While walking toward the library, I wondered if there had been a mistake. I had been given a list of poems, essays and reviews published in several little magazines during and after the Great War and asked to print copies of them. The work of ambitious, prickly coteries, the Little Review, the Egoist, Poetry and the Dial provoked a revolution in literature in Great Britain and the United States by publishing some of the most beautiful, meticulous and extravagant writing of the twentieth century, including “An Octopus” by Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and The Waste Land, W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses (both in installments), excerpts from Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, poems by Hart Crane and essays, polemics and poems by Ezra Pound.
I had read many of those works in a course on literary modernism during my first year as a graduate student in literature. Yet there I was two years later, a student in a seminar on Anglo-American literary modernism, thinking myself wiser yet stranded in the stacks in a fog of doubt. Was the list in my hand suggesting that I had not even passed Go? As I cranked through the first few reels of microfilm searching for the texts (it was the late Eighties), my worries evaporated. I kept stumbling on surprises and stopping to read them. There were some disjointed, exuberant poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German Dadaist who settled in Greenwich Village in 1913 and was a lover of Djuna Barnes. There were two scrappy letters from William Carlos Williams about sexual psychology and Otto Weininger, the Viennese sexologist whose writings had convinced the poet that his philandering was preventing him from becoming a literary genius. The list is lost, but I remember finishing all the copying that day and returning often to the microfilm archive to continue the treasure hunt.
I owe that serendipitous library errand to James Longenbach, a poet and literary critic who spent his entire career at the University of Rochester, from 1985 until his death last year. I never got around to asking Jim if his list was a nudge to dig deeper in the archives or something like the shield of a greeting, a gesture of fellowship and collaboration. Even if I had asked, Jim probably would have rolled his eyes and changed the subject with the wave of a hand. Jim had a sensibility that blended the intellectual and aesthetic virtues of the modernists whose work he returned to regularly: Yeats’s self-questioning, Pound’s exquisite ear, Eliot’s philosophical agility, Wallace Stevens’s sense of contingency, Elizabeth Bishop’s skepticism, George Oppen’s refusal of romance and Kenneth Burke’s element of grace.
What Jim enjoyed most and did best was to draw on his own archival discoveries and vast reading to tell elegant stories about the deliberate and haphazard work of discovery, experimentation and transformation lived by twentieth-century poets. He had zero patience for polemics and was allergic to false oppositions. He avoided asking binary questions like “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?”—floated by the critic Marjorie Perloff in 1982—because he thought that zero-sum thinking belittles the imaginations of poets as well as their readers. A question like “Whose Era?” was anathema to another of Jim’s fundamental ideas: the influence of one poet on another, or of a tradition on a poet, often sparks a relationship that is more intimate and creative than oppositional and combative. “There is a long tradition in romantic poetry of associating the desire for originality with anxiety and competition,” he acknowledged, but then emphasized that “there is an equally long tradition of associating it with openness and generosity.”
Even so, being a student of Jim’s could be tough. His standards were exacting and his achievements at once inspiring and impossible to match. Yet when challenging us to think and write better, he was always a model of generosity. At a time when postmodernism had hardened into an orthodoxy and was often used as a cudgel to attack modernism, Jim emphasized that “reading the moderns, we need to remain open to their variousness, their duplicities, their contradictions.” Explore their writing closely and follow their inclination to entertain divergent points of view, which included a capacity for self-criticism and the vital work of transformation. If you accepted Jim’s advice, you wondered why you’d ever considered taking the shortcut of what he called “a strategically limited reading of modernism,” one that would “force us to choose between competing ideas of what poetry might be” rather than from a variety of them. Why deny yourself the chance to learn from such marvelous company—including Jim’s? Not long ago my classmate Adam Parkes told me, “I still talk to Jim in my head every day, and whenever I sit down to write, I’m writing to him.” Calm, fastidious, clear: I still talk to that voice, and write for it as well.
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Jim’s approach to teaching modernism was unorthodox. Our syllabus included classics like Eliot’s The Waste Land, Moore’s Observations and Crane’s The Bridge, as well as a modest number of readings from critical texts. Our guides, however, were the scholarly bibliographies of each poet’s periodical publications, much of which remained uncollected at the time. Eliot steeped himself in the writings of Dante, Nietzsche and Henry James but was also an avid reader of esoteric thinkers like the nineteenth-century theologian Louis de Bonald. During that semester, Eliot’s uncollected poems and prose, as well as those of Pound, Stevens, Moore, Williams, Crane, Bishop and H.D., were our esoterica. As Jim challenged us to master entire bodies of work—published, uncollected and unpublished—he was also emphasizing, contrary to the spirit of the times, that theory needn’t be the first or only option for a critical perspective.
Jim wasn’t thumbing his nose at theory. He read it all and with care but engaged with it sparingly. Besides, Jim had sound reasons for going his own way. During the 1970s and 1980s, literary critics had struggled to make sense of the methodological confusion that had followed the New Criticism. What materialized was not a movement beyond formalism but a new formalism, this time in the guise of French theory, especially the strain of deconstruction elaborated by Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight in 1971. De Man was ironic and provoked controversy with claims like “the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.” Although he appreciated the power of de Man’s arguments, Jim was alert to their pitfalls. As he pointed out in his dissertation in 1985, by undermining the possibility of historical understanding altogether, like Nietzsche, de Man reduced it to “a self-consciousness that teeters on the brink of the abyss of hermeneutic nihilism.”1
Jim thought that the New Historicism of the 1980s could be pernicious in a different way. Treating literature more as the product of a cultural moment than the work of an individual writer, reading a poem “against” its social context, its acolytes often argued that poems can only betray history as well as themselves. In a famous interpretation of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” the literary critic Marjorie Levinson remarked that when Wordsworth returned to the abbey in 1798—he had visited it five years earlier, after coming back from revolutionary France a euphoric man (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”)—it was a refuge for vagrants, and the surrounding river valley had been marred by industry. Yet in Wordsworth’s poem nature is pristine, a refuge for the poet, and its recent social history is left unmentioned (or “elided,” as the New Historicists liked to say). That really bothered Levinson: “what we witness in this poem is a conversion of public to private property, history to poetry.” In her eyes, Wordsworth had shirked social responsibility while seeking mythic consolation.
