The Urban Poets
Subverting the Pastoral Tradition
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The term ‘flâneur,’ originating from the Old Norse verb ‘flana’ in around the 16th or 17th century, literally means ‘to wander with no purpose’. It was popularised in early nineteenth-century Paris, where the earliest known representation in writing is an anonymous pamphlet of 1806.
The term was originally used to denote strolling or idling; essentially wasting time. Sometime in the 19th century, however, more meaning was attached to the term, which came to represent male writers such as Baudelaire, who wandered the city and used the intense images he encountered within his writing. This term became synonymous with the modern idea of the writer and artist, at once immersed in, yet apart from, the busy urbanised environment of the city.
Within her wonderful book Flâneuse, Lauren Elkin introduces the idea that the female equivalent to this, the ‘flâneuse’, was often dismissed as a non-existent entity. Women on the streets of a city in the 19th and early 20th centuries were viewed with distrust, open only to female prostitutes or homelessness, and it was considered that a woman seen in the streets to be of questionable morals. This resulted in whole public spaces from which women were excluded or invisible. I wrote more about the flâneuse and her connections to the city, as well as Lauren Elkin’s book, in my earlier essay Women and the City, as well as touching on it in my more recent essay on Anäis Nin.
One of many women writers who subverted tradition and utilised her city walks to inspire her writing was poet and novelist Amy Levy, who wrote of Jewish women’s experiences and the juxtaposition of beauty and violence in late 19th century London in her collection A London Plane Tree and Other Verse (1889).
Levy’s poem ‘Captivity,’ for example, speaks of the country of her homeland as she compares herself to a caged bird, wondering whether if she were to return to her homeland now that she had assimilated into the urbanised culture of London, whether she would wish to be re-incarcerated back into her ‘cage’.
‘Shall I wander in vain for my country?
Shall I seek and not find?
Shall I cry for the bars that encage me
The fetters that bind?’
Levy, who was the first Jewish woman to attend Newnham College, Cambridge, wrote several novels as well as poetry and essays. Her first novel, The Romance of a Shop (1888) is often regarded as an early ‘New Woman’ novel popularised at the end of the 19th century, and covers such topics as the difficulties for women of running a business at the time. Her second novel Reuben Sachs (1888) allowed for a deeper literary dive into the issue of Jewish life and character which she had formerly discussed in essay form. The city at the turn of the century is central to both of these novels and much of her poetry, and clearly informed her ideas around feminism, Jewishness, and life in the city.
Her work allowed for a contemplation of the emotional and intellectual struggles for women of the era, navigating the restrictions of society and tackling large themes such as social justice, gender roles, and a yearning for fulfilment.
Levy, who could be described as a proto-Modernist writer, utilised the earlier tradition of ‘pastoral literature,’ and upended it to create her poetry through the lens of an urban pastoral through her contemplation of urbanising nature.
An unwieldy term applied to literary texts from as early as the Greek and Roman works of Theocritus and Virgil, ‘Pastoral’ was used by many writers during the Renaissance, and it has gone on to be popularised in varying forms of literature.
However, the definitive answer to ‘What is pastoral literature?’ is difficult to pin down.
In literary terms, pastoral often refers to writing about shepherds (from the Latin ‘pastor’) and the associated term ‘bucolic’, which originates from the Greek for ‘cowherd’. Further adopted by writers to put forth ideas about the relationship between the country and the city, a key component of pastoralism is its depictions of nature, more specifically, the idealised concept of nature.
In his concise Pastoral, Terry Gifford cites the traditional pastoral mode as containing ‘motifs which we can recognise as deriving from certain early Greek and Roman poems about life in the country, and about the life of the shepherd in particular.’ Prior to 1610, he claims the term pastoral referred to poems or dramas in which ‘supposed shepherds spoke to each other, usually in pentameter verse, about their work or their loves, with (mostly) idealised descriptions of their countryside’. He goes on to suggest that in a broader sense, ‘pastoral refers to any literature that describes the country with an implicit or explicit contrast to the urban,’ putting forward the idea that the pastoral usually suggests a ‘celebratory attitude’ to the landscape it describes, even if such landscape appears bleak to the reader. However, his assertion that ‘A poem about trees in the city could also be called pastoral because it focuses upon nature in contrast to the urban context,’ would allow for us to see the work of Amy Levy within the pastoral mode.
