A . R. Jones

Necessity and Freedom : The Poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and

Anne Sexton

I LEARLY every age recreates the past in its own image and looking back now, much of the poetry written in England C in the 1950’s appears slightly faded though elegant, lucid,

decorous and curiously irrelevant. In many ways the Movement now seems strangely like a flight into Georgianism, a return to a personal, well-ordered and fairly decent version of reality which denied the violence and the horror of the war which immediately preceded it. The new quietism of their poetry presented a curiously neutered version of man as a sensitive, sociable though anti-heroic, slightly absurd, at times, indeed, almost ridiculous, animal; a Prufrock loitering in the wings of life, half-hoping, half-dreading that he might be called upon to play Hamlet; and, like Prufrock, the poetry never did dare disturb the universe or think it worth while to face some overwhelming question. Tndeed, in trying to define the mood of that decade, T. S . Eliot’s portrait of Prufrock now seems uncannily prophetic. It is the mood of Betjmanesque suburban conservatism, of Joan Hunter Dunn and Lucky Jim, engaging but not engaged, a new academic and urbane pastoralism. However accomplished their poetry might be, their conception of man was severely diminished, the area of life, on which they estab- lished themselves so confidently, severely restricted. Those appalling images of mass horror that the war had released to communal consciousness-horror symbolised in words like Belsen or Hiroshima-hardly involved them, for the rational, ordered consciousness and traditional decencies could not contain or comprehend irrationality on this scale ; the unloosing of the blood- dimmed tide, the anarchy that Yeats predicted, found poetry vaguely incredulous and totally unprepared. A century after the birth of Freud found poets still working with the original model of human nature as constructed by Plato and modified by Christianity.

Everyone knows that Plato in the Republic and in the Laws recommended that the poet should be banished from the ideal city,

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or, if admitted, his activities should be severely curtailed and his works heavily censored. Because the poet created in a divine frenzy, hardly understanding rationally what he received from irrational sources, he therefore represented a disturbing threat to the mental and moral health of a well-ordered community, which must always be run on rational principles. But in the dialogue between the poet and his society, the poet has, traditionally, to force the pace. In the past the poet has shown an enviable courage in persisting in his vision of reality, rather than accepting that which society has tried to force upon him. His happy ability to create the taste by which he is appreciated, eventually, has thus refined and enlarged his society’s vision of itself. Many believe the health of the community depends upon maintaining this healthy, vigorous dialogue between artist and society, for unless a society continually confronts the changing patterns of reality, it will rapidly atrophy, intellectually and morally, however rationally ordered. It is in this sense, surely, that poets are the antennae of the race. The poetry of the first half of this century, of Pound and Eliot particularly, exploited largely Imagist techniques and came to dominate the poetry of their generation. Nonetheless, they aroused the displeasure of post-war critics because their poems appealed to the sub-rational and because they could not be paraphrased. They offended, it is said, against the poetic tradition and against the canons of commonsense (which Robert Graves once defined as the mind working at its laziest). In the face of criticism of this kind one can only remark how very restricted and rigid these critics must think the tradition of English poetry. In fact, poets, unlike critics, have not often prided them- selves on their orthodoxy or commonsense. Indeed, if critics talk of the tradition of English poetry, then that tradition must include a number of poets, such as Cowper, Collins and Clare, who were not only insane but who in one way or another exploited their madness in their poetry, and, perhaps, achieved a power and an insight into areas of experience which were not accessible to them when sane. Everyone says that there is method in madness- indeed it has achieved near proverbial status-but few seriously believe it to be true.

The basic pattern of derangement for literature was surely set by King Lear. Lear falls from pre-eminence in power and wealth and as he falls, so he loses, with gradual inevitability, all the props of civilised man, until nature and consciousness itself turn against him, leaving him naked, a feeble body and a deranged mind challenging fate and the elements. Yet while he loses social and family status, he grows in moral strength until, isolated, insane and suffering, he gains a profundity of insight into the nature of the human dilemma that ensures his complete and continuing moral triumph. This reversal through exposure to intense suffering and derangement is almost unbearably painful, particularly at the point

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of Cordelia’s death when, certainly, the ceremony of innocence is drowned. Yet, however raw and savage the assault upon the reader’s sensibilities, there is no doubt that the stoical spirit of man is a r m e d . To use Stephen Dedalus’s distinction, although the spectacle of Lear itself is certainly kinetic, within the artistic frame- work of the play, it also undoubtedly achieves the appropriate tragic stasis.

