By the time he finally died in 1936, the English poet A.E. Housman was forty years past his first and best book (1896’s chilling A Shropshire Lad), a dinosaur in the view of most living writers. The Waste Land, which helped create that thing college teachers tell you to call Modernism, came out in 1922, but in comparison to Housman’s language of experience, it might as well have been 2022. Housman hails from a late-Victorian England that knew it was vanishing, and which, in his case, largely took the form of a partially ironic pastoral language of tetrameter stanzas, waistcoats, pipes, elaborate mustaches, mossy pastures, bachelors, afternoon tea, diligent Latin (apparently some of Housman’s translations are still revered), and quiet middle-class homosexuality. Yet here it is 2014, and homeboy’s work is still in print for a damn good reason, which is that it is existentially timeless and metrically elegant, a hit song in poem’s clothing. Right now, the pears and cherries are blooming in California’s damp Mediterranean winter. This is the second poem from A Shropshire Lad:

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It leaves me only fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

But not all the modern hotshots had dismissed or forgotten him. In 1936 W.H. Auden’s gift was blooming, and this entailed his lifelong embrace of forms (like ballad meter) that many of his avant-garde contemporaries found simple-minded and archaic; Philip Larkin, whose genius emerged in poems that rhyme and scan, followed Auden’s lead. Both men were Housman fanboys. If one were looking for the opposite of Ezra Pound’s tedious poetics, this line of English prosody would be it.

Housman, of course, is only possible because of who wrote before him. His work points back to Renaissance lyricists like Robert Herrick, John Skelton, Shakespeare (even if you left out the sonnets), and Ben Jonson.

Were any of these men suckers for slightly disheveled beauty, for women whose physical presences aren’t entirely, elaborately assembled, for scarves thrown on at the last minute and light makeup and holes in black leggings? At least Herrick (1591-1674) was! By the time he wrote—about a generation after Shakespeare—English was more or less modern, close enough for you, dear reader, to follow along. When this kinda-sonnet (it has fourteen lines but none have five beats) cruised into the world, you know panties were dropping all over London:

A sweet disorder in the dresse
Kindles in cloathes a wantonnesse:
A Lawne about the shoulders thrown
Into a fine distraction:
An erring Lace, which here and there
Enthralls the Crimson Stomacher:
A Cuffe neglectfull, and thereby
Ribbands to flow confusedly:
A winning wave (deserving Note)
In the tempestuous petticote:
A carelesse shooe-string, in whose tye
I see a wilde civility:
Doe more bewitch me, then when Art
Is too precise in every part.

Other routinely anthologized poems from Herrick are “The silken Snake,” “Her Bed,” and “Upon Julia’s haire fill’d with Dew.” I’m citing from this Penguin collection, which you should own and can probably find cheap if you look around; failing that, you could just drop the piddling $25 for a new copy. What, you needed those three Jameson shots?

More songs! Let’s pivot to an American artist. My residual graduate training still objects that this sort of ahistorical, trans-Atlantic, slipshod move is not a research convention that English PhDs get jobs by pulling, but luckily, especially for me, I’m not an academic literary scholar anymore. I took what I needed. Turns out that on the General Reader, you can link Shropshire to the Rust Belt.

Bruce Springsteen’s hollow-eyed tape-deck masterpiece Nebraska (1982) might best be listened to on hand-me-down vinyl on a Goodwill turntable on a scarred desk in a rented room in, like, Iowa. Maybe you need to be drinking bourbon out of a Dale Earnhardt glass to truly savor this record and its gorgeous cover, maybe you’re wearing old jeans the winter sun can shine through, maybe it’s sleeting and you’re heartbroken . . . We don’t know! Your humble critic has found at least a dozen emotions in this thing. Like much of Springsteen’s best work (all of it pre-1990), like most lyrics that compel you to remember them, the rhythm and the rhymes are based on careful repetition spliced with metrical variation: whatever chaos or melancholy the songs are dealing with, the language is organized. Sometimes it is even catchy. I don’t want to be a total bummer, and I shouldn’t always link to trashy rap videos, so here is “Atlantic City.”

Second track on the album, about as buoyant as the scene gets. Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty. Stay safe out there.

To simplify the literary-historical narrative a whole lot, William Carlos Williams is often placed in opposition to Wallace Stevens. To simplify this post, both poets are fantastic, and you should read as much of their work as you can starting right now.

Williams is reputedly the more “American” in voice and subject matter; not exactly plainspoken, but carefully ordinary. To the extent that such a thing is possible in writing, he tried—as he spent his career telling everybody who would listen—to build and arrange his lines based on what he considered the rhythms of mid-century conversation and thought. The lines usually break where one can imagine a person taking a breath, changing the subject, or shifting from one mental association to another. This might make you think of the parts of Ulysses that aren’t boring. Charles Olson, a poet I generally dislike but agree with here, praises texts where “The contingent motion of / each line” ending leaves us hungry for a qualifier or a completion. (Charles Tomlinson first explained that point to me.) Williams routinely achieves this effect with clever syntactic breaks (e.g. splitting text between a noun phrase / and the subsequent phrase / that elaborates on it), instead of the containment structures of end rhyme and accentual-syllabic meter. (Roses are red, violets are blue, / Even blogs are a kind of poetry, too.)

Meanwhile (goes the narrative), although Stevens’s work is likewise obsessed with the corkscrews of human thought, he cultivates an aristocratic, ornate, Europhilic, philosophically gregarious, iambically oriented style that plays around with but eventually confirms the Anglo-American lyric tradition, wherein a delicate subjectivity (such as the poet’s) absorbs, interprets, and responds to the teeming world. In other words, even when Stevens’s poems are tongue-in-cheek (“Unsnack your snood, madanna“) or jauntily nonsensical (“The Emperor of Ice Cream”), they aspire to at least sound rhetorically conclusive.

