William De Witt Snodgrass was born in 1926 in Pennsylvania, growing
up through the Great Depression and
subsequently set to experience the turbulence which engulfed America. This turbulence
was furthered in his own experiences from 1944 in the United States Navy, and ultimately
shaped the course of his expression – as on demobilisation in 1946 he enrolled
in the University of Iowa’s poetry workshop. Perhaps Snodgrass was searching
for a way to communicate what for many had been an era of discontented
voices, but no clear narrative.
America during the 1940’s and 1950’s faced a rising mood of
conservatism, influenced significantly
by Cold War tensions and an overt fear of Communism. Yet this was conservatism
which culturally appeared to expect a certain degree of inversion, as was seen
as ‘decency’ – with the critically established ‘modernist’ tradition invaded by
an extent of self-censorship. Whereas in the era of the Great depression, Steinbeck
emerged with substantial narratives which gave a voice to the typically unheard
– like the wild inhabitants of ‘Cannery Row’ – by the 1940’s, the cultural
climate of America was turning to television and technology; means of
introducing conformity. However, it
could be seen that emerging in reaction were the ‘Beatnik’ writers who were to
express the struggle of consciousness in America, at this time, such as Jack Kerouac , and also
Science Fiction writers such as Isaac Asimov. Yet Snodgrass can be seen as
unique as he did not disengage with literary principle like many of the ‘beats’
and neither did he look he extensively into the future. Instead, Snodgrass looked
internally - to the human condition and own experience – and wrote not just
about it, but from it.
His collection ‘Heart’s Needle’ in 1959 is historic not only
in that it was his first collection of a long and distinguished academic career,
but also marked a break with the past through the voice of the present – Snodgrass
overturning what was the fashionable approach of the anti-expressionistic New
Critics. ‘Heart’s Needle’ itself could be considered a kind of sequence, the
lack of determining language (i.e. it is
not ‘a heart’s needle’ or ‘the heart’s needle’) leaving the audience
open to appropriate what is meant by an image which coveys both warmth and yet
a sharpness. The sequence itself
actually began to first appear in New
Poets of England and America in 1957.
Snodgrass is at pains to reveal the repressed, violent feelings
that often lurk beneath the seemingly placid surface of everyday life,"
David McDuff observes in Stand.
Yet ‘Heart’s Needle’ seemed to allow a certain thread to
hold together a sense of admiration and awe. The poem possesses an
autobiographical element – profound with a sense both of bewilderment on loss;
following his divorce from his wife and his subsequent estrangement from their daughter, Cynthia, to
whom the sequence is addressed. It is profound that throughout the poem, he appears
to liken his daughter’s absence to a kind of death .
It is this conveyance of lived experience through poetry
which often gains the label ‘confessional’, though Snodgrass himself disliked
the term. ‘Confessional poetry’ as a genre is often quickly appropriated to
writers such as Sylvia Plath, who was writing
at a similar time. However, the environments which the poets
experienced, especially America, could be considered very different. Snodgrass
was raised in Beaver Falls, a prominent location on what is known as the ‘rust belt’ – land once heavily
used for iron extraction. It was this area which saw its own losses in the form
of a rapidly declining population as the industry deteriorated following the War
in the 1940’s – when Snodgrass began to set ‘Heart’s Needle’ into motion. In
this light ‘Heart’s needle’ pierces our prejudices in terms of the experience
of loss and deepens it, from the individual to the atmospheric. It could be considered in contrast that
Plath, growing up in an affluent area of
Boston and attending the prestigious Smith college, highlighted the chaos of
human high ideals. Snodgrass could be seen to scrape at the lowest sensations,
and not in bad way.
The sequence opens with a kind of impersonal reversal
“Loingseachan told him, “Your father is dead.” “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said”
the internal rhyme conveying death with an eerie simplicity. This itself is actually an extract from the
Middle-Irish Romance the Madness of Suibhnne, and thus an allusion to the
historical nature of loss. Perhaps it could be seen as Snodgrass himself
trying to accept the fact of loss, which
he appears to liken in a metaphor to ‘The thick trappers boot trying to
restrain the weasel of summer’; an attempt to possibly justify the process. Yet
throughout the poem this imagery of nature is increasingly interrupted by aspects
of human mechanisation. It is in this way Snodgrass describes the how a child
may be suspended from the parents hands,
as they Recoil to swing him through the weather/Stiffen and pull apart’. It is
difficult not to feel the harsh clash of consonants and subsequent sense of disassociation. In
this way Snodgrass could be seen to conjure the various emotions underlying
loss – the disbelief, the anger, and yet the continuation of the cycle of life
and action. He had lost his daughter yet both their lives continued.
