Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics

Lexical Scapegoating: The Pure and Impure of American Poetry

Author(s): Rob Wilson
Source: Poetics Today, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1987), pp. 45-63
Published by: Duke University Press
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LEXICAL SCAPEGOATING
The Pure and Impure of American Poetry
ROB WILSON
English, Hawaii

What need for purists when the demotic is built to last,

To outlast us, and no dialect hears us?
-John Ashbery, "Purists Will Object"

The pure poem implicitly remains, by the intrinsic dialogical conditions of language, already impure, already invaded by "foreign"
terms from beyond the impossible-to-police boundaries of its lexical
community. Founded in the Romantic illusion of reaching some indigenous purity prior to the contaminations of history, the pure
poem, in its various historical versions, would define itself differentially by adhering to the positive terms of a bipolar opposition. As
Geoffrey H. Hartman has suggested in "Purification and Danger 1:
American Poetry," "The strength of pure poetry resides, then, like
all poetry, in the impure elements it cuts out, elides, covers up,
negates, represses . . . depends on."' In diverse national contexts, the
pure poem would attempt to purge Europe from America, Asia from
Greece, self-consciousness from sensuous perception, high from low,
Latinate from vulgar, artificial from natural, sublime from humble,
self-ironical from imagistic, native from nonnative, literary from ordinary, all in the futile attempt to essentialize poetic (pure) from nonpoetic (impure) language.
As these unstable, easily reversible oppositions of
pure/impure
should suggest, such a quest for pure poetry enjoins a
"puritanical"
act of stylistic segregation pursued within the lexical - and
arbitrary
- boundaries of poetic diction: that is, the
purity of a diction usually
presupposes some social class (Augustan), literary group (Symbolist)
1. Geoffrey H. Hartman (1980:121). On political implications of
quests for "linguistic
purism" as a quasi-nationalistic goal in diverse countries such as North and South Korea,
Iran, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Australia, I benefit from having participated in a conference
on "The Politics of Language Purism" held at the Institute of Culture and
Communication,
East-West Center, Honolulu, September 8-14, 1985. In "Language Purism As a Type of
Language Correction," for example, J.V. Neustupny illuminated RomanJakobson's critique
(1932) of "Czech purism" as motivated by a resistance to the "impure" language of western
modernization; also see Park (1985).
Poetics Today,Vol. 8:1 (1987) 45-63

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46

ROB WILSON

or even nationalist allegiance (say, Young America of the 1840's)

for whom this lyrical break from the "heteroglossia" of the impure
intertext is symbolically enacted. Best illuminated by the material
linguistics and contextualizings of M.M. Bakhtin, the poetic quest for
purity of diction would affiliate itself with the dominant "monologue" of an ideological group whose language sets them apart from
(that is, above) the contaminated, actively polyglot language of ordinary usage. Through the symbolic agency of the poem, as I will argue
using examples mainly from nineteenth-century American poetry,
some version of impurity must be implicitly defined, exorcised and
eliminated in a process which will be termed "lexical scapegoating."
I will focus on two formative versions of this quest for "purity"
in American poetry, in a contrast between the "pure" language of
Poe's "To Helen" (1831) and Whitman's "impure" inscription to
Leaves of Grass, "One's-Self I Sing" (1871). For two opposing versions of a "pure" poetic language can be found in American poetry,
as perhaps in other national literatures: that pure which moves towards the vernacular as an originary, terminus a quo and that (symbolist) pure which moves away from traces of vernacular diction and
syntax - what Ashbery calls above "the demotic" base - as a terminus ad quem or limit of estrangement. (Even the abundantly
"impure" Whitman can be seen to pursue some version of a purified
"American English" whose "omniverous lines" yet enforce poetic
discriminations against sedimentations of a so-called impure, Eurocentric language.)
Indeed quests for purity in poetry are founded in such arbitrary
acts of lexical discrimination. As Hartman warns, "Any call for purification or repristination is dangerous. For it is always purity having
to come to terms with impurity that drives crazy" (117). This dangerous battle call for authorial authenticity is usually fought out
in the loaded terms of diction, as it was on the unpolished Reformation altars of Massachusetts; however, since the first vernacular salvoes of Dante in De Vulgari Eloquentia to the latter-days of modernism, this battle for purity occurs in what Hartman calls the "religion
of language itself, language as a quasireligious object when a new
vernacular is developing." If certain poets still seek to "purify the
language of the tribe," to use Mallarme's symboliste slogan for the
labors of purist Poe, we need to ask just what is being washed away
lexically and being whitewashed sociologically if "pure" is to have
any critical bite in handling the myriad reifications of poetic diction.
Hence a book like William Carlos Williams' Spring and All (1923)
can be rightly read by Hartman as a singular purification rite, a
purging or "spring cleaning" of American poetry of those sedimented European (read "Eliotic") echoes, just as almost any poem by
Wallace Stevens can be viewed as a struggle with the "impure" Romanticism of Keats and Whitman which his chastening intelligence

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THE PURE AND IMPURE OF AMERICANPOETRY

