Periodization and Difference PDF

Periodization and Difference Author(s): Micah Mattix Source: New Literary History, Vol. 35, No. 4, Forms and/of Decadence (Autumn, 2004), pp. 685-697 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20057866 Accessed: 31-08-2018 10:06 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-...

Periodization and Difference Author(s): Micah Mattix Source: New Literary History, Vol. 35, No. 4, Forms and/of Decadence (Autumn, 2004), pp. 685-697 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20057866 Accessed: 31-08-2018 10:06 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  Periodization and Difference Micah Mattix Periodization in literary history, as it is currently employed, is a fairly recent phenomenon. While the past has been "cut up" since the time of Herodotus of Halicarnassus (440 BCE), secular periods, such as "ancient" and "modern," were first used by Petrarch to compare himself with the past, and increased in prominence with philosophers and literary historians such as Voltaire (1694-1778), J. G. Herder (1744-1803), Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), and Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829).1 The term "romantic" was first used by Thomas Warton (1729-1790) to distinguish between poetry that embraced the medieval romances as opposed to "classical" poetry, and, in the late 1800s, began to be applied to describe English poets such as William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834).2 In 1888, Heinrich W?lfflin was one of the first critics to apply the art term "baroque" to poetry, and, since the late 1960s, the term "postmodernism" has been frequently applied to both English and American literature.3 The application of such terms to categorize and analyze past texts, however, has been increasingly critiqued as their use has grown. In 1902, for example, Benedetto Croce argued that such generalizations do little to advance our understanding of works of art as each work is, according to Croce, unique.4 In 1966, Michel Foucault argued that the periodization of literary history has no inherent historical validity as a division of human culture, being, at best, an arbitrary imposition on an otherwise dynamic system and, at worst, a means of creating and controlling knowledge and, therefore, of consolidating power. And, more recently, Robert Rehder has shown how the use of period terms is, in many ways, ahistorical, as authors who do not exhibit the stylistic elements of the supposed period in which they live are treated as somehow living outside their own time.5 In response to such critiques, while it is almost universally recognized that the periodization of the past can be reductive, it is argued that periods are nevertheless necessary in understanding past texts because they make difference apparent. In a recent special issue on periodization, Marshall Brown summarizes what has become the standard defense of their usage. While, he claims, period terms are "relative" and fictitious, New Literary History, 2005, 35: 685-697 This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 686 NEW LITERARY HISTORY they are nevertheless "necessary" for understanding the "complex accomplishments" of individual authors.6 While Brown admits that period terms can be reductive and even engender misunderstanding if they are understood as definitive divisions of human culture, he claims that we must use some form of periodization because without it "there can be no thought and no transcendence beyond mere fact toward understanding" (312). In relation to the literary work, Brown argues, period terms not only help to establish the context of a text but also provide a fictional homogeneous period style against which contrasting styles can be compared (312, 316). In other words, periods, Brown claims, clarify the literary accomplishment of an individual author. They help to make difference?the measure by which literary works are evaluated?apparent. This theoretical defense, however, does not match the use of period terms in practice. Far from helping to delineate how a particular author is different, period terms obscure it by superimposing a predetermined schema that is reductive.7 In this sense, they obscure what they purport to describe. While period terms might be a convenient way of dividing up literary history for undergraduate and graduate programs at the university, or for certain anthologies written primarily for students, the argument that period terms assist the scholar in determining the uniqueness of a particular author or work is, quite simply, false. The opposite, in fact, is frequently the case. A brief analysis of the poetry of Frank O'Hara (1926-66) in several recent works of literary history will show the extent to which period terms have such a leveling effect. In the process of showing this, I will also mention briefly