The Confessional School The Beat Generation

1. Chapter 21 The Confessional School � The Beat Generation

2. Features of The Confessional School: A ruthless, excruciating self-analysis of one�s own background and heritage, one�s own most private desires and fantasies etc., and the urgent �I�ll-tell-it-all-to-you� impulse. Representatives: Delmore Schwartz, Stanley Kunitz Theodore Roethke, John Berryman W. D. Snodgrass, Allen Ginsberg Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich ?. The Confessional School

3. ?. Robert Lowell ( 1917-1977) 1. Literary Status an American poet, the founder of the confessional poetry movement the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946 Pulitzer Prize winner in both 1947 and 1974.

4. 2. Life and Career Lowell was born in Boston, Massachusetts to a Boston Brahmin family that included poets Amy Lowell and James Russell Lowell. He attended Harvard College for two years before transferring to Kenyon College, where he studied poetry under John Crowe Ransom and received an undergraduate degree in 1940. He took graduate courses at Louisiana State University where he studied with Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks. Lowell was politically involved�he became a conscientious objector during the Second World War and was imprisoned as a result, and actively protested against the war in Vietnam�and his personal life was full of marital and psychological turmoil. He suffered from severe episodes of manic depression, for which he was repeatedly hospitalized. Lowell continued to develop his work with sometimes uneven results until his sudden death from a heart attack at age 60. He served as a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets from 1962 until his death in 1977.

5. Poetry Collections Land of Unlikeness (1944) Lord Weary's Castle (1946) The Mills of The Kavanaughs (1951) Life Studies (1959) Phaedra (translation) (1961) Imitations (1961) For the Union Dead (1964) The Old Glory (1965) Near the Ocean (1967) The Voyage & other versions of poems of Baudelaire (1969)

6. Prometheus Bound (1969) Notebook (1969) (Revised and Expanded Edition, 1970) For Lizzie and Harriet (1973) History (1973) The Dolphin (1973) Selected Poems (1976) (Revised Edition, 1977) Day by Day (1977) The Oresteia of Aeschylus (1978) Collected Poems (2003) Selected Poems (2006) (Expanded Edition)

7. Masterpiece: Life Studies ? Introduction Life Studies is the fourth book of poems by Robert Lowell. Most critics consider it one of Lowell's most important books, and the Academy of American Poets named it one of their Groundbreaking Books. It is a masterpiece of Confessional poetry. The book won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960. It is natural that Life Studies concludes in a positive way because it is meant to be a series of studies on life and survival. A series of studies of personal life to begin with, Life Studies becomes eventually a scrutiny of American life in general.

8. ? Structure The book is in four parts. Part One contains four poems: Beyond the Alps The Banker's Daughter Inauguration Day: January 1953 A Mad Negro Soldier Confined at Munich Part Two is a long prose passage entitled "91 Revere Street" Part Three contains four poems: Ford Madox Ford For George Santayana To Delmore Schwartz Words for Hart Crane Part Four is titled "Life Studies" and comprises:

9. I My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow Dunbarton Grandparents Commander Lowell Terminal Days at Beverly Farms Father's Bedroom For Sale Sailing Home from Rapallo During Fever Waking in the Blue Home After Three Months Away II Memories of West Street and Lepke Man and Wife "To Speak of Woe That Is in Marriage" Skunk Hour

10. ? Content Part I of the book contains four poems that are similar in style and tone to the poems of Lowell's previous books, The Mill of the Kavanaughs and Lord Weary's Castle. They're well-polished, formal in their use of meter and rhyme, and fairly impersonal. This first section can be interpreted as a transition section, signaling Lowell's move away from Catholicism, as evidenced by the book's first poem, "Beyond the Alps," as well as a move away from the traditional and impersonal style of poetry that characterized Lowell's writing while he was still a practicing Catholic and closely associated with the New Critical-inspired Fugitives literary movement.

11. Part II is the first (and only) significant passage of prose to appear in one of Lowell's books. It centers, with intricate detail, on Lowell's childhood in Boston's Beacon Hill neighborhood when he grew up at 91 Revere Street, the street address that gives the piece its title. The section introduces and describes the relationship between Lowell and his parents as well as other relatives in the Lowell clan (some of whom show up in later poems in Part IV). It sets the stage for the portraits of his family members in the book's final section. According to Ian Hamilton, one of Lowell's unofficial biographers, this section was begun as a potentially therapeutic assignment suggested by Lowell's therapist. Lowell also stated that this prose exercise led him to the stylistic breakthrough of the poems in Part IV.

