Over the last few weeks, I’ve been turning back to the poetry and the study of poetry. Now that I’ve filled in the blank space, culturally, that first turned me away from poetry as my primary focus more than forty years ago, the cumulative force of my circular and not so anarchic reading presents itself in spontaneous conclusions, not the least being a realization about the modern and the poetry of voices. John Berryman first made me aware of the issue, more or less indirectly, when I turned back to the prefatory note in his Dream Songs, and read his statement about characters and the voice of the narrator, Henry, whom Berryman insists he is not. I have some inkling who Henry is, since he calls him Henry Hankovich, Henry, son of Henry. And of course the title of the poem says the rest. Perhaps I confused characters and voices when I read the preface the first time, since I heard it as saying that the characters themselves had speaking parts. I hadn’t fully recognized the range of speaking voices assigned to Henry and ‘his friend’.
            Apart from drama, this poetry of voices is a new thing. Not that it’s altogether new, of course. But the business of recognizing the voice as part of the recognition of both style and content is something new. Undoubtedly Browning sets us up. But that’s just to say that it has a history, but a history that’s ultimately modern. The inceptive monstrosity (however much one may care to discover antecedents) is Pound’s Cantos. And perhaps it was the study of the Cantos at the same time that I first endeavored the Dream Songs that caused me to misread Berryman’s note, if indeed I did misread it. In the Cantos the personae have found the full – how shall I say it – the full choral cacophony, perhaps. ‘Objective’ voices mix with masks of the poet in a sometimes almost indecipherable and sidereal if not errant stream of ‘modern’ choral sound: call and response, confrontation, snide commentary, inference, rebuttal, eruptive interjections of all sorts, mellifluous denouements melding into chaotic rants, etc. etc. etc.

             If there is one definition of the ‘classical’ or the ‘traditional’ in terms of a kind of ready cultural understanding, it has become the univocal ‘personality’ of the artist. I think this has always been below the level of connoisseurship, but it certainly still exercises great force in the critical world. I could name two or three grand prize winners who have apparently succeeded to the mark not because of the greatness of their poetic work, but because they have achieved the univocal ideal with some measure of poetic finesse. At least, from where I sit, that’s the only excuse or justification I can see. Perhaps I’m missing something. In the meantime, however, the fragmentation of the voice is almost a critical imperative, not because the critics embrace it, and not even because the critics reject it (although more than a vast majority now do), but because nowadays no critic’s critical grasp extends beyond a narrow range. Therefore, this critic approves this range; that critic approves that range. And meantime the field itself is diced onions. A whole voice – that is, a complete human voice, untrammeled by stylization – is possible with none of them.
            I may be wrong, but when I read Henry Miller’s Time of the Assassins, his study of Rimbaud, what I heard was a strong statement about the relationship between the author and his audience. I cannot guarantee the state of my consciousness – of my psychic precision – at the time of the reading, since I was commonly drifting about in my own peculiar sphere of hearing. But it doesn’t matter. The conclusion is correct, if the source is not. There is an immediate relationship between creator and audience. And the lack of audience for the fulness of the artist, whether of ‘voice’ or visually, directly impinges the artist. Now this may sound bizarre, but if there are artists working in a whole voice right now, it is because they have private income and no need to publish or present. As soon as presentation is necessary, one is connected to the contemporary eye and ear, however defective. If there is no critical understanding of the whole potential range of contemporary voice and eye, pure integration becomes the transcendent ideal, no doubt. But the work must move toward it intentionally, but only in terms of the actual moments of intuition of the artist. The integrity of voice, in other words, becomes the integrity and wholeness of the given piece, which expresses wholeness within its self-defined frame. If the pieces seem disparate or divided, the test is the integrity of the given piece and its power of the whole in terms of itself.

             But it’s not just about critical response. What we are looking at here is the destruction of critical integrity itself. That is, late modernist and postmodern are precisely the destruction of the integrity of art itself. What we are trying to witness here is the reconstruction. Whitman and Dickinson apparently achieved a unified voice out of unique sources and prior to the dissolution inherent in final modernism. But their voices are far larger than any assessment has presently allowed. The culture was still prepared at some level to hear the unified voice as relatively large, although the incremental professionalism was already reducing the openly published poetry of the journals to trivial cliché. And the ‘versifiers’, as Emerson defined them, barely rose above the hackwork of the ‘professionals’.
            If I have railed here against the artificial ‘speech’ values of contemporary poetry, it is precisely because it comes nowhere near the actual ranges of speech, even as it is practiced today, in a society whose speech tends to mirror the mass media – that is, the arbitrarily trivialized, homogenized and clichéd speech of the mass media and its writers, panderers who generally patronize ‘the lowest common denominator’, an infantile mirroring of the worst. But ‘speech’ as such, even in its full range in a ‘literate’ society, is less than a fraction of the ground of poetry. Poetry has rights to all languages, of which its current language is derivative or kindred, as well as to the whole history of the language itself, both spoken and written. English poetry carried the Anglo-Saxon foot for more than a thousand years, something we still cannot dispense with, even though American now brings an unprecedented range of vowel length to the formerly upright and relatively strictly measured syllable of the British. Therefore American moves rhythmically in terms of an almost melodic phrase, something the poetry has grasped since Dickinson and Whitman – since Bryant, in fact – but has still not fully encompassed, much less integrated into a more or less formal pattern for poetry.
            So the fragmentation is an historical imperative as well. The problem with a Picasso or a Joyce is the patronizing assumptions implicit in their ‘poking the bourgeois’. That is, they hold themselves superior to their own style. As a consequence, they fail ‘style’ as we have defined it here. They act as if the fragmentation is something extraneous to their work. In an absolute world it is. But anyone who clings to the absolute world without regard to fact cannot be an artist finally. Art deco is precisely the consequence, on the one side. And the brilliantly talented jokes that ‘poke the bourgeois’ but fail the connoisseur fall on the other. They are involuted expressions of talent that, when exhausted, leave no trace of the ultimately human, the final definition of art.

             Eventually, the ‘personality’ of the artist takes over, that place of intuitive awakening that finds its response in recognition, not strictly in the form or intention, but in the direct expression of a state of consciousness – like the perfect word or phrase in Dickinson that suddenly defines the whole congeries of the poem – again, a definition of the deepest aesthetic pleasure.
             I struggle with voices in my own poetry, and particularly the search for the ‘single’ voice. But when I hear them from the distance that objectifies them, I hear that they are all mine. It is all my voice. How that will play out in the long term remains to be seen. Whether we will ultimately drop the relatively arbitrary demand for the unified voice, or whether the language will integrate in such a way and critical understanding expand so that a singular vision can become expressive of the whole person remains to be seen. We have entered world culture, even if we retain these relatively provincial linguistic differences. Perhaps this is the real dissolution at work.