On January 27, 1302, when Dante stopped in Siena, on his way home to his native Florence from a political mission, he learned the bad news that his party had been betrayed, the government overthrown, and he himself banished for life upon penalty of death. Though for several years he had been at the center of political life, he now began the life of an exile in Milan, Verona, Ravenna (where he is buried), and other towns, and was never to return. During the next few years he could not accept this turn of events, and even to his last days was plagued by a nostalgia for his home and the bitterness of his party’s defeat. For a while it seems that his brother joined him, and towards the end it seems that his children did, though apparently his wife never did: it was indeed a life lived on the periphery, the margins, of all he loved.

Allegorical Portrait of Dante, c. 1530
(Oil on wood, 127 x 120 cm)
BY Agnolo Bronzino
National Gallery of Art, Washington

For several years he wrote treatises and some canzone, and then he began his great work, The Divine Comedy, which can be read as a poetic structuring of his wandering life, a gradual informing of his life with purpose and direction. Indeed, he begins: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrova per una selva oscursa” (“Midway on our life’s journey / I found myself within a dark wood”). He accepts as his guide not the popular writers of his day, but Virgil, who leads him out of the dark wood at the very periphery of physical, political and spiritual life, and who finally gives Dante the direction he needed to construct in poetry a world to replace the one he lost and at the same time to savagely satirize his political enemies whom he places grotesquely among the fires of hell for all time. In a sense, he makes a new center of his marginalized situation. “We ourselves and our things come and go, pass and return; nothing belongs to us which does not become alien to us; all things alive eventually become our own,” writes Dante’s near contemporary, Girordano Bruno in Teleology of Heaven and Earth. And Bruno, the scientist burnt at the stake for suggesting the ultimate in peripheral thinking — life on another planet — serves as a reminder to us of how high the stakes are in establishing a periphery, and how alienated this makes the individual thinker.

This double motion, building a new center at the periphery and finding a way to poetically deal with whatever power structure keeps one at the periphery, provides a paradigmatic definition for what we might call the disenfranchised or marginalized writer. And certainly the exiled Dante serves well as the paradigmatic poet of the periphery. And yet what Dante learns in the Commedia, especially through his experiences with the follies of the cheats, gossips and political and literary panderers of his day, is that the poet’s proper place is not in the center but on the circumference. … freedom is at the essence of poetry in every respect, but it is a freedom, as Wallace Stevens says, which pushes against ‘the pressure of reality,’ that fights against the central forces in a society. It is a lesson he might well have learned from many writers before him — writers like Ovid, for example, banished to the Black Sea by the Roman emperor, or like Virgil himself, who was constantly worried about his status under Augustus. This is not to suggest that the poet should, by some grand sacrificial gesture, ostracize himself or herself, or should delight in a life lived on the periphery, but rather to suggest that most good poetry is in fact written from the point of view of an outsider, and that it is the task of the writer to locate him or herself at such a periphery. Certainly, freedom is at the essence of poetry in every respect, but it is a freedom, as Wallace Stevens says, which pushes against “the pressure of reality,” that fights against the central forces in a society. In fact, even Stevens was highly secretive about his own work, and first published, like Williams and Pound, in small, marginal presses. And it is for this reason that so many American writers, the so-called “Lost Generation” of the twenties, for example, and writers like Richard Wright and James Baldwin in the fifties went to France to distance themselves from the center of American literary life, to live their literary careers at some margin. Similar motives certainly played a part in the Beat movement of the fifties and for the language poets of today.

Of course, for writers like Dante, banishment or marginalization is not a choice, but subsequently taking one’s poetic stance on the periphery is. Take the case of John Clare. The enclosure act of 1832 literally destroyed his way of life, tearing up trees, damming brooks, fencing off lands in what had been for him an Edenic nature. As a poor migrant worker, he was literally fenced out of a livelihood. As the “Northhamptonshire peasant Poet,” as he came to be known, he worked in nearly total oblivion, his work was damned and ridiculed until very recently, and he became as isolated as his beloved villages, finally going mad in his later years. Literally and poetically on the periphery, he nonetheless created in his poems the ideal central world, a vision that acknowledged the oppressive forces yet transcended them. Literally and poetically on the periphery, he nonetheless created in his poems the ideal central world, a vision that acknowledged the oppressive forces yet transcended them. So many of his poems deal with creating centers on the far circumference, and many of these deal with various animals who become emblems for Clare’s own oppressed life: the fox who escapes a shepherd and dog by retreating to a far den, the elusive hedgehog, the numerous poems about protective nests, and even in his journals the sense of the asylum as its own central world. Even one of his more anthologized poems, the badger, describes in the end how the animal, even when half-domesticated and so displaced from its natural habitat, will retreat when pressed, “And runs away from the noise in hollow trees / Burnt by the boys to get a swarm of bees.” It is precisely because Clare’s voice speaks to us from the margins, speaks to a center from the circumference, that it is so unique, offering us an incredibly accurate picture of the breakdown of rural society and values that, say, Wordsworth’s sublime visions often overlook. Self-educated, he made a poetic tradition and a uniquely powerful voice for truth that would have been impossible had he taken the usual paths for a poet of his day.

