Thomas Carper: Miniaturist of the Grand Scale

Getting It Right

For D.A.

He sits before the blank page of his mind,
Adrift in possibility. A thought
Is deeply felt, but masked beneath a white
Opaqueness which, he senses, may be brought
Into such clarity that he will find
The sentence he desires to get right.

As wind might toss a paper to the ground
Creating movement, suddenly it’s there,
Alive in English meaning, word on word:
A confident procession where we share
His celebration of idea in sound
At once both ours and strangely over heard.

Who is his listener, then? And who is he?
The one who wrote the phrases on a page
No longer is the person that the new
Discovery seems intended to engage
In dialogue. The listener once was me,
But have I vanished? Is the listener you?

—Thomas Carper

+++

Although the New Formalist movement is much discussed these days, the poetry of one of the finest American formalist poets tends to be significantly overlooked. Although Thomas Carper has had two books published by Johns Hopkins University Press since 1991, the sixty-seven-year-old poet’s work has been reviewed in only one national American publication (a page-and-a-half review by R. S. Gwynn in the Hudson Review). Ironically, the most serious critical analysis of Carper’s work has been published in Germany. A recent issue of Anglistik featured a fourteen-page overview of American New Formalism by Franz Link, one of Germany’s leading Americanists; the article’s first half discussed the writers usually associated with that movement, and the article’s second half was devoted entirely to Carper’s poetry.

His poetry resembles Robert Frost’s in embodying clear thought in clear statement, ranging in a spectrum from homey exposition to elegant restraint. Though Carper’s poetry encompasses a varied range of focus from the amusing to the ironic to the poignant to the cosmic, readers in search of the stylistically pyrotechnic or avant-garde should be warned that Carper’s poetry consistently demonstrates an affinity for Apollonian moderation in tone and traditionalism in rhyme and meter.

Carper’s easygoing equanimity and clarity of statement and logic are exemplified in “Sisyphus’ Pet Rock” (From Nature), which also demonstrates Carper’s quietly ironic sense of humor and tendency to express ideas through parables:

I have my rock, my hill. So, every day
My task, though hard, is known. And as I roll
My rock, its weight seems always to convey
A certain satisfaction to the soul.
Near sunset-time, just before I can see
The highest point, I purposely let go.
My rock responds and, thanks to gravity,
Takes its own way back to the plain below.
I follow willingly, our duties done,
And grateful that another day’s in store,
And glad to think my rock and I are one
In labor and in meaning. Surely, more
Is not to be expected; surely we
Will have our task throughout eternity.

In part, “Sisyphus’ Pet Rock” distills an attitude of acceptance which pervades Carper’s work, in both his amusing and serious poems. His poems attempt to maintain a basic optimism in the face of the many potential trials provided by life and acknowledged in his poetry, as he himself writes elsewhere, “ . . . The structure of a happy destiny/ That finds fulfillment in the smallest things. . . .” (“Kingdoms”). Furthermore, “Sisyphus’ Pet Rock” distills Carper’s workmanly attitude toward the writing of poetry. Like his portrayal of Sisyphus, Carper tends to write one line of iambic pentameter after another until one sonnet is completed, at which time the rock rolls to the hill’s bottom for the process cheerfully to resume. While Carper’s two books contain several deviations from the English sonnet, the deviations are rare, and no poem in either of the collections deviates from iambic pentameter, as Carper writes, “ . . . And now I number, too:/ The syllables in lines (most often, ten), / And fourteen lines desiring to ring true. . . .” (“Step by Step”).

Carper’s allegiance to traditional metrics extends back to his late teens and early twenties when he wrote longish poems in the modes of William Butler Yeats and John Keats, adhering closely to iambic pentameter. After a few of his poems were published, editorial taste shifted to favoring free verse, and magazines stopped accepting his poetry. After a brief stint working in publishing in New York City where he met his wife, Janet, Carper stopped writing poetry for a decade, turning his energies to beginning his thirty-year career teaching at the University of Southern Maine while pursuing his Ph.D. at Boston University (having received his A.B. from Harvard and his M.A. from New York University). At the age of thirty-six and upon completing his doctoral work and his dissertation on Thomas Gray, Carper resumed writing poetry, now adhering with almost surprising single-mindedness to writing English sonnets. In 1983 when Carper was forty-seven, John Frederick Nims accepted several of his poems for Poetry, which marked the beginning of Carper’s publishing poems regularly in magazines, most often in Poetry.

