The Canon

from “A Letter to Robert Frost”

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Last time in our National Poetry Month series of musical settings of poems and poets included in Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry  we heard from the poems of a leading practitioner of light verse, Ogden Nash. Today’s piece was made using some brief quotes from a much longer poem that fancies itself a step up from light verse.

In 1937 Robert Hillyer was a fresh winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and he had a professed friendship with the GOAT of all poetry Pulitzer winners, Robert Frost. That year he published a long poem in rhyming couplets, a format that in his day might make a cultured reader think of Alexander Pope – though a 21st century ear might hear in that rhyming form the philippics of Pulitzer winner Kendric Lamar. Couched as a letter to Frost, it’s a wry survey of the between-world-wars state of poetry. As an active professor of literature at Harvard, Hillyer’s in a good position to comment on and even change the nature of The Canon – that agreed upon pantheon of great poets to be taught and kept alive, even if as only as cadavers for academic dissection.

His poem from the start wants to make a point that The Canon is mutable – unlike arguments that it’s revealed truth only disputed by ignorant academic Visigoths with sub-rosa agendas. So, from the start (and the parts I chose to quote for today’s musical piece are all from the beginning of the poem) Hillyer uses himself and Frost (and meta-event! also the very anthology and anthologist that I’m drawing from for this month’s #NPM2026 series) to point out that we can change our mind and experience of poets, even long-dead ones.

His first case in point concerns Emily Dickinson. Let me do a quick attempt to summarize how that great poet – dead 50 years when Hillyer tells his tale – came to be vetted for a position in The Canon. Most of Dickinson’s best-considered work was written in the 1860s, and when she died in 1886 that work was almost entirely unknown, save for those poems she included in letters or otherwise distributed to intimates. None-the-less, in one of the cultural miracles of the ages, a large cache of hand-written fair copies of her poems were located after her death, and her surviving sister Lavinia Dickinson sought to publish them. More coincidence comes into play: Emily had corresponded with Thomas Higginson, a smart and well-connected Boston cultural figure, and two other culturally ambitious local women were willing to assist in editing these manuscripts: Emily’s sister-in-law (and now commonly assumed lover) Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and Mabel Loomis Todd, wife of a local astronomer and mistress of Emily Dickinson’s brother, the husband of Susan. No, this isn’t a season arc of Real Housewives of Amherst, that’s the mishigas/miracle that gives us one of America’s greatest poets.

Susan got first at bat with the surviving poems. She had grand plans for them, perhaps too grand. Lavinia grabbed the rights back and handed them to Mabel. Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Higginson were expeditious: they turned in a publishable manuscript quickly, doing what any responsible professional editor would do with this batch of handwritten “amateur” poems: cleaning up punctuation, spelling, grammar, etc., ordering their choice of best poems in a sequence, and adding helpful-to-the-casual-reader poem titles and subject-matter sub-sections.*

Still, the posthumous publication of a dead loved one’s poems generally produces about as much reaction as an engraved epigraph on a cemetery rock: a loving gesture with a small audience. Yet, surprisingly the Poems of Emily Dickinson sold very well, needing additional print runs only weeks after it was released. Two subsequent volumes containing more cleaned up and regularized poems quickly followed. So, at the turn of the 20th century, shortly before Modernism breaks out, this mid-19th century poet arrived.

When Untermeyer presents Emily Dickinson in his Modern American Poetry, it’s only her and Walt Whitman who are from the mid-19th century – the pair considered suitable to be considered “moderns” – but he points out that with the rise of High Modernism in the late 1920s, Dickinson’s poetry had taken a hit in critical assessment: she didn’t seem “serious” enough, and even with the Higginson-Todd edits, her prosody seemed sloppy. Untermeyer notes that the myth and mystery aspect of Dickinson’s biography, as understood then, was in danger of taking over from the verse: why did she withdraw socially, and was that part of some doomed romance?

That was still the Emily Dickinson that I read and heard about in school in the mid-20th century: a curious eccentric with a cozy-gothic-romance backstory to go with those poems of strangely polite funeral carriages. Real poets, like Frost, Stevens, and Eliot had no backstory, just texts that could support impersonal New Criticism exegesis.

But Emily Dickinson’s poetry was still to be written – or rather, printed. It was only in my lifetime that accurate and complete editions of her poetry were released. Shorn of half-measures, her language when faithfully conveyed, unleashed from conventional rules, now seemed less careless and more passionate and incisive. New readers started to see a Shakespearean width to Dickinson’s concerns, partly I suspect because there were smart women now with academic rhetorical skills who didn’t put blinders on when reading Dickinson, poems now sharper with the varnish taken off.

