Poet Marianne Moore, 81, threw out the first pitch at the opening of the 1968 baseball season at Yankee Stadium on April 10th, against the Los Angeles Angels. © Bettmann/CORBIS

Historian David Ward from the National Portrait Gallery last wrote about poetry for Women’s History Month

Baseball is a game of unpredictable actions occurring within strictly defined guidelines—innings, strikes and outs. It should be perfect for poetry. But there has yet to be a truly great poem about baseball. The desire to be serious is what kills most baseball poems—they’re all metaphor and have none of the spontaneous joy that went into, say, John Fogarty’s pop song “Center Field.”

Put me in coach, I’m ready to play.

“April is the cruelest month,” is one of the most famous lines in poetry, but it is one that only makes sense in the post-apocalyptic world of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” For the rest of us, clinging to hope, warm weather and the eternal prospect of new beginnings, April is not cruel at all, but welcomed. And in America, it’s welcomed because of baseball. Indeed baseball and spring, the meaning of one spills into the other in a mutually reinforcing bond of associations between the game and rebirth. It is the time when the white chill of snow is replaced by the diamond’s green growth of grass.

But this renewal is specific, even nationalistic, and uniquely American. Baseball speaks to the our country’s character and experience. In particular, the sport is rooted in special connection that Americans have with the land; an encounter with nature formed a particular type of person—and a particular type of democracy and culture.

This baseball was used in the 1937 Negro League East-West All-Star Game, played on August 8, 1937 at Comiskey Park in Chicago, Illinois. Buck Leonard (1907-1997), first baseman for the Homestead Grays, hit a home run to help the East win 7-2, keeping this baseball as a souvenir. Image courtesy of the American History Museum

The founding myth about baseball—that General Abner Doubleday “invented” the game in and around Cooperstown, New York, as an activity for his troops—is historically inaccurate, but satisfying nonetheless. Where better for baseball to have been created than in the sylvan woodlands of upstate New York, home of James Fenimore Cooper’s frontier heroes, Leatherstocking and Natty Bumppo? If Cooperstown is a myth, it is one that endures because the idea of America’s game being born out of the land confirms the specialness, not just of the game, but of the people the game represents. Yet it is impossible to disentangle baseball from its myths; and it seems uncanny that the first professional baseball game ever played actually occurred in urban Hoboken, New Jersey, at a place called “Elysian Fields,” Uncanny, because in Greek mythology, these are the fields where the gods and virtuous disported after they had passed on. Is this heaven?

Recall a certain magical ballfield built in Iowa cornfield, where the old time gods of baseball came out to play? The 1982 novel Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, later adapted into the 1989 film Field of Dreams, starring Kevin Costner, certainly paid homage to that Greek myth.

The virtuous and heroic in baseball is the subject of much non-fiction journalism of course, from beat writing to one of the greatest essays ever penned, John Updike’s eulogy to Ted Williams, “the best old hitter of the century.”  Inevitably it is also the subject of both literary fiction and poetry. Poetry is especially suited to expressing the mythic attractions of the game. And back when poetry was more a part of regular conversation, sportswriters and newspapermen used verse to comment on the game. In 1910, Franklin P. Adams penned his famous tribute to the Cubs’ double play combination, “Tinker to Evers to Chance/A trio of bear cubs fleeter then birds.” And probably the single most well-known poem is Ernest Thayer’s comic 1888 ballad of mighty “Casey at the Bat.” Fiction inevitably requires the author to get down and dirty in the rough and tumble of a difficult sport played (mostly) by young men, full of aggression and testosterone–not always a pretty sight.

But poetry creates just the right tone to convey the larger meaning of the game, if not always the game itself. There are not many poems from the participant’s point of view. With a poem comes the almost automatic assumption that the poet will see through the baseball game to something else, frequently the restoration of some lost unity or state of grace. Poetic baseball creates an elegy in which something lost can be either regained or at least properly mourned.

