Natural history and epiphany: Elizabeth Bishop's Darwin Letter

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Zachariah Pickard

Insofar as modernism sought an aesthetics of clarity and precision, of stripped-down objectivity, the scientist made an attractive emblem. The "poet and the scientist," Marianne Moore suggests, "work analogously":

     Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one of
     the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must
     narrow the choice, must strive for precision. (30)

The characterization of "the poet" as one who is objective ("hard on himself"), eliminates clutter ("narrow[s] the choice"), and "strive[s] for precision" reveals a number of modernist preoccupations. Ezra Pound similarly recommends "the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap" (Literary 6) and labels his ideogrammatic method "THE METHOD OF SCIENCE" (ABC 26). Most famously, perhaps, T.S. Eliot unites tenor and vehicle when, in order to show that only through "depersonalization" can art "be said to approach to the condition of science," he likens the mind of the poet to "a bit of finely filiated platinum" (40). Eliot's rhetoric here takes it as given that art should approach the condition of science, and his argument about the relationship between tradition and the individual talent is implicitly based on familiar ideas about how scientific work is done. In Pound's words,

     there are simple procedures, and there are known discoveries,
     clearly marked [... and] in each age one or two men of genius find
     something and express it. (Literary 19)

One builds, that is, on the work of one's predecessors, thus contributing to a larger project. According to Pound, the individual talent can contribute by "find[ing]" something; for Eliot it does so by introducing "the new (the really new) work of art" into the field (38). Behind much of the high-modernist rhetoric about the project of poetry lies a set of ideas and notions about the experimentalist sciences.

But as Charles Altieri points out, the modernists are not entirely comfortable with some of the implications of the scientific metaphor:

     However liberating science's version of impersonal dehumanization
     might prove, [modernist] artists almost always had to restore some
     aspects of the romantic values they were ostensively denying, as in
     Eliot's claim that only those who knew what it meant to suffer from
     personality would appreciate the impersonality he was calling for.
     (77)

Hence too Pound's recursion to "men of genius." This reluctance to commit fully to impersonality is not an obstacle for everyone, though. Across the channel, Andre Breton, the founder of surrealism, picks up some of Eliot's terms in his own argument about the extinction of personality, telling his reader that one might as well speak "du talent de ce metre en platine" (39) ("of this platinum ruler's talent") as of the artist's talent. Whether or not Breton is consciously invoking Eliot as an authority, the two of them fit into a useful narrative of literary depersonalization: modernism publicly endorses a scientific, depersonalized notion of poetry as a project while secretly harboring certain misgivings; feeling none of modernism's doubt, surrealism picks up on the scientific language and declares that its recherches will eliminate personality in favor of the unconscious; and, more recently, some postmodern poets have celebrated the eradication of personality for its own sake. Christian Bok, for instance, Canada's postmodern enfant terrible, writes enthusiastically that The Policeman's Beard Is Half Constructed, a book made up of random phrases generated by a computer program, is "not so much a book of surreal poems as it is an obit for classic poets" that "confounds the very idea of authorship, refuting the privileged uniqueness of poetic genius" by proving that "the involvement of an author in the production of literature has henceforth become discretionary." Where the surrealists and modernists believe in setting the self aside in favor of something greater (the unconscious, precision, tradition), it is the setting aside itself that so pleases Bok.