It may also be relevant to recall that many of the works that contribute heavily to the English tradition were written at times when their authors were involved in personal crises, often of an intensely private and painful kind. For instance, it now seems reasonable to suppose that in those desperate years which followed his return from France, Wordsworth experienced something like a mental breakdown, and that when his mind recovered its normal balance, he used the experiences that his mental suffering had made available to him as the material of his poems. Certainly the world of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads is inhabited by social outcasts, by misfits and by the deranged. The Thorn, The Mad Mother and The Idiot Boy are specifically studies of madness. But the whole world of this volume suggests, as Helen Darbishire noted, some- thing like an arctic voyage of discovery into a stark and unfamiliar territory of the mind. The personae are elemental creatures who suffer the primary deprivations of bereavement, homelessness, guilt, old age and derangement, and they are given the most elemen- tary of poetic forms and language. It is as if Wordsworth stripped man naked in order to realise the human condition at the barest level of subsistence, and at the same time found that the appropriate form and language in which to realise his vision must itself be naked, stark and elemental. Perhaps also we might recall that, according to Pound,l The Waste Land was written while T. S. Eliot was in a sanatorium in Switzerland recovering from a breakdown. It seems likely, then, that this poem of broken images, with its vision of a civilisation ruined and in fragments, owes something of its power to T. S. Eliot’s personal sufferings and his insight into the fragmentation of his private world. Whatever their source in the personal sufferings of their authors, both Lyrical Ballads and The Waste Land pushed back the frontiers of poetic consciousness while at the same time achieving a break-through in language and technique; both confronted new versions of reality which were, eventually, endorsed by their contemporaries. There can be little doubt that in both cases the poets succeeded in their traditional social function of objectifying imaginatively, profound and vivid personal experience potentially common to all, and have enriched their society’s awareness of itself if only by “awakening the mind’s attention to the lethargy of custom”. ’Letter from Ezra Pound to W. C. Williams, 18 March 1922, The Letters of Ezra Pound, ed. D. D. Paige, 1951, p. 239. See also p. 241.

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I1

At present, to talk of an English poetic tradition at all seems curiously parochial, for in this century the initiative in English poetry has largely been taken by Americans. In spite of the example of Pound and Eliot, it is only in recent years that English critics have awoken to the fact that American poets and critics no longer exist in a state of colonial dependence on the English tradition. The case of Robert Lowell is indicative of the critical parochialism which dominated the 1950’s. In fact, Lowell’s reputation was assured as early as 1947 when he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. With the successive appearance of Land of Unlikeness, Lord Weary’s Castle, The Mills of Kavanaughs, Life Studies, Imitations, and For the Union Dead, six volumes of poetry published over a period of twenty years, American critics had no doubt of his stature. The English attitude towards his work, however, is indicated by the fact that when the English edition of Life Studies was published, Part 11, a prose interlude, “91 Revere Street”, crucial to the volume as a whole; was omitted. This was surely a somewhat casual treat- ment of a poet whose work was already exercising a decisive intluence on the poetry of his younger contemporaries.

Indeed, largely as a direct result of Robert Lowell’s example, American poetry is moving towards an acceptance of the dramatic monologue as the predominant poetic mode. But it is a dramatic monologue in which the persona is not treated dramatically, as a mask, that is, in the manner of Browning’s Dramatis Personae, but is projected lyrically, as in Whitman’s Song of Myself or in Pound‘s Pkan Cantos. In other words, although the poem’s style and method is unmistakably dramatic, the persona is naked ego involved in a very personal world and with particular, private experiences. This private world into which the reader is drawn has established, in Lowell and his followers, something like a confessional orthodoxy in so far as the persona adopts the attitudes of a patient on the analysist’s couch, revealing, often in images of violence and fantasy, a sick alienation. The intolerable compulsion to confess is irresistibly tied to a free-floating and neurotic guilt, so that the world into which we as readers are drawn is, in the end, phantasmagoric, intensely personal and painfully private, the world of Kafka, of Joseph K. in fact: a nightmare world of guilt, suffering and sudden confron- tations. It is significant, in this respect, that Anne Sexton, perhaps Robert Lowell’s most brilliant and powerful follower, quotes as her epigraph from a letter Kafka wrote to Oskar Pollak:

. , . the books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we w e on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from all human habitation- book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.

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Such an attitude is overtly psychological; the aesthetic experience is tragic, we are to be drawn into a world of despair, of lost, lonely, wandering souls, which is at once terrifying, pitiable and cathartic, the effect of which is to release a deep compassion through the experience of intense suffering. But if the experience of the work is inevitable and necessary suffering, then the release must somehow represent freedom from suffering, at least the freedom to rise above it, for even if freedom is the knowledge of necessity we must know what the necessity is in terms of which we can said to be free. In 1946, Randall Jarrell, commenting on Lord Weary’s Castle (and this was subsequently endorsed by Lowell himself) remarked that Lowell’s poems “understand the world as a sort of conflict of opposites”. On the one side there are the forces of “Stasis or inertia of the stubborn self, the obstinate persistence in evil that is damnation. Into this realm of necessity the poems push everything that is closed, turned inward, incestuous, that blinds or binds.” On the opposite side are those forces that represent “everything that is free or open, that grows or is willing to change . . . this is the realm of freedom, of the Grace that has replaced the Law, of the perfect Liberator . . .” Lowell’s poems normally move from the “closed” to the “open”, into liberation; from the “realm of necessity” to the “realm of freedom”; through the knowledge of personal and often painful experience to Grace and a totally different, aesthetic and largely impersonal stasis ; indeed in many cases (cf. the poem In Memory of Arthur Winslow, for instance) death is the final stasis, the ultimate liberator.

