American poet Alfred Corn has produced several well-received volumes of poetry and has won numerous awards. Much of his work has an autobiographical component, dealing frankly with such issues as his marriage and divorce and his homosexuality. According to Jay Parini, writing in the Boston Review, Corn "is the inheritor of a long tradition, that of the personal epic, with Dante, Milton and Wordsworth as the leading figures to whom Corn alludes." His autobiographical narratives unfold within the place that gave rise to his meditations. "He is especially good at what might be called the topographical lyric, the poem which mingles place with and observing mind's meditations," wrote Robert B. Shaw in the Nation.

"Corn blends the innovative and the traditional in his poetry and has a style and tone that are unmistakable; yet, unlike other poets with highly original voices, he gives no impression of being a loner or isolated pioneer," explained James David Spreckels in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Writing in Parnassus: Poetry in Review, G. E. Murray found Corn to be "a poet able to manage and merge two distinct and often contradictory instincts, namely, to articulate a sharp verbal discipline within the broader framework of a narrative posture."

Frequently concerned with a personal journey of transformation, Corn's poems have consciously followed the pattern set by earlier poetic works. A Call in the Midst of the Crowd, The Various Light, and Notes from a Child of Paradise, Corn explained to Contemporary Authors, are meant to be "a trilogy, retracing in different terms the journey followed by Dante in his Commedia. The last of the three, Notes from a Child of Paradise, recapitulates the tripartite structure in Dante, but all under the sign of memory which brings its own paradisal transformations to lived experience."

A major section of A Call in the Midst of the Crowd is devoted to a four-part poem about New York City. The poet's "apparent plot is a 'portrait of the artist as a young man,'" as David Kalstone described it in the Nation. "But the emotional subtext—not realized fully enough on the surface of the poem—is a lovers' separation and tenative reunion." The title poem is in part a journal of a young man walking the streets of New York. Its "romantic-visionary themes," presented in "twenty-six lyrical sections," noted George Kearns in Canto: Review of the Arts, are "interleaved with a miscellany of short prose passages, all about New York, gathered from guidebooks, encyclopedias, letters, memoirs, the daily papers." Kearns commented that "the mixture of lyric with prose 'found objects,' combined with the theme of a walker through the streets of an American city, suggests an obligatory comparison with [the William Carlos Williams poem] Paterson; but Williams is enormously more complex." Nonetheless, Corn's ambition "to write within a high tradition," as Kearns described it, is redeemed by his linguistic brilliance. Corn's "inspired passages," Kearns observed, "can be rapturous and dazzling."

Corn's poems in The Various Light continue the theme of a poet commenting upon his environment and display, according to Stanley Plumly in the Washington Post Book World, "the same polish and with high verbal energy and exhilaration as his earlier books." The poems "Grass" and "A Bid," in particular, show "how even in the midst of action, the mind is sorting and selecting and converting," wrote Plumly. He dubbed Corn "a committed formalist, which means that he perceives the world not only in language but as language." Dana Gioia, reviewing the book in the Hudson Review, called it Corn's "finest book of poetry." The book, Gioia wrote, "packs an intellectual punch as much as a viceral one." The book's long poem "The Outdoor Amphitheater" has received particular attention. In this poem written in the Wordsworthean tradition, the mature poet returns through memory to his Georgia youth and the summertime rituals that took place in the amphitheater where he was alternately performer and spectator. Murray deemed the poem to be one of "Corn's finest" and "a beautifully sustained 12-page reflection on the rites of childhood and its impending passages." Shaw called it a "luminous account of the poet's Georgia childhood."

Corn's poetic trilogy ends with Notes from a Child of Paradise, a long narrative poem "about but not of the '60s," as Alan Williamson commented in the New Republic. The poet here is a "spectator of cataclysmic public events," said Williamson, even as Corn fictionally recounts his courtship and marriage to Ann Jones and the recognition of his own homosexuality. While the poem focuses on the relationship between alter egos Anna and Alfred, it also recounts the couple's travels throughout Europe and America. References to both Dante's Commedia and the Lewis and Clark Expedition raise the journey to a mythic level. Paul Breslin, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said that "Dante and the Northwest expeditions are analogies, but they have some literal connections. Ann does graduate work on Dante and the Provencal tradition, and she comes from the West Coast, so that the Lewis and Clark expedition is a journey toward her place of origin." Breslin was not convinced that the poem is really a spiritual quest for "'Alfred" as we know him through the pome changes very little." We wait in vain, he said, for turning points in the poet's consciousness, yet the poem "does not allow us to journey very far into the soul of the poet-protagonist or the tumultuous events of his youth." Moreover, it is not Dante, but Walter Pater, the writer who sought to depict life as a series of isolated moments to be experienced and appreciated," who is the real tutelary spirit of this poem, Breslin insisted. For Breslin, the poem is "a procession of surfaces," some engaging, in which one could delight "if only the loftier claims were not urged so relentlessly." Still other critics, Parini for example, accept that "the physical journey is transformed into a spiritual one."

In his fifth collection, The West Door, Corn offers what seem to be exquisitely wrought poems that present the face of "artifice," "using words the way a painter would use the slenderest possible brush," as Leslie Ullman expressed it in the New York Times Book Review. She believed these poems signal a slightly new stance for Corn, for in them, "the natural world often takes on an indoor quality, like a series of still lifes. Mr. Corn's stance is that of a civilized man confronting and honoring nature without losing any of the accoutrements of culture and education." Wayne Koestenbaum, writing in the Voice Literary Supplement, felt that with this book, "Corn proposes the path of reticence." These poems, he said, are "promptings from nature, history, and art. Though inspired by external sources, they do not plunder. The moments of experience Corn puzzles over always remain recalcitrant. His poems end with paradoxes that signify a shrug of the shoulders."