some insufficiencies and incoherencies regarding the definition and time span of some of the period terms currently employed in works of literary history, after which an alternative to period terms will be proposed. In his History of Modern Poetry (1976), David Perkins examines over fifty poets in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Ireland from 1890 to the present, providing insightful and original analysis on authors as varied as Sir William Watson (1858-1935) and Allen Ginsberg (1926-2001).8 His treatment of Frank O'Hara, while short, provides, among other things, an excellent analysis of the effect and purpose of O'Hara's use of direct and informal language in poems such as "Personal Poem" (1959) and "Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean-Paul" (1959), as well as some very insightful remarks concerning O'Hara's treatment of politics in poems such as "Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!)" (1959).9 Despite these excellent pieces of criticism, however, Perkins is ultimately unable to explain in any consistent way how O'Hara is different from and similar to other past and contemporary poets?and, therefore, to clearly evaluate his poetic This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PERIODIZATION AND DIFFERENCE 687 accomplishment?because of his use of period terms. That O'Hara is quite different from Charles Olson (1910-60), Robert Lowell (1917 77), and Allen Ginsberg, and that he shares some similarities with Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) and William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), are rarely mentioned, and certainly never explored in any detail, because the premise that style develops in periods does not allow for such comparisons. Perkins begins by arguing that style in poetry develops in periods. "In every age," Perkins claims, "only a small number of the techniques and conventions that are possible in poetry are actually used. The others are not adopted because they would be inconsistent with those which are, or because they involve moral or metaphysical assumptions the poet does not share, or because (in ages that prize originality) they would remind readers of some past style or other poet and are thus suited only for allusion or parody" (333). Because of this, Perkins claims, "poems by poets who lived in the same age and place are likely to resemble one another in style and content" (335). There are, however, two problems with this initial statement. First, Perkins assumes that there are such things as "ages" in human culture, and implies that they possess an objective definition. This, however, is false. Not only are ages, as Foucault notes, the historian's arbitrary imposition on an otherwise dynamic system, but there is little agreement among literary historians as to the arbitrary definition and time span of many of the supposed literary ages. The meaning and time span of terms such as "romanticism" and "modernism" have been the subject of much debate over the past fifty years, and no other term is currently more highly debated than the term "postmodernism," which has been variously defined as "incredulity toward metanarratives" (Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard), the dissolution of the distinction between high and low culture (Fredric Jameson), a "Kunstwollen" (Umberto Eco), or as merely an aspect of "modernism" (J?rgen Habermas), and is said to have begun anywhere from the mid 19408 to the mid-1960s.10 Because of this, the term "postmodernism" has been applied to almost every cultural phenomenon in the past thirty years and engenders a whole gamut of philosophical and aesthetic ideas that make it nearly impossible to use the term in a coherent and applicable way. Terms based on political dynasties, such as "Elizabethan" or "Victorian," or those based on cultural changes, such as "the Renaissance" or "the Enlightenment," have not fared much better, as many scholars have noted, due primarily to the awkwardness of employ ing a time period used to identify political or social changes, which may or may not have affected what or how people write.11 Therefore, to assume, or even to state uncritically, that there are such things as ages This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 688 NEW LITERARY HISTORY and that they possess some agreed-upon definition and time span is to ignore one of the principle problems in using them to categorize and analyze past texts. The second problem with Perkins's claim that "poems by poets who lived in the same age and place are likely to resemble one another in style and content," and the principal reason for rejecting it, is the simple fact that poems written at the same time and place do not necessarily resemble each other in style and content. O'Hara's poetry is a case in point. O'Hara published A City Winter, his first book of poems, in 