiably
could be understood as expressing Stein’s own dissatisfaction (coded male)
with the effect of her fame upon her personal life. Similarly, although the
landscape is supposedly French, American elements persist, such as tobacco
(“Tobacco can be grown also in the place of a fear that it may be too late
various things”), cacti (“Suppose eight more are cactuses and have rosy flow-
ers”), and the California town of Piedmont (“how many wonder if Piedmont
is a name that means near the water between a bay and an ocean”) (Lucy, 16,
53–54, 97). Even Stein’s sister, Bertha, despised by Stein for her convention-
ality, makes an appearance: “Bertha is the name of Bertha as if it were used
and as if it were used” (Lucy, 119).
When relationships between the amorphous characters begin to take
shape, they do so in terms that suggest Stein’s keen sense of the history
of language and genre, as well as the ways in which these translate per-
sonal into social events. For example, while pastoral traditionally celebrates
human love and sexuality, Lucy Church Amiably makes prominent reference
to a “marriage contract” that turns out to be an inversion, or perversion, of
such official documents:
They marry.
If she made it easy to read the marriage contract a contract to marry. If she
made it easy to for the imitation and the other one who could call follow-
ing false cock false cock and no answer. And by the best embroidery which
is white with a delicate touch. And so they marry marry marry three.
When this you see you can marry me. When this you see you can marry
me marry marry undeniably marry and see see that orchids are brown
and withal withal withal intent. (Lucy, 27)
Rather than having another (implicitly a man) administer the docu-

ment, it is a “she” who does so. In addition, it is “she” who is in charge of
how “easy to read” the “marriage contract” will be, and she who may deter-
mine if it takes place at all (the entire proceeding is conditioned by “if”).
The proceedings are unusual to say the least, involving not only traditional
“white” and “embroidery” (a specialty of Alice’s) but also a “false cock,” to
which the male-identified but physically female Stein sets a coy “no answer.”
Ignoring impediments, “they marry marry marry three” in a ritualized rep-
etition of a conventional service, the narrator performing the consent of
both parties as well as that of the officiant. Traditional gender roles are dis-
solved as the text replaces a heterosexual “two” with an ambiguous “three”
in which no clear female or male parties can be identified. In a comic twist,
the act of reading itself becomes part of the celebration, for in “see[ing]” this
page we too are given permission to “marry,” although the accompanying
“orchids” may be “brown” rather than their usual exotic hues, their sugges-
tive folds more reminiscent of flesh than flora.
Although Stein considered the locality of Bilignin to have been conse-
crated by the presence of the French poet Lamartine and his paeans to ideal-
ized love, her vision of pastoral beauty is considerably more earthy. Herself
confidently large, with a “massive, heavy fat” that “she always seemed to
like,” exuding a charismatic attraction in all her “ampleur,” Stein “had none
of the funny embarrassments Anglo-Saxons have about flesh. She gloried in
hers.”27 Embodying an excessive physicality that was the antithesis of the
modernist male aesthete, Stein was not shy about the physical world in her
writing. As such, she exemplifies what Tim Armstrong refers to as a “set of
bodily relations . . . typified by a pleasure in the production of waste which
signals a refusal to the aesthetics of efficiency.”28 Rather than dwell upon
a masculine efficiency and idealization of a “pure” autonomous self, Stein
here codifies a version of herself in terms of a distinctly feminized languor
and sensuality, sensations traditional to the realm of the pastoral. “Imagine
she says. Imagine what I say,” we are instructed: “Add cows to oxen goats
to sheep add cows and oxen and goats to sheep. Add oxen and cows and
chickens and sheep to fields and she will be satisfied so she says. She will be
satisfied” (Lucy, 49). To many of Stein’s readers, especially those acquainted
with “As Every Wife Has a Cow A Love Story” with its blatantly sexual
overtones, “cow” is the pastoral code word for “orgasm,” and its presence in
Lucy Church Amiably the inevitable manifestation of lesbian sex. Even the
advertisement for the book, promising the reader all sorts of natural delights
such as “falling water,” “a river a gorge an inundation” and “a remarkably
meadowed mass which is whatever they use not to feed but to bed cows,”
clearly appears upon rereading to be a highly eroticized rendition of the local
topography rather than a naïve description of a natural environment.29
The very fact that such an advertisement even exists for Lucy Church
Amiably points toward yet another layer of history attached to this text,
indicating the major significance this deceptively flat, modest volume of
“romantic beauty” gradually took on for both Stein and Toklas. After com-
pleting the novel, Stein had difficulty finding a publisher, especially after
her Useful Knowledge (1928) failed to sell. As a consequence, Toklas, under
Stein’s direction, took it upon herself to form their own publishing company,
which Stein dubbed “Plain Edition.” After careful research into distribution
and marketing tactics, Toklas issued the book in the form Stein proposed:
“Gertrude Stein wanted the first book Lucy Church Amiably to look like a
school book and to be bound in blue.”30 Simple, childish, the color of purity,
the book would be a neat compendium of country pleasures whose com-
plications were carefully disguised. The book’s publication was evidently
deeply gratifying to Stein, who saw it as a vindication of her genius and
its imminent recognition by the reading public. According to Stein’s The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, on seeing her book in store windows, the
author reportedly felt “a childish delight amounting almost to ecstasy. . . . she
spent all her time in her wanderings about Paris looking at the copies of Lucy
Church Amiably in the windows and coming back and telling [Alice] about
it” (Selected, 903). The encoded pastoral romances of the book give way in
the Autobiography to the decidedly public romance of Stein of gazing raptur-
ously at the product of her genius and most likely at her own reflection in
the glass simultaneously. Toklas, who largely engineered the production of
the small volume, thus brought her lover to spasms of “delight” that were
decidedly not “childish.” Although Lucy Church Amiably was not the com-
mercial breakthrough that the Autobiography was to be in a few short years,
its publication proved to both women that rather than being dependent on
male publishers (with the exception of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap)
they themselves could begin to control Stein’s publicity. History and identity
proved, in the end, to be inextricable from the pastoral text of Lucy Church
Amiably as well as from material conditions of its release. Fittingly, the text
itself appears to anticipate this turn of events, even going so far as to describe
its eponymous protagonist, too, in terms of a public and financially remu-
nerative “romance”: “Lucy Church was astonished to know that they loved
her so was astonished to know that to pay her to pay her to pay her to so pay
her for the paper to pay her they loved to pay her. They did love to pay her
they loved to pay her for the paper” (Lucy, 200).31
Lucy Church’s delight in her own literary propagation can be understood
as a manifestation of Stein’s midcareer determination to make her person
and her work public and successful, to be both a woman and a genius at
once. A delayed return to the optimism of her youth, in which mentors such
as William James, Hugo Münsterberg and others supported her research
and encouraged her in her scientific endeavors,32 Lucy Church Amiably
is a site in which Stein questions the supposedly “scientific” assumptions
regarding gender and sexuality that were used to keep women out of the
public sphere.33 Like many professional women of her generation, however,
Stein was more interested in skeptical inquiry than in politics, reluctant to
turn her professional gains into political arguments. As a result, the inno-
vative conclusions of Stein and others as well as the rights that logically
followed from such studies were not fully received by larger audiences until
much later in the century.34 In the 1950s poets such as Frank O’Hara and
John Ashbery (who in 1957 described Stein’s Stanzas in Meditation as “a
hymn to possibility”) received her work warmly, while in the 1970s through
the 1990s poets such as Lyn Hejinian and Lisa Robertson would take her
pastoral project forward toward a new millennium.35
Landscape Ventures
Stein’s version of pastoral, while generally disregarded beyond a small circle
of Stein critics, has not gone completely unnoticed. While poets like O’Hara
and Ashbery noted Stein’s pastoral treatment of homosexuality, poets such
as Hejinian and Robertson have been especially intrigued by Stein’s adap-
tation and complication of pastoral gender conventions. Hejinian, a poet
identified with the Language school of writing prominent since the 1970s
in the San Francisco Bay area and New York City, has explicitly aligned
herself with Stein’s avant-garde poetics as well as the scientific impulse she
detects in Stein’s pastoral “landscapes.”36 Not just aesthetic or methodologi-
cal, Hejinian’s affiliation with Stein is also personal and political. Hejinian’s
reception of Stein’s work as well as readings that limn Stein’s influence upon
texts such as “The Green” reveal the continuity between their poetic projects,
as do Hejinian’s own readings of the works of William James. Absorbing his
radical empiricism directly, Hejinian reveals her aesthetics and ethics to be
decidedly “neo-pragmatic.” Articulating a politicized aesthetics that marks
her as the heir of Stein, James, and Dewey, Hejinian’s poetry and spatialized
understanding of language itself lends credence to the concept of a con-
tinuous American pastoral tradition that encodes a distinctly late twentieth-
century social landscape.
Introducing her essays “Two Stein Talks” (1986), Hejinian begins by
mentioning how her father—who grew up in Oakland, California, as did
Stein—wrote to Stein in 1933 praising her work. Alice Toklas responded
to his letter, thanking him and sending along Stein’s “greetings and to
Piedmont too.”37 Stein’s affable response to her young admirer and explicit
acknowledgement of their shared native environs near Piedmont (also men-
tioned in Lucy Church Amiably), was the beginning of a lifelong admiration
that he passed down to his daughter. Hejinian, in turn, saw her father’s
regard for Stein as a sign that women, too, could be important writers
(“Talks,” 83–84). Hejinian grew up to attend Radcliffe, Stein’s alma mater,
and became a major avant-garde American poet. When she describes what
she learned from Stein in more detail, she describes it as a method, derived
from William James, that is decidedly scientific: a focus on “not truth but
understanding,” a “shift of emphasis from perceived to perceiving, and thus
to writing, in which acts of observation, as complex perception, take place.”
In a turn that foreshadows a shared interest in a pastoral poetics, Hejinian
professes herself especially intrigued by the link she perceives between
“grammar” and “landscape” in Stein’s work, which she then considers in
terms of her own practice. “It is the convergence of these elements—that is,
time and space—with language that provides the excitement of grammar,”
she notes, observing that Stein’s work provides an important model insofar
as it “distributes value or meaning across the entirety of any given work; the
emphases are panoramic” (“Talks,” 116). In a gesture that elucidates Stein’s
subtle poetics, Hejinian immediately divines the ways in which both time
and space energize “grammar,” with results linked to the pastoral terminol-
ogy of “landscape” and “panoram[as].”
Hejinian herself has been received as postmodern in the sense that her
work, like that of her peers, “wants to open the field so as to make con-
tact with the world as well as the word,” according to Marjorie Perloff.38
Hejinian’s references to Stein and “landscape,” however, suggest an alterna-
tive genealogy for her revisionary pastoralism. While Perloff’s rhetoric here
recalls Charles Olson’s manifesto “Projective Verse,” with its call upon poets
to “venture into FIELD COMPOSITION” and for the poet to “put himself
into the open,” Hejinian’s work inverts Olson’s determination to write from
the (implicitly male) body poetry that manifests “the breath, the breathing
of the man who writes,” conveying the “high energy-construct” necessary to
this evidently strenuous, not to mention phallicly suggestive verse (as evoked
by such key terms as “projectile,” “percussive,” and “prospective”).39 While
Stein at one level accepted (even as she elsewhere mischievously disman-
tled and reassembled) the romance of masculine individualism, Hejinian
is more overt in her own landscape poetics. Opting instead for a different
kind of “open” form, she describes her poetics in terms of its “resistance
to closure,” insofar as her ideal is “to achieve maximum vertical intensity
(the single moment into which the Idea rushes) and maximum horizon-
tal intensity (Ideas cross the landscape and become the horizon and the
weather).”40 In this pastoral vision of the text, “Ideas” exist within a dynamic
of time and space that is at once linguistic and experiential. In part a reac-
tion—like Olson’s—against the classic “I”-centered, nature-oriented lyric
form so common in mainstream American poetry (whose perceptual and
metaphysical assumptions Olson at times shares), Hejinian’s poetics also

partakes of a shared desire to upset binaries of “form-content, male-female,
now-then, here-there, large-small, social-solitary, etc.” lending itself instead
to “deliberate and complex disintegration, dispersal, elaboration.”41 That
these impulses can take the form of a pastoral text and are articulated in a
decidedly pastoral rhetoric is significant and as yet unexplained in any criti-
cal account of her work.
Hejinian’s text, “The Green” (1994), exemplifies the kind of Steinian
landscapes she reads and reproduces, albeit with an attention to the history
and politics of her project that Stein never made explicit.42 The first thing
that one notices about the poem is that, like much of Stein’s work, it looks
like prose. Playing against the traditional “line” and all of its connotations
of “lines of sight, lines of investigation, horizon lines, cartographer’s lines,
and . . . lines of travel—routes, paths, etc.” the poem suggests a different kind
of literary landscape.43 While the title of “The Green” suggests a pastoral
idyll, or at least a country scene, it begins on a humorous, even unnerving,
note: “I am nearsighted and therefore cannot tell, though I would, whether
the shapes in a field across the road are rocks, or shrubs, or cows.”44 Although
there seems to be an “I” who is a speaking subject, the first thing that we
learn about him or her is that his or her sight is unreliable. Their language
(like all of ours) is limited by physical and spatial conditions, and will just
as often reflect the speaker’s misperceptions as his or her insights. Although
“landscape” is often a “reassuring” element in a work, as Hejinian notes,
while temporality “exerts a particular pressure” resulting in “restlessness and
sometimes anxiety,” here the poet inverts the anticipated affect of each ele-
ment, ascribing an indeterminacy to landscape much as Stein could not help
but bring “human nature” into her pastoral “masterpieces.”45
Other similarities between Hejinian’s and Stein’s approaches to land-
scape and pastoral abound. Hejinian, like Stein, plays with traditional pas-
toral topoi, calling attention to a seemingly natural scene or field, as well as
domestic animals such as “cows” (which recall Stein’s eroticized animals).
But the next line disperses any fixed images or assumptions about literary
modes the reader might be attempting to form. As a speaker notes, “There
are many figures in this scene which might form separate scenes” (“Green,”
127). The vagueness of reference, with its unspecified “figures” and “scene,”
both of which might form “separate scenes,” is reminiscent of Stein’s gram-
matical play in its resistance to forming a singular coherent narrative or
image. For example, the repetition of the word “scene” brings into question
the referent of the word, which, as a homonym of “seen” suggests something
perceived earlier and reconstructed, or an image that conforms to certain
conventions of “scenes,” and as such is inherently preconstructed, almost
theatrical. However, while the text indicates that several stories may be
unfolding here, their purpose is simply as backdrop: as readers we will never
have intimate access to them. Or if we do, our access will always be mediated
by language and our own preconceptions of how “landscapes” and “scenes”
work. The emphasis on the spatial relationships brings us closer into the
process of the poem, but often so close that we cannot see the field for the
individual blades of grass.
The emphasis on relations among objects in space in “The Green” extends
for Hejinian to an implied relationship with her reader that, like Whitman’s,
aspires to be non-hierarchical, improvisational, and ethical. Part of a strong
community of writers in the Bay area, many of whom actively protested
the Vietnam War and the “pervasive hypocrisy of the 1950s and 1960s,”
Hejinian clearly sees her work as a “utopian undertaking” to destabilize the
presumed “naturalness” of language as well as the oppression toward women
and other marginal social groups that it encodes. Accordingly, her poetry
works at the “borders” of culture where it often produces a “dream land-
scape” that, like “the border landscape,” is
unstable and perpetually incomplete. It is a landscape of discontinuities,

incongruities, displacements, dispossession. The border is occupied by
ever-shifting images, involving objects and events constantly in need of
redefinition and even literal renaming, and viewed against a constantly
changing background.46
The text of “The Green” bears out this desire to fuse the aesthetic and
the ethical in its idiosyncratic gestures towards description. To an extent,
the shift from a rhetoric of “dreams” to that of “borders” reflects a wider
scholarly and cultural shift from studies of a quasi-mythical “frontier” to
that of more historically accurate—if more complicated and amorphous—
“borderlands.” The sentences play with the reader’s expectations of what
kind of environment is being imagined, leaving room for the reader to fill
in spaces or blanks. For example, early in the text a speaker continues as if
previously interrupted: “At the head of what is known as endlessly recep-
tive the river crosses an occasional rain. The symmetry is broken by the
wind. My attention trails off to the nether side of the clay mustard jar in
which the collection of pencils is kept.” In the first of these sentences the
location resists definition, leaving room for imagination, improvisation, and
future revision to a text that is itself “endlessly receptive” (“Green,” 127).
The subject of the sentence appears to be the “ river,” but then the nonsen-
sical occurs: the river crosses “an occasional rain,” bringing into question
perceptions of movement and depth, as well as the capacity of “normal”
syntax to relate the variety of human experience or the true nature of any
landscape or scene. The “symmetry” of the next sentence seems to have no
preceding referent, and it is left unclear what the “wind” has “broken.” The
initial suggestion of Romantic harmony is subverted by a mildly vulgar joke
as the poet pokes fun at our desire to locate the transcendent in a poem. The
sentence that follows then moves us towards the accidental and seemingly
banal, the speaker (if it is even the same one) turning her or his attention
to a “clay mustard jar” in which “the collection” looms large, the use of the
definite object giving it seemingly undue grammatical weight. The passive
verb construction (“is kept”) leaves the ownership and purpose of the pencils
up in the air, calling attention to the kind of narrative detail that one often
expects from a description of a landscape. In addition, the domestic nature
of the “clay mustard jar” also brings into question the speaker’s location,
which at first seemed to be outdoors, but suddenly suggests a kitchen with
vaguely feminine and literally “earthy” touches.
The fluid shifts among syntax, scenes, reference, tones, and subjectivity
implied in these sentences are all indebted to Hejinian’s investment in a
specifically American, pragmatic, postfrontier poetics of description that is
antithetical to Enlightenment science and empirical reportage. With such
concerns in mind, over the years Hejinian has read the travel journals of
Lewis and Clark and William Bartram, Owen Wister’s The Virginian and
Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers,
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Ralph
Waldo Emerson’s essays, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Jack London’s The
Call of the Wild, Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, and William
James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism. Teaching several of these texts in a
course entitled “Romantic Theory and American Event,” she developed a
theory of the poet as a “barbarian”: one who works against what is unjust in
civilization with an endlessly productive poetic language “which generates
an array of logics capable, in turn, of generating and responding to encoun-
ters and experience.”47
The inclusion of James in this course is directly indebted to Hejinian’s
stress upon a pragmatic or neo-pragmatic understanding of experience and
knowledge that both connects her work to Stein’s and underlines the per-
sistence of a pragmatically inflected American poetic tradition. In “The
Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem,” written in 1992 originally for
presentation at the Naropa Institute’s Summer Writing Program, Hejinian
addresses concepts such as the “ ‘discovery of America,’ ” the West, and
the “frontier,” emphasizing how “geophysical unfamiliarity” and “physical
dislocation” can give rise to experiences not dissimilar to those idealized
by pragmatic philosophers such as James, whose scientific methodology
emphasizes such processes of discovery and immediate, intimate experience

of the world.48 Stressing “I was born in the West,” Hejinian calls atten-
tion to her native locality, California, and to the gradual imposition upon
this formerly remote American province of Western conceptions of subjec-
tivity and knowledge in which self and object, self and other are strictly
delineated, often with disturbing consequences (“Quest,” 212). Turning to
the Rodney King beating and the ensuing riots in Los Angeles, she reflects
upon a culture in which “immobilized, static, blameworthiness is extracted
from (or given in place of) history,” overly clear and often wrongheaded
conclusions or forms of “knowledge” drawn from complex interrelations
of persons and events, videotaped images and courtroom deliberations. In
contrast, she posits a model of knowledge and knowing drawn from James’s
Essays in Radical Empiricism: “ ‘Why insist,’ asked James, ‘that knowing is
a static relation out of time when it practically seems so much a function of
our active life? . . . When the whole universe seems only to be making itself
valid and to be still incomplete (else why its ceaseless changing?) why, of all
things, should knowing be exempt?’ ” (“Quest,” 224).
In her juxtaposition of contemporary race relations, national poli-
tics, Jamesian pragmatism, and the history of poetics, Hejinian implicitly
stresses the ideological underpinnings of James’s own philosophy, especially
as received by contemporary interpreters and progressively-minded neo-
pragmatists such as Hilary Putnam, James Kloppenberg, and Cornel West,
among whose number she should be counted.49 A postmodern poet like col-
leagues Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein—the latter characterizing his
“indigestible, intransigent” writing as an antidote to “thought control” and
“reality control”50 —Hejinian leans toward what Kloppenberg describes as
an “older variet[y] of pragmatism descended more directly from James and
Dewey,” rather than a purely linguistic postmodernism derived from prag-
matic principles (Kloppenberg, 116). Sharing James and Dewey’s “ideals of
democracy” and “commitment to communities of inquiry rigorously test-
ing all truth claims,” Hejinian’s poetic “restlessness” and commitment to a
“language of inquiry” within both a community of poets and a wider, trans-
national literary and social world (witness her interest in Russian literature)
all suggest a modern neo-pragmatism closely aligned with its oft-cited roots
in James and, implicitly, Dewey (Kloppenberg, 116). While Hejinian does
not cite Dewey directly, his vision of art’s relation to society and democratic
community provides the natural political extension of James’s writings that
Hejinian herself articulates.
Hejinian’s avant-garde poetics is inextricably bound to the realm of the
political, the public, and all that cultural convention suggests is beyond the
realm of the late modernist lyric, with its connotations of a private realm
or garden conducive to personal insight.51 Yet in a counterintuitive criti-

cal move, Hejinian understands Stein herself—especially in texts such as
Stanzas in Meditation (1933)—to have been “not a political writer,” a posi-
tion ostensibly due to Stein’s distrust of the public sphere, which the earlier
poet associated with “identity,” a self whose publicity (like Stein’s own after
the publication of the Autobiography) endangered the “entity” or “human
mind” at its most free.52 Instead, she celebrates the terms of Stein’s “con-
tinuous present” as the basis for an everyday, feminine, household-oriented
“happiness”—derived from Hannah Arendt and denoting “the sheer bliss of
being alive”—that she understands as manifesting a quasi-existential “will
to live” and generated by an endlessly productive and recurrent paradox or
“aporia.”53 Even as Stein consistently paid encoded tribute to both the banal-
ity and pleasures of the everyday as well as a convention-defying “romance”
within a radically unconventional household or domestic space, the fully
historicized and political nature of Stein’s textual innovation is curiously
elided in Hejinian’s contemporary reception. Implicitly, however, Hejinian
still draws upon Stein’s example in forging pastoral poetics that reveals the
seemingly feminine and domesticated landscape to be potentially transgres-
sive and politically disruptive. Whether recognized directly or not for her
contribution, Gertrude Stein had cleared this path long before, leading read-
ers down circuitous paths that began in the south of France and continued
in California.
Beginning and Beginning and Beginning Again

