Robert B. Silvers Lecture: Helen Vendler
December 8, 2015
LIVE from the New York Public Library
www.nypl.org/live
Celeste Auditorium
ROBERT SILVERS: I’m Robert Silvers. I’m the editor of the New York Review of Books. I
want to welcome you here tonight. Before these lectures happened I’d felt an editor like myself
should try on the whole to work with writers and stay out of sight. Somewhere in the middle
distance, you might say. But when the late Max Palevsky, the great philanthropist, he was a
scientist, an inventor, builder, made the startling suggestion that I do something in my name—
editor, a reader of the Review, he was—I was not only touched by this generosity, I felt an
editor’s impulse to do something to honor writers I greatly admire and do so in a way that would
involve the two institutions that meant the most to me, the New York Review and the New York
Public Library, which seems to me one of the most admirable institutions we have, a truly
democratic source of the mind of the city, and so I must say thanks to Tony Marx, who has been
keen to continue these lectures, and to Paul Holdengräber, who’s in charge of lectures, and to the
Library for making all of this possible, and thanks to Max.
Now, after talks, talks we’ve had by Zadie Smith and Derek Wolcott, John Coetzee, Lorrie
Moore, Daniel Mendelsohn, Joyce Carol Oates, and many others, I was particularly happy when
Helen Vendler said she would give this year’s lecture. No one is respected more for their
understanding and criticism of the poetry of our time. It seems a towering challenge even to
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describe the extent of her work. I can start very selfishly by saying that she’s written some fiftyeight contributions to the New York Review of Books since 1975, and one of those early
contributions was not about poetry at all, but about freedom of expression at Boston University,
where she then taught. She summed up a deeply disturbing situation at that university where the
president and some others were not tolerant of dissent, where there was interference with student
and faculty opinion, and critical statements were not seen as acceptable.
Now, there was in what we published—and it wasn’t very long by—Helen a particularly calm
and yet implacable fierceness about her defense of freedom of expression. It was not at all
surprising that she soon moved to Harvard. There was, in what we then published by Helen, a
particularly calm and unflinching tone and that tone of a quest for truth, and it remains an
underlying current in the very different work she went on to write for us. And that work included
appreciation and carefully weighed perceptions of the work and practically every important poet
of the last century and this one, beginning with Robert Lowell and James Merrill in the late
seventies.
She’s written literally dozens of books and anthologies on, among others, Emily Dickinson and
W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Shakespeare’s sonnets. Early on, she wrote for us about Wallace
Stevens, one of the central figures in her own critical universe, and she recalled writing about
what she said were his—and I’m quoting—“his wonderful constructions. Tempting. Seductive.
Impertinent. Resistant. Teasing.” And these often-elusive qualities are ones that we find again
and again in her own widely varied studies, whether of Elizabeth Bishop or Amy Clampitt or
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John Ashbery or James Schuyler or Seamus Heaney or John Berryman or Lucy Broido or Robert
Frost or Marianne Moore.
There seems no limit to her range or her ability to capture the unseeable. As when she wrote of
Czesław Miłosz that his poems, and I’m quoting, “are so powerful that they burst the bounds in
which they are written.” We can feel, we can feel the presence in her writing of what she once
called “the other side of consciousness, of things that present themselves as knockings, voices,
faces, memories, tireless eliciting of the poet and the reader,” and we feel that Helen can
transcend what she has called “the well-defended wall between the haunted night of the mind
and its rational day.”
And over the years we sense her own work as she wrote about Seamus Heaney, and I quote, her
own work becoming “ever fuller and freer with expanding linguistic and literary power.” Helen
once wrote of the poet who wants to have things out, as she put it, “out on the highest premises.
Refinement is as natural to that mind as breathing.” And so I think all of us have felt that in
reading Helen’s work. We felt that we have had the gift of being lifted to the highest level of
perception of the poetry of our time. Helen Vendler.
(applause)
HELEN VENDLER: I am delighted and honored to be giving the Robert Silvers Lecture this
year. Like others, I can testify to Bob’s unerring perception of what an essay needs in the way of
clarity or subtlety, expansion or cutting. From my many years of sending reviews to Bob, I offer
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a single anecdote of his editing. It was very funny. Normally I sense from inside when I’m
reaching the end of a piece and then I send it off as I once did with a new review of—I’m sorry,
a review of a new book of Seamus Heaney’s. That review without my noticing it had become
weirdly long. When it arrived at Bob’s desk, he called me in some perplexity. “Helen,” he said
gently, “I think this is a chapter from a book you want to write,” and of course it was and I did.
