british holocaust poetry: songs of experience so resistant to artistic representation’.^57 Histaxonomy of awkward poetics includes
embarrassed rhetoric, incongruity, paradox, theanti-redemptive, the anti-elegiac,
and anti-objectivism.^58 It is particularly exemplified in the Holocaust poems of
Geoffrey Hill, such as ‘September Song’, a work notable for its compression.^59 The
power of Rowland’s thesis is demonstrated by the fact that it can be fruitfully applied
to poetry he does not consider, such as ‘Shirking the Camps’, ‘Kristallnacht’, and
other poems in Tom Paulin’sThe Invasion Handbook.^60 Paulin’s poem itself enacts
the displacement activities that ‘you’ would distract yourself with rather than ‘sing
a song of Belsen’.^61 He tries to share the anger of aKristallnachtsurvivor, but then
the broken glass recalls the ‘murder, theft, danger’ of his own culture’s history of
iconoclasm. His voice trails off as he suspects ‘something complicit’ with fascism.^62
As Paulin, hailing from Northern Ireland Protestantism, recognizes, it is almost
impossible not to be complicit with thuggery merely by using the English language,
which was imposed by force throughout the British Empire. Plath, as a nascent
feminist, parodies language’s bullying power by exaggerating what Gubar calls
her ‘Mother Goose rhymes’.^63 Yet even self-consciously ‘awkward poetics’ such
as parody cannot altogether avoid the colonizing implications of English and its
Anglican baggage. So I think Rowland’s judgement that Plath’s thought needs to
be more rigorous is spurious. Her compression of meanings (the implicit yoking
together of apparently disparate ideas in vivid imagery, as in the example discussed
above) is precisely what gives her work its disturbing power. In fact, although
Kendall calls Alan Sinfield’s defence of Plath’s poetry ‘dubious’ and reductive, I
would agree with Sinfield’s view that (amongst other aims) Plath was struggling to
bring into consciousness ideas not yet fully articulated in her period,^64 particularly
to understand what came to be sloganized as ‘the personal is the political’. Plath’s
Holocaust poetry belongs to that generation of literary and theoretical writings of
the 1960s and 1970s by authors such as Margaret Atwood, Eva Figes, Betty Friedan,
Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Adrienne Rich, and Fay Weldon, that gave birth to
the Second Wave of the Women’s Movement. The Movement not only stressed
(^57) Ibid. 11. For a test case of Rowland’s theory, a poem that does not utilize awkward poetics but
attempts universalizing moral authority, and does not appear in Holocaust anthologies, see Alan Bold’s
‘June 1967 at Buchenwald’, in Edward Lucie Smith (ed.),British Poetry Since 1945(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1971), 321–4.
(^58) For a full list, see Rowland,Holocaust Poetry, 12.
(^59) Hill has published a number of poems connected with the Holocaust, including ‘Of Commerce
and Society’, repr. inCollected Poems(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 46–51, and his recentThe
Triumph of Love(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999). These are analysed by Rowland inHolocaust Poetry,
ch. 2, where he acknowledges the criticism by Paulin amongst others that Hill risks complacency and
obscurity. Hill discussed his views onHolocaust writing in an interview with Caryl Phillips, ‘The Art
of Poetry LXXX’,Paris Review, 154 (Spring 2000), 270–99.
(^60) Paulin,Invasion Handbook, 140–1. (^61) Ibid. 40. (^62) Ibid. 131.
(^63) Gubar, ‘Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English’, 205.
(^64) Kendall,Sylvia Plath, 170–1, referring to Alan Sinfield,Literature, Politics and Culture in Post-War
Britain(Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 224.