In 1910 the great sportswriter Grantland Rice made just that point in his “Game Called,” that as the players and the crowd exit the stadium: “But through the night there shines the light/home beyond the silent hill.”

Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox wore this batting helmet around 1970. “Yaz” played 23 seasons and 3,308 games for Boston, racking up more than 3,000 hits and 400 home runs. He cut away the right earpiece to hear more clearly. Image courtesy of the American History Museum

In his comic riff on sports, the comedian George Carlin croons that in baseball “you go home.” There are a lot of poems in which families re-connect, sometimes successfully, by watching baseball or by having fathers teach sons how to play.

For modernist poets—the heirs to Eliot—baseball was generally ignored because it was too associated with a romantic, or even sentimental, view of life. Modernism was nothing, but hard headed and it was difficult to find a place for games. William Carlos Williams, in his 1923 poem “The Crowd at the Ball Game,” delights in the game, precisely because it’s a time out from the hum-drum grind of daily work.

The crowd at the ball game
is moved uniformly
by a spirit of uselessness
which delights them

And this purposelessness has a point, “all to no end save beauty/the eternal.” Williams is mostly after the relationship between crowd and individual, the game is not really the thing.

The great Marianne Moore got something of a reputation in the popular press for actually being a fan of baseball, and in 1968 threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium (above). In fact she was often seen in stands, taking in a game and some of her poems reference bats and balls. She talked about creativity more expansively in “Baseball and Writing:”

Fanaticism? No. Writing is exciting
and baseball is like writing.
You can never tell with either
how it will go
or what you will do;
generating excitement

This gets closer to the flow experience of the game itself rather than just describing it but the poem then breaks down into a not very good roll-call of Yankee players from the early ‘60s. Baseball always crops up enough to make it interesting to see how poets have used it. May Swenson turned baseball into an amusing puzzle and word play game based on romance and courtship:

Bat waits
for ball
to mate.
Ball hates
to take bat’s
bait. Ball
flirts, bat’s
late, don’t
keep the date.

And at the end, inevitably, everyone heads home. The Beat Poet Gregory Corso has a typically hallucinatory encounter with Ted Williams “In the Dream of the Baseball Star” in which Williams unaccountably is unable to hit a single pitch and “The umpire dressed in strange attire/thundered his judgment: YOU’RE OUT!”

Fellow beat Lawrence Ferlinghetti invoked baseball to make a civil rights point.

Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
reading Ezra Pound,
and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders

You can sense in the shift from the game to Ezra Pound, the poet’s uneasiness with the game itself and his eagerness to move from the physical to the intellectual. When the body appears in a baseball poem it is the body of the aging poet, as in Donald Hall’s extended, very well done, but extremely depressing linkage of innings going by with aging—and death. Maybe baseball poems will always be troubled with an excess of seriousness; perhaps we’ve become too rooted in the mythology of baseball and character to treat it on its own terms. Alternate takes by African Americans, like Quincy Troupe’s “Poem for My Father” about the impact of the Negro leagues and the prowess of such players as Cool Papa Bell, give another angle on the tradition. Further such outsider views, especially from the point of view of women who are not either adoring spectators or “Baseball Annies”, would be welcome as well.

As with a new season, hope springs eternal not just that a new season is starting but that someday some poet will give baseball the kind of relaxed attention that does the sport justice. It really is remarkable that baseball, which occupies such a large part of our culture and history, remains in the view of this critic, so inadequately treated by our writers and poets.

Roger Maris (1934-1985) of the New York Yankees by Robert Vickrey. Gift of Scott Vickrey, Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Babe Ruth (1895-1948) also of the Yankees in a photograph by Nickolas Muray. © Courtesy Nickolas Muray Photo Archives © Family of Babe Ruth & Babe Ruth Baseball League, Inc. by CMG Worldwide, Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Josh Gibson (c.1911-1947) who played for the Homestead Grays and Pittsburgh Crawfords in a photograph by Charles “Teeny” Harris. © Estate of Charles “Teenie” Harris, Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

Portrait of Marianne Moore by George Platt Lynes from the exhibit, “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets” at the National Portrait Gallery, courtesy of the museum

Historian and poet David Ward contributes monthly musings on his favorite medium. He recently wrote about Phillis Wheatley.