12. Part III contains four odes to living and deceased writers who influenced Lowell; with the exception of Hart Crane, Lowell knew all of them personally and considered them to be his contemporaries (particularly the poet Delmore Schwartz). Part IV contains the majority of the book's poems and is given the subheading of "Life Studies." These poems are the ones that critics refer to as "confessional." These "confessional" poems are the ones that document Lowell's struggle with mental illness and include pieces like "Skunk Hour" and "Waking in the Blue." Still, the majority of the poems in this section actually revolve around Lowell's family (as the section's title would suggest) with a particular emphasis on the troubled marriage of his parents. Lowell's grandfather also receives significant attention in poems like "Dunbarton" and "Grandparents." Part IV consists of two subsections of altogether 15 poems. Section one is a sequence of 11 poems, all about failure. Section two contains 4 poems all about the poet himself.

13. ? Critical response M. L. Rosenthal wrote a review, entitled �Poetry as Confession� which first applied the term �confession� to Lowell's approach, and led to the name of the school of Confessional poetry. Life Studies is commonly seen as the first confessional book of poetry, although some poets and poetry critics such as Adam Kirsch and Frank Bidart question the validity of this view. However, no one questions the book's lasting influence. The website for the Academy for American Poets states that, "Lowell's work in Life Studies had an especially profound impact that is discernible not only in the poetry of his direct contemporaries, such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, but also in the treatment of biographical detail by countless poets who followed." John Thompson in The Kenyon Review supports this contention stating that, "For these poems, the question of propriety no longer exists. They have made a conquest: what they have won is a major expansion of the territory of poetry."

14. A. Sylvia Plath (1932 -1963) Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two collections The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. ?. Plath and Sexton

15. Life Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963. Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.

16. Themes Sylvia Plath's early poems exhibit what would become her typical imagery, using personal and nature-based depictions featuring, for example, the moon, blood, hospitals, foetuses, and skulls. Late in 1959, when she and Hughes were at the Yaddo writers' colony in New York State, she wrote the seven-part "Poem for a Birthday", echoing Theodore Roethke's Lost Son sequence, though its theme is her own traumatic breakdown and suicide attempt at 21. After 1960 her work moved into a more surreal landscape darkened by a sense of imprisonment and looming death, overshadowed by her father. The Colossus is shot through with themes of death, redemption and resurrection. After Hughes left, Plath produced, in less than two months, the forty poems of rage, despair, love, and vengeance on which her reputation mostly rests. The poems in Ariel mark a departure from her earlier work into a more personal arena of poetry.

17. Works Poetry collections The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) Ariel (1961�1965) Three Women: A Monologue for Three Voices (1968) Crossing the Water (1971) Winter Trees (1971) The Collected Poems (1981) Selected Poems (1985) Plath: Poems (1998) Sylvia Plath Reads, Harper Audio (2000) (Audio)

18. Collected prose and novels The Bell Jar: A novel (1963), under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" Letters Home: Correspondence 1950�1963 (1975) Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (1977) The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982) The Magic Mirror (published 1989), Plath's Smith College senior thesis The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, edited by Karen V. Kukil (2000) Children's books The Bed Book (1976) The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit (1996) Collected Children's Stories (UK, 2001) Mrs. Cherry's Kitchen (2001)

19. Masterpiece: Daddy Daddy is probably the most famous of all Plath�s poems. a. Structure and form The poem repeats in 5-line stanzas with meter and rhyme scheme resembling the style and structure of a nursery-rhyme. Sylvia Plath, introducing the poem for a BBC radio reading shortly before her suicide, famously described the poem as about "a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God.� Coupled with morbid imagery, the narrator's childlike intonation evokes a keen state of unease in the reader throughout the poem, climaxing in the final lines "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through".

