Chapter 44 - Psychoanalytic Poetics

Summary

W.H. Auden's scenario implies that psychoanalysis will produce a new poem. Poets protested that the term confessional ignored meticulous craftsmanship and knowing self-dramatization. Poets from midcentury have explored psychoanalytic models of personhood, voice, and dialogue to complicate models of lyric expressivity. Mouths recur throughout Plath's poetry, mediating between the realm of bodies, blood, and wounds and the potentially more ethereal realm of voice. The sequence of poems about beekeeping that closes Sylvia Plath's Ariel manuscript links poetic creation with organic production and reproduction. To speak because one is shattered might be to utter a cry of emotional devastation. Although it might equally be to recognize that to speak is to be open to, and broken open by, the conditions of speech: psychoanalytic, linguistic, social, and historical. In the new century, the divide between sincere lyric and experimental poetry has been perceived to have broken down.