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Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets

Reed Whittemore

by Michael Paul Novak

Other literary forms

Reed Whittemore has published many essays and reviews in magazines, most of them of a literary nature, but also essays on education, science, and television. From Zero to Absolute (1968) consists mainly of a series of lectures he gave on poetry at Beloit College in 1966. The Poet as Journalist: Life at The New Republic (1976) is made up of the short pieces he wrote for The New Republic when he was the literary editor for that magazine. In his literary essays, he often praises, with some qualifications, the early modern poets such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot but is rather critical of most of his contemporaries, particularly the Beat poets, whom he has mocked in his satirical verse.

The publication of Whittemore’s William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey (1975) was a surprising departure for this writer of short personal essays. The biography was criticized by some reviewers for being too casually written and for taking, at times, an irreverent attitude toward its subject, yet the book does give a clear and sympathetic portrait of Williams and, at the same time, punctures some of the more pretentious opinions of Williams and his disciples about free verse and other poetic matters.

Whittemore’s biography of Williams has led him to write books about the nature of biography: Pure Lives: The Early Biographers (1988) and Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern Biography (1990). These wide-ranging, erudite, and lively works trace biographical art from its beginnings (Plutarch, Aelfric) all the way to late twentieth century literary biographers (Richard Ellmann and Leon Edel). As in the Williams biography, Whittemore manages to combine his scholarly matter with a casual manner in interesting ways.

Achievements

The most striking characteristic of Reed Whittemore’s verse is its comedy. As Howard Nemerov pointed out many years ago, Whittemore is not only witty (an admirable trait) but also funny (a suspect one). His most distinctive poems are those about serious subjects—the failure of belief, the difficulties of heroism, the search for the true self—that make intelligent statements while at the same time being very clever and humorous. Whittemore’s emphasis on intelligence, moderation, and comedy makes him a rather unfashionable writer today, but these very qualities account for the success of his best poems. He served as consultant in poetry (poet laureate) to the Library of Congress from 1964 to 1965 and from 1984 to 1985. He received an Award of Merit from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1970.

Biography

Reed Whittemore was born in New Haven in 1919 as Edward Reed Whittemore II, named after his physician father. He graduated from Yale in 1941, and he served in the Army Air Force during World War II and was discharged as a captain. He continued his education at Princeton after the war, although he never received an advanced degree. He married Helen Lundeen in 1952, and they had four children. He often depicts himself in his poetry as a middle-class figure, with middle-class burdens of family and job. Although his poetry is not of a confessional nature, a picture of Whittemore as an affectionate and concerned family man does emerge from his poetry.

Whittemore taught in the English department at Carleton College in Minnesota for nearly twenty years beginning in 1947 and was for a part of that time chairman of the department. In 1964, he was consultant in poetry at the Library of Congress. In 1968, he moved to the University of Maryland, eventually becoming professor emeritus.

Whittemore is rightly well known and admired as a magazine editor. From 1939 to 1953, he was the editor of Furioso, one of the liveliest literary publications of the period. What distinguished this magazine from all its competitors was its fondness for comic parody and satire. This tradition was carried on with nearly equal distinction when Whittemore edited The Carleton Miscellany from 1960 to 1964. His work as the literary editor of The New Republic from 1969 to 1974 added some zest to the pages of that venerable publication.

Analysis

Reed Whittemore has published fewer poems than many of his contemporaries have done, and most of them have been written in an ironic vein. His targets are the pretentious—both romantic and bureaucratic, both individual and institutional—against which he sets his own balanced, moderate point of view. The poems imply that the realism at their center is all the modern world has to offer in the way of belief.

At times, Whittemore runs the risk of being merely a writer of light verse, a maker of clever rhymed jokes, but in his best work he combines the sensible note of comedy with a seriousness of theme. This combination, along with his subtle command of form and sound in verse, make him a poet of consequence.

Heroes and Heroines

Whittemore’s first book, Heroes and Heroines, consists primarily of poems about literature and literary figures. It is an amusing book that explores, through a series of comic poems, the idea of heroism in portraits of Don Quixote, Lord Jim, Hester Prynne, Lady Ashley, Gulliver, and many other characters from books. The poems display Whittemore’s fondness for traditional verse forms—particularly the sonnet—his wit, and his interest in the theme of heroism; yet it is a book of very limited range that only hints at his potential as a poet.