This is the basis of a worry among Central European poets today, now that so many of the repressive regimes have fallen, because resistance to them was a motivating factor among writers and readers. This worry takes the form of a question: what is left to write against and about, and for whom? The question does not mean to suggest that all writing was or should be political, but that the expression of an individual, to be an individual expression, must run counter to an official party line — whether that party is political, moral, sociological, racial or any of the many categories that seem to try to govern our lives.

What these poets are discovering is that the party line is not just the communist party line, but now the party line of capitalism that now brings with it a materialism which must be countered with an even more spiritualist, or transcendental perspective than was taken against the so-called people’s parties. These poets have always seen the poet as an outsider, as marginalized, as or disenfranchised in some way, and regarded poetry as a means of gaining some center for the self. In fact, the underlying premise might be that unless the poet is writing directly or indirectly against the gain of some power structure, the writing will wither and die: to do anything else is to become part of the power structure or problem. Here is a poem by the Bulgarian poet, Blaga Dimitrova, entitled “Bulgarian Woman From The Old Days”:^[1]

The woman’s action is a kind of making do, a kind of nest building reminiscent of the nests of Clare, but here Dimitrova warns against this gesture, and indeed every such poetic gesture has its own “traps.” The difficulty is that the woman has let her narrow concern with the everyday overshadow the larger political threat from the totalitarian communist state. In short, the old woman’s nest building, without a reference to any center of power, is insufficient. The quotidian images and objects, seemingly innocent clothes and laundry, become redefined here as threats; in Dimitrova’s vision these everyday objects must be reexamined. Indeed the state itself wants to confine the citizen’s concerns to the realm of laundry, and in the post-communist era the capitalist society would also like to confine the citizen’s concerns to such material nestings. The poet, for Dimitrova, as for so many Central European poets, must remake the symbols and images of the day that the political or economic or social censors have attempted to control.

Let us also take a look at the work of an American poet, Ethridge Knight. In his poem, “The Warden Said to Me,” he is asked why the Black prisoners do not run off, and he answers, “Well, suh, / I ain’t for sure, but I reckon it’s cause / We ain’t got no wheres to run to.” For Knight, this sense of displacement and being shut out becomes the essence of his poetics much like Clare’s and Dante’s. Here is “Prison Graveyard”:^[2]

Though seemingly walled in, deprived of a future, the west of the setting sun, though deprived of their hymns, their poetry, the spirits nonetheless transcend their lot through an association with the forces of darkness which, in the poem’s context, become forces of light and freedom. And the poem’s strategy, by resorting to what used to be called the via negativa, the negative way, is to list the very things it does not have, that it desires, and so, at least in terms of the poem, to possess them, to possess their words.

In these four poets, we have four basic predicaments of the outsider: the political and personal exile of Dante; the social and poetic exclusion of Clare; the racial repression of Knight; the political censorship faced by Dimitrova. And we also have four paradigmatic techniques for writing in the margins: Dante’s satiric dismissal of the center and inward journey to his own marginal paradise; Clare’s creation of secure nests for his imagination; Knight’s imaginative appropriation of the lost world; Dimitrova’s redefinition of poetic language and image. These four situations and the solutions the poets find for them are essential for understanding a possible role of the poet in our world today. We can further understand the vision of the periphery by examining how other poets in various times and places have both found themselves in and have established peripheral positions and how they have dealt with them.

For Blake, the essential stance of the poet is also that of the prophet — an outsider, an observer marginalized by the forces around him, a writer on the periphery, a Jeremiah or a Daniel.