In 1855, Nathaniel Hawthorne complained to his publisher:

“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,
and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied
with their trash.”

Hawthorne’s contempt seethes with the sneering and patronizing discrimination of his era; and demonstrates the double bind of a lot of discriminatory attitudes—the outcast form their own counter-culture, and are further condemned for it. Banished from the highest echelons of literary culture, women responded by tapping a popular audience hungry for “domestic” fiction—romances and the like. They were, then, criticized for undermining serious culture. Nice!

Hawthorne’s superiority, coupled with his angry self-pity, is a particularly bald statement of the obstacles that women writers faced in 19th-century America. But it also inadvertently reveals that women were active producers and consumer of literary culture. Yet, how long would it take for women to be treated on equal terms with men? And how would women authors affect the form and content of American poetry and fiction?

The case of poetry is particularly interesting both in tracing the arrival of women poets, but also for the way that gender influenced and changed the very form of poetic writing.

Hawthorne may have let slip what a lot of people thought about women writers; discrimination is always a tangle of personal and societal motivations. It took a long time to untangle things.

In American poetry, there were outliers like Phillis Wheatley (1752-1784) and a century later,  Emily Dickinson (1830-1886). Dickinson is the archetypical undiscovered genius: now considered one of America’s greatest poets. Virtually unknown and unread in her own lifetime, she wrote over a thousand poems, concise masterpieces about faith, death and the terrible beauty of life.

One suspects that when she wrote: “The soul selects her own society,/Then shuts the door,” she was referring not only to her own shyness, but also to the way that society shut the door on certain sensitive souls. It was only by hiding herself away in her Amherst, Massachusetts, home that she freed herself to write.

Writing poetry is such an odd business that it’s dangerous to try to draw a direct connection between improvements in the legal or social conditions of women and the quality of poetry written by them. Nonetheless, movement on civil and social rights did have a general, positive impact, especially as women gained access to higher education.

At the turn of the 19th century, Hilda Doolittle studied Greek literature at Bryn Mawr college and came under the patronage of Ezra Pound who wrote poems for and about her as well as encouraging her to cultivate a style influenced by the imagistic forms of Asian poetry. Her poem “Sea Rose” begins in almost haiku style:

“rose, harsh rose,/marred and with stint of petals,/meager flower, thin. . .”

Indeed, Pound bestowed Doolittle with the moniker, “H.D. imagiste. The H.D. stuck as her pen name although her verse became less imagistic as her career—and her religious faith—developed.

As a student in Philadelphia, Doolittle met other poets. Together, she along with William Carlos Williams and especially Marianne Moore formed, under Pound’s tutelage, the first generation of modernist American poets. And it was Moore who cracked the proverbial glass ceiling for women poets. Establishing herself, in a way that Langston Hughes did for African Americans, Moore became the poet who would command serious consideration from the literary establishment because the quality of her work could not be denied. Competing equally with poets like Pound or Williams or Frost influenced the kind of poetry that Moore wrote, over and above questions of personal choice and temperament. A particularly astute naturalist, Moore delighted in beauty and elegance of the animal world:

“I remember a swan under the willows in Oxford,
with flamingo-colored, maple-
leaflike feet. It reconnoitered like a battle-
ship.”

In her poem about “Poetry” she confessed that “I, too, dislike it” but verse gave rise to voice:

“hands that can grasp, eyes/that can dilate/hair that can rise”

In creating a genealogy of American women poets, Moore is important for those she helped and mentored, especially Elizabeth Bishop.

Bishop, like Moore, handled the “women’s question” by ignoring it. They were modernist poets, who happened to be women and they didn’t spend much energy—in public anyway—considering their political predicament. Instead, they created poetry that was ordered by their close observation of the natural world and human society. The results offer the annealed and detailed quality of an Albrecht Durer etching. Consider these lines from Bishop’s famous poem, “The Fish” (Moore had written a poem with the same title so Bishop is paying homage to her mentor),which begins with the immediacy of “I caught a tremendous fish”

“He was speckled with barnacles
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.”

