Marguerite Young's Collected Poems
She was already a powerful lyricist by age NINE...
Marguerite Young is primarily known for her long novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. I remember seeing the two-volume edition sitting tantalizingly in the college library stacks. The cover of one of the editions from the 90s has a photo of the author hugging the large solid cube of a manuscript to her lap. That she had been a poet of great renown till the mid 40s was dimly known to me. But when I read one of her poems a couple of years ago, I immediately got the impression of a high-quality mind working in exalted realms of knowledge. The impression was confirmed last year with the release of her Collected Poems, a project initiated over 30 years ago and now includes poems never seen before that were uncovered in 1990.
“Poetry is the purest art,” she wrote in her 1989 introduction for the book. “For the poems, I would like for my audience to be poets, of whom there are so many in America—poetry being, it seems to me, our greatest art form.” Now we can see how Young was one of those writers whose later prose books could be seriously considered as poetic works, or at least developments of her practice in these lyrics. They are wonderfully substantial and traditional in a way that shows how different literature has become within the same society—and they are stark and fresh at the same time. To use one of her phrases, they are “very old and very new.”
The arcane charm of Young’s classical style
In a poem from Young’s early period (1917-1934) called “The Seeker,” a man sits before his collection of postcards at his kitchen table alone at night. I was carried away by this evocative catalog of pictures in blank verse, the idealized European trappings, the alliteration:
And here would lie a haunting Grecian girl, / And there a placid old cathedral’s spires, / And here the clustered roofs of some walled town, / And there a fleet of white-winged ships returning / Across a silver sea as smooth as glass; / And castles perched on cliffs above the clouds, / Green marble fountains splashing streams of light, / Thin wayside crosses hung with wreaths of flowers, / And Mont Saint Michel rising from the mist, / Its towers and tourelles mirrored in the waters—
Throughout her work Young sustained an epic, Miltonic atmosphere, using Latinate syntax in some poems, as well as a particular effect of wonderment that comes from natural and astronomical beauty. There is lot of flight and weightless freedom across expansive worlds in these poems, bringing to mind some lines from book 10 of Paradise Lost, where the upshot of partaking in the fruit includes the tilting of the earth’s axis to create seasonal changes and passage of the sun:
Some say he bid his Angels turne ascanse / The Poles of Earth twice ten degrees and more / From the Suns Axle; they with labour push'd / Oblique the Centric Globe: Som say the Sun / Was bid turn Reines from th' Equinoctial Rode / Like distant breadth to Taurus with the Seav'n / Atlantick Sisters, and the Spartan Twins / Up to the Tropic Crab; thence down amaine / By Leo and the Virgin and the Scales, / As deep as Capricorne, to bring in change / Of Seasons to each Clime; else had the Spring / Perpetual smil'd on Earth with vernant Flours, / Equal in Days and Nights, except to those / Beyond the Polar Circles; to them Day / Had unbenighted shon, while the low Sun / To recompence his distance, in thir sight / Had rounded still th' Horizon, and not known / Or East or West, which had forbid the Snow / From cold Estotiland, and South as farr / Beneath Magellan.
Other early pieces incorporate folktale imagery of woodlands and monsters while continuing the classical style, reminiscent of the fairytale-like stories of Ducornet or Carter:
But in the limpid evening
She quite forgot her loss;
She listened for their coming
Like leaves that fall on moss. (“Wild Deer”)
Her poetry is reminiscent of Wallace Stevens (not exactly her contemporary but he did publish mostly in the 30s and 40s), only more attentive to content, more carefully generous toward the poetic material, and a lot more accessible.
The substantial philosophy in Young’s verse
I don’t mean that it trades in fashionable critical theory concepts or grand words, or even that her poems are somehow “doing philosophy” on their own purely aesthetic terms.
No—Young expressed solid philosophical ideas, rooted in classical German Idealism, in tight English verse, in a way that presented the fundamental questions of the field, regarding the relationship between consciousness and the things that present themselves before it.
Thinking, or existing? What actually comes first, logically speaking? It’s easy to say our being comes first: we move through the world and apprehend things in it through our sense impressions. Our ordinary sensual experience seems to naturally confirm the objective solidity of the Universe. This inborn common sense realism certainly got me to the café to write this letter in one piece.
