In the wake of modernism and the Industrial Revolution, the idea of “place” grew from the literal to a more figurative, even mystical sense of the word. Place, even home, grew to where one stood physically as well as emotionally and mentally. Growing from the idea of globalization and migration, 19th-20th Century American poetry grew from the private life to public life in search of new poetic truth. The poetic “I” grows from the imagined to the observed but falls back in the area between the private rural and the public urban to a state of poetry where the imagined goes hand in hand with the observed.
Starting chronologically, Emily Dickinson is where the discussion of the body and private life begins. It is because of the almost pop culture knowledge and mystique of the poet's isolated hermitage and seclusion that the discussion of the body's role must also begin. With Dickinson, we see that the body given titles and roles to fulfill. She is the “other,” with the physical house and home listed as an environment, she takes the perceptions and the conceptions of others. She is the wife; she is a woman, lover, schoolgirl, empress and lady. She is the docile body at home, given a task, she performs them. She has no public name and does so as resistance,
“I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there's a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog
To tell ones name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!” (116)
In not having a name, this allows her to assume any identity she pleases, her body is a blank slate for whatever she chooses. The act of refusal allows Dickinson the freedom of personal privacy. However, this freedom does come at a price. The body comes to languish, the poet has the internal life which is full, but the external is marked with a quotidian outlook. She writes in observation that
“There'll be that Dark Parade –
Of Tassels – and of – Coaches – soon –
It's easy as a Sign –
The Intuitions of the News –
in just a Country Town -” (247).
This marks her surroundings as so unsurprising, that causality marks the expected. Death is exciting for the poet; the funeral procession is a parade, symbolizing festival rather than mourning. She describes funeral veils or shrouds being designed by a milliner; this commotion is a celebration, and one that Dickinson explores. In one of her most well known poems, Death serves as a gentleman caller for her. She is identities, courted and “lives” on for centuries after her death that she gathered from riding with death and the immortal spirit of Immortality. She rides “toward Eternity” with Death (219). However, in being nameless, she is positioned as subordinate. Dickinson questions if she is worth remembering her as she writes, “how noteless – I could die -” (217).
Because of her surroundings, Dickinson turns to her own body. She imagines herself as a vessel. Dickinson's discusses on the relationship between the body and spiritualism when she writes, “I felt my life with both my hands / to see if it was there -” and with this, she offers up her soul as subject (162). The act and thought of taking her life and soul in her hands place her as physical space as her relationship to her identity. In turning to herself as subject, she is given agency by claiming her body as a place and as an object. Dickinson writes,
“I am afraid to own a Body –
I am afraid to own a Soul –
Profound – Precarious Property” (429).
There is power in her actions and choices. In doing so, the imagined is given strength, and Dickinson is allowed to write and continue to write, even when censored as being “shut [me] up in prose” (206). The action allows the imagined life to become real to her as “A word made Flesh is seldom / And tremblingly partook” and this development and play of words allow her joys and imagined life, abstract or concrete as well as her role as poet come through; however, she crafts it (616). Dickinson finds her role and voice as a writer internally by taking command of her private space.
The “I” is not seen only at home and through introspection, but through experience. Frank O'Hara chronicles the urban experience as an opposition to the rural. The self does not appear through the heavenly and religious aspects, but in the very secular and real everyday moments. O'Hara paints Manhattan as exciting and entertaining. His goal of resisting boredom comes through his observations about others. In his collection, Lunch Poems, he approaches the body through exploration rather than self-examination. In “A Step Away From Them,” he writes from the urban routine:
“It's my lunch out, so I go
for a walk among the hum-colored
cabs. First, down the sidewalk
where laborers feed their dirty
glistening torsos sandwiches”
………………………………………
A blond chorus girl clicks: he
smiles and rubs his chin. Everything
suddenly honks: it is 12:40 of
a Thursday.
Neon in daylight is a
great pleasure. . .” (15-16)
In this densely populated poem, there are bodies upon bodies. We see them through the speaker, and we understand the sense of identity and purpose through how the speaker's description. The torsos are glistening, shirtless and dirty. The man in the doorway with a toothpick has a specific ethnic identity, and he is languishing as a blond girl clicks disapprovingly. A woman possesses a status by the fox fur and pet poodle. The details directly known about the speaker is the fact that he is walking, he gets a cheeseburger for lunch, has papaya juice and carries a collection of poems in his pocket. With only these minimal details, the reader has to look for more information, and the relationship between the poet and the audience allows takes command. The audience has to interpret the name dropping, the pop culture references, the identification of gender and ethnicity as not only motive but as deliberate. These details allows the reader to discern O'Hara's poetic “I” in the social and public sphere.