Jim saw things differently. “Tintern Abbey” is a poem, so what did Levinson expect? What is it that we want when we want a work of art to be like history—unambiguous, unimpeachable, fact-checked? Echoing Eliot’s speaker in “Gerontion,” who thinks that “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,” Levinson assumed that the historical texture of a poem can only be validated by the weight of its historical content. To think so, however, is to downplay the value of interpretation itself, which as Jim emphasized “is by nature the act of supplying something that appears left out of a text.” What Levinson left out is the very possibility of a poet leaving something out, of making the obvious unobvious. “Tintern Abbey” is not an example of Wordsworth’s “repression of his awareness of human suffering,” Jim argued; “it is the result of a displacement of that awareness into the kind of terms that the poem can articulate most forcefully.” He was stating a bedrock principle of his criticism: poems exist in the frame of history only because they originate in the frame of art.
Jim’s wariness of the New Historicism, or any critical approach that drew from a well of suspicion, wasn’t confined to his scholarship. When I left academia and got involved in magazines, I asked Jim to write for the Nation, where I was editing the books section. His first review, in 2008, was of a volume containing the daybooks, selected prose and uncollected writing of George Oppen. It was an easy assignment to make. Jim was keen to write about Oppen, and we were both fascinated by the daybooks: hundreds of pages of fragmentary thoughts, observations and quotations that Oppen began writing and collecting in 1958. After the review appeared, we received a letter from an Oppen scholar who claimed to have found evidence that George or his wife Mary might have appeared in the Venona cables—a counterintelligence operation launched by the United States during World War II that had only been made public in the mid-Nineties. The implication was that the Oppens, who were open about their communist commitments, may have shared sensitive information with Moscow during or after the war. Jim chafed at such claims. He dubbed them “narratives of utility” and “fake controversies” because they sought to elevate a poet’s reputation by favoring the possible, yet unverifiable, social implications of the work. Those of George’s admirers who told such stories were players in the passing history of literary taste. The poet himself, who “never imagined that the terms of his own life could be transformed into categorical imperatives about the relationship of politics and art,” had achieved the impossible by earning an enduring place in the history of the art.
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Who knows what a poem is? So begins The Lyric Now, which appeared in 2020 and is the last book of prose that Jim wrote. The answer, he says, is literally a mystery because “the poem doesn’t exist yet” for the person beginning to write it or the person beginning to read it. The pleasure of understanding it is “an act of discovery,” even if the writer has already written “a thousand poems preceding this one” and the reader has read that new poem many times. Jim never explicitly asked, Who knows what scholarship and criticism are? One answer is that scholarship wraps and unwraps works in competing interpretations whereas criticism is an endless skein of reinterpretation. The answer implicit in Jim’s work is different: scholarship and criticism can also be acts of discovery.
Jim’s first three books are literary and intellectual histories of modernist poets who cultivated complex attitudes toward history as they faced two world wars and the Great Depression, the epic events of their lifetimes. These books—Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (1987); Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (1988); and Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (1991)—are also elegant demonstrations of the method Jim taught his students. Rather than treating poems as pegs for theoretical concepts or political interventions, he wove judicious ideas about literary change into graceful stories about the work, lives and ambitions of poets. The books are like ritornellos, variations on recurring questions, arguments and themes that as they go from discovery to discovery never sound the same way twice.
My earlier comparison of Marjorie Levinson’s historical sense to the speaker of “Gerontion” is no accident. In Modernist Poetics of History as well as in our seminar, Jim stressed that the poem had often been misunderstood as an expression of Eliot’s dour view of the past, and consequently was treated as a talisman for the idea of history in modernist literature. What had escaped those readers is that “Gerontion” is a dramatic monologue, an exploration of a particular, imperfect point of view; it is not an articulation of Eliot’s sense of the past but one of Eliot’s many attempts to explore “a sense of the sense of the past.” Eliot and Pound left behind the positivism of the nineteenth century in order to grasp the psychological intricacies of historical understanding. Each poet’s “sense of the sense of the past” was less a fully articulated philosophy than an intellectual style brought to life through the formal dynamics of poetry and a process of “imaginative reconstruction.”
Whereas the narrative of Modernist Poetics of History is general and centrifugal, Stone Cottage is a vivid narrative account of the three winters during which Yeats and Pound sequestered themselves in a cottage in Sussex. Yet like its predecessor, Stone Cottage is also the story of an odd couple: a middle-aged Irish poet of international fame who chose as his secretary a talented, 28-year-old American with little more to his name than juvenilia and a reputation for being obstreperous. It was a time and place crucial in their careers. While their first winter together in 1913 was peaceful, all had changed by their final one in 1916: Yeats and Pound had contempt for the war verse that filled the daily papers, yet they too eventually wrote poems that addressed the responsibility of the poet during a time of war. Stone Cottage joined Modernist Poetics of History in avoiding the standard ploys of literary criticism. Yet Jim surpassed the accomplishments of his first book by narrating the personal, artistic and intellectual dramas that unfolded in Sussex with an elegance and discernment that became his signature style. At a time when deconstruction and New Historicism were deforming many of the voices that took them up, Jim built Stone Cottage from stories about literary careers and explored theories about literature and its capacity for historical understanding. The book’s immersion in its subject colors even its prose: it is, as Yeats described the landscape near his cottage, “beautiful with a beauty that is not distracting.”
