Carl Rakosi Essay, Research Paper
Andrew Crozier
Rakosi’s career before the "Objectivists" moment of
1931 needs to be read in terms of the literary situation as it presented itself to writers
of his generation. What then becomes apparent is that although it was a generation with
something of a common frame of reference — Imagism, for example — its cohesion was
superficial, and concealed a potential for rupture which developed, in due course, along
lines marked, as much as anything, by social difference. Rakosi belonged, that is to say,
to a generation of American poets who, at the start of their careers in the 1920s, took
initial direction from the expression of contemporary experience and sensibility made
possible by the innovations of the first generation of modernists. Tate made precisely
this point about Crane: "From Pound and Eliot he got his first conception of what it
is, in the complete sense, to be contemporary." Unlike some other members of his
generation (Tate himself, for example, and more especially Yvor Winters) Rakosi did not
ally his poetry to the formation and propagation of a new literary-critical canon, and
thus make a theoretically entailed connection between writing in the present and the
literature of the past on behalf of a stabilising cultural order of the sort Eliot seemed
to adumbrate in "Tradition and the Individual Talent". His writing identifies
him, instead, with poets more concerned to investigate the formal uses to which the data
of contemporary life might lend themselves. Like Rakosi, these poets were mostly from
immigrant families and, cut off from cultural traditions which American experience tended,
in any case, to negate, their attention to formal compositions that could be understood as
the specific, unprecedented resolution of their experience was expedient and necessary. It
was also their special distinction. As members of immigrant families they were immune to
nostalgia for the American past, and as Americans in the process of assimilation it is not
surprising that they were less concerned with their perception of the immediacies of
experience than with the discourses in which that experience was constituted. We need
always to remind ourselves that America in the 1920s was not the London of 1913, and that
the world of lived experience, as well as poetry, had been modernised, and continued to be
modernised and rationalised at an accelerating rate.
These "Objectivists", as they became, are to be seen as initiators of the
first revolt against institutionalised modernism by virtue of their rejection of the
impersonal theories of discourse implicit in the notion of poetic values sustained by
tradition. (It should be noted that Eliot used "tradition" as a stalking horse
while in pursuit of other game. When Tate says that Crane’s poetry is "in the grand
manner" it is its traditionalism that wins his approval.) Their work may also be seen
as an attempt, not altogether well timed, to incorporate and extend the innovations of the
first generation of modernists at a moment when that generation was losing momentum and
cohesion. Such a revolt, however, was inauspicious at the start of a decade in which the
main opposition to the academic modernism of what became the "new criticism"
came from left wing demands for a literature of solidarity and social commitment.
Objectivism represents, then, a particular development of early modernism, rather than its
straightforward evolution, still directly responsive to the instigations of the previous
generation by virtue of an understanding of poetic form as a resolution of responses to
contemporary experience and its characteristic discourses, rather than a conceptual order
able to accommodate and so regulate an awkward and perhaps undesirable novelty. This
development took place (perhaps only could have taken place: Rakosi and Zukofsky both were
refugees from university teaching posts) outside the new establishment of literary power
relations, brought into existence by the alliance with modernism of an increasingly
professionalised literary criticism. This alliance, the main site of modernist affiliation
for poets of Rakosi’s generation, was built up around an analysis of modernism of the sort
suggested by Tate’s remarks about Hart Crane. Its concepts and related values are evident
in Winters’s review of An "Objectivists" Anthology, in which he
reproached the Objectivists for their lack of "rational intelligence", and read
them as "sensory impressionists of the usual sort". For Winters, as for Tate,
the agency of form was conceptual; it represents (for Winters it could only do so by
conventions of metre; for Tate it was signified by an intuited imaginative centre) the
mind’s rational control of disorderly sensation and feeling. Inevitably, therefore, they
would find in Imagism and Objectivism no signs of unifying intelligence. Their realism
precluded anything approaching Zukofsky’s understanding of words as "absolute
symbol", and its implication that form is actualised in the local and sequential
relations between particular words. What is striking about Winters’s theory of form, in
particular, is that rational intelligence is represented symbolically, by metrical verse;
its textual domain, that is to say, is the aesthetic, which acts as a corrective to the
confused emotions and muddled thought of modern life. Despite the attention his criticism
gives to the local vitality of poetic language, its denotation and connotation are for
Winters cognitively weak. It is as though he recognised the place of modernism’s energy
and expression but can only assign such qualities affective status. What is outside the
poet’s mind, including the instrumentality of language, is a source of brute sensation and
vagrant mood; it is without organisation or unity. One does not, however, have to be a
phenomenologist not to suppose the mind capable of representing only its own coherence,
nor idly complaisant in acknowledging the discourses that constitute the greater part of
daily life. No doubt much of the twentieth century deserves our contempt, but contemptuous
dismissal is a luxury as well as a clich?.