I am grateful for all that Bob has taught me about writing for the general public and for the many
reviews he’s commissioned, all of them provocations to thought and often to further writing. I
added on your handout the best poem about editing. It’s at the last page. In this poem, God is the
editor who cuts and shapes our lives so that we will be beautiful and fit for paradise from all the
cutting and shaping. And you can see that it’s one of those clever poems, and more than clever,
inspired, I think. And it’s called “Paradise,” and of course God as the editor is always right,
shaping us for our most beautiful contours.
I Bless thee, Lord, because I GROW
Among thy trees, which in a ROW
To thee both fruit and order OW.
What open force, or hidden CHARM
Can blast my fruit, or bring me HARM,
While the inclosure is thine ARM.
Inclose me still for fear I START.
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Be to me rather sharp and TART,
Then let me want thy hand and ART.
When thou dost greater judgments SPARE,
And with thy knife but prune and PARE,
Ev’n fruitfull trees more fruitful ARE.
Such sharpnes shows the sweetest FREND:
Such cuttings rather heal then REND:
And such beginnings touch their END.
Now, it seemed to me that a lecture in honor of Bob Silvers should be somehow about editing
and I decided to talk about the record of poets editing their own work when they’re searching, as
young Keats said, “round the poles” to make the poem a work of art. W. B. Yeats, replying to
friends who deplored his late revisions of early verse, which they had cherished, said the
definitive word in what is entailed in poetic second thoughts. “Those friends that have it I do
wrong whenever I remake a song should know what issue is at stake. It is myself that I remake.”
Or, as John Berryman put it more surgically in The Dream-Songs: “I am obliged to perform in
complete darkness operations of great delicacy on myself.”
I’ll be offering examples from several poets about these operations of great delicacy. The first
injunction of poetic self-editing, as in the self-editing of any work of art, is a moral one. To do
open-heart surgery in the darkness means to restore the uprightness of the self. “How hard,” says
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Yeats, “is that purification from insincerity, vanity, malignity, arrogance, which is the discovery
of style.” One daunting aspect of poetic self-editing is the number of planes that must be under
revision at once. The elementary ones of syllable, rhyme, rhythm, and stanza form. The basic
ones of plot and the conduct of the plot, the navigational ones of space and time, and the
emotional ones of veracity and tone, generating, in Seamus Heaney’s words, a work that is “not
tract, not thesis.”
Revision can be minimal in what we sometimes consider the simplest case, it may add or delete a
single word, as in my first example coming up from Dickinson, and revision can be maximal. In
the most complex case, a revision may create and add a substantial new portion to an already
finished poem, as we’ll see in my example from Milton. In the case of poetry, the work of
revision is theoretically endless. As Valéry said, poems are not finished but abandoned. Revising
even a single word is a complex act. Finding the mot juste is never simple.
Emily Dickinson does her most elaborate piece of single-word revision when she considers
thirteen possible adjectives for a single noun. Thinking of her own nephew’s response to church
sermons, she rebukes the preacher whose staid retelling of Bible stories bores his young
audience. Why can’t a sermon offer to the boys versions more excitingly named of those stories
of the Bible and therefore more attractive? Why shouldn’t descriptions like these enliven the
sermon: Eden, the Ancient Homestead. Satan, the Brigadier. Judas, the Great Defaulter. David,
the Troubador. However, on rethinking the problem of attracting the young, Dickinson decides
it’s not plot excitement that would make the boys listen, it’s rather an elusive quality in the teller
himself. “Had but the tale” and she first said “thrilling.” “Had but the tale a”—mm-mm, she
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didn’t like thrilling, it’s too clichéd. “Had but the tale a mm-mm teller, all the boys would come.”
What is that quality?
I’ve reproduced on the handout the thirteen adjectives as Dickinson lays them out for the
choosing. Some of those adjectives—sorry, looking for my own handout, you can see that I’ve
copied from her manuscript, this is exactly the way it appears in the manuscript—typic, hearty,
bonny, et cetera, breathless, spacious, tropic, warbling, ardent, friendly, magic, pungent,
warbling, winning, mellow—thirteen of them, and they are not synonyms.
Some of those adjectives suggest why the audience might respond to the teller—he would be
thrilling, winning, pungent, bonny. Other adjectives, perhaps more appropriate to a scout leader,
include friendly, mellow, and hearty. Yet others suggest that the teller might exhibit religious
fervor—ardent, breathless, even magic. Still others suggest qualities belonging to the teller’s
rhetoric—had but the tale a typic teller, a tropic teller, a spacious teller. What is it fundamentally
that attracts an audience to a tale? And a threatening tale at that. Boys that believe are very
lonesome, other boys are lost.
