Six of one, but there are others

The title of this sleek manual, “The Wounded Surgeon,” comes from T. S. Eliot’s poem “East Coker,” the second of his “Four Quartets,” and evokes what Adam Kirsch calls “the resolve, not to say heroism, that these poets displayed by submitting their most intimate and painful experiences to the objective discipline of art.” The six of whom he speaks -- Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, Sylvia Plath -- “make up one of the great constellations of American poetry,” from the 1940s to the 1970s.

And the book’s subtitle, once the ruse of “confession” is discerned and dismissed (“Confessional poetry, as it came to be known, learned from Lowell that Modernist allusions and ambiguities are less important than simple, searing honesty”), refers, one poet at a time, to an overarching metamorphosis from Modernist strictures to intimate disclosures of artistic personality revealed in rhythms and metaphors, language and thought.

Many critics have preceded Kirsch in this critical enterprise, and his elaborate bibliographies suggest that he has read them all. Consequently, his prose has a businesslike ease about it -- there is no indigestible jargon here, no schoolmaster’s smirk about the ranking of his chosen masters. Even Kirsch’s most venturesome judgments reveal, as in the following six sentences, the confidence of a man who knows his field as well as those who have plowed it before him:

1) “Lowell’s art is one of power and grandeur, assertion and transformation ... [a]nd it is this, rather than ‘poor passing facts’ that survives when, as he writes in ‘Endings,’ ‘the immortal is scraped unconsenting from the mortal.’ ”

2) “Instead of metaphors that expand meaning like a telescope, [Bishop] will mainly employ metaphors that focus and clarify it like a microscope.”

3) “What [Berryman] knows about books only emphasizes what he does not know about himself.”

4) “In politics as in literature, [Jarrell’s] sympathy was with the vulnerable -- everything that was excluded from, and therefore implicitly resisted, the domain of aggressive, masculine reason.”

5) “Already in the late 1930s, [Schwartz] enacted the transition from Modernist to post-Modernist that was to take his peers another twenty years.”

6) “[Plath] is significant not as a sociological case study -- millions of other women could serve that purpose just as well -- but as an artist; not for what she suffered but for what she did.”

Indeed, each of the essays that encapsulate these six poets within Kirsch’s lucid theory and his irreproachable prose affords a manifest working-out of what this critic has previously determined must be their fate. And of course, mere poems, utilized as proof and skillfully dissected to reveal the displacement of New Critical principles of symbolic order by truth to lived experience must shrivel somewhat in their success as poems even as they prove the case for “transformation.” If it weren’t for the evidence of Kirsch’s own handsomely tooled collection of poems, “The Thousand Wells,” published a couple of years back, one might suppose that he didn’t enjoy the performances of the Super Six (once they had satisfied his stipulations) so much as he approved of them.

The witty neatness of Kirsch’s critical arbitration, a little surprising when you consider the messy lives and deaths of the poets so inspected, tends to keep him from simply or even elaborately delighting in the remarkable successes of poem after poem that, according to Kirsch’s Law, should not have occurred after one poet or another had gone too far in the direction of truth-to-experience after abandoning the principles of symbolic order.

For instance, even Bishop, who comes in for fewer of Kirsch’s strictures than the others on account of her shift from New Critical disciplines to what she called “the art of losing,” is said to have written only “two poems in her last decade which seem to transcend any period; they have a precision, economy and inevitability that can be called classical.” This is Kirsch’s way of overlooking her late masterpiece “Santarem,” left out of the reckoning, I believe, because it doesn’t fit the critic’s imposed design. “Bishop was not about to begin writing nakedly autobiographical poetry of the kind she detested when it came from her peers ... her last poems are an unsparingly intimate, yet impersonal and immensely controlled investigation of suffering.”

No, that misses the quality of the very poetry Kirsch elsewhere commends his chosen poets for creating. For “Santarem” is a large-scale, generous-spirited poem that investigates everything except suffering, relishes the shared experiences of other people and sustains a comical self-criticism that seems quite beyond “the Calvary of being observant.” It is actually a post-Christian poem rich and powerful enough to be called not classical but joyous and wise.

I don’t mean to slight Kirsch’s generally clear-sighted readings of these troubled poets. His astuteness in dealing with Plath, for instance, quite convinces me about the unexpected way he has grouped Plath with her elders, who more often than not resisted the collocation, as Lowell himself commented: “[M]any, after reading ‘Ariel,’ will recoil from their first overawed shock and painfully wonder why so much of it leaves them feeling empty, evasive and inarticulate.” Kirsch responds to that wonder and takes us into the reasons for constellating “Ariel” with Bishop’s “Geography III” and Berryman’s “Dream Songs.”

What he does not respond to is the question of the Missing Poets: where, for instance, are Richard Wilbur and Theodore Roethke, exact contemporaries of the Suffering Six and quite answerable to the stipulations Kirsch has established for filing them thus together? If such poets (and surely there are others of a comparable excellence: James Dickey, Robert Penn Warren, May Swenson, Howard Nemerov, Stanley Kunitz -- just saying the names is ever so comfy) don’t satisfy the paradigm, how can they be the lively and rewarding poets so many of us know them to be? And if they do “fit,” why aren’t they here brought into play?

Their omission suggests to me that “play” is precisely what is lacking in Kirsch’s lively and astute assessment of his sextet’s attributed majority status. His careful pursuit of a theory of a poetic generation has kept him from taking into account the pleasure principle of poetry. And I suspect that if an entire national expression (that is the implication of Kirsch’s cluster) is scrutinized without allowing for the delight the poets’ works afford us (as in the failure to consider “Santarem,” for instance), that will indeed be a “wounding” (though not crippling) limitation of this otherwise perceptive and rewarding critical study. I can’t help thinking of Oscar Wilde’s preference of pleasure to happiness. After all, it has so many more tragic possibilities. *