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• W179635154 abstract "Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewStephen Burt, The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence. Stephen Burt . New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Pp. x+263.Douglas MaoDouglas MaoJohns Hopkins University Search for more articles by this author Johns Hopkins UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreSome words take their time a-blossoming. As the poet and critic Stephen Burt notes in the very efficient introduction to his new book, “adolescence” has been part of the English vocabulary at least since the fifteenth century, but it only came into widespread use following the publication of the psychologist G. Stanley Hall's phenomenally successful Adolescence in 1904. The term supplied a handy nomination for the period between childhood and maturity—a phase thought genuinely “new in modern life” by some, “newly important” by others—and soon gathered to itself a number of crucial beliefs about youth in the modern world: that the younger generation differed from its predecessors more sharply than those predecessors did from theirs; that modern young people have developed a peer culture or subculture in which they “acquire norms from one another” rather than their elders; and that in individuals the phase is marked by heightened sexuality and creativity, rebelliousness, group mindedness, introspection, and volatility of emotions and beliefs. Such qualities are not always accounted virtues, of course, but when they are they may “resemble the virtues sought in a particular kind or genre of art” (4). And it is this last point that grounds The Forms of Youth. Poets of the twentieth century and after, Burt argues, have often discerned a kinship between adolescence and the kinds of poetry they have striven to fashion and promote.William Carlos Williams, for example, “found in adolescents and their peer culture after the First World War important analogues for the newness, demotic speech, and sexual energy he sought in his own New World verse,” “models and metaphors for his own deliberately unfinished, always-beginning-again works of art” (28–29, 33). Marianne Moore “identified her poetic methods with the procedures of a responsible student” (35). W. H. Auden's early poetry at once explored and exemplified that impasse in which youth seeks to mature but descries no adult role worth filling; in some of Robert Lowell's sonnets, “self-canceling lines and sentences are aesthetic equivalents for both adolescent energy and adult unease” (117). In his poetry of the 1960s, George Oppen uses gravity of tone and “aposiopeses—open spaces left for experience he has not had, will not have” to “rebuke other grown-up poets' naive beliefs that their inherited art and their students' tastes might merge in a seamless, revolutionary whole” (103), while in her “broken-up, unpredictable, semimetrical, aggressive, sometimes fragmentary poetics” of the same decade, Gwendolyn Brooks seems out to capture the “aggression, rebellion, sexualized vigor, fresh attempts at independence” she ascribes to youth (115). The “sense of loss” and the “slippery language” of John Ashbery's poems have “common sources in the school codes, evasions, and deliberate ‘immaturity’ that we recognize, in other contexts, as Audenesque” (56); “analogies between the self of lyric…and the self of adolescence” thread through Jorie Graham's 1991 Region of Unlikeness (150).These are only a few of the many poets—from North America, Britain, Ireland, and Australia—whose debt to the ardor and perplexities of adolescence The Forms of Youth illuminates; to his credit, Burt makes clear that the life phase in question holds no single meaning across poetic fields. For many twentieth-century poets, adolescence seems to mean hardly anything at all (as Burt forthrightly acknowledges), and poetics of adolescence can differ greatly even within one era, as Moore and Williams together show. Still, a certain historical sequence does seem to emerge. In the long first stage of adolescence's poetic career, roughly coinciding with the years of high modernism, the productive turbulence of the young was commonly identified with the vital iconoclasm of the new arts. In the late 1940s and the 1950s, by now naturalized rituals of teenagerhood (dates, drugstores, movie magazines, reckless driving) provided grist for reflection on life's courses, intergenerational differences, and young casualties of World War II. The new tumult of youth in the sixties elicited from adult poets complicated identifications or disidentifications with emancipated sexuality, drug use, defiant behavior, and revolutionary fervor. And some present-day poets seem to be using adolescence to ponder “poetry's own apparent loss of social power and status in the larger, ‘adult’ world” (210)—as when Shanna Compton depicts poetry as “its own subculture, with its own idiom, much like ‘jock’ or ‘skater’ subcultures in schools,” and suggests how “these terms call into being an energetic community more worthwhile than any substitutes from a recognizable adulthood” (203).Moreover, some features of the poetics of adolescence seem to persist across decades and oceans. Burt locates one such feature in a “tension between youth as pastoral and youth as rebellious or revolutionary novelty” that appears in “teen cultures through the twentieth century and in poetic reactions to them” (5). For some poets (Philip Larkin, Laura Kasischke, Larry Levis), adolescence—however exuberant, painful, or poorly spent—appears to hold an originary authenticity whose power over the imagination adulthood can never match. For others (Allen Ginsberg in some lights, Brooks at some points), adolescence is less the past than the future, its generativity associated not with nostalgia but with fresh ideas and forces capable of reshaping the world. For still others, the