Signs & signatures
Dark and disturbing poetry

Darshan Singh Maini talks about the unique verse of Confessional Poets Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath

THOUGH poetry is, in one respect, confessional in nearly all types and genres, yet, clearly some poets examine themselves, their inner selves and the world without with an eye of perception that reaches down to Freudian depths, and lays bare those dark and hidden areas of the self of which the waking mind is almost unaware. And this is true not only of modern poetry per se, but also of poetry as a form of indirect discourse.

One could name scores of earlier poets in the English language who, too, were confessional in their own manner. But the group of American poets known as Confessional Poets is uniquely open, naked and disturbingly outspoken. The way in which poets like Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke and Sylvia Plath open up the sewers of their hearts, and reveal their innards was never seen in that fullness in the poetry written before them. All products of the post-Eisenhower era, thus, translated into verse the rebellious moment, as also the uglinesses of the society that created and supported militarism, imperialist ethos etc.

The first poet to be taken up for a brief discussion is, of course, Robert Lowell who in his first volume Land of Unlikeness broke fresh ground, the poems reviving the radical revolt against their Puritan ancestors who still fumed in their blood. With the publication of Lord Weary’s Castle he confirmed the emergence of a new style. In his celebrated poem, The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, the extravagance of the Gothic and the baroque forms signalled the arrival of a new type of "romantic" poetry. Lowell’s deep concern with history makes his poetry more and more prophetic and archetypal. Later, in his Notebook, he confirms the tragic finality of history.

But what’s now called "confessional poetry" begins really with his vastly influential, Life Studies. Now his concern with the private and domestic world posits a philosophical belief — a belief in the sanctity and primacy of individual experience. It’s now a "history" within the wider history.

In For the Union Dead, poems of personal sorrow and private grief engage his imagination only. In the next volume, The Dolphin, he again turns agonisingly on nodules of personal pain. Estranged from his wife and daughter, he has to still the ache of separation by plunging into the intimacies of his new beloved, his "dolphin". However, he’s seldom far away from chaos that looms over his horizons.

Theodore Roethke is now widely regarded as a visionary poet whose poetry reaches out, in the end to the far horizons. More than Lowell, he plunges into the mysteries of love, and puts out on the string his naked self.

Roethke’s mysticism remains suspect in same ways. The philosophic influences — Kirkegaard, Buber, Tillich, Boehme etc. — only helped provide a launching pad. The fact that he even enrolled for a course in Sanskrit was perhaps a dubious attempt, and the element of deliberateness has not been ruled out. But the ancestral ghosts had to be exorcised, and his Oedipal and incestuous urges could not let him breathe in peace. In The Lost Son, in particular, such strong buried fevers are seen in their fullest. Some of the poems are "a bright blaze of being", as Sullivan puts it. In The Echoing Wood, he is reminded of his multiple progenitors:-

His main themes are: "birth, separation from father and God, sexual confusion and guilt, fear of self etc." and his Faustian romanticism is, thus, vindicated in the end. The later volumes such as The Far Field, Praise to the End are exceptionally strong and beautiful, his muses full to the brim.

Sylvia Plath who became a cult figure after her fateful date with death in 1963 was once described as "a white fury". Her fiery ideal, when estranged from her faithless and jealous husband-poet, Ted Hughes, ended when she shoved her head into a gas oven, but her spirit was to haunt those she loved. In her Letters to Mother, there are enough indications of her strong antipathies and strong bonds.

The suffering she pumped out of the "jet-blood of her heart" into her "hell-Pired" poetry appeared and she knew not when the song had turned into a lament, a cry. She turns into "God’s lioness", in her famous poem Arial, No wonder, one critic described her as "the James Dean of modern poetry", and other soubriquets included "bitch-goddess", "Vampire", "Medusa" and "White goddess". Her father, the German Otto Plath, becomes an ugly figure in her terrifying poems. In the celebrated poem Daddy, her father surfaces as a Nazi monster, an incestuous threat.

Purdah combines her two anathemas, man and sexuality.

In Lady Lazarus:

She has now become a "Demon Lover". And then, as a wife, she turns from a lover to a fierce, hawkish and predatory woman.

Her life with Ted Hughes becomes increasingly a Greek tragedy. To quote her own words from a B.B.C. broadcast, she has started "courting the experience that kills". Adifficult daughter, a tortured woman, a violated wife, a misfit mother — all these roles of the "artist" are seen in all her five volumes.

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