Reviewing her options, Dickinson finds something disingenuous in a teller who takes pains to be
one of the boys in his friendliness, his heartiness, and she doubts that religious fervor, no matter
how ardent, will win over the boys. There is one adjective I haven’t yet mentioned, it’s the one
Dickinson wrote twice among her alternatives and the one she finally adopted. It has nothing to
do with the personal qualities of the preacher or his religious feelings or his efforts to make
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friends with the boys or his exciting melodrama or the rhetorical gestures, “typic,” “tropic,”
“spacious,” that he might employ.
The chosen adjective in Dickinson’s fair copy is the unexpected word “warbling.” Who warbles
in a pulpit? Dickinson makes her point immediately by a telling comparison—“Orpheus’ sermon
captivated/It did not condemn.” But she’s also remembering Milton’s characterization of
Shakespeare in his poem “L’Allegro” about the happy or the contented man. When the contented
man goes to the theater at night to hear “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy’s child, warble his native
wood-notes wild.” It was the comedies, it was before the tragedies. Both Dickinson and Milton
insist on the manner—on the warbling—rather than matter, religion, history. It is both, sorry,
both Dickinson and Milton insist on manner rather than matter, it is shaped via linguistic music
that charms the audience. The nightingale warbles, Shakespeare warbles, Orpheus warbles. The
clergyman then must warble too. Whether he can is Dickinson’s sardonic question.
A poet loves being given a task. To Dickinson contemplating her adjectives, the muse says, “to
finish a poem, you need to find a two-syllable adjective in a trochaic rhythm, with some sonic
connection to ‘tale’ and ‘teller.’” “Had but the tale a mm-mm teller.” The poet’s first response is,
“I’ll find a trochaic t-word to alliterate with ‘tale’ and ‘teller,’” and she launches “typic” and
“tropic.” However, she ultimately decides against those punctual t’s—“typic,” “tropic”—and c’s.
She finally decides on a liquid “l” and chooses “warbling,” replicating the liquid “l” of “tale” and
“teller,” “had but the tale a warbling teller.” Dickinson’s pondering of adjective after adjective
suggests the flood of intellectual or moral alternatives that are generated when a poet searches
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for truth. She is not assembling a group of synonyms. Rather each of her possible choices
suggests a different angle from which to predict the success of a sermon.
But lest we think from this example that revision amounts merely to finding a single better word,
Dickinson offers in another poem an anecdote rebuking the poet’s original misguided notion that
it’s merely a single word that she’s lacking. As she had in “The Bible as an Antique Volume,”
she repeatedly searches philology looking at possible candidates for the mot juste, wishing to
nominate one to that office, but every one of the verbal candidates in waiting that she has around
is imperfect. Vexed by frustration, she almost succumbs to the temptation to compromise her
standard of truth and take what is available.
Shall I take thee, the Poet said
To the propounded word?
Be stationed with the Candidates
Till I have finer tried—
The Poet searched Philology
And when about to ring
For the suspended Candidate
Why not settle for a word, she thinks, already propounded, standing by among the other
candidates? Then she realizes, abashed, that it is not a word that is missing but rather a particular
element of her original vision for the poem. To fill the spot the poet must reclaim the whole
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vision, retrace her steps, revisit the original vision, and explore it until she finds the whole
neglected territory and acknowledges that territory. When she does retrace her steps and
repossess her imaginative vision from the inside, the word she lacks appears all by itself.
There came unsummoned in—
That portion of the Vision
The Word applied to fill
Not unto nomination
The Cherubim reveal—
The cherubim, the highest of the orders of angels, can’t be commanded to reveal the right word.
You can’t nominate a candidate and have the angels approve. The right word isn’t languishing
among the propounded candidates waiting to be nominated. The right word reveals itself
unsummoned once the poet revisits a hitherto opaque and therefore neglected portion of her
original vision. Because the vision proper inhabits the realm of the highest angels, it is only when
the poet ascends to that realm and reexamines her vision, admitting to herself that it is not a word
she lacks, but an as-yet-unexplored area of inspiration, that the cherubim act and the word arrives
to complete the poem.
I’ve been speaking of revision as if the poet is alone in the task, but sometimes, as we know, the
poet reaches out to a stimulating collaborator. The most famous—this is a parenthesis—the most
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famous modern collaborator was Ezra Pound in his savage editing of the manuscripts of The
Waste Land, where with a single word, “putrid,” he rejected a whole passage and Eliot deleted it.
Dickinson’s sister-in-law, Susan, married to Dickinson’s brother Austin. Dickinson’s sister-inlaw Susan was the poet’s first reader, and when Susan was dissatisfied with the second stanza of
the now very famous poem “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers,” Dickinson—when Susan was
dissatisfied, Dickinson furnished a glittering proliferation of new possibilities. The first stanza is
the same in all four versions, except that Dickinson wrote “lie” instead of “sleep.” The first
version: About the dead, half of whom were named Dickinson, who were lying in the Amherst
courtyard where Dickinson herself would be buried in her family plot. She looks around.
