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How conceptually innovative poets are like conceptually innovative painters.
How experimentally innovative poets are like experimentally innovative painters.
Many conceptual poets are like conceptual painters in ways other than the trajectory of their careers and the timing of their most successful works. For example, they often care more about form than about content. They often will focus on a particular style, master it, then move on to another. Picasso and Braque did that, and so did Eliot, as critic Malcolm Cowley observed: “His poems, from the first, were admirably constructed. He seemed to regard them, moreover, as intellectual problems – having solved one problem, he devoted himself to another.”
Similarly, experimental poets can be like experimental painters. They often are keen observers, much like seeker painters Cézanne and the Impressionists. Experimental poets with similarly intense interest in the details of their surroundings include William Carlos Williams, Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. As poet Robert Lowell said of a collection of Williams poems from age 63, “for experience and observation, it has, along with a few poems of Frost’s, a richness that makes almost all other contemporary poetry look a little secondhand.” Bishop’s poems “all … have written underneath, I have seen it,” poet-critic Randall Jarrell said. Moore was “the empress of observation,” in the words of poet Josephine Jacobsen.
Another similarity shared by many seeker poets and seeker painters is the difficulty letting go of a work and declaring it complete. Lowell, for example, said of his own verses, “In a way a poem is never finished. It simply reaches a point where it isn’t worth any more alteration.” Bishop had a slightly different characteristic, which Lowell described in a poem about her unending search for the right word: “ten years unfinished, glued to your notice board, with gaps or empties for the unimaginable phrase.” Those patterns are reminiscent of the work habits of Cézanne, Motherwell and De Kooning, who would rework paintings repeatedly and balked at declaring their paintings finished.
Like some experimental painters, Lowell was also uncertain about the quality of his works. Of his Life Studies, which won the national Book Award, he said, “When I finished Life Studies I was left hanging on a question mark. … I don’t know whether it is a death-rope or a life-line.” Some experimental poets, like experimental painters, prefer to start work on a new piece without careful planning. Frost, for example, said poems should be discovered, not outlined in advance. “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader,” he said. “For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.” That sounds much like experimental painter Joan Miró, who preferred to start a canvas “without a thought of what it might eventually become.”
Finder poets and seeker poets don’t completely mirror their counterparts in painting, in part because of the differences between between visual artistry and verbal artistry. One set of characteristics of poetic innovators that has no siple counterpart for painters: Conceptual poets often emphasize the importance of studying and responding to poetic traditions, while experimental poets are more likely to focus on studying and responding to how people talk. For example, finder Eliot spent his twenties studying at Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford. He took his early inspiration from nineteenth-century French poets and Dante. In contrast, seeker Frost dropped out of Dartmouth and Harvard and by his 30th birthday had hopped freight trains, taught in grades 1 through 8, worked as a newspaper reporter and run a chicken farm. All the while, he studied the language of the people around him. In his poetry, he said, “I would never use a word or combination of words that I hadn’t heard used in running speech.”
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