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PARTISAN REVIEW
rious pseudo-candor that knows that love is just sex (and sex is just biol–
ogy) or that truth is just power (and power is just economics). One of
the reasons one writes in verse at all is that the discipline of form forces
one closer to the living motions of one's thought, yielding perceptions
one might not otherwise have stumbled upon - it isn't that the sonnets
impose upon us sonnet thoughts; it's that finding our own way of solv–
ing a sonnet problem gives us a better sense of what is our own about
that way, makes us think through our thoughts with a keener intelli–
gence. Form, as Stephen Cushman remarks, is trope. A thought plainly
blurted out is less of a thought.
Hollander's concerns are intensely particular, which is why his poetry
is full of object lessons about form, about metrics, about enjambment,
about how
to
retain an easy and conversational tone - the tone of
someone thinking aloud (as J.D. McClathy puts it) - even when solving
a technical problem of mad arbitrariness. This concern with specific verse–
problems is partly a consequence of skepticism about grand theory in po–
etry - which Hollander gently parodies in his mock-high-romantic
"Mount Blank." Hollander marks out the boundaries of poetry empiri–
cally, each poem a kind of formal test, rather than through the devel–
opment of a fully rigorous theory of poetry, as Stevens attempts. He has
Wittgenstein's faithfulness to the details, not Kant's sweep.
This particularity (and perhaps an embarrassment about things that
need saying in a loud voice) makes Hollander appear to be a poet of
fancy more than a poet of imagination, but the kind of power one calls
imaginative often marks Hollander's poetry in ways that more direct
means would falsify. Hear it in this meditation on being an American
poet, a belated heir to a tradition which made him but which he cannot
quite make his own and also cannot fully renew, from "One of Our
Walks," in
Powers of Thirteell:
We ramble along up-hill through the woods, following
No path but knowing our directions generally,
And letting fall what may we come up against the worn
Fact that all this green is second growth - reaches of wall
Knee-high keep appearing among low moments of leaf;
Clearings, lit aslant, are strewn across old foundations.
This is of course New England now and even the brook,
Whose amplified whisper ofT on the right is as firm
A guide as any assured blue line on a roadmap,
Can never run clear of certain stones, those older forms
Of ascription of meaning to its murmuring, as
We hear it hum, 0,
[//lay
COllie
alld [//lay
,itO,
IJII/.
Half-ruined in the white noise of its splashing water.
