A Delicate Aggression

by David O. Dowling

  As he later made clear in the preface to his collection of autobiographical sketches, Snodgrass was careful to avoid the impression that he was exploiting his own personal trauma for self-promotion. And as the critical and popular acclaim of Heart’s Needle indicates, the culture sanctioned confession only if it emanated from the tortured soul of a previously unknown creative figure like Snodgrass, especially in the key of the suffering artist. In Heart’s Needle, he suffers not for art, but for the broken relationships in his life. This struck a chord with readers ready for a human presence missing in the Eliot-Pound school advanced by Brooks, Warren, and Allen Tate.

  Heart’s Needle compelled readers with its rendition of the most traumatic chapter Snodgrass suffered in what Workshop alumnus James B. Hall called “the terrible emotional disarray of growing up artistically.” Few, however, could channel that artistic turmoil into subjects that might render confessional poetry possible. Snodgrass could because “he was at the time living ‘Heart’s Needle.’ ” Like Howl before it, the poem is a powerful protest against the alienating effects of institutional repression, which Snodgrass feels most acutely in the restricted access to his daughter meted out by the judicial system. The slow death of his relationship with his daughter Cynthia was a symptom of the 1950s judicial system that typically placed children in the custody of mothers.30 “Winter again and it is snowing;/ Although you are still three,/ You are already growing/ Strange to me,” he laments, exposing the fractured nature of their relationship, artificially broken into distanced and painfully infrequent visitations. The girl is increasingly alien to both him and his neighbors. When she visits for Halloween, he notices, “How queer:/ when you take off your mask/ my neighbors must forget and ask/ whose child you are.”31

  Heart’s Needle is in part a protest against the sterility and regimentation faced by the artist in a bureaucratic institution of higher education. But unlike Beat poetry, “the intimacy of its disclosure is distilled into variations upon some very old forms of English prosody.” Specifically, “beautifully perfect” little stanzas are set in regular ABAB meter, neatly packaged according to the Workshop’s obsession with formal precision.32 The poem’s power lies in its appearance of formal constraint belying its subject of unleashed inner anguish. “What might have become ‘merely personal,’ ” Larry Levis observed, “is never idiosyncratic; it is representative not only of the pain of an absentee father but also of the entire impoverishment of the culture.” Snodgrass locates that broader cultural impoverishment specifically in “cold war soldiers that/ never gained ground, gave none, but sat/ Tight in their chill trenches.” In the fray, “It’s better the soldiers live/ In someone else’s hands/ Than drop where helpless powers fall,” in places like rural Iowa, “On crops and barns, on towns where all/ Will burn. And no man stands.” “Pain seeps up from some cavity” in the culture, entering the individual, so that “The whole jaw grinds and clenches.”33

  Much of the impetus for Heart’s Needle is rooted in romanticism, both poetic and musical. Before entering the Workshop, Snodgrass “started taking voice lessons, first with an excellent speech teacher in Detroit, then with a series of fine singing coaches,” which he acknowledged, “clearly . . . has affected the way I write. Influenced partly by the Beat poets, who gave so many readings, and by Dylan Thomas, I do compose for the voice—particularly my own voice.”34 His classmate Richard Stern confirmed that Snodgrass was the first “of us to break out of the Brooks-Warren-Tate world of the perfected piece, trying to open up,” acknowledging Snodgrass’s role in leading a kind of renaissance in poetry. “My two years—’52–’54—were big for poets.”35 The regular meter and well-mannered English prosody of Heart’s Needle brought an ironic edge of control in a romantic torrent of emotion traceable to Thomas and the Beats.

