The Poetry of Film: Helen Vendler, Wallace Stevens, and…Film Studies
I. “A Poem Is Not an Essay” … and Neither Is a Film
The poetry critic Helen Vendler (1933–2024) once said that film is more like poetry than like the novel (even though poems, unlike novels, rarely get adapted into films). Poems are efficient, if sometimes cryptic; novels are expansive, if sometimes tedious. Despite their (typical) reliance on chronological development, which links them structurally to (typical) novels, films undergo the formal editing and compression that routinely defines poetic composition, a fact that explains why 20 hours—or 200 hours—of footage can be ordered and presented in two hours. Throughout most of the 20th century, high-minded novelists often aimed for poetic-grade compression and efficiency, making their work as difficult to read as a Modernist poem could be, but, if attention is maintained at that intensity, the long form hits a natural processing limit: novels (just like very long poems) soon exceed the human ability to control signification. Prose architecture is therefore built from larger chunks—paragraphs and chapters—whereas poems build their architecture at the word and phrase level and generally stop at the paragraph—the “stanza”—level. The math of signification demands this shift in the scale of control. The novelist’s lengthy enterprise forbids the comprehensive mastery that a poet can exert over a much smaller text because, as the variables add up—word by line by paragraph by chapter, developing and entailing premise after implication after consequence—the relationships among the parts multiply exponentially. When the text grows (if it aims for an exhaustive semantic and syntactical use of its materials and yet aims also for coherence, without slipping into any periphrastic quagmires), the hundreds or thousands of relationships (permutations) among the variables at the poetic level soon become millions, then billions and trillions at the novelistic level. Yes, trillions, and that’s putting it conservatively. In film, the same math applies, as design choices multiply in different dimensions, from visual and aural to choreographic and dialogical. So films generally require multiple creative agents to work these various dimensions. What would Steven Spielberg have done without John Williams? For their part, film editors earn Oscars because the work of piecing together a meritorious film from all its footage requires extraordinary skill, and the structural result is, in effect, a two-hour poem (whereas the 200-hour version might be hustled as melodrama for a [End Page 67] Reality TV series).1 A director or writer is not enough. There’s only so much extension and granularity a single mind can sustain over a symbolic body. Individuals can’t orchestrate billions of variables at the “poetic” level. Too many choices. Too many dead ends. Too little time.2
We use the word “poem” or “poetic” to refer to the maximum control and order an individual can exert over an aesthetic form while maintaining maximum efficiency with available materials while supplying an information density or “complexity” sufficient to portray the subject convincingly.3 In math, a “poetic” level of achievement with equations or theorems or proofs is called “elegance.” Scoff as we might, Einstein’s E=mc2 is the most famous poem in science. When Vendler asserts that poetry proper is the most concentrated form a language can take, she is likewise describing the total elegance—the control, order, efficiency, complexity, and sufficiency—that is possible at that scale. The number of syntactical, semantic, psychological, ideological, and social forces at work in even a short composition in any discursive art staggers the ordinary imagination (and certainly exposes the amateur). In fact, one test Vendler offered for her assertion was the difficulty—the impossibility—of fully translating a poem into a different language (as a poem). Even poems within the same language family do not translate fully to each other. In this respect, film is very unlike poetry, because films, apart from their script, can translate much better. But Vendler was more interested in how film, like poetry, could [End Page 68] coordinate enormous complexity with stunning efficiency. This unlikely kinship—the structural elegance of both poetry and film—from an unlikely critic of film is the impetus for this essay, which examines a critical historical succession from poetry to film.
As a New Critic, Vendler valued what made both art forms, at their best, “elegant.” But the real prize was something audiences could gain only by paying very close attention to the order of all the design choices in any art form: a specific “event” happening. That event does not exist outside the art form. Once you step outside the poem or walk outside the cinema, there’s no way to translate or re-create Hamlet or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” or Star Wars or The Piano. The experience of the event happening inside the aesthetic form evaporates into memory—or must be reconfigured as propositional content. Critics and reviewers can describe what happens and even how and why, but they can’t re-create it, because the experience is entirely a function of the form itself. To readers today, this approach, with its emphasis on “experience,” might sound subjective, but it was formulated by philosophers and critics to be just the opposite, because it held readers to all the manifest choices and constraints of the text itself. Poems were not piles of lumber to be interpreted subjectively; they were houses and farms and fences to be re-assembled accurately. The poem was more than a story; its form was a blueprint for how to tell it. The same reasoning applied to a film: how is it set up to be experienced? When you enter a cinema, popcorn in hand, you don’t wait for a statement about a story; you wait for the story itself, and it’s supposed to unfold for your literate eye and ear; it’s not supposed to be delivered to you as a lecture. A dramatic “event” is about to occur; something will be happening, and, if it’s any good, what “happens” will be expertly orchestrated from all its parts to produce—or reproduce—a specific and valuable experience. Its reconstruction isn’t “subjective,” even if how I feel about what happens is.
When Vendler spelled out this (Aristotelian) principle to me—writing “A poem is not an essay; it is an event” on one of my aspirational but wrong-headed undergraduate essays—I puzzled over the word “event.” Like so many students of literature (and film) today, especially in their fevered hunt for topically salient material on which to seize for political credit, back then I, too, had been treating poetry as if it were prosy history or philosophy: propositional language. Because I was looking for statements, I could not yet recognize the drama of a poem happening in front of me, phrase by phrase, line by line, like a film scene unfolding on the page, tightly edited, with very few hermeneutical leaks.4 It’s a spectacle to watch and hear, the poet holding [End Page 69] compass over the enterprise as a whole, mastering all the variables in a concentrated form (be it a sonnet or a villanelle or an ode). To our relief, Vendler neatly demonstrated to the class the “event”-like nature of a poem by asking us what “antecedent context” would be instantly recognizable in Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 116 if we should (accurately) emphasize the word “me”:
Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments; love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove.O no, it is an ever-fixèd markThat looks on tempests and is never shaken;It is the star to every wand'ring barkWhose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeksWithin his bending sickle's compass come.Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,But bears it out even to the edge of doom:If this be error and upon me proved,I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
In a way, this lesson in poetry served as my first lesson of film studies, because I could “see” and “hear” the scene of this script being played out in terms of its form—its peculiar staging. The sonnet is a dramatic monologue in which a speaker is addressing a lover who has just ended their relationship. That’s the antecedent context, and the poem dramatizes the moment directly after it: when the speaker spirals into a desperate effort to prove, with a string of “poetic” hyperboles, that a faded love can be argued back into feeling, as if his lover’s heart were subject to the felicitations of pompous rhetoric or the pressures of logical debate. Sentimentalists using this poem for wedding ceremonies (and it is used often) are, in fact, dissolving the poem’s dramatic structure to distill a statement (e.g., “Love is forever”)—which turns out to be false, anyway, because the speaker’s absolutes affirm unconditional love only within the context of his panic. The sonnet is not a list of metaphors; it’s a crescendo, the end of which is meant to box the lover into the impossibility of asserting that no sonneteer has ever written of love and that love itself is not real. After dangling a line in a contradiction— “love is not love”—which unwrites the speaker’s argument before he can speak it, he posits the immobility of love but then, by comparing it to an immovable “star,” casts lovers as ships on the sea, themselves moving by wandering impulse; next he denies death any power over love but then admits that rosy life gets cut down, so, again, “love [End Page 70] is not love”; then he announces that this disembodied love, no longer tied to anyone at all, hangs on—to what? to whom? everyone is dead—until the world ends, a “doom” that adumbrates the speaker’s hopelessness; and, finally, he challenges his mute lover to disprove his metaphors, which is ridiculous in terms of reasoned debate and thus unwrites, yet again, the poem’s own argument. That’s a dramatic scene, not a statement.