The first of Carper’s two collections is Fiddle Lane, published when he was fifty-five. Like most books of poetry and unlike Carper’s second collection, Fiddle Lane is a collection of unconnected poems. Reading Fiddle Lane feels much like strolling through a pleasant exhibit of photography in which all the photographs, to greater or lesser degrees, offer points of interest, and none of the photographs appear to have any particular relation to one another. The book is comprised of self-contained vignettes of small incidents from the poet’s experience or day-to-day observations, which Carper has described as being fictionalized to greater or lesser degrees. The poems follow like little snapshots of subjects, such as children interacting at a skating rink, a teenager revving a car to leave a track of burnt rubber, a mini-portrait of a bullying coach, Carper jogging with his dog, childhood memories of family, etc. The book contains a few poems which seem little comments on humankind’s metaphysical situation, sometimes rendered playfully and sometimes with additional weight implied more than directly presented or developed. The poems display wit without pretension, as well as a competent miniaturist’s clarity.

While maintaining all of the first book’s charms, Carper’s second book, From Nature (1995), subtly shifts into a greater scope and depth. The second book’s poems viewed individually seem, for the most part, a continuation of the first book’s mode. However, From Nature takes on a very different organizational approach, grouping poems so they may amplify one another. While the poems in the first book seem each to sound one separate key, the poems in From Nature group into chords, providing greater resonance, subtlety and combined power. While Carper continues primarily to write sonnets, his second book demonstrates he has enlarged his aims beyond the limiting boundaries of individual sonnets.

In From Nature, Carper’s new method of combining poems into sequences is not immediately obvious. Only the final third of the book is arranged and titled to make clear the poems are intended to group together and stand as suites. This final third of the book is grouped under the overarching title “Four Sequences” and includes a group of four sonnets concerned with war, based on the Carpers’ visits to European sites where combat occurred (the Carpers summer each year in France where, in 1972, they bought a small Loire Valley farmhouse built in the late fourteenth century). A second war sequence of three sonnets is based on the experiences of a friend who served in the German army during World War II. The “Four Sequences” section also includes five octave stanzas providing a series of portraits of Norway. Finally, the “Four Sequences” section includes the superb sequence of fourteen parts entitled “On Basho’s Way.”

The most ambitious of the sequences in the “Four Sequences” section, “On Basho’s Way” follows a linear narrative as the poet sets out on an imagined journey retracing Basho’s famous pilgrimage from Edo to Japan’s northern provinces. The sequence’s content includes Carper as narrator both identifying with and separating himself from the Japanese poet, this duality being reflected structurally in the sequence’s individual sections, each of which is a combination of Carper’s hallmark English sonnet followed by a modified haiku. Carper consciously writes “On Basho’s Way” in the tradition of the poem which itself becomes a spiritual journey, as clearly signaled by the initial poem’s title, “Traveler in Eternity.” The sequence embodies a concise simplicity of expression which seems Japanese, as well as being temperamentally natural to Carper himself, while the sequence ranges to encapsulate a spectrum of human possibilities, including micro-meditations on friendship, ambition, nature’s random power, aging, evanescence, expansive invigoration, weary aimlessness, hardship, and the pleasures of domestic comforts. This quiet sequence is one of the fine achievements in current American poetry.

By contrast, the first two-thirds of From Nature misleadingly appears, at a glance, to be organized identically to Carper’s first book, apparently using occasional titled divider pages to partition groupings of separate poems loosely related by theme. However, although the poems in the first two titled sections (“Memorials,” which includes thirteen poems, and “Painters, Musicians, Writers,” which includes fourteen poems) can be read as individual poems, the individual poems also build upon one another and combine to provide a coherent unity and progressive movement. This is especially pronounced in “Painters, Musicians, Writers,” which, in fact, should be viewed as one large poem or poetic sequence, similar to “On Basho’s Way.” Both of the book’s first two sections are interesting from the standpoint of their being artifacts of the poet’s transition from the micro-unit of the individual poem to the macro-unit of the sequence. While Carper from the beginning consciously conceived and planned “On Basho’s Way” to be a coherent sequence (one long poem), in the two opening sections of From Nature, we witness an in-between period in the poet’s development. The book’s two opening sections illustrate a poet growing in the direction of larger units and the poet’s evolution toward incorporating increasing breadth into his work. While Fiddle Lane was the work of a miniaturist, From Nature is a work of expanse which maintains the miniaturist’s light touch. The poet’s conscious commitment to this artistic evolution is reinforced by his choice for a working title for his in-progress third collection of poetry, Sequences.

