I Made You to Find Me I MADE YOU TO FIND ME The Coming of Age of the Woman Poet and the Politics of Poetic Address Jane Hedley T H E O H IO S T A T E U N I VER SITY P R E SS | C O L UM B US Copyright © 2009 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hedley, Jane. I made you to find me : the coming of age of the woman poet and the politics of poetic address / Jane Hedley. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1101-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Women poets, American—20th century. 2. American poetry—Women authors— History and criticism. 3. American poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 4. American literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 5. Women and literature—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. PS151.I25 2009 811.'54099287—dc22 2009002739 The author has received permission to quote from the following sources: The Un- abridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil (New York: Random House, 2000); Carol Muske, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), courtesy of the University of Michigan Press; Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1972), reprinted by consent of Brooks Permissions; “The Double Image,” from To Bedlam and Part Way Back by Anne Sexton, copyright © 1960 by Anne Sexton, renewed 1988 by Linda G. Sexton, reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, all rights reserved; and Gwendolyn Brooks (© 1949), Poem XI from Annie Allen, “The Womanhood” (New York: Harper Peren- nial, 1999). The poem “SOS” by Imamu Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) is reprinted in its entirety in chapter 4 by permission of SLL/Sterling Lord Literistic, Inc. Copyright by Amiri Baraka. Cover design by Mia Risberg Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in ITC Giovanni Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Amer- ican National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my colleagues and students at Bryn Mawr College CONTENTS List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction Making “You” to Find “Me” 1 Chapter 1 Anne Sexton and the Gender of Poethood 25 Chapter 2 Adrienne Rich’s Anti-Confessional Poetics 48 Chapter 3 Sylvia Plath’s Ekphrastic Impulse 71 Chapter 4 Race and Rhetoric in the Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks 103 Coda Presence and Absence 144 Notes 151 Bibliography 179 Index 189 ILLUSTRAT I ONS Figure 1 Giorgio De Chirico, Conversation Among the Ruins, 1927. Chester Dale Collection. Image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 83 Figure 2 Paul Klee, Perseus. (Der Witz hat über das Leid gesiegt.) 1904, 12; Perseus (wit has triumphed over grief): etching, 12.6 x 14 cm. Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern. 89 Figure 3 Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in Paris, August 1956. Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, © Warren J. Plath. 91 ix AC KNOWLEDGMENTS y indebtedness to other scholars’ published work will emerge in due course, and is documented in the footnotes, but I would M especially like to thank a few colleagues from whom I have learned a great deal about contemporary poetry and poetics in more informal exchanges: Heather Dubrow, Roger Gilbert, Nick Halpern, Karl Kirchwey, Jeanne Minahan, and Willard Spiegelman. A wonder- ful group of Philadelphia-area colleagues, including Scott Black, Betsy Bolton, Claire Busse, Edmund Campos, Nora Johnson, Laura McGrane, Kristen Poole, Katherine Rowe, and Lauren Shohet, read drafts of the book’s individual chapters and helped me to do yet further thinking about the issues they raise; I’m grateful for their time, their candor, and their friendship. At The Ohio State University Press I have been fortunate indeed to work with Senior Editor Sandy Crooms and her superb editorial staff; special thanks to Copyediting Coordinator Maggie Diehl. I am grateful to two anonymous readers for the press whose suggestions helped me to make this a better book in several key ways. Bryn Thompson, our departmental secretary at Bryn Mawr, did the work of securing permis- sion to include the images that appear in chapter 3. xi xii Bryn Mawr College, where I have spent my whole career as a teacher, AC KNOWLEDGMENTS has supported my work with sabbatical leaves, research funds, and an institutional expectation that I would put both my students and my scholarship first; with students as good as I’ve had at Bryn Mawr, this has proved eminently feasible. I would especially like to thank Nancy Vickers and Robert Dostal, who were Bryn Mawr’s president and pro- vost, respectively, during most of the time I