17
Michael Thurston
At first glance, some of the terms of this essay’s title might seem to contradict each other. “Self‐fashioning,” as Stephen Greenblatt canonically defines it in the book that contributed the term to literary studies, names the practices by which upper‐class men in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries composed powerful public selves characterized by their effortless sprezzatura. The confessional poets of the American 1950s and 1960s portrayed themselves as agonized and fragile, broken, mad, sick, sometimes suicidal. And the drugs and other therapies developed or deployed during these decades to treat the mentally ill seem not to mediate these opposed concepts but to complicate any relationship between them. The apparent contradiction is useful, however, because it points out both the artifice of the “self” revealed in confessional poetry and one of the historical factors that brought that artifice to the poetic foreground during these decades. While, as Greenblatt admits in the introduction to his own study, “there are always selves,” those selves, consisting of “a sense of personal order, a characteristic mode of address to the world, a structure of bounded desires,” are conventions (Greenblatt 1980: 1). And those conventions are determined by the specific tensions characteristic of a given historical moment.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, conditions (including the Cold War, new attention to mental illness and its treatment, shifts in assumptions about gender roles and about the distribution of power in American society more generally) answer the description Greenblatt offers for the moment he examines (the sixteenth century):
If we say that there is a new stress on the executive power of the will, we must say that there is the most sustained and relentless assault upon the will; if we say that there is a new social mobility, we must say that there is a new assertion of power by both family and state to determine all movement within the society; if we say that there is a heightened awareness of the existence of alternative modes of social, theological, and psychological organization, we must say that there is a new dedication to the imposition of control upon those modes.
(Greenblatt 1980: 1–2)
Where the typical literary‐historical narrative tells how the confessional poetry in the late 1950s and 1960s is newly candid in its expression of the emotional and psychological experience of the self, expression perhaps enabled or prompted by poets’ experience of mental illness and its treatment, in this essay I want instead to show how the poems, rather than expressing a known and coherent self, seek to establish and confirm a self recognized as fragmented, contradictory, and contingent. This is necessary because, under the combination of historical pressures and practices new in this moment (chief among them the new and dominant modes of treating mental illness), they were forced to confront the self’s fictive character, to recognize the self as something made rather than given. Attention to the broader senses of self and of poetry’s possible role in the securing of a self under circumstances that emphasize its insecurity allows us usefully to discuss, along with these poets, others – such as Elizabeth Bishop – whose work also engages in the work of self‐fashioning during this postwar period of intense poetic activity. It also helps us to make visible the important self‐making taking place in the work of African American poets during these same years.
In 1959, Robert Lowell published Life Studies, the volume often credited with bringing to prominence the newly revelatory and loose‐formed poetry that came quickly to be known as “confessional.” Indeed, it was in his Nation magazine review of the book that M.L. Rosenthal coined the term “confessional” for this poetry. Unlike the first‐person speaker familiar from earlier poetry, Rosenthal wrote, the persona in Lowell’s poetry was “unequivocally” Lowell himself, so that Life Studies (or the poems in the section of the book with that title) read as “a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor‐bound not to reveal” (Rosenthal 1967: 26). And Lowell was not alone, Rosenthal continued. He was joined by other poets in his apparent sense of poetry “as soul’s therapy,” the “use of poetry for the most naked kind of confession.” Lowell’s poems described his relationships with his parents, his arguments with his wife, and his hospitalization and treatment for mental illness. He acknowledged the influence of W.D. Snodgrass’s poems, which Lowell had read before Snodgrass’s volume, Heart’s Needle, appeared (also in 1959). Snodgrass, too, had written about intimate matters, especially, in the volume’s title sequence, his divorce and his strained relationship with his young daughter in the aftermath of that divorce. Lowell’s friend, John Berryman, brought his alcoholism, infidelity, and family difficulties into his Dream Songs, and his students, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (both women studied with Lowell at Boston University), wrote their own poems on deeply personal subjects, including family relationships and mental illness and its treatment. Though all of them resisted the label, these poets have been grouped by critics and literary historians as “confessional” poets (along with, sometimes, Theodore Roethke or Allen Ginsberg) (Sherwin 2011: 7).
The late 1950s poems of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and others offer numerous glimpses into the machinery of mental health in American culture at that moment. Along with Allen Ginsberg, Lowell, Plath, and Sexton write (with differing degrees of explicitness) about breakdown, institutionalization, and a variety of therapies with which they were treated. Just as Ginsberg named Metrazol (a brand name for the stimulant pentylenetratrazol, which, in sufficiently high doses, induced convulsions in the patient) in “Howl,” Lowell describes himself in “Man and Wife” as “Tamed by Miltown” (emphasis in original), pointing to the Wallace Laboratories’ brand name for the tranquilizer meprobamate, a popular tranquilizer released in 1955 and celebrated as something of a wonder drug (Tone 2009: 27).