I took you on that little side-trip for two reasons. First, I wanted to be fair to Robert Hillyer as he recounts his and Frost reactions to Dickinson in the between-world-wars era. In the first blush of Modernism before the end of WWI, Dickinson (even if still regularized) seemed contemporary, because those early American Modernists prized concise directness and freedom from tired metaphorical tropes in poetry. Sandburg wrote a poem calling Dickinson an Imagist, the name taken for that early 20th century vanguard. And so it is too, that the young Hillyer recalls his original fondness for Dickinson, but then Hillyer’s journey as a poet and academic** taught him to value exactness in prosody: perfect rhymes, precise metrics, correct grammar arrayed in longer poems with grand themes. And what of his reporting of Frost reply to his youthful Dickinson enthusiasm: “Perhaps a genius, but mad?” Hillyer heard that judgement when Frost was teaching in Dickinson’s home town, people there still lived that knew the living Emily Dickinson, town eccentric.

I think it’s fine to (I quickly did this myself) ascribe the incident I extracted from Hillyer’s much longer poem to so much patriarchal prejudice – but the judgement of The Canon as its caissons go rolling along was for us to forget Hillyer’s verse and study Dickinson’s. The second reason I told Dickinson’s story, the greater point, and the reason I perform these few lines from Hillyer’s poem now, is to show that The Canon isn’t static, that it changes, or rather that we change it by our attention, what we find, what we take into ourselves. Because Hillyer’s long 1937 poem is likely still in copyright, I’m not able to provide a link to the full text on the Internet and I’ve chosen not to print the quotes I excerpted from it for educational purposes this National Poetry Month.

Robert Hillyer

Robert Hillyer. I don’t know if he ever got to revise his learned opinion of Emily Dickinson’s poetry once again.

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I also present this piece as evidence of the music in differing styles precept of this Project.*** I am a naïve composer with limited musician skills. I suspect nearly all composers compose on an instrument, and that most inform their trial-and-error exploration with more adequate skills on an instrument buttressed with more knowledge of musical theory that I have. My mitigations, which I hope to hide from listeners partway, it to use anything I can do  with my instruments and voice in my compositions, and avoid those things I can’t. If I learn some new musical theory or tactic, I’ll turn it into a composition while remaining ignorant of the panorama of musical structural theory – and when I work with orchestral instruments, as I do today, I’m closer to the Lego school of musical construction, using arpeggiators, MIDI editing, and lots of trial and error to make something that may be worthwhile. Today’s piece is therefore limited – from its composition through to its recording you can hear below – by the composer/performer’s limits to realize it. I believe that it will still work for some listeners – perhaps you. The audio player to hear this short piece with quotes from Robert Hillyer’s “A Letter to Robert Frost”  is below. No player seen? Some ways of viewing this blog won’t let audio player gadgets into the canon, but I offer this highlighted link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.

 

 

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*Modern critics and scholars generally decry their work. Todd in particular is often taken to task today for suppressing anything in the poems related to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, and both are accused of making the genius of Emily Dickinson all too conventional with their edits. But, if they had not done their work, not gotten Emily published, not done the commercial “clean-up” that made her immediately approachable to general readers in print, we likely wouldn’t have an Emily Dickinson to be concerned with.

**Hillyer seems more remembered today as an important teacher at Harvard than as a poet.

***Beside my own listening to orchestral music and art song (amidst a broad palette of other musical expressions) two pieces by trained composers likely influenced this work. Many years ago I was able to hear a locally-based composer, Dominick Argento’s Letters from Composers  performed, and much more recently I was delighted to hear the premier performance of young composer Patricia Wallinga’s The Sisters,  a one-act opera featuring singers portraying Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Amy Lowell together on stage singing about their poetic careers. I’d almost consider my little work today to be a modest response to The Sisters  from the male side, as three of Wallinga’s quartet of women poets are observed in the Hillyer excerpt I performed. Where’s Amy Lowell? “Our friend at Sevenells” mentioned in Hillyer’s poetic letter to Frost is a reference to Amy Lowell’s home. Wallinga’s less-than-an-hour opera performance is available to be seen and heard at that hyperlink on YouTube.

You might notice that those composer/performer particulars I mention above limit the sophistication of my two-minute piece compared to these of course, my saving grace is the hope that my piece retains some value. I’ve taken to calling my efforts in this vein “punk orchestral” to make my case.

