Damned Good Poet: Kenneth Fearing

In order to appreciate some good but narrow writers, you need to adopt a temporary acceptance of their world-view, a willingness to postpone your possible complaint about the writer's limitations of sympathy, or blind spots, or addiction to certain images or attitudes; you need this willing suspension, not only of disbelief but of judgment, so that you'll be able to stay alert while reading, alert enough to notice the variations, shadings, wiggles of emotion and meaning enacted by the writer within his or her narrow range of effects. Well, I suppose what I've said can be applied to the task of reading any writer, since any writer (except perhaps the greatest—Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Tolstoy?) can be described as narrow in some sense. Be that as it may, there are certain writers, writers who will be labeled "minor" by an awfully pragmatic and taxonomic posterity, who especially deserve and repay a provisional acceptance of their limited "take" on life. Kenneth Fearing (1902-1961) is such a writer.

Thanks to the long-overdue publication of Fearing's Complete Poems (National Poetry Foundation, 1994) edited by Robert M. Ryley, it has become easy for a willing reader to see how good Fearing was. What you have to accept, provisionally, is that in nine out of ten poems Fearing will be relentlessly panoramic, not focusing intently on any one person's life (especially not on his own) but rather producing brisk montages of experience which he presents as typical in American society of the 1930s and 1940s, and pressing grimly toward the bleakest general ideas about that experience; and that he will be aggressively skeptical about anyone's notions of romantic love, heroism, artistic achievement, honor, faith, and hope.

If Fearing were mediocre, those sour consistencies of his work would vitiate it or at least render it easily forgettable.

But Kenneth Fearing is a terrific poet. There must be hundreds of people who have known this for a long time, but I didn't find out till 1999 when I happened to pick up the Complete Poems. Before that I'd only noticed a few Fearing poems in anthologies and sort of liked them but allowed myself to assume that Fearing was too dated, too political, too much a Depression-era cultural commentator to matter anymore. Now I've discovered that Fearing's poetry—in most of the more than 150 poems—survives and transcends its historical period the way great or nearly great poetry does.

In his admirably informative and thoughtful introduction to Complete Poems, Ryley summarizes Fearing's turbulent and rather depressing life. Born in 1902, son of a Chicago attorney, Fearing attended the University of Illinois and the University of Wisconsin, moved to New York as a free-lance writer in 1924, and published the first of his seven books of poetry in 1929. He also published eight novels. Alcoholism contributed to the failure of both of his marriages. He seems to have had trouble believing in anything, including love. He had one son by his first marriage. During the '30s Fearing published in leftist journals (though also in The New Yorker and other mainstream journals toward the end of that decade) and allowed himself to be thought of as a Communist, but he seems never to have invested serious hope in any ideology. His last book of poems appeared in 1948; he wrote very few poems after that; he died in 1961.

As Ryley points out, after the '30s Fearing's poetry mostly withdrew both from daring stylistic experiment and from historical and cultural specifics (nearly ignoring the Second World War, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb). He seems to have felt increasingly jaded and skeptical about poetry's chance to participate in national life. Yet he still wrote good poems.

Indeed, some of his best poems float free from any footnote-worthy links to the '30s or '40s and sound as if they could have been written yesterday. Often these poems are shorter than Fearing's typical two-to-three-page length. I want to start by praising a few of these "unhistorical" poems, but in doing so I don't mean that I prefer them categorically to the many good bitter or sardonic poems that bristle with references to urban American life in the years 1926-1948.

"Statistics" appeared in The New Yorker in 1941 a few weeks before Pearl Harbor. It contains no reference to war, but its burden is a painful awareness of the disappearance of human lives in history.

 
This poem, with its mathematical conceit, is even more governed by a pretense of distanced, pallid neutrality than most; most Fearing poems allow (as if against their own better judgment) a burst or two of startling, zany, or intemperate phrasing. Still, " efficiently displays several elements typical of Fearing's work.

Above all, there is the insistence on panoramic awareness. Fearing always requires himself to register the typicality, or at least the non-uniqueness, of any individual's experience. This is a deep thing in Fearing, a severe and self-chastening compulsion. It summons him to deploy pluralizing phrases in many poems—the "statistics" about "Sixty souls" etc. being a coldly obvious example—which call to mind similar phrases in T. S. Eliot ("the damp souls of housemaids / Sprouting at area gates"). Only fourteen years older than Fearing, Eliot influenced him deeply.