But how can we really know if we can’t really get outside our head, out of our own first-person experience of consciousness? Bishop Berkeley—who will appear in one of Young’s later poems—put forward a hardcore solipsism where knowledge stops at the collections of ideas that compose “things.” We can only say things exist to the extent that we perceive them: to exist is to be perceived. To go any further and claim absolute knowledge of things’ existence is an impermissible transcendence of experience (when idealist philosophers say that materialism is a form of metaphysics, this is in part what they mean).
One thing that follows from this premise is that if you should be destroyed, the Universe will wink out like a dream. Western philosophers have been backtracking from this pure subjective idealism ever since: to empiricism (Hume) or rationalism (Liebnitz), or against both of these, the agnosticism of Kant.
An untitled poem from Young’s middle period (1938-1943) begins by proposing another take on this question of the relation between thought and being:
[…] Like roses wherein time and space must wed,
All cohere in us. We are both subject thinking and object thought of, / And nothing certain, but glitter of our eyes, / That bright glitter of the dumb and blind.
For Christ, the mediation process, moves between / Us and the thing-in-itself. The leopard’s bane is tentative as angel, / Or honey gathered from the atmosphere, / For we cannot know how much of us is involved in the act of knowledge,
Christ is a veil of illusion on our eyes.
Things “cohere in us.” That is, neither ‘being determines thought,’ nor ‘thought determines being,’ but a kind of pragmatic simultaneity of the two elements in the moment of perception. This is the model preferred by Husserl’s phenomenology and then Sartre’s existentialism a little later.
“Nothing certain.” If Kant is right, then the knowledge we hold is subjective in nature. Self-consciousness conditions everything that happens in our cognitive activities. Something is provoking my sensations, but I don’t absolutely know anything about that thing as such, or the thing-in-itself, other than that it’s out there. All I really have to go on is the phenomena represented in my mind, furnished by the excitations of my nervous system—the “glitter of our eyes”—phenomena that are merely fragmentary manifestations of the thing-in-itself. Never shall the two meet.
Christ moves between us and phenomena as “the mediation process” because he contains both human and divine nature. Young draws an analogy between the epistemic model that “unifies” the world and experience within the subjective mind, and the hypostatic union of Christian doctrine. But to stay consistent with the philosophical system we’ve established, Christ’s mediation must ultimately be a veil, an obstacle to reliable cognition of reality, which is intangible as the surreal image of atmospheric honey.
Some of the phrases and motifs from this draft poem make it into a piece from her second book, Moderate Fable, called “That Apple Was Mental.” The epistemic problem is given some dramatic weight by linking it to Original Sin:
That apple Eve ate, a sweetness or sourness, a roundness, a redness / Subsided as no experience of fact / But marriage of Eve with space.
Eating the apple is not an “experience of fact,” not gaining direct knowledge of the taste of an apple by ingesting it—and thereby transforming this particular specimen of matter—but a mental image, an image only recognizable by general properties: sweetness, sourness, roundess, redness. These nesses are the Categories in Kant’s system, and they work to synthesize our particular perceptions, the Intuitions, into knowledge.
The poem continues to elaborate “this view” that “The effects of the body / comprise the body.” We don’t know things but the Berkeleian combinations of senses that represent things:
Yet whether harmony is probable is our disputation, / If indeed there is a coherence of snow-colored ibis / And apprehensive senses of the fragmentary
Man, locus for the transparent bird / And starlight striking in particles on his two eyes.
Any one individual can only gain partial knowledge of the world within the range of their senses, and this subjectivity is the “locus for the transparent bird,” an elegant image because it evokes the thing-in-itself conceptualized apart from its image. The phrase occurs in the earlier version too, as an assertive negation of any correspondence between what we perceive and what exists:
Or shall we rather say, all things are process / And no locus ever for the transparent bird
And no color of the invisible we hear, no sound / Of the inaudible…
The tenor of the improved poem is more scientific than the untitled draft as well. The “glitter” of fragmentary perception has become a more precise image of photons from starlight. And the Christ figure re-enters with more linguistic tautness: “For Christ, the mediation process, moves ever between self / And thing-in-itself.” But despite being more conditional, the poem stops decisively in the idealist camp, taking perception as “deception played by lonely man.”
But who gets the last word?