“Painters, Musicians, Writers” emerges as a powerful and moving single, large poem, all the more energized because the author did not originally conceive of it as one unified work but, rather, the work exerted itself beyond the author’s initial intentions. I met Carper in the summer of 1997 at West Chester University where he was delivering a paper at the university’s annual conference on form and narrative, and he affirmed I was right in reading “Painters, Musicians, Writers” as a single large poem. In a later letter, he compared this sequence to the more consciously devised “On Basho’s Way,” acknowledging that some of the strengths of “Painters, Musicians, Writers” occurred precisely because of the work’s subconscious evolution in becoming an interconnecting suite. In his letter, Carper wrote, “It seems to me the sequence, if it had been carefully pre-planned and then composed, might have become too evidently contrived.” He also noted that at the time of writing “Painters, Musicians, Writers,” he had been thinking increasingly in terms of sequences because of his having earlier translated Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem (1994). He credits John T. Irwin, general editor of the Johns Hopkins Poetry Series, with shortening “Painters, Musicians, Writers” into a clearer whole, though Carper alone devised the sequencing.

As previously stated, one of the welcome aspects of Carper’s work is its clarity of expression or, as R. S. Gwynn put it in his Hudson Review article, the poetry’s “reverence for the old-fashioned act of saying something worth saying.” However, From Nature’s transitional movement into larger scale can at times obscure some of the poetry’s more beautiful consistencies of imagery and structure. Because “Painters, Musicians, Writers” is a work of noteworthy importance, which has been largely overlooked, this essay will examine it in some detail.

As its title suggests, “Painters, Musicians, Writers” presents a range of artists and events from their lives. These small portraits provide concrete situations which distill and universalize experiences and themes which, in turn, support the sequence’s overall theme, the sequence being a homage to human creative engagement. The sequence examines this theme within a context of cosmic proportion. Unlike “On Basho’s Way,” which followed a linear narrative, “Painters, Musicians, Writers” follows no narrative line but, rather, its sequencing is organized according to a progression of abstract ideas.

The sequence is powerfully framed by its first and last sections, the two sections playing off one another in a beautiful counterpoint of similarity and contrast. The first section, entitled “Bamboo,” describes an artist of the Yüan dynasty painting bamboo on a canvas. Yet the act also takes on a larger fractal of significance, especially in the context of the poetry to follow, echoing a God-like creation from nothingness. Using meter to signal largeness of intention, Carper begins this sequence with the chord-like resonance of three spondees and a pyrrhic (“Light glazes the out-there. Therefore. . . .”) which rumble like slow thunder preceding a refreshing shower. Here the creator is a man, not a god (“ . . . a sheet/ Of paper is a world for human will. . . .”). On the canvas’s empty whiteness, the painter’s brush “begins its fleet/ Exfoliations,” filling the “emptiness” of the “pale, undifferentiated sky” with bursting foliage.

The sequence’s final section, entitled “Genesis,” begins with an epigraph from Genesis 1:2: “The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” Building upon the entirety of the preceding body of the sequence, “Genesis” erupts into a very direct philosophical questioning of the human condition and predicament, couched in imagery of its epigraph’s images of the void and darkness:

What spirit moves upon the waters? Where
Do all its turbulent intentions tend?
When life is summoned from the void, is there
A patterning that life can comprehend?
In darkness seed is sown, and from the seed
The child comes forth, a spirit from the deep;
It cries, seeks steady light, and, with its need
Awakened, tires and falls away in sleep. . . .

The section later continues as follows:

And while the years declare reality,
While destinies divide, some sinking down
To depths and darkness as others see
Success in sunlight, riches in renown—
Though all move toward a mystery—the few
Who trace the solar patterns, who observe
The patterns their own passing lives renew,
Recording them in sound and color, serve
To grant to all the sense that spirit lives. . . .

