Poems written in reply (6.13.18)

This week we’ll investigate “poems in reply,” which is my shorthand for poems written in response to our readings of other poems.  You can’t rightly call this practice a sub-genre, and it’s not technically a form of ekphrasis, but the poem written in reply to another poem is an “art-to-art” exchange and common enough in literary history.  Here’s a famous example:

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow’d Homer rule as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with easly eyes

He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men

Look’d at each other with wild surmise—

Silent upon a peak in Darien.

John Keats wrote this poem, reportedly, after spending an entire night reading the George Chapman translation of Homer (likely The Illiad) with his former teacher, Charles Cowden Clarke. He walked home at dawn and by 10:00 o’clock that same morning posted the finished poem back to Clarke.[1]  The story is important for our purposes because it touches on the passion or excitement or reverence or pure engagement underlying poems in conversation with each other.  Keats’s poem is about how or what he felt upon reading Homer.  Put slightly differently, it’s about one poet’s understanding and admiration for the translation that Chapman had made available to readers of English.

There are as many reasons for writing poems in reply as there are readers and readings of poems. Poems in reply have been written in praise of an original model, like the Keats poem above, or to take issue with it, or simply to use the model as a launching point for expressing a reader’s thoughts and feelings. That makes sense especially when you approach poems as expressive art: as a reader, you’re engaging with feeling, emotion, psychological tension. The poem in reply is an artistic record of that engagement.

Often, poems are written in reply to only a few lines or phrases or just an image in a model poem.  Here’s an example:

Nuances of a Theme by Williams

It’s a strange courage

you give me, ancient star:

Shine alone in the sunrise

toward which you lend no part!

I

Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,

that reflects neither my face nor any inner part

of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.

II

Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses

you in its own light.

Be not chimera of morning,

Half-man, half-star.

Be not an intelligence,

Like a widow’s bird

Or an old horse.

This poem, by Wallace Stevens, incorporates an entire poem by his contemporary, William Carlos Williams, as the opening stanza. Stevens italicizes but does not number it, to set it off from his own nuanced reading of Williams’ theme.  In the Williams poem, the speaker takes courage from the star shining alone in the heavens against the superior force of the rising sun. But in the Stevens poem, the speaker wants no courage from the start, in fact disassociates everything human from the star.

Poems in reply to William Carlos Williams are something of a cottage industry, perhaps because of the fame of both Stevens and Williams; thus, to make a little tradition out of replying to themes by Williams is to step up to the podium, as it were, of American poetry and add your voice to the general conversation.  This is what Kenneth Koch did in this poem:

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams

1.

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.

I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do

and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2.

We laughed at the hollyhocks together

and then I sprayed them with lye.

Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3.

I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.

The man who asked for it was shabby

and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4.

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.

Forgive me. I was clumsy, and

I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

Some poems in reply are not so obvious. They merely nod at famous antecedents, like this one by Frank O’Hara:

Autobiographia Literaria

When I was a child

I played by myself in a

corner of the schoolyard

all alone.

I hated dolls and I

hated games, animals were

not friendly and birds

flew away.

If anyone was looking

for me I hid behind a

tree and cried out “I am

an orphan.”

And here I am, the

center of all beauty!

writing these poems!

Imagine!

The reference is in the title of the poem. The poem was written as a spontaneous, tongue-in-cheek and thoroughly modern American reply to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous critical work, Biographia Literaria.

But my absolute fav poem in reply is a poem that uses a famous couple of lines as departure for developing a completely separate theme:

Milton by Firelight

Piute Creek, August 1955

“O hell, what do mine eyes

with grief behold?”

Working with an old

Singlejack miner, who can sense

The vein and cleavage

In the very guts of rock, can

Blast granite, build

Switchbacks that last for years

Under the beat of snow, thaw, mule-hooves.

What use, Milton, a silly story

Of our lost general parents,

eaters of fruit?

The Indian, the chainsaw boy,

A string of six mules

Came riding down to camp

Hungry for tomatoes and green apples.

Sleeping in saddle-blankets

Under a bright night-sky

Han River slantwise by morning.

Jays squall

Coffee boils

In ten thousand years the Sierras

Will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion.

Ice-scratched slabs and bent trees.

No paradise, no fall,

Only the weathering land

The wheeling sky,

Man, with his Satan

Scouring the chaos of the mind.

Oh Hell!

Fire down

Too dark to read, miles from a road

The bell-mare clangs in the meadow

That packed dirt for a fill-in

Scrambling through loose rocks

On an old trail

All of a summer’s day.

There are other famous “riffs” on famous antecedents, such as Anthony Hecht’s “The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life,” which is of course a reply to the much more famous “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold.  Hecht’s poem is a satirical reply.  The love object of Arnold’s poem is not so lovely as Hecht’s, nor is the speaker of Hecht’s poem so melancholic as the speaker of Arnold’s.  In fact, the emotional ground of Arnold’s poem, a cri de cœur for love in a warring world, becomes a sardonic take on Empire well past its prime.  Hecht’s poem isn’t so much a criticism of life as of the late Victorian view of life.

And on that theme, here is my own take on the Arnold-Hecht exchange, written many years ago:

The Dover Bandit

I was thinking of writing this poem in Spanish

but it has come out in Romanian instead,

in a remote mountain dialect of Romanian,

which is very strange, not because

I know so very little Spanish and even less Romanian

but because I was thinking about this in Latin,

in Church Latin, to be exact.  That is, “in an Italian way.”

Yes, what a strange thing to be thinking this way

in the Mother Tongue that connects me to you

and you and therefore me to the rest of the world,

the crazy misspelled unpronounceable world we go

talking through each day, like Sophocles with the sea

coming in and going back out and coming in again,

only, I guess, he wouldn’t have thought of it in Latin?

Well, it is a strange thing that I was thinking at all—

about the pissy world, you, writing this poem.

C

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[1] By the way, he’d have been around 22 or 23 years old when he had this experience and wrote the poem. Imagine that! Darien is in Panama and the explorer was Balboa, not Cortez. But what does that matter?