Levy’s poetry often focuses upon elements of nature within, or in contrast to, their urban setting. In ‘A London Plane Tree’, the opening lines state:
‘Green is the plane-tree in the square,
The other trees are brown;
They droop and pine for country air;
The plane-tree loves the town.’
Levy here is celebrating (echoing Gifford’s ‘celebratory attitude’) the fact that, whereas the other trees in the city may turn brown, the plane tree is designed to weather the smog and pollution. It ‘loves the town’. Referring directly to ‘A London Plane Tree’, Nicholas Frankel claims Levy’s poem ‘acquire[s] a positively celebratory feel in [Levy’s] open embrace of the modern city’. Levy does not, as the traditional mode may suggest, compare the countryside as an idyll in contrast to the urbanised city, but instead idealises the natural within the urban setting.
Levy’s collection gives examples of the elements of nature juxtaposed with the bleak or mundane as represented in often gloomy urban settings. Perhaps not something you would initially consider pastoral poetry. Yet if we follow Gifford’s suggestion, I would argue that her poetry fits within this scope.
Much of Levy’s poems within her collection A London Plane Tree and Other Verse display tend towards an ‘urban pastoral’ aesthetic, cultivating an idealised sense of nature within the urban setting of the city. In ‘Between the Showers’, Levy’s roundel portrays a city street with the sort of language we might expect from a typical pastoral poem:
‘Between the showers I went my way,
The glistening street was bright with flowers;
It seemed that March had turned to May
Between the showers.
Above the shining roofs and towers
The blue broke forth athwart the grey;
Birds carolled in their leafless bowers.
Hither and thither, swift and gay,
The people chased the changeful hours;
And you, you passed and smiled that day,
Between the showers.’
In the same way that the arguably more well recognised poet William Wordsworth’s pastoral poetry reflects the idealised Lake District countryside, Levy utilises the mode to portray her version of an idealised urban environment. Whilst her poetry does not shy away from the bleak aspects of urban living, she continually celebrates the juxtaposition of nature and compares it to people she sees, or her emotional state.
Throughout Levy’s collection, she gives the reader a modern sense of a woman’s travails through the city landscape, witnessing the blending of the features of urban living. Features such as smog and grey skies appear, whilst Levy also comments on the often unexpected joy of coming upon nature. She very much puts her human, female experience of walking the streets of her home city into this urban landscape, using the pastoral mode to reflect her mood and experiences.
In ‘London in July’, she contrasts the idyllic summer weather in the city with the face of her love, concluding, ‘the summer in the city’s heart— That is enough for me.’
Her poetry reflected changes within society in the nineteenth century, as more people moved away from rural towns and therefore countryside living into more urbanised areas for mostly economic reasons. Levy’s poetry provides a connection between the pastoral traditions people were used to and develops this for the increasingly urbanised reader; she becomes the urbanised poet.
Pastoral literature was often seen as literature of place or community; think of Thomas Hardy’s rural novels set in his fictionalised Wessex, with shepherds and farmers and rural workers. Levy’s work sits firmly within this context; in place of the fields of sheep and cows, and the characters of shepherds and milkmaids, her ‘place’ is the city of London and her ‘community’ her fellow city dwellers.
Whilst it could be argued that Levy does not, perhaps, meet the traditional modal concepts of the pastoral – certainly, there are no shepherds or rural idylls within her city landscape - I would put forward that Levy’s collection of poems lay claim to the term ‘urban pastoral’ in her portrayal of the idealised natural elements of the city. Her use of language extends an idea of place and community to her increasingly urbanised readership of the time, subverting, and providing an antidote or alternative to, the traditional bucolic nature idyll.
Levy’s poetry preempted the work of American poet Barbara Guest, writing in the modernist mode of the early twentieth century.
