BURNSHAW, Stanley

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Nationality: American. Born: New York City, 20 June 1906. Education: Columbia University, New York, 1924; University of Pittsburgh, B.A. 1925; University of Poitiers, 1927; University of Paris, 1927–28; Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, M.A. 1933. Family: Married 1) Irma Robin; 2) Madeline Burnshaw in 1934 (divorced); 3) Lydia Powsner in 1942 (died 1987); one daughter and two stepchildren. Career: Advertising copywriter, Blaw-Knox Company, Blawnox, Pennsylvania, 1925–27; advertising manager, The Hecht Company, New York, 1928–32; co-editor and drama critic, The New Masses, New York, 1934–36; editor-in-chief, The Cordon Company, publishers, New York, 1937–39; president and editor-in-chief, Dryden Press, New York, 1939–58; vice president, 1958–65, and consultant to the president, 1965–68, Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., publishers, New York. Lecturer, New York University, 1958–62; Visiting Regents Lecturer, University of California, Davis, 1980; visiting distinguished professor, University of Miami, 1989. Founding editor (and hand setter), Poetry Folio magazine, and Folio Press, Pittsburgh, 1926–29. Contributing editor, Modern Quarterly, 1932–33, and Theatre Workshop magazine, 1935–38. Director, American Institute of Graphic Arts, 1960–61. Awards: American Academy award, 1971. D.H.L.: Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati, 1983. Address: 250 West 89th Street, Apt. PH2G, New York, New York 10024, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Poems. Pittsburgh, Folio Press, 1927.

The Great Dark Love. Privately printed, 1932.

The Iron Land: A Narrative. Philadelphia, Centaur Press, 1936.

The Revolt of the Cats in Paradise: A Children's Book for Adults. Gaylordsville, Connecticut, Crow Hill Press, 1945.

Early and Late Testament. New York, Dial Press, 1952.

Caged in an Animal's Mind. New York, Holt Rinehart, 1963.

The Hero of Silence: Scenes from an Imagined Life of Mallarmé. Lugano, Switzerland, Lugano Review, 1965.

In the Terrified Radiance. New York, Braziller, 1972.

Mirages: Travel Notes in the Promised Land: A Public Poem. New York, Doubleday, 1977.

Play

The Bridge (in verse). New York, Dryden Press, 1945.

Novels

The Sunless Sea. London, Davies, 1948; New York, Dial Press, 1949.

The Refusers: An Epic of the Jews. New York, Horizon Press, 1981; part 3 published as My Friend, My Father, New York, Oxford University Press, 1986.

Other

A Short History of the Wheel Age. Pittsburgh, Folio Press, 1928.

André Spire and His Poetry: Two Essays and Forty Translations. Philadelphia, Centaur Press, 1933.

The Seamless Web: Language-Thinking, Creature-Knowledge, Art-Experience. New York, Braziller, and London, Allen Lane, 1970.

Robert Frost Himself. New York, Braziller, 1986.

A Stanley Burnshaw Reader. Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1990.

Editor, Two New Yorkers (Kruse lithographs and Kreymborg poems). New York, Bruce Humphries, 1938.

Editor, The Poem Itself: 45 Modern Poets in a New Presentation. New York, Holt Rinehart, 1960; London, Penguin, 1964; revised edition, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1989.

Editor, Varieties of Literary Experience: Eighteen Essays in World Literature. New York, New York University Press, 1962; London, Owen, 1963.

Editor, with T. Carmi and Ezra Spicehandler, The Modern Hebrew Poem Itself, From the Beginnings to the Present: Sixty-Nine Poems in a New Presentation. New York, Holt Rinehart, 1965; revised edition, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1989.

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Manuscript Collection: University of Texas, Austin.