Sexton is frank about the experience of institutionalization (she was first hospitalized after a suicide attempt in 1955) and the electroconvulsive and occupational therapies that she endured. “The Double Image” encapsulates these with haunting economy:
I pretended I was dead
until the white men pumped the poison out,
putting me armless and washed through the rigmarole
of talking boxes and the electric bed.
(Sexton 1988: 28)
The institution responds to the emotional and spiritual pain that drives the speaker’s suicide attempt (not her first) by addressing her body, first emptying her of the drugs she has taken and then subjecting her to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which brought about brief seizures through the application of electricity in order to alter “abnormal” functions in the brains of depressives and schizophrenics (Valenstein 1986: 52). And in “You, Doctor Martin,” the routines of the hospital are powerfully adduced as Sexton describes patients standing in lines, eating on command and in unison, watched at all times, infantilized as they stitch moccasins (Sexton 1988: 9). Plath was treated with ECT and with insulin shock (which used heavy doses of insulin to induce daily comas, typically lasting for an hour), first as an outpatient during the summer of 1953 and then, after her suicide attempt, at McLean Hospital (Stevenson 1989: 44). The experience of ECT seems to provide the image that takes on mythic resonance in “The Hanging Man,” whose speaker “sizzle[s] in blue volts” and awakens in a “world of bald white days,” and Anne Stevenson suggests that the “Communion tablet” the speaker takes in “Tulips” represents the “wafer” of the poet’s electroconvulsive therapy.
These poems make clear that what the therapies revealed or instantiated was not a stable or coherent self whose expression constituted the content of confessional poetry. Instead, the experiences of institutionalization, ECT, insulin shock, occupational therapy, and new products of psychopharmacology forced these poets to recognize the contingency of selfhood. Sexton portrays her speaker in “You, Doctor Martin” as unmade by the institution. Like the moccasins she stitches, she is refashioned in a shape more socially useful (if no more whole or self‐knowing) than the “mad queen” persona with which she begins: “Now I am myself / counting this row and that row of moccasins / waiting on the silent shelf” (1988: 10). Stevenson is convinced that Plath’s two periods of electroconvulsive therapy “changed her personality permanently, stripping her of a psychological ‘skin’ she could ill afford to lose,” and that the therapy is responsible for the “unseen menace that haunts nearly everything she wrote” (1989: 47). Lowell represents himself, upon release from McLean Hospital, in poems like “Waking in the Blue” and “Home After Three Months Away,” as self‐divided, weakened, static, and shrunken: “I keep no rank nor station. / Cured, I am frizzled, stale and small” (Lowell 1959: 83).
If the poems reveal the self as a construction, something made and therefore un‐makeable or re‐makeable, the label often used for them directs us to the social sites in which selves are powerfully shaped. As numerous critics have pointed out, “confessional,” the term used by Rosenthal and adopted by literary historians, invokes the discourses of law and religion, and we are taught by the insights of Michel Foucault to see these discourses as ones in which subjects are constituted. Confession in the precincts of the state, whether in the investigative operations of the police or in the judicial operations of the court, produces a legal subject, one named, understood, and determined by the dictates of the law. Confession in the chambers of the church (as in the various confessions of faith or recitations of creed) produces the subject of religion, one known and identifiable by articulated and communally held beliefs. Moreover, the rituals of confession in religious settings, whether in the Jewish rites of atonement, the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation, or the various Protestant practices of acknowledging sin, like legal confession, produce this subject as fallible, guilty, a self comprising rupture and division from the community.
Work by Helen Vendler, Miranda Sherwin, and others proposes Freudian, Jungian, and other psychotherapies as key to understanding the dynamics of this poetry. As Foucault demonstrates in Madness and Civilization, these are also discourses (medical/psychoanalytical/psychological) we might see as powerfully constituting subjects. What Vendler calls the “therapeutic hour,” the psychoanaytic session whose structure she sees as determining that of many poems by Lowell, Plath, and Berryman, is devoted to uncovering unconscious desires unknown to the conscious self. According to Vendler, the specific practice of weekly hour‐long sessions in which intimate episodes were not only narrated but also analyzed offered a means for bringing previously unavailable subject matter into verse. This subject matter would not serve simply as the expression of personal emotion, but would, instead, be set as a text for analysis within the poem, a provocation for the poet’s and the reader’s search for significance (Vendler 1995: 31). Sherwin, who prefers “psychoanalytic poetics” to Vendler’s “Freudian lyric,” also argues that the interpretive practices of psychoanalysis influence these poets’ work. The poetry of Roethke, Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Sexton, Snodgrass, and others has fruitfully been read along these lines, but whether we call this poetry “Freudian lyric” or “psychoanalytic poetics,” what it often enacts is the desperate need to construct a self rather than the expression of a known and coherent self (Sherwin 2011: 10). Lowell’s acknowledgments of violence and fragility, Sexton’s exploration of doubleness and her deployment of fairy tale personae, Plath’s histrionic performances, and Berryman’s almost literal staging of the self’s internal multiplicity and contradiction all suggest this existential challenge.