The kicker here is that, if we can read this “scene” as thoroughly and finely as the poem itself has been composed, then our recreation of this drama—the “event” happening—becomes, for Vendler, the truest history of that aesthetic object, because we have reached the poet’s own level of mastery over that specific instance of language and form occurring inside its historical moment. External factors beyond the artist’s control certainly impinge on, inflect, or erase aspects of the object, but a “history” is not simply those external factors. In fact, the structural context of the work will often filter out competing signals. The word “gay” appears in The Great Gatsby (1925), but it means what it meant in 1925 and in its context in the story. Fitzgerald could have changed its meaning through an alternative context, but he didn’t. A sloppy but zealous—or simply unscrupulous—reader might try to force the word to mean what it came to mean by the 1980s. A faithful reader, more aware of relevant historical factors, will not. Meaning is bound by circles of context, the most proximate of which is the peculiar form of the diegesis itself. If something outside its syntactical sphere affects the diegesis—and something always does, because no text exists in a vacuum— then you still need to define the “it” that is being affected. What, for example, does a red jacket “mean” in a film? This is Semiotics 101: principally, it depends on whether it occurs in, say, Rebel Without a Cause or Schindler’s List—and then on where and how it is played out in each of those films. If you can’t read the red jacket in context, then anything you say about an external force of signification will refer only to that force, not to the red jacket “happening” in either film. You will produce elaborate tautologies, not interpretations. [End Page 71]
Vendler’s comment about the poetic structure of film, with its well-ordered elisions and ellipses, its relatively quick and provocative juxtapositions of image and sound, its tight rein over symbol and metaphor, its complex orchestrations of gesture and movement, and its painstaking architecture overall, is meant to tell us that, even if an aesthetic object is always constrained by external contexts, its “history” starts from inside the operational world of the artifact. If we can’t reconstruct the syntactical/semantic system (the fictional “world” or diegesis) that an artifact is creating from its own structure (as a function of the artist’s organizing will, not the viewer’s or reader’s)—a structure that is, ultimately, the hypostasis of self to which we must stipulate if we want to think in terms of any individuated person in the first place—then we’re almost helpless to say anything meaningful about it. Structural context—an architecture of choice x before or because of choice y, of image a with or against or instead of image b or symbol k or metaphor f or premises 1 and 2—defines meaning first, and the most proximate context tends to be decisive.5 We follow that principal in law for good reason: proximate causes generally figure as more powerful causes. A scene in a film is often storyboarded for this same compositional reason: the scene must have an internal order, a structure, a dramatic, not just a propositional—external—purpose, [End Page 72] one that only the playing out of it can manifest to audiences. The play is the thing, as Hamlet says, because it recreates the precise structure of a specific experience, and he needs Claudius to relive that thick experience, not just repeat a thin assertion of his guilt; Hamlet wants the evidence to be decisive, so he needs a play, not a proposition. What a “red jacket” means in a film or a poem is primarily whatever the scene or the sentence makes it mean, using all the inside/outside materials the artist can master. This truth is as obvious as it is forgotten in each generational rush to fashion a new aesthetic, so we must re-teach it every generation—ever since Aristotle formulated it in his Poetics, because the Platonists will always reduce art to statement, especially the political or moral sort. History always intrudes on art, yes, and it does so often and significantly, but, in our rush to integrate history, we can’t forget the question “intrude on what?” Ultimately, “meaning” is local. Even great artists can’t bend every signifying force to their will; at maximum agency, however, whether in a text or a film, they can reach “poetry,” which is more that most can achieve and which, in terms of both reasoning and ethics, is enough to warrant careful study of the dramatic structure that does manifest such extraordinary control.6
II. The Film Inside the Poem
If the comparison between film and poetry still strikes some readers as tendentious or implausible, then perhaps they must let go of the assumption that accessibility defines a genre. Poetry is less accessible, yes, but that’s partly because it limits the aperture of signification to words alone, whereas film has multiple apertures (light, sound, color, shape, volume, kinesis, etc.). As audio-visual creatures, we naturally enter film worlds more readily—more sensuously—than we enter poetic worlds. So the latter are often harder to decipher—a film by David Lynch or Darren Aronofsky notwithstanding—but the construction itself of poetic worlds is like that of film worlds. (Simply bracket the script, and the similarities become visible, as I’ll explain in the next section). The moment students begin storyboarding, staging, and filming scenes and then cropping, splicing, attenuating, re-organizing, and dumping [End Page 73] media clips to create what they hope will be a potent, coherent film, students appreciate the immediacy of the connection to poetry: everything must be accounted for to produce a coherent dramatic event. That’s why entry-level film students typically make very short films: everything must be accounted for, and it ain’t easy to do even with small projects. The demand is built in to the stagecraft, regardless of polemical bent. The same goes for staging poems. Construction is granular, multidimensional, and comprehensive: everything must be accounted for. This imperative formed the foundation of New Criticism. “Accessibility” was irrelevant, because the central question was “What is happening among all the parts as they are arranged?” To put it less accessibly but more comparatively: How is the story filmed in words? Consider an “inaccessible” poem from a famously inaccessible poet. The drama in “The Planet on the Table” (1954) is frequently dismissed or distilled for its propositional content. Wallace Stevens calls a (successful) poem a “planet” that could sit upon a “table” because a miniature world of experience can be ordered, concentrated, and edited to convey the “character” of the mind creating it. Many readers think that such a summary is the poem, but it isn’t. The film is, as Vendler would say, an “event”—and, as I would say, a film in words. Here the protagonist, Ariel, contentedly reviews his little constructed worlds, which he later says have been the “makings of his self,” much as children are, and then he compares them with the products of nature, the “makings of the sun”—all of which waste, welter, and writhe—implicitly causing Ariel’s ego to swell through the contrast. Here is the poem:
Ariel was glad he had written his poems.They were of a remembered timeOr of something seen that he liked.
Other makings of the sunWere waste and welterAnd the ripe shrub writhed.
His self and the sun were oneAnd his poems, although makings of his self,Were no less makings of the sun.
It was not important that they survive.What mattered was that they should bearSome lineament or character,
Some affluence, if only half-perceived,In the poverty of their words,Of the planet of which they were part.
The poem might seem to offer merely this gratifying conceit to Ariel: his poems are like entire planets, revolving around the self as planets revolve around the sun. By the [End Page 74] fourth stanza, however, he has moved beyond his gladness at having made art that will bear his likeness and not waste, welter, and writhe. Transcendence is now off the table: “It was not important that they survive.” What just happened? The moment of change occurred in the third stanza, when Ariel admitted that the self and the sun “were one”—and recognition that logically forces him to conclude that his poems, coming from him, are likewise trapped in time and space, subject to death, like all nature: “no less makings of the sun.” It’s a simple truth—everything dies—but tell that to a teenager…or an eschatologist…or an artist. Few artists are brave enough to face mortality in these sober terms by creating art that, say, erases itself after viewing or reading or art that evaporates or disintegrates after a few hours or days. But Stevens, in character as Ariel, summarily accepts the doom even of his poems, not unlike children you know will die. All that matters, then, to Ariel after this humbling truth— which he himself formulates—is that the poems once existed and spoke into being some aspect of the “planet” that was his careful, hopeful imagination. Merely to have existed, to have been expressed into a well-ordered reality, with some momentary richness (“affluence”), is enough. It must be, just as it had to be for Shakespeare’s Ariel, in The Tempest, who gamely accepts the “change” of a drowned face into “something rich and strange.” Everything beyond this acceptance is delusion, and, in Stevens’s poem, a self-chastened Ariel refuses the comforts of metaphysics. In the final two stanzas, after reasoning his way from ego to entropy, he takes comfort in what less and less remains: his poems existed. He doesn’t shake his fist against the sky. He accepts the maximum instantiation of his will that reality has offered him: an existence structured satisfactorily in the form of evanescent poems. The point of his life—and of every one of his poems, including “The Planet on the Table”—is suddenly contracted. Ego evaporates. Such is the quick self-referential drama that is happening inside this poem. Ariel is changed, and Stevens has written a short film in words to reproduce that experience. We miss the drama, which is a function of its structure, if we strive only to synthesize propositions, parse ideologies, and marshal polemics— those standard political flags that academics in the humanities are often compelled to fly for publication and promotion.
We also miss the point if we feel compelled to ignore the drama in favor of connecting the poem’s descriptions to an external history, checking the date of publication for post-war correlations or Cold War consolidations or checking the literary or ideological scene for genre conformities. The peculiar “history” happening in the poem is the experience itself, which is not reducible to an index of something else. This “experience” is a written, not oral, history, and, as a publication, it is a public history, not a private one. It’s perfectly real, entirely open to academic inspection. Do such experiences—as opposed to the texts—constitute conventional “history”? No. But they happen anyway, they are historical, and they are not merely subjective: there [End Page 75] is an empirical set of conditions and constraints upon meaning.7 A biography of Stevens or a history of American literature will not reproduce the “history” of the event occurring in this poem. The same goes for film “history”: the events inside the fictional cinematic worlds are played out as sensuous experiences, and then they’re gone, until we play them again, “reading” their order of composition accurately enough to relive them. These are formally interior histories, and, unless we’re trapped in the fictional worlds of purely formulaic experience, interior histories can’t be generalized, precisely because they “happen” entirely as a function of the specific order of each artifact.8 Each aesthetic world is its own, unique and ephemeral. Standard historiography (or philosophy or psychology or any other systemized field of study) cannot recreate these events happening on page and screen; they can only report on them from the outside.
Consider a companion example of a “film” happening inside what most readers would call “difficult” poetry and would likely parse into summary propositions, in an excerpt from Stevens’s The Comedian as the Letter C. The figure of Triton (son of Poseidon) has lost his godlike voice and regal bearing after eons of mundane splashing upon the shore, so, when Crispin, the “comedian” traveler of the poem, comes upon the sea absent the lovely “caparison” that gives even sublime objects a humanizing accessibility, he is shaken by the sea’s bare reality, experiencing a cognitive “Severance” (the word cut off by a caesura before it and an enjambment after it) from the “shadow of himself” that has been tied to myth and romance:
Here was the veritable ding an sich, at last,Crispin confronting it, a vocable thing,But with a speech belched out of hoary darksNoway resembling his, a visible thing,And excepting negligible Triton, freeFrom the unavoidable shadow of himselfThat lay elsewhere around him. SeveranceWas clear. The last distortion of romanceForsook the insatiable egotist. The sea [End Page 76] Severs not only lands but also selves.Here was no help before reality.Crispin beheld and Crispin was made new.The imagination, here, could not evade,In poems of plums, the strict austerityOf one vast, subjugating, final tone.