I11 In many ways this opposition of forces barely restates the tradi-

tional dualism between the flesh and the spirit or, at least, bearing in mind that Romanticism has been described as “spilt religion”, the Romantic one between the mechanical and the organic. A volume of poems by Robert Lowell or Anne Sexton, or Sylvia Plath’s Ariel, if these poets can be seen as a group, makes an unmistakeably autobiographical impact. (Indeed, one factor-and perhaps not the least important-that those critics who insist on the poem as an autonomous whole neglect, is the impact of a volume of poems, a total impact sometimes greater than the sum of its parts-The Songs of Innocence or Lyrical Ballads for example-in so far as it is the complete volume which creates a distinct and homogeneous world rather than the individual poem.) Anne Sexton’s poems, for example, create largely the world of her persona, the “I” of the poems which undergoes a continuing development and is clearly related, intimately and painfully, to the poet’s autobiography. Part of the interest of such poems is focussed on the poet’s response to unusual experience and unbearable suffering and deprivation. This is different in some degree to the Romantic approach which

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insists on the excitement of usual, even commonplace, events as experienced by a very unusual sensibility. Moreover, whereas the Romantics would have agreed that their examination of personal experience is intended to release the “frozen sea within us” their poems move, always, towards an intensification of self-awareness through self-revelation. Anne Sexton’s poems, however, are often a dialogue with the self in which the self struggles to find “wholeness” rather than “awareness”. The world of her poems is certainly a world of enclosed perspectives, at the centre of which is the lyrical persona who represents too often an unstable and hysterical response to experience. Whereas the Romantic “I” is the omniscient and often omnipotent centre of poetic consciousness, who confronts experience directly, the persona of Anne Sexton is essentially passive, a patient rather than an agent, who suffers under experience. Indeed, passive suffering is one of Anne Sexton’s d n concerns and irresistibly recalls W. B. Yeats’s objection to Wilfred Owen’s poetry: “passive suffering is not a theme for poetry”, a sentiment which would have our agreement, had it not been applied to Owen’s poetry. Yet Yeats, in another axiom and in a different context, asserts that, “We make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric but out of the quarrel with ourselves poetry”-and Anne Sexton makes her poetry largely out of the quarrel, the tense dialogue with the self; for her, poetry is a way of handling and coming to terms with painful and intensely personal experience. T. S. Eliot’s assertion that, “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” indicates the dualism that is operating in these poems, for in so far as the persona represents the “man who suffers”, the artist creates the poem within which the suffering is contained and given meaning. If the man is patient and passive under suffering, the creative mind is certainly both agent and active. The creative mind -which is largely released and refined in suffering-knows freedom and achieves Grace, through the act of creation itself. The poet exercises his traditional power in using the beneficent passion of poetry to expel the malignant forces of private suffering. In this sense such poetry, though always directed towards intellectual and moral ends, is therapeutic. The dialogue with the self is, in effect, the dialogue between the man who suffers and the mind which creates, and the separation between them is more or less complete, so much so, in fact, that they constitute something in the nature of two identities, the one struggling to organise into meaningful patterns the overwhelming chaos of the world of suffering inhabited by the other. The poetry that results very closely corresponds to the emotional pattern of tragedy that Maud Bodkin tried to isolate in psychological terms :

In the gradual fashioning and transforming, through the experience of life, of an idea of self, every individual must in some degree

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experience the contrast between a personal self-a limited ego, one among many-and a self that is free to range imaginatively through all human achievement. In infancy and in the later years of those who remain childish, a comparatively feeble imaginative activity together with an undisciplined instinct of self-assertion may present a fantasy self-the image of an infantile personality-in conflict with the chastened image which social contact, arousing the instinct of sub- mission, tends to enforce. In the more mature mind that has soberly taken the measure of the personal self as revealed in practical life, there remains the contrast between this and the selfrevealed in imaginative thought-wellnigh limitless in sympathy and aspiration. (Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, I, vii.)

This restates, in effect, the opposed forces that Randall Jarrell sees as representing the basic conflict in Robert Lowell’s poetry between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, the practical, habitual world of suffering man and the imaginative, limitless world of the creative mind. In a poet such as Anne Sexton the contrast between the two selves is so sharp as to be appropriately described, psychologically, as schizophrenic; and if the persona is on the analyst’s couch re-enacting a private terror, the creative mind is the analyst himself whose insight enables him to give pattern and meaning to what the persona sees only as incoherent experience.