While critics have often explained these poems in terms derived from one or another sense of “confessional,” turning either to medical/institutional or to church/state discourses, I want to bring to bear here another strand of Foucault’s thinking that might illuminate aspects not only of “confessional” poetry but also of other poetry published during the 1950s and 1960s. The resources of lyric themselves might also be seen, in terms borrowed from Foucault, as technologies of self, which is to say that rather than linguistic, rhetorical, and prosodic strategies for the expression of a self’s experience they are the means by which a self is named, narrated, textually embodied, and secured (Foucault 1988: 18). The pharmacological age (and the psychotherapeutic age) presses upon us (as it pressed upon these poets) the contingency of self, and much of the power of this poetry derives not from the openness with which poets express themselves but, instead, from the desperation with which they seek poetically to compose themselves.
This self‐composition takes a variety of forms, from the narration of family drama in Lowell’s poems to the fairy tale or nursery rhyme singing of self in Sexton’s to the dramatization of multiple or conflicted selves in poems by Plath and Berryman. In Lowell’s case, it is often precisely in the elaboration of his failures and fragility that he most powerfully asserts the self shown to be failing and fragile. Describing himself as powerless and lost as he serves his infant daughter during her bath‐time “levee” in “Home After Three Months Away,” Lowell solidifies himself as the object of her attention. Guiltily recalling the trials he has put his wife through in “Man and Wife” (“as if you had / a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad […] and dragged me home alive” [Lowell 1959: 87]), he constitutes himself as the object of her sorrow and anger. In “Skunk Hour,” he famously finds himself (in multiple meanings of the phrase) skulking around the hilltop outside a resort town in Maine, watching “for love‐cars” and acknowledging that his “mind’s not right.” Even here, though, as he contemplates self‐destruction (“I hear / my ill‐spirit sob in each blood cell / as if my hand were at its throat”), as he identifies himself with damnation (“I myself am hell”), and as he finds himself empty (“nobody’s here”), Lowell is at the same time securing a self through the illocutionary acts of forswearing one (89–90). The “I” that doubts and denigrates itself must exist in order to do so. These moments are augmented by the poet’s continual linking of his private self and the public. Sometimes allusions do this work; quoting Shakespeare’s Richard III in “Home After Three Months Away” or Milton in “Skunk Hour,” he produces a self at once composed of intertextual reference and consolidated by powerful similitude (to a monarch or to Satan). More often, Lowell structurally aligns private and public, as when he interprets his youthful political dissent in terms of mental illness in “Memories of West Street and Lepke” (calling his public disavowal of the conduct of World War II a “manic statement,” for example, or linking his current becalmed state to that of American society when he sees both as “tranquilized”) (85).
Lowell most effectively achieves this private/public alignment in “For the Union Dead,” whose complex and intersecting identifications account for much of the poem’s brilliance. The poem begins with the instability of the city. The aquarium the speaker remembers from his youth is closed and abandoned, its windows are broken and boarded, its codfish‐shaped weathervane has “lost half its scales” (Lowell 1964: 70). The weathervane’s cod suggests the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (the fish is one of the state’s familiar symbols), and the metonymic presence of the state is strengthened when Lowell turns to Boston Common and the Statehouse; the former is being dug up for the construction of an underground parking garage and this work threatens the Statehouse, which is braced by a “girdle of orange, Puritan‐pumpkin colored girders.” The city’s history as well as its present is unstable; at the edge of the Common and across the street from the Statehouse, Augustus Saint Gaudens’s relief monument to the Massachusetts 54th Regiment of the Civil War is “shaking” and must be “propped by a plank splint against the garage’s earthquake.” Lowell’s speaker is similarly shaken. Just as the Statehouse is “tingling,” he recalls how his hand “tingled” when he watched fish in the aquarium and wanted to “burst the bubbles” rising from their noses, and he presses against the fence on the Common as if, like the monument, he needs to be held up.