was writing this book, for increasing the frequency of sabbaticals and raising the level of fund- ing for faculty research. My present and former colleagues in the Eng- lish department have made coming to work every day a treat and an adventure. I am also grateful to those colleagues at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges whose commitment to feminist and gender studies over the past thirty-plus years has made the “bi-co” a hospitable place to engage in this kind of scholarly project—among them Jane Caplan, Anne Dalke, Elaine Hansen, Carole Joffe, Raji Mohan, Judith Shapiro, and Sharon Ullman. My colleague Joseph Kramer, now emeritus, whose wide-ranging knowledge of English and American literature includes both lyric poetry and queer studies, read an early draft of every chapter and made astute suggestions for revision. Often Joe saw where I was headed next before I did, and his belief in the project’s potential to interest read- ers never wavered (or if it did, he never let on). Sandra Berwind, with whom I traded a course in “The Lyric” back and forth while she was my colleague in the English department, has kept me walking and talking about this book throughout the whole process of its gestation and writ- ing; Sandra’s advice and support have been important to me. My sister Barbara Turner-Vesselago, who writes and teaches writing, is a good friend to all my intellectual endeavors, and our sororal relationship has itself become part of the book in all kinds of ways. Tony Jenkins’s undergraduate honors seminar at the University of Victoria brought it home to me many years ago that I would never tire of dissecting and discussing poems. At Bryn Mawr, my own undergrad- uate students have been reading and discussing women’s poetry with me since the 1970s. This book is dedicated to them and to my faculty colleagues, with heartfelt thanks for their intellectual companionship. Steve Salkever, with whom I have been privileged to share domestic arrangements for more than twenty years, has been my professional colleague for even longer. In both capacities I couldn’t live without him, for too many reasons to list here. INTRODU C T I ON MAKING “YOU” TO FIND “ME” Arrogant, I think I have written lines which qualify me to be The Poetess of America (as Ted will be The Poet of England and her dominions). —The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, entry for March 29, 1958 The prototypical woman poets of the twentieth century are, of course, Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich. They were (along with Anne Sexton) the beginning of an era. Prior to this era the categories were set well apart. Women and poets. Of course, there was the Uber-frau-ish “poetess,” a dread diminutive with an arched eyebrow over every syllable. —Carol Muske, Women and Poetry: Truth, Autobiography, and the Shape of the Self My father provided me with . an old desk . with . a removable glass-protected shelf at the top, for books. Certainly up there, holding spe- cial delights for a writing-girl, were the Emily books, L. M. Montgomery’s books about a Canadian girl who wrote . dreamed, reached. Cer- tainly there, also, to look down at me whenever I sat at the desk, was Paul Laurence Dunbar. “You,” my mother had early announced, “are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar.” —Gwendolyn Brooks, Report from Part One n the first of these three passages, the status of “poetess” is invoked in a spirit of playful grandiosity by an aspirant to poethood who has Ijust produced—to her own amazement—eight poems in as many days. Four years later, on the verge of writing the poems that would lay claim posthumously to the status she craved, this same poet would align herself with “the poetess Anne Sexton,” telling a radio interviewer that she found Sexton’s willingness to engage with certain “private and taboo subjects” “quite new, quite exciting.”1 Meanwhile, however, on 1 2 the back cover of her first published volume, The Colossus, poetry critic INTRODUCTION A[lfred] Alvarez was assuring potential readers that “Miss Plath . steers clear of feminine charm, deliciousness, gentility, super-sensitivity, and the act of being a poetess: she simply writes good poetry.”2 According to Alvarez, furnishing book jacket copy in 1961, “poetess” was indeed a “dread diminutive” whose connotations needed fending off in the interest of garnering the widest possible readership for a woman poet’s work. Implicit in Alvarez’s praise for Plath’s début volume is the con- viction that good poems are not acts of self-expression, but of mak- ing—acts to which gender, a category of social identity, is or should be irrelevant.