In his poetry, Robert Lowell lives among the haunting images of the past, his own past, his family’s past and the historic past, and seems to inhabit a world which is timeless or, at least, a world in which all time is both irredeemable and eternally present. His images move backwards and forwards in time, and between personal and historical references, with a casual ambiguity, as if in an attempt to break the tyranny of time, His poems are tense with the effort to maintain a balance between the cruel necessity of the world and the realm of freedom, between the chaos of life and the order of art. His attitude towards his ancesteros, the Puritan aristocracy of New England, is curiously ambivalent, a mixture of admiration, ironic contempt and guilt. He rejects particularly their rigidity of mind, their snobbishness, intolerance and ruthless commercialism, but admires their eccentricities, their pride and their decorum. His conversion to Catholicism suggests something of the quality of this rejection, just as it also makes available to him a world of values by which he judges them. Although no-one, Lowell reports, spoke disrespectfully of Amy Lowell in his family, her addiction to free- verse was derided as “loud, bossy, unladylike chinoiserie”. While, then, he rejects the formal, puritanical decorum of his family’s way of life, he maintains an extremely formal decorum in his poetry. Although clearly indebted to The Waste Land and to The Pisan Canros, he employs traditional verse forms with an eccentricity and a fastidiousness more immediately associated with Marvel1 or

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Jonson; his triumph, like theirs, is one of tone, to use the language with unique authority, to feel that all the elements of the poem, however disparate, are appropriately commanded into place, and to know that structure is meaning. His most characteristic and successful effects have been achieved by his use of an escalating imagery that moves with easy assurance from personal experience into public and metaphysical meaning, so as to be established as a complete analogue, the perfect artefact proof against the world’s chaos and time’s erosion,

IV The poetry of his most recently published volume, For the Union

Deud,l is as highly wrought and severely accomplished as anything he has written; although it does not mark any distinct break with his previous poetry, it does show the maturity to which his method has come. Indeed, it must be said that the volume reprints a f d e r version of “Beyond the Alps”, restoring the third sonnet and deleting the description of Mary’s assumption, “at one miraculous st”ke,/angel-wing’&’, in the second, thus reducing it to thirteen lines, and recasts “David and Bathsheba in the Public Garden” into the paem “The Public Garden”. But the greatest disappointment is to find that the title poem of the volume, “For the Union Dead”, which is in many ways its finest poem, is a reprinting of “Colonel Shaw and the Massachusett’s 54th”, which first appeared as the last poem in Life Studies. Apart from the title, the differences between the two versions are trivial. The epigraph is maintained, a misspelling, “vigilence”, is corrected and another, “waspwasted”, is introduced; “air tanks” becomes “airy tanks”, “City’s throat” becomes “city’s throat”, a hyphen is lost, and the only revision of any substance, “Negro children”, becomes “Negro/ school- children”. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the poem deserves the prominence that it now achieves. It opens by establishing, in autobiographical reminiscence, a contrast between the dereliction of the present and the past:

The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant iish.

Lowell’s personal childhood attitude towards the aquarium is made quite plain in “91 Revere Street”, when he describes being herded into the South Boston Aquarium and given “an unhealthy, lFaber and Faber, 15s.

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little lecture on the sewage-consumption of the conger eel”. In his poem he stresses his regret that the aquarium is now empty of fish and expresses his nostalgia “for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom/ of fish and reptile”. Yet the imagery throughout insists on the fish and reptile references, the most explicit being the description of the excavations for an underground garage on Boston Common:

Behind their cage, Yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage.

But it is not until the last stanza, when the poem returns to its opening, that the full implication of the empty aquarium is made plain; the kingdom of fish, reptile and monster has been loosed upon us:

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cats nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease.

The fish, once “cowed” and “compliant”, now show a “savage servility”. The poem’s imagery is much more complex and less thematic, of course, than this would suggest, the image of the Sahara introduced in the first stanza is also developed into images of desolation and insecurity, the images of the bubbles, of bursting and of bronze are also extended. But the overwhelming vision of the poem is of the birth of new monsters-like “Hiroshima boiling over”-and of little, if anything, to offset the new monstrosities. The Civil War relief, showing Colonel Shaw and his Negro infantry, suggests at least, in the figure of the Colonel, a different order of things, for he

rejoices in man’s lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die- when he leads his black soliders to death, he cannot bend his back.

Lowell is characteristically ambiguous about the colonel’s choice; whether to choose life as a kind of death or whether to die for some superior ideals of life. The Colonel ironically recalls the motto of a branch of the Lowell family: malo frangere quamjec te re , which Lowell reads as “I prefer to bend than to break”. In the present of the poem, as in the past, Colonel Shaw stands out against Boston, with pride and with courage, “he waits/for the blesskd break”.