February Twilight

~ Frank Hudson ~ 2 Comments

The cosmos says we need to get a leap year, and extra day, and yet we put it in February. It was a dozen degrees Fahrenheit this morning, and my bike ride back from breakfast was into an insistent north wind that explains to me that we’re in Minnesota and we’ll probably have a snowstorm or two yet before we can see spring—a spring that sometimes seems too short to form memories.

So, before we leave this month and season, I thought it a good time for a short poem referencing a short month from American poet Sara Teasdale. Teasdale is like Edna St. Vincent Millay, a poet that 100 years ago was thought a leading voice in this country’s verse, after which we spent the rest of the century more or less forgetting or down-grading their place.

When such re-evaluations happen, it’s common to assign them to the refined judgement of posterity, the further assay that separates momentarily sparkly stuff from the for-all-time classics. How does that happen?

One could assign this downward path to Teasdale (like Millay) writing metrical and rhyming verse in their prize-winning years early in the 20th century. The evil Modernist free-verse hordes in this view laid waste to all who dare to rhyme or march to a one-shoe-off beat.

There’s a factor there, sure, but this story doesn’t account for two giants whose statues were not toppled: Frost and Yeats. Nor the monuments on many campuses to canon sitters like Auden and Wilbur et al who were not primarily free-verse poets.

No, I think there are more important factors in this determination, one that is currently under revision in our new century. First, both were essentially lyric poets. “Lyric” in this sense doesn’t mean that they wrote song lyrics. Though of course this project finds them sing-able and otherwise suited to presentation with music, “Lyric” in the literary sense means that their poems tend to be set in the impressions and immediacy of a moment, and their final and considered judgement of that moment is not necessarily explicit. Lyric poems don’t usually have great themes developed with long arguments in verse. Nor do they have narratives the way a novel or story does, were we turn the page to find out what happens next. What happens in a lyric poem—happens! Right then. Right now.

The pioneering Modernists in the years before the end of WWI, those that were or wrote like Imagists, were fine with that. Indeed, this was the point of Imagism. Teasdale wasn’t called an Imagist, but she could write like one, albeit with rhyme and meter. The Imagists didn’t call for the end of rhyme and meter, they called for an end of poems that existed to fill out those forms without the vividness of the lyric.

But post Eliot and the Pound of the Cantos, post the sheltering of poetry inside the academic monasteries which could too easily fall into a rout of poems to be taught rather than poems to be experienced, these poems could seem slight. The Imagists were a fine exercise to break from the past, but they were not, in this outlook, the way to write great poetry.

And here’s the other reason. Gender. The academics were overwhelmingly men and were steeped in the things men were thinking about. And the world of the middle of the 20th century had a lot of concerns that made the concerns of Teasdale and other women poets of the early part of the 20th century seem like the line in Casablanca  uttered by Humphrey Bogart “The problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

For the first part of our double feature: 90 seconds of cinema that was an emotional touchstone to many. Also, mansplaining.

 

It took the culture until nearly the end of the 20th century to see that part of the world’s craziness was because men were still explaining how it worked to women.*

All that may be too much of a burden to bear for this short poem by Teasdale. But if “February Twilight”  was signed Frost or Yeats, I suspect more attention might be paid to her poem. It doesn’t read much like Yeats, but it could pass for the shorter, lyric Frost.

The lyric impulse in poetry survived the mid-20th century when colored with Dada and Surrealism. “See, it’s not me! I’m a serious poet, but I just chanced into this charged moment.”

 

What does Teasdale experience in the charged moment of her lyric? That it seems like she’s the only one that views this star, a manifest untruth we could explain to her, but which I think she knows as the final line presents. She doesn’t explain this to us, but we can stand in the cold, snowy February and experience it with her.

I’m choosing tambura and acoustic guitar again for my performance today, this time with an organ keyboard part. Click on that player gadget below to hear it.  “If you don’t, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, and maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.”

 

 

 

 

*Which I’m doing here. Ha Ha! Here’s where one of the principles of the Parlando Project comes in: “Other People’s Stories.” I’m not claiming the exclusive right to mansplain mansplaining, but men speaking up about it has its place and value.

Oh, and explaining has value too. And I happen to like Casablanca  as a movie. And defeating fascism might have a value greater than the optimum choice for a snuggle-bunny. And I had huevos rancheros for breakfast. A hill of beans would be meaningful and sustaining to me!