An American Takes a Walk

In Whittemore’s second book, An American Takes a Walk, that potential is clearly displayed as he develops the comic tone that becomes the trademark of his work. That tone can be seen in his often reprinted poem “Lines (Composed upon Reading an Announcement by Civil Defense Authorities Recommending that I Build a Bombshelter in My Backyard).” The poem begins with a description of the dugout that the speaker and his friends had built as children and that he identifies with some vague notion of heroic fantasy, “some brave kind of decay.” Now he is being asked to dig another hole “under the new and terrible rules of romance.” “But I’ll not, no, not do it, not go back,” the poem proclaims; he knows that this time, if he conforms to the government’s wishes, he will not be able to return to “the grown-up’s house” as he had done as a child. This time the seeming child’s play is play in earnest, a deadly absurdity. As Nemerov has pointed out, Whittemore’s poetry is filled with images of entrapment and burial, and this poem can be read as more than a satirical thrust at Civil Defense. It contains the poet’s rejection of safety and security as a kind of living death and seems to long for some world where daring and risk have meaning.

The problem, however, Whittemore’s work implies, is that a heroism that risks all often leads to nothing. One of his funniest poems, “A Day with the Foreign Legion,” makes a number of tough statements about the failure of heroic action, or its meaninglessness. The poem is based on a beau geste version of the Foreign Legion as it appears in motion pictures, where, when everything seems darkest, the characters make speeches that “serve as the turning point”:

After which the Arabs seem doped and perfectly

 helpless,

Water springs up from the ground, the horses come

 back,

Plenty of food is discovered in some old cave,

And reinforcements arrive led by the girl

From Canada.

That is what usually happens, but in this instance it is too hot; there is no magical ending and the audience is bitterly disappointed. The poem asks who is to blame—the film, the projector, “the man in the booth, who hastened away, as soon as the feature was over”? The poem answers, in a series of purposely confusing repetitions, that none of them is to blame, or all of them are, or possibly the culture is to blame. “It was the time, the time and the place, and how could one blame them?” The poem seems to be saying that in this time (modern) and this place (the United States) the world of romance and happy endings is finished.

The title poem, “An American Takes a Walk,” mocks the idea of a tragic or sacred vision existing in the United States or American literature. When the American of the poem comes across a wood reminiscent of Dante’s world of hell, it is a pleasant wood, hell in a “motherly habit.”

How in that Arden could human

Frailty be but glossed?

How in that Eden could Adam

Be really, wholly lost?

The emphasis on innocence and on success in the United States, according to Whittemore, leads the American writer to adopt the demands of his culture. In “The Line of an American Poet,” the poet writes for the market, following the supply-and-demand economy. He produces works, “Uniform, safe and pure,” becoming another American success story.

Whittemore once described poetry “as a thing of the mind,” saying that he “tends to judge it . . . by the qualities of the mind it displays” (Poets on Poetry, Nemerov, editor). This emphasis on the mind, on intelligence, is an unusual one for a contemporary American poet. In recent years, the instinctual and the irrational have usually been seen as the sources of poetry. Whittemore’s attitude is what leads him to reject the theatrical and fantastic, to be a realist and ironist. At the same time, however, it can be argued that this dominating intelligence in his work limits Whittemore, giving his poetry a kind of self-consciousness, a too-ready irony. He has written many poems about writing poems (“A Week of Doodle,” “After Some Day of Decision,” and “Preface to an Unwritten Text,” for example, in An American Takes a Walk), about the difficulties of writing poems, about the fact that he has not written any poems. These pieces are often funny, but still they seem to point to some problem with his very notion of being a poet, a kind of debilitating self-awareness. At times he seems burdened with the idea of being a poet, as if it were a pompous occupation, apologizing for not offering a worldview of proper scope for one who would call himself a poet.

“The Self and the Weather”

In his next few volumes, Whittemore continues the style developed in An American Takes a Walk. His poems give an amusing picture of suburbia and the academic life, worlds where trivial things matter. Even the weather—as in “The Self and the Weather”—can depress one’s mood. The poem begins by declaring that it is tiresome to talk about the weather and goes on to talk about it—very amusingly—at considerable length. The poet finds he cannot write on a rainy day, staring out the window “at wet leaves, wet grass, wet laundry and so on,” but he feels that a better man, “any man of resolve, any man with a mission,” would rise above the weather, rise to where it always was sunny, and write. Such a person, however, would write treatises, not poems, “for treatises seldom/ Traffic in weather as poems do.” These treatises would be written in underground rooms where the outside world will be represented by “a picture by some gay cubist of what could not possibly/ Be wet leaves, wet grass, wet laundry, and so on.”

Satiric poems

The only new element in Whittemore’s work at this time in his career is found in a number of long, satiric poems written in rhyming, loosely metrical couplets. The purposely forced comic rhymes seem to imitate both Ogden Nash and Lord Byron. The targets range from the Beat poets to rocket scientists, and although almost all the poems have amusing passages, they go on at entirely too great a length for their satiric purposes.