If Stone Cottage is like an intimate three-act drama, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things resembles a Frank Capra epic. In Jim’s telling, Stevens was inspired and troubled by the tension between what Kenneth Burke called the vocational and the vacational—between the practical and aesthetic dimensions of life. Whereas for decades critics had viewed Stevens as a secretary of porcelain, an aesthete removed from life’s hard realities (which at times he was), Jim shows, by drawing copiously on the poet’s correspondence, diaries and drafts, that Stevens’s imagination was often quickened by catastrophic events like war and economic collapse. Even as his poems measured the pressure of reality, however, Stevens avoided writing in the apocalyptic vein of The Waste Land or Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” In fact, among writers and critics of the time, Stevens was rare in having sensed what most of us learned only after the publication of a facsimile edition of The Waste Land manuscripts in 1971: if the poem “is a supreme cry of despair it is Eliot’s and not his generation’s,” Stevens told Alice Corbin Henderson in 1922. (The cry of despair concerned the collapse of Eliot and his wife Vivian’s acrimonious marriage.) Building on Stevens’s observation, Jim explained that Eliot had created an illusion in The Waste Land by transferring “the responsibility for a disintegrating world from the self to a world that victimizes the self.”
Throughout The Plain Sense of Things, the case that Jim makes for Stevens as a poet engaged with history is, not unlike Stevens’s own sensibility, anchored in historical scrutiny and wary of counter-polemic and sleights of hand like Eliot’s. If a single poem can represent the virtues of Stevens’s work that Jim honored in his own writing, it is “A Postcard from the Volcano” (1936). Spoken in the voice of the dead, “Postcard” describes children in a landscape of ruins building a future from the remains of the past: “Children picking up our bones / Will never know that these were once / As quick as foxes on the hill.” Neither prescriptive nor fateful, the poem leaves room for imagination, ceding the future to the young and granting them the benefit of ambiguity. Such postcards are a rarity.
Even more rare was a faultless modernist, and Jim did not hesitate to identify the miscues or self-destructive tendencies in a poet’s work. Sometimes Stevens seems to be putting ambiguity on a pedestal and hiding behind it to avoid taking action. He also had a thing for heroes, and at one point admitted to admiring Mussolini’s cult of power, a passion that eventually cooled. In the case of Pound, another admirer of Il Duce, the errors are well known: his anti-Semitism; his dismissal of his anti-Semitism as a suburban prejudice; his broadcasts on Italian radio during World War II, for which the poet was charged with treason. Like many critics, Jim detailed Pound’s failures of political judgment, but he didn’t stop there. He could recognize what was best in Pound’s work while remaining clear-eyed about the worst. As Jim saw it, Pound’s ambition and writing rested on a paradox. Pound wanted nothing less than to “rejuvenate Western culture” by making available in new ways its “neglected or unappreciated riches.” He was a roving spark of renewal, and having failed to spark a renaissance as a junior professor at Wabash College in Indiana in 1908, he migrated during the next three decades to Venice, London, Paris and Rapallo, perpetually homesick for a place he could shape into a cultural capital. Yet to realize his ambition Pound also needed to stand permanently at odds with the world, and so he found any place that accepted his efforts to be inhospitable. To fulfill his dream would have deprived him of a purpose. Jim’s final assessment, made over a decade ago, still stings: “There is something chilling about the artist who never changes, who continually recreates the terms of his own failure so that he might enjoy a strange species of success.”
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“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” Yeats wrote in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, which he completed at his Stone Cottage in 1917. It’s a stirring line, and the temptation to quote it is hard to resist. Yet as Jim once said of another of Yeats’s epigrams, which in Jim’s seminars were part of our table talk, there is “something wrong, something too ingeniously self-forgiving” about Yeats’s remark about quarrels, not least because it contradicts some of his best poems, which are anchored in his arguments with others as well as himself.2 Yeats was on firmer ground when he said that “unlike the rhetoricians … we [poets] sing amid our uncertainty.” Jim also favored this kind of song. If his books about Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Stevens can be characterized as histories of poets arguing among themselves as well as with their political and intellectual cultures, the half-dozen books he wrote thereafter often turn on discussions and defenses of poems that argue with themselves. These books were more colloquial yet no less vigorous than his scholarship, a shift in focus and tone that matched his shift in audience, as he started to write more for a general reader as well as for critics and poets.
“This book is about the ways in which poetry is its own best enemy.” That is the first sentence of The Resistance to Poetry, published in 2004. Who begins a book this way, especially at a time when it wasn’t poetry but money that critics claimed was its number-one enemy? Among their targets were the six-figure advance that the poet Billy Collins had recently received from his publisher and the $100 million bequeathed by Ruth Lilly (heir of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune) to Poetry, which for nearly a century had often enjoyed an outsized impact despite its meager resources. “It’s difficult to complain about poetry’s expanding audience,” Jim admitted, “but it’s more difficult to ask what a culture that wants poetry to be popular wants poetry to be. The audience has by and large been purchased at the cost of poetry’s inwardness: its strangeness, its propensity to defeat its own expectations.”
The Resistance to Poetry is preoccupied not with fears of selling out but with the formal techniques of poetic self-resistance, the tool kit (line, syntax, metaphor, voice, disjunction) that poets use to question their own convictions, working by glimmers and glints instead of tidy sums. After all, it is because Emily Dickinson refused to rid her poems of their unorthodox rhythms and rhymes, thereby preserving a status of seclusion and secrecy, that she and her poems are now so well-known. Poems claim our attention, Jim argues, inasmuch as they effectively resist it. They exploit rather than suppress the slippages of ordinary language, and what we are challenged to grasp is how a poet makes the ineradicable ambiguities of ordinary language adequate to the meaning a poem may express.
