Lloyd Schwartz on 20th c Poetry

Lloyd Schwartz is Poet Laureate of Somerville, Massachusetts, Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at UMass Boston, longtime arts critic for NPR’s Fresh Air and WBUR, and an editor of the poetry and prose of Elizabeth Bishop. His latest book is Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems (University of Chicago Press). We think there is no better guide to poetry than Lloyd and hope you enjoy his review of the best of 20th c poetry as you create your reading list for National Poetry Month!

*** Lloyd Schwartz on 20th c Poetry ***

I was delighted when, in 1993, the late Louisa Solano, then owner of the Grolier Poetry Book Shop in Cambridge, invited me to write about ten books of 20th-century poetry—I like making recommendations and I love giving my opinion. But the more I thought about it, the harder it became to choose so few books. Even if I were going to list only personal favorites, they’d probably all be books written by my friends, who happen to be (I say in all objectivity) the poets who make me most optimistic about the future of poetry. But there’d be far more than ten, and I didn’t want to leave anyone out. So I started by trying not to list any books by friends, though I knew there’d be at least one exception (which I’ll explain below). I decided also to focus on individual volumes rather than larger collections, because I particularly like the idea of a single, unified book—though I’ve made exceptions here, too. I know I’ve been inconsistent, and I know I’ve left out too much. But these are the books I couldn’t leave out. Variety, I should add, was one of my guidelines; availability was another. Above all, these are books I love, unapologetically and irrationally. I think they’re among the most memorable, enjoyable, original, and moving books there are. And, frankly, I wouldn’t buy a used book from anyone who thought they weren’t. — Lloyd Schwartz

Life Studies/For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell (Farrar, Straus, Giroux)

These magnificent, courageous, breakthrough books, are among the most personal and accessible of Lowell’s entire output. Life Studies reaches further inward than perhaps any other book of poems ever written, and For the Union Dead begins Lowell’s turn outward to a new kind of public and political writing, both more mysterious yet with more breathing space than his earlier, denser style. Yet Life Studies, more than any volume by Lowell’s “confessional” imitators, found a convincing way of making the inner life a matter of public concern; and in For the Union Dead, which also includes some of Lowell’s most personal and intimate poems, the public voice is a manifestation of the interior life. Every poem in these volumes is a masterpiece of exhilarating brilliance and heartbreaking power.

Geography III by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus, Giroux)

Though the work of this “writer’s writer’s writer” had been greatly respected and admired throughout her career, I think it was really with this last and most personal of her four individual collections that she was truly loved. It was the book that made us all understand her earlier work in this new and personal light, that allowed everyone who knew her work to see how lovable all the earlier work really was. Since her death, Bishop has finally come to be recognized as one of the century’s greatest, sanest, most humane, and most original voices. This is the book that got that ball rolling. (All the poems of Geography III are included in the Library of America’s Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters and Poems, FSG)

 Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara (City Lights)

Sweet poems, funny, exhilarating, spontaneous, subversive, poignant, and sometimes—often—more deeply, even darkly moving. But above all sweet. Probably a greater proportion of Frank O’Hara’s poems can be read for sheer pleasure than the poems of any other 20th-century writer. This slim volume is his liveliest, most distilled and delectable single collection--quintessential O’Hara.

Selected Poems by Langston Hughes (Vintage)

There are some books you want to read from cover to cover, others you want to keep dipping into. This is one of the latter, its 297 pages filled with delicious, teasing, loving, poignant, elegant “big little poems” (like Emily Dickinson’s).  Hughes writes about street life in Harlem, about blues and spirituals. There are poems of morality and (better still) immorality. What a delight to open the book at random to find something familiar and wonderful, or something you never quite took in before. My only regret is that among the poems missing from this volume are the exquisite lyrics he wrote for Kurt Weill’s music-drama Lost in the Stars (the musical version of Cry, the Beloved Country).  An indispensable volume.

