History repeats itself? Helen Vendler's 1973 review of America a Prophecy

Charles Bernstein has posted a fascinating historical document at Jacket2: Helen Vendler's 1973 review of an anthology called America a Prophesy: A New Reading of American Poetry from Pre-Columbian Times to the Present. Her piece, now almost forty years old, sounds -- at least in parts -- strikingly similar to her recent trashing of The Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry and points to some remarkably consistent critical concerns. (Some might say blind spots).

The anthology in question was edited by Jerome Rothenberg and George Quasha. According to their introduction, "a special concern for the interplay of myth and history runs through the whole of American literature." To get at this mythological vein, they anthologized the poetry of not just Thoreau, Emerson, and Whitman, but also Beats like Gregory Corso, avantists like Gertrude Stein, linguists like Benjamin Lee Whorf (on Hopi verb conjugation), an anonymous schizophrenic, a Tohono O'odham poet from the Sonoran desert, and so on.

Vendler is not impressed. She writes:

All this is nothing new at all (contrary to the editors' pretensions). A revolt against high culture is a stage in the life of many authors, and it is equally a stage in the life of many readers. Back to primitive roots we go -- to runes, inscriptions, charms, riddles, spells, catalogues, invocations, rituals; to baby-talk, to nonsense rhymes, to madness, to syllable-chants; to myths and folk-tales and folk-songs; to the origins of language, to chronicles, inscriptions, ancestors and, we hope, the pristine unfallen vision of man, merely man, merely himself, before the corruptions of high culture.

But the "high culture" poets are the best ones, she maintains. And they're under-represented in the anthology, to her dismay:

Of the "traditional" authors included there isn't much, and the principle of selection has been in no case to give the author's best or most representative work but rather any stray work with a myth or a dream or a vision in it. The "hidden aspects" of American poetry are clarified here, not by the best work of our best poets, but by poems of H.D., Zukofsky, Rexroth, Oppen, Fearing, Patchen, Olson, Duncan, etc. [...] This is, then, a counter-anthology to the "received" anthologies, but it's not a convincing one.

In fact, she argues that the counter-anthology is inadequate because the "best work of our best poets" could provide whatever readers might look for in this defiantly non-traditional collection:

What becomes most clear, in the sponsoring of anthologies like this by reputable publishing houses, is that the hunger of the young for the greatest possibly art is being terribly underestimated in the schools. What students hear in Ginsberg they would hear and appreciate in Blake [...] What they discover in Hesse they would embrace in Rilke, if only they were taught him; what they sense in Dylan or Cohen is, if they only knew, waiting for them, to a degree that would satisfy them far more, in Keats. Their own concern for universal religious consciousness appears in Eliot, their yearning for brotherhood in Whitman, their interest in the land in Frost, their wish for wisdom in the literature of Dickinson.

Intriguing stuff. Check out the review in its entirety! And don't miss Rothenberg's zingy rebuttal in a Letter to the Editor, with all its echoes of Rita Dove's response to Vendler's review of her Penguin Anthology. To provide just a taste of it: "To live in 20th-century America and see your back yard filled with 17th-century Englishmen is bordering on the pathological." Nothing new under the sun!