20. b. Common interpretations "Daddy" deals with a girl's deep attachment to the memory of her father and the unhappiness it caused in her life. It can be interpreted along with other poems by Plath as semi-autobiographical regarding her own relationship with her father or her husband, Ted Hughes. Plath's poems "Full Fathom Five� and "The Colossus" also explore the relationship between a girl and a dominant father figure. Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,Ghastly statue with one grey toe[...]And a head in the freakish Atlantic In all three of these lines, her father is portrayed differently. In "Full Fathom Five", he is portrayed as the god of the sea; surfacing only on occasion. He is portrayed as ancient, ethereal, mysterious, and powerful. Quite differently, in "The Colossus", he is portrayed as a massive fallen statue, who Plath has spent her life trying to reassemble, and in so doing, resurrect. In "Daddy", Plath continues in the same vein as "The Colossus", portraying her father in the same manner. However, "Daddy" differs from the others in that it shows an attempt to change the situation. Plath states: "Daddy, I have had to kill you." By this, she of course means her unhealthy relationship with the memory of her father. The extent to which her father's memory affected her is obvious; especially from the twelfth stanza on. She states

21. At twenty I tried to dieAnd get back, back, back to you.I thought even the bones would do. Here Plath refers to an attempted suicide by overdose of sleeping pills, stating that it was an attempt to get back to her father, to be with him in death. She continues by stating that: But they pulled me out of the sack,And they stuck me together with glue.And then I knew what to do.I made a model of you,A man in black with a Meinkampf lookAnd a love of the rack and the screw.And I said I do, I do. The 'man in black with a Meinkampf look' is a reference to her husband, Ted Hughes (who dressed head to toe in black), from whom she had recently separated. She portrays their relationship as a manifestation of her Electra complex, that she was attracted to Hughes because he reminded her of her father. In the next stanza, Plath describes the outcome of this relationship.

22. If I've killed one man, I've killed two-The vampire who said he was youAnd drank my blood for a year, The two men she refers to are her father and Hughes. Killed here means that she has moved on, and forgotten about them. Although from the portrayal of both of them as vampires, it is obvious that this was not done easily, that Plath endured seven years of marriage to this 'vampire'. But, as she says in the poem "So Daddy, I'm finally through." In stating this she means that she has overcome the memory of her father, and has moved on. This could also mean that Plath is through with dealing with these painful memories and living with these thoughts going through her mind since she commits suicide a mere 5 months after writing this poem. C. Rejection of religion Sylvia Plath's rejection of religion is also a potential theme in "Daddy". Plath explicitly compares her father to God and later to a devil, prompting some to suggest that she was openly attacking her own religious beliefs. (She was raised as a Unitarian.)

23. B. Anne Sexton (1928 -1974) Anne Sexton was an influential American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her suicidal tendencies, long battle against depression, and various intimate details from her own private life, including her relationship with her husband and children.

24. Life Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts to Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Harvey. She spent most of her childhood in Boston. In 1945 she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school, Lowell, Massachusetts, later spending a year at Garland School. For a time she modeled for Boston's Hart Agency. On August 16, 1948, she married Alfred Sexton and they remained together until 1973. She had two children named Linda Gray and Joyce Ladd. On October 4, 1974, Sexton locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

25. Works Poetry and Prose (collections and novels) Uncompleted Novel-started in the 1960s To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) The Starry Night (1961) All My Pretty Ones (1962) Live or Die (1966) - Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1967 Love Poems (1969) Mercy Street, a 2-act play performed at the American Place Theatre (1969) Transformations (1971) The Death Notebooks (1974) The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975; posthumous) 45 Mercy Street (1976; posthumous)

26. Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977; posthumous) Words for Dr. Y. (1978; posthumous) No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose, edited by Steven E. Colburn (1985; posthumous) Children's books all co-written with Maxine Kumin 1963 Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall) 1964 More Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall) 1974 Joey and the Birthday Present (illustrated by Evaline Ness) 1975 The Wizard's Tears (illustrated by Evaline Ness)

27. Content and themes of work Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. Aside from her standard themes of depression, isolation, suicide, and despair, her work also encompasses issues specific to women, such as menstruation, abortion, and more broadly masturbation and adultery, before such subjects were commonly addressed in poetic discourse. Her work towards the end of the sixties has been criticized as "preening, lazy and flip" by otherwise respectful critics. Some critics regard her dependence on alcohol as compromising her last work. Her work started out as being about herself, however as her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poetic themes. Transformations (1971), which is a re-telling of Grimm�s Fairy Tales, is one such book. Much has been made of the tangled threads of her writing, her life and her depression, much in the same way as with Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963. Levertov says, "we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction."

28. Her Kind have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitchover the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.A woman like that is not a woman, quite.I have been her kind.I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned.A woman like that is misunderstood.I have been her kind.I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivorwhere your flames still bite my thighand my ribs crack where your wheels wind.A woman like that is not ashamed to die.I have been her kind. 

29. The Beat Generation, also known as the beat movement, were a group of American writers who emerged in the 1950s. Among its most influential members were Gary Snyder, the radical poet Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. The Beat Generation rejected the prevailing academic attitude to poetry, feeling that poetry should be brought to the people. A common theme that linked them all together was a rejection of the prevailing American middle-class values, the purposelessness of modern society and the need for withdrawal and protest. The major Beat writings include Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and William Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Both Howl and Naked Lunch became the focus of obscenity trials in the United States that helped to liberalize what could be legally published. ?. The Beat Generation

30. ?. Allen Ginsberg (1926 -1997) an American poet who vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. a rebel, a trailblazer, and an explorer of the unknown a leading figure of the Beat Generation Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl� is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation

31. Life and Career Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey. As a student at Columbia University in New York in the 1950s, he fell in with rebel writers such as Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs. He traveled to San Francisco, where his 1955 public reading of Howl launched the poem as a counterculture hit, helped along by the publicity over an obscenity charge against Ginsberg, a homosexual. During the 1960s Ginsberg became one of the more prominent figures in the American anti-war movement, as he also joined love-ins, took LSD, and generally grabbed every opportunity to harass the authorities. Still, his anger and rebellion were perceived as generally good-natured, and in 1974 he won the National Book Award for The Fall of America: Poems of These States, 1965-1971. in his later years he served as a kind of Grand Old Man of pop counterculture, even appearing in a video for MTV in 1996.

32. Style and technique From the study of his idols and mentors and the inspiration of his friends�not to mention his own experiments�Ginsberg developed an individualistic style that's easily identified as Ginsbergian. Ginsberg often had to defend his choice to break away from traditional poetic structure, often citing Williams, Pound, and Whitman as precursors. Ginsberg's style may have seemed to critics chaotic or unpoetic, but to Ginsberg it was an open, ecstatic expression of thoughts and feelings that were naturally poetic. He believed strongly that traditional formalist considerations were archaic and didn't apply to reality. Many of Ginsberg's early long line experiments contain some sort of anaphoric repetition, or repetition of a "fixed base�. In the 60s, after employing it in some sections of "Kaddish" he, for the most part, abandoned the anaphoric repetition. He abandoned the "stepped triadic" when he developed his long line, but the stepped lines showed up later, most significantly in the travelogues of The Fall of America.

33. Works Howl and Other Poems (1956) Howl and Other Poems 50th Anniversary Edition (2006) Kaddish and Other Poems (1961) Empty Mirror: Early Poems (1961) Reality Sandwiches (1963) The Yage Letters (1963) � with William S. Burroughs Planet News (1971) Fire Blues: Rags, Ballads and Harmonium Songs 1971-1974 (1975) The Fall of America: Poems of These States (1973) Iron Horse (1972) Sad Dust Glories (1975) Plutonian Ode: Poems 1977�1980 (1981) Collected Poems 1947-1980 (1984) Republished with later material added as Collected Poems 1947-1997 , New York, Harper Collins, 2006 White Shroud Poems: 1980�1985 (1986) Deliberate Prose 1952�1995 (2000)

34. Masterpiece: Howl Howl is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch (1959). "Howl" was originally written as a performance piece, but it was later published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of City Lights Books. The poem was originally considered to be obscene, and Ferlinghetti was arrested and charged with its publication. On October 3, 1957 Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the poem was not obscene, and "Howl" went on to become the most popular poem of the Beat Generation

35. Overview and structure of "Howl" The poem consists of three parts, with an additional footnote. Part I Called by Ginsberg, "a lament for the Lamb in America with instances of remarkable lamb-like youths," Part I is the best known, and communicates scenes, characters, and situations drawn from Ginsberg's personal experience as well as from the community of poets, artists, political radicals, jazz musicians, drug addicts, and psychiatric patients whom he encountered in the late 1940s and early 50's. These people represent what he considers "the best minds of my generation," an ironic declaration since, in what members of the Beat Generation considered the oppressively conformist and materialistic 50's, those Ginsberg called "best minds" were unrepresented outcasts. The shocking aspect of the poem was further enhanced by Ginsberg's frank descriptions of sexual, often homosexual, acts. Most lines in this section contain the fixed base "who". In "Notes Written on Finally Recording Howl," Ginsberg writes, "I depended on the word 'who' to keep the beat, a base to keep measure, return to and take off from again onto another streak of invention."

