The American Century: Literature since 1945 563to and with her father. Like scratching a wound, the speaking of her relationship
seems only to have exacerbated the pain. “Maybe it’s an irrelevant accident that
she actually carried out the death she predicted ...” Lowell observed of Plath,
“but somehow the death is part of the imaginative risk.” This captures perfectly the
difference between the two poets. There is an art of reconciliation and an art of
resistance. There are confessional poets who discover peace, therapeutic release in
the disciplines of writing and those, equally disciplined, whose writing only pushes
them further toward the edge. If Lowell is an example of the former, then Plath is
clearly an illustration of the latter: in the interests of her art she committed herself,
ventured to the point where there was nothing left but the precipice and little, if any,
chance of a return.New formalists, new confessionals
Since the deaths of Plath, Berryman, and Lowell, new generations have been busy
redrawing the map of American poetry. Among these generations are some notable
formalists, poets who necessarily derive their inspiration from personal experience
but use a variety of means to distance things and disengage their work from
autobiography. The personal stimulus and the desire for disengagement are
particularly remarkable in the work of Charles Wright (1935–) (a selection of which
is to be found in Country Music (1982) and Scar Tissue (2002)). “I write poems to
untie myself, to do penance and disappear / Through the upper right-hand corner
of things,” he declares in one poem, “Revision”; other typical lines are: “I am weary
of daily things,” “I’m going away now, goodbye.” If the first person enters Wright’s
poetry, it does so only to be erased. His poetry is poetry of an “I” yearning for
transcendence, and its own obliteration. It is a poetry of spiritual hunger, rather
than fulfillment, expressed sometimes directly, as in “Next” (“I want to be bruised by
God ... / ... / I want to be entered and picked clean”) and sometimes, as in “Spider
Crystal Ascension,” through symbolism of, say, a chrysalis turning into a mayfly or
the Milky Way (“The spider, juiced crystal and Milky Way ... / ... looks down,
waiting for us to ascend”). The structures Wright chooses – the three-stanza form of
“Tattoos,” for instance, or the twelve and fourteen line forms of China Trace (1977)
and “Skins” – are clearly a part of this larger project: seeking the still point of the
turning world, he commits himself to spatial forms, a frozen moment, arrested
motion. “I’m talking about stillness,” Wright says in a poem called “Morandi”; and
that stillness is something he tries to imitate in his remote and severe lines.
Other forms of stillness and severity are to be found in the poetry of William
Bronk (1918–1999). His poetry, as Life Supports: New and Collected Poems (1997)
illustrates, is notable for its austerity of vision and voice. In some ways, it recalls the
New England tradition of Thoreau, Dickinson, and Frost in its preoccupation with
nature, particularly harsh winter landscapes, and its refusal to compromise. “I will
not / be less than I am to be more human,” Bronk insists in “The Abnegation.” But,
even more emphatically, it recalls the work of Wallace Stevens in its obsessive con-
cern with the elusiveness of fact, and the necessity and impossibility of knowledge.GGray_c05.indd 563ray_c 05 .indd 563 8 8/1/2011 7:31:31 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 31 PM