Sean Pryor

Happiness and Happening in Harmonium

OETRY IS SOMETIMES said to promise or deliver salvation, even when that seems least likely. Such claims suggest a theological horizon for poetry’s purpose and powers, and depend on a dialectic of heaven and earth, or paradise and wilderness, whose terms are constantly remade as desire overtakes imagined satisfactions. The desire for paradise and for a poetry that delivers it responds to and judges the earth, the life, and the poetry we know. The judgment changes with the world, not least because our theories of suffering and evil change, as does the way we inherit conceptions of Eden, Elysium, the new Jerusalem, or any other happy realm or state. When Wallace Stevens hymns modern poetry as an act of finding what will suffice (CPP 218), or as the pursuit of happiness on earth (CPP 900), or as that which takes the place of empty heaven (CPP 137), he figures this world as insufficient, unhappy, or all too earthly: “The earth, for us, is flat and bare” (CPP 136). He calls into question poetry’s salvific potential even as he invokes it. To suffice may not be to redeem, since we may wish for satisfactions beyond those that we can find. To pursue forever may be never to satisfy certain desires, however satisfying that pursuit may be in itself. And to replace heaven may not be to remake the earth. It is to figure our world and our poetry as fallen. The intuition of fallenness is newly configured as modernist writers feel the burden of—but cannot believe wholeheartedly in—Matthew Arnold’s hope that poetry, appropriating religion’s role in redemption, offers an ever surer and surer stay (9: 63). In modernity the judgment that life is fallen includes, and is subject to, a fall from literal religious faith; the judgment becomes figurative, but it persists. It is no accident that Stevens so often describes the death of God in terms of the myths of paradise: the belief in redemption is entwined with the consolation of belief. It is also no accident that Stevens often looks for redemption in figuration. To the extent that Stevens does place his faith in poetry, the fall from religion might yet prove fortunate. Certain familiar oppositions structure the association of poetry with salvation, as well as the sense that life is not as it should be. For W. B. Yeats, the voyage to Byzantium seems, at least at first glance, to be a passage from nature to artifice and temporality to eternity (239–40). In a letter, Ezra Pound distinguishes the casual world of history and accident, of the

Satyriast's Beatitudes: John Rodker's Hymns

“He is both creative and procreative, and his own volume of Hymns, which was one of the last things to come from his press, combines these two libidos to such an extent that it is necessary to keep the book hidden in the piano”—so wrote Wallace Stevens of John Rodker on September 25, 1920 (“Letters” 383). Rodker’s second book of poems, Hymns, had appeared in April. Stevens appreciated Rodker’s work as a poet and as a printer, and in writing to him on October 6, Stevens called Hymns “that admirable book” (“Letters” 383). This might give us pause. What was it about the poetry of a man chiefly remembered, if at all, as the publisher of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, that Stevens liked? Stevens was by no means unequivocal in his praise. “Rodker’s publications last winter were by all odds the most sympathetic of the year,” he enthused to Harriet Monroe on December 2. But then he qualified: “There is, of course, a cliche of the moment as well as a cliche of the past: and I rather think that Rodker merely represents the cliche of the moment” (Letters 221). Rodker’s poetry often provoked this ambivalence. Sometimes it seemed radically modern, refusing to truck with hackneyed tradition. Sometimes that modernity seemed merely superficial, representing only a passing vogue. After Richard Aldington attacked Hymns in the October issue of Poetry, Maxwell Bodenheim leapt to its defense. “Rodker is constantly groping for new methods in poetic style,” he urged, “and because he sometimes attains these roads, he must naturally arouse the anger of those who believe that poetry should stand still” (“In Defense of Rodker” 170). Even Bodenheim allows for a degree of worthy failure. In turn, Monroe appended a brief note to Bodenheim’s letter, confessing that she felt “strain, rather than achievement, in Mr. Rodker’s beautifully printed Hymns.” 1 Stevens’s praise is further complicated by the fact that Hymns appeared in April, in the spring. Perhaps Stevens was referring loosely to “last winter.” Perhaps he meant some of the other works which Rodker’s Ovid Press had been busily producing: Pound’s Fourth Canto in October 1919, Wyndham Lewis’s Fifteen Drawings in January 1920, and Eliot’s