Visions of presence in modern American poetry

There is nothing at all, according to deconstructionist doctrine, outside of language. Nowhere, it holds, is it possible to locate any kind of "presence" external to language on which spoken and written utterance might be grounded. Nevertheless, Homer deeply contemplated the ocean, and Wordsworth the farmland, and Gerard Manley Hopkins "the dearest freshness deep down things," and their poetry suggests an undeniable experience of intimacy with things outside of language - things "as they are.".

In Visions of Presence in Modern American Poetry, eminent scholar Nathan A. Scott, Jr., argues that this testimony to "presence" offered by poetry is the strongest possible reputation of poststructuralist theory of knowledge. Exhibiting the kind of wide-ranging analysis his readers have come to expect, Scott explores the ways in which the poetic act of contemplation makes palpable the sense of "a something more." He does this by turning to "the nine figures with whom - over the years I have found myself most deeply involved": Wallace Stevens, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Wilbur, A. R. Ammons, James Wright, and Howard Nemerov.

From Stevens' belief in the transcendence of the human imagination to Auden's flat rejection of Stevens' view of poetry as a guide to life; from Roethke's joyful praise of the "numinous" reality to Bishop's "poetry without myth"; from Wilbur's "splendor of mere being" to Ammons's reflections on the sublime and the mundane; from Wright's simple, lyricism, to Nemerov's expression of "a moment's inviolable presence," Scott finds one enduring principle: that the chief source of the sublime is to be found in the rich density of the everyday. The resulting "poetry of presence," he contends, represents the greatest legacy of modern American poetry.

"In poetry," Scott writes, "truth is at work because poetic art, by inviting an attitude of enthrallment before the various concrete givens that surround us, prepares us to be laid hold of by that wherewith these things are inwardly constituted and enabled to be what they are. . . . It is, in short, the poetic imagination that so grasps and renders things as to convey to us the wondrous bouquet of presence."