Expansive Poetry
& Online Review
CLEAR
AND FLAWED
by
Edward Zuk
A review of The Wounded Surgeon by
Adam Kirsch.
New York: Norton, 2005.
ISBN 0-393-05197-8. $24.95.
When The Wounded Surgeon was
released earlier this year to modest fanfare, a large part of the
attention focussed on the promise of its author. Adam Kirsch is a
young book-reviewer for such august magazines as The New Republic, The New Yorker, and
the TLS, and he is also the author of the prize-winning The Thousand Wells, a volume of
poems. It was no surprise, then, that the blurbs on the jacket of
The Wounded Surgeon, his first
full-length book of criticism, praised the arrival of a new
poet-critic. However, the choice of subject matter was
puzzling. I could find no obvious reason why Kirsch chose to
write at such length about “Confession and Transformation in Six
American Poets: Lowell, Bishop, Berryman, Jarrell, Schwartz, and
Plath” (to quote the book’s subtitle) instead of writing a survey of
recent poetry, say, or a polemic defending the principles of his own
art, two time-honoured ways of establishing a poetic career. The
book offers no answer to these questions. Instead, what we have
is a clear and fairly well-researched account of the works of these six
writers, prefaced by a vague declaration that “the example of these
poets, who put their whole humanity into their art, is more valuable
than ever.” We will have to wait for Kirsch’s subsequent books to
see what he has gleaned from this study of Lowell, Bishop,
Berryman, and Plath in relation to his own art.
The Wounded Surgeon has three
distinct aims. The first one, which is announced in the
introduction, is to correct our view of these six poets as
“confessional” since they do not seek any type of spiritual healing
through their poetry. Instead, Kirsch hopes that they might be
thought of “wounded surgeons” so that readers can appreciate “the
resolve, not to say heroism [sic], that these poets displayed by
submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective
discipline of art.” While the basic sentiment is praiseworthy (I,
too, wish that more critics of Plath would focus on her art rather than
on her life), in this aim the book is destined to fail. I cannot
imagine critics speaking of the “wounded surgeon poets” instead of the
“Confessional poets.” Besides, the image of the wounded surgeon
comes from Eliot’s Four Quartets
(the fourth section of “East Coker,” to be more precise), and it
symbolizes the healing powers of Christ. Surely Kirsch does not
want to compare the writing of Life
Studies to the work of Jesus, whatever he means about the
“heroism” of these poets? Fortunately, the other two aims of the
book are more reasonable, if still controversial. Kirsch wants to
show how these writers transformed their lives into art by providing
what he calls “biographies of the poetry,” and he tries to establish
them as the defining group of poets of mid-century America.
The Wounded Surgeon is not a
history or a survey of confessional poetry, so important figures like
W. D. Snodgrass and Anne Sexton are absent from its pages while
Theodore Roethke is mentioned only once in passing. Instead, the
book is an attempt to assert the aesthetic worth of these six poets,
which Kirsch believes to be independent of the lurid personal details
that filled their poetry. The starting point for these poets,
Kirsch argues, was their negative reaction to the tenets of New
Criticism and its championing of T. S. Eliot’s belief in the
impersonality of the artist. Eliot wrote that:
. . . the more perfect the artist, the more
completely separate in him will be the
man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more
perfectly will the mind
digest and transmute the passions which are its
material . . . the poet has, not a
‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium,
which is only a medium and
not a personality, in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar
ways . . . Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion,
but an escape from emotion;
it is not the expression of personality, but an
escape from personality. But, of
course, only those who have personality and emotions
know what it means to
want to escape from these things. (“Tradition
and the Individual Talent”)
In fact, Eliot, argues for the separation between the work of art and
the emotional life of the poet, an aesthetic approach to poetry that
both Kirsch and the poets he discusses support (a fact which Kirsch, to
his credit, acknowledges). But for a generation of critics,
Eliot’s remarks were taken as a declaration of what in our time has
been called “the death of the author,” or the neglect of all
biographical and personal concerns in studying a work of art. The
confessional poets exploded this notion by writing about their intimate
lives, in the process “redefining what it means for a poet to write
honestly” in Kirsch’s nicely-turned phrase.
This theory seems correct to me as far as it goes, but Kirsch fails to
consider an important question: what separates the use of
personal details by these poets from the revelations in the poetry of
Yeats, say, or of Wordsworth? What made their use of
autobiography unique? I have no ready answer to this question,
other than to note that the Confessional poets sensationalized their
experience to a greater extent than any group of poets before them, and
they provided more minor, novelistic details and a looser poetic form
in order to produce the illusion that readers were encountering the
poet’s actual life. I wish that Kirsch had taken on this question
directly. But he has chosen to avoid it and many others
besides. Do the Confessional poets have any literary ancestors or
heirs? What is their relationship to the Romantics or their
contemporaries the Beats, from whom they drew? Are there any
further reasons why they should be noticed now? Sadly, none of
these issues are addressed in the book, and we are left to speculate on
what Kirsch’s insights might be.
However, what we do have in this book is still valuable, if
incomplete. Kirsch provides a revisionary reading of each poet’s
work. For Lowell, Kirsch attempts to raise the later
pseudo-sonnets of his book History
into a major work; for Bishop, he argues that her poetry improved on
the whole as she allowed more personal details to enter her poetry; for
Berryman, he declares that the Dream
Songs were successful because Henry cannot quite be identified
with the author, and that Berryman’s attempts to write without a mask
were a disaster; and for Plath, he suggests that her work is best read
as a personal myth like that of Blake, which rescues her from charges
of unfairness with respect to her portrayals of her father.