We Wear the Mask

~ Frank Hudson ~ Leave a comment

Today I present the other widely anthologized Paul Laurence Dunbar poem: “We Wear the Mask.”  I was going to put a “now” qualifier in front of “widely” above, but that made for an awkward sentence. I think it’s worth burning at least another sentence to note that.

In looking for some more Dunbar information, I found this story told by Professor Joanne Braxton. Braxton recounts that as recently as the 1980s when she was looking to teach Dunbar poems at her university, that Dunbar’s work was out of print and difficult to find. That’s not unusual. As Donald Hall fatalistically stated in one of his late essays: the majority of poets who receive prizes and ample publication in their time will be unread 20 years after their death. Braxton, who knew Dunbar’s poems from family and Afro-American tradition, eventually saw to publishing of the first collection of all of Dunbar’s verse.

I’m sure I have readers here for whom the 1980s is “a long time ago.” It’s all relative I suppose, but this change in availability speaks to the dynamism of “The Canon,” and which poets we’re exposed to in school or the culture at large. Braxton teaches by her example that we, each of us, shape The Canon,* particularly with poetry, which is in suspended animation on the page and lives only when we read aloud, chant, and sing it. It’s up to all of us to find those poets who split our skulls, open our caged chest bones, and let us animate the slumbering dreams.

Young Negro Poet Dunbar poster

No date is known for this poster, but Dunbar looks quite young here

 

Braxton** and others have written eloquently on the meaning of this Dunbar poem and about Dunbar’s pioneering code-switching project to write in dialect as well as mainstream 19th century poetic forms, so once more I’ll defer to others today in those matters.

On the poem itself, let me praise its word-music. There were occasional words that were hard for me to sing or set to music, but that’s likely my fault as a composer and certainly my fault as a singer. “We Wear the Mask” is almost too pretty for its subject, but then there’s a tradition (I associate it with Celtic folk musics) of setting the saddest stories to the most beautiful tunes. Last time, for Dunbar’s “Sympathy,”  I followed that idea for my music and the fiddle melody. Now, for my explicit music today, I decided to go in a more martial cadence and ambience. Art song (that traditional method of setting poetry to music) usually avoids that mood; but one of my influences, the English language 20th century Folk Music Revival is perfectly fine with that.

We Wear the Mask

Here’s the guitar chords. The piano and bass mostly just play the roots of the chords in today’s performance. That’s a nice thing about music: sometimes simple works just fine.

 

In the Broadside tradition, I’ve included my guitar chords with Dunbar’s lyrics for this one. I played it with a capo on the second fret, so the chords sound a full step higher than the chord forms indicated above. My performance can be heard with the player gadget that should appear below.

 

 

*This leads to complaints that change in The Canon is “watering down,” or subject to special pleading which somehow is self-evidently inferior to one or another objective aesthetic criterion. If there are indeed multiple criteria (objectively, that must be agreed to be so) how else must we decide among ourselves what has worth, but by a dynamic of discussion, debate, disagreement? And will such actions by human minds and hearts ever lead to a static situation? How can it, if for no other reason that we continue to create poetry, music and art. Hall says, correctly on the face of it, that most will be forgotten. But like those that charge, armed or not, against the redoubts, we must move forward even if only a few will reach and cross the wall.

**One fascinating bit in the link has Braxton sharing an account from Dunbar’s widow about a possible specific inspiration for Dunbar’s famous “Sympathy (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings)”  poem.

The Most Anthologized American Poems of the Modern Era

~ Frank Hudson ~ 6 Comments

Here’s a list of poets and poems, along with the year they were written:

Top 20 Poems List

 

OK, you probably already read the title of the post, so you know what they are.

This list comes from an article I bookmarked this summer that intrigued me, and today I returned to it because I’m thinking a bit about “The Canon”—those poems and poets that are judged by some generalized panel of experts as being worthy.

The whole The Canon thing is full of controversy, with complaints that it doesn’t include enough of what some favor in terms of poetic expression, or that it’s too-much a dead white man’s club; but part of what makes that discussion worthwhile is that The Canon is how almost all of us got introduced to poetry as an adult practice. Somewhere in our school years, we will be asked to open a textbook, and there on the pages will be some “great poems” that we will be asked to grapple with. Some of us will be puzzled that we can’t figure out how to do the sums of what these poems mean; and some of us will want to emulate them, to steal a little of their vision of existence, and some will hope to someday gain for ourselves something like that esteem in the eyes of others, to be, in our words, on a page in an anthology.