Lisa Robertson, a poet associated with the avant-garde Kootenay school of
writing in Vancouver, has recently produced work that is both explicitly
pastoral and radically intimate, representing at least one more way in which
a progressive pastoral tradition has persisted. Writing from beyond the bor-
ders of the United States, Robertson’s work is evidence of a transnational
pastoral mode that the Parisian Stein also represents, writing simultaneously
from within and without the Anglo-American tradition. Foregrounding the
erotic dimensions of pastoral, Robertson positions herself within a Steinian
lineage that culminates in what can be termed an urban or cosmopolitan
pastoral, speaking to new visions of community that exceed and defy tradi-
tional concepts of national affiliation.54
The Epigraph to Robertson’s volume XEclogue (1993; revised 1999) is
taken, not surprisingly, from Stein: “Nature is not natural and that is natu-
ral enough.”55 From the beginning, Robertson calls upon Stein in order to
dispel the myth of “natural” origins, the attribution of Truth and History
to Nature, Nature as Logos. Rather than situate her work in a recognizable
physical terrain, she identifies it in terms of another text. Intrigued by

“Gertrude Stein’s sentence,” Robertson alludes to the spatial dimension of
texts, their function as points of reference in and of themselves, aesthetic
style as substance.56 At the same time, she uses Stein in order to grant herself
the authority to create a new nature, one that is “natural enough”—one of
many alternative natures, incomplete, in process, open to possibility, revi-
sion and reform. And Stein is not her only influence: in a final “Note” to
the text, Robertson invokes Frank O’Hara and Virgil, among other writers,
musicians, and artists such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (whose “City
Eclogues” Robertson deems formative), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Patti Smith,
Annie Lennox, Marguerite de Navarre, and Christine de Pisan. The list is
wide-ranging historically and generically, as well as international, in scope,
citing popular music, philosophy, correspondence, novels, poetry, and land-
scape history from English, French, Latin, and American sources. Physically,
the book is characterized by irregular typography and absence of pagination
that speaks to its wide-open boundaries, its eclectic derivations from a vari-
ety of sources whose collective influence helps to forge a sustained critique
and unraveling of pastoral’s inherent tensions between nature and culture,
high and low, masculine and feminine.
The poem itself begins with a prologue, “How Pastoral,” in which
Robertson somewhat satirically chronicles the disruptive impulses underly-
ing the text. “I needed a genre for the times that I go Phantom,” she declares,
“I needed a genre to rampage Liberty, haunt the foul freedom of silence.”
Eschewing a feminine passivity, she will “rampage” “Liberty” herself, thereby
denaturalizing the term’s associations with the female, abstract, and ultimate
good. The syntactic hiccup by which “rampage” takes an object in “Liberty”
already speaks to the kinds of ruptures this shadow writing may produce.
Her intention, apparently, is to become a ghost in the workings of pasto-
ral itself, haunting its manifestations in “historical innocence,” “Nature,”
“homeland.” Eschewing these forms of “nostalgia,” she leans toward a “new
world” born mysteriously of “her” (Liberty’s?) “fruiting skin”: “so elegant, so
precise, so evil, all the pleasures have become my own.” Radically unmoored
from North American and gendered conceptions of citizenship and virtue,
the volume invokes not only “happiness” but “pleasure” in place of “liberty,”
while maintaining its claims to “life.” Recasting the rhetoric of American
democracy from a slight distance and across a national frontier, Robertson
invites the reader into a locality experienced with a curious intensity, her
poetry a profane, vaguely pornographic paean to lust and mortality, love
and language.
Robertson has taken the path of Hejinian and fused it with the erotic
pastoral strain found in poets like Frank O’Hara, sketching a map for how
they might be brought together and fused with still other pastoral gestures.
She exults in “the Latinate happiness that appears to me as small tufted syl-
lables in the half-light, greenish and quivering as grasses.” The “happiness”
here is as erotic as that of Whitman’s “grasses” and curiously formal, pedan-
tically calling attention to “syllables”: it is “Latinate.” “Latinate,” however,
could also refer to Virgil’s Latin and the pastoral pleasures of which his
shepherds sang. The “quivering,” “tufted syllables” refuse to stay in place,
bending under the implied breath of speaker as seductress. Such immediacy
and intimacy are typical of this book-length poem. Robertson offers up the
fantastic and fanciful in letters and transcribed dialogues, fragments of cor-
respondence between “Nancy” and a “Lady M” set amid stanzas and blocks
of proselike passages that also contain the “Roaring Boys” and their reti-
nue. As “phantom” the speaker adopts, for instance, a “sub-Garbo hauteur,”
channeling a figure known for her subtle and sensual performance of gender
as well as her extremely well-publicized desire for privacy. The overall effect
is of a headiness, a disorienting immersion in language that is still deeply
politicized, a playful form of cultural critique.
With its gestures towards both hetero- and homosexual love, includ-
ing its tongue-in-cheek X-rated title, Robertson’s Xeclogue, as well as later
texts such as “Utopia/” “Palinodes” and The Weather, may well fall into a
genre that has recently made its way into the critical discourse of modern
poetry, an urban or more precisely “cosmopolitan pastoral.” Timothy Gray,
for example, has discussed Frank O’Hara’s persona and poetry in terms of
urban pastoral, while Terence Diggory has claimed Allen Ginsberg’s work
for this tradition.57 Both arguments indicate that this pastoral strain is in
certain ways like traditional pastoral—a form that encodes the simultaneous
invoking and eliding of difference between privileged and nonprivileged,
enabling speakers and readers to move among varying modes of subjectivity,
gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and nationality within a newly capacious and
at times disorienting urban space. Drawing upon Stein as well as Annette
Kolodny’s early feminist critique of pastoral,58 Robertson berates “history
diffused as romance; a genre’s camouflaged violence,” yet ends with an
“Epilogue” that references a “bus” in her “dream of an intersection,” and
a “we” who, as the “cabinet swung open” “felt a strong burst of vitality.”
Adopting a plural speaker and a virtual coming out of the closet into an
urban locale, Robertson alludes to the modern city as a physical space and
intellectual nodal point, where history unravels and some form of refuge
might be found.
The postmodern urban city haunts XEclogue as often as the “natural”
world, its subjects and communities leaving barely discernable traces to
be deciphered. Critics of Robertson’s related work on landscape, urban
architecture, weather, and space have invoked her investment in “emergent

discourses of cosmopolitanism,” linked to poems that function as a “city,
or as public architecture . . . the poem as polis.”59 While less overtly pasto-
ral than XEclogue, these poems share that text’s investment in denaturing
the subject’s experience of the world, filtering the material environment
through layers of consciousness, pulling and stretching at skeins of his-
tory and sediment, revealing the contingency of selfhood and place. To the
extent that subjectivity is mutable in Robertson’s pastoral texts, she gestures
toward a cosmopolitan “postethnicity” similar to that proposed by David
Hollinger, in which individuals and communities are marked by voluntary
affiliations rather than fixed identities.60 A darker side of this project also
emerges, however, for like O’Hara and Ginsberg, the unruly, fractured and
at times endangered speakers of Robertson’s poem appear most at home in
the city precisely because it offers anonymity as well as diversity. Equally
reminiscent of what Homi Bhabha has termed “vernacular cosmopolitan-
ism,” such a poetics speak from a local, minoritarian perspective upon global
cosmopolitanism and the nature of modern citizenship.61 In both cases, the
cosmopolitan nature of the modern city offers a refuge not unlike that for-
merly reserved for rural retreats. The sloughing off of rigid conceptions of
subjectivity and citizenship allows for greater personal freedom even as it
also allows for the political vulnerability and potential victimization that
accompany a lack of formal affiliations.
Ideally, these new, “cosmopolitan,” pragmatically pastoral texts will con-
tinue to evoke the historicized, politicized nature of experience in the world,
the “nature” inherent in all aspects of everyday life and loves, arguments and
desires, in sites rural and urban and in between. After all, it was precisely a
turn-of-the-century sense that the structural fabric of the everyday had per-
manently altered, that only a pragmatic method and the arts could guide us
toward the ethical frontiers of the present and future that impelled so many
poets to reinvent pastoral yet again approximately 100 years ago. The grim
realities of Lawrence and the lonely farms of New England, the urban parks
of Paterson, the suburbs of Connecticut and environs of Reading, the apple
farms of upstate New York, and the localities of Oakland and Bilignin all
proved testing grounds within which one way of life met another, popula-
tions altered and were refigured, the poet observed and could not help but
participate.
John Dewey’s exhortation to remember that “imagination is the chief
instrument of the good,” though dated in its optimism, nevertheless con-
tinues to affirm a potent understanding of art’s embeddedness within our
very social structure and the nature of human experience in the world (Art,
348). If literature indeed “conveys the meaning of the past that is significant
in present experience and is prophetic of the larger movement of the future”

(Art, 345), then the illumination of a twentieth-century pastoral poetics
reminds us of a past meaning that had been lost as well as the capacity of
what Raymond Williams termed “residual” cultural practices such as pas-
toral to maintain an “alternative or even oppositional relation to the domi-
nant culture” that is neither nostalgic nor unresponsive to that dominant
culture.62 In a corrective to Williams’s observation that ideas of “rural com-
munity” too often tend to be a “leisure function of the dominant order
itself”—an observation that complements Dewey’s own remarks regarding
bad pastoral art decades earlier—the cumulative effect of the pastorals both
rural and urban that I have examined here suggest a literary mode that may
have qualities of both the “residual” and what Williams terms “emergent,”
pragmatically determining “new meanings and values, new practices, new
relationships and kinds of relationship.”63
Over the course of the preceding chapters, I have sought to make visible
both broad contours and specific examples of pastoral as a modern creative
and critical practice within the United States. That the very concept of the
nation—its citizens and the nature of its civil society—was and continues
to be in flux is crucial to my understanding of the pastoral poetics I have
examined. As we look toward the future, it is clear that the pragmatic pas-
torals of the early, mid-, and late-twentieth century have been continually
reconstituted. As rights for women, African-Americans, other minority and
ethnic groups, and homosexuals have increasingly been encoded in law—if
not always instituted in practice—so has pastoral come to reflect a culture
that anticipates surfeit as often as want, alternatives rather than injustice.
Whether or not pastoral is deemed to have taken on new life beyond the
United States, the possibility pushes us again to reconceptualize the physi-
cal and political sites within which cultural meanings are produced and to
recognize our function as readers and critics in making their values and
possibilities more visible.
Pastoral entails alternative visions of history wedded to intimations of
possibility. Yet, as Ashbery’s early pastorals suggest, simple pleasure, love,
and basic rights to personhood can never be assured and are always in a
kind of danger. Even as more obvious forms of social disarray slip away from
general consciousness for many Americans, they persist and always will,
returning with a regularity that is neither surprising nor predictable. After
September 11, 2001, a different kind of pastoral will be necessary to write
about the pleasures of New York City, as those pleasures might now have
a melancholy edge, reminding us not only of the necessity of reconceiving
the meaning and purpose of national borders, but also of the ethical abyss
to which an excessive individualism or unilateralism can bring us. After
Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 Supreme Court ruling that finally struck down
state antisodomy laws, a gay pastoral tradition might take on a different
tone, still mindful, perhaps, of our law as both amendable and vulnerable.
The pastoral poetics of the future can speak to such events and their every-
day iterations, confronting myths of destiny with the experience to know we
might still choose our destinations.
Notes
Introduction
1. Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, 32, lines 1–5.
2. James, “Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s
Ideals,” Writings 1878–1899, 851.
3. Little has been published on twentieth-century American pastoral. Marx’s
seminal The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in
America, effectively ends with a discussion of The Great Gatsby, while major
recent accounts of pastoral such as Patterson’s Pastoral and Ideology and Alpers’s
What Is Pastoral? discuss Frost and Stevens briefly but in little detail, focus-
ing instead upon European examples. Recent articles on “urban pastoral” in
the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Gary Snyder, James Schuyler, and
Allen Ginsberg, while useful, have not established thoroughly the distinctive
American qualities of these text. See Gray, “Semiotic Shepherds: Gary Snyder,
Frank O’Hara, and the Embodiment of an Urban Pastoral,” Contemporary
Literature 39, 523–559, also “New Windows on New York: The Urban Pastoral
Vision of James Schuyler and Jane Freilicher,” Genre 33, 171–198; Diggory,
“Allen Ginsberg’s Urban Pastoral,” College Literature 27, 103–118; and Vendler,
“New York Pastoral: James Schuyler,” Soul Says: On Recent Poetry. Some inter-
esting new perspectives on pastoral are included in a recent issue of Triquarterly
116, but again none offers a historically attuned case for how American pastoral
of the twentieth century is distinct from other pastoral modes.
4. It was also by the late nineteenth century that class-driven formulations
of highbrow and lowbrow culture were articulated, as Lawrence Levine has
documented, leading to acknowledged distinctions between the cultural life
of the elite and the pastimes of the working poor. See Highbrow/Lowbrow: The
Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America.
5. On African-American literature and pastoral, see Outka, Race and Nature
from Transcendentalism to the Harlem Renaissance, Mance, Inventing Black
Women: African American Women Poets and Self-Representation, Johnson,
Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American Literature, and Dixon,
176 ● Notes
Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature.

Dixon claims that—in contrast with their white counterparts—pastoral tra-
ditionally has been a vexed genre for African-American writers, as rural spaces
tend to evoke a collective memory of slavery.
6. Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valery, 1, 2, 5.
7. See Williams, The Country and the City, and Alpers, What Is Pastoral?. See also
Donna Landry, Gerald McLean, and Joseph P. Ward, eds. The Country and the
City Revisited: The Politics of Culture, 1550–1850.
8. Other major accounts of the European pastoral mode include: Poggioli, The
Oaten Flute: Essays on Pastoral Poetry and the Pastoral Ideal; Rosenmeyer, The
Green Cabinet: Theocritus and the European Pastoral Lyric; Iser, The Fiction
and the Imaginary: Charting Literary Anthropology; Toliver, Pastoral Forms and
Attitudes.
9. Walter Benn Michaels posits a desirable, pure “native” Americanness, while
the pastorals I examine problematize the native/outsider dynamic. See Our
America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism , The Gold Standard and the
Logic of Naturalism. See also Trask, Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in
American Literature and Social Thought; Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism:
American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State; Mary Esteve, The
Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature; Esty, A Shrinking
Island: Modernism and National Culture in England.
10. Unlike regionalist texts, pastorals tend to be written to and from the cultural
center, although like regionalist literature the complexities of modern pastoral
have long been ignored. See Stephanie Foote’s admirable essay, “The Cultural
Work of American Regionalism” in A Companion to the Regional Literatures
of America, ed. Charles L. Crow. See also Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes
of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth- Century America; Sundquist, “Realism
and Regionalism,” in The Columbia History of the United States; Fetterly and
Pryse, Writing Out of Place: Regionalism, Women, and American Literary Culture
and American Women Regionalists, 1850–1910: A Norton Anthology; Zagarell,
“Country’s Portrayal of Community and the Exclusion of Difference,” New
Essays on The Country of the Pointed Firs; and Foote, Regional Fictions: Culture
and Identity in Nineteenth- Century American Literature. On the regionalism of
the 1930s, a related topic that I will address later, see Robert L. Dorman, “Revolt
of the Provinces: The Regionalist Movement in America, 1920–1945,” in The
New Regionalism; see also Lauren Coats and Nihad M. Farooq, “Regionalism in
the Era of the New Deal,” A Companion to the Regional Literatures of America;
and Szalay, New Deal Modernism. See also Lentricchia on gender and modern
American poetry: Modernist Quartet.
11. Ecocriticism tends to focuses upon the depiction of nature as an “other” with
whom human beings attempt to forge an ethical relationship. Pastoral is not
nature poetry; georgic is the more appropriate term for this modern phenom-
enon. For general applications to American literature see Lawrence Buell’s
The Environmental Imagination and Writing for an Endangered World as well
Notes ● 177
as the various approaches contained in The Eco- Criticism Reader, ed. Cheryll
Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Recent critiques of postwar American poetry
from this perspective include Rasula, This Compost: Ecological Imperatives in
American Poetry; Scigaj, Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets; Dean, Gary
Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground; Quetchenbach,
Back from the Far Field: American Nature Poetry in the Late Twentieth Century;
and Langbaum, The Word from Below: Essays on Modern Literature and Culture.
On Anglo-American pastoral and the concept of an ecocritical “post-pastoral,”
see Terry Gifford’s Pastoral as well as his Reconnecting with John Muir: Essays in
Post-Pastoral Practice.
12. In recent years there has been a gradual resurgence of interest in pasto-
ral generally, inspired in part by Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral, but
also evidenced by recent studies such as Mathilde Skoie and Sonia Bjornstad
Velaquez’s Pastoral and the Humanities: Arcadia Re-Inscribed, William Barillas’s
The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American
Heartland, as well as an issue of Triquarterly edited by Susan Steward and John
Kinsella devoted to the pastoral in modern poetry [Triquarterly 116 (Summer
2003)].
13. See generally Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class
and the Development of Higher Education in America for an account of the rise of
the professions during this period.
14. John Dewey, Art As Experience 19. Further citations will be noted parentheti-
cally as Art.
15. Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, 466–467.
Further citations will be noted parenthetically as Bourdieu.
16. John Haffenden, William Empson: Among the Mandarins, 128.
17. Empson’s characterization of pastoral contradicts Michael Denning’s charac-
terization of a proletarian pastoral tradition, although there is some potential
for overlap. While Denning tends to advocate texts written by members of
the working class and Empson would automatically disqualify such texts, he
would not do so if the author somehow identifies him or herself with a more
bourgeois or middle class position and foregrounds, for example, his education.
See Denning, “ ‘The Tenement Thinking’: Ghetto Pastorals,” in The Cultural
Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, 230–258;
Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral, 6–11.
18. Empson, 200, 209. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as
“Empson.”
19. Ransom, “Mr. Empson’s Muddles,” Southern Review 4: 322–339. Further refer-
ences to this essay will be cited parenthetically as “Muddles.”
20. On Ransom’s unacknowledged range of readings, see Ann Mikkelsen, “ ‘Roger
Prim, Gentleman’; Gender, Pragmatism, and the Strange Career of John Crowe
Ransom,” College Literature 36: 46–74.
21. Ransom’s discussion of irony in literature can be found in essays such as
“Thoughts on Poetic Discontent,” The Fugitive 4.2: 63–64, and reappears in
178 ● Notes
his discussion of the failed idealism of the Southern Agrarians in “Art and the
Human Economy,” Kenyon Review 7: 686–687. For Ransom the ironic state
of mind is the most mature and healthful, as contrasted with earlier, youthful
states of idealism and dualism.
22. Marx, The Machine in the Garden. Further citations will be noted parentheti-
cally as “Marx.”
23. For discussions of the conservative, even reactionary politics of the New Critics
and Southern Agrarians, see Walter Kalaidjian, “Marketing Modern Poetry
and the Southern Public Sphere,” in Marketing Modernisms: Self-promotions,
Canonization, and Rereading, 297–319, and Kreyling, Inventing Southern
Literature. Although I see room for reading Ransom’s poetics and poetry in
a more nuanced manner, the overarching claims of these essays are compel-
ling. Alternatively, in her “Formalism and Time,” Modern Language Quarterly
61.1 March 2000: 229–251, Catherine Gallagher offers a compelling critique
of Ransom’s poetics that acknowledges his reluctant acknowledgement of the
temporality of the textual object he sought to capture and describe, while in
“The New Critics and the Text Object,” ELH 63.1 (1996): 227–254, Doug Mao
offers a nuanced account of the New Critical concept of the text as “object.”
24. See Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture;
Strychacz, Modernism, Mass Culture, and Professionalism; McGurl, The Novel
Art: Elevations of American Fiction after Henry James. See also Jani Scandura and
Michael Thurston, eds. Modernism, Inc.: Body, Memory, Capital. In her latest
book, 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics, Marjorie Perloff sloughs off
what she refers to as the “tired dichotomy” between modernism and postmod-
ernism, arguing that “the real fate of first-stage modernism was one of deferral,”
to be continued in a “materialist poetic” she associates with Language poetry
and sees as opposed to the “ ‘true voice of feeling’ ” or mainstream “lauraeate
poetry” typical of postwar poetry that perceived itself, wrongly, to be antimod-
ernist (1, 3, 4).
25. See also Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism and Berger, Theory of the Avant- Garde,. For additional critique
of the traditional modernism/postmodernism divide and all that it entails,
see Schwartz, “The Postmodernity of Modernism,” The Future of Modernism,
9–31.
26. See Jonathan Levin’s, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism & American
Literary Modernism, which tends to expand upon the apolitical pragmatism of
Richard Poirier’s Poetry and Pragmatism.
27. See Rorty, Contingency, Irony, Solidarity. Rorty stresses the role of the liberal,
intellectual “ironist,” but this figure is incommensurable for him with real
political efficacy.
28. See Lentricchia, Ariel and the Police: Michel Foucault, William James,
Wallace Stevens; West, The American Evasion of Philosophy; Posnock, Color
and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual and
The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of
Notes ● 179
Modernity; Gunn, Thinking Across the American Grain; Kadlec, Mosaic

Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture; and Mailloux, Rhetoric,
Sophistry, Pragmatism.
29. See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progressivism in
European and American Thoughts, 1870–1920 and The Virtues of Liberalism.
See also Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy.
30. See Nelson, Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics
of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945; DuPlessis, Genders, Races, and Religious
Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934; Davidson, Guys Like
Us: Citing Masculinity in cold war Poetics; Filreis, Modernism from Left to
Right: Wallace Stevens, the Thirties, and Literary Radicalism; and Thurston,
Making Something Happen: American Political Poetry Between the Wars. See
also Sadoff, History Matters: Contemporary Poetry on the Margins of American
Culture.
31. I adopt the concept of “transideological irony” from Linda Hutcheon’s Irony’s
Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. Hutcheon affirms that “irony can and
does function tactically in the service of a wide range of political positions,
legitimating or undercutting a wide variety of interests” (10). Transideological
irony foregrounds irony’s normative “dynamic and plural relations among the
text or utterance (and its context), the so-called ironist, the interpreter, and the
circumstances surrounding the discursive situation” (11).
32. See Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Pollution and Taboo; Kristeva,
Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection; Freud, Three Essays of the Theory of
Sexuality; Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky; Stallybrass
and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression; Trotter, Cooking with Mud:
The Idea of Mess in Nineteenth- Century Art and Fiction; La Porte, The History
of Shit; Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust; Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life,
eds. William A. Cohen and Ryan Johnson. For a sociological perspective upon
waste that corroborates the idea that “value” can be transformed over time
and culture, see Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of
Value.
33. Stallybrass and White, 202. Grounding their claims in readings of Bakhtin’s
theory of carnival—whose politically emancipatory potential they are careful
to circumscribe, noting that usually the “weak” are the victims of such revel-
ry—as well as Freud’s explication of disgust and desire in his Three Essays of the
Theory of Sexuality, Stallybrass and White demonstrate how disgust is constitu-
tive not only of modern subjectivity but also of poetic authorship itself. “The
‘poetics’ of transgression,” they conclude, “reveals the disgust, fear, and desire
which inform the dramatic self-presentation of that culture through the ‘scene
of its low Other” (Stallybrass and White, 202). Such assertions are similar to
those of Douglas, whose Purity and Danger articulated the analogy between
“dirt” and “disorder” in a social unit and identified pollution rituals as the
sociological counterpart of “a care to protect the political and cultural unity of
a minority group.” (Douglas, 124). They also parallel those of Kristeva, whose
180 ● Notes
focus is upon the “mother”—rather than excrement or its equivalent in the

Freudian nurse or “low” sexual object—as the “abject” entity who “threatens
one’s own and clean self, which is the underpinnings of any organization by
exclusions and hierarchies” as well as “the symbolic order itself ” (Kristeva, 65,
69, 13).
34. Miller, 254.
35. On waste and the American Romantics, see Michael Gilmore, American
Romanticism and the Marketplace. Gilmore notes that at one point in his career
Emerson’s “revulsion from commodity is so great that he even identifies the
visible creation with scum or dross, and implicitly with excrement” (27).
36. For a general account of this shift in the American economy and culture, see
Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds. The Culture of Consumption:
Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. See also Higham, Strangers
in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925 2d ed.; Rosenberg,
Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism; Peiss, Cheap
Amusements: Working Class Women and Leisure in Turn of the Century New
York.
37. See Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash for a useful discussion
of the evolution of garbage in American society. Cecelia Ticchi also discusses
the function of a discourse of “waste” as opposed to a rhetoric of “efficiency”
in a newly technologized, utilitarian, turn-of-the-century America in Shifting
Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America.
38. Trotter, 30.
39. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology and the Body. Even more suggestively,
Armstrong connects such apprehensions of the body back to Bourdieu via prag-
matism: “modernist interventions in the body are pragmatic, moving into the
world of embodied thinking which Pierre Bourdieu calls the habitus . . . .” (7).
40. Provoking disgust rather than horror, mess has to do with “the gradual fad-
ing . . . of doctrines of determinism” and the rise of democracy (Trotter, 30).
1 Pastoral Ideology and the Pragmatic Response

1. For thorough discussions of this phenomena, see Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking
the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing
Democracy,” The Phantom Public, 109–142; also Ryan, “Gender and Public
Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America,” Habermas and the
Public Sphere, 259–288.
2. See Marx, The Machine in the Garden; Smith, Virgin Land: The American West
as Symbol and Myth; Miller, Nature’s Nation; Jehlen, American Incarnation: The
Individual, the Nation, the Continent.
3. For a prominent example of the more recent environmental history, see
William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of
New England, and Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human
Place in Nature. For a more recent account of the function of nature and
Notes ● 181
place in American culture see Ticchi, Embodiment of a Nation: Human

Form in American Places. See also Hallock, From the Fallen Tree: Frontier
Narratives, Environmental Politics, and the Roots of a National Pastoral,
1740–1826; Comer, Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography
in Contemporary Women’s Writing; Handley, Marriage, Violence, and
the Nation in the American Literary West; Hall, Performing the American
Frontier, 1870–1906; Fresonke, West of Emerson: The Design of Manifest
Destiny; Johnson, Black Masculinity and the Frontier Myth in American
Literature.
4. Bryant, “The Prairies,” The Heath Anthology of American Literature, 2714.
5. Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” The Frontier in
American History, 1–38.
6. Limerick, “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century,” The
Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August
26, 1994–January 7, 1995: 72, 87.
7. Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth- Century
America, 54.
8. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 170. Further citations will be noted
parenthetically as “Jefferson.”
9. See Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth- Century
America for a discussion of “pastoral ideology” and the “frontier myth.” See
Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke
for the definition of “possessive individualism.”
10. See Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,”
Signs 13: 37–58, for a discussion of how virtue came to be associated with the
private, domestic sphere rather than the public and political.
11. See Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace. In a typical reading
he recounts how, “Disavowing, on the one hand, the commercial outlook of the
times, Emerson, on the other, purifies and sanctions an aggressive, ‘capitalistic’
ethos of mastery over nature” (30).
12. See Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the
Revolution to the Modern Era; Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural
History; Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender
and Race in the United States, 1880–1917; Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and
the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in
America.
13. See Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy, 533, for an account of
the speech in which these words appear. Further citations of this text will be
indicated by “Westbrook.” It is also interesting to note that in his account
of American pragmatism, Cornel West constantly employs the rhetoric of
the “frontier” in order to discuss the work of John Dewey. See West, The
American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism.
14. Livingston, Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution,
1850–1940, 209. This text is crucial to my understanding of the links between
182 ● Notes
changing perceptions of property and the self and to my dating of this pastoral
phenomenon in poetry from the turn of the century.
15. Dewey, “Pragmatic America,” The New Republic, XXX (April 12, 1922): 185–
187; reprinted in Pragmatism and American Culture, 60.
16. These mixed feelings towards America’s pastoral legacy were and are very much
the result of concurrent desires for modernization and longings for traditional
forms of social life, both of which intensified at the turn of the century. As
intellectual and cultural historians have long observed, cultural debates from
at least 1900 onward have focused in large part upon developments in modern
American concepts of “personality” and “community.” Warren Susman orig-
inally chronicled the shift from “character” to “personality” over the course
of the century in Culture As History: The Transformation of American Society
in the Twentieth Century, 271–286. R. Jackson Wilson and Jean B. Quandt
have stressed, respectively, the “failure of individualism” in nineteenth-century
thought and the related profound significance of “communitarian thought” in
early twentieth-century American culture, see Quandt, From the Small Town to
the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals; R. Jackson
Wilson, In Quest of Community: Social Philosophy in the United States, 1860–
1920. T.J. Jackson Lears has documented a turn-of-the-century antimodern
desire for a more authentic selfhood and traditional society; see No Place of
Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920.
Casey Nelson Blake has presented a compelling argument for reading young
American intellectuals Randolph Bourne, Lewis Mumford, Waldo Frank,
and Van Wyck Brooks in terms of their shared “communitarian vision of self-
realization through participation in democratic culture.” Sharing pragmatism’s
historical moment, such conceptions of the self and society also were articulated
in terms of Turner’s argument. See Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism
of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford, 2.
Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Blake.”
17. Dewey, Individualism Old and New, 5, 41. Further citations will be noted par-
enthetically as Individualism.
18. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 41, 359.
19. James, Pragmatism, 127, 16.
20. Frank, Our America, 9. Brooks, “Toward a National Culture,” Seven Arts I:547,
as cited in Nelson, 125.
21. Mumford, The Story of Utopias, 301, 302, 307.
22. Bourne, “John Dewey’s Philosophy,” The Radical Will: Randolph Bourne,
Selected Writings 1911–1918, 335; Bourne, “Twilight of Idols,” The Radical
Will, 336–337.
23. Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study in American Experience and Culture, 186.
Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Mumford.”
24. Ransom, “Reconstructed but Unregenerate,” I’ ll Take My Stand: The South and
the Agrarian Tradition , 8.
25. Although Ralph Waldo Emerson certainly wrote on political issues, his articu-
lation of a proto-pragmatic thought and aesthetics simply did not address, for
Notes ● 183
historical reasons, the shifts central to James and Dewey’s work. In this sense,
my understanding of pragmatism’s post–Civil War genealogy is in keeping with
Louis Menand’s account of pragmatism’s roots in The Metaphysical Club: A
Story of Ideas in America. In contrast, many American cultural and literary crit-
ics who discuss the Emersonian lineage of pragmatism, such as Richard Poirier,
do so in order to avoid questions of ideology, which I see as central to pragma-
tism’s ultimate implications as a philosophy and practical methodology.
26. William James, Pragmatism, 28, 14. Further citations will be noted parentheti-
cally as “James.”
27. See Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory, 116, for a discussion of James and Dewey
as ironist and optimist respectively. My understanding of pragmatism and lib-
eral thought during this period is strongly informed by Kloppenberg’s work.
28. James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” The Writings of William James, 669.
29. John Dewey to Scudder Klyce, note enclosed with letter of 29 May 1915, The
Correspondence of John Dewey, vol. 1 1871–1918, 3rd ed.
30. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 8. Further citations will be noted parentheti-
cally as “Experience.”
31. Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy (New York, 1920) Middle Works, 131–2,
cited in Kloppenberg, 76.
32. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 213. Further citations will be noted par-
enthetically as “Public.” My discussion of this book is informed in part by
Westbrook’s reading of Dewey’s stance on democracy and community. See
Westbrook, 314.
33. Westbrook emphasizes the connection that Dewey felt to Thomas Jefferson’s
understanding of the American community and democracy, a point that is
not insignificant to my understanding of Dewey as a latter-day pastoralist. See
Westbrook, 438, 454.
34. See, for example, Yi-Fu Tuan’s landmark text Space and Place: The Perspective of
Experience, which inaugurated this genre of criticism in the United States.
35. Dewey, Art as Experience, 3. My discussion of this text also has been influenced
by Westbrook, 393. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Art.”
36. Dewey, Ethics (1932) in John Dewey: The Later Works, vol. 7, 350, as cited in
Westbrook, 416.
37. I generally understand pragmatism to entail a democratic, progressive agenda,
as is suggested by Westbrook and Kloppenberg in addition to a number of liter-
ary critics including Frank Lentricchia, Cornel West, Ross Posnock, and Giles
Gunn.
38. Westbrook, 300–318.
39. Perhaps one of Williams’s best known lines is an excerpt from “Asphodel, That
Greeny Flower”: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die
miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.” Williams, The Collected
Poems, 318.
40. This idea resurfaces in Rosa A. Eberly’s Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres,
in which she uses Dewey in order to take issue with Habermas’s negative assess-
ment of modern culture. Eberly posits that ordinary readers enact the formation
184 ● Notes
of public spheres in their articulated and published reactions to controversial

texts.
41. Habermas, Communication and the Evolution of Society.
42. See Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of Thinking,”
and Robert Westbrook, “Pragmatism and Democracy: Reconstructing the
Logic of John Dewey’s Faith,” The Revival of Pragmatism, 83–127; 128–140,
for overviews of pragmatism’s lineage in the twentieth century, as well as a
refutation of Rorty’s conception of Dewey, respectively.
43. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
2 Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan:

Robert Frost’s Pastoral of Class Mobility
1. Lawrance Thompson, Robert Frost: The Early Years, 185. Further citations will
be noted parenthetically as “Thompson.”
2. On London’s tramp writings, see Kenneth Kusmer, Down & Out, On the Road:
The Homeless in American History, 178–180.
3. Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey, Songs of Vagabondia, 2, 3.
4. In addition to articles about lynching, government corruption, and accounts
of tramping by figures such as William Aspinwall, the Independent also pub-
lished a fair amount of poetry. William Aspinwall was a real tramp whose cor-
respondence with reformer John James Cook was published serially by Cook
in 1901–02. Harry Kemp’s autobiographical account of tramp life, which later
became Tramping on Life: An Autobiographical Narrative, was published in The
Independent on June 8, 1911. Frost’s indebtedness to late nineteenth-century
verse by women is chronicled in Karen Kilcup’s Robert Frost and the Feminine
Literary Tradition and in Paul Giles’s “From Decadent Aesthetics to Political
Fetishism: The ‘Oracle Effect’ of Robert Frost’s Poetry,” American Literary
History 12: 713–744
5. All dates for Frost’s poems are based upon those in Jeffery S. Cramer, Robert
Frost among His Poems: A Literary Companion to the Poet’s Own Biographical
Contexts and Associations.
6. Frost, Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays , 509. Further citations of this volume will
be cited parenthetically as Collected.
7. When Ezra Pound tried to place Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man” with
the magazine Smart Set in the summer of 1913, he was informed by the maga-
zine’s editor that they had decided against the poem “because things like that
were a dime a dozen, in fact he had just printed a poem about a hired man
written by the newly discovered Ohio-born ‘tramp poet,’ Harry Kemp.” See
Thompson, 437.
8. While living in England, Frost was keenly aware of the wide popularity of
the self-declared “super-tramp” poet, W.H. Davies, whom Frost disliked on
both professional and personal grounds. As Tyler Hoffman has observed, Frost
criticized Davies as “ ‘an unsophisticated nature poet of the day— absolutely
Notes ● 185
uncritical untechnical untheoretical.’ ” See Hoffman, Robert Frost and the

Politics of Poetry, 15. For more on Frost’s attitude toward Davies, see Walsh,
Into My Own: The English Years of Robert Frost, 1912–1915, 153. See also
Frost, Robert Frost and Sidney Cox: Forty Years of Friendship, 39, 51. See also
Hooper, Time to Stand and Stare: A Life of W. H. Davies, the Tramp Poet,
81–84. For Frost’s views on Lindsay, see Frost, The Letters of Robert Frost to
Louis Untermeyer, 64–66. For examples of Lindsay’s tramp poetry, see “The
Tramp’s Excuse and Other Poems” and “Rhymes to be Traded for Bread” in
The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay, ed. Dennis Camp. Frost also was suspicious of
Carl Sandburg’s populist stance, forged in part by Sandburg’s own, more suc-
cessful attempts at youthful tramping. For Sandburg’s account of his tramp
experiences, see Always the Young Strangers. While both Lindsay and Sandburg
made appearances at Chicago’s Dill Pickle Club, a social club for tramps, Frost
never mentions the venue nor would have been likely to perform there. See
DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America, 100.
By the late 1910s and early 1920s, Frost also became familiar with (and dispar-
aged) the work of Maxwell Bodenheim, yet another “tramp poet.” For examples
of Bodenheim’s tramp poems, see “Dialogue between Past and Present Poe,”
Advice and “Poet-Vagabond Grown Old,” in Minna and Myself. At the time of
Frost’s death his personal library contained volumes by Carman, Kemp, Davies,
Lindsay, Sandburg, and Bodenheim as well as a volume edited by Stephen
Graham entitled The Tramp’s Anthology. See Tutein, Robert Frost’s Reading: An
Annotated Bibliography.
9. Robert Park, The Collected Papers of Robert Ezra Park, vol. 2, 95.
10. On “disorder” and “matter out of place” as kinds of “dirt,” see Mary Douglas’s
Purity and Danger, 35. Michael Trask’s Cruising Modernism also addresses
Park’s text in order to point out how new disciplines such as sociology tended
to “embrace . . . the irrational and perverse as constituents of the social world,”
arguing that “the disobedience and lawlessness that social theorists located in
the erotic realm had a close affinity to the disobedience that contemporaries
saw as the defining attribute of the class other” (4, 10).
11. Whitman, Specimen Days, 330. In a footnote to the same essay, dated February
1979: “I saw today a sight I had never seen before—and it amazed, and made
me serious; three quite good-looking American men, of respectable personal
presence, two of them young, carrying chiffonier-bags on their shoulders, and
the usual long iron hooks in their hands, plodding along, their eyes cast down,
spying for scraps, rags, bones, &c.” (330).
12. On the history of tramps, see Depastino and Kusmer; on the “discovery” of
unemployment see Ringenbach, Tramps and Reformers, 1873–1916: The Discovery
of Umemployment in New York. See also Miller, On the Fringe: The Dispossessed in
America, 25–50; Bruns, Knights of the Road: A Hobo History. For a cultural history
of the tramp in the U.S., see Cresswell, The Tramp in America, and for an early
critical account of the tramp in American literature see Seelye, “The American
Tramp: A Version of the Picaresque,” American Quarterly, 15, 535–553.
186 ● Notes
13. See Toby Higbie, “Crossing Class Boundaries: Tramp Ethnographers and
Narratives of Class in Progressive Era America,” Social Science History, vol. 21,
no. 4, 559–592, especially 572, also Kusmer, 8. In addition to London (see
note 2) prominent tramp narratives of the period included: London, The Road;
Flynt, Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life; Wyckoff,
The Workers: An Experiment in Reality, The East; Stephen Crane’s articles “New
Lawlessness” and “The Men in the Storm,” can be found in The New York
City Sketches of Stephen Crane, and Related Pieces, 315–22, 283–93 as cited in
Kusmer, 300.
14. See Eric Schocket, “Undercover Explorations of the ‘Other Half,’ or the Writer
as Class Transvestite,” Representations, 64: 110–11, 126.
15. See Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working- Class Culture
in America, rev. ed., 150, for a discussion of depictions of tramps aimed at a
working-class audience.
16. See Depastino, 58, on the tramp as disenfranchised “producer”; see Depastino,
64, on Carlos Schwantes use of the term “wageworkers’ frontier.”
17. See Hoffman, 1–28; see also Hoffman, “Robert Frost and the Politics of Labor,”
Modern Language Studies 29: 109–135; Donald G. Sheehy, “Stay Unassuming:
The Lives of Robert Frost,” The Cambridge Companion to Robert Frost, ed.
Robert Faggen, 7–34. As Roy Rosenzweig notes in Eight Hours for What We
Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 “the nineteenth-
century American working-class experience [is] an intensely local experience”
(3).
18. For a discussion of the rise of the middle class in the early nineteenth century
and its coalescence in the late decades of the century, see Bledstein, The Culture
of Professionalism, Chapter 1, 8. See Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle
Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900, 296, for a reference to
Stephen Ross’s discussion of blurring class lines in the late nineteenth century.
19. In texts such as Progress and Poverty (1879) and Social Problems (1883), George
was one of the first to recognize the phenomenon of unemployment and one
of original protesters against a culture of “tramps and millionaires,” a critique
directed at those George perceived as having amassed too much land, thereby
forcing honest producers off the land and into the cities. Favoring a “land tax”
that would rectify the situation, George’s theories likely influenced Frost’s ini-
tial perspective upon tramps. See Henry George, Social Problems, chapter 13;
see also George, Progress and Poverty, books VI–VIII.
20. Although Ezra Pound praised Frost’s work, the terms in which he did so—and
Frost’s violent objection to them—are revealing. Writing to fellow poet F. S.
Flint, Frost complains:
And yet compare the nice discrimination of his review of me with that of
yours. Who will show me the correlation between anything I ever wrote and
his quotation from the Irish, You may sit on a middan and dream stars. You
may sit on a sofa and dream garters. But I must not get libre again. But tell
me I implore what on earth is a middan if it isnt a midden and where the
Notes ● 187
hell is the fitness of a word like that in connection with what I wrote on a
not inexpensive farm.
Frost’s distress at Pound’s comparison of his poetry with that of the country
Irish and his bitter if not violent observation concerning the “midden,” or
manure or waste pile in relation to his relatively gentlemanly brand of farming,
begin to suggest some of the anxieties surrounding class, nationalism, cultural
production, and waste contained in his writings on tramps. See Ezra Pound, “A
Boy’s Will,” Poetry 2 (May 1913): 72–74, as cited in Robert Frost: The Critical
Reception, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin, 2. In a letter of January 2, 1915, addressed
to Sidney Cox, Frost worries about the potentially negative effect of the some-
what notorious impresario’s good will. He complains that Pound will “make me
an exile for life” by including him in his London circle of “American literary
refugees.” He continues, “Another such review as the one in Poetry and I shan’t
be admitted at Ellis Island” (Letters, 147). While during his years in England,
Frost could ironically call attention to his somewhat humble position as an
aspiring poet by referring to his family’s address as “The Bung Hole” (derived
from The Bungalow). See Selected Letters of Robert Frost, 71. Further citations
will be noted parenthetically as “Letters.”
21. My knowledge of turn-of-the-century Lawrence is based in large part on
Donald B. Cole’s Immigrant City: Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1845–1921.
22. My discussion of the IWW is indebted to Melvin Dubofsky’s We Shall Be All:
A History of the Industrial Workers of the World.
23. As Roy Rosenzweig has pointed out, by the early nineteenth century the term
“extravagance” was commonly associated with critiques of the working class
and their newly won freedoms, such as opportunities for social drinking in
saloons and the general demand for amusements such as parks and eventually
moving pictures (Rosensweig, 47).
24. Concurring with Hoffman’s assertion that Frost drew upon the works of James
as well as Henri Bergson not only to “keep in step with other modernist art-
ists” but also “by his awareness of the democratic politics implicated in their
writings,” I also emphasize the ways in which both James’s and Frost’s writ-
ings on tramps encode the ethical challenge presented by unemployment and
the phenomenon of mass homelessness (Hoffman, 30). While acknowledging
Frank Lentricchia’s observation that Frost’s Jamesian aesthetics must be read as
“arguments over what shape the American social future should take” as well as
Robert Faggen’s discussion of Frost as a pragmatic Darwinian whose pastoral
vision consists of “an ongoing battlefield in which hierarchies are made and
unmade,” I see Frost’s tramp poetics as a complication of James’s more apo-
litical and at times naïve writings on the working (and nonworking) poor. See
Lentricchia, “Lyric in the Culture of Capitalism,” American Literary History
1: 67; Lentricchia, Modernist Quartet; Faggen, Robert Frost and the Challenge
of Darwin, 24. In addition, whereas Richard Poirier reads Frost as a linguistic
skeptic in a pragmatic Emersonian vein, divorced from all historical and politi-
cal realities, and Frank Lentricchia’s early work emphasizes Frost’s Jamesian,
188 ● Notes
post-Kantian tendency to emphasize the role of “active consciousness” in shap-