The body gains agency in this realm. However, it is done in a means of advice. O'Hara suggests that mothers allow their children a chance to go to the movies not only as a reprieve from the children, but for the children to experience the world outside the familiar domestic (51). He places the body away from home in order to grow and develop, since home is where apathy begins, which will breed into hate. O'Hara has the body portrayed as weak where children “grow old and blind in front of a / TV set” (52). O'Hara stresses this as a judgement call, to speak to another population other than one he identifies with, he gives more of his own poetic voice. He places himself and his values openly but without specifically naming them. He is allowing his voice to be embedded in the city narrative that he has constructed.
In addition to moving to the urban at the turn of the century, there is a pull towards the city and the “I” is no longer seen through the relationship of the spiritual and the self that Dickinson wrote, but towards the relationship between common man and surroundings. Carl Sandberg alludes to this in his collection Chicago Poems. Towards the end of the collection, his early poems from Other Days appear. He writes
“Emily Dickinson:
You gave us the bumble bee who has a soul,
The everlasting traveler among the hollyhocks,
And how God plays around a back yard garden” (77).
Rather than focus on nature and introspection, Sandberg writes of the literal and concrete. The playfulness vanishes, replaced with a realism that tinges on melancholy. The movement to the city and the incoming immigrant population makes a new sense of self. The “I” is identities through shared experiences and camaraderie. Where as O'Hara used the influx of bodies to separate himself from them, Sandberg uses the other bodies in his collection to stress relationship. Sandberg personifies his city in the poem “Chicago” where he writes that the city itself “Under the terrible burden of destiny laughing as a young man / laughs” (1). The city takes on the communal tone and becomes all of the people inhabiting it, Sandberg associates himself with the other rather than identifies it. He becomes the butcher, the gunman, the witness, and the victim. He takes on all these roles because he seems them as necessary and functionary in the city. He finds joy with them, when he in the poem “Happiness,” he finds “a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women / and children and a keg of beer and an accordion” (8). In “Jack,” the subject is the described as “son-of-a-gun” who embraces his life (20). The bodies here survive and flourish because of their ability to find one another.
It is the community that Sandberg relishes in and thrives in, but he is realistic about the city and its inhabitants have their limits. He writes of the city itself in the same introspection that Dickinson does of heaven and the spiritual. Sandberg writes in “Skyscraper” of the dangers of the city and the physical and literal destruction of the bodies of those working. The work is rough, regardless of who does it, no matter it is an office girl or watchman (30-31). But everything is just beyond reach in Chicago, just barely attainable. He writes of what is imagined outside the city with the same wonder that O'Hara implies in his narrative. Sandberg writes about choice and agency in leaving and travel in “Mamie,”
“maybe there is
romance
and big things
and real dreams
that never go smash (15).”
much like desire that O'Hara has for bodies to thrive outside the domestic, Sandberg simply desires for people to thrive. The two different takes on the urban reflect how the poetic voice can be seen through the lens of other bodies in the text rather than self-reflection.
However, Allen Ginsberg shows how the community can fail, community in this case being presented as both location and organization of people. Where O'Hara depicted New York as a Paradise, Ginsberg presents it as the opposite. Rather than place serving as an empowering existence, in his long poem Howl, the mind and body deteriorate severely because of their presence. Ginsberg writes of the decline of his generation, as he writes, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by / madness” (9). His poem that serves as part confession and part manifesto is a rallying cry, very similar to Walt Whitman in his desire to be a poet of the nation. Ginsberg sees the general populace around him and rallies them. His intent to save them might is suspect since he describes those already lost as worth saving.