In early poems such as "Morning at the Window," "The Boston Evening Transcript," "Preludes" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and in The Waste Land, Eliot conveyed the depression that flows from an undodgeable awareness—an urban awareness—of the awful similarity of millions of lives, all of them drearily present in their physical reality while weirdly absent spiritually. Whereas Eliot tried to move from this depression toward a beatific resignation to the inevitable, Fearing often colors his Eliotic pluralizings with anger. The anger emerges as sarcasm, contemptuous reductiveness, caricature, cartoony distortion, mocking hyperbole, and this array of angry tones animates some Fearing poems with a nervous energy which Eliot abjured in "The Hollow Men," having been tortured by it in "The Waste Land." Anger tends to imply that what is wrong in life is not absolutely inevitable. Fearing usually seems to need to declare that misery and failure and disappointment are fundamental and permanent (a view unconducive to political poetry!), yet his anger flares up and suggests that what's bad in life arises partly from historical conditions which may not be necessary. Thus there's a fascinating tension in Fearing between his pervasive grimness and his suspicion that someone—the rich, the government, the media—is especially to blame. We might say it's the question of whether he's to be the poet of his depression or the Depression.

"Statistics" is an example of Fearing's voice attaining a tonal register not far from the gravity of Eliot's "Burnt Norton," yet there is an element of satirical anger in it, audible to the reader who knows Fearing's earlier poetry. "These are the figures, incontrovertibly; such are the facts. / Sixty, two thousand, five thousand, ninety-four, thirty-three, twenty-one." The redundant flatness here evokes the stupid complacency of minds—in government bureaucracy or in popular journalism—that suppose human experience has been adequately responded to when it has merely been tabulated. At the same time, though, such stupid complacency is the bad version of the insistence on panoramic vision and unflinching overviews of entire classes of people that is central to Fearing's originality. In the two lines quoted Fearing is satirizing the alienated empty-heartedness that is precisely a key danger threatening his own poetic achievement. He was dangerously susceptible to the kind of grim smugness that likes to say that something—especially something regrettable—is "incontrovertibly" true.

The trace of bitterness in "Statistics" is subsumed in pathos. A kind of cool distanced tenderness is one of Fearing's most powerful effects, rendered more affecting by its seeming to have sneaked past the censor of his anti-sentimentality. He addresses a transcendent "Actuary of actuaries" (in Whom he does not believe) and calls for an accounting of human experience in a realm beyond contingency and suffering, an accounting that would provide not mere tabulation but preservation, explanation, and redemption—"Because the need for an answer that is correct is very great." To my ear the unadorned quality of this last line is beautiful, expressing the stoicism of someone who knows the great answers will not be forthcoming but knows also that the depth of the need for an answer deserves respect. Fearing's line is in the same key as Stevens's "One would continue to contend with one's ideas" or "It can never be satisfied, the mind, never."

The lack of any permanent honoring, the disappearance of the beauties of human experience, is the anguish animating "Memo," my favorite among Fearing's shorter poems.

 
The yearning in this poem seems more nakedly attributable to the poet himself than Fearing usually allows. The poem doesn't deploy his usual satiric devices for separating the human experience in the poem from any individual lyric speaker representing him. (The dexterity of Fearing's avoidances of the lyric "I" is indeed a crucial factor in his stylistic originality.) As we shall see, Fearing's poetry is full of characters who talk about big things like "victory and death" and who wish to claim that some bit of their own antlike (or mouselike, chickenlike, lemminglike, molelike) activity filled "a glittering hour, an important hour in a tremendous year"—but in "Memo" that "glittering" is not exposed as an absurd tinsel delusion; instead we are allowed to infer that the poet's heart is equally implied in the need for some lasting record of brief human beauties: "no heart could beat if this were not so." In "Memo," then, Fearing reveals what Wallace Stevens was much more willing to acknowledge: underneath layers of cynicism, jadedness, and negation there is—at least in anyone who keeps writing poems—an inevitable romanticism still pulsing, watching for rescue. It's true that the question asked by "Memo" summons the realistic answer "No, there is no such shadow"this is a poem in which the questioning itself becomes an affirmation of value stronger than the negation of that value's permanence. In the plangency of its need to doubt that our shared "glittering" must totally vanish, "Memo" strikes a chord struck (in "At Castle Boterel," for instance) by Thomas Hardy, another poet who strove dourly to resist wishful thinking but could not make his mind purely a mind of winter.