1952, followed by Meditations in an Emergency in 1957, Second Avenue in 1960, and Lunch Poems in 1964. During this same period, Allen Ginsberg published Howl (1956), Kaddish (1961), and Reality Sandwiches (1963); Robert Lowell published Lord Weary's Castle (1946) and Life Studies (1959); and Charles Olson, The Maximus Poems (1960). While these poets share some similarities in style, there are also many differences, and it is simply incorrect to claim that O'Hara's style, for example, somehow resembles Olson's, Lowell's, or Ginsberg's more than it does William Carlos Williams's, or that Olson's style resembles Ginsberg's and O'Hara's more than it does Ezra Pound's, or that Lowell has the same style as Olson, Ginsberg, and O'Hara, but a different one from T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) or Allen T?te (1899-1979). In O'Hara's poetry, for example, as is the case in Williams's, decisions regarding commas, periods, section breaks, and line length are made primarily in order to give the poem a certain visual look on the page, whereas in the poetry of Lowell and Ginsberg, they seem to be made primarily to give the poem a certain sound. O'Hara uses commas to separate images, while Lowell and Ginsberg use them to separate a certain number of syllables and to add stress and tension to the words of the poem as it is read aloud. The lightness of O'Hara's verse, further more, has more parallels, in many ways, with the poetry of Williams, the early work of Stevens in Harmonium (1923), and, in some instances, Byron's (1788-1824) Occasional Poems than it does with either Lowell's Lord Weary's Castle or Olson's The Maximus Poems. The idealism in Olson is absent in both Lowell's and O'Hara's poetry, and the political controversies surrounding the civil rights movement and the cold war that preoccupied Ginsberg hardly enter O'Hara's work at all. Poems by poets living at the same time and same place do not necessarily resemble each other in style and content, and in treating poets such as Ginsberg and O'Hara as part of the same period, Perkins is at pains to explain the obvious differences in their respective styles. At the beginning of his section on Ginsberg and O'Hara, Perkins immedi ately gives the following qualification, where he oscillates between This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PERIODIZATION AND DIFFERENCE 689 attempting to be sensitive to their obvious differences while still claim ing that they shared a period style: As a matter of moral and aesthetic faith, they composed with rapid spontaneity. They were Dadaist and Surrealist, though much more so in New York than in San Francisco. And they shocked traditional readers by their dissolution of form, their subject matter, and their moral and philosophical attitudes, which could seem frivolously nihilistic. But despite these and other resemblances, the two styles were not closely similar; they were both versions of the general period style of the United States in the 1960s, which I described in Chapter 14, but they had no greater similarities with each other than they did with other types of poetry in the period, and I place them together in this chapter for convenience.12 Perkins's description of the similarities between Ginsberg's and O'Hara's styles borders on jargon. He uses broad terms, such as "Dadaist" and "Surrealist," to claim that they shared a writing style only then to hedge such generalizations by claiming that "despite these and other resem blances, the two styles were not closely similar" (528). Further on in the same section, Perkins remarks that much that preoccupied poets such as Ginsberg and Olson "seemed not to concern" O'Hara and other poets living and writing in New York at the time (530). "Political and social themes," Perkins writes, "?the controversy of their generation with the United States?rarely eritered their poetry even during the war in Vietnam" (530). "The tones of political-moral philosophy," Perkins continues, "in Ginsberg, Lowell, Duncan, Olson, Bly, Levertov and so many others were not included on their register" (530). Despite these clear differences, however, Perkins nevertheless feels that these poets can still be grouped under the same "general period style" and focuses in the rest of the section on the principle of similarity in their work?the "personal" and "spontaneous" elements in their poems. While Perkins is a sensitive enough critic to notice that the styles of Ginsberg's and O'Hara's poetry, as well as those of Olson's and Lowell's, are, in fact, quite different, he is ultimately unable to examine these differences in any detail because of a previous commitment to the notion of a period style. O'Hara himself recognized that his poetry was quite different from much of the poetry being written at the time, and refused to locate his style on some supposed spectrum of contemporary styles. When asked in an interview with Edward Lucie-Smith in 1965 what his relation was "between the academic and Black Mountain, or between Lowell and Olson," O'Hara responded: "Actually I don't really see what my relation is to them one way or the other except that we all live at the same time."13 In his 1966 obituary essay for O'Hara, John Ashbery (b. 192V) also This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 690 NEW LITERARY HISTORY points out that his poetry was quite different from his contemporaries: "O'Hara's poetry has no program and therefore cannot be joined. It does not advocate sex and dope as a panacea for the ills of modern society; it does not speak out against the war in Viet Nam or in favor of civil rights; it does not paint gothic vignettes of the post-Atomic Age: in a word, it does not attack the establishment. It merely ignores its right to exist, and is thus a source of annoyance for partisans of every stripe."14 What Ashbery highlights (which, it might be added, is also true of his own poetry) is that O'Hara's work is as different from Ginsberg's verses on the war in Vietnam as it is from the so-called established verse of T. S. Eliot. O'Hara was not interested in poetic "movements" or "schools." He was not interested in working out some philosophical or political ideal in his poetry, or about writing poetry for any reason other than poetry itself. In his "Statement for The New American Poetry" (1959), he writes: "I don't care about clarifying experiences for anyone or bettering (other than accidentally) anyone's state or social relation, nor am I for any particular technical development in the American language simply because I find it necessary."15 His "formal 'stance,'" he continues, is to see his poetry as a means of expressing "where what I know and can't get meets what is left of what I know and can bear without hatred" (500). He views his poetry, in other words, simply as the product of his individual conscious ness. This is a view he shares with Wordsworth, and, in many ways, Stevens, Williams, Pound, and many others. The notion of a "period style," however, blocks Perkins from examining how O'Hara might be similar, or indebted, to Wordsworth, Stevens, Williams, or Pound. While Perkins admits in his chapter on Pound and Stevens that poets such as O'Hara, Ginsberg, and Olson built on their poetry, as well as on the poetry of Williams, he does not explore this relationship in any detail, but simply asks the reader to keep this relationship (whatever it might be) in mind.16 This is, perhaps, because what poets such as Olson, Lowell, Ginsberg, and O'Hara share with poets such as Pound, Williams, and Stevens, as well as with almost every poet since Wordsworth, is precisely the "personal" and "spontaneous" elements of their poetry that Perkins finds so different. Wordsworth, for example, wrote famously in his Preface (1802) to the Lyrical Ballads that poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and attempted (though not always successfully) to use a much more personal and less elevated diction than any poet before him.17 Walt Whitman (1819-92) uses free verse in Leaves of Grass (1891) because of the freedom it allowed him to express his feelings, and attempts, as he explains in his notes, "to avoid all poetical similes."18 Both Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot would perfect the free verse form, and in his introductory note to William Carlos Williams's The This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PERIODIZATION AND DIFFERENCE 691 Tempers (1913), Pound writes that what he admires in Williams's poetry is the fact that it is "not overcrowded with false ornament," and the fact that Williams's "cadence is, to my sense, genuine."19 While it may be argued that O'Hara's poetry is so spontaneous and so personal that, as Marjorie Perloff has stated, his poems hardly seem "to qualify as poems at all," it is important to remember that similar remarks have been used to describe the poetry of nearly every great poet since Wordsworth.20 Frank O'Hara also shared other aspects of style with poets such as Williams and Stevens, all of which Perkins leaves unanalyzed. While O'Hara's relationship to Williams has been noted and explored in several works, strangely, little has been written of his relationship to Stevens. Yet, O'Hara clearly admired and was influenced by Stevens's honesty in his poems and his ability to develop a style of his own that expressed his sensibility. In notes for a talk at The Club in 1952, O'Hara writes: "More than any other living poet he has maintained poetry as high art. Never making concessions to styles or public sentiments he has remained austere without becoming cold or finicky; his work has grown steadily in beauty and wisdom while never thickening into mere fuss and elegance nor hardening into theory. The sensibility his poems reveal