Like Adrienne Rich’s intrepid neophyte in “Diving into the Wreck” (1972), who becomes both man and woman once severed from the binary conventions operating above the water, Crispin confronts the sea as the thing in itself—“ding an sich”— much as Rich’s diver confronts “the wreck and not the story of the wreck / the thing itself and not the myth.” But then, because a perception of anything “in itself” is, in Kantian terms, impossible, this naked sea, stripped of myth and romance, destroys his ego (even as a now “negligible” Triton’s ego was checked by repetition and entropy). Crispin cannot “evade” the “vast, subjugating, final tone” of this bare, annihilating sea. In that moment, however, he is freed from old ways of thinking (the excerpt above appears in the first section, titled “The World without Imagination”), propelling him to travel beyond himself (no Kubrickian monolith required for his evolution, just an endlessly repeating ocean that washes aways our phantasms). Hence Crispin’s subsequent journey to foreign lands and back, siring four “True daughters both of Crispin and his clay,” and thus establishing a new knowledge of the “soil” that constitutes his “intelligence.” He is humbled and happy because he has run the fantastic course of his imagination and, like Triton himself, has been assimilated into the realities that crash, wave upon wave, on the shore of the ordinary: “So may the relation of each man be clipped,” the speaker affirms at the end.
This excerpt, like “The Planet on the Table,” is not reducible to a dull statement like “be content with existence alone” or “check your ego.” It’s a scene of severance happening, first to Triton, as both conceptual model (resplendent myth) and concrete model (repetitive sea) for Crispin’s own diminishment, and then to Crispin directly, as he himself feels forsaken by the protections of romance against things as they are. He beholds, in active voice, but then, in the same line, “Crispin” is named again, in passive voice, as a new being, the two selves inhabiting the same plane but severed by sequence. The active beholder is made passive by a destruction of the ego, and so the passive, denudated self, is “made new.” In this paradox of agency, Crispin is liberated from “poems of plums” (alluding to the highly imagistic poems characterizing Stevens’s career at this early point) that had concealed the demanding “austerity” of this experience. This scene in the poem is performed not as a series of statements but as a sequence of escalating actions, which are held in tension against each other, each scene in the poem played out in terms of the specific locations Crispin visits, the protagonist becoming “where” he is. The ontological journey Crispin takes, as his agency is changed but made rich and strange, is dizzying and dazzling to watch.
Perhaps the Apple TV series Severance (2022+) has this very poem in mind as it explores the ramifications of a literal, physiological severance of the mind into two [End Page 77] distinct selves (with, admittedly, more emphasis on the technological parameters set by physical location and on the emotional predispositions of the employees than on the mythic and cognitive precursors to an ontological splitting). On one “soil,” Mark Scout (Adam Scott) is a grieving widower, fired from his job as a history professor because of his drinking and dereliction; at work, because of a device in his brain, he is completely free of that persona, becoming instead “Mark S.”—who himself, despite working for dehumanizing supervisors, is completely free of the dissolute Mark Scout. The ensuing drama then lies in the fact that neither “Mark” is actually free, however. While “Outie” Mark remains trapped in long memory, unable to move forward, “Innie” Mark, disconnected from memory and therefore always moving forward, is trapped by a sterile economic, political, and religious hegemony, which itself is freed by its coercive technology to generate a brutal theocratic dictatorship inside its “seventh” floor (the word half-repeating through simple alliteration the comprehensive indoctrination of the “severed” employees, whose minds are almost child-like once freed of memory).
Ontologically, the corporation’s severance process is able to collapse the human will to the proportions of a workplace, bypassing an external reality that would diversify the variables of cognition and identity formation beyond any single agency’s control. The result is a single teleological impulse in the employee: complete one’s work, ignore its inscrutability, ask no questions. Mark S., like every other severed worker, becomes, in effect, the well-wrought poem that Mark Scout, more like a picaresque novel on the outside, can never be. But the “poet” creating this ontologically new “Mark” stands outside both forms of “Mark”: Lumon Industries, which is sometimes more cult than global corporation, inculcating the persona of its founder into the psyches of the [End Page 78] severed employees. Mark S. is therefore never allowed to become himself, and Mark Scout has no say in, or knowledge of, how Mark S. is worked into loyal shape. Severed employees are thus prevented from writing themselves into being. That denial of agency propels much of the plot, and, except for the finale of Season 2 (in which Mark S. chooses the romance he has found in the labyrinths of Lumon’s hallways and so denies life to Mark Scout), such a denial of agency inverts the story of Crispin, who relinquishes his agency precisely because it has been built from fantastic “poems of plums,” allowing himself instead to be “made” by the “soil” he visits. His passivity frees him to become other identities. In both cases, however, “severance” is not merely a proposition; it is, quite obviously for the series but less obviously for the poem, a dizzying dramatic event, unfolding as an ordered experience that unwrites one ego and re-writes another.9
III. Filming Against the Script: The Sound of Music and Pretty Woman
If we accept that staging a poem is akin to staging a film (or film scenes), then making sense of either form requires the skill to explain the logic of its construction. Announcing principles and concepts, whether eloquent or abstruse, is far easier a task, because the expositor is free to invent, to synthesize, without constraint from the structure of the form itself. Consider the voluminous commentary on The Sound of Music (1965) and Pretty Woman (1990)—two of the most popular examples, for many critics, of a failed or disingenuous elevation of women.10 My point is not that such claims are patently wrong; it’s that they see the formal elements of the works (if these are addressed at all) as a means to a polemical end, distorting, cherry-picking, or altogether ignoring the structure of the drama—its poetics—to amplify the propositions the critics have synthesized from it. For Helen Vendler, this emphasis on the critic’s ego was irrelevant to the work of criticism because the vector of analysis would insistently point audiences toward the ideological content generated outside the work, by the critic, instead of toward the aesthetic content generated inside the work itself, by the poet—or by the director, writer, editor, or other primary creative agent. [End Page 79]
Orchestrating a large-scale “cinematic” poem demands extraordinary control, as I argued in the first section. In film, this demand typically impels directors to shoot far more footage than could ever be used in the final product. Storyboarding can increase efficiency only so much. Julia Roberts once remarked, with some frustration, that Garry Marshall had shot enough footage to make 10 films just to produce one good one. How is Pretty Woman “good”? That’s a loaded question. In terms of historiography, the 1990 film comes at the end of masculine hegemony in film and television—the 1980s—and thus the film is often maligned for its subject: a rich man exploiting a sex worker, whose exploitation is then eclipsed by the mechanics of pop romance, the man mending his exploitative ways only as a businessman, among other men, and the woman remaining mostly helpless to determine her fate—the whole story functioning as sentimental service to the status quo of gender inequality, just as women were beginning in the 1990s (as they briefly did in the 1920s, as Laura Mulvey has argued) to flourish in film (and, later, television). So, in terms of propositional history, instead of in terms of poetic construction, Pretty Woman stands at an extra-diegetic precipice and seems, to many critics, to look backward. But the film is no more a proposition than is Sonnet 116, “The Planet on the Table,” or The Comedian as the Letter C—or any other poetic construct. Pretty Woman is a fairly “well-wrought” film (as Cleanth Brooks would call a finely crafted poem) with a systematic tension at work between its visual and verbal orders, the first rebuking the second and thereby undercutting the very hegemony that the film is accused of perpetuating.
The story begins in close-up with a magician performing coin tricks at a party, which sets in motion a visual trope that will map the gender dynamic between Vivian (Julia Roberts) and Edward (Richard Gere): money stands at the center of gender power. Filmmakers often use such pre-figuration to establish a conceptual framework for the rest of the film, miniaturizing at its beginning the central problem and even sometimes the solution to it. In fact, Robert Wise uses a similar kind of pre-figuration in The Sound of Music (1965), presenting Maria (Julie Andrews) singing on a hill—but only after the film has opened by surveying the inhabitable peaks of the Alps and then the meandering life of the world farther down. Maria stands between the two worlds as intermediary, just as she weaves through trees and crosses a brook (both fabricated on the hill for the film) to establish emblematically the problem of the film: the disconnect between a repressive civilization below and a free and organic impulse above. Maria is not an austere celestial descending from the unforgiving mountain tops; she is a liberated agent of natural music, ministering to the denatured humanity in the valleys, giving it back its melodies and harmonies—songs that are themselves adumbrated by the chirping birds before her appearance on the hill. It’s the poetics of the Romantics, and it’s a Christological motif: Maria is Nature’s itinerant Intercessor. The hills are therefore “alive” with music, which is the sound of love and life, not death, and that’s the voice that Maria teaches the Von Trapp children and finally their fractured father—who, despite his buried love, is sinking into autocratic terror over them, like the Nazis he consciously despises. The Captain has already militarized his [End Page 80] beloved Austria from within his own domestic fortress. So he can’t hear nature’s music until Maria weaves him and his progeny back into a family, not into yet another regiment.