The impossibility of maintaining a dispassionate, icily reasonable attitude toward life is expressed in "X Minus X," my third example of Fearing's shorter poems without topical references. In its first and third stanzas the poem uses one of Fearing's favorite structural devices, the anaphoric elaboration of a subordinate clause that waits in limbo for its controlling statement to arrive. I think this syntactical procedure is a way of representing a life which people mostly can't shape for themselves, a world of people who can't be the agents of their experience and mostly live subordinated to great mysterious forces, whether those forces are political and alterable or—as in "X Minus X"—anthropological and permanent.

 
The poem may be said to amount to a blunt and simple generalization, yet something in its rhythm, and in its proposed identities (radio/friend; magazine/dream; ticker/life; boulevard/destiny; etc.), gives it an unsettling authority. It is a vision of the endlessness of desire and dismay, suggesting that they are the essence of our lives regardless of the ephemeral forms we cherish. "X Minus X" is a worthy cousin of other good compressed versions of this theme, such as Hardy's "I Look Into My Glass" and Stevens's "The Well Dressed Man with a Beard" and Dickinson's "It struck me—every Day—" (#362) and Robert Pinsky's "The Want Bone."

We may imagine that our lives consist in the struggle for X outcome—attaining a certain lover, publishing a certain book, amassing a certain fortune, escaping a certain disease or danger—but when that X is subtracted (due to defeat, or merely due to the depreciations of time) the result is not zero: we find ourselves still helplessly throbbing.

Neither the radio (popular culture loaded with the dubious invitations and promises of capitalist economy) nor the magnate (capitalism itself with its pretense that every diligent worker will succeed) turns out to be a reliable friend. By placing the word "magnate" so noticeably at the end of "X Minus X" Fearing calls to mind the issue that was never far from anyone's thoughts in 1934, the grotesquely unequal distribution of wealth in America. Yet the poem's clear assertion is that no rich "friend" or glamorous "sweetheart" could ever release you from frustration and yearning.

The poems I've discussed so far are not the most typical Kenneth Fearing poems. By starting with these shorter, less satirical, less '30s-ish poems, I hoped to discourage easy categorization of Fearing as a political poet, which can quickly become dismissal of him as a dated poet. Fearing may be, in M. L. Rosenthal's justifiable but limiting phrase, "the chief poet of the American Depression"—but I'm eager to help spring him from the trap of being considered a poet interesting only in relation to one phase of history. I think this would be easy if my reader had the patience (and I had the stamina) for a very long essay quoting many longer poems in full—because dozens and dozens of them feel vital and valuably disturbing sixty and seventy years after they were written. To quote only bits from them, I fear, would be less convincing. I realize that this complaint about the injustice of brief excerpts is what enthusiastic critics always say, but it's especially relevant to a poet like Kenneth Fearing who writes not in lapidary pentameters but in long lines full of demotic phrases (like Whitman) and who (again like Whitman) relies much less on metaphor than on cumulative rhetorical rhythm and nimble disorienting shifts of tone and perspective.

The inevitability of ongoing desire in "X Minus X" is a distillation of Fearing's pervasive sense of inevitable patterns in human experience—social patterns, and psychological patterns responding to the social. Many poems evoke overwhelming forces tending to make the individual accept—and be complicit in—harmful and dishonest practices and attitudes. "Conclusion" is a poem about passivity and complacency. Here is the second stanza:

 
We may say that disgust and satiric anger fuel the poem, but the underlying spirit is more fatalistic than any essentially political or satirical poetry could permit. When Fearing says that fools and villains will have the glory "forever and ever," the hopelessness sounds less like his target than like his shelter, his home. Thus in his attack on complacency Fearing may be accused of complacency himself, as he cherishes the immutability of what he criticizes. Here are the last six lines of "Conclusion":

