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    Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery
    Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery
    Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery

    By Helen Vendler

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    When a poet addresses a living person--whether friend or enemy, lover or sister--we recognize the expression of intimacy. But what impels poets to leap across time and space to speak to invisible listeners, seeking an ideal intimacy--George Herbert with God, Walt Whitman with a reader in the future, John Ashbery with the Renaissance painter Francesco Parmigianino? In Invisible Listeners, Helen Vendler argues that such poets must invent the language that will enact, on the page, an intimacy they lack in life.


    Through brilliantly insightful and gracefully written readings of these three great poets over three different centuries, Vendler maps out their relationships with their chosen listeners. For his part, Herbert revises the usual "vertical" address to God in favor of a "horizontal" one-addressing God as a friend. Whitman hovers in a sometimes erotic, sometimes quasi-religious language in conceiving the democratic camerado, who will, following Whitman's example, find his true self. And yet the camerado will be replaced, in Whitman's verse, by the ultimate invisible listener, Death. Ashbery, seeking a fellow artist who believes that art always distorts what it represents, finds he must travel to the remote past. In tones both tender and skeptical he addresses Parmigianino, whose extraordinary self-portrait in a convex mirror furnishes the poet with both a theory and a precedent for his own inventions.


    By creating the forms and speech of ideal intimacy, these poets set forth the possibility of a more complete and satisfactory human interchange--an ethics of relation that is uncoerced, understanding, and free.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPrinceton University Press
    Release dateFeb 9, 2009
    ISBN9781400826711
    Author

    Helen Vendler

    Helen Vendler is Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University. She is the editor of ‘The Faber Book of American Poetry’ (1990).

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      Book preview

      Invisible Listeners - Helen Vendler

      L.Haven

      Contents

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      INTRODUCTION Invisible Listeners

      ONE George Herbert and God

      TWO Walt Whitman and the Reader-in-Futurity

      THREE John Ashbery and the Artist of the Past

      CONCLUSION Domesticating the Unseen

      NOTES

      Acknowledgments

      I am grateful to the Princeton University Press for inviting me to give the Farnum Lectures on which this small book is based, and to two editors at the Press,Mary Murrell, who guided the book at its inception, and Hanne Winarsky, who brought it to its conclusion. The hospitality of the Press and the Department of English made my visit to Princeton a very pleasant one. I thank the anonymous readers of the manuscript, who raised significant questions that affected the final form of these chapters. It was the poet Alan Williamson who, some decades ago, when I expressed some skepticism about Ashbery, sat me down on the spot and made me read The Skaters; without that timely intervention, my subsequent writing on Ashbery, including the chapter here, might not have come about. My assistant, Alicia Peralta, put my manuscript into the proper form for the Press, and I owe her thanks for that as well as for her meticulous assistance in library research. Finally, and always, I feel gratitude to those who have taught me, either in person or by their books, to be a better reader of the poets considered here: these include the late Elsie Duncan-Jones, Wynn Thomas, Bonnie Costello, and John Shoptaw.My beloved grandchildren, to whom this book is affectionately dedicated, will I hope find my voice in it when they grow up.

      Invisible Listeners

      INTRODUCTION

      Invisible Listeners

      The chapters of this book investigate the odd practice by which certain poets address their poems, in whole or in part, to someone they do not know and cannot set eyes on, their invisible listener. George Herbert speaks to God;Walt Whitman to the reader in futurity; John Ashbery to a painter of the past. What are we to make of this choice of addressee? With many visible listeners presumably available—the beloved, the patron, the child, the friend—why does the poet feel he or she must hold a colloquy with an invisible other? And what is the ethical import of speaking to such a nonexistent being? To think about such a choice, we must look first at the more common sorts of address within the lyric.