Both “Bamboo” and “Genesis” are similar in acknowledging reality’s ground of nothingness and meaninglessness—the bamboo’s utterly empty white background and the Spirit of God’s background of “darkness upon the face of the deep.” Structurally, the sequence’s intervening sections exist between the sequence’s outer borders of “Bamboo” and “Genesis,” the intervening sections being held like books between these two bookends; the intervening sections describe anecdotes from individual lives while being held within the two framing sections which describe the void; thus, the poems’ sequencing mirrors the sequence’s overarching theme of the figure of life held within a ground of the void. The two framing sections describe this void as (1) the empty canvas and “emptiness that occupied the core of all” on which the “human will” can paint a pleasing image and (2) the drowning “darkness” and “deep” of “waters” being a background which might be etched by those of us who can “trace the solar patterns.” The colors of both the void and its figures of life are oppositely portrayed in the beginning and the ending of the poem: in “Bamboo” the void is a white background inhabited by a black icon of life (the ink painting of bamboo); in “Genesis,” the void is a dark background inhabited by a bright icon of life (the “solar patterns”). This is a beautiful portrayal of the yen yang of dark and light. The idea of yen and yang opposites is suggested by “Bamboo” beginning the overall sequence with its portrayed Asian art form.

Between these two framing sections, the majority of the sequence is a series of small portrayals (usually sonnets) describing some event or aspect from the life of an artist, to include Titian, Rembrandt, Monet, Corot, Beethoven, Chopin, Brahms, and Scarlatti. The sections follow as small vignettes, each captured with the deftness of the quick-sketch artist who is able to bring people and places to life with spare, essential strokes which portray a concrete setting and reality. In reading the entire sequence, the reader encounters poem after poem, each concretely adhering to a specific habitation of situation and circumstance; then the sequence in “Genesis” finally and surprisingly erupts into an unabashedly abstract discussion of cosmic reality, which seems all the more startling as well as earned in the context of the previous sections having maintained restraint from indulging in such sweep of prophetic statement.

A host of today’s poems, especially those most influenced by deconstructionist thought, uniformly announce their meaning to be that there is no meaning. By contrast, “Painters, Musicians, Writers” makes a serious attempt at examining deep levels of human meaning, hence becoming an art object which almost seems designed to serve as a meditative tool, like a prayer wheel. “Genesis” is the sequence’s final section, genesis meaning beginning and this section appearing last in the sequence; this title combines with the sequence’s interconnected opening and concluding imagery to loop the overall sequence back to its beginning. These initial and concluding correspondences make the sequence’s overall structure seem almost a yen yang circle of temporal and existential opposites and similarities (the thing whose ending is its beginning). In this, the poem becomes a sort of meditative icon or mandala supporting the discovery of a greater completion than is provided by the mortal linear progression in time, the poem becoming a circle which closes into wholeness instead of being a runaway linear path leading into nothingness. The sequence’s circular structure thereby supports the self-recognition Eliot described as being “In my end is my beginning.” The poem indicates this recognition is found if we are able to climb or rise (one of the sequence’s sections is entitled “Rising in Music”) in engaged awareness as the hikers climbed Basho’s mountain on their pilgrimage.

Set within this cosmic frame, the sequence presents little moments ticking in time, each sonnet being like an individual tick of mortal experience, each seeming to join into becoming a tapestry of related emblems, like related images joining into a Grecian urn’s overall design, rather than seeming like separate vignettes. Instead of being a Bayeux Tapestry unrolling to provide images recording historical events, “Painters, Musicians, Writers” might be viewed as a tapestry of images of what it is like to be a human being feeling and living through life with engagement, awareness, and with the potential for enjoyment, albeit amid a context also inhabited by pain and tedium:

+++

“Titian Makes Preliminary Studies for a Picture of Saint Sebastian”: As the title suggests, this section concerns the experience of pain.

“Rembrandt Prepares for a Walk Along the Amstel River”: This section describes the experience simply of looking at the world with pleasure and engagement. It also portrays the contrast of outward and inward human realities and experience.

“A Farmstead With a Hayrick and Weirs Beside a Stream”: This section describes a scene which continually lured Rembrandt to return to draw it, its pleasing beauty embodying for Rembrandt both a tactile reality as well as suggesting “all beyond, even beyond the brink” of the drawing’s canvas and beyond the humanly describable world. This section examines the experience of a “prosperity/ Not got by owning,” the sense of non-materialistic, non-attached richness of feeling.

