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“Literary Place” – an essay

In a commercial, anti-intellectual, competitive society to think about literary place evokes Auden’s often quoted lines:

Encased in talent like a uniform

The rank of every poet is well known.

On the other hand, to realize what place means in the comings and goings of a literary life, we should think what a leading role Dante played in Florence’s civic life in 1300, how that shaped The Divine Comedy, and how his exile from the city eighteen months later broke his life in two.  For us as for him inner and outer experiences occur simultaneously, and the turmoil leading to spiritual conversion parallels the social violence. In our time, the scale of violence is different, but the causes, like the occasions, seem no different. We have always to start with the daily facts.

Place–everybody feels there’s one for him, feels cheated or betrayed even when, merely losing a place in line, he loses where he belongs.

Two hundred years ago, America industrialized, created huge, impartial stone-and-brick mountains–Baudelaire’s fourmillante cité, Dostoevsky’s stinking city—where most people live in undergrounds of self-consciousness. As we plowed, parceled, and paved the natural landscape, we turned it from a simple, real place into a romantic symbol of freedom. On what we paved, we raised skyscrapers 250 times our height, but more than ever we needed art to apprehend the symbol. Of no artistic significance, the tallest buildings, like the demolished World Trade Center towers, stand for nothing but the economic forces in them. Built 2500 years ago, the Parthenon, the world’s most aesthetically perfect public building, isn’t so high as ten of us, but its humanly accessible grace still expresses the ideas behind it. Most of us accept our national propaganda about progress and have so forgotten even what our symbols stand for that, as Patrick Smith remarked, we no longer discuss issues honestly.

In our cities, we’ve lost our places. We feel we don’t matter. We commute alone, encased in cars and planes.  On the factory floor we repeat the same motions day after day. In offices we handle the same accounts. From one city to another we visit the same kinds of museums, sleep in the same class of hotels. We can scarcely distinguish one airport from another. Dependent on our machines we operate them anonymously, and this gives rise to a frightening insecurity in our lives: we dispossessed ourselves when we first despoiled our place.  By setting property rights above human rights and granting the power of alienation, we converted land into money. It’s an economic scheme that leaves most people placeless.

Only where labor acknowledges the power of place does the place rebecome ours. We invest ourselves in it, and it gives us imaginative fulfillment. In writing, it becomes one of our literary places, which, from big-city barios to Siberian gulags by our acknowledgment of their chthonic powers, we turn back into landscapes, repossess as human places.

Some people say you can’t belong to a place until you’ve buried one of your own there—as if the dead take root. Surely the native Americans belonged to the land they placed their dead in, but the white men traveling across it in prairie schooners rapidly imposed their own. And place of death may mean much less than source of life: Byron’s death in Greece and Keats and Shelley’s in Italy didn’t diminish their English roots. Even abroad, they took their senses of being from their English places, for a poet’s literary place shows up throughout the work, large or small, classical or modern, as evidenced by Goethe’s dramatic Italienische Reise, which ends with Ovid’s last night in Rome as if it were Goethe’s, and his Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre or by Pound’s dynamic Pisan Cantos and Richard Wilbur’s jeweled “The Wall Fountain at the Villa Sciarra.” As the American sculptor Dimitri Hadzi said a few years ago,

To be in Italy, actually to see the classical Greek forms work their way through the  Romanesque, the Renaissance, the Mannerist, and the Baroque, to the Modern, was a wonderful education. It didn’t take long for it to become clear to me that I was in the  land of miracles.

After his trip to Italy, however, Goethe confessed, “I cannot live outside our fatherland”; the years 1786-88 had really been spent, he later admitted, in an Arcadia of the mind and heart—a fantastic landscape that could well be included with Wonderland, Treasure Island and the Abbey of Thélème in that compendium of literary heartlands entitled The Dictionary of Imaginary Places.

Most artists travel to study, as Wordsworth went to Paris and Coleridge to Germany. Some, like Benjamin West and Washington Irving, quit an inhospitable, uncultured land. But the Romantic poets were among the first who left without leaving: in one of his last letters to Charles Brown from Naples, the dying Keats, passionately, incurably in love with Fanny Brawne, cried silently,  “O that I could be buried near where she lives!”  During all their Italian peregrinations, Shelley, with lady, children and maid, and Byron, with valet and menagerie, continually received books, letters and newspapers from England and sent their work back to England to be published. Keats left England to die, but Shelley and Byron used socio-political exile to establish a new kind of literary place. A generation later, Turgenev traveled all over Europe with the Viardots but always wrote culturally and politically only about a Russia he never spiritually left. Joyce carted Dublin with him wherever he went.

O. Henry’s story “The Cosmopolite” tartly makes the point that in his heart-of-hearts the weariest world traveler believes he belongs some unique where. In short, we think of ourselves secretly in terms of place while we go around publicly labeled by name. Not a few names themselves come from place–Sanctuary, Sandburg, Sausville, Scofield, Scotland, Scranton, Sedgwick, Severinghaus, and so on. Whether or not we’re aware of it, we keep a place of our own as part of our identity.

Of course, there are false identities. Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley was a Chicagoan’s mask for political satire.  Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon folk are a sentimentalizing humorist’s middle-class stereotypes. In the Seventies, New York City’s Edward Field assembled A Geography of Poets, “an anthology of the new poetry,” by selecting work of 228 living American poets divided into ten regions. In his introduction, he wrote:

“In America today with poetry springing up everywhere and with such a variety of approaches, no one has been able to find a coherent pattern in it…. For the first time there are no recognized standards or any nationally powerful critics whose judgment is respected…. By presenting the poets of each area I might reveal a whole world of poetry still undiscovered or ignored by the New York publishers.

Despite the anthology’s unwieldiness, Field’s intent was clear and sincere. Carlos Baker’s comment on the equation between authority and authenticity holds true: “The great trick of true realism is to combine depth of sympathetic involvement with artistic detachment, reaching unity through the establishment of a point of view.”

Much writing emphasizing place is exploitative regionalism, parochial documentary like Rowland Robinson’s Danvis Folks of a hundred years ago, even then intended to amuse the reader and to preserve the Vermont vernacular of the 1840s. It’s ornamentalism, fun and attractive but not meaningful, like revivals of Morris dancing. On the other hand, built out of dialectical discriminations and the tensions among verbal subtleties, a poem like Robert Frost’s “Wild Grapes” is organic art:

It wasn’t my not weighing anything

So much as my not knowing anything–

My brother had been nearer right before.

I had not taken the first step in knowledge;

I had not learned to let go with the hands,

As still I have not learned to with the heart,…

Despite television’s influence, diction and pronunciation remain regional. Thought may not be, but the language that carries it is characterized by place.  R-dropping is the most obvious regular dialect feature, but there many dialect variations throughout the United States, giving considerably different pronunciations for lost in, say, Atlanta, New York and Chicago, or for peer, pair, poor and pour on Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras, but, says linguist Norman Hoss, “There is no dialect that occupies the position that Parisian French does in France…; on the other hand, there are no American dialects of English that are not readily comprehensible to speakers of the major dialects.”  For an American writer that means that the language is characterized by as many places as she or he is engaged. The language is local but transportable and translatable, as Frost showed by adopting New England speech when, as a teenager, he moved from San Francisco, and then adapting the dialect to the specifics of classical poetic forms. In America, the “Midwest Poet” or the “Mid-Atlantic Poet” may really be a gypsy whose themes and language change startlingly when the Romany wagon of verse goes elsewhere. In America, the place around the poet may or may not be the place in the poet’s head. Only the language tells from book to book. A commitment may be fortuitous–for example, mine to Canyon de Cheilly, Window Rock and the Navajo world as expressed in Nightway–or it may be the consequence of a life lived spiritually in one place, as you can see in the sweet, thoughtful sorrow of the Maine coast and the sea in Philip Booth’s Selves.

In the world of culture and civilization, episode can’t be separated from exposition, place from character. Our fictional characters live in palpable worlds like our own, and the heightened language of poems about them tells our stories, also. Masters’s Spoon River Anthology, Williams’s Paterson, Berryman’s Dream Songs, Merrill’s The Changing Light at

Sandover show the modern range of response to the relationship between figures in the mind and real-life figures who have places to keep or to lose. As we read, the real and the imagined places become ours. Indeed, the poems themselves would be inconceivable without their relief maps of emotions, for our most intense emotions are always tied to some person, some place.

The more we pay attention to place, the more we see its many forms. We see people coming together in railroad stations and airports, town halls and fire stations, and there affecting each other. We can write about people in all those places though they may take their identities from the distant, green hills.

The seasons change; so do people and places. So does our language in all its aspects–our national language, our common dialect, our personal idiolect.  Changes in our personal speech most accurately measure our overall change as we go from year to year and from place to place. The place where I now live is tranquil and beautiful. I keep looking for ways to express its indifferent magnificence, but the danger of sentimentalizing it restrains me. After all, when you’re fishing a stream, you may think you hear voices–it’s the water “talking”–but if you start talking back, you’re crazy.

The first place I imagined I belonged was an old-fashioned summer house under tall pines by a lake; the second, a pegged, red barn at sunset where we kept the cows and the mow always smelled of sweet hay; the third was the Dakota wheat fields where I fancied growing up to the sky; the fourth was the New York City waterfront where I shared solidarity with the other longshoremen; and the fifth was a dacha outside Moscow,  which I filled with solitude and years of history. There have been others since, like the  old, white farmhouse with a view west down a valley across the Green Mountains where my wife Laura and I live now. All together, they turn into the world I’ve known–the way I take the world, the way it takes me. In a final sense, all writing, all painting, all music and all art are only efforts to get closer to defining the one, ultimate place where we suppose we’ll know exactly who we are.