      In its usual form, the lyric offers us the representation of a single voice, alone, recording and analyzing and formulating and changing its mind. Although no one else is present in fact, the solitary poet is frequently addressing someone else, someone not in the room. It has even been claimed that apostrophe—literally, a turning away from one’s strophe to address someone else—is the essence of the lyric (although there are many lyrics of solitary internal meditation that do not address another person; such a lyric is, as Arnold paradoxically said, a dialogue of the mind with itself ). One possible absent addressee of lyric is a person whom the fictive speaker knows—a lover, a patron, a family member. The speaker of Shakespeare’s son-nets may address the friend or the mistress; Donne may address his patron, Ben Jonson his dead son. This sort of human address could be called horizontal: although the poet may adopt a tone of formal respect (in the case of a patron) or one of adoring warmth (in the case of a lover), the addressee is, after all, merely another human being. But there exists also the vertical sort of address: in this case, the speaker’s apostrophe is directed to a person or thing inhabiting a physically inaccessible realm conceived as existing above the speaker. The vertically situated addressee may be a god (Christian or classical) or a nightingale or a Grecian urn, and may be situated in Heaven, on Parnassus, or on a Platonic plane where Truth and Beauty are one. The tone adopted by the speaker in vertical apostrophe rises above the level of respect shown to a worldly patron or the veneration shown toward a beloved, and manifests a humility suitable to a speaker addressing the divine.

      The loneliness experienced when one lacks an adequate relation to others is mentioned by many poets. This is my letter, says Emily Dickinson,to the World / That never wrote to Me.The painful asymmetry of the relation between expressive poet and in-different audience compels the continuous production of her letters to the silent world.Where art thou friend, whom I shall never see? asks Hopkins, estranged from both family and fellow students by his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Hopkins imagines two locations for the permanently invisible friend. Perhaps he is only somewhere else in the contemporary world—sunder’d from my sight in the age that is—but more probably, given the unconventionality of Hopkins’s character and verse, the friend remains the far-off promise of a time to be:

      Where art thou friend, whom I shall never see,

      Conceiving whom I must conceive amiss?

      Or sunder’d from my sight in the age that is

      Or far-off promise of a time to be; Thou who canst best accept the certainty That thou hadst borne proportion in my bliss,That likest in me either that or this,—Oh! even for the weakness of the plea That I have taken to plead with,— if the sound Of God’s dear pleadings have as yet not moved thee,—And for those virtues I in thee have found, Who say that had I known I had approved thee,—For these, make all the virtues to abound,—No, but for Christ who hath foreknown and loved thee.¹

      Although Hopkins’s invisible friend more probably lives in the future—a time to be—than in the present, the poet adopts to-ward him a tone of plangent present intimacy, confident that the friend would like in him one or another trait. At the same time, Hopkins recognizes the weakness of the plea of recommending religious conversion on the basis of a putative intimacy conceived over an impassable gulf of time.The extreme hunger of the present casts its desire for intimacy forward, imagining a society that could produce a companion who would bear proportion in the poet’s bliss.

      In these passages, Dickinson and Hopkins convert the normal intimate address to a known other into a rarefied form—intimate address to an unknown human other.What all lyrics of apostrophe, horizontal or vertical, offer us are tones of voice through which they represent, by analogy, various relations resembling those that we know in life. Lyrics can replicate the tenderness of a parent, the jealousy of a lover, the solicitude of a friend, the humility of a sinner. Such lyrics reveal the social relations in which the speaker is enmeshed, and they often embed within themselves the social norms embodied in various institutions such as the family, the church, or courtly love. But what is the poet to do who wants not to express such relations but to redefine them, who yearns, for example, to adopt a more intimate relation to God than that offered by the church,who intends to model an erotic relation between men not yet sanctioned by society, or who seeks an aesthetic identity currently unfashionable among living artists, but visibly present in the past? The intrinsic and constitutive ability of the lyric to create intimacy is perhaps most striking when the object of intimacy can never be humanly seen or known, yet can be humanly addressed. In such a case, the unseen other becomes an unseen listener, anchoring the voice of the poet as it issues into the otherwise vacant air.

      I will here be reflecting on the creation of intimacy with the invisible in the work of three poets. George Herbert, not finding in conventional prayer adequate verbal expressions of his relation to the divine, invents a new constellation of tones

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