ing our experience of the world, I suggest that Frost’s poetics gesture beyond
the parameters of formalist and phenomenological forms of pragmatism to
emphasize the self’s interactions with the world, the nation, and his immedi-
ate or “local” community. See Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing ;
Lentricchia, Robert Frost: Modern Poetics and the Landscapes of Self; Levin, The
Poetics of Transition.
25. William James, “Psychology: Briefer Course,” Writings 1878–1899, 107.
26. On the tramp as irresponsible, see Kusmer, 11.
27. James, “Psychology,” 176.
28. James, “On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” Writings, 847. Further cita-
tions of this essay will be cited parenthetically as “OCB.” The book from which
“The Lantern Bearers” is excerpted also contains Stevenson’s account of his
own tramping adventures in the United States, which culminate in his physical
collapse in California. See Stevenson, Across the Plains: Leaves from the Notebook
of an Emigrant between New York and San Francisco.
29. On Beaudelaire’s flâneur see Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,”
Illuminations, 195, note 1.
30. Although Frost’s private library contains a copy of Dewey’s work and Frost
was acquainted with the philosopher during his lifetime, this connection has
never been explored. Frost’s personal library, currently owned by New York
University, contains Dewey’s The Philosophy of John Dewey; at one point Frost
documents meeting Dewey in Florida and indicates at least an acquaintance-
ship. For Frost’s account of meeting Dewey, see Robert Frost and Sidney Cox:
Forty Years of Friendship: “Kathleen and I went down to Key West to see old
friends. It is a cramped little island. We had a talk with John Dewey there. He’s
eighty-five.” (251–2).
31. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184.
32. Dewey, Art As Experience, 9. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as
Art.
33. Frost makes a subtle allusion to Burrell in a letter that situates a curious discus-
sion of English masculinity in the context of flowers and nature in general, the
distinctly pastoral and hence nationally representative settings that were hall-
marks of his own poetry. In the letter addressed from “The Bung Hole” Frost
reflects upon how:
[T]he English—they all have time to dig in the ground for the unutilitar-
ian flower. I mean the men. It marks the great difference between them
and our men. I like flowers you know but I like em wild, and I am rather
the exception than the rule in an American village. Far as I have walked in
pursuit of the Cypripedium, I have never met another in the woods on the
same quest. Americans will dig for peas and beans and such utilities but not
if they know it for posies. I knew a man who was a byword in five townships
for the flowers he tended with his own hand. Neighbors kept hens and let
them run loose just to annoy him. (Letters, 71)
Notes ● 189
What is most intriguing about Frost’s suggestion that he (and Barrell) might
be perceived as homosexual, or the kind of posy called a “pansy” (and all it
would connote for him concerning wasteful or nonprocreative sexual and other
energies), is that it seems oddly lacking in the kinds of anxiety that one might
expect this kind of self-description to generate. The term “pansy” came to refer
to homosexuals during precisely this period, according to the OED, with the
first published references dated around 1929, but its vernacular surely predated
its printed usage. Frost’s use of the term “posies” also links flowers to poetry (or
“poesy”) itself.
34. Robert Frost, Prose Jottings of Robert Frost, 65. The brackets are the editorial
markings applied to Frost’s “jottings” by the volume’s editors.
35. Letters, 80.
36. Frost, “On Extravagance,” Collected, 902.
37. Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 42.
38. Nevertheless, Frost was constantly in debt and while living in England was
observed by Frank Flint to be living in near poverty. See Walsh, Into My Own,
p. 117.
39. Frost, Interviews with Robert Frost, 14.
40. As such, this Frostian “extravagance” is unlike the apolitical Frostian “extrava-
gance” as discussed by Richard Poirier.
41. At the same time, this pose is intended to augment the verse’s value. Despite—or
as a complement to—his pose as a gentleman farmer, Frost liked to imagine
himself as “[his] own salesman,” putting himself or rather his poems “on the
market” as would an experienced speculator or person of means (Untermeyer,
29).
42. In novels such as William Dean Howells’ The Minister’s Charge (1887) a young
New England poet comes to Boston only to end up penniless and a resident of
the Wayfarers’ Lodge, where along with tramps he is compelled to chop wood
for room and board. See Howells, The Minister’s Charge.
43. See Dimock, “The Economy of Pain: The Case of Howells,” Raritan 9:
99–119.
44. See Poirier, Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, 234.
45. See Szalay’s New Deal Modernism for a revisionary perspective on Frost and the
New Deal, particularly in the context of poems such as “Build Soil.”
46. One evening while out walking with his son, Carol, Frost encountered a woman
in a carriage who accused him of prowling. According to a neighbor, the woman
was a former neighbor who had gone to Boston as a nurse, married, but then
run away with a patient back to her native farm. Ever since, she had lived in fear
of her husband coming after her and her lover. (Thompson 344–45)
47. For an intriguing discussion of Frost’s relationship to contemporary farming,
see Farland, “Modernist Versions of Pastoral: Poetic Inspiration, Scientific
Expertise, and the ‘Degenerate’ Farmer,” American Literary History 19,
905–36.
48. See Waye, The Forgotten Man and Other Poems, 26.
190 ● Notes
49. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, radio address, April 7, 1932, <http://newdeal.feri.

org/speeches/1932c.htm>. To prevent increasing homelessness among farmers
and honorable war veterans, Roosevelt called for a national program to protect
farms and homes from foreclosure while increasing the purchasing power of
the working classes through the lowering of tariffs on imports. Inverting the
concept of the “forgotten man” as promulgated by Social Darwinist William
Sumner in 1883—the “industrious” working-class laborer unfairly taxed to
support “paupers” whose vice and “extravagance” made them the undeserving
recipients of government charity—Roosevelt’s “forgotten man” of the 1930s
was an impoverished figure toward whom the nation had distinct obliga-
tions. Sumner, “The Forgotten Man,” Sumner Today: Selected Essays of William
Graham Sumner, 3–26. Originally delivered as a speech on January, 30, 1883.
50. Waye, 26.
51. See Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture.
52. Poirier, Robert Frost, 272–275.
53. See Michael Szalay, New Deal Modernism, 227–233 for a discussion of how
Frost can be understood as one of a range of writers who internalized a New
Deal logic in which art becomes “not a system of commodities at all, but an
administratively coordinated process of production” that as an end in itself,
insured, in effect, a federal buyer according to the state’s new logic of universal
insurance as a form of and means to ideological legitimacy (6).
54. William Carlos Williams, letter to Kay Boyle, 1932, Selected Letters of William
Carlos Williams, 132.
3 “The Truth About Us”: Pastoral, Pragmatism, and William

Carlos Williams’s Paterson
1. Williams, Paterson, 8. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as
“Paterson.”
2. This Kore is a distinctly modern version of the Greek Kore figure, tradition-
ally a virgin who, despite her violation, is essentially uncorrupted (and often
associated with both Demeter and Persephone). See Ochs, Behind the Sex of
God: Toward a New Consciousness—Transcending Matriarchy and Patriarchy,
78–79.
3. Mariani, William Carlos Williams: A New World Naked, 263.
4. Mariani, 408.
5. Letter to Charles Henri Ford, March 30, 1938, Williams, Selected Letters of
William Carlos Williams, 169.
6. Williams’s provocative decision to write Paterson, an epic with prominent
pastoral interludes, during World War II can be compared with the work of
fellow poets who turned to the lyric and its “first-person singular depth of
feeling,” as analyzed by Lorrie Goldensohn in Dismantling Glory: Twentieth-
Century Soldier Poetry, 2. See also Keith Alldritt in Modernism in the Second
World War: The Later Poetry of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Basil Bunting and Hugh
Notes ● 191
MacDiarmid; and Susan Schweik, A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets
and the Second World War.
7. A previous version of this article was published as “ ‘The Truth About Us’:
Pastoral, Pragmatism and Paterson,” American Literature 75.3 (September
2003): 601–627. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Duke University
Press.
8. Williams characterized Randall Jarrell’s negative reaction to Book Four and
his own response in I Wanted to Write a Poem, 79. Peter Schmidt much later
comments upon Paterson’s nightmarish qualities in “Paterson and the Epic
Tradition,” Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams, 172.
9. Geoffrey Hartman reads Williams as interested primarily in textual purity
in “Purification and Danger 1: American Poetry,” Criticism in the Wilderness,
117–121.
10. Douglas, Purity and Danger, 2.
11. Douglas, 124.
12. Williams, “Marianne Moore,” Selected Essays, 128. For other perspectives on dirt
in Williams’s work in addition to Hartman’s see Smedman’s article “Skeleton
in the Closet: Williams’s Debt to Gertrude Stein,” William Carlos Williams
Review, 21–35, and see Altman, “The Clean and the Unclean: Williams Carlos
Williams, Europe, Sex, and Ambivalence,” William Carlos Williams Review,
10–20. Smedman tends to see Williams, like Stein, as interested in filth as such,
while Altman reads Williams in the conventional “modernist” mode, locating
filth in Europe and aligning his own work with the clean elements of the New
World.
13. Mariani, 246.
14. See Tashjian, William Carlos Williams and the American Scene, 1920–1940,
100–105. Williams’s worries were not unfounded—for example, one of
Williams’s sons recalled being queried by a Rutherford townsman about his
father and how those “shitty” verses of his were coming along (Tashjian, 20).
15. William Carlos Williams, Interviews with William Carlos Williams, 64.
16. Lawrence Buell offers an assessment of Williams as “bioregionalist” in an
ecocritical take upon the concept of localism. See “Whitmanian Modernism:
William Carlos Williams as Bioregionalist,” Writing for an Endangered World,
109–120.
17. William Carlos Williams, “Yours, O Youth” from Contact in Selected Essays,
32.
18. William Carlos Williams, Selected Letters, 224.
19. Paul Mariani repeatedly calls attention to John Dewey’s influence upon
Williams: “Williams’s basic affinity with Dewey’s liberal philosophy—his dis-
satisfaction with all forms of oppression, like procrustean educational prac-
tices, the recidivism of many of his colleagues in the medical profession who
had steadfastly refused to allow women a choice in the use of contraceptives,
his own refusal to turn the other way when he saw evidences of wife beating
and child abuse—all this had come through untouched, despite his political
192 ● Notes
differences with Dewey. In ‘47, these were still avant-garde ideas in his part of
the world, as avant-garde as his search for a new measure” (Mariani, 544–45).
More recently, John Beck has explored the “ideological confluence” of Dewey’s
and Williams’ work in Writing the Radical Center: William Carlos Williams,
John Dewey, and American Cultural Politics, as has David Kadlec in Mosaic
Modernism: Anarchism, Pragmatism, Culture. While Beck’s argument is often
congruent with my own—with exceptions—I find Kadlec’s claims for pragma-
tism’s “anarchist” tendencies to be out of keeping with either James or Dewey’s
politics or practices. In Money and Modernity: Pound, Williams, and the Spirit
of Jefferson, Alec Marsh presents a useful analysis of Williams’s Jeffersonianism
and Dewey’s influence on Williams.
20. John Dewey, “Americanism and Localism,” Characters and Events: Popular
Essays in Social and Political Philosophy, 538. Further citations will be noted
parenthetically as “Americanism.”
21. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 for a discussion of the
history of the word “culture.”
22. William Carlos Williams, The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams,
Volume I 1909–1939, 42–43. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as
“Collected.”
23. Williams, I Wanted To Write a Poem, 21. Further references to this book will be
cited parenthetically as Poem.
24. William Carlos Williams, “Marianne Moore,” Selected Essays, 125.
25. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 183–4.
26. Beck characterizes all of Williams’s pastoralism and pragmatic localism as “nos-
talgic,” including his desire for “contact” (87) and his characterization of the
poor in “To Elsie” (90). Beck seems to contradict these conclusions, however, in
his more favorable reading of Paterson’s impetus “toward a retrieval of what he
considers locally appropriate, not to restore a golden age, but simply in order not
to abandon what might in fact be most suited to the environment: service, duty,
free and open exchange, communal solidarity, dispersed rather than consoli-
dated power.” (152). For another critique of Beck on Dewey, see Astrid Franke,
“William Carlos Williams and John Dewey on the Public, Its Problems, and
Its Poetry,” REAL: The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature,
269–292.
27. Their names are traditional pastoral appellations.
28. See Altman, “The Clean and the Unclean: William Carlos Williams, Europe,
Sex and Ambivalence,” 10–20 for a more detailed discussion of Williams’s feel-
ings regarding homosexual behavior he witnessed in Europe.
29. See Mariani’s biography of Williams for a rendition of this traditional read-
ing of the scene (614–617); even Joseph Riddel’s otherwise innovative reading
of Paterson as “the poetic deconstruction of history . . . and a reconstitution of
history as poetry, as the search or the ‘effort’ toward ‘virtue’ ” reproduces this
same assumption about the Corydon and Phyllis relationship and the ironic
nature of American pastoral. Riddel, The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the
Notes ● 193
Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams 237–241. See also Sankey’s discussion

of Book Four in his A Companion to William Carlos Williams’s Paterson.
30. While Phyllis and Corydon have been read all too often solely as crude New
World/Old World allegories of purity and pollution, it is clear that both emerge
as intricate, sympathetic characters who transcend such stereotypes. What is
significant is that readers in the past (such as Schmidt and Jarrell) have so read-
ily accepted the potentially homosexual nature of their relationship as proof that
Corydon especially embodies a type of “dirt.” Other readers are more sanguine
about Williams’s rude incursion into the “cultural,” and all that term signifies
in terms of political, social, and economic privilege. For Joseph Riddel, the
“dissonance” of Book IV is a symptom of the “dissonance” of language itself
and therefore of the text’s deconstructive tendencies (Riddel, 237). J. Hillis
Miller stresses the radical nature of Williams’s poetic ontology, its suspension
of subject/object relations in the interest of establishing a space that is purely
linguistic, or a moment of pure, atemporal naming. See Miller, Poets of Reality,
381. Yet Miller, like Hartman, is overly invested in perceiving Williams’s poet-
ics as striving towards a kind of linguistic purity, ignoring the central role of
dirt and pollutants as aesthetic and ethical catalysts. Both neglect to take into
consideration the role of the pastoral mode in Williams’s work. Only Peter
Schmidt has addressed the role of pastoral in Williams’s work, but his argument
primarily concerns the idealization of American industry by Williams and
the Precisionist school of artists. See “Some Versions of Modernist Pastoral,”
Comparative Literature, 383–406.
31. It is interesting to note that Williams included one more description of these
islands and their neighborhood in an earlier draft of the poem: it was near here
that the British imprisoned “Nathan Hale (in an outhouse).” The emergence of
the American revolutionary within the excremental zone is a perfect example of
how Williams associates pollution with those people and elements that disrupt
traditional distinctions within and among nation-states, in addition to other
kinds of political and cultural boundaries. See Williams’s papers at the Beinecke
Library, Yale University. Previously unpublished material: Copyright © 2001
by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents.
32. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 184.
33. Williams’s perspective here can be said to resonate closely with his friend
Kenneth Burke’s definition of comic “acceptance” insofar as both “provide
[a] charitable attitude towards people” that promotes dialogue, pushing read-
ers to work toward a “maximum consciousness” through their observations
of human relationships in all their complexity and foolishness. See Kenneth
Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 166, 171. See also Brian Bremen’s William
Carlos Williams and the Diagnostics of Culture for an insightful and sustained
consideration of the confluences of Williams and Burke’s thought.
34. See Williams papers at the Beinecke Library for a reference to Phyllis as having
“big thighs, the left one / scarred.” Previously unpublished material: Copyright
194 ● Notes
© 2001 by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted
by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents.
35. Sankey, 172. In a 1951 letter to Robert Lowell, Williams writes in reference to
Corydon: “I like the old gal of whom I spoke, she was at least cultured and not
without feeling of a distinguished sort. I don’t mind telling you that I started
writing of her in a satiric mood, but she quite won me over. I ended by feeling
admiration for her and real regret at her defeat” (Selected Letters, 302). In a
June 19, 1951, letter to Marianne Moore, Williams defends Corydon on similar
terms: “I rather like my old gal who appears in the first pages of Paterson IV
(if she’s one of the things you object to); she has a hard part to play, and to my
mind plays it rather well. As far as the story goes, she represents the ‘great world’
against the more or less primitive world of the provincial city. She is informed,
no sluggard, uses her talents as she can. There has to be that world against
which the other tests itself ” (Selected Letters, 304).
36. Sankey, 175.
37. See Williams’s papers at Beineke Library, Yale University. Previously unpub-
lished material: Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of
William Eric Williams. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing
Corp., agents.
38. In notes on this section of Book IV, Williams wrote that he intended this sec-
tion to display Corydon’s humanity: “Corydon’s poem is to be fully developed:
it shows her intelligence, her appreciation for a situation, a developed under-
standing with considerable humility of what’s going on—overcome by her sense
of loss—and her force of character in her lust (defeated) It is a real defeat for
her as she is the one who suffers, not Phyllis.” See Williams’s papers at Beinecke
Library, Yale University. Previously unpublished material: Copyright © 2001
by Paul H. Williams and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corp., agents.
39. See Sankey, 70.
40. For background on the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913 and the Pageant, see Tripp,
The I. W. W. and the Paterson Silk Strike; Martin Green, New York 1913: The
Armory Show and the Paterson Strike Pageant; Norwood, About Paterson: The
Making and Unmaking of an American City. See also Paul R. Cappucci, William
Carlos Williams’s Poetic Response to the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike.
41. See Williams’s notes, “Paterson: Book II,” Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Previously unpublished material: Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Williams
and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corp., agents.
42. To Babette Deutsch, July 28, 1947, Selected Letters, 259.
43. See Williams notes, “Paterson: Book I,” Beinecke Library, Yale University.
Previously unpublished material: Copyright © 2001 by Paul H. Williams
and the Estate of William Eric Williams. Reprinted by permission of New
Directions Publishing Corp., agents.
44. Sankey, 71.
Notes ● 195
45. This incident and Williams response both are described by Alan Filreis in Wallace
Stevens and the Actual World 181. Filreis also reads Stevens’s “Description with-
out Place” as far more politicized than have most previous critics, specifically in
its attention to the phenomenon of postwar, cross-cultural readership.
46. William Carlos Williams, Collected Poems, 163–166. The poem first appeared
in the Kenyon Review 8 (Winter 1946): 55–58.
4 “Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!”: Wallace Stevens’s

