Poetry can sometimes offer to the young a piercingly accurate formulation of their inchoate suffering. I remember reading, at twenty-three, two lines in a new book: For to be young Was always to live in other people’s houses. Perhaps some poet had said it before, but if so, I hadn’t come across it. I learned from those lines what I was — a provincial girl in a house constituted by persons so alien to me that they were in effect “other people.” It had not occurred to me that one could think of one’s parents as “other people.” It was not “our house” — it was “their house.” And where, then, was my house, and how could I find it? And who were my people, if not those in the house with me? The poem containing those lines was “The Middle-Aged,” written in her twenties by Adrienne Rich. It is spoken in the plural “we” by newly adult siblings, as they consider the house in which they grew up — its values, its conditions of “belonging,” its rules, its “people.” That house of their childhood was established by what the title estrangingly refers to as “the middle-aged,” the parents now being judged by the altered eyes of their altered young. When I read those revelatory lines in Rich’s second book, The Diamond Cutters, I knew almost nothing of her life. I hadn’t the slightest notion, before reading her lines, of how to frame the defects — always felt — of my life as a child, but I learned from the lightning-bolt of her page that my life was being lived in some other people’s house, and they did not understand me, nor I them. Later, reading about Rich’s early life (she was born in 1929 and died in 2012), I saw that really we had little in common except that as adolescents we had found ourselves living with people different from us: they were “other people” and we had to live in their house. That formulation — so insistently phrased in the poem — was what Rich so assuagingly offered me. She had “solved,” by naming it, the inexplicable misery in which we both had existed as adolescents. We could not speak aloud our disturbingly deep disquiet with the life imposed on us. The problem of a coerced silence was already troubling Rich earlier; her first book, published when she was an undergraduate, had included a poem called “An Unsaid Word,” recommending self-suppression in love. She had to train herself not to interrupt the thoughts of “her man,” knowing that “this [was] the hardest thing to learn.” The tyranny of the socially unsayable is a pervasive theme in the work of some fiery writers, and the anger provoking their fury often creates, in their verse, problems of tone. In “Easter, 1916,” Yeats encounters on the street former friends planning armed revolt against English rule and finds himself betraying a poet’s most exigent obligation: to speak intellectual and emotional truth in accurate words. After briefly greeting the conspirators, whose willingness to kill he cannot condone, he bitterly utters first a self-reproach for his cowardice in avoiding truthful conversation, then, using identical words, reproaches himself for actually lingering and prolonging his “meaningless words,” an offense worse, because hypocritical, than the first: I have passed with a nod of the head, Or polite meaningless words, Or lingered awhile and said Polite meaningless words. Such early self-restriction in fear of social ostracism is likely to result in a later explosion of language. Yeats, for instance, finding “polite meaningless words” intolerable, quite rapidly turned the hitherto unsayable into the complexly said, willing to bear the opprobrium that meets defiance of social norms. Other poets, such as Rich, have a more uncertain evolution within contrary states of feeling. Rich, conventionally reared, found a relief from self-censorship in discreet poems such as “The Middle-Aged.” Like the endangered Hamlet discovering that he must keep silence concerning his father’s murder — “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” — Rich could not at first become entirely candid about her prolonged suffering (fully revealed to her readers in the recent biography by Hilary Holladay). Her unhappiness — partly situational (an uncongenial family, a failed marriage, social expectations of women), partly physical (as her early rheumatoid arthritis became crippling), and partly uncontrollable (resentment against her father’s estrangement from her after she married a Jew) — generated a growing tumult in her work, fortified by a commitment to a newly enthusiastic feminism especially directed against “the patriarchy.” After her marriage, Rich found it impossible to hold her tongue as she had done in “The Middle-Aged,” and made the search for a responsible tongue a life-long endeavor. But like most young protestors, she had on the whole no tolerance for ambiguity, no empathy for opponents, no metaphors for a middle way. If we look back to her chief predecessor in social protest, Milton, we can see him as our most eloquent denouncer of silence in his moving elegy for his fellow-student Edward King (bearing the Greek pastoral name “Lycidas”) who, like Milton, was being trained for the priest- hood and already composing poetry. Milton’s anonymous surrogate, who sings the elegy for his companion Lycidas, witnesses with horror a flock of local sheep abandoned to hunger and disease by their criminal shepherd-guardians. In a second dereliction of their duty, the guardians have left the sheepfold open to nightly invasion by the “privy paw” of the “grim wolf.” Starvation, disease, and massacre meet the innocent eye of the young singer, and his shocked voice reveals the hideous results of the guardians’ vices: The hungry sheep look up and are not fed, But swollen with wind and the rank mist they draw, Rot inwardly, and foul contagion spread; Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace[.] Reacting to that appalling scene of starving sheep and bloody corpses, the singer excoriates the total silence of the bystanders with three bitter words:
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence