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PARTISAN REVIEW
move toward his purpose through offhand, apparently random state–
ments and through objective description.
Elizabeth Bishop, though her "almost toneless observer" becomes
in some of the later poems an "I," has not changed style and remains a
modernist working like Marianne Moore through the accumulation of
intensely perceived details. "Bishop lets us know," says Kalstone
acutely, "that every detail is a boundary, not a Blakean microcosm."
She seems to me to have perfected the art of epiphany in just Joyce's
sense of the word, for her self-sufficient details suddenly-as she herself
said of Darwin's-sink or slide "giddily off into the unknown." Even
Lowell remains half a modernist in that, as I see it, he combines with
his new Whitmanesque freedom the wry, ironic diction of modernist
poetry and, as Kalstone points out, he worries like Eliot and Pound
over lost connections with the past as James Merrill, Adrienne Rich,
and other younger poets do not.
Merrill, who has been mainly influenced by Proust, is nourished
by a continuing access to childhood memories as Lowell, who finds
memory a curse, is not. But Merrill does not as autobiographical poet
try to capture the raw feel of the moment; he offers instead a continu–
ous artistic revision of his life. Merrill 's phrase, "That life was fiction
in disguise" is, Kalstone suggests, his leading idea. Merrill is, in other
words, an aesthete who believes that experience exists only inasmuch as
it has been expressed through art. In this, as in his use of the occult in
his recent volume
Divine Comedies,
he reminds me in a small scale way
of Yeats.
Adrienne Rich does try to capture the raw feel of the moment, and
worries over the reduction of momentaneous feeling by language. "A
language, " she has written, "is the map of our failures." John Ashbery,
too, works for immediacy but in a more interesting way (I don't see
how Kalstone can resist making such relative evaluations). For Ashbery
is interested not only in feelings but in "getting into remoter areas of
consciousness." He does this in the romantic way by breaking the
"packaging," as he puts it in a poem, "which has supplanted the old
sensations." He works through random associations as Bishop works
through random observations-he has spoken of the need to combine
"meaningfulness" with "randomness." But Ashbery breaks through
into "opacity" rather than the clarity of epiphanic vision. Ashbery is
the most innovative of these five poets; for, like the action painters, he
projects the activity of consciousness during the process of creation.
The point of his innovations is best illustrated by "Self-Portrait in a
Convex Mirror," which, as Kalstone demonstrates in a masterful
