The American Century: Literature since 1945 539or whatever, but because they image the poet’s inner world, his personal feelings.
“We need the landscape to repeat us,” Snodgrass observes later. The measured,
musical quality of his verse, and his frequent attention to objects and narrative,
disguise an obsessive inwardness, a ferocious preoccupation with the subjective.
“My poems ... keep right on singing the same old song”: the words could belong
to Snodgrass, but in fact they were spoken by Ann Sexton, whose first two collections,
To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), established
both her reputation and her intensely personal stance. Even those pieces by Sexton
that appear not to be concerned with herself usually turn out to be subjective, to
have to do with her predicament as a woman. “The Farmer’s Wife,” for instance,
begins as a description of someone in rural Illinois, caught up in “that old pantomime
of love,” and then concludes with lines that suddenly switch the focus from farmer
and wife to the poet and her lover. Elsewhere, when the narrative mask is dropped,
the tone can be painfully raw and open, and given a further edge by elaborate rhyme-
schemes or tight stanzaic forms. “All My Pretty Ones” is a good illustration of this.
Addressed to the poet’s father, the contrast between the passion and intimacy of
the address and the strictness of the given measure only intensifies the feeling of the
poem. It is as if the disciplines of the poetic form, which Sexton confronts in a half-
yielding, half-rebellious fashion, were part of the paternal inheritance, something
else that the father she both loves and hates has left her to deal with. However,
she was not only concerned with the pain of being daughter, wife, mother, lover. She
also sang, as she put it, “in celebration of the woman I am.” Long before it was
fashionable to do so, she wrote in praise of her distinctive identity, not just as an
American poet, but as an American female poet. “As the African says:” she declares
in “Rowing,” “This is my tale which I have told”; and for her this tale was, finally,
a source of pride.
A similar pride in the condition of being a woman characterizes the poetry of
Adrienne Rich. Rich’s early work in A Change of World (1951) and The Diamond
Cutters (1955) is decorous, formal, restrained. But even in here there is a sense of the
subversive impulses that lie just below the smooth surfaces of life. In “Aunt “Jennifer’s
Tigers,” for example, the character who gives the poem its title seems to be crushed
beneath patriarchal authority: “The massive weight of Uncle’s wedding band / Sits
heavily upon Aunt Jennifer’s hand.” However, the tigers she has embroidered “across
a screen” suggest her indomitable spirit. Even after her death, “The tigers in the panel
that she made / Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.” “Sleek chivalric” and
poised as they are, these animals nevertheless emblematize certain rebellious ener-
gies, turbulent emotions that will not be contained: polite on the surface, passionate
beneath, Aunt Jennifer’s art is, at this stage, Adrienne Rich’s art. Gradually, though,
Rich came to feel that she could “no longer go to write a poem with a neat handful
of materials and express these materials according to a prior plan.” “Instead of poems
about experience,” she argued, “I am getting poems that are experiences.” A work like
“Diving into the Wreck,” the title poem in her 1973 collection, measures the change.
In it, the poet tells of a journey under the sea, during which she has to discard all
the conventional supports, the crutches on which she has leaned in the upper world.GGray_c05.indd 539ray_c 05 .indd 539 8 8/1/2011 7:31:30 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 30 PM