I carry one small memory of his form

Aslant at his clavier, with careful ease,

To bring one last enigma to the norm,

Intelligence perfecting the mute keys.
—“From J. Haydn to Constanze Mozart (1791)”

How will a generation know its story

If it will know no other?
—“For Louis Pasteur”

Edgar Bowers, who died in San Francisco of cancer on February 4 this year, wrote flawless poems, which may account for why there are so few. When his collected poems appeared from Knopf in 1997, he was pleased to have them handsomely printed and all in one place, but sorry that there were not more of them. “You’re only a poet when you’re writing a poem,” he often said, wryly suspicious of the cult of the artist that would elevate writers to mystical status: “There’s nothing beautiful about being a poet.” Reckoned by his own clear-eyed standards, Bowers was a poet a relatively small part of the time, his published work limited to three full-length collections—The Form of Loss (1956), The Astronomers (1965), and For Louis Pasteur (1990). In 1973, Living Together returned his first two books to print, along with a handful of new poems, and a section of more recent work inaugurates his Collected Poems, a volume of fewer than two-hundred pages.

Bowers may have wished his books longer than they were, but he could hardly have wished them better. He polished each poem until nothing in it “bothered” him, as he would say, carefully eliminating each rough edge and infelicity until it was “uncorrectable.” “It’s all perfect,” Thom Gunn has said of Bowers’s work, yet if perfection provided the limit, Bowers remained modest about his chances of attaining it. As he suggested in “To the Reader,” the prologue to his debut collection, error haunts even the finest attempts at order:

These poems are too much tangled with the

     error
And waste they would complete. My soul

      repays me,
Who fix it by a rhythm, with reason’s terror
Of hearing the swift motion that betrays

      me.
Mine be the life and the failure. But do not

      look
Too closely for these ghosts which claim my

      book.

By “complete,” Bowers meant “to perfect,” an action forever bedeviled by fear and waste. A spiritual melancholy reminiscent of Ben Jonson and Fulke Greville underlies this early poem in its vision of the tangled error and swift motion that threaten to undermine art’s attempts to “fix” experience in meaningful structures. As he put it elsewhere, in “The Astronomers of Mont Blanc,” the living cannot attain “that perfect order trusted to the dead.” (Only Bowers’s beloved Mozart possessed the genius to create a “perfect note.”)

Bowers’s tone tempers melancholy with decorum, and stoic meditation with personal warmth, a quality most pronounced in his later work. His poetry combines the intellectual heft, formal play, and density of expression reminiscent of metaphysical wit with the associative imagery of Valéry (whom Bowers placed, with Mozart and Louis Pasteur, in his personal pantheon). Yvor Winters, with whom Bowers studied, called this the post-symbolist method, producing poems “rational in structure, although [the] explicitly rational connectives are suppressed,” as in “Grove and Building”:

When, having watched for a long time the

     trees
Scatter the sun among their shaded places,
You turn away, your face is many faces,
Each formed by the resistance of the leaves.

And though the dim contagion in your eyes
The agony of light which shade refuses
With bright decay a near facade infuses,
Drenched by the ebbing warmth of Paradise.

Bowers created a symbolic landscape against which the ancient metaphors of light and dark suggest something of man’s relation to the divine. Although Bowers lived in a “difficult and sophisticated period,” Winters explained, he “was still a great devotional poet, but of a sort that George Herbert would not have understood.”

Like Geoffrey Hill, Bowers carried the moral seriousness of the religious impulse into a secular age. Also like Hill, Bowers, who served in the Second World War, grappled with the question of faith in light of the atrocities of the twentieth century. Bower’s war experience as a counterintelligence officer assigned to the de-Nazification of Germany and then to Hitler’s Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden informed much of his work. Take “Two poems on the Catholic Bavarians”:

Thus in the summer on the Alpine heights
A deity of senseless wrath and scorn
Is feasted through the equinoctial nights
As though a savage Christ were then reborn.

Up from the floors of churches in December
The passion rises to a turbulence
Of darkness such as threatens to dismember
The mind submerged in bestial innocence.

This last suggests, with Bowers’s favored symbol of darkness, the dangers inherent in romanticism (Christ is reborn as a noble “savage”). The passage ends with voices “raging and distinct,/ About the curious symbol of the cross.” The use of ambiguity here—the double meanings of “passion,” “senseless,” and “about”—recalls Hill’s emphasis on the duplicity of language in a fallen age.

That Bowers is not better known says a good deal about recent poetry in the United States, which, after confessionalism, became obsessed with “impotence,/ Insanity and lying,” as Bowers put it in “To the Contemporary Muse.” Perhaps accordingly, many of his greatest admirers have been British, including Hill, Gunn, Dick Davis, and Clive Wilmer. Among his American adherents are Donald Justice, Timothy Steele, Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, and Harold Bloom. (Bowers “never wrote a bad poem in his life—which is almost unique,” Bloom said recently.) Bowers received two Guggenheim Fellowships and, in 1988, the Bollingen Prize. Though his reputation would paint him as something of a poet’s poet (his work can be difficult), his is one of the great voices of the late twentieth century, and it deserves to be more widely heard.

