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On Poetry
The Age of Citation
Imagine that this essay began not with the sentence you’re reading, but with the following observation, attributed to Wittgenstein: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” A little oblique for an opening gambit, you might think, but presumably it will pay off shortly. Imagine further, however, that the Wittgenstein quotation was immediately followed by quotes from Simone Weil, the Upanishads and the Hungarian poet Gyorgy Petri. At this point, you might find yourself wondering, “O.K., when is the actual author going to actually give me something he actually wrote?”
Right now, actually. And it is this: The above scenario is one that occurs with surprising frequency in books of contemporary poetry. Consider Liz Waldner’s recent collection, “Trust.” First, we’re presented with epigraphs from Lewis Carroll and Karl Marx that are presumably meant to cover the book as a whole; then we have an epigraph from Samuel Johnson that’s meant to apply to Section 1; and finally, we have an epigraph from Plato’s “Symposium” in the first poem. So that’s four writers we’ve encountered before we’ve read one line from the author.
To be fair to Waldner, this tally is by no means unusual: a quick survey of recent collections on my bookshelf yields opening pronouncements from Wallace Stevens, Walter Benjamin, Shakespeare, Karl Marx (again), James Schuyler, Don DeLillo, Gertrude Stein, Chekhov, Ovid, Dickinson, Sappho, the Wu-men kuan, Theodore Roethke and the 18th-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Randall Jarrell said his generation lived in the age of criticism; we apparently live in the age of citation.
Why is that? In part, our abundance of epigraphs is simply a function of poets doing what poets have always done. Chaucer opened “The Knight’s Tale” with a quotation from the Roman poet Statius; Alexander Pope began the 1743 version of the “Dunciad” with an epigraph from Ovid; and Keats prefaced his “Poems” with a quotation from Spenser (as well as a drawing of Shakespeare’s head). But while epigraphs have always been a part of poetic tradition, they do seem to be unusually thick on the ground these days, and not just in America — as the Canadian poet and critic Carmine Starnino wryly noted in the January issue of Poetry magazine: “Lately it seems no book of Canadian poetry can be put to bed without an epigraph to tuck it in.”
Some of the credit (or blame) for this peculiar ubiquity probably belongs to the continuing and often underestimated influence of T. S. Eliot. Eliot is, after all, the master quotation-dispenser of Anglo-American letters, with almost half of the poems of his maturity sporting some preliminary wisdom. “The Waste Land,” for instance, begins with the following excerpt from Petronius, which Eliot helpfully declines to translate: “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί Θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποΘανεῖν Θέλω.” (Roughly, “Sorry about ‘Cats.’ ”) Along with his sidekick Pound, Eliot inspired a generation of midcentury poets to offer up little appetizers from the illustrious dead, and it’s interesting to see so many poets today working from the same menu.
But if the epigraph’s prevalence is a product of history, it also reflects the specific needs of our own literary moment. In “Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation,” the theorist Gérard Genette claims four basic functions for epigraphs. The first two are straightforward — an epigraph can comment on the title of a given work, or it can apply to the work’s body. But after that, matters get a little more “oblique,” as Genette diplomatically puts it. “Very often,” he says of the epigraph, “the main thing is not what it says but who its author is, plus the sense of indirect backing that its presence at the edge of a text gives rise to.” The point, then, isn’t Karl Marx’s wisdom, it’s “Karl Marx.”
In addition, the epigraph can be “a signal . . . of culture, a password of intellectuality.” With it, Genette says, the author “chooses his peers and thus his place in the pantheon.” So if you were wondering where my work belongs in the greater scheme of things, look right here: Pascal, Dickinson!
That last function is the most relevant one for contemporary poetry. Like all literary genres, poetry is constantly in the business of positioning itself — of reminding us what poems are, and how they’re to be read. And as Eliot understood, epigraphs can assist in this process by acting as a shorthand for tradition. But traditions aren’t all the same size or shape. When T. S. Eliot quotes Dante and Heraclitus, it’s because Eliot wants to be seen as binding together thousands of years of Western culture. When a contemporary poet quotes the same authors, however, it’s more likely that he wants to be seen (whether he knows it or not) as T. S. Eliot. That’s not a bad thing, of course. But it does reflect a change in the way that Eliot’s signature device is being deployed: once a symbol of ambition, the epigraph is now more likely to be an indication of community. It tells us less about whom a poet hopes to equal and more about where he’d like to hang out.
In this sense, the epigraph reflects a larger trend in American poetry. Partly as a result of the art form’s academic attachment, poets are increasingly knit together in complicated patterns based on mentorship, instruction or just basic university proximity. These structures can encourage a kind of association via pedigree that greatly resembles association via epigraph. In “Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry,” for example, the critic Robert Archambeau smartly traces poets including Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass through their connection to Yvor Winters at Stanford. It’s a project that wouldn’t work (or at least, not quite so well) with Eliot or Frost or Williams, simply because times have changed. That said, some of the interdependence in today’s poetry world isn’t a function of modernity but of insecurity, which is why you’ll occasionally find writers claiming to be “fourth-generation New York School poets,” as if latching on to your great-grandfather’s avant-garde were something to be proud of, rather than sheepish about. Presumably it feels better to be a poet carrying on the tradition of “X” than just a plain old poet talking to the void.
Which brings us, finally, to the question of audience. As Genette points out, the epigraph is often a token of literary fashion — but because fashions vary from group to group, the ones you follow say a great deal about whom you expect to meet. So it’s interesting that Eliot himself appears so rarely in contemporary poetic epigraphs, despite his responsibility for their popularity. Indeed, to judge again from a quick tour of my bookshelf, Wallace Stevens beats Eliot by a count of something like 15 to none. That disparity has nothing to do with the relative abilities of the two poets (both are brilliant) and everything to do with the expectations of the contemporary poetry world, in which Stevens has been a fashionable name to drop for decades, whereas Eliot . . . well, weren’t we sick of him by 1940? When poets quote Stevens but not Eliot (or Frost, for that matter), the implication is they expect a potential reader to be the sort of person who considers Stevens the Acceptable Name.
And yet Eliot is one of the few poets the average reader actually knows. So the contemporary poet can please either the universe he inhabits (a smart thing to do, as it’s the only one he can be sure of) or he can play to the taste of an audience that probably doesn’t exist. It’s a hard choice. And it very likely explains one of the more distinctive and inevitable epigraphic tactics of our era, which you might call the Janus approach. This is when a poet pairs epigraphs from very different cultural realms, as when William Matthews opened his 1995 collection “Time and Money” with quotes from Stevens (naturally) and Fats Waller (“One never knows, do one?”). The quotes have little to do with each other, or with the book as a whole, but there’s a wistfulness in their pairing that recalls the delicate yearning for connection of a Victorian poet circa 1850. It’s almost enough to make you think that time present and time past might both be present in time future. As someone may have said.
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