Irritable Lines: The Revision of Shakespeare’s Blank Verse in Robert Creeley’s “The Crisis”

Charles Bernstein is one of a chorus of critics who praises the “microtonal inflections” that characterize postmodern American poet Robert Creeley’s prosody—in particular, Creeley’s “radical use of the line break”: “[His] exquisitely precise lines,” writes Bernstein, “measure the pressure of reality through their articulation of emotional rupture or turbulence” (132). In the early 1950s, this “emotional rupture or turbulence” is often localized to Creeley’s discussions of the institution of marriage and domestic strife therein—what Sherman Paul identifies as the poet’s “personal” and “common” subject matter (382). “The Crisis” is one of Creeley’s earliest and most iconic poems in this mode, scrutinizing marital tensions with angst, self-loathing, and irony. As the poet explains in a letter to Charles Olson from April 12, 1952, he is trying in “The Crisis” to develop a “feel” for “irritation” (241). This “irritation” rises to drama because of a surprising interpolation of a passage from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice—I say surprising because, unlike Louis Zukofsky or Olson (mentor and friend, respectively), Creeley’s poetry and poetics are not typically so self-consciously in conversation with Shakespeare. In “The Crisis,” however, Creeley’s speaker voices Portia’s plea for justice (“the quality of mercy is not strained” [4.1.188]), and in doing so he revises Shakespeare’s blank verse to test—and, ultimately, contest—the Bard’s moral and metrical wisdom in the context of love and marriage at midcentury. “The Crisis”’s ironic vision is immediate, with a title that suggests the intensities of Cold War geopolitics, Existential philosophy, and poetic debates of the period—everything and everyone on the brink of some kind of annihilation or discovery or both. In contrast, the first line of predominantly monosyllabic words is long, plodding, and awkward, while the first sentence in its entirety (distributed across lines 1-4) serio-comically corrects the title’s scale and severity. It establishes the poem’s speaker and occasion: a disenchanted husband is disproportionately upset about a repeatedly misplaced “towel” in his home and, https://doi.org/10.1080/00144940.2023.2253555