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Preface
Marjorie Perloff 2 PROFESSOR, STANFORD UNIVERSITY
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| First, a word about choices of volumes by the poets above: I almost chose Rilke's Duino
Elegies, but Neue Gedichte contains such classics as "Torso of Apollo" and "The Panther"
—classics that just couldn't NOT be on a top ten list. I chose Prufrock rather than
The Waste Land because I believe Eliot had already hit on his great poetic mode by the
time Prufrock was published. I chose A Draft of XXX Cantos by Pound because only in his
Cantos did Pound do something that changed the course of poetry forever. I chose The Tower
as Yeats' most fully realized collection of poems. And I chose Akhmatova's Requiem because
it was a political milestone as well as a great work—her poem contra Stalinism—and hence
deserves a place. I might have made other choices within the Césaire or Celan corpus but
those are my favorites. As for Tender Buttons, I am aware that many of my fellow critics
dismiss this book as "not poetry" but I think it qualifies on every poetic ground: intensity,
verbal complexity, formal brilliance, thematic richness.
But I am not sure my second string is not equally good. 1. William Carlos Williams, Spring and All (1923) Indeed, I agonized about not having Williams on the list but if I judge by impact and influence as well as "greatness," I opted for Yeats instead. True, Yeats looks back to the nineteenth century—it's hard to believe that the "Byzantium" poems and "The Second Coming" are written much later than Eliot's or Pound's early works—but the fact remains that these poems are among the great poems of the century. 2. Wallace Stevens, Harmonium (1923) Certainly one of the great books of the century, but not as influential as the others. 3. Velimir Khlebnikov I take Khlebnikov to be the great Russian poet of the period, but there isn't one volume that's seminal and so he is not on my top ten list. 4. Guillaume Apollinaire, Calligrammes (1918) A central volume of twentieth-century inventions, especially in the verbal-visual realm, but Cendrars is even more important, I feel, and the two are similar. So I chose Cendrars. 5. W. H. Auden, The Sea and the Mirror (1944) And a list without Georg Trakl, Bertold Brecht, without Montale and Vallejo and Pessoa? And without the avant-gardists Kurt Schwitters, Tristan Tzara or Max Jacob? It's unfortunate, but ten items is very little. On principle, I have chosen to omit poets who have come of age in the second half of century—so there is no Ginsberg, no Ashbery, etcetera—because it is difficult to judge the present and because, when I thought about it, it struck me that no contemporary poet has quite the ambition, range and influence of the poets of the early century. Grace Schulman 3 POETRY EDITOR, THE NATION
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| 1. Marianne Moore, Selected Poems Of the many reasons why Moore's Selected Poems is ground-breaking, I'll offer two. (1) She was the first of her major contemporaries to write (in 1922) of urban people behaving mechanically for want of insight. This theme was to become dominant in the literature and painting of the period. In "People's Surroundings," which appeared first in The Dial (June 1922), she writes of the city as "the vast indestructible necropolis/ of composite Yawman-Erbe separable units . . ." preceding Eliot's "unreal city" of The Waste Land (1922) and Williams' "automatons" of Paterson (1946). (2) The sequence, "Part of a Poem, Part of a Novel, Part of a Play" (later revised and split into three poems), is ground-breaking in that its length is sustained by musical effects, by rhyme and image patterns, rather than by a closed form. Here the rhythm and the sensibility are new. Even Eliot, notably adherent to tradition in poetry, wrote in his introduction to this volume, "Miss Moore has no immediate poetic derivations. I cannot, therefore, fill up my pages with the usual account of influences and development." Your question does not ask about the books' greatness, and I will say only that it contains "Poetry," "A Grave," "The Fish," "No Swan So Fine," "Critics and Connoisseurs" and "Roses Only." 2. Ezra Pound, The Cantos "The epic of the farings of a literary mind," Moore called The Cantos, and added, "The ghost of Homer sings." Begun in 1904 and representing the work of a lifetime, The Cantos is the most ambitious poetic sequence of the 20th century. The multiple hero, or "periplum," the poet merging with heroes of the past, speaks to us of our civilization as it is seen from the vantage point of many luminous eras. His brilliant use of metamorphosis, akin to Joyce's experiments in Ulysses, shows us reality as a process of perceptual change. And lest we forget: The title of this assignment, "Make it New," is one Ezra Pound translated from Confucius, and gave us as our most precious gift. 3. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land A conventional choice, I'm afraid. But then, how can one live without it? Four Quartets is a better book, I feel, but The Waste Land may be the century's primary ground- breaker. Reasons: You've heard them all before—his absence of transitions, his handling of the simultaneity of occurrences over time, his theme of the present ironically placed in the shadow of past beauty, his vision of a doomed civilization and language. OK, OK. I hear the reader yawning. But it's true. 4. The New Poetry, edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson Both editors of Poetry in 1917, they included here poetry published outside the magazine as well, but nothing before 1900. Among the poets are H.D., Eliot, Frost, Hardy, Pound, Stevens, Williams and also the likes of Charles Erskine Scott Wood. My reason for choosing this is symbolic in that women broke new ground as editors in the 20th century: Moore, Monroe, Margaret Anderson, Dorothy Norman and Margaret Marshall, among other women editors, brought together some of the century's best writers and advocated contemporary speech over poetic diction. 5. W. B. Yeats, In the Seven Woods This may be the century's first book in English to emphasize direct, natural speech in poetry, in contrast to the flaccidity of the Aesthetes and the Georgians. In "Adam's Curse," Yeats writes: "A line will take us hours maybe; Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought, Our stitching and unstitching has been naught." Brand-new for its time. 6. Pablo Neruda, Residence on Earth Neruda is the innovator, but here, as with Cavafy and Celan, I like the translation, as well. Neruda dwells on all his mind can entertain and he lifts it into poetry. He transmutes wet onions, calling cards, rosebushes, political betrayals, "and so many things that I want to forget." "Alberto Rojas Jiminez Comes Flying" is my love. I add that because I cannot write about Neruda without love. 7. C. P. Cavafy, Selected Poems I choose this for Cavafy, but find the translation innovative as well. Cavafy's poetry broke ground in revealing faithfulness to his own experience, distaste for decoration for its own sake, and the use of demotic Greek combined with high style. He was one of the first modern poets to acknowledge his homosexuality, and he writes of sex without any moral tone. In his most famous poem, "The God Abandons Antony," he deftly combines the hero, the city, the god, the man. The Keeley and Sherrard translations are the first to capture Cavafy's urgent, colloquial tone. 8. Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan The ground-breaker here, of course, is Celan, whose poems occupy a unique place in 20th century literature. A survivor of German death camps, he wrote of horror in a way that celebrates energy and beauty while telling of destruction. "Death Fugue" is an example of how he makes art of what can barely be spoken; other poems are of light and air and hope: "The bright/ stones pass through the air, the brightly/ white, the light-/ bringers." Hamburger's translation is the most efficient I know. 9. Emily Dickinson, The Poems of Emily Dickinson A ground-breaking edition. Johnson showed us the Dickinson we know. She had published only seven poems in her lifetime, and her posthumous editions were slim, their punctuation and wording, in some cases, altered. Johnson found 1775 poems, discovered their dates, and restored her own punctuation as well as her great lines. 10. The Poem of the Cid, translated by W.S. Merwin I must include this book because it changed my life. Before reading it, in the early 1960s, I did not appreciate how beautifully a translator could render a 12th century classic into contemporary English. I wish I could cite Merwin's new translation of Dante's Purgatorio here, but that will be first on my list for ground-breakers of the 21st century. Daniel Halpern EDITORIAL DIRECTOR, THE ECCO PRESS
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| Picking ten "ground-breaking"—or, in my case, "personally significant"—books of poetry
written over the past 100 years is like being asked to relocate with only ten lifelong
possessions. What's left behind? Who's not on that list of them? However, as I've been
given a little room, here's a list of what will be coming along anyway—under separate cover,
as it were.
Here comes Rafael Alberti's The Owl's Insomnia and John Ashbery's Rivers and Mountains. The Bridge or White Buildings by Hart Crane and North of Boston by Robert Frost, Zbigniew Herbert's Selected Poems and Czeslaw Milosz's Bells in Winter. Residence on Earth by Pablo Neruda, The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke (I know he'll safely be on other lists), and either of James Wright's first two books. And I would add a favorite underdog, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir by Richard Hugo, a now forgotten and very underrated volume of poems that moved me mightily when I first read the voicey opening lines of "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg":
The last time I saw Hugo, he was eating out of a gallon container of vanilla ice cream in the tiny West Village studio apartment of an old girlfriend of mine, talking to James Wright about a bad review one or the other had recently received. Of course, the most idiosyncratic book on my list is Summer Knowledge by Delmore Schwartz, but I find him irresistible. For example, from "I Am to My Own Heart Merely a Serf":
The ten books I've listed above are those that made a tremendous difference to me as a poet and as a reader of poetry. Each contributed something that had never occurred to me—each spoke in a voice so novel that the poems rising up and through the voice reinvented language for me. Barbara Epler EDITOR-IN-CHIEF, NEW DIRECTIONS
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| Pretty soon after agreeing to go on this interesting PSA fishing trip, I realized that I was
the one on the hook. As a New Directions editor, compiling a list of the ten most
ground-breaking texts was impossible—impossible (and a bit suicidal) to select among all
the poets (dozens of them living) chosen by James Laughlin for their ability to "make it new."