36. Part II Ginsberg says that Part II, in relation to Part I, "names the monster of mental consciousness that preys on the Lamb." Part II is a rant about the state of industrial civilization, characterized in the poem as "Moloch". Ginsberg was inspired to write Part II during a period of peyote-induced visionary consciousness in which he saw a hotel fa�ade as a monstrous and horrible visage which he identified with that of Moloch, the Biblical idol in Leviticus to whom the Canaanites sacrificed children. Ginsberg intends that the characters he portrays in Part I be understood to have been sacrificed to this idol. Moloch is also the name of an industrial, demonic figure in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, a film that Ginsberg credits with influencing "Howl, Part II" in his annotations for the poem (see especially Howl: Original Draft Facsimile, Transcript & Variant Versions). Most lines in this section contain the fixed base "Moloch". Ginsberg says of Part II, "Here the long line is used as a stanza form broken into exclamatory units punctuated by a base repetition, Moloch."

37. Part III Part III, in relation to Parts I, II, and IV is "a litany of affirmation of the Lamb in its glory," according to Ginsberg. It is directly addressed to Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met during a brief stay at a psychiatric hospital in 1949; called "Rockland" in the poem, it was actually Columbia Presbyterian Psychological Institute. This section is notable for its refrain, "I'm with you in Rockland," and represents something of a turning point away from the grim tone of the "Moloch"-section. Of the structure, Ginsberg says Part III is, "pyramidal, with a graduated longer response to the fixed base." Footnote The closing section of the poem is the "Footnote", characterized by its repetitive "Holy!" mantra, an ecstatic assertion that everything is holy. Ginsberg says, "I remembered the archetypal rhythm of Holy Holy Holy weeping in a bus on Kearny Street, and wrote most of it down in notebook there ... I set it as 'Footnote to Howl' because it was an extra variation of the form of Part II."

38. Rhythm The frequently quoted (and often parodied) opening lines set the theme and rhythm for the poem: I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix; Angel-headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. Ginsberg's own commentary discusses the work as an experiment with the "long line". For example, Part I is structured as a single run-on sentence with a repetitive refrain dividing it up into breaths. Ginsberg said, "Ideally each line of 'Howl' is a single breath unit. My breath is long�� that's the measure, one physical-mental inspiration of thought contained in the elastic of a breath." On another occasion, he explained: "the line length ... you'll notice that they're all built on bop�� you might think of them as a bop refrain��chorus after chorus after chorus�� the ideal being, say, Lester Young in Kansas City in 1938, blowing 72 choruses of 'The Man I Love' until everyone in the hall was out of his head..."

39. ?. Gary Snyder (1930- ) an American poet (often associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance) an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist (frequently described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology") Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Gary Snyder was connected with the "Beats" in the mid 1950s and early 1960s. He has been placed next to Ginsberg in reputation among this group. Snyder was in spiritual consonance with the Beats. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. Snyder has also translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese.

40. Ideas and Themes For Snyder the wildness is always a tonic to man. He feels that we humans need to sink back in nature to brace up for life even if it is for a stay as brief as one night. The "stillness" is central to Snyder's poetic Concern. He seeks to locate a point of stillness amid the constant change of the universe. This stillness is important because it offers a moment, a break, a breathing space for modern man and makes it easier for him to cope. Snyder seems to think that the job of the poet is to catch sight of the poetic, and the poetic resides nowhere but in the natural world. It is necessary to say a few words about Snyder's poems that portray the erotic experience, one primal activity of human life. The tone in these works is always celebratory. Snyder may be didactic; he may have a political vision that is good. But he will not be mainly remembered for these. He will make an imprint on history if he persists in his belief in nature as the stay against confusion (to quote Frost) and writes accordingly.

