Poetry—the writing of it, anyway—simply cannot be taught. Despite today’s abundance of workshops and MFA programs, this remains a widespread article of faith. People who do find themselves in the teacher’s position tend to be modest in their claims. The typical “creative writing” class (as I have experienced it, anyway) is a blend of very cautious criticism, gentle nudging, and readily offered praise. There may be “prompts,” there may be suggestions, but nothing is exactly taught.

Against this grain, though, there runs another, minority tradition, treating the art as a demanding discipline and offering specific, shared steps on the road to individual mastery. Let Anthony Burgess speak for this party: “Arts begin with craft, and there is no art until craft has been mastered. You can’t create unless you’re willing to subordinate the creative impulse to the constriction of form. But the learning of a craft takes time, and we all think we’re entitled to short cuts.”1

The Twentieth Century had no fiercer advocate of this sterner tradition than Lawrence Hart, the degree-less California intellectual who mentored what has intermittently been called the Activist Group of poets. Hart’s students attained some prominence in the middle of the last century, with two appearances in the Yale Younger Poets series and two long features in Chicago’s Poetry magazine, and successors in this line have soldiered on since in a poetic climate less open to their ambitions.

Despite commonalities, the Group label is misleading. Even when these poets marketed jointly under that label, “Activism” was not a cast of characters: it was and is a method, an approach, a curriculum, and above all a demand.

The demand: to create that kind of poetry in which just about every line is charged with some kind of excitement, emotional or intellectual. No filler; no mere setting; no “packaging material,” as Kay Ryan has termed it.2 Not a matter, as the Nineteenth Century had it, of “felicities” emerging from long tracts of less distinguished verse. Not prose narrative with flashes of imagery or wit. Hart scoffed at the thought that the mind needed respite between more fully realized moments: “The idea that flat lines are restful I would flatly contradict. Boredom is exhausting.” Tone and technique and pitch should vary constantly, of course, but dead space was a thing to be avoided.3

Origins

Like Ezra Pound, whom he resembled in his ferocious opinions, the vastness of his reading, his lack of formal credentials, and his distrust of received wisdom, Lawrence Hart was born in a remote mountain setting: a ranch outside Delta, Colorado, called Harts Basin. A year younger than the Twentieth Century, he was the son of Harry Hart and Anna Pope and the descendant on his father’s side of a local pioneer family.

This frontier heritage would fascinate him later, but he had no contact with it as a child.4 His parents were estranged; his biological father soon absent and mentioned only with bitterness; his stepfather A. H. Davis abusive. The unhappily blended family moved continually around the West as Davis, a railroad man, followed work. Shaking free as soon as he could, young Hart kept on wandering, accumulating the kind of experiences that would read well on a book jacket: organizing a revolt against compulsory military training at his high school in Santa Rosa, California; working as a roughneck on an oil rig; canning fish in Alaska; bicycling the half-completed U.S. Highway 101 in the redwood region and camping with a labor gang of prisoners; beginning and abandoning a career as a reporter.

To the stresses of his early life Hart had a classic if uncommon response. Seeking some foundation in a shifty and often hostile world, some strategy for living, he embarked on a study of religions and philosophies. He read the Buddhists, the Hindus, the Confucians, the Stoics, the Pragmatists. (He would wind up, eventually, as a species of modified Gnostic.) He read just as widely in history, and found himself fascinated with this question: What is it that creates a period of vigor in the arts and culture? That he himself was maturing in such a period—the years of Imagism, Cubism, Dada; the prime years of Pound, Rilke, Valéry—at first escaped him entirely.

Among the things he was reading was poetry: not poems but poets, whole lifetimes of verse from the first line to the last. Vast stretches he memorized. Somewhere along the line he absorbed a truth that academic students of literature, in their dedication to a chosen subject, may seem to overlook: that the landscape called poetry, for all the peaks it contains, is also full of plains of metrical plodding and valleys of barely inflected prosaic chatter. He marked and memorized the passages he liked best and began to ask himself by what criteria he chose them.

In the late 1920s, Hart settled in San Francisco. Seeking out artists and writers, he lived first on Telegraph Hill and later in the famous old Montgomery or Monkey Block at Montgomery and Kearny Streets, a warren of studios that was the city’s informal artists’ colony. (The TransAmerica Pyramid stands there today.)

