BOOKS
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music which has hitherto chirped unnoticed in the expanse of prose.
Any rhyme forbidden, many Shagpats were unwigged."
A number of our poets do indeed insist that we hold them up to
the standards of prose. Some among them are so emphatically com–
mitted to a prosaic principle that they seem intent on rewriting the
verse of the past as prose-without, however, justifying the right
margin. "Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning," wrote
Oscar Wilde, but the same remark applied to, say, Robert Bly
would have its wit overwhelmed by its Wahrheit.
In
Bly's most re–
cent book,
The Man in the Black Coat Turns,
there appears a poem en–
titled "The Prodigal Son." The third of its four four-line stanzas–
quatrains isn't quite the right word - reads this way:
An old man once, being dragged across the floor
by his shouting son, cried:
"Don't drag me any farther than that crack on the floor–
I only dragged my father that far!"
Nowhere does Bly acknowledge it, but the source of these lines can
be only the opening of Gertrude Stein's
The Making of Americans:
Once an angry man dragged his father along the ground
through his own orchard. "Stop!" cried the groaning old man at
last, "Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree ."
There's no question of any impropriety here . Ever since "The Waste
Land," we have grown accustomed to echoes and quotations and
other such raids on the articulate - with or without the footnotes
Eliot provided, with or without the quotation marks favored by
Marianne Moore. But Bly doesn't really quote the Stein material, he
translates it - into a specific, deliberately nonliterary idiom.
Now, unless we are prepared to redefine what we consider the
hallmarks of good prose, Bly's stanza must suffer in comparison with
its source. We have, after all, been conditioned to deprecate the
passive construction Bly uses; it is the active voice that makes for
vigor, as anyone brought up on Strunk and White must know. But
certain descendants of the emancipators of verse seek precisely to
alter the ground rules of prose, treating "prosaic" as synonymous
with "pedestrian."
In
his introduction to
The Selected Poetry of Rainer
Maria Rilke
as recently translated by Stephen Mitchell, the poet
Robert Hass offers a remarkable illustration of this tendency. Hass