This technical discussion doesn’t do justice to the pictures Young injects into your imagination. And what picturesque images these poems contain, full of natural activity at once earthy and ephemeral. “That Apple Was Mental” supplements the intangibility of “Honey gathered from the atmosphere,” with “insects generated out of evening dew,” and “the wind-impregnated mare / In meadows sloping toward a sea which has no permanence but possibility.”
More comes to us in “Bishop Berkeley of Cloyne,” which features a dialog between that philosopher and John the Baptist’s severed head. (Young in her introduction takes time to point out that some figures in this poem became elements in Miss MacIntosh.) In this poem Berkeley discourses on how his solipsism means it makes no difference if your head is attached or not—how do you know you aren’t just a brain in a jar taking in fabricated visualisations “as food through a tube”?
And in a reverie he begins to “furnish” his mental world with fantasies:
And furnish my brain with dim antarctic circles, yea, / And moose I paced for with jewelled spears, / That congregation holy as the idea of God,
Yea, furnish complete and awesome thought / And the blind seal swimming up an Irish stream / The peasant caught and took to the lonely church / Believing a lost soul had at last come home,
Yea, furnish my brain with hemispheres snow-caped / And the handkerchief in the raven’s nest / And my wife who talks to her husband and the departed only.
But after all this, there is just one line that answers, and think it suffices:
Yet how will away the absent hills? How shall they not endure outside us?
Ultimately the problems resolve in favor of that spontaneously arising sense of realism.
Young in her 1989 introduction talks about the “dragging in” of “all perceptions and all metaphors” into the work, and this volume of her poetry, with its trove of draft poems, displays the long evolution of her approach to composing, of “including without undue censorship the riches of…perceptions,” as she told her students, in order to produce “something very old and very new.” She would go on to extend this artistic project into her prose works, Angel in the Forest (about 19th c. utopian socialism), Harp Song For a Radical (about Eugene V. Debs), and her magnum opus Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.
With this excellently produced book, the culmination of a decades-long editorial project, we have a thorough presentation of her lyrics, these “divine jewels” of her making. Bound together as such, her early poems form a beautiful entrance corridor to the edifice of her later prose.
Young’s oeuvre needs to be reprinted. I await the reissue of Miss MacIntosh, My Darling with bated breath! (And if you’re a paid subscriber and the prospect of a multi-post first time readthrough of this major novel sounds good, consider leaving a comment.)
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See the Introduction to Kant’s Prolegomena for a succinct (for him!) discussion on his move against Hume’s skepticism. For Hume, any truth that isn’t a simple tautology can only be contingent, depending on an ever-changing world. Everything needs to be challenged in this empiricist framework, even mechanical cause and effect.
When you kick a ball, it moves. But not in all instances or places that we can imagine, and therefore “when you kick a ball, it moves” is not actually a simple logical truth. The statement’s truth doesn’t lie solely on the terms involved. The truth of the statement is contingent, a posteriori, an example of reasoning from given facts.
Kant needs to make the world intelligible again, and to do it he needs a system of thought that can sustain a reasoning independent of experience, or a priori:
The question was not whether the concept of cause was right, useful, and even indispensable for our knowledge of nature, for this Hume had never doubted; but whether that concept could be thought by reason a priori, and consequently whether it possessed an inner truth, independent of all experience, implying a wider application than merely to the objects of experience. This was Hume's problem. It was a question concerning the origin, not concerning the indispensable need of the concept. Were the former decided, the conditions of the use and the sphere of its valid application would have been determined as a matter of course.
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I openly confess, the suggestion of David Hume was the very thing, which many years ago first interrupted my dogmatic slumber, and gave my investigations in the field of speculative philosophy quite a new direction. I was far from following him in the conclusions at which he arrived by regarding, not the whole of his problem, but a part, which by itself can give us no information. If we start from a well-founded, but undeveloped, thought, which another has bequeathed to us, we may well hope by continued reflection to advance farther than the acute man, to whom we owe the first spark of light.
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Hopefully the choice to include so much technical philosophy in a debut post for a literary newsletter won’t be too destructive. But it feels appropriate to involve such a foundational story for western culture as Adam and Eve in this beginning.
Next week, we’re piggy-backing off the historical socialism that Young focused on, to another politically charged American writer of the 20th century: Richard Wright (who cast his lot at one point with the Communist movement in the US, whose trajectory, generally speaking, began where Debs’s ended with the American Railway Union).