The Wounded Surgeon

Michiko Kakutani

Mr. Kirsch, the book critic for The New York Sun, does a wonderfully nimble job of conveying each poet's individual achievement and the evolution of his or her style, as apprenticeship gave way to maturity, as new techniques and language were invented to accommodate new ideas and material. Writing in a manner that is at once erudite and accessible, Mr. Kirsch proves equally adept at dispensing the sort of close readings of individual poems championed by the New Critics and at explicating correspondences between a poet's life and art in a fashion that would have been anathema to the high modernists … In The Wounded Surgeon, Mr. Kirsch has not only succeeded in communicating the achievement of six remarkable American poets, but in doing so, has also established himself as a poetry critic of the very first order.
— The New York Times

Library Journal

New York Sun book critic Kirsch (The Thousand Wells) understands poetry as both a critic and a practitioner. Here he reevaluates the work of six leading lights of 20th-century American poetry: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Sylvia Plath. He sees this group as reacting against T.S. Eliot's insistence that poetry be impersonal and opening the art form up to include an emotional honesty that was previously veiled in allusion and ambiguity. At the same time, he takes exception to the term confessional, often used to describe this group of poets. Through detailed analyses of each poet's work, he illustrates that they were not simply spewing autobiographical pap (as did the worst of their imitators), but that each had a commitment to poetry as an aesthetic rather than a therapeutic pursuit. Recommended for academic and larger public libraries.-Alison M. Lewis, Drexel Univ. Lib., PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An examination of the work of six so-called "confessional" poets-Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Sylvia Plath-all schooled in modernism and poised to break the rules. New York Sun book critic Kirsch calls these poets "rebellious heirs" of T.S. Eliot, who famously dictated that poetry should not be "the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Indeed, Lowell et al. were trained variously by New Critics, yet all transcended the heroic strictures of modernism by artfully working into their poetry the inner demons of their personal lives, which often involved mental illness, alcoholism, or suicide. Kirsch proposes a "brief biography of their poetry" by dropping in a few details from their lives only to show how brilliantly they reworked the material for effect. Beginning with Lowell, Kirsch quotes Allen Tate's appalled warning-after reading Life Studies in manuscript, he declared, "the poems are composed of unassimilated details, terribly intimate, and coldly noted . . . of interest only to you"-then proceeds to analyze Lowell's masterly manipulation of the material. Bishop's "experiments in control" are set against Schwartz's "pedestrian" attempts at reconciling art and life through artful spontaneity and innovation. By juxtaposing his childhood as a Brooklyn Jewish immigrant with that of the children of Tsar Nicholas II, for example, in the poem "The Ballad of the Children of the Czar," Schwartz was the first who dared to dignify (and elevate) an intimate, shameful experience. Kirsch admirably works through Berryman's "harrowingly intimate" poetry, which emerged despite his zealous apprenticeship under Yeats,contrasting him with Jarrell, who responded to the "burden" of breaking from Modernism by "respectful, self-protective evasion." The essay on Plath sheds no new light, but demonstrates a perceptive restraint when comparing her "juvenilia" with the ferocious, mature style of later work that transformed her experience "beyond recognition." Thoughtful studies by an evenhanded critic that will no doubt urge readers back to the original texts.