Of course, her relatives were all Christians, as was her family. She was the one who refused to
go to church and the one who refused to come forward at Mount Holyoke and say that Jesus was
her savior and she fled, she left after one year. Everybody else was pious. And so she thinks of
the dead now finding out that there isn’t any afterlife after all.
Safe in their Alabaster Chambers—
Untouched by Morning
And untouched by Noon—
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection—
Rafter of satin,
And Roof of stone.
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Light laughs the breeze
In her Castle above them—
Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,
Pipe the Sweet Birds in ignorant cadence—
Ah, what sagacity perished here!
She, as the poem opens, as the poet satirizes the credulity of her Christian forebears who
descended to their graves believing in an afterlife in heaven, she imagines that the deluded dead
think themselves safe from time’s daily dangers, morning, noon, against the dead unable to hear
breezes, bees, and birds, Dickinson sets nature ignorant in its laughing, alliterating energy to
mock the complacent Christian sagacity that believed in a personal resurrection.
Replying to Sue’s note criticizing the second stanza, Dickinson writes back “perhaps this verse
would please you better, Sue.” She then offers the first of her fiercely brilliant variations,
creating an alternate setting for the pious Christian dead. If their first backdrop, emphasizing
their immobility, was nature’s lightness and vigor, the second backdrop, abandoning mockery of
Christian delusion, offers not the human-scaled morning and noon, but an epic backdrop of huge
cosmic motion and extended historical time, all taking place in an infinite silence that reduces
human death to insignificance.
Grand go the Years—in the Crescent—above them—
Worlds scoop their Arcs—
And Firmaments—row—
Diadems—drop—and Doges—surrender—
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Soundless as dots—on a Disc of Snow—
As she implicitly revises the view that the dead inhabit a human-scaled solar time, Dickinson
places them within vast interstellar space and lengthy historical time, into which human life, no
matter how regal, disappears soundlessly, invisibly, unremarked. When Sue was dissatisfied with
this second stanza as well, Dickinson, asking, “Is this frostier?” Created a third version of the
afterlife, this time rendering the dead as the Biblical tribes of Exodus, now silent, blind,
paralyzed, eclipsed, and fastened in tents that the cold has turned to marble. In this wintery desert
where the last words of the dying have left only echoes, the dead are destined never to view the
promised land.
Springs—shake the sills—
But—the Echoes—stiffen
Hoar—is the Window—and
Numb—the Door
Tribes of Eclipse—in Tents
of Marble
Staples of Ages—have buckled—there
Dickinson added in her own fair copy yet another version, one not submitted to Susan’s
collaborative judgment. In this last variation on the afterlife, or the absence of the afterlife, the
backdrop is no longer indifferent local nature nor large astronomical and historical motions nor
an arrested caravan of tribes but rather a thawing Arctic zone. As the spring sun diffuses its
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warmth, even Northern frosts begin to move, unhooking themselves from their frozen
immobility, while deep hidden icicles, sensing the warmth of spring, crawl towards it like snakes
issuing from their polar caverns. Dickinson chills even the life-giving powers of the spring sun
with the foreseen disappearance of both frosts and icicles as the warmth makes them vanish and
the deep night of the sealed sarcophagus refutes the suns of every successive dawn.
Springs—shake the Seals—
But the silence—stiffens—
Frosts unhook—in the
Northern Zones—
Icicles—crawl from polar
Caverns—
Midnight in Marble—
Refutes—the Suns—
With the word “refutes” Dickinson makes the Christian doctrine of the resurrection into a
premise—I think I said promise, hold on—sorry, proposition. Dickinson makes the Christian
doctrine of the resurrection into a proposition in theological logic, one that is refuted in every
instance by the philosophic universality of death. There was an optimism in the satisfactory
finding of warbling, the first poem, and in the ecstatic recaptured vision of the second.
Both of those endings imply that a poem can be resoundingly concluded, but the four versions of
the second stanza of “Safe in Their Alabaster Chambers” prove Dickinson’s imagination to be
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almost unnaturally fertile in reconceiving a concept. Had there been yet another objection from
Sue the poet would have been goaded into yet another backdrop for death. Dickinson’s second
stanzas, all four of them, re-create and reconceive a single concept, here the concept of the
horrible deadness of the dead becoming more horrible as the versions proliferate.
