By Victor D. Infante
On Friday, American poet, novelist and critic Jay Parini published a list of “10 Best American Poems” online for the British newspaper, The Guardian. On the surface, it’s a fine list, with a few standards, including Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which is pretty much the originating point of American poetry, and a few surprises, such as John Ashbery’s And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name.
“Every list is subjective,” writes Parini, “and of course the use of ‘greatest’ even more so – but these are not just ‘favorite’ poems. I’ve been thinking about American poetry – and teaching it to university students – for nearly 40 years, and these are the 10 poems that, in my own reading life, have seemed the most durable; poems that shifted the course of poetry in the United States.”
And again, it’s actually not a half-bad list, albeit one that appeals to the somewhat conservative middle-class poetic sensibilities American academics tend to share with the British media (which still puts them all ahead of the American media, which has no poetic sensibility to speak of at all.)
Still, one has to quibble, especially when one considers the terms Parini lays out. For example, Middle Passage, by Robert Hayden, is an excellent choice, but the absence of A Dream Deferred by Langston Hughes seems baffling. If influence on American poetry is a parameter, it’s hard to condone the exclusion of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, Sylvia Plath’s Daddy or Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool, each of which has been a starting point for a near-endless array of nascent poets. Parini himself expresses a deep regret at the absence of a number of poems, including Adrienne Rich’s Diving into the Wreck, and it’s difficult to not agree with him on that point.
But that’s the trap of these things, isn’t it? There comes a point where an attempt to reduce a subject as broad as American poetry becomes ridiculously reductive, and the excluded possibilities begin to fractal, leaving a list which says more about the taste and the perspective of the author than anything else. Almost anyone with a healthy knowledge of American poetry would have created a different list – some more dull, certainly, some more radical. And in 10 poems, all of them would have seemed insufficient.
So tell us. What poems would you have chosen?
My very incomplete list:
1. “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman
2. “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg
3. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes
4. “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks
5. “This Is Just To Say” by William Carlos Williams
6. “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri
7. “won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton
8. “Because I could not stop for death” by Emily Dickinson
9. “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath
10. “Chicago” by Carl Sandburg
The omission of William Carlos Williams is particularly troubling to me because Williams was much more of an American poet than Eliot was by virtue of Eliot’s Europhile tendencies. Also, Williams embracing of an American idiom (“We talk American; we don’t talk English.”) was the natural evolution of Whitman’s free verse and led to his introduction of Ginsberg’s Howl.
Y’know, it’s funny. I thought that about Eliot, myself, and decided not to make that argument because A.) Anglophile or not, he WAS American, whatever he wanted; and B.) I think his long-term influence ended up being stronger here than in England, especially through Poetry, which was publishing him. Ironically, he had his biggest stylistic impact on W.H. Auden, whom was seriously Americanized, in a lot of way. For all of his efforts, Eliot did more to bring American poetry and poetic ideas to Europe than the other way around.
Totally with you on Williams. For me, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s I Am Waiting might make the cut, too. But you begin to see Parini’s plight … (:
V.-
How many poems, excluded here, will haunt me tonight! My gut says (in no particular order) –
1. Walt Whitman “Song of Myself”
2. Hart Crane “The Bridge”
3. Gwendolyn Brooks “We Real Cool”
4. Wallace Stevens “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
5. John Ashbery “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
6. William Carlos Williams “The Red Wheelbarrow”
7. Emily Dickinson “The Soul Selects Her Own Society”
8. Kenneth Koch “In Bed”
9. De La Soul “Millie Pulled a Pistol on Santa Claus”
10. Frank Stanford “the battlefield where the moon says i love you”
This is my list of the 10 best U.S. poems:
1. Muriel Rukyser “Book of the Dead”
2. Langston Hughes “Harlem”
3. Anne Bradstreet “To My Dear and Loving Husband”
4. Paul Dunbar “We Wear the Mask”
5. Walt Whitman “When Lilacs in the Dooryard Bloomed”
6. Alan Ginsberg “Howl”
7. Simon Ortiz “Sandcreek”
8. Joy Harjo “‘The Women Hanging from the Thirteenth Floor Window”
9. Kenneth Patchen “Joe Hill Listens to the Praying”
10. Jimmy Santiago Baca “Mi Tio Baca El Poeta de Socorro”
To me, each of these poems sum up a poetic era. If I had an 11th choice, it would be
e.e. cummings. Cummings is the only American modernist poet whom I return to read again and agin.