One of the most obvious choices is the great Romantic poet, William Blake.^[3] “I must Create a System or be enslav’d by another man’s,” he writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. For Blake, the essential stance of the poet is also that of the prophet — an outsider, an observer marginalized by the forces around him, a writer on the periphery, a Jeremiah or a Daniel. So it is no surprise that we find him in this book “walking among the fires of hell” or dining with Isaiah and Ezekiel, satirizing the rest of mankind for not living up to its potential, for confining itself to the five senses rather than using the imagination. Blake sets himself apart from society, though he does so in a vision that is always dialectic, always questioning itself. “Without Contraries is no progression,” he says early on. And yet for Blake, the contraries are themselves always being deconstructed: heaven and hell are the opposite of what we imagine them to be, but Blake’s aim is not to destroy one at the expense of the other, rather to see each as necessary for the other, and to have their relationships constantly shifting or progressing. Along the way, he champions the power of the individual: “One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression,” he writes. Such a dialectic play of contraries is meant to fight against a rigid world view, against a rigid ethics that does not question itself, against the “mind forg’d manacles” he criticizes in “London.” “Expect poison from standing water” he says in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

At the same time he positions himself as a marginalized outsider, he does not attempt to cut himself off from the world; to have a dialectic vision is, after all, to engage the world. A prophet who speaks only to the saved speaks to no one but himself or herself. But he does so by means of an imaginative embrace that looks forward to the expansive and embracing visions of Whitman. We can see this in some of the proverbs of hell that form the center of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and begin to radiate outward to embrace the world: “The most sublime act is to set another before you,” “One thought fills immensity.” So it is not surprising to find Blake saying in a few pages later, “All deities reside in the human breast.” By now the marriage has been consummated and blessed by imagination so that the book can end with the line, “For every thing that lives is Holy.” This is an astounding turnaround: a book that begins with a radical challenge to accepted belief, with a combative desire to take on the central power structure, ends up by creating its own inner harmony, its own world, from which it can embrace everything, including what it once criticized. The margin has been transformed into a center.

This is an astounding turnaround:
a book that begins with a radical challenge to accepted belief, with a combative desire to take on the central power structure, ends up creating its own inner harmony, its own world, from which it can embrace everything, including what it once criticized. The margin has been transformed into a center.

Blake’s poetic move is an heroic one, and we see similar strategies from the brief Songs of Innocence and Experience all the way to his epic, Jerusalem, where the characters who have been marginalized by the narrator suddenly realize it is their responsibility to form a center before the poem ends. It is based upon a certain freedom the periphery gives the speaker. It is a freedom manifest in the sudden shifts in tone, the unexpectedness of the book where almost anything can happen next, from walking among the fires of hell to dispelling imaginary monsters. It is a freedom that produces “The Proverbs of Hell” — a free verse poem that seems discontinuous on the surface, but in fact keeps progressing to more radical deconstructions of contemporary modes of thought: “What is now proved was once only imagined,” he states. Poetically, it is a freedom the narrator has because he situates himself in the wilderness, like the prophet Rintrah in the opening lyric of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Sociologically, it is the freedom Blake has because he is not caught up in the politics of poetry of his day: his copies sold a scant few books, mostly in the tens or dozens, and he was looked upon by all in the so-called poetic establishment — except for Coleridge — as either insane or inconsequential. He was, for instance, no Robert Southey, the poet laureate who wrote an epic a year and was far better known and a far more popular writer than, say, Keats, or Coleridge, but who is today long forgotten except as the object of Byron’s great satire in The Vision of Judgement.

Of course, Blake was not the only poet of his day to understand that the only legitimate role of the poet was on the periphery. This Romantic dialectic of periphery and center is defined succinctly by Schelling in Of Human Freedom, “Self-will may seek to be, as a particular will, that which it is only in its identity with the universal will. It may seek to be at the periphery that which it is only insofar as it remains at the center (just as the quiet will in the calm of the depths of nature is also universal precisely because it stays in the depths).”^[4] And William Wordsworth, for example, in “Lines Composed a few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” remembers how alienated and maginalized from his family, nature, the whole world he felt in his childhood until he remembers

It is imagination, once again, that embraces the “all,” that brings the poet from the periphery to a new center constructed from that very periphery, constructed from a sense of absence, loss, and deprivation. It is a center that he can project into the future for his sister to whom the poem is addressed.

