Josephine Miles

• Born: June 11, 1911
• Birthplace: Chicago, Illinois
• Died: May 12, 1985
• Place of death: Berkeley, California

Other literary forms

In addition to her many volumes of poetry, Josephine Miles wrote more than a dozen books developing her theories of poetry and applying these theories to particular poets and eras. Among the most widely read of these works are Eras and Modes in English Poetry (1957, 1964) and Style and Proportion: The Language of Prose and Poetry (1967, 1984). These books are detailed structural analyses of English poetry and prose; all of Miles’s criticism expounds her theory that the structure of language changes to reflect the spirit of the time that the language expresses. Her one play, House and Home, was first performed in 1960 and was published in First Stage in 1965.

Achievements

Josephine Miles’s contribution to American poetry is valuable and unusual. She combined poetry of political commitment with sound scholarship and theory to produce a body of work that is at the same time of the tower and of the streets. Her work is a challenge both to the poet/propagandist and to the art for art’s sake poet.

Miles’s many awards and honors include the Shelley Memorial Award (1936), the Phelan Memorial Award (1937), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1948), a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award (1956), the Oscar Blumenthal Prize (1959), an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (1965), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1967), and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship (1978). She received a Silver Medal from the Commonwealth Club of California (1983), the Fred Cody Award for lifetime achievement (1984), and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1984) for Collected Poems, 1930-1983. Although her critical works have been to some extent superseded, Miles’s poetry has guaranteed for her a lasting place in twentieth century American literature.

Biography

Josephine Louise Miles was born on June 11, 1911, to Reginald Miles and Josephine Miles, a Chicago couple. When she was still an infant, Miles was diagnosed as having rheumatoid arthritis, a disease that plagued her all her life. When she was five, her father, who was in the insurance business, moved the family to Southern California, hoping that the climate there would be beneficial to his daughter’s condition. The family moved back to Evanston, Illinois, for a time, but Miles had identified California as her spiritual home. The family eventually settled down in Los Angeles, and Miles, after finishing at Los Angeles High School, attended the University of California, Los Angeles. After receiving her B.A. in 1932, she enrolled in graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. She completed her M.A. in 1934 and her Ph.D. in 1938.

Although she had written poems since childhood, it was during her graduate school years that she first began to publish seriously and to gain recognition. Her first poems were published in an anthology, Trial Balances (1935), and this work earned for her two awards. Her first book, Lines at Intersection, appeared in 1939 and contains the best poems of her graduate school period.

In 1940, Miles began teaching at Berkeley as an instructor, and she remained there for the rest of her life. In 1947, she was the first woman to be tenured by Berkeley’s English department, and in 1952, she was made a full professor. Miles never married, devoting her life to teaching, research, and poetry; during her years at Berkeley, she published more than two dozen books in addition to numerous articles and reviews. She retired in 1978 and was given the status of distinguished professor emerita. She died in Berkeley of pneumonia on May 12, 1985.

Analysis

Josephine Miles’s poetry reflects both her political involvement in liberal causes and her intense concern with the sounds and structures of English. Over the decades of her writing, the poems became less formal and closed as their political content increased. Her topics shifted from minute observations of daily activities to analysis of the poet’s role in the chaotic contemporary world. Nevertheless, even her most strident political poems show careful craftsmanship and attention to sound.

Miles’s first published poems are tightly structured and intellectually dense. Her often-anthologized “On Inhabiting an Orange,” published in the anthology Trial Balances in 1935, precedes her first collection. “All our roads go nowhere,” the poem begins. “Maps are curled/ To keep the pavement definitely/ On the world.” Because of these conditions, people’s plans for “metric advance” must “lapse into arcs in deference/ to circumstance.” The poem develops its single metaphor with clarity and sureness, using common metaphysical geometric images to provide the pleasure afforded by this kind of poetry. It is not surprising that her first work received two awards, the Shelley Memorial Award and the Phelan Memorial Award.