47

must resist. Yet the "pure" is such a historically unstable and ambiguous term, embodying in its poetic freight so many anthropological, religious, literary, racial, national and even scientific ideals of
linguistic betterment, that we inevitably confront what Hartman
terms a "purity perplex" (147) whose textual strands are difficult to
discriminate in merely semantic bipolar terms. The "various doctrines of pure poetry" which have been proposed in Anglo-American
poetics, as Robert Penn Warren interestingly pointed out in "Pure
and Impure Poetry" (1943), often presuppose some foundationalist
definition of poetry as an ahistorical essence "that is to be located
at some particular place in a poem, or in some particular element" in
which the quixotic purity of language is presumed to inhere (Warren
1958:375).
Confronting "Edgar Poe's Significance" in Specimen Days (1882),
for example, Walt Whitman commented that Poe's purist and antimundane poetry, committed scornfully as it was in its essentialist
lyrical symbolism to "the lush and the weird," nevertheless had
sprung from a "strange spurning of, and reaction from" specific nineteenth-century circumstances we would have to articulate through
a "subtle retracing and retrospect" of Poe's material life (as in, say,
Walter Benjamin's materialist reading of Poe's self-alienated drifter
in "Man of the Crowd"). Poe's purity, that is, notoriously reeks of
impure psychic and historical sources which the poem cannot wholly
repress in its lyrical strategies of lexical scapegoating in the will to
some supernal sublime of higher ideality.
What Whitman noted as Poe's "intense faculty for technical and
abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess" can be seen to be
his strategy of symbolical transcendence, the detoxifying retreat
from the language of material commodification into the antilanguage
of pure poetry, which indeed resulted in what Whitman saw as "the
abnegation of the perennial and democratic concretes at first hand,
the body,

the earth

and sea, sex and the like.

..".

Indeed

Poe's

pursuit of a supernally "pure" poetry effectively repressed the

"immense materiality" (Whitman) of the sexual body, of egalitarian
democracy and of pedagogical Nature as impure, inferior, grossly
tainted with vulgar traces of American middleclass ideology. This unstable opposition of the poetically pure/impure has been finely illuminated by Barbara Johnson in her deconstructive contrast in The
Critical Difference (1980) between the cliche-riddled prose version
of Baudelaire's Invitation au Voyage (1857) and its purist younger
brethren, the repressively original poem wherein "La, tout n'est
qu'ordre et beaute,/ Luxe, calme, et volupte" (23-52). As Johnson
argues,
The forces of order which guard the poetic frontier are designed not only to
repress, but to erase - wipe clean - the very traces of repression, the very

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48

ROB WILSON
traces of the cleaning operation. Only then can the poetry - "propre et luisant comme une belle conscience" - seem to be "pure," that is, cut off from
the very process of its own production, from any history or context that is
not Itself; cut off by what Jacques Derrida has called "a pure cut without
negativity, a without without negativity and without meaning" (47).

Not as openhanded about their textual cuttings and cleanings as Barbara Johnson in "Poetry and Its Double," both Poe and Baudelaire
obscure the process by which the "douce langue natale" of the
purity-seeking soul is founded in an (arbitrary) repression of the lexically impure and contentious prosaic base.
Poe's antihistorical criterion of lyric purity is epitomized in his
comment on Tennyson, whose poetic effect of sublimity he praised
as "at all times the most ethereal - the most elevating and the most
pure": "No poet is so little of the earth, earthy" ("The Poetic Principle," 1849). Poe's lyrical pursuit of an unearthly musicality to
counter the shocks of modernism enacted a will to ideal abstraction,
a semantic abnegation of the real in pursuit of beautified shapes and
sounds which was of course ultimately morbid, a melopoeic formalism ghoulishly "motivated" (to use the Russian Formalist term for
poetic device) by the misogynistic scapegoating of a dying woman
whose death engenders a melancholy male lyricism in love with the
precious diction of its own voice. However, in the impure materiality and ideological turmoil of what Wallace Stevens termed "The
Poems Of Our Climate," the imagistic - that is, poetically "pure" plentitude of some "Clear water in a brilliant bowl/ Pink and white
carnations" can no longer suffice to arrest the lexical flux that is
modern consciousness. As almost any Stevens lyric from Ideas of
Order (1936) on would show, both lexically and ideologically, "the
imperfect is our paradise."2
Walt Whitman, with his omniverous inclination to enrich rather
than to purify poetry by wildly supplementing what he proposed
2. Wallace Stevens, "The Poems of Our Climate," The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
(1974:193-194). The profound attraction toward an American version of "pure poetry" in
early Stevens is best revealed in a letter to Ronald Latimer of October 31, 1935, during the
decade when Stevens was preoccupied with the social/ideological demands socialist critics
were making on his poetry: "... I remembered that when HARMONIUM was in the making [1914-1922] there was a time when I liked the idea of images and images alone, or
images and the music of verse together. I. then believed in pure poetry, as it was called. I still
have a distinct liking for that sort of thing" (1981:288). Stevens's emerging defense of an
impurist poetry which could engage ideology and "actual backgrounds" can be seen in a
later letter to Latimer on Dec. 19, 1935: "Imagism was mild rebellion against didacticism.
However you will find that any continued reading of pure poetry is rather baffling. Everything must go on at once. There must be pure poetry and there must be a certain amount of
of didactic poetry, or a certain amount of didacticism in poetry" (302-303). Stevens's
struggle in the 1930's not to renounce but to refigure - and mask - a credible position for
the "Pure Poet" within Marxist debates defending the mimetic function of literature is deftly argued in Milton J. Bates (1985: Chapters 4 and 5). Also see, A. Walton Litz (1977:111132).