Figurations of Masculinity
1. “Eclogue” appears only in a letter of April 10, 1909 to Elsie Moll (Stevens’
future wife). See Letters of Wallace Stevens, 138–139. “The Silver Plough Boy”
was originally included in Harmonium but omitted from future editions. See
letter to Alfred A. Knopf, October 16, 1930, Letters, 259. Significantly, “The
Silver Plough Boy,” like Frost’s Pan, is a racially marked pastoral figure (a “black
figure” who “dances”) that Stevens experimented with in this one poem only
to discard it in most later poetry for “fat” pastoral figures. As I note in my
discussions of “Jumbo” and “Red Man Reading,” however, “fat” retains a racial
connotation for Stevens in some instances, although it is more often associated
with a “native” whiteness. For “The Silver Plough Boy,” see Wallace Stevens,
Opus Posthumous, 17.
2. Stevens, Letters of Wallace Stevens, 300. Further references will be noted paren-
thetically as “Letters.”
3. A previous version of this chapter was published as “ ‘Fat! Fat! Fat! Fat!’: Wallace
Stevens Figurations of Masculinity,” Journal of Modern Literature 27.1/2 (Fall
2003): 105–121. © Indiana University Press, 2004. This article is reprinted
with permission from the publisher.
4. In yet another disorderly twist to Stevens’s attempts at genealogy, according
to Bart Eeckout, “How Dutch Was Stevens?” Wallace Stevens Journal, 37–43,
Stevens’s best claim to Dutch ancestry was likely not Dutch at all but Belgian
or German.
5. See Stevens’s discussion of these terms in the context of his essay on John Crowe
Ransom, “John Crowe Ransom: Tennessean,” (1948), Opus Posthumous, 247–
249. This essay will be discussed later at more length.
6. See Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport and American Society
for a discussion of these concerns.
7. For example, see Joseph Riddel’s chapter “The Hero’s Head” in The Clairvoyant
Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens; also Milton J. Bates, “Supreme
Fiction and Medium Man” and “Major Man,” in Wallace Stevens: A Mythology
of Self; and James Longenbach, “The Fellowship of Men that Perish,” and “It
Must Be Masculine,” in Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things.
8. See Gorham Munson’s well-known attack on Stevens, “The Dandyism of
Wallace Stevens,” originally published in The Dial (November 1925), 78–82.
Recently, several critics have begun to discuss the gendered aspects of Stevens’s
196 ● Notes
sense of self, including Jacqueline Brogan (The Violence Within The Violence
Without: Wallace Stevens and the Emergence of a Revolutionary Poetics) and
Patricia Rae (The Practical Muse: Pragmatist Poetics in Hulme, Pound and
Stevens), and Frank Lentricchia (Modernist Quartet).
9. See Kimmel’s Manhood in America, Rotundo’s American Manhood, as well as
Green’s Fit for America.
10. See Gail Bederman’s Manliness and Civilization, 6–19, for an account of this
distinction.
11. Helen Vendler suggests the former reading, stressing that Stevens “identifies
with the bantam,” a smaller lyric animal approaching a grander epic tradition.
See “Wallace Stevens,” in The Columbia History of American Poetry, 379–380.
See also Eleanor Cook, Poetry, Word-Play, and Word-War in Wallace Stevens,
70; and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “ ‘Hoo, Hoo, Hoo’: Some Episodes in the
Construction of Modern Whiteness,” American Literature 67:678–680.
12. See Kimmel, Manhood in America, 138, for a discussion of this phenomenon.
13. See Gorn, The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America for a his-
tory of the sport and the ways in which it reflected contemporary anxieties
regarding class, race, and gender. By late adolescence, Stevens worried about his
body’s physical condition, writing to his father during college that he longed for
summer activities that would enable “muscular development” (Letters, 19).
14. Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 75–76. Further refer-
ences will be cited parenthetically as Collected.
15. Carl Van Vechten, “Rogue Elephant in Porcelain,” The Yale University Library
Gazette 138: 42.
16. See Rosemarie Thomson’s “Introduction” to Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring
Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, especially pages 33–36
and 41–44, for a discussion of physical disability as a kind of “dirt” and
creative disorder as well as its relation to the kind of normative subjectivity
and citizenship proposed by Emerson. Stevens himself was diagnosed as an
“acromegalic type,” a condition “in which the thorax, head, and extremi-
ties continued to grow long after normal development has stopped.” Such a
disease probably heightened Stevens’s sense of his body as grotesquely, even
freakishly large. See Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens, A Biography: The Later
Years, 1923–55, 45.
17. See Schwartz, Never Satisfied: A Cultural History of Diets, Fantasies and Fat, 89.
Further citations will be parenthetical.
18. See Richardson, Wallace Stevens, The Later Years, 45, 118; Letters, 749.
Further references to Richardson’s biography will be noted parenthetically as
“Richardson.”
19. The domestic sphere for Stevens, as for all Americans, soon became key to the
control of appetite and waist size: “the muscle of domestic science was flexed in
the kitchen . . . here one fought off the fear of abundance and the golem of waste”
(Schwartz 82). In 1931 he even sent Elsie and Holly to a special Vassar confer-
ence on “Euthenics,” a series of courses designed to help housewives improve
Notes ● 197
their childrearing and domestic skills by applying the “naturalist” conclusions

of philosophers such as John Dewey. In addition to courses on the psychol-
ogy of the child, Elsie likely attended courses on “Physiology and Nutrition,”
with a strong emphasis on “maintenance of weight,” as well as “Food Selection,
Preparation, and Service.” [For information on this course, see the Bulletin of
Vassar College 21 (Jun.-Aug. 1931), Subject File 26.5, VC Vassar Summer Inst.,
1931, courtesy of Vassar College Library, Archives and Special Collections.]
Although Elsie was universally acknowledged to be an excellent cook of the
elaborate dishes typical of the era and their social class, she evidently was quite
involved in Stevens’s efforts to reduce and maintain his weight. Stevens men-
tions at one point “the value of my wife’s interest in calories and things of that
kind,” and one of the family’s few intimates in the 1930s remarked upon the
special dinners Elsie served: everything was “very healthful but very simple,”
there were “no rich sauces or anything like that” (Letters, 619). Josephine M.,
Holly Stevens’s nanny from 1933–1935, recalled these meals. See Peter Brazeau,
Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered, 233.
20. Stevens clearly saw his weight problem as hereditary, writing to his cousin
Emma Jobbins: “although I am perhaps overweight, I am not nearly as much
overweight as a Stevens usually is at my age” (Letters, 807).
21. See Trotter, Cooking with Mud, 30; Stallybrass and White, The Politics and
Poetics of Transgression, 183–84, 187, 191–2, on carnival and the relation of
the post-Romantic writer’s “bourgeois sensibility” to the crowd, the “nostal-
gic” appeal of the low. See Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, 251, on disgust as
antidemocratic.
22. Steven’s interest in fat men and women serves as an important counterpoint to
contemporaries such as Pound and Eliot’s idealization of the poet as anorexic.
See Heywood, Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture,
56. See also Ellmann’s The Hunger Artists and Armstrong’s Modernism,
Technology and the Body, especially “Chapter Two: Waste Products.”
23. While I do not agree with Alan Filreis that Stevens’s vision of the “hero”
becomes decisively “more democratic” over time, I do agree that Stevens’s
expansive sense of what was physically “normal” made him vaguely, if not deci-
sively, sympathetic to the American population in general. See Filreis, Wallace
Stevens and the Actual World, 34.
24. See James, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” The Writings of William James,
660–671.
25. Patricia Rae notes James’s gendered description of pragmatism in The Practical
Muse, 146.
26. James, Pragmatism, 38–39.
27. While James was dead at this point, Dewey was alive but only accepted the
necessity of the war after Pearl Harbor, committed to the pacifist and prode-
mocracy ideals he had embraced in the wake of World War I. As he phrased it:
“it is quite conceivable that after the next war we should have in this country
a semi-military, semi-financial autocracy, which would fashion class divisions
198 ● Notes
on this country for untold years. In any case we should have the suppression
of all the democratic values for the sake of which we professedly went to war”
(Westbrook, 511–12).
28. Dewey, “Anti-Naturalism in Extremis,” Partisan Review X: 26–7.
29. Al Filreis has characterized this speech as Stevens’s attempt to “ground himself
in the politics of wartime exile” (Filreis, 99). See Filreis, “Chapter 2: Formalists
Under Fire,” 98–115, for an extended discussion of this conference.
30. Other readings of Stevens in a pragmatic context include Poirier’s Poetry
and Pragmatism; Lentricchia’s Ariel and the Police, and Levin’s The Poetics of
Transition. None addresses the physical dimensions of Stevens’s pragmatism,
however, or link this concern to Stevens’s citation of James during the early
years of World War II.
31. Wallace Stevens, “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” The Necessary Angel
66, 46. Further references will be noted parenthetically as “Youth.”
32. As Stephen Burt has noted, Stevens also eschewed imagery of the virile youth in
favor of images of the poet at middle age. See “The Absence of the Poet as Virile
Youth,” Wallace Stevens Journal 29: 81–90.
33. Dewey, Art As Experience, 22. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as
Art.
34. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 392–3.
35. In “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,” the speaker refers to himself as one of “two
golden gourds distended on our vines, / Into the autumn weather, splashed
with frost, / Distorted by hale fatness, turned grotesque.” In “The Comedian as
the Letter C” Crispin recalls “That earth was like a jostling festival / Of seeds
grown fat, too juicily opulent, / Expanding in the gold’s maternal warmth.”
He also reflects upon the relationship between objects, such as the “good, fat,
guzzly fruit,” and the various linguistic terms used to signify their presence. In
“Banal Sojourn” “Summer is like a fat beast, sleepy in mildew,” and in “Like
Decorations in a Nigger Cemetery the speaker refers to both “the rabbit fat, at
last, in grassy grass,” and “this fat pastiche of Belgian grapes,” which “exceeds /
The total gala of auburn aureoles.” See Stevens, The Collected Poems and Opus
Posthumous.
36. Stevens, “John Crowe Ransom: Tennessean,” Opus Posthumous, 248.
37. Bonnie Costello, “‘Planets on Tables: Still Life and War in the Poetry of Wallace
Stevens,”Modernism / Modernity 12: 445.
38. Stevens, Opus Posthumus, 106–09. Further citations will be noted parentheti-
cally as Opus.
39. Helen Vendler discusses “Owl’s Clover” and the inadequacy of the “pioneer”
figure in On Extended Wings: Wallace Stevens’ Longer Poems, 92–3. Vendler’s
discussion of the “subman” is also useful (85).
40. James Longenbach quotes Stevens paraphrasing his discussion of waste in these
lines: “it is a process of passing from hopeless waste to hopeful waste. This is not
pessimism. The world is completely waste, but it is a waste always full of por-
tentous lustres. We live constantly in the commingling of two reflections, that
Notes ● 199
of the past and that of the future, whirling apart and wide away.” See Wallace
Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things, 180.
41. My reading here stands in direct contrast to Helen Vendler’s dismissal of these
lines as sentimental (On Extended Wings, 244).
42. When recommending favorite poems to be included in an Italian edition of his
work, to be edited by Renato Poggioli, Stevens listed: “A Rabbit as King of the
Ghosts,” “Credences of Summer,” and “Large Red Man Reading” (Letters, 778).
43. Holly Stevens struggled with weight issues during her adolescence. See Joan
Richardson, Wallace Stevens: A Biography: The Later Years, 1923–1955, 129.
44. For Stevens’s views on Holly’s marriage to John Hanchak, a Polish man he
thought socially and ethnically beneath her, see Richardson, Wallace Stevens: A
Biography: The Later Years, 233.
45. In a letter to Henry Church, Stevens writes: “The fat girl is the earth: what the
politicians now-a-days are calling the globe, which somehow, as it revolves in
their minds, does, I suppose, resemble some great object in a particularly blue
are” (Letters, 426).
46. Milton Bates, “Stevens’s Soldier Poems and Historical Possibility,” Wallace
Stevens Journal 28: 206.
47. John Ashbery, “Introduction to a Reading by James Schuyler,” Selected Prose,
ed. Eugene Richie, 209.
48. John Ashbery, “Michelangelo Pistoletto,” Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles
1957–1987, ed. David Bergman, 159.
5 “The Mooring of Starting Out”: John Ashbery’s

Pastoral Origins
1. John Ashbery, Some Trees, 12–13.
2. See Elaine Tyler May’s account in Homeward Bound: American Families in the
cold war Era, 10, of how cold war ideology infiltrated even the most intimate
aspects of family life during the post-World War II era.
3. See Suzanne Clark, Cold Warriors: Manliness on Trial in the Rhetoric of the West
for a discussion of cold war “frontier” rhetoric.
4. Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the
Atomic Age, 4.
5. There has been an important critical exchange regarding whether or not Ashbery
is a public or a private poet, with Douglas Crase suggesting that Ashbery is
indeed “not . . . our most private poet, but our most public,” see “The Prophetic
Ashbery,” Beyond Amazement: New Essays on John Ashbery, ed. David Lehman
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), and S.P. Mohanty and Jonathan
Monroe affirming that Ashbery is a poet of the “everyday” and as such of the
“self-world relationship,” see “John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social,”
Diacritics 17: 37, 41, both arguing against critics such as Harold Bloom and
Helen Vendler, who would have Ashbery understood as a “Romantic” poet con-
cerned only with “successive state[s] of mind or spirit” (Mohanty, 38). While
200 ● Notes
Mohanty sees Ashbery’s “new realism” as “dissolving boundaries between life

and art by questioning the ontologizing of both Art and Self,” however, I under-
stand this “new realism” to be historically grounded in Ashbery’s experience of
cold war culture.
6. W. H. Auden, “Foreword,” Some Trees, 11, 13. My reading of W. H.
Auden’s response to Ashbery draws in part upon John Shoptaw’s obser-
vations concerning Auden and surrealism in Ashbery in On the Outside
Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry, 35–36. Auden’s response to Ashbery’s
work was mixed. In an interview with Sue Gangel, Ashbery remarked that
he felt Auden chose Some Trees “though I think somewhat reluctantly,
actually, from the Preface he wrote. I think he respected something in
it but didn’t understand it very well. In fact, in later life, I heard that he
told a friend that he had never understood a single word I had ever writ-
ten.” See Sue Gangel, “An Interview with John Ashbery,” San Francisco
Review of Books 3 (Nov. 1977): 11; reprinted in American Poetry Observed:
Poets on Their Work, 11. Auden’s existentialism, with its emphasis on the
despair and futility of human existence, may also have prevented him from
reading Ashbery’s work as other than escapist. On Auden’s existentialism,
see George Cotkin, Existential America, 54–5. Although Cotkin argues
that American versions of existentialism tended to adopt a more progres-
sive, politicized edge, I find that his argument shortchanges the persistent
inf luence of pragmatic thought upon American intellectual life, a point
that Hazel E. Barnes, a key translator and interpreter of Sartre’s work, is
quite explicit upon (see Cotkin, 153–155).
7. See Ashbery’s frequent writings on surrealism, especially that of Cornell and
Chirico in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957–1987, 1–19.
8. Reported Sightings, 12.
9. As Deborah Nelson argues, even as certain privacies associated with male dom-
inance over property and the domestic sphere were eroded in the context of
cold war paranoia, lyric redeployments of privacy during this second half of the
twentieth century paralleled the establishments of new forms of privacy situ-
ated in gender and sexuality (rights to abortion and birth control, gay rights).
See Nelson, Pursuing Privacy in cold war America, 1–41.
10. Auden, “Foreword,” Some Trees, 11.
11. See David Lehman, The Last Avant- Garde: The Making of the New York
School of Poets, 92, as well as Mark Ford, “The Boyhood of John Ashbery: A
Conversation,” PN Review 29: 14–21, for Ashbery’s account of his childhood
and relationship with his parents. See Douglas Shand-Tucci’s The Crimson
Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture, 206, for a
reference to Ashbery’s coming out to his mother.
12. Ashbery as cited in Gooch, City Poet: the Life and Times of Frank O’Hara,
190. John Shoptaw comments most extensively upon Ashbery’s cold war
experiences as a gay man, as does Catherine Imbriglio in “ ‘Our Days Put On
Such Reticence’: The Rhetoric of the Closet in John Ashbery’s Some Trees,”
Notes ● 201
Contemporary Literature 36, 249–288. In Statues of Liberty: The New York

School of Poets, 2d ed., Geoff Ward suggestively discusses the influence of the
New York School poets upon younger poets in terms of a quotation from Walter
Benjamin: “The poets find the refuse of society on their street and derive their
heroic subject from this very refuse. This means that a common type is, as it
were, superimposed upon their illustrious type” (187–88).
13. Invoking the framework of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Silverman celebrates
“specular” and “masochistic” subjectivities for undermining the misrecogni-
tions that constitute the symbolic order and thus language and ideology, reject-
ing the alignment of phallus and penis, patriarchal law, heterosexuality, and
absolute authority. See Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins, 1.
14. David Savran has questioned the emancipatory potential of Silverman’s concep-
tion of masochistic masculinity, but his discussion of the Beats’ macho postur-
ing in Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary
American Culture in fact brings the decidedly different approach of the New
York School artists into broad relief (37).
15. “Jean Fautrier,” Reported Sightings, 136.
16. See, Leja’s Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the
1940s 8, 10, 203–274, for a discussion of how the Abstract Expressionists’ fasci-
nation with the primitive and unconscious aspects of man ended up bolstering
rather than undermining a mainstream “Modern Man” ideology. Interestingly,
Leja discusses Dewey’s Human Nature and Conduct (1922), which he sees as an
important text for qualifiers of Modern Man discourse, see pages 217–221. Leja
emphasizes how Dewey’s work stresses science and education over primitive
drives, noting that Dewey’s allowance for “ ‘human desire and choice’ ” “went
against the grain of the resolutely individualist orientation of Modern Man
discourse” (219).
17. On this circle generally, see Andrew Epstein’s Beautiful Enemies: Friendship and
Postwar American Poetry.
18. Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” Against Interpretation, 279, 283, 286.
19. My understanding of Ashbery’s use of camp parallels and conflicts with
Marjorie Perloff ’s reading of Ashbery’s use of parody, although both are
aligned with the “other tradition” that, as Perloff notes, is described in
Three Poems as “a residue, a kind of fiction that developed parallel to the
classic truths of daily life (as it was in that heroic but commonplace age)
(TP, 55–56) as cited in Perloff, “ ‘Mysteries of Construction’: The Dream
Songs of John Ashbery,” The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, 260.
Perloff ’s discussion of Ashbery’s surrealism is also very helpful. Andrew Ross
argues that Ashbery was never quite comfortable with camp, see “Taking the
Tennis Court Oath,” in The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry,
ed. Susan M. Schultz, while Ian Gregson suggests that while Ashbery may
employ camp and that it may have its political uses, Ashbery’s version of it
is repetitive and lacks a real politics, see The Male Image: Representations of
Masculinity in Postwar Poetry, 180.
202 ● Notes
20. Ashbery, “The Compromise,” Three Plays (Calais, Vt: Z Press, 1978), 117.
21. See John Ashbery Papers, 1927–1987, Houghton Library, Harvard University,
Letter to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, October 22, 1957, AM 6,
Box 24. Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the
author.
22. Ashbery, “The Philosopher,” Three Plays, 160.
23. “John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch (A Conversation),” (Tucson, Ariz.: The
Interview Press, n.d. [c. 1965]), 7, Quoted in notes made by David Lehman
(“Notes on Ashbery on Ashbery”) in the John Ashbery Papers, Houghton
Library, Harvard University, AM 6 Box 31. Reprinted by permission of Georges
Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
24. My account of Ashbery’s radical marginality is in this sense opposed to Robert
von Hallberg’s understanding of Ashbery as a white, male poet who writes
“with an eye on the center.” See Von Hallberg, American Poetry and Culture,
1945–1980, 9, and Ch. 2.
25. In contrast, James McCorkle describes Ashbery’s pastoral as “an assertion of
the convention of the dialogue as typified by Virgil’s Eclogues and as such
emphasizing “exchange rather than interpretation” “reciprocity and the appre-
hension of differences,” thereby underscoring “the vital role of love and eros in
reading and, by extension, in human relations.” See “The Demands of Reading:
Mapping, Travel and Ekphrasis in the Poetry from the 1950s of John Ashbery
and Elizabeth Bishop,” in The Scene of My Selves: New Work on the New York
School of Poets, ed. Terence Diggory and Stephen Paul Miller, 84. Helen Vendler
has not read Ashbery within a pastoral context, although she does see his friend
and contemporary, James Schuyler, in this light. In “James Schuyler: New York
Pastoral,” Soul Says, Vendler associates pastoral with “leisure, the sexual life”
as well as a domestic world linked to “the found, the cared-for, and the home-
made,” but Vendler does not pursue any of the historical or social resonances of
these observations.
26. Shoptaw characterizes Ashbery as “misrepresentative” insofar as he aspires to
speak as a democratically representative poet while employing “homotextual”
techniques such as “distortions, evasions, omissions, obscurities and discontinu-
ities” in order to mask what is referred to in the poem “A Boy” as his “true fate”
(Shoptaw, 1, 4). Herd argues that Ashbery belongs in a pragmatic literary tradi-
tion derived from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman and William James
in which “the object of literary understanding is not the text but the world,”
and perceives Ashbery’s poetics to manifest a Habermasian desire to “make
communication possible in liberal-democratic society” (Herd, John Ashbery
and American Poetry 13, 19). While Shoptaw sees Ashbery’s poetry function-
ing as a kind of code in which the private self is obscured by the intentionally
difficult, public voice, Herd reinforces that the poetry is a “medium of com-
munication not expression,” thereby explaining Ashbery’s own much-quoted
antipathy towards ostensibly personal or confessional poetry (21). Imbriglio
and Vincent address Ashbery’s sexuality more directly, focusing upon Ashbery’s
Notes ● 203
“reticence” as a rhetorical technique of the “closet,” and emphasizing the lack of