Sure, we may have already encountered nursery rhymes, Dr. Seuss, and perhaps some song lyrics, but these poems are the adults, writing the adult things. Poetry sections of literature classes can be as fraught with adolescent frisson as sex ed.

The article I was intrigued by was written by Emily Temple and posted on Lithub. It’s a painstakingly counted-up list, collated from twenty anthologies of poetry. The selection of anthologies has some problematic focus: half of them were specifically focused on American poetry, and nearly half (eight) were anthologies of modern or contemporary poetry. Still, the work to make this list must have been considerable, and I don’t know any similar, but better, efforts to use instead. For this post, I’ve decided to take even more shortcuts, over and above relying on Temple’s work, so bear that in mind.

I’m going to focus on the “Top 20,” the poems that appear in nine or more of the twenty anthologies. While this doesn’t eliminate the anthology-weighting to modern Americans, I think it means that these 20 poems and their authors are safely in “The Canon” as constituted in our current century. Here are a few scattered, short, observations about these most of the most anthologized modern American poems.

I had read and/or remembered reading all but three of the poems. (“Musee des Beau Arts,” “Skunk Hour,”  and “Love Calls us to the Things of This World”).  I suspect anyone who’s been interested in American poetry for a few decades would come in around that.

I sometimes worry that I’ve concentrated here too much on works from the first quarter of the 20th Century, and particularly those connected to the “Imagist” revolution in the center of that time. From this list, I shouldn’t. Nearly half the list (nine) is from this period, and if one was to play the “Kevin Bacon game” with Ezra Pound concerning these, your number is always zero to one, or you’re Wallace Stevens. I use so much from this era because I have trouble even finding the time to seek the rights to present a piece still in copyright, but also because I happen to find that era fascinating—and it turns out as far as modern American poetry is concerned, it’s still the core of The Canon.

However, even though the Parlando Project is closing in on 140 pieces, we’ve only done two of these top twenty poems (“The River Merchant’s Wife,”  and a small portion of “The Waste Land.”)

What era other than the Teens and Twenties of the 20th Century was over-represented? The Fifties, four selections, and you could consider Gwendolyn Brooks’ 1960 “We Real Cool”  sneaking in as a fifth.

Dead White Man’s Club? Not as bad as it was when I was in school. Not Dead White Males: 7 out of 15 authors if I count William Carlos Williams’ second-generation Puerto Rican heritage and don’t count that Richard Wilbur, though white and male, and still alive. The Canon is always historical, always trailing the contemporary. It’s not 7 out of 20 because five authors had two works in the Top 20. If someone does this article in 2117, or even 2067, I wager the pale dead males will be less than 50%. This is an easy bet (I won’t be around to collect from after all) but also because if we take the short-term acclaim of literary awards for new work in the past few years, I informally believe we’re already at that level. I know some will object to even mentioning these distinctions for various reasons. That’s a big topic, another time. If one wants to make an argument for tokenism from either side of that debate, that only the white males got double selections in the Top 20 would be your data point.

UPDATE:  not to belabor the White Males count, but as I pointed out when we presented “The River Merchant’s Wife” back in July, the authorship of that poem in a complex subject. It is  a translation of classical Chinese poet Li Bai. Pound’s Chinese translations are acknowledged to be of the looser variety however. If we split that one 50/50 we’re halfsies on White Males.

Here’s one that was interesting to me as I think about another issue: how old were the authors when the wrote their “Top 20 poem?” Go ahead, guess….

You didn’t look ahead, did you?

I guessed low. I was of the impression that poetry was a young person’s game, and many of the poems I’ve used here were written by authors below the age of 30. Turns out the average was a fraction over 40 years old, with Elizabeth Bishop at 65 and Wallace Stevens for his second selection at 75 making appearances for the Medicare set. The youngsters? Eliot at 27, Pound at 28 and 30, Auden and Moore at 32, Dickinson and Plath at 33. One oddity? Despite the average of a bit over 40, no one wrote a Top 20 poem in their 50s. If you’re under 30, don’t despair, as I did, thinking “John Keats died at 25, and what have I accomplished.” If you’re a poet in your 50s, consider a career in the insurance industry and plan on being Wallace Stevens.

This is another of the posts here that I’m tagging “About” that are not occasioned by a new Parlando Project audio piece. For those who can’t wait for the next piece mixing various words (mostly poetry) with original music, here’s that “included in 10 out of 20 anthologies” hit “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter”  done up Parlando Project style. Use the player below to hear it.