In the 1930s he got involved with the Barter Movement, a social experiment that arose in response to the economic hard times. Cold-shouldered by the New Deal as too radical, it was at the same time infiltrated by orthodox Communists, who sought to make it a front organization. Finally, it fell apart in dissension.

Hart was now writing poetry of his own and getting some of it published. He wrote reviews for several publications and did some criticism for local writing circles. He also started a literary magazine, The Talisman, which lasted only two issues. Later on, when someone mentioned having a copy, he would ask to borrow it, and destroy it.

As the Depression deepened, he kept himself going with various government-subsidized jobs. In 1934 he was serving as a probably superfluous night watchman on a construction site when a fellow-worker made the suggestion that might be said to have begun Hart’s real life: Why didn’t he apply for a teaching post, also an option under the Emergency Work Relief program?5 He applied, was accepted, drummed up some students, and began telling people how to write poetry.

Was he qualified? By his own later account, not remotely.

The Talisman—copies of which in fact survive—bears out this rueful self-assessment. Lawrence Hart in 1934 was a stylistic conservative, behind the times, out of touch with the live currents of the day. A hopeless provincial. In one editorial, he takes after literati “whose writings, while not overly intelligible, are supposed to mean something or other from a psychological standpoint, and who enjoy exaggerating their little eccentricities so as to create masterpieces of deliberate mystification.” Just so might the Activists themselves have been attacked, later on, by puzzled readers.

Every teacher knows it: there is nothing like explaining a subject to others to reveal how imperfect is one’s own understanding. In his first several years of teaching, Hart’s attitudes underwent a revolution.

He was apparently not yet thinking of starting a group or defining a method. But he took his modest teaching platform as a chance to test one of the ideas he had developed through his readings in history and sociology. This was his vision of cultural democracy: of a nation in which many or most people, not just a self-selected few, would understand the arts and work seriously in them.

At first glance this seems a conventional hope. But when Hart talked about a sharing of the arts, he had much more in mind than mere exposure, inspiration, or pleasurable dabbling. He determined to adopt, as a probably false yet useful assumption, the idea that any student of poetry, however seemingly ill-equipped at the start, could produce writing of a very high caliber. If this did not occur, he declared, he would blame his own failure to teach.

The education of a taste

Work of a very high caliber: but how was he, and who was he, to judge?

Some years earlier, Hart had begun to wrestle with the problem that faces any honest practical critic: by what authority does one set up one’s own reactions as a standard for others, perhaps in opposition to prestigious authorities? His first response was to exercise, challenge, and solidify his taste. He set up for himself a kind of global tennis tournament of poetry. Beginning with poems and passages he already knew—the seeded players, so to speak—he matched them off in pairs. He would read one passage aloud, then the other, then the first again, until it was clear to him which he preferred. Then he would pair off the survivors, and repeat. As newer work came to his attention, he would enter it into this ongoing competition.

The result was an elaborate set of lists, again a bit like the rankings by which the sport declares tennis players to be the first, or tenth, or ninetieth best in the world. In early years, he recalled, his estimations would go up and down wildly; but with many repetitions and shifting pairs of matches, his opinion would settle, often in ways that surprised him. Of the contemporary work of the 1930s he first fed into this machinery, Elinor Wylie held up better than most; Robinson Jeffers started high and moved down the list. Among older poets, the Romantics fared increasingly poorly, and Milton climbed. (Like Pound, Hart took no account of era, inquiring only as to the effect of writing on a contemporary ear.) W. H. Auden, barely noted in the first rankings, moved up and up, and T. S. Eliot came to occupy the pinnacle. In a very late form of Hart’s canon, the top 30 poems include no fewer than ten Eliot pieces, seven by Milton, five by Pound, two by Auden, and one each by Bryant, Coleridge, Gray, Hopkins, Swinburne, and Whitman. (He limited the field to poetry originally composed in English, so his touchstones Dante, Mallarmé, García Lorca, and Perse do not appear.)

If the very top tier in Hart’s listings included poets of several periods, the second and third tiers contained, above all, the Moderns, among whom he found a consistency of brilliance unmatched by any other period—and, as Clive James has pointed out, not necessarily striven for in any other period: “This wish for the thing to be integrated by its intensity seems to be fundamental, although it might be wise to allow for the possibility that it has taken the whole of historic time for the wish to become so clear to us.”6 Hart did not know James’s writings, but would have concurred.