The poem revolves around Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the white scion of an abolitionist family who led the regiment’s African American troops into the battle in which he and half of them were killed. While the landscape all around him (not only in downtown Boston but also across New England) is characterized by instability and decay, Shaw stands firm. Lowell verbally connects himself with this strong figure, too; just as his childhood self longed to “burst the bubbles” in the aquarium, Shaw rides “on his bubble” and awaits “the blessèd break,” and just as Shaw shared “the ditch” with his troops, Lowell feels the closeness of the “ditch” as nuclear war threatens even as its threat is bathetically reduced to advertising imagery for a safe (Lowell 1964: 72). In his recognition of his frailty, in his identification with a figure of permanence (even when such identification is ironized), and in his linkage of his private self with public spaces and the political state, Lowell performs the necessary fashioning of a self amid all that threatens it. In a final and crucial turn on these identifications, Lowell situates himself outside the glass (the screen of the television to which he crouches) as he had stood outside the aquarium’s glass as a child and outside the Common’s fence the previous spring. On television, he sees “the drained faces of Negro school‐children,” where he had seen fish in the aquarium and “dinosaur steamshovels” on the Common. Where bubbles arose from the fish, the children’s faces on the screen “rise like balloons.” Lowell’s selfhood is secured, in part, by his separation from fish and children, bubbles and balloons, and in part by the desire he shares with Shaw to burst or break. In the poem’s final stanza, the “Aquarium is gone”:
Everywhere
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.
(Lowell 1964: 72)
Lowell stands apart from the city and its slithery uncertainties, certain of himself as its other.
I have already touched on the way Sexton’s “The Double Image” (a key poem in her 1960 volume, To Bedlam and Partway Back) reveals the fragility and the contradictory nature of the self. Sexton’s speaker attempts suicide, endures institutionalization and multiple therapies, and recovers (or tries to) in her mother’s house, riven at every moment by the sense of herself as only a reflection or portrait, as an artificial identity constructed in relation (or opposition) to another (her mother, her daughter). The insistent patterning of images – the portraits painted of Sexton and her mother, the image of images more generally (photographs and postcards the speaker sends to her daughter, for example) – subvert assumptions we might have that the self simply exists and expresses and replaces these with the consciousness that the self is constructed, conflicted, multiple, shifting, and fragile. At the same time, though, the poem’s rhetorical and formal operations work to ground and secure a self. The suicide attempt itself is an effort to exert control, an assertion of the self in the will to destroy the self. But it is the poem’s emphasis on acts of (artistic, poetic) making that most obviously articulates a self, even as it recognizes that self’s artificial character.
The poem’s second section is constructed around a refrain that is especially significant in this regard (“I had my portrait done instead”), and the careful versification enacts the artistic practice that these references to portraiture point to. Notice, for example, the subtle rhymes and significant allusions in the last two stanzas of the sixth section:
The artist caught us at the turning:
we smiled in our canvas home
before we chose our foreknown separate ways.
The dry red fox fur coast was made for burning.
I rot on the wall, my own
Dorian Gray.
And this was the cave of the mirror,
that double woman who stares
at herself, as if she were petrified
in time – two ladies sitting in umber chairs.
You kissed your grandmother
and she cried.
(Sexton 1988: 33)
The second stanza’s rhyme of “mirror” and “grandmother” links two of the reflective surfaces in which the speaker comes to recognize herself. In both stanzas, Sexton deploys allusions to works in which the true nature of selves are discovered. Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray remains artificially youthful while his portrait suffers the ravages of both time and Dorian’s evil, registering the character’s reality in what is presumed to be the artificial. In “the cave of the mirror,” Sexton obliquely alludes to Plato’s famous allegory, in which prisoners chained in a cave can see only the shadows projected onto the wall in front of them, not the reality of puppeteers who create the shadows behind the prisoners’ backs. Mistaking appearances for reality, the prisoners can know only artifice. Sexton alters the significance of the allusion, offering the artifice of portraiture not simply as an illusion but, instead, as a means for self‐creation. Finally, the poem comes to understand the nature of the self as produced in and through familial relationships. For better or worse, Sexton writes, she “needed another image to remind her” who and what she was. This image is the daughter, whose birth and recovery from illness initiated the speaker’s spiral into self loss but whose presence finally secures the self the speaker struggles to construct. Just as relationship might threaten to unmake the self, it might, for Sexton at this poem’s conclusion, offer a (partial, conflicted, difficult) way to remake the self: “And this was my worst guilt,” she writes; “I made you to find me” (Sexton 1988: 34).
Berryman and Plath both dramatize their traumatized, threatened, and divided selves in order to ground provisional, plausible, and hopefully durable selves. For Berryman, the drama arises from and performs the self’s internal division. In his 77 Dream Songs (1964), Berryman speaks in both first‐ and third‐person, sometimes as and sometimes of, a protagonist, Henry, whom readers immediately saw as a thin mask for Berryman himself (though Berryman emphasized that in spite of apparent similarities Henry was emphatically not him: “Henry does resemble me, and I resemble Henry; but on the other hand I am not Henry. You know, I pay income tax; Henry pays no income tax” [Thomas 1988: 7]). Henry is not alone on the stage, though; he is joined by a persistent counterpart who speaks in stilted old‐time minstrel blackface. This figure often addresses Henry as “Mr. Bones” or “Sir Bones,” but it is often difficult to determine who is speaking to whom, and it sometimes seems as if this figure, too, goes by “Mr. Bones.”
