Illness and Confession in Modern American Poetry

Fellow Bibliophiles,

I'm back! July was a month of transitions for me as I moved and had some other changes personal and professional.
I have been doing some reading and will definitely have more to blog in the very near future.
Adam Kirsch who is a poet and book critic wrote a study of six modern American poets titled The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets. The poets he considered were Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berrryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Sylvia Plath.
If you have read some of my earlier blogs, I have reviewed several books that cover similar territory or some of these same authors. As a KU undergrad I took a class on the poetry of Robert Lowell and John Berryman. I took another class on the poetry of Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. In another life, I might have pursued a PhD in American Literature and become an academic reader of poetry. I did not, but I still remain a dedicated and impassioned reader of poetry and I do confess that I have a particular fondness for what some critics call "The Middle Generation", which comprises poets like those mentioned above who came after the great American and European modernists like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and others.
I have the collected works of Lowell and Berryman and individual collections of poetry by Plath. I've read Bishop's and Jarrell's poetry, and am least familiar with Schwartz. In addition to earlier blogs on Peter Davison's memoir of the Boston literary scene and Jeffrey Meyers study on mania in some of these poets, I've read the major biographies of Lowell and Berryman. I also read Bruce Bawer's study titled the Middle Generation that included all of these poets except for Bishop and Plath. So I was very excited to see what Kirsch would do with these poets.
Overall, this is an excellent introduction to the work, if not the lives of these poets. If you have only read a few poems by these authors in your survey lit classes in high school and college, this would be a good place to learn more about them. If you want to see a very fine example of close reading of poetry, Kirsch's work is a great template. It is obvious that he is familiar with the poets under consideration and offers thoughtful and occasionally insightful readings of individual poems.
However, considering that he considers all six poets in under 300 pages, the individual chapters are certainly condensed and I would recommend reading this book in parts rather than all at once. There were times that I felt there was no overarching organization to his reading of these poets' work rather than a rough chronological outline. He simply goes from poem to poem or work to work without providing much of a road map. Some thematic headlines or section divisions would have made the chapters more cohesive.
For someone who has studied these poets, both academically and privately, I am not entirely satisfied with this work. A common theme that runs through the work of several of these poets is religion. Lowell began his life as Boston Brahmin Puritan, converted to Catholicism, and later seemed to have abandoned organized religion. Berryman had a similar conversion experience late in life after he went through alcohol rehab. Finally, Schwartz was born to Jewish immigrant parents and many of his poems reference his Jewish roots. Kirsch is not a particular sensitive reader when it comes to the the role that religion played in the poetry of this writers. He seems to be unable to consider the genuine conversion of these poets when they write "religious poetry." Instead, he tries to point out how the imagery or themes are inconsistent with organized religion. What this tells me is that Kirsch has a rather shallow understanding of religious belief. Just because someone calls themselves a Christian or a Jew does not mean that every word that comes out of their mouth or their pen has to be pious. However, this seem to be the standard that Kirsch applies to these authors. It is as if he can tolerate and appreciate ambiguity in their poetry, unless the topic is religion. As someone who has a great understanding of modernist and New Critical techniques in poetry, I do not understand why Kirsch seems to be unable to accept ambiguity, if not outright contradiction from religious poets.
Personally, I believe that when they were writing their poems, that these poets were true believers. Does that mean the religion "stuck"? No, it certainly did not with Lowell and Berryman's conversion occurred so late in his life that we don't know what might have happened had he lived longer.
Kirsch writes, "'Eleven Addresses to the Lord.' . . . But these addresses are born of urgent personal need, and they throw overboard all the irony, doubt, and grief that made the Dream Songs authentically religious poetry." Kirsch doesn't tell you what the criteria for "authentically religious poetry" is, except that it cannot be statements of faith or belief! Again, Kirsch's inability to understand the anthropology of religion is puzzling. He goes on to discount the poetry because it appears so soon after Berryman's conversion. "Yet the very recent date of the conversion, and still more the absence of any reticence or introspection, make this experience hard to credit; while it may have been real, it does not become poetically convincing." What the hell does "poetically convincing" mean? Also, is there a certain time limit on conversions, before the poets who have undergone this conversion become "poetically convincing?" When someone undergoes a conversion experience, it seems axiomatic to me that they don't show reticence or introspection. That may come later, as Thomas Merton's life and writing would illustrate, but any new convert is full of belief and their experience of the spirit of the divine.
Kirsch's decision to focus on the poetry and not the lives of these poets is admirable, but there are times that the reader needs to know that Robert Lowell suffered from manic depression or that Sylvia Plath did have a passionately tortured life. Using Plath as an example, Kirsch notes how too much of the writing on Plath has involved her life and not her poetry, but he does not even mention that Plath sat in on Robert Lowell's poetry seminars. Might this have affected her poetry? In other places he notes the community these poets had, but curiously leaves Plath all alone. He does not hardly mention her marriage to Ted Hughes. Again, this area has been well documented, but does he consider how that influence and the influence of her being a wife and mother had on the work she produced in her short personal and poetic life?
Finally, the book abruptly ends with his chapter on Plath. There is no concluding postscript or epilogue to tie the theme of this book and the work of the poets together. The Wounded Surgeon is a good introduction to how to read poetry and to the work of these six poets, but I'd still recommend Bruce Bawer's Middle Generation and the individual bios and critical studies of the poets that Kirsch includes in his bibliography.

Czar