It is not that Rakosi and the other Objectivists stood outside the literary situation
of their generation; Tate and Winters were, in their own way, outsider figures; indeed,
the figure might apply to the whole of the generation "entre les deux guerres".
The point is, rather, that the Objectivists were successfully outflanked; we can see
this being done very neatly in the pages of Hound and Horn — at first
friendly to Pound and his young men, its literary policy was eventually dominated by the
opinions of Winters. None of this any longer matters, but it is against just this
background of generational identity and rupture that the contour of Rakosi’s career shows
up most clearly.
From "Carl Rakosi in the ‘Objectivists’ Epoch." In Carl Rakosi:
Man and Poet. Ed. Michael Heller. Copyright ? 1993 by The National Poetry Foundation,
Inc. Reprinted with permission.
Robert Buckeye
We may read in the case of Carl Rakosi at least the following: the early influence of
Williams and Stevens and, later, Zukofsky; his Jewishness, as well as what some
characterize as his Europeanness; his efforts through the twenties and thirties to settle
on the work of his lifetime; the impact of the Depression; his lifelong work as a social
worker, and his love for those he worked with who enlivened him so much; his relation to
other poets linked with him as Objectivists, both in their early years and, later, in the
sixties, what Ron Silliman characterizes as their "third or renaissance phase"’;
his decision that he could not be both poet and social worker and the effect of a
quarter-century silence as a writer; how his writing habits, circumstances, aesthetic led
to an aphoristic, epigrammatic style; how the function of poet and poetry had changed in
half a century.
1903
Carl Rakosi born in Berlin, November 6.
"I am in a very long room, so long that I can not see its end. There is very
little furniture. The ceiling is very high and vast. There are shadows. The further away
they are, the longer and heavier. There is no one there. I lie in my crib. All I’m aware
is that I am. And the silence. The silence is loud. No one comes. The silence is
all there is. The nothing is oppressive. Hours go by and it becomes harder and harder to
bear. There is no end. There is only the silence. And nothing. But beyond what I can see
is Something ominous looming.
This is not a dream; it’s a memory, and I am bonded to it. It’s a memory of no one
being there and no one coming. A mother was not there. I’m sure."
1904
Parents separate.
Mother moves back to her parents’ home in Baja, Hungary, with Carl and his brother. Father
emigrates to the United States and remarries.
"I have to remember that he was only thirty at this time and soaking up new
experiences. He had one in particular which was in the nature of a revelation and forever
changed his thinking. It happened somewhere near the Tiergarten, I think. A crowd had
gathered around two speakers. He walked over to listen. One was a young man about his age.
He was almost shouting, in order to be heard, about the terrible privations of the poor,
working men included, the disabled, the homeless, the unemployed, . . . urging his
listeners to band together … in union there was strength….
. . . the realization came to my father then that this was the noblest thing a man
could do . . . he could not conceive of anything nobler . . . to have a great cause, to be
spokesman, an advocate, a champion of the oppressed and downtrodden. He never got over
that. There was awe in his voice, almost reverence and a hush, and his face became
transformed when he mentioned the names of the speakers… Karl Liebnecht and Rosa
Luxemburg.
And when he went on about the brotherhood of man and the necessity for justice, . . . a
wave of emotion surged through me and lifted me up and I was glad.
[. . .]
" . . . how else can I explain never seeing her [his mother], even in Baja,
Hungary, where we lived next with her parents, . . . until I was six, and never remember
her ever touching me an that time."
[of his grandmother]: "Her presence has always been with me. The eyes are sad and
reflective. The face tired, beginning to show wrinkles, but the mouth smiles and an
incomparable sweetness, her character exudes from her, holding nothing back, and envelops
me. She leans towards me, attentive, smiling, and I respond in like, as I had learned to
do from her, also smiling, all inside me light."
[. . .]
"I remember too … summer. . . A Serbian workingman has just sat down on a bench
to have his noon lunch and I smell something overpowering. He takes out a pocket-knife and
holding a slab of smoked bacon in one hand, he slices it with the other the way one would
slice a peach, and the way he slices his country bread too, and eats with gusto, a
thousand years of peasant life . . . the peasant and his pig … behind him … that aroma
… still in my nostrils."
1910
Stepmother comes to Hungary and takes Carl and his brother to the United States.