Lowell does not make the pastoral gesture of believing things were better in the past; it is only that in the past cruelty and necessity operated on a diminished scale, and a complacent feeling of security protected people from reality. Lowell is particularly skilful in achieving complete assurance of tone while maintaining

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a complex and often ironic attitude. In “Beyond the Alps” he characterises the Victorian sages :

I envy the conspicuous waste of our grand-parents on their grand tours- long-haired Victorian sages accepted the universe, while breezing on their trust funds through the world.

where the force of “I envy” is powerfully set off against words like waste, accepted, breezing and trust funds, all of which suggest the materialism, social complacency and moral negligence of the immediate past. Similarly, in his reference to the new England religion of his ancestors in For the Union Dead he makes his admiration and his reservations quite plain:

On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The pretentiousness of “Grand Army of the Republic”, the attack in words like “sparse” and “quilt”, go a long way toward suggesting that the religion of his ancestors is genteel, selective in the realities it faces, and isolated from the urgencies of the present time. The point about this poem is that in spite of the violent nature of its subject and imagery, in spite of the intensity of its organisation and in spite of the fact that it achieves social, historical and meta- physical dimensions, the tone of quiet, personal, almost inconse- quential meditation is never transgressed, its texture never broken. The chaos, sin, darkness and dereliction of life that affront the man who suffers are redeemed from time, given order, grace and formality by the mind which creates. The union which the title commemorates is, of course, the dead Union soldiers, but it is also the many other unions the poem touches on, the flesh bearing downward and the spirit rising upward between time and eternity - even the title of the poem escalates between different levels of meaning.

Lowell’s images share something of that kind of wit that T. S. Eliot found pre-eminent in Marvell, a combination of precise intelligence and moral equilibrium with great imaginative powers of a structural kind. Although the world of Lowell’s poetry is filled with random violence and destruction, the terror is always con- tained, always accommodated to the poem’s decorum. He never rawly simplifies violence but contains it within a framework of complex and often contradictory attitudes. Indeed, we are more aware of the complexities of his response than of the raw experience of the violence, in a couplet such as the one that concludes “Beyond the Alps”, as his train from Rome, “the City of God”, rushes into Paris :

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Now Paris, our black classic, breaking up like killer kings on an Etruscan cup.

Often he will exploit syntactical ambiguities in order to explore and make precise the ambiguities of his own response. Addressing Caligula, for example, he asks :

Tell me what I saw to make me like you when we met at school?

where it is deliberately left unclear as to whether Lowell is asking why as a schoolboy he liked the historical figure of Caligula, or whether he is asking why he was like him. In a poem of particular violence and horror, the second alternative is maintained as a real possibility. Similarly, in the poem “The Drinker”, he opens by stating, apparently quite baldly:

but then proceeds through the image of the drunkard to explore the ambiguities that this statement introduces, returning in the last stanza to his point of departure:

The man is killing timethere’s nothing else.

Is he killing time? Out on the street, two cops on horseback clop through April rain to check the parking meter violations- their oilskins yellow as forsythia.

Thus, in a conclusion perfectly adjusted to the world of the drunkard, he wittily confirms the tyranny time exercises in the image of the cops checking the parking meters, but simultaneously he affirms, with reminders of the April rain and the yellow forsythia a different order of time altogether, the time of spring, resurrection and God. In the conflict between the two contrasting planes of reality, such an image achieves a daring equilibrium.

v The last poems of Sylvia Plath,l a selection of which has recently

been published in a volume entitled Ariel,2 raise in a rather different way the problem of equilibrium, The persona of many of these poems is wilful and even perverse in its responses, at most main- taining a precarious balance of terrors, victim of the nightmare world that lies below the threshold of consciousness but that relates, only too readily, to the daylight world of the mind. Though recog- nisably a world of sensibility, nothing could be farther from the “only connect” world of beautiful personal relationships ; here the sensibility is fractured and dissociated, a world in which “the deaf and dumb/Signal the blind,” and the blind are images of monstrous fascination : *See also “After the Tranquillized Fifties”, C.Q. Vol. 6 No. 2, Summer 1964. aFaber and Faber, 12s. 6d.

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The eye of the blind pianist

At my table on the ship. He felt for his food. His fingers had the noses of weasels. I couldn’t stop looking.

In an image such as this, from the poem “Little Fugue”, the relationship between the inner and outer worlds is fractured, the outer world holding up a mirror in which the inner world can see its distorted self; if the blind pianist is seen as a weasel, it is because the persona feels like a rabbit, fearful and hypnotised. This poem is organized around the polarity between images of blackness, deafness and dumbness and those of whiteness and blindness, on the one side the stasis of death, on the other the inertia of life, but in between the image of the father as executioner decapitating his victims :

In the California delicatessen

Lopping the sausages ! They colour my sleep, Red, mottled, like cut necks. There was a silence.