“closure” in his poetics as a rejection of “confining notions of identity,” respec-
tively (Imbriglio, 260; John Vincent, “Reports of Looting and Insane Buggery
Behind Altars: John Ashbery’s Queer Poetics,” Twentieth Century Literature 44:
158).
27. Sodus had a persistent hold upon Ashbery’s imagination. Writing back to an
admirer, Betsy Myers Exner, on March 10, 1978, Ashbery wrote:
“I was touched, charmed and pleased by your letter. At the same time I
thought it was funny that you have difficulty reading my work because I
come from Sodus. I felt much more exiled there in my home town that I
have ever felt anywhere since. I’m glad we’re both out of there though I must
say I rather enjoy going back to see my mother, who lives in Pultneyville
now, and driving around the country side remembering those dim dopey
days.”
Responding to a letter to Mr. Hod Odgen, 30 October 1977, an old friend from
Sodus days who wrote soon after Ashbery was awarded three major literary
prizes, the poet wrote: “Again, it was really nice to hear from you—that remote
past when we knew each other is still very much alive for me.” See the John
Ashbery Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, AM 6 Boxes 23, 25.
Reprinted by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
28. “John Ashbery: The Imminence of a Revelation,” Acts of Mind: Conversations
with Contemporary Poets, ed. Richard Jackson, 70.
29. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem Is Being Written,” Representations 17: 117,
126. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Sedgwick.”
30. On Chester Ashbery’s violence, see Lehman, Last Avant- Garde, 92. Ashbery
himself apparently denies such reports of his father’s behavior toward him.
Whether or not such beatings did take place, however, certainly fears of such
violence from a father or any other male figure would be entirely plausible for a
young gay man during the 1930s and 1940s.
31. Landscapes are part of but not central to Ashbery’s pastorals, although land-
scape as the site of expanded, coterminous time and space does serve a purpose
in establishing a pastoral atmosphere. See Bonnie Costello’s “John Ashbery’s
Landscapes,” The Tribe of John, ed. Susan Schultz, 60–80, for a highly insight-
ful and provocative discussion of Ashbery’s use of landscape as a metaphor for
knowledge.
32. John Ashbery, Some Trees, 12–13. Further references to this text will be noted
parenthetically as “Trees.”
33. The reference to Ferber’s work is not unlikely, as the book Showboat was a
bestseller in 1926, was quickly followed by a Hammerstein and Kern musical
version in 1927, and was adapted repeatedly to film in 1929, 1936, and 1951.
Ashbery, a fan of American cinema, would undoubtedly have been acquainted
with at least the film versions of this story of love and miscegenation.
34. Charles Berger also notes the significance of The Double Dream of Spring in
terms of Ashbery’s homecoming in “Vision in the Form of a Task: The Double
204 ● Notes
Dream of Spring,” Beyond Amazement, ed. Lehman, although his emphasis is

upon the more traditional lyric aspects of Ashbery’s work in this volume.
35. Ashbery wrote to Charles Newman with condolences upon his father’s death,
in a letter dated “Twelfth Night, 1976.” See John Ashbery Papers, Houghton
Library, Harvard University, AM 6 Box 25. Reprinted by permission of Georges
Borchardt, Inc., on behalf of the author.
36. As such, Ashbery’s counterculture era poetics differ substantially from those
discussed by Cary Nelson in Our Last First Poets: Vision and History in
Contemporary American Poetry; or the postmodernist poetics discussed by
Charles Alteri in Enlarging the Temple: New Directions in American Poetry during
the 1960s (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1979); or James Longenbach
in Modern Poetry After Modernism.
37. John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring, 13. Further citations will be noted
parenthetically as Dream.
38. See the discussion of Dewey and his attitude toward World War II in my chap-
ter on Stevens.
39. John Ashbery, Can You Hear, Bird?, 70.
40. Sue Gangel, “An Interview with John Ashbery,” 16.
41. A point also made by Shoptaw, 15. See John Ashbery, The Vermont Notebook,
31. Further references to this text will be cited parenthetically as Vermont.
Conclusion: Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral: Gertrude Stein,

Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson, and the Continuity of a Mode
1. Gooch, City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara, 99.
2. O’Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, 17. Further citations will be
noted parenthetically as “Poems.”
3. Rainey, Institutions of Modernism, 3, 5.
4. See generally Nelson, Repression and Recovery and Revolutionary Memory:
Recovering the Poetry of the American Left and Huyssen, After the Great Divide,
44–62.
5. See Dickstein, The Revival of Pragmatism for a representative sampling of such
neo-pragmatic approaches.
6. The socially and culturally radical nature of Stein’s work generally has been
discussed by Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis; DeKoven,
A Different Language: Gertrude Stein’s Experimental Writing; Wald,
Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form, and Damon,
The Dark End of the Street: Margins in American Vanguard Poetry, among
others.
7. Note also the identification of pastoral in the work of Barbara Guest; see
Vickery’s “ ‘A Mobile Fiction’: Barbara Guest and Modern Pastoral,” Triquarterly
116 246–61.
8. See Wineapple’s Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, 151.
9. Stein, Writings 1903–1932, 2.
Notes ● 205
10. Wineapple, 175.

11. Stein, “Melanctha,” 390.
12. Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, 517,
518.
13. Stein, “Melanctha,” Selected Writings, 376.
14. Stein, “Melanctha,” Selected Writings, 417. On pastoral elegy see Sacks, The
English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats, 14–37, especially his
discussion of repetition on page 23.
15. Very few critics address Lucy Church Amiably at length. One exception is
Victoria Maubry-Rose’s deconstructive account of the text in her doctoral the-
sis: The Anti-Representational Response: Gertrude Stein’s Lucy Church Amiably.
Another recent exception is Jennifer Ashton’s From Modernism to Postmodernism:
American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century.
16. Stein, “Plays,” Lectures in America, 125.
17. Stein, The Geographical History of America, 194. Further citations will be noted
parenthetically as “GH.”
18. In From Modernism to Postmodernism, Ashton argues that “the ‘business of Art’
and ‘the business of living’ are for Stein thoroughly opposed,” but I argue that
Stein’s enigmatic descriptions of her own work suggest otherwise (62).
19. Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” Lectures in America, 245.
20. Stein’s debt to James’s pragmatism has been documented extensively.
Representative readings of Stein in this light include those by Lisa Ruddick
(Reading Gertrude Stein), Jonathan Levin (The Poetics of Transition), and
Richard Poirier (Poetry and Pragmatism). More recently, see Liesl Olson,
“Gertrude Stein, William James, and Habit in the Shadow of War,”
Twentieth Century Literature 49: 328–59; Stephanie Hawkins, “The Science
of Superstition: Gertrude Stein, William James and the Formation of Belief,”
Modern Fiction Studies 51: 60–87; and Stephen Meyer, “Writing Psychology
Over: Gertrude Stein and William James,” Yale Journal of Criticism 8:
133–163.
21. James, “Principles of Psychology: Briefer Course,” Writings 1878–1899,
159–160. Further citations will be noted parenthetically as “Principles.” Lyn
Hejinian makes notes of the correlation of these concepts in her writings on
Stein. See note 36.
22. Dewey, Experience and Nature, 365. Further citations of this text will be
noted parenthetically as “Experience.” Barnes and Leo Stein met in Paris in
the early 1910s and Stein was crucial in helping Barnes develop his art col-
lection. See Greenfield, The Devil and Dr. Barnes, 43–46. Barnes was inter-
ested in Jamesian as well as Deweyan pragmatism and became good friends
with Dewey after enrolling in his Columbia seminar in 1917–18, eventually
becoming largely responsible for Dewey’s education in aesthetics (Greenfield,
56, 63). Dewey dedicated Art As Experience to Barnes. It was Barnes, pre-
sumably, who put Dewey and Leo Stein in touch, a connection revealed by
Stein’s letters. According to Stein, he read Art As Experience and judged that
206 ● Notes
“although Dewey’s book was both comprehensive and sound it was inevitably
all familiar to me,” see Stein, Journey into the Self, 152. Evidently Stein felt
Dewey’s aesthetics to be largely shaped by his own and other contemporaries’
insights. In his own The ABC of Aesthetics, Stein tried to develop a psychology
of aesthetics that blends Jamesian and Freudian insights. As he notes, “Since
the aesthetic object is constituted by, and is made known through, the self, we
cannot possibly know much about aesthetics unless we understand the self,” see
Stein, The ABC of Aesthetics, 29–30, 99. Wineapple argues that Leo’s theories of
aesthetics, as influenced by James, not only led him in a different intellectual
direction from Gertrude but that this intellectual divergence prefigured their
personal rupture. Despite Wineapple’s assessment, however, Gertrude Stein’s
protectively coded yet deeply personal texts and highly subjective self-critiques
suggest an underlying affinity between the aesthetic philosophies of the two
siblings.
23. See Gass’s introduction to Stein’s The Geographical History of America, 11–15,
for a discussion of Stein in the context of the “frontier.”
24. Sutherland characterizes Lucy Church Amiably in these terms in Gertrude Stein:
A Biography of Her Work, 138.
25. See Bridgman’s reading, for example, in Gertrude Stein in Pieces, 191.
26. Stein, Lucy Church Amiably, 9–10. Further citations will be noted parentheti-
cally as “Lucy.”
27. From Dodge’s Intimate Memories; as quoted by Janet Malcolm, “Gertrude
Stein’s War,” The New Yorker.
28. Armstrong, Modernism, Technology, and the Body, 66.
29. DeKoven begins to address this point in A Different Language, 133.
30. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Writings 1903–1932, 900.
31. As Bridgman points out, however, the publishing venture was not entirely a
success: both Stein and Toklas thought the volume “badly printed,” poorly
bound, and beset with typographical errors (Bridgman, 190).
32. Rosalind Rosenberg’s Beyond Separate Spheres heavily influences the ensuing
discussion of women scientists during this era.
33. The argument for John Dewey’s influence upon feminists of the early and later
twentieth century also has been thoughtfully detailed by Charlene Haddock
Seigfried. See “John Dewey’s Pragmatist Feminism,” Feminist Interpretations
of John Dewey; and Seigfried, Pragmatism and Feminism: Reweaving the Social
Fabric. More recently still, James Livingston has made similar connections
in Pragmatism, Feminism, and Democracy: Rethinking the Politics of American
History.
34. See Rosenberg, xxii.
35. Ashbery, “The Impossible: Gertrude Stein,” first published in Poetry 90 (July
1957), reprinted in John Ashbery: Selected Prose, 12.
36. In this alignment of her poetics with Stein’s, Hejinian is typical of many lan-
guage poets who see Stein as having originated a skepticism regarding “logical
continuity,” forcing readers to “read writing, not read meanings,” according
Notes ● 207
to Davidson in “On Reading Stein,” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 198.

Critical accounts of the Stein/LANGUAGE poet connection include most
prominently Perloff’s “The Word as Such: LANGUAGE Poetry in the
Eighties,” The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition.
More recent commentary on the connection includes that by Spahr, Everybody’s
Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity; Harryman, “Rules and
Restraints in Women’s Experimental Writing,” We Who Love to be Astonished:
Experimental Women’s Writing and Performance Poetics, 116–124; and Mix,
A Vocabulary of Thinking: Gertrude Stein and Contemporary North American
Women’s Innovative Writing.
37. Hejinian, “Two Stein Talks,” The Language of Inquiry, 83–4. Further citations
will be noted parenthetically as “Talks.” Stein refers repeatedly to the influence
of James upon Stein, including the correlation between Jamesian and Steinian
conceptions of substantive and transitive consciousness.
38. Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect, 181.
39. Olson, “Projective Verse,” Selected Writings, 16, 19.
40. Hejinian, “The Rejection of Closure,” Language of Inquiry, 44. Also on Olson’s
phallic rhetoric, see DuPlessis, Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work,
84.
41. Hejinian, “Strangeness,” Language of Inquiry, 140.
42. I have been able to locate no secondary criticism on “The Green” specifically,
although several critics write about other Hejinian texts including My Life,
Writing Is An Aid To Memory, The Guard, and Oxota.
43. Hejinian, “Line,” Language of Inquiry, 131.
44. Hejinian, “The Green,” The Cold of Poetry, 127. Further citations will be noted
parenthetically as “Green.”
45. Hejinian, “Language and ‘Paradise,’ ” Language of Inquiry, 67.
46. Hejinian, “Barbarism,” Language of Inquiry, 323, 321.
47. Hejinian comments upon her reading and teaching in the preface to “The Quest
for Knowledge in the Western Poem,” 210, and the preface to “Barbarism,”
Language of Inquiry, 318.
48. Hejinian, “The Quest for Knowledge,” Language of Inquiry, 210. Further refer-
ences will be cited parenthetically as “Quest.”
49. See Kloppenberg, “Pragmatism: An Old Name for Some New Ways of
Thinking?” in The Revival of Pragmatism, 84, for an account of such politically
invested pragmatist as opposed to contemporary pragmatists who deny the phi-
losophy’s ideological investments. Further citations will be noted parentheti-
cally as “Kloppenberg.”
50. See Silliman, The New Sentence, 7–54; and Charles Bernstein, “The Dollar
Value of Poetry,” The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, 140, also note Section 2,
“Writing and Politics,” 119–192.
51. See Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect, 168–9, for a definition of the “late mod-
ernist lyric.”
52. Hejinian, “A Common Sense,” Language of Inquiry, 366.
208 ● Notes
53. Hejinian, “A Common Sense,” 370–78.

54. Also, Alpers mentions Robertson’s work in “Modern Eclogues,” Triquarterly
116: 44, and Alpers in turn cites Freidlander’s “Nature and Culture: On Lisa
Robertson’s XEclogue,” 1995. <http://home.jps.net/~nada/xlogue.htm>, which
evidences a great deal of confusion over Robertson’s choice of the pastoral
mode.
55. Robertson, XEclogue. The volume contains no pagination.
56. Robertson acknowledges her interest in “Gertrude Stein’s sentence,” later
linking Stein to her interest in the history of “landscape” as a concept in
“Stuttering Continuity (or, Like It’s 1999); An Interview with Lisa Robertson
at Cambridge,” Open Letter 13, 69, 81. On Roberton’s use of a similar technique
in “Utopia/,” and its linkage to spatial conceptions of the poem, see Davidson,
“Picture This: Space and Time in Lisa Robertson’s ‘Utopia/,’ ” Mosaic (Dec.
2007) 87–102.
57. Gray, “Semiotic Shepherds: Gary Snyder, Frank O’Hara, and the Embodiment
of an Urban Pastoral,” also Gray’s article on James Schuyler and Jane Freilicher,
in which he makes a somewhat more conventional argument for the centrality
of “otium” to their work: “New Windows on New York: The Urban Pastoral
Vision of James Schuyler and Jane Freilicher,” as well as “ ‘A World Without
Gravity’: The Urban Pastoral Spirituality of Jim Carroll and Kathleen Norris,”
Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 47, 213–52; see too Diggory’s “Allen
Ginsberg’s Urban Pastoral.”
58. See Kolodny’s “Unearthing Herstory: An Introduction,” in The Ecocriticism
Reader, 170–181. From The Lay of the Land: Metaphor as Experience and History
in American Life and Letters.
59. See Davidson, “On the Outskirts of Form: Cosmopoetics In the Shadow of
NAFTA,” Textual Practice. 733–756; Collis, ‘ “The Frayed Trope of Rome”:
Poetic Architecture in Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, and Lisa Robertson,”
Mosaic 35: 143–162; See also the Chicago Review special issue on Robertson,
Chicago Review 51–52 (Spring 2006) 97.
60. See Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism, 7.
61. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, xvi–xvii.
62. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 122.
63. Raymond Williams, 123.
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Powys. Self-published, 1940.
West, Cornel. The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism.
Westbrook, Robert B. John Dewey and American Democracy. Ithaca: Cornell
Whitman, Walt. Specimen Days. Philadelphia: David McKay, 1882.
Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press,
1973.
———. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. New York: Columbia University Press,
1983.
———. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
Williams, William Carlos. The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams. Two Vols.
Edited by Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions Press, 1988.
———. I Wanted to Write a Poem: The Autobiography of the Works of a Poet. Edited
by Edith Heal. Boston: Beacon Hill Press, 1958.
———. Interviews with William Carlos Williams. Edited by Linda Wagner. New
York: New Directions Press, 1976.
———. Paterson. New York: New Directions Press, 1963.
———. Selected Essays. New York: New Directions Press, 1954.
———. Selected Letters of William Carlos Williams. 1957. New York: New Directions,
1984.
Wilson, R. Jackson. In Quest of Community: Social Philosophy in the United States,
1860–1920. New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1968.
Wineapple, Brenda. Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein. New York: G. P. Putnam’s
Sons, 1996.
Witemeyer, Hugh, ed. The Future of Modernism. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
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Zagarell, Sandra. “Country’s Portrayal of Community and the Exclusion of
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Index
Abstract Expressionism, 128, 201n16 camp and, 128

aesthetics, 16, 34–35 cold war and, 126
Ashbery and, 125, 127–28, 149 Dewey and, 22, 33–36, 47, 49, 69,
Dewey, 47, 71, 157–58 72, 74–75, 106–7, 126–27, 137,
Hejinian and, 162, 165–66 144, 157–58, 167, 171–72
James, 157 Frost and, 2–3, 47–50
Stein and, 157–58 Hejinian and, 167
Stevens and, 92 social conditions and, 8
Williams and, 70–71, 77, 88–91 Stein and, 157–58
African-Americans, 65, 68, 72, 114, Stevens and, 93, 106–7
154–55, 172, 175–76n5 Williams and, 67, 69, 72, 74–75, 69,
Alpers, Paul, 5 80, 88
What Is Pastoral?, 175n3 see also poet; poetics and poetry
Altman, Meryl, 191n12 Ashbery, John, 4, 6, 13, 15, 17–18,
ambivalence 123–49, 172, 175n3, 199–204nn
Ashbery and, 135 “A Boy,,” 202n26
Williams and, 17, 78–80 Can You Hear, Bird’s, 148
American culture “Civilization and Its Discontents,”
pastoral mode and, 22–23 142
postwar, 125–29 “The Compromise,” 129
American pastoral, 175–77nn, 182n16 Dewey and, 21
defined, 6–12 The Double Dream of Spring,
history of, 15, 181n9 124–25, 139–48, 203–4n34
see also specific authors “Eclogue,” 17, 123–24, 126, 128,
Anderson, Margaret, 161 131–32
“anorexic” poetics, 17, 102, 197n22 Frost and, 121–22
apocalyptic images, 80–81, 84 James and, 21, 202n26
Aragon, Louis, 127 “Military Pastoral,” 148
Arendt, Hannah, 168 “The Mythological Poet,” 17,
Armstrong, Tim, 14, 160, 180n39 137–38
art and artists O’Hara and, 152
Ashbery and, 126–30, 137, 144 “A Pastoral,” 17, 131, 135–36
230 ● Index
“The Philosopher,” 129 “Beloved Community,” 29

“The Picture of Little J.A. in a Benjamin, Walter, 46, 201n12
Prospect of Flowers,” 131–35 Bentham, Jeremy, 25
“Rural Objects,” 140, 144–48 Berger, Charles, 203n34
“Some Trees,” 138–39, 142, 200n6 Bernstein, Charles, 167
Some Trees, 123–39 Bhabha, Homi, 171
“Soonest Mended,” 18, 140, 143–44 Bilignin, France, 155, 158, 160, 171
“Spring Day,” 18, 140–43 Blake, Casey Nelson, 182n16
Stein and, 162 Bloom, Harold, 199n5
Stevens and, 121–22 Bly, Robert, 26
“The Task,” 140–41 Bodenheim, Maxwell, 185n8
“Variation, Calypso and Fugue on a body, 14, 17, 180n39
Theme of Ella Wheeler Wilcox,” Ashbery and, 130
140, 144–45 Hejinian and, 163
The Vermont Notebook, 148–49 James and Dewey and, 102
“A Wave,” 147 Stein and, 160
Williams and, 122 Stevens and, 17, 94, 96, 98–100,
women pastoral poets and, 153 102, 108–9
“Ashcan” school, 98 Williams and, 68, 72, 73, 80–82,
Aspinwall, William, 184n4 86–89
Atlas, Charles, 96 Bookstaver, Mary, 154
Auden, W.H., 9, 126–27, 200n6 borders, 23, 165, 172
autobiography Boston Post, The, 50
Ashbery and, 130, 132 Bourdieu, Pierre, 180n39
Stein and, 154 Distinction, 8
avant-garde, 152–53, 162–63, 167–68, Bourne, Randolph, 29, 182n16
192n19 Bridgman, Richard, 206
Britain, 11, 13, 25
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13, 179n33 Brogan, Jacqueline, 196n8
banal pastoral, 7–8 Brooks, Van Wyck, 29, 182n16
Barnes, Albert, 157, 205n22 Bryant, William Cullen
Barnew, Hazel E., 200n6 “The Prairies,” 23
Bartlett, John, 49 Buell, Lawrence, 191n16
Bartram, William, 166 Burke, Kenneth, 193n33
Bates, Milton, 112, 120 Burrell, Carl, 48, 188n33
Baudelaire, Charles, 46, 188n29 Burt, Stephen, 198n32
beauty (“beautiful thing”)
Ashbery and, 124 California, 167
Stein and, 160 camp sensibility, 125, 128–30, 136,
Stevens and, 119 146, 148, 201n19
Williams and, 17, 67–68, 75, 79, capitalism, 14, 25–27, 51, 181n11
84, 89 Carman, Bliss, 185n8
Beck, John, 71, 75, 192nn Songs of Vagabondia, 40
Bederman, Gail, 26 Catullus, 84
Bellows, George, 98 Chicago School, 42
Index ● 231
childhood, 132, 134, 137–38, 140–42, cosmopolitan pastoralism, 18, 170–72