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THE PURE AND IMPURE OF AMERICANPOETRY

49

was "American English" on the intuitive lexical principle that "the

best of America is the best cosmopolitanism," notoriously smuggled
into American poetry such peculiar foreign expressions as "accouchez!" (French), "ambulanza" (Italian), "avatara" (sanskrit), "blab"
(slang), "eidolon" (Greek), "lambent" (Latin), "Libertad" (Spanish),
"mossbonker," "Presidentiad" (his coinage), "barbaric yawp" and so
forth. This perpetual opening of the poetic boundaries of American
English to ethnic and foreign influxes of modern and politically
tumultuous terms during the industrializing era of massive European
immigration is what we can term, in contrast to Poe's quest for the
supernal Pure, his indiscriminating fearlessness of the Impure. Nevertheless, even the linguistically broadminded Whitman had a recurring
taste for an Americanized brand of purity, for a nativist English purified of imported terms he found impurely loaded with "feudal"
ideology, even if transmitted through Shakespeare or taken as empirical givens on the American scene.
To take one striking example, in An American Primer, a collection
of lecture notes from 1855 to 1860 when he was inventing the
"language experiment" that came to be Leaves of Grass, Whitman
avowed the following on the seemingly neutral nature of American
place names:
Californiais sown thick with the names of all the little and big saints. Chase
them away and substitute aboriginalnames. Whatis the fitness - Whatthe
strange charm of aboriginalnames? - Monongahela- it rolls with venison
richnessupon the palate. Amongnames to be revolutionized:that of the city
of Baltimore(1970:29-30).
Many of his poems are rife with such "aboriginal" names, as if invoking, in native tongue, some pure poetry from the Edenic mouth of
Indians and other primal Americans: words like "Mannahatta" and
"Paumanok" (the Indian names for New York and Long Island),
"fourth-month" and "fifth-month" (de-monarchized names used by
the Quakers), "gab" and "kelson" and "lacy jags" (working class
specifics) and so forth. "Starting from Paumanok" (1860, Section
16) voices this Adamic claim to prior purity:
The red aborigines,
Leavingnaturalbreaths,sounds of rain and winds, calls as of
birdsand animalsin the woods, syllabledto us for names,
Okonee, Koosa, Ottawa,Monongahela,Sauk, Natchez,
Chattahoochee,Kaqueta,Oronoco,
Wabash,Miami,Saginaw,Chippewa,Oshkosh,Walla-Walla,
Leavingsuch to the States they melt, they depart,charging
the waterand the land with names.
Having left such pure poetry tacked on to the landscape, the red (and
sublated) Americans must disappear into so many reified nouns, into
names such as "Miami" and "Wabash" which have lost their Indian
aura to football teams and railway lines.

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50

ROB WILSON

When "Song of Myself" sounded its outrageous "barbaric yawp

over the roofs of the world" in 1855, it certainly contained arbitrary
traces of such purist native-American diction, right in there with the
impure heteroglossia Whitman forever embodied in "hundreds and
hundreds of words, all tangible and clean-lived, all having texture and
beauty" (3). Seeing the political implications of naturalized namings,
even Whitman wanted to purify American English of lingering papist
and feudal traces, an impossible act for any government not to mention for one six-foot poet from Brooklyn: "Californian, Texan, New
Mexican, and Arizonian names have the sense of the ecstatic monk,
the cloister, the idea of miracles, and of devotees canonized after
death - ... What do such names know of democracy [?]" (35).
What remained "pure" to Whitman's hybridized poetics were those
"ten thousand native idiomatic words" that concretized "that taste
of identity and locality which is so dear in literature." A bit of a
latter-day Puritan about his clean-smelling body if not about his poetic diction, Whitman nevertheless would forge a poetic idiom from
regional and vernacular sources as the rugged poems of our climate
generated primarily from a nativist terminus a quo.
By rarified contrast, the "doctrine of purity" central to the symbolist aesthetic of autonomy which developed from "La Poesie pure"
of Poe and Baudelaire to its specular reincarnations in modern poets
like those gathered in George Moore's An Anthology of Pure Poetry
(1924) proscribed all elements of self-reflective ideation from genuine ("pure") poetry: poetry in this linguistic estrangement from the
actual aspired to a condition of musicality which was implicitly antididactic, nonutilitarian, antirepresentational, rendering the poem
into the rarified language of "pure feeling" and precious things.
Much more mystified and self-indulgent than the Augustan and neoclassical ideal of "purity" as that stylistic norm of "elegance" and
"correctness" (which American linguists like Noah Webster and John
Pickering adhered to in the 1820's and 1830's), this latter-day Symbolist "mystique of purity," as Renato Poggioli argues in The Theory
of the Avant-Garde (1968), would seek "to abolish the discursive and
syntactic element, to liberate art from any connection with psychological and empirical reality, to reduce every work to the intimate
laws of its own expressive essence" in the total poetic "hyperbole"
of an unprecedented form (201).
Pure poetry like Poe's aspired to the lyrical condition of music on
the one hand and to an "ideal logic" of artistic form on the other.
That didactic "message" of moral transcendence so dear to Emerson
and his poetic heirs, Whitman and Frost, was essentially banished by
Poe to Western Union and the vulgar vagaries of so-called ordinary
speech which, as many have observed with Stanley Fish, is not so
"ordinary" after all. The material weight of historical subject matter
was repudiated and instead style (what Fredric Jameson now terms a

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THEPUREAND IMPUREOFAMERICAN
POETRY