In fact, his sister, Dorothy, though not a poet, was herself an outsider to the male-dominated poetry world of the time; she left an extraordinary journal comprised of entries that should be called prose poems. In a way, being on the periphery allowed her a sense of freedom that led to her unique text. If we look at her entry of October 3, 1800, we find the basis for Wordsworth’s poem, “Resolution and Independence.” We should note here that Wordsworth used many of his sister’s observations in his poems, often having her read them to him in order to recall particulars of scenes. This is Dorothy’s strength while William’s concern was with the transcendental, the horizons, the big picture, a concern that sometimes led to pomposity, and which in fact he mildly satirizes in “Resolution and Independence.” Dorothy’s account of the incident with the leech gatherer which forms the basis for Wordsworth’s poem shows us the poor man in all his particulars: we see the picture of the individual we miss in Wordsworth (a fact Wordsworth himself satirizes when he shows how it takes him three glances to recognize the man not as a monster or a rock, but merely as a man). Dorothy, after describing the man, his occupation, the economic hardships, ends her account with these three sentences:

Everything here contributes perfectly to the final effect. Within an almost casual observer’s style the poem runs a whole gamut of emotions. The first sentence is really four short sentences fused together with a minimum of punctuation, the effect being an intensification of the feeling. There is a sense of almost overwhelming and relentless agony, moving from simply “hurt” to the fractured skull. Then the second sentence pulls back from the idea of pain momentarily before revealing its magnitude; one senses an almost stoical heroism on the part of the man. Finally, in the third sentence, a somber and melancholy tone is counterbalanced by the mention of the last bit of light that holds on, like the last bit of life in this old man. The last sentence becomes an emblem for the whole scene. By focusing on the simple descriptive powers of language, on her own world at the periphery of Romantic literature, she ironically achieves an effect as transcendent as William’s, and at least as memorable. It is only on that periphery, away from the influences of Wordsworth, Coleridge and their circle, that she can thrive. In essence, she has taken an out-of-the-way experience and transformed it into an heroic vision. Schiller, the German Romantic critic, in On The Aesthetic Education seems to define Dorothy’s strength: “The person must therefore be its own ground, for the enduring cannot issue from alteration; and so we have in the first place the idea of absolute being grounded in itself; that is to say of freedom.”

We might also consider the case of Coleridge, who in his “Eolian Harp” transforms that simple, peripheral image into a central one for understanding the transcendent nature of reality that transcends the static religion the poem confronts. Or his “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison” where, having injured his leg, he sits detached from his friends, including Charles Lamb, who have gone off to explore the countryside, leaving him alone and isolated. He begins: “Well, they are gone, and here must I remain, / This lime-tree bower my prison!” But instead of simply lamenting his situation at the margin, he imagines what their sojourn must be like, imagining, from his memory of the area, where they must be, how they must approach a bower like his with a similar tree — an image that begins to link the two places:

The imaginative bridge is the sense of unity between the place where he is imprisoned and the place where the friends probably arrive. But the aim of the poem is not simply to notice two centers, or a center and a periphery; rather, in the typical way the Romantics had of making the poem enact within its dynamics its very theme, the poem begins to expand the horizons available to Charles as it has Coleridge’s. The scene thus shifts to a “wide landscape” where Coleridge recalls how Charles has escaped the confines of London for the open spaces of the country so that Charles can view a whole panorama, can, as Coleridge says, “stand as I have stood,” experience what Coleridge now does imaginatively. At this point in the poem, both Charles and Coleridge remain at centers for which the other is at the circumference. The final resolution of the poem occurs when Coleridge sees a rook fly over, imagines it heading towards Charles, blesses it, and then, in a gesture of inclusiveness reminiscent of the end of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, embraces everything, making all that can be seen or imagined both center and circumference:

As in Blake, the periphery and the center become interchangeable. The emotional power of the poem comes from this imaginative leap, a leap that would have been impossible without the detachment, the peripheral vision, as it were, of the narrator. This dialectic progression forms the basis for what we call Romantic melancholy as further defined by Keats; as he lies in his hammock in “Ode to a Nightingale,” he imaginatively follows the bird over several ridges, ranging farther and farther towards a periphery, until he has formed a new center beyond space and time, in a realm where it is uncertain whether he even wakes or sleeps. And we might note that Keats, too, lived the life of an outsider, making the stance in his poems more natural, for he was cut off by his deadly disease, by the reviewers who savaged him mercilessly, and even geographically by his trip to Rome in a useless attempt to regain his health.

The point is not simply that the Romantics considered themselves outsiders, though they did… and the point is not that they found ways to transform the peripheral into the central… The point is that these two things are true of the best poetry in any age.