In Pretty Woman, Vivian will likewise save Edward from his greed, but that’s not the central problem posed by the film. Vivian is stuck in transactional thinking about herself, measuring her value in proportion to the coin she commands. Hence the opening scene. Coins are moved around deceptively, they magically become big coins, and women giggle as they are sold on the larger charm. That’s the trick, in [End Page 81] metaphor, that Edward plays later with Vivian, buying her smiles and services with bigger and bigger coins to keep up appearances around L.A., without getting bogged down in any relationship. To bring Vivian into his egocentric world, he gives her a credit card, and she hits Rodeo Drive, excited to redefine herself, at least for the week she’s on the job. However, after she’s humiliated by a salesclerk, Edward accompanies her to another boutique and takes full control of the selections, dressing her up as he sees fit—a sensibility that Marshall registers in the shots of him continually in the foreground, obscuring Vivian, who is occasionally blurry in the background, and dominating the scenes, setting terms with the manager, frowning or smiling at garment choices, and all the while inviting Vivian to believe that she can be refashioned into a “lady” from the outside in: by him (not unlike the perspective of Lumon Industries toward its severed employees). She is Galatea to Edward’s Pygmalion, the well-wrought poem he writes. Roy Orbison’s title song plays triumphantly as she struts down the sidewalk, catching rewarding looks, and the confident Vivian even taunts the snarky salesclerk on her way back to Edward. But her confidence is built on an illusion, which Vivian has not faced. The Orbison song is ironic, which the structuring of shots has already revealed. When she hesitates to participate in the polo charity— “What if someone recognizes me?”—Marshall places her between two upscale cars, angling her into the corner they form. She is trapped by her bargain with Edward. She wants the dignity of the illusion, but it’s not actually hers to wield.
Edward assuages her doubts, pulls her from her grip on the door handle, and commands her to smile, which she does on cue. After all, she’s been paid to serve, and she understands her value as a function of the money she can command in return. The relationship, along with her self-image, is entirely transactional, and she still believes [End Page 82] in the illusion. Hence her cavalier retort, afterward, to another snark, a socialite at the polo game, that she’s just using Edward for sex. The camera dollies around the offending woman on the dais and then dollies away as Vivian walks into its trailing frame, causing her antagonist to shrink dramatically in screen size. Vivian has shown her who’s boss. Well, no, it’s just more clothes Edward has bought for her, and the next attack will undress her. Can she figure out her value apart from money, which men still largely control? Not yet. Her primary tool has been her attractiveness, which even plays well with the polo crowd, as a Cinderella scene of a rival suitor fitting her shoe suggests, but the princess is about to meet the pumpkin. When Edward’s craven and jealous lawyer, Stuckey (Jason Alexander), learns that Vivian is a sex worker, he subverts her confidence—visually presented through a low-angle, medium-distance shot of her against a tree, with a clear view to the right—by stepping into that space and blocking her against the tree, the two figures now presented at eye level, with Stuckey in the foreground, and then by suggesting that he purchase her services later. He verbally returns her to the streets, and the scene visually imitates her sudden demotion. In shock, Vivian says “sure,” and her upper-class identity collapses. She is, as far as she knows, still a function of the coin she can ask a man to conjure. The bigger the coin, the greater her value. Playing dress-up hasn’t changed her identity; it has simply disguised it for a time. But the scene sets up the essential question: can she choose not merely “who” her clients are but “who” she is? Does she have meaningful agency?
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The ugly truth of her identity, as far as she understands self-creation at this point, is what enrages her when she and Edward return to the hotel room, in the climactic scene of the film. However, what could have been a scene of instruction for Vivian by the realist Edward—because the script aims squarely in that direction—is instead reversed by the camera work. Marshall refuses to grant Edward any visual superiority, even though the script has him in complete control. When Edward tries to defend himself for having betrayed Vivian to his lawyer, he sits on the bed, while Vivian towers over him.
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When the two bicker, one in the foreground and one in the background, Marshall keeps the focus sharp on Vivian but keeps Edward in a background blur. He is demoted. She is not.
Even when their positions are swapped, Vivian gets the focus, and the camera dollies up and back to preserve the stage blocking of her as the primary character. This approach does not harken to the 1980s and earlier. It anticipates the incursion of women into film and television. A comparable use of shallow focus will occur often in X-Files (1993+), showcasing Scully (Gillian Anderson) in a similar reversal of gender stereotypes—she is the grounded FBI scientist; Mulder (David Duchovny) is the New Age FBI speculator—which began to play out across media in the early 1990s. Pretty Woman stands at the front of that technique in modern popular culture. [End Page 85]
But the broader technique of undercutting a gendered script through visual counterpoint occurs a generation earlier in The Sound of Music (1965), when Maria reproaches Captain Von Trapp for neglecting his children and he attempts to reproach—and then fire—her. The camera disagrees with the script on who has moral superiority, so Maria is repeatedly filmed either larger in foreground, as the Captain walks to and from the camera (just as Marshall will do with Vivian against Edward) or from a low angle against the eye-level shot on the Captain. [End Page 86]
Indeed, by the time the Captain manages to re-assert his superiority, the visual rhetoric subverts the script explicitly: after Maria has shouted that she is “not finished” reviewing his failures as a father, he replies “Oh, yes, you are, Captain! Er, Fraulein.” She smiles. He fires her. And the hierarchy appears to be restored, as the poster for the 1956 adaptation The Von Trapp Family assured audiences it would be (cue the paternal chinhold) and as the poster for the The Sound of Music visually promised it would not be, with Maria literally floating and the grumbling Captain set below her, smaller, waiting to be mastered by her music. [End Page 87]
The climactic scene in the epic 1965 film—“climactic” because a protagonist’s character is fundamentally changed by an event that springs, in ideal Aristotelian terms, from the character’s own actions—continues to develop from here, for the master of assertion over this girlish governess suddenly hears music, which, in the film’s logic, is also the sound of the hills and trees, which is the sound of Maria, which is the “problem” he himself invited into his home, having fired a string of governesses to blind himself to his own failures as a father, the very subject of Maria’s complaint now. Neither he nor the nuns, both highly regimented, could “solve” the problem of Maria because, linked to the unmanageable mountain looming behind them in this patio scene, her will transcends their conventions, exerting a command and grace that stand above their increasingly grotesque, hyper-civilized world. The Captain is instinctively pulled by the unpretentious song and by his children’s unmannered voices, entering the drawing room on the right side of the frame, initially aligned with the Baronness and the grifter Max, looming over them all, seeming again to dominate, but then he spontaneously sings, emotionally caught off guard by the music, and he steps left, to his children, to the buried side of his character and to the music of their mother. He humbly, tearfully, gratefully abandons the Baronness—dressed in an aberrant red against the earth tones of the Von Trapps (including the Captain) and of Maria—as Maria watches over the scene like a saint of salvation for the grieving fuhrer of this [End Page 88] reconstituted family. It is one of the most moving domestic scenes in film history, not for its sentiment, but for its art: the long chain of visual reasoning that began with Maria whirling and singing on the hilltop, diversifying that song among locations throughout Salzburg, and dislocating Georg Von Trapp conceptually from his militaristic domain, until he could sing with his children, as it were, on a hilltop. He could no longer hear “love,” but he could hear its music. Such a concept is not profound, but it’s powerfully constructed—because it is built frame by frame, scene by scene. It has a total order. The film becomes a system, not just a series of events. It has “form.” If we don’t recognize such form, then, as students of the craft, we are reading only its pieces—at which point, the total order of the film is as “abstruse” to us as a Wallace Stevens poem we’ve never read.
Garry Marshall seems to have learned from Robert Wise how to effect such a systematic reversal of gender hierarchy with an equally fluid formal technique. In Pretty [End Page 89] Woman, when Edward tells Vivian the “obvious”—that she is “in fact a hooker”— Marshall keeps this major man low and off-center in the frame.
When Vivian finally demands her payment, the camera lingers in a high angle on the money and then follows her movement out the door, panning back to Edward, stupefied by her disavowal of his coin. Vivian seems to have lost everything, but, no, she has simply decided to assert the terms that she believes define her character: “I decide who!” But even during her outburst, she doesn’t know entirely what she’s saying. She’s referring, by the context of Edward’s betrayal and Stuckey’s presumption, to her clients. The film, as a system, however, is referring also to Vivian herself. Can she decide “who” she is? That’s the pivotal drama played out in the next scene. Edward silently follows Vivian outside to the elevator to reclaim her, but now the exchange shifts almost entirely away from visual rhetoric. The shots are made from standard eye-level cuts according to speaker. Now the script is queen, and the scene concludes in a moment of poetry. Thematically, sure, Vivian needs something other than money from life; her dignity matters. That’s no big insight. But she isn’t looking for “love,” as a pretty woman might seek in a typical rom-com of the period. Here the script suddenly catches up to the logic of the camera, just as it does in the lakeside patio scene in The Sound of Music (“Captain! Er, Fraulein”). After telling Vivian that he’s “sorry” for being “stupid and cruel” for unmasking her to his lawyer and that he “didn’t mean it,” Edward says that he doesn’t want her to leave. He sounds sincere, but Vivian asks “Why?” Apparently, she’s content with neither an apology nor an expression of desire from him. “Why,” indeed, then? Edward tries a third approach: he “didn’t like” seeing her talk to a rival suitor at the polo match. Perhaps jealousy can win her back? Nope. The script has Vivian seeing through this old ploy. Jealousy is [End Page 90] just the petulant face of possessiveness, and Vivian, though dismissing the rival’s chances of winning her, isn’t looking to be owned. She wants something more fundamental. First, she declares, without artifice or subterfuge, “You hurt me.” “Yes,” Edward meekly replies, without follow-up. No “yes, but.” Edward’s impulse to chase after the girl leaving his domain began as a standard trope of romance, but now he must accept a fact beyond his control, and yet even this fact has been woven into the film systematically through the accumulated consequences of his behavior upon Vivian’s feelings. The pretending has given her a “play” to perform, and the experience, not any statement of her worth, is what has changed her perception. Vivian has learned that she’s a person, not a thing. And Edward is learning the same truth right now. It’s the simplest fact to recognize, unless the unimpeded will never has to do so. The climax of the scene: Vivian says, quietly but resolutely, “Don’t do it again.” She gives Edward a command. Like Maria, in The Sound of Music, who finally issues a command to Captain Von Trapp (“You’ve got to!”), Vivian declares a moral standard, not an economic standard, for the relationship. Gold coin, like brass on a Captain, is irrelevant. It’s not a war of egos; it’s a transformation of identity. And both the Captain, in The Sound of Music, and Edward, in Pretty Woman, change their moral character as a result.
