A Fairer House than Prose

Maureen N. McLane is the author of eight books of poems, all of which demonstrate an enviable commitment to wearing her wide learning lightly. She is also the author of two scholarly monographs (and many shorter works) on British Romantic poetry, as well as a ‘hybrid memoir’ (before it was cool), My Poets. Her latest book title, My Poetics, bills it as a sequel to her memoir, but, really, it’s a sequel to the whole body of work. Indeed, poems from her previous collections show up as envois, counterpoints or fade-outs to each of its chapters. We might think of it as a transept, joining and dividing the imaginative and the critical in the Wordsworthian ‘Gothic church’ of her writing.

At the heart of My Poetics is a question McLane transposed, in My Poets, into the key of autobiography from Percy Shelley’s unfinished final poem: what is life? Throughout the book, McLane is concerned with how poetry might help to broaden the definition of life, and how it lets all that extra life in. Rather than making a strict argument, each of the five main chapters rings the changes through the question of how poetry is part of nature in the broadest sense. Or as she puts it:

How have poems shaped and responded to our condition and conditioning, as historically and biodynamically conditioned sentient creatures? […] What is the relation of poetry to its surround, its environment, ‘the’ environment?

We are treated to a chapter on poetry’s relationship to modality – necessary ...