Paul Zweig
THE RAW AND THE COOKED
It
has seemed at times as if the poetry of the 1960s spoke one lan–
guage: simple, sensitive to conversational rhythms, and deliberately " unliter–
ary." In order to be believed, it was felt, a poem had to create a feeling of
honest talk. Indeed, a rhetoric of " honesty" developed, the main features of
which were a slight clumsiness, the avoidance of culturally charged words in
favor of common speech, and a rhythm of understatement, as if the poem's
" honesty" required that it avoid a sense of authority. The poem was supposed
to have " happened."
It
was not an artifact of words, but an outgrowth of the
poet's integrity. The reader was meant to be surprised by leaps of insight
emerging simply and vulnerably, as if a man were saying more than he
thought he knew. This rhetoric of honesty exerted an enormous attraction on
poets of the most varied gifts. The feeling seemed to be that language had to be
held in check if it were not to lie; that language, the poet's only tool, was
fundamentally untrustworthy. He had, therefore, to use it minimally. He had
to write as if it were not language at all, but a pure transmission of intimacy,
like Rousseau 's language of hearts.
Along with this attitude toward language went a distrust of the sort of
conceptual ambition which characterized the poetry of a preceding generation.
Poets of the 1960s did not trust the reflective power of a Stevens or an Eliot.
They chose humbler models, for example, Chinese poetry, with its mood of
domestic mystery and unsophisticated emotions. This surely is an irony of
cultural influence, since Chinese poetry is in fact highly conventional. The
casual " honesty" of Tu Fu or Li Po is the result of a codified rhetoric, and not
at all a " language of the heart.
n
But, as Harold Bloom has argued, such mis–
readings are of the very nature of cultural influence.
A sustaining irony of this plain style, perhaps a source of the energy it
released for so many poets, is political, though covertly and probably uncon–
sciously so. The refusal of rbetorical authority, the humble rhythms of in–
timacy, the focus on fleeting moments and small perceptions, represents, per–
haps, a distrust of power itself which was expressed in many other ways in the
culture of the 1960s. As the nation had come to value control over the material
world and coercive authority, enforced by the machines of war, its poets reo
linquished the material world and the language of power; they relinquished