  “The Prodigal Son of New Criticism”

  Snodgrass’s political critique in Heart’s Needle drew on campus countercultural figures like Morgan Gibson, a leading political radical and conscientious objector who established an “anti-war group on campus” that confronted “incredible opposition by the administration of the university.” As an aspiring author, Gibson found that the Workshop’s “formalistic approach to writing, inculcated by disciples of Eliot, Ransom, Tate, Brooks, and Warren,” stultified his creativity, as the classroom climate left him broken and defeated. “I learned the art of poetry and fiction according to the orthodoxy of the New Criticism, which prevailed at the time; but the more I tortured my speech into forms that remained immortal only until dissected in the next workshop, the more discouraged I became.” Gibson could not “remember anyone teaching a workshop who mentioned Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, Paul Goodman, Kenneth Patchen, certainly not surrealism or dada.” Thus he had to discover these writers for himself, just as Snodgrass did. He could rely on neither Engle nor Lowell to introduce them. “Certainly no one recommended, in any workshop, LEAVES OF GRASS for the young writer,” whose only hope at such innovative models could be found in the English department curriculum. “Fortunately, up on the hill, John Gerber required CALL ME ISHMAEL in his Melville seminar,” which buoyed Gibson, but only in a limited fashion since “no one indicated that Charles Olson was a formidable poet” from Black Mountain College.36

  Thus the search for inspiration in the barren setting of the Workshop must have been a formidable one for a romantically inclined poet like Snodgrass with a musical background steeped in “the great Romantic composers—Beethoven, Brahms, Chopin, Schumann.” The program’s curriculum systematically denied him both English and American romantic traditions, and deemed his own contemporary Beats sacrilege.37 Thus when one considers the notorious dust jacket blurb supplied by Robert Lowell for Heart’s Needle, one often cited as a vicious swipe at the Workshop, it appears less a personal retort than an accurate assessment of the literary culture. Lowell, after all, knew better than anyone that Snodgrass had defied his own warning to avoid sentiment and steer away from personal self-disclosure in the poem. Despite this, Lowell still found power in the book, recognizing his protégé’s unique contributions, leading him to declare, “Except for Philip Larkin, Snodgrass is the best new poet in many years.” Lowell finds it remarkable that he “flowered in the most sterile of sterile places, a post war, cold war Midwestern university’s poetry workshop for graduate student poets.” Lowell’s targets were not motivated by personal spite toward the Workshop. Instead, they are mainly political, as seen in his “post war, cold war” reference, and regional, in the “Midwestern university” allusion, reflecting his antiwar activism and New England roots. His comment that “most of the poems here have a shrill, authoritative eloquence” refers to the confessional mode of Snodgrass’s poem. His distaste is apparent in the word “shrill,” a quality hardly appealing in any poetic work. However, no such misgivings appear in his next statements. “It’s the best parts of the sequence entitled Heart’s Needle that I really want to go all out for,” because “they are beautifully perfect and a breakthrough for modern poetry,” according to Lowell. “Their harrowing pathos will seem as permanent a hundred years from now as it does now,” he predicted.38

  In Heart’s Needle, the poem “Cardinal” reveals Snodgrass’s process of production, as it depicts him searching for sounds to turn into poetry despite his barren surroundings. He begins in the confessional first person. “I wake late and leave/ the refurbished Quonset/ where they let me live./ I feel like their leftovers:/ they keep me for the onset of some new war or other,” he writes, emphasizing his bizarre occupation as a government-issued artist. Equipped “with ink and ink eraser,” Snodgrass describes how “I tromp off to the woods,/ the little stand of birches/ between golf course and campus/ where birds flirt.” Despite being surrounded by tokens of the profane “inside this narrow compass” that is littered with “beer cans and lovers’ trash,” he persists “in search of my horizons/ of Meadowlark and thrush.” With the acute sensitivity of the seeking poet, he carries “a sacred silence/ with me like my smell
” that enables him to connect with nature despite signs of industrial mechanization toward war and the refuse of consumer gluttony. He miraculously finds music, reveling in “the insect noises” that make “The weeds sing where I leave,” situating himself like a latter-day Thoreau to conduct his aesthetic business in the woods. “I’ve come to set up shop/ under this blue spruce/ and tinker with my rhymes.” The poem validates Lowell’s praise for his pupil’s discovery of lyrical inspiration in an environment hostile to it. Snodgrass is careful to register the herculean effort demanded in this enterprise. “Though I strain to listen,/ the world lay wrapped with wool/ far as the ends of distance,” he writes, noting the formidable resistance to hearing “Little that sounds like mine” in the cacophonous town of Iowa City “across the way” where “mill whistles squeal,” and the “whine of freight car wheels” bombard his senses.39

