Conclusion: Late Twentieth-Century Pastoral: Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson, and the Continuity of a Mode

Abstract

From his first semester at Harvard in 1946, Navy veteran and future poet Frank O’Hara was captivated by the work of Gertrude Stein, who died that same year. In English A, he wrote an essay on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which he described to his parents as “one of the most interesting things I’ve ever read by anyone.”¹ In the poem “Memorial Day 1950,” O’Hara would describe the early stages of his work as including “several last things/Gertrude Stein hadn’t had time for.”² Clearly, O’Hara saw links between his poetics and hers, and one of these links was a highly eroticized form of pastoral. O’Hara’s “Concert Champêtre,” or “rustic harmony,” for example, is a humorous and amorous poem in which the speaker encounters a “cow” with curiously human qualities (Poems, 15). A “grand” “giantess of good,” she dwells among “bees.” It is at her invitation that the speaker takes a roll in the “clover,” and begins a conversation about his own cow story, at the prospect of which she responds with a “bit[e]” and postcoital cuddling (“she crooned/silently and threw a leg/over my shoulder”). The speaker’s attitude towards her is fond if at times vaguely hostile; the last words of the poem refer colloquially to his own about-to-be-recounted tale: “It will kill you.” As he sees it, he will get a laugh, but also may appall and offend in some devastating way.