41. Works Myths & Texts (1960) Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End (1965) The Back Country (1967) Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (1969) Regarding Wave (1969) Earth House Hold (1969) Turtle Island (1974) The Old Ways (1977) He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979) The Real Work (1980) Axe Handles (1983) Passage Through India (1983) Left Out in the Rain (1988) The Practice of the Wild (1990) No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992) A Place in Space (1995) Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations (1999) Danger on Peaks (2005) Back on the Fire: Essays (2007) The Politics of Ethnopoetics (1975)

42. ?. Merwin, Bly, and Wright W. S. Merwin , Robert Bly , and James Wright�s works have revealed some quality in common. They do not seem to like the sight of the manifestations of "civilization" such as roads, wires, and the cityscape. They are worried about environmental pollution like global warming, oil spills, and the use of pesticides which threatens the survival of the humankind and the species in general. They feel the terror of war. Somehow they find value in the primitive, in nature and wildness, and believe that the humankind would be better off if they could live the way Snyder does, or like Robert Bly (who once stayed in the farm country of Minnesota). To them nature and civilization form an inevitable antithesis, and we humans stand at the point where two roads branch out into the future.

43. W. S. Merwin W. S. Merwin was born in New York, son of a clergyman. He studied medieval literature and romance languages, and stayed long in Europe--France, Spain, and Portugal. Merwin has received many honors, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (in both 1971 and 2009) and the Tanning Prize, one of the highest honors bestowed by the Academy of American Poets, as well as the Golden Wreath of the Struga Poetry Evenings. In 2010, the Library of Congress named Merwin the seventeenth United States Poet Laureate to replace the outgoing Kay Ryan.

44. The theme of his poetry is generally concerned with the dilemmas of humankind and the wholesome effect of the natural world. He wrote about Vietnam war (read his "The Asians Dying"), the death of the whales (read "For a Coming Extinction"), the ecological pollution ("The Last One"), and the direction America takes, its poisoning of the earth and its hi-tech triumphs emerging as symbols of death. There is a pessimistic strain of thought in Merwin.But everything is not lost yet. Nature and solitude may offer "a pale resurrection" to man. "The Drunk in the Furnace" illustrates the point well.

45. Robert Bly (1926- ) Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement. Robert Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota. He was enlisted in the navy during the war and returned to complete his B. A. at Harvard. Then he spent three years in solitude, mostly in New York City, and stated later that a poet needs to experience loneliness and "inwardness." After attending the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa in 1955, he went on a Fulbright scholarship to Norway where he met famous European and South American authors like the German poet Goerg Trakl. Back to the U. S., he settled on a farm his father bought for him.

46. Regarding Bly's poetics, in addition to his views on surrealism, he feels that the poet must free himself from his rational ego and release the deeper, the less conscious levels of the mind, and that modern poetry should grasp the flowing psychic energy. His notion on imagery is known as the "deep image." was "petals on a wet black bough," to him, the image was "death on the wet deep roads of the guitar." This is associated with his stance on the deeper, unconscious aspect of the poetic mind.This "deep image" idea of his influenced quite a few contemporary writers like Robert creeley, Gary Snyder, and James Wright. Bly's poetry is generally moody. There is exhibited an amount of obsession with death in some works. His 1979 volume, This Tree Will be Here for a Thousand Years, along with his "Snowy Fields" poetry, contains some of his best memorable poems.

47. James Wright (1927-1980) He was born and grew up on a farm in Martins Ferry, Ohio and experienced poverty and its emotional impact in the years of the Depression that was his childhood. Themes: Mostly he wrote in his poetry about the Midwest, the America he knew at first hand, the poverty of the river towns along the Ohio, the suffering, both physical and emotional, of the underdog, the low, the "social outsiders." He was sensitive to the seamy side of life and felt keenly about the sad aspects of the world of man where there is so much of loneliness, pain, weariness, and death. Hence the depressed mood of his poems.

48. Formal Features: Wright experienced some drastic stylistic change in his career. He began writing poems in traditional forms, such as the sonnets, the iambic pentameter, and regular rhymes. After his second book Wright felt a moment of crisis when he could not go on writing well in the traditional way. Wright visited Bly's farm, fell under the influence of the "deep image" or "emotive imagination," abandoned his previous methods of writing, and wrote a new poetry of leaping images and free verse of American colloquial speech. Wright's volumes include The Green Wall (1957) Saint Judas (1959) The Branch Will Not Break (1963) Collected Poems (1972) which won him a number of awards including the Pulitzer Prize To a Blossoming Pear Tree (1977) This Journey (1982) Above the River: The Collected Poems (1990).

49. Thank You!