is one which other ages [may] well envy us for possessing."21 Not only does O'Hara state his admiration for Stevens's poetry here, but he also claims that what he admires in it is precisely the fact that Stevens has not followed other "styles or public sentiments." What he admires in Stevens's work is its difference, and the fact that it cannot be reduced to the styles of the supposed period in which Stevens lived. Marjorie Perloff, one of the few critics to write of Stevens's influence on O'Hara, shows that O'Hara drew from Stevens's poetry in creating his own style. She writes, for example, that one of O'Hara's early poems, "A Procession of the Peacocks" (1948), "is an example of a Wallace Stevens imitation," and that lines 12 and 13 of O'Hara's "Ode to Michael Goldberg ('s Birth and Other Births)" (1958) recall "Wallace Stevens's 'The World Is Larger in Summer.'"22 While there are, in fact, few similarities between O'Hara's "Ode to Michael Goldberg" and Stevens's "The World Is Larger in Summer," Perloff is correct in claiming that "A Procession of the Peacocks" is a Wallace Stevens imitation. Furthermore, what she does not mention is the fact that the entire poem is also a variation on a theme in Stevens's "Domination of Black" (1923), where O'Hara both enacts and reverses Stevens's image of poetic imagination. O'Hara's "Les etiquettes jaunes" (1950), furthermore, begins in almost the same way, as far as subject matter is concerned, as Stevens's "Cye est pourtaicte Madame Ste. Ursule, et les unze mille vierges" (1923), and O'Hara's "Early Mondrain" (1950) and "On Looking at La grande jatte, the Czar Wept Anew" (1951) recall the dramatic, descriptive tone of This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 692 NEW LITERARY HISTORY Stevens's "The Auroras of Autumn" (1950). While the styles of O'Hara and Stevens are often quite different, they also share similarities. \et, both these differences and similarities go undetected when the two poets are separated by the categories of periods. Style in poetry does not necessarily develop in periods. Literary historians, however, sometimes organize literary history in such a way as to make it look as though this is the case. Perkins, for example, divides poetry in the United States from 1890 to the present into four distinct periods in an attempt to accommodate four distinct styles: "The Ameri can Milieu, 1890-1912"; "Popular Modernism," which spans a mere ten years, from 1912 to 1922; "High Modernism," which he dates from 1925 to 1950 and then extends it, somewhat confusingly, to include the 1950s and 1960s with the "resurgence of Pound, Williams and Stevens"; and "Postmodernism," which Perkins dates as starting in 1954. Almost every poet included in Perkins's History spans at least two, if not three, of these periods, and the decision to place Olson, Lowell, Ginsberg, and O'Hara in the "postmodern" period, and Stevens and Williams in what Perkins calls "High Modernism" is not based on any historically d?fendable period style, but rather upon a predetermined period style posited by the literary historian. Each great poem and each great poet is different. They each have particularities that other poems and other poets do not share. These particularities, however, go unperceived when we use period terms. Rather than highlighting the poetic accomplishment of a particular poet, period terms have a leveling effect?highlighting only the ele ments of style or content that are shared between poets in the same period, or highlighting those elements that are different from poets in previous periods. How a poet differs from contemporary poets in the same period, or how he is similar to poets in previous periods, is rarely, if ever, mentioned. While not all literary historians have claimed, as Perkins has, that style in poetry develops in periods (and even Perkins himself seems to have restated his position somewhat in his Is Literary History Possible?),23, it is frequently argued, as Brown does, that periods are nevertheless neces sary in understanding past texts because they make difference apparent. This theoretical defense, however, does not match the use of period terms in practice, as we have seen in Perkins's work. Nor does it seem to match the use of periods in other more recent works of literary history. In Emory Elliot's Columbia Literary History of the United States (1988), for example, while Elliot does not use period term labels such as "modern ism" and "postmodernism" to title his chapters, he nevertheless divides literature in the United States into five distinct categories, the final two of which ("1910-1945" and "1945-Present") correspond almost exactly This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PERIODIZATION AND DIFFERENCE 693 to the dates Perkins uses to define "High Modernism" and "Postmodernism." Poets such as Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams are placed in the period "1910-1945," while poets such as Olson, Lowell, Ginsberg, and O'Hara are placed in the one entitled "1945-Present." Despite attempting to allow for the heterogeneous nature of much of American poetry, and of literature in general, as Elliot states in the preface, the poetry of this second group is neverthe less treated as somehow possessing the same style, which is described in terms almost identical to Perkins's.24 James Breslin, the author of the section on poetry in the volume, writes that the poetry in the "postwar era" was "spontaneous and unpredictable," due to its reaction against "Modernism."25 While Breslin admits in his short section on O'Hara and Ashbery that "Williams and Whitman were important to O'Hara, as was Wallace Stevens to the young Ashbery," and that both O'Hara and Ashbery wrote "many different kinds of poems and differed markedly from each other," he nevertheless focuses in practice on what makes O'Hara's poetry "speedy, literalistic" and "transparent," thus supporting his thesis that poetry in the "postwar era" is "spontaneous and unpredict able" (1097-99). A further example of the leveling affect of period terms can be found in the recent Cambridge History of American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch.26 Despite its claims to have marked "a new beginning in the study of American literature" and to have "redrawn the boundaries of the field and redefined the terms of its development," Bercovitch, nevertheless, divides American poetry into volumes according to the familiar dates of 1800-1910 (volume 4), 1900-1950 (volume 5), and 1940-1995 (volume 8).27 As was the case in both Perkins's and Elliot's histories, in The Cambridge History, poets such as Williams and Stevens find themselves in the volume dated 1900-1950 and Olson, Lowell, Ginsberg, O'Hara, and Ashbery in the one dated 1940-1995. What is new with The Cambridge History is not that it has, in fact, "redrawn the boundaries of the field," but rather that it has added new ones. In the volume on poetry from 1940 to 1995, for example, not only does Robert von Hallberg, the author of the section, employ the traditional dialectic of "modernism" versus "postmodernism," but following, perhaps, Helen Vendler's proposal that the solution to reductive period terms is more categorization, further divides "postmodernism" into "Rear Guards" and "Avant-Gardes," and "Avant-Gardes" into four different "literary avant garde scenes."28 These further divisions, however, have not corrected the reductive nature of period terms, but accentuated it. In Hallberg's chapter on the "Avant-Gardes," for example, while there is a fair amount of discussion of the definition of the avant-garde in American poetry, which he This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  694 NEW LITERARY HISTORY admits, ironically, seems not to concern many poets, there is very little analysis of the actual poetry of Olson, Ginsberg, or O'Hara. In this particular case, not only have Hallberg's added divisions failed to make the heterogeneous nature of much of American poetry apparent, but, I would argue, they have displaced the subject of poetry almost entirely in favor of discussion of such things as "Black Mountain avant-gardes," "New York avant-gardes," "the Black Arts Movement," "continental avant-gardes," "the postwar avant-garde," "Futurists," and so forth (83 92). Period terms do not make difference apparent, and, in practice, are simply used for convenience. In The Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry, for example, Paul Hoover explains why he has chosen to use the term "postmodern" in the title of the anthology: "I have chosen 'postmodern' for the title over 'experimental' and 'avant-garde' because it is the most encompassing term for the variety of experimental practice since World War II, one that ranges from the oral poetics of Beat and performance poetries to the more 'writerly' work of the New York School and language poetry."29 In other words, the term "postmodern" has the least amount of precise descriptive content, which makes it a very convenient term to lump together a bunch of otherwise unrelated authors. It is used precisely because it does not make difference apparent, and it is this convenience, I would posit, that makes the term "postmodernism" and other period terms attractive to use in works of literary history, where a large number of poets need to be treated in a comparatively few number of pages. This does not mean that the past should not be "cut up" at all. Robert Rehder argues, however, that the problems of "dynamics and develop ment can only be seen if much longer durations are considered than are included in any period."30 Rather than using period terms, therefore, he proposes that all historical statements be made "in terms of particular authors and texts," and that