It’s important to note that there is no poet that Hart thought was writing poetry in every poem. “Even the great,” he was heard to say, “are not continuous.” And: “There are no good poets, only good poems.”

Soon after he began teaching, Hart opened a second front in this research. He began typing up anthologies of individual lines and short passages that seemed to him to exemplify particular poetic effects or strategies. He would then further analyze, subdivide, and retype these lists, attempting to put his finger on the precise technical means being used. In later years, lines selected from his own students came to dominate the example lists. Even the secretarial element of this project, in pre-computer days, seems staggering; but again it enabled him to speak with the authority of someone who had paid his analytical dues.

Activist Rosalie Moore, in a poem of tribute, would capture something of his approach:

You, Lawrence Hart, had better carry a crux-bug,
     jump-bob, tick-nut:
Wind up the palm to show—
Say This makes it go.7

One of the characteristic Modernist attitudes has been to emphasize the technical basis of the arts. Hart took this as far, perhaps, as anyone has. Though he certainly acknowledged the role of inspiration, and sought ways to encourage the emergence of surprising, perhaps unconscious content, he had no patience for the idea that certain poetic effects are inexplicable, ineffable. If some group of words stands out, leaps up, impresses itself on our minds, there is a reason.

Building poems from the line up

Hart started with the commonsensical insight that only some of the poetry written in any era is destined to last. He wanted his students to aim high: to make their lodestar not the good-enough or publishable, but the enduringly valuable.

He distinguished two routes to that end. In the ancient and always more common procedure, the poet builds poems, so to speak, from the outside in, filling out a plan or following a series of impulses. Really striking passages may (or may not) emerge of themselves along the way. “It is possible for a writer to begin with something very much like prose and to lift this material into poetry,” Hart acknowledged.

He offered, however, a second approach, one aimed directly at producing the kind of luminous moments that John Dryden called “hits.” “I see no reason why it is not practical to begin instead with brilliant if fragmentary poetic detail, and [then] work toward order and clarity,” he wrote.8 He asked his students to aim first at writing strong lines and only later to tackle the problem of assembling such units into poems. He thought this progression from small effects to large, though difficult enough, would allow a wider range of people to create valuable work. This was the “Activist” path—which any participant in his classes walked on, for a shorter or longer time.

Three tools: Direct Sensory Reporting

Hart would later regard it as good fortune that few of his first students were conspicuously talented. Rather, he faced roomfuls of people who could not take what was, to him, the unavoidable first step: to give up relying on tired, used-up metaphors in the attempt to communicate emotion and experience. Repeated criticism did not change these habits, and neither did various exercises designed to produce fresh comparisons. Finally, he asked his students to try writing descriptions of physical objects only, and without any use at all of metaphors or similes, in language of the severest simplicity.

So began the development of the exercise he called Direct Sensory Reporting. It had a negative and a positive side. The negative component was simply the avoidance of all comparison, all speculation, all abstraction. But the mere stripping down of language could go only so far. To make a description pleasing to the reader, one needed to find a new way of illuminating the subject. The solution was to add a few sensory details, precisely and concretely observed. A frequently cited model by Robert Frost:

Sprays of honeysuckle
That when they're gathered, shake
Dew on the knuckle.9

Frost didn’t write “dew on me,” Hart would emphasize, or “dew on the hand” or even “on the skin.” Prompted perhaps by the rhyme, the poet specified: “Dew on the knuckle.”

Faced with the objection, “I can’t think what to say,” Hart would inevitably send the student back to the model, the goldfish, the flower arrangement, the cat, the wave-worn glass fishing float (a perennial subject). “Don’t think,” he would respond. “Look.”

This very early poem by Activist Jeanne McGahey grew almost directly out of that discipline.

WARNING BY DAYLIGHT10

This is the corner, look four ways at stone.
Watch in two streets a wind
In the rattled and paper autumn.
(This to be dreamed of,
In some dark waken and hear the heart strike fear.)

Pages against the grating
Turn war and the Katzenjammers, someone named Talbot
Or merchandise.
She leaned out from a window,
Held apart curtains.
I saw her face
True Romances, the hair yolk-yellow,
And the pearls lay out
On the tight satin, and she held a cup
That was blue and empty: and whatever it was she said,
Or whether she laughed, I saw her mouth move with it,
Dental and bright.
But it was the stone I heard
And gutter of leaves.
And seeing how the wind
Blew big the curtains, and her red-cluttered hand
Twisted the cord, even before I woke
I saw she was the death that I had come for.