The point is not simply that the Romantics considered themselves outsiders, though they did, and some, especially Shelley and Byron, had the reputations of being moral and political degenerates who were ostracized by the poetic power structures of their day, though Byron enjoyed immense popularity; and the point is not that they found ways to transform the peripheral into the central, though they did, often by discovering the sublime and the transcendental in the everyday and the commonplace as Wordsworth does in talking about a pile of stones or the fall of an acorn. The point is that these two things are true of the best poetry in any age. Take, for example, Wyatt’s stance in his great satire, “Myn owne John Poynz” (#196). Wyatt is writing to his friend about leaving the Spanish court. Wyatt, we must remember, was nearly always in trouble at court, at least from the time he revealed having an affair with one of King Henry the VIII’s future wives, and was jailed several times. Though he was not hung like his contemporary, Surrey, and enjoyed some important political offices, his position at court was always on the margin. To his credit, he had an honest appraisal of it, and as we see in this poem, he was trying to escape “the presse of courtes wher soo they goo.”

Wyatt’s strategy is not the gradual dialectic of the Romantics, but a more direct satire meant to clear a space from which a new center can be built. The poem is structured basically by a series of negatives and denials, by mentioning what he won’t do or say at court: “I cannot frame me tune to fayne, / To cloke the trothe for praisse withowt desart, / Of them that lyst all vice for to retayne.” It is a stance, then, taken at the periphery, and a stance taken at some considerable cost because he cannot “holld my pece of them allthoo I smart.” At one point, in rather famous lines, he refers to his own poetry, considered a bit rough in relation to other poetry of the day, and really only recently fully appreciated, for he writes by his own metrical formulas:

The poem continues with its indictment of every aspect of the pandering court life and climaxes in one of the great lines of denial in English poetry: “I cannot, I, No, no, it will not be.” However, once he has established his independent position on the periphery, away from the center of court life, he can then embrace his friend, Poynz, from a newly imagined center which ends the poem:

Two centuries later, Alexander Pope, a 4’11” hunchback in an age of surface beauty, a Catholic in the middle of Protestant England, a recluse who spent most of his time in his grot he had artificially decorated with colored stones and glass, would enhance Wyatt’s satiric strain. Pope begins his “Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot” by begging his servant to shut the doors against the panderers and influence peddlers of poets so common in his day:

This act of closing himself off from the politics of poetry sets the stage for the long satire of the poetry and ethical values — two things he sees as interrelated — of the day. Pope obviously feels himself to be a target, as he says a little later in the poem: “Poor Cornus sees his frantic Wife elope, / And curses Wit, and Poetry and Pope.” The cost of his estrangement — he had, despite his reputation as a writer, some considerable difficulty among the publishers, and even more among the reviewers — is evident a third of the way through the poem. “Why did I write?” he asks: “The Muse but serv’d to ease some Friend, not Wife, / To help me thro’ this long Disease, my Life.” As he continues to criticize the “jealous,” the “scornful,” those who “Damn with faint praise,” he also continues to distance himself from their world: “I sought no homage from the Race that write: / I kept, like Asian Monarchs, from their sight.”

Like Wyatt, Pope, having distanced himself from the powerful evils of his time, begins the process of building and embracing. Unlike Wyatt, however, his solution is not only personal but an attempt to create a universal truth, an archetypal center. He does this by opposing a theophrastic villain against Arbuthnot who becomes the model for the good life. The villain is called Sporus:

The linking of the idea of false speech in everyday life and the Eden story suggests how dangerous and unethical Pope feels the empty and florid writers of his day have become. It is important to remember that Pope’s couplets set up a dialectical relationship of opposites: the second half of a couplet often brings a surprise or a qualification, or an opposition, and in some cases the second half of a line performs this task. In other words, the couplet pairs opposites to compare and contrast: thus the form of the whole poem behaves somewhat like a couplet. In fact, the portrait of Sporus allows Pope to move to his opposite, Arbuthnot, the moral individual who has shunned the evils of the London social and literary scene: “Un-learn’d, he knew no Schoolman’s subtle Art, / No Language, but the Language of the Heart.” Pope then extends this care for Arbuthnot first to the small center of his own family, then to a political and cosmic dimension, though still centering himself at the same peripheral position of detachment from the political and poetic world:

It is worthy a note that the political dimension enters the margin here only as a simile, a comparison from the periphery to the center, that the end of the poem becomes a prayer, as we have seen in William Wordsworth, and that the expanding center is one of the imagination — an idyllic hope.