Kirsch has much less to say about Jarrell and Schwartz, naturally
enough since they are minor poets, though he does make a spirited case
for reviving Schwartz’s reputation as a poetic innovator. None of
these positions is indisputable, but each one is argued well and
supports the overarching argument, which is sound if a little
obvious: the Confessionals succeeded in writing poetry only
insofar as they treated their lives with objectivity and artistic care.
Two of Kirsch’s arguments deserve to be questioned more closely,
however. First, he argues at length that Robert Lowell was a
major figure in American literature. Lowell is a “great poet,”
Kirsch declares, proclaiming that Lowell is “a natural heir and
companion to the classic English poets, starting with his beloved
Milton.” Well, no. I would raise the following objection to
Lowell’s canonization: he is not a great poet because he did not
write enough great poems. Lowell’s two best works, it is
generally agreed, are “The Quaker Graveyard at Nantucket” and “Skunk
Hour.” Both are flawed, at best. The first shows no
development in its seven parts, is exaggerated in its rhetoric, and
fails to be convincing in its portrayal of either the Quakers or the
Virgin Mary. “Skunk Hour,” for all the brilliance that Lowell
lavished on its details, is comical in its self-aggrandizement.
The hill that the speaker drives up is connected through the imagery to
“the Hill of Skulls where Jesus was crucified” (as Kirsch notes), and
the poem then goes on to compare the poet-speaker to Milton’s
Satan. Who can accept Lowell or his stand-in (if you prefer) as
either a crucified Jesus or as Satan? After these poems,
there is a sharp drop-off in quality to works like “Jonathan Edwards
and the Spider,” “Beyond the Alps,” “Waking the Blue,” “For the Union
Dead,” “Water,” “The Dolphin,” and so on. If we compare Lowell’s
achievement to that of Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, or Keats – poets
who stand solidly in the line that Kirsch invokes – we soon find that
he did not accomplish what they did.
To prop up Lowell’s reputation, Kirsch attempts to raise the
pseudo-sonnets of History into
a major work. For this I must give him credit: he is the
only one I have met, in person or in print, who actually enjoys the
poems from that volume. My own copy of Lowell’s Notebook (the book from which many
of the poems of History were later drawn) was given to me by an English
professor who begged me to take it from him. “I’ll never read the
damned thing any more” he told me as he shooed me out the door, book in
hand. Kirsch’s argument is that in these poems Lowell “is able to
find a fruitful approach to nearly every subject, and his language is
constantly vigorous and inventive.” This is not how I remembered History. Not wanting to “read
the damned thing any more” either, I depended on Kirsch’s quotations to
jog my memory. Here are two snippets that Kirsch quotes in
support of Lowell’s genius: “Like Henry VIII, Mohammed got
religion / in the dangerous years” and “What raised [Stalin] / was an
unusual lust to break the icon, / joke cruelly, seriously, and be
himself.” Ah yes, good old Comrade Stalin did let it all hang
out. Kirsch’s comment on the latter ‘sonnet’ is that “we remember
illustrious men and women, Lowell suggests, because of the intensity of
their self-affirmation, no matter whether their actions are good or
evil. In this, the artist, the hero, and the tyrant are
united.” This statement is silly – is mass murder a
‘self-affirmation’? Besides, I shudder at any theory of history
that would collapse the distinction between Shakespeare and Hitler, and
if this is the “fruitful approach” that Lowell found, I will cheerfully
take a pass on it.
A second major argument of The
Wounded Surgeon is Kirsch’s claim that these poets wrote the
lasting poetry of mid 20th-century America. At no point does
Kirsch openly speak of canonizing them, but the tenor of his argument
is clear: Kirsch want us to view these writers as the defining
“great constellation” of writers which current poets must either react
against or follow. This opinion need not be accepted, to say the
least. There are many good reasons not to overestimate the six
poets that Kirsch analyzes. Leaving aside Jarrell and Schwartz
since even Kirsch cannot work up much enthusiasm for them, none of the
other four poets (not even Bishop) produced an oeuvre that is obviously
a classic, if only because they left so much human experience and so
many modes of poetry untouched. Of these writers, I would
nominate only Bishop for a decent ranking in the history of English
poetry while Lowell and Plath would receive much lower ones, though I
cannot summon the enthusiasm for any of them that I can for Auden,
Frost, or Yeats. Besides, it is likely too soon to pronounce on
the generation that came of age in the middle of the last century,
though the temptation to nominate one poet or another for immortality
is irresistible, as I myself can attest. One or two more decades
need to pass so that other revolutions in taste may occur and we can
judge their poetry on its own merits, not on its possible connections
to our own. Only then will we be able to sort out whose work will
survive, and whose will not.
In reading over what I have written so far, I realize that I have been
quite critical of The Wounded Surgeon
for the limitations which hobble it. As both literary history and
as a sort of polemic, I find that the work falls short of its
promise. But I wish to end this review with an acknowledgement of
how much I enjoyed the book and how much I learned from it. If I
have been able to quarrel with its positions, that is because the
author lays out his theses clearly and passionately, citing evidence
and defending his points so that his readers can judge the matter for
themselves. It takes great courage to write clearly and
passionately, allowing ideas to be grasped, weighed, and debated freely
by anyone who reads them: cowardice hides behind jargon, but
bravery requires a clear prose. May more critics take the risks
that Kirsch has in this book, and may the result be a larger pool of
ideas – true or half-true, brilliant or dubious – to inform our
writings.