Though several techniques are in play, this is above all a poem of observation. At the intersection, we “look four ways at stone”; a wind blows down two of the four directions. (Who has actually remarked on this?) A newspaper flaps, and particular items glimpsed in its pages are named. The woman’s cup is “blue and empty”; what she says is inaudible, but her mouth is seen to move. Details are chosen for a dreamlike effect, and lined up in support of the menacing final statement.

Three tools: Double Imagery

After some months of the strangely difficult Sensory Reporting exercise, the student would advance to the second step: the construction of original similes and metaphors, which Hart preferred to think of as “double images.” The more surprising the objects brought together in the comparison, he taught, the more force it would have―if it didn’t tip over into the ridiculous. The principle had been defined in 1918 by the dean of the French Surrealists, Pierre Reverdy:

[The image] cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities. The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, the stronger the image will be—the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.11

For distant and true Hart would substitute the musical terms discord and accord.

Had Hart read Reverdy? While it was never safe to assume that he had missed a relevant work, he did not mention the Frenchman; he cited rather a now-forgotten study by Henry Lanz of Stanford, The Physical Basis of Rime.12 And of course the principle in some form as ancient, traceable even, perhaps, to the “concordia discors” of Pythagoras and Horace. But Hart gave it a central position in his teaching. At every level of technique, and in poem structure as well, moves should surprise but, in the end, feel right.

Thus Hart did not (like Harriet Monroe in the famous exchange with Hart Crane) insist that each imaginative departure make some kind of literal sense; but equally he did not (like Crane responding) defend bold combinations for their own sake: the wilder the better, to be sure, but the image must create a satisfying experience.13 Hart felt that such poets as Crane, Edith Sitwell, and Dylan Thomas, for all their brilliance, had been defeated by this further problem, while the Surrealists had simply ignored it.

The imagistic examples he drew from literature ranged from combinations quite easily grasped, which he called “semi-realistic,” to fantastic flights in which the original subject of the comparison almost disappears, called “romantic”:

And the golden seed of the fire14

A South Wind that carries fangs, sunflowers, alphabets
and an electric battery with suffocated wasps.15

The following highly imagistic poem by Rosalie Moore grew out of an experiment: the attempt to plot a poem like a piece of music, with a succession of moods or colorations. The first section is, as it were, pizzicato; the second aims for a sense of strangeness and menace; the third brings a lyric accord. The piece may be read as a succession of attitudes toward death and the deceased, or simply accepted as the tone poem it is.

FEAR BY HANGING16

What a battle the dead make among the kitchen knives
Racketing, and plucking the harps of forks.
Oh the faucet is shedding silverware―
Oh from their play I fly―
I retreat like a storm of plates.

            In a small upstairs hill
A bird is sharpening.
Always and always, visiting the rounds of hill
With their gulfed kings, I feel the rising of
The knights taller than wells―
And the dark in their throats is a man tall with hanging.

            Under their floors are seas: their old machines, their anvils.
There watch you walk not loud,
But hearing a whine in belfries,
Turning three times on a cold heel.

But oh, the dead coming
Are cliff pushing on cliff in a march of walls;
Their gable voices are calling down wells on wells;
They come with a filling of bells.

Into our low grasses, with their daylight of poppies,
The horses softly charge―being more, to the dead,
As clouds are.

Three tools: Poetic Statement

As they worked, most students began feeling the need to deal with ideas or abstractions more directly. Hart searched the literature to see how poets have done this without lapsing into flat, prosaic language—how they have made us feel, rather than merely understanding, their ideas. Two key variants he called Simple Statement and Cross Category. Simple Statement is a crystalline yet somehow unexpected formulation of an idea. Dante and Auden provided many of his examples:

I am Beatrice who send thee; I come from a place where I desire to return; love
     moved me, that makes me speak. 17

Their fate must always be the same as yours,
To suffer the loss they were afraid of, yes,
Holders of one position, wrong for years.18

Cross-category works in a more obvious way, by replacing an expected word with a parallel yet startling one, often from another realm of experience:

These are the hearts you falsified19

     For all the pools at my feet
Accommodate blue now20

 “Accommodate” might be said to replace the more predictable “reflect,” and “falsified” deepens the underlying meaning of “betrayed.”