For Jim, the poetry of Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Oppen and Louise Glück, among others, is like what we may imagine knowledge to be, a river that’s never the same way twice, the changing event of itself. The ambiguity in these poets’ work is neither an endpoint nor a means of obfuscation. Nor is it the apolitical, formalist cul-de-sac sanctified by the New Criticism. In Jim’s view, ambiguity in poetry can act in at least two ways. It is an antidote to knowingness, the expression of a feeling or explanation of an idea that sounds over-rehearsed. (Whenever Jim found such blots in my prose, he tagged them with a large black exclamation mark.) Ambiguity is also the threshold of “composed wonder,” which Jim defined in The Resistance to Poetry as “the reinvention of humility, the means by which we fall in love with the world.”
Composed wonder arises, as Jim noted in an essay on Joyce’s Ulysses, from “the meticulous reformulation of what is plain” and in moments when “the logical and arbitrary also seem to converge, to become each other.” When realized through the resources of poetry, composed wonder embodies “a music of deference—a constitutional unwillingness to dominate the world by virtue of having understood it.” The modifier Jim places before “wonder” is crucial: “composed” emphasizes that a poem can be an expression of wonder at once self-aware and artful, blending an appetite for the world and a respect for form. Yet as a poem establishes coherence and composure, accumulating significance, it never stops being strange.
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The difficulty and the marvel of poetry is that it takes work, which always thrives on and provokes resistance. Yet “if the resistance to poetry is the wonder of poetry,” Jim asks, “how do we prevent resistance from becoming a fetish, something with which we are merely fascinated” and which foils comprehension? One way is to begin by accepting that poems are not vessels of knowledge, as Jim never hesitated to emphasize, perhaps never more succinctly than in “Thoughts Upon the Present State of the World,” the last essay he completed, which he shared with me before delivering it as an online lecture at Princeton University on January 28, 2022, the 83rd anniversary of Yeats’s death. The title of the essay repeats that of the long poem Yeats began writing in 1921 and later published under the title “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” In his essay, Jim enters into a pitched dialogue with Yeats, channeling his poem’s disparate energies and jagged self-questioning as he explores how Yeats succeeded in making an ancient theme—what the poet called “a lamentation over lost peace and lost hope”—feel essential, perpetual and new.
Yeats’s lines are driven by language instead of an individual speaker, their utterances sounding coherent in the swells of what initially sounds like incoherence. “But rather than appearing at the outset to be the poem’s foundation, this principle accrues as the series progresses—as if the foundation were being constructed beneath a house already partially built.” Yeats cannot but chastise himself and others for their idealism before the Great War broke out: “Oh what fine thought we had because we thought / That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.” Here thought is the antithesis of thinking, and the poem lives that tension. So too does Jim’s reconsideration of the poem, which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, a different kind of rude awakening to the dangers of certainty:
Lately, as apocalyptic stories have tumbled out of the New York Times, as if we craved the mortality by which we also feel threatened, six words shot out at me as they had never before—“what fine thought we had because we thought” … Did the problem as well as the solution lay in thinking itself, in the way we think, in the way we’ve come to recognize thinking?
The poem’s self-indictment raises doubts about poetry, and consequently remains, as Jim stressed, “a poem of thought happening now”—a poem of thinking, a drama of composed wonder that provoked Jim to renew his critical powers to be skeptical and reassuring, coherent and strange.
Jim had been ill for some months, and delivering the lecture tested his stamina (which could be heard in his voice). It was uncertain how long his body could hold on. Yet there he was, his voice clear and passionate and streaming into my headphones, telling stories about Yeats that delight in the value of creativity and the resistance of poetry in face of death. I returned to the poem a few days later, and after reading it I thought of Stone Cottage and imagined that it was not Pound sequestered there with Yeats but Jim, the two of them discussing spiritualism and the war, how Yeats’s lines can sound frustrated yet simultaneously driven by joy, and his knack for turning a conclusion into a question. Why imagine that Jim was there? Because through his life in poetry he honored the noble dream of Pound’s “Canto 81,” which Pound’s errors had placed beyond his grasp.
To have gathered from the air a live tradition
or from a fine old eye the unconquered flame.
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Picture a small seminar room with a large table at its center, and graduate students settling into chairs around it. The windows are streaked with condensation, and their thin, square panes gleam an inky black dotted by tiny random lights. It’s a March afternoon in Rochester and still bitter cold. The room is filling with chatter, the rustle of papers, the thump of books being arranged on the table.
The door closes and the room turns quiet. It’s Jim, clutching a few folders and moving gracefully toward his seat. Suddenly he freezes and does a double take: at each place around the table someone has left an orange from Florida. A pungent sweetness fills the air. On this particular Thursday, the topic of the seminar is Wallace Stevens, and the centerpiece of the conversation is to be “Sunday Morning,” which begins “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / And the green freedom of a cockatoo / Upon a rug mingle to dissipate / The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.” Somber, gaudy and tender, an epic response to the slaughter of the Great War, “Sunday Morning” is also Stevens’s first major attempt to imagine a mythology of modern death, one in which, although God is a fiction and death absolute, human life on earth is not without memorial and is still capable of composed wonder.
Smiling, Jim sits down and begins to peel an orange.
Art credit: J. Adam Fenster, James Longenbach in his office, 2010 ©University of Rochester / J. Adam Fenster.
While walking toward the library, I wondered if there had been a mistake. I had been given a list of poems, essays and reviews published in several little magazines during and after the Great War and asked to print copies of them. The work of ambitious, prickly coteries, the Little Review, the Egoist, Poetry and the Dial provoked a revolution in literature in Great Britain and the United States by publishing some of the most beautiful, meticulous and extravagant writing of the twentieth century, including “An Octopus” by Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and The Waste Land, W. B. Yeats’s “The Second Coming,” James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses (both in installments), excerpts from Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, poems by Hart Crane and essays, polemics and poems by Ezra Pound.
