A New Theory for American Poetry: Democracy, the Environment, and the Future of Imagination
BY Angus Fletcher
Harvard University Press, $29.95

Long known as a critic of allegory, Angus Fletcher now turns his attention to Clare, Whitman, and Ashbery in order to define what he calls the "environment-poem." This isn't an ecological poem; instead, it's a poem that resists narrative or teleological progression in order to mimic the reader's own environment, or the disorganized aggregate of our daily lives. Fletcher paints Clare as the anti-Wordsworth par excellence, and his thinly-disguised yet quaint dislike of that poet laureate drives the book's middle section. For the most part, though, he wants to show Clare, Whitman, and Ashbery as anti-allegorical, metonymic, and pre-Socratic in scope: ideas that are certainly worth contemplating, if not astonishingly new. The problem is that Fletcher can't decide whether to write "theory," as in the title, or a more empirical study of the poems in question. The result is something like a university lecture in which the purported topic of the day continues to be, not unpleasantly, circumvented. (In a chapter called "Ashbery and the Becoming of the Poem," Fletcher eloquently quotes Pound, Nietzsche, and Pasternak, only to end the chapter before quoting Ashbery himself.) In the book's final chapter, lushly inhabited by the flora and fauna of actual poems, we see what we've been missing: in a book so concerned with "surround," why can't we be more surrounded by poems themselves? Fletcher's learning is formidable, but perhaps he needs to get his hands a little dirtier. If these poems are environments, he's less of a trail guide than a pilot flying overhead, naming a certain mountain range over the loudspeaker —but as you turn your head to look, it's already gone.

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