 
Fearing's sense of everyone's complicity in harmful social arrangements does not undo, though it does qualify, his awareness that some people egregiously enjoy and profit from those arrangements. "Dividends" is one of several poems in which he enters the psychology of a winner, a capitalist executive, to expose not only the moral vacuity but the dreary patterned banality of the winner's daily life. "Dividends" tempts us to read it as an interior monologue in the mind of one character (a good later poem, "Engagements for Tomorrow," fits this description better) but the poem is more original and stranger than that. The "speaker" of "Dividends" is better interpreted not as one man but as a state of mind, a world-view shared by many rich men; we might call it a class voice; but this voice is twice interrupted or invaded by a frightening prophetic voice which would seem foreign to the magnate mind.

 
The overall effect of "Dividends" strikes me as somewhat muddy, but it is impressive as one of Fearing's experiments in shifts of subjectivity. The point of view that can perceive the capitalist's routine as "A defense against gray, hungry, envious millions" is not the point of view that primly idealizes "Convenience and order" and says "here, Mildred, is the easiest way." The parenthetical intrusion "(But what is swifter than time?)" sounds like a sententious Sophoclean chorus but it succeeds in complicating the question of whether ideas beyond the Machiavellian seizing of advantage may pass through the mind of a capitalist who does, after all, have "strange dreams." And then the very Eliot-influenced Burke-Johnson-Hendricks passage (echoing the Guiterriez-Boudin-Floret passage in "Animula," which appeared five years earlier in 1929) injects startling fear into "Dividends," causing us to wonder if the rationalizing plutocrat has a secretly cancerous conscience, buried each day when he summons his chauffeur and carries on with his ostensibly unrevisable plans.

That plutocrat may be culpably complacent in his feeling that the patterns of his life are fixed, but in Fearing's world everyone does less real choosing than he or she imagines, and escapes the deterministic grip of economic-social-cultural forces only by means of illusions and delusions—terribly fragile myths proposing the specialness of the individual. Individuals haplessly invest themselves in dreams of wealth, fame, glamour, romantic love, heroism, escape to another world, transcendence via art (including poetry). When Fearing is sticking to what we might call his official program, all these dreams are debunked, deflated, mocked; exposed as corrupt or exposed as doomed, or both.

 
That's a stanza from the third of Fearing's five poems entitled "American Rhapsody". Here is the whole of the fourth poem:

 
Not a subtle poem, I realize. There is no ambiguity to ponder. Fearing knows there is a magic in the word "silver" for all of us who keep harboring idiotic expectations of transcendence, and he tries to make us gag on the word. Is the poem too simple to be good? I think it has power—it has a kind of deft purity, a knifelike directness which reminds me of the best angry poems of D. H. Lawrence. But the fatalism of Fearing, the sense that he too, along with everyone else, is permanently mired in folly, this is not shared by the defiant and disputatious Lawrence.

"Laughter, with a few simple instructions, and a bona-fide guarantee"—we should note the obvious satire of advertising here, the suggestion that the culture with its manipulative marketing has sold us our dreams like quack nostrums or drugs. Satirical jabs at the teasing, hypnotizing, maddening dishonesty of what we now call the media—Hollywood films especially, and also radio, newspapers, magazines, popular fiction, billboards—come frequently in Fearing, and I'll give more examples, but again I want to recall that Fearing's vision of what's wrong with human life—whether it's a fair vision or not—runs deeper than any one set of historical circumstances, as "X Minus X" suggested. This is my chance to present the amazing early poem "Angel Arms." It appeared in a journal in 1927 and became the title poem of Fearing's first book in 1929. Thus it obviously can't be called a Depression-era poem; nor does it contain any charge that Hollywood or Madison Avenue or Calvin Coolidge is particularly to blame for the protagonist's being forever humiliated and tantalized.

 
Sheesh! It's as if a whole Nathanael West novel were compressed into two pages. I wonder if we glimpse a streak of craziness in the young Kenneth Fearing here. (And occasionally throughout Complete Poems there are jolts of hostility and paranoia that seem over-the-edge, too frantic or uncalled for to seem satirical or artful; examples are in "American Rhapsody (2)," "C Stands for Civilization," "Net," "Happy New Year," "Dirge"). The roach-sewer-poodle passage in "Angel Arms" comes from somewhere deeper and darker than a cartoon Everyman. Like Tennyson in the later sections of Maud, Fearing seems to know insane rage from the inside.