Therefore Snodgrass appears to explore the cycles in life despite
the fragmentation of his poem – sewing together what could be considered the
two sides of reality through the ‘heart’s needle’; life and death. This could
considered evident in that although the poem progresses, the speaker returns to winter in the fifth section, now addressing
the child directly as seemingly comes with age ‘You are growing/strange to
me’. Here the division of
‘growing/strange’ emphasizes a potentially paradoxical process, leaving the
reader to question whether the speaker is referring to his daughter’s absence as
a kind of growth into the distance, or actually discussing her adolescence. The
possibility for interpretation in ‘Heart’s needle’ is vast – just as the
sensation of loss when felt by the human being. Snodgrass is not afraid to
amplify feeling, as he does increasingly
through imagery such as’ cold air rushed in to fill/them out like bushes
thick with leaves’ in terms of the lungs. In this way the human body is
projected as part of the natural process, with death and loss an inevitable
part of that.
Yet it is a part we struggle to accept – just as the speaker
seemingly struggles to accept the role of grieving father. His early fond allusion
to a ‘little girl aged three’ invites the mind to play over the ‘three’ and
hopes it to ‘free’. Snodgrass plays with the emotion like the little girl plays
amongst imagery such as ‘bad penny. Pendulum’ which breaks a stretch of
carefree rhythm, indicating the slow but deliberate progression of time always
in the background.
Progress comes with pain. Snodgrass perhaps knew this all
too well, having married his first wife Lila Jean hank in the post-war euphoria
of 1946, though divorcing by 1953. The turbulence
he had experienced in the military, having been drafted into the navy serving
between 1944 and 1946, thus seemingly continued in domestic life – and it is
this continuation of turbulence he explores in the collection through apparent contrasts;
nature and the artificial, man and machines, adult and child.
Thomas Lask of the New York Times to wrote, "In Heart's
Needle, . . . Snodgrass spoke in a distinctive voice. It was one that was
jaunty and assertive on the surface but sombre and hurt beneath. . . . It is
one of the few books that successfully bridged the directness of contemporary
free verse with the demands of the academy."
In this way it could be considered that Snodgrass’s work was
making a confession, even if he did not see it as part of the ‘confessional movement’
– that man continues to be unhappy. This sounds like an overtly-simplistic
statement; but writing sat a time of post war euphoria and anticipated growth, Snodgrass’s
work highlights the complexity of emotion which still continues as part of human
nature and identity. Snodgrass himself was sensitive with his identity, often
publishing under the pseudonym S.S Gardons. However, as his first collection
‘heart’s Needle’ gained much critical attention, published in 1959 and winning
the Pulitzer Prize in 1960, evidently cultivating a kind of empathy.
Over the years, Snodgrass continued to cultivate his own thoughts
and words – though none perhaps held the same situational impact as ‘Heart’s
needle’ – the image of the heart and the needle remain profound in the mind –items
which bring humans together, but also are capable of injuring them. It is the
very human combination of strength and weakness Snodgrass went on to
controversially explore in his Fuhrer Bunker poems, based on eyewitness
extracts of those who served in the bunker with Hitler during World War II,
eventually published as a complete cycle in 1995. This was a work of weighty controversy, highlighting
Snodgrass; use of poetry to highlight the depths which the human condition can
sink to. One outlook in the American
Book Review, believes that the volume is "a rare example of ambitious,
on-going verse sculpture. . . . It will be around for a long time to inspire
writers who've come to realize the sad limitations of the locked-in, private,
first lesson, obsessional poem."
Whereas others some called it
‘shameful sensationalism’. The use of Nazi imagery holds a similarity with
Plath’s work of the 1950’s – highlighting two poets evidently affected by human
atrocities.
In this light, W.D Snodgrass can be seen as an innovator of
human expression, often under-discussed. His output was diverse, controversial
and deeply affecting, in turn inspiring other American poets such as Robert
Lowell. Lines such as from Lowell’s ‘On the Woe that is Marriage’:
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant."
Somewhat like Snodgrass, here Lowell has revealed the wild horrors
of the domestic and provides the intimate revelation of both love and suffering
– like a heart and a needle. That last lines of
Snodgrass’ first collection in
this light come as a cutting question of the very individuality he seeks to
explore:
Dawdling over the remorseless
earth,
What evil, what unspeakable crime
Have you made your life worth?
In this way, perhaps Snodgrass was not confessional, but if
to be defined by a word, expressional –
highlighting human emotion without apology. Whilst Plath and Anne Sexton,
commonly regarded as confessional poets, often adopt fantastical speakers such
as ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Cinderella’, Snodgrass scrapes away the façade to reveal
a human being at the mercy of very human emotion.
By love I could not still,
By fear that silenced my cramped mind.
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