Containing Multitudes: Poetry in the United States Since 1950.
Edited by Fred Moramarco and William Sullivan.
Twayne Publishers, 370pp., $32.


With the immense number of poets now publishing in America, a book surveying the contemporary scene has been needed for some time. Quite a few readers wish to know who they can comfortably skip without remorse, which poets some critical consensus agrees need not be bothered with. Of course this need has hardly been felt in our mainstream culture, since no one reads poetry anymore, but in our classrooms, where captive audiences of adolescents must slog through such bloated anthologies as Jerome Rothenberg's 872-page Poems for the Millennium.

Thus, the survey is a unique genre: a guide to all the people whom no one reads, sold to the children who are forced to read them.

This state of affairs creates another imbalance: in order to get their books adopted in the classroom, the writers of surveys must include every poet that a teacher might wish to discuss. The Poet Laureate of the United States? Of course. The Poet Laureate of Oklahoma? Possibly. The Poet Laureate of the Nowata Women's Auxiliary? Best not to take any chances. So the survey writer dutifully notes everyone, mentions people he has never read, has never heard of, prays that he has left no one out. Critical history, presumably written to help students sort through their contemporaries, becomes the phone book without the ads: a sorry mass of undifferentiated data.

So, into this Bedlam appears Containing Multitudes, a survey of recent American poetry, which covers “more than 60 poets, acknowledging the remarkable variety and diversity of poetic talent.” Rather than survey the field by doting on the particularly talented, the authors have decided to summarize the work, lives, and general significance of some five-dozen poets in a mere 370 pages. The subtitle of such a work could be: Very Brief Remarks.

Such are the pressures of inclusion in this volume, that not just whole poems, or collections, but entire poetic careers are reduced to paraphrase. Just imagine writing about the importance of Randall Jarrell, and doing it in three pages. Imagine summarizing his critical views in one paragraph, though his criticism is contained in four volumes. Imagine how wrong you can be:

As a critic, this led him to fault poets who failed to record contemporary life accurately and to imitate the rhythms of actual speech. In Jarrell's view, for example, W.H. Auden's work lacked both substance and power because it had degenerated into mere poetic rhetoric.
Imagine writing these two simple sentences, sentences so wrong that they call into question whether you have ever read Jarrell's criticism. Just think how two disastrous words (“for example”) can harness the second sentence (which presents Randall's view of the later Auden as his view of the whole of Auden) to the first, thus presenting as an example of Jarrell's criticism a view which no critic in the English-speaking world has ever uttered or would dare to entertain. For not only was Auden Jarrell's favorite poet, but no one (including Jarrell) would ever accuse Auden of having “failed to record contemporary life accurately and to imitate the rhythms of actual speech.”

After such thoughtlessness, what forgiveness? How could two professors of English blunder so spectacularly, on page six? The answer, of course, is that they are hardly interested in Jarrell, or Auden for that matter. What the authors are really interested in are Statements, and Revolutions, and Revolutionary Statements...in other words, Politics. So Robert Duncan is important in American poetry because:

An early poem...clearly indicates Duncan's insistence on openly acknowledging and celebrating both the homoerotic and spiritual elements of homosexual love. These poems and actions clearly foreshadow the gay and lesbian social activism of the seventies and eighties, and they made it possible for many homosexual poets to openly express their sexuality in their work. Duncan joins that company of visionary poets who insist on revisioning art as well as our private and public lives.
Thus the bigger the Statement, the bigger the Verse.

This means spending two pages glossing over Robert Pinsky but four pages on Sonia Sanchez and her HOMEGIRLS AND HANDGRENADES, because, “as indicated by the title of the book, there is a tension here between the redemptive force of love and the need for revolution.” This means dividing the poets up between the boys and the girls, the blacks and the Indians, so that diversity is celebrated by an obnoxious cataloging.

This leads, of course, to some curious critical judgments. The sprawling, the messy, the inchoate poem means Freedom. Conversely, any display of technical virtuosity or traditional poetic form is suspicious, since poetic conservatism leads to political conservatism. The two are equated with each other so consistently that, in condemning two harmless anthologies, the authors can state:

The conservatism of the Reagan era made for what was largely perceived as a climate hostile to experimentation and innovation in poetry, one resistant to the notion of expanding the bounds and limits of what sorts of individuals might be valued as poets in the United States.
Having seamlessly joined aesthetic traditionalism to social elitism, the authors then execute what might best be called the Beat fallacy:

Although these anthologies contain first-rate work by first-rate writers, innovation is lacking. This is not poetry born of an imperative vision. This is the poetry of revision rather than vision.
It is hard to believe that intelligent readers of poetry (let alone professors of English literature) could forward such simple-minded equations. How could any critic believe that revision destroys writing, by altering the supposedly “pure” first draft? And when did the possession of leftist sympathies ever guarantee poetic talent, let alone “imperative vision?”

What it does seem to guarantee in this book is sodden prose: one is always encountering awkward phrases, indeterminate remarks, and comments so equivocal that one imagines the authors must have cribbed from some Stanley Kunitz manual on blurb-writing. What is one to make of such random pronouncements as: “The poem's images are generated by subconscious associations, limited by the experience being described” or “the desire to be awake in the river of life, not to sleep and not to remain silent, is the force that gives life to her poetry?”

If there is a cardinal sin in criticism, it is equivocation. The desire not to offend anybody, to find beauty everywhere, to say something polite about everything, is a political virtue, not a critical one. The critic must be critical, and that is precisely what our present critics are not. Containing Multitudes will not help anyone to read more judiciously; rather, it will confuse those students who wish to discover poets of importance even more. But all of this is, as they say, academic. And that the authors could have learned their survey was doomed from the start from that much-maligned figure Randall Jarrell (had they bothered to read him) constitutes, then, a last irony which we should rightly call poetic justice: "Whether we live in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth I, there is one law we can be sure of: there are only a few good poets alive. And there follows from it another law, about critics: if a man likes a great many contemporary poets, he is, necessarily, a bad critic."



Garrick Davis is editor of Contemporary Poetry Review. He lives in California.