Kaddish and Other Poems 1958-1960 by Allen Ginsberg (City Lights)

Allen Ginsberg’s long, graphic, lamenting elegy for his mother is one of the most shattering poems written in this century. Harrowing. Grotesque. Hilarious. Non-stop in its verbal energy. This was only Ginsberg’s second major collection, and it’s a landmark. It also includes what I wouldn’t have to go too far out on a limb to nominate as Ginsberg’s greatest short lyric poem, the poignant, tender, nostalgic, sublimely endearing “To Aunt Rose” (“Hitler is dead, Hitler is in Eternity; Hitler is with/Tamburlane and Emily Bronté”). I love these little City Lights collections—they’re certainly more fun than the big Collected Poems (Harper), easier to carry, easier to hold, and easier to read, although the riches of that weighty and overflowing volume are undeniable.

 Ariel by Sylvia Plath (Harper)

This is the posthumous collection that made Sylvia Plath’s name a household word. Later finds included other marvelous, perhaps warmer poems, but this is the single volume most identified with her. It’s hard to think of a poet who provides more literary satisfaction out of such relentlessly grim psychological themes (many of these are the poems she was working on just before her suicide). But the dazzle of her language, the brilliance of her images and the brilliant way she organizes them, the energy of her mind ruthlessly at work—this all serves to make the experience of reading these terrifying poems not depressing (they’re never depressing) but electrifying. (All of these poems, in chronological order, appear in The Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes.)

North by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus, Giroux)

Still, perhaps, the most concentrated and devastating of this wonderful poet’s books; perhaps the first of his volumes to proclaim loudly (or quietly) and clearly his most mature and authoritative voice. It finds in the violence of the Danish Bog People terrifying metaphors not only for the “Troubles” in Seamus Heaney’s native Northern Ireland, but for all of Western culture in this century. North is also included in Heaney’s Poems 1965-1975.

The Alphabet in the Park by Adélia Prado, translated by Ellen Watson (Wesleyan University Press)

This is a delightful and powerful collection from one of Brazil’s most beloved living poets, a woman who started writing poems at an early age but didn’t show them to anyone—or acknowledge they were poems—until her late thirties. Adélia Prado’s poems are a gust of fresh air: each is in a single free-verse stanza, anywhere from a few lines to a couple of pages long; each is filled with whatever comes into her head, direct statements (“Poetry will save me,” is how she begins “Guide”; “I know how to write,” begins the title poem), unexpected images, and non sequiturs that somehow always add up to an idea completely worked-out and deeply imagined. These vital poems are earthy in their intelligence, spiritual in their sexuality (and vice versa), and brilliantly aware of language. Many are about writing: “not the word,” she says, “the thing.” And Prado couldn’t have asked for a more sympathetic translator.

The Book of the Body by Frank Bidart Farrar, Straus, Giroux)

Frank Bidart is an old and close friend and the person I’ve learned the most from about poetry (my own included). He’s either introduced me to, or made me think more deeply about, most of the poets on this list. His uniquely generous and trustworthy advice has had a significant influence on some of the best books written in the last two decades, and on some of our very best poets (also including several on this list). He’s also writing some of the most adventurous, full-hearted, and moving poems of our time, works of extreme psychological (and typographical) states, poetry that pushes against the boundaries of style, subject matter, and serious intellectual investigation. The Book of the Body may be his most dramatic single volume, the one which includes his best known poem, “Ellen West,” a long and powerful monologue/narrative about an anorexic woman—and one of the most profound and intense explorations I know of the question of identity. The Book of the Body is out of print as a separate volume but is now happily available in Bidart’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Half-Light: Collected Poems, 1965-2016 (FSG).

Pictures from Brueghel and other poems by William Carlos Williams (New Directions)

This little Pulitzer-Prize volume has some of Williams’ best poems. The title sequence never ceases to amaze me with its understated simplicity and cheeky daring. No punctuation except by the unpunctuated line-ending (the last line of “Children’s Games,” printed here in its entirety, is an astonishing “it”; my breath is also taken away by “fry,” which is preceded by “elder women are looking/after the small”). This edition also includes two earlier volumes, The Desert Music and Journey to Love, which concludes with one of Williams’s most celebrated and ambitious poems, “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” but which also includes my favorite of all Williams’s poems, “The Pink Locust,” in which he poignantly asserts (note, there’s no question mark at the end), perhaps for all poets, his modest but unshakable location in the scheme of things:

I am not,

                  I know,

in the galaxy of poets

          a rose

                  but who, among the rest,

will deny me

                  my place.

********

LLoyd Schwartz Photo credit: Michael J. Lutch