After 75 lines of exquisite observation, the final line is simply: “And I let the fish go.”

A double entendre, perhaps, since Bishop has created the fish in her poem and now lets it and the poem out into the world. Bishop’s tightly packed, carefully considered poetry (she was notable for the time she took before she was satisfied with her work and would release a poem for publication), fit into a solitary and somewhat reclusive personality.

Portrait of Adrienne Rich by Joan E. Biren from Ward’s exhibit, “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets” at the National Portrait Gallery, courtesy of the museum

As American poetry became more personal and confessional after World War II—Bishop’s great friend Robert Lowell led the way and she chastised him for making his verse too personal—women poets began to depart from the model created by Moore and Bishop. As the personal became political, so also did it become poetical and then again political as well.

Sylvia Plath’s coruscating poems about the emotional airlessness of middle class life; the analogy of her house to Auschwitz and her father to Hitler still shock. Others didn’t have the audacity—or the sense—to go that far, but the physical and emotional state of women now became a subject that could be raised in print instead of sublimated or kept out of public view.

The line of ascendency started by Plath and pointing to contemporary poets like Sharon Olds and Louise Gluck, who have focused on the body (their bodies), draws wider connections and resonances.

With women assuming a larger place in the literary canon, they have also begun questioning the very nature of language itself. In particular, is language necessarily patriarchal? The career of the great Adrienne Rich is key here. Rich was tremendously talented even as an undergraduate, her books won prizes, but in the 1950s she became aware that her poetic voice was not her own. Rich self-consciously re-made her poetics to suit her emerging feminist consciousness. Her poem “Diving into the Wreck” describes her purposes:

“I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
‘ and the treasures that prevail.”

Contemporary poet Eavan Boland, courtesy of the poet

The contemporary Irish poet Eavan Boland has taken up Rich’s task. Writing her way out from under the patriarchal inheritance of Irish literary traditions, Boland radically stripped her language and lines down to the essentials. In a series of autobiographical investigations, she remakes language, expressing not only her own artistic autonomy, but the multitudinous roles and traditions that she embodies as a modern woman writer.

In “Mise Éire,” Boland offers:

“a new language/is a kind of scar/and heals after a while/into a passable imitation/of what went before.”

Boland is too modest here: the wounding scar becomes a new language altogether and something else entirely.

What Hawthorne would make of women taking possession of the language and subjects of poetry and making it their own is hard to imagine. One hopes he would have grown with the times.

Having found herself as a poet, Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784) discovered that she and her voice became appropriated by a white elite that quickly tired of her novelty. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Galley

The great writer Ralph Ellison, in his 1952 novel Invisible Man, gave a literary grandeur to what was a commonplace theme in American society and race relations: African Americans were invisible to white America and eventually, tortured by this predicament, would begin to doubt even their own existence. If blacks were not “seen,” neither were they heard. It took a long time, and the heroic efforts of people like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois and countless others, for black voices to be heard in the public square; and tragically, it was as likely that those voices would be extinguished with their speaker’s passing. The strange case of Phillis Wheatley, an 18th-century poet, and her meteoric career, raises many questions, not just about literature, but about the cruel predicament of race in America.

Phillis Wheatley (c.1753-1784) was an American literary sensation whose only analogue is possibly the young English poet, Thomas Chatterton, for the precocious brevity and novelty of her career. For Wheatley was a slave, captured in Gambia, brought to Boston in 1761 and sold to a wealthy merchant named John Wheatley. Her master John Wheatley provided a letter which was published with her poems, introducing Phillis and accounting for her sudden appearance:

“PHILLIS was brought from Africa to America, in the Year 1761, between
Seven and Eight years of Age. Without any Assistance from School Education,
and by only what she was taught in the Family, in sixteen Months Time from
her Arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger
before, to such a Degree, as to read any, the most difficult Parts of the Sacred
Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her.”