51

distinctive "monadic" language) became the only subject worth pursuing. In the domain of early modernist American poetry, this largely
meant a rigorous privileging of the sensuous image over other more
ideologically deconstructive tropes, as if each poet had to reproduce
a language of pure presentation, some material embodiment in language of a consciousness immune from irony: purity became not just
a lexical but an ontological preoccupation, which of course was
covertly at stake in prior versions, too. This modernist version of
Pure Poetry which, in effect, took dominion everywhere, furiously
abhorred "the impurity of an intellectual style" and thus sought to
purge the poem, as Robert Penn Warren lamented in the wartorn
1940's, of "all ironies and self-criticism," those rhetorical tools of
poetic demystification which the New Critics wielded in an alternative hegemony.
Any such preciously "monological" poetry aspires to become a
special language set apart from the material transactions of everyday
speech for, as Mallarme boorishly pronounced: "Speech is no more
than a commercial approach to reality." The poet in the wake of lyrical Poe sought "to purify the dialect of the tribe" by creating a
special, presentational language coded with sudden images and symbols which functioned as defamiliar tokens, irreal and surreal and
antireal but, above all, remote from ordinary speech with its instrumental designs on truth, the struggle of ideology and the intrusions
of technological manipulation. Such a willfully symbolic language,
partly a romantic response against industrialization if not democratization as is clear in Poe, like Baudelaire "our postmodern contemporary," sought repressively to purify poetry of ideology as the
worldly jargon of the middleclass masses when "the 'age demanded'
chiefly a mould in plaster/ Made with no loss of time,/ A prose kinema ..".
Of course George Moore's purist credo of Modernism was outrageously imagistic and anti-cerebral, as when he wrote to John
Eglinton in 1927: "Ideas are worthless, yours, mine, and everybody
else's. Ideas are pernicious: things are the only good" (Brown 1955:
By Moore's criterion of such ideological laundering, he
206-208).
can astonishingly assert that even "Shakespeare never soiled his songs
with thought"; and poems like Shelley's "Hellas" were damnably
"impure" (as were Dickens's novels) because based on political ideas
like "duty, liberty, and fraternity" that should no longer seriously
interest mankind after the age of 30. Needless to say, Poe's ethereal
"To Helen" turns up in Moore's anthology (p. 151) as a Romantic
example of a musical poem devoid of any vulgar interest in "idea"
(or, I might add, in "things" in any ordinary sense).
According to the aristocratic tenets of such "pure poetry," poetry
works best as a special language-within-language, a peculiarly individuated diction which perpetuates the "imagination's Latin" as it

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52

ROB WILSON

departs from and renews, in Stevens's later formulation, the demotic

tongue. As Stevens formulates the problem in "Notes Toward a
Supreme Fiction" (1942), as he meditated on the vexed nature of
poetic language in the impinging context of global war:
The poem goes from the poet's gibberish to
The gibberish of the vulgate and back again....
It is the gibberish of the vulgate that he seeks.
He tries by a peculiar speech to speak
The peculiar potency of the general,
To compound the imagination's Latin with
The lingua franca et jocundissima
(1974:396-397).

The purity of any "poet's gibberish" repeatedly gets contaminated

with the "gibberish of the vulgate" which was its alienated material
origin; nevertheless, Whitman-like, Stevens aspires to write inside this
potent American vulgate, this "lingua franca," as long as such diction
can be vigorously compounded with the lexical purity of "the imagination's Latin." (However, like Dante, Stevens paradoxically advocates the poetic uses of the vernacular in rich phrasings from the antidemotic Latin.)
What was "impure" for Stevens even in the ideologically demanding 1930's was not so much the vernacular but more often prior
poetic metaphors, tropes which had been interiorized from the Romantic tradition if not from his own lusher poems in Harmonium.
Such moribund or dead metaphors he sought to "decreate" (what we
would term "deconstruct," as in Johnson's analysis of Baudelaire's
purity) from the language of consciousness in repeated acts of linguistic purification against metaphor itself (as the trope of tropes,
the heliotrope): "We seek the poem of pure reality, untouched/ By
trope or deviation." However, this dialectical confrontation with the
natural "object" was always already tainted with poetic diction, with
prior tropes and prior languages he could not wholly purify from his
post-Romantic consciousness, not even in the rigorous deconstructions of, say, "The Rock." What was "impure" to Stevens and hence
lexically scapegoated from the poem was not so much political ideas
per se but those ideological legacies from romanticism which had lost
credibility and were invoked only to be decreated: "but poetry is
[and] What one is always doing is keeping
essentially romantic...
the romantic pure: eliminating from it what people speak of as the
romantic" (letter to Ronald Latimer, March 12, 1935, Letters, 277).
Attracted as he was to the purist strategies of image-making and
sonorous presentation - the production of what he early termed
- poetry remained for the
"heavenly labials in a world of gutturals"
tough-minded Stevens intrinsically impure: full of didactic and ideational traces, .nfused with diverse language codes in an active flux
and mental combat which the poem, then, enacted.

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THE PURE AND IMPURE OF AMERICANPOETRY

53

Yet in Stevens's extreme modernist version, the pure poem on any

"ordinary evening in New Haven" can become unreadable, an obscurantist challenge to any reader's hermeneutic because of the
estranged reification of style itself and the very materiality of a poetic language stripped of its utilitarian meaning. At times the result is
a precious poetry purified of plain sense, as in Stevens's own antireferential lament: "Words, lines, not meanings, not communications."
Impossibly enough, such poetry would attempt to originate a break
with material history and the polyglot determinations of language itself by means of the singular production of pure imagery and ethereal
music. If such "Purity is a forgetting after study" (Apollinaire), then
the modernist poem must autonomously forget conventional linguistic procedures of past poems, even of one's own, as always already
impure, the stuff of mere prose.
This kind of "pure poem" originates, then, in the illusion of social
autonomy, as if the poem can be the byproduct of a superior self
generating a verbal "mundo" apart from social mediations other than
the verbal constraints of the medium itself. The impersonality sought
by the author becomes a mystified way of disappearing into the verbal object, an abnegation of the self in an act of total verbal reification,
an effacing of the subjective trace into pure textuality. If language
can think and dream inside the man, poetic style becomes not so
much the man as his self-effacement, his Cheshire-cat grin in the godhead of an originary form.
Donald Davie, in Purity of Diction In English Poetry (1952), an
influential study which later came to be regarded as a manifesto of
the "chaste" British Movement poets of the 1950's against the seductions from literary Bohemians and Americanists, defined the criterion of "purity of diction" in neo-Augustan terms as that specialized
use of language whose hallmarks remain: "economy in metaphor"
(32), a cultivated "tie with conversational usage" (59) of Middle
Class London speech, an inclination toward "urbane and momentous
statement" (107), a fondness for "nice meanings" (68) as enforced
by poets of moderation like Goldsmith, Johnson, Cowper and Davie
himself. Even a High Romantic poet like Shelley, despite his strokes
of "violent," "impure" and "licentious phrasing" in his spiritual
quest to write sublime poetry, nevertheless can be ranged in the
camp of the urbane Pure because he is,
a poet of poise and good breeding. Shelley was the only British Romantic
poet with the birth and breedingof a gentleman,and that cannot be irrelevant (158).
In his 1966 "Postscript," Davie makes the underlying class basis of
his notion of "purity of diction" even more apparent, in positing a
crucial contrast between British and American poetics: "... I seem
to detect that not only the struggle against Bohemia, but more