Poets editing their poems necessarily undertake the efforts required by the editing of prose. They
must scrutinize levels of logic, coherence of argument, variation in diction, imaginative clarity,
propulsive force. And like prose, poetry often requires deletion and additions and stimulates
considerations of length but the poet’s choices, that’s all true of prose and poetry, but the poet’s
choices are governed by and constrained by something extra, an aesthetic principle different for
each poem, so that each one will be unique and unrepeatable, an aesthetic principle different for
each poem that is the source of poetic individuation and originality.
The poet’s aesthetic decisions, to delete, to supplement, to shape, to obey or disobey a meter, to
mimic the vicissitudes of the mind, even to begin in prose and end as poetry, all of these
decisions are arrived at invisibly as from the poet’s repertoire, vast repertoire, sound and
meaning alike, there arise promptings that approximate obedience to an inner contour, perhaps
not entirely obvious even to the poet as yet but which nonetheless must be replicated in words.
Every accomplished and moving poem has therefore a will of its own. One poem will want to
grow from a lyric to a sequence, while another will want to shrink to a single line, and as the poet
listens to those desires issuing from the evolving poem, possible revisions arise and are adopted,
minimizing or maximizing themselves to arrive at the poem’s final shape. The most aggressive
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minimalism, one end of the scale, in which a broad history is condensed into a single line, has its
own successes both comic and tragic. Ashbery’s stately title “The Cathedral Is” dissolves in a
sardonic anticipation of the future, “Slated for demolition.” There the single line is comic but it
need not be.
The most moving single-line poem I know is W. S. Merwin’s “Elegy,” six words: “Who would I
show it to?” The six simple unpunctuated words amazingly create on the page four extended life
moments: the continued past when the poet always showed a new poem to that friend and a
recent past when the friend died and a limitless present lamenting that death and a hypothetical
but aborted future in which the poet would want to write a new poem but would be stopped by
grief at the absence of his best reader.
I’m skipping a piece about Marianne Moore for shortness but it’s about her cutting a thirty-line
poem called “Poetry” to three lines. And to reduce a poem to one tenth its size is a very violent
act, but the epigraph to her complete poems, Collected Poems, warns us that “this condensation
is not a printer’s error but an example of her own Puritan will, which refuses her own subversive
delight in the fiddle of her chosen form.” Some self-editing is less literary than ethical. We may
recall Auden’s “We must love one another or die” corrected later to “We must one another and
die.” But the original “or” sprang from and was true to the poet’s fear of the inevitable war that
Hitler’s annexing Austria would occasion. Since lyric, as Wordsworth said, is “the history of
feeling,” you must, the poet must, replicate that feeling of desperation, “we must love one
another or die,” the alternatives of love and war, the poet cannot discard his feelings in favor of
philosophic cliché.
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Other substantial moves towards the minimal, as when Dickinson rejects a whole group of
stanzas, occur when the poet realizes that she has been writing on autopilot, producing
characteristic lines rather than inspired ones. Inspiration, says Hopkins, produces the highest
Olympian form, as he calls it, of poetic language, but there is a second and lesser kind. “The
second kind,” says Hopkins, “I call Parnassian. It can only be spoken by poets, but it is not in the
highest sense poetry. It does not require the mood of mind in which the poetry of inspiration is
written, is it spoken on and from the level of a poet’s mind not as in the other case of Olympian
poetry, when the inspiration which is the gift of genius raises him above himself.”
Dickinson, whose aesthetic law was one of inspired minimalism, rarely descended to the
Parnassian, but she was always prepared to delete any stanza that she found uninspired. Where
deletion on moral or aesthetic grounds is a self-amputation, addition in the poem, adding another
piece, is the “growing of another self,” as Yeats said, or another heart. Why, we ask, would a
poet still feel after writing an inspired poem and making a perfect fair copy of it, why would he
feel that something is missing?
Milton’s “Lycidas,” the greatest elegy in English, like previous classical and Christian elegies,
includes the usual social forms of mourning—a group of mourners, a dirge, a eulogy of the dead,
a rebellion against fate, and a resurrected hope for the lost friend. In his fair copy, Milton has
already given several lines to the classical gesture of strewing flowers on a grave, a gesture here
rendered impossible because Lycidas’s death by drowning has—premature death, he was a
school fellow, a college fellow of Milton’s, an adolescent—strewing flowers is here rendered
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impossible because Lycidas’s death by drowning has deprived the mourners of a body to bury.
The grieving poet pretending for a moment that an actual hearse is really before him, calls on the
pastoral muse to bring and strew a tribute of flowers and bids the landscape itself cooperate in
the gesture. This is the fair copy. Milton, as you can see on the handout, puts a little arrow in for
the addition he wants to—he puts it in later after he has written the addition, this is where it goes.