"All I am thinking of is the going and the necessity to act as if this were like
any other day. She [his grandmother] has suppressed her tears so as to make the parting
bearable to me. I walk up to her … and … let myself be hugged and kissed with that
self-possession and vigilance which protect children. And I leave without recognizing her
grief or even acknowledging that this is a separation.
Forgive me."
[. . .]
"We went second-class. I remember Lester [his brother] leading me down a forbidden
flight of stairs to see what it was like in third-class. It was more crowded there and the
talk was thicker and louder and more of it, but otherwise not different that I could see.
We tried also to see what it was like in first-class, what the rich people looked like and
what they were doing, but the steps were barred to that deck.
The only other thing I remember is throwing up night after night at the dinner table on
the clean white tablecloth . . ."
[. . .]
"There, into what looked like an enormous, barren barracks, the immigrants poured
and stood around, waiting nervously in their best clothes to check out their papers and to
go through the required medical examination, and it hit them head-on for the first time
that no one knew exactly what state of health they had to be in order to pass. . . ."
1910-1911
Family lives in Chicago where his father works as a watchmaker.
1911-1919
His father goes into business for himself in Gary, Indiana. Family moves to Kenosha,
Wisconsin, where his father opens a second jewelry and watch repair shop after the failure
of the first in Gary.
". . . one day I was sent to a room I had never seen before and given a test; …
The next day I was called out of class to the principal’s office and told I was going to
be moved ahead a grade. I couldn’t understand it. Then a month later, the same thing,
another grade ahead. I had no difficulty doing the work in the upper grades, but now
everybody in the class was two years older than I, and that did make a difference in my
life because henceforth everybody in class would always be two years older and bigger and
I would always be two years younger and smaller. . . ."
[. . .]
"Our house was a house of daily scrimping and worry because of the nature of my
father’s business . . . he had started in Gary with only a credit line from Moore and
Evans. He earned enough from his watch repairing to provide us with food and part of the
other necessities; he could depend on that, but he never knew whether he would sell enough
jewelry to provide the rest and pay his bill at Moore and Evans on time….
This is what had my parents locked in and dominated their lives, subsuming their
softer, convivial qualities. It locked me in, too. It locked me into a lifelong concern
about making a living and affected my personal habits and the way I deal with practical
matters….
‘How can you move,’ I asked [Ed Dorn once], ‘if you don’t have something?’
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I can always find something.’ I have never been free in that way."
[. . .]
"Although my father and stepmother were intelligent and had a high regard for
learning (he had a European’s great respect for culture), she was too practical and
literal to be interested in more than a newspaper, and his eyes at the end of a day were
too tired to be able to read. Thus, there were no books in our home."
[. . .]
"That didn’t bother me because I didn’t know I was missing anything, until one day
I discovered the public library on the other side of town."
[. . .]
"The library now became my secret home and my secret vice….
… the old Scribner’s edition of Dickens … Thackeray … and the great Russians . .
. Maxim Gorki’s unforgettable My Life comes to mind; and Huneker who
introduced me to the wonders of music and the cross-cultural currents in the arts….
… all the time I was in Kenosha I don’t remember ever seeing a grown man carrying
books on the street, and I knew they weren’t reading. So I couldn’t help feeling
embarrassed….
Once I was across the bridge on the immigrant North Side I was safe. During the day
there was no one in the long block of saloons on the way to our house, and if a lone
figure did happen to be in and looking out at the street at that exact moment, books were
so far outside anything he was interested in that I passed by, invisible."
[. . .]
"I had no inkling of anything in me beyond this until I was sixteen and wrote a
piece in high school in senior English on George Meredith. To my wonderment the teacher
wrote back a long enthusiastic response as to an intellectual equal with comment after
comment indicating that she respected my literary mind."
1920
Rakosi becomes a student at the University of Chicago and begins to write poetry.
"They [my parents] thought they could manage to support me at a university if they
were very careful and if I lived frugally and worked during the summers."
[. . .]
" . . . one day I was a reader of literature and the next day, there was the
knowledge, as if it had always been there, that I wanted to be a writer and that I could
best express myself in poetry, not prose."
1921-1924
Transfers to University of Wisconsin. Becomes editor of the Wisconsin Literary
Magazine. Friendship with Kenneth Fearing and Margery Latimer. Graduates with a BA.
Eliot — The Wasteland (1922)
Cummings – Tulips & Chimneys (1923)
Stevens — Harmonium (1923)
Williams — Spring and All (1923)
"The University had some ten thousand students, mostly from Wisconsin farms and
small towns, blond young Babbitts, their hair cropped close. Time was suspended for these
boys and girls from the country while they looked each other over and saw that they were
comely, and flirted and horsed around. And the big events were football and the Big Ten
pennant ahead, and standing guard was a smugness hard to imagine these days, though Nancy
Reagan comes pretty close to it.