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54

ROB WILSON

generally an approach to poetry by way of its diction, comes more

naturally to British writers and readers than to American."
This is so, Davie goes on to argue, because "among the pressures
which a poet must respond to, if he is employing a [poetic] diction,
are pressures of class-usage - and of speech-usage, to the extent that
all poems are written to be spoken, unless written to be sung. Everyone knows that British society is class-ridden, and that in Britain the
badge of class is speech; and that in American society this is not so,
or not to the same degree" (200-201).
Pure diction cannot whitewash its labor of social affiliation, its aloofness from impure codings
and tones. That is, the sensitivity to nuances of poetic diction which
Davie brings from the Augustan past into the Movement/Bohemian
present, with its castigations of the Impure and its taste for niceties
of the Pure, comes from his acculturated sensitivity to ideological,
loaded speech. Purity of diction functions as a telegraphic class-sign
in poets as in the loaded transactions of ordinary conversation, and
Davie would have more of it. If Shelley can commit forgiveable
errors, and infelicities of the Impure under the pressures of Romantic taste, it is because Shelley after all is a gentleman, born and bred
into purity of diction - "and that cannot be irrelevant." This sociological underwriting in Davie's usage of the value term pure should
not be ignored, not even in the classless and redneck wilds of American poetry, as it struggles toward and away from that conversational
base we loosely term, after Dante, the vernacular. In all impurity, it
"is built to last,/ to outlast us," as Ashbery claims in embracing his
own version of the demotic.
Davie's book is helpful in foregrounding the mix of aesthetic/social
motives that go into this prosodic surveillance and moral policing of
poetic diction, what Mikhail Bakhtin has termed the threatened injection of heteroglossia - "words thrusting to be let into the poem
and held out of it by the poet" (Davie p. 5) as the literary site of
such struggle. By dialogical strategies, literature (above all, the novel,
but also the "novelized" poem of the nineteenth century) "can inject
social heteroglossia" into its would-be autonomous genres. For, as
the materialist linguistics of Bakhtin remind us, "Every word gives
off the scent of a profession, a genre, a current, a party, a particular
work, a particular man, a generation, an era, a day, and an hour.
Every word smells of the context and contexts in which it has lived
its intense social life."3 The Augustan "purity" of Davie or the Symbolist "purity" of Poe: both "smell" of the impure social situations
and strategies in which such poetic ideals were produced. Purification
3. Mikhail Bakhtin (1981:293). 1 quote and benefit from Tzvetan Todorov (1984:56-76)
on formal/dialectical uses of impure "heteroglossia" in literature. On Bakhtin's dialogical
undoing of "binary opposition" as a differential structure of language exclusion, also see
Paul de Man (1983:102-103) and Michael Davidson (1986:33-45).

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55

movements, whether in poetry or in national linguistic trends to recover some indigenous base prior to foreign infiltration, must confront the intrinsic conditions of language expressed in Bakhtin's impurist maxim: "Polyglossia had always existed (it is more ancient
than pure, canonic monoglossia) .. ." (12). No linguistic immersion
in the Lethe of pure poetry can wholly abolish this axiomatic linguistic necessity for literature's unconsciously assuming "several 'languages"' (295) in the formal unifying of its "ghostlier demarcations,
keener sounds."
In addition to such social semantics as Bakhtin's, we can understand, by invoking the phenomenology of pure/impure lucidly presented in Paul Ricoeur's The Symbolism of Evil (1969), that the use
of poetry as a "symbolic language" of defilement (evil) and of ablution (good) enacts "the ambiguity of purity which oscillates between
the physical and the ethical" (37). That is, the invocation of a socalled pure language, as some symbolic formula to recover a prior
state of purity, is used by poets to ward off the contagion of some
morally and biologically dreaded "impure": "a material 'something'
that transmits itself by contact and contagion" (28). The terms of
the impure can be seen to embody, by what I will here call the process of lexical scapegoating, the "quasi-materiality of defilement" of
a dreaded contact with symbolic mechanisms of sex, blood, disease,
sin, stain, improper food and so forth.
For the poet, as the symbol-keeper of his linguistic tribe, some
"cathartic practices related to defilement" (33) need to be invoked:
a symbolic cleansing must be called upon, in mimetic structures of
ritual practice, to erase what was in effect already merely a contagiously symbolic strain: "In truth, defilement was never literally a
stain; impurity was never literally filthiness, dirtiness" (35). Classical
Greece, which Ricouer and Moulinier agree imparted to the West our
aesthetic vocabulary of the pure and impure, had invented the cathartic agency of tragic drama to exorcise the fear of the impure as in the
scapegoat figures of Orestes and Oedipus whose victimage can represent "purgation" for the tribe. However, in more general social practices, too, symbolic language plays a crucial part in the collective
attempt to ward off, if not eliminate, the impure. What Ricouer
formulates as the "formation of a symbolic language" in which the
"rite is never mute" and words are given ritual efficacy can be read in
the stronger (that is, Burkean and Marxist) terms of Fredric Jameson
to enact a social praxis via myriad symbolic imaginings expressing
and only fictively resolving historical contradictions which cannot be
resolved directly in blood deed.4
4. On language as symbolic praxis, see Fredric Jameson (1981:76-81); and Jameson's postAlthusserean critique of Burke's dramatism (1978:507-523) as well as Burke's crusty rejoinder (1978:401-416).

