The Gutter and the Spire: The Exilic Revelation of Thomas McGrath
It is one of culture’s buried ironies that the poets who burn with the clearest flame are often those whose names rarely appear in the currency of citation. Such is the case of Thomas McGrath (1916–1990), a North Dakota-born American poet whose corpus, dense with political conviction and surrealist clarity, bridges the stark idealism of Whitman with the embittered hope of Mandelstam. A communist, a veteran, a teacher, a wanderer, McGrath’s life was a liturgy of exile, never at ease within the institutional or ideological perimeters of his age. His poetry, particularly his magnum opus, the long poem sequence “Letter to an Imaginary Friend,” spins out a life lived on the turbulent thresholds between politics, metaphysics, and soul.
Born on a struggling farm in Sheldon, North Dakota, McGrath was educated at the University of North Dakota and then at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. His time in England, however, left him disillusioned with academic formalism; he soon returned to the States, finding himself drawn into union activism and Marxist politics. During the McCarthy era, his open socialist leanings saw him blacklisted and dismissed from his post at Los Angeles State College in 1953—an exile that would mirror the poetics he refined over a lifetime. McGrath’s work is not merely autobiographical, though each line trembles with personal history. Rather, it is an ongoing question addressed to a shattered republic, an apostrophic transcription of America’s dreamt but unachieved utopia.
His most profound work remains “Letter to an Imaginary Friend,” first published in sections from 1957 onward, culminating in a complete edition in 1985. Sprawling over four books, it is both epic and diary, myth and denunciation. It constitutes what critic Cary Nelson calls an “epic of the disillusioned,” a work that exists “to record testimony not against a single betrayal but against the systemic failure of an entire culture.”¹ And yet despite this, its flame is not embittered but luminous, stoked by the dialectic of hope and despair that defines all great tragic literature.
McGrath’s verses are the offspring of two incompatible longings: the longing to belong, and the longing to remain unbought. In the litany-like cadence of his lines, we hear echoes of Rilke’s Orphic distance, but also the plain-sung Americana of Sandburg’s Chicago—as in Book III of the “Letter,” where he recalls his boyhood on the plains:
_”the harsh wind / moving over the desolate prairies / and the cattle frozen into statues / the snow turning red in the birth-blood of calves”²_
Here, the lyricism is not cosmetic but oracular; it arises from the tension between tenderness and terror. McGrath approaches suffering not as spectacle but as sacrament. One gets the sense, increasingly rare in contemporary poetry, that he understands art as something salvific—as an ordering prism through which the chaos of history must be passed if it is to be made bearable.
But amid the political and pastoral fragments that constitute his fractured American geography, McGrath’s ultimate preoccupation is neither polemic nor nostalgia. It is a quest to recover that which the machinery of industry and ideology has obliterated: the sacred. And the sacred, in McGrath, is communitarian rather than divine—residing not in gods, but in comradeship; not in dogma, but in dialogue. As he writes:
_“My faith / is in the redemptive congregation of the poor / who strike, who sing, who argue poetry / in dark union halls, drunk at midnight”³_
This assemblage of the sacred—a fellowship of suffering—is not accidental. McGrath posits that only within such sacrificial community can we resist the slow erasure of personhood by corporate modernity. His poetry does not evangelize; it witnesses.
It is in this context that we must interpret one of the most luminous and enigmatic utterances in all four volumes of the “Letter.” Toward the closing stretches of Book IV, McGrath writes:
_“The gutter is not the opposite of the spire. / They are the same thing, seen upward or downward / according to the plague in the viewer’s eye.”⁴_
This line stalks the metaphysical heart of McGrath’s vision—that elevation and abasement are not opposites but perspectives; that redemption and ruin often grow from the same root. Here, McGrath articulates a quiet resistance to Puritan dichotomies. The gutter as the base, the spire as the aspiration—both are one, he claims. This is the poet’s gnosis: that meaning is dependent not on station but on sight.
I have turned this line over in my mind at intervals, like a river-stone carried across cities and time zones. Once, in an underheated student flat in Bucharest, I read it aloud until my breath turned to fog. Another time, walking alone through the slums of Thessaloniki, it surfaced, unbidden, like an oracle murmured by stray dogs howling amidst ruins. What “plague” afflicts the viewer’s eye? Is it cynicism? Is it pride? Or—is it history?
Perhaps McGrath knew, in the marrow of his agrarian bones, that American innocence was the myth born of amnesia. By conjuring both gutter and spire in the same breath, he resists the sanitized narratives of ascent. He insists rather on the simultaneity of beauty and desolation. For the redemptive truth, McGrath suggests, can only be seen when one refuses to look away from either.
The “Letter” ends, appropriately, not with triumph but with a kind of choral openness. Its final lines evoke the river—even as McGrath had begun his journey with rivers, with North Dakota’s filtered runoff waters. But by the end, the river stands not merely as geographic feature, but as allegory—the poem is cyclical, undammed:
_“And so it’s back to the river / to build again from all that has been drowned / a map, a raft, a hymn.”⁵_
This is not closure but return. The poet returns to the source not to forget, but to remember rightly—and it is this remembrance that makes his work so enduring, so valuable. For in an age increasingly addicted to oblivion and spectacle, McGrath offers not resolution, but a sacred kind of reckoning.
He remains, then, an essential voice for those who walk between disenchantment and devotion. Readers seeking absolute optimism will not find it here. But neither will they encounter despair. Rather, they will discover the rare poet who understands that the deepest sustenance comes not by escaping contradiction, but by dwelling faithfully within it.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy
—
¹ Nelson, Cary. “Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945.” University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
² McGrath, Thomas. “Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Part III)”, Copper Canyon Press, 1985.
³ Ibid.
⁴ McGrath, Thomas. “Letter to an Imaginary Friend (Part IV)”, Copper Canyon Press, 1985.
⁵ Ibid.