Michael Fried is widely known in the United States and abroad for his important and influential books, essays, and lectures as a critic, historian, and theorist of art and photography and as a literary critic. Beginning in the 1960s, his career has been extraordinary, including major studies of Caravaggio, Courbet, Manet, Thomas Eakins, Stephen Crane, Flaubert, and many other painters, sculptors, photographers, and writers. This body of work is so extensive and significant, compelling and provocative, that it has overshadowed the fact that Fried is also an original and stimulating poet, as he has demonstrated in Powers (1973), To the Center of the Earth (1994), The Next Bend in the Road (2004), and Promesse du Bonheur (2016).
For this reason, I’m interested in and intrigued by a poem titled “The Realm of Spirit,” where Fried depicts the predicament he encountered as a poet—not so much in writing poems but, rather, in bringing them to light, making them public. Here it is, from The Next Bend in the Road:
The Realm of Spirit When I wrote my poems and kept them in a drawer I believed I was William Blake in a closet. The pathos of my unappreciated genius bowed my shoulders but put spring in my step. In that divided mood each line I composed seemed to me a triumph against prodigious odds. I communicated this sense of struggle to my friends who treated me with the respect due a warrior. And I exhaled contempt for the famous names whose anodyne verses collected yearly prizes. I lived like that for decades, impregnable in the knowledge that my castle had no drawbridge. Then one day in a trance of inadvertence I sent my poems to an editor, who published them. Now the drawer is empty and the closet is sealed and I know that in the realm of spirit I am nothing.
The title has a familiar ring, and I wondered on first encounter whether it might be an allusion to or echo of a phrase in the Bible. Perhaps I was remembering Romans 8:9: “You, however, are not in the realm of the flesh but are in the realm of the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God lives in you.”
I noticed the name William Blake, visionary poet and artist, little appreciated in his lifetime, yet for us one of the foremost figures of the Romantic movement. Is Fried quoting a line from Blake, who claimed he saw God at age four and beheld angels in a tree at age ten? But when I skimmed my Blake book and checked online, I couldn’t find “the realm of spirit,” though I did learn that Blake used “realm” a few times and “spirit” frequently.
I’m tempted to say that “The Realm of Spirit” is a confessional poem. Every line sounds and feels true. But I think something happens to a personal revelation when it’s presented in a poem. We’re in contact with Fried, but not directly. It’s a voice that addresses us, a first-person speaker who relates a private experience in his past, poems he wrote but didn’t show to others. This speaker isn’t identical to the poet who created this voice into existence. There’s distance between the two.
In line 3, “pathos” signifies pity or sadness, from Greek pathos, “suffering.” It conveys the speaker’s hurt and vulnerability, but also his self-esteem. He wasn’t being read, yet this was for him a source of pride; he knew about himself what others did not. There was self-sustaining pleasure in the poetic prowess he wasn’t exhibiting to anyone.
“Prodigious odds,” the packed syllables, the mock-heroic resonance, show with satiric edge the speaker’s image of himself, writing poems he wasn’t making visible. To friends, he “communicated” what he was doing. The implication I hear is that these friends supported him but were puzzled by his decision, and that he knew this, as the over-heightened honorific image of “a warrior” suggests.
The speaker recalls his disdain for famous poets who were producing “anodyne” books, safe, pain-free, not likely to spark dissent or controversy. They were winning renown; he was not. The similar-sounding syllables, impregnable/knowledge/drawbridge, bear witness to his multi-year self-enclosure in a “castle,” grand, imposing, fortified in stone against attack. “No drawbridge”: the speaker couldn’t get out; no one else could get in.
“A trance of inadvertence”: unpremeditated, a blur of sound in the phrase, a reverie. Then the release into a simple line: “I sent my poems to an editor, who published them.” It was quick, in contrast to decades of unread, unpublished privacy. This was a moment of triumph, the speaker’s breakthrough past doubt and inhibition. But that’s not how the poem concludes.
The final stanza is two lines, no internal punctuation, the parts linked by the conjunction “and.” Fried’s tone is decisive, but this assertion about himself impels us to ask questions about where the speaker is and where we are in relation to him. Publication beckons: we would like others to know what we’ve done. On the other hand: possibly it’s better to conceal this dimension of ourselves. For revelation is a risk. When it happens, if it does, it might occur as if we were in a spirit state, not through an act of will.
The words used here are “drawer” and “closet,” yet in conjunction with “sealed,” that is, fastened securely, closed tight, they evoke for me the sense of a sepulcher or tomb. But one with nothing in it. The speaker did something momentous, yet the feeling is more that something has happened to him, as though outside his control, with consequences he hadn’t anticipated.
Fried brings alive a speaker who recounts memories that may prompt our own, secrets we hold close, identities we may have imagined and dreamed about, and fears and hesitations we can’t overcome. Sometimes it turns out we do overcome them. From unread to read, from hidden to seen. Enter the world, show yourself in it, surely that’s a good thing.
The last line is a shock: “and I know that in the realm of spirit I am nothing.” What does this mean? I’m inclined to say it defeats explication—that it has an effect that close analysis cannot capture, cannot do justice to. The drilled-down force of the language, the emphatic negative: there’s recognition and acceptance, yet also regret, some bitterness, even a flash of contempt.
My experience as a reader includes all of this. But when I try to explain it, my sentences feel labored and inadequate. What hits me is not in parts, not this and that. It’s all at once, an entirety of effect.
“The Realm of Spirit” is hard for me to let go of. I tell myself that with more concentrated effort, I’ll get to the bottom of it and come up with better sentences. But I doubt I will.
The speaker’s declaration makes me conscious of myself, of the intellectual engagement Fried is demanding from me. His poem is difficult, more about my mind than his, and I think that’s his intention. He has written a poem about himself that makes me aware of myself as the reader, the beholder, of a work of literary art that solicits interpretation and resists it.
William E. Cain is Mary Jewett Gaiser Professor of English at Wellesley College, where he enjoys teaching courses on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and other American writers. His recent publications include essays on Edith Wharton and Ernest Hemingway.