I had read many of those works in a course on literary modernism during my first year as a graduate student in literature. Yet there I was two years later, a student in a seminar on Anglo-American literary modernism, thinking myself wiser yet stranded in the stacks in a fog of doubt. Was the list in my hand suggesting that I had not even passed Go? As I cranked through the first few reels of microfilm searching for the texts (it was the late Eighties), my worries evaporated. I kept stumbling on surprises and stopping to read them. There were some disjointed, exuberant poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, a German Dadaist who settled in Greenwich Village in 1913 and was a lover of Djuna Barnes. There were two scrappy letters from William Carlos Williams about sexual psychology and Otto Weininger, the Viennese sexologist whose writings had convinced the poet that his philandering was preventing him from becoming a literary genius. The list is lost, but I remember finishing all the copying that day and returning often to the microfilm archive to continue the treasure hunt.
I owe that serendipitous library errand to James Longenbach, a poet and literary critic who spent his entire career at the University of Rochester, from 1985 until his death last year. I never got around to asking Jim if his list was a nudge to dig deeper in the archives or something like the shield of a greeting, a gesture of fellowship and collaboration. Even if I had asked, Jim probably would have rolled his eyes and changed the subject with the wave of a hand. Jim had a sensibility that blended the intellectual and aesthetic virtues of the modernists whose work he returned to regularly: Yeats’s self-questioning, Pound’s exquisite ear, Eliot’s philosophical agility, Wallace Stevens’s sense of contingency, Elizabeth Bishop’s skepticism, George Oppen’s refusal of romance and Kenneth Burke’s element of grace.
What Jim enjoyed most and did best was to draw on his own archival discoveries and vast reading to tell elegant stories about the deliberate and haphazard work of discovery, experimentation and transformation lived by twentieth-century poets. He had zero patience for polemics and was allergic to false oppositions. He avoided asking binary questions like “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?”—floated by the critic Marjorie Perloff in 1982—because he thought that zero-sum thinking belittles the imaginations of poets as well as their readers. A question like “Whose Era?” was anathema to another of Jim’s fundamental ideas: the influence of one poet on another, or of a tradition on a poet, often sparks a relationship that is more intimate and creative than oppositional and combative. “There is a long tradition in romantic poetry of associating the desire for originality with anxiety and competition,” he acknowledged, but then emphasized that “there is an equally long tradition of associating it with openness and generosity.”
Even so, being a student of Jim’s could be tough. His standards were exacting and his achievements at once inspiring and impossible to match. Yet when challenging us to think and write better, he was always a model of generosity. At a time when postmodernism had hardened into an orthodoxy and was often used as a cudgel to attack modernism, Jim emphasized that “reading the moderns, we need to remain open to their variousness, their duplicities, their contradictions.” Explore their writing closely and follow their inclination to entertain divergent points of view, which included a capacity for self-criticism and the vital work of transformation. If you accepted Jim’s advice, you wondered why you’d ever considered taking the shortcut of what he called “a strategically limited reading of modernism,” one that would “force us to choose between competing ideas of what poetry might be” rather than from a variety of them. Why deny yourself the chance to learn from such marvelous company—including Jim’s? Not long ago my classmate Adam Parkes told me, “I still talk to Jim in my head every day, and whenever I sit down to write, I’m writing to him.” Calm, fastidious, clear: I still talk to that voice, and write for it as well.
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Jim’s approach to teaching modernism was unorthodox. Our syllabus included classics like Eliot’s The Waste Land, Moore’s Observations and Crane’s The Bridge, as well as a modest number of readings from critical texts. Our guides, however, were the scholarly bibliographies of each poet’s periodical publications, much of which remained uncollected at the time. Eliot steeped himself in the writings of Dante, Nietzsche and Henry James but was also an avid reader of esoteric thinkers like the nineteenth-century theologian Louis de Bonald. During that semester, Eliot’s uncollected poems and prose, as well as those of Pound, Stevens, Moore, Williams, Crane, Bishop and H.D., were our esoterica. As Jim challenged us to master entire bodies of work—published, uncollected and unpublished—he was also emphasizing, contrary to the spirit of the times, that theory needn’t be the first or only option for a critical perspective.
Jim wasn’t thumbing his nose at theory. He read it all and with care but engaged with it sparingly. Besides, Jim had sound reasons for going his own way. During the 1970s and 1980s, literary critics had struggled to make sense of the methodological confusion that had followed the New Criticism. What materialized was not a movement beyond formalism but a new formalism, this time in the guise of French theory, especially the strain of deconstruction elaborated by Paul de Man in Blindness and Insight in 1971. De Man was ironic and provoked controversy with claims like “the bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.” Although he appreciated the power of de Man’s arguments, Jim was alert to their pitfalls. As he pointed out in his dissertation in 1985, by undermining the possibility of historical understanding altogether, like Nietzsche, de Man reduced it to “a self-consciousness that teeters on the brink of the abyss of hermeneutic nihilism.”1That abyss darkened two years later, not long after de Man’s death, when a graduate student in Belgium discovered anti-Semitic articles written by de Man during World War II and published in a Nazi-controlled French-language newspaper. History was a burden for de Man, something to be buried and forgotten, yet in this instance the presence of his own past proved to be inescapable.