“From Nature”: This section portrays Monet working on a large painting of his garden which includes four life-sized figures of women, his wife modeling in different poses for all four of the painting’s pictured women. Thus, this section portrays the experience of love’s expansive goodness as astonishingly represented by Monet’s wife companionably multiplying into the literal image of love’s generative fecundity. This section’s situation also suggests the painter actively creating the life and world of which he wishes to be a part.

“The Tranquil Life”: Corot is portrayed painting what is described as “the most inviting landscape.” Yet as an artist, he is torn by the despair that “to convey/ A moment of its meaning calls on powers/ He sometimes doubts possessing.” This section describes the experience of living out our lives in the spectrum bordered by tranquility and struggle.

“Three Houses”: This section describes three houses to which Beethoven went by turns to escape into solitude. The section depicts these houses as being places where the composer has no need to hide his art, but rather can be fully himself and fully expressed. The section examines the experience of the pleasure of privacy and introspection.

“Chopin’s Fantasy”: This section portrays Chopin on a quiet day in solitude working and reworking a passage from a composition, feeling depressed in looking at the notations he has written on the page (“ . . . soul, is fixed, and stares back, black on white,/ Up from the voiceless page. . . .”), until finally he begins to hear the passage in a new way (“ . . . The melodies return,/ Now differing from those that had begun/ The unpredicted journey that would earn/ Their permanence. . . .”). This section examines the experience of working and concentrating on a task at hand, even the high task of trying to “earn permanence,” coming down to being the experience of muddling in a mix of often sad tedium which potentially might verge into happy accomplishment.

“A Way of Speaking”: This section describes Brahms’s youthful, jarringly high-pitched voice which he tried to lower when speaking, but which then only became unpleasantly hoarse (“To speak was an embarrassment. To be/ Without expression was a kind of death. . . .”). Thus, he searched for a way of communicating other than the “ugly noise” of his voice, sensing “a world of things to say,” which would find expression in “song that others would produce by choice,/ As though his was their purest, loveliest voice.” This section concerns the experience of slowly gravitating toward our true essences which might surpass our self-conscious egos, experimenting, often clumsily, until we might find our way from our false, posturing voices/selves to being able, to some degree, to enter into producing the “purest, loveliest voice” which exists in a realm larger than our individual selves.

“Scarlatti at the Cabin”: In this section, the first in the sequence to depart from the sonnet form, the poet describes thinking about Scarlatti while driving to a secluded cabin, speaking of the musician as if he were a palpable companion, to the extent he even enjoys jolting along in the car. The poet notes, “I feel the way he feels,” and describes how they have “the unspoken dialogue of friends.” Reaching the cabin, the poet opens a double-manual harpsichord (Carper actually once constructed a simpler type of harpsichord). Scarlatti is described as smiling and moving to the instrument to play, which, of course, actually indicates the poet himself moving to the instrument while feeling the presence of the long-dead artist whose essence, through his legacy of music, has come to live within him like a friend. Interestingly, before entering the cabin, “they” had heard the pleasant sound of a nearby brook, but Scarlatti’s presence had declined the invitation to go to “the brook’s lovely margin,” rejecting nature for that which is imagined, preferring the music of the harpsichord to the music of the brook. This section examines the companionable pleasure and consolation of art, art being presented as a human mode of modulating and retaining the otherwise elusive experiences described in the sequence’s preceding sections.

At this point, the sequence changes in tone, shifting as it builds into synthesis and overview. The very title (“Rising in Music”) foreshadows and subtly builds toward the sequence’s ultimate eruption into a climax of meaning, as will later occur in “Genesis.” In describing a vocal recital, the biblical first two lines of “Rising in Music” (“The silence in the hall before the sound/ Begins is as a darkness before light . . .”) signal a widening of perspective, and, hence, a major shift in the sequence’s progression, the sequence’s structure now moving away from a pattern of poem after poem each recounting one ticktock of human possibilities; in these two opening lines of “Rising in Music,” the sequence instead returns to echo the sequence’s beginning note of cosmic creation from “Bamboo” and the sequence’s overarching theme and undercarriage of the imagery of the figure of life actively played out on the ground of the void. We also encounter precursors for the sequence’s ending in “Genesis,” the singer drawing a breath, as Adam drew his first breath in the other Genesis. Then the singer’s note “[m]oves out into the expectant atmosphere,/ From a small point enlarging everywhere,” again reminding us of the bamboo being drawn across the void-canvas and the spirit moving out and expanding across the void-waters. The void imagery is further echoed by, “Beyond the edges of the galaxies,/ Where once resounded. . . . ,” the poem now naming the void which holds our physical province.