In poem after poem, each comprising 18 lines split into three six‐line stanzas, Berryman transforms his own alcoholism, depression, marital and other relationship difficulties, and existential anxiety into episodes of situational tragicomedy, realizing through the interplay of Henry and the interlocutor and the other characters on the set the agon of selfhood and self‐construction. Song 5 swiftly presents Henry in three situations: in a bar drinking, on a plane apparently drunk, and lying in netting as if caught from flight. In Song 4, a single situation reveals Henry’s complex and inescapable desire and his self‐loathing. In both his insatiable appetite and the judgment he levels at himself for it, Henry recognizes (however painfully) himself as a self, as at once the helpless agent of desire and the heartless judge. Having spent most of the first two stanzas elaborating Henry’s desire for the young woman he is watching at a restaurant – “Filling her compact & delicious body / with chicken paprika” – Henry just manages to keep himself from falling at her feet and crying out his desire. Instead:
I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni. – Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.
(Berryman 2007: 6)
Henry shifts objects of desire, from the woman to his ice cream (a poor substitute), while his interlocutor shrugs, in terms that echo both Henry’s appetite and the woman’s eating, that there are plenty of similar women to want. When the poem’s third‐person narrative voice concludes, in the final stanza, that “There ought to be a law against Henry,” the interlocutor replies, “there is.”
The dramatic and narrative construction of a self even in the throes of self‐destructive impulses or desires is especially prominent in Song 26. More than in many of the Dream Songs, this poem deploys the back and forth of the minstrel show “end men” from which Berryman draws the name and dialect of Mr. Bones. Two related kinds of repetition structure the poem. First, the speaker/Henry is interrupted in each stanza with the question “What happen then, Mr. Bones?” In addition to this refrain, Berryman builds the poem around the repeated grammatical structure of the narrative answer (that is, the speaker tells what happened). These work together to emphasize the creation of the self both intersubjectively and narratively; the self consists of moments when it is known to another or others, and its continuity consists of the sequence of those moments. This is true even (or, for Berryman, perhaps especially) in the context of the subject’s desire to disappear. Song 26 is, in fact, framed by such desire (and, not coincidentally, by the first‐person speaker, who shifts to talking of Henry in third‐person from the poem’s second to seventeenth lines). The speaker begins by exclaiming that the “glories of the world” struck him and provoked song (“made me aria”), which, of course links metonymically to these Dream Songs, as well as to poetry in general. It is out of this stricken moment that Henry precipitates, experiences his appetites and the pain they entail, and commits the “crime” of poetry (“art, rime”). And it is from the struggle and pain associated with these, with life, with being a self, that the speaker, who returns to self‐reference in the final line, imagines release: “I had a most marvelous piece of luck. I died” (Berryman 2007: 28).
In some of her most familiar poems, Sylvia Plath, too, deploys the vocabulary, themes, and structures of theater to dramatize both conflicts within the self and the emergence and consolidation of the self in struggle against another (or others). The diction of drama applies to the character of the self that is asserted in these poems, as well, as Plath histrionically performs that self’s assertion against destructive forces. The speaker of “Lady Lazarus” explicitly casts herself in theatrical terms, describing the miracle of her decennial resurrection (the recovery from near‐death experiences, especially a suicide attempt) as a sideshow attraction:
The peanut‐crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot –
The big strip tease.
Gentleman, ladies
These are my hands,
My knees.
(Plath 2004: 15)
Where dying is an art she has mastered, something she does “exceptionally well” and “so it feels real,” these recoveries to life, these reemergences as a known self, are exhausting: “It’s the theatrical // Comeback in broad day,” she says, “That knocks me out.” But if she is going to suffer this existence as a self, then the speaker of “Lady Lazarus” is going to use that self to her advantage, charging audiences for a sight of her scars or the hearing of her heart.
More than this, she is going to inhabit the full power of her miraculous rebirth, her rise from the grave or the ashes of her self‐destruction, and affirm herself as a weapon against those who have wrought the miracle, the artists for whom she is an “opus,” a “pure gold baby.” In the famous conclusion of the poem, Plath writes that these powerful figures who have forced her into the self she would have escaped should “Beware”: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air” (Plath 2004: 17).
In just these brief quotations, it is possible to hear something of the histrionic character of Plath’s performance of self‐emergence. The insistent, if irregular, rhymes in “Lady Lazarus,” as well as the assonance and consonance that sound through many of the poem’s lines, alert us to the way the speaker is “acting out.” This is perhaps even more true of “Daddy,” whose opening stanza introduces the “oo” sound that is an obsessively repeated aural continuity throughout the poem: “You do not do, you do not do, / Any more, black shoe” (Plath 2004: 74). This aural excess is part of what might save the bathetic and hyperbolic Nazi and Holocaust imagery in “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy.” Both the figurative language and the sound take the poems “over the top,” calling attention precisely to the artificial character of the self performed and produced in the poems.