Jim thought that the New Historicism of the 1980s could be pernicious in a different way. Treating literature more as the product of a cultural moment than the work of an individual writer, reading a poem “against” its social context, its acolytes often argued that poems can only betray history as well as themselves. In a famous interpretation of William Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” the literary critic Marjorie Levinson remarked that when Wordsworth returned to the abbey in 1798—he had visited it five years earlier, after coming back from revolutionary France a euphoric man (“Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”)—it was a refuge for vagrants, and the surrounding river valley had been marred by industry. Yet in Wordsworth’s poem nature is pristine, a refuge for the poet, and its recent social history is left unmentioned (or “elided,” as the New Historicists liked to say). That really bothered Levinson: “what we witness in this poem is a conversion of public to private property, history to poetry.” In her eyes, Wordsworth had shirked social responsibility while seeking mythic consolation.
Jim saw things differently. “Tintern Abbey” is a poem, so what did Levinson expect? What is it that we want when we want a work of art to be like history—unambiguous, unimpeachable, fact-checked? Echoing Eliot’s speaker in “Gerontion,” who thinks that “History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,” Levinson assumed that the historical texture of a poem can only be validated by the weight of its historical content. To think so, however, is to downplay the value of interpretation itself, which as Jim emphasized “is by nature the act of supplying something that appears left out of a text.” What Levinson left out is the very possibility of a poet leaving something out, of making the obvious unobvious. “Tintern Abbey” is not an example of Wordsworth’s “repression of his awareness of human suffering,” Jim argued; “it is the result of a displacement of that awareness into the kind of terms that the poem can articulate most forcefully.” He was stating a bedrock principle of his criticism: poems exist in the frame of history only because they originate in the frame of art.
Jim’s wariness of the New Historicism, or any critical approach that drew from a well of suspicion, wasn’t confined to his scholarship. When I left academia and got involved in magazines, I asked Jim to write for the Nation, where I was editing the books section. His first review, in 2008, was of a volume containing the daybooks, selected prose and uncollected writing of George Oppen. It was an easy assignment to make. Jim was keen to write about Oppen, and we were both fascinated by the daybooks: hundreds of pages of fragmentary thoughts, observations and quotations that Oppen began writing and collecting in 1958. After the review appeared, we received a letter from an Oppen scholar who claimed to have found evidence that George or his wife Mary might have appeared in the Venona cables—a counterintelligence operation launched by the United States during World War II that had only been made public in the mid-Nineties. The implication was that the Oppens, who were open about their communist commitments, may have shared sensitive information with Moscow during or after the war. Jim chafed at such claims. He dubbed them “narratives of utility” and “fake controversies” because they sought to elevate a poet’s reputation by favoring the possible, yet unverifiable, social implications of the work. Those of George’s admirers who told such stories were players in the passing history of literary taste. The poet himself, who “never imagined that the terms of his own life could be transformed into categorical imperatives about the relationship of politics and art,” had achieved the impossible by earning an enduring place in the history of the art.
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Who knows what a poem is? So begins The Lyric Now, which appeared in 2020 and is the last book of prose that Jim wrote. The answer, he says, is literally a mystery because “the poem doesn’t exist yet” for the person beginning to write it or the person beginning to read it. The pleasure of understanding it is “an act of discovery,” even if the writer has already written “a thousand poems preceding this one” and the reader has read that new poem many times. Jim never explicitly asked, Who knows what scholarship and criticism are? One answer is that scholarship wraps and unwraps works in competing interpretations whereas criticism is an endless skein of reinterpretation. The answer implicit in Jim’s work is different: scholarship and criticism can also be acts of discovery.
Jim’s first three books are literary and intellectual histories of modernist poets who cultivated complex attitudes toward history as they faced two world wars and the Great Depression, the epic events of their lifetimes. These books—Modernist Poetics of History: Pound, Eliot, and the Sense of the Past (1987); Stone Cottage: Pound, Yeats, and Modernism (1988); and Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things (1991)—are also elegant demonstrations of the method Jim taught his students. Rather than treating poems as pegs for theoretical concepts or political interventions, he wove judicious ideas about literary change into graceful stories about the work, lives and ambitions of poets. The books are like ritornellos, variations on recurring questions, arguments and themes that as they go from discovery to discovery never sound the same way twice.
My earlier comparison of Marjorie Levinson’s historical sense to the speaker of “Gerontion” is no accident. In Modernist Poetics of History as well as in our seminar, Jim stressed that the poem had often been misunderstood as an expression of Eliot’s dour view of the past, and consequently was treated as a talisman for the idea of history in modernist literature. What had escaped those readers is that “Gerontion” is a dramatic monologue, an exploration of a particular, imperfect point of view; it is not an articulation of Eliot’s sense of the past but one of Eliot’s many attempts to explore “a sense of the sense of the past.” Eliot and Pound left behind the positivism of the nineteenth century in order to grasp the psychological intricacies of historical understanding. Each poet’s “sense of the sense of the past” was less a fully articulated philosophy than an intellectual style brought to life through the formal dynamics of poetry and a process of “imaginative reconstruction.”
Whereas the narrative of Modernist Poetics of History is general and centrifugal, Stone Cottage is a vivid narrative account of the three winters during which Yeats and Pound sequestered themselves in a cottage in Sussex. Yet like its predecessor, Stone Cottage is also the story of an odd couple: a middle-aged Irish poet of international fame who chose as his secretary a talented, 28-year-old American with little more to his name than juvenilia and a reputation for being obstreperous. It was a time and place crucial in their careers. While their first winter together in 1913 was peaceful, all had changed by their final one in 1916: Yeats and Pound had contempt for the war verse that filled the daily papers, yet they too eventually wrote poems that addressed the responsibility of the poet during a time of war. Stone Cottage joined Modernist Poetics of History in avoiding the standard ploys of literary criticism. Yet Jim surpassed the accomplishments of his first book by narrating the personal, artistic and intellectual dramas that unfolded in Sussex with an elegance and discernment that became his signature style. At a time when deconstruction and New Historicism were deforming many of the voices that took them up, Jim built Stone Cottage from stories about literary careers and explored theories about literature and its capacity for historical understanding. The book’s immersion in its subject colors even its prose: it is, as Yeats described the landscape near his cottage, “beautiful with a beauty that is not distracting.”