Poets such as Guest worked within the modernist aesthetic, similarly discarding many traditional elements of poetry, such as working with metre and rhyme, as well as often choosing strange and obtuse subject matter. This became a particularly urgent concern for female writers, who arguably had their own aesthetics to create.
Not falling tidily within the modernist movement, the work of poet Barbara Guest shared much of the modernist aesthetic.
Part of the so-called New York School of writers formed after World War II and influenced by the avant-garde art movement, Guest sat on the periphery of modernism and was highly influenced by surrealism, a key component in the avant-garde art scene.
However, no art or literary movement develops in isolation and Guest’s poetry, whilst forging new and often challenging modes, borrowed, as did Levy’s, from the earlier pastoral tradition. Her collection The Location of Things shows how Guest blended the fresh, modernist aesthetic with the tradition of the pastoral to create binaries of interior versus exterior landscapes.
The New York School poets were often influenced by modernist artists such as Matisse, Picasso and Miro, as well as Abstract Expressionism, leading them to adapt their new modernist aesthetic into a reworking of the earlier pastoral tradition, which tends to idealise the natural world. Guest appeared to set out to revise the pastoral and create her own, experimental style aesthetic, allowing for an exploration of both country and city life.
Another member of the school, Frank O’Hara, made an argument for the urban pastoral mode, claiming that the pastoral no longer needed to be located in fields, instead relying on the oppositions and contrasts around nature and simplicity with civilisation and artifice.
This opposition or contrast of urban versus rural was something of which Guest was acutely aware.
Frequently spending time in rural Long Island, Guest claimed to hold an ‘unconscious division’ between the country and the city, stating that she often wrote whilst in Long Island and took this writing back to the city. Interestingly from the viewpoint of a writer, she claimed that her weekly bus trips into New York helped her to create the tension between the city and the country in her work.
Guests’ poetry often moves ceaselessly between the domestic, urban, coastal, and rural environments, creating a collection of ‘spaces’ in which to enter and leave.
In ‘The Location of Things,’ the title poem of a collection of Guests’ poetry, we encounter such an example of this persona located at a window, looking out. The window acts as the first of three locations within the poem, which functions in both a realist and surrealist aesthetic. In the opening lines of the first stanza:
‘Why from this window am I watching leaves?
Why do halls and steps seem narrower?’
the reality quickly turns from the realist to something more representative of a surrealist painting, accessed through pastoral language:
‘Or hidden, am I to find a lake under the table
or a mountain beside my chair
and will I know the minute water produces lilies
or a family of mountaineers scales the peak?’
Guests’ ‘window’ functions here as both location and dislocation, framing the speaker’s view. But this is no ordinary scene, as Guest slips between the real view from the window, to pastoral scenes of nature, and then into a third persona of memory:
‘On Madison Avenue I am having a drink, someone
with dark hair balances a carton on his shoulders
and a painter enters the bar…’
The schema of the poem follows the narrator’s thoughts as she witnesses the reality of life through the window, juxtaposed with surrealist elements and memory. A later mention of a ‘crucifix’ and a scene introducing a ‘hospital’ present a further location, perhaps speaking to loss or grief. The juxtaposition of the natural world with ‘Madison Avenue’ perhaps indicates the longing for the simplicity and beauty of the natural world, as perhaps Guest acknowledged on her weekly bus trips back into the city, representative of Guest’s disparity between her rural life in Long Island and her day-to-day reality in the city.
Although poetry is not my area of expertise within literature, what interests me about this poem and the inferred distance between ‘locations’ and ‘things’ is the idea of the threshold of the window at the beginning, framing the scene and so framing the memories or other images Guest fragments throughout. It appears that the window represents the ‘threshold’ between the interior and exterior landscape of Guest’s persona. These interior versus exterior binaries represent the shifting between the reality of the speaker’s actual location and enigmatic references to natural elements.
If you are interested in learning more about Guest and her collection, I wrote more extensively on her use of ‘thresholds’ in her work here, as well as a biography of Guest here.
Throughout Guest’s collection, there appears an emphasis on dislocation, displacement, and incessant ‘travel’ – whether real or imagined. With such contrasts between the persona’s memories and the traditional elements of pastoral writing, Guest creates some wonderful lines:
‘The water’s lace creates funerals
it makes us see someone we love in an acre of grass’.
