Cristanne Miller

Tongues "loosened in the melting pot": The Poets of Others and the Lower East Side

Cristanne Miller is edward H. Butler Professor of literature at University at Buffalo, SUNY. She is the author of Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority, (Harvard 1996) and editor or co-editor of numerous anthologies. Her most recent book is Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, Else Lasker-Schuler (Michigan 2005). She is now working on a project to be called “Poetry After Gettysburg,” on the effects of the Civil War on the development of poetry in the U.S. Tongues “loosened in the melting pot”: The Poets of Others and the Lower East Side

Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and the Rewards of Indirection

TRADITIONALLY, women have voiced radical conceptions of themselves and their world in code form, under a guise of obedience, respectability, or triviality; the claim that women have had to speak and write indirectly has become a commonplace in feminist criticism.1 Studies have documented that, when speaking, women employ a broader range in voice, pronunciation, and vocabulary and typically adapt their speech to their situations more than men do; that women use more questions in conversation, along with other rhetorical patterns that distract attention from the speaker either to the topic or to her conversation partner; that women use more polite language and more tag questions than men and are less likely to command or use directive statements.2 The applicability of such findings to womens writing is limited because pitch, pronunciation, and tone cannot be measured in written language and because the immediate social pressures women

The Colonial Moment: Discoveries and Settlements in Modern American Poetry

In The Colonial Moment, Jeffrey W. Westover argues that American modernist poets who do not expatriate confront the colonized and colonizing history of the United States in their poetry. More specifically, Westover sees the repeated return of Hart Crane, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams to inaugural moments and myths of American history in their poems as reflecting early twentieth-century conflict between the nation’s colonial history and its growing status as an imperial world power. While, as he puts it, “the poetry I consider puts the emphasis more on the colonial heritage and the neocolonial expansions of the United States than on its postcolonial status,” the poets he discusses both “inherited” and “remade the mythology of discovery and colonization as a cultural paradigm in their era” (4, 5). Westover grounds his discussion both in Benedict Anderson’s and Homi Bhabha’s conceptualizations of the nation and in the historical terms of Waldo Frank’s influential cultural study of 1919, Our America. According to Westover, Frank presents the problem of “our America” as one of linguistic deficiency, or lack of articulate self-disclosure: “America” is in cultural crisis, a “turmoiled giant” dumb because “consciousness within America has not yet reached that pitch where the voice bursts forth” (Frank, quoted 11). National self-disclosure can be accomplished only through this bursting forth of language, but the vernacular—as Frank saw it—was dominated by European models and the world of commerce, hence inadequate to the task. Implying a coincidence of opinion if not Frank’s outright influence on contemporary poets, Westover argues that poets seeking to express a meaningful concept of the nation did so performatively, through self-conscious and sometimes contradictory negotiations of history, identity, and form: “They view[ed] their poetic projects (their “making” of America in the representative domain of language) as unsettled and unsettling, open-ended and ongoing, and yet they also [saw] the poem as the fixed object of their desire, the solid embodiment of their achievement” (11). Not merely a matter of intellectual or political interest, Westover argues, this mapping or making of America in language in effect drives the projects of the poets he studies; moreover, these individual poets’ poems offer “a collective remedy” to the problem of national expression Waldo Frank identifies (11). Because each working chapter of The Colonial Moment focuses on a single poet, the first part of Westover’s argument is more persuasively developed than the second. In fact, this notion of a collective remedy largely disappears after the introduction. In his epilogue, Westover shifts his focus to the general claim that “the conflict between the nation as a republic and the nation as an empire may be one of the key features of democratic poetics in the United States,” apparently in any era (203). Nonetheless, the cumulative work of his five major chapters does provide ample evidence that several early twentieth-century poets with differing agendas and formal interests use metaphors of settlement, mappings of colonial history, or other articulations of national self-making, to explore notions of political and cultural identity. As this brief summary indicates, Westover’s The Colonial Moment both is and is not a product of its (and our) critical moment. University presses and much university pedagogy discourage work on single authors, reflecting an earlier and broader professional movement away from focus on the work (say, the poem) and the author and toward transnational contexts, theory, and cultural studies. In this climate, readings of particular poems largely disappear from critical studies. This is, delightfully, not the case with The Colonial Moment, which provides generous and insightful analysis of significant poems in every one of its major chapters. Westover knows

Drum-Taps: Revisions and Reconciliation

Examines the 1865 Drum-Taps and “Sequel to Drum-Taps” in comparison to the 1871 “DrumTaps” sequence in Leaves of Gra, tracking Whitman’s growing “participation in a Northern liberal turn toward nostalgia” in the aftermath of the Civil War, a “reflective rather than restorative” nostalgia that erases ideological difference between North and South in order to celebrate “reconciliatory nation-building,” silencing the iues of slavery and sedition that generated the war.

Book reviews: Rewriting Christine

THE BOOK OF THE CITY OF LADIES by Christine de Pizan. Translated by Earl Jeffrey Richards. Persea Books, 1982. COMIC WOMEN, TRAGIC MEN: A STUDY OF GENDER AND GENRE IN SHAKESPEARE by Linda Bamber. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1982. 211 pp. (

Dickinson and the Ballad

18.50) THE UNDISCOVERED CONTINENT: EMILY DICKINSON AND THE SPACE OF THE MIND by Suzanne Juhasz. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983. REGINA by Leslie Epstein. Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, New York. 251 pp. (

Emily Dickinson: A Poet's Grammar

13.95). Avon Books (

The Emily Dickinson handbook

3.95). MORE WORK FOR MOTHER: THE IRONIES OF HOUSEHOLD TECHNOLOGY FROM THE OPEN HEARTH TO THE MICROWAVE by Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Basic Books, New York, 1983. 219 pp.

Marianne Moore: Questions of Authority

Emily Dickinsons metrical structures were as fully influenced by the ballad as by the hymn, and other elements of her style may also have been shaped by the huge popularity of ballads in the early nineteenth century in the United States. Understanding that the ballad is as important a model as hymns for Dickinsons short-lined verse undercuts interpretation of her chosen forms as either inherently rebellious against orthodoxies or devoutly meditative. Instead, Dickinson participated actively in secular as well as religious nineteenth-century popular verse culture. Attention to the ballad form and to ways ballads were read in the early nineteenth century illuminates both what is most extraordinary in Dickinsons verse and ways that it participates in the widespread development of popular forms. Her greatness emerges from her pleasure in, and experimentation with, her eras most popular and common forms as much as from the distinctiveness of her ear and imagination.