If Stone Cottage is like an intimate three-act drama, Wallace Stevens: The Plain Sense of Things resembles a Frank Capra epic. In Jim’s telling, Stevens was inspired and troubled by the tension between what Kenneth Burke called the vocational and the vacational—between the practical and aesthetic dimensions of life. Whereas for decades critics had viewed Stevens as a secretary of porcelain, an aesthete removed from life’s hard realities (which at times he was), Jim shows, by drawing copiously on the poet’s correspondence, diaries and drafts, that Stevens’s imagination was often quickened by catastrophic events like war and economic collapse. Even as his poems measured the pressure of reality, however, Stevens avoided writing in the apocalyptic vein of The Waste Land or Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” In fact, among writers and critics of the time, Stevens was rare in having sensed what most of us learned only after the publication of a facsimile edition of The Waste Land manuscripts in 1971: if the poem “is a supreme cry of despair it is Eliot’s and not his generation’s,” Stevens told Alice Corbin Henderson in 1922. (The cry of despair concerned the collapse of Eliot and his wife Vivian’s acrimonious marriage.) Building on Stevens’s observation, Jim explained that Eliot had created an illusion in The Waste Land by transferring “the responsibility for a disintegrating world from the self to a world that victimizes the self.”
Throughout The Plain Sense of Things, the case that Jim makes for Stevens as a poet engaged with history is, not unlike Stevens’s own sensibility, anchored in historical scrutiny and wary of counter-polemic and sleights of hand like Eliot’s. If a single poem can represent the virtues of Stevens’s work that Jim honored in his own writing, it is “A Postcard from the Volcano” (1936). Spoken in the voice of the dead, “Postcard” describes children in a landscape of ruins building a future from the remains of the past: “Children picking up our bones / Will never know that these were once / As quick as foxes on the hill.” Neither prescriptive nor fateful, the poem leaves room for imagination, ceding the future to the young and granting them the benefit of ambiguity. Such postcards are a rarity.
Even more rare was a faultless modernist, and Jim did not hesitate to identify the miscues or self-destructive tendencies in a poet’s work. Sometimes Stevens seems to be putting ambiguity on a pedestal and hiding behind it to avoid taking action. He also had a thing for heroes, and at one point admitted to admiring Mussolini’s cult of power, a passion that eventually cooled. In the case of Pound, another admirer of Il Duce, the errors are well known: his anti-Semitism; his dismissal of his anti-Semitism as a suburban prejudice; his broadcasts on Italian radio during World War II, for which the poet was charged with treason. Like many critics, Jim detailed Pound’s failures of political judgment, but he didn’t stop there. He could recognize what was best in Pound’s work while remaining clear-eyed about the worst. As Jim saw it, Pound’s ambition and writing rested on a paradox. Pound wanted nothing less than to “rejuvenate Western culture” by making available in new ways its “neglected or unappreciated riches.” He was a roving spark of renewal, and having failed to spark a renaissance as a junior professor at Wabash College in Indiana in 1908, he migrated during the next three decades to Venice, London, Paris and Rapallo, perpetually homesick for a place he could shape into a cultural capital. Yet to realize his ambition Pound also needed to stand permanently at odds with the world, and so he found any place that accepted his efforts to be inhospitable. To fulfill his dream would have deprived him of a purpose. Jim’s final assessment, made over a decade ago, still stings: “There is something chilling about the artist who never changes, who continually recreates the terms of his own failure so that he might enjoy a strange species of success.”
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“We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” Yeats wrote in Per Amica Silentia Lunae, which he completed at his Stone Cottage in 1917. It’s a stirring line, and the temptation to quote it is hard to resist. Yet as Jim once said of another of Yeats’s epigrams, which in Jim’s seminars were part of our table talk, there is “something wrong, something too ingeniously self-forgiving” about Yeats’s remark about quarrels, not least because it contradicts some of his best poems, which are anchored in his arguments with others as well as himself.2“Sixteen Dead Men” memorializes the Irish nationalists, among them Patrick Pearse, who were executed by the British after the 1916 Easter Rebellion: “You say that we should still the land / Till Germany’s overcome; / But who is there to argue that / Now that Pearse is deaf and dumb?” No less stringent is the self-indictment of “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen,” written in 1921: “We, who seven years ago / Talked of honour and of truth, / Shriek with pleasure if we show / The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth.” Yeats was on firmer ground when he said that “unlike the rhetoricians … we [poets] sing amid our uncertainty.” Jim also favored this kind of song. If his books about Eliot, Pound, Yeats and Stevens can be characterized as histories of poets arguing among themselves as well as with their political and intellectual cultures, the half-dozen books he wrote thereafter often turn on discussions and defenses of poems that argue with themselves. These books were more colloquial yet no less vigorous than his scholarship, a shift in focus and tone that matched his shift in audience, as he started to write more for a general reader as well as for critics and poets.
“This book is about the ways in which poetry is its own best enemy.” That is the first sentence of The Resistance to Poetry, published in 2004. Who begins a book this way, especially at a time when it wasn’t poetry but money that critics claimed was its number-one enemy? Among their targets were the six-figure advance that the poet Billy Collins had recently received from his publisher and the $100 million bequeathed by Ruth Lilly (heir of the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune) to Poetry, which for nearly a century had often enjoyed an outsized impact despite its meager resources. “It’s difficult to complain about poetry’s expanding audience,” Jim admitted, “but it’s more difficult to ask what a culture that wants poetry to be popular wants poetry to be. The audience has by and large been purchased at the cost of poetry’s inwardness: its strangeness, its propensity to defeat its own expectations.”