  Lowell aptly credits Snodgrass for discovering powerful art in an environment where the voices of the muse are wrapped in wool. Rather than simply venting his own personal disgust with Iowa, Lowell appreciates his pupil’s flowering “in the most sterile of sterile places.” Indeed, the dust jacket of his best student would have been an odd place for a full-throated condemnation of the Workshop. Instead, it reflects the depth of Lowell’s bond with Snodgrass, and their mutual awareness of the unique ideological and aesthetic difficulties of being a Workshop poet at the height of the Cold War. In “The Campus on the Hill,” Snodgrass renders a telling tableau of the setting, as he sees “White birds that hang in the air between/ Over the garbage landfill and those homes thereto adjacent.” They hover over “the shopping plaza,” “the backyards of the poor,” and “the dead canal,” a world of materialism, economic inequality, and environmental blight.40

  Although journals such as the Northwestern Tri-Quarterly highlighted Lowell’s hard words directed at the Workshop, Snodgrass’s confessional aesthetic came as “something of a triumph,” one that “at its calm, insistent best has both credo and style.” Indeed, critics did not find Lowell’s assault on the Workshop a troubling liability for Heart’s Needle, but instead focused on the innovative poetic approach toward personal self-disclosure that came to define the confessional school. Almost Whitmanian in its emphasis on the musical dimension of poetry as a force of personal expression, Snodgrass claims a presence for himself in his writing typically denied in the depersonalized Workshop curriculum. His poetic voice acts on the world, rather than passively receiving it, so that “The world’s not done to me,/ it is what I do.” In lines that offer the clearest definition of confessional poetry in the verse itself, he declares, “I music out my name,” brazenly “verbing” in violation of the grammatical rules of expression established in workshop sessions. “And what I tell is who/ in all the world I am,” he boldly asserts, echoing Whitman’s famous opening of “Song of Myself” in which he sings himself into existence, becoming both his own muse and announcing that the subject of his poem will be himself.41

  Snodgrass’s self-possession is extraordinary in light of the Workshop’s active suppression of subjectivity. The program according to Engle derided introspective writing as a narcissistic form of talking to one’s self, or worse, an indiscreet public method of resolving psychological problems that should otherwise remain private. Many graduates from Snodgrass’s era simply stopped writing after enduring two years of the doctrine of depersonalized authorship. Ed Blaine, for example, located “the reason I haven’t written” since earning the MFA from the Workshop “in the curriculum,” particularly in the effect of “two years of concentrated criticism classes and workshops” that left him knowing “so much about technique that I was paralyzed.” The program provided “too much opportunity to become completely absorbed in techniques,” about which “everyone was so serious.” Blaine was thus disgusted with his culminating short novel project for the MFA, which he admitted “was really shitty,” pausing to point out, “See how I’ve loosened up? Twenty-five years ago I would have said, ‘Execrable.’ ”42

  Loosening up was difficult in a culture dominated by the New Criticism, but for many it was a process of growth through opposition, as in the case of Snodgrass’s confessional poetry. Snodgrass’s classmate Ogden Plumb “didn’t realize it then, but in my rebellion against professionalism and the devouring influence of the Pound-Eliot-New Criticism, I was gradually finding literary values which have remained amazingly unsoiled.” He thus became dedicated to “rescuing the sentimental and the rational from the hordes of dabblers.” The dabblers, he notes, “were undergoing a population explosion along with the rest of us more-dedicated fellows sitting in that meager Quonset by the peaceful river, or mixing cheap beer and inconsequential brilliance at Kenney’s Tavern on a barely remembered Iowa evening.”43 For his part, Snodgrass mixed plenty of cheap beer and banter at local bars, but in the process he did not waste his best insights.

