Answering "The Waste Land": Robert Hayden and the Rise of the African American Poetic Sequence.

April of 1966 was one of the most eventful and paradoxical months in the history of twentieth-century American poetry. At the Third World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, Robert Hayden's A Ballad of Remembrance was awarded "the Grand Prix" as "the best" recent volume of Anglophone poetry (qtd. by Pool 43). In at least some international literary circles, the prestige of this award roughly matched its Olympic title. The first such event to be held on "independent African soil," the Festival was sponsored by Leopold Sedar Senghor in conjunction with UNESCO and the Societe Africaine de Culture and was attended by over 10,000 people from thirty-seven nations (Vaillant 323).(1) The other finalists in the poetry competition were Derek Walcott's In a Green Night and Christopher Okigbo's Limits. Langston Hughes was one of the judges. Also in attendance were Aime Cesaire, Leon Damas, Alioune Diop, Yevgeny Yevtoshenko, and Duke Ellington. Andre Malraux, then French Minister of Culture, seems to have captured the prevailing spirit when he praised the Festival as an indication that Senghor's cultural program was about to shape "the destiny of a continent" (qtd. by Vaillant 323).

For Hayden, though, the Grand Prix was wildly unexpected. He had not yet published a book with a commercial or university press in the United States, and he was still teaching fifteen hours each semester as an associate professor in the English department at Fisk University. Even the Grand Prix itself, when it first arrived, seemed to do him as much harm as good.(2)

In fact, within a few days, while his poetry was being praised in Senegal as the centerpiece of international negritude, back home in Nashville Hayden was being attacked as the scapegoat of choice for a new generation of African American poets.(3) At Fisk's First Black Writers' Conference, a group of writers and students, led by Melvin Tolson, assailed Hayden as the stooge of exploitive capitalists and, all in all, a traitor to his race. For the most part, Tolson and his supporters endorsed the "Black Cultural Nationalism" of Ron Karenga, with its declarations that "all art must reflect and support the Black Revolution" and that "any art that does not discuss and contribute to the revolution is invalid" (33). Hayden's crime was that he refused to be labeled a "Negro poet." From the beginning of the conference, and much to the dismay of most of his audience, he insisted that he should be considered, instead, "a poet who happens to be Negro" (Llorens 60).(4) When he reiterated his position at a panel discussion - which also included Tolson, Ama Bontemps, and Margaret Walker - the advocates of Black Cultural Nationalism reacted as though they had come face to face with the Enemy. Tolson's response was perhaps most characteristic. Among other things, he declared that, "when a man writes, he tells me which way he went in society." "I'm a black poet," he continued, "an African-American poet, a Negro poet. I'm no accident - and I don't give a tinker's damn what you think" (qtd. in Llorens 62-63).(5) One member of the audience even accused Hayden of contributing to the "delusion" of the "young black people" studying at Fisk (64). In the following months, students on the Fisk campus - almost all of whom, as Hayden was well aware, were from backgrounds more privileged than his own - continued to refer to him as an "Uncle Tom" or an "Oreo," believing that he should use the prestige granted by the Grand Prix to authorize and advance their political positions (Hatcher 38).

I begin with these events for three reasons. First of all, it is in these few days that studies of Hayden almost inevitably find their critical center - and, unfortunately, Hayden's defining moment.(6) From a conventionally biographical perspective, this focus might seem reasonable. In the years immediately following the Third World Festival of Negro Arts, Hayden was granted a brief flurry of academic and otherwise official interest. From 1967 to 1969, he was offered a couple of visiting professorships, a permanent position at the University of Louisville, a recording at the Library of Congress, and finally the position at the University of Michigan that he would accept and then occupy for the rest of his life (Williams 32). Nonetheless, it is safe to say that by the end of the 1960s, soon after the Grand Prix and his auspicious association with the negritude movement, and at least until very recently, Hayden would regain and retain his status as "one of the most underrated and unrecognized poets in America" (Lester 4).(7) This neglect is largely the result of a collective choice - usually implicit but nonetheless clear - that academic critics have made in their descriptions of Hayden's career. Hayden's poetry has rarely been considered in terms of its rich affiliations with the work of major international poets - including Walcott, Okigbo, and Cesaire, among many others - as suggested at the Third World Festival. And his poetry has never been seriously considered - at least by mainstream critics - in relation to the major works by younger African American poets who have found it a rich resource and an inspiration.(8) Rather, his poetry has been viewed - by his detractors and most of his supporters - as somehow determined by his one-line answer to the "Negro question," as it was framed by his opponents at the Fisk Conference. For Tolson and the younger writers of the emerging Black Arts Movement, Hayden eventually came to be viewed as a poet of some ability - and some minor historical significance - whose work is irreparably limited and dated because, in their view, it was not sufficiently concerned with issues of race. Even Arna Bontemps, who was often sympathetic with Hayden's work, would conclude after the Fisk Conference that Hayden "doesn't really like that Negro thing" (qtd. in Llorens 61). For a handful of more conservative critics and editors, Hayden's poetry has also maintained a kind of marginal interest - and, ironically, for much the same reason. For instance, in the influential Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair begin their introduction to Hayden's poetry by stating that Hayden "did not subscribe to any esthetic of Black poetry." They describe his poetry in terms of his interest in the work of Countee Cullen, Carl Sandburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and "the English classics" (863), and then include a selection of Hayden's poetry that would seem to suggest, to a reader unfamiliar with his career, that he must have been trying to write a kind of race-free poetry. In either case, Hayden's critical reception has served, more than anything, to obscure and diminish his most formidable accomplishments.

Second, when viewed in the context of the history of American poetry over the past thirty years, the events of April, 1966, point to an even more striking neglect. Recent criticism has remained oblivious to one of the most remarkable developments in contemporary literature: the rise, in part out of Hayden's poetry, of the African American poetic sequence. Because of their particular moment in history, I think, the conferences in Dakar and Nashville were bound to have mixed legacies. Despite the notable absence of the more politically "radical" American writers, the Third World Festival of Negro Arts did help make the rich history of negritude known beyond the cultural centers of Paris and Dakar.(9) At the same time, as a formative moment in the American debate over a "black aesthetic," bringing together a number of still neglected writers on the verge of academic awareness - if not legitimacy - Fisk's First Black Writers' Conference helped expand the audience of such poets as Margaret Walker and Amiri Baraka, among others, and the Second Conference of 1967 would generally be recognized as the impetus for Gwendolyn Brooks's movement toward African poetic forms and what has been called a "new Black consciousness" (Melhem 154). Nonetheless, the universalizing grandeur with which Hayden was praised, on the one hand, and the vehemence with which he was attacked, on the other, suggest that the two conferences, like most events that end up being reconstructed as defining moments, obscured just about as much as they revealed. After all, the often contentious politics surrounding the emerging post-colonial African and Caribbean literature - still loosely grouped at the Dakar conference under the title "negritude" - was just about as foreign to Hayden's sensibilities as the cultural politics of the Fisk Conference.(10) A Baha'i by faith, Hayden was committed to "the affirmation of independent investigation of the truth" and to abstinence from partisan politics of any kind (Hatcher 68-69). Beginning just about a decade later, however, American poets would be better prepared to draw directly from the legacy of Hayden's poetry - at once individualistic and engaged, local and international, highly crafted and improvisational. Clearly conscious of Hayden's example, in recent years such poets as Michael S. Harper, Jay Wright, and Brenda Marie Osbey have been writing highly ambitious poetic sequences, firmly grounded in history, that invoke distinctly heterogeneous heritages with a wide range of formal experimentation.

Third, if the events of April, 1966, are located in the context of a more extensive literary history, Hayden becomes an even more significant figure. His career spans a crucial period, from the early 1940s through the early 1970s, and his poetry eventually plays a major role in the emergence and development of what I have come to call "post-traditional" poetry. This poetry is largely informed by its authors' paradoxical stance toward literary tradition. The post-traditional poet is certainly conscious - in fact, often intensely conscious - of tradition. At the same time, though, he or she manages, in one way or another, to view any distinctly literary tradition as historically contingent. Most often, the post-traditional poet uses this sense of contingency to construct from disparate sources a personal heritage - provisionally, heterogeneously, willfully - in order to address some perceived historical crisis or, especially in recent years, some immediate social need.

Post-traditional poetry has its most conspicuous origins in the mid-1920s, when, just about simultaneously, the leading canonizers of high modernism began to take radical measures to address what seemed to them a profound schism between their most revered traditions and their peculiar historical interpretations of post-War Europe. At this time, writing in Venice, Ezra Pound began to juxtapose paradisal visions with Dante's Inferno and Major Douglas's economics. At the same time, in London, T. S. Eliot, recently established as a cultural icon, began his second "career" as poetry editor at Faber and Gwyer, redefining himself as a "reactionary" man of letters in what was in effect an elaborate attempt to counterbalance his own philosophical uncertainty with a millennial vision of Christian culture. Meanwhile, in Ireland, William Butler Yeats set out on his first deliberate effort to distance himself from his early romantic nationalism - a truly strange journey, by way of a highly personal reclamation of an Anglo-Irish heritage, that would eventually lead him, in the last days of his life, to the striking embrace of common humanity in "The Circus Animal's Desertion" and "Cuchulain Comforted."

By the middle of their careers, these poets were writing as though tradition - as they knew it - was about to come to an end, under the assault of a debased and debasing culture. They cultivated their notions of historical crisis in ways that resulted not only in reactionary cultural politics but also, eventually, in an understanding that, if the sense of literary culture they so cherished could be threatened and even destroyed by the forces of history, then any canon, indeed any culture, might be considered radically contingent.

Of course, at least since the Bollingen Prize controversy of 1949, the efforts of later poets and critics to come to terms with this legacy - specially its disturbing mixture of poetic innovation and reactionary politics, its vast international influence and intense Eurocentrism - has amounted to a kind of collective anxiety attack. By now, though, I think it has become clear that these often embarrassing ancestors have contributed largely - and, politically speaking, despite themselves - to the rise of a post-traditional poetry that has been growing, at least since the mid-1980s, more explicitly heterogenous and more international, both in its sources and its influence, in such works as Adrienne Rich's Your Native Land, Your Life (1986), Seamus Heaney's Station Island (1983), and Derek Walcott's Omeros (1990). Considered more broadly, a distinctly post-traditional stance has become increasingly apparent in the linguistic heterogeneity of contemporary Irish poets like Nuala ni Dhomhnaill and Medbh McGuckian, in the communal heritage evident in the prison poetry and autobiographical writing of Jimmy Santiago Baca, and in the remarkable emergence of contemporary poetry by American Indians. For these

later poets, any approximation of a tradition - any communal or even personal heritage - is conceived pragmatically, as one instrument among many others with which they can engage a world that is at once overwhelmingly various and desperately in need.

In this essay, I will focus primarily on Hayden's "Middle Passage," the long early poem that would remain his most significant contribution to the development of post-traditional poetry. In "Middle Passage," he developed an experimental poetics that could examine racism, directly and specifically, by telling an episode of its history in a number of contending voices. Even at this early point in his career, Hayden was able to challenge the modernists' sense of social crisis and give voice to his personal doubts about modernism's moral limitations - in terms that would not even be suggested at the conferences at Dakar and Fisk. In this sense, "Middle Passage" is crucial to any reconsideration of Hayden's career. It anticipates his later "Negro history" poems, including "Runagate Runagate," "The Ballad of Nat Turner," and "Frederick Douglass." It also anticipates a number of Hayden's poems in widely varied historical contexts - most notably "A Ballad of Remembrance," "Night, Death, Mississippi," "Belsen, Day of Liberation," "El-Hajj Malix El-Shabazz," and the important later sequence "Words in the Mourning Time" - in which he explores, often in brutal detail, the psychology and consequences of racism and xenophobia. Throughout this poetry, as William Meredith has put it, "there is scarcely a line of his which is not identifiable as an experience of Black America" (vi).

Eliotic Intonations

For American poets of Hayden's generation, the development of a post-traditional poetry almost inevitably involved some kind of direct confrontation with received modernism. Hayden was certainly no exception. Beginning his career in the early 1940s, he was conspicuously aware of the previous generation's legacy, particularly as it was perceived in the academy. In this view, a few designated "masterpieces," the most conspicuous of which was "The Waste Land," tended to appear as the culmination - both in the sense of the highest attainment and in the sense of the end - of a predominantly English tradition. The post-traditional impulses in the work of the established modernists - Yeats's provisional reconstructions of his own heritage in his final poems, for instance, or the philosophical and linguistic uncertainty of Eliot's "Little Gidding" - were not yet recognized, or had not yet appeared.

Hayden's confrontation with this legacy can be seen in two contrary tendencies of his critical writing. On the one hand, he was prone to monumentalize Eliot's work - as would most academics of his time - by locating it at the end of the Great Tradition. In an overview of "Twentieth Century American Poetry" written for a 1973 textbook entitled The United States in Literature, he begins with a surprisingly conventional narrative account of modern poetry in which he acknowledges "the supremacy of Auden and Eliot" in the 1940s and then finds his conclusion in a description of "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock" and "The Waste Land" as expressions of "the spiritual emptiness of industrialized civilization" (Collected Prose 4549). On the other hand, having been raised in Detroit's Paradise Valley, Hayden was also unusually aware, for an academic of his time, of the persistence of folk culture, jazz, and popular song throughout modern poetry. So even in his textbook account he mentions, along the way, the influence of these populist forces on the work of Edward Arlington Robinson, Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters, and the writers of the Harlem Renaissance - among many others.

Only on rare occasions in his critical writing could Hayden put aside this characteristic ambivalence - and, in doing so, move beyond the positions of both the "academicians and purists" and the Black Cultural Nationalists. Near the end of his career, in an address to the Library of Congress, he was finally able to articulate a more nuanced and culturally grounded understanding of "poetry as a medium, an instrument for social and political change":

Poetry does make something happen, for it changes sensibility. In the early stages of a culture it helps to crystallize the language and is a repository for value, belief, ideals. The Griot in African tribes keeps names and legends and pride alive. Among the Eskimos the shaman or medicine man is a poet. In ancient Ireland and Wales the bard was a preserver of the culture (Collected Prose 11)

From a perspective with this range of cultural and historical reference, the conventional academic canon of the mid-century - which usually seemed, with Eliot in his place, so complete - suddenly appears temporary, limited, and relatively inconsequential. So, in the same passage, Hayden is able to reconsider poetic tradition in terms that are personal, pragmatic, provisional, and moral:

A point to consider: What would I as a poet do if my people were rounded up like the Jewish people in Germany under the Nazis? Claude McKay's sonnet "If We Must Die"; the poems of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos that were recited and sung by men and women fighting in the streets for the freedom of their country; Pablo Neruda, William Butler Yeats, Emily Sachs, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Walt Whitman; they stand out as poets even if you dislike their politics. To be a poet, it seems to me, is to care passionately about justice and one's fellow human beings. (11)

In this construction of a living poetic heritage, Hayden no longer sees tradition as a "line of development," leading toward an inevitable poetic conclusion. He is arranging writers, in heterogeneous combinations, to address a particular historical problem with a poetic vision of justice and compassion.

One irony in Hayden's situation is that, obvious political differences aside, this general method of overcoming the canon of the day is something he shared not only with a number of his contemporaries but also, in a way he himself never recognized, with the canonized modernists themselves. Like Yeats, Pound, and Eliot - especially in the later stages of their careers - Hayden's most basic tendency was to reconstruct a standard canon and, at the same time, to locate himself outside this canon in a way that highlighted its limitations and, ultimately, its historical contingency. In this sense, his method was similar to that of philosophers like Nietzsche and Heidegger, as Richard Rorty has described it, when they redescribed their predecessors in terms of a tradition that seemed, in some sense, to have reached its end. Canon construction then became a strategy for dealing with "the problem of ironist theory . . . the problem of how to overcome authority without claiming authority" (105). In this sense, at least from the mid-1920s on, each of the major modernists eventually came to see himself as Hayden saw Eliot: at the end of the English poetic tradition; as, in some manner of speaking, the last poet.

For those of us who have entered the academy well after the rise of postmodern theory, I think it is difficult to appreciate just how common, and at times overwhelming, the monumentalizing view of Eliot was in the 1940s. Overcoming "The Waste Land" was a problem Hayden shared with such different poets as H.D. when she wrote her Trilogy, William Carlos Williams when he wrote the first four books of Paterson, and even Charles Olson, early in the next decade, when he began The Maxim us Poems. As these poets progressed through the 1940s and 1950s, they were not worried, as their predecessors had been, that tradition, as they knew it, was about to end, and that therefore there might no longer be anything of significance to write; rather, they were driven, and at times practically inebriated, by a sense of freedom they associated with the end of tradition, in the conventional academic sense of the term. That is why, just when literary criticism was being established in an unprecedented state of institutional security and influence within the academy, and mainstream critics were settling on a totalizing view of poetic tradition, a number of American poets were undertaking some of the most ambitiously experimental work of the century.

