| In the 20th century, no form of experience has been more frequently drawn on by poets eager to capture both the openness and fluidity of life and the aesthetic closure of an artwork than that of a walk. The walk provides a readymade frame within which to explore the full range of individual consciousness as it responds to and reflects on the world immediately at hand. The unstructured, plotless character of the walk allows poets to move freely from place to place, image to image, thought to thought. It thus represents a compromise between the American obsession with process or movement and more traditionally mimetic concerns.; The body of this study is given to a close analysis of selected instances of the genre, with the aim of displaying the full range of representational strategies that it elicits. Robert Frost's cold parables, in which the walker moves from a version of pathetic fallacy to the wisdom of disenchantment, use the walk as a vehicle for an essentially cognitive movement. Wallace Stevens avoids the closure Frost's narratives create in favor of a "never-ending meditation," one that takes the walk as an occasion for thought rather than a subject for representation. William Carlos Williams emphasizes the purely aesthetic character of the walk, presenting the various sights and sounds he encounters with a directness intended to convey their special "music" to the reader. Theodore Roethke and Elizabeth Bishop try to infuse their versions of the walk with a sense of the particular insight or revelation that it occasions. Frank O'Hara and Gary Snyder present the walk as a convenient way to sample their experience at its most ordinary, while enabling them to capture and convey its affective and physical intensities. Finally, A. R. Ammons and John Ashbery treat the walk as a process of reflection or thinking in which the impingements of the world continually modify and deflect the motions of the mind. |