challenge is to see how the pastoral and the revolutionary intertwine, either in relative success (Williams, Thom Gunn) or in partial or total failure (Lowell, Basil Bunting). Burt identifies a second important constant in poets' tendency to play with senses of ending as they seek formal equivalents for adolescence's unresolvedness—identifies, that is, a recurrent “conflict between completion and incompletion, between closure and resistance to closure, in the forms of poems as in the adolescent life course” (212). In a few instances, he hazards that the question of adolescence may have had a surprisingly potent role in formal decisions governing a poet's whole oeuvre. “What if,” he asks, “the resistance to narrative time Graham so often depicts derives from a resistance to ways of ‘being-seen,’ to ways of becoming a woman?” (153).This is an intriguing claim, and one wishes there were more like it in The Forms of Youth. For if there is any cause for disappointment in this acute, handsomely written study, it comes on the score of its arguments' power and reach. Claims that startle with their wiliness—ideas that carry the zing of the counterintuitive or the pop of the polemical—are less frequent than might be expected, and one feels as though Burt has passed up some fine chances to clarify the project's intellectual urgency. In a tantalizing, too-brief early section, he draws on diverse sources from the second and third decades of the last century (Randolph Bourne, the Futurists, The Dial, Others, the short-lived journal Youth: Poetry of Today, and many more) to illuminate the pervasiveness of the age's rage to identify the new young with a new art. Given that these years arguably installed many of the paradigms under which we continue to think about poems, Burt might well have pressed the point that early twentieth-century perceptions of youth are genealogically crucial to our understanding of poetry even where that phase of life is scarcely visible as theme.Another missed opportunity for more bracing argument would seem to inhere in Burt's simple willingness to take the poetry of teenagerhood seriously. My impression on reading the most heavily teen-focused verse he quotes was that it is fairly weak stuff, but I was ready to be convinced that such a reaction bespeaks a need for us to rethink our habits of evaluation instead of an essential flimsiness in the work. Because Burt does not explicitly take or reject such a position, however, I often wondered whether his silence on the merits of a given poem proceeded from an assumption that mere inclusion would signal regard or, on the contrary, from a reluctance to disparage a text that had proven thematically useful. This reticence becomes particularly noteworthy at the close of the book, when Burt discusses contemporary poems and poets who treat adulthood as “the state in and for which poetry…seems to have no value any more” (211). As he helpfully points out, numerous sociologists and other experts have perceived a worrisome resistance to maturity permeating twenty-first-century adult life, which might suggest that a poetry celebrating infinitely extended adolescence is complicit with damaging social trends. Burt does not pursue this question, however, and the book ends in the register of (studied or unstudied) neutrality it has maintained throughout.Indeed one of the most striking features of The Forms of Youth is a tonal placidity or benignity that can feel almost genteel. The study's note is not the fiery unrest of adolescence but the poise of a certain kind of adulthood—open-minded about the caprices of the young, but also clear-eyed and pin straight in its own bearing, oddly emblematized by those moments when Burt hastens to mark his distance from aspects of sexuality that remain nonnormative even in academic discourse. (Queerness settles in here quite comfortably, but not so desire for the underaged: Burt observes cautiously that we may find “disturbing” Bunting's “continuing interest” in the girl he loved when he and she were still prepubescent [80], notes how the “predatory sixth-former” in Larkin's Trouble at Willow Gables “expresses views that now might attract police” [58], and describes some contributors to the magazine Others as writing “amorous verses to alarmingly young girls” [25].) There are moments, even, when it seems that the tutelary spiritof the book is the midcentury poet Phyllis McGinley, whom Burt would like to restore to critical attention but whose work as sampled here (“No outcast dungarees / Over this season's round and scarless knees, / No soft departures from the veering norm” [88]) evoked for me some hybrid between the wearily with-it parents in Lolita and Pale Fire's technically proficient, meditatively empathetic, emphatically uncool John Shade.Strange to say about a scholarly book, then, but The Forms of Youth could really have been longer. More ambitious arguments and a more robust account of its topic's claim on our attention would clearly have been to the good, and yet there is little that could have been excised from this study without loss. One of its irreplaceable merits is that it treats such an impressive range of poets (testimony to its author's command of an immense poetic terrain), and one would not want to sacrifice any of Burt's lucid, lovely readings of individual texts or his economical digests of the extrapoetic history of adolescence. In other words, there is a sense in which The Forms of Youth is like youth after all. However lively or languorous in the experiencing, it seems, once ended, to have gone by too fast—and to have teased with glimpses of one or two treasures it does not, in the end, yield up. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 3February 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/659001 Views: 250Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article." @default.
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