Soon thereafter she started writing poetry as well, apparently on her own initiative, and by 1765 she was publishing serviceable, neo-classical elegies and other poems on subjects ranging from daily life to more elevated moral themes. Such was the oddity of an African-American slave girl writing verse that her first published book of poems was prefaced with a testimonial from prominent colonists, including the governor of Massachusetts Thomas Hutchinson as well as John Hancock, that the book was actually “written by Phillis, a young Negro Girl, who was but a few Years since, brought an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa.”
Her poem “To Maecenas” was doubtless self-referential for Gaius Maecenas had been the cultural adviser to the emperor Octavian and the patron of Roman poets. The subject reflected colonial American sentiment. Soon to be revolutionaries, the Colonialists looked to ancient Rome and Greece for classical precedents and models for right behavior:

Maecenas, you, beneath the myrtle shade,
Read o’er what poets sung, and shepherds play’d.
What felt those poets but you feel the same?

Wheatley was taken up into the world of Anglo-American Evangelical Protestantism, meeting the great preacher George Whitfield about whom she wrote a widely republished elegy:

Thou didst in strains of eloquence refin’d
Inflame the heart, and captivate the mind.
Unhappy we the setting sun deplore,
So glorious once, but ah! it shines no more.

The poem contained a direct tribute of Whitfield’s patroness, the Countess of Huntingdon, who was friends with the Wheatleys. It was through this connection that Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral was published in London in 1773. A portrait by the Boston slave Scipio Moorhead (the only surviving example of his work) became its frontispiece.

Indeed, Wheatley traveled to London to meet the Countess and prepare the volume for publication. Having published the first book by an African American, she was lionized by society and later that year freed, “at the desire of my friends in England.” Thereafter, tragically, her life unraveled. She continued to write but never published a second book and she died in poverty, possibly in childbirth.

Wheatley’s is an extraordinary story about which we know too little. Once she was freed, her letters hint that she felt betrayed by her erstwhile patrons as well as by her former owners. Having found herself as a poet, she discovered that she and her voice became appropriated by a white elite that quickly tired of her novelty. She is now taken as a symbol of African American and feminist creativity and resistance. One suspects that her actual history is more interesting—and tragic—than her typecasting by both her contemporaries and posterity. In particular, one wants to know more about her masters, the Wheatleys. By what process of mind and calculation did they purchase a slave, permit her to become educated and published, and then, having capitalized on Phillis’s fame, discard her on the granting of her freedom? In a story that would recur again and again in America, the achievement of African Americans would be greeted first with incredulity and then with a silencing. She had written in her poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

Some view our race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain
May be refin’d and join th’angelic train.

Centuries later, African American poet, Langston Hughes, would write, “What happens to a dream deferred?” The question lingers—and haunts.

In this week of the Presidential Inauguration, it must be said that poetry serves another function when deployed in public: it is classy, it adds tone and the aura of high-minded literary prestige. This is where poetry gets into trouble: when it gets stuffy, pompous, and stiff.

Robert Frost was the first poet included in an inauguration when he spoke at John F. Kennedy’s ceremony. Photo by Walter Albertin, 1961. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

All of these characteristics, the Inauguration has in spades. Inaugurations have gradually gotten bigger and more complicated over time. Certainly, we are far from the day when Jefferson walked over to the Capital from his boarding house, was sworn in, and then walked back to have lunch with his roommates at the communal table. My recollection is that the ceremonies used to be fairly simple, followed by a parade. Now the ceremony itself is lengthy and studded with musical interludes, prayers and invocations, and an inaugural poem—as well as the parade. It’s not clear that the elaborateness of the inaugural ceremony is an improvement over brisk efficiency.  The inauguration, which is now an all-day event, tends to bring out the kind of stiff pomposity, both physical and rhetorical, that Americans mock in other areas; the solemn tones of the newscasters with their nuggets of “history.” Inaugural addresses are nearly always forgettable let-downs because the rhetoric is pitched too high as the speaker competes with some ideal notion of “posterity.” Who remembers President Clinton’s awkward rhetorical trope: “We must force the spring,” an admonition that puzzled analysts finally decided was horticultural not hydraulic. One suspects that presidents and their speechwriters are paralyzed by the example of Lincoln and his two majestic Inaugurals.