The grotesqueness of "pink mouse" to identify this working-class hero's idealized Daisy makes Feldman seem more deluded and more scary than Fitzgerald's half-heroic Gatsby. "Angel Arms" achieves a volatile bubbling mixture of sympathy with contempt and disgust. If it was influenced by the fascinated revulsion against sexual desire in Eliot's Sweeney poems, it manages to be more complicated than those poems (in one way) by including convincing sympathy for its creepy protagonist. At the same time we can hardly wish for the ultimate union of the frustrated male with his touch-me-not dreamgirl. We are not invited to feel that this union, though impossible, is a marvelous beautiful goal that glorifies the quester, as in (for instance) Hart Crane's "For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen." Feldman is no worthy Faustus, and his pink mouse is no Helen.

Lawrence, Tennyson, West, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Crane—my impulse to pile on references to great writers reflects my wish to make you think that Kenneth Fearing should not be too easily consigned to a lower echelon.

His poems that satirize the products and messages of popular culture seem remarkably un-dated, as relevant to the mass-media ethos of the early twenty-first century as they were to the decades when nationally circulated images and messages and products first unified the United States as a mass culture society. Consider "Jack Knuckles Falters," published in 1926, Fearing's first very good poem. Just four years after The Waste Land (and four years before The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos), Fearing has mastered the use of interruption to create a sense of the helplessness of the individual caught in the currents of a decadent culture. (Thinkers about postmodernism who want to claim discontinuity as big news in the last ten or twenty or thirty or forty years should be required to notice "Jack Knuckles Falters.") Here is the whole poem:

 
The poem is not interested in whether Jack Knuckles is guilty or innocent. His "appropriate remarks" have a canned quality, but this seems inevitable since they were produced at the behest of reporters whose objective is neatly packageable news, and indeed Jack is understandably engaged in his own last attempt at spin control. What interests Fearing is the terribly shallow kind of interest felt by Jack's audience, not the prison wardens but the newspaper-reading public. That public is mildly diverted, perhaps momentarily titillated by the image of a war veteran stoutly maintaining his innocence at the moment of his execution, but mostly they just want to read that a bad man has been electrocuted; and in any case the public's interest is extremely evanescent, ready in a microsecond to be distracted by another headline. "WILL RUMANIAN PRINCE WED AGAIN?"

The capitalized lines in the poem that refer to Jack Knuckles sound like sub-headlines in the newspaper article about his execution, an article jostled in the casual reader's consciousness by various other reports emphatically irrelevant to Jack, and the purpose of those sub-headlines is to guide the reader smoothly and comfortably through the event, including a dash of pathos ("WISHES HE COULD HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE") but not allowing any serious doubt as to whether justice has been done, and leading to the thrill of sanctioned murder. The title of the poem reflects journalism's power—so easily misused—to tilt a set of putative facts toward an appealing digestible inference. "He faltered," the news-reader is invited to infer, "because he knew he was guilty, and also because he was a coward, as villains secretly are." There is no invitation to think twice about Jack's punishment or capital punishment in general; on the contrary, the reader's attention is immediately summoned to other stories, which are co-present with the execution story and appear to be just as important or unimportant. Fearing in 1926 (before television, before the Internet) is not calling for some practical redesigning of news delivery; he is asking his reader to think about the psychological effect of the simultaneous availability of countless bits of information, all formatted for quick-snack consumption.

"How shall these accounts be balanced, otherwise than in personal flesh and blood?" Along with poor Mr. Knuckles, we need some divinely sensitive registration of our many fates, whereby each of us will be recognized as specially interesting, not infinitesimal like the fish in a fishery dispute or the unimaginably distant peasants of Peru. We need a "fiery comptometer"—it won't be Saint Peter, nor will it be the newspaper—could it be, to some degree, poetry?

Fearing refers very seldom to poetry in his poetry, and then only satirically. Several poems point to the absurd inadequacy of popular literature, its failure to address the realities of tedium and injustice and pain—or, failure to do so in ways that will nourish any serious new hope. "Scheherazade" presents a catalogue of rejection slips, a catalogue of topics for books that we can't use. The first line of this catalogue crystallizes Fearing's refusal to write personal lyric poetry, poetry based on an illusion of individual specialness. Notice also, though, that the last line of the catalogue turns the attack against Fearing himself, who could sometimes see that cynicism, thickened by alcohol, threatened the value of his work. Here is all but the last three lines of "Scheherazade":

 
The concluding three lines of "Scheherazade" call for literature that is useful, or clear, or deeply new; but Fearing doesn't sound hopeful or expectant like a William Carlos Williams demanding freshly immediate art; and the strange example Fearing gives of something deeply new is (assuming no reference to Babe Ruth, who was already a legend in 1938) an ancient story of exile and steadfast love:

 
The implication is either that we have lost any connection to sacred texts, or that we need new fictions as archetypally resonant as the Old Testament, or both.

Another poem about popular literature, "$2.50" (the price of a new book in 1934) bitterly mocks the kinds of fiction and drama and poetry produced to please an aristocratic "cracker" (slang for a charming playboy) or a liberal "clublady." The poem then declares that the ingredients for such entertainment have been wiped out or discredited by the Depression and (apparently) by imperialism; and finally the poem undertakes—in a tone uncharacteristically uncynical—to evoke a sense of a possible new literature that would meet the demand of the present.

 
"$2.50" is a poem to read alongside Wallace Stevens's "Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz" (1935). Both poems powerfully lament the failure of established art forms (symbolized by music in Stevens) to deal with the turmoil of present history, and both hypothesize a new art that will rise to the occasion. But Stevens, in his austere way, is more hopeful than Fearing. Fearing's imaginative experience is much more thoroughly colored by the un-sublimatable realities of national guardsmen, picket lines, and what "$2.50"calls "the flophouse, workhouse, warehouse, whorehouse, bughouse life of man." We can hear Fearing's cynicism seeping back into the poem at the end, where the words "honor" and "grace"—which we'd like to associate with the good dream, the durable dream that would correspond to Stevens's "new music" or supreme fiction—are instead aligned with the word "profit" (a very suspect ideal in a Depression poem) and confined to "the cracker's evening fantasy."

Popular culture, meanwhile, never ceases to sell fantasies, pseudo-solutions to the spirit's yearning, momentary palliatives in the absence of meaning. The insidiously deferential voice in "Radio Blues" is all too familiar to all of us today, we who might have supposed that sixty years ago an American's consciousness was safe from the white noise of commercial propositions which we constantly have to filter. This 1938 poem is entirely relevant to the electronic culture of 2001.

 
The insight in this poem is that media mediation of our thoughts eventually transforms them and floats them out of our possession; the time comes when we not only can't shape our own lives, we're not even sure what we'd want if we could. Relentless accommodation of our whims becomes debilitation of our spirits. Like "Jack Knuckles Falters," then, "Radio Blues" is a picture of a world in which the authentic individual voice can't be heard, can't even hear itself, and may indeed cease to exist except as a marketable myth.

How good a poem is "Radio Blues"? I remind myself of what critics often forget, that a poem's handiness for the making of points about cultural and social history is not identical with emotional power, psychological depth, artistic achievement. Is "Radio Blues" too obvious? Like many Fearing poems, it unfolds according to a simple pattern (the list of radio frequencies) and thus can be attacked as an example of "the gimmick poem"—but any wholesale dismissal of catalogue devices would cost us lots of great poetry, Whitman being the outstanding example. When Fearing sets up, or gestures toward setting up, a comprehensive catalogue, what comes across is the desperation for artifice in a mind seeking brief stays against confusion. What makes "Radio Blues" good is the itch in it. Its catalogue of radio offerings is not cleverly predictable. It is audibly driven by the desperation that can underlie what we now call channel-surfing, with a sense that "your very own life" has already sunk under the waves.

That same fear drives other good Fearing poems such as "Suburban Sunset, Pre-War, or What Are We Missing?" and "King Juke" (which aggressively presses the question "What have you got, a juke-box hasn't got?") and is anatomized most explicitly and discursively in "Reception Good." At bottom all of Fearing's poems about cultural media are rooted in the fear that individual agency, individual will, individual creation of meaning—in a society broadcasting easy substitutes for those things, and perhaps in any society—is impossible.