In some ways the most impressive and horrifying fact about these last poems is that they were written at all, that the creative mind could articulate and organize mental conflicts of such intensity. Their procedures can be approached most coddently through poems such as “In Plaster”,’ in which the formal structure is less elliptic, and the imagery more concrete, than in many of the more ambiguous poems. This poem is a dramatic monologue in eight loosely controlled stanzas of fourteen syllable lines, in which the persona presumably lying in a hospital bed after an accident, discusses the relationship that has developed between herself and the plaster that encases her, her grotesque doppelganger:

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one,

In spite of the fact that the doppelganger is at first cold and un- responsive to her advances, the persona realizes that it needs love and that the relationship between them is a dependent one like that between the body and the soul, the soul inspiring the body and bringing it to life :

Without me, she wouldn’t exist, so of course she was grateful. I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain, And it was I who attracted everybody’s attention,

’Not included in Ariel: published in New Poetry 1964, C.Q. Poetry Supplement No. 5.

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Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed. I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up- You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality.

Thereafter the relationship entered its honeymoon phase when the cast gloried in her dependence and the persona in her sense of power and possession; but, “In time our relationship grew more intense”. The cast neglected her, tried to assert its independence, became resentful and began to wish for her death, the ultimate of power and possession :

-secretly she began to hope I’d die. Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely, And wear my painted face the way a mummycase Wears the face of a Pharaoh, though it’s made of mud and water.

Now the doppelganger had the upper hand, the persona was entirely dependent on it and could only look to the future to reassert her domination

--I was careful not to upset her in any way Or brag ahead of time how I’d avenge myself. Living with her was like living with my own coffin: Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

With great precision the poem analyses the shifts and adjustments in the relationship as each partner seeks her selfish advantages. It becomes a power game, in which both partners struggle to dominate the relationship, and thus to assert their independence of it. Neither wants love, but the power and possessiveness that love makes available; both wish for each other’s death as a way in which power, possession and independence can be finally demon- strated. The poem clearly achieves its climax in the laconic statement :

I used to think we might make a go of it together- After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.

At this point in the poem we are aware that what is being studied is not only a grotesque case of paranoia, but that through the persona’s delusions we have been led into a bitter commentary on the institution of marriage. The private world of the persona’s derangement has been elevated into a matter of public, rather than merely clinical, concern.

These last poems return time and again to the theme of death and love, to the romantic idea that love is completed by death and can only be perfected in death. These poems are continually enacting death, its peace and its terror, and while life is seen largely as bric-i-brac, meaningless and mechanical, death is seen as powerful and organic:

The world is blood-hot and personal

Dawn says, with its blood-flush. There is no terminus, only suitcases

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Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes,

Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors. I am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms.

And in truth it is terrible, Multiplied in the eyes of the flies.

They buzz like blue children In nets of the infinite,

Roped in at the end by the one Death with its many sticks. (“Totem”)

In this vision of the sinister, spider-and-fly nature of life, the images appear to slide one into the next by virtue of some fortuitous association, though, in fact, they are firmly secured by the over- riding pattern of the poem’s imagery. The mind of the persona in tormented conflict with itself projects these conflicts into the world outside itself. Thus the images in the poems do not embody percep- tions of external reality, but reflect the internal world of the persona’s sensibility; thus what is private and secret is made public and accessible to the reader. In the world of the irrational the poet lays claim to an order of reality other than the one his senses offer him; a world in which he hopes to test his knowledge of himself in an attempt to discover identity; a world fllled with danger and obscurity but in which, it seems, the frontiers of knowledge are always being pushed back in the general direction of some absolute profundity.

There is no doubt that in Arid Sylvia Plath submits herself entirely to this destructive element, or equally that her creative mind realized in poems of burning intensity what her suffering self experienced as tormenting desolation. Yet, strangely, these poems are affirmative in that tentative way, perhaps, of Stein’s questionings:

Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece. Perhaps the artist was a little mad. Eh? What do you think? Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him; for if not, why should he want all the place? Why should he run about here and there making a great noise about himself, talking about the stars, disturbing the blades of grass? . . .

(LordJim Ch. XX)

VI Sylvia Plath recorded her debt to Robert Lowell and linked her

work to that of Anne Sexton. She acknowledged her excitement at Lowell’s “intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal

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emotional experience”, and remarked that these “peculiar private and taboo subjects” had been explored by Anne Sexton, who writes “also about her experiences as a mother; as a mother who’s had a nervous breakdown, as an extremely emotional and feeling young woman. And her poems are wonderfully craftsmanlike poems, and yet have a kind of emotional and psychological depth which I think is something perhaps quite new and exciting”.

Notice that she relates, almost incidentally, the idea of “break- through” with the idea of “breakdown”, and that she isolates the dualism between the taboo nature of the subject of the poetry and the “wonderfully craftsmanlike” quality of the poetry itself.