With that poetically compressed exchange at the elevator, the logic of the hotel scene returns to the visual narrative. Edward, himself quieted by this assertion of command from someone he had presumed to own, humbly blinks in assent and then wordlessly follows Vivian back into the room. One final scene to seal the deal: cut to a bird’s-eye view of the couple in bed, with the sheets down—but not for titillation (as the previous sex scenes were shot). Even if the verbal conversation in the bedroom scene lapses a bit into sappy scripting of their confessions to each other, the camera, not the script, delivers the film’s denouement to the line of visual reasoning that began with the magical coins: hierarchy is flattened into a portrait of intimacy between naturalized equals. [End Page 91]
The brief, sotto voce exchange at the elevator is perhaps the film’s most concentrated moment of writing. It is verbal poetry. But the film’s visual poetry has been far more extensive (though not at the proportion of 2001: a space odyssey, which, as I argued in these pages back in 2022, nearly erases verbal poetry in favor of its visual counterpart). Yes, Pretty Woman has its silly and shlocky moments, and the genuine laugh produced in Julia Roberts by the gag of snapping the jewelry case shut on her fingers is as jubilant as it is thematically superficial (unless we count it as another visual instance of Edward impishly controlling the transaction), but the line of filmmaking logic from the opening magic-coin scene and the shopping sequences to the polo scene and the climactic hotel-room scenes, when film’s visual and verbal worlds finally agree, is deep and expertly developed. This is the art of the film, its visual “poetry,” and no proposition or polemic can touch its power as “experience” to move audiences.
“Poetry” is a fraught word in film studies, because it tempts us to look for elevated language in the script. Hence the perennial film adaptations of Shakespeare to slake the ambitions of serious actors, whether they can read well or not. But the example of Maria and Vivian, as subjects of cinematic art, suggests that “poetry” is a large-scale phenomenon, built in to the structure of the film: a formal property. It can seem as quick as “Captain!” and “Don’t do it again,” but it actually results from a writer’s or director’s or editor’s sense of total design. The quick expression or fleeting scene, on its own, no matter how “poetic” in appearance, does not constitute the film’s poetry, any more than a single brilliant thread constitutes the tapestry. Filming The Sound of Music and Pretty Woman systematically against the script, an approach that is developed coherently across the narrative through small- and large-scale events, reveals the power of cinematic techniques—of visual poetics—to constitute meaning. [End Page 92]
IV: Wallace Stevens…and Film?
Toward explaining an over-arching conceptual and historical connection between film and poetry—which will reconnect with the discussion above—I’ll start with an anecdote (though not of a jar in Tennessee). After purchasing a first edition of The Auroras of Autumn (1950), I discovered an original letter inside it from the author himself, Wallace Stevens, to a high-school teacher who had asked the poet for a summary of his life and work. At first, given the brevity of the document (it’s just a few lines), I thought little of it beyond its remarkable provenance. After all, it wasn’t an undiscovered poem, and, as letters go, it contained nothing that would immediately ring alarm bells at The Wallace Stevens Journal or American Literature (the latter nonetheless having requested an earlier version of this essay). But a closer look at both the inner and outer contexts of the letter revealed a surprisingly familiar gender crisis, in miniature, that occurred in poetry in the middle of the 20th century and, more to the purposes of this journal, that occurred again in the film industry in the 1990s. Still more, the two crises were causally related. It was a “moving history” worth describing in this special issue.
Masculinity has always had a shaky relationship with poetry. Socrates famously complained that, in its power to arouse “sympathy,” poetry moved citizens away from the “quiet and patient” attitude he deemed “manly” and, because it “feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up,” moved citizens toward the “evil constitution” of an irrational “woman” (35). It's an old saw. But Stevens belonged to the generation of literary provocateurs aiming to convert poetry, once and for all, into a man's sport. The poet would be “virile”; the figure of the man would be “major,” a “hero,” even “giant”—all terms that, as Ann Mikkelsen observes, depended rather baldly on “opposition to women,” as well as on the rejection of “racial and ethnic groups perceived as cultural, social, and political threats” (105–106). Such gender and racial opposition is hardly surprising for historians of the early twentieth century, but Mikkelsen argues that Stevens himself felt caught between his own “fat” body and the “muscular” man he praised in his poetry, leading to a hypocritical “protest” against “the predominance of an aggressive and highly performative masculinity that often had little to do with an individualʼs intellectual or moral fiber” (121). Maybe so. But, in terms of gendering (not just economics), poetry was and still is risky business for a cis-gender man, not just for the avowed dandy, and it is this friction—between masculinity (especially its “white” variant, which was under siege by competing ethnicities and gender formulations during the immigration surges and suffrage movements of the period) and femininity, which, in the wake of popular, sentimental nineteenth-century literary practices, had stigmatized poets as limp-wristed, belated romantics—that makes this new letter interesting, in part because the naive question it puts to Stevens bears no marks of gender bias whatsoever. It appears focused only on poetics. He should be game to answer. [End Page 93]
If, having learned from the New Critics, we treat this composition more liberally as a kind of poem, one that has an order and drama to it, a shadow portrait of the poet emerges, like a severed self that Stevens both conceals and asserts. On March 31, 1951, Stevens answered a letter from an Arkansas high-school instructor named Frederick Huff (1930–2010). We do not have Huff’s original letter to the poet, but, apparently, the instructor had sent a nearly identical letter, on April 19, 1951, to Robinson Jeffers, wherein Huff had asked each poet to send “a brief account” of his life and a statement about his “theory and practice of poetry or…aesthetic principles.” Stevens answered Huff’s inquiry promptly and, it appears, politely. Jeffers, by contrast, ignored the request—or stewed over it—for more than a month, finally responding with undisguised contempt: “one doesn’t ask a casual stranger for a sketch of his life and a statement of his aesthetic principles. My life may be found, dated, in ‘Who’s Who in America’” (letter from May 22, 1951; see The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers 724). If a dullard’s inquiry is beneath you, why answer it at all (particularly in the slow and deliberate world of paper, typewriters, and the U.S. mail)? A negligible offense hardly seems worth the effort, even in today’s world of e-mail and instant messaging. But Huff’s fatuous inquiry seems to have cut with surprising depth into the Modernist poet’s psyche—which, in its historical retreat from realist representation and from the immediate hermeneutical access afforded by familiar political exigencies or hackneyed sentiment, was continually resisting its own propensity for dilettantism and dandyism, postures anathema to the ruff-and-tumble Jeffers. In effect, Huff was inadvertently asking Jeffers and Stevens to justify themselves not just as poets but, given the Modernist contempt for “feminine” writing, as men. But what in Huff’s letter triggered this contempt for supposedly flaccid 19th-century postures? The offense is barely visible in Jeffers’s reply, and the more refined Stevens does not openly rebuke Huff at all, replying with a seemingly direct answer to the inquiry. Perhaps Jeffers had misread the letter?