True to its title, “Rising in Music” raises the sequence to a new level of tone, feeling and reinforcement of meaning, which prepares for the subsequent three poems which constitute the sequence’s philosophical culmination and climax. The title of the first of these sections (“A Commentary”) alerts the reader that the poet will now look more overtly and directly at overarching meaning. Then with elegant restraint and a conversational quietness of tone, “A Commentary” and “The Poet’s Horizon” begin sorting through what the essence of human meaning and value might be.

“A Commentary” meditates on a phrase from Horace’s Odes (“I love. And a fierce wolf ran away.”), considering how comforting it would be to believe the “truly righteous” could walk safely through the menacing woods, while only “those whose sin stinks” would be in danger. But the poet acknowledges that if such were true, then “blank deserts” (again reinforcing the sequence’s void imagery) could be sustaining. The poet notes that Horace himself knew his phrase was a lie, yet necessary in nurturing a “deep sense of things” which might provide the hope necessary to enhance human potential.

Next, “The Poet’s Horizon” further defines human vulnerability within a context of time and mortality. The overall sequence had confidently begun in “Bamboo” by describing a canvas as being “a world for human will,” indicating optimistic belief in the possibility of human control and creativity. However, “The Poet’s Horizon” acknowledges the ultimate impossibility of lasting human achievement or even the ability to express apprehension of significant realities. Appropriately, the section’s epigraph is a statement Corot made to a friend while dying: “Ah, how I would like to show you these boundless horizons.” This section pictures a page on which a poet is writing, yet the sun is angling so shadows of trees are moving across the page, much like a sundial’s shadow, to obscure the words. This page reminds the reader of the canvas so confidently described in “Bamboo” (the “world for human will”), yet now time literally overshadows and obscures this human attempt at expression and communication:

The leaves will tell the hours
As light angles above them and their shade
Moves down the page, their trembling in the air
Blotting and mottling words and phrases made
For you.

The poet is described looking out over the “particular trees” and “arching skies” while this time of being obscured—the progression toward the increasing recognition of non-comprehension and death—puts “an end to our infinity.” In recognition of the impossibility of lasting human communication, no matter how deeply the world is felt, the section ends poignantly with the poet’s thoughts echoing Corot’s dying words: “Could I but show you. Could I but let you see.”

As earlier discussed, the sequence’s final section, “Genesis,” bursts into (especially for our time in American poetry) a surprisingly direct and philosophical statement. Until this point in the sequence’s progression, the individual sections have held fairly faithfully to the old poetic dictum of, “Show—Don’t tell”; however, the sequence culminates with “Genesis” unabashedly violating this dictum. While “Painters, Musicians, Writers” looks to artists as its vehicle for distilling its abstract concepts into concrete situations, the poem’s homage to creative engagement is meant to refer more universally than to artists. Commenting on “Genesis” in Anglistik, Franz Link writes that for Carper “the creation of the world is seen as one with that of individual human life,” and the spirit that moves upon the waters is “equated with creativity in general.”

Irving Howe once commented that all of William Faulkner’s separate novels joined into one large book which portrayed a unified system of mythology. This is how to understand the relationship between the various sections of “Painters, Musicians, Writers.” What initially may appear to be separate poems are, in fact, separate tiles building into one mosaic picture.

In writing Four Quartets toward the end of his career as a poet, T. S. Eliot departed from poems like Ash Wednesday or “The Hippopotamus,” permeated as they were with imagery and language drawn directly from Christianity and Church. Rather, Eliot wanted in Four Quartets to write a work of strong spirituality which would be less limited to the descriptives of one faith, so as to achieve a wider universality. Similarly, Carper’s poetry contains a strong spiritual dimension, almost as a sort of religious after-image. Carper’s father was an Episcopal minister, which doubtless influenced Carper’s formative views in ways beyond his absorbing the metrical cadences of the hymns which he grew up singing. However, Carper’s more spiritual poetry finds its imagery in the natural world as filtered through human creativity as well as in anecdotes from lives, more so than in any sect or individual religion’s outward trappings. As in the poetry of Wallace Stevens, Carper’s spirituality looks strongly to the human imagination for redemption.