Anne Sexton’s recently published Selected Poems1 are drawn from her two volumes of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), and All My Pretty Ones (1962). On the whole the poems of the second volume are richer in texture, more diversified in subject matter and more composed than the poems of the earlier volume, which are often powerful and raw. At her best there is no doubt of her craftsmanship; her control of diction and rhythm is remarkably assured, and commands immediate attention and respect. Her themes are those of love, motherhood and death, of suffering and breakdown, and at their best her poems are both harrowing and compassionate. Like Lowell, her framework of reference is ultimately religious ; without being overtly theological, traditional religious values are gently but firmly insisted upon. The world of her poems is intimately personal, and her difficulty is to relate morally a world of physical and mental suffering that can only be diagnosed clinically. She sees evil and suffering as the condition of humankind :

I was born doing reference work in sin, and born confessing it. This is what poems are: with mercy for the greedy, they are the tongue’s wrangle, the world’s pottage, the rat’s star.

She is very conscious of evil and of Original Sin, and if she sees the relation between confession and poetry it is because she believes poetry to be morally directed. In her poetry she transcends imagina- tively what she can only otherwise patiently accept as the lot of man. Her best poems are filled with a profound compassion for man as a suffering being and for the human predicament, and often the image of the suffering self tends to merge into the figure of the crucified Christ. Thus far from endorsing or exploiting madness or pain her poetry comes to terms with human suffering in order to redeem it. Poetry is not a way of evading the purgatory of human ’Oxford University Press, 21s.

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experience but a means of facing and controlling it. In her poem, “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further”, she claims on behalf of the poet that courage to face experience which Schopenhauer in a letter to Goethe claimed for the philosopher:

It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in face of every question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles’s Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible fate, pursues his indefati- gable enquiry, even when he divines that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God’s sake not to inquire further . . .

Her poetry describes in images of powerful violence the suffering and terror of life, not for the sake of the suffering or the terror, but for the sake of a different order of reality that she finds through them. Thus her poems achieve something of a tragic dignity, and display an attitude of mind that is neither cynical nor despairing, but which is clearly related to the whole powerful tradition of Christian stoicism, to King’s “Exequy” and Johnson’s “Vanity of Human Wishes”.

Her poems are mostly formally organized as dramatic narratives; set in a particular place at a particular time, they tell a story in an almost old-fashioned way, except that whereas the narrative seems to move longitudinally, so to speak, the meaning of the poem moves latitudinally, across and below the narrative line. At its most direct, in a poem such as “Flight”, for instance, the narrative structure is extremely simple and describes a woman driving through Boston to the airport and back again through Boston; but the subject of the poem is revealed through t4e state of mind of the woman, the sudden and desperate need for love and the despair when that need is frustrated. The description of the drive to the airport is full of anticipation and outward-going images:

There was rose and violet on the river as.1 drove through the mist into the city. I was full of letters I hadn’t sent you, A red coat over my shoulders and new white gloves in my lap.

At the airport, the turning point of the poem and of the journey, there is a terrible note of finality:

All flights were grounded. The planes sat and the gulls sat, heavy and rigid in a pool of glue.

The return journey is marked by a sense of almost cosmic desolation and the realisation that there is no escape, that fight from the self and the world that self creates is illusory:

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I drove past the eye and ear infirmaries, past the office buildings lined up like dentures, and along Storrow Drive the street lights sucked in all the insects who had nowhere else to go.

Although she drives to the airport through “Sumner Tunnel” and away from it along “Storrow Drive”, a happy coincidence of naming, the symbolic level of the narrative is not schematised or insisted upon but allowed to emerge naturally and gradually through the narrative.

She has a remarkable sense of particularities, a fine awareness of the detail that will bring the whole scene vividly before the eyes and that, at the same time, will be psychologically telling and exact. This ability to realize complex landscapes of mind in visually concrete terms is one of the main sources of her poetic strength. Curiously enough, this can be seen as clearly in her unsuccessful poems as in her best work. Because her poems, particularly those concerned with mental breakdown, build such intense and violent conflicts, she sometimes escapes conclusions glibly in the way that the last couplet of the Shakespearean sonnet is occasionally used to distract attention from the fact that the tensions the poem creates have not been fully resolved. Thus what ought to have been dramatic is merely theatrical. In the poem “The Abortion”, the persona driving back from the abortionist rationalises her sense of guilt and loss and concludes by turning upon herself:

Yes, woman, such logic will lead to loss without death. Or say what you meant, you coward . . . this baby that I bleed.

However brilliantly horrible the last image may be in itself, the effect of this last stanza is to turn an already sensational subject into sensationalism, to drop from the reality of drama into the over-simplifications of melodrama. In poems such as this, and it must be said that her Selected Poems contains a number of them, it is as if the subject has got out of control, become indeed almost hysterical, and that the poet has asserted herself in an arbitary way, forcing the poem to a conclusion.

In her best poems, in a poem such as “The Operation”, for example, she uses all her imaginative resources to create a statement of disturbing, even terrifying, beauty. The poem is straightforwardly narrative in structure, beginning with a description of her visit to the doctor’s and his diagnosis that she is suffering from hereditary cancer of the womb, which killed her mother the previous year:

I come to this white office, its sterile sheet, its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath while I, who must, allow the glove its oily rape, to hear the almost mighty doctor over me equate my ills with hers and decide to operate.