The “poetic” evidence in the letter suggests otherwise, because Stevens reveals the offense by attacking it in terms of dramatic structure, not simple protest. First, he replies as an attorney and the Vice President of a major company, on Hartford Accident and Indemnity letterhead (which he did use often, dictating content to his secretary). In other words, visually (i.e., on paper), Stevens does not present himself first as a poet. Next is the brevity itself, which fits squarely with his persona as a company lawyer, not as a singular poet. In the world of insurance lawyers, Stevens was notoriously brusque, “concise almost to the point of being rude” (Brazeau 62). His character Crispin, by contrast, is called out by the poet for being “verbose” (a trait of many long poems by Stevens, which, in truth, sometimes do begin to sacrifice compressed order in service to subtilizing elaborations). As an essayist and a correspondent in letters about poetry, Stevens typically is fulsome, not brusque. As a businessman, Stevens is abrupt, curt. The Hartford company named its theater in honor of him, in fact, only after “a discreet amount of time was allowed for the scar tissue to heal.” He was a sober and stable worker. In his review of Paul Mariani’s [End Page 94] biography of Stevens, Peter Schjeldahl claims that the “key” to understanding “the routine demands of his office job” is the “stability” those chores gave the otherwise depressive man. Maybe. But such reasoning would turn the routine demands of poetry into a source of instability, a realm of “nagging anguish” to which the insurance job would serve as emotional counterweight. The record of the poet’s vigor and enthusiasm in his letters suggests the opposite. Stevens wrote freely about the loftiest or most perfunctory machinations behind the publication of his poetry, maintaining vital conversations in his letters about everything from classical myth to routine punctuation. Sweating the details was just fine with him. Almost until his death (August 2, 1955), he wrote letters indicating that the ordinary demands attending his poetry, not merely the routine duties attending his job at Hartford, were also serious and stabilizing activities. He complained about managing a new child (his daughter, Holly) because it pulled him away from poetry, a source of comfort, not away from management chores at Hartford Insurance.
In other words, if Stevens appears gracious toward Huff, instead of angry (like Jeffers), his terseness in this one letter deviates strikingly from the relative prolixity of the letters he wrote outside the traditional business world, particularly during the same period as Huff’s letter. Consider the extent to which Stevens, in his July 30 correspondence to publisher Herbert Weinstock, explained his concerns about the use of indentation and italics in the galleys of The Necessary Angel, offering to “pay the cost of making these changes myself” (724). Stevens’s prose, as opposed to his oral exchanges at work, is expansive (where it can be), not terse. In the March 26 letter, written just before his reply to Huff, the poet answers Sister M. Bernetta Quinn, an expositor of Stevens’s “Catholic” underpinnings, with gentle expatiation. He compliments freely and self-effacingly the critical work that his readers are developing about his own work (speaking well of a PhD candidate at Yale and of two students at Smith who are writing “theses on my things”). Like Robert Frost suddenly coming to life to recite poems in his final years—Frost himself a master of compressed order and drama11 who was likewise unable to sustain that level of efficiency in his longest [End Page 95] compositions—Stevens during this period is responding gamely in his letters to any deepening activity of the literary mind; his duties as poet-critic energize him. What does enervate him, he elsewhere complains, is his growing “publicity,” because it subjects him to soft thinking, to sappy, old-fashioned poetics: the offices of the mawkish dandy, not the modern poet. A man recently having visited Stevens “reeked of Swedish poetry,” he tells Quinn, and any such exchanges with dull admirers generally run him “ragged.” He makes the same complaint, in a letter to Theodore Weiss (April 5, 1951), just two days after writing to Huff (who doesn’t seem to express or request sentimentalities), but then, in perfect counterpoise, Stevens expresses joy at having spoken at Bard College, waxing lyrical about the “rain on the roof, the croakers filling the night with their noise” during his “most memorable week-end.” No matter how taxing the rich exchanges in letters might be, they stimulate a full response from Stevens. Huff gets almost nothing.
Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens (right), 1935
So why speak like a businessman to Huff when Stevens is speaking like a poet to everyone else inquiring about the craft? The Modernist period—which sits roughly between the vestigial poetry of the Victorians (i.e., the Edwardian and Georgian poets of the early 1900s) and the Beat poets of the 1950s—had been ruthlessly detaching itself from the stylistic traditions of iconic poets like Tennyson and Longfellow, burning away their eloquent cadences and lofty imagery in the redemptive fire of naturalism, empiricism, materialism, imagism, philosophical abstraction and all the other hard, anti-sentimental views of art springing up after the cultural failure of 19th-century serial novelists and effulgent balladeers, none of whom had seemed equipped to rival the cultural power of modern science and technology. The dandy was deemed [End Page 96] incapable of negotiating the travails of economically and socially transformative warfare, of broad demographic ingress and reorganization, and of the general shift in Western culture toward figures of action like Teddy Roosevelt and Benito Mussolini. Poets, especially in America, were trying to cast out the ineffectual Prufrocks of European decay. The effete prose of a Henry James, for all its sinuous psychological delights, felt too feminine for writers of the next generation. William Faulkner, not unlike Franz Kafka, turned such prose on its head, forcing readers into anarchic and abject mentalities. Modernist writers as a whole, whether men or women, were striving toward a more muscular style.
In sum, the retreat from the nineteenth century was a retreat from the putatively feminine sensibilities toward art, from “the fluff of women’s fiction” (429). Sounding not unlike Plato and Pope, T.E. Hulme demanded that “man” be “disciplined by order and tradition” rather than salting the daffodils with reckless tears. Ezra Pound demanded that literature should cultivate “power”: “Man reading [should] be man intensely alive. The book [should] be a ball of light in one’s hand” (55).” In fact, Pound mocks every supposed “age of gold,” in which “the poet lay in a green field with his head against the tree and played his diversion on a ha’penny whistle,” attracting the “person of charm or a young lady”; by contrast, “the serious artist is scientific,” demanding “precision in verse” (8, 46, 54). The Positivists in philosophy (e.g., Gotlieb Frege) were explaining how veridical language transcended poetical language, which was always stuck in partial, disposable versions of the truth (although Frege recognized the epistemology of context, acknowledging that a word has determinate meaning only inside a sentence). Against these modern assaults, poets were striving to raise the cultural and intellectual capital of their craft, so it had to take on greater technical—and concomitant philosophical, social, and moral—challenges. Victor Shklovksy, in 1917, famously argued that texts must be roughened, made harder, more “difficult,” “defamiliarized” (800). Readers had to be worked and wakened, not coddled and caressed. Instead of sentimental language, Modernism sought greater compression, order, and strength: maximum density and complexity, the language of the “major man,” simultaneously refined, palpable, and abstract. The reductive populist version of this impulse in film history would be the machismo of the 1980s, with its slick yet desperate affirmations of masculinity, from First Blood (1982) to Die Hard (1988)—and then, holding the flag up almost too late against the wave of new women, True Lies (1994), the very film that, in Captain Marvel (2019), a disoriented hero (Brie Larson) instinctively targets in the darkened Blockbuster Video store as she searches for her enemy, shooting at the obscure figures she glimpses on a movie poster and thus decapitating the life-sized portrait of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the icon of late-20th-century masculinity in film, while leaving “Jamie Lee Curtis” intact (the story is set in 1994). At the film’s conclusion, the chief adversary (Jude Law) even demands that this superpowered woman “prove” to him that she can beat him in a fight without her superpowers (whereas the Curtis character, in True Lies, can’t even shoot a gun properly), hoping to return the battle to a test of primal physical strength, [End Page 97] the province of the man, the 1980s culture of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. Instead, she zaps him back on his ass and says, quietly, “I have nothing to prove to you.” The 2019 hero refuses to operate inside this obsolete paradigm of power, which is also the foundation of the masculine ego. Women were on the rise by 1994. The industry had held back the wave as long as men could. And that’s pretty much how mid-20th-century male poets felt after the nineteenth century and then once more, in futility, after the beats and confessional poets: women were invading (again).
Whatever sloppiness in discipline and form actually attended this reactionary masculine credo of “order” and “power,” as Hulme and Pound describe it, the muscular attitude dominated the literary world, both creatively and critically. Hemmingway stood proud in its glow. And, for Jeffers and Stevens, that’s the problem with Huff: he is treating poetry as if it were still the “fluff” of effeminate writing that could be fairly shrunken to a sketch. In the mid-century paradigm of serious poetry, every word and every line are vital, and no poem can be summarized. Principles, like propositions, do not create the experience inside a well-crafted poem. Probably without understanding his grave offense, Frederick Huff, in demanding a “brief account” from Jeffers and Stevens, was returning their poetry to the nineteenth century, an explicitly forsaken literary tradition, back when poetry, in the exaggerated Modernist view, lacked the density and intricacy that would make any mere “sketch” or “statement” of it ridiculous.12 It “can mean little,” Stevens says. A Tennyson or a Longfellow could “sketch” the contours of his poetry, sure, but no Modern poet worth his salt would stoop to such a reduction. That offense probably explains why Jeffers came out swinging at Huff rather than just ignoring him. The high-school instructor wasn’t simply lazy, seeking encapsulated genius in exchange for a postage stamp; his attitude toward poetry violated the core principles of Modernist aesthetics, all of which were collected as the pre-eminent hermeneutical approach of the 1940s: New Criticism.