Poems, New and Selected

Although there is no revolutionary change in Whittemore’s poetry after An American Takes a Walk, his poems do wear a somewhat more experimental guise, opening up in language and form, in the new poems that appeared in Poems, New and Selected in 1967. In the six poems labeled “shaggy” (“Flint Shaggy,” “Geneva Shaggy,” and so on), Whittemore slips into a black-faced comedian’s voice reminiscent of the comic language of John Berryman’s The Dream Songs (1969). In other poems from this collection, such as “The Bad Daddy,” and poems from later volumes, such as“Death,” “The Mother’s Breast and the Father’s House,” and “Marriage,” he moves toward an irrational side of his psyche that his earlier work explicitly rejected. Whittemore presents marriage as pigs eating each other and death as the lord that lives in the marrow: “Holy illiterate . . . spider of bone.” A kind of fierce bitterness overwhelms these poems at times, in a manner not seen in his previous poetry.

“Clamming”

In “Clamming,” Whittemore writes one of his most successful antiromantic poems in his more familiar, amusing style. The poem begins with the poet telling of how he often repeats a story about the time he was trapped on a sandbar while clamming as a little boy and faced the Long Island Sound as his possible fate. There is not much to the story, but he keeps telling it because “it serves my small lust/ To be thought of as someone who’s lived.” He cannot get away from his ego: “The self, what a brute it is. It wants, wants./ It will not let go of its even most fictional grandeur.” Now he has a son, small and sickly, and he would like to protect him from the sea and other dangers, but a greater danger might be too much self-regard, as represented by the oft-told tale of clamming, and that he does not want to pass on to his son. Finally, his advice to his son is to be careful but not too careful: “Lest you care too much and brag of the caring/ And bore your best friends and inhibit your children and sicken/ At last into opera on somebody’s sandbar. Son, when you clam,/ Clam.” The plea for realism and modesty in the ending of “Clamming” sums up very nicely the attitudes and strengths of Whittemore’s poetry.

The Feel of Rock and The Past, the Future, the Present

In 1982, in The Feel of Rock, and more extensively in 1990, in The Past, the Future, the Present, Whittemore again created volumes selected from his previous poetry, adding a few new poems on both occasions. The small number of new poems added seems to show that Whittemore was concentrating on the writing of prose in the 1980’s rather than the writing of poetry.

A number of the new poems continue Whittemore’s satiric expressions of dissatisfaction with modern American culture: “It’s a terrible thing to come to despise one’s country,” he states in one of his poems, but he obviously thinks that the ideals of the United States have been lost in the modern political and social scene. In “The Destruction of Washington,” he imagines some future archaeologists exploring the destroyed capital. Whatever they discover, he hopes that at least their ignorance will be less than that of people in the twentieth century.

Whittemore also began exploring his childhood and the lives of his parents in a few poems in these two volumes. “Mother’s Past” is about the inability of his mother to take good photos, as she is always moving or putting her finger in front of the lens. The photos are often of young people going off on automobile excursions, while the photographer—the mother—remains behind. The speaker is dissatisfied with the record of a life represented by the photos: “Ask how many were missed that it takes to make a good/ Past for a life or a book./ The answer is always more pictures than poor mother took.

In “The Feel of Rock,” the early life of the speaker’s home is portrayed in the ironies of the opening stanza:

My father went broke on a shaded street.

My mother drank there.

My brothers removed themselves; they were complete.

I kept to my room and slicked down my hair.

As the poem continues, the speaker realizes that he resembles his father in his loneliness and unhappiness. Then he goes on to think about his father’s burial (the mother already dead); the feel of rocks becomes the gravestones of his family. On a later return to the cemetery, he loses himself amid the maze of stones and wonders where his father has gone and whether life is only the world of rocks.

In “The Feel of Rock” and “Mother’s Past,” Whittemore is risking a personal tone rarely seen before in his work. Although the poems have at times a tentative quality, they add a new element to the work of this always interesting writer.

Bibliography

1 

Bloom, Harold, ed. Twentieth-Century American Literature. Vol. 7. New York: Chelsea House, 1988. Contains a short biographical essay on Whittemore that also offers literary criticism.

2 

Dickey, James. Babel to Byzantium: Poets and Poetry Now. 1968. Reprint. New York: Ecco Press, 1981. Dickey classifies Whittemore as essentially a satirist, but he modifies his praise of his work because of Whittemore’s tendency not to go deeply and personally into his subjects.

3 

Whittemore, Reed. Against the Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet. Washington, D.C.: Dryad Press/University of Alaska Press, 2007. Whittemore relates his memoirs through his alter ego “R,” from his days at Furioso, to his experiences during World War II, and his years at Carleton College and The New Republic. Contains a foreword by Garrison Keillor, a former student of Whittemore.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
Novak, Michael Paul. "Reed Whittemore." Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets, edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman, Salem Press, 2011. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=CSPAM_13780160000281.
APA 7th
Novak, M. P. (2011). Reed Whittemore. In R. M. Reisman (Ed.), Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Novak, Michael Paul. "Reed Whittemore." Edited by Rosemary M. Canfield Reisman. Critical Survey of Poetry: American Poets. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2011. Accessed December 14, 2025. online.salempress.com.