In light of this impossibility, I would like to offer a few more qualifiers. First of all, I would have demurred had I known how small and select would be the pool of experts. I had pictured about a hundred opinion-mongers. I am no poetry critic or theorist: I read fiction most of the time. Secondly, I created my list with the understanding that the PSA was not fishing for a Greats List, so Homer, Dante and Shakespeare are not on it, and with the understanding that the PSA did not want a Personal Favorites List—among the non-New Directions authors, poets like Ovid, Elizabeth Bishop, Basho, Lorine Niedecker, Christopher Smart, Mina Loy, Lucille Clifton, John Ashbery and Anne Carson (we have brought out only one of her books, Glass, Irony and God). The PSA, as had to be explained at length to me, wanted a list of the Top Ten Ground-Breakers of the Twentieth Century. In making my list, I chose not to confine myself to the last century, because (to my admittedly partisan mind) it is just not the same century without the entire span of poetry New Directions publishes: from, to name just a few, Kamau Brathwaite, Robert Creeley, H.D., Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Susan Howe, Denise Levertov, Bernadette Mayer, Charles Olson, George Oppen, Michael Palmer, Ezra Pound, Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas, Rosmarie Waldrop and William Carlos Williams to contemporary translations of Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarmé, Henri Michaux, Paul Valéry, Bei Dao, Vicente Huidobro, Federico Garcia Lorca, Eugenio Montale, Pablo Neruda, Nicanor Parra, Octavio Paz, Rainer Maria Rilke and Arthur Rimbaud. Max Rodriguez 6 EDITOR, QBR THE BLACK BOOK REVIEW
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| If you want to know the condition of a people, listen to its poets. For my taste, the best
poetry is structurally sound, visually vibrant, and most importantly, opens new vistas of
thought. The above selections meet these criteria for me. They are ground-breaking (some
for reason of style and presentation; some for content) in that they introduce the
consciousness of emerging social movements within the poetic form. these are the works of
those poet-intellectuals who led those movements. Andrew Krivak POETRY EDITOR, DOUBLETAKE
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| All 20th century poetry, it seems to me, is measured against the poetry of the Modernists,
and, of all the works of that period, The Waste Land acts as the ultimate standard. Yet,
while The Waste Land certainly shaped the mind of Modernist criticism in this century, it
didn't shape the voices of poets or re-tune the ears of readers. I consider a ground-
breaking text in this century to be a book of poems that allowed an audience of writers and
readers to re-hear as well as to re-think what a poem might be.
I begin with Robert Frost's North of Boston because of the formal complexities and regional echoes that elide in this early book. Poems such as "Mending Wall," "Home Burial," "The Death of the Hired Man" and "After Apple-Picking" demonstrate a truly unique prosody, which may prove in the end to be more lasting than Eliot's project. Copies of William Carlos Williams' book Spring and All were actually confiscated at U.S. Customs when they were shipped from France in 1923. Written one year after The Waste Land, Spring and All never had a chance to emerge as a "book" in the United States until after Williams' death. Yet, this is the text in which Williams famously proclaims "THE WORLD IS NEW." From this book come the poems "By the road to the contagious hospital," "The pure products of America" and "so much depends"—poems that "freed-up" more than one generation of poets writing after the Moderns. Which leads me to Robert Lowell's Life Studies and Sylvia Plath's Ariel. I put these on the list because there is no dismissing the impact the turn to a so-called "confessional" voice has had on poetry in the twentieth century, and these two books are, in my opinion, the first and only ground-breakers on that front. Finally, I have chosen Adrienne Rich's The Dream of a Common Language and Seamus Heaney's Field Work for the influence they have had on a "post-confessional" generation of poetry readers and writers. These two books were published nearly simultaneously in the United States, and they are remarkable for their turn towards a desire for "witness" in poetry. While Heaney and Rich have had different projects in mind (for Heaney, the Troubles in Northern Ireland; for Rich, the oppression of patriarchal language), their respective breakthroughs in these mid-career volumes show what it means to write poetry that forces readers to re-consider their notion of a world that has changed significantly since the publication of The Waste Land. John Tranter 7 EDITOR, JACKET