The rain on the window of the speaker’s actual location functions to dissolve the scene, obscuring it both metaphorically from her mind, and literally from view, indicating that the poem’s narrator recognises that these are all disparate memories which are now dissolved in the reality of her current location.
‘In the final stanza, however, the speaker is:
‘rushing into darkness as corridors
who do not fear the melancholy of the stair’.
The narrator here demarcates between the narrow view from her window and the world beyond, indicating uncertainty.
Guest arguably forged her own style as a poet, with her poems demonstrating a modernist inspired aesthetic, whilst simultaneously an adaptation of a female reconstruction of the urban pastoral tradition through the lens of the female gaze. Her modernist poetry reminds me also of the work of Allen Ginsburg, particularly his book length poem ‘Howl’. Her fragmentary verses, having no regard for traditional metre or rhyme, are coupled with a nod toward the traditional pastoral, working to create this new and bold aesthetic.
Modernist poetry itself can often be seen as a collection of disparate images without the formal traditions of poetic style.
Whilst Guest’s poetry contains strong elements of the experimental, modernist mode in its fragmentary and ruptured nature, her poetry in this collection works together in a dialogue with the more traditional pastoral mode. But even so, it is often ruptured and difficult to pin down. Her collection pulls together recurring themes: melancholy, decay, death, even umbrellas and rain. The weather and seasons as experienced whilst Guest wrote her poetry in the rural retreat of time spent in Long Island are reflected as both interior and exterior landscapes throughout the collection.
It could be argued, then, that Guest writes in a modernist, surrealist, pastoral aesthetic, however urban her locations may be. However, I would suggest something of a hybrid; a genre-adjacent mode, encompassing newly transgressive forms whilst borrowing from earlier traditions.
Although I find poetry to be the most difficult genre to access, in Guests’ work, the effort feels rewarding. As I live on the ‘threshold’ of a busy urban city juxtaposed with the natural expanse of the Peak District National Park, Guests’ work speaks to me in her capturing of such contradictions. Her use of nature with the ideas of memory, as well as the thresholds of ‘place’ – both physical and literal – are explored in some of the most beautiful, resonant language, that I continue to return to.
Similarly, when I return to Levy’s earlier poetry, I can associate with her walks down busy urban streets lined with beautiful plane trees. There are many such trees in my local urban environment*; I believe the plane trees were a popular choice for planting within increasingly urbanised areas following the industrial revolution as they are excellent for absorbing pollution out of the atmosphere.
Importantly, I believe that the work of such writers as Levy and Guest show that women have been adopting and rewriting the rule book on earlier literary traditions for centuries. Taking the old forms, polishing them up, and sending them out as something new and brave.
Long may this continue.
*For an excellent essay on urban trees and their importance, I highly recommend this piece by my writing friend Joanna Clare Dobson on her Substack Wreckage and Shimmer.
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Bibliography:
Alpers, Paul J., What Is Pastoral? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)
Frankel, Nicholas, ‘Embodying the City in A London Garland’, Victorian Poetry, 48 (2010), 95–136
Gifford, Terry, Pastoral, (Routledge: University of Sheffield, 1989)
Guest, Barbara, ‘The Location of Things’, The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, ed. Hadley Guest, (Wesleyan University Press, 2008)
Guest, Barbara, ‘The Brown Studio’, The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest, ed. Guest, Hadley, (Wesleyan University Press, 2008)
Huth, Kimberly, ‘Come Live With Me and Feed My Sheep: Invitation, Ownership, and Belonging in Early Modern Pastoral Literature’, Studies in Philology, 108 (2011), 44–69
Levy, Amy, ‘A London Plane Tree and Other Verse’, (USA: Project Gutenberg, [1889] 2018)
I loved how you described the blend of the urban and the countryside. It made me look at city nature in a whole new way! Your passion for these writers really shines. Such a good piece.
Wow Amy Levy’s writing sounds so powerful, I love that mix between the urban and the pastoral. It’s interesting to see how her work takes a well-known genre and completely flips it. Thanks for sharing :)