But surely poetry cannot come into being without some belief in individual creation of meaning? This may be called a Romantic view; but I think Chaucer and Dante and Virgil, while they thanked heaven for their talent, knew they were making something important that no other person could make. And they knew its importance depended on its transmission to others, to readers. Poetry requires a belief that it can be deeply heard, that one person can communicate profoundly with another. When his depression and cynicism gripped him too firmly, Fearing ran the risk we might call the Beckettian risk—it could as well be called the Swiftian risk—that dismay and disgust will strangle art. So far, in my anxiety to fend off reductive ways of categorizing and then ignoring Kenneth Fearing, I've touched on this problem only gingerly. But there's no denying that Fearing's work, read in bulk, invites summaries like this by Carl Rakosi: "To him America was already an all-enveloping nightmare in which he felt trapped like a rat and from which he could not awaken." That's too florid and melodramatic, but Fearing (so to speak) asked for it. In a poem called "Class Reunion" he catalogues the failures and defeats of old classmates and says: "White mice, running mazes in behavior tests, have never displayed more cunning than these, who arrived by such devious routes at such incredible ends." In context "incredible" means all-too-credibly foolish and pathetic; and the failure or folly of any grand or Romantic or even merely earnest aspiration was too constantly credible to Fearing.

Artistic representation of despair can be bracing, even cathartically invigorating, in sudden shots and tours de force. But ongoing relentless despair becomes dreary, in art as in life. Tedium is thus one danger. An opposite danger is hysteria, when despair suddenly blossoms in brief ungoverned hyperbole. This came up in connection with a passage in "Angel Arms," above, and it comes to mind when "Radio Blues" refers to "the decade after this, with the final results of the final madness and the final killing" (but perhaps we should consider that line more prophetic than hysterical in a poem of 1938!), and when an interruptive all-caps voice in "Happy New Year" says "BUT IF IT IS TRUE THAT THE NERVE AND BREATH AND PULSE ARE FOR SALE." In a way that would not seem odd to psychologists, the dreary coolness of depression gets intermittently punctuated by hot jolts of hysteria which the depressed person or poet is too depressed to evaluate critically.

Similar alternation between the d-feelings (dreariness, depression, dejection, dismay, despair) and hysteria afflicts the poetry of Weldon Kees, that talented and darkly narrow poet who was a blood brother to Fearing in interesting ways. Kees reviewed Fearing ambivalently in Poetry in 1941, complaining that "his repetitions and lists . . . become tiresome and mechanical, degenerating into a facile and overwrought shrillness." This is a case of the pot recognizing the kettle. Kees (1914-1955) seems to have burned with an even more debilitating despair than Fearing, or so we are apt to infer from his apparent suicide at the age of forty-one. In satiric poems such as "The Clinic" Kees comes close to Fearing's style, but Kees's main style is grimly iambic and formal; he seems trapped in the style as he seems trapped in bitterness; both Kees and Fearing may be seen as hooked on the despair in early Eliot, but Fearing finds more ways to wriggle on the hook. An example of hysteria in Kees is the ending of "Crime Club"—it's an attractive deft poem about the unsolved murder of a conventional genteel citizen who was secretly lost in anomie, but Kees can't resist having the detective in the case become "incurably insane"—

 
Those three uses of the word "screaming" sound compulsive, a giving in to temptation.

Meanwhile, the tedium of sourness is more of a limitation for Kees, I think, than for Fearing. In "River Song" Kees's speaker tells of being crucified while life goes on around him:

 
In that ending we hear Kees settling for his alienation. He seems too burned, too far gone to entertain new thoughts. It's a problem in Fearing too, as I've admitted. "Engagements for Tomorrow" is a pretty good Fearing poem in the form of an interior monologue by a corporate executive coaching himself to be tough. Here are the poem's last three lines:

 
The poet who writes that last line is in danger—the danger of being too well acquainted with the night so that he cannot separate his voice from the blankness of life without meaning. "Dirge" presents a satiric eulogy for an executive less successful than the one in "Engagements for Tomorrow." Here is the last third of "Dirge":

 
That mindless bonging threatens to bong the poet himself, Mr. Fearing, into a kind of death, the numbed condition I called alienated empty-heartedness in discussing "Statistics."

