The Southern Review Autumn 1986 [antikvár]

Editorial Note Although the official position of "state poet" seems to be a not uncommon office in tlie individual states of the Union, we have until this year had no official poet of the Republic. Now, as of February 26, 1986, we have one. Tiie office of the American laureate is, to be sure, not one of lifetime tenure nor does it mandate that the holder write odes celebrating the nation or its president or legislators. Essentially, in fact, the office represents an embellishment of the established but limited position (tenure: one or two years) of poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. It is literally imitative in title only of the position unofficially instituted in 1616 when James I gave Ben Jonson a royal stipend for life and officially instituted in 1688 with the appointment of John Dryden to the Royal Household as the Poet Laureate of England. Of course, in a sense, in America we have had poets whom we have elevated through widespread acclaim and veneration to something like the unofficial laureateship. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow is a case in point. The late Robert P'rost—whose reading of "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1963 is a singular moment in American literary history—may be pointed to even more surely as an American laureate. Then, too, we have had our self-proclaimed national laureates, none bolder or more notable than Walt Whitman, who—conceiving "Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth" to have "probably the fullest poetical nature," and declaring that "the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem"—prophesied the arrival for the first time in history of "a bard" (namely himself) "commensurate" with a democratic people. But this projector of the largest national poetical program ever set forth was fated to die unknown to the masses he sought to be the voice of. Thus, so far as Americans—who seem at times to have the least poetical nature of the nations of the earth-have had national poets in the past, they have had two New Englanders. Aside from the subde, inarticulate irony that in creating the poet laureateship we may respond to an unconscious regret for committing symbolic regicide two centuries ago, the major irony in the establishment of the office of poet laureate in the United States is that its first occupant is an eighty-one-year-old descendant of the southern secessionists. Yet it can be effectively argued that our first official poet laureate, Robert Penn Warren, distinctly more than Longfellow or Frost, or even than the prophet Whitman, responds to the need for a poet "commensurate" with the American people. For all the attention to the South in his work, Warren is far less a regionalist—or, to use the less polite term, a section-alist—than Longfellow or Frost, and patently, in spite of his penchant for philosophizing about the self in America, he is far from being the