The Cuban poet, Herbert Padilla, describes this process in “Cuban Poets Do Not Sleep Anymore,”^[6] where poets first attempt to turn away from the world, enter their own imaginative nests, but finally are forced to “turn round” towards society’s center:

The key for Padilla is that the poet on the periphery, while not really entering society yet cannot remain simply “alone,” for, literally overwhelmed by the world’s horrors, they must be accurate witnesses to the injustices and wars of our day, “must look and look and look.” The marginalized poet as witness is a role that is adapted by a number of poets such as Claribel Alegría, a Salvadoran poet born in Nicaragua living on the margins of a world created by the oppressive government in Salvador and by American intervention in the entire area.

For her, even meeting a woman described in the poem, “Bus Stop,” as disenfranchised as she herself is, is an occasion to expand her own center through a series of accurate observations until she can exclaim at the end of the poem: “I’ll take your smile with me / the love in your eyes / that redeems me.”

A poet like Irina Ratushinskaya, jailed for several years in the Soviet Union, not only witnesses the evils around her but tries to find at the periphery some moment of beauty, however fleeting. In “I Will Live and Survive,” written in 1983 in a labor camp hospital, she describes how she was beaten, and frozen, as well as the tortures, the feeble attempts at cheering jokes, the utter isolation, the betrayals. Yet one image stands out:^[7]

A more tragic witness is the great Spanish poet, Miguel Hernández. A self-educated shepherd from a small town in eastern Spain, his poems are filled with unexpected images, sudden turns, violent shifts in tone, layers of context, poems that refuse, by their very nature, any static emotional center. At the same time the poems, especially those from the Spanish Civil War, are driving and relentless. Born in 1910, he died only 32 years later, after having been arrested by Franco’s “Civil Guard,” the same thugs who killed another poet of the periphery for his politics and sexual orientation, Federico García Lorca. As a further measure of Hernández’ estrangement, his wife’s father was a member of that guard that arrested him; he spent the last three years of his life in jail where he finally died of tuberculosis. His “Opening Poem”^[8] suggests how he feels the world as a whole, even nature, has ostracized mankind:

Cut off from the natural world around him, the pastoral world he knew as a boy now savaged by war and injustice, the poet at first becomes part of it, becomes metamorphically an animal:

This oxymoronic vision of pain in love recalls Keats somewhat, and indeed his poems are filled with images of thrashing black wings, thorns, anvils, stalactites, icy archangels, thorns, a womb-like, a drum and the like. So far has the world been disrupted, so far has the poet been shoved to the periphery, that he must gather all the threatening images and reorder them in an unending attempt to start over. He says in an article on Neruda:^[9]

I am sick of so much pure and minor art. I like the disordered and chaotic confusion of the Bible, where I see spectacular events, disasters, misfortunes, worlds turned over, and I hear outcries and explosions of blood. I don’t care for the tiny voice that goes into an ecstasy at the sight of a poplar, that fires off four little lines and thinks that now everything has been accomplished in poetry.

For Hernández, then, the role of the poet, recalls the drastic remaking of poetry achieved by the surrealists, and by the unpredictable and wild poetry César Vallejo, exiled from his native Peru, wandering Europe.

For Vallejo, in fact, the poet is marginalized even from himself: “Chances are, I am another, walking, at dawn, another who moves / around a long disc, an elastic disc.” Vallejo, in a sense always sees himself as proleptically dead, as Emily Dickinson did several decades earlier, allowing himself an almost mythic perspective at once far removed from the mundane, and yet dealing with its images in an intimate way — a poetry of vascillation. He even forecasts accurately his own death in Paris in the rain years before it happened — and he ends “Chances Are” with “posthumous suspicions, / this index, this bed, these tickets.” Even the last line moves violently from circumference (the list of things in the poem working against him, an index, and also the “index” of banned books) to the center where he finds himself in a bed, to the tickets which will take him away, to a place where “beyond there is nothing.”

A similar self-estrangement occurs in the the poetry of the Pakistani, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (1911-1984), imprisoned three times for his resistance to an oppressive British government. His poem, “My Visitors,”^[10] begins by listing the visitors to his door — nostalgic evening, brokenhearted midnight, a torturous morning, a searing noon; time itself, in other words. The realities of the oppressive world knock at the center where he should be. But Faiz has already constructed a mythical world like Hernández, as distant as that of Vallejo, for he ends the poem:

Here the poet has deliberately chosen a periphery to escape the sorrows and injustices of everyday Pakistani life, and the “home” now seems something different than the “house” where time knocks, a place removed, detached, beyond the horizon. The periphery becomes an ethical choice, but whose makeup, beyond the horizon and reach of the center, is necessitated by political oppression, by “fears, questionings, forebodings.”

