fair game for verse, inspiring M. L. Rosenthal to
create the label ‘‘confessional poetry.’’ These
books shocked readers in 1959 precisely because
Snodgrass and Lowell presented themselves not
as wild-man outsiders like Allen Ginsberg, who,
guided by Blakean vision and elegiac Whitma-
nia, ran naked through America, but strong tra-
ditionalists who clothed disturbing personal
dramas in technical beauty, so the rawness of
the wounds they examined seeped through the
gold tissue of their poems’ finery.
Our difficulty today in seeing Snodgrass’s
special quality actually derives from his success
and his influence, as well as the influence of
Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and
others: What looked forbidden in his poetry,
what made it new and startling at the time, has
become the norm. The wrong turns that in the
1950s counted as dirty secrets of private life—
divorce, adultery, and the emotional snarls they
make of parent-child relationships—have
become common American experiences and,
therefore, common poetic subjects. The culture
has caught up with Snodgrass and Lowell, and
poetry, as always, has pushed beyond the cul-
ture, outing all of its skeletons from the closet
into cold print.
IfHeart’s Needle’s subject no longer piques
our lust for gossip or scandal, its technical mas-
tery still compels us and argues for the sequen-
ce’s enduring power. Snodgrass has included all
ten sections of the title sequence in his new book
of selected poems,Not for Specialists,and they
demonstrate how, early on, he had achieved an
impeccable craft.
...The poem’s complex grammar unrolls in
a single sentence whose long parenthetical
phrases interrupt his address to the child, sug-
gesting the constant interruptions in their love. It
embodies the difficult balancing act the speaker
has assigned himself: to salvage some harvest in
his emotional winter, to control his sometimes
violent feelings (the sequence’s third poem
describes how he ‘‘tugged your hand, once’’ so
hard he ‘‘dislocated/The radius of your wrist’’),
and to establish a lasting bond with his daughter
(the same poem boasts that ‘‘Solomon himself
might say/I am your real mother’’ since he has
surrendered her to his rival parent rather than
tearing her in half like ‘‘Love’s wishbone’’). If the
movement from the Korean War to the divorced
couple’s ‘‘cold war’’ seems presumptuous, the
development of the snow metaphor for the
child’s mind resonates richly. The ‘‘new snow,’’
hertabula rasa,presents a comforting purity but
also induces anxiety, implicit in the preceding
image of Asian snows ‘‘fouled’’ by death, in the
guise of ‘‘fallen soldiers,’’ ‘‘new’’ in both their
youth and their sacrifice. By turns, her ‘‘new
snow’’ recalls the trauma ‘‘Of birth or pain,’’
offers itself ‘‘spotless as paper’’ for the poet-
father to make his mark upon, and demands
protection from ‘‘the weasel tracking, the thick
trapper’s boot,’’ and other predatory dangers.
Yet the speaker also feels temporary and
helpless, like ‘‘the chilled tenant-farmer’’ who
neither owns the land nor can, in the dead of
winter, cultivate ‘‘His fields asleep.’’ His lack of
rights eliminates any certainty in his life with her:
He has ‘‘planned’’ only to leave much between
them to chance, realizing that any paternal pro-
tection he can provide must be hit or miss. The
poem’s stanza, swelling to four beats in the third
line before dwindling to two at the end, plays out
his swelling love and shrinking hope, while the
language details his restrained and terrible
acceptance. Later, in poem seven, set in summer,
the rhythm of a playground swing enacts pre-
cisely his combined love and despair in their
periodic relationship, ending, as she returns
through the air to him, with an emblem of their
tentative love: ‘‘Once more now, this second,/
I hold you in my hands.’’ That the subject matter
of ‘‘Heart’s Needle’’ has grown commonplace
reflects on us, not on the poetry, which still
succeeds in its skillful designs.
In his letters from the late 1950s, Lowell
repeatedly judges Snodgrass ‘‘better than anyone
[of the new poets] except [Philip] Larkin,’’ and
his best early poems warrant the comparison.
Snodgrass is more flamboyant than his English
contemporary, as in this stanza I often quote to
my students from ‘‘Mementos, 1,’’ from hisIFHEART’S NEEDLE’S SUBJECT NO LONGER
PIQUES OUR LUST FOR GOSSIP OR SCANDAL, ITS
TECHNICAL MASTERY STILL COMPELS US AND
ARGUES FOR THE SEQUENCE’S ENDURING POWER.’’Heart’s Needle