Lines at Intersection

Her first collection, Lines at Intersection, is a series of poems of everyday events arranged by time of day—morning poems, noon poems, evening poems. The individual works are mostly formal in structure, but they are more impressionistic than the early poems, and their music is subtler. These poems incorporate such devices as internal rhymes, unusual metrical patterns, Dickinsonian slant rhymes, and incremental repetition. The poems are personal but not intimate, providing new perspective on such familiar things as the morning paper, the door-to-door salesman, baseball games, and theater performances. A few of the poems still show her preoccupation with mathematics and geometry, while others foretell one of her future concerns: the world of business, which was to become a major metaphor for the contemporary world. Lines at Intersection was well received, with favorable reviews in Poetry and elsewhere.

Poems on Several Occasions

Miles’s second collection, Poems on Several Occasions, shows a marked divergence from her earlier work in content. These poems, too, are arranged by time of day, and they also represent the life cycle from birth to death; moreover, these poems use the same stylistic devices as those of her earlier collection. This group, however, begins to define Miles’s social commitments. By this time, Miles was becoming more aware of the inequalities, injustices, and false promises of contemporary America. Her titles show her new perspective: “Market Report on Cotton Gray Goods,” “Committee Report on Smoke Abatement in Residential Area,” “Committee Decision on Pecans for Asylum.” The United States in these poems is as unattractive as that depicted by Allen Ginsberg in the 1950’s and 1960’s, and often for the same reasons. Business transactions take the place of personal contact, and there is a vast gap between what society would provide and what people want and need. Yet the poems are by and large wistful and do not actively suggest interference with the processes of oppression.

Local Measures

Local Measures marks a change in style: These poems are more conversational and irregular than Miles’s earlier works. Their subjects include daily observations, social topics, and the relation of art to life. More of these poems are free verse or highly individualized forms. Dancing and motion pictures are analogues to poetry; the collection, written while Miles was working on her analysis of poetic forms in different periods of history, reflects her own search for a form appropriate to herself and her time. The mutual reflection of art and life is a theme approached again and again, as in “Redemption.” Films, dances, even the jewelry that appears in these poems show Miles’s attempts to define and thus master the process of creation.

Prefabrications

Prefabrications combines her concerns for art and the social world. This rich and varied collection of sixty poems demonstrates the sense of community and continuity she was developing in the poetic theory on which she was working at the same time. Some of these poems, such as “The Plastic Glass,” express the belief that the essentially human transcends the shabbiness and emptiness of life’s surfaces. Others, such as “The Student,” seek a source or definition of that humaneness, often using metaphors and images that are accessible to all but particularly compelling to academics. Indeed, in this and other poems in the collection, the academic life itself becomes a metaphor of the teaching-learning dialogue with the world. Some of the poems are about art. “Two Kinds of Trouble,” a long poem, compares the social structures that made it hard for Michelangelo to communicate his vision with the problems of contemporary artists—a different kind of trouble.

Poems, 1930-1960

Miles’s Poems, 1930-1960 included selections from all her earlier books and a new group of poems, “Neighbors and Constellations,” for the most part negative assessments of the possibility of meaningful intercourse among members of the human community. These poems, however, marked a turning point in her attitude, and the next collections showed a more active involvement in causes combined with a belief in the possibility of success.

Civil Poems and Kinds of Affection

Civil Poems and Kinds of Affection show that Miles was in and of Berkeley in the 1960’s. These two collections center on pollution, poverty, destruction of beauty for purposes of greed, experimentation with animals, gun control, the war, the bomb, technology. An index to these poems would please nostalgia buffs, but the poems are less calls to action than expressions of the notion that social involvements are in fact ways of loving, or “kinds of affection.” Among references to Dag Hammarskjöld, Molotov cocktails, and other hallmarks of the time, Miles returns again and again to the subject of commonality, the sharing underneath that survives all divisions.

Fields of Learning

Fields of Learning does not diverge greatly from the previous two collections, but it includes more science and slightly less politics. The world of these poems is filled with deoxyribonucleic acid, free neutrons, and gravitational electromagnetic fields. Yet despite their heavy freight of theoretical physics and technology, these poems are still accessible. They communicate a sense of human potential that exists not because of, but in spite of, technological advancement.

