ArtsBeat

Last night we learned of the death of poet William De Witt Snodgrass on Tuesday in the village of Erieville, New York (in Madison County, about 30 miles southeast of Syracuse) following a four month struggle with inoperable lung cancer.  He was 83.

Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for his first full length collection Heart's Needle (1959), a deeply meditative and self-questioning volume in which he wrote of a bitter divorce and the lost of contact with his beloved daughter in both traditional and free verse forms using a voice--radical at the time--that was unapologetically personal and sentimental.  Heart's Needle, along with his friend Robert Lowell's Life Studies (which won the National Book Award that same year), are widely credited with launching the "confessional" movement in American poetry.

Although Snodgrass never accepted the "confessional" label, and subsequently did everything possible to distance himself from the movement, it's clear that the early mainstream acceptance of his literary psychodramatics ushered in an era when many poets of his generation--not only Lowell, but also John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and even, in more profoundly avant garde direction, Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley's For Love--explored material previously thought too personal and language too intimate to be the incorporated into the discourse of poetry. 

Snodgrass released two more volumes of poems in the 1960's and early 1970's, while broadening his reputation as a literary translator, essayist, and critic.  By the mid 1970's, however, he was immersed in a widely misunderstood project that would occupy him for the better part of a decade and isolate him from many of his peers and former supporters.  The Fuhrer Bunker (originally published as a  "cycle in progress" in 1977 and again as a "complete cycle" in 1995), was a series of dramatic monologues based on research and invention that attempted to reconstruct--again using the language of psychodrama--the paranoia, self-indulgence and rage that had consumed the members of the German High Command and their families inside Adolf Hitler's infamous Berlin command center in the closing weeks of World War Two.

While the project could in no way be thought of as sympathetic to Nazism or the Third Reich, Snodgrass's immersion in psychopathology of fascism was confusing to many readers and critics and became something of a puzzlement in the literary world.  He rebounded strongly with a half dozen volumes over the last two decades of his life, the best of which are collected in Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (2006), an excellent companion to his earlier volume Selected Poems: 1957-1987.

A native of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, Snodgrass attended Geneva College before joining the Navy and serving in the Pacific during World War Two.  Upon his return, he enrolled in the then nascent Iowa Writer's Workshop where was he among the first generation of writers-including Lowell, Berryman, and Randall Jarrell--to be instructed by the likes of Robert Frost and Robert Penn Warren.

Snodgrass was a true intellectual vagabond during much of his long career, teaching at Cornell University, the University of Rochester, Wayne State University, Syracuse University (1968-1977), Old Dominion and the University of Delaware, from which he retired in 1994.  BOA Editions Ltd., the Rochester-based independent press founded in 1976 by the legendary Al Poulin, Jr., was Snodgrass's publisher from 1977 until his death this week.

Snodgrass read in Buffalo on a number of occasions in recent decades, most recently at Canisius College in April of 2002.  I happened to attend that reading, and was struck by how self-absorbed even his new poems sounded by contemporary standards.  I mean this not as a criticism of the man or his work, but rather as an echo of an observation made originally by critic Laurence Lieberman in the Yale Review: namely, that Snodgrass had essentially launched the "confessional" movement in American poetry, but that the movement did not return the favor.  His work remained obsessive and idiosyncratic: brilliant, but in many ways isolated from where American poetry had gone in the intervening decades.

--R.D. Pohl