The Resistance to Poetry is preoccupied not with fears of selling out but with the formal techniques of poetic self-resistance, the tool kit (line, syntax, metaphor, voice, disjunction) that poets use to question their own convictions, working by glimmers and glints instead of tidy sums. After all, it is because Emily Dickinson refused to rid her poems of their unorthodox rhythms and rhymes, thereby preserving a status of seclusion and secrecy, that she and her poems are now so well-known. Poems claim our attention, Jim argues, inasmuch as they effectively resist it. They exploit rather than suppress the slippages of ordinary language, and what we are challenged to grasp is how a poet makes the ineradicable ambiguities of ordinary language adequate to the meaning a poem may express.
For Jim, the poetry of Dickinson, Yeats, Stevens, Moore, Bishop, Oppen and Louise Glück, among others, is like what we may imagine knowledge to be, a river that’s never the same way twice, the changing event of itself. The ambiguity in these poets’ work is neither an endpoint nor a means of obfuscation. Nor is it the apolitical, formalist cul-de-sac sanctified by the New Criticism. In Jim’s view, ambiguity in poetry can act in at least two ways. It is an antidote to knowingness, the expression of a feeling or explanation of an idea that sounds over-rehearsed. (Whenever Jim found such blots in my prose, he tagged them with a large black exclamation mark.) Ambiguity is also the threshold of “composed wonder,” which Jim defined in The Resistance to Poetry as “the reinvention of humility, the means by which we fall in love with the world.”
Composed wonder arises, as Jim noted in an essay on Joyce’s Ulysses, from “the meticulous reformulation of what is plain” and in moments when “the logical and arbitrary also seem to converge, to become each other.” When realized through the resources of poetry, composed wonder embodies “a music of deference—a constitutional unwillingness to dominate the world by virtue of having understood it.” The modifier Jim places before “wonder” is crucial: “composed” emphasizes that a poem can be an expression of wonder at once self-aware and artful, blending an appetite for the world and a respect for form. Yet as a poem establishes coherence and composure, accumulating significance, it never stops being strange.
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The difficulty and the marvel of poetry is that it takes work, which always thrives on and provokes resistance. Yet “if the resistance to poetry is the wonder of poetry,” Jim asks, “how do we prevent resistance from becoming a fetish, something with which we are merely fascinated” and which foils comprehension? One way is to begin by accepting that poems are not vessels of knowledge, as Jim never hesitated to emphasize, perhaps never more succinctly than in “Thoughts Upon the Present State of the World,” the last essay he completed, which he shared with me before delivering it as an online lecture at Princeton University on January 28, 2022, the 83rd anniversary of Yeats’s death. The title of the essay repeats that of the long poem Yeats began writing in 1921 and later published under the title “Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen.” In his essay, Jim enters into a pitched dialogue with Yeats, channeling his poem’s disparate energies and jagged self-questioning as he explores how Yeats succeeded in making an ancient theme—what the poet called “a lamentation over lost peace and lost hope”—feel essential, perpetual and new.
Yeats’s lines are driven by language instead of an individual speaker, their utterances sounding coherent in the swells of what initially sounds like incoherence. “But rather than appearing at the outset to be the poem’s foundation, this principle accrues as the series progresses—as if the foundation were being constructed beneath a house already partially built.” Yeats cannot but chastise himself and others for their idealism before the Great War broke out: “Oh what fine thought we had because we thought / That the worst rogues and rascals had died out.” Here thought is the antithesis of thinking, and the poem lives that tension. So too does Jim’s reconsideration of the poem, which occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic, a different kind of rude awakening to the dangers of certainty:
The poem’s self-indictment raises doubts about poetry, and consequently remains, as Jim stressed, “a poem of thought happening now”—a poem of thinking, a drama of composed wonder that provoked Jim to renew his critical powers to be skeptical and reassuring, coherent and strange.
Jim had been ill for some months, and delivering the lecture tested his stamina (which could be heard in his voice). It was uncertain how long his body could hold on. Yet there he was, his voice clear and passionate and streaming into my headphones, telling stories about Yeats that delight in the value of creativity and the resistance of poetry in face of death. I returned to the poem a few days later, and after reading it I thought of Stone Cottage and imagined that it was not Pound sequestered there with Yeats but Jim, the two of them discussing spiritualism and the war, how Yeats’s lines can sound frustrated yet simultaneously driven by joy, and his knack for turning a conclusion into a question. Why imagine that Jim was there? Because through his life in poetry he honored the noble dream of Pound’s “Canto 81,” which Pound’s errors had placed beyond his grasp.
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Picture a small seminar room with a large table at its center, and graduate students settling into chairs around it. The windows are streaked with condensation, and their thin, square panes gleam an inky black dotted by tiny random lights. It’s a March afternoon in Rochester and still bitter cold. The room is filling with chatter, the rustle of papers, the thump of books being arranged on the table.
The door closes and the room turns quiet. It’s Jim, clutching a few folders and moving gracefully toward his seat. Suddenly he freezes and does a double take: at each place around the table someone has left an orange from Florida. A pungent sweetness fills the air. On this particular Thursday, the topic of the seminar is Wallace Stevens, and the centerpiece of the conversation is to be “Sunday Morning,” which begins “Complacencies of the peignoir, and late / Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair, / And the green freedom of a cockatoo / Upon a rug mingle to dissipate / The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.” Somber, gaudy and tender, an epic response to the slaughter of the Great War, “Sunday Morning” is also Stevens’s first major attempt to imagine a mythology of modern death, one in which, although God is a fiction and death absolute, human life on earth is not without memorial and is still capable of composed wonder.
Smiling, Jim sits down and begins to peel an orange.
Art credit: J. Adam Fenster, James Longenbach in his office, 2010 ©University of Rochester / J. Adam Fenster.
If you liked this essay, you’ll love reading The Point in print.