Ironically, this oppositional narrative encompasses and, to a significant extent, relies on similarities. The poets were about the same age. Both spoke Romance languages in addition to their native English; were well-educated Easterners; enjoyed theorizing exuberantly about the power of a world-remaking, almost mystical poetic “Imagination”; and became large literary figures by late middle age. And no garrets for them, they had serious careers outside of poetry. Stevens was an insurance-company executive, and Williams, a family doctor, delivered thousands of babies in north Jersey. (It was easier for middle-class male poets to have demanding day jobs back when wives would customarily take care of scrubbing the bathroom and cooking dinner. Shacked-up poets my age are rightly expected to split the chores. Bachelor poets of course handle one hundred percent.)

A number of critics, such as James Longenbach in Modern Poetry After Modernism, disdain the tidy Stevens/Williams split, along with other reductive mega-narratives about how some phenomenon called “modernism” led straight into whatever the hell “postmodernism” is, or about how Poet A influenced Poets B and C, who in turn bequeathed major parts of their sensibilities to Poet D, who, unlike Poet E, didn’t end up rejecting that aesthetic worldview. And so forth. Marjorie Perloff argues that Williams’s true foe was not Stevens but T.S. Eliot—Williams distrusted what he saw as Eliot’s patrician nihilism—while Stevens was actually the antagonist of Ezra Pound, whom by many accounts he considered a fraud. (Which isn’t an untenable opinion. Unlike Stevens and Williams, Pound was always—rather than just some of the time—pompously self-important about his views of Art and Culture, and when it comes to most of his work after about 1930 there isn’t enough musical pleasure to excuse or obscure a mind that revered Mussolini and deemed a thousand pages of largely incoherent bricolage the right sort of “epic” for the modern age—just try slogging through his Cantos. A few are good. Most will make your forehead throb.)

Still, the Williams v. Stevens deal is not entirely fatuous. The former’s writing truly is less bookish and more at home in the twentieth century, even its grubby parts, hence the well-known wheelbarrows, county hospitals, and baseball games. The USA of his lifetime didn’t unsettle him too much. Stevens, on the other hand, might have hailed from rural Pennsylvania, but in poems he often views the universe as a tourist or collector would. The man was detached about his detachment. Even when his poems name American places (Tennessee, Florida, Oklahoma, New Haven), they are not “about” or situated in those places, which in Stevens’s hands become emptied-out terms, or “shadow worlds,” as Perloff has it. His poems love the world yet aren’t completely comfortable there, so instead of presenting themselves as referential, they turn real spaces into what often seem to be stages, curio cases, dioramas, such as with the famous moonshine jar. Stevens is also a much bigger fan of commas.

But as the decades keep passing—these “modern” writers came onto the scene almost a century ago and were dead before JFK was—grand categories make little sense outside of academic careerism and scholarly quibbling. Besides, literary competition, whether cooked up by a writer or a reader, is stupid, because there is always plenty of language to go around. While it would be difficult to mistake one writer’s work for the other’s, style-wise, if you have read enough of Williams and Stevens they begin to sound like half-siblings. Not brothers, but not distant cousins either, and certainly not strangers.

So how to explain this? Like all poets who are good at writing poetry, whatever forms they prefer, Stevens and Williams sought to reproduce “radiant gists” (WCW’s phrase) of identifiable experience, a goal most readily realized in lyric poems, and indeed these dudes are at their best when they keep things under a couple pages and play up the overlapping sounds and lovely pictures. Unfortunately, each also wrote lots of long, uneven poems. Paterson, Williams’s epic, has numerous prosy stretches that suuuuck, while Stevens’s Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction is a congeries of lyrics, not a unified epic, a reality many scholars ignore in spite of the title. (NOTES!) Further, their strongest texts are visually acute, rich in half- and internal rhymes, frequently arranged into stanzas or couplets, and redolent of symbolism, in the sense that they tease the reader into thinking that some object (a bouquet, a fish, a factory) in a text represents a Bigger Concept, while also frustrating any attempts to track and clarify the perceived symbolism. They are both funnier than readers usually realize.

This poem, “The Widow’s Lament in Springtime” (1921), isn’t a funny one, though. Like a lot of lyrics, it confronts death, in this case a death that has already happened; and like most lyrics written in English since about 1580,  it is based on the conceit that readers are overhearing a lone, conflicted speaker. That said, it is not a tragic poem. The widow’s marriage was long. She grieves immensely but her son is alive, and it is no catastrophe for a child to bury a parent. (The reverse is.) Although it would be a stretch to say that a feeling for nature is somehow healing her, the widow’s mourning is implicitly tied to biospheric arcs of death, decay, and regrowth. Williams’s debt to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and its quasi-ecological conception of eternity (“there is really no death“) is evident here. Anyway, I’ll stop talking. “Widow’s Lament” is great. Enjoy. You are lucky to live in a place in a time in the world where you can read poems. Don’t sleep on that.

Sorrow is my own yard

where the new grass

flames as it has flamed

often before, but not

with the cold fire

that closes round me this year.

Thirty-five years

I lived with my husband.

The plum tree is white today

with masses of flowers.

Masses of flowers

load the cherry branches

and color some bushes

yellow and some red,

but the grief in my heart

is stronger than they,

for though they were my joy

formerly, today I notice them

and turn away forgetting.

Today my son told me

that in the meadows,

at the edge of the heavy woods

in the distance, he saw

trees of white flowers.

I feel that I would like

to go there

and fall into those flowers

and sink into the marsh near them.