Postwar Poetry and Drama

This is Unit Seventeen of American Literature, part one of two: the poetry written after the war, and the turn that made the private self a poem's material. Unit sixteen closed on a fiction about selves that cannot find a place inside a system. This unit's poets face the same problem in a shorter form, and the governing idea, which part two pays off, is a search for a voice the public words had lost. The witness arranges the period along a spectrum with three overlapping camps: traditionalists who kept established forms and taught in universities, idiosyncratic poets who mixed old and new techniques into unique voices, and experimental poets who left the universities and attacked middle-class society. The decisive break came from the middle. Robert Lowell, a Boston formalist who had already won a Pulitzer for metered verse, published *Life Studies* in nineteen fifty-nine and admitted in a poem that his mind was not right, which the witness calls a watershed. His students Plath and Sexton went further. Against them stands Bishop, describing an object until the feeling arrives on its own. Then the Black poets, who built their own institutions. By the end you will be able to name the three camps and the watershed. To account for Plath's life and work. To describe Bishop's method against the confessional poets. To place Jarrell and Roethke. And to account for Brooks, Hayden, Randall and Knight.

Five entries on the shape of the period: a broken sense of history, three camps, and the formalist who broke his own forms.

History felt broken; form did too.

AML 1601 American Poetry After the War

The witness says traditional forms no longer seemed to give meaning to American poets after the war, and that events produced a sense of history as discontinuous, with each act and moment unique. Style became provisional and reflexive, and originality itself was becoming the new tradition, which is a paradox the period lived inside.

Traditional, idiosyncratic, experimental.

AML 1602 The Academic Poem and the Reaction Against It

The witness arranges the period along a spectrum with three overlapping camps. Traditionalists kept established forms and taught in universities. Idiosyncratic poets mixed traditional and new techniques into unique voices. Experimental poets were bohemian intellectuals who left the universities and attacked middle-class society. The camps overlap, and poets moved between them.

A formalist who broke his forms.

AML 1603 Robert Lowell and *Life Studies*

Lowell came from a Boston family that traced its roots to the Mayflower, won the Pulitzer for *Lord Weary's Castle*, and then changed course. *Life Studies*, of nineteen fifty-nine, mixed free and metered verse and brought an intense discussion of personal, family and psychological struggle into American poetry. The early Lowell is a traditionalist.

The private self, made material.

AML 1604 Confessional Poetry: The Term and the Risk

The witness says Lowell initiated confessional poetry, a mode in which he bared his most tormenting personal problems with honesty and intensity, and that the change was a watershed that opened the way for younger writers. The anchor names Plath and Sexton as his students. Confession here is a technique rather than mere diary.

A poem admitting the speaker's illness.

AML 1605 "Skunk Hour" and "For the Union Dead"

The anchor says "Skunk Hour", from *Life Studies*, was prompted by Elizabeth Bishop's "The Armadillo", and that Lowell declares in it, as no American writer had before, that his mind is not right. *For the Union Dead*, of nineteen sixty-four, continued the autobiographical work. Many of his poems set private against public history.

Six entries on the poets who took the turn furthest: an exemplary surface, a winter of poems, and taboo subjects brought into focus.

An exemplary surface, unresolved beneath.

AML 1606 Sylvia Plath: The Life and the Work

Plath was born in Boston, lost her authoritarian father at eight, took a scholarship to Smith and a Fulbright to Cambridge, and married the poet Ted Hughes. The witness describes an outwardly exemplary life above unresolved problems, some personal and some coming from the era's attitudes to women. She died by suicide in February nineteen sixty-three.

A winter's work, published after.

AML 1607 *Ariel* and the Late Poems

Separated from Hughes and caring for two children through a London winter of extreme cold, Plath wrote a series of poems against the clock. They were collected as *Ariel* in nineteen sixty-five, two years after her death, and Lowell wrote the introduction to them. Her early poetry is traditional and well made.

Extreme imagery, extreme emotion.

AML 1608 "Daddy"

The anchor states that the Nazi imagery in "Daddy" is not autobiographical but depicts the extreme emotions of a speaker trying to cut the cord of paternalistic domination. The witness adds that she imagines the father as the Dracula of cinema, with a stake in his heart. The anchor is explicit that the imagery is not autobiography.

Nursery-rhyme language, used brutally.

AML 1609 "The Applicant" and the *Ariel* Voice

In "The Applicant" the witness says Plath exposes the emptiness of the wife's role by reducing a woman to an inanimate it that can sew and cook and talk. The voice uses nursery-rhyme language, a brutal directness, and bold images taken from popular culture. The plainness of the diction is the weapon.

A novel about a lived contradiction.

AML 1610 *The Bell Jar*

The witness calls the novel highly readable and says it evokes the psychological problems beneath her successful surface, some personal and some from the belief, held by many women themselves, that women should not show anger or pursue a career. It appeared in January nineteen sixty-three, weeks before her death.

Taboo subjects, in close focus.

AML 1611 Anne Sexton and the Confessional Company

Sexton attended Lowell's class beside Plath. The witness says her poetry is more autobiographical than Plath's and less crafted, but that it appeals powerfully to the emotions, thrusting taboo subjects into focus: childbearing, the female body, and marriage seen from a woman's side. Berryman's *Dream Songs* belong to this same company.

Four entries on the other side: a travelling eye, a villanelle that restrains grief, and a contrast the witness draws directly.

A life of travel, exact looking.

AML 1612 Elizabeth Bishop and the Traveling Eye

Bishop's father died in her infancy and her mother was institutionalized, and the legacy he left funded a life of travel: Key West, then Brazil for sixteen years, then Harvard. The witness praises her crystalline intelligence, her remote landscapes and her metaphors of travel. She was never a prolific poet.