To All Appearances

To All Appearances , while still political, is in many respects a return to earlier themes. Many of these are quiet poems of family and friendship. Their form is (usually) free verse, but in content the work is often reminiscent of Local Measures. One of the most memorable of the group is “Conception,” which begins:

Death did not come to my motherLike an old friend.She was a mother, and she mustConceive him.

The poem elaborates on its controlling metaphor, as do some of Miles’s earliest poems, but here the appeal is as much emotional as it is intellectual. In general, these poems seem more direct than her earlier work. She uses “I” often in poems of reflection on her experiences inside and outside the university community.

Coming to Terms

Miles’s last major collection (exclusive of her Collected Poems, 1930-1983) was Coming to Terms in 1979. This powerful collection gathers together the many strands of her lifelong preoccupations and weaves them into a single fabric. These are poems of social and aesthetic interest, asking the broadest questions and providing penetrating answers. The critics received the work with highest praise; Miles’s last years were filled with honors and awards. More than one reviewer found the long poem “Center” to be Miles’s strongest work. The poem poses the question “What are we here for?”—“we” being poets, creators, and humane visionaries. Her answer, not unlike that of the God in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust: Eine Tragödie (pb. 1808, 1833; The Tragedy of Faust, 1823, 1838), is that we are here to make the best mistakes:

Give us to errGrandly as possible in this completeComplex of structure, risk a soulNobly in north light, in cello tone . . .

The result of such risk and error is a re-vision, a new perspective from which to view the possible. Human creativity in all its forms becomes a medium “To take, as a building, as a fiction, takes us,/ Into another frame of space/ Where we can ponder, celebrate, and reshape.” Miles’s late view of poetry as process, or becoming, is similar to Wallace Stevens’s final aesthetic. In this poem, Miles shows her own adjustment of vision, from the downward glance at the fatal curve of Earth in “On Inhabiting an Orange” to the upward and outward vistas of the possible from “the center.”

Collected Poems, 1930-1983

Collected Poems, 1930-1983 gives an overall view of Miles’s development and includes her last poems, for the most part scenes of Berkeley and of the university. (She lived only about a year after the appearance of this volume, which was popular as well as critically acclaimed and earned her the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.) Her careful craftsmanship and metrical felicity can be appreciated in this final publication, a well-edited work that illustrates the range of her poetic gift. Her “search for a common language” antedated Adrienne Rich’s better-known one and combined some of the same ingredients. This collection shows how her hopes for community within human society paralleled her search for what she called “commonality” in language. Her intellectually and emotionally persuasive metaphors, her subtle music, and the potency and optimism of her later work make Miles a significant contributor to twentieth century American poetry.

Bibliography

Beloof, Robert. “Distances and Surfaces.” Prairie Schooner 32 (Winter, 1958/1959): 276-284. This fine, readable article examines Miles’s poetry in terms of poetic strategies. Beloof’s analysis is detailed, thematic, and logical.

Chase, Karen. Review of Collected Poems, 1930-1983. World Literature Today 58 (Summer, 1984): 423. A very favorable review of Miles’s career. Excerpts from selected poems are briefly discussed to reveal Miles’s versatility.

Guillory, Daniel L. Review of Collected Poems, 1930-1983. Choice 24 (March, 1984): 978. Guillory suggests a favorable comparison could be made between the poetry of Miles and the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Important themes in Miles’s poetry are listed, as well as a thematic and chronological progression.

Miles, Josephine. Josephine Miles, Teaching Poet: An Oral Biography. Edited by Marjorie Larney. Berkeley, Calif.: Acacia Books, 1993. A short biographical work that provides invaluable details of Miles’s life and thoughts from interviews with the poet by Ruth Teiser and Catherine Harroun.

Muller, Erik. Josephine Miles. Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 2005. A short biography of the Berkeley poet that details her life and critiques her work.

Smith, Lawrence R. “Josephine Miles: Metaphysician of the Irrational.” Pebble 18/19/20 (1979): 22-35. An insightful article examining some of the major symbols and themes in Miles’s poetry. Careful attention is given to many of Miles’s poems.