Entered I, poor little Jewish, boy, stewing in an inner life, sensitive, mystical, full
of Tolstoy and Nietzsche, feeling as if I had been branded by a stigma …."
"The bestial evening of alienation and insecurity, of mysterious depths and
longing. With that, I graduated…."
[. . .]
"When we were together, Eros was in Blake country, and woman as Blake envisions
her, was Margery [Latimer] herself. From the start, I was drawn into a deep relationship
in which, to borrow Blake’s imagery, our souls contemplated each other happily …. "
[. . .]
"The only poetic-literary influences that I am aware of, at the very beginning,
were Yeats, and then Stevens, and Cummings a little."
" . . . at first I was seduced by the elegance of language, the imaginative
association of words; I was involved in a language world — a little like the world of
Wallace Stevens, who was an idol of mine during a certain period."
". . . you take one of his [Stevens's] poems and try to understand it as a man
saying something, you’re lost. Its beauties are something utterly different. He’s killed
all subject matter."
[See "The Domination of Wallace Stevens (1925)."]
1924
Hired as a social worker-in-training by Family Service, a family counseling agency in
Cleveland.
"I happened to be talking to somebody who was also looking for a job and he said,
‘Why don’t you go into social work?’ I didn’t even know what it was."
"I found the courses rather dull but immediately became deeply involved with my
clients, more deeply and disinterestedly than I had ever been involved with anyone before.
And I discovered in myself a great urge to listen deeply to their distress, to understand
it, my whole attention in it, and be helpful. In this I discovered a great
excitement and a gay self-fulfillment unknown to me before."
1925
Works as messboy on merchant ship to Australia. Counselor at a treatment center for
disturbed children, New York City.
Williams–In the American Grain.
Poems appear in The Little Review and Nation.
"New York was all I expected and I learned a great deal of Freudian theory in my
new agency, which had the best clinical reputation in the country at the time, but I had
to give it up. It was too much of a good thing, absorbing, too demanding, too rigorous. It
was making it hard for me to write."
"I guess I underestimate Williams’ influence on my early work. Williams did
influence my form a great deal Williams and Cummings. The openness and opportunity for
clarity in Williams’ spatial arrangements appealed to me and I appropriated it at once. I
would probably have arrived at something similar on my own because that was what my work
had to have, but he saved me a lot of time. Williams’ Americanisms also left their mark on
me."
1925-1926
Returns to the University of Wisconsin to study psychology. Changes name legally to Callman
Rawley. Co-founds and edits The Issue, which publishes twice.
"For one thing, Rakosi was forever being mispronounced and misspelled, but the
main reason was that I didn’t think anyone with a foreign name would be hired, the
atmosphere was such in English departments in those days."
1926-1927
Works as a psychologist in the personnel department of The Milwaukee Electric.
"I checked the motorman’s responses … his speed, accuracy, endurance, and the
like, and made out a psychological profile from that. And on that the poor fellow’s
employment or future in the company depended."
1927-1928
Works as a psychologist for Bloomingdale’s in New York City. Works as a family
counselor with the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children.
1928-1929
Becomes an instructor and graduate student in the English Department at the University
of Texas. Becomes a student in the Law School at the University of Texas.
"I felt the need to protect my time and resources for writing by work that was
less compelling, less absorbing … and got myself a job . . . teaching freshman
composition to engineering students. . . . The work was easier all right…. but now it
was the young prigs in the department I couldn’t stand. They acted as if they had brought
Oxford to Austin, . . . and were so affected and British high-toned that I felt nauseated
and was faced with having to spend the rest of my life with clones. I could see too that
what I would be doing as a professor would be so specialized and of so little value except
in English departments. . ."
"[In law school] I was captivated by the insistent practical base of jurisprudence
and found the logical and philosophical reasoning supporting it as clear and
well-proportioned as the Parthenon . . . but because for me to stand up and speak in
public was nerve-wracking then, an ordeal and I realized too late that’s what a lawyer
did."
1929-1931
Works as English teacher in Houston. Works evenings as a group worker with Mexicans at
the Rusk Settlement House.
Pound –How to Read
"I had a job teaching English literature to high school seniors in Houston. What I
thought would be a relatively easy, mild experience turned out to have a monstrous work
load, and I loathed the students’ lack of interest and cutting up in class and the fixed
Victorian course of study from which one was not allowed to deviate. Zukofsky’s letter
came when I was in despair. I had tried every occupation I could think of in which I could
make a living and still have time and mental energy to write without success. There was no
place else to go. It seemed like the end of the line."
