The Poem Is Only Half

THE BROADEST VALUE of some books lies beyond their main arguments, and such is the case with Anthony Libby's Mythologies of Nothing, a series of essays on what the author describes as a prevalent strain of negative mysticism in recent American poetry. Labby's highly academic presentation leaves no doubt about his authorily as a scholar, and his meticulous explications and comparisons have unquestionable value to the litetary connoisscur. All the same, Libby makes his best points in seemingly incidental remarks, explaning the limitations of a critic and expanding the definitions of acceptable poetry beyond the national.

Libby begins his study by considering T.S. Eliot 'II, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams, whose works staked out much of the turf that later poets have explored. He then discusses these later poets, with a chapter each on Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Robert Bly, and W.S. Merwin, emphasizing their continuing involvement with the mysticism that the older poets had resurrected from medieval times.

The poets under consideration, Libby maintains, have evinced a "preoccupation with death" which includes the idea of a more absolute annihilation of nothingness as a positive entily. Annihilation becomes both a subject and a method Eliot, for example, uses the self-destruction of logic to create a patados which gives his famous Four Quarlets much of their energy.

Libby then analyzes the central role religion has played in the development of these ideas. "Post Christian" poetry, Libby suggests, questions traditional Christian views More important, it uses immanence--mystical immersion in the world--as a clear alternative to the Christian idea of redemption by transcanding the physical. Both transcendence and immanence appear in recent poetry, usually implied rather than stated logically. In their works, Libby explains, the poets have often run aloul of crities who cannot understand their poetry on a rational level and relase to accept any other legitimate means of understanding it.

LIBBY OFTEN FINDS himself defending the poets against the judgments of critics who fault their work for obscurity. Wallace Stevens early work drew praise. Libby says, from critics who were "attracted more by the prospect of rational complexity than by the hope of vision" In fact, Libby insists that the contrast, and some times conflict, between the philosophical and the visionary deepens Stevens' poetry. At times it can be understood logically, while at other times, it can be experienced as ecstasy Academics often fail to come up with standards by which to judge such poetry How can one be objective about an experience which involves both poem and reader'.

Picking up this thread later in a discussion of Bly, Libby fails against critical skepticism of the poet's prophetic visions. Beliet is hardly the point," he writes continuing.

The problem with such critical condescension is that it seems hard to imagine how a poet like Bly or Merwin, once having felt such skepticism could go on writing poetry at all

Literary critics must use new criteria or perhaps none at all to judge such writing, just as the poets themselves constantly employ new methods of expression Obsessive rationalism destroys the beart of poetry, Libby maintains.

Perhaps annihilation has become an inevitable subject of modern thought, since the safety net of an afterlife his been yanked away. Poetry then takes up the struggle with exceptional vigor, since it is one of the few battles which is both highly personal and (presumably) universal. Critical reaction to the use of death as a theme has varied from bornor to intellectual acceptance, usually depending on the level of abstraction with which the subject is treated.

Libby points out that Eliot's move toward "the stasis of eternity" and his ultimate acceptance of a Christian, transcendent view are less threatening than say, Steven's line. Death is the mother of beauty" in the poem Sunday Morning" One of Bly's images of death as a physical joining with the earth-is even more threatening, Libby describes it as a powerful spiritual force, because it is more absolute than the topic of Christian death. The traditional view of death often seems like an enlarging of the liberated soul, but Bly's physical merging implies annihilation.

Libby says that the most misinterpreted use of death arises in Plath's poetry. Her 1963 suicide more than almost anything else, publicized the preoccupation with death in poetry. But critical fascination with psychoanalysis, combined with the shaliownes of popular opinion, reduced the accepted view of Plath's overwhelming irony and lostered further misconceptions Libby's reasessment of Plath does not lapse into sensationalism Her poetry, he argues, concerns itself more with the nature of the mother daughter relationship than with an impersonal death. In the process of exploring the idea of a mother. Plath discovered and dramatized Carl Jung's idea of mothers as "archetypal forces operating in the collective unconscious" Plath's identification with a destructive mother gives her poetry a jurid power--which paradoxically brings it to life.

What happens after a poet has written a line like Steven famous "Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is "Does he simply stop writing having discovered and assereted a great word' Libby mentions this phenomena almost as a clinical analyst of the process of aging he does not answer however. Lithuanian poet Czeslaw Milosz's contention that the poet's duty must be the discovery of hope.

In a way a poet can more easily celebrate a avoid than a fullness, more easily erect intricate monuments to Nothing than admit the existence of Something, Libby does not ask if the mystical absorption in death is not perhaps a retreat. This is the only serious flaw in a critical argument that fully acknowledges an off-ignored characteristic of poetry. The poem is only half--the reader is the rest.