The Moore and McGahey poems above each have statement elements mixed with other techniques. A third early Activist, the young prodigy Robert Horan, relied more on statement, less on visual imagery, than his colleagues; he also was more attracted to meter and rhyme.

ANTIPHONAL SONG 21

What is it eats the hunter’s breath
as he picks through the thicket?
The blood that’s bound to bleed to death
like a leak in a bucket.

What is it tires the oarsman so
as he climbs the chaste water?
The love that he leaves and the winds that blow
him on green miles after.

What is it drains the drinker there
at the jumping fountain?
The desert he crossed that brought him there
and the next mountain.

This seems to be a poem about cost, about the price we pay for our quests, whatever they are: and it seems also to be about time-hauntedness. The hunter looks ahead to the death of his quarry (or his own?). The oarsman looks back to a lover left behind. The drinker is not really present at the fountain, at the moment his thirst is slaked, but looks away to struggles past and future.

From passages to poems

After making progress in precise sensory description and the creation of bold, successful metaphors—usually followed by some exercises in statement—students would finally burst the initial constraints and turn to whole poems. At this stage they became something more than students, if not quite peers: rather co-explorers of the problems of effective expression. Distinct voices quickly emerged. Lawrence Hart would sometimes applaud, sometimes offer detailed criticism, and sometimes intervene with a suggested assignment, if the writer seemed to have reached a dead end.

All these poets now confronted the challenge built into the ground-up approach they had followed so far: how to make individually vivid phrases and lines work together in paragraphs and poems. The first leap—from line to integrated stanza—was often the hardest. This was especially so for writers whose penchant was for bold, concrete, metaphorical imagery.

Hart and his student-colleagues spent years exploring techniques for stacking brilliant images one on another without anarchy. One of these techniques he called Connotation Line. The principle was to choose metaphors so that the objects brought in as comparisons (the Bs of “A is like B”) themselves had certain qualities in common, permitting them to chord rather than to clash. Rosalie Moore was a master at it.

SHIPWRECK22

Watching, watching from shore:
Wind, and the shore lifting,
The hands raising on wind
And all the elements rising.

Calmly the wreck rides,
Turns like leviathan or log,
And the moon-revealing white turns upward
(Upward of palms, the dead);
And all the of the sea’s attack, small tangents and traps,
Is wasted on it, the wind wasted,
Helpless to wreck or raise.

Often in sleep turning or falling
A dream’s long dimension
I rock to a random ship:
The one like a broken loon,
Clapping its light and calling:
The one bug-black, signing its sign in oil;
The telegraph-tall, invented—
Moved by a whine of wires;
The Revenge riding its crossbar,
Raising its sword hilt:

And I know their power is ended, and all of the dreams
Too vacant and inhabited:
The ships with lights on their brows, the mementos, the messages,
The cardinals, couriers to Garcías; 23
And after it all, they say,
The ships make more noise than the sea

And I look again
At the equal ocean
With its great dead ship.

Jeanne McGahey praised this poem especially for its central, virtuoso burst of images about the doomed ships:

The one like a broken loon,
Clapping its light and calling:
The one bug-black, signing its sign in oil;
The telegraph-tall, invented—
Moved by a whine of wires;
The Revenge riding its crossbar,
Raising its sword hilt . . .

Even if removed from context and simply placed in a list, all of the major words reinforce one another connotatively. McGahey would ask, “What if Moore had written instead, The one like a broken cup? Or the submarine ebony black? Or the ship treetop-tall?”24 In the last four lines, the series of cross-shapes—telegraph poles, crossbars, swords—is classic Connotation Line.

Ideas of Order

In 1945, George Leite, publisher of the Berkeley magazine Circle, invited Hart and his colleagues to produce statements of theory and practice. The result was a feature (and offprint) called Ideas of Order in Experimental Poetry; this is sometimes regarded as an Activist manifesto.25 Hart’s contribution, “Some Elements of Active Poetry,” develops an idea he traced back to the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce. Esthetic or connotative meaning, said Croce, is too often thought of as a mere illustration or adornment of literal or denotative meaning. Instead it must be recognized as, so to speak, a co-equal branch:

There exists a very ancient science of intellective knowledge, admitted by all without discussion, namely, Logic; but a science of intuitive knowledge is timidly and with difficulty admitted by but a few. Logical knowledge has appropriated the lion's share; and if she does not quite slay and devour her companion, yet yields to her with difficulty the humble little place of maidservant or doorkeeper.26

Hart sketched two parallel ladders of meaning, each mounting in complexity. On the literal side it led from dictionary definitions to “the comprehensive rationalistic philosophy”; on the esthetic side, from sensory impressions to “the comprehensive esthetic intuition.” Thus there was something fundamentally wrong with the question, “What does this poem mean?” The question must be “What experience does this poem produce”—which might or might not be followed by a translation into “sense,” as from one alien language into another.