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| 1. Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems Rimbaud's political and aesthetic revolution was carried out almost single-handedly by a teenage boy, and laid the foundations for Modernism in France. Bernard's translations made all the works available for an English reader in clear, striking prose versions, with the French on the same page. 2. W.H. Auden, On This Island Though Poems (1930) set up Auden as the smart young poet to watch, On This Island saw his verse reach out to find a wider audience and start the process that made his poetry famous. In Auden a blend of imagery from Anglo-Saxon verse, the Icelandic sagas, Freud, Marx and contemporary cinema fuses into a quintessentially "modern" tone. 3. T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations From the appearance of this, Eliot's first volume, the 20th-century poetic revolution begins in English. It represented a break with the immediate past as radical as that, which Coleridge and Wordsworth achieved in Lyrical Ballads (1798). 4. John Ashbery, Some Trees The first full collection of poems from a writer whose seductive and oblique verse has become a salient feature of the landscape of contemporary poetry. 5. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems The 1957 obscenity trial the book provoked brought mass attention to the Beat movement. The Encyclopedia Britannica says that Ginsberg is the "American poet whose epic poem Howl is considered to be one of the most significant products of the Beat movement." 6. Hans Magnus Enzensberger, The Sinking of the Titanic In this sharply observed book-length series of poems, Enzensberger's political acuteness and his profoundly European sense of irony are brought into play in a cinematic survey of capitalism, greed and the decline of the West. 7. George Seferis, Collected Poems Seferis was a Greek poet, essayist and diplomat who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1963. The Keeley and Sherrard book was the first large-scale English translation, bringing into the English-speaking world a fresh and haunting world-view and a powerful voice that spoke for three thousand years of poetry that had shaped the way Europe had viewed itself. 8. Blaise Cendrars, Selected Writings The challenge of a maverick, and vagabond, who went far beyond the surrealist paths of Apollinaire... Cendrars was a French-speaking poet and essayist who created a powerful new poetic style to express a life of action and danger. His poems Pâques à New York (1912; "Easter in New York") and La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913; "The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France") are combination travelogues and laments. His abundant, mainly autobiographical writings were a strong influence on his contemporaries, especially the Henry Miller of Tropic of Cancer, which would be unimaginable without the influence of his hero Cendrars. 9. Fernando Pessoa, Selected Poems Pessoa was a poet whose part in Modernism gave Portuguese literature European significance. He began publishing books of English poetry in 1918, but it was not until 1934 that his first book in Portuguese, Mensagem, appeared. It attracted little attention. Fame came to Pessoa after his death in 1935, when his extraordinarily rich dream world, peopled with alter egos or "heteronyms," whose poetry he produced along with his own, became generally known. Though the works of the imaginary poets differ in outlook and style from the work done under Pessoa's own name, taken together they express different personalities that he felt to exist within himself. The most important of his works are Poesias de Fernando Pessoa (1942), Poesias de Álvaro de Campos (1944), Poemas de Alberto Caeiro (1946) and Odes de Ricardo Reis (1946). 10. Ern Malley, The Darkening Ecliptic This book gathered the hoax poems written collaboratively in 1943 under the pseudonym "Ern Malley" by the young conservative poets James McAuley and Harold Stewart and originally published in the avant-garde magazine Angry Penguins in Adelaide, Australia, in 1944. Their mix of fractured surreal images and almost Elizabethan diction was meant to satirize the New Apocalypse movement and its followers such as Dylan Thomas and Henry Treece, and then self-destruct. Instead, they lived on long after their mission had been completed, puzzling and intriguing readers (such as long-time fan John Ashbery, who discovered the book in a Boston bookstore) with the haunting strangeness of their bricolage effects.
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| NOTES 1 On Wyndham Lewis and Blast: "BLAST signifies something constructive and destructive. It means the blowing away of old ideas and worn-out notions." Daily News, April 7, 1914. 2 All lists have been placed in chronological order, unless otherwise indicated. 3 Rather than placing the texts in chronological order, Schulman has chosen to order them according to "the relative impact of their invention." 4 Richard Hugo, The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir (W.W. Norton, 1973). 5 Delmore Schwartz, Summer Knowledge: New and Selected Poems (Doubleday, 1959). 6 The order of Rodriguez's list is not intended to reflect relative impact. 7 The order of Tranter's list reflects the texts' "importance to contemporary poetry." |
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