Nineteen lines, two refrains.

AML 1613 "One Art" and the Villanelle

A villanelle runs nineteen lines in five tercets and a quatrain, with two refrain lines repeating through it and pairing at the end. The witness says the form's rigid structure helps a poet restrain emotion that might otherwise run to excess, which is exactly what "One Art" does with it. The refrains may shift wording slightly.

A first book, a Pulitzer, a last.

AML 1614 "The Fish" and *Geography III*

"The Fish" appeared in her first book, *North & South*, of nineteen forty-six, and the witness calls it famous and much anthologized. *Poems: North & South. A Cold Spring* won the Pulitzer in nineteen fifty-six, and her last book, *Geography III*, came in nineteen seventy-seven. Her whole output fits in a few volumes.

Cool description against hot statement.

AML 1615 Bishop's Reticence Against Lowell's Disclosure

The witness places Bishop with Marianne Moore in a cool female tradition going back to Emily Dickinson, against the hot poems of Plath, Sexton and Rich. Bishop describes an object until the feeling emerges, and the confessional poets state the feeling and let it drive the poem. Cool and hot are the witness's own terms.

Two entries: eight lines spoken from inside a bomber's gun position, and a language built out of roots and insects.

A war poem from the turret.

AML 1616 Randall Jarrell and "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"

Jarrell studied under Ransom, Tate and Warren at Vanderbilt, roomed with Lowell at Kenyon, and served as a control tower operator in the Army. His best-known poem appeared in *Little Friend, Little Friend* in nineteen forty-five, written from inside a bomber's gun position. He was also a feared critic of poetry.

Roots, insects, a private vocabulary.

AML 1617 Theodore Roethke's Late Work

The son of a greenhouse owner, Roethke built a language out of what the witness calls the greenhouse world of tiny insects and unseen roots, writing lines like worm, be with me, this is my hard time. His love poems in *Words for the Wind* celebrate beauty with innocent passion. The greenhouse was a real childhood.

Eight entries on poets who built institutions as well as poems: a Chicago street, a Detroit father, a press, a theatre and a prison cell.

A Chicago street, given a book.

AML 1618 Gwendolyn Brooks and Bronzeville

Brooks published her first poem at thirteen and her first book, *A Street in Bronzeville*, in nineteen forty-five. The anchor says it uses South Side residents as characters and takes up violence, grief, racism, trauma and resiliency, reflecting Chicago's inadequate housing for Black Americans. Bronzeville is a real South Side neighbourhood.

Eight short lines, seven players.

AML 1619 "We Real Cool"

The anchor calls "We Real Cool" an often anthologized jazz poem and places it in her nineteen sixty collection *The Bean Eaters*. It is eight very short lines spoken by seven pool players, and its rhythm is the whole argument of the poem. The line breaks carry that rhythm rather than the words alone.

The first African American Pulitzer.

AML 1620 *The Bean Eaters* and the Pulitzer

Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in nineteen fifty for *Annie Allen*, becoming the first African American to receive it. She later left Harper and Row to publish with Dudley Randall's Broadside Press, and served as Poet Laureate of Illinois from nineteen sixty-eight. The prize was for *Annie Allen* rather than for the Bronzeville book.

A poem about a father's rising.

AML 1621 Robert Hayden and "Those Winter Sundays"

Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, was given up to foster care, and became the first Black faculty member in Michigan's English department and the first African American Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. "Those Winter Sundays" is a poem about his father's hard work. His childhood household was violent.

History, as the material for poems.

AML 1622 "Middle Passage" and the Historical Poem

Two Hayden poems focus on slavery, "Middle Passage" and "Frederick Douglass", and he studied African American history and folklore at the Federal Writers' Project. Because his Baha'i faith taught unity he called himself an American poet rather than an African American poet, which alienated some of his peers.

A press that was also a movement.

AML 1623 Dudley Randall and Broadside Press

Randall, called the father of the Black poetry movement of the nineteen sixties, founded Broadside Press, which published Gwendolyn Brooks, Audre Lorde and Etheridge Knight. The anchor calls it one of the most important literary forums of the Black Arts Movement. His poem "The Melting Pot" treats immigrant identity, and he became Detroit's first poet laureate.

A Harlem theatre, and a subway.

AML 1624 The Black Arts Movement

The witness records that Amiri Baraka started the Black Arts Repertory Theater in Harlem by nineteen sixty-five and portrayed Black nationalist views of racism in plays such as *Dutchman*, in which a white woman flirts with and then kills a young Black man on a subway. Baraka changed his name more than once.

A sentence, and poems written inside.

AML 1625 Etheridge Knight and the Prison Poem

Wounded by shrapnel in Korea and left dependent on morphine, Knight served eight years in the Indiana State Prison and began writing there. *Poems from Prison*, of nineteen sixty-eight, made him an important voice of the Black Arts Movement, and Brooks wrote its preface. He wrote that poetry brought him back to life.

That is the confessional turn and the poets around it. Part two takes the Beats, the politics and the stage. You can name the three camps the witness arranges the period into, and the watershed inside it, a Boston formalist who had already won a Pulitzer for metered verse admitting in a poem that his mind was not right. You can account for Plath, whose exemplary surface sat over unresolved problems, who wrote a winter's worth of poems against the clock, and whose Nazi imagery the anchor is explicit is not autobiography. You can describe Bishop's opposite method, describing an object until the feeling emerges, and the villanelle's rigid structure restraining a grief that would otherwise spill. You can place eight lines spoken from a bomber's turret and a language made of roots and insects. And you can account for a Chicago street given a book, the first African American Pulitzer in poetry, a Detroit poet who called himself American and lost allies for it, a press that was a movement, and poems written in an Indiana cell.