The historical and institutional pressures that revealed the fissured and fictive character of the self, and the deployment of lyric technique as a means for shoring up the fragmented self, are most easily apparent in the work of poets known as confessional, but these shape the work of poets more reticent about their private lives as well. It would be a mistake, then, to limit our consideration here to the poets typically grouped together as confessional poets, for we can also and importantly see lyric technologies of self at work in the poems of more reticent poets like Elizabeth Bishop. Here, instead of “confession,” we find strategies that Thomas Greene has helped us to see and name as “calling out of diffusion.” Writing on the genre of the “promenade poem,” Greene emphasizes both the fictive character of any poetic speaker’s passage through the textually presented world and the ways lyric poetry’s rhetorical strategies compose a self from the narrated interaction between perceiver and perceived (Greene 2002: 1, 8). But what these poetries have in common is their admission of (or even emphasis on) the artifice of self‐fashioning, the conscious construction of a self on the page out of narrated perceptions of the world with which that self interacts.
A close friend and constant correspondent of Robert Lowell, Bishop is often set against Lowell as an example of a poet who refused the siren song of confession and self‐revelation. Her poems are often described as “reticent,” characterized by their qualities of observation and their emphasis on the ways representation mediates experience. Influenced and befriended by Marianne Moore, Bishop makes sense as a counterweight to the confessional momentum that rose to dominate the American poetry scene in the 1960s. In her widely anthologized poem “In the Waiting Room,” though, Bishop discloses anxieties about the self and its slipperiness that resonate with, even if they do not quite resemble, those on display in the poems of Lowell or Sexton or Plath. In the poem, the speaker recalls accompanying her aunt to the dentist when she was a child. Occupying herself with a National Geographic magazine, she avoids the attention of adults in the waiting room and overhears the pained sounds her aunt makes in the dentist’s chair. That sound – “not very loud or long” – precipitates a crisis for the speaker, who hears herself in her aunt’s voice, and who at once comes to recognize herself as a self and to find herself overwhelmed:
What took me by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I – we – were falling, falling.
(Bishop 1980:160)
In this vertiginous fall into self‐awareness, the speaker names herself (“you are an I, / you are an Elizabeth, / you are one of them”). This is her strategy to maintain herself (her self) as she feels she will fall “off / the round, turning world, / into cold, blue‐black space”), but even as she makes this claim on human identity and on her specific, nameable identity, the speaker is unsure of just what it means to be an I, an Elizabeth, one of them, unsure of just why she must be one. She can see in retrospect the importance of her horror at the breasts of African women depicted in the magazine, the way they link her to humanity just like clothes and voice do, and, like those other markers, they separate her from the whole and indicate her frightening distinctiveness. Self, for Bishop in this poem, is frightening both as a known and concrete thing and as the loss or dissolution of that thing.
Out of the kind of anxiety at the heart of “In the Waiting Room,” many of Bishop’s other poems of the 1950s use careful observation and careful composition to balance between these threats. While there is not space here to offer detailed readings of these poems, a brief discussion of “At the Fishhouses” illustrates the point. Influenced by Moore’s “A Grave” (1924), “At the Fishhouses” meditates on the ways of knowing available to the human consciousness, and in so doing fabricates the perceiving self cast into such crisis in “In the Waiting Room.” In this poem, long first and third stanzas, each of which explicitly assumes a relationship between the sea and knowledge, balance each other across the fulcrum of a much shorter middle stanza. The long first stanza focuses on the shore, the accessible and concrete perceptibility of the fishhouses. Opposed to this scene is the sea, limned in the long third stanza as an “element bearable to no mortal” (Bishop 1980: 65). Through her attention to these settings and their relationship, Bishop elaborates the self who sees them. Bishop’s descriptions of the fishhouses are detailed and specific, and we come to know through them not only how things look but also how they smell and, crucially, how things like the “cleated gangplanks” and the fisherman’s knife are used. The dominant notes in her description of the sea are its unchanging character and its inaccessibility. No matter how often and repeatedly she has seen it (and her seeing is repeatedly referred to), the speaker cannot penetrate the sea. It is, we read twice, “Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,” it swings “indifferently,” always “the same sea, the same,” but to enter it would be to ache and burn “as if the water were a transmutation of fire.”
In each stanza, Bishop provides herself an interlocutor, and in these, too, she at once emphasizes the difference between shore and sea and stages the self through interaction. The old man is a friend of the speaker’s grandfather. They talk of familiar topics (“the decline in the population / and of codfish and herring”). Out in the water, a seal appears “evening after evening.” Able to live in that unbearable element, the seal is inaccessible to the speaker, who imagines its curiosity, its interest in music, its beliefs and attitudes. In both cases, Bishop makes a little joke, and even these jokes distinguish the sites and situations of her interlocutors. The old man “accepts a Lucky Strike,” the cigarette brand punning on fortune and fishing as the sociable sharing links the two people. The seal, the speaker says, is “like me a believer in total immersion,” the pun here pointing to religion as she sings “Baptist hymns” to the distant animal. The totality of effects, as the grammatical “I” describes perceptions, narrates actions, and notices relationships, is to produce (and, for a poet who has experienced the vertiginous dissolution of self described in “In the Waiting Room,” perhaps to stake a claim for) a self that might, at least for a while, cohere in the face of all that threatens to dissolve it.