This argument was in part a response to the Stanford critic Yvor Winters, who maintained the need for rational frameworks in poetry.27 Such arguments would continue. John Crowe Ransom, responding to a submission in the late 1940s, wrote: “I like the two lady-poets [Moore and McGahey] best, and in fact I like them a good deal. But I gag at the theory, the heroic, quixotic theory: that they must resist the ordering that could unify the poems. In my theory the prime essential of a poet is the gift of association and free meaning, but it is technically or formally subordinated to the scheme or order; without the latter, the poem falls apart.”28 Hart was as worried as anyone about poems “falling apart,” but sought alternative means of holding them together.

A label sticks

In Circle, Hart spoke of “Active” poetry, yet the word “Activist” appears nowhere in these pages. At this time the label of choice seemed to be “Associationalist,” referring to one non-logical approach to ordering paragraphs in a poem. Eliot’s The Waste Land remains the supreme model. It is unclear when “Activist” was adopted. Once it was, it became necessary to explain, over and over again, that no political stance was implied.

The label was set in stone when W. H. Auden employed it in introducing Rosalie Moore’s 1949 Yale Series of Younger Poets volume, The Grasshopper’s Man and Other Poems. (Robert Horan had preceded Moore in the series.) In this introduction, Auden recognized the Activists, and sought to place them in the landscape:

The history of poetry is an interaction of two histories, a history of theme and a history of treatment, of the various answers given, on the one hand, to the question, “what kind of relations, situations, persons, objects, etc., excite the poet most?”, and, on the other, to the question “how is that excitement most accurately and completely transmuted into the medium of poetry?” In each case, development is the outcome of a continuous struggle between two diametrically opposed principles. In the history of theme these are: 1) “nothing shall be excluded which does in fact excite the poet’s passionate concern,” and 2) “everything shall be excluded which does not really excite the poet as a poet.” Thus there is always a party (every poet is necessarily a party man, though he may switch sides) which is seeking to extend the range of theme against traditional conceptions of what is a “poetic” subject, e.g., low life as a subject for tragedy, and a party seeking to limit poetry to its true concern as against its improper uses, e.g., teaching or journalism.

Similarly, the party which, in treatment, upholds the principle “everything which is relevant to the subject must be expressed” stresses the importance of intensity as against triviality while the party of the principle “everything which is irrelevant to the subject must be excluded” stresses clarity and unity as against obscurity and disorder.

Miss Rosalie Moore is a member of the Activists, a group of poets associated with Mr. Lawrence Hart, who may be described as adhering to the exclusive principle in regard to theme and the inclusive principle in regard to treatment.

Hart & Co. read this statement with some astonishment. After his valuable if somewhat rambling analysis, Auden had gotten  the punchline exactly wrong. The Activists were inclusive with regard to theme—anything is fair game for poetry—but unusually exclusive with regard to treatment—anything must undergo a considerable transformation to be counted as poetry. Hart would later have contact with Auden while teaching at Mills College, and claimed that the eminent poet acknowledged his slip. I have found no documentation of such an exchange.

In 1951, the editor of Poetry, Karl Shapiro, returned a batch of Activist work, suggesting instead that Hart guest-edit an entire issue devoted to the group and its approaches. The feature appeared in May, with contributions by McGahey, Moore, and fourteen others. Hart contributed a note on the group and a separate one on a recently deceased member, the anthropologist and H. P. Lovecraft associate Robert Barlow. He assessed the work on offer with characteristic moderation: “The selection of poems in this issue of Poetry may seem very uneven, partly because of the sequence in which some of the poets are working out their technical problems . . . . In a sense they sometimes do stammer, but I think they stammer in poetry.”29

The issue also includes a letter from William Carlos Williams suggesting an affinity of the Activists with the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora. Williams had developed a fondness for some of the most adventurous Activist work; later in 1951 he wrote of Moore: “It is shocking for the uninformed to look at a Picasso or to pick up a poem by Rosalie Moore. He can’t understand them. He will never understand them until he has CHANGED within himself.”30

The later years

Near the end of the 1950s came another invitation from Poetry. Henry Rago, Shapiro’s successor as editor, asked Hart to guest-edit a feature titled “Activists: A Sequel.” This September 1958 issue provides a nice snapshot of the group twenty years after its founding, including much work by a younger generation.