Edgar Bowers was born in Rome, Georgia, a self-styled “child of the South” who lived for most of his life in California. Both regions impressed themselves on his manner, his old-world formality and Southern accent tempered just slightly by the West Coast sublime. As a young man in the Armed Services Training Program at Princeton, Bowers roomed with a student of Allen Tate who introduced him to the poets of modernism. After the war Bowers returned to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he read the New Critics, going on to Stanford (Ph.D., 1953) in 1947 to study with his favorite of that group, Yvor Winters. After short teaching stints back east at Duke University and Harpur College, Bowers settled in Santa Barbara, teaching at the University of California from 1958 until his retirement in 1991. It is there, in his house on Miramar Beach, that Wilmer remembers him “chatting wittily on his couch with the Pacific in all its grandeur breaking behind him.”

Not surprisingly, the landscapes of California became increasingly prominent in his work, as his syntactically dense, philosophically charged lyrics gave way to more accessible elegies and tributes to friends. Exchanging the contexts of religion and the war for natural settings (some, like “Trees,” recalled from boyhood), Bowers nonetheless stuck to his ongoing concerns of identity and what Dick Davis has called “the mystery of consciousness”[1]: “Who is it says ‘I am’?,” Bowers asks in “Autumn Shade.” Beginning with “Autumn Shade,” a poem in ten parts from The Astronomers, he made use of the poetic sequence, employing this structure in one of his greatest achievements, “Thirteen Views of Santa Barbara” —a poem, oddly, in fourteen sections and with an epilogue. Bowers devised the sequence after viewing an exhibition of Hokusai’s “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji” (he later came to own a Hokusai print, which adorns the cover of his collected poems). Section four of the poem, “The Beach,” typifies Bowers’s expert way with blank verse, the signature form of his later work:

In spring, we fish for halibut. In summer,
When grunion spawn at midnight in the surf,
We look for them on the sand to throw them

     back.
In winter, from the point, we cast beyond
The breakers to where bass feed. Solar age
And mythic distance turn round the point’s

     ellipse.
Earth is dark. Air darkens. The moon is

     white.
Then, as if I were there, I watch us here,
Immensities of purpose barely visible
Intent upon the message in the line
Startlingly taut with sudden gravity,
Muscle and bone of the reflected light.

The poem, like so many of Bowers’s, considers the opposition of the ideal with the muddying properties of contingency. Yet it is the struggle that matters. As he put it in “From J. Haydn to Constanze Mozart (1791),” works of art represent “the mind’s continual search/ To find the perfect note, emotional/ and mental, each the other one’s reproach,”—what he calls elsewhere “the order passion yields.”

One senses that, despite illness, Bowers grew more hopeful in his later years, ameliorating the brooding severity of his earlier poems and “occasionally extending to a positive joy,” as Gunn has observed. The poems become more generous, more easily apprehensible, while still maintaining their evocative associativeness of imagery and riparian extravagances of syntax, as in this elegy for his friend the poet John Finlay:

But when the sudden force of the disease
Tossed him, in a new garment, on the bed
Where he had wakened, mornings, as a child—
Despised by all his neighbors, helpless blind
And vulnerable to every life, he listened
Intensely to the roosters, mules and cows
As well as to the voices of the desk,
The chair, the books and pictures, pastures

     and fields,
The tree of every season, the age of seas
And, on its surge, the age of galaxies,
The bells within the spires of Cambridge,

     bodies
And faces revealed or hidden in the flow,
All that he knew or could imagine joined
Together in the sound the stream flows

     through
As witness of itself in every change,
Each trusting in its continuities,
All turning in a final radiant shell.

I knew Edgar Bowers only briefly, in the last year of his life. It was due solely to his generosity and consummately gracious nature that I felt as if I’d known him longer. On our second meeting, at his apartment overlooking San Francisco and the white-capped waters of the Golden Gate (he lived on a hill above that section of Lombard that tourists know as the windiest street in the world), I asked him about a copy of Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature that was on the coffee table. It was for a class that he was taking, he told me, with a younger man’s bluff enthusiasm. As Davis notes, Bowers remained constantly curious. He would ask me what people of my generation were reading and what sorts of poetry we liked, and he was surprised and pleased when I explained that there were still some younger writers interested in metrical verse.

Bowers had become somewhat gloomy about the state of contemporary poetry. I got the sense from him that he no longer recognized in most current poetry those qualities and concerns that he had himself devoted so much attention to. In a radio interview last year, Bowers was asked what advice he might give to younger writers. His answer—at once heartfelt, unassuming, and lightly self-deprecating—is worth quoting at some length:

I would advise them [he said] to read as much as they can and to learn what I call “the formal virtues.” I’m an old reactionary. I don’t like what they call free verse now. I think it’s ruinous what has happened to the writing of poetry in general, because free verse—which of course was practiced by a few masters early in the century—has just become a kind of prose in lines. So I would advise them to study good poems and see what the formal principles are … to think of it as an art, which has for you these objective personal means by which you can master your subject, if “master” is not too strong a word. [This] will help you find the words you are looking for and make your better self come into existence for a while, which will write poems in a sense that you’ll say, Did I write that? … Having this help of what I call the public formal virtues helps that being come into existence.

“And that much never can be obsolete,” as Larkin wrote. Bowers’s “better self,” the one not bound by human error and change, can be found everywhere in his poems. One may look at Bowers the same way that he looked at his hero Mozart and marvel at a man who could bring “one last enigma to the norm,/ Intelligence perfecting the mute keys.”

Notes
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1. For Davis’s exceptional reading of Bowers’s work, see his tribute in the July/August issue of Poets & Writers. Go back to the text.