we "talk about poetry from Milton to Wordsworth or the novel from Waverly (1814) to Ulysses (1922)" (123). In such a case, Rehder argues, literary history "could then be expressed in literary terms and subsequently related to the dynamics of other subjects, and hypotheses formulated that would allow for different rates of change and for development over periods of time determined by the object described" (123). Similarly, Ralph Cohen argues that change and development in literary texts ought to be analyzed in terms of their genre over a period of time, the duration of which is, in turn, determined by identifiable changes in the texts belonging to that particular genre.31 Rather than imposing a superficial time period such as "modernism" or "postmodernism," in such a case difference and This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PERIODIZATION AND DIFFERENCE 695 variation themselves determine the time period needed to study the change observed. For example, a work of literary history in this case might examine American poetry from Walt Whitman to Frank O'Hara without dividing the poets into periods, which would then allow the author of the history to compare the styles of each poet included in the history based upon identifiable differences or similarities located in the poems themselves. Or, it might examine a particular idea, or stylistic element, over a period time?the expression of the self in poetry from William Wordsworth to John Ashbery, or first-person narration in the novel from Pamela (1740) to Heart of Darkness (1902). While any attempt to organize and synthesize the past will necessarily lead to certain reductions and regrettable omissions, in the above example, the criteria by which an author is included or not in the history, and the change being analyzed, are clearly stated. This, I would argue, is a marked advantage over period terms, where the organizing principles are not only frequently unstated or unclear, but, quite simply, false. As opposed to attempting to show that Frank O'Hara is a "postmodern" poet, or that Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a "romantic" one, historians would be free to explore the complex relationships that exist between poets and between them and their cultures, cutting up the past into manageable sections without also establishing monolithic period terms. While I agree with Brown that we cannot attain to knowledge of the past without some sort of division of it, Brown and others claim unnecessarily that such divisions need to be made using period terms. It is unclear, however, why it is, in fact, logically necessary that an absolute, homogeneous period be posited in order for difference and variation to be apparent. Especially given that, in practice, period terms clearly have the opposite effect. For difference to be apparent, another approach to dividing literary history is clearly needed, and, perhaps, thinking of the past in terms of changes within literary genres rather than in terms of arbitrary and often ideologically weighted period terms might be the beginning of a fresh approach to literary history that opens up new discussion of texts and authors hitherto excluded by periodization. University of Neuch?tel NOTES 1 Michael Grant, The Ancient Historians (London: Weidenfelf and Nicolson, 1970), 26 30; Robert Rehder, Wordsworth and the Beginnings of Modern Poetry (New Jersey: Barnes and Noble, 1981), 32; and Ernst Behler, "Problems of Origin in Modern Literary History," Harvard English Studies: Theoretical Issues in Literary History 16 (1991): 9-34. This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  696 NEW LITERARY HISTORY 2 Hans Eicher, "Introduction," in "Romantic" and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. Hans Eicher (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 6; and George Whalley, "England/Romantic-Romanticism," in "Romantic" and Its Cognates, 159-60. 3 F. J. Warnke, "Baroque Once More: Notes on a Literary Period," New Literary History 1, no. 2 (Winter 1970): 146. 4 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic, trans. Douglas Ainsli (London: Vision Press, 1953), 26. 5 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), 125-65; and Robert Rehder, "Periodization and the Theory of Literary History," Colloquium Helveticum 22 (1995): 117-36. 6 Marshall Brown, "Periods and Resistances," Modern Language Quarterly 62, no. 4 (December 2001): 312 (hereafter cited in text). 7 Rehder, "Periodization and the Theory of History," 120-23. I am indebted to Robert Rehder for this idea and for many of the ideas that follow from it in the rest of the essay. 8 David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976-87). 9 Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, vol. 2, Modernism and After, 532-33 (hereafter cited in text). 10 Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), xxiv; Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 2-3; Umberto Eco, "Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable," trans. William Weaver, in Modernism/Postmodernism, ed. Peter Brooker (London: Longman, 1992), 225-28; J?rgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1993), 91-104; and Linda Hutcheon and Joseph Natoli, introduction to A Postmodern Reader, v-vii. 11 See, for example, Ren? Wellek and Austin Warren's discussion of periodization in Theory of Literature, 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1956), 263-67. 12 Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, 2:528-29. 13 Frank O'Hara, Standing Still and Walking in New York, ed. Donald Allen (San Francisco: Grey Fox, 1975), 12-13. 14 John Ashbery, "Frank O'Hara's Question," Book Week, September 25, 1966, 6. 15 Frank O'Hara, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Allen (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 500. 16 Perkins writes: "The young poets who admired and built on them [Pound, Williams, and Stevens] are not discussed in the next chapters on Pound, Williams and Stevens, and minor authors of long Modernist poems. But since the 1950s Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson, Frank O'Hara, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, and many others?Robert Lowell in his Life Studies (1959), John Berryman in his Dream Songs from 1964 on, Randall Jarrell in his poems of the 1960s?were responding to Pound, or Williams, or both, and transforming the context in which they were read, the younger poets and the transition in taste they express are very much a part of Pound and Williams and should be kept in mind throughout the following pages" (A History of Modern Poetry, 212). 17 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, ed. Michael Mason (London: Longman, 1992), 63. 18 Walt Whitman, Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 1:157. 19 Ezra Pound, "Introductory Note," quoted in William Carlos Williams, / Wanted to Write a Poem, ed. Edith Heal (London: Cape, 1967), 24. This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms PERIODIZATION AND DIFFERENCE 697 20 Marjorie Perloff, Frank O'Hara: Poet among Painters, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), xiii. In his review of Wordsworth's The Excursion (1814) in the Edinburgh Review, for example, Francis Jeffrey writes that "the peculiarities of his composi tion" must be ascribed "not to any transient affection, or accidental caprice of imagination, but to a settled perversity of taste or understanding" (Francis Jeffery, "Review of The Excursion," Critics on Wordsworth, ed. Raymond Cowell [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1973], 6). In his article on Whitman in The Literary History of America (1900), Barrett Wendell describes Whitman's verse as possessing a "decadent eccentricity" that "nobody else can imitate"; and in an anonymous review of Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in 1917, we read that "much of what he [Eliot] writes is unrecognizable as poetry at present" (Barrett Wendell, "Walt Whitman," in Leaves of Grass, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett [New York: Norton, 1973], 818-19; Anonymous, "Shorter Notices," T. S. Eliot: Critical Assessments, ed. Graham Clarke [London: Christopher Helm, 1990], 11). 21 Frank O'Hara, "The Image in Poetry and Painting," The Club, April 11, 1952, unpublished manuscript, 467, quoted in Perloff, Frank O'Hara, 61. 22 Perloff, Frank O'Hara, 141. 23 Perkins, Is Literary History Possible? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 24 Emory Elliot, preface to The Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot and others (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), xi-xii. 25 James Breslin, "Poetry," in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, 1082-83. 26 Sacvan Bercovitch, ed., The Cambridge History of American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994-2004). 27 This introductory note is found on the front inside flap of volume 8. 28 Helen Vendler, "Periodizing Modern American Poetry," in The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives, ed. Lawrence Besserman (New York: Garland, 1996), 233-34; and Robert von Hallberg, "Avant-Gardes," in The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 8, Poetry and Criticism, 1940-1995, v (hereafter cited in text). 29 Paul Hoover, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (New York: Norton, 1994), XXV. 30 Robert Rehder, "Periodization and the Theory of Literary History," 123 (hereafter cited in text). 31 Ralph Cohen, "Genre Theory, Literary History and Historical Change," Harvard English Studies: Theoretical Issues in Literary History 16 (1991): 92. This content downloaded from 125.22.9.100 on Fri, 31 Aug 2018 10:06:23 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms