A Hybrid Ars Poetica: Levertov’s Musicality Meets Nelson’s Interiority
Nelson offers in her conclusion to “Confessional Poetry” a lens through which one should examine the poets who belong to the school:
Withdrawing into privacy to conduct a conversation with oneself is one of the most powerful images of autonomy that we have. The freedom of expression of the lyric – where the speaker has no obligations to others because there are no listeners other than self – translates into the freedom of self-creation where the speaker can – indeed, by the New Critical standards of that history.
A perfect example is Lowell’s poem Man and Wife. The theme is marriage. He is lying in his bed with his wife at sunrise. The sun is ablaze with colors of red, rising sun in war paint dyes us red (Line 2) which contrasts the blossoming white magnolia flowers blossoms on our magnolia ignite (Line 60). The tone is intimate, underscoring the motif of marriage. Yet, there is a sense of fear and anxiety that pervades throughout the poem. This is most evident by his lexical choices such as war paint (line 2), murderous (line 7), kingdom of mad (line 10), its hackeneyed speech, its homicidal eye (line 11). After the volta …Oh my petite (line 12), Lowell’s tone remains contemplative, but, it also intensifies as his memories, evocative of Freudian psychoanalysis, produce a sense of pathos: dragged me home alive (line 12), shrill verve (line 21) invective scorched (line 22), Sleepless (line 24), tirade (line 26), merciless (line 27). It is a pendulum that oscillates between tenderness and trauma. Consider the final verse’s metaphor breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head, designed to contrapose to line 8 All night I’ve held your hand. Furthermore, another noteworthy element is the punctuation.
Before the volta, the first two stanzas are complete thoughts ending in full stops. After the volta, the speaker embarks on one continuous thought strewn together with commas, semi-colons, colons, and hyphens, conveying a feeling that he is on the precipice of a fall into the kingdom madness. It is the ultimate example of the characteristics of confessional poetry that Nelson discusses. However, if we turn our attention to his poem Memories of West Street and Lepke, set within the confines of prison versus the imprisonment of domesticity, his use of sound devices such as alliteration, assonance, consonance, and onomatopoeia creates a musicality more similar to the ars poetica of Levertov’s organic poetry.
Levertov explains in her discourse on poetics, Some Notes on Organic Poetry, the chief characteristics of the school of organic poets:
It is in very much the same way that there can arise, out of fidelity to instress, a design that is the form of the poem-both its total form, its length and pace and tone, and the form of its parts (e.g., the rhythmic relationships of syllables within the line, and of line to line; the sonic relationships of vowels and consonants; the recurrence of images, the play of association, etc. (1084).
This description seems equally applicable to an analysis of Lowell’s Memories of West Street and Lepke. The poem contrasts his affluent upbringing against his dour jail sentence. The tone is more ironic and detached compared to Man and Wife, emphasizing his sense of self-deprecation. For brevity, a simple examination of the third stanza should suffice to illustrate the “musicality” Lowell creates which is more attuned to the poetics of Levertov.
This repetition of the “S” creates a modulated sound effect that ties the entire stanza together. Beginning in the first verse with West Street, it continues with a string of “S” sounds: school/ soccer/ saw/ Hudson/ sooty / clothesline/entanglements /tenements /Strolling metaphysics/Abramotitz/ jaundice/ pacifist/ so/ pimps/ muscular/ suburban/ suits. To compliment and unify the repetitive “S”, Lowell employs internal assonance. For example, the vowel sound of “O”, roof/ school/ sooty/ clothes/ shoes. This sentence culminates in an alliterative “F”, he wore rope shoes and preferred fallen fruit (line 30). Phonetically, both the “S” and the “F” are frictives. Their alternation creates a hissing effect, reflective of Lowell’s theme of self-deprecation and state of inner turbulence. Additionally, at the end of the second sentence, the stanza’s ending is an alliterative “B” blew/ beat/ black/ blue. “B” is a plosive. In general, plosives are usually associated with harsh sentiment: In this case, the “B” is onomatopoeic of someone being plummeted.
In conclusion, Lowell’s attention to the use of sound is reminiscent of Levertov’s idea of musicality, albeit to a somewhat different end. Levertov seeks to examine boundaries beyond what we know of ourselves and an awe of nature which borderlines the transcendence of the transcendentals. She explains:
The X factor, the magic, is when we come upon those rifts and make those leaps. A religious devotion to the truth, to the splendor of the authentic, involves the writer in a process rewarding in itself; but when that devotion brings us to undreamed abysses and we find ourselves sailing slowly over them and landing on the other side – that’s ecstasy (1085).
This type of metaphysics is not found in Lowell’s poetics of anxiety, self-deprecation, and perennial mal d’être that is self-inflicted and/or institutional. Yet, Levertov’s idea of rifts and leaps is certainly present in his ars poetica: It just leads the reader to an abysmally darker sense of Being absent of Levertov’s mythical wonder- albeit equally beautiful in all of its apathy and pathos.
I enjoy how you turn Levertov’s ideas of organic form, associative logic and sound patterning, which tend, formally, towards the sort of autonomy and self creation that we sense in the excerpt from Nelson, on their head by, well, getting into Lowell’s head. There, the associative logic and sound patterning lead, as you say, to more suffocating “poetics of anxiety and self-deprecation.”