Critical Studies: "The Great Dark Love" by André Spire, in Mercure de France (Paris), 1 December 1933; "The Poem Itself" by Lionel Trilling, in The Mid-Century (New York), August 1960; "On Translating Poetry" by Herbert Read, in Poetry (Chicago), April 1961; "The Poet Is Always Present" by Germaine Brée, in The American Scholar (Washington, D.C.), summer 1970; "In the Terrified Radiance," in New York Times Book Review, 24 September 1972, and "The Total Act: An Introduction to 'The Seamless Web,' by Stanley Burnshaw," in Carrell (Coral Gables, Florida), 28, 1990, both by James Dickey; Stanley Burnshaw issue of Agenda (London), winter-spring 1983–84; interview with Alan Filreis and Harvey Teres, in Wallace Stevens Journal (Potsdam, New York), 13(2), fall 1989; "Stanley Burnshaw and the Body" by Robert Zaller, in Carrell (Coral Gables, Florida), 28, 1990; "Stanley Burnshaw: The New Masses Years" by S.L. Harrison, in Journal of American Culture (Bowling Green, Ohio), 17(3), fall 1994.

Stanley Burnshaw comments:

Poetry is the expression of the creator's total organism, or, as I say at the beginning of The Seamless Web,

Poetry begins with the body and ends with the body. Even Mallarmé's symbols of abstract essence lead back to the bones, flesh, and nerves. My approach, then is "physiological," yet it issues from a vantage point different from Vico's when he said that all words originated in the eyes, the arms, and the other organs from which they were grown into analogies. My concern is rather with the type of creature-mind developed by the evolutionary shock which gave birth to what we have named self-consciousness. So far as we know, such biological change failed to arise in any other living creature. So far as we can tell, no other species, dead or alive, produced or produces the language-think of poetry. We are engaged, then, with a unique phenomenon issuing from a unique physiology which seems to function no differently from that of other animals—in a life-sustaining activity based on continuous interchange between organism and environment.

Poetry begins with the body and ends with the body. The Seamless Web pursues and confronts the implications of this statement from three different vantage points: (1) language-thinking, (2) creature-knowledge, (3) art-experience. The third (art-experience) offers the clearest introduction to my poetry, especially for the reader who has at hand a copy of my Caged in an Animal's Mind and In the Terrified Radiance; there are numerous references to the pages in that volume of my poems.

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Writing of man's struggle through science and technology to master nature and the culmination of that struggle in the discovery and use of atomic power, Stanley Burnshaw says, "The war against Nature had been confidently waged and won; and we post-moderns, of 1945-and-after, breathe the spirit of a different epoch, and we have a different terror on our minds: Now that man is victorious, how shall he stay alive?"

This question is a recurring one in his poems, as death, love, and life wage unceasing war, observed by a coal-hard intellect striving relentlessly to illuminate the world, "this eden," through a sense of its kinship with the world of nature. In his long poetry-writing career, Burnshaw has remained contemporary, and in his view of the urgency of confronting man's imminent self-annihilation through the destruction of nature he is in agreement with many poets younger than himself. His collection In the Terrified Radiance gives us those parts of his earlier work he wants us to remember, and his oeuvre is made to seem remarkably of a piece. From the beginning he has filled his lyrics with stones, flames, wind, trees, singing, and blood, an imagery suggestive at times of Robinson Jeffers and at others of Theodore Roethke. In all of them, however, Burnshaw is distinctively, if somewhat monotonously and humorlessly, himself.

In Burnshaw's dense, hard-surfaced poems one encounters a harsh, relentless, and totally committed intelligence confronting the mind and senses with the inexorable facts of death and life. The effect is a seamless web (to borrow the title of his book about the physiological origins of the creative act) of images of storm, fire, growth, destruction, and the nourishment of creativity by the forces that destroy. These are not simply poems about the "good that comes from evil" or of the cyclical quality of nature; there is something much more elemental in their feeling of primordial unity. Burnshaw, in a paradox of cerebral style and physiological message—what he refers to as creature knowledge—seems a solemn shaman preserving his intellectual detachment while in an ecstasy of sympathy with the tides of being.

Mirages: Travel Notes in the Promised Land is a book-length poem in eight parts chronicling the poet's journey to Israel. He connects biblical events with modern history and modern-day Israel and both to his private life. His response to the turbulence and violence of the ancient and the modern land is to turn again to the body, to life, and to the transcendence of history:

   Since the only certainty is the body out of whose currents
   Clashing and blending,
   Fumes of knowledge may rise—quieting question—
   Leading us out of our nights
   Into untroubled wakefulness.

—Donald Barlow Stauffer