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Anne Stevenson: Between the Iceberg and the Ship: Selected Essays. Michigan: University of Michigan Press,  £10.95.

Anne Stevenson: Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop. London: Agenda/Bellew, £15.95.

     Anne Stevenson writes of T.S. Eliot that his “poetry primarily relates to his preoccupation with language in search of faith; his criticism relates to language in search of objectivity in the discussion of poetry.” She continues,

His strengths, both as a poet and a critic, derive from the objectifying austerity of his intelligence, which enabled him to abstract and universalize his feelings without reference to his autobiography. His method was more like that of the Milton he attempted to downgrade than of the Dante he revered.

This passage exemplifies Stevenson’s approach as a critic and helps us to see her virtues. Behind this description of Eliot there is a clear theory about the man, a biographical understanding of the kind Eliot disliked. Time and again, Stevenson reads poems as the expressive utterances of particular lives. She does not reduce texts to the circumstances which may have shaped them, but shows how they carry the grain of those who made them.

     This “method” can lead to confusion. In ‘Sylvia Plath’s Word Games’, “Unless a reader knows something of this poet’s biography many of her references will be lost.” In other words, they haven’t been fully made over into art: Stevenson risks legitimising any pretentious obscurity or authorial vanity, not just Plath’s. Again, it leads her to speculate about Louis MacNeice’s ‘House on a Cliff’ in an Irish context to no revealing purpose at all. However, these are cavils: at her best, as on Seamus Heaney, for instance, Stevenson is an exact and illuminating reader.

     A particularly interesting pair of essays treat Eavan Boland. In the first, ‘Inside and Outside History’, Stevenson argues that Boland’s view of Irish women of the past is sentimental and bogus. She demonstrates a tradition of strong women’s writing which Boland overlooks, and concludes that

Only contemporary self-consciousness and a socially sanctioned piety far more inhibiting than old-fashioned Irish religion could snuff out the truly pagan spirit of the Irish past by substituting ideology for mythology and hand-wringing for energy and wit.

     Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill took exception to this, seeing in it a “subtle sneering tone”. In her rejoinder, ‘Outside Histrionics’, Stevenson declares that

The only way I know to insure poetry against the misconceptions and stereotypes of our time is to distrust all cultural generalizers and, as a woman or man, allow oneself to make poetry out of the particular. That will be the poetry that lasts and that eventually will represent the imagination and culture (whatever its faults) of our period.

Stevenson’s humanist sanity is both challenging and bracing. Her refusal to participate in group-think, her resistance to all generalisation, enable her to read sympathetically a broader range of poetry than is often the case. Her unfashionable insistence on the universality of good poems is far more liberated and liberating than the gang-stances so many contemporary poets, male and female, adopt.

     Dealing with poetry’s low station in our culture, Stevenson observes that there may be several reasons for “mistrusting contemporary language”, sullied as it is with the jargons of sociology and advertising. “In times like ours [...] it may even be that our best, most sensitive writers are those least able to manipulate words, the slowest to fall into the habits of convenience speech.” Stevenson believes, I think rightly, that poetry should look harder at contemporary science. “In the years since the world wars, poetry in England and America has pretty well abandoned overarching problems of philosophical truth”, and “Today, what is still called ‘poetry’ has fragmented, for the most part, into a plethora of politically-inspired factions”. Of course, these generalisations invite the reader to find rebutting instances, but nonetheless they convey a broadly accurate picture. Citing the physicist Richard Feynman, Stevenson suggests that “Once released from anthropocentric obsession, any poet, any observant person of whatever race or gender, can become, for moments anyway, that eye – e-y-e, not the ubiquitous capital I – to which nothing is ‘mere’”:

In the future, self-cancellation (losing yourself to find yourself) might well come to be accepted as a poet’s necessary prerequisite for finding words to express something of what Feynman and others like him have discovered to be the most spiritual and miraculous challenge of reality.

The text speaks of “loosing yourself”, but I take that to be a misprint, one of rather too many. Stevenson proposes that a poetry which did not centre exclusively on the human might earn the central cultural position from which it has temporarily been exiled. She may well be right.

     Naturally, when trying to think of a poet whose self was reticent and who had trouble finding words, one comes to Elizabeth Bishop. I must admit that for over twenty years I have felt Bishop’s reputation to be excessive. I have wondered how far it was, as is often the case, easier for her jostling male contemporaries to praise a woman rather than each other. Equally, her placing as an ancestor of Martianism seemed designed to exclude both Norman MacCaig and Boris Pasternak. Further, elevating Bishop meant depreciating both Lowell and Berryman, examples too powerful for their successors. In other words, I suspected that Bishop’s work was being used for purposes of literary politics: I continue to think so. But I was wrong about the poems. Anne Stevenson’s Five Looks at Elizabeth Bishop constitute a compelling book; patiently and intelligently, Stevenson elucidates and illuminates her subject, relating work and life with exemplary tact. I read it with mounting excitement and, ultimately, gratitude. In a healthy culture, it would be a best-seller.