Still, as I've suggested throughout, Fearing finds many ways to vary and color his observations of human failure and folly. The comparison with Kees helped me see this. Weldon Kees is an underrated poet, but Fearing is more versatile, more surprising, finally more original. The difference is somehow related to Kees's investment in the Romantic lyrical protagonist—most Kees poems involve a protagonist who, though blighted, is specially blighted, impressively sensitive; whereas Fearing keeps reminding us that each sufferer is like a thousand or million others.

But that comparative point makes me uneasy, since I'm not willing to imply that Fearing is necessarily the better poet because he refuses the self-steeped blues of the lyrical I. Indeed, as I suggested in discussing "Memo," traces of an unsnuffable romanticism contribute crucially to Fearing's poetic power. Against what he purports to consider his better judgment, Fearing sometimes contrives not to quite destroy the possibility of meaningful life, imaginative transcendence, and joy—recognizing that "no heart could beat if this were not so."

One instance waiting to be mentioned is the six-page poem "Denouement" (1935), which Robert M. Ryley calls Fearing's only "explicitly Marxist" poem because it imagines masses of people protesting oppression until "millions of voices become one voice. . . ." But "Denouement" as a whole is far from being an optimistic battle cry, and it ends with a picture of a world where there is "no light but the lamp that shines on a trooper's drawn and ready bayonet."

Deeper glimpses of hope are those that are more clearly emotional and unpolitical, irrational but necessary, in poems where Fearing finds a way to avoid blacking the hope with pessimism or cynicism.

 
Reading this poem we expect Fearing to expose all the yearning as folly, but this time he doesn't quite do so; moreover, the poem's title works to imply an affirmation: money (practicality, greedy gain, power) must not be all that matters, because look how we keep seeking transcendence. Far from being a Marxist poem, "If Money" is an anti-materialist poem. Anti-cynical, too. We recall the line in "Scheherazade" rejecting the story of "how cynical you are, rumpot, and why you became so." Fearing occasionally (though not often enough) saw the dead-endedness of cynicism.

As I hope to have shown, a key fascination of Kenneth Fearing's poetry is the tension in it between a grim collectivist vision—conveyed more importantly by his determination to eschew any romanticized protagonists than by his few skittish hints in favor of Communism—and unreconstructable romantic individualism. Dramatized in many ways in the Complete Poems, this tension is even more pervasive and basic than the tension between depression and anger. The constant presence of both these tensions may tend to make Fearing a narrow poet, yet he is full of surprises within his narrowness. Turning his pages one feels the kind of excitement David Ferry has described as the pleasure of reading Horace: "How is he going to do it this time?"

Deluded egocentrism in other people can seem repulsive, absurd, and perhaps terrifying, and did often seem so to Fearing. Besides his many satirical responses to this, he wrote good poems of drastic bleakness in which all hope is felt to be delusion; standouts I haven't mentioned include "4 A.M.," "Tomorrow," and "Lunch with the Sole Survivor." Meanwhile, though, deluded egocentrism in oneself is much harder to identify, to dig out. I love the moments when Fearing implicitly acknowledges that he can't scrape it from his own soul. One more example: "Requiem" is a beautiful poem about imagining the ordinary world after one's own death. The poem refuses to pretend that any immortality or even any specialness can be claimed for the individual who dies, but it honors our astonishment that oblivion is our fate.

 
"Requiem" is simpler than Stevens's "A Postcard from the Volcano," another poem that imagines what our survivors will say of us, but "Requiem" has a candid plangency of its own and is not wiped out in the comparison. Both poems end with sunlight. Stevens often evoked sunlight as the paradox of a heartless benevolence, a blessing from no blesser, a generosity from no philanthropist except ourselves in our eagerness to feel loved. Fearing tried to resist even such equivocal praise of the universe; but when he imagines having lost the world, in "Requiem," his cityscape basks in the unrefusable sunshine of a day whose value ("As though there could be such a day again") becomes visible when it's out of reach. This doesn't mean Fearing's world is revealed to be good; but here Fearing is a long way from "Bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong, Mr., bong." Here he knows that a lost life does deserve a requiem, as a lived life deserves poems.