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ROB WILSON

The quest to write such a "purity of diction," with its implicit

commitment to ward off the impure, enforces a symbolic practice by
which poets undertake to scapegoat linguistically some undesirable
foreign terms, whether Bohemian (as in Donald Davie) or "feudal"
European (as in Whitman) or middleclass ideological (as in Poe's
"didactic heresy") as delectably impure, threatening, nonessential for
the survival and status of the social group the poet assumes as the
barely repressed horizon of the text's political unconscious. In such a
reading, the pure poem can be seen to enact a symbolic drama in
which the impure is fended off, banished, exiled or condemned to
the flux of ordinary speech or the prisonhouse of poetic diction,
even though the Impure (like any scapegoated victim) already cohabits with (or, as Burke would say, "is consubstantial with") the very
language of the Impure.
A famous example of this is George Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" (1946) which - beyond its admirable polemic against
- censures the overuse of Latinate, Greek, Gerpolitical obfuscation
manic and abstract terms as impure signs of linguistic and political
"degeneration," an argument advanced in a supple English mothertongue whose vaunted strength comes from the prior assimilation of
those "hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English" which
Orwell everywhere assumes. For those impure "foreigners" outside
the insular boundaries of England have already invaded the AngloSaxon tongue.
Regrettably enough, the collective promotion of some indigenous
purity of language as a normative standard remains a linguistic illusion which is all too often politically motivated, as in the contemporary South Korean movement to purify Hangul of colonialJapanese borrowings - but not of American ones - or the longstanding
attempt in Persian poetry to ward off intrusions of Arabic and now
of the dreaded West. However, as the broadminded Whitman accurately noted in his language lecture, the capacious English language
was already so "chock full" of linguistic assimilations and literary
hybridizations "that its own sturdy home-dated Angles-bred words
have long been outnumbered by the foreigners whom they lead" (30).
This attitude seems politically more healthy-minded concerning the
policies of language-purism movements, whether inside or outside
the domain of pure poetry. Indeed, in lexical terms, there is no such
thing as a "pure" poem, just as there is no such thing as "pure" diction, as the naming of the impure threatens to become a bloody, exclusionary act of more-than-lexical scapegoating.
In fact Donald Davie later admitted that the "aggressive philistinism" (198) that ran through his poetic thinking on "purity of diction"
was ultimately his way of doing battle against the literary Bohemians
of London who had claimed Dylan Thomas as the tragic victim of an
antisocial lifestyle. If Davie came to be labeled a genteel "Puritan" by

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57

his opponents on the Left, many of these impure poets had already
defected to the "barbaric yawp" of Ginsberg's Howl (1955) for "revivifications" (Davie's word now seems ludicrously tame) of metaphor and diction, as in the striking case of Thom Gunn who left the
influence of Yvor Winters for the Hells Angel dust. The battle of
academic and beat diction in the American 1950's can similarly be
read not only in literary but in sociological terms as an opening of
poetry to marginalized dictions (of the street, Blacks, the madhouse,
Jews, Gays and so forth) which the Richard Wilburs of more academic bent regarded as poetically toxic and hence scapegoated from
the pure prose, as James E.B. Breslin's analysis of the "New Rear
Guard" formalist ideology in From Modern to Contemporary: American Poetry, 1945-1965
(1984) makes clear.
Moving beyond a lexical towards a more ontological perspective in
The Greeks and the Irrational (1964), E.R. Dodds has illuminated
the Orphic religious dynamics of early poetic purification-rites in the
"universal fear of pollution (miasma), and its correlate, the universal
craving for ritual purification (catharsis)" (35) which was enacted
in Homer and, more strongly, in the dramas of Sophocles. Seeking
purity of vision and language, Orphic poets had to practice a rigorous askesis of purification to train themselves in psychic power and
vision: an occult self of the psyche (or, later, the "daemon"), considered separate from the body, had to be verbally invoked and
biologically cultivated. A practice of catharsis was socially enforced:
"man must be cleansed not only from specific pollutions, but, so far
as might be, from all taint of carnality ... Purity, rather than justice,
has become the cardinal means to salvation" (153-154).
Indeed the would-be Orphic poet (whom Harold Bloom has suggestively taken as poetic prototype for would-be Emersonians) fasted,
ate vegetarian food, shed no blood, cultivated states of dream and
daemonic possession through inner purity. Such Greek "puritanism,"
influenced as it was by Shamanistic practices beyond the Black Sea
in the seventh century, imparted to western poetics, even through
the later rationalizations of Plato, this visionary sense of "the pure"
as providing access to the supernatural, to some godgiven, psychically
inspired vision as in Poe's symbolist quest for Helen's purer language
of feeling or in Emerson's mandate to "The Poet" (1844): the inspired poet with his god-intoxicated, "ravished" intellect has no need
for the "sorceries of opium and wine" because, "The sublime vision
comes to the pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body." Hence
in "Song of Myself," Whitman prefers the pure "intoxication" of
clean, odorless air to the impurity of "houses and rooms [which] are
full of perfumes" and even smelly shelves, just as Emily Dickenson
would become inebriated by the Amherst air.
In this latter-day Puritanism of Emerson,
"purity" became an
aspect of poetic character, something the poet cultivated as an ap-

