American Literature Readings in the st Century Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women & Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction By Amy L. Strong Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery The House Abandoned Marit J. MacArthur THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE IN THE POETRY OF FROST, BISHOP, AND ASHBERY Copyright © Marit J. MacArthur, 2008. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-60322-6 All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the US—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-37150-1 ISBN 978-0-230-61411-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230614116 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MacArthur, Marit J. The American landscape in the poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery : the house abandoned / Marit J. MacArthur. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the 21st century) Includes bibliographical references (p. ). 1. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Landscape in literature. 3. Abandoned houses in literature. 4. Rural conditions in literature. 5. Country life in literature. 6. Nostalgia in literature. 7. Frost, Robert, 1874–1963—Criticism and interpretation. 8. Bishop, Elizabeth, 1911–1979—Criticism and interpretation. 9. Ashbery, John, 1927—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS310.L3M33 2008 811(cid:2).540936—dc22 2007047161 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: August 2008 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my mother, Marit Sheldon Taylor Without your love, resilience, and wisdom, I would never have learned to flourish far from home. Contents List of Abbreviations ix Introduction 1 The House Abandoned 1 Robert Frost 8 Elizabeth Bishop 16 John Ashbery 21 1 Robert Frost: “The Ruined Cottage” in America 33 A Rootless Youth: San Francisco to New England 33 Abandoned Houses and Cellar Holes 43 “The Gift Outright”: Key West in 1935 62 “Directive”: The Legacy of Derry in 1946 70 2 Elizabeth Bishop: Incarnations of the “Crypto-Dream-House” 81 A Lost Home and a Fairytale Orphan 82 A Homeless Tourist, 1934–1951 92 Home at Last: The Brazil Years 126 Return to New England 135 3 John Ashbery: The Farm on the Lake at the End of the Mind 147 A Farmer’s Son 148 Escape from Sodus and Early Nostalgia 159 Pulled Home 171 Ashbery’s “Version of America” 189 The End of the Ashbery Line 201 Notes 225 Bibliography 235 Acknowledgments 243 Index 247 Abbreviations AW John Ashbery, A Wave AWK John Ashbery, As We Know ATSWS John Ashbery, And the Stars Were Shining CPPP Robert Frost, The Collected Poems, Prose & Plays CP Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems: 1927–1979 CPr Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Prose CW John Ashbery, Chinese Whispers CYHB John Ashbery, Can You Hear, Bird EAP Elizabeth Bishop, Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box. Uncollected Poems, Drafts and Fragments FC John Ashbery, Flow Chart HD John Ashbery, Houseboat Days HL John Ashbery, Hotel Lautréamont LRFLU The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer MSO John Ashbery, The Mooring of Starting Out NBRF The Notebooks of Robert Frost OA One Art. Letters. Elizabeth Bishop OT John Ashbery, Other Traditions SL Selected Letters of Robert Frost SPCM Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror TP John Ashbery, Three Poems WSIW John Ashbery, Where Shall I Wander YNH Your Name Here Introduction One might enumerate the items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent from the texture of American life. . . . No country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins. . . . the effect . . . upon an English or French imagination, would probably, as a general thing, be appalling. . . . The American knows that a good deal remains; what it is that remains—that is his secret, his joke, as one may say. —Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1879) One sees in an ironic light, the flat matter-of-fact light of the American landscape, James’s remark that America “has no ruins.” America is full of ruins, ruins of hopes. —Randall Jarrell, “An Introduction to the Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams” (1949) In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfac- tion or failure. . . . Pluralist and experimental: in place of verfallen Schloesser America has ghost towns and the relics of New Jerusalems which failed. —W.H. Auden, “American Poetry” (1960)1 The House Abandoned In the view from my bedroom window, in the house where I grew up, an abandoned farmhouse stood in a nearby field, in the foreground of 2 THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE the foothills and the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains. My childhood in Lafayette, Colorado, east of Boulder and north of Denver, was more suburban than rural, but our house, joined in a row of others with small back patios and narrow unfenced front yards, skirted the countryside. Beyond the last row of houses, there was Coal Creek, bor- dered by cottonwoods, and open fields lay to the south, west, and east. Not far from the abandoned farmhouse, a family still lived on a func- tioning sheep ranch. (Now the ranch is gone, and new subdivisions and shopping centers have erased many of the open fields.) As a child in the 1980s, I often explored this rural landscape, and at the other end of the continent, I spent several weeks every summer on a horse farm in Pattersonville, New York, which my grandfather, a former business executive, had bought when he retired in 1974. On his land too I discovered an abandoned house—once owned by a Polish-American family by the name of Surin—pictured on the cover of this book. My father died in 1988, my mother sold the house in Lafayette in 1993, and since then, like the statistically average American, I have moved often, living in Illinois, England, Colorado again, California, Poland, and California again. As it turned out, I finished the manu- script for this book while I was a visiting scholar at the University of Łódz´, living in a Communist-era block apartment building, located in the neighborhood of the former Jewish ghetto. Aside from the repeti- tion of the phrase, “LITZMANNSTADT GETTO 1940–44,” which is stamped in white capitals at intervals along the sidewalks and along the route to the former ghetto quarter from the city center, there is little visible memorialization in the cityscape. These fading letters are left over from the city’s ceremonies of 2004, marking the sixtieth anniversary of the liquidation of the ghetto. Small brown signs mark the buildings associated with the ghetto, numbered on a pamphlet for a self-guided tour, available from the tourist office. Since Łódz´ escaped the bombings that destroyed other Polish cities, many of these build- ings still stand, some empty and dilapidated, many in disrepair. Compared to the total displacement and systematic murder of Poland’s Jewish citizenry by the Nazis, the subject of my study here— the poetic evocation of American experiences of displacement, loss and abandonment of houses and landscapes, and complicated nostal- gia for these in the twentieth century—may seem inconsequential or myopic. Discussing my research inside and outside the United States, however, I have found that many people share an intuitive, personal sense of the pathos of the abandoned house in our time, and share stories about it from many different cultures and in various art forms. For example, in his 1962 collection In a Green Night, Nobel laureate