Wordsworth, "The World Is Too Much With Us," More on Hirshfield and Romanticism

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.



“Most wild American Crows live for about 7–8 years. Captive birds are known to have lived up to 30 years.” (Wikipedia)

Jane Hirshfield’s “The Woodpecker Keeps Returning” has me thinking once again that seemingly over-simplified writing and/or flat language can be deceptive. There is an important difference between the merely descriptive word, “simple,” and “simplistic,” which judges something as over-simplified or simple-minded.

I’m not sure which word or concept describes Hirshfield in “Woodpecker” or elsewhere. I've also felt that the simplicity of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, for example, shifts from profundity and power in one passage to puerile self-parody in the next. Ditto the quality of their work from story to story.

I've often wondered about this business of simplicity as it relates to the ancient Eastern forms and the West's enchantment with them since about 1920 (William Carlos Williams and James Wright, to name two, and now Jane Hirshfield; but the list is much longer than that and includes some of nineteenth-century American transcendentalists.).

Some people say that to understand Nirvana we should think of still water and silence. OK. I kind of get that—the absence of conflict and complexity as a sublime. But if that's paradise or some such perfection, how is a writer supposed to convey it and make it feel desirable as an ideal rather than boring or dead?

Ditto, for me at least, Classicism’s ideals like order, symmetry, balance, rationality, restraint. That's why I've always been drawn to the Romantics and their passion for dynamism, tumult, eerie, scary mysticism, “the one soul within us and abroad.” That seems so much more alive than pale reason and order. But then I’ve never lived or taken part in a revolution. America’s mini-revolution that we call The Sixties had some admirable purposes, but also a lot of phony bullshit, as the advent of Yuppiedom has verified.

Similarly, those old English Romantics proved to be only a short step from Wordsworth's wind-baggery and others' emotional, spiritual quackery in general. Just around the corner was the late Romantic oozing into Gothicism, which could get downright silly. And what about our squeamishness over the question of just how noble the Noble Savage is? I think it was Joan Baez who wrote, “A hero’s a nuisance to live with at home.”

In any case we're back to Classicism and Romanticism—and that icky business of one’s way of being in the world. Once again, it’s not either-or, but in which ways is this or that person or characteristic Romantic and in which ways Classical? For example, most think of Keats as the most classically inclined of the major Romantic poets. Or maybe Picasso as cubist is Romantic in his revolutionary, individualistic new way of seeing the world, but in the geometric shapes he uses to portray what he sees, he is mathematical, precise, drawing between the lines—that is, Classical.

With that to chew on, I offer Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much with Us,” an orderly poem inasmuch as it’s a sonnet, with classical allusions, but a very Romantic celebration of the Natural, the definition of which might require a tome.


The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

**

Charles McGee, Barnett Newman, Picasso, Chick A. Dee

Here I go again, spouting without a license about subjects I do not know.

One day a friend said about some rather dark poem, “What is the gift of that poem?” My friend knows his poetry; he was not looking for sappy sunlight in every poem, but some new and plausible way of seeing and saying things that are worth reporting. And by the way, to be sure he wasn’t plagiarizing or going off half-cocked, he attributed the notion of Poem as Gift to a professor he’d had.

Since then, I’ve taken the liberty of spreading the idea to parts of poems and, always the daredevil, to all art and other objects of beauty. No gift, no beauty; no beauty, no gift and no truth.

Just to demonstrate my hip open-mindedness, I want to say that I can see, and could argue for, the gift in the first two of these paintings, “Spectral Rhythms” (1970s) by Charles McGee and “Be I” (1970) by Barnett Newman (in spite of its pretentious title).

However, I do not see much gift below in Picasso’s “Girl Reading” (1938). It’s likely I have never seen any Picasso painting as a gift, though he certainly shows us new ways of seeing things, and through that, potentially new ways of “being in the world” (a phrase common in the study of philosophy, I’m told, and I think it's a hugely important concept).

Am I the only one who sees Picasso’s girl as a pig? Yea or nay, how is his transmogrification of her a gift? Is it cruel comedy? Should it alter our perception of all females’ ways of being in the world? My own way of being in the world? The way of being in the world if you're a pig that reads?

What is the value of Picasso’s rendering of this subject, except that it’s new? If a surgeon could attach a hand to the top of her head, a hand with fingers that wiggle, that would also give us a new way to think about girls who read, girls who don’t read, and all humans. Wouldn’t it?

Here is young Fritz Chickadee, Certified Gourmand. With his big orange treat, he's pretty cocky; he's also rather common and quite a flighty guy. His way of being in the world is both everything and nothing like my own, which he invited me to think about. In late November, he was a gift.