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ROB WILSON

proach to those symbol-making powers which would turn nature

into an aura-invested "language" superior to its marketplace commodification in real estate. This literary puritanism found an influential
American incarnation in Emerson, especially through his virtually
shamanistic influence on Whitman. Such a visionary aspiration to
produce dream or god-induced language cannot be ignored in understanding the romatic quest for the pure in nineteenth-century American poetry. Xenophon's comment, "It is in sleep that the soul
(psyche) best shows its divine nature," could serve as an epigraph to
Poe's "To Helen" which makes the fleshly woman an incarnation of
Psyche whose dream lantern seemingly transports the poet to a
glimpse of the ideal incarnated, in linguistic displacement, in the
metrical and adjectival perfections of his verse. His Helen-as-Psyche
incarnates for Poe some real estate of the Holy Land, some glimpse
of the transcendent which obtained in purified states of dream,
reverie and opiate intoxication. The Romantic ideology of the pure
entails more than language purification, indeed assumes a purification not so much of the lexicon as of the soul. That is, the "pure"
is loaded not only with class implications but also, in nineteenthcentury America, with that whole Orphic baggage of "ideality,"
the magical mutation of the real into the symbolic, an attempt to live
within what was increasingly regarded as poetic estrangement under
the emerging order of industrial capital. The purity of diction still
reeks of such literary puritanism, the antimaterialist purifying of the
body into a nervous vehicle of the supernatural, a theme outrageously apparent in "Song of Myself" with its drama of ecstatic possession
not only by the Oversoul but also by the diverse polity of the heteroglossic states of the Union.
According to Kenneth Burke's "rhetoric of motives," what motivates the pure poet in his antimaterial quest to embody this special
essence of "language as symbolic action" is that Poesque will to sheer
formal excellence, to a lyrical perfection of utterance which delights
in the verbal play of "symbolicity" per se. Man, as symbol-making
animal, intrinsically delights in a language beyond the pull of argument and advantage-seeking, a language of "pure persuasion" which
would effect a "meta-rhetoric" that is a pure delight in trope-making
without any performative responsibility. Poets of pure poetry, of
whom Poe is Burke's salient example in "Poetics in Particular, Language in General," best enact the "poetic motive" of language, that
is, the sheer delight in language itself trying to bypasss its overt propositional designs: "As for poetics pure and simple: I would take this
motivational dimension to involve the sheer exercise of 'symbolicity'
or 'symbolic action') for its own sake, purely for the love of the art.
If man is characteristically the symbol-using animal, then he should
take pleasure in the use of his powers as a symbolizer, just as a bird
presumably likes to fly or a fish to swim" (1966:29).

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This symbolizing prowess, the poetic making of a poem "for its

own sake" (a phrase which recurs in most of Poe's works on the
theory of lyrical poetry, as it does later in Baudelaire) nevertheless
need not be separated from the divisive tensions of historical predication and conflict. If "Pure persuasion involves the saying of something, not for an extraverbal advantage to be got by the saying, but
because of a satisfaction intrinsic to the saying" (269), the pure
poem, despite such delight in form per se, secretly is "impure" and
must seek advantage and persuasion as a condition of language itself
(274). The pure poem cannot get beyond rhetoric-as-persuasion by
its mere delight in rhetoric-as-trope. Even if a poet was motivated by
formal delight in symbolic language, the audience can still read the
poem as symbolic action, that is, in Burke's words, "it becomes
so interwoven with the problems you symbolically resolve, [that]
people tend to see these problems as the motivating source of your
activity." The death of a beautiful woman may be the most poetical
topic in the world to Poe, but readers can also suspect some kinky
version of misogyny as a deeper motive, too. As Burke puts it, homo
semioticus is always already homo dialecticus, at his most "poetic"
only when performing as a "symbol-using animal whose symbols
simultaneously reflect and transcend the historical 'reality' of the
nonsymbolic" (1969:275).5
To turn to two examples of poetic purity/impurity from the midnineteenth century where an "American" brand of poetry was effectively invented, Poe's much-admired "To Helen" (1831) can represent the symbolic extreme of la poesie pure in American Poetry, the
will to estrange the poem from daily life and ordinary language as a
terminus ad quem. Poe's dreamy Helen is never seen as a real woman;
the metaphor moves away from Anglo-Saxon diction and American
reality towards some transcendent "native shore" of supernal essence:
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks of yore
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long want to roam
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!
5. And passim on diverse attempts at "Pure Persuasion."