It is impossible not to notice both the absence of race in most treatments of confessional poetry (or of 1950s and 1960s poetry in general that are not focused explicitly on African American poets) and the role of racial representation in the work of some of these white poets (e.g. “Negro” figures in Lowell’s poems, especially “For the Union Dead,” and the minstrel echoes in Berryman’s Dream Songs). To take one recent example of the scholarly blind spot, Albert Gelpi’s American Poetry After Modernism (2015) includes, among the poets receiving sustained attention and listed in the table of contents, no African American poets or other poets of color. Gelpi’s book focuses, he writes, on “those poets who most effectively helped [him] to focus and substantiate [his] argument” (Gelpi 2015: ix). His justification is worth quoting:
I don’t discuss a number of poets whose work is less relevant to the questions of form and language that I am pursuing. In particular, I should note the emergence of African‐American, Latino, and Asian‐American poets in this period, but the strong focus on issues of ethnic identity in the dominant culture, important for all Americans as these issues are, mean that most of this poetry starts with and is sustained by a different set of questions.
(Gelpi 2015: ix)
One might argue that a dialectic purporting to account for the distinctiveness of American poetry that makes no room for representation of or reflection on the impact of race on poetic self‐understanding is doomed to miss much of what is in fact distinctive in American poetry. One might wonder why a “focus on issues of ethnic identity” must be at odds with “questions of form and language,” why Gelpi’s structuring dialectic of Postmodernism and Neoromanticism might not be as effectively substantiated through readings of Melvin Tolson and Gwendolyn Brooks, of Nathaniel Mackey and Robert Hayden, of Harryette Mullen and Rita Dove, as it is through readings of Lowell and Berryman, Ashbery and Bishop, and so on. I single out Gelpi here not because his book is either alone or especially egregious, but because it is only the most recent among a number of scholarly examinations of postwar American poetry that construct an exclusively white canon. Nor is Gelpi the only critic to write about the minstrelsy conventions and dialect deployed in Berryman’s Dream Songs without reckoning with those conventions’ inextricability from the long history of racial oppression and appropriation in American culture.
The racial blind spot of many critics and literary historians matches that of many of the poets they write about. Notice, in the work of poets writing during the rise and intensity of the Civil Rights movement, the dearth of references to African Americans. And notice the function of those references when they do occur. Lowell refers briefly, in “Memories of West Street and Lepke,” to a “young Negro with curlicues of marijuana in his hair,” a detail that helps to set the scene of the West Street Jail. His most sustained representation of African American figures occurs in “For the Union Dead,” where, as noted above, Lowell engages both the African American soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th (as they appear in Saint Gaudens’s monument to the regiment and its commander, Colonel Robert Shaw), and the African American schoolchildren he sees on television as they seek to integrate schools and demonstrate for civil rights as props for his own unstable self rather than as subjects whose selfhood might itself be averred.
Taken together, these representations – critical/historical and poetic – might allow (or lead) us to believe that only white subjects suffered the sense of a threatened self during these decades, and that black subjectivity might work only to help the beleaguered white poet to secure and stabilize a self. We have only to turn to the work of black poets writing at the same time, though, to see that both the problem of a threatened self and the deployment of poetry as a means of self‐fashioning that we see in the canonical white poets’ work is shared across the color line.
Where discourses and therapeutic practices of mental health most powerfully reveal the constructedness and fragility of self for the white confessional poets, it is the history and present‐day lived experience of racism that push this to the foreground for their African American contemporaries. If white poets of these decades could experience conditions that Greenblatt summarizes for his archive of Renaissance texts, African American writers living through the social and political instabilities of postwar America could not escape those constitutive tensions. Like that of Robert Lowell and John Berryman, the early work of Robert Hayden (one year older than Berryman and four years older than Lowell) took on the founding narratives of American history through the rhetorics and forms of Eliotic modernism, and, like Lowell, Hayden turned, in his work of the late 1950s and early 1960s, toward more subtly mediated examinations of his own experience. Where the nation’s history, and the family history that was tied up in the broader narrative, brought Lowell to confront problems of sin and depravity, though, Hayden’s “Middle Passage” and “Runagate, Runagate,” modernist history poems of the late 1940s, put the national sin of slavery at the center of American history, foregrounding the dependence of black subjectivity on the legal and political systems of enforced servitude. Where the medical manipulability of brain chemistry and psychological states forced Lowell to recognize the performance and artifice of self, the intense national attention to race during the Civil Rights movement, the susceptibility of black lives to casual and unpunished white violence, brought his exact contemporary Gwendolyn Brooks to register, especially in her poems about the murder of Emmett Till, the existential threat white culture posed to black selfhood.