President Clinton brought back the inaugural poem perhaps seeking a connection with his youth as well as the ideals he hoped to embody since it was President Kennedy’s inaugural that saw perhaps the most famous example of public poetry in American history. Famously, the 86-year-old Robert Frost, a rock-ribbed Rebublican, agreed to read. A flinty, self-reliant New Englander, the poet had been beguiled by the attractive figure of the young Bostonian Democrat. Kennedy, shrewdly courted the old bard—undoubtedly America’s most famous poet—and convinced Frost, against his better judgment, to compose a poem to read at the swearing in. Frost, battening on to the Kennedy theme of a new generation coming to power, struggled to produce an enormous and bombastic piece on the “new Augustan age.” He was still writing the night before the ceremony.

Frost’s inaugural poem, including his edits. He was unable to actually read it at the inauguration. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Amazingly, Frost was unable to deliver the new work: facing east into the noon day, he was blinded by the glare off the snow that had fallen over night and could not read the manuscript of his newly completed ode. So Frost, from memory, recited “The Gift Outright” his paean to America’s foreordained triumphalism: “The land was ours before we were the land’s.”

If the speaking platform had faced west as it does now, all this drama and inadvertent symbolism would have been avoided as Frost could have delivered his giant pudding of a poem. Accidentally, “The Gift Outright” jibed perfectly with JFK’s call to arms and a call to service that troubled only some at the time. But Frost practically was forced to recite “The Gift Outright” once he lost his eyes. It is the only one of his poems that would suit the public needs of the occasion. Imagine the consternation if he had recited the ambiguous and frightening lines of “The Road Not Taken” or the premonition of death in  “Stopping by Woods on a Snowing Evening”: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep.” Reading from “Fire and Ice” at that Cold War moment would have gotten the Kennedy Administration off on the wrong foot: “Some say the world will end in fire,/Some say in Ice./From what I’ve tasted of desire,/I hold with those who favor fire.” This could have caused panic if not incomprehension among political observers.

The Inaugural poet does not, then, have an easy task, balancing the public, the private—and above all else the political. President Clinton brought back the inaugural poet tradition with Maya Angelou, whose voice and presence redeemed a poem that is not very good. The others have been competent, nothing more. We will see what the newly announced poet Richard Blanco has to say. He is under tremendous pressure and the news that he is being asked to write three poems, from which the administration’s literary critics will pick one is not reassuring. Kennedy at least trusted his poet to rise to the occasion. Things are rather more carefully stage-managed these days. I wish Mr. Blanco well and remind him to bring sunglasses.

Historian David Ward of the National Portrait Gallery

As both a historian and poet himself, David Ward will contribute monthly musings on his favorite medium. His current show “Poetic Likeness: Modern American Poets” is on view through April 28 at the National Portrait Gallery.

This is, fittingly, Ward’s inaugural post for Around the Mall. This blog, he writes: “has the modest goal—or at least this blogger has the modest intention—of discussing  various aspects of American poetry, both contemporary and from past time. Poetry exists in a particularly salient place in the arts because if it is done well it combines opposites: form or structure with personal exuberance, for instance. Above all, it permits the most private feeling to be broadcast to the largest public. Poetry is one of the few ways that Americans permit themselves to show emotion in public, hence people resort to it at funerals – or weddings and other important occasions.  Poetry is a way of getting to the nub of the matter; as Emily Dickinson wrote, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.” There has been a tremendous boom in the number of people who read and write poetry precisely because we see it as a way of opening up ourselves to others in ways that are sanctioned by a tradition that goes back centuries. Among its other dualities, poetry always balances past and present.”