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ROB WILSON

The alliterative and Anglo-Saxon formulae of this "weary, way-worn

wanderer" would journey, via symbolist transformation of such rude
poetic diction, to purer realms of classical diction ("Nicean barks ...
hyacinth hair.. .Naiad airs") which, as Richard Wilbur has argued,
are not so much historical allusions as fictive inventions (133-135).
This poetry-inducing Helen is not so much a real woman but a
phonemic fetish: as Poe confided to Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman, his
recurring characters of Helen, Ellen, Elenore and Lenore (not to
mention Ulalume, Morella, Eualalie and so on) are anagrammatic
variations on one name containing "e" and "1" which circulate, we
can speculate, like those pure poetic phonemes of Saussure or of
Stevens's beloved "c."
Poe's phonemic muse is at once Helen and Psyche, temptress from
some Holy Lands of the dreaming mind; she is the metaphor-engendering "bark" and "lantern" of some subconscious journey beyond
the "desperate seas" of history into some essentialist realm transmuting the impure real into the pure symbolic. Words like "Nicean,"
"hyacinth," "Naiad" and "agate" serve as the precious tokens of a
remote, "supernal" existence in the timeless Yore of such poetry.
"To Helen" indeed is written in a poetic diction ("thy," "o'er,"
"yore") and poetic form estranged from mere instrumental language:
the poem would enact a language of symbolist magic, transmuting an
ordinary woman (there were several Sarah Helen Whitmans in Poe's
life) into a purifying goddess who can transport the poet across
oceans of worldliness to some sacred realm of symbolic intuition
where one woman can equal the whole of Greek and Roman grandeur. By scapegoating in its pure language all traces of "impure"
(middleclass) ideology of material embodiment, this would-be monological poem would look away from the daily and modern as sources
of toxic "desperation." The woman is not so much flesh and blood,
as "statue-like," a creature of aesthetic composure whose function is
Psyche, to become a muse of supernal loveliness evoking the poetic
effect in Poe of a transport out of American landscape and history.
The antihistorical goal of any Poe landscape is that of "Dream-Land":
I have reached these lands but newly

Froman ultimate dim Thule Froma wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of SPACE - out of TIME.

His "home" and "native shore" is not Whitman's materialist New

York City but a poetic "clime" of affective essence which the poem
would not only be about but would enact in sublime delicacies of
diction and meter. The Poe lyric aspires to that lexically purified
condition "so little of the earth, earthy" - as Poe said rather ludicrously in praise of a "supernal" Tennyson lyric.
By "barbaric" contrast - to invoke Santayana's half-censorious

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61

phrase - Whitman's "One's-Self I Sing" (1871) strips away such purity of poetic diction and the trappings of classical allusion. The poet
would speak directly in his own voice, with unpredictable rhythms
and phrasal forms, his language empowered by the vernacular as a
terminus a quo. The poetic form takes shape in the making, as an
event of unprecedented prose-like poetry in which each phrase gets
repeated and built upon like some agglutinative music of ordinary
speech:
Ones-SelfI sing, a simple separateperson,
Yet utter the word Democratic,the word En-Masse.
Of physiology from top to toe I sing,
Not physiognomyalone nor brainalone if worthy for the
Muse,I say the form complete is worthierfar,
The Femaleequallywith the MaleI sing.
Of Life immensein passion,pulse, and power,
Cheerful,for freest action form'dunder the laws divine,
The ModernManI sing.
Whitman's verbs are connected not to flight but to bodily process,
"I sing... I utter," as the poet tries to name his own body on the
stage of poetry. Local politics enter in, the impurity of foreign terms
such as the French Revolutionary slogan "En-masse," sex, the female,
passion, all as an immense hybridized compound centered in a lowerclass personality of the American nineteenth century nicknamed Walt
Whitman. Not the classical and inward and remote but the modern,
outward and near are celebrated as the stuff even of epic poetry:
"The Modern Man I sing." The heteroglossia and dialogical materiality (Bakhtin) of daily speech are given embodiment and "voice"
through the semiotic coding of one democratic "I."
Such a poem is "impure" in its irregular, rhymeless form, its vulgar
vocabulary, its singing of the ordinary person as divine. There is no
special muse, no realm to flee to, no European baggage of poetic diction and allusion to perpetuate (though of course Whitman's very
phrase "One's-Self I sing" would transmute the "impure" epic formula of Greco-Roman battles, "Arms and the man I sing" into a
phrase the self can use). Reeking of lexical impurity, of poetic and
prosaic indiscrimination, Whitman showed thit American poetry can
be made from the here and now, from ideologically loaded images, in
an open form which blatantly represents the stuff of history. The
"other" which the purist Poe elides and scapegoats is here omniverously included, even ancient Homer and the normally idealized Female
physiology "from top to toe."
Written within a pluralistic ideology of the subject, American
poetry can incorporate diverse voices and modes, but Whitman and
Poe still stand as impure and pure options at its modernist origin.
"La poesie pure" with its will to purify the language of the tribe
through a process of aesthetic laundering was forever countered by

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ROB WILSON

the "barbaric yawp" of Whitman building a poetry more naked in

form, substance and ideology. For most poets, Whitman's embracing
of impurity has become the dominant American mode, as in the heteroglossic vocabularies of Ginsburg, Ron Silliman or Ashbery, who
assume that "Purists Will Object" to a lexically incongruous line like
"the gonzo (musculature semmingly wired to the stars)." Stevens's
embracing of the impure and ideologically inclusive as the dominant
mode of American poetry, as in his letter to the Cuban critic Jose
Rodriquez Feo (April 6, 1945), has only intensifed after the impurist
shocks of Howl and Life Studies: "But no one proposes to practice
pure poetry. I think the feeling today is for an abundant poetry, concerned with everything and everybody" (1981:495). Nevertheless, a
recurring will to purify poetic diction can be seen in poets as diverse
as early Stevens or the Poe-loving Wilbur, or even in recent poets of
epistemological music and depth images such as Creeley and Merwin
or Brad Leithausser, as the essentialist purity of an incantatory imagism which T.S. Eliot saw running "From Poe to Valery" in 1948 still
exerts its hold on the mixed modes of the always-heteroglossic
American present.6 However, to echo the hardwon moral of Stevens,
"Everything [the pure and the impure of language] must go at once."
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