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The description is almost horrifyingly precise, and, apart from the image of the glove, almost clinical. The rhythms fall gently, rather hesitantly, into place and the rhyme is re@r but unobtrusive. The second and third sections of the poem describe in similar detail the operation and recovery, reenacting the patient’s feelings in the dramatic and vivid present tense:

I glide down the halls and rise in the iron cage towards science and pitfalls.

The great green people stand over me; I roll on the table under a terrible sun, following their command to curl, head touching knee if I am able. Next, I am hung up like a saddle and they begin. Pale as an angel I float out over my own skin.

In the operating theatre she is commanded to adopt a foetal position, and her recovery, slow and bewilderingly painful, is like the re-epactment of the birth trauma. The association between the evil of disease and birth is established earlier in the poem in the connection between her own birth and her mother’s cancer of the womb :

It grew in her as simply as a child would grow as simply as she housed me once, fat and female. Always my most gentle house before that embryo of evil spread in her shelter and she grew frail.

Although the child is in some senses innocence, there is no doubt that the traditionally religious idea of being born into a world of evil and disease is suggested in these images. In so far as the opera- tion is seen as a re-birth, her ultimate discharge from hospital is a re-emergence into childhood; chivied and cajoled, like a child, she is again ready to participate in the bitter and sorrowful game we call life:

Time now to pack this humpty-dumpty back the frightened way she came and run along, Anne, and run along now my stomach laced up like a football for the game.

The humour is sardonic, the attitude stoical compassion. While the patient faces the violent and painful images of suffering, the creative mind uses the operation to establish a complex and comprehensive image of the continuity of human life, evil and suffering, the jest, the glory and the riddle of the world. The poet meaningfully organizes the incoherent and meaningless world of suffering. However startling or gruesome, it is not the quality of the experience itself or the fact of its confession that hold our attention, but the quality of the imaginative energy.

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Although she avoids any ready-made theological conclusions she does endorse the traditional idea of redemption through suffering. In several of her poems she associates suffering with the agony of Christ crucified. Sometimes the association is direct as in the poem “In the Deep Museum”:

My God, my God, what queer comer am I in? Didn’t I die, blood running down the post, lungs gagging for air, die there for the sin of anyone, my sour mouth giving up the ghost?

Steeping in fever, I am unfit to know just who you are: hung up like a pig on exhibit, the delicate wrists, the beard drooling blood and vinegar; hooked to your own weight, jolting toward death under your nameplate.

Or, again, in the poem “For God While Sleeping” :

But in the poem “With Mercy for the Greedy” she examines the crucifixion as both suffering and symbol and relates it directly to her poetry:

I detest my sins and I try to believe in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face, its solid neck, its brown sleep.

True. There is a beautiful Jesus. He is frozen to his bones like a chunk of beef. How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in! How desperately I touch his vertical and horizontal axes! But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.

She rejects the consolations of a “beautiful Jesus”, for, however much she would like to believe such an idea, it runs counter to her experience of sin and suffering. The Christ in which she believes is the suffering Christ of the crucifix, whose pain she recreates so physically in the line “How desperately he wanted to pull his arms in!” But the crucifix is not only an image of tortured suffering: it is also a symbol of unselfish love and redemption. Thus the cross is at one and the same time an image of intense agony which can be realized personally, and a geometric symbol of the intersection of the timeless eternity of God and the world of man which is changeless and impersonal. Similarly, the man who suffers in a world of suffering and evil can be transcended by the mind that creates in the unchanging, timeless world of art. Through the world of poetic imagination, man can move from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom.

Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are all extremely traditional poets. Not, of course, in the sense that they see tradition

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as an unchanging force to which they should submit themselves- in this sense tradition is a dead hand-but in the sense that they see the tradition of poetry as a living and growing force, which must be constantly extended in order to be kept vitally alive. All three poets are self-conscious and accomplished craftsmen, who delight in the poet’s traditional role of maker; and all three are incidentally concerned in trying to define a specifically contem- porary sensibility. They are, of course, all Americans to whom the tradition means, say, Hart Crane, as much as it means, say, Thomas Hardy. But, above all, these poets are willing to experiment, to take chances and to run risks. Indeed, in America during the last decade a great deal of exciting and experimental poetry was written, quite apart from the poetry of the Beats. By comparison, the poetry written in England during that period seems extraordinarily safe. The most exciting English poets of the period, such as Ted Hughes and Thom Gunn, tend, interestingly enough, to be those poets who are most aware of contemporary American poetry. Philip Larkin, once the showpiece of the 1950s, has in his recent volume, Whitsun Weddings, moved into territories of thought, feeling and form hardly sanctioned by the ethos of the 1950s. There is every hope that the English poetry of the second half of the century will be as exciting and as relevant to its society as was the poetry of Yeats and Eliot in the first half.

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