Also included was an essay by Rosalie Moore, “The Beat and the Unbeat,” taking notice of a new force in American poetry. In Lawrence Hart’s home region, the transplanted New York Beats had fused with local tendencies in what was called “the San Francisco Renaissance.” Since the 1956 publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, the phenomenon had captured national attention. Hart found himself and his colleagues unwelcome in the new constellation. He also saw little merit in the trumpeted works, finding in them pure laziness or at best a recycling of old Surrealist ideas.

As the movement nonetheless gained ground, Hart sought to set a backfire. In June 1959, he wrote to San Francisco Chronicle book reviewer William Hogan with a call for “a movement to recredit poetry in San Francisco after the Beat Generation fever.” Hogan sent the letter for comment to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg’s publisher; Ferlinghetti returned it with mocking annotations in a Dada vein. Jeanne McGahey, in turn, wrote a satirical poem directed at Ferlinghetti. Hogan printed parts of this exchange and following letters, but there was limited sequel.31

Hart soon realized that he was facing not a regional but a national—and soon international—change of mood. A reaction against Modernist demands and practices, building for some time, had taken hold on both U.S. coasts (Kenneth Koch’s “Fresh Air” appeared at almost the same moment as “Howl”) and at other centers like Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Once begun, the change of climate was astonishingly rapid. When Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry appeared in 1960, collecting “215 poems culled from the most authentic and interesting poetic voices to emerge in the past fifteen years,” the Activists were conspicuous by their absence.32 Though Moore and McGahey continued to appear in Poetry through the mid-1960s, as if by sheer momentum, the avenues to recognition were closing one by one.

This is not the place to review the later marketing fortunes of Hart’s students. There were some widely spaced highlights, including John Hart’s The Climbers (Pitt Poetry Series, 1978) and Jeanne McGahey’s Homecoming with Reflections (Quarterly Review of Literature at Princeton, 1989). Clusters of current or former Hart students had volumes with Woolmer-Brotherson, a small but respected New York house, in the 1970s; another cluster would appear with Sugartown Publishing, a now-defunct San Francisco Bay Area press, in the 2010s. In 1983-85, Hart and Co. received a series of grants from the San Francisco Foundation to publish a newsletter of literary debate, the poetry LETTER; this elicited a number of late theoretical statements by Hart and McGahey.

Lawrence Hart died in 1996, having taught very nearly to the end. Since then, I have continued his seminars under the auspices of the Lawrence Hart Institute, accepting his basic precepts, documenting his approaches, and hopefully at times extending them. However the means evolve, the challenge remains the same: to pursue a poetry that exhibits its intensity and difference from prose in almost every line.

In the end I circle back to two very venerable guides indeed: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Lawrence Hart did not cite them, feeling perhaps that their precepts were too obvious to require mention. Truisms. They are not truisms today.

Wordsworth was half-right: “The Poet writes under one restriction only, namely, that of the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a Human Being . . . .”33 But this thought is treacherous without the completion that Coleridge gave it: “As the result of all my reading and meditation, I abstracted two critical aphorisms, deeming them to comprise the conditions and criteria of poetic style;—first, that not the poem which we have read, but that to which we return, with the greatest pleasure, possesses the genuine power, and claims the name of essential poetry; —secondly, that whatever lines can be translated into other words of the same language, without diminution of their significance, either in sense or association, or in any worthy feeling, are so far vicious in their diction.”34

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John Hart, poet and journalist, has written sixteen books. He leads the Lawrence Hart Institute, a nexus for the study and promotion of poetry as an exacting craft, and is chief editor of Blue Unicorn, an all poetry semi-annual published in California since 1977. His own verse has been recognized with a James D. Phelan Award and a title in the Pitt Poetry Series. *** This essay is part of the "Teaching..." series launched by The Montreal Review in 2024 and edited by Stephen Haven and Laura Ann Reed. The series publishes essays by scholars, writers, and artists on teaching and interpreting the work, ideas, and lives of prominent authors, philosophers, artists, and political figures.

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