146–47, 148 Cotkin, George, 200n6
Chirico, Giorgio de, 126 counterculture, 144, 204n36
Church, Henry, 199n45 “covert pastoral,” 8
citizenship, 14–16, 172 Cowper, William, 140
Ashbery and, 143, 144 Cox, Sidney, 187n20
Dewey and, 34–36 Crane, Stephen, 43
new models of, 24–30, 102 Crase, Douglas, 199n5
Robertson and, 171 Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John de,
civic body, 21, 24, 42, 46, 83, 172 24–25
Civil War, 42, 43, 183n25 Letters from an American Farmer, 166
Clark, Suzanne, 125
Cohen, William, 13 Davidson, Michael, 11, 207n36
cold war, 15, 121–22, 200n9 Davies, W.H., 42, 184–85n8
Ashbery and, 17–18, 123–40, democracy, 5, 12–16, 25, 27, 29,
144–45, 199n2 180n40, 182n16, 183n32
communitarianism, 182n1 Ashbery and, 126–27
community, 7, 13, 23–24, 26–29, cold war and, 125
182n16, 183n32 Dewey, 21–22, 32–36, 47, 49, 63,
Ashbery and, 123, 124 72, 103, 126, 167
Dewey and, 21, 29, 33, 35, 167 femininity and, 103
Frost and, 42, 44, 53–57, 65 Frost and, 47, 49, 63–64
James and, 29 Hejinian and, 167
Mumford and, 29 James and, 32, 46, 102, 167
Stevens and, 106–7 Lippmann and, 35
Williams and, 17, 65, 90–91 Robertson and, 169
see also civic body; farming; society; Stevens and, 121
urban life Whitman and, 47
Confessional poets, 127, 133 Williams and, 69, 72
consumers (consumption), 14, see also citizenship
25–26 Democratic Party, 56
Ashbery and, 128, 133, 134 Denning, Michael, 177n17
Eliot and Pound and, 17 Depression, 1, 42–43, 61, 69, 111
Frost and, 44, 62, 63 Dewey, John, 3, 6–8, 11, 15–17, 21–22,
labor unions and, 44 24, 26–36, 126–27, 152–53,
Stevens and, 17, 101 171–72, 181n13, 183–84nn,
Veblen and, 50 197n19, 201n16
Williams and, 83, 87 “Americanism and Localism,”
Cook, Eleanor, 96–97 16, 72
Cook, John James, 184n4 Art As Experience, 7–8, 34–36, 69,
Cooper, James Fenimore 74–75, 107, 157–58, 205–6n6
The Pioneers, 166 Ashbery and, 124, 132, 137, 140
Cornell, Joseph, 126 Experience and Nature, 32–34, 157
corporate culture, 14, 25–26, 40, 43 feminism and, 206n33
see also capitalism frontier and, 26–31, 36
232 ● Index
Dewey, John—Continued Dixon, Melvin, 176n5

Frost and, 16, 47, 49, 63, 188n30 Douglas, Mary, 13, 70
Hejinian and, 167 Purity and Danger, 179n33, 185n10
Individualism Old and New, 27–28 DuPlessis, Rachel Blau, 11, 97
James and, 31–32, 42
The Public and Its Problems, 33, Eberly, Rosa A.
35–36 Citizen Critics, 183–84n40
reassessment of, 144 ecocriticism, 6, 176–77n11, 191n16
Rorty and, 11 economic conditions, 12, 24–26,
Stein and, 18, 157–58, 205n22 180n36
Stevens and, 17, 102–4, 106–7, 109, cold war and, 125
197n27 Dewey and, 8
Whitman and, 47 Frost and, 59
Williams and, 16, 65, 69, 71–75, 78, Williams and, 85
191–92n19 see also capitalism; Depression;
WW II and, 103–4 poverty; social classes
Diggory, Terence, 170 education, 34–36
Dimock, Wai-Chee, 51 Eliot, T.S., 17, 102, 197n22
dirt (filth), 12, 13, 179–80nn, 185n10 “The Waste Land,” 71
Ashbery and, 141 elite culture, 4, 32, 36, 40
Frost and, 65 see also high and low culture
Stevens and, 196n16 “Ellis Island” school, 71
Williams and, 16–17, 65, 70–83, 91, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 25, 114, 145,
191n12 166, 180n35, 181n11, 182–83n25,
see also excrement 196n16, 202n26
discourse (communication; Empson, William, 6–14, 108, 128,
conversation; dialogue), 4, 26–27 177n17
Ashbery and, 18, 140, 143 Some Versions of Pastoral, 8–9
Dewey and, 35, 36 environmentalism, 5–6, 23, 180n3
Stevens and, 196n16 ethics, 5, 6, 13, 24–25
Williams and, 83–84 Ashbery and, 18, 124
disgust (nausea), 12–14, 179n33, Dewey and, 71, 106–7, 157–58
180n40 Frost and, 16, 47, 54–55, 59,
Dewey and, 27 62–63
Eliot and Pound and, 17 Hejinian and, 165
Stevens and, 102 James and, 157
disorder (chaos), 12, 179–80n33, Stevens and, 106–7, 121
185n10 Williams and, 71, 85
Asbery and, 122, 124, 130, 143 ethnicity, 11, 72, 96, 121, 170, 172
Dewey and, 107 excess, 13, 137, 172
Stevens and, 93–95, 99, 107–9, 111, Ashbery and, 135
116, 118, 121, 122 Stevens and, 92, 109
Williams and, 79–81, 89, 91 Williams and, 78, 92
see also chaos; mess see also extravagance; waste
dissent, 125, 126 excrement, 180n35
Index ● 233
Ashbery and, 149 Stevens and, 17, 94–96, 98, 106–7,

Stevens and, 113, 124 110–11, 113, 119–22
Williams and, 17, 68, 72–73, 78–81, Williams and, 68–69, 79–82, 86, 89
83, 87, 92, 193n31 feminism, 6, 18, 154, 170, 206n33
see also dirt; waste feminist pastoral modes, 18, 153
Exner, Betsy Myers, 203n27 Ferber, Edna
experience, 16 Showboat, 136, 203n33
Ashbery and, 126–27, 130, 144, 148 Filreis, Alan, 11, 15, 195n45, 197n23,
Dewey and, 22, 32–33, 74–75, 144, 198n29
157–58 Flint, F.S., 186n20, 189n38
Frost and, 41, 48–49 Flynt, Josiah, 43, 46
James and, 31, 41, 49 forgotten man, 59–60, 62, 64, 190n49
Stein and, 156–58 formalism, 10, 11
Williams and, 74–75 Frank, Waldo, 182n16
“experimental empiricism,” 32 Our America, 29
extravagance, 44, 187n23 Freilicher, Jane, 128, 208n57
Ashbery and, 13, 128 Freud, Sigmund, 13, 180n33
Frost and, 12–13, 16, 50–59, 62, Thee Essays of the Theory of Sexuality,
189n40 179n33
Stein and, 13 frontier, 23–24, 181n9
Stevens and, 13 Ashbery and, 125
Williams and, 13 cold war and, 17, 124, 125, 126
see also excess Dewey and, 24, 26–31, 33
end of, 4, 15, 22–24, 26–27, 40–41
Faggen, Robert, 62, 187n24 Hejinian and, 166–67
“Failure of Nerve” controversy, James and, 24, 31
103–4 pragmatists and rhetoric of, 27–30,
farming, 12, 14, 23–24, 190n49 36–37, 181n13
Dewey and, 32 Stein and, 158, 206n23
Frost and, 12, 59, 189n47 tramp and, 40, 42–43
fascism, 69, 109, 121 Frost, Elinor White, 39
fat Frost, Robert, 1–4, 6, 13, 15–16, 18,
Ashbery and, 124 21–22, 39–65, 122–23, 153,
Stein and, 160 184–90nn
Stevens and, 13, 17, 94–102, 108, Ashbery and, 121–22
110–13, 116–22, 124, 195n1 “A Bed in the Barn,” 64
“fat girl,” 13, 17, 95, 116, 118–22 “The Death of the Hired Man,”
father, 127, 131–32, 139–40, 203n30 54–55, 58, 184n7
Faulkner, William, 135 Dewey and, 16, 21, 47–49, 188n30
femininity (female), 14, 103, 106 “The Fear,” 56–58
Ashbery and, 122, 137 feminists and, 153
Frost and, 4 “The Guardeen,” 60
Hejinian and Stein and, 168 “The Hill Wife,” 57–58
Pound and Eliot and, 17 James and, 16, 21, 44–46, 187–
Robertson and, 169 88n24
234 ● Index
Frost, Robert—Continued Grey, Zane

“The Literate Farmer and the Plant Riders of the Purple Sage, 166
Venus,” 60 Guest, Barbara, 128
“The Lockless Door,” 60 Gunn, Giles, 11, 153
“Love and a Question,” 53–56, 58,
64 Habermas, Jürgen, 36, 183n40,
“The Mill City,” 41, 48 202n26
“My Butterfly,” 40 Hartman, Geoffrey, 193n30
“On Extravagance,” 50 H.D., 18
“Pan with Us,” 1–4, 22, 40–41, 49 Heap, Jane, 161
“The Self Seeker,” 48, 55, 59 Hejinian, Lyn, 18, 152–53, 162–69,
“The Smile,” 58 207–8nn
“Trespass,” 60 “The Green,” 18, 162, 164–66,
“Two Tramps in Mud Time,” 42, 207n42
61, 64 “The Quest for Knowledge in the
“An Unstamped Letter in our Rural Western Poem,” 166–67
Mailbox,” 60 Robertson and, 169
“A Way Out,” 60 “Romantic Theory and American
Williams and, 64–65 Event,” 166
“The Wood-Pile,” 51, 61–62 Stein and, 162–68, 205n21,
206–7n36
Gallagher, Catherine, 178n23 “Two Stein Talks,” 162–63
Gangel, Sue, 200n6 Hemingway, Ernest, 97
garden, 22, 124, 125 Herd, David, 129, 202n26
Geddes, Patrick, 29 heroes, 108–9
gender, 6–7, 26, 54, 170 Ashbery and, 129, 144
Ashbery and, 128, 132, 134, 200n9 Stevens and, 100, 104, 197n23
Hejinian and Robertson and, heterosexuality
152, 162 Ashbery and, 130, 132–34, 201n13
James and, 197n25 Robertson and, 170
Stein and, 18, 152–54, 158–59, Stein and, 160
160, 162 see also homosexuality; sexuality
Stevens and, 96, 121, 195–96n8 high and low culture, 12, 13, 175n4
Williams and, 13, 79, 82, 91 Empson, 9
George, Henry, 44, 50, 186n19 Frost and, 4
Gide, André, 107 Robertson and, 169
Giles, Paul, 184n4 Stevens, 92
Gilmore, Michael, 25, 180n35, 181n11 see also elite culture; mass culture
Ginsberg, Allen, 170, 171, 175n3 history, 13, 15, 172
Graham, Stephen, 185n8 Hejinian and, 164
Gray, Timothy, 170, 208n57 Stein and, 156, 159–61
“Great Community,” 33, 35 Hoffman, Tyler, 43, 184n8, 187n24
Greeks, 18, 73–74 Hollinger, David, 171
Gregson, Ian, 201n19 Hollywood, 129
Index ● 235
homosexuality, 7, 11, 15, 18, 172–73 industrialization, 13–14, 17, 26, 30,
Ashbery and, 13, 18, 122, 40, 43
124–25, 127–32, 136–38, 162, Dewey and, 35, 49
202n26 Frost and, 3, 47, 49–50, 59
cold war and, 125 Lippmann and, 35
Frost and, 189n33 inequality
O’Hara and, 152 Dewey and, 22
Robertson and, 170 Frost and, 22, 44
Stein and, 13, 152, 162 Williams and, 85
Williams and, 16, 65, 69–70, 76–77, innocence, 79, 80, 128
78, 80, 82, 192n28 International Workers of the World
Hook, Sidney, 21, 103 (IWW, “wobblies”), 44, 85,
Hovey, Richard 187n22
Songs of Vagabondia, 40 “ironic” high modernism, 10
Howells, William Dean “ironic” pragmatism, 31, 33, 36
The Minister’s Charge, 189n42
human James, William, 2–3, 6, 11, 15–17,
Stein and, 156, 158 21–22, 24, 27, 29–33, 36, 49–50,
Williams and, 82–85, 89–90 95, 102–5, 152–53, 183nn,
humanism, 25 197n25
Hume, David, 25 Ashbery and, 146, 148, 202n26
Hutcheon, Linda, 12, 179n31 “The Consciousness of the Self,” 45
Huyssen, Andreas, 10 Dewey and, 31–33
Essays in Radical Empiricism, 166–67
ideal self, 3, 8–9, 16, 124 frontier and, 30–31, 36
see also citizen; self Frost and, 16, 44–45, 47, 187–88n24
Idealism, 27, 41 Hejinian and, 162–63, 166–67
ideology “The Moral Equivalent of War,” 17,
Ashbery and, 124–25 31–32, 102
Empson and, 10 Mumford and, 30
Hejinian and James and, 167 “On a Certain Blindness in Human
Imbriglio, Catherine, 129, 200n12, Beings,” 45, 188n28
202n26 Pragmatism, 31, 44–45, 104
immigrants, 14 Principles of Psychology, 156–57
Frost and, 44 Psychology: Briefer Course, 44–45
Williams and, 16, 17, 70, 72, 85 Stein and, 18, 156–58, 161, 163,
imperialism, 23–24 205n22, 207n37
Independent, The, 40, 184n4 Stevens and, 95, 102, 104–5,
individualism, 25, 27, 125, 152, 172 118–19, 197–99nn
Dewey and, 27–28 Talks to Teachers and Students on
“possessive,” 25, 171, 181n9 Psychology, 44
Stein and, 158, 163 The Will to Believe, 44
tramp and, 40 WW II and, 103
Williams and Frost and, 65 Jameson, Fredric, 10
236 ● Index
Jarrell, Randall, 70, 191n8, 193n30 Lawrence, Massachusetts, 3, 44, 64,

Jefferson, Thomas, 24–25, 183n33, 171, 187n21
192n19 Strike (1912), 15, 44, 85
Jobbins, Emma, 197n20 Lawrence v. Texas, 173
Johnson, Ryan, 13 Lears, T.J. Jackson, 182n16
leisure, 79, 86
Kadlec, David, 11, 71, 192n19 Leja, Michael, 201n16
Kasson, John, 26 Lennox, Annie, 169
Keats, John, 73 Lentricchia, Frank, 11, 36, 187–88n24
Kemp, Harry, 42, 184n7 lesbians
Kenyon Review, 92 Stein and, 13, 18, 152, 160
Kilcup, Karen, 184n4 Williams and, 72, 76–78, 80
Kimmel, Michael, 26 see also homosexuality
King, Rodney, 167 Levin, Jonathan, 11, 178n26
Kinsella, John, 177n12 Levine, Lawrence, 175n4
Kloppenberg, James, 11, 31, 36, 153, Lewis, Cecil Day-, 9
167, 183n27 Lewis and Clark, 166
knowledge liberal ironists, 11
Dewey and, 28, 34 liberal politics, 17, 24–25, 35, 44,
James and, 31 69, 85
Williams and, 79 Limerick, Patricia, 23–24
Koch, Kenneth, 127–28 Lindsay, Vachel, 42, 97, 185n8
Kolodny, Annette, 170 Lippmann, Walter
Kootenay school, 168 The Phantom Public, 35
Kore, 68, 70, 78, 79, 190n2 Livingston, James, 11, 26–27,
Kristeva, Julia, 13, 179–80n33 181–82n14, 206n33
localism
labor, 16, 26 Dewey and, 29, 33, 35, 69, 71–73
Dewey and, 32, 47 Hejinian and, 167
Frost and, 44, 51–52, 61–64, 69, 85 Mumford and, 29
James and, 32 Robertson and, 169
Williams and, 69, 85 Stevens and, 91–92
labor movement, 43–44, 69, 85 Williams and, 16–17, 68–73, 78–79,
Lamartine, Alphonse de, 160 82–84, 91–92, 191n16, 192n26
land and landscape, 13, 25–26 Locke, John, 25
Ashbery and, 131, 203n31 London, Jack, 43, 46, 184n2
Bryant and, 23 The Call of the Wild, 166
Hejinian and, 163–66, 168 Longenbach, James, 198n40
Roberston and, 170–71 love, 172
Stein and, 18, 155–59, 162, 164–65, Ashbery and, 18, 124, 136, 138–39,
168 142, 203n33
Language school, 153, 162, 207n36 Stein and, 159, 160
LaPorte, Dominque, 13 Williams and, 79, 82–85, 87, 89–90,
Latimer, Ronald Lane, 93 90
Laura (film), 129 Lowell, Robert, 194n35
Index ● 237
Macpherson, C.B., 25 Stevens and, 101

Mailloux, Steven, 11 see also disorder
Mao, Doug, 178n23 Michaels, Walter Benn, 176n9
marginality, 19l, 152–53 middle class, 6–7, 43, 96, 186n18
Ashbery and, 124, 131, 137, 202n24 Frost and, 50–51, 57, 59, 60, 63
Dewey and, 78 James and, 45
Frost and, 41 Miller, J. Hillis, 193n30
Williams and, 17, 68–69, 73, 74, 78, Miller, William Ian, 13
83, 85 Mills, C. Wright, 21, 26
Mariani, Paul, 77, 191n19 mirrors
market, 4, 11, 29, 99–100 Ashbery and, 122, 126
Marsh, Alec, 71, 192n19 Stevens and, 113–14, 122
Marvell, Andrew, 91, 132–34 modernism, 9–10, 14, 30, 122, 149,
“The Picture of Little T.C. in a 151–52, 167, 178nn
Prospect of Flowers,” 133–34 Mohanty, S.P., 199–200n5
Marx, Leo, 6 Monroe, Jonathan, 199n5
The Machine in the Garden, 10, Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley
175n3 “City Eclogues,” 169
Marxists, 7 Moore, Marianne, 18, 71, 74, 194n35
masculinity (male), 14, 26, 103 morality, 17, 24–25, 31
Ashbery and, 18, 122–25, 127–31, Dewey and, 34–35, 107
138, 140, 144–45 Frost and, 60–61
cold war, 125 James and, 17
crisis in, 14, 26, 28, 94, 102 Stevens and, 107
Dewey and, 28 see also ethics; value
Frost and, 4 mother, 103, 132, 180n33
Hejinian and, vs. Stein and Olson, 163 Mumford, Lewis, 182n16
James and, 17, 45, 102 The Culture of Cities, 29
Robertson and, 169 The Golden Day, 29–30
Stein and, 18, 153, 154, 158 The Story of Utopias, 29
Stevens and, 17, 84–101, 103–11, Münsterberg, Hugo, 161
119, 121
tramps and, 42, 45 Nadel, Alan, 126
masochism, 201nn national mythology, 73, 125, 172
mass or popular culture, 10–11 native-born, 17, 102, 108–17, 119
Ashbery and, 122, 128 nativism, 6
Dewey and, 27 naturalism, 103, 126, 197n19
Stevens and, 113 nature and “natural,” 22, 24–25, 29,
May, Elaine Tyler, 125 176–77n11, 180–81nn
McCorkle, James, 202n25 Dewey and, 29, 33, 74–75
McGurl, Mark, 10 Frost, 47–48
Menand, Louis James and, 31–32
The Metaphysical Club, 183n25 Robertson and, 168–69, 171
mess, 13–14, 180n40 Stein and, 168–69
Dewey and James and, 27 Williams and, 74–75, 79, 90–91
238 ● Index
Navarre, Marguerite de, 169 Williams and, 80, 89–90

Nazism, 103 Park, Robert, 185n10
Nelson, Cary, 11 “The Mind of the Hobo,” 42
Nelson, Deborah, 200n9 Partisan Review, 103
neo-pragmatism, 11, 21, 152–53, 162, pastoralism, resurgence of interest in,
166–67 177n12
New Critics, 9–11, 88, 178n23 see also American pastoralism;
New Deal, 56, 189n45, 190nn pragmatic pastoralism; and specific
New England, 1, 3, 50, 171 authors
new historicism, 6 Paterson, New Jersey, 64, 171
Newman, Charles, 204n35 Silk Strike (1913), 15, 69, 84–85,
New Women, 154 194n40
New World, Old World vs., 43, 76–79, “Patriarchal Poetry,” 154
81–82, 90, 193n30 patriarchy
New York City, 92, 100, 127, 128, 162, Ashbery and, 125, 130, 201n13
172 Stein and, 153
New York School, 201nn Williams and, 84
New York State, 68, 130, 171 Patterson, Annabel, 5
“97 pound weakling,” 26, 96 Pastoral and Ideology, 175n3
Pennsylvania, 94, 95, 99,
Oakland, California, 162, 171 101, 115
Odgen, Hod, 203n27 Perloff, Marjorie, 163, 178n24, 201n19,
O’Hara, Frank, 127–28, 151–53, 162, 207n36
169–71, 175n3 “personality,” 182n16
“Concert Champêtre,” 151 Pierce, Charles, 31
“Memorial Day 1950,” 151 pioneer, 14, 23–29, 36–37
Olson, Charles, 163–64 Ashbery and, 127–28
“Projective Verse,” 163 Dewey and, 27–28, 32
ordinary or everyday life, 12 Mumford and, 30
Ashbery and, 149, 199n5 Ransom and, 30
Dewey and, 21, 75 Williams and, 82
James and, 21 Pisan, Christine de, 169
Roberston and, 171 play, 124, 125
Stein and, 158, 168 pleasure, 172
Stevens and, 92, 93, 95, 99, 117 Robertson and, 169–70
Williams and, 69, 75 Williams and, 89–91
otherness, 13, 176n11 poet, role of, 3–6, 11, 12, 49, 152
Stein and, 152 Ashbery and, 124, , 137–38, ,
Stevens and, 101–2, 118–19 140
Williams and, 81 Dewey and, 35–36, 78–79
outsider, 94, 116 Empson and, 8, 12
Frost and, 2–3, 6, 41–42, 46, 48,
Pan 50–52, 56–57, 59–64
Frost and, 1–4, 22, 40–41 Hejinian and, 166
Stevens and, 195n1 James and, 2, 46
Index ● 239
Stevens and, 92–95, 102–6, 104, pragmatic pastoralism

108–17, 111–15, 117, 119 defined, 3, 6–7, 12–15
Williams and, 78–80, 82–83, historical context of, 22–30,
85–88, 90–91 182–83nn
see also art and artists mapping, 15–19
poetics and poetry new discursive model and, 18–19
Ashbery and, 129, 130 see also specific authors
Dewey and, 33–37, 47–48, 73–75 pragmatism
Frost and, 12–13, 47–49, 59 American intellectual life and, 18–19
Stevens and, 95, 102, 106–7 American pastoral ideology and
Williams and, 69, 73–75, 87, 89–91, integration of, 30
91 art and democracy and, 35–37
Poirier, Richard, 11, 63, 64, 153, continued influence of, 19, 153, 166
187n24, 189n40 defined, 11–12
Poetry and Pragmatism, 178n26 femininity and, 103, 106
politics, 11, 18–19, 30, 152 frontier rhetoric and, 27–28
Ashbery and, 17–18, 127, 144–45, masculinity and, 102
149 radical thought and, 30–37
Dewey and, 17, 35–36, 144–45 redefinition of community and,
Frost and, 16 29–30
Hejinian and, 162, 164, 167–68 resurgence of, in 1980s, 19, 152–53
Ransom and Empson and, 10 see also specific authors and issues
Roberston and, 171 private-public links, 30
Stein and, 162, 168 Ashbery and, 18, 124–28, 131, 132,
Stevens and, 17 136, 200n9
Waye and, 59 Dewey and, 7–8, 21, 36, 158
Williams and, 68, 88 Frost and, 54–59
pollution, 13, 179n33 Hejinian and, 167–68
Stevens and, 95 Stein and, 154, 158, 161–62, 168
Williams and, 68–71, 78–82, 84, Stevens, 196–97n19
86, 88–89, 91–92, 193n30 Williams and, 73
Porter, Anne, 128 privilege, 8–9, 11, 152, 170
Porter, Fairfield, 128 production, 16, 26, 43–44
Posnock, Ross, 11, 36, 153 Frost and, 63
postmodernism, 10, 122, 152, 163, 167, Stevens and, 110
170–71, 178nn Williams and, 86–88
postwar era, 18, 61, 85, 92, 123, 149, Progressive Era, 21, 84–85
152 progressive politics, 26–27, 30, 65, 69,
Pound, Ezra, 17, 64, 71, 91, 102, 72, 75, 168
184n7, 186–87n20, 197n22 proletarian literature, 8, 152
poverty, 9, 41, 44, 49, 57–61, 101, protoconfessional mode, 132–34
190n49 public sphere, 4, 14, 36–37
see also economic conditions; see also private-public links
working class Puerto Rico, 74
pragmatic anarchism, 49–50, 192n19 Puritans, 28
240 ● Index
purity, 13–14 Robertson, Lisa, 18, 152–53, 162,

Dewey and, 72, 78 168–71
Williams and, 13–14, 68, 72, 77–81, “How Pastoral,” 169–70
193n30 “Palinodes,” 170
Putnam, Hilary, 167 Stein and, 162, 168–69, 208n56
“Utopia/,” 170, 208n56
Quandt, Jean B., 182n16 The Weather, 170
XEclogue, 18, 153, 168–71
race, 7, 11, 14, 96–97 Robinson, Edward Arlington, 60
Hejinian and, 167 Roman Civil Wars, 5
Stevens and, 17, 94, 98, 107, 113–15, Romantic-Modernist aesthetic, 134
195n1 Romantics, 180n35
tramps and, 40 Roosevelt, Franklin, 59–60, 62, 64,
Williams and, 13, 68, 74, 77–79, 91 190n49
“radical empiricism,” 31, 162 Roosevelt, Theodore, 96, 100, 102, 125
radical thought, 30–37, 44, 60, 70–71 Rorty, Richard, 11, 36, 152
Rae, Patricia, 196n8, 197n25 Rosenberg, Rosalind, 206n32
Pragmatism, 103 Rosenzweig, Roy, 186n17, 187n23
Rainey, Lawrence, 10 Ross, Andrew, 201n19
Ransom, John Crow, 6–7, 9–10, 12, Ross, Stephen, 186n18
29–30, 177–78nn Roth, Philip
“Mr. Empson’s Muddles,” 9 American Pastoral, 177n12
Stevens and, 108 Rotundo, Anthony, 26
Williams and, 92 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 169
Reading, Pennsylvania, 95, 115–16, Roussel, Raymond, 127
171 Rubin, Joan, 60
realism rural life, 172
Ashbery and, 124, 126, 128, 135, Ashbery and, 140
149, 200n6 Frost and, 4, 49, 56–59
cold war and, 125, 126 see also farming
Dewey and, 32–33
James and, 31 Sandburg, Carl
Stevens and, 92–93, 95, 106, 116–17 Always the Young Strangers, 185n8
Williams and, 74–75, 91, 92 Sankey, Benjamin, 77
relationships, new, 26–27, 84, 85 Saturnalia, 84
“representative anecdotes,” 5 Savran, David, 201n14
“representative men,” 125, 129, 140 Schmidt, Peter, 191n8, 193n30
Republican Party, 56 Schuyler, James, 128, 175n3, 202n25,
republican ethos, 24–25, 33 208n57
see also citizen; democracy Schwantes, Carlos, 186n16
Riddel, Joseph, 77, 112, 192n29, science, 6, 14
193n30 Hejinian and, 163
Rimbaud, Arthur, 126 Stein and, 154, 161–62
Rivers, Larry, 128 Sedgick, Eve, 130
Index ● 241
Seigfried, Charlene Haddock, 206n33 Smith, Patti, 169

self, 3, 7, 12–14, 16, 21–31, 152, Snyder, Gary, 175n3
182n16 social class, 5–8, 11, 13, 26, 186n18
alienation from, 86–87 Frost and, 13, 42–43, 51–52, 64,
Ashbery and, 18, 122, 124, 124, 127, 63–64
131, 141, 144, 148, 148–49 Williams and, 13, 79, 84, 85, 91
crisis of modern, 30–31 see also middle classes; poverty;
Dewey and, 21, 28–29, 32–34, 71 working classes
Frost and, 42, 56–57 social consciousness, 35, 45
James and, 29, 31, 45 socialism, 7, 44
postmodernism and, 152 society (social order), 4–6, 8, 10–12,
Stein and, 160 14–15, 17, 22, 24, 26, 30
Stevens and, 94, 95, 101, 102, 114, Ashbery and, 18, 124, 127, 143
121–22 Dewey and 32–36, 171–72
Williams and, 69, 71, 73, 78, 85, Empson and, 11
87, 91 Frost and, 42, 52–56, 60, 64
September 11, 2001, 172 James and, 22
Sewanee Review, 91 Marx’s pastoralism and, 10
sexist essentialism, 68 Stein and, 158–59
sexual difference, 14, 26 tramps and, 42–43
Hejinian and, 153 Williams and, 78, 84
Robertson and, 153 see also citizenship; community;
see also femininity; gender; localism; private-public links
masculinity soldiers, 120–22
sexuality, 7, 11, 170 Sontag, Susan, 128
Ashbery, 13, 18, 125, 128–29, spectacle, 128, 136
131–33, 135–37, 140, 200n9 Spender, Stephen, 9
Frost and, 54 Stallybrass, Peter, 13, 101, 179n33
Robertson and, 168–70 Stein, Bertha, 159
Stein and, 18, 151–54, 158–60 Stein, Gertrude, 4, 13, 15, 18–19,
Williams and, 13, 78–80, 82–84, 151–70, 204n6, 205–6nn
88–89 “As a Wife Has a Cow a Love Story,”
see also heterosexuality; 151, 160
homosexuality Ashbery and, 148
Shakespeare, William The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
As You Like It, 154 151, 159, 161, 168
Sheehy, Donald, 43 “Bee Time Vine,” 151
Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 35 “Composition as Explanation,” 154
Sherman, Gen. William Tecumseh, 105 “continuous present” in work of,
Shoptaw, John, 129, 200nn, 202n26 154–56, 168
Showboat (musical), 203n33 Dewey and, 21, 205–6n22
Silliman, Ron, 167 The Geographical History of America,
Silverman, Kaja, 128, 130, 201n13 156
Smedman, 191n12 geography of history and, 154–62
242 ● Index
Stein, Gertrude—Continued James and, 17, 21, 102, 104, 119,

Hejinian and, 162–66, 168, 197n27, 198n30
206–7n36 “Jocundus” figure, 111–14, 116, 119,
James and, 21, 205n20, 207n37 121
Lucy Church Amiably, 18, 153, “Jumbo,” 94, 113–15, 122, 195n1
155–56, 158–62, 205n15 “Large Red Man Reading,” 94, 113,
The Making of Americans, 166 115, 195n1
“Melanctha,” 18, 153–55 “Le Monocle de Mon Oncle,”
“Poetry and Grammar,” 156 198n35
Q.E.D., 154 “Life on a Battleship,” 109
Robertson and, 168–69, 170, “Man on the Dump,” 149
208n56 “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,”
Stanzas in Meditation, 162, 168 17, 116, 118–19
Three Lives, 154 “Owl’s Clover,” 111, 198n39
Useful Knowledge, 161 “Ploughing on Sunday,” 93
Stein, Leo, 157–58, 205–6n22 “The Silver Plough Boy,” 93, 195n1
The ABC of Aesthetics, 206 “Sombre Figuration,” 111–13
Stevens, Elsie Kachel, 94, 196–97n19 Williams and, 91–92
Stevens, Holly, 120, 196n19, 199nn World War II and, 103–4
Stevens, Wallace, 4, 6, 13, 15, 17–18, Stevenson, Robert Louis, 188n28
21, 91–123, 153, 195–99nn “The Lantern-Bearers,” 45
“Anecdote of a Jar,” 122 Steward, Susan, 177n12
Ashbery and, 121–22, 143, 147, 149 Strychacz, Thomas, 10
“Asides on the Oboe,” 113 subaltern, 79, 86
“The Auroras of Autumn,” 116 subjectivity, 14–16, 26–27, 170
The Auroras of Autumn, 95 Ashbery and, 124, 129, 148
“Bantams in Pine Woods,” 22, Dewey and, 32–34, 36, 71
94–100, 108 Robertson and, 171
“The Comedian as the Letter ‘C’,” Stein and, 158
114 tramps and, 44
“Credences of Summer,” 115–18 Williams and, 69, 71, 87
“Description without Place,” 91–92, women poets and, 152–53
195n45 subject-object relations
Dewey and, 17, 21, 102–4, 197n27 Dewey and, 32–33, 158
“Eclogue,” 93, 195n1 James and, 21–22
“Examination of the Hero in a Time Sumner, William, 190n49
of War,” 108–9, 113 surrealism, 17–18, 124, 126–27,
feminist pastorals and, 153 131–33, 135, 149, 200nn, 201n19
“The Figure of the Youth as Virile Susman, Warren, 182n16
Poet,” 17, 104–8, 118 Sutherland, Donald, 158
“The Glass of Water,” 112 Szalay, Michael, 190n53
Harmonium, 95–96, 116
“The Idea of Order at Key West,” Taft, William Howard, 100
147 Tate, Allen, 91
Index ● 243
Theocritus, 15, 73–74, 84, 86 Mumford and, 29

The Odes, 73 Robertson and, 168, 170–72
Thompson, Lawrence, 39, 52–53 Stein and, 154
Thomson, Rosemarie, 196n16 Stevens and, 111
Thurston, Michael, 11, 15 Williams and, 16–17, 71, 82, 84–86
Ticchi, Cecelia, 180n37
Today, 59 value, 6
Toklas, Alice, 155, 161–62, 206n33 Frost and, 55
Torrence, Ridgely, 60 Williams and, 68, 79, 84, 86, 88
tramps, 16, 47–50, 69, 184–90nn Van Vechten, Carl, 98
Ashbery and, 124 Veblen, Thorstein
Frost and, 1–2, 4, 13, 16, 22, 39–46, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 50
49–65, 68, 85 Vendler, Helen, 196n11, 198n39,
George and, 50 199nn, 202n25
James and, 42, 44–46, 50 Vietnam War, 165
Waye, Oliver, and, 59 Vincent, John, 129, 202n26
Whitman and, 2, 46 violence, 123, 125, 128, 130–34, 138,
Williams and, 68 144–46, 203n30
“transideological irony,” 12, 179n31 Virgil, 15, 49, 84, 86, 120, 169–70
transideological valences, 35 Eclogues, 5, 124, 202n25
transnational pastoral, 168 Idylls, 155
Trask, Michael virtue, 26–27, 30, 181n10
Cruising Modernism, 185n10 Ashbery and, 133–34
Triquarterly, 175n3, 177n12 cold war and, 125
Trotter, David, 13, 14, 101 See also citizen; ethics; morality
truth Von Hallberg, Robert, 202n24
James and, 22, 31
Ransom and, 9 war, 31–32, 121–22, 144–45
scientific method and, 6 Ward, Geoff, 201n12
Williams and, 68, 73, 82–84 Ward, Susan, 40
Tuan, Yi-Fu waste, 13, 14, 16, 179n32, 180nn
Space and Place, 183n34 Ashbery and, 126, 149
Turner, Frederick Jackson, 182n16 Frost and, 51–52
“The Significance of the Frontier in IWW and, 44
American History,” 23 Stevens, 17, 92, 95, 101, 121, 198n40
Williams and, 67, 85–88, 90, 92
unemployment, 43, 45, 61, 185n12, Waye, Oliver, 59–60
186n19 “The Forgotten Man,” 59
Untermeyer, Louis, 44, 60, 101 Wayne, John, 125
upper-classes (rich), 9, 31–32, 34–35, Webb, Clifton, 129
45, 50, 101–2 West, Cornel, 11, 36, 152, 167,
urban life, 14, 26 181n13
Ashbery and, 128–29, 145, 146 West, 158, 167
Frost and, 41–42, 60 see also frontier
244 ● Index
Westbrook, Robert, 11, 35, 36, 153, Spring and All, 74–75
181n13, 183nn Stevens and, 91, 92, 102
White, Allon, 13, 101, 179n33 “To Elsie,” 73–75, 84, 192n26
whiteness, 13–14, 40, 42, 76–78, “The Wanderer,” 68, 85, 86
195n1 “Yours, O Youth,” 71
Whitman, Walt, 2, 43, 45–47, 127, Williams, Raymond, 5, 11, 172
185n11 Wilson, R. Jackson, 182n16
Ashbery and, 149, 202n26 Wineapple, Brenda, 206n22
Hejinian and, 165–66 Wister, Owen
Leaves of Grass, 166 The Virginian, 166
Robertson and, 170 women, 11, 14–16, 96, 161–63
The Tramp and Strike Question, 43 Ashbery and, 133
Wilcox, Ella Wheeler, 144–45 rights of, 172
Williams, William Carlos, 4, 6, 13, Stein and, 152
15–17, 21, 35, 64–65, 67–91, 122, Stevens and, 102, 106
123, 141, 149, 190–95nn Williams and, 16, 65, 70
Ashbery and, 122, 141, 149 see also feminism; femininity
“Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” working class, 6, 11, 40, 42, 44,
183n39 177n17, 186nn, 187n23, 190n49
Complete Collected Poems, 68 Dewey and, 35, 36, 72
Dewey and, 16–17, 21, 35, 191–92n19 Empson and, 8–9, 12
feminist pastorals, 153 Frost and, 41–46, 48–50, 51, 59,
Frost and, 64–65 63–65
“Idyll” (1914), 69, 72–73 James and, 31–32, 45, 45, 102
James and, 21 Stevens and, 98
“A Pastoral,” (early unpublished), tramp and, 43
80–81, 84 Williams and, 16, 64–65, 69, 70, 72,
“Pastoral” (1914), 69, 72 78, 83, 85–88
“Pastoral” (1917), 73 World War I, 15, 29, 197n27
“Paterson” (1926), 68 World War II, 15, 17, 19, 43, 95,
Paterson, 16–17, 67–73, 75–91, 102–4, 108, 120, 124,
192–95nn; Book One, 70, 79, 141; 197–98n27
Book Two, 69–70, 84–90; Book WPA, 64
Three, 68, 70; Book Four, 69–70, Wyckoff, Walter, 43, 46
75–84, 191n8
“A Place (Any Place) to Transcend Yeats, William Butler, 9, 81
All Places,” 92 Young Americans, 29

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Pastoral, Pragmatism, and Twentieth-Century

Language and the Renewal of Society in Walt Whitman,

Ann Marie Mikkelsen

wonderful collegiality provided by my friends and fellow lecturers Raphael

Pan came out of the woods one day—

in which tramps figure prominently. The figure of the tramp in American

signs,” among other markers of gentility, the omniscient speaker of the

or stances of environmental activism, I argue that a socially conscious

The Elision of American Pastoral

For Dewey true art—and by implication, a better kind of pastoral art—

communal imperative, its function in helping to make sense of relation-

pastoral traditionally aspired to “imply a beautiful relation between rich and

of Ransom’s response in this instance, however, other of his writings—espe-

and political context.30 This diverse range of scholarship helped to limn

Empson’s Legacy: The “Muddles” of Modern Pastoral

“contempt,” which in democracy alone can emanate from lower as well as

Mapping the Pragmatic Pastoral

felt himself to be similarly culturally marginalized—urges his readers to

Pastoral Ideology and the

Pastoral and Pragmatism Historicized

central to debates in American studies classrooms by virtue of a revived

As Bryant’s poet listens, visualizes, and sings of the landscape’s transforma-

violence, it has maintained a central place in popular culture. Examining 100

Jefferson’s emphasis is more religious in tone as he observes that “[t]hose who

flexible, horizontal sense of social and financial obligation. As members of

moral type.”17 Dewey describes the contemporary sense of crisis in a series

work.”19 Quintessentially, American pastoral conceptions of the ethical self

James, Dewey, and the Advent of Radical Thought

uncannily unstable” in which immediate experience is consistently alter-

in place of ignorance, ethics complicating expedience. Poetry, necessarily

Tramp Culture and the Cult of Pan:

Frost’s attempt to blend in with these exotic strangers, however, was

addressing the experience of social marginalization attendant upon tramp

Yet I supposed that they had all one hope

revealing what would become a growing anxiety regarding class divisions

was an ardent supporter of socialist Henry George, a family acquaintance

Normal School in New Hampshire.24 But it is significant for Frost’s early

Pragmatic Critique and the Origins of a Tramp Poetics

the interplay of natural and poetic rhythms to be the underlying principle

in a “stream” of life that was no mere metaphor. Just as Virgil’s Tityrus is

as picturesque turn-of-the-century depictions of tramps as carefree spirits.

The Extravagance of the Middle Class

understands that this promise of labor is a fictive gesture designed to mask

I didn’t like the way he went away.

Like “The Fear,” this poem presents a woman’s perspective on a perceived

intimate knowledge of the couple. His imagined perspective on their poverty

Late Frost and the Forgotten Man

While characterizing himself as unlike the “tramp” or social “deserter,”

prominent role.51 Considered in their historical context, Frost’s late tramp

The blows that a life of self-control

The weight of an ax-head poised aloft,

They knew they had but to stay their stay

But yield who will to their separation,

“The Truth About Us”: Pastoral,

Filth, the “Local,” and Pragmatist Aesthetics

Dewey’s theory of locality is progressive and proimmigrant, citing the

speaker “consider[s] [him]self / Happy—” (Collected, 48). A later poem also

as if the earth under our feet

Without knowing Greek I had read translations of The Odes of Theocritus