So I’ll read first the fair copy. And he was content enough with the poem as he had it in his
hands to write it all out in a fair copy, in lovely handwriting, and just leave it there as his record
of the poem, and then the second thoughts came. This is what it first said and continues to say
because the addition is inserted.
Return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades, and wanton winds, and gushing brooks,
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enameled eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honeyed showers,
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
For so, to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise.
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As he rereads his fair copy, Milton finds the flower-strewing gesture incomplete, although he has
already given the psychological motive for the imagined, because factually impossible, strewing
to interpose a little ease in the pain of our shaken thoughts and although he has mentioned
various shapes and colors of flowers, he feels, somehow, that there is still something lacking.
What can it be? On a separate sheet of paper he assembles not one or two but ten more lines of
flowers and cues them into the fair copy with an arrow at the point of insertion. And this is what
he adds:
Bring the rathe primrose—that means early.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale gessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cowslips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
When we try to understand why Milton, already well supplied with flowers, it would seem, in his
fair copy, felt compelled to add more, we perceive, as he obviously did, that the original flower
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passage offers only unspecified blossoms, flowerets of a thousand hues and vernal flowers. That
he now feels compelled to list individual species of flowers, but the new flower names—sorry,
this is I’m sorry to say a medical issue, you must forgive me. And so he feels compelled to list
individual species of flowers now, but the new flower names convey more than mere
specification. For the most part, each individual name is inseparable from pathos. The early
primrose dies forsaken, the cowslips are wan, the black markings on the flowers jet are sad. The
immortal amaranth itself is commanded to shed its beauty, and daffodils are bidden to fill their
cups with tears. As grief takes material form in tender flowers, an almost intolerable poetic
conflict between tragedy and pathos takes place.
So far the poem had been dominated by Milton’s tragic words both about the sea’s destruction of
Lycidas’s corpse—“where’er thy bones are hurled,” the disarticulated corpse. The poem had
been dominated by Milton’s tragic words on the corpse and by his bitter words on the spiritual
corruption of the preaching bishops, those blind mouths who starve their flocks and leave them
prey to “the grim Wolf with privy paw.”
This harsh orchestration, Milton has decided, needs to be rescued from his own immersion in
despair, and he inserts powerful mollifying notes through the spring flowers. When Milton adds
a cascade of lavishly and intimately named flowers he rights the aesthetic balance of his poem.
Tempering tragedy by the pathos of tribute, he repairs the anguishing site of Lycidas’s unsunk
corpse “weltering to the parching wind.” Without the profusion of flowers the wounded voice of
the elegy would have lacked the balancing intellectual judgment that maintains even in loss an
objective view of nature and a fair distribution of diction. The flowers satisfy the moral
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obligation of accuracy, establishing even in a tragic moment a sane, not distorted view of both
nature and society.
The revision that spills out more and more beautiful flowers on the page is moral, aesthetic,
decorative, emotional, and intellectual. It embodies the high aim of second thoughts in the poet’s
critique of his own productions, to do justice not only to his immediate feelings but also to the
world as it actually is, all of its beautiful flowers included.
Not all revisions are so grand or intense as Milton’s and few depart as his did from “Lycidas”
from an already completed fair copy. Really hard to begin tinkering with your fair copy. On the
contrary, a poet’s very first en court revisions attempting to encourage an embryonic notion into
verse are often both revelatory and entertaining. Yeats quotes Aubrey Beardsley as saying of
composition, “I make a blot and shove it about until something comes.” As a contemporary
example of the blot and shoving about, I offer two of Seamus Heaney’s earliest worksheets for
the poem eventually called “Alphabets.” Written for Harvard’s 1984 Phi Beta Kappa
commencement ceremony.
The theme of Heaney’s poem is literacy itself. In elementary school the child first learns to write
single letters, then to join them into English words. In secondary school he progresses from
English to Latin to Irish, encountering in Latin an unfamiliar imperial culture and in Irish uncial
writing a new formation of letter shapes. In manhood, as he visits foreign countries, he realizes
that literacy finally aspires to a global culture, resembling the stunning view of the astronauts
seeing Earth from space.
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As from his small window
The astronaut sees all he has sprung from,
The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O
Like a magnified and buoyant ovum—
However, Heaney does not end “Alphabets” with the adult global view, which suggests an
overoptimistic estimate of adulthood but rather writing now in the first person, he closes on the
wonder of his own preliterate recognition that a formerly unintelligible group of letters can
represent his own family name. This is the misprint, it shouldn’t be a name but rather our name,
it’s his own family name. The astronaut’s view is as we travel back in time to childhood
like my own wide pre-reflective stare
All agog at the plasterer on his ladder
Skimming our gable and writing our name there
With his trowel point, letter by strange letter.