The New Critical practice of close reading and reverse-engineering a poem’s total dramatic form sought to reveal exactly the opposite of thin sketches and statements in a poem. Cleanth Brooks, building on the classroom experiments conducted by I.A. Richards, spoke for a whole generation of poet-critics—for which group Jeffers and Stevens were towering representatives by 1951—when he said that a true “poem…is a simulacrum of reality…by being an experience rather than any mere statement about experience or any mere abstraction from experience” (1043). Reducing a poem or poetic practice to mere sketch or statement or paraphrase is, at best, a useful heuristic; at worst, a vulgar “heresy.” The same would come to be said of a “auteur” film. Reducing, for example, The Graduate (1967) to a series of statements about generational gaps or the ennui of American consumerism or the bourgeois soft belly of the intellectual class or the moral vacuity of family structures built on capitalist [End Page 98] ideologies—these possible topic statements would betray the film itself as a complex “experience,” as a combination of well-orchestrated elements producing multiple but connected sensations, just as music or drama does. Statements can represent a sum, but they don’t add up to an “experience,” a thing happening, as if one could experience kayaking by reading reviews of it. The New Critics—the formalists principally responsible for teaching the critics in other arts to understand aesthetic structure in terms of individual, not just corporate or industrial or ideological, design—worked hard to faithfully re-create the peculiar “simulacrum” that a poem (or a film) was built for. Asking an auteur filmmaker—or a Modern poet—to offer a summary or sketch meant that Huff was a traitor. In this perspective, only a dim nineteenth-century attitude toward Modern vigor, density, and complexity, toward its difficult order and totalizing power, could backslide to such apostasy. Jeffers and Stevens bothered to respond, in other words (one with vitriol, the other with indirect rebuke, both with pride), because Huff, particularly in his role as an educator, was subverting a generation of Modernist victories, returning the poets to an ineffectual, effeminate era of belletrism. This threat of cultural castration explains why Stevens complains directly to Huff, rather than to more sympathetic correspondents like Quinn and Weiss. Stevens, not unlike Jeffers, seems compelled to address Huff himself, the man; it’s a direct engagement—as if Stevens were trading actual fist blows again with Hemingway back in 1936.
Where Jeffers attacks openly, though, Stevens does so by poetic stealth. Besides presenting his “attorney” persona up front, Stevens aligns himself not with the effete denizens of the northeast, the withered 19th-century “New York” or “New England” poets, but with the resolute folk “still from Pennsylvania,” who “always will be.” Then: “If a man is to sum up…what he tries to do” in poetry, that man must identify what he is as a man: he has a solid job, and that practice has a solid lineage— his father was a lawyer, whereas Stevens’s mother, Margaretha Catharine Stevens, goes unmentioned, presumably because she is not relevant to this foundational identity, despite her son’s closeness to two of the pre-eminent women in poetry at the time, Harriet Monroe (editor of Poetry) and Marianne Moore, who themselves were laboring inside the Modernist’s camp of a muscular, masculine aesthetics. (Monroe and Moore did not disrupt the ethos of Modernism as Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich would do a generation later.) Stevens even plays out this masculine ethos in a sly boast of his stamina: he has outlived his “whole family.”
Only after this foundation has been tersely spelled out—not effete New England, not low-level or jobless writer, not maternal, not weak and short-lived— does Stevens supply the obtuse Huff with a description of his poetic craft: subtilizing experience and varying appearances, especially when the imagination is faced with [End Page 99] reality.13 It’s vague, cryptic, and anti-climactic, and that’s probably the point. Huff earns the executive’s terse reply, not the poet’s eager engagement. Stevens has warned Huff that “a phrase or two…can mean little.” In effect, the poet is saying I have tried to do in my poetry exactly the opposite of what you have done in asking for a sketch of it. Stevens even denies Huff the satisfaction of any definitive statement of “principles”: “I suppose it could be said…” (my emphases). And, with that, the man of letters, so generous with other correspondents, is spent. Robinson Jeffers waited over a month to hit Huff directly with the Modernist Poet’s attack against summaries. Stevens hit back immediately, but sideways, declaring his credentials and his virility before gently shaming his inquirer with an answer that itself mimics the uselessness of generalized statements and summaries. Huff earns no clean manifesto from Stevens because he has asked the poet to forsake all the complex energies and forms of Modernist poetics by reducing them to summary, to statement, to paraphrase, to proposition. What neither poet did, of course, was simply to let it go. They couldn’t. Stevens’s peculiar reaction to a long-standing anxiety about femininized literature is the unique contribution this letter makes to our understanding of the poet and the period. But the point for its treatment here is that this careful and peculiar letter, when treated as a kind of prose poem, has dramatic structure—a character is moving through a sequence, a process of development—that can be seen (1) only in the light of the history of Modernism but also (2) only in the light of formalist analysis. Remove either of these lights, and the drama of the letter is invisible. [End Page 100]
[End Page 101]
V. Film Studies and the Legacy of the New Critics
In this small letter, then, Stevens is clinging to a posture, in terms of both aesthetics and gender, that would open the great rift between poetry and audience during the twentieth century and would lead to the revolt, from poets and readers alike, against the depersonalized masculinity and arcane convolutions of Modernism— shifting poetry back (or forward) to the sensitive confessions of “feminine” voices, like those of Ginsberg, Plath, Lowell, and Bishop. Film and television, by comparison, witnessed the entrance of women in force in the 1990s, a full generation after poetry had done so. In the 1960s, women rose to media prominence in fits and starts, and most were sexualized and/or subordinated to soften or annul their socially disruptive powers.14 Hence the implicit cultural imperative to return the disruptive Maria, in The Sound of Music, to her conventional sphere as wistful lover and then as submissive wife in the latter portion of the film, in which the poetics of filming against the script is traded for a cultural (and thus economic) imperative. The male icons of the 1960s were still Die Hards (while their counterparts in the 1990s would struggle to compete with women on screen), and so were the male producers behind them, bound by a masculine “discipline” and “tradition” that saw women as unstable elements, even as the Clark Gables and John Waynes of the industry were fading fast and Father [End Page 102] evidently did not know Best. So masculine screen culture (especially in television) remained intact during the 1960s. But poetry was fully (if still grudgingly) giving way to women in the 1960s. The Mary Tyler Moores of poetry were ascendant, not just disruptive. Poetry was turning feminine. Film and television would have to wait.
Literature as a whole had been wrestling with the role of women operating in force since the late 18th century, and well before that in terms of their presence at all, as Plato attests, but, because of Modernism and its critical counterpart, American Formalism (New Criticism), poetry was the last stronghold of masculine literature right up to the middle of the 20th century (as the conclusion to The Sound of Music demonstrates). Then it gave way. By contrast, film and television held relatively firm until the 1990s, preserving its masculine ethos. Pretty Woman dangles at the edge of that 1980s masculine hegemony, questioning it, resisting it, succumbing to it, but also transforming it, even though its lead woman is expressly sexualized by the film’s topic. Vivian says to Edward, after he has described his sterile relationships with the polo crowd who fill the world he controls, “Well…no wonder you came looking for me.” Edward, his persona built from the Die Hard Gordon Gecko Rambos of the 1980s, has spent himself as Hegemonic Man. He is sterile, needing to learn how to walk barefoot in the grass. The machismo of 1980s masculinity had turned cartoonishly aggressive. It was spent, too, just as the masculine ethos of Modernist poetry was spent by the 1960s.15 It had taken the feminized voice centuries to reach dominance in poetry. By contrast, the gender shift in film and television, while coming a generation later, happened blindingly fast in historical terms. In the 1990s, after only a century of filmmaking and just half that period in television production, women began to assume lead roles generally assigned to men, from Silence of the Lambs (1991), Fargo (1996), Contact (1997), Toy Story 2 (1999), and The Matrix (1999) in film to the extraordinary gender shift occurring in television, with The X-Files (1993+), Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993+), Star Trek: Voyager (1995+), Xena: Warrior Princess (1995+), Ally McBeal (1997+), Buffy, the Vampire Slayer (1997+), La Femme Nikita (1997+), and Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (1999+). Television had pitched a woman in a traditional man’s role before, with Police Woman (1974–78) and The Bionic Woman (1976–1978), for example, but respective leads Angie Dickinson and Lindsay Wagner could not curb the appetite for Charlie’s Angels (1976–81) in a way that the next generation of leading women, in the 1990s, finally could (sort of: Baywatch alert). Film and especially television started to grow up.