Dickinson saves herself by becoming the poet and inhabiting the space in her lines. O'Hara identifies himself through separating himself from others and Sandberg offers friendship to those inhabiting his poems. Ginsberg simply laments them. Regardless of where they are, from Laredo to Baltimore, to Oklahoma this lament has spread nationwide (10-12). This gritty urbanism specifically naming jazz and Eastern spiritualism is an attempt at rejecting established community and norms (14-17). Ginsberg's depiction of Carl Soloman's deterioration of the mind and body in response to systematic structures, in place, is likened to his own when he writes, “Ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and / now you're in the total animal soup of time” (19). Carl served as a spokesperson for those stuck in the relationship between the arts, the self and the city of New York. Ginsberg then identifies with this rebellion as a means of replying back to society, who like a figurative place and figurative collective body, he holds responsible. In the depiction of Moloch rising from the city (21) to his lament in “Sunflower Sutra” where he writes,
“….when did you forget you were a
flower? when did you look at your skin and
decide you were an impotent dirty old locomo-
tive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specture and
shade of a once powerful mad American locomo-
tive (37)”
Ginsberg's distaste of the vanishing natural world is made clear. That is not the America that he imagined nor does he believe Whitman imagined for himself. Ginsberg writes to the imagined Whitman, “Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of Love / past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent cottage (30)?” In placing Whitman in a grocery store, a symbol of consumerism, it displaces Whitman's legacy as a natural poet and the discomfort that Ginsberg feels is killing him.
This call that Ginsberg establishes with Howl brings back the idea of the imagined and introspective. The environment is responsible for the poet as a poet is responsible for the environment. It is this thought process places Lorine Niedecker and David Wagoner in a position that is past Dickinson but with the same respect that Sandberg has for his community. Niedecker's work is populated with fancy; her earlier poems in New Goose are very much observation based, just like O'Hara's work in Lunch Poems but this time, Niedecker describes the surroundings around her in a rural setting. She writes,
“Ash woods, willow, close to shore,
gentle overflow each spring,
here he lived to be eighty-four
then left everything”
which follows a distinct nursery rhyme, but this poem leads into darker territory dealing with fur trappers and people that could be found populating her physical and literal landscape (93). This combination of the observation is made heartbreaking when combined with the imagined. In her work, For Paul and Other Poems the poet imagines her son, who is dead populating the pages and with her in her community. In the poem, “For Paul” she repeats “maybe Paul” signifying his death and how this sequence is an elegy (137). Not only does this poetic sequence treat the imagined space that Paul would fill, both physically within her home but also the metaphorical space in her life. This imagined body, which is disappears quickly in the text, only to be replaced by houses, property and the physical is more dear to Niedecker. The use of repetition again comes into play with discussing Paul. Unlike Dickinson who embraces being the poet and allows herself the fulfilled imagined life, Niedecker has a desire for her body to serve a purpose. She repeats, “I've spent my life on nothing. / The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing” and ends with the word, “nothing” to show that her body occupies space, but without a relationship to it (147-148). She is given place in the rural and a familiarity she embraces, but the relationship she has to it is simply as an observer. She is a body among the wilderness.
Just like Niedecker, Wagoner discusses his presence in the rural, as opposed to the urban environment. He employs a narrative style, as does O'Hara. He opens his poem, “Toward the Interior” discussing the limits of the body when he writes, “Far as eyes go: the stiff apparel / of the pine, and the hillocks in the field (29).” Not only is his location lush and bountiful, but it more than he can ever witness and grasp. Wagoner's collection Dry Sun, Dry Wind places the body as deteriorating and the environment as constant. This works against Ginsberg whose rallying cry against nation has the hopes that the body can overcome place, where Wagoner is very aware of the limits of the body. While embracing this, Wagoner employs the historical bodies rather than the imagined bodies in the development of his poetic “I” and through the various subjects and personae, we piece Wagoner together as done with O'Hara. In the poem, “Silas the Tree Surgeon” the historical is imagined as returning to the place where they work, thrive and live as he writes,
“There are applies in my head. They knock
Like stones against the backs of my eyes,
and break to blossoms beyond my eardrums (50).”
The body has become vital to home and location, that they become inextricable, much like the roots in the poem, the tree surgeon and his work cannot be separated. As the tree dies, then so will the tree surgeon one day also pass.
Place influences the body. As much as the body can leave an imprint of a location, the place does the same to identity and the bodies of writers transitioning the line between physical space and mental space. Dickinson's physical space was sparse which allowed for her internal place, be populated with religion and the imagined life she could live. O'Hara and Sandberg both one of many living in their respective cities. O'Hara took a literal step away from those around him, describing the relationship their bodies had with his city. Sandberg found that the city that he celebrated, but also accepted for its faults was only as strong as those who inhabited it. Ginsberg's occupation of the social space allowed for him to champion a voice for those he felt no longer had a place, through the decline of the physical and mental body, but also through the spiritual body. This leaves us with Niedecker and Wagoner. Niedecker whose cloistered secluded life mirrors Dickinson is rich and lush with play with through that her use of sound to describe her place in the world while Wagoner already describes what has happened and what will always be.