Against the various forces and practices that these poets could name and describe as threatening the black self and/or revealing that self’s fragility, these poets, like their white counterparts, deployed aspects of lyric form as technologies of self, making of poetry a means of self‐preservation or performance. In books that came out at almost exactly the same time as the hallmark volumes of confessional poetry (Brooks’s The Bean Eaters was published in 1960, just after Lowell’s Life Studies and during the year that also saw the publication of Sexton’s To Bedlam and Partway Back, while Hayden’s Selected Poems came out, like Plath’s Ariel, in 1966), these poets sought to produce selves through the illocutionary acts of lyric. Like the speakers of Lowell’s, Sexton’s, and Plath’s poems, the speakers in many of Brooks’s and Hayden’s poems of this period “confess” to weaknesses, failures, and shortcomings in ways that ground and vouchsafe a self able to make such confessions. In “Those Winter Sundays,” one of his most often anthologized poems, Hayden recalls both his father’s unappreciated “austere and lonely offices of love” (his rising early on Sunday mornings to lay the fires and warm the house before the speaker had to get up for church), and his own lack of gratitude, his “indifferent” speech in the face of these subtly sacramental acts of care (“offices” carries the lingering resonance of the divine office, the liturgy of the canonical hours or breviary which calls the believer to regular prayer throughout the day) (Hayden 1985: 41). With all the sonic certainty of Lowell or Plath, Hayden fashions a compelling lyric surface: the first stanza enacts the “breaking” of the cold, for example, in its insistent repetition of hard consonants, often accompanied by the vowel sound of “breaking” as well: “blueblack,” cracked,” “ached,” “weekday,” “banked,” “thanked,” “wake.” And repetition performs the complex emotional work of the poem’s conclusion, as well, when the speaker twice asks “What did I know,” emphasizing at once his youthful ignorance, his failure to care that he was cared for, and his mature recognition of his father’s love, his understanding of just what love requires.
Brooks’s work of the 1950s and early 1960s is more often in the vein of dramatic monologue or other persona poems than in first‐person, poet‐as‐speaker styles. Even in these poems, the securing of black selfhood is at issue. Brooks often gets at this straightforwardly, as when Brooks imagines the interiority of Emmett Till’s mother after her child’s murder, or when she speaks as a black newspaperman who can find no obvious angle for his coverage of events in Little Rock, Arkansas (where public schools were being integrated with the support of National Guard troops) beyond “They are like people everywhere” (Brooks 1963: 89). In other poems, the burden of black selfhood is more obliquely borne, as when she channels the white woman whose accusation led to Till’s murder or focuses on ghetto life through the eyes of the white suburban “Lovers of the Poor.”
One poem in which Brooks does speak in propria persona, “In Honor of David Anderson Brooks, My Father,” offers in its concluding lines an apt way of capturing what she is up to through her multiple personae: dead, her father “Translates to public love / old private charity” (Brooks 1963: 69). Indeed, the ballad stanza in which several of her poems are cast (a form sometimes called out in the text even when it is not named in the title) performs the collective character of the black selves who speak. Brooks is at her most intimately revealing in the uncharacteristic “A Lovely Love”:
This is the birthright of our lovely love
In swaddling clothes. Not like that Other one.
Not lit by any fondling star above.
Not found by any wise me, either. Run.
People are coming. They must not catch us here
Definitionless in this strict atmosphere.
(Brooks 1963: 101)
The last line here nicely sums up the fragility of selfhood, while the structural allusion to the birth of Christ, an allusion that operates even in disavowal, seeks to secure selves – the speaker’s and that of the lover to whom she speaks – with significance beyond the alleys and halls, the “hyacinth darkness,” in which the hoped‐for tryst might take place.
Bishop and Lowell are often read as friendly antitheses, she reticent while he is revealing. Neither of these poets (nor Plath, Sexton, or Berryman) are typically read alongside Brooks or Hayden. But when we shift our attention from the expression of self to the poetic construction of self, from our understanding of “confession” as emanating from the self to producing the self, we enlarge and productively complicate the poetic groupings we have inherited from earlier accounts. All of these poets, and many besides, are engaged in poetic self‐fashioning, a project whose necessity was acutely felt by them in the wake of existential threats on the world stage and new products of psychopharmacology that rendered the self unstable, malleable, and in need of construction and shoring up.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 6 (THE COURSE OF MODERN AMERICAN POETRY); CHAPTER 19 (POETRY AT THE END OF THE MILLENNIUM).