If this is true, then the poem might indeed
well deserve its categorization as confessional.
The speaker is perhaps confessing to a much
dimmer level of concern for his daughter than
is socially expected. The divorcing father should
be lavishing affection on his daughter, but the
use of this epigraph implies that he is dismissing
her as an inconvenience. There is a sense of
shame implied in the lines the poet has chosen
from Suibhne’s story. If Snodgrass actually is
admitting, confessing, this as the reality of his
relationship with his daughter, he is taking a
gamble that he might embarrass his readers.
Throughout the poem itself, however, the
poet’s sense of shame is not so clear. Just when
he seems to be confessing to loving his daughter
too little, new evidence arises to show that he
feels he has loved her the best he could. Exam-
ples of this can be found from the very first
image of the poem. Snodgrass starts by referring
to his daughter as the child of his winter. In other
circumstances, the mention of one’s winter
would mean the later years of one’s life, when
growth is past and one is facing the cold of death,
as in the title of Shakespeare’s playA Winter’s
Tale. In this case, though, the poet was still a
relatively young man when his daughter was
born. Later references to soldiers and the cold
war indicate that the winter he means is an emo-
tionally cold and dead period that he went
through. The reference to his cold, frozen emo-
tions could be read as a confession, as a way of
saying that he was more inaccessible to her than
a father should be. But it could just as much be
read as the poet accepting what life has dealt
him, as if his coldness, like the cycle of the
world’s climate, is just something that recurs
now and then. One might confess if they looked
back and saw that they had turned aloof, shut-
ting out wife and child, but one would hardly
confess for being cold because the temperature
dropped. Observing a natural occurrence is not a
confession.
And that is the problem overall with calling
this poem, or any poem, confessional. Poets do
what they can to look at their subject matter and
find meaning in it, but the wordconfessiondis-
tracts readers from precisely what is being said.
The focus ends up being on what the situation
described means to the poet, on whether he is
discussing or confessing. The possibility of con-
fession invites the reader to pass judgment; these
judgments will usually be favorable, but if the
poet seems to be trying too hard for a favorable
judgment—if he is twisting his description of the
circumstance to make his actions look at all
favorable—then his ‘‘confession’’ lacks sincerity.
The search for confessions in confessional poetry
becomes like sorting salt from sand with tweez-
ers, a job so labor-intensive that it can never end
up being worth its while.
The task of the artist is to look at life and
present it with all of its flaws. ‘‘Heart’s Needle’’
tells a story that is emotionally true. The truth of
what it has to say remains unchanged, regardless
of where the ideas came from or how much
Snodgrass felt shame about the details he shares
within the poem. The label ‘‘confessional’’ can
make readers overlook that fact. There may
indeed be such a thing as the confessional poetry
movement, and critics and historians can argue
about who and what the term applies to. Still,
segregating these poets because they happened
to use their lives as subjects does little to further
one’s understanding and appreciation of their
works; by the time one finishes sorting through
the confessional elements, the poem’s other
splendors have lost their allure.
Source:David Kelly, Critical Essay on ‘‘Heart’s Needle,’’
inPoetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2009.Jay Rogoff
In the following excerpt, Rogoff reviews Snod-
grass’s collectionNot for Specialists: New and
Selected Poems, along with specific discussion of
‘‘Heart’s Needle.’’ Rogoff praises the collection,
noting its ‘‘technical mastery.’’
Almost two decades ago, when W. D. Snod-
grass’s lastSelected Poemsappeared, another
poet told me how different she felt revisiting his
Heart’s Needlesequence after many years. Back
in the 1960s, she said, those poems had shocked
her—had shocked everyone—with their subject
matter: the guilt and anger of the speaker’s
divorce and the anxious difficulty of maintaining
a loving relationship with his estranged young
daughter. But the poetry now seemed tame, dec-
orous in its formal restraint, and she had diffi-
culty perceiving what had created such a fuss.
And truly, it was quite a fuss: The 1959Heart’s
Needle, Snodgrass’s first collection, took the
Pulitzer Prize over, among others,Life Studies,
the now-iconic book by Snodgrass’s teacher
Robert Lowell that, together withHeart’s Nee-
dle,brought family trauma and psychological
disturbance out of the closet and made themHeart’s Needle