"I’d send him something to look at and it would come back with just a few
comments, but they were always right on the nose. He seemed to know better than I what was
true Rakosi and what was not."
"Rakosi’ may be dead, I wish I cd trace him.
His last address was
61 N. Main St. Kenosha, Wisconsin."’
— Pound in a letter to Zukofsky, 25 October 1930.
1931-1932
During summer vacations studies premedical sciences and goes on to study medicine at
the University of Texas Medical School in Galveston until his money runs out.
Objectivist Anthology
Objectivist issue of Poetry
"I see that his definition was tailor-made for his work and that his frame
of reference was already the tour-de-force. I see too why it struck me as curious and
wrong. He had omitted all reference to the poet’s relation to the real world, except for
his insistence on particulars, and that was at odds with his argument."
". . . if Reznikoff was an Objectivist, Zukofsky is not and never was one."
". . . the one who is closest to me . . . the critics said he hadn’t done enough
with the material. But my first reaction when I read it was that maybe Reznikoff was
right. Maybe the material can speak for itself."
1932-1940
Returns to social work in Chicago ("I rode back north to Chicago on freight
cars"). Takes courses in social work at the University of Chicago. Works as Director
of Social Services in the Federal Transient Bureau in New Orleans. Continues to pursue a
degree in social work at Tulane University. Works in social work in New York City.
Completes graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania and receives a Master of Social
Work degree. Marries Leah Jaffe, 6 May 1939. Brief internship in psychotherapy.
Oppen –Discrete Series
Pound -Make It New
Stevens -Ideas of Order
Williams -Collected Poems 1921-1931
Stevens — Man With the Blue Guitar
"I respect his [Oppen's] poetry. It can come through with brilliant perceptions of
reality…. But I can’t warm up to it. It’s stripped down too much."
"I believe that Pound’s critical writing–particularly the famous ‘Dont’s’
essay–is an absolute foundation stone of contemporary American writing. But in his own
work I think he’s been disastrous as a model, totally disastrous to younger writers….
It’s not honest. He pretends that his material is epic when it is only a device to achieve
grandiosity at the expense of the reader. All that pretense and double-dealing nauseate
me."
". . . Williams was not central for me. However, there are similarities between us
for reasons other than literary that is, we were both in the helping professions and not
in academia, we were doing somewhat parallel things, he a doctor, I a social worker and
psychotherapist, both of us always out in the world, engaged with people, living always
with their problems, learning from them. That common workplace left its impression on our
work."
". . . with Williams you always have the feeling that there’s a man there talking.
With Stevens, you don’t get that feeling. He’s transformed himself into something
wonderful and beautiful, but he’s not a man talking."
"I fell in love with social work and that was my undoing as a poet, in a sense. .
. . I’m not so completely subsumed by language as I was then."
"I had become convinced by 1935 that capitalism was incapable of providing jobs
and justice to people and that the system had to be changed, that there was no other way .
. . it seemed like half the country was out of work and ready to explode, the unemployed
organizing and storming the relief offices, when true-blue Americans who had never thought
much beyond the
morning news and football became radicalized. The stakes had become too high to do
nothing."
"I took very literally the basic Marxian ideas about literature having to be an
instrument for social change, for expressing the needs and desires of large masses of
people. And believing that, I couldn’t write poetry, because the poetry that I could write
could not achieve those ends."
"After a couple of years, however, I stopped going to meetings, and that ended it.
Nobody noticed because all I had ever done was listen, and march occasionally on picket
lines with people I didn’t know, and cheer and feel uplifted at mass rallies."
"It was impossible to pile on top of this daily regimen a night of writing. When I
tried it, I turned into such a live wire that I could neither sleep afterward nor do my
work right the next day. In addition, my Marxist thinking had made me lose respect for
poetry itself. So there was nothing to hold me back from ending the problem by stopping to
write. I did that. I also stopped reading poetry."
1941
Selected Poems
Leonard Bacon — Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
1940-1968
Works in St. Louis at Jewish Family Service. Becomes Assistant Director of Bellefaire,
a residential treatment center for disturbed children in Cleveland. Becomes Executive
Director of Jewish Family and Children’s Service in Minneapolis until his retirement in
1968. Also works as a psychotherapist in private practice.
From "Materials Towards a Study of Carl Rakosi." In Carl Rakosi: Man and
Poet. Ed. Michael Heller. Copyright ? 1993 by the National Poetry Foundation, Inc.
Reprinted with permission.