Charles Edward Eaton, in New and Selected Poems, as elsewhere, is a remarkable poet, a fine metrist and stylist, and a close disciple of Wallace Stevens in artistic skill and finesse as well as in theory and topics. Many a poet who buys whole hog and pen Stevens’ often-prevalent view of poetics (and thus poetry) as endless vacillation and uncertainty, utterly lacks Stevens’ polish and pleasure and talent. Eaton beautifully has them, yet also makes them his own. He is the strong disciple, not the weak.
One can even say (I do say) that Eaton writes more satisfactory poems than the later Stevens. Stevens in Harmonium and sometimes elsewhere wrote some magnificent things, but most of his later work is one sprawling notebook of genius, perpetually defeating its gains and humming its losses in many a modernist key.
Eaton regularly writes poems, whole and unified poems, with skill and grace and frequent power. The theme and topic is the relationship between aesthetics, art (poetry and painting most of all, but even ordinary conversation and observation), and reality. The conclusion is that aesthetic attempts do not suffice in their purity, and that the gap between art and reality is really not to be closed.
One can complain of the prevalence of such skepticism in our time. Descartes’ dream (of achievable certainty in human thought) has been replaced in much 20th-century assertion with an absolute certain uncertainty in all we think, were it possible for any thought to be thought or spoken. To paraphrase Heidegger: since philosophy is wholly uncertain, then poetry and metaphor become of importance, since they are no more wholly uncertain than philosophy. But how likely then is it that a given metaphor or poetic striving is true? Having confidence in what is wholly uncertain is hardly rational, much less heartening.
In a witty poem by Wallace Stevens, “A High-Toned Old Christian Woman,” we are told that the “supreme fiction” of poetry, its “bawdiness . . . indulged,” is just as likely to reach Heaven as are Christian projections from moral law. Both, Stevens argues, are equally projections, and therefore equally unverifiable. The word “equally” is his, the bawdiness is “equally [with the Christian morality] converted into palms,” into heavenly vision. Equally? An exact tie? 50-50? A five-tenths probability? What a magnificent certainty of epistemology it would take to arrive at that! The poem ends:
Such tink and tank and tunk a-tunk-tunk.
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullaboo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wince as they will. Wink most when widows wince.
That is high good fun, but it should make logicians wince, then have the last laugh. Everything in the poem is mocked and self-mocked, an epistemological insurance policy that pays few dividends. The comedy becomes tragedy swiftly enough. It did recurrently for Stevens, whose hunger for truth—however despairing he was at times about achieving it—could not finally be placated by jokes. Poetry and truth are serious matters, in deep senses.
But, having said that, there is something to his doctrine—to know the true is not easy, and Eaton, much more than most poets who adopt such a doctrine, does not let the uncertainty undo his poetic skill, nor does he always succumb to the limitations of such belief.
His techniques and structures vary. He is one of the most skilled metrists we have, and his best qualities can be seen in “Sentimental Education,” whose long lines—quiet and constrained—stand in ironic contrast to the poem’s passionate lovers and vivid colorations. The title, a playful allusion to Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, is at once literal (the poem is about education, the training up, and intensifying, of the sentiments, the passions) and pejorative (applying the notion of sentimentality self-mockingly).
The poem tells the story of telling the story of a man and woman going in a canoe across blue water perhaps to an island, where they perhaps picnic and perhaps make (perhaps?) passionate love even though “somewhat wistfully” they would, perhaps, rather be reading quietly in a quiet room. The narrator then tells how that story, from childhood’s mud-plushings—rich sensuous involvements in the world—on, has haunted and affected the narrator’s art. He has (he tells us) retold the story many times and ways, ending with an excellent line: “Letting the keel of the green canoe cut the pages, white, so white, then blue.” The line is lyric, graceful, nostalgic, gently self-mocking of poet and process, and suavely blending the actuality and the telling. The green canoe cuts through pages, whose whiteness becomes the blueness of the lake. How can we tell the telling from the tale, the language from the thing said? Well, the question can be asked and insisted on many a time and way, which come to one reasserted uncertainty, one certain uncertainty: the truth is not to be had.
Eaton builds poems, a welcome relief nowadays. In “Portrait of a Man Rising in His Profession,” the title’s jollity turns out twice true: a diver in a wet suit is speaking, underwater; the poet and the images rise toward and in the ending of the poem. The blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, is as fine as any modern blank verse I know, its variations speaking their changes with a greater precision and feeling because of the strictness.
“Suit of Light” is a simple narrative, elaborately performed and achieved. A man stands looking at a white carpet in the sunlight through the windows and sees colors, including reds, in it—and he imagines a savage on the floor, bleeding, bleeding, just for him. The long lines are handled as skillfully as in “Sentimental Education.” The poem has passion and color and playfulness. “But time rustles the silk curtains—there he stands, in the tenor of your life, opening another vein.”
“Steps Taken in a Debris of Day Lilies” (in The Thing King, not in New and Selected Poems) is based on a simple procedure, intricately developed: day lilies are described, then a woman is described, and woman and lily meet in a simile that invokes a network of connectings and identities.
Like a turned down lily, ready to drop.
The woman drops her pollinated jewels.
Reads a story about the sun’s far death:
If someone is trying to frighten her.
She will turn out the light, lift up the lamp.
It is still warm by the river—you can
Hear the lilies feeding on the starlight.
The jewels are literally pollinated from being near the lilies. Jewels breed jewels metaphorically as beauty and need breed beauty and need and art. The intricate art pauses against the far and real presence-to-be in time and space and seeming inevitability of “the sun’s far death”; and if the woman lifts up the lamp (of art and invention) against the light and the darkness to come, the light and dark are still present. The typical theme in Eaton—the gap between art and our artifacts and any reality—is soundly defeated for once, and we are glad. Great art does speak truth.
[New and Selected Poems, 1942-1987, by Charles Edward Eaton (New York, London, Toronto: Cornwall Books) 318 pp., $28.50]
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