If one conclusion from this historical and hermeneutical analysis is that unwriting systemic bias takes time to process in almost any field, another conclusion is that film, as an industry, is unusual, operating in tandem with cultural forces that literature, like most other arts, has never experienced. Most artists like to think of [End Page 103] themselves as leaping out ahead, like astronauts, to explore new frontiers, new forms of expression. But arts have all the inertia of the systems that produce them. With film and television, the inertia of gender control seemed insuperable by the middle of the 20th century. But the histories of literature and film meet in the New Criticism that emerged in this same period. The close-reading approach of the Formalists in America during the long middle stretch of the century deeply affected how film, not just literature, was studied. English departments were soon churning out film classes right and left. We learned to view better because we were taught to read better. An advance in one critical method (textual poetics) moved another critical method (film poetics) forward. We read more carefully for sequence and structure; then we watched and listened more carefully for these features, paying special attention to how choices can be orchestrated to produce a concerted representational experience, with its own distinctive syntax, frame by frame, shot by shot, and scene by scene: an audio-visual “planet on a table.”16 That critical skill, adapted from American Formalism in literature, allowed generations of feminist critics since the late 1950s to read and then to watch and hear how an internal structure could also produce unexamined assumptions and postures toward gender. The New Critics taught colleagues in other fields how to see the architecture of drama-as-form, whereby even the smallest communicative gestures, from terse rebukes in letters to jingles in commercials on television, could be linked up to the largest choices, addressing whole genres or franchises. Coming from the 1940s and founding their principles on a putatively masculine aesthetic, the New Critics taught us how to see what is chosen against what is not chosen—y instead of x—so we learned to see the faces of those who had been erased. The anger that lay behind the rebuke of Huff by Stevens and Jeffers came from a principle of poetic composition that, despite their best efforts to confine it to masculine sensibilities, transcended gender boundaries, and we learned how to speak that order and structure of composition in other arts. That’s how we can now read the central complication of a film like The Sound of Music or Pretty Woman: shot in a visual rhetoric bluntly set against the masculine assumptions of its own script. The poetry of each film lies not in its linguistic techniques but in its cinematic techniques. Formalist criticism taught us how to re-construct the internal world a film creates through these kinds of techniques, but it also taught us how to detect what those choices distort or destroy, because we must understand the field of plausible choices from which artists might construct a poem—or a film—to understand the consequence of that kind of choice. Helen Vendler, herself a student and teacher of New Critical pedagogy, [End Page 104] understood this (genderless) structural connection between film and poetry. A minor letter from a major poet rebuffs a high-school teacher to protect the masculine hegemony in poetry, but precisely this hegemony taught a generation of readers to recognize the women whom the letter shuts out. That’s irony. But these are the cracks in history waiting to be recognized in thousands of artifacts, both banal and precious. We see them for what they are by understanding not just their external contexts but, crucially, their internal contexts, each artifact, whether poem or film or television program, a unique dramatic world in which a few lines from the typewriter or a few angles from the camera might create an irreducible, crystalline sphere of experience— beautiful, in many cases, but also, inevitably, cracked, because nothing can be “closed” completely to the world outside. As Leonard Cohen might have sung it, history is full of these cracks: it’s how the light gets in. But the New Critics, in their scrupulous sensitivity to technique and formal structure, taught us how to see them accurately. [End Page 105]
Works Cited
Footnotes
1. If readers can process, on average, 300 words per minute, then a two-hour film is equivalent to reading 36,000 words in one go, which equals 120 pages of a standard novel. But what if a writer could accomplish the same amount and quality of work in 20 pages—or two—all held in carefully ordered suspension around a central drama, like an orchestra around a piano or violin in a concerto, the harmonies and counterpoints as clear as they are extended? That’s a “poem.”
2. Hence the revolutionary leap recently made in analytical and compositional skill from large-language models for artificial intelligence, which only recently has approximated the complex, multi-modal processing that characterizes human thought. This advance in technology processes not just “more words” but “more” of all their interactions at higher levels of organization, from word, phrase, and sentence to conceptual constructs like symbol, trope, and metaphor. An exponential growth of variables—because they interact—soon exceeds the capacities of a human brain. So we chop, abridge, paraphrase, summarize, and elide, whereas A.I. (despite its current stupidities and hallucinations) can process whole forms of any length. We can’t.
3. Paring down material to reveal and develop an essential drama, either in words or in pictures and sound, generally requires multiple rounds of revision. The more you write, the more you must prune, because clichés abound, stock phrasing intrudes, stereotypes and pat formulas invade, standard tropes triumph. A good poet, like a good filmmaker, must work hard against the inertia of routine thinking, editing scrupulously. T.S. Eliot ran drafts of his poems by Ezra Pound to shake loose all the dying fruit, because Eliot’s sentimentalities were infecting some of the poems that would define his career, along with early Modernism. And the shakedown paid off, because Pound did more than shake; he re-configured, added, chopped, and sometimes even re-plotted. Such “editors” of any craft are engaged in its poetics, which is both architecture and micro-engineering, not merely shaking a tree.
4. There’s drama in novels, to be sure, but its intensity is created more through accretion (hence “serialization”) than through a granular poetic architecture. You can fairly abridge War and Peace (copies sell, and the complaints are small); you can’t abridge The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Whether and how we are pleased by such tight, well-ordered control is a different question, one that takes us beyond the scope of this essay. Some people are pleased to watch jugglers throwing bowling pins and chainsaws in the air. Other people would prefer to watch pros at basketball or chess. Expertise at artful, complex tasks takes many forms, and I think we mustn’t feel obligated to like all of them, even if we might train ourselves well enough at least to recognize and respect them. Some expert films are both beautifully made and boring to watch (depending, perhaps, on when in your life you watch them). “Taste” is difficult—and often ethically dangerous—to prescribe.
5. The necessity of this well-established linguistic and hermeneutical principle drove Stanley Fish, during the rise of Cultural Studies, to demonstrate it with laborious precision and concreteness in his famous 1980 essay “Is There a Text in This Class?”
6. The next question, then, is “Do we trust the artist to shape our interpretation?” Critics who focused on sociological factors (or on hermeneutical discrepancies, as Derrida famously revealed) argued persuasively in the 1960s that external contexts, not the strictly internal correlations and tensions, can reveal additional or subversive content occurring inside the poem or the film. So critics learned to read around the writer or the director—around the agency or will that was imposing order on the material—to see this alterity “happening” in the text, right next to the “little drama” that poet Cleanth Brooks described as occurring in any “well-wrought” poem. Even if such content still could be said to fall under the intuitive control of the author or director, it could nonetheless be invisible to (or repressed by) formalist discernment. True enough. Still, film studies took root in literature departments in that same period (the 1960s) precisely because Formalist tools that were originally developed for poetry subsequently allowed students to study film in terms of its total architecture, as I argue in the conclusion.
7. The same must be said, more or less, about any other ordered experience (art), such as that in a play from Shakespeare or a novel from Margaret Atwood or an opera from Giuseppi Verdi. I’m not referring to how readers “feel” about such experiences; those are personal responses to the experience. I’m talking about the experience that is objectively rendered by the text’s own order, just as the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building is an objectively rendered form that has blueprints mapping out how to construct it and therefore how to move within or around its structure.
8. I am referring to the artifact’s structured interiority, not to an individual’s personal interiority, even though the “event” can “happen” (as percepts) only inside a human mind. Benedetto Croce examined this epistemology in early-20th-century pre-formalist terms, with Umberto Eco countering it in late-20th-century post-formalist terms. The neo-Aristotelian perspective driving New Critical Formalism was largely an Anglo-American, not Continental, aesthetic.
9. The TV series, like a novel, lacks the compression of a poem (and even the too-long The Comedian as the Letter C could use some more compression), but its structural integrity, as a coherent dramatic event, also suffers (unlike the integrity of the Stevens poem). The story of the severed employees and their “Outie” counterparts does capture, repeatedly, the experience of cognitive/existential severance—a splitting off from oneself—instead of presenting, by way of summary, a mere statement of it, just as Stevens’s 1923 poem captures the dramatic experience of it, but Severance, perhaps as a function of production demands, sacrifices the concision of poetry to the patience-testing dilations of melodrama.
10. As an editorial, this essay doesn’t review scholarly examples that readers may adduce to this claim through a simple Internet search. Learned readers know that even drama proper is often treated critically as if it were not in fact drama but instead a series of propositions.
11. See, for example, the most famous poem in American literature, “The Road Not Taken,” in which a speaker is not choosing between two different roads (the roads are “equally” trodden, he admits; they were “the same”—a point that Frost himself stressed because the poem was routinely misread) but is instead choosing between two different identities: the false persona in which he is the trailblazing original of American myth or the true persona in which he is a nobody but one who might concoct a self-aggrandizing tale about being the supreme Individual—just as the routine-bound speaker in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” who resumes his monotonous life in the final imitatively redundant lines, fantasizes about vicariously smothering a rich man’s “woods” with falling snow to erase the markers of property. Frost stages the drama of this decision about the choice of paths at the end, in a stutter: “Two roads diverged [not differed] in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by.” The enjambment and dash signal the moment of the speaker’s moral choice. (I presented these arguments at the Frost International Conference in 1997 at Winthrop University.)
12. No one reading Robert Browning can believe that later 19th-century poetry lacked complexity, concision, order, and drama, as Robert Langbaum has ably and eloquently demonstrated.
13. Borrowing from the very work he was preparing for publication at the time, The Necessary Angel, Stevens gives Huff a working formulation that answers the question by attacking the very manner of Huff’s inquiry: “I have tried to subtilize experience or vary appearance…” (viii).
14. In television, Elizabeth Montgomery, in Bewitched (1964–1972), is probably the most under-rated non-sexualized feminine icon from that decade.
15. Because of its explanatory power, however, New Criticism would endure, to apply itself to poetry by women and minorities, even as sociological critics increasingly contested the relatively “closed” readings of texts presented by the New Critics. Yet the explanatory power of Formalism is exactly what fortified film criticism, as discussed further (below).
16. Logically, if the “how” of technique decisively alters meaning (even if subtly), then very little of what poem’s do has been expressed before: with unique architecture, each new meaning, like each unique leaf in Nietzsche’s otherwise terrifying observation, springs from countless verbal or visual objects all the time—unless they’re just formulas and cliches, in which case, they’re mere redundancies. The New Critics erred continually on the side of individual expression over generic manifestation. Each (expert) poem—or (expert) film or painting or concerto—was ultimately its own world, requiring attention to its specific order and form to experience it fully.
