Abstract
Out of the New American poets following in the wake of Pound, Moore, and Williams, Johnson is particularly vocal about his Romantic and Transcendental affinities. In a letter written to Dirk Stratton in 1991, Johnson describes his poetic response to the world as “Visionary Romantic” and “New Transcendentalist.”2 Indeed, Johnson’s poetry supports Albert Gelpi’s argument for the existence of “a subtler continuity between Romanticism and Modernism” than what many critics accept.3 Johnson’s perpetuation of this “continuity” is evident in his essay “Hurrah for Euphony,” when he praises Thoreau for Romantic and modernist qualities.
The “visionary” is the man who has passed through sight into vision, never the man who has avoided seeing, who has not trained himself to see clearly, or who generalizes among his stock of visual memories. If there is a reality beyond our perception we must increase the power and coherence of our perception, for we shall never reach reality in any other way.
—Northrop Frye1
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Notes
Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25–6.
Dirk Stratton, Ronald Johnson, Western Writers Series No.122 (Boise Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1996), 9.
Albert Gelpi, A Coherent Splendor: The American Poetic Renaissance 1910–1950 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2.
Ronald Johnson, “Hurrah for Euphony: Dedicated to Young Poets,” The Cultural Society (January 14, 2002), http://culturalsociety.org/RJ.html
Marjorie Perloff, The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 11.
H. Daniel Peck, introduction to The Green American Tradition: Essays and Poems for Sherman Paul, ed. H. Daniel Peck (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 2.
Paul Rosenfeld, By Way of Art: Criticisms of Music, Literature, Painting, Sculpture and Dance (New York, Coward-McCann, 1928), 302–3.
Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1993), 29.
Lee Rust Brown, The Emersonian Museum: Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 173.
Robert von Hallberg, “Poetry, Politics, and Intellectuals,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature Vol. 8, Poetry and Criticism, 1940–1955, ed. Sacan Berchovitch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 33.
Charles Capper, “ ‘A Little Beyond’: The Problem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History,” in Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), 21.
Paul F. Boller, Jr. American Transcendentalism, 1830–1860: An Intellectual Inquiry (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons and Capricorn Books, 1974), xxii.
Charles Capper, “ ‘A Little Beyond’: The Problem of the Transcendentalist Movement in American History,” in Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), 19.
Rita Charon “In Memoriam: Elizabeth Sewell,” Literature and Medicine 20.1 (2001), 3.
C.f. Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, ed. Stephen Fender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 272.
Stephen Fredman, The Grounding of American Poetry: Charles Olson and the Emersonian Tradition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), vii.
Lawrence Buell, “Emerson in His Cultural Context,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Lawrence Buell (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1993), 58–59.
Conrad Edick Wright, preface to Transient and Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Lts Contexts, ed. Charles Capper and Conrad Edick Wright (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1999), x.
Walt Whitman, The Complete Poems, ed. Francis Murphy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004), 82.
Stan Brakhage and Ronald Johnson (with Jim Shedden), “Another Way of Looking at the Universe” (1997), Chicago Review 47/48, 4/1 (Winter 2001/ Spring, 2002), 31.
Eric Murphy Selinger, “Important Pleasures and Others: Michael Palmer, Ronald Johnson,” Postmodern Culture 4.3 (1994), http://muse.jhu.edu/jour-nals/postmodern_culture/v004/4.3selinger.html
James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart and The Soul of the World (Woodstock, Connecticut: Spring Publications, 1997), 43–4.
Kenneth W Rhoads, “Thoreau: The Ear and the Music,” American Literature 46 (Nov, 1974), 324.
Antoine Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism, trans. Christine Rhone (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), xiv.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 19.
Jacob Boehme, The Signature of All Things and Other Writings, trans. John Ellinstone (Cambridge: James Clark & Co., 1981), 9.
See Eric Murphy Selinger, “ ‘I Composed the Holes’: Reading Ronald Johnson’s Radi os,” Contemporary Literature, 33.1 (Spring, 1992), 53–4.
See W B. Yeats, “Mona Lisa,” in The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892–1935, ed. W B. Yeats (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), 1.
Jerome McGann, Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1993), 83.
Johnson’s use of the term “Spires” in ARK carries something of the meaning of “conspires” too. Although principally suggesting architectural spires or the organic shoots and stems of plants (the grass spires of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, perhaps), ARK’S “Spires” also propose breath as an agency of creation.
Charles Olson, Collected Prose, ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1997), 242.
See also Ernest Fenollosa, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry, ed. Ezra Pound (San Francisco, City Lights), 14–5.
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© 2010 Ross Hair
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Hair, R. (2010). Johnson’s New Transcendentalism. In: Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry. Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230115552_2
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