The Work of Poetry.

John Hollander 

Columbia, $35, 318 pp.

The Work of Poetry is a resonantly arranged and beautifully titled collection of twenty-three lectures, book introductions, and essays written over a twenty-year period by John Hollander, Sterling Professor of Poetry at Yale and much-honored poet. I say beautifully titled because the collection reveals itself as a sustained meditation on the multiple senses of the phrase "the work of poetry": a book dedicated emphatically not to inspiration but to the labor of poets and readers. Such emphasis reflects no special hostility on Hollander's part to the Muses, but rather his sense that we live in dark times, when language has become a coarse currency for crude thought, and poetry largely a form of cheap grace. In these conditions, Hollander wants to assert as strongly as possible that poetry is a demanding and life-giving human work. Densely allusive, richly autobiographical, digressively informative, and crowned by brilliant close readings that are Hollander's particular genius, these essays provide a crash course in poetry: what it has been, what it is, what it gives us when it is good, how poems work, what makes a poem masterful.

For me, the heart of the book is the essay titled "A Poetry of Restitution." Here Hollander considers (in the American context) whether poetry can help us be "greatly good," can restore "what has gone wrong with our own and society's lives." As unsatisfied by the Modernist segregation of the aesthetic from the moral as he is by contemporary poems that are politically or morally knowing, Hollander argues that the Modernist assault on the didactic function of poetry was so persuasive that the necessary and important restitution of that function can only come about when poems bear witness to their own diminished capacity to teach. Taking us slowly through three poems by James Merrill, John Ashbery, and A.R. Ammons respectively, Hollander shows contemporary American poems which nourish the moral force of the imagination by dwelling on the conditions under which they have come into being, and by making the reader "cooperate in their creation."

The Work of Poetry is a hymn to reading and an argument that reading (not the accumulation of raw life data or feeling) is the poet's most important work. Of the three headings under which Hollander has grouped his essays, two expressly chart his reading life. In "Poetic Experiences," he recalls momentous early encounters with the Psalms, A Child's Garden of Verses, and Wallace Stevens, as well as his formation within a generation of poets (poets whose first books appeared in the 1950s) which includes Ashbery, Ammons, Anthony Hecht, W.S. Merwin, and Alan Ginsberg. In "The Work of Poets," Hollander dedicates individual essays to the work of twelve poets, many not wellknown, from the Victorian period through his generation, whom he wishes to particularly recommend to us: Walt Whitman, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, Jean Ingelow, George Meredith, Trumbell Stickney, Edgar Lee Masters, Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, Elizabeth Bishop, May Swenson, and Geoffrey Hill.

In every essay of The Work of Poetry, and perhaps most especially in the first section, "Poetic Substances," where poetry is considered in relation to dreams, work, restitution, and originality, the irrepressible Hollander supersaturates his sentences with information and insight gleaned from a lifetime of reading. His best paragraphs are glorious digressive rifts of allusion, my favorite a catalogue of mountains - a resonant evocation of "Vision," poetically and religiously conceived - that is provoked by A. R. Ammons's line, "I went to the summit and stood in high nakedness":

But the summit of what? There are several kinds of mythical mountains. Olympus as a region, seat, or dwelling place of the gods; Parnassus as a scene of specifically poetic elevation; Sinai as a high point of revelation and transmission of the holy law; Pisgah as a supreme point of overview, of what can be vouchsafed in vision but not directly possessed or inhabited; Spenser's Mount of Heavenly Contemplation, his beautiful Acidale, his part-local part-universal Arlo-Hill; Milton's Niphates upon which Satan alights and the pinnacle from which the other Satan (in Paradise Regained) "smitten with amazement, fell." All are paradigmatic of later mountains (as indeed the earlier ones in this list are of those at the end of it) in subsequent poetry. (Only Ararat seems a nonce occurrence - a point whose height does not reach toward a higher realm, or provide views of the lower one, but that becomes, at the subsiding of the Deluge, the new First Ground. And, at the other end of the list, there is Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg, in no way a typical revision of any of these.)

The poet Richard Howard perfectly described Hollander's work as trusting in the possibility of "a teeming surface bearing one to a high place." Hollander achieves such transport in that parenthetical reflection on Ararat. Each of these essays - some pyrotechnically allusive, others warmly crowded with recollected poems and literary friendships - asks the reader to work hard and, at almost every paragraph, repays our labor. Hollander's essays so successfully unsettle the generic boundaries between poetry and prose writing that you may be ruined for the business-as-usual prose of the majority of other critics, even if bewildered by his subordinating argument to description.

When I got bogged down it was not because of the diverting gems laid down in the path of each essay but rather because I was so disheartened by the bitter and barely limned portrait of the state of American poetry and poetry teaching. Hollander's effort to restore our sense of an enlarging poetic past does not require a blighted poetic present. Unfortunately readers unfamiliar with contemporary poetry will not recognize his portrait as caricature; those who do may prematurely put down the volume. The Work of Poetry finds Hollander perhaps overindulging the temptations that beset us with advancing age, but more in evidence is the suppleness of writing and thought that makes his poems such potent witnesses for the ongoing vitality of formal verse.

Daria Donnelly has taught literature at Brandeis and Boston University.