  Lowell’s early resistance to confessional poetry led Snodgrass to the discovery of literary values rooted in intimacy and authenticity. Snodgrass brought rich emotional substance to poetry in such a way that rescued its human dimension from bloodless technical approaches. Writing in the Prairie Schooner, Frank H. Thompson took to task the Workshop for overemphasizing technique, chiding “the technically adept, empty poets that Paul Engle so complacently turns out.” Lewis Turco took exception, arguing that “although readers are used to this sort of remark concerning the [Workshop], the hostility displayed by various writers . . . such as Robert Lowell is remarkable and largely unwarranted.” Such dissent, Turco claimed, was largely directed at the legions of mediocre writers produced by the Workshop. Such weaker poets are inevitable products of the Workshop due to the law of averages in any student population ranging the gamut from stellar to abysmal. “Thus, the appearance every now and then of a Snodgrass . . . is expected and applauded” by critics such as Thompson. But “why must the rest be deplored—worse, vilified?” Turco asked. The Workshop is not an elitist star factory, he asserts, but endeavors to develop all writers to their full potential, regardless of their creative limitations. “If all our schools were to restrict their enrollments only to the potentially supreme,” according to Turco’s populist appeal, “we would have an unworkable society at best.”44

  Finding an occasion to deride the Workshop was relatively easy, since mediocre poets like Edmund Skellings had so far outnumbered the W. D. Snodgrasses. But what sustained the careers of weaker poets who were perennially envious of the success of Snodgrass—including a Guggenheim in 1972, nomination as Fellow of the Academy of American Poets in 1973, and praise as “one of the six best poets now writing in English” by 1987—was the vast network of Workshop graduates and faculty throughout the world. Engle certainly did not focus his attention on remediating his less adept students. Instead he was actively engaged in expanding the scope and power of this network, scurrying to answer phones, constantly excusing himself from conversation to handle his incessant flow of contacts. He often stopped class to answer a phone ringing in a nearby office. In one instance, a euphoric Engle reentered the classroom after handling a call to proudly announce the Iowa Natural Gas Fellowship in Creative Writing. The class erupted in laughter, the double meaning of gas in a room full of apprentice poets having escaped none. “Hurrying back to class, he would take a quick look at the poem under discussion and, without knowing what had been said so far, nonetheless wade in with remarks useful and to the point. And then, like as not the telephone would ring again,” Marvin Bell recollected.45 Engle’s preoccupation with pursuing “administrators, legislators, businessmen for the funds to support those students, their courses, the writers who taught them,” meant Engle’s criticism of student manuscripts “reverted to a sort of knee-jerk New Criticism,” according to Snodgrass.46

  Despite Engle and the faculty’s resistance to Snodgrass’s poetry, Lowell shared his pupil’s basic temperament. James B. Hall astutely observed that “For one kind of absolute taste in poetry, Robert Lowell was a pure example: He
was so sensitive, he trembled when he read to us.” Snodgrass also recognized Lowell’s special talent long after their conflict at the Workshop. In 1965, he affirmed his admiration for his old mentor with a ringing review of The Old Glory in the New York Review of Books, one of the most powerful critical platforms in the world. “In Praise of Robert Lowell” is at once a critical tour de force and an appreciation no one but Snodgrass could have produced, given his intimate knowledge of his craft, sources, and methods from hours of discussion in the Quonset huts on the muddy shores of the Iowa River.

  Although Snodgrass was grateful for both Lowell’s guidance and Engle’s willingness to admit him to the program, his treatment there was severe. Perhaps his harshest treatment came in the wake of his divorce. The hostile split left him wounded and virtually childless, removed from his role in the community as the father of his little family that lived happily if unglamorously in a converted Quonset near “the garbage house.”47 Before the divorce, he was often seen downtown with his wife and cherubic daughter Cynthia at parades and festivals like the one held for the city’s Fourth of July celebration. James Sunwall had fond memories of the Workshop in the 1950s, particularly its convivial community in which “our children had picnics by the river, while other husbands, such as W. D. Snodgrass, pushed their infants in strollers along the banks of the Iowa near Riverside Park.” In addition to regular visits to the City Park Zoo, which makes an appearance in the final image of Heart’s Needle, “all attended the Fourth of July Fireworks,” as Sunwall described the cohesive community of Workshop families.48