When people joke about suicide, there can be a hidden kernel of truth on their true feelings about it. Perhaps it is not "hidden" exceptionally well behind a joke or a poem, but it is a way to creatively interact with their emotions and confess their experiences. In this era of post-war poetry, we see an influx of voices that were not overly flowery or complicated, but those who spoke plainly on their experiences - which differed greatly from the typical white man that was given a platform so often in our society. This movement of revealing, personal poetry is known as "confessional poetry," and is one that still being read and even written to this day. This erasure of private and public life has been going on since the end of the 19th century, but certainly after the Second World War, we see an influx of different writers and poets from all backgrounds (especially in America). Poetry, one could argue, might have always been "confessional" - isn't that what poetry is? To shed light onto truths? However (to again borrow Ezra Pound's philosophy on Modernist poetry) this age of poetry was "made new." Dying
Sources:
Academy of American Poets. “A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry.” Poets.Org, 2014, poets.org/text/brief-guide-confessional-poetry. Accessed 4 Oct. 2019. Grobe, Christopher. “From Midcentury Confessional Poetry to Reality TV.” Literary Hub, 8 Apr. 2019, lithub.com/from-midcentury-confessional-poetry-to-reality-tv/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2019. Edmund, Aiyana. “The Tragic Relationship of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes.” Literary Ladies Guide, 2012, www.literaryladiesguide.com/literary-musings/relationship-sylvia-plath-ted-hughes/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2019.
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Desire is a tricky thing to define - for people, it can simply be "sex" or "sensuality," but it can in fact be much more complicated than that. In Tennessee Williams's famous play, A Streetcar Name Desire, Williams explores the multifaceted desire that people hide behind closed doors. One of the most interesting characters, in my opinion, that explores desire is Blanche - a woman who moves in with her pregnant sister and her abusive husband after the death of all of their family members led to the family losing their land. Her relationship with men, and her desire itself, is one of the main focal points explored. The small, painful experience Blanche went through while watching her family die shed light into the pain she had. "You just came for the funerals, Stella, And funerals are pretty compared to deaths. Funerals are quiet, but deaths - not always (21, Scene I)." This circumstance that Blanche went through not only led her to her sister's doorstep, but also into the arms of other men in a way to escape the pain and heartache that came afterwards. Desire is as much of a main character in the story as any other: Stanley with his desire to physically control his wife and other women around him (notably Blanche); Stella with her desire to be both with her brutish husband and constantly defend her sister; Blanche with her desire to both live in the imaginary while also seeking out ways to explore her sexuality in a time where it was widely considered to be "disgusting" itself. These dual identities make a large impact on a person and can make it difficult to come to full realize yourself. "After all," Blanche said to Stanley while he was questioning her motives, "a woman's charm is fifty per cent illusion... (41, Scene II)." Even while Stanley continually beats his wife, Stella insists that she is "not in anything I have a desire to get out of (74, Scene IV)." Blanche and Stella have very different experiences with men - Blanche being one of imagination, and Stella facing the reality of mens cruelty. But even when Blanche points out how wrong it is for Stanley to beat his pregnant wife, Stella herself ignores the reality of the situation and instead choses to see their relationship as hot and passionate. "What you are talking about is brutal desire - just - Desire!" Blanche exclaims incredulously when Stella tells her about what happens between a man and a woman behind closed doors. "Haven't you ever ridden on that street-car?" Stella asks (31, Scene IV). This question Stella asks her sister sheds light into Blanche's character and her own desire that she battles with. During this time, anything that was outside the norm was considered disgusting, devilish, or plain disgusting. Blanche not only faced that street-car when her own husband, Allan, was caught him in bed with another man, but also when she had "intimates the strangers" at The Flamingo Hotel (146, Scene IX). These parts of ourselves are an important, but hidden - humans desire, but can't be seen. Even during this time in history, "there was also a desire on the part of Americans to live in the moment and enjoy life," which also included a little bit more freedom to explore sex and desire - even if it was behind closed doors (Extracts). Tennessee Williams, a closeted man himself, was not shy about tackling taboo subjects of desire, rape, and allusions to homosexuality in this famous work, A Streetcar Named Desire. It may not be difficult to see that, as he hid his sexuality from public eye until years later, his own desire to break free from societal "norms" is reflected in Blanche's own love and disgust of her late husband, who killed himself after she called him "disgusting" after catching him in bed with another man. I do not wish to project the idea that Williams was suicidal or that his entire identity was tokenized into a single character, but by creating and exploring this in literature, it may have been a way to voice the silent minority and to shed light into the thoughts and feelings many people had, but had no other way to show. Sources: A Streetcar Name Desire, by Tennessee Williams. Keen, Cathy, and Alan Petigny. “Extracts - ’Silent ’ Sexual Revolution Began In The 1940’s and ’50s.” Ufl.Edu, Extract, 2005, research.ufl.edu/publications/explore/v10n1/extract4.html. Accessed 28 Sept. 2019. Spectrum South, and Austin Svedjan. “A Queer Literary Pillar in Exile: Tennessee Williams in Retrospect.” The Voice of the Queer South, 4 May 2018, www.spectrumsouth.com/tennessee-williams-retrospect/. When I think about poetry, I think of nursery rhymes and Shakespeare sonnets; something that contains half-baked moralities or frolics about romantically. Distant and highbrow. I was never one to think deeply about most poems. However, at the turn of the 20th century during the start of the Modernist era of literature, I saw poetry not as it was, but what it was trying to be. In this current era, where our conversations about our culture and our world are what most would consider much more technical, I believe it is a mistake to not consider that the arguments made by Modernist poets were also deep and full of ideas about what it meant define morality and reality. Modernism is an era of intrigue within the art world, especially within poetry, set after the Victorians until roughly after World War 1. During this turn of the century, "lofty" ideas about things such as accessibility and a profound urge to be understood by all began to emerge, along with the more "relatable" concept of finding a deeper meaning in the fewest of words. The famous saying "a picture speaks a thousand words" is something that began to rise within the Modernist era in this poetry. The idea that items such as the red wheel barrow in William Carlos Williams's poem "The Red Wheelbarrow" and etcetera in e. e. cummings's "my sweet old etcetera" are not as simple as they appear. The first time you read them, they are "too short" or perhaps mistaken for first drafts. But by the time you reread and reread again the same poem, an image of what the author is trying to convey is not as emotionally stunted as it first appears, but instead sheds light on Ezra Pounds's idea to "make [something] new." Others may perhaps criticize these Modernist poets as reinventing the wheel, but I consider these poems to be a reflection of the past. Wallace Stevens, a poet who had the privilege of showing his artistic side conjoined with (or perhaps in spite of) his career as a lawyer, said in his poem "Of Modern Poetry" that a poem was "of the act of the mind." Poetry was to be simple, to "learn the speech of the place." Art, which had for so long been something just out of reach to the masses, was now being brought to the middle class - understood even to those who had never read poetry before. Marianne Moore, a female Modernist poet, argues that poetry could still be deep and beautiful whilst also being digestible to the masses. As said in Moore's poem "Poetry," poems are to be "above insolence and triviality and can present for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them"). There are exceptions, of course, to the idea of Modernist poetry being relatable. In TS Eliot's famous poem "The Wasteland," Eliot plays around with the idea of a poem being both of simple speech and of complicated word choice and formatting. Modernist poetry is not shy about conveying the idiocy of a woman's "roles" in our patriarchal society (as expressed by Mina Loy and Edna St. Vincent Millay), nor of the horrors of the First World War (Eliot's "Wasteland"). One of the most, and in my opinion, interesting things about Modernist poetry, is its reaction to rigid "rules" or expectations about poetry, and of confronting the upper class's social standards of art itself. Modernist poetry, in my opinion, was attempting to be this effervescent and vivid creature that could morph into some new, deeper thing each time you read it. These poems are something that I believe are "#Relatable" to today's readers, and is something that grows and changes as each generation changes and moves on from past generations. This great, big push by these poets was one that changed my opinion on poetry, and is something that can certainly hop around in my imaginary gardens. |
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