An even more mythic solution to the need to escape the center is given by the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish:^[11]

Oppressed by Israeli governments who refuse the Palestinian dream of a homeland, his people literally marginalized to the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Darwish’s vision is to see an invisible parallel world living coincidently with the visible Jewish homeland of the Song of Songs. It is a world made of love and tears, a mythic world of an invisible circumference which cuts directly across the powerful and oppressive center. The strategy here is to counterpoint the physical and the spiritual, to allow a victory to the physical and an ultimate triumph to the spiritual. Ironically, then, the Palestinian poet takes on the role of an Old Testament prophet, and the poem is a subtle prophecy for the ultimate failure of the transient and the physical which is equated with the oppressive Israeli state.

We find in the poetry of Marina Tsvetaeva a similar desire to build not an invisible world of the heart, but an unspoken world. Oppressed by the Soviet government, she was first abandoned to starve in Moscow by her husband who was off fighting the Bolsheviks, then she followed her husband into exile in Prague and Paris. In Paris, he eventually turned sides by betraying both her and other exiles, resulting in her ostracization by other Russians. She finally returned to Russia in despair and eventually committed suicide. Her poems transform the harsh realities of her life into exquisite and complex lyrics that acknowledge and transcend the pain and longing. For Tsvetaeva the unspoken world of the heart is not an escape, but a means of telling the truth, of establishing the self, and it is a world that must be implied by the metaphoric structure of the poem. Even in one of her early, pre-revolution poems, perhaps addressed to her husband, we see this poetic gesture:^[12]

The secret world here — her only real contact in the second half of her life with other writers was through the uncertain mails — is what lies beyond the words of the letters, and indeed, of the poems. Tsvetaeva is the master of the unspoken, the implied, the metaphoric.

In this technique of the unspoken, she resembles Emily Dickinson, who wrote to Higginson: “My business is circumference.”^[13] We must remember that she lived in a society where women’s poetry was relegated to the realm of the domestic and the emotional, rather than the cosmic and intelligent, and where even her own father thought of her as rather unimportant in relation to her brothers. This was a society in which Hawthorne, for example, expressed dismay and apprehension at the rise of many women writers; granted, these women writers were far inferior, but that was mostly a product of the social structure and poetic hierarchy that dictated that they should write an overly sentimental poetry about everyday objects. Dickinson’s solution to finding herself already on one periphery because of her sex was to deliberately establish herself on the margins of two other value systems of the day, the religious and the stylistic, as her letters show, for this was also a society that expected a religiously symbolic literature and a Latinate style. Early on she gave up church going and began criticizing the Calvinist and Miltonic god of the day which she pictured as detached, invisible, uncaring; and she situated herself deliberately on a stylistic periphery with her creative play with the strict eight/six meter of the popular hymnals, as well as her off-rhymes, half-rhymes, dashes, and quick turns of thought. Now, fully at the edges of poetic and everyday life, secluded in her house in Amherst, she began her ironic attack on the center, for it is her incredible sense of irony and comedy that so distinguishes her poetry. Perhaps this withdrawal is also related to why Dickinson herself seemed in her letters and meetings with Higginson to present a persona who cared little for publication. As she says in one poem,

And she ends the poem after playfully taking on the roles of charioteer and emperor closing her lids “like stone.” What she closes herself off from is one part of society and poetry, so that she can “select” quite another.

In her excellent study of Dickinson,^[14] Cynthia Griffin Wolff describes three ironic voices Dickinson uses in her attack. The first is the voice of the child, reminiscent of Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience, which produces an ironic questioning. “Do People moulder equally, / They bury, in the Grave?” she begins one poem, only to suggest an ironically naive view at the end that God has said “Death was dead.” Behind the poem, though, is the woman’s experience of death by disease, by childbirth, by wilting age, which gives the lie, from the child’s perspective to god’s words: there is a sense that he has abandoned the world, that there is no controlling center. The second voice is that of the “wife,” a figurative way of dealing with the position of the woman in society. For example, in #199, she begins

She goes on to lament here is the “soft Eclipse” that a “Girl’s life” suffers as “wife” before she becomes “woman.”

