Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems

by W.D. Snodgrass

Until the late 1970s, W.D. Snodgrass was known primarily as a confessional poet and a key player in the emergence of that mode of poetry in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Snodgrass makes poetry out of the daily neuroses and everyday failures of a man—a husband, father, and teacher. This domestic suffering occurs against a backdrop of more universal suffering which Snodgrass believes is inherent in the human experience. Not for Specialists includes 35 new poems complemented by the superb work he wrote in the Pulitzer Prize winning collection, Heart’s Needle, along with poetry from five other distinguished collections.

from “Nocturnes”

Seen from higher up, it makes its first move
in the low creekbed, the marshlands
down the valley, spreading across the open
hayfields, the hedgerows with their tops
still lit, laps the roadbed, flows over
lawns and gardens, past the house and up
the wooded hillside back behind us
till only some few rays still scythe
between the treetrunks from the far horizon
and are gone.

W. D. Snodgrass, born in Pennsylvania in 1926, is the author of more than 20 books of poetry, including The Fuehrer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (BOA, 1995); Each in His Season (BOA, 1993); and Heart's Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His other books include To Sound Like Yourself: Essays on Poetry (BOA, 2002), After-Images: Autobiographical Sketches (BOA, 1999) and six volumes of translation, including Selected Translations (BOA Editions, 1998), which won the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award.

Genres: Poetry

251 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

William De Witt Snodgrass, pseudonym S. S. Gardons, is an American poet and a 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner.

Snodgrass's first poems appeared in 1951, and throughout the 1950's he published in some of the most prestigious magazines: Botteghe Oscure, Partisan Review, The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Hudson Review. However, in 1957, five sections from a sequence entitled Heart's Needle were included in Hall, Pack and Simpson's anthology, New Poets of England and America, and these were to mark a turning-point. When Lowell had been shown early versions of these poems, in 1953, he had disliked them, but now he was full of admiration.

By the time Heart's Needle was published, in 1959, Snodgrass had already won the The Hudson Review Fellowship in Poetry and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Poetry Prize. However, his first book brought him more: a citation from the Poetry Society of America, a grant from the National Institute of Arts, and, most important of all, 1960's Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. It is often said that Heart's Needle inaugurated confessional verse. Snodgrass disliked the term. Still, it should be pointed out that the genre he was reviving here seemed revolutionary to most of his contemporaries, reared as they had been on the anti-expressionistic principles of the New Critics. Snodgrass's confessional work was to have a profound effect on many of his contemporaries, amongst them, most importantly, Robert Lowell.

Reviews

[Bradley Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Snodgrass is, in my mind, one of the last of the great formal poets. His poems are about as formal as they come, in terms of meter and even rhyme. But, unlike most such structured poems, they flow, in most cases, like ordinary conversational language. The regular structure is almost subtle enough to avoid notice, if you don't look for it, similar to the way that a skilled craftsman can make the joints of a fine piece of furniture almost invisible to the casual glance. The ideas and imagery of the poems vary widely throughout this career-spanning collection of his work, from superb to unexciting.

Let's start with the superb. For years, I found myself haunted by the memory of one of Snodgrass's poems that some college professor had had an English class read. Those who know anything about Snodgrass or academia will not be surprised to hear that it was The Examination - a bitter, clever, ironic, metaphorical fantasy of something all too familiar to denizens of the ivory tower.

When I finally acquired a copy of Snodgrass's "new and selected" poems, I found that -- not to my surprise -- The Examination was one of the standouts. I also found that the highlights of his selected work, to me, seemed to be concentrated in his early years -- in the poems like April Inventory, from 1959's Pulitzer Prize-winning Heart's Needle collection, or the poems from his 1968 collection After Experience, which include The Examination. Several of the After Experience poems, like Leaving the Motel and A Friend, seem to be about an adulterous affair, which of course makes me wonder how closely and how recognizably they were based on reality. Given Snodgrass's reputation as a "confessional" poet and his frequent invocation of his own name, it seems likely that they were -- which prompts further thoughts about the ethics and consequences of writing about real people and events from one's own life.

Remains, the next collection, seems to find Snodgrass focused on mortality. There are another couple of quiet stunners here -- Viewing the Body and Disposal.

Items from the next collection, From the Fuehrer Bunker, do nothing for me. His subjects here are not minds I am interested in exploring.

Some of the later poems seem to be the kind of lighter work that one might to do flatter or amuse colleagues or oneself. A few actually are noted, in their subtitles, to be "on the occasion of" someone's medical procedure or the anniversary of some event in their lives. It's almost as if Snodgrass lived a Benjamin Button kind of life, beginning as an "old soul" with complex and insightful poems invoking universal issues, and eventually shrinking his focus to observations and commentary of interest primarily to himself and his immediate acquaintances. No doubt this is partially due to the fact that these, being the "new" works, have not been winnowed by time and judgement as the "selected" ones have.

Even among the lesser, later poems, there are a few that retain some of the old inspiration. Putting Away the Lute quietly but powerfully invokes thoughts that all of us have as we get older, and the poem that closes the collection and graces the rear cover, Invitation, seems a sincere appeal to its subject, even though a cynic reading it might have to ward off a mocking echo of that line from Anthony Hecht's immortal satire Dover Bitch about being "addressed / As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort."

[Lorraine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Snodgrass is not for me.

I like some of the poems, or to be more accurate, I often like *part* of a poem, and then he goes and ruins it. LOL

His particular brand of crass humor does not work for me at all.

[behsforensics]

Cutting is for Eva Braun: Tea for Two and
Two For Tea
By W.D. Snodgrass

[Barathiba · Rating 4 out of 5]

Confessional poems with deep emotion.