Corn once commented: "Ever since my older sister taught me, I have loved to read. Around age ten it occurred to me that someone had to Write the books that were on the shelves: possibly I might myself become a producer and not merely a consumer of literature. No person, no program prompted the desire to write: it seems to have come over me without much fanfare or explanation.

"Now, though, I think I ought to have a clearer notion of why I write, or rather publish, apart from the wish to shine in public, or for money, the lesser motives that all writers share. I hope it isn't too idealistic of me to imagine that books can truly make a difference in our lives, that they can delight us and teach us. I have paid close attention to my own life and the lives of others around me, as well as the lives of others as recorded in books. I have devoted a good part of my life to studying the English (or American) language and to other languages (French, Italian, Latin, German, Spanish, Attic Greek). When I write I try to bring all the resources of experience and language to bear on what I say, in the belief that the result will strike the reader as rare and valuable, beautiful and useful. I think I have written things that allowed readers (without forcing them) to share things I have felt—emotions from terror to sorrow to love to joy, and with a constant reliance on comedy, the funny things in life, and in words that we wouldn't want to miss. It seems to me that a poem, story, or novel as part of its nature ought to be (if only inferentially) a kind of working model for the well-lived life. A book is like a dwelling: you don't want to live either in a mausoleum, or a prison, or an office, or a bull ring, or a church. It's possible too that you might like to live in different sorts of houses over a lifespan: a tent in the woods for a while, then an apartment in Manhattan, then a two-story frame house with lots of acreage.

"I also consider that those writers who actually bother to reflect on what they do (and why) should try to ask themselves what it is they might bring to contemporary literature that isn't already there. Too often everybody just does the same thing everybody else does because approval is forthcoming. I hate duplication of effort—do we need thirty name brands of detergent? It seems to me that over and over again the voices in the mainstream repeat the same battle cries, not acknowledging that the day was long since carried. We hear a lot of pounding in favor of all that is (at least theoretically) instinctual, unreflective, untutored, unconscious, red-hot, brawling; and this is presumably a rebellion launched against an 'Establishment' often described as academic or East Coast. A quick perusal of the academies of the East Coast and then the record of reputations and rewards ought to put a quick end to this myth. I believe that those writers who wish to perform in the useful role of gadfly, a sting to intelligence and conscience, should at this moment in history, urge readers to think and not simply to lunge. Who can doubt that the problems we face now, on the societal and personal level, are enormous? Who can then believe that help will come if we all adopt unthinking, 'instinctual' behavior? Love goes better when thought and imagination are expended in the other's behalf, and an analogy at the level of community relationships shouldn't be hard to come up with. Thought beyond the immediate circle of selfish desires takes practice; literature can help us in this by teaching us to pay attention to things outside ourselves, especially other people, and then to think about them, using our imagination and experience, and finally to help us devise actions that promote well-being—ours and others'.

"At the same time, an important role that books play is to console us for irremediable sorrows, of which there are so many kinds. Not all the things we read lead to action; many lead to contemplation and an invisible healing. How this happens isn't explained. It also strikes me that few contemporary authors are concerned with the curative and contemplative aspects of literature; and I'm probably allowing this estimate of the present time to serve as a reinforcement for my own wish to write along these lines. If ever our society should revert to the puritanical restraint and suppression of individuality that was the rule in the nineteenth century, then, gadfly that I am, no doubt I would wish to begin to write in favor of brash self-assertion, and the community be damned. . . .

"Among the qualities I like, apart from moral or philosophical content, are richness of perception and texture; the sensation of the shaping hand of art (which is its own universe); verbal agility and surprise; the presence of 'voice' and personality; concentration of meaning; light touch; the non-routine, fresh, and unusual; and rhythm. I like poems that have story qualities, and fiction that has poetic qualities. Wit, comedy, satire, 'laughter in the soul,' all of these I like. Also, writing that brings me information (of whatever kind) that I didn't already have: much of what I know I learned by letting my explorations in subject matter teach me.

"As to my own career as a writer, it is still perhaps in the formative stage. I believe my books of poems show a steadily widening scope as to subject matter and verbal power. I have also written a good many critical articles and drafted a couple of novels. My earliest attempts at fiction I've thrown out as unpublishable, but for several years I've been revising and changing a novel that I think is about ready to be published. No more than half of the poems in my first book still seem readable to me, but the good ones are quite good. As for my second book, it is mostly the long sequence on New York that has attracted notice. I put the book together as a single book, and wish more attention were paid to how the lyrics in the first part shape response to the New York poem. My third book, written after I moved to Connecticut, is in a way purgatorial, a pastoral scaling of the craggy mountain of poetry and life.

"First and last, . . . I am an American writer. I love Walt Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, James, Pound, Crane. Those American writers for whom the European tradition was available and life-giving stand a better chance, in my view, of continuing to be read (the world over) than those who won't have anything to do with it. It seems to me that American literature (especially if you add Latin America) is now the greatest. It's an honor to belong to that literature."

July 1977

From this Issue

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Table of Contents

Fire: The People

Totenlieder

The Telephone