What is unique about the strategy of the poem in sociological and poetic terms is that the wife or woman is not defined in terms of a husband, and no male figure, save the metaphor of the Czar usurped by the speaker, ever enters the poem: the perspective stays securely at the margin, eshewing any further comparisons, defining womanhood entirely in terms of the margin which has now become, in essence a new center, a new relationship with the self, from which the two commands, orders that end the poem, can be given.

The third voice is in many ways the most important for it includes elements of the first two, an utter openness to experience and a reaching beyond accepted boundaries. Given her predicament by gender and religion, she projects herself as dead in a number of poems, and speaks from the furthest circumference we know, from beyond the grave. She also challenges the central function given to Poe who equated Death and Beauty in a way that seemed as perverse to Dickinson as the Calvinist equation of Death and Life. One of her landmark poems in this voice is #465:

The self is gradually disintegrated here, the synechdotal eyes and breaths of onlookers seem oppressive, and by the third stanza the “I” has become little more than a legal function. The most important function for the poet is be the observer at the moment of death, from the perspective of the other side, to reveal to us if whether our beliefs are true. This is the reason sight — as we saw earlier in Padilla — becomes so important, and a loss of which is the sure sign of death as we know it. And yet one great discovery is made with the last bit of sight — and reported from the far horizon. It has to do with the image of the “King.” Is it merely death? The last pulse of life? God? It is all three of these, and ironically, almost sacrilegiously, its onset comes with the fly, the insignificant but annoying insect that is at once a reminder of death and a reminder that there is still life in the observer, that something goes on, and in either case the image suggests that the King, the Calvinist, repressive god perhaps, is something like a fly. The weapons here are her hallmark irony and ambiguity in a poem that would be impossible for a man or woman within the power centers of Amherst.

The poet as outsider, then, as peripheral figure, has a number of strategies to deploy. Building upon the paradigmatic gestures in the poetry of Dante, Clare, Knight and Dimitrova — satire, nest building, appropriation of a lost center, redefinitions of terms — each poet, as marginalized figure, deals with her or his situation differently. It might be useful to recall for a moment Blake’s satiric, aphoristic style, discontinuously interrupting a central static theme in order to reformulate a a new vision; William Wordsworth’s use of memory to recall a lost center and imagine a new one; Dorothy’s intense function on the now that makes the distant familiar; Coleridge’s expanding periphery that makes circumference and center simultaneous; Wyatt’s building of a nest against the court; Pope’s expansion of the nest idea to a transcendent form of love; Ratushinskaya’s creation of centers of singular beauty at the desolate edges of the world; Hernández’s nearly surreal use of the unexpected to create a mythology for the isolated self; Vallejo’s mythic projections from the periphery; Faiz’ further projections of the horizon beyond the savage reaches of time; Darwish’s invisible center within an all too tangible periphery; the secret world Tsvetaeva creates in her isolated circumstances; Dickinson’s subtle undercutting of the male establishment and the breaking of barriers imposed by Calvinist Amherst through a variety of voices that extend the periphery beyond life itself… And of course, we could have mentioned many more poets who were forced to the periphery: exiles like the Greek poets Ritsos and Seferis, the imprisoned and harassed like the Russians Mandelshtam and Akhmatova, the Turkish Hikmet, or the Chilean Neruda. It is important to re-emphasize, however, that whatever periphery these poets found themselves on, they used these positions as dramatic forces and images in their poems. Indeed several, such as Dickinson, Pope, Hernández, Wyatt and Tsvetaveva, created further, other, peripheral positions, recognizing the importance of being somewhat disenfranchised by various central powers. We could well have explored Thomas McGrath’s return to the “cold, black North” in a self-imposed exile to write his great political poems, or Rexroth’s self exile in Santa Barbara to escape the poetry wars of his time. We should also remember Elizabeth Bishop’s travel to Brazil where she wrote her great, individual poems, and Jack Gilbert’s self-exile in Greece where he wrote his tightly compressed lyrics against the loosely expansive poetics of the beat generation. We should remember Rimbaud’s self-exile to escape the pandering literary scene, and the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu’s self-exile in Spain where he wrote in a forbidden language at the far edge of Spanish poetry. For all these poets, poetry was not an exercise, something learned in school and rewarded with prizes and books. It was a way of defining their lives running counter to the norm, the center, the prefabricated state, religious or social patterns.