When we look at Heaney’s editing of the drafts for “Alphabets,” it appears that the poem’s
closing word, “letter,” is hovering in the poet’s mind as he begins, but which letters he asks
himself, and as you look you’ll see Greek, English, Latin, Irish. Here the Beardsley blot that
requires shoving about is the alphabet itself. Because it is the Phi Beta Kappa Society that is
sponsoring the poem, Heaney’s first worksheet thinks to illustrate the Greek letters by
imaginative simile, “Kappa like the Phi like a on the alphabets.” Another initial attempt tries
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further visual similes from primary school and at the end tacks on a sound effect. “On the wall
there are charts with a big A like two rafters and a crossbeam and a roof.” “Like new rafters
before the roof goes on.” “Two rafters and a crosstie on his slate make the capital some call ‘ah,’
here A, capital A.” The notion of visual simile is shoved about until it loses energy and dwindles
into overspecificity. “Small d is a hoop left of the upright, and small b a small apple hopefully.”
As the poet thinks he doodles on the page. Should the shapes he uses be those of lowercase
letters or uppercase ones?
The next worksheet shows both. The unsuccessful hoops of “b” and “d” combine on the page as
you can see in joint shapes go upside down and pile up into an eight, which with a tail becomes a
cat. Only then can the poet begin to plan the full and satisfactory extension of the work. There
are forty-three more worksheets, besides these two. Heaney’s primitive and abortive revisions of
an embryonic poem still operate in hope and indeed the poem comes out at the end finished and
alive, but Sylvia Plath, in an early poem called “Stillborn” envisages the ultimate end of hope
when all possible revisions have been attempted and the poem still does not quicken. In distress
Plath conveys her view of her unviable poems, her deformed births, preserved in a jar of
formaldehyde. Two words, “and smile,” I left out of the fifth line here. She looks at the jar of
formaldehyde and the embryos inside and says,
These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
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It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.
O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start.
Her poems technically so finished from high school on have adamantly resisted revision, these
ones, into breathing life. They were not abandoned, they are not forgotten, they have failed. The
pickling fluid of memory preserves them as a grotesque residue, testimony that the poet was
unable to rise to the occasion of her own original inspiration. They are dead and their mother
near dead with distraction and they stupidly stare and do not speak of her. In their inertia, the
stillborn poems cannot speak at all, neither of their maternal origin or of their own selfhood.
In a different tone entirely, but in a comparable moment Wallace Stevens, in a laconic
retrospective remark, said justly, “Some of one’s early things give one the creeps.” (laughter)
Best remark on revision. Unlike Plath, however, Stevens destroyed his drafts, unwilling that their
embryonic forms should survive to reproach him. A landlady did rescue one draft from the trash
out back, we do have that, but he had thrown it away.
In their radical individuality of practice, some poets resort to improbable fashions of self-editing.
Yeats, for instance, more often than you would think sometimes writes the intended poem out in
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prose and then tailors the prose into poetry. In the case of his penultimate poem, “Cuchulain
Comforted,” he in effect composed in two dialects, the prose is a dilatory colloquial narrative
rendering of the hero’s entrance to the afterlife, where the poem, composed a week later,
recounts the same plot but imposes on it the austere formal shape of Dante’s meter of the
afterlife, terza rima.
Yeats’s prose draft, in wayward folktale style, is too long to cite here, but I give only the
colloquial diction of the opening. “A shade, recently arrived, went through a valley in the
country of the dead. He had six mortal wounds but he had been a tall, strong, handsome man.
Other shades looked at him from the trees. Sometimes they went near to him and then went away
quickly. At last he sat down. He seemed very tired.” The poem stiffens this tale into a set of
uncompromising and eerie events.
A man that had six mortal wounds, a man
Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.
Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head
Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree
As though to meditate on wounds and blood.
Prose to Yeats’s mind has many ways of telling a tale, and he offers a version not in standard
English but in the oral Hiberno-English of folktales. Oral recitation is allowed to be indolent and
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erratic, but an aesthetically successful poem, once complete, is invariable, unalterable. Its many
atoms cohere inseparably into a single unity. As Mandelstam said, any period that means piece,
“any period in poetic speech, be it a line or a stanza or a complete lyrical composition must be
regarded as a single word.” You can’t dislocate the parts any more than you can in a word—if
you take out two letters it’s no longer the same word.
In Yeats’s version of the idea of a poem as a single word, the earth itself becomes a single
spoken word, an eternal flaming word because it issues by creative fiat from the realm of the
highest element, fire. The wandering earth herself may be only a sudden flaming word, in
clanging space a moment heard troubling the endless reverie. Because that coherence of elements
is so powerful, the most perplexing critical problem for me is the poet’s deletion of an
irreproachable line. In the poet’s draft as we look at the rough draft, the line that will be deleted,
as far as we can see fits the theme, illuminates its stanza, falls beautifully upon the ear and has a
rhythm and consonance with its emotion, but it has been banished.
I take as my final example here of poetic self-editing Keats’s initially baffling deletion in his
“Ode to Autumn” of an apparently impeccable line. The other revisions in the manuscript were
all improvements, so I couldn’t doubt that Keats himself in sacrificing this exquisite line from
the central stanza thought he was improving his ode. But what could have been his reason for the
subtraction of a warm and thematically relevant scene as perfect in its details as any other in the
poem. In the first, morning stanza of “To Autumn,” Keats had shown the first harvest, that of
nectar, gathered by the deceived bees who think warm days will never cease. Now in the second
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stanza it is noon, and the goddess autumn carries on her self-harvest in wheat and apples, the
wheat her winnowed hair, the crushed apples her blood, as she sacrifices herself to produce the
bread and wine, here cider, of the earthly paradise. Unlike other divinities, Autumn dwells
among us, visible to any passerby, in the various places and postures of her self-harvesting. In
this stanza we first see the goddess sitting on a granary floor where the grain will be threshed
from the chaff, followed by her interrupted reaping and her completed gleaning. We last see her
as she watches the final drops oozing from the cider press. Addressing the goddess Autumn, the
poet says, wondering at her constant availability and visibility. “You used to have to wait and
pray and have vigils and fasts before the god would appear, you hoped, but it was always a brief
appearance, and immediately the appearance vanished, but Autumn is not like that, this natural
goddess of the earth, addressing a goddess Autumn, the poet says,
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twinèd flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.
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Through her conspiring with the paternal sun, the first stanza has told us, the maternal autumn,
season of mists, has given birth to the fruits of the earth. Because Keats desires to reproduce in
poetry the complete arc of birth to death, morning to evening, center to periphery, it would seem
quite an order for the noon scene in the granary to again mention the paternal sun, and Keats,
seeing that plausibility after writing thy hair soft lifted by the winnowing wind inserts the line, “I
puzzled over, while bright the sun slants through the husky barn.” And then he rejected it, cutting
as well a reference to the warm slumbers of the goddess. In short he deleted not only the sun’s
brightness but the sun’s warmth, and I couldn’t understand his reasons for that elimination.
Although in the morning the maturing sun is veiled in mists, his fostering warmth is implicit in
the growth of fruit and at evening his rosy color, borne by clouds, warms the stubble plains.
“Somehow,” Keats wrote two days later, “somehow a stubble plain looks warm.”
Why is the sun not allowed to illuminate the motes of floating chaff and to warm the slumbering
goddess? In the deleted line, Keats manages the sensory details with care, as he always does,
creating the echo of “bright” and “barn,” strongly juxtaposing “sun” and “slants,” and
suspending the husks of grain to create the inner volume of the barn. The paternal sun, strangely
obscured by mists at morning and clouds at evening is at those times inaccessible to the eye.
Must then the sun be obscured at noon as well?
I wondered at first whether Keats’s repression of noon light and warmth prophesied the coming
dusk and chill of the evening, the third stanza, but in the last analysis, I felt that it is the liquid
cadence of “thy hair, soft lifted by the winnowing wind,” which prevents the retention of the
robust and energetic line “while bright the sun slants through the husky barn.” Its rhythm is no
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dying fall but rather a rhythm matching the strikes of the flail, since everything is being threshed
to produce the husks and the grain, while “bright the sun slants through a husky barn,” that is not
fading out. Its rhythm is no drying fall but rather a rhythm matching the strikes of the flail and
out of tune with the rest of the stanza in which the reposing reaper does not reap, the brookcrossing gleaner does not glean, and the presser of apples does not press but merely watches. All
is aftermath, drowsy and static. The flail cannot be allowed its active work, and brutal work at
that, so Keats sacrifices his beautiful line.
It is in such self-editings that we come closest to the imagination of the poet in the intense
activity of conception. We see the poet’s mind advance from the first glimpses of a possible
work of art, the cat, to the delight at finding the right general plan, I came among the alphabets,
but then there must also be the querying of individual words, images, and rhythms, and then the
adjusting of each of those multiple planes to an alignment with the others. In the miraculous
transformation of a blank sheet of paper into echoing lines, we see an exacting self-scrutiny and
self-correction that must be more imaginative, more stringent, and more precise than any act we
perform in editing our prose. Thank you.
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