That is also the reason that, no matter how monumental high modernist poetics might have seemed to be when Hayden began his career, his confrontation with "The Waste Land" should not be construed as the kind of agonistic struggle against "belatedness" imagined by Harold Bloom in books like The Anxiety of Influence, A Map of Misreading, and Agon. Hayden's revision of Eliot's poetics was far more conscious and strategic than Bloom's Freudian mythology would allow, and more engaged with history than Bloom's metaphysics and his preoccupation with private irony have ever permitted him to recognize. In the writing of his poetry, Hayden understood from the start that all acts of literary influence, and most of all those involving any kind of "alternative" tradition, take place in a world in which power is distributed unequally.(11) As Edward Said has written of narrative literature in relation to European imperialism, even the most essentialist accounts of influence always retain, in some form, traces of the relationship between master and disciple, even master and slave (191).

In "Middle Passage," Hayden's revisionist strategy is calculated most of all to challenge Eliot's poetics by drawing upon historical sources alien to Eliot's social world. He originally meant to use this poem as the opening piece in a volume to be entitled The Black Spear, in which he would attempt to "correct the misconceptions and to destroy some of the stereotypes and cliches which surrounded Negro history" (Prose 162). Though Hayden never finished The Black Spear, an early manuscript version, without "Middle Passage," won the Hopwood Prize for creative writing in 1942 when he was a graduate student at the University of Michigan, and many of the poems later appeared, extensively revised, in the fifth section of his Selected Poems of 1966.

Several critics have discussed the significance of "Middle Passage" to Hayden's career-long effort to incorporate revisionist history into his poetry.(12) At the same time, however, most of the critics who have noticed the connections between Hayden's poetry and Eliot's have assumed that Hayden was, at least in matters of poetics, little more than a dutiful disciple, learning matters of technique from the master, and in some cases imitating him directly.(13)

In fact, the only readers who seem to have understood the kind and degree of confrontation involved in Hayden's reading of Eliot are those younger poets who have turned to Hayden's poetry as a resource for continuing innovation. For instance, in a letter to Hayden, Michael S. Harper has described his poetry as "a real testament" to "complexity and historical consciousness" (in Nicholas 995). Elsewhere, in a reminiscence written on the occasion of Hayden's death, Harper has referred to "Middle Passage" as, in part, an "answer" to "The Waste Land" - that is, a poetic and historical challenge rather than a reverent echo. Harper recognizes that Hayden tried, through his knowledge of diverse poetic traditions, to move "beyond many of the experiments steeped in conscious modernism" (184). According to Harper, "Middle Passage" recalls "the schizoid past's brutalities" in order to confront Eliot's poetry with "a broad and pungent social reality" (184). Along similar lines, Jay Wright has written that "Middle Passage" alters Eliot's famous claim that a poet's fundamental responsibility is to language - and at the same time answers the criticism of many of Hayden's "younger contemporaries" - by demonstrating that "a language has a history and a relationship to other languages" that is more complex, and far more political, than Eliot ever imagined ("Desire's" 18). To these poets, Hayden's view of Anglo-American modernism is much like that of Houston Baker in Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance: Even though such iconic figures as Eliot and Joyce and Pound confronted the "changed condition of humankind" in the early twentieth century with "seriousness and sincerity," to use Baker's words, they also "mightily restricted the province of what constituted the tumbling of the towers, and they remained eternally self-conscious of their own pessimistic 'becomings'" (4).

As he worked on the manuscript of The Black Spear in New York City during the summer vacation of 1941, Hayden immersed himself in the various histories, journals, notebooks, and ships' logs related to the slave trade in the Schomburg collection (Prose 170-71). Most significantly, at least for "Middle Passage," he also read the account of an 1839 slave mutiny on a schooner named the Amistad in Muriel Rukeyser's remarkable biography of the theoretical chemist Willard Gibbs. Gibbs' father Josiah was, for most of his life, a retiring professor of theology and sacred literature at Yale; in his more daring moments, he was an amateur practitioner of the new German philology. But when a group of slaves who had seized control of the Amistad mysteriously appeared on Long Island, only to be thrown in jail, the elder Gibbs came to their aid, teaching them some English and finding translators for their legal defense among the African laborers in the ports of New York. He also seized the opportunity to begin a study of Mendi grammar.

Still, Hayden could not effectively use his research to answer "The Waste Land" until he had established a critical understanding of Eliot's poetics. At the end of the summer of 1941, he returned to Michigan, where he continued his research and enrolled in a course taught by W. H. Auden. Under the influence of Auden's teaching, Hayden's understanding of modern poetry, and Eliot in particular, was caught in an intellectual landslide. Auden still spoke of Eliot as a close friend, and regarded him as the leading arbiter of current literary taste, but he was also in the midst of a prolonged, difficult moral questioning of his own earlier poetry. Most of all, in 1941, Auden was struggling to reconcile his early leftist politics with his recent reading of modern theology, especially the Christian realism of Reinhold Neibuhr - often deliberately obscuring his earlier positions but still subjecting his poetry to the questions of conscience raised by the rise of Naziism, the fall of the Spanish Republic, and the ongoing war in Europe. Auden's understanding of Christianity was significantly different from Eliot's increasingly millennial vision of a homogeneous Christian culture and before long, most notably in For the Time Being (1942), he would reject Eliot's peculiar fusion of social crisis and reactionary ideology.

Auden's efforts to remake himself as a Christian intellectual led him to challenge the very idea of a stable literary canon. A couple of years before Hayden met him, in his "New Year Letter," Auden had satirized the prevailing concept of literary influence, the idea that anyone who dares to write poetry must face "interrogation" by "The grand constructions of the dead" (163). Dismissing this kind of purely literary anxiety, Auden had claimed for the poet a radical freedom to reshape the canon in order to serve immediate social needs, moral imperatives, and even personal whims:

Each one, so liberal is the law,

May choose whom he appears before,

Pick any influential ghost

From those whom he admires most. (164)

By the time Hayden came along, Auden's method of teaching involved an apparently endless rearrangement of texts in constellations that were provisional, deliberately unconventional, and often downright playful. Another of Auden's students at Michigan, Donald Pearce, has described Auden's teaching at this time as driven by a "sense of verbal text as interdisciplinary conflux, or event . . . of convergent-and-explosive text" (157). Tossed into one of Auden's textual "confluxes," Eliot's works could never appear as sacred, or as secure, as they were so often made out to be: For instance, in the reading list for Auden's course in the fall of 1941, Eliot's essays and Family Reunion appear alongside more than two dozen other books, including Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Nietszche's The Case of Wagner, and Rimbaud's Season in Hell (Miller 27).

As eccentric as they must have seemed to many of his poor students, Auden's exercises in textual convergence were motivated by a developing sense of moral purpose. Mostly through his reading of Niebuhr, Kierkegaard, and Charles Williams, Auden had recently come to believe that the individual is far more capable of moral action than any larger social group can ever be. Primarily for this reason, the undermining and reconstruction of an authorized tradition was more than just the individual poet's prerogative. At the very least, it was a moral responsibility. At best, it could be a religious vocation.

Before long, all of these revisionary forces - the "Negro history," the understanding of tradition as an array of cultural fragments provisionally constructed by an individual writer, the commitment to canon reconstruction as a moral imperative - would provide Hayden with his own means of answering "The Waste Land."

Though "Middle Passage" was not finished in time for the Hopwood contest, The Black Spear manuscript did include a preliminary response to Eliot. This poem is far less impressive than "Middle Passage," but it does suggest just how quickly and systematically Hayden was developing his own revisionary poetics. "Schizophrenia" is a superficially Eliotic poem in two voices, each of which speaks a refrain with variations. The first voice recalls the "heap of broken images" from "The Waste Land" and its nearly exhausted anguish in the face of cultural and spiritual disintegration:

We were trying to harvest the fragments

of our scattered spirits,

but it was the blitzkrieg's year,

and the bombs were failing. (185)

"The blitzkrieg's year" is the most obvious among many symptoms of a culture so fragmented, so far beyond any hope of repair, that it seems to have come to the end of its history. The war continues, somehow, beyond human agency; yet, at the same time, it is all too ordinary, something like the weather. The second voice in "Schizophrenia" supplies the predictable metaphoric connection between this cultural catastrophe and personal insanity. For this second voice, the falling bombs are little more than background noise for a series of private nightmares: "I saw a man in a cracked gold mirror / and a man in surrealist streets"; "I saw a pale girl, savage of eye, / fondling a headless doll"; and so on.(14) Like a conspicuously modernist Parsifal, the narrator has set out on a quest of some significance, apparently, but he is unable to figure out where he should go or what he should do: "One of these tasks is mine, / and the other is mine, / but which is mine they won't tell me" (185). Needless to say, it is never clear just who "they" might be, these unhelpful shades. But that hardly seems to matter, either, since, as it turns out, within a few lines, both of the poem's speakers discover that they are locked up "in padded cells."

Poetically, the most basic problem with "Schizophrenia" is that its two voices sound far too much alike to answer each other - let alone anyone else - in any very meaningful way. Even if they are meant to be spoken by the same person, they could hardly support any respectable diagnosis of schizophrenia - perhaps clinical depression, or echolalia