The Poem in Context of the Book

I’ve been avoiding writing an essay about how reading a poem changes when it’s in the context of its book of origin, in part because I’m mustering the will to do the necessary research, and also because I’m not sure exactly what I’m writing about. Right now, I’m thinking the essay would be a two-part study, beginning with the different forms books of poetry take, followed by a section on how the possibilities of what an author can do with a poem is opened up by a book—i.e., the author can teach readers how to read their work, and can develop their own images and metaphors imbued with their own personal meanings. Think of Wallace Stevens with Harmonium, and the weird way he uses colors like blue and green, and the significance portals take on. I write a little bit in an older post on Chelsey Minnis about how she does something similar in Poemland.

The second section will likely have a tangent on how a poem changes when removed from its book context. I have lots of examples of this, but the one I’ve been obsessing over lately is “The Second Coming”, by W.B. Yeats. Before this week, I’d only read the poem in anthologies, and while I’d always loved it, I had only thought of it in a general end-of-times, quasi-biblical context. Do you know where the poem appears in Yeats 1921 book Michael Robartes and the Dancer? After “Easter, 1916,” and “Sixteen Dead Men,” and “On a Political Prisoner,” and “The Leaders of the Crowd.” Read in this context, “The Second Coming” becomes a poem of political desperation, short years after an Irish uprising was quelled and its leaders were executed for treason—Surely some revelation is at hand;/ Surely the Second Coming is at hand!

Readers smarter than I would have deduced the political undertones of "The Second Coming" from an anthology if it gave the year, and especially if they knew of Yeats’ nationalism, but even so Yeats meant the poem to bookend some strongly political poetry. The poem is so much more powerful and immediate in the context of the book, where Yeats’ purposeful arrangement highlights the struggle for an independent Ireland. It also fits into another of Yeats’ traits—mythologizing the ordinary. That wouldn't fit in my essay, but I thought I'd mention it.

A better example, I think, is W.C. Williams, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Removing this poem from its context and putting it in an anthology should be a crime. Everyone knows this abused fragment, but here it is again:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Now, from this poem, students are supposed to understand that Williams was espousing an idea that can be summarized as “no ideas but in things?” Ridiculous. When this poem is taught in a class, it serves one primary purpose: it’s a soapbox for a teacher to talk about Imagism. Realistically, anything students should be exposed to concerning Williams—his American Idiom, his peculiar line breaks—can be better shown in other poems, such as “This Is Just To Say.” Teaching “The Red Wheelbarrow” can be useful, and it can be done much better with minimal, minimal effort by simply exposing students to a longer section of Spring & All, the book “The Red Wheelbarrow” is taken from. Using the poem this way not only allows students to really see Williams play with form as he mixes prose and poetry, and writes in fragments, it also allows them to read Williams explaining his ideas about Imagism for themselves, instead of feeling like idiots because they can’t get the history of modernism from four couplets like their brilliant teacher.

Obviously, the degree to which a poem suffers when removed from the context of the book varies in each case. With Wallace Stevens, not bad. “The Emperor of Ice Cream” is pretty easily comprehended, although I think reading it along with “The Snow Man,” and the rest of Harmonium really drives Stevens ideas home, and lets the reader enjoy them much more, because they've learned to read Stevens. With Yeats, I think we’re losing a bit more. Author intention is certainly not everything, but Yeats meant his poems to rely on one another, so a lot of raw information is lost when reading them as individual entities. With Williams and “The Red Wheelbarrow,” well, like I said, I think it’s a travesty. And this kind of thing happens with lots of poems. I mentioned in my last post that I think the goal of education should be exposure rather than specialization, but in this case, I think students aren't being exposed to how important books are.

I'm not saying don't read anthologies, or use them in class; I'm saying is it too much to ask that students read one entire book along with the anthology in a high school or undergrad creative writing course. Maybe Lowell's Life Studies, or Ariel, or Spring & All? It's been my experience that students enjoy being pushed in constructive ways, and exposed to new material. And discussing how a book shapes reader interpretation of poems, and author intent, could be an important part of student devolopment as they begin to persue authors that interest them and learn to shape their own poems into manuscripts.

Since this is such a broad topic, I’m trying to find a way to focus it, and I’m thinking that selecting well-known books from various time periods might allow me to make a cohesive argument. Yeats, Stevens, and Williams could even be a good starting point, and I want to incorporate my ideas on Minnis, whose use of the book works in some relation to Stevens, I think. She really kind of creates her own funny little world. I’m not sure I’ll need to address books that are structured narratives, or long poems, such as Yeats’ The Wanderings of Oisin, or Seth Abramson’s The Suburban Ecstasies, or even in-betweeners, like Catie Rosemurgy’s The Stranger Manual or Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa. But, obviously my choice on what contemporary books to write about will be important, so I may choose two or more. Something mainstream, as well as something experimental, since I like to read both, and the idea applies to all of poetry. This might be an August project.