So you want to be a major poet? You’ve come to the right place as I’ve located the four conditions necessary in becoming a major poet. (If that sounds daunting, don’t fear. You must only satisfy three and a half of them.) Editor and sometime poet W.H. Auden wrote in the introduction to his anthology, Nineteenth-Century British Minor Poets, this summation.
To qualify as a major poet:
1. He must write a lot.
2. His poems must show a wide range of subject matter and treatment.
3. He must exhibit an unmistakable originality of vision and style.
4. In the case of poets, we distinguish between their juvenilia and their mature work but, in the case of the major poet, the process of maturing continues until he dies so that, if confronted by two poems of his of equal merit but written at different times, the reader can immediately say which was written first. In the case of the minor poet, on the other hand, however excellent the two poems must be, the reader cannot settle the chronology on the basis of the poems themselves.
Disregarding the patriarchal and sexist “he” (sorry, Lisa), Auden’s guidelines make a fair bit of sense to me. I’m sure this line of thinking is not productive to a young poet, and to someone like Yeats, (who in my estimation, passes at least three of the four,) they probably arose naturally in his work. He didn’t sit down as a young poet thinking, “I must exhibit an unmistakable originality and vary my subject matter if I’m to be remembered.” I suppose I shouldn’t give these categories too much thought. However, Auden’s keys to greatness got me thinking about career progression, about how writers develop (or fail to develop) over the courses of their careers, and one notable exception stood out.
What about Jack Gilbert? Though he’s not been recognized, to my knowledge, as a major poet and is glaringly absent in my edition of The Norton Anthology, I can’t say I’ve encountered a poet who has better mastered the plain-spoken, confessional “I.” Even the slight takes on significance in the world of Jack Gilbert. Consider “Happily Planting the Beans Too Early” from Refusing Heaven:
I waited until the sun was going down
to plant the bean seedlings. I was
beginning on the peas when the phone rang.
It was a long conversation about what
living this way in the woods might
be doing to me. It was dark by the time
I finished. Made tuna fish sandwiches
and read the second half of a novel.
Found myself out in the April moonlight
putting the rest of the pea shoots into
the soft earth. It was after midnight.
There was a bird calling intermittently
and I could hear the stream down below.
She was probably right about me getting
strange. After all, Basho and Tolstoy
at the end were at least going somewhere.
Despite the quiet beauty of this poem and many of his others—try reading The Great Fires without grabbing for your loved one and holding him or her for the rest of the evening—he’d probably fail Auden’s standards of a “major” poet.
For one, he’s not been the most prolific. Aside from a publishing flurry in the past four years, he has had only three major books over the span of his 80+ years on earth: Views of Jeopardy (1962), which won the Yale Younger Series of Poetry, The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (1996), and Refusing Heaven (2005), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. (I leave out Monolithos only because its first half is comprised of poems from Views of Jeopardy. We can squabble over this minor point, but as an analogy, I direct you to Rolling Stones’ list of the top 500 albums. If I remember correctly, not one greatest hits album made the list. Instead, new, complete albums were given preference). This is all not to say he hasn’t written a bunch. I have no idea know if he has. However, he surely hasn’t published a great deal of work. I don’t disparage this; in fact, I encourage it. But regardless of my publishing inclinations (far too many books = watered-down quality), Auden would tsk.
Secondly, he doesn’t deviate wildly in his later two books from his core subjects of aging, grief, and isolation, and the form he funnels these ideas through is likewise unchanging. I was shocked when I opened Monolithos, after only knowing Gilbert through Refusing Heaven, to see stanzas! Apart from subject matter and a certain spunk (apparent in his early books—I have not had the opportunity to read all the poems from Views of Jeopardy though I have read Monolithos), which has been replaced with a sense of worldly exhaustion, his style has remained consistent and his work early work is largely indistinguishable from his later poems.
I will give him vision and style and maintain that in my progression as a writer, he was a major discovery. (Who knew Poets & Writers—where I first encountered him in a profile piece—could actually pay dividends?) But does he ultimately fail Auden’s test? Should we even spend anytime thinking about what this Auden fellow says? I know there are some Gilbert fans out there who must have a few thoughts…
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Your weekend song: Bang! Bang! by The Knux. Allow their coolness to wash over you. They’ll make you hip and groovy too. They’ll put that pop on ya like Redenbacher.
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The “Is that Really the Definition” Word of the Week:
past mistress—n. 1: a woman